Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

Winston Vargas, Barbershop, Washington Heights, New York, 1961
"America’s urban streets have long inspired documentary photographers. After World War II, populations shifted from the city to the suburbs and newly built highways cut through thriving neighborhoods, leaving isolated pockets within major urban centers. As neighborhoods started to decline in the 1950s, the photographers in this exhibition found ways to call attention to changing cities and their residents. Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography explores the work of ten photographers—Manuel Acevedo, Oscar Castillo, Frank Espada, Anthony Hernandez, Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Ruben Ochoa, John Valadez, Winston Vargas, and Camilo José Vergara—who were driven to document and reflect on the state of American cities during these transformative years. Rather than approach the neighborhoods as detached observers, these artists deeply identified with their subject. ..."
SAAM (Video)
NY Times: Piri Thomas, Spanish Harlem Author, Dies at 83
[PDF] Down These Mean Streets
amazon
YouTube: Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

Hiram Maristany, Hydrant: In the Air, 1963

The Soul of Black Peru: Afro-Peruvian Classics (1995)

"The Afro-Peruvian style heard on The Soul of Black Peru compilation originated hundreds of years ago from the Spanish slave trade. The music is a mix of African, Spanish, and Andean traditions, due to the fact that the slaves who came to Peru were not from one specific region, so they did not have a common language to communicate with. It's easy to break the music down and see which culture contributed what -- the lyrics are all sung in Spanish (Spain), have a slight melancholy approach (similar to the Yaravi form from the Andes), and boast interesting rhythms (Africa). The musical form is just starting to catch on in other parts of the world, and deservedly so. ..."
allmusic (Audio)
W - Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru
W - Afro-Peruvian
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru

Son de los Diablos, an Afro-Peruvian dance which is based in the Diablada and African rhythms. Painting by Pancho Fierro

A Map of Every Building in America

South of New Orleans
"Most of the time, The New York Times asks you to read something. Today we are inviting you, simply, to look. On this page you will find maps showing almost every building in the United States. Why did we make such a thing? We did it as an opportunity for you to connect with the country’s cities and explore them in detail. To find the familiar, and to discover the unfamiliar. So … look. Every black speck on the map below is a building, reflecting the built legacy of the United States. Use the search bar to find a place and explore the interactive map below. There was a time when every car's glove compartment was crammed with tattered fold-out road maps, trim rectangles that became table-size monsters that challenged you to refold them neatly. We traced our proposed routes ahead of time, seeing that, say, after New Jersey would come Pennsylvania, which would take forever to cross, and then Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and beyond. ..."
NY Times

Mesa, Ariz.

How we roasted Donald Duck, Disney's agent of imperialism - Ariel Dorfman

Donald Duck in The Three Caballeros, 1944
"I should not have been entirely surprised when I saw How to Read Donald Duck, a book I had written with the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart, being burned on TV by Chilean soldiers. It was mid-September 1973 and a military coup had just toppled Salvador Allende, the country’s president, terminating his remarkable experiment of building socialism through peaceful means. I was in a safe house when I witnessed my book – along with hundreds of other subversive volumes – being consigned to the inquisitorial pyre. One of the reasons I had gone into hiding, besides my fervent participation in the revolutionary government that had just been overthrown, was the hatred the Donald Duck book had elicited among the new authorities of Chile and their rightwing civilian accomplices. ..."
Guardian
W - How to Read Donald Duck
[PDF] How to Read Donald Duck
vimeo: Rodrigo Dorfman - How to Read Donald Duck Redux
W - 1973 Chilean coup d'état, W - Salvador Allende

‘As amusing as the Duck we were disparaging’ … a strip from How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart.

Jennifer West - Serpentine Dance, (2014)

"Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer West will premiere the first in a series of interactive cinematic installations at this year’s TBA Festival. Originally conceived as a swan song to celluloid, her project presents a screen-less, communal viewing space where audiences can playfully explore the art of projection. ... For the first time, West worked with the last remaining 70mm optical printer at her lab in North Hollywood to blow up sections of the filmstrips to 70mm for the installation. Two nights of live choreographed flashlight projection performances are accompanied by Theremin and live music taking place inside the installation. A dancer will enact the infamous pre-cinematic Serpentine Dance (created by Loïe Fuller in the 1890’s) – where the dancer’s billowing silk costume becomes a screen for the filmstrip projections. ..."
Mousse Magazine
Film Strips Shining Like Stained Glass (vimeo)
W - Jennifer West
vimeo: Exhibition VIDEO from PICA TBA Fest 14, Portland, Oregon

Paterson - William Carlos Williams (1946 to 1958)

Wikipedia - "Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by James Joyce's novel Ulysses. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on Paterson, honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Bridge by Hart Crane could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror 'the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city.'  While Williams might or might not have said so himself, commentators such as Christoper Beach and Margaret Lloyd have called Paterson his response to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Pound's Cantos. The long gestation time of Paterson before its first book was published was due in large part to Williams's honing of prosody outside of conventional meter and his development of an overall structure that would stand on a par with Eliot and Pound yet remain endemically American, free from past influences and older forms. ... Paterson is set in Paterson, New Jersey, whose long history allowed Williams to give depth to the America he wanted to write about, and the Paterson Falls, which powered the town's industry, became a central image and source of energy for the poem. ..."
Wikipedia
amazon


2017 December: Paterson - Jim Jarmusch (2016)

Laila Je T'Aime

"Laila Je T'Aime is a compilation of guitar music from the Western Sahel - including Mauritania, Senegal and Mali. Selected from three years of field recordings, the compilation highlights guitarists and guitar bands and the vast differences in interpretation of the instrument. Recorded on location from the riverside houses of the Niger to the desert campfires of Northern Malian desert. Beautiful field recording compilation of guitar music from the Western Sahel. A wide spectrum of styles is covered here in stripped down variations of regional styles ranging from the deep acoustic ballads and nostalgic folk songs to Western pop cover songs. Street musicians and professional stage bands are featured in intimate and informal sessions in village houses or around desert campfires, complete with the occasional car horn or motorcycle rumble in the distance. Highlights of over three years of field recordings, includes a full color booklet with many photos and liner notes by Christopher Kirkley. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
bandcamp (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Le Marchand Du Soleil, Le Dental Orchestra - Penda, Hamadth Kah - Ce Weeti

Bambara Mystic Soul - The Raw Sound Of Burkina Faso 1974-1979

"For its commemorative 10th release, Analog Africa indulges in Burkina Faso, one of the jewels of the Sahel, a harsh and arid strip that straddles the southern Sahara, stretching from Dakar in the west to Djibouti in the east. Formerly known as Haute Volta, Burkina Faso's sound was organized and nurtured during the country's time as part of a vast patchwork making up French colonial West Africa. The rise of a post-independence urban middle class willing to invest in the Burkinabe arts spawned a cadre of singers, bands, orchestras and, most importantly, competitive record labels who all played their part in ushering in a golden age of music in their landlocked nation during the 1970's - a decade marred by political instability in the country and an era of artistic enlightenment empowering the whole of Africa. The Sahelian climate fortunately bore no influence on the Burkinabé sound, which is cosmopolitan as it was raw. ..."
Analog Africa (Audio)
The Quietus
amazon, iTunes
Discogs
YouTube: VA ‎– Bambara Mystic Soul - The Raw Sound Of Burkina Faso 1974-79 Afrobeat Funk Highlife Compilation 1:02:14

Turkish Officials Say Khashoggi Was Killed on Order of Saudi Leadership

"Top Turkish security officials have concluded that the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on orders from the highest levels of the royal court, a senior official said Tuesday. The official described a quick and complex operation in which Mr. Khashoggi was killed within two hours of his arrival at the consulate by a team of Saudi agents, who dismembered his body with a bone saw they brought for the purpose. ... Saudi officials, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, have denied the allegations, insisting that Mr. Khashoggi left the consulate freely shortly after he arrived. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has demanded that the Saudis provide evidence proving their claim. ..."
NY Times
NY Times - A Journalist’s Disappearance: Where Jamal Khashoggi Was Last Seen

2016 February: The Feminist, Democratic Leftists Our Military Is Obliterating -  Debbie Bookchin, 2016 May: Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn, 2016 July: How Turkey Came to This, 2017 March: As repression deepens, Turkish artists and intellectuals fear the worst, 2017 July: A Long March for Justice in Turkey, 2017 July: Radical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve, 2017 September: Istanbul: Memories and the City - Orhan Pamuk, 2018 January: Turkey’s State of Emergency, 2018 April: The Unlikely New Hero of Turkeys, 2018 June: How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy, 2018 June: How Nietzsche Explains Turkey, 2018 August: The West Hoped for Democracy in Turkey. Erdogan Had Other Ideas.

The Fearless Rise of the Black Southern Progressive

"Last December, at the election-night watch party for Doug Jones in Birmingham, Alabama, LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright were among the last to arrive. The founders of the Black Voters Matter Fund had worked throughout 2017 to register and turn out rural voters in the state for the former U.S. attorney’s long-shot U.S. Senate bid against evangelical stalwart and accused child molester Roy Moore. They had moved souls to the polls until they closed, then met up in Birmingham to join their fellow activists and Democrats. ..."
New Republic

the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down - Director Robert Wilson to music by Philip Glass, David Byrne, Gavin Bryars and others (1980s)

Wikipedia - "the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down is an opera created in the early 1980s by director Robert Wilson to music by Philip Glass, David Byrne, Gavin Bryars and others. The vast five-act work has never been performed whole. Originally, The Civil Wars was conceived as a single daylong piece of music theatre to accompany the 1984 Summer Olympics. Six different composers from six different countries were to compose sections of Wilson's text inspired by the American Civil War. After initial premieres in their countries of origin, the six parts were to be fused in one epic performance in Los Angeles during the games, a parallel to the internationalist ideals of the Olympic movement. ... A documentary on the work's creative process, Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, was released in 1987. It is out of print. ..."
Wikipedia
Glass/Wilson (The) Civil Wars
W - Music for "The Knee Plays"
Pitchfork
amazon - Glass: The Civil Wars - A Tree is Best Measured When it is Down, The Knee Plays - David Byrne
YouTube: Philip Glass the CIVIL warS Rome as performed in Amsterdam 19 June 2014, The Knee Plays

Distressed Tape

"Just yesterday, the musician Hainbach released a short video, barely five minutes long, of a noise-informed, texture-rich ambient performance. The instrumentation on this is simple: cassette playback, which Hainbach controls four channels on, and an effects unit. The piece develops in two primary ways: as the relative levels of those channels are adjusted, and as the various effects are put into effect. A loop of murky, sodden, melting melody, seemingly on piano, is warped beneath the distressed qualities of the tape on which it was first recorded. ... This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Track originally posted at Hainbach’s YouTube channel. More from Hainbach, aka Stefan Paul Goetsch, who is based in Berlin, at hainbachmusik.com and hainbach.bandcamp.com.
disquiet (Video)

Southern Gothic Literature

"Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became 'the principal region of American Gothic' in literature. The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Because of its dark and controversial subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level. ..."
Oxford
Guardian: Why southern gothic rules the world
Why People Love Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic: The Present Haunted by the Past -- Part I, Short Stories, Southern Gothic: Wrestling With Our Demons -- Part 2, Novels
YouTube: Southern Gothic Project

Read ‘Escape From New York,’ From Ellen Willis’s Award-Winning Anthology

"On March 12, the National Book Critics Circle awarded the late Ellen Willis the top prize in its criticism category for The Essential Ellen Willis, a collection of over 40 years’ worth of Willis’s writing. Willis, who served as the first-ever pop critic for the New Yorker in the early Sixties, died of lung cancer at the age of 64 in 2006. She began writing for the Village Voice in the early Seventies, and became a staff writer here in 1979, where she remained as a writer and senior editor for the next decade. ... On the next page, you can read a piece she wrote for the cover of the July 29, 1981, issue, 'Escape From New York,' which appears in the anthology. ..."
Voice

Juju – Siouxsie and the Banshees (1981)

"In 1981, British rock was in a transitional phase. Punk had, by then, all but completely faded out, and new wave and post-punk were shaping fresh ideas of how rock could sound. It was in this environment that Siouxsie and the Banshees were set to record their fourth album Juju. After going through a lineup change before their previous release, and with guitarist John McGeoch now cemented as an official member, the band was ready to experiment with their sound, to create lyrical and melodic concepts that would mesh together cohesively as one work. The band created and molded the songs for Juju while on tour, working the songs out live and letting them take the dark, theatrical, romantic shape that would give the album its singular sound, the final product of which would help define the subset of post-punk that would come to be known as 'goth rock.' In this episode, we discuss this move from punk to post-punk, detail the Banshees’ stylistic choices and conceptual soundscapes, and (surprise) have a conversation about feminism and punk rock. ..."
77 Music Club (Video/Audio)
Dissecting the deathly mystique of Siouxsie And The Banshees (Video)
Why Siouxsie And The Banshees’ ‘Juju’ Casts Such A Potent Spell (Video/Audio)
Siouxsie And The Banshees: “We were losing our minds”
W - Juju
amazon
YouTube: Spellbound (Live), Arabian Knights (Live), Voodoo Dolly (Live)
vimeo: Juju 41:10

2017 April: "Hong Kong Garden" / "Voices (On The Air)" (1978), 2017 September: "Playground Twist" (1979)

Looking for the Way Out of Brazil’s Crisis

Signs in Sao Paulo protesting the far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. 
"After thirteen years of Workers’ Party (PT) government, the last two years have witnessed Brazil sink into deepening economic and institutional crisis. In 2016 an 'institutional coup' against PT president Dilma Rousseff saw the establishment of a new government under conservative lawyer Michel Temer, her own former vice-president. Fresh elections are taking place today. Former president Lula da Silva, jailed earlier this year, had hoped to run again and had a strong lead in opinion polls. But he has been barred from running, and the PT is instead fielding Fernando Haddad. Haddad currently trails the 'Brazilian Trump,' the far-right former army officer Jair Messias Bolsonaro, in what threatens to be a fresh electoral shock. The stakes are extremely high, at a moment when it cannot even be assumed that there is any peaceful way out of the crisis. In recent months, violence has exploded in several cities and regions, and there is an ever more imposing army presence in the streets. ..."
Jacobin
Jacobin: Brazil’s Ultra-Politics

2018 February: The Long Brazilian Crisis

Scotch Bonnet Presents: Puffer's Choice Vol. II

"Following the success of 2016's Puffer's Choice Vol. I (SCOB 007CD/LP), the label arm of Glasgow's Mungo's Hi-Fi has selected more cream cuts from their globe-trotting link-ups celebrating sound system culture. The album starts with Bim Sherman. 'Lightning And Thunder' is a Mungo's remix of a vocal supplied by Adrian Sherwood. French collective Subactive's aquatic dub imagining of 'Follow Me' by UK garage/grime project Wolves, featuring the voice of Bo* Johnson. Supercat straddles Chief Rockas's update of the classic Gunshot riddim for a reprise of Don Dada's 1982 hit 'Dance Inna New York'. ... JA meets 'Glasgae' for 'Feel Good', an uplifting collaboration between Jamaican singer Skari and Scottish producer Escape Roots. Earl 16, wraps his pipes around Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', helmed hauntingly by Capitol 1212. ..."
Forced Exposure (Audio)
amazon
YouTube: Capitol 1212 - Love will tear us apart ft Earl 16, Soundcloud: Capitol 1212 Featuring Earl 16 -Love Will Tear Us Apart (Scotch Bonnet Records)
YouTube: Scotch Bonnet present Puffers Choice vol.2 [Full album] 46:40

F.B.I. Review of Kavanaugh Was Limited From the Start

"An exasperated President Trump picked up the phone to call the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, last Sunday. Tell the F.B.I. they can investigate anything, he told Mr. McGahn, because we need the critics to stop. Not so fast, Mr. McGahn said. Mr. McGahn, according to people familiar with the conversation, told the president that even though the White House was facing a storm of condemnation for limiting the F.B.I. background check into sexual misconduct allegations against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, a wide-ranging inquiry like some Democrats were demanding — and Mr. Trump was suggesting — would be potentially disastrous for Judge Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation to the Supreme Court. It would also go far beyond the F.B.I.’s usual “supplemental background investigation,” which is, by definition, narrow in scope. The White House could not legally order the F.B.I. to rummage indiscriminately through someone’s life, Mr. McGahn told the president. And without a criminal investigation to pursue, agents could not use search warrants and subpoenas to try to get at the truth. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: House Democrat Promises Kavanaugh Investigation if Party Wins Control
NY Times: Bitter Tenor of Senate Reflects a Nation at Odds With Itself
NY Times: Collins and Manchin Will Vote for Kavanaugh, Ensuring His Confirmation
NY Times: The F.B.I. Investigation Into Kavanaugh Has Ended. Here’s Who Was Questioned, and Who Was Not.

Reuben sandwich

Wikipedia - "The Reuben sandwich is an American hot sandwich composed of corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing, grilled between slices of rye bread. One origin story holds that Reuben Kulakofsky (his first name sometimes spelled Reubin; his last name sometimes shortened to Kay), a Jewish Lithuanian-born grocer residing in Omaha, Nebraska, was the inventor, perhaps as part of a group effort by members of Kulakofsky's weekly poker game held in the Blackstone Hotel from around 1920 through 1935. The participants, who nicknamed themselves 'the committee', included the hotel's owner, Charles Schimmel. The sandwich first gained local fame when Schimmel put it on the Blackstone's lunch menu, and its fame spread when a former employee of the hotel won a national contest with the recipe. ..."
Wikipedia
Reuben Sandwich History and Recipe
YouTube: How to Make a Grilled Reuben Sandwich

The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue

"Among a number of influential women in electronic music whom we’ve profiled here before, French avant-garde composer Eliane Radigue stands out for her single-minded dedication to 'a certain music that I wished to make,' as she says in the video portrait above, 'this particular music and no other.' Her compositions are haunting and meditative, 'prefiguring the concept of deep listening, expressed by Pauline Oliveros some years later,' as Red Bull Academy notes in an extensive profile of Radigue. Using feedback, tape loops, field recordings, and, beginning in the 70s, the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer, Radigue 'developed soundscapes… an interweaving of electronic drones, subsequently assimilated to what would later be called drone music.' ..."
Open Culture (Video)
Éliane Radigue: The Mysterious Power Of The Infinitesimal (Video)
Eliane Radigue: An interview
UbuWeb: Eliane Radigue (Audio)

2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993)

The Sordid Truth behind Degas’s Ballet Dancers

The Dancing Class, ca. 1870.
"The fundamentals of ballet haven’t changed all that much since its invention in 15th-century Italy. Yet the popular image of this deeply traditional medium has been largely defined by the talents of one thoroughly modern artist: Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas. The coteries of young women in flowering tutus who populate the approximately 1,500 paintings, monotypes, and drawings Degas dedicated to the ballet are among the French artist’s most universally beloved artworks. At first glance, Degas has rendered the sort of pretty, innocent world one might associate with a 6-year-old’s first recital. These works actually speak to an insidious culture that would be shocking to contemporary audiences. Although it enjoyed unprecedented popularity in Degas’s era, the ballet—and the figure of the ballerina—had suffered a demoralizing fate by the late 1800s. ..."
Artsy
Guardian: Degas's dancers are studies in cruel reality. But don't go thinking he felt compassion for them - Germaine Greer
Smithsonian: Degas and His Dancers
Sexual Exploitation Was the Norm for 19th Century Ballerinas

The Dance Class (La Classe de Danse), 1873–1876

Ziminino - "I'm Cool Like That" (2018)

"Ziminino is a new project from INTL BLK that features collaborations between Chief Boima and a host of Afro-Brazilian artists coming out of Bahia. The project has already shared its first song and now comes through with the follow-up single, 'I'm Cool Like That'—a head-nodding track spearheaded by singer-songwriter Ricô Santana, produced by Rafa Dias and Boima. The hypnotizing song is a mixture of trap, bossa nova, and pagodão, an urban style of popular music from Bahia which could be seen as Salvador's equivalent to Baile Funk. Rafa Dias is the inventor of the electronic pagodão sound that resulted in massive tracks like 'Elas Gostam (Popa de Bunda)' by Psirico and ATTØØXXA (the band Rafa founded). ..."
Okay Africa: Bossa Nova Meets Trap In This New Single From Ziminino (Audio)
vimeo: "I'm Cool Like That"

Professor Calculus

Wikipedia - "Professor Cuthbert Calculus (French: Professeur Tryphon Tournesol meaning 'Professor Tryphon Sunflower'), is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. He is Tintin's friend, an absent-minded professor and half-deaf physicist, who invents many sophisticated devices used in the series, such as a one-person shark-shaped submarine, the Moon rocket, and an ultrasound weapon. Calculus's deafness is a frequent source of humour, as he repeats back what he thinks he has heard, usually in the most unlikely words possible. He does not admit to being near-deaf and insists he is only a little hard of hearing in one ear.
Calculus first appeared in Red Rackham's Treasure, and was the result of Hergé's long quest to find the archetypal mad scientist or absent-minded professor. Although Hergé had included characters with similar traits in earlier stories, Calculus developed into a much more complex figure as the series progressed. ..."
Wikipedia
Cuthbert Calculus
Professor Calculus' Inventions

2008 May: Georges Remi, 1907-1983, 2010 July: The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free, 2011 December: Prisoners of the Sun, 2012 January: Tintin: the Complete Companion, 2012 December: Snowy, 2015 August: The Black Island (1937), 2015 September: King Ottokar's Sceptre (1938), 2015 December: Red Rackham's Treasure (1943), 2016 July: Captain Haddock, 2017 April: Cigars of the Pharaoh (1934), 2018 March: Destination Moon (1950), Explorers on the Moon (1954), 2018 July: The Calculus Affair (1956)

Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father

"President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found. Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help. But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day. Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings. ..."
NY Times (Audio)
NY Times: Opinion - Donald Trump and the Self-Made Sham

Punking Out, a Short 1978 Documentary Records the Beginning of the Punk Scene at CBGB’s

The Ramones
"I hate to be one of those people who goes on about how punk was an all-American phenomenon before it crossed the pond. But hell, I’ve no less an authority on the counterculture than William S. Burroughs on my side, or on the side of Legs McNeil, at least, the music journalist who just happened to give punk its name by co-founding Punk magazine in 1975. Of McNeil’s seminal oral history Please Kill Me, Burroughs remarks, 'This book tells it like was.' More accurately, it lets the music’s frontiersmen and women tell it, starting with Lou Reed and the Velvets and other mainstays in Andy Warhol’s Factory scene. McNeil’s book surveys a number of major American scenesters, most of them from New York, with the exception of The Stooges from Detroit, and one exceptional band from, of all places, Cleveland, Ohio. The Dead Boys rarely get their due, but they were as influential as the Ramones in the downtown New York scene. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
Must-Watch: “Punking Out” – a Short 1978 Documentary About the CBGB Scene (Video)

Charles Simonds - Dwellings

Picaresque Landscape (detail). Museum of Modern Art installation, 1976.
"Charles Simonds is an artist who has been making dwelling places for an imaginary civilization of Little People who are migrating through the streets of cities throughout the world. Each dwelling tells part of the story of the lives of these people, where they have gone, what they do, how they live, and what they believe. Usually passersby, often children, join in as Simonds works and he offers them clay bricks, and allows them to add to his dwelling or to make a fantasy dwelling of their own. In 2016 Simonds was invited by the Department of Arts and Culture of the city of Munich to propose a public artwork. ... Irving Sandler has followed Simonds’s work since the artist began creating dwellings in the streets of the Lower East Side of New York in the early 1970s. He was curious about the Munich project and interested to know how Simonds’s involvement with children relates to his conception of art-making generally. ..."
Brooklyn Rail: CHARLES SIMONDS with Irving Sandler
UbuWeb: Charles Simonds (b. 1945) - Dwellings (1972), Landscape <--> Body <--> Dwelling (1973), Dwellings Winter (1974) (Video)
Charles Simonds - Dwellings (Video)

Dwelling, Dublin, 1980.

Music Revelation Ensemble - No Wave (1980)

"James 'Blood' Ulmer may well be the only constant in the Music Revelation Ensemble, or MRE. For over 20 years, the self-professed blues preacher has remained the sole permanent member of this ever-shifting group, known as much for mixing up melodics as personnel. This is not to say the pursuit is a sketchy one: Since its 1980 Moers Music release No Wave, featuring Ulmer on guitar, David Murray on tenor saxophone, Amin Ali on electric bass, and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, MRE has been fueling the free jazz torch lit by pioneer and Ulmer mentor Ornette Coleman so adeptly that All Music Guide’s Chris Kelsey was moved to call the group 'one of the first and best free jazz/funk bands.' ..."
Different Perspectives In My Room
Discogs (Video)
W - No Wave (album)
YouTube: Big Tree, Sound Check, Baby Talk

TellusTools (1992)

"... A legendary twin-release, TellusTools was a 2LP set meant as a Tellus resumé and a DJ tool, albeit purposedly intended for ‘perspective DJs’ (according to liner notes). Basically, this is a Tellus survey conceived by curator Taketo Shimada, with 7 Tellus sound excerpts added at end of side 2 for break-beat purposes. Both discs have the same content to allow creative mixing on 2 turntables. A New York resident since the late 1980s, Taketo Shimada graduated from MIT in 1997. A visual artist and musician, he was then a member of the band Messages along Tres Warren. ... The TellusTools’ cover art by Christian Marclay is gorgeous, an arrangement of spread out Tellus cassettes and dischevelled audio tape. Musically speaking, the choice is clearly aiming at sound art – no electric guitar here, no improvisation, no theater–, and participants are mostly US sound artists from NY’s early 1990s art milieu. Basquiat even found his way – along Rammelzee – on Isaac Jackson’s radio show excerpt from 1982, for an exqusite early hip-hop session. Other tracks include concrete/plunderphonic experiments, avant-song and performance pieces. ..."
Continuo
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Messages from The RAMMELLZEE, Jean-Michel Basquiat, A-One, Toxic C1 & General Arbitrator KOOL KOOR, Alan Tomlinson - Floor Polish Tango, Christian Marclay - Groove, Maurice Lemaître - Lettre Rock

Terrorist By Association

"In the salle des assises, the Paris courtroom reserved for the examination of murders, rapes, and other serious crimes, a box of thick glass has been erected atop the old wood enclosure in which the accused is made to sit. The glass is a recent addition, and incongruous; the remainder of the room—the lustrous carved oak of the wainscoting, the six brass chandeliers strung from the high plafond—has been preserved as it was at least a century and a half ago. Above the glass box, a grand mural depicts a conclave of red-robed judges and the child king Louis XIII. The mural is in fact a somewhat recent flourish, having been commissioned by the wartime fascists of Vichy, but that infelicitous detail is easily obscured by the vision of splendid continuity the painting sets forth. French judges still wear those red robes. Amid this pomp, the effect of the glass box is that of nothing so much as a museum specimen case, one intended for curiosities of human scale. Last year, for the month of October, it held a 35-year-old Franco-Algerian man named Abdelkader Merah. ..."
New Republic

Photographer Alex Harsley Created An Artists’ Hub In the East Village—And Now He’s Trying To Save It

"All the roads in Alex Harsley’s life have led him to photography (many of these roads he traversed as a young man keen on tearing up the streets of New York on his sweet motorcycle). Specifically, what he calls 'information photography.' ... He gestures to a photograph on the wall near him, where a man and woman stand under streetlamps on a New York night. Two drops of blue from the streetlights—almost like splashes of paint—stand out from the yellow and black hues of the photo. This is a signature technique of Harsley, who’s spent much of his life experimenting with the ultraviolet spectrum by pulling different colors out and plopping them where they normally wouldn’t be seen. But Harsley is fixated on a different detail at the moment. ..."
Bedford + Bowery
GoFundMe - Keep the 4th St Photo Gallery Open! (Video)
vimeo: Alex Harsley - East Village photographer

Céleste Albaret

Wikipedia - "Céleste Albaret (née Gineste, 17 May 1891 – 25 April 1984) was a country girl who moved to Paris in 1913 when she married the taxi driver Odilon Albaret. The most regular of Odilon Albaret's regular clients was the celebrated novelist and critic, Marcel Proust. Lonely and bored in the grand city, and at her husband's suggestion, Albaret began to run errands for Proust. Before very long she became his secretary and housekeeper. During the final decade of Proust's life his health declined and he became progressively more withdrawn, even while working with continuing intensity on his writing: she became his nurse and 'the writer’s most trusted conduit to the world beyond his reclusive, cork-lined bedroom'. Marcel Proust died in 1922 and Albaret moved on to run a small Paris hotel, together with her husband and daughter. Odilon Albaret died in 1960, by which time the hotel had been sold and Albaret had become the caretaker-guide at a museum at Montfort-l'Amaury, on the western edge of Paris. In the early 1970s she was persuaded by the Laffont publishing company that she should disclose what she could concerning the private life of Marcel Proust, who was still an iconic literary figure among the intellectual classes. ..."
Wikipedia
NYRB: Monsieur Proust by Céleste Albaret, foreword by André Aciman, translated from the French by Barbara Bray

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: "Paintings in Proust" - View of the Piazza del Popolo, Giovanni Battista Piranes, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online, 2017 December: The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925), 2018 May: Time Regained (1927)

From Roots to Dancehall

"The death of Bob Marley in 1981 is often conceived as a line of demarcation, signalling the end of roots reggae and the dawning of dancehall. But Jamaican music has never been as simple as that. Dig a little deeper and you will find that the shift happened significantly earlier, with the deejays of western Kingston being the major catalysts of change. For much of the last fifty years, Jamaican popular music has been typified by transformation. Most readers will be familiar with the ska/rock steady/reggae axis that was at the music’s core before dancehall’s advent. In fact, the island’s earliest recordings featured mento — an indigenous folk form — and during the late 1950s, a Jamaican form of rhythm and blues gained favour, which gave way to ska as the independence movement gathered steam. Then, after the pared-down rock steady dominated, in late 1968, reggae came storming in as a fast-paced dance style with a shuffling organ. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)