Guardian: ‘We don’t live in a world of goodies and baddies, do we?’ The true story behind The Mauritanian
The Mauritanian - Kevin Macdonald (2021)
Magnus Carlsen Pounces on Rival’s Mistake to Retain Chess Title
“Magnus Carlsen of Norway retained his world championship on Friday in Dubai after his challenger, the Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi, committed the last of a series of blunders that turned their once-taut match into a relatively easy victory. Carlsen’s victory came in the 11th game of an event that had been scheduled to last 14 games. The final score was 7.5 to 3.5 points, with each victory worth one point and draws worth half a point. The loss in the final game by Nepomniachtchi completed one of the worst collapses in a title match in chess history. After the first five games ended in draws, Nepomniachtchi lost four of the last six games. His last three defeats were mostly the result of self-inflicted wounds, as Nepomniachtchi made critical and relatively simple errors in each of them. ...”
New York Rocker
Robert Farris Thompson, ‘Guerrilla Scholar’ of African Art, Dies at 88
Professor Thompson at his home in New Haven, Conn., in 2019. He continued teaching into his 80s.
“Robert Farris Thompson, a self-described ‘guerrilla scholar’ who revolutionized the study of the cultures of Africa and the Americas by tracing through art, music and dance myriad continuities between the two, died on Nov. 29 at a nursing home in New Haven, Conn. ... Born into an upper-middle-class white family in Texas and educated at Yale, Professor Thompson is remembered by colleagues and students for his energizing thinking and his extravagantly performative presence. In the Yale classroom, where he taught African American studies for more than half a century, he turned lecterns into percussive instruments. On research trips in Brazil, Cuba and Nigeria, he was known to exchange his J. Press madras shorts for the robes of an initiate into tribal religious societies. ...”
2014 April: Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, 2017 February: Canons of the Cool
Music makes the past alive
“Moving on from ‘clubbing across the continent,’ Africa Is a Country Radio is back on Worldwide FM with a new season. This time, each show will be inspired by a different work of African literature. In the first episode, we visit Ethiopia with Kenyan-American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who has just released a new novel called Unbury Our Dead with Song on Cassava Republic Press. In his latest work, Mukoma uses the Tizita, and its birthplace of Ethiopia, as an entry way to ruminate on the intricacies of love, war, life and death, the past, the future, faith and human expression. ...”
Greg Tate
“Greg Tate, a journalist and critic whose articles for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications starting in the 1980s helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same plane as jazz and Abstract Expressionism, died on Tuesday in New York City. He was 64. ... Mr. Tate exploded onto the New York cultural scene in the early 1980s, soon after graduating from Howard University, when he began contributing freelance music reviews to The Voice. Although he didn’t join the weekly newspaper’s staff until 1987, he almost immediately became its pre-eminent writer on Black music and art, and by extension one of the city’s leading cultural critics. New York at the time was an ebullient chaos of cultures, its downtown scene populated by street artists, struggling writers, disco D.J.s and punk rockers living in cheap apartments and crowding into clubs like Paradise Garage and CBGB. ...”
Village Voice: Harlem When It Sizzled (1982), Langston Hughes: A Genius Child Comes of Age (1988), Chuck D: All Over the Map (1991), Black Metropolis: Upholding Sugar Hill’s Radical Tradition (1987), Gil Scott-Heron, R.I.P. (2011), Voice: Greg Tate
Inside the Fall of Kabul
Instead, to the shock of the world, the Afghan capital fell in a matter of hours.
“Part 1: The Withdrawal. After dark on a mild July evening, I made my way through a heavily fortified neighborhood in downtown Kabul. Over the years, the capital’s elite had retreated deeper behind concrete walls topped with concertina wire; sometimes they even added a layer of Hesco barriers on the sidewalk, forcing me into the street as I passed. I buzzed at the home of a former government official, went inside and climbed the marble stairs to a rooftop party. I’d been to a few of his gatherings over the years, some of them raucous with laughter and dancing, but this was a quiet affair, with a small group of Afghan men and women, mostly young and stylishly dressed, sitting in a circle under the lamplight. The mood was grim. In recent weeks, large areas of the north, places that had not historically supported the Taliban, had suddenly fallen. ...”
2021 August: Afghanistan Live Updates: Afghan President Said to Have Fled as Taliban Enter Kabul, 2021 August: How Will the Taliban Rule? Here’s the Early Evidence
Families, most likely relatives of Zero Unit fighters, making their way into the airport to be evacuated on Aug. 24.
Tangerine Dream - Poland (The Warsaw Concert 1984)
“... This latter attribute clearly struck a chord with the band’s new sponsors, Clive Calder’s UK-based Jive imprint, whose first Tangerine Dream release was November 1984’s Poland. A lavish two-disc live LP, the record was compiled from highlights of the two triumphant shows the Berlin-based trio performed at Warsaw’s cavernous Ice Stadium on December 10, 1983. Tangerine Dream had long since built up a sizable following in Communist-controlled Eastern Europe, and they were one of the first major Western outfits to make significant inroads behind the Iron Curtain. ...”
Appeals Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to Shield Material From Jan. 6 Inquiry
”A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that Congress is entitled to see White House records related to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he still has the power to keep the material secret. In a 68-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that Congress’s oversight powers, backed by President Biden’s decision not to invoke executive privilege over the material, outweighed Mr. Trump’s residual secrecy powers. ...”
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Will Be Retold from a Woman’s Point of View
“Nineteen Eighty-Four has been a byword for totalitarian dystopia longer than most of us have been reading books. But apart from its the title and certain words from its invented ‘newspeak‘ — doubleplusgood, unperson, thoughtcrime — how deeply is George Orwell’s best-known novel embedded into the culture? Most of us recognize the name Winston Smith, and many of us may even remember details of his job at the Ministry of Truth, where the facts of history are continually rewritten to suit ever-shifting political exigencies. But how much do we know about the other major character: Julia, Winston’s fellow ministry employee who becomes his clandestine co-dissident and forbidden lover? ...”
2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 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: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016), 2019 September: What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural, 2021 November: Down and out in George Orwell’s Paris: A guide to the secret Paname
Robbie Shakespeare
“Robert Warren Dale Shakespeare (27 September 1953 – 8 December 2021) was a Jamaican bass guitarist and record producer, best known as one half of the reggae rhythm section and production duo Sly and Robbie, with drummer Sly Dunbar. Regarded as one of the most influential reggae bassists,Shakespeare was also known for his creative use of electronics and production effects units. He was sometimes nicknamed ‘Basspeare’. As a part of Sly and Robbie, Shakespeare worked with various reggae artists such as U-Roy, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minott, Augustus Pablo, Yellowman, and Black Uhuru. His production work also extended beyond the reggae genre, covering various pop and rock artists such as Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Cyndi Lauper, Joe Cocker, Yoko Ono, Serge Gainsbourg, and Grace Jones. Prior to his involvement in Sly and Robbie, he was a member of the session groups The Revolutionaries and The Aggrovators. ...”
25 Years of UbuWeb, the Internet’s Best Kept Secret
“Though you’ve likely stumbled across a post or two from UbuWeb during one of your internet excursions or referenced the site during college courses, perhaps it’s a good time to devote solid, focused energy on absorbing the profoundly deep lessons buried in the crucial online archive of art, music, film, literature and esoteric ephemera. This year marks UbuWeb’s 25th anniversary, but don’t expect a social media blitz, a plea for funding or a major web redesign. Defiantly utilitarian, it operates as a crucial resource while openly acknowledging in its About essay that its archive contains copyright-infringing content: ‘By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted. We’ve never been sued—never even come close.’ ...”
How Soccer Lost America (Then Got It Back) - Brian Phillips
"A strange feature of American exceptionalism during the 1980s and ’90s was that we wanted to import everything but culture. This is one way to understand the bizarre anxiety and contempt with which much of the American sports media regarded soccer in the late 20th century: It was the wrong kind of product. ... American men in Bangladesh-made khakis could, without a whisper of cognitive dissonance, drive their German cars while listening to their Chinese-engineered radio consoles, where they’d spend drivetime deriding soccer as a foreign menace, a cosmopolitan threat to American strength—a 'game for beret-wearers,' as Ann Coulter once put it. ..."
Promises - Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra (2021)
“... This month, Sanders returns with ‘Promises,’ his first major album in nearly two decades. It is a collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and is led by Sam Shepherd, a d.j. who produces electronic music under the name Floating Points. Shepherd, an Englishman in his mid-thirties, emerged in the late two-thousands, making boogie-influenced dance tracks. His music soon became more ambient and expansive, as though he were uncoiling his club-oriented songs and exploring where the synth squiggles and hazy textures might go if they were allowed to meander. ...”
NY Times: Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points Meet in the Atmosphere, Floating Points, Electronic Music’s King of Pain (Video)
2015 December: Maleem Mahmoud Ghania With Pharaoh Sanders - The Trance Of Seven Colors (1994), 2016 January: Ptah, The El Daoud - Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders (1970), 2016 November: Tauhid (1967), 2017 May: The Pharoah Sanders Story: In the Beginning 1963-1964, 2017 November: Let Us Now Praise Pharoah Sanders, Master of Sax, 2018 February: Anthology: You've Got to Have Freedom - Pharoah Sanders (2005), 2018 February: James Blood Ulmer & Pharoah Sanders - Live 2003, 2018 May: How Pharoah Sanders Brought Jazz to Its Spiritual Peak with His Impulse! Albums, 2019 January: Africa (1987)
Titian: Women, Myth & Power
The Rape of Europa, 1559-1562
“Between 1551 and 1562, Titian created a series of monumental paintings for King Philip II of Spain. Celebrated as landmarks of western painting, the six poesie — or painted poetries — envision epic stories from classical Antiquity. Titian reimagined these familiar tales and used his modern style of painting to shape the future of western art. For the first time in over four centuries, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s fully restored Rape of Europa is reunited with its five illustrious companions in the exhibition’s finale and its only American venue on an international tour including to the National Gallery, London and the Museo del Prado, Madrid. This exhibition explores each painting's story, its drama, raw emotion, and complex consequences illustrated in each painting, reconsidering what the poesie meant in their own time and how they resonate now. ...”
Venus and Adonis, about 1553–1554.
Why New York Is Unearthing a Brook It Buried a Century Ago
Tibbetts Brook was dammed in the 18th century to create a pond that still exists in Van Cortlandt Park. Part of the brook was buried underground around 1912.
“New York is a city surrounded by water, from the open ocean to bays to rivers. But there is also an enormous trove of water hidden below its streets and high-rise buildings — hundreds of subterranean streams, creeks and springs that were buried long ago and all but forgotten as the city grew. Tibbetts Brook is one of them. Its final stretch was diverted into a drain in the Bronx around 1912 and sent down to the sewer pipes below to make way for development of the marshland where it used to run. For decades, environmentalists and local activists campaigned to resurface the long-buried stream. Now, a changing climate is making what they struggled to achieve necessary. ...”
The original course of Spuyten Duyvil Creek and its junction with Tibbetts Brook, and the island of Paparinemo (now Kingsbridge, Bronx)
Late nights in Lisboa
“Contrary to the prevailing idea that Portugal lies at the margins due to a disadvantaged economic positioning in the EU, that small country on the Atlantic coast was actually central in the making of modern Europe. That is, it was from ports such as Lisbon that the subjects of the Portuguese Christian kings, only a generation or two removed from the rule of the remains of the Umayaad Caliphate, sailed south hoping to circumvent the trade routes that snaked through the much wealthier and African and Asian kingdoms of the time. On their way to the Indian Ocean, they set up trading posts along the African coast that would eventually turn into outposts for the brutal European expansionism, enslavement, and resource extraction that would define the next 500 years. ...”
Francesco Rosi - Hands over the City (1963)
“Rod Steiger is ferocious as a scheming land developer in Francesco Rosi's Hands over the City, a blistering work of social realism and the winner of the 1963 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion. This expose of the politically driven real-estate speculation that has devastated Naples's civilian landscape moves breathlessly from a cataclysmic building collapse to the backroom negotiations of civic leaders vying for power in a city council election, laying bare the inner workings of corruption with passion and outrage. ...”
2013 July: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), 2021 July: Christ Stopped at Eboli: Memories of Exile
25th Anniversary Countdown (2 of 13): LX(RMX)
“Disquiet.com 25th anniversary countdown, day 2 of 13. In 2012, I had the pleasure of engaging eight musicians to explore the sounds of Lisbon, Portugal. These were: Steve Roden, Robin Rimbaud, Pedro Tudela, Kate Carr, Shawn Kelly, Marielle Jakobsons, Paula Daunt, and João Ricardo. The project was done with an old friend of mine, Jorge Colombo, the phenomenal illustrator, photographer, and designer, to accompany an exhibit of his at the time. In the spirit of Fernando Pessoa (whose The Book of Disquiet provided the name for Disquiet.com), who wrote under (from within) numerous different heteronyms (or authorial identities), each participant did two tracks: one under their own name, and one under their pseudonym. ... More details at disquiet.com/lx-rmx. Design by Brian Scott of Boon Design.”
Speaking with the Multifaceted Street and Studio Artist Will Power
“Active on both the streets and in his studio, Will Power fashions stylishly seductive images, often fusing elements of graffiti, street art and fine art. His talents can now be viewed not only on the streets of his native New Jersey and throughout NYC, but in the group exhibition, On and Off the Streets: Urban Art New Jersey, that continues through February 27 at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey. While selecting studio works to feature in the exhibition, I had the opportunity to interview Will. ...”
Museum rivalry ‘could make Dutch Vermeer show last of its kind’
Girl with a Pearl Earring will be loaned to the Rijksmuseum from the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
“Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has announced a ‘first and last’ exhibition of all the paintings by Johannes Vermeer that are fit to travel, as its director claimed growing museum rivalry makes such international cooperation unlikely in the future. Vermeer, whose most famous work is Girl with a Pearl Earring, dating from around 1665, is thought to have painted 35 masterpieces, of which 23 were shown together 26 years ago at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum director, said his institution would surpass that number but he did not expect such a collection to ever be possible again owing to the age of the works and the intense competition among galleries to draw in visitors. ...”
2009 September: Vermeer's Masterpiece, The Milkmaid, 2011 February: Vermeer: Master of Light, 2013 October: Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, 2015 December: This Is Not a Vermeer ™, 2017 January: The Art of Painting (1665–1668)
Detail from The Little Street, circa 1658.
Best Ornette Coleman Pieces: Songs of Limitless Creativity
December: Geminid Meteors & Comet Leonard
Who is the best player from each of England’s 48 counties?
"England’s system of counties is rarely discussed in relation to professional football. If you say you support Surrey or Lancashire or Worcestershire, you are clearly talking about cricket rather than football. England’s second sport is played by sides who take their names from the county they’re based in, but football is contested by teams almost universally named after cities and towns. There are, of course, Notts County and Derby County; Notts literally being the name of the county and Derby representing the county of Derbyshire. Things become more complex when you consider Stockport County, named because Stockport was once a ‘county borough’, independent from control of any wider county, and across the border in Wales there’s Newport County, originally named Newport & Monmouth County, after the historic county of Monmouthshire. ..."
Doll’s House - Courtney Harris
“Have I always loved small things? I’ve asked myself that question many times over the past few years as my obsession with all things miniature has grown and grown. I was certainly interested in tiny objects before the doll’s house arrived at the MFA in 2017 thanks to the generosity of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, but its appearance and immediate integration into our galleries fanned the flames of my growing love for everything small. An object like the doll’s house is full—literally and figuratively—with opportunity. Opportunities for research, for study, for connection, for exploration. With nine rooms and more than 200 silver miniatures, it begs for repeat visits. This house has become a living object to me—one I come back to time and time again. I probably speak, write, and think about this artwork more than any other in the Museum. ...”
2013 April: Dollhouse
Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation
“Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have stepped up an effort to conflate the so-called Steele dossier with the Russia investigation following the indictment of a researcher for the document on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of its sources.Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign — as a ‘hoax.’ But the available evidence indicates that the dossier was largely tangential to the Russia investigation. Here is a look at the facts. ...”
African Guitar Heroes
Dr Nico Kasanda
“Let’s kick it off with Djelimady Tounkara, one of the best instrumentalists of his generation, who happens to play the guitar. The former member of the Rail Band of Bamako has managed to make his instrument take on the accents and triplets he previously learnt on the ngoni, the Mandingo lute, and even makes it flirt with flamenco and Afro-Cuban sounds. While Mali is not lacking in six-string talent (the eternal Ali Farka Touré, father of Saharan-accented deep blues, Kante Manfila, Zani Diabaté, and Mama Sissoko, who was part of Super Biton of Ségou’s best days), the best sounds are coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Listen to our African Guitar Heroes playlist on Spotify and Deezer. ...”
Wild Things – The Creatures EP (1981)
“Wild Things is the first release by British duo the Creatures (singer Siouxsie Sioux and drummer Budgie). It was issued on 25 September 1981 by Polydor Records as two 7″ single records in a ‘double-album’ style card cover, and is usually referred to as an EP. It peaked in the UK Singles Chart at No. 24, and the pair performed ‘Mad Eyed Screamer’ on Top of the Pops. … The initial idea for Wild Things, and the Creatures, came about during the recording sessions for the Siouxsie and the Banshees album Juju. While bassist Steven Severin and guitarist John McGeoch took a break, Siouxsie and drummer Budgie created the song ‘But Not Them.’ ...”
2017 April: "Hong Kong Garden" / "Voices (On The Air)" (1978), 2017 September: "Playground Twist" (1979), 2018 October: Juju – Siouxsie and the Banshees (1981)
Gilbert Sorrentino - The Orangery (1978)
“... The Orangery is one of [Gilbert] Sorrentino’s most memorable collections of poetry. Each poem includes the word ‘orange,’ the ‘preconceived constraint’ upon which the poet planned this book. Orange appears and reappears as a color, a fruit, a memory, an intrusion, a word seeking a rhyme, or an unexpected presence. On first publication William Bronk wrote, ‘In The Orangery Sorrentino makes things which are hard, gaudy, and sometimes scary. They are stark artifacts of our world. . . . They are made to last.’ The poem titled ‘King Cole’ takes two lines from a song that Nat King Cole made popular—’Wham! Bam! Alla Kazam!/ out of an orange colored sky’—and focuses on the nonsense words. ...”
An 1873 map shows rural Brooklyn on the cusp of big changes
“I can’t help but get lost in the Beers Map of Gravesend. Drawn in 1873 by cartographer Frederick Beers, it’s an impressive survey of one of the original six towns of Brooklyn—founded in 1643 by English-born Lady Deborah Moody and her group of Anabaptist followers, according to heartofconeyisland.com. What amazes me most is how rural this pocket of southern Brooklyn was in the 1870s—and how much change was right on the horizon. (If you can’t magnify the map above, try visiting this link.) First, look at that craggy shoreline of Coney Island. At some point, as Coney transitioned into the beach resort dubbed the People’s Playground in the next few decades, all those inlets and little islands were filled in and straightened out—including Coney Island Creek, making Coney no longer an island. ...”
2009 April: Coney Island, 2010 July: Nathan's Famous, 2011 March: "An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders", Owen Smith, 2013 August: Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, 2013 October: Last Days of Summer at Coney Island, 2014 July: Coney Island - Directors: Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler (1973), 2015 May: The Case for Riding the Subway to the Last Stop, 2016 December: Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, 2017 August: Here's What Coney Island Looks Like In The Empty Pre-Dawn Hours, 2019 August: Pierless, 2021 July: The 1916 stunt that made Nathan’s Famous a Coney Island hot dog icon
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