As God Intended - Apollo Brown & Che' Noir (2020)


"Buffalo & Detroit are America’s broken dream. They are once thriving cities, now known for frigid temperatures and violent crime. The cities were birthed in a different era, forged in fire, built of cold steel. It follows that the rawest Hiphop in recent memory has bled from these two regions. No two artists exemplify this hard truth more than legendary Detroit producer Apollo Brown and Buffalo’s maverick emcee Che’ Noir. The two artists came together to create a sound as natural as calm after the storm. The soulful, head-nodding production of Apollo Brown has been a staple called on by some of the greatest to ever do it.






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The Athletic’s men’s college basketball 2024 preseason Top 25: Coach insights, key questions


"Six days away from tipoff of the 2024-25 men’s college basketball season, we’re rolling out our final Top 25 of the offseason. We’ve interviewed coaches, talked to scouts and used any preseason intel we could find to set a baseline for the season ahead, ranking teams through more of a long-term lens rather than a snapshot of where everyone stands right now. It’s easy to overanalyze charity exhibition and secret scrimmage results. Although they are data points worth considering, those games are not always treated like a regular season game. They can make us better informed than we were two weeks ago when the Associated Press preseason poll dropped. Next week, everything gets real. Click on each team below for the latest lineup projections and analysis from head coaches and scouts. ...."








RJ Davis

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TRUMP STORMS BACK

"Donald J. Trump rode a promise to smash the American status quo to win the presidency for a second time, surviving a criminal conviction, indictments, an assassin’s bullet, accusations of authoritarianism and an unprecedented switch of his opponent to complete a remarkable return to power. Mr. Trump’s victory caps the astonishing political comeback of a man who was charged with plotting to overturn the last election but who tapped into frustrations and fears about the economy and illegal immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris. His defiant plans to upend the country’s political system held appeal to tens of millions of voters who feared that the American dream was drifting further from reach and who turned to Mr. Trump as a battering ram against the ruling establishment and the expert class of elites. ...  Now, Mr. Trump will serve as the 47th president four years after reluctantly leaving office as the 45th, the first politician since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s to lose re-election to the White House and later mount a successful run. ..." 

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Art colony

Ogunquit was the largest art colony in Maine for the better part of the 20th century. 

"Art colonies are organic congregations of artists in towns, villages and rural areas, who are often drawn to areas of natural beauty, the prior existence of other artists, art schools there, or a lower cost of living. They are typically mission-driven planned communities, which administer a formal process for awarding artist residencies. A typical mission might include providing artists with the time, space, and support to create, fostering community among artists, and providing arts education, including lectures and workshops. Early 20th century American guest-host models include MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Two primary organizations serving artist colonies and residential centres are Res Artis in Amsterdam, and the Alliance of Artists Communities, in Providence, Rhode Island. ..."


An art colony of students at the Newlyn Art School in England in 1910
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A remnant of the late 19th century city at the corner of First and First in the East Village


"On the northwest corner of First Avenue at First Street, on the border of the East Village and the Lower East Side, is a handsome red-brick tenement. Five stories high (with a two-story, beach house–like penthouse on the roof, but that’s a subject for another post), it’s a typical, well-kept building likely on this corner since the early 20th century. But look up—what’s that two-sided panel affixed to the second-floor corner? It’s an address plate giving the corner’s cross streets, a not uncommon feature of tenement buildings in New York City. What was the purpose of these cross street markers? I’m not sure. But a clue might be found in how high up the sign is. From 1878 to its demolition in 1942 (above photo, looking south from 13th Street and First Avenue), the Second Avenue El would have traveled up First Avenue until it veered over to Second Avenue at 23rd Street. ..."



The Second Avenue El, looking south on First Avenue from 13th Street during its demolition in September 1942
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Various Artists – Swamp Blues


"To the southwest of Baton Rouge the french-music, i.e. the traditional native music of the Acadian region (Cajun Country), in the mid-twentieth century was no longer isolated as it until a few decades earlier, and was discovered influenced by the surrounding popular musical culture, from country music to rhythm and blues. ... It was in the little Crowley that the swamp blues developed and defined itself in its characteristic expression, and precisely in J.D's studio. Miller. A place or, it is appropriate to say, a genius loci that in those years became unrattled and contaminated with blues, cajun, zydeco, country, rock ‘n’ roll, for the passage of many local artists, many from towns in southern Louisiana and south-east Texas, from the Bayou Country, such as Church Point, Breaux Bridge, Rayne, Ville Platte, Lake Charles, Port Arthur, Eunice, Opels (e.g. from Lafayette to Beaumont and vice versa) represented by I 10, crossed from the east and west for his job opportunities, and on which Crowley casually pinned. In this album we find those five names of the Baton Rouge area listed on the cover in a mature phase, aware that the parable of the swamp blues, at least the one identified as 'Excello sound' and therefore that of commercial success, was accomplished. ..."




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Music to Soundtrack the Apocalypse


"Apocalyptic thinking is as ancient as mankind; when human beings first realized there was a future, we also realized there would be an end. The Zoroastrian Frashokereti is the oldest surviving eschatology, and surely there were others that predated it. Centuries later, Europeans in the Middle Ages felt terror toward the advent of the year 1000 that was driven by a belief that the soul would continue to live after the Apocalypse. They made prophetic music, often based on the Book of Revelations, and that creative impulse was also surely not new to man, the music maker. ... And we have our own, growing tradition of music that imagines the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Aesthetically falling under the 'dark ambient”'umbrella, much of this is drone-based, beat-less, and lacking any obvious human presence. Some of it is made to intentionally express that humanity has no future, some subconsciously broadcast terrors from the zeitgeist, all of it reflects our contemporary expectations for the future. ..."

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VOTE TO END THE TRUMP ERA

 
"You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvertan election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote."

 
 
 
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The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Century


"From Rick Steves comes a thought-provoking documentary that revisits the rise of fascism in Europe, reminding us of how charismatic figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler came to power by promising to create a better future for their frustrated, economically depressed countries–a future that recaptured the glory of some mythologized past. Once in power, these fascist leaders replaced democracy with a cult of personality, steadily eroded democratic norms and truth, ratcheted up violence, and found scapegoats to victimize–something facilitated by the spread of conspiracy theories and propaganda through modern media. They would lead their nations into war, and ultimately ruin, but not before creating a playbook for other charismatic autocrats who entice voters with simplistic solutions to complex problems. ..."




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The Issues 2024: Reproductive Rights Are Truly on the Ballot


"For the past few weeks, Literary Hub has been going beyond the memes for an in-depth look at the everyday issues affecting Americans as they head to the polls next week, on November 5th. We’ve featured reading lists, essays, and interviews on important topics like income inequality, health care, gun culture, and more. For a better handle on the issues affecting you and your loved ones—regardless of who ends up president on November 6th (or 7th, or 8th, or whenever)—we have you covered. You can catch up on past features here: Income Inequality, The Importance of Labor, The High Costs of a For-Profit Healthcare System, and our National Epidemic of Gun Violence. Today we’ve gathered the best stories published at Lit Hub about a very important issue that affects all Americans: reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. ..."


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The 25 Best Pizza Places in New York Right Now

L’Industrie

"If you were to dig deep below New York City’s streets, past the subway tunnels, you might expect to find thick layers of schist, gneiss and marble. But what you’d actually find is pizza, the cultural and emotional bedrock of a city that can’t even coalesce around a single baseball team. Here, finding a decent slice is as easy as jaywalking. But finding a great slice, one that’s worth eating down to that last bite of crust, is much harder. So we set out to do the 'hard work,' sampling 50 of the city’s most popular and beloved pizzerias and landing on the 25 best. They offer a variety of styles — Sicilian, Neapolitan, New York and others that haven’t even been classified yet — but they’re all well worth the miles of subway (and ferry) travel. ..."

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The City Is Covered in Snow: From the Notebooks of Orhan Pamuk


"At the heart of this book there is a dream I’d had before I ever started writing and drawing in these notebooks. I have managed to make sense of some parts of the dream, but others I still don’t understand. I was watching the dream unfold as if it were the view outside my window when I suddenly woke up, afraid … To help me understand that dreamscape, I have arranged the illustrated pages of this book not in CHRONOLOGICAL but in EMOTIONAL order. Morning: the city is covered in snow. It’s sticking. Even on our balcony, it’s thirty or forty centimeters thick. Ash is sleeping in the other room. I am inside my novel. I have been reading a great deal about Ottoman telegraph offices. I’ve bought so many books lately! A snowy hush reigns over the house and the city. It’s still falling, so visibility is low. ..."


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***Rimbaud - Graham Robb (2000)

 

"Still another biography of the poet who stopped writing before he was 20! Over a century after his death, the procession of biographers, translators, critics and hagiographers continues. It would seem that no definitive identification can be made (Rimbaud the symbolist, the surrealist, the Bolshevik, Rimbaud the bourgeois, the crook, the pervert, Rimbaud the prophet, the superman, the mystic, Rimbaud the Catholic, the cabalist, the atheist, etc.); the latest 'proved' avatar is forever recycled as evidence -- faulty or secure -- on which to base the next.... What Roland Barthes would call the ''figure'' of Rimbaud is the ghost at the banquet of literature: his radical rejection of poetry (not of writing, as Graham Robb makes clear: correspondence from Rimbaud's last 15 years constitutes a significant share of his output) has been appropriated by literary history as his most enduringly poetic act. ..."
NY Times: There Was Only One Rimbaud
amazon: Rimbaud: A Biography by Graham Robb  

W - Arthur Rimbaud
W - A Season in Hell '
W - The Spiritual Hunt
Open Culture: The Photography of Poet Arthur Rimbaud 
A Day in Rimbaud Land
Quotes from Arthur Rimbaud's Surrealist Writing
NY Times: A Rebel French Poet Draws New Followers to the Hometown He Hated
The Arthur Rimbaud Museum 

NY Times: Where Rimbaud Found Peace in Ethiopia
NY Times: I Is Another
Arthur Rimbaud - Articles - etc.
The New Criterion: Rimbaud, the anarchic demiurge by John Simon
Jack Spicer | After Lorca & A Fake Novel About The Life of Arthur Rimbaud
BBC - Rimbaud and Verlaine: France agonises over digging up gay poets
Arthur Rimbaud: The Discovery of Two New Portraits of the Planetary Poet-laureate. Part 1, Part 2: 
Guardian: Teenage dirtbag
Julian Peters Comics: The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud
YouTube: Patti Smith: Poem about Arthur Rimbaud

Fertile Destabilization: On translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations By John Ashbery
"What are the Illuminations? Originally an untitled, unpaginated bunch of manuscript pages that Arthur Rimbaud handed to his former lover Paul Verlaine on the occasion of their last meeting, in Stuttgart in 1875. Verlaine had recently been released from a term in a Belgian prison for wounding the younger poet with a pistol in Brussels two years earlier. Rimbaud wanted his assassin manqué to deliver the pages to a friend, Germain Nouveau, who (he thought) would arrange for their publication. This casual attitude toward what would turn out to be one of the masterpieces of world literature is puzzling, even in someone as unpredictable as its author. Was it just a question of not wanting to splurge on stamps? (Verlaine would later complain in a letter that the package cost him '2 francs 75 in postage!!!') More likely it was because Rimbaud had decided already to abandon poetry for what would turn out to be a mercantile career in Africa, trafficking in a dizzying variety of commodities (though not, apparently, slaves, as some have thought). ..."

NY Times: Rimbaud’s Wise Music By Lydia Davis
John Ashbery’s Arthur Rimbaud
rain taxi - The Illuminated Text: John Ashbery translates Rimbaud
Guardian: Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud – review
amazon: Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery


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Cuba Struggles Amid Hurricanes, Sanctions, and Blackouts

Cubans chat at night on a street during a nationwide blackout on October 18, 2024, in Havana. 

"To say that Cuba has had a trying week would be an understatement. After a grid failure last Friday caused four days of nationwide blackouts and a Category One hurricane smashed into the eastern province of Guantanamo on Monday, killing seven, the lights are back on most of the time and things have steadied on the island. Nilza Valdés Núñez, sixty-one, from Guanabacoa, East Havana, feels a bit of a relief. I spoke to her on Monday, the day after her eighty-one-year-old mother cooked all the defrosting meat in their freezer that her brother in Florida had bought for them. ... At a time when over a million Cuban homes are already going without running water, the power cuts compounded the problem by disabling pumps. People carried water to their houses in buckets from nearby cisterns and wells. ..."



A street is lit by car lights during the third night of a nationwide blackout in Havana, Cuba on October 20, 2024.
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Works for Tape and Piano - BlankFor (2019)


"... Works For Tape And Piano immerses the listener in a sonic landscape where sustained piano tones bend and flutter as light travels through a prism. The centerpiece of this recordings creation is a tape machine, which Tyler Gilmore aka BlankFor.ms uses to capture his world and warp it; sometimes speeding up time, sometimes slowing it down and often painting a warm, analog canvas by layering sounds and letting long forgotten recordings on old cassettes shimmer through to the foreground. Originally from the Wind River region of Wyoming, a sparsely-populated region where the stars shine much brighter than his new home in Brooklyn, BlankFor.ms began improvising and composing when he was very young, playing piano and using acoustic instruments to attempt to recreate the sounds of synthesizers and other electronic composition tools. ..."




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Pleasant Murals at the Festival d'Arts al Carrer de Calldetenes in Spain

Lidia Cao

"The Festival d’Arts al Carrer de Calldetenes (FACC 2024), held in late April, has become a celebrated cultural event in the town of Calldetenes, located about 60 kilometers north of Barcelona. Organized by Associació La Pera with support from the Ajuntament de Calldetenes, this annual event blends various artistic disciplines, but murals are undeniably its centerpiece. ... Murals by Lidia Cao, Lily Brick, M. Calde, and Pablo Astrain—some of the more recognized names in the urban art scene—contribute to this welcoming aesthetic. Each year, around a dozen or more artists, both emerging and established, participate, bringing a sense of creative vitality to the streets of Calldetenes. This festival is unique not just because of the murals but also for its broader cultural appeal, which includes music performances, circus acts, artisan markets, and more. It’s a family-friendly event that draws locals and visitors alike, offering them a chance to engage with the town’s artistic and cultural spirit. ..."


Pablo Astrain




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What Donald Trump Would Do, in His Own Words


"Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency. His rallies offer a steady stream of such promises and threats — things like prosecuting political opponents and using the military against U.S. citizens. These statements are so outrageous and outlandish, so openly in conflict with the norms and values of American democracy that many find them hard to regard as anything but empty bluster. We have two words for American voters: Believe him. The record shows that Mr. Trump often pursues his stated goals, regardless of how plainly they lack legal or moral grounding. ... Trump says he will use the Justice Department to punish people he doesn’t like. Believe him. ... After his conviction on 34 felony charges in New York in May, Mr. Trump, in an interview with Newsmax, escalated his threats to use the Justice Department to go after his political enemies. As president, Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to use the power of government to punish his political opponents. He was open about trying to get other countries to do his bidding — his attempt to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden led to his first impeachment in 2019. ... Trump says he will round up and deport millions of immigrants. Believe him. Standing on a dirt road along the Mexican border in Arizona in August, Mr. Trump offered a version of the promise that has become the signature of his third presidential campaign. Why You Should Believe Him Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he would move quickly to deport millions of people who are living in the United States without legal permission. ... Trump says he will deploy the American military against U.S. citizens. Believe him. ... In a Fox News interview on Oct. 13, Mr. Trump said he was primarily concerned about election interference by his domestic political opponents rather than foreign nationals. Mr. Trump has shown his willingness to target people who oppose him and to subject or expose them to violence to suit his ends. After refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, he incited rioters to sack the Capitol, and several people died as a result. ..." Etc.

****NY Times - Presidents, Conventions and Nazis: A Political History of ‘The Garden’
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plexures by plunderphonics - John Oswald (2022)


"... On the surface, pop music seems be all about self-expression and individuality — but all hit songs, regardless of genre, sound like the decade in which they were produced. There are unbreakable rules to be followed, and a message in the uniformity by which these songs are engineered: the sounds in songs need to be just novel enough to mark the moment, they need to sound expensive enough to be distinguished, and any approach that works instantly profilerates across the pop charts. If one were to cut away all the speech, the structures, and leave nothing but those sounds, maybe you’d be able to hear what’s really going on with all of this unavoidably popular music. One thing suggested by pop music is that recordings and music are the exact same thing. From the beginnings of jazz, the rise of Popular music as a meaningful category is inextricable from the technology of recording, but a recording isn’t music until it’s played. ‘Plexure’ is an overview of the first decade of remix culture going mainstream, where sounds became so plastic and malleable that only transformed noises seemed real. ..."




2010 March: John Oswald

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African contradictions in the world of science

Abdul Wahid shows a manuscript from 14th century at his house in Timbuktu, North of Mali.

"June 30 marked the celebration of Africa Scientific Renaissance Day (ASRD). This date was established in 1987 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now known as the African Union (AU), to be observed in all member countries, to recognize Africa’s modern contributions to science and technology globally and highlight the continent’s ancient and ancestral technologies, such as forest medicines for healing, climate pattern interpretation, sustainability, food security, and more. We acknowledge epistemicide, a philosophical concept developed by Sueli Carneiro, as a means by which European whiteness, during the period of slavery, suppressed African knowledge and traditions as a strategy to dominate and discredit them as cognizant subjects. This led to the concealment of African contributions to the cultural heritage of humanity, particularly by denying Africans and their descendants the status of being subjects of their own history’s knowledge. ..."



The science of medicine was originated by Africans in the ancient empire of Ghana.
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Jill Stein Won’t Stop. No Matter Who Asks.


"Jill Stein, the Green Party’s serial presidential candidate, has heard the pleading from strangers. 'How does it feel to be personally responsible for actually bringing Donald Trump into power?' Ms. Stein recalled being asked this year by a man in New York — another heckler accusing Ms. Stein of tipping the 2016 election. She has absorbed the glowering across her anxious blue neighborhood outside Boston. 'When people are being propagandized,' Ms. Stein said, 'they won’t be especially friendly on the street, put it that way.' And as she weighed another campaign this time, she found resistance in the most intimate constituency: her own family. ..."



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At 150, Charles Ives Still Reflects the Darkness and Hope of America


"Sunday is the 150th anniversary of the composer Charles Ives’s birth, and the most fitting way to celebrate would be to bang your fists on the table and rail against the damned closed-mindedness of classical music, with its lazy dependence on a predictable canon. But honestly, that’s old news; a lot of the classical community is already doing that. Would Ives be satisfied by the current state of things? Hard to say. Improvements have been made but not, I suspect, enough. Ives, a Connecticut Yankee, straddled tumultuous and defining eras of American life; he was born in the shadow of the Civil War and lived almost a decade after World War II. He had no shortage of grand visions, whether for music or for his quite successful insurance business. He conceived influential strategies of estate planning and formulas for coverage. He dreamed that music would evolve into 'a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.' ... And, in the first two decades of the 20th century, he dreamed up a radically original American musical voice — an enviable triumph that came bundled with failure. It was a voice many people didn’t want to hear, and still don’t. ..."


2020 May: Charles Ives

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