Kendrick Lamar and the Shell Game of 'Respect'

"Here’s one among the many provocative questions raised by Kendrick Lamar’s Damn winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Is Damn the best work of rap or pop ever made? The Pulitzers, whose only stated criteria is 'for distinguished musical composition by an American' in the eligible timeframe, have previously only awarded classical and jazz artists. By making an exception for Lamar, the Pulitzers could be seen as saying that he is, well, the exception. That only Lamar’s blazingly intricate 14-track reckoning with vice and Geraldo Rivera can compete with rarefied types like Caroline Shaw (winner in 2013), Wynton Marsalis (1997), or Aaron Copland (1945). That the rest of pop—not to mention the rest of hip-hop—remains of an unmentionable tier, except maybe for Bob Dylan, who won a special citation from the Pulitzers in 2008. This is a dubious and snobbish thought, yes—but it’s a result of the inevitably thorny logic that always goes along with artistic awards-giving. ..."
The Atlantic

2015 December: To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), 2016 March: When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (2013), 2016 March: Who gets to say how black people see themselves? - Marlon James, 2016 March: untitled unmastered (EP - 2016), 2016 July: BET Awards 2016: Watch Beyoncé Perform “Freedom” with Kendrick Lamar, 2017 April: Damn. (2017)

Jeddah’s Historical Al Balad Neighbourhood

"Sami Nawar, who’s leading a project to restore buildings in Jeddah’s Al Balad area, stands on the roof of Naseef House, a tall building right in the middle of the neighbourhood. ‘It will start soon, just listen,’ he says. It is just before sunset and the weather, pressingly hot and humid all through the day, is becoming more agreeable. There is even a slight wind from the west, coming from Jeddah’s Red Sea coast. On the other side, to the east, is the age-old road leading to Mecca. Suddenly, ‘it’ begins. The unmistakable sound that is heard five times a day across Saudi Arabia: the voices of muezzins, many at once, calling people to prayer. ‘You can hear the sound coming from all directions up here, and you can see everywhere,’ says Nawar. Surrounding Naseef House on all sides are white buildings, several storeys high, with elaborate hand-carved wooden shutters and balconies. Some are painted bright green or blue, others are naturally brown. The houses were built between the 16th and early 20th centuries, during which Jeddah grew from a small fishing settlement to a fortified wall city, largely thanks to its position as an important port on the Indian Ocean trade route and the gateway to Mecca. ..."
Atharna
W - Al-Balad, Jeddah
Ten Things to do in Al-Balad Historical District, Jeddah
YouTube: Al Balad District Jeddah, Al-balad-Jeddah

On Tax Day, Reread Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’

Protesters on tax day last year.
"There must have been a lot of Abu Ghraib-inspired loitering in post offices that year. The first time I had to turn in a tax return after seeing those photos of Iraqi prisoners of war being tortured by United States Army reservists, I stood in front of a mail box for 45 minutes, hesitating to contribute to the federal coffers and envying the folk singer Pete Seeger. Mr. Seeger’s wife, Toshi, used to cover their tax return with a blank sheet of paper so he saw only the one line he had to sign and not the amount of money he was sending to Washington to pay for wars he disapproved of. I played Al Capone in an eighth grade re-enactment of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. So of course I mailed my tax return. I slunk home and figured I had two choices: I could cheer up, or I could reread Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture on 'resistance to civil government' that would acquire the post-mortem title 'Civil Disobedience.' ..."
NY Times

2009 April: Henry David Thoreau, 2012 September: Walden, 2015 March: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 2017 March: Civil Disobedience (1849), 2017 April: The Maine Woods (1864), 2017 June: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, 2017 July: Pond Scum - Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia. By Kathryn Schulz, 2017 July: Walden, a Game, 2017 October: Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece, 2017 December: Walden on the Rocks - Ariel Dorfman, 2018 March: A Map of Radical Bewilderment

Sonny Rollins Quartet - Tenor Madness (1956)

"At a time when he was a member of the legendary Clifford Brown/Max Roach sextet, Sonny Rollins was still the apple fallen not too far from the tree of Miles Davis. Tenor Madness was the recording that, once and for all, established Newk as one of the premier tenor saxophonists, an accolade that in retrospect, has continued through six full decades and gives an indication why a young Rollins was so well liked, as his fluency, whimsical nature, and solid construct of melodies and solos gave him the title of the next Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young of mainstream jazz. With the team of pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones, staples of that era's Miles Davis combos, Rollins has all the rhythmic ammunition to cut loose, be free, and extrapolate on themes as only he could, and still can. ... A recording that should stand proudly alongside Saxophone Colossus as some of the best work of Sonny Rollins in his early years, it's also a testament to the validity, vibrancy, and depth of modern jazz in the post-World War era. It belongs on everybody's shelf. ..."
allmusic
W - Tenor Madness
Popmatters
amazon
YouTube: Tenor Madness 35:25

2012 September: The Singular Sound of Sonny Rollins, 2012 December: Village Vanguard, 2015 September: Rollins Plays for Bird (1957), 2016 February: Saxophone Colossus (1956), 2016 May: Plus 4 (1956), 2017 June: Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem

Betting on the Berkshires

MoCA
"... However, after agreeing to visit North Adams, a former manufacturing town of brick industrial buildings ringed by rolling green hills in Berkshire County, to discuss a possible consulting role, she found it impossible to leave. ... Such is the attraction of Berkshire County, more commonly known as the Berkshires, a destination that mixes bucolic landscapes, organic farms, hiking trails and ski hills with a bevy of top-tier cultural attractions. Stretching across the western edge of Massachusetts, the county is roughly equidistant from New York and Boston, with most towns about a two-and-a-half- or three-hour drive from either city. ... The northern part of the county, though, is in the midst of a significant transformation. In North Adams, the enormous Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, inhabits a series of 19th-century industrial buildings once occupied by the Sprague Electric Company. The museum roughly doubled in size last year by expanding into previously shuttered structures on its 16-acre campus to offer expansive, long-term exhibitions of artists like James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson and Louise Bourgeois. ..." Renata D.
NY Times
MoCA
Clark Art Institute

Clark Art Institute

Six Shows to Get You Cultured This Spring

Marie Orensanz, “Limitada,” from ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985‘ at the Brooklyn Museum
"The opening of 'Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985' at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last September was a revelation: finally, a thoughtful, scholarly exhibition with real popular appeal that focused on a period of cultural history that was almost completely unrecorded in conservative, mainstream surveys. Just up at the Brooklyn Museum — its only East Coast venue — the show includes more than 260 works by more than 120 artists from 15 countries that underwent tremendous political upheaval in the mid-twentieth century. Those contexts — of American military interventions; dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere; and the rise of Black Power movements around the world — inspired artists like Anna Maria Maiolino and Victoria Santa Cruz, two of the most compelling artists in the show, to radicalize modern art to political ends. During our own moment of political turmoil, this is a timely and important exhibition. ..."
Voice

Captured - Clayton Patterson (2008)

"CAPTURED is the story of one man's commitment to chronicling the legendary Lower East Side, and the individuals who define it. Since the early 1980s Clayton Patterson has been fully dedicated to documenting the final era of this historic and eclectic neighborhood long known for its humble streets, revolutionary minds and creative influence. He has obsessively recorded its many faces: from drag to hardcore, heroin to homelessness, political chaos to gentrification. CAPTURED profiles Patterson's odyssey from voyeur to provocateur, and from activist to renegade archivist. This fast-paced documentary includes Patterson's rare and renowned footage of the Tompkins Square police riots, and provides a close-up look at a fascinating character and chapter of urban culture. ..."
Patterson (Video), YouTube: CAPTURED TRAILER Clayton Patterson
W - Tompkins Square Park riot (1988)
Fight the Power: The 1988 Tompkins Square Park Police Riot
Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988
Brooklyn Rail - Rebel with a Lens: Neighborhood Preservation in the Darkroom of Clayton Patterson
Tillou Fine Art
Clayton Patterson: shoot to thrill
NY Times - Melee in Tompkins Sq. Park: Violence and Its Provocation
NO!art: Tompkins Square Park Police Riot August 1988

Stan Mack: Inside Tompkins Square Park, 1988

2014 Octboer: Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side

History Doesn’t Go In a Straight Line - An interview with Noam Chomsky

"Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky’s chief preoccupations has been questioning — and urging us to question — the assumptions and norms that govern our society. Following a talk on power, ideology, and US foreign policy last weekend at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change. For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, 'is a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.' It is not implemented, Chomsky says, 'because of any economic laws.' American capitalism also benefits from ideological obfuscation: despite its association with free markets, capitalism is shot through with subsidies for some of the most powerful private actors. This bubble needs popping too. In addition to discussing the prospects for radical change, Chomsky comments on the eurozone crisis, whether Syriza could’ve avoided submitting to Greece’s creditors, and the significance of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. ..."
Jacobon

2011 January: Peak Oil and a Changing Climate, 2015 May: The Limits of Discourse As Demonstrated by Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky, 2015 October: Electing the President of an Empire, 2015 December: Noam Chomsky on Paris attacks, 2016 December: Chomsky: Humanity Faces Real and Imminent Threats to Our Survival, 2017 April: Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power (2016), 2017 July: Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy, 2017 October: Noam Chomsky Diagnoses the Trump Era

Benjamin Lew & Steven Brown - Douzième Journée : Le Verbe, La Parure, L’Amour (1982)

"A photographer, writer and poet of the analog synth, Benjamin Lew used to work as a mixer of exotic cocktails in a bar which was haunted by Tuxedomoon’s sax-player, and by the rest of the American Lost Generation of early Eighties Brussels. The encounter gave birth to one of these discreet but unforgettable minor miracles which take place sometimes... The fact that the title of the resulting album is taken from a book (by ethnographer Marcel Griaule) on the cosmogony of the Dogon people of West Africa points to the magical and radically alien dimension of this music."
Crammed Discs
Discogs
iTunes
YouTube: De L'Autre Côté Du Fleuve, Il, Les Quitta A L'Aube, L'ile, L'hotel, Bamako Ou Ailleurs

2017 July: Made to Measure, Vol. 1 (1984), 2017 July: Minimal Compact - Lowlands Flight (1987)

American Air Strikes in Syria Do Nothing to Further Justice for the Victims of the Attack on Douma

Douma, Syria, March 30, 2018.
"UPDATE: Friday night’s US and allied air strikes against three apparent military sites in Syria were the inevitable denouement of a week’s worth of threats, taunts, bullying, and more threats. There is still a huge amount of information we don’t know: Were there casualties? Who were they? Were any of them civilians? Are the Pentagon reports of what installations were hit, what buildings destroyed, etc., accurate? That’s only the beginning—what we don’t know about what happened. The broader set of things we don’t know all involve what comes next. The Pentagon spokeswoman and the general speaking for the Joint Chiefs of Staff said this was a 'one shot' deal, and now it’s over. In fact we don’t know whether it’s over. Because the danger of all military actions—even those that might attempt and even those that succeed at being narrowly targeted, focused, and without 'collateral' casualties, can and often do have consequences that go far beyond intention. ..."
The Nation
W - 2018 bombing of Damascus and Homs
NY Times: Trump’s Syria Strikes Show What’s Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy
The Atlantic: The Unconstitutional Strike on Syria
Aljazeera: Syria strikes: All the latest updates (Video)
Telegraph: Syria airstrikes: Allies declare success, as UN rejects Russian bid to condemn attack - latest news (Video)
NBC: Democrats blast Trump for not seeking congressional approval for Syria strikes (Video)
Don't let Trump use US missiles to cause more death and destruction in #Syria. ...
NY Times - In a Syrian Town, People Started Shouting: ‘Chemicals! Chemicals!’, April 11, 2018 (Video)
YouTube: Syria air strikes: Latest updates- BBC News

Trump announces strikes on Syria following suspected chemical weapons attack by Assad forces

Giovanni Boldini - Crossing the Street (1873–75)

"Boldini’s view of a busy street captures the rapid pace of city life in Paris. As figures hurry along in different directions, an elegantly dressed—and unaccompanied—woman crosses the cobbled street, attracting the attention of a man in a carriage. In her haste, she has raised her skirt and exposed her petticoat, adding to her allure. The painting is dated twice, perhaps indicating that the artist finished or reworked it two years after he began."
The Clark
W - Giovanni Boldini
Giovanni Boldini
YouTube: The Complete Works HD

Conversation at the Cafe, 1877

Yankees–Red Sox rivalry

Bostonography.com
Wikipedia - "The Yankees–Red Sox rivalry is a Major League Baseball (MLB) rivalry between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. The two teams have competed in MLB's American League (AL) for over 100 seasons and have since developed one of the fiercest rivalries in American sports. In 1919, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold star player Babe Ruth to the Yankees, which was followed by an 86-year period in which the Red Sox did not win a World Series. This led to the popularization of a superstition known as the 'Curse of the Bambino', which was one of the most well-known aspects of the rivalry. The rivalry is often a heated subject of conversation, especially in the home region of both teams, the Northeastern United States. ... The Yankees–Red Sox match-up is regarded by some sports journalists as the greatest rivalry in sports. Games between the two teams often generate considerable interest and receive extensive media coverage, including being broadcast on national television. National carriers of Major League Baseball coverage, including Fox/FS1, ESPN and MLB Network carry most of the games in the rivalry across the nation by default, regardless of team standings or playoff implications. Yankees–Red Sox games are some of the most-watched MLB games each season. Outside of baseball, the rivalry between the two teams has led to violence between fans, along with attention from politicians and other athletes. ..."
Wikipedia
30 Most Intense Moments in the Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry - April 2012 (Video)
NY Times: A Brawl Erupts, and the Red Sox-Yankees Rivalry Catches Fire (Video)
1973 Brawl Ignited Yankee-Red Sox Rivalry
NY Times: The Antiseptic Truth About the Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry (Aug. 2017)
YouTube: Red Sox-Yankees Fight

Tyler Austin, center, rushed the Red Sox reliever Joe Kelly after being hit by a pitch during the seventh inning. Austin and Kelly were both ejected, as was Phil Nevin, the Yankees’ third-base coach.

Slow Awakening - r beny

"This lovely video by r beny is a single musical object put to subtle use. The ambient track, bearing one of beny’s trademark naturalist titles, 'Western Sycamore,' moves from slowly undulating formless pads to gentle streams of soft percussive tones. The latter are loops of notes rotating through with the momentum of a slow awakening. The note patterns don’t just lend contrast to the track’s longer tones. They give them shape, revealing the pads as akin to a string section that goes at its own pace. Throughout we see, on occasion, sometimes more than others, beny’s hand enter the frame to turn a knob or hit a button, not so much playing an instrument, in the broadly understood sense of the term, as coaxing something along. This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at r beny’s YouTube channel. More from r beny, aka San Francisco Bay Area resident Austin Cairns, at rbeny.bandcamp.com, soundcloud.com/rbeny, and twitter.com/_rbeny."
Disquiet (Video)

2017 October: Lightbath’s Percussive Reverberations, 2018 February: The Actions Within - r beny, 2018 March: Cartographic Misdirection - r beny

The Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul Cézanne

Self-Portrait with Bowler Hat, from 1885-86.
"When things fall apart, you can see what they’re made of. 'Cézanne: Portraits,' a retrospective of some sixty portraits by Paul Cézanne, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is the most instructive show of the artist I’ve ever seen, because it’s so lurchingly uneven. Wonderments consort with clunkers, often on the same canvas: credible figure and woozy ground, or vice versa. Portraiture was the genre most resistant to Cézanne’s struggle—the inception of 'difficulty' as a notorious feature of modern art, needing specialist explanation—toward new ways of transposing the world’s three dimensions into the two of painting. There are about a hundred and sixty portraits among the thousand or so paintings that he made between around 1860 and his death, of pneumonia, in 1906. They lack the knitted density of his landscapes and figure groups and the stunning integrity of his greatest works, the still-lifes with apples like succulent cannonballs. ..."
New Yorker
NGA: Cézanne Portraits
Guardian - Cézanne unmasked: the shattering portraits that blew Picasso and the Paris avant garde away
amazon
YouTube: Cézanne Portraits: Alastair Sooke goes behind the scenes

2011 August: Paul Cézanne, 2014 November: Cézanne: Landscape into Art, 2015 March: Madame Cézanne, 2017 June: Portraits by Cézanne, 2017 November: Inside Paul Cézanne’s Studio

Defunkt - Avoid the Funk: A Defunkt Anthology (1988)

"This is a serviceable look back at the first part of Defunkt's illustrious career, and though the label should have included more music, there's no arguing with the quality of the content. Included are 'Make Them Dance,' the lead track from the band's debut album and still perhaps the creepiest song they've ever recorded; live versions of 'Strangling Me With Your Love' and 'In the Good Times' that squash the original studio versions like grapes; an extended 12" single mix of 'Razor's Edge' (bandleader Joe Bowie's harrowing personal account of heroin addiction); and a great live version of Defunkt's self-titled theme song. The collection's title track is a sweaty, full-speed-ahead funk explosion, and the band's take on the O'Jays' 'For the Love of Money' is lots of fun as well. These alternate takes and live versions will be enough to attract fans who already own the studio versions, and taken altogether this collection offers a useful overview for newcomers as well. Recommended, though paying full price for a program this brief is a bit painful."
allmusic
W - Defunkt
Discogs
YouTube: Avoid The Funk... A Defunkt Anthology ( Full Album )

2017 May: Defunkt/Thermonuclear Sweat (2005)

The End of Impeachment - Elizabeth Drew

"The worst thing that could happen to the power of the Congress to impeach a president and remove him from office appears to be happening now. If it hasn’t already occurred. It’s become politicized—in a way that robs what should be a solemn process of its seriousness, even its legitimacy. Impeachment may have already become defunct as an effective instrument for dealing with a crooked or out-of-control president. This is as constitutionally serious as one political party’s efforts to prevent a significant number of the other’s voters from casting a ballot in elections, which has in fact defined the outcome of races in some states. Each form of getting around the rules is a subversion of the basics of the American democratic system. ..."
New Republic
W - Impeachment in the United States
NY Times: The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump
NY Times: It’s Mueller, Not Trump, Who Is Draining the Swamp
NY Times: How the Impeachment Process Works (May 17, 2017)

2018 March: Can Donald Trump Be Impeached?

How Democracy Became the Enemy

"Hungary had a horrendous 20th century of lost territory and freedom, but Budapest, a handsome city set on a broad sweep of the Danube, suggests its wounds have healed. Trams hum along boulevards lined with elegant cafes and clogged with the cars German companies manufacture here. The country has escaped what Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, called the 'kidnapped West,' the great swath of Europe yielded to the Soviet empire after World War II, and has returned to the Western family. Or so it seems, until you notice the posters of a smiling Hungarian-American Jew, his arms around opposition politicians who brandish wire-cutters and have cut through a fence. The man in question is George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist. He’s not on any ballot, but his international renown and funding of liberal causes has made him the chosen symbol, for Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz party, of all they loathe: international speculators, sappers of nation and Christendom, facilitators of mass migration. As a young man, Orban fought against Bolshevism. Western liberal democracy was the Promised Land. Now it has morphed into the enemy. The West is the site of European cultural suicide, the place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die. ..."
NY Times
Eurozine: What happened in Hungary

In 2015, dozens of refugee families, mostly from Syria, camped underneath the Keleti train station in central Budapest.

Semiotext(e) SF (1989)

"For more than a decade Semiotext(e), the most consistently unpredictable intellectual journal in America, has published (once every year or so) out of a liberated zone in Philosophy Hall, Columbia University. Over the last couple of years Autonomedia, a highly competent cell of America's anarchic independent guerrilla press, has operated out of Brooklyn, N.Y., publishing new European political theory. Together Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia have put out an anthology of new science fiction. Edited by Peter Lamborn Wilson (with an assist from Rudy Rucker), the anthology is designed with a mind to print work too experimental and/or radical to get published by mainstream SF outlets, a useful goal and one Wilson, a shaker and mover of the alternative press scene, is uniquely qualified to pull off. The main problem with the anthology, for all its virtues, is that other distracting concerns undermine Wilson's best efforts. One is the concern with jamming in 'big names', the other is the controversiality criterion Wilson makes so much of in his selections. ..."
Street Tech
Socialist Jazz
Space Canon
W - Semiotext(e) SF
amazon

Orientalism - Edward W. Said (1978)

The Snake Charmer, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1880)
Wikipedia - "Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, about the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism, defined as the West's patronizing representations of 'The East'—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. According to Said, orientalism (the Western scholarship about the Eastern World) is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power. According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab élites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized the romanticized 'Arab Culture' created by French, British and, later, American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land. The critical application of post-structuralism in the scholarship of Orientalism influenced the development of literary theory, cultural criticism, and the field of Middle Eastern studies, especially regarding how academics practice their intellectual enquiry when examining, describing, and explaining the Middle East. The scope of Said's scholarship established Orientalism as a foundation text in the field of post-colonial culture studies, which examines the denotations and connotations of Orientalism, and the history of a country's post-colonial period. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Orientalism
Counterpunch: Orientalism by Edward Said (August 5, 2003)
The Atlantic: The Roots of Muslim Rage
NYBooks: Orientalism: An Exchange, Edward W. Said and Oleg Grabar, reply by Bernard Lewis
Guardian - The 100 best nonfiction books: No 8 – Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
New Yorker: A French Novelist Confronts Orientalism
Guardian: Compass by Mathias Énard review – a dreamlike study of Orientalism
NY Times: A Prize-Winning French Novel About the Western Obsession With the East
[PDF] Chapter 1 of Orientalism
amazon: Orientalism - Edward W. Said, Compass - Mathias Énard
YouTube: Edward Said On Orientalism 40:13, Orientalism: How the West views the rest of the world

Convulsionists of Tangier (1837–38), Eugène Delacroix

Léon Cogniet - L’Expédition d’Egypte Sous les Ordres de Bonaparte (1835)

King's Death Gave Birth to Hip-Hop

"... Ostensibly, Raekwon’s words foreshadow the coming song, or reflect on the four minutes of bluesy, foot-stomping brilliance that just unfolded in 'Rosa Parks.' But they also serve as a guiding ethos for hip-hop, which was enjoying a banner year in 1998. Danger. Style. Funky beats and aural violence. Spines tingled from provocation, not the least of which was mine, then a 10-year-old boy listening to a hip-hop album with intent for the first time. ... The answer can be found in the nascence of hip-hop. The question of the birth of hip-hop is a contentious one—as are all questions concerning the geneses of art forms—and full of rich debate on cultural touchstones, waves of influences, geography, visual art and dance, and stories of intrepid pioneers. Most of these debates locate the distinct emergence of the form in the mid-to-late-’70s. But a closer look reveals that the seeds of the art were sown by and during the civil-rights movement. ..."
The Atlantic (Spotify)
Spotify
W - Rosa Parks

Sneakers Jazz Band - Live at White Crow (2016)

"In March 1984, some of Vermont’s most talented jazz musicians began meeting every Tuesday night at a Winooski watering hole called Sneakers. The place was small and the pay wasn’t great, but they showed up anyway. For these musicians, it was an opportunity to sharpen their chops and play with some of the most accomplished jazz musicians in the area. These guys played in more lucrative bands the rest of the time, but Tuesday night at Sneakers was the night to play the music they wanted to play. The roster of musicians sometimes included nationally-known jazz artists who were touring in the area. Their presence, along with the skills of the regular players, contributed to the feeling that Tuesday night at Sneakers was something special. ..."
Club Metronome
Seven Days: Sneakers Jazz Band Reunite
‘For the love of the music’ Sneakers Jazz Band celebrates release of 1989 recording
amazon, Spotify
Sneakers Bistro - Winooski VT

Toronto, a City Full of Public Art Exhibitions - Douglas Coupland

"In the summer of 1979, I drove from Vancouver to Toronto with my best friend Mike. It was the year Toronto eclipsed Montréal to become Canada’s most populous city, and just as Mike and I were driving into Toronto’s city limits, highway workers were installing a new welcome sign with Toronto’s new population tally. If this had been 25 years later, I would have had a smartphone to capture the moment, but it was 1979, so all it can ever remain is a charming memory. Population: roughly 2.8 million versus Montréal’s 1.7 million. Nine years later, I was working in Toronto in October of 1988, and the city was experiencing a very mild Indian summer. On Halloween night, I attended a friend’s party dressed as an ironic ghost: a bedsheet with two holes cut out for the eyes. ..."
New Yorker

A Quiet Passion - Terence Davies (2016)

"New England in the mid-19th century was a literary hothouse, overgrown with wild and exotic talents. That Emily Dickinson was among the most dazzling of these is not disputable, but to say that she was obscure in her own time would exaggerate her celebrity. A handful of her poems appeared in print while she was alive (she died in 1886, at 55), but she preferred private rituals of publication, carefully writing out her verses and sewing them into booklets. Though she had no interest in fame, Dickinson was anything but an amateur scribbler, approaching her craft with unstinting discipline and tackling mighty themes of death, time and eternity. She remains a paradoxical writer: vividly present on the page but at the same time persistently elusive. The more familiar you are with her work, the stranger she becomes. An admirer can be forgiven for approaching 'A Quiet Passion,' Terence Davies’s new movie about Dickinson’s life, with trepidation. ..."
NY Times: ‘A Quiet Passion’ Poetically Captures Emily Dickinson (Video)
New Yorker: A Masterly Emily Dickinson Movie
W - A Quiet Passion
W - Emily Dickinson, W - List of Emily Dickinson poems
YouTube: A QUIET PASSION Trailer | Festival 2016

Joe Bataan - Salsoul (1994)

"Classic, essential latin funk album from salsa superstar Joe Bataan - one of the most prominant of the new wave of young 1960s artists to mix latin and soul and RnB sounds together. This early 1970s album is his masterpiece and exemplifies all that was great about the funky fusion albums of that era. Super Latin-Funk album from 1973 by Joe Bataan one of the first recorded for the Cayre Brothers who then developed the Salsoul label. Includes the killer funky instrumentals ‘Aftershower Funk’ and ‘Latin Strut’. ‘Johnny’ is an uptempo vocal Latin Soul track that has a funky backdrop, and ‘Fin’ is a pure Latin dance floor groove. Bonus cuts incl the original Mono single versions and his original cut of ‘Continental Square Dance’. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: Latin Strut, Mujer Mia., When Sunny Gets Blue, Continental Square Dance, Johnny

Underground and Alternative Magazines from the ’70s and ’80s That Capture NYC’s Downtown Art World

"If you wanted to find out the real deal behind the fashion, culture, nightlife, music, art, and film happening in New York City during the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, there was only one place to turn. Alternative and indie publications of the time like Paper Mag, New York Rocker, and Art-Rite captured the diverse intersection of art and life — and the covers of these magazines were just as exciting as the contents within. The biggest art stars and personalities made the headlines, including John Waters, Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, and Yoko Ono — but no wave artists and punks were printed right alongside them, like Beth B and Richard Hell. Gallery 98, the online space for 98 Bowery, chronicles New York City’s downtown art world with an amazing collection of periodicals. 98 Bowery founder and curator Marc H. Miller was kind enough to let us dig through his online collection and share the best of the best. ..."
flavorwire

RIP, Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)

"My favorite Cecil Taylor story is secondhand. I used to see him play at the Knitting Factory in the late 1980s when I was fortunate to live a few blocks away. I would often sit in the audience with Irving Stone and his wife, Stephanie. (It’s after Stone that John Zorn named the venue he founded, the Stone.) Taylor was late to a show one night, and Stone told of an epic late appearance by Taylor decades earlier. Taylor had been booked on a boat that would tool around Manhattan while jazz musicians played for a willingly captive audience. Taylor, who was often late for shows, Stone said, was warned not to be late because the ship’s schedule was unforgiving. The night of Taylor’s performance arrived, as did the boat. The audience boarded, along with other scheduled musicians. But no Taylor. They waited briefly, but the schedule had to be kept, and the boat left the dock. And then, of course, arrived Cecil Taylor, running to the end of the dock, unable to reach the boat, his eager audience stranded aboard, watching his figure fade in the distance. Judging by how late he was to the Knitting Factory that night, Taylor had never learned his lesson, though of course his audience, me included, was going nowhere. We waited. He arrived, and blew our minds. I reviewed a massive Cecil Taylor box set many years ago, and I mentioned to a friend what I’d been working on, and he asked, teasingly, if I had managed to do so without using the word 'cluster.' Cecil Taylor is the musician most synonymous with the word 'cluster' (often employed by critics to describe his playing), except perhaps for Roedelius, Moebius, Plank, and Eno — and, as someone reminded me on Twitter, Cowell. ... RIP, pianist, improviser, genius Cecil Taylor (b. 1929). By Marc Weidenbau"
disquiet
New Yorker: The Revolutionary Genius of Cecil Taylor By Richard Brody (Audio)
W - Cecil Taylor
NY Times: Cecil Taylor, Pianist Who Defied Jazz Orthodoxy, Is Dead at 89 (Video)
Free-Jazz Pioneer Cecil Taylor Has Died At 89 (Video)
Cecil Taylor - Perfect Sound Forever
Cecil Taylor, free jazz pioneer, dies age 89 (Video)
YouTube: Les grandes répétitions, Rare - Cecil Taylor at the Village Gate 1965, Unit Structures (1966) full album, Conquistador! (full)

Baklava

Wikipedia - "Baklava (/ˈbɑːkləvɑː/, /bɑːkləˈvɑː/, or /bəˈklɑːvə/; [bɑːklɑvɑː]) is a rich, sweet dessert pastry made of layers of filo filled with chopped nuts and sweetened and held together with syrup or honey. It is characteristic of the cuisines of the Levant, the Caucasus, Balkans, Maghreb, and of Central and West Asia. ... Although the history of baklava is not well documented, its current form was probably developed in the imperial kitchens of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The Sultan presented trays of baklava to the Janissaries every 15th of the month of Ramadan in a ceremonial procession called the Baklava Alayı. There are three proposals for the pre-Ottoman roots of baklava: the Roman placenta cake, as developed through Byzantine cuisine, the Central Asian Turkic tradition of layered breads, or the Persian lauzinaq. The oldest (2nd century BCE) recipe that resembles a similar dessert is the honey covered baked layered-dough dessert placenta of Roman times, which Patrick Faas identifies as the origin of baklava: 'The Greeks and the Turks still argue over which dishes were originally Greek and which Turkish.' ..."
Wikipedia
Epicurious: Baklava
AllRecipes: Baklava

Corona Is Queens’ Cultural Smorgasbord

Get off the 7 train at 103rd Street to find yourself in the heart of Corona.
"The neighborhood now called Corona was originally christened 'West Flushing' in the mid 1800s, after a new Long Island Rail Road line opened between the then-farmland towns of Elmhurst and Flushing. In 1868 a real estate developer named Thomas Waite Howard suggested the neighborhood be renamed 'Corona,' since it was the crown jewel of Queens County. While some theorized that he took the name from an emblem used by a local development company, corona fittingly means 'crown' in Italian and Spanish, languages that later became common in the neighborhood. Italians settled the neighborhood in the early twentieth century, but residents are now mostly more recent arrivals from Mexico, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. Early buildings from the neighborhood still stand, including intact Victorian houses and churches from the late 1800s, which now often share block space with multifamily brick houses, Latino grocery stores, meat markets, and flower shops. ..."
Voice
W - Corona
History of Corona, Queens

John Ashbery: They Know What They Wanted, Poems & Collages

"They Knew What They Wanted, edited by Mark Polizzotti and out with Rizzoli this week, places a lifetime of John Ashbery’s collages in conversation with his poems. The book selects poetry that either references the visual arts or uses collage as a compositional method, such as the ‘The Painter’, from his first book, Some Trees (1956), the pantoum ‘Hotel Lautréamont’ (1992) and the fragmentary ‘37 Haiku’ (1984) (‘Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon’). The collages share many traits with Ashbery’s poems: the collision of literal and figurative meanings, and of high and low culture, hilarious mise-en-scène, the intrusion of the comic on the sentimental and emphasis on games and formal playfulness. The best of Ashbery’s collages date from the early 1970s, when he made a body of work from postcards in the company of artist and poet Joe Brainard and poet James Schuyler, including one called ‘Diffusion of Knowledge’ (1972) that shows Captain America and some other sinewy superhero looking inappropriately triumphant while blocking our view of the Smithsonian Institution. ..."
Frieze: Stuck on You, John Ashbery
Rizzoli

ESCIF, BLU, SAM3, More Join “SenseMurs” as Activists Protecting “La Punta”

BLU. SenseMurs. La Punta, Valencia, Spain, March 2018.
"Street Artist Escif organized with other artists to fight the commercial development of seaside land in Valencia last month. With the help of other socially responsible artists including Aryz, BLU, Borondo, Escif, Anaïs Florin, Hyuro, Luzinterruptus, Daniel Muñoz 'SAN', Sam3 and Elías Taño, Escif and local organizers are publicly pushing a message that shows the local council what it means when citizens are engaged. According to the organizers La Punta is a hamlet of orchards and gardens located in the south of the city of Valencia where more than 15 years ago the 'Logistics Activities Zone' (ZAL) project of the Port of Valencia decided to chase hundreds of people out of this land to give to developers as a new port initiative. ..."
Brooklyn Street Art

Escif. SenseMurs. La Punta, Valencia, Spain, March 2018.

The ISIS Files

Mosul, 2017. Paperwork littered the remains of ISIS’ bombed-out Ministry of Agriculture.
"MOSUL, Iraq — Weeks after the militants seized the city, as fighters roamed the streets and religious extremists rewrote the laws, an order rang out from the loudspeakers of local mosques. Public servants, the speakers blared, were to report to their former offices. To make sure every government worker got the message, the militants followed up with phone calls to supervisors. When one tried to beg off, citing a back injury, he was told: 'If you don’t show up, we’ll come and break your back ourselves.' The phone call reached Muhammad Nasser Hamoud, a 19-year veteran of the Iraqi Directorate of Agriculture, behind the locked gate of his home, where he was hiding with his family. Terrified but unsure what else to do, he and his colleagues trudged back to their six-story office complex decorated with posters of seed hybrids. They arrived to find chairs lined up in neat rows, as if for a lecture. The commander who strode in sat facing the room, his leg splayed out so that everyone could see the pistol holstered to his thigh. For a moment, the only sounds were the hurried prayers of the civil servants mumbling under their breath. Their fears proved unfounded. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Extreme Brutality and Detailed Record-Keeping
NY Times: Caliphate (Audio)
YouTube: Breaking News - The ISIS Way: Extreme Brutality and Detailed Record-Keeping

How Far ISIS Spread Across Iraq and Syria and Where It’s Still Holding On

2014 August: The Islamic State, 2014 September: How ISIS Works, 2015 February: The Political Scene: The Evolution of Islamic Extremism, 2015 May: Zakaria: How ISIS shook the world, 2015 August: ISIS Blows Up Ancient Temple at Syria’s Palmyra Ruins, 2015 November: Times Insider: Reporting Europe's Refugee Crisis, 2015 November: Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS, 2015 November: The French Emergency, 2015 December: A Brief History of ISIS, 2015 December: U.S. Seeks to Avoid Ground War Welcomed by Islamic State, 2016 January: Ramadi, Reclaimed by Iraq, Is in Ruins After ISIS Fight, 2016 February: Syrian Officer Gave a View of War. ISIS Came, and Silence Followed., 2016 March: Brussels Survivors Say Blasts Instantly Evoked Paris Attacks, 2016 April: America Can’t Do Much About ISIS, 2016 June: What the Islamic State Has Won and Lost, 2016 July: ISIS: The Cornened Beast, 2016 October: Archaeological Victims of ISIS Rise Again, as Replicas in Rome, 2016 December: Battle Over Aleppo Is Over, Russia Says, as Evacuation Deal Reached, 2017 January: Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra, 2017 February: Tour a City Torn in Half by ISIS, 2017 March: Engulfed in Battle, Mosul Civilians Run for Their Lives, 2017 May: Aleppo After the Fall, 2017 July: Iraqi forces declare victory over Islamic State in Mosul after grueling battle, 2017 July: The Living and the Dead, 2017 October: ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse