After Defeat on Brexit Plan, Theresa May Faces No-Confidence Vote

"LONDON — After suffering the worst parliamentary defeat in modern times over her plans for leaving the European Union, Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, endured another day of turmoil on Wednesday, when she is to face a vote of no confidence in her battered government. On Tuesday Mrs. May lost by a crushing margin, 432 to 202, when Parliament voted on her plan for European Union withdrawal, or Brexit, as the clock ticks toward March 29 when Britain is scheduled to leave. Lawmakers spent much of Wednesday debating whether Mrs. May’s government should continue in power before voting at around 7 p.m. on a motion that could, in theory, lead to a general election. ..."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times: May’s Brexit Deal Failed. What Happens Now?
Open Culture (Video)
***NY Times: Britain Races Toward a Cliff. Time to Slow Down.
*NY Times: Hold a Second Brexit Referendum, *NY Times: Britain Needs a Miracle

Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story

Sylvia Plath in April 1954, as a student at Smith College
"When I heard that a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath short story would appear in January 2019, I requested an electronic galley and then let the file sit unopened in my inbox for several weeks. I felt apprehensive, even frightened of it. I love Plath’s poetry, but what if I didn’t like this story? I read The Bell Jar so long ago, when I was fourteen or so, that I couldn’t remember anything about it. But I read The Catcher in the Rye at around the same time, and I remember that book clearly. Had I only meant to read The Bell Jar, and never finished it? Oh God, I thought, what if none of Plath’s fiction is good? I decided to read The Bell Jar again before addressing the new old short story. The first, striking sentence—already suffused with death—gave me hope: 'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.'' ..."
The Paris Review
W - The Bell Jar
Guardian - The 100 best novels: No 85 – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
[PDF] The Bell Jar
amazon: The Bell Jar


2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956

Television Learned the Wrong Lessons From The Sopranos

"The elderly Uncle Junior is in his armchair, facing down a disloyal male relation. In the next episode, Junior will get his hand stuck in the garbage disposal for six hours, but for now he has the dignity of a retired king, which is what he is. He holds up one hand, and says: 'I’m in no shape for disharmony.' After mainlining the entire Sopranos oeuvre this last week, Junior’s seated pronouncement is the moment that has stayed with me. Not the first time we see Tony take joy in strangling a man, not the violent death that takes Adriana away, not even the time Paulie Walnuts gets lost in the woods. No, I’m obsessed with the easy, elegant way in which The Sopranos’ patriarchs wield their power. With a word, peace is made or broken. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the show’s first air date, and everybody is re-watching the series credited with inventing prestige television. ..."
New Republic
Esquire: 15 Moments That Made 'The Sopranos' The Greatest Show Of All Time (Video)
Guardian - The Sopranos at 20: how the hit show changed the gangster genre
NY Times - ‘The Sopranos’ 20th Anniversary: Here’s Your Complete Guide to Rewatching It

2011 June: The Sopranos, 2012 March: The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos, 2013 June: James Gandolfini, 2015 April: David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Soprano’s Final Scene, 2018 September: Spaccanapoli - Vesuvio (As featured in The Sopranos)

Struggle for Pleasure - Soft Verdict (1983)

"The fourth release by Belgian post-minimalist composer Wim Mertens, 1983's Struggle for Pleasure, is a brief EP's worth of, as the composer puts it, 'petite musique de chambre.' It sounds a bit stuffy, but it's indicative of Mertens' talent that one of these six tracks, the hauntingly beautiful piano instrumental 'Close Cover,' actually became a hit on the continent when it was released as a single. Although 'Close Cover' is the clear highlight of Struggle for Pleasure, the other five tracks are beautifully arranged pieces of modern chamber music. Although Mertens is clearly heavily influenced by American minimalist composers -- the title track and "Gentleman of Leisure" are unalloyed Philip Glass homages -- he brings his own brilliant compositional sense and a genuine gift for unexpected arrangements to these pieces. ... Like all of Mertens' early releases, Struggle for Pleasure was originally released under the group name Soft Verdict and reissued under Mertens' own name in the late '80s."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
Clone (Audio)
amazon
YouTube: Struggle For Pleasure (Live). Close Cover [live], Gentleman Of Leisure

Parliament of 1327

Assassination of Yvain de Galles at the siege of the castle of Mortagne-sur-Gironde – from Jean de Wavrin’s ‘Chronique d’Angleterre’
Wikipedia - "The Parliament of 1327, which sat at the Palace of Westminster between 7 January and 9 March 1327, was instrumental in the transfer of the English crown from King Edward II to his son, Edward III. Edward II had become increasingly unpopular with the English nobility, predominantly because of the excessive influence of unpopular court favourites, the patronage he devoted to them, and his perceived ill-treatment of the nobility. By 1325, even his wife, Queen Isabella, despised him. Towards the end of the year, she took the young Edward to her native France, where she joined and probably entered into a relationship with the powerful and wealthy nobleman Roger Mortimer, whom her husband had exiled. The following year, they invaded England to depose Edward II. Almost immediately, the King's resistance was beset by betrayal, and he eventually abandoned London and fled west, probably to raise an army in Wales or Ireland. He was soon captured and imprisoned.
Isabella and Mortimer summoned a parliament to confer legitimacy on their regime. ..."Wikipedia
amazon: The Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327

Mortimer and Isabella's invasion route in 1326, Their landing and attack is in green; the King's retreat westward is in blue.

The Fleeting Magic of the F.A. Cup

Accrington Stanley hosted Ispwich Town in one of dozens of third-round F.A. Cup matches played over the weekend.
"ACCRINGTON, England — Andy Holt is standing at the door to the bar, watching the celebrations unfold. On the field, Accrington Stanley’s players are in the middle of an impromptu lap of honor, pumping their fists and beaming broad smiles. John Coleman, their manager, is conducting the crowd’s chanting, soaking in their adulation. Holt, the club’s owner, does not seek to join them, to bask in their reflected glory. But still, as fans start to leave, a steady stream heads toward him, hands outstretched, wanting to offer their congratulations, or share their glee. He greets each one like an old friend. ... On one level, that is what the F.A. Cup means to a club like Accrington Stanley, and to a chairman like Holt. Though Coleman’s team is now thriving in League One — English soccer’s third tier — it is doing so on a fourth-tier budget. ..."
NY Times

Watford won at Woking in the third round. To many fans, the chance to glimpse a Premier League opponent up close is still the best part of the third round.

Why 1984 Isn't Banned in China

"Last winter, after the Chinese Communist Party announced the abolition of presidential term limits, Beijing temporarily moved to censor social-media references to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. The government’s concern was that activists would use these titles to charge, in not-so-subtle code, that China was moving in a decidedly authoritarian direction. But censors did not bother to ban the sale of these texts either in bookstores or online. It was—and remains—as easy to buy 1984 and Animal Farm in Shenzhen or Shanghai as it is in London or Los Angeles. The different treatment of these texts and their titles helps illuminate the complicated reality of censorship in China. It’s less comprehensive, less boot-on-the-face—as Orwell might have put it—and quirkier than many Westerners imagine. ..."
The Atlantic

2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2011 August: Down and Out in Paris and London, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: Homage to Catalonia (1938)

The Leopard - Luchino Visconti (1963)

"Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard had a hard time finding a publisher but was well-known by the time Luchino Visconti began working on his film of the same name. The book appeared in Italy in 1958 and was subsequently translated into many languages—a German version can be seen lying around in Visconti’s section of the four-part film Boccaccio ’70, released in 1962 (the other episodes were directed by Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and Mario Monicelli). ... Both novel and film are ironic, elegiac, stately, and dedicated to a lux­urious mourning of a lost past. But the loss and the past are different in each case, and the film is a good deal more political—more political than the novel and more political than it may look at first sight. The most magnificent moments in the book involve a movement that Visconti does not make, and that a film, perhaps, cannot make persuasively: the flash-forward in time, the long look at the future beyond the story currently being told. ..."
Criterion - Remembrance of Things Past: The Leopard
Fashion Institute of Technology (Video)
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Those Who Are Not Rich in A Country of Arrangements
Cannes winner The Leopard is a gloriously uneventful period piece
W - The Leopard
amazon
YouTube: The Leopard (1963) ORIGINAL TRAILER

Amped up

Aleksey Podat
"The Ukrainian music scene is undeniably in the middle of a boom, with interest in local musicians experiencing an unexpected rise. A bonafide artistic movement has appeared, bringing with it promising emerging producers, DJs and promoters. Tight, a Russian/English-language online magazine, was born out of Ukraine’s local scene earlier this year and has quickly become a destination for discovering home-grown music and reading playful Q&As with international names. Here, its co-founders, Maya Baklanova and Tanya Voytko and picks ten musicians who are carrying forward and rapidly transforming electronic music in Ukraine. ..."
The Calvert Journal (Audio/Video)

Seben Heaven: The Roots of Soukous

"Kanda Bongo Man’s 1987 hit 'Sai' is an assault of joyful energy from the opening note through to the last: Diblo Dibala’s lead guitar rings clearly above Guadeloupean drummer Ti Jean’s pounding kit, while Pablo Lubadika Porthos’ slick bass lines and Lokassa Ya Mbongo’s expert rhythmic twang provide a solid springboard. As the music takes off, Kanda shouts “kwassa kwassa” and the band shifts into high gear. This powerful studio production is archetypical Parisian soukous, recorded with a studio ensemble of household names – all stars in their own right – and aimed directly at the clubs. But what is this rapid-fire, guitar-driven music that swept Europe in the ’80s? Where did it come from, and where did it go? ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)

The spectral resistance

"A few weeks ago I went into the city to see a revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties, in which Henry Carr, an elderly English civil servant, looks back on his time as a diplomat in Zurich in 1917, where he was witness to the various antics of James Joyce (composing Ulysses), Tristan Tzara (fomenting Dada), and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (plotting communist revolution). The play is a delightful, disorienting romp, but at its heart — somewhere between the sublimely apolitical aestheticism of Joyce and the burning political rage of Lenin — is a question that has occasioned endless thought over the past two centuries: what is the relationship between literature and politics? Does the 'revolution of the word' have anything to do with revolution in the world? ... The first two decades of the last century, when modernism was remaking European art and literature and popular revolution was remaking much of Europe, were the heyday of artistic 'manifestos': Marinetti’s futurist manifesto of 1909, the Vorticist manifestos Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound published in Blast in 1914, Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto of 1918, and so forth. ..."
Jacket2
W - One Big Union (concept)
amazon: The OBU Manifestos

2010 April: Little Red Songbook, 2016 September: Don't Mourn-Organize!: Songs of Labor Songwriter Joe Hill (1990), 2017 January: The Rebel Girl, 2017 March: Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

Dave Robinson - My Homeland (1976)

"My Homeland -Come on everyone, and listen to my song // Through my nationality, they refuse to set me free / But I know, oh yes I know I shall get home to Africa / 'Cause it's my homeland, where I belong, you know / And I love it so well, only time will tell, yeah // Many times I sit and I've wondered / About the many times I've been slandered, yeah / By the hypocrites-dem, by the hypocrites-dem / So ..."
Jah Lyrics
W - Dave Robinson
Discogs
YouTube: My Homeland [1976]

Curtis Mayfield - (Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going To Go (1970)

"... 'Hell Below,' [Curtis] Mayfield’s debut single as a solo artist, was released soon after he stepped down as the leader of the beloved soul group, The Impressions. The song also opens Curtis, his first solo album. Always a deliberate and self-aware artist, he didn’t choose randomly. He’d already steered The Impressions toward funkier, more conscious material—most notably on 1968’s This Is My Country and 1969’s The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story—but as a solo artist, he wanted to make a fresh impression beyond The Impressions. 'Hell Below' certainly did that. While The Impressions had shown occasional flashes of darkness or outrage, Mayfield’s sweet, silky tenor sounded more pleading than pummeling. It didn’t help that the diminutive, baby-faced Mayfield—whose bucktoothed smile is plastered on almost every Impressions LP—kind of looked like a teddy bear. On 'Hell Below,' though, he comes out like a grizzly. A feral bass line launches the song, growling and loping along like a wounded animal. On top of it, a Tower-Of-Babel clamor of voices—some gibbering like TV news, others pushing The Book Of Revelation—twist the mood from bestial to biblical. Then Mayfield steps up. To listeners in 1970, it must have been jolting. ..."
Curtis Mayfield, “(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going To Go” (Video)
W - "(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going To Go"
Genius (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: ‎(Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below We're All Going To Go

2013 June: Roots (1971), 2014 May: Super Fly (1972), 2014 July: There's No Place Like America Today (1975), 2014 September: Back to the World (1973), 2014 October: Omnibus (1995), 2015 March: "Freddie's Dead" (1972)

Gas - Edward Hopper (1940)

"... Take Gas. The petrol station on the empty road seems about to close down. The lights from the hut are almost fluorescent. The petrol pumps are garish splashes of red against a dense, dark background. The trees are solid and impenetrable - only the road continues, but it quickly disappears behind the building and there is no sign at all of where it might lead, if indeed it leads anywhere. And then there is the solitary, half-hidden figure. Is he turning off the pump, or hiding?It is impossible to tell. The only thing that is certain is that he is alone. And though by definition he is unaware of it, it is a loneliness he shares with nearly all the people who populate Hopper's world. ..."
Edward Hopper: All The Lonely People
Hopper “lost in an artist’s dream”: Gas (1940)
W - Gas (painting)
Whitney: Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940 (Audio)

2010 October: Finding Nighthawks, 2012 Wednesday: Through Edward Hopper's eyes: in search of an artist's seaside inspiration, 2013 July: Hopper Drawing, 2014 May: INTERVIEW: “An Interview with Edward Hopper, June 17, 1959″., 2014 September: How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks, 2015 February: Edward Hopper's New York: A Walking Tour, 2015 September: Edward Hopper life and works, 2016 May: "Night Windows," 1928, 2016 July: Sunday (1926), 2016 September: Drug Store (1927), 2018 January: Seven A.M. (1948), 2018 February: Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun

St. Paul & the Broken Bones - Half the City (2014)

"With a charismatic, dynamic, and theatrical lead singer who seems to channel the intensity of James Brown on-stage, a loose and punchy two-man horn section, and a garage band back line that holds everything down, Birmingham, Alabama's St. Paul & the Broken Bones at their best capture a retro-soul sound that echoes nothing so much as the classic Stax and Muscle Shoals sides from the late '60s and early '70s. Lead vocalist Paul Janeway's gospel-inflected soul singing is impassioned to say the least, and he wrings every ounce of sweat and soul out of the tracks included on this, the band's debut full-length album. From the opener, 'I'm Torn Up,' the stage is set for track after track of slow-burning and heart-wrenching soul ballads, a form that is obviously Janeway's specialty. He croons, and roars, and gasps, and groans, and slides through these songs like the second coming of Al Green, somehow smooth and rough and raw all at the same time, pure emotion tempered with a dose of gospel spark, and there's no denying this is his show. ..."
allmusic
W - St. Paul & the Broken Bones
Discogs
amazon, iTubes
YouTube: Half the City FULL ALBUM 39:09
YouTube: Call Me (Live), "Half the City", Apollo, I'll Be Your Woman, Broken Bones and Pocket Change, "Everybody Knows (The River Song)", "Let Me Roll It"

Apollo Theater Is Celebrated in a New Graphic Novel

The cover of the graphic novel, adapted from a history by the same author.

"The graphic novel 'Showtime at the Apollo: The Epic Tale of Harlem’s Legendary Theater' is like a sprawling Hollywood biopic. A sea of boldface names — James Brown, the Jackson Five, Dionne Warwick and countless others — make their way through the theater. The work, adapted by Ted Fox from his 1983 history of the same name, and illustrated by James Otis Smith, goes beyond the singers, dancers, comedians and other entertainers who have taken the stage of the Apollo, which celebrates its 85th anniversary this month. The book also shines a light on Harlem and black culture in America. Fox said he reworked his Apollo history into a focused narrative told in three acts, beginning years before the first performance at the theater. ..."

NY Times
Showtime At The Apollo: The Epic Tale Of Harlem’s Legendary Theater (Video)
amazon: Showtime at the Apollo: The Epic Tale of Harlem’s Legendary Theater

The graphic novel includes an inside view of the theater inspired by news clippings from a 1937 New York World-Telegram article.

2009 February: Harlem Renaissance, 2010 August: A Nightclub Map of Harlem, 2010 October: Apollo Theater, 2014 May: History of Harlem, 2014 November: A Harlem Throwback to the Era of Billie Holiday, 2015 February: A Nightclub Map of Harlem, 2017 June: During Prohibition, Harlem Night Clubs Kept the Party Going

2018 Was the Year of the Labor Strike

Thousands of teachers, students and union allies march through downtown Los Angeles on December 15, 2018, ahead of a possible strike.
"For US workers, 2018 was the year of the strike. It may seem incongruent for workers to have gotten more militant in making demands of their employers in an economy with such low unemployment. The unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent or less this year. If so many people can find work, what’s the problem? Even as many of us have gone back to work in the years since the Great Recession, we’re not being rewarded for our labor. Wage growth has just recently started to show signs of increasing — it was up 3.1 percent over the last year, as of the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — but it’s still lagging behind where it was before the recession and where you’d expect it to be, given the low unemployment rate. Four in ten adults in the US say they don’t have the money to cover an unexpected $400 emergency and more than a fifth can’t pay all of their monthly bills in full. ..."
TruthOut
Soundcloud: Punching Out (Audio)

Battle of Quebec

Good Friday Massacre
Wikipedia - "The Battle of Quebec is a former National Hockey League (NHL) rivalry between the Montreal Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques. The rivalry lasted from 1979–80 to 1994–95. The teams played against each other five times in the NHL playoffs, and the Canadiens won three of the series. One meeting in 1984 resulted in the Good Friday Massacre, a game in which multiple brawls happened. The Battle of Quebec extended to politics, in which the Canadiens and Nordiques became symbols for rival parties, and beer distribution, as the teams were both owned by competing breweries. ..."
W - Battle of Quebec
W - Good Friday Massacre
La Bataille du Québec 1979-1995 - The Montreal Canadiens vs. the Quebec Nordiques (Video)
The Atlantic: Remembering Hockey's 'Good Friday Massacre,' 28 Years Later (Video)
Quebec Nordiques – A History of Beer, Brawls, and Van Halen
SI: The Battle of Quebec
Waiting for the Nordiques: Quebec City doesn’t mind being NHL’s Plan B
YouTube: Quebec Nordiques: History & Future, Canadiens vs Nordiques - Oct.28,1979, NHL Classics: Good Friday Massacre 1984 playoffs

A Gilded Age painter’s rainy, wintry New York

"Cold rain and wet snow make it hard to get around New York on foot and take in its beauty. But damp weather like this was ideal for the Impressionist painters who lived and worked in the city at the turn of the last century. With dark streets marked by puddles and tree branches heavy with water, the Gilded Age city glistened. The blurred faces of New Yorkers in black coats and hats came across as elusive and mysterious. Carriages and street cars made their way through wet streets with passengers hidden and snug inside. Tall buildings higher than treetops and small walkup tenements alternate in the background. Few painters revel in this rainy enchantment quite like Paul Cornoyer. Born in St. Louis in 1864, he came to New York at the tail end of the Gilded Age in 1899. ..."
Ephemeral New York

The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More

"'I first took on The Lord of the Rings at the age of eleven or twelve,' writes The New Yorker's Anthony Lane. ... And it hardly requires covering much more ground to get from hungering to know everything about the world of The Lord of the Rings — one rich with its own terrain, its own races, its own languages — to hungering to know how Tolkien created it. Now the countless Lord of the Rings enthusiasts in America have their chance to behold the materials first-hand. The exhibition Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth, which runs from January 25th to May 12th of this year at New York's Morgan Library and Museum, will assemble 'the most extensive public display of original Tolkien material for several generations,' drawing from 'the collections of the Tolkien Archive at the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Marquette University Libraries (Milwaukee), the Morgan, and private lenders.' ..."
Open Culture (Video)

When America Stared Into the Abyss

"The Treasury secretary’s voice exuded tension and urgency. 'A very serious situation is developing,' Henry Paulson warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the phone. 'Nothing we can say will calm the situation until we come up with a policy that is overwhelming force!' Later that Thursday afternoon, Pelosi received the same dire message when she telephoned Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke; financial markets were seizing up, major Wall Street firms were on the brink of collapse, and the nation’s economy hovered perilously on the edge of an abyss. Pelosi recalls asking, alarmed, 'If things are this bad, why aren’t you calling me?' Paulson and Bernanke urgently requested the speaker to convene the bicameral congressional leadership to hear the George W. Bush administration’s proposed response to the rapidly accelerating crisis. Pelosi agreed to call a meeting the next day. That might be too late, Bernanke cautioned. Indeed, without swift action, there might not be an American economy by the end of the weekend. ..."
The Atlantic
The Atlantic: The Nancy Pelosi Problem (April 2018)
The Atlantic: How Wall Street’s Bankers Stayed Out of Jail (Sep. 2015)
The Atlantic: The Never-Ending Foreclosure (Dec. 2017)
The Atlantic: This Sociological Theory Explains Why Wall Street Is Rigged for Crisis (Sep. 2013)

The Death of Stalin - Armando Iannucci (2017)

"... And so to 'The Death of Stalin,' a startling new film from Armando Iannucci. The title does not lie. Less than twenty minutes into the movie, Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) is found lying on a rug in his dacha, outside Moscow. It is March, 1953, and breakfast is ready, but the great leader has been felled by a stroke. Steeped in urine, he is soon surrounded by a small horde of henchmen from the Central Committee. First to arrive is Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Stalin’s fellow-Georgian and the head of the N.K.V.D., the security service, followed by Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor)—next in line to succeed Stalin, and dreadfully pale at the prospect—and Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), still wearing his pajamas under his suit. Then comes the rest of the gang, including Kaganovich (Dermot Crowley), Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse), and Bulganin (Paul Chahidi). Notable by his absence is Molotov (Michael Palin), whose wife has been arrested. His own head could be on the block. The problem, for all concerned, is the idea of a Stalin-free land. ..."
New Yorker: “The Death of Stalin” Dares to Make Evil Funny
Slate: What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in The Death of Stalin
W - The Death of Stalin
NY Times: The Slapstick Horror of ‘The Death of Stalin’
amazon
YouTube: The Death of Stalin - Official Green Band Trailer, THE DEATH OF STALIN - OFFICIAL TRAILER [HD]

Record Collector Is The Best Record Store In Iowa

"... I became obsessed with music at a young age, and wanted as much as I could possibly hear. I scavenged to build my music collection. I ripped my older siblings CDs into my library. I had a friend whose parents’ enormous CD collection included every classic rock and pop record from every decade dating back to the 1960s; I borrowed and ripped all of those. ... All but one of my friends went off together to attend Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, the other stayed back in Waukon. I left that sparse Iowa town after graduating and packed into a 19’x9 single dorm room for my first year at the University of Iowa in Iowa City without a single friend. ... I’d never been to a record store. Like other small town kids in Iowa who moved to Iowa City to attend the University of Iowa, I didn’t really know what it meant to be a part of a music scene beyond just myself. It was called Record Collector. ..."
Vinyl Me, Please (Video)

Author and Experimental Musician David Toop on Hip-Hop’s First Decade

"Since the mid-1970s, David Toop has skillfully combined careers in three disparate disciplines: music, journalism and academia. In that time, he has earned respect from his peers in all three fields, releasing a wealth of cutting-edge albums and a number of exemplary music books. It was in the world of improvised music that Toop first made his mark, joining forces with free-jazz musician Max Eastley for the 1975 full-length New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s label, Obscure Records. Since then, he has continued to record and release albums that draw inspiration from a myriad of experimental styles, in the process collaborating with like-minded musicians including Eno, Scanner, Bill Laswell, Jeff Noon, Ken Ikeda and Japanese art-pop troop Frank Chickens. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)
David Toop (Video)

2018 March: David Toop Is Still Seeking Out New Sounds

Lee Dodou & The Polyversal Souls - Basa Basa

"As the lead singer of George Darko's legendary Burger-Highlife hit-band, Lee Dodou became the number one voice of 80's Highlife. Born in Kumasi, the epicenter of Ghanaian Highlife, he came to Berlin in the late 70's - by then the uprising epicenter of Burger-Highlife - to work as a back-up-singer for Pat Thomas. After joining and leaving Georg Darko and running his own band 'Kantata', he stopped releasing music in the early 90's. Now, Philophon is proud to present new recordings of his soulful genius to the world of 2018. Basa Basa is a song in the classic 'concert party' style, as it was played in the glorious 60's. After a firey horn introduction Lee takes over in that funny and entertaining manner typical for 'concert party' music. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Basa Basa, Sahara Akwantuo

See for Yourself

“Cleaning the Drapes,” also from House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.
"The black-and-white video looks, just for a moment, like it might be a real cooking show. The female host holds up a chalkboard displaying its title, then puts on her apron and picks up a bowl. Yet instead of preparing food, she begins to stir with an invisible spoon. One by one, she picks up kitchen utensils and says their names aloud, making her way through the alphabet—'apron,' 'bowl,' 'chopper,' 'dish,' and so on—until she reaches U and starts spelling out the rest of the letters with her body. She never handles any food. Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen is one of the artist’s most beloved works. The six-minute video parodies cooking demonstrations, replacing the typical gracious host with, in the artist’s words, 'an anti-Julia Child' played by Rosler, who doesn’t smile and maintains a withering stare throughout. ..."
New Republic
The Living Room War: A Conversation with Artist Martha Rosler
INTERVIEW with MARTHA ROSLER, The Artist Who Speaks Softly but Carries a Big Shtick
MoMA (Audio)
NY Times: Martha Rosler Isn’t Done Making Protest Art
W - Martha Rosler
YouTube: Semiotics of the Kitchen 1975

Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck (1935)

"Tortilla Flat was, I believe, John Steinbeck's third novel first published in 1935, and it marked his first of many commercially successful novels. As with many of his novels it is set in Monterey, California. It tells the story of Danny and his friends, a group of paisanos - a word of Spanish origin referring to poor countrymen. At the start of the novel, in the preface, we see them leaving to join the military during World War I, but by the first chapter they have returned. ... Tortilla Flat follows the adventures of the friends, some rather extravagant, some essentially rather mundane, but even so this book is such a pleasure to read. It's fun and lighthearted, very comic at times, but above all else it was very warm and vibrant. It's a novel about friendship and we see how, in Monterey where people are poor and are possessions are few, friends and small communities are structured outside the more familiar class system. ... But it's a beautiful one, very simple and even honest to a degree (though one must acknowledge the reader may be uncomfortable with the portrayal of paisanos as layabouts), and yet again I am reminded that Steinbeck is one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century."
On Books
Guardian: John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat is not for 'literary slummers'
W - Tortilla Flat
[PDF] Tortilla Flat
amazon

William Basinski - A Shadow in Time (2017)

"In the fifteen years since William Basinski released the debut installment of his Disintegration Loops series he has been rapidly, and rightly, lionized. But for two decades prior to that, he was just another eccentric artist in New York, a tinkerer who built his own instruments, ran a venue and experimented insatiably with tape loops. He would tune in to the easy listening piped out by CBS and record snippets of it, creating a massive archive of schmaltz that, through the alchemy of sampling, could be transfigured into something infinitely more haunting. 'I would set up loops, get them going, put on the tape recorder and let it go for the length of the cassette because if it was going, it captured this eternal moment,' he told The Quietus in 2012. That eternal-moment is quintessential Basinski; his work has been uniquely fixated on time and loss, his compositions heaving with longing, melancholy and a sense of impenetrable mystery. ..."
Pitchfork (Audio)
W - A Shadow in Time
William Basinski’s A Shadow In Time is the tribute David Bowie deserves (Audio/Video)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: A Shadow in Time, For David Robert Jones


2017 January: The Disintegration Loops (2002-2003), 2017 October: Watermusic II (2003), 2018 January: The Garden Of Brokenness (2005)

The 1959 Project - January 1, 1959

Charles Mingus, John Handy and Booker Ervin playing at the Five Spot while Orson Welles listens, 1958
"Anyone ringing in 1959 in Manhattan had options: Eartha Kitt at the Waldorf, Dizzy Gillespie at the Village Vanguard, Count Basie and Joe Williams at Birdland (which was broadcast nationally on CBS Radio’s 'New Year’s Eve Dancing Party'), Teddy Wilson at The Embers (54th St. and 3rd Ave.), Willie 'The Lion' Smith at Central Plaza (6th St. and 2nd Ave.), and Blossom Dearie at Versailles (9th St. and 6th Ave.) among many, many others. But the most tantalizing line-up, in retrospect, might have been at humble East Village club the Five Spot (Bowery Ave. between 4th and 5th St.), where Sonny Rollins and Charles Mingus were performing with their ensembles. ..."
The 1959 Project (Video)

Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

"Even in our age of unprecedentedly abundant images, delivered to us at all times by print, film, television, and especially the ever-multiplying forms of digital media, something inside us still values paintings. It must have to do with their physicality, the physicality of oil on canvas or whatever tangible materials the painter originally used. But in that great advantage of the painting lies the great disadvantage of the painting: tangible materials degrade over time, and many, if not most, of the paintings we most revere have been around for a long time indeed, and few of them have come down to us in pristine shape. Enter the art restorer, who takes on the task of undoing, painstakingly and entirely by hand, both the ravages of time and the blunders of less competent stewards who have come before. In this case, enter Julian Baumgartner of Chicago's Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration, a meditative short documentary on whose practice we featured earlier this year here on Open Culture. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

Africa is a Country - World Cup 2018

The 2010 World Cup was tumultuous for France; both an athletic failure and a site of social conflict.
"The Respectable French - Football exerts a tortured fascination on the French public. It is fashionable to scoff at the benighted masses turning to football as an opium and to deplore the bad behavior and flashy spending of footballers. But everyone goes back to being a fan if Les Bleus are winning. The only country to qualify for three World Cup finals in twenty years, France also flamed out in the group stage at two of the tournaments in between 1998 and now. As Les Bleus’ athletic performance has seesawed, so has the team’s perception by an increasingly racist, classist society. Countless retrospectives have looked back at the French 1998 squad and the illusory dream of 'black-blanc-beur' unity. But while the memory of that victory 20 years ago is beloved, what really shapes the current iteration of Les Bleus was the tumultuous 2010 World Cup. ..."
Africa is a Country - The Respectable French
Africa is a Country - World Cup 2018

French national football team squad member, Paul Pogba with the national team at the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Africa is a Country - Pogbacité By Laurent Dubois

Arthur Russell - The World Of Arthur Russell (2004)

"There appears to be a typo on the usually on-point Soul Jazz label, in that an 'S' is missing from the title of their attempted overview of the enigmatic New York scene cellist Arthur Russell. If anything, there were many musical 'worlds' for Iowa-born Arthur Russell, and he floated between them effortlessly in a way that, up until death from AIDS in 1992, no one else had. There was the world of Indian master-musician Ali Akbar Khan, in which Arthur used his cello to trance-inducing effect. There was the world where his cello shadowed the beat-poet Allen Ginsburg at readings, as well as the world of The Kitchen, where he premiered his peculiar minimal compositions while also rubbing elbows with composers like John Cage, Rhys Chatham, and Philip Glass. He was in the rock world, too, nearly joining the Talking Heads and forming the short-lived Flying Hearts with ex-Modern Lover Ernie Brooks. He even briefly produced quirky tracks in the rap world, frustrating young rapper Mark Sinclair who would one day go on to make it as the meat-headed action hero Vin Diesel. ..."
Pitchfork
Sounds of the Universe (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: The world of Arthur Russell (Full album) 1:13:13

2015 November: Love Of Life Orchestra ‎– Extended Niceties EP (1980), 2015 September: Arthur Russell, 2017 January: Instrumentals (2007), 2017 April: The Infinite Worlds of Arthur Russell

Manhole covers that left their mark on New York

"To get a sense of modern, massive New York City, you have to look up and take in the scope of the bridges, apartment towers, and skyscrapers. But to uncover the city’s past, it helps to look down. That’s where you’ll find manhole covers not stamped 'Con Edison' or 'Made in India' but embossed with a local manufacturer’s name and signature design motif. Instead of cookie cutter lids that all look alike, these covers turn a utilitarian object into something sublime. One of my favorites is the one at the top of the page by J.B. and J.M. Cornell, a manufacturer of specialty and ornamental ironwork since 1828, according to glassian.com. The address on the cover is that of the company; the cover itself was spotted in Brooklyn Heights. (Patented 1845!) The cover likely had glass over the holes at one time, allowing light through. ..."
Ephemeral New York