How ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ Became Sergio Leone’s Butchered Swan Song

 

“... The great Italian director Sergio Leone established himself as the inventor of the spaghetti Western genre in the mid-1960s thanks to his Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) starring the legendary Clint Eastwood. His three following and equally adored films would become known as the Once Upon a Time trilogy and would end up spanning three decades—the first installment, called Once Upon a Time in the West, was released in 1968, the second one Duck, You Sucker! came out three years later in 1971, and the last one titled Once Upon a Time in America took him over a decade to make. ...”

Cinephilia Beyond

2016 July: Once Upon a Time in America  (1984)

The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021)

 

“As a political figure, Donald J. Trump used Twitter to praise, to cajole, to entertain, to lobby, to establish his version of events — and, perhaps most notably, to amplify his scorn. This list documents the verbal attacks Mr. Trump posted on Twitter, from when he declared his candidacy in June 2015 to Jan. 8, when Twitter permanently barred him. More recent insults are highlighted. ...”

NY Times

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask - Isaac Julien (1995)

 

“Isaac Julien and Mark Nash’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996) is a film portrait of the revolutionary, writer and psychiatrist, whose classic publications The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin White Mask (1952) remain the bibles of decolonisation. One of the leading black intellectuals of the twentieth century, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) trained in psychiatry in France. He explored the ‘black is beautiful’ Negritude movement and entered into a dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre about the experience of being black. He wrote his first major work, Black Skin White Masks as his graduate psychiatry thesis, focusing on the psychological interdependence of the colonised and colonisers, with particular reference to the French colonies. ...”

Victoria Miro

Isaac Julien

Criterion

W - Black Skin, White Masks, PDF

Victoria Miro: Black Skin White Masks trailer

2017 October:  The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Carlos Pinto and John Sear Fashion Elegant Mosaic Mural of Endangered Swan for “The Audubon Mural Project” in Uptown Manhattan

 

“163rd Street off Broadway was the place to be last week. Multidisciplinary artists Carlos Pinto and John Sear brought their wondrous skills to The Audubon Mural Project, adding two elegant trumpeter swans to the approximately 100 uptown murals featuring endangered birds. The Audubon Project’s first mosaic mural fashioned entirely with recycled objects — from shards of glass to shattered plates  — garnered a huge welcome from the neighborhood, with volunteers eager to assist in the process. Featured above is the completed mural that was captured this past Monday. The images that follow were taken last week as the mural was still in progress: Carlos Pinto at work ...”

Street Art NYC

The Journey of the Antihero Image

 

David Goodis at Warner Bros. One of the bleakest of all the noir authors, he set his 1946 novel, Dark Passage, in San Francisco.

“What is noir? It’s one of those catch-all concepts, an I-know-it-when-I-see-it designation, as elusive as a Santa Ana wind. It’s an American genre with a French name, a literary style perhaps best understood through the lens of film: atmospheric black and white. As a category, noir dates back to the 1920s and the writers who contributed to the pulp magazine Black Mask. These included Raymond Chandler, who published his first story there in 1933, as well as Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Dashiell Hammett—who introduced the Continental Op, an archetypal detective who never reveals his name, in October 1923—and the now largely forgotten Paul Cain, whose brutal, jazzy 1933 novel, Fast One, reconfigured Southern California crime fiction with a bang. ...”

Alta

Speaking Up for the Armchair Fan

 

Critics of television’s influence on soccer ignore that it’s still the way most fans experience the game.

“Television is not a dirty word. It is not the sort of word that should be spat out in anger or growled with resentment or grumbled through gritted teeth. It is not a loaded word, or one laced with scorn and opprobrium and bile. It is not a word that has a tone. Not in most contexts, anyway.In soccer, television is treated as the dirtiest word you can imagine. It is an object of disdain and frustration and, sometimes, hatred. Managers, and occasionally players, rail against its power to dictate when games are played and how often. They resent its scrutiny and its bombast. Television is never cited as the root of anything pleasant. Television is the cause of nothing but problems. There is no need to linger for long on the irony and the hypocrisy here. Television, of course, is also what pays their wages. ...”

NY Times

The violin over the door of a Turtle Bay mansion Image

 

“Old New York City houses hold the most interesting clues—like this bas relief of an angel and horns. It sits over the doorway of 225-227 East 49th Street in Turtle Bay, a mostly brownstone block with the exception of this unusual Tudor-style building. Now a carved up rental, it was once a single-family mansion…and the hint about its most famous occupant is inside this bas relief.See the violin and musical notes? This is the former home of Efrem Zimbalist, the Russian-born violinist whose career spanned much of the 20th century. (If you aren’t familiar with him, you might have heard of his actor son, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., or his actress granddaughter, Stephanie Zimbalist.) ...”

Ephemeral New York

The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

 

“... Mary Ann Caws preempts any complaints regarding selection of poets and poems in her editor’s note: ‘Compiling a major volume such as this one is, of necessity, a highly subjective process. In considering the many poets writing in French in the twentieth century and just after, I have given less attention to the number of poems and pages per poet than to the more important goal of including as many poets from as many countries as a single volume permits. My aim has been to create a truly international anthology, one that represents the diversity and changing nature of French poetics during the century just past, giving sufficient space to the voices of the living, while not letting them overwhelm those of the past. Every effort has been made to include poets that seem to have been most crucial to their own time as well as those from the present that demand to be read.’ ...”

rain taxi

amazon

Duke Ellington - Liberian Suite (1947)

 

“By 1947, when Duke Ellington jumped to Columbia after a brief stay at Musicraft (following six years at RCA Victor), he had one of the best bands anyone ever led, in any category of music. The tragedy was that Columbia squandered its opportunity to use them. The group spent almost a full year cutting short-form single tracks, and didn't get around to doing any of the more challenging music that Ellington was writing until the December 24, 1947 session that yielded Liberian Suite, after which it got caught in the Musician's Union recording ban and wasn't in the studio again until 1949. Liberian Suite brought Ellington to a new level of recognition. He'd begun writing multi-section suites in the early '40s, but Liberian Suite was his first international commission, from the government of the African nation, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding by freed American slaves; it was the first formal manifestation of a process by which Ellington would be a virtual musical ambassador to the world by the end of the next decade. As to the music, it is not Ellington's most sophisticated, but it is filled with bracing rhythms, juicy parts for the horns and saxes, and one stunning vocal part. ...”

allmusic

I Like the Sunrise : Duke Ellington’s “Liberian Suite.”

W - Liberian Suite

Discogs (Video)

moochin about: Liberian Suite, YouTube: Liberian Suite

2011 November: Duke Ellington - "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", 1943, 2011 September: "Take the A Train" - Duke Ellington, 2015 January: Home Movies of Duke Ellington Playing Baseball (And How Baseball Coined the Word “Jazz”), 2017 November: Secret Music: On Duke Ellington’s The Queen’s Suite., 2020 June: Bundle of Blues (1933), Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935), Black & Tan (1929)

The Socialism of James Joyce

 

“Ulysses is a book in which everything happens and nothing happens. The story of a day in the life of a city — the Hibernian metropolis, as James Joyce saw Dublin — is a journey in a rambling flow of consciousness, where the very serious political issues of the day (the book is set on June 16, 1904) wrestle for space with the mundanities and excitement of the lives of his characters. Speaking of his appreciation for the book, Jeremy Corbyn noted how ‘Joyce references and richly describes what’s happening in the street. So somebody is holding forth about a big political issue and then the refuse cart goes by.’ Edna O’Brien, one of Joyce’s finest biographers, has rightly maintained that ‘no other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city.’ ...”

Jacobin

NY Times: Can’t Get Through ‘Ulysses’? Digital Help Is on the Way. (Video)

Corbyn, Joyce and Ulysses

2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell, 2014 July: Digital Dubliners, 2014 September: Read "Ulysses Seen", A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Classic, 2015 January: The Mapping Dubliners Project, 2015 February: Davy Byrne’s, 2016 January: Port and Docks, 2016 February: Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Different Artists, 2016 April: Nassau Street, 2016 May: Stephen’s Green, 2016 October: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 2016 November: Skerries, 2017 January: Walking Ulysses | Joyce's Dublin Today, 2018 October: Bloomsday Explained, 2020 March: Ireland’s Voices, 2020 June: Stephen Dedalus, 2020 November: The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov, and Homer in Maps

 

A section of an 1883 Letts, Son, and Company map of Dublin showing the eastern end of Liffey between the Custom House and the river’s mouth. Along the north bank are the main docks and port industrial complexes. Port and Docks - Mapping Dubliners

Venice: Palazzo Grimani - Canaletto

 

“This work is almost a portrait of a building: the imposing facade of the Palazzo Grimani fills nearly the entire composition. Boatmen emerge from the left and right just in front of us, adding a sense of movement, while figures composed of dots and daubs of paint stand on the palace’s steps. Palazzo Grimani, built between 1556 and 1575 for Gerolamo Grimani, Procurator of San Marco, was one of the outstanding buildings of Renaissance Venice. It was admired during the eighteenth century and included in Antonio Visentini’s Admiranda Urbis Venetae, a series of architectural drawings of Venetian palaces. ...”

 

National Gallery

Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot

 

“Militiamen showed up proudly bearing the emblems of their groups — American flags with the stars replaced by the Roman numeral III, patches that read ‘Oath Keepers.’ Alt-right types wore Pepe the Frog masks, and QAnon adherents could be seen in T-shirts urging people to ‘Trust the Plan.’ White supremacists brought their variant of the Crusader cross.And then there were thousands of Trump supporters with MAGA gear — flags, hats, T-shirts, thermoses, socks. One flag portrayed President Trump as Rambo; another featured him riding a Tyrannosaurus rex and carrying the kind of rocket-propelled grenade launcher seen on the streets of Mogadishu or Kandahar. The iconography of the American far right was on display on Jan 6. during the violence at the Capitol. ...”

NY Times (Video)

LitHub - From Al Qaeda to QAnon: Rebecca Solnit on the Inside Job at the Capitol

LitHub - American Legacy: When White Supremacist Mobs Threaten Democracy

Politico - The Gutted, 'Unnerving' State of the Agencies Supposed to Keep the U.S. Safe

******NY Times: Videos Show How Rioter Was Trampled in Stampede at Capitol (Video)

Pepe the Frog

Habibi Funk’s Musical Revivals

 

“In a small shop in Casablanca in 2013, Jannis Stürtz dropped a needle on a vintage vinyl recording of Fadoul, one of Morocco’s most-popular musicians of the 1970s. What he heard next was ‘a mighty voice and a raw sound’ that Stürtz, a Berlin-based DJ and music producer, found ‘enormously inspiring.’ The ‘energetic performance and very lively atmosphere preserved in the recording tugged at me,’ he says. He heard clear links in it to alternative music scenes in Germany and the West. ‘When I listened to Fadoul’s album Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, I found he was blending rock and funk’ in a style both Moroccan and inspired by James Brown, America’s ‘Godfather of Soul.’ The experience led Stürtz, now 36, to the founding of his second recording label. In 2000 he and a friend had turned their fascination with vinyl and African and Asian funk into Jakarta Records. ...”

AramcoWorld

Habibi Funk - A spotlight on Arab grooves - An exhibition

FvF Mixtape #111: Habibi Funk

2017 June: Ahmed Malek and Other Treasures From Habibi Funk’s North African Crate - Digging Expeditions, 2017 July: Lebanon: Various artists - Jakarta Radio 010 Mix, 2017 December: From the Counter: Beirut, 2018 June: "Habibi Funk 001 Mix" by Jannis of Jakarta Records (Mix of Arabic 60s & 70s), 2019 September: Habibi Funk, the label playing hide and seek in Medina

French Collectives Pagans & La Nòvia Plunge Traditional Folk in Drone and Noise to Bracing Results Image

 

“‘Plugging in’ can be a dangerous thing to do in a traditional folk environment—just ask Bob Dylan. Or, for that matter, French musician Guilhem Lacroux, who received a ‘mixed’ reaction the first time his groups, Toad and La Baracande, toured the traditional music circuits in their home country. Perhaps it was their ‘harsh noise’ aesthetic that did it. ... La Nòvia is a unique proposition. Consisting of 12 musicians spread between Mulhouse in the east and Pau in the southwest, it’s not really a label so much as, ‘a place to exchange and to meet,’ says Lacroux. It’s also become a key player in the movement to bring France’s oft-maligned and half-forgotten folk tradition into the present day. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

A 16th-Century Astronomy Book Featured “Analog Computers” to Calculate the Shape of the Moon, the Position of the Sun, and More

 

“If you want to learn how the planets move, you’ll almost certainly go to one place first: Youtube. Yes, there have been plenty of worthwhile books written on the subject, and reading them will prove essential to further deepening your understanding. But videos have the capacity of motion, an undeniable benefit when motion itself is the concept under discussion. Less than twenty years into the Youtube age, we’ve already seen a good deal of innovation in the art of audiovisual explanation. But we’re also well over half a millennium into the age of the book as we know it, a time that even in its early phases saw impressive attempts to go beyond text on a page. Take, for example, Peter Apian‘s Cosmographia, first published in 1524. ...”

Open Culture

TRUMP IMPEACHED AGAIN

 

“The House on Wednesday impeached President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as 10 members of the president’s party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors for an unprecedented second time. Reconvening under the threat of continued violence and the protection of thousands of National Guard troops, the House was determined to hold Mr. Trump to account just one week before he was to leave office. At issue was his role in encouraging a mob that attacked the Capitol one week ago while Congress met to affirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, forcing lawmakers to flee for their lives in a deadly rampage.The House adopted a single article of impeachment, voting 232 to 197 to charge Mr. Trump with ‘inciting violence against the government of the United States’ and requesting his immediate removal from office and disqualification from ever holding one again. ...”

NY Times

c|net: Donald Trump impeached following deadly riot at US Capitol

CNN: Trump's been impeached again. What's next?

aljazeera: Donald Trump impeached for ‘inciting’ US Capitol riot

Colette (2018 film)

 

Keira Knightley

 

“Colette is a 2018 biographical drama film directed by Wash Westmoreland, from a screenplay by Westmoreland, Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Richard Glatzer, based upon the life of the French novelist Colette. It stars Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Denise Gough. ... Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is a young woman from the rural Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye at the end of the 19th century, who begins an affair with Willy. Willy eventually brings Colette to Paris as his bride, with socialites expressing surprise a libertine like him would marry. Willy refers to himself as a ‘literary entrepreneur’, employing a number of ghostwriters to write articles. However, he finds the limited output does not bring in enough revenue to cover his expenses, due to his expensive lifestyle of entertaining socialites. He commissions one ghostwriter to work on a novel while Colette manages his correspondence. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: ‘Colette’ and One Woman’s Lust for Life (Video)

TIME: What to Know About the Real Author Who Inspired the Movie Colette

YouTube: Colette Trailer #1

W - Colette

Colette on Writing, the Blissful Obsessive-Compulsiveness of Creative Work, and Withstanding Naysayers

amazon: Colette

Colette

Jungle Lab

 

“The machete-wielding scientists ventured into the Amazon, hacking through dense jungle as the mid-morning temperature soared past 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 C). Soaked in sweat, the small group of men and women sawed and tore trees limb from limb. They drilled into the soil and sprayed paint across tree trunks. This is vandalism in the name of science. In the trees about 90 km (55 miles) from Rondônia state capital Porto Velho, the Brazilian researchers are seeking to learn how much carbon can be stored in different parts of the world’s largest rainforest, helping to remove emissions from the atmosphere that foment climate change. ...”

Reuters: Amazon rainforest

How a Presidential Rally Turned Into a Capitol Rampage

 

“When President Trump railed against the election results from a stage near the White House on Wednesday, his loyalists were already gathering at the Capitol. Soon, they would storm it. We analyzed a crucial two-hour period to reconstruct how a rally gave way to a mob that nearly came face to face with Congress. The day’s events were captured by protesters and witnesses who live-streamed the action or posted the scenes on social media. The footage shows the simultaneous and alternating perspectives of Mr. Trump at the podium, the lawmakers inside the Capitol and the swelling numbers  — and growing violence — of the rioters on the ground.  ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: ‘They Got a Officer!’: How a Mob Dragged and Beat Police at the Capitol (Video)

NY Times: ‘Our President Wants Us Here’: The Mob That Stormed the Capitol

NY Times: Impeach Trump Again

Where to Begin With Biosphere’s Dreamlike Electronica

 

“Say ‘biosphere’ and most people will think of the research site in Oracle, Arizona that has replicated seven of Earth’s biomes in order to study our ecosystems and place in the universe. But Biosphere is also the musical alias of Norwegian producer Geir Jenssen. The name is fitting; as Biosphere, Jenssen builds experimental electronic soundworlds that can be at once universal and site-specific—a closed system that feels seemingly infinite. Now thirty years into his career, Jenssen continues to make deep-focused and wide-ranging music, always seeking new vistas. He’s a tireless innovator and explorer, frequently mentioned alongside electronic legends like Aphex Twin, Carl Craig, and Autechre Inspired by the likes of New Order, Depeche Mode, and Brian Eno as a teenager in northern Norway, Jenssen utilized the synthesizer to begin making his own music. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Behold an Interactive Online Edition of Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants (1868)

 

“‘Who owned nature in the eighteenth century?’ asks Londa Schiebinger in Plants and Empire, a study of what the Stanford historian of science calls ‘colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic World.’ The question was largely decided at the time by ‘heroic voyaging botanists’ and ‘biopirates’ who claimed the world’s natural resources as their own. The matter was settled in the next couple centuries by merchants like Thomas Twining and his descendants, proprietors of Twinings tea. Founded as Britain’s first known tea shop in 1706, the company went on to become one of the largest purveyors of teas grown in the British colonies.One of Twining’s descendants, Elizabeth Twining, carried on the legacy as what Schiebinger calls one of many ‘armchair naturalists, who coordinated and synthesized collecting from sinecures in Europe,’ a role often taken on by women who could not travel the world. ...”

Open Culture

Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants: About the project 

An early image of ice skaters in Central Park

“The building of Central Park began in 1858. Later that year, the first section opened to the public: the 'skating pond,' aka the Lake. You’ve probably seen paintings and illustrations of 19th century New Yorkers ice skating in Central Park and on the ponds of Brooklyn. But this Currier & Ives lithograph (after a painting by Charles Parsons) might be the earliest.In ‘Central-Park Winter, the Skating Pond,’ it’s 1862, the middle of the Civil War. Yet the frozen pond is a scene of pure joy: couples in fancy skating outfits (yep, they were a thing) glided together, a rare opportunity for socially acceptable coed mingling. Kids play, adults fall, a dog is getting in on the fun, and everyone is enthralled by the magic of the ice under Bow Bridge. [Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art]”

Ephemeral New York

How Instruō Went Virtual

 

“Just as December 2020 was coming to a close, and the year’s surprises, both good and horrible, were seemingly behind us, a new surprise — quite the former — popped up for modular-synthesizer enthusiasts. The hardware manufacturer Instruō, based in Glasgow, Scotland, announced that it was making almost all of its modules available in software form, 17 total, and better yet: entirely for free. The modules run on the free VCV Rack software platform, which is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. (Visit Instruo at instruomodular.com, and VCV Rack at vcvrack.com.) ...”

disquiet (Video)

Beat Jazz Vol. 1 & 2: Pictures From The Gone World

 

“A mainstay favorite for years, this compilation collects music inpsired by the beatnik scene. The musical interpretation of blase on the New Bangs ‘Go Go Kitty’ is worth the admission all by itself. Way out poetry readings over bop combos, drugged up beret-wearers, and finger-popping hipsters making fifties pop. Featured artist: Jack Kerouac, Jack Hammer, Slim Gaillard, Gregory Corso, The Cosmic Rays with Sun Ra, Moondog and Coleman Hawkins. Beat poetry, hip Jazz and Be-Bop with the feel of a smoky club underground club in the early '60s, make this one of the coolest compilations you'll ever hear. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video), Discogs Beat Jazz:: Pictures From The Gone World Vol.2

YouTube: Beat Jazz: Pictures From The Gone World Vol. 2

Awe and Shock - How the world reacted to the Trumpist mob that sacked the heart of American democracy.

“Around the world, the shock of Wednesday’s assault on Capitol Hill brought into sharp focus a question that has been smoldering for four years among America’s allies and adversaries. ‘And again the doubt,’ wrote Emma Riverola in El Periódico de Catalunya, a Barcelona, Spain, daily, in painfully graphic terms. ‘Is this just a final burst of pus? Or has the infection spread, now threatening to cause a sepsis of the entire system?’ Was Donald Trump an aberration or the ominous onset of decline in the world’s premier democracy? The question echoed in democracies beset in recent years by populist movements nurtured by the same blend of far-right nationalism and blue-collar grievances as President Trump’s following. ... From the other end of the geopolitical spectrum, entrenched authoritarian regimes exulted in the disarray in a superpower accustomed to hectoring and sanctioning them over their suppression of democratic and human rights. ...”

NY Times

BBC - Capitol riots: World media see Trump ignite an 'insurrection' (Video)

YouTube: End times for President Trump, new dawn for Trump media? -  Al Jazeera

NY Times: The American Abyss

America Is Not Exceptional. Its History of Violence Cannot Be Denied.

Reuters: Factbox-World shocked by Trump supporters' attack on U.S. democracy

Open Culture - Mayhem Inside the Capitol: 40 Minutes of Footage (Video)

Rebecca Solnit: When the President of Mediocrity Incites an Insurrection

In These Times - Equating White Nationalists and "Left Radicals" Is What Got Us Here in the First Place

NY Times - America in 2021: Racial Progress in the South, a White Mob in the Capitol

How the Insurgent and MAGA Right are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington D.C.  - Robert Evans