Liberation and Loss: The Tangled History of Zimbabwean Music

Thomas Mapfumo, 1988
"In 1986, a group of five young Zimbabwean musicians called the Bhundu Boys arrived in the UK for their first foreign tour. They had the charisma of a young Beatles, reflected in soulful vocal harmonies, exuberantly enmeshed electric guitars, pumped-up grooves, synchronized stage moves and hook-laden songs that easily transcended the language barrier. ... They were typically nimble, gliding along in 12/8 time with I-IV-I-V harmonic progressions that likely owe something to the hymns and songs sung in colonial-era churches. They focused on matters of daily life, accompanied by anything from gourd shakers and ngoma hand drums to an array of acoustic guitars. Curiously, the word jit isn’t even found in the Shona language. It came from South Africa – along with terms such as jive, marabi and tsava-tsava – describing a feeling of giddiness and celebration rather than an identifiable set of musical characteristics. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)

Various - Down & Wired

"Few would challenge the claim that the 1960s and 70s have been the most fertile two decades in the history of popular music ever - a period which, regardless of genre, laid the foundations for everything that has followed. What is more, this period was so fertile that the speed with which tastes changed left a colossal amount of incredible music to gather dust - perhaps most famously a profusion of funk, soul and jazz. It was a musical legacy that lay mouldering until the rise of sampling in late 80s hip-hop precipitated a mad scramble for lost crates and suddenly, the music that became known as 'rare groove' - for obvious reasons (it was rare and very groovy) - experienced a phoenix-like rebirth. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
DeeJay (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Chain - Down And Wired

In Don Newcombe, Baseball Got Its First Black Ace

Don Newcombe was the first black player to win 20 games. He did so three times in his career.

"... Being around (Don) Newcombe, who died on Tuesday at 92, gave (Dave) Stewart unfiltered access to what Mudcat Grant, another top black pitcher, would one day describe as a Black Ace. Grant, who wrote a book on the subject, had simple criteria for that distinction: an American- or Canadian-born black player who won 20 games in a season. That’s it. Newcombe did it first, winning 20 for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951, just four seasons after his eventual teammate, Jackie Robinson, broke baseball’s color barrier. In the 67 seasons since, 195 pitchers besides Newcombe have recorded a 20-win season, and only 14 of them were black — a select list that includes Stewart, who won at least 20 games in four consecutive seasons, from 1987 to 1990. ..."

NY Times

The New World: Comics from Mauretania - Chris Reynolds (2018)

"Strictly speaking, The New World is not new. All the comics included in it have been published before; the earliest date from the 1980s. But in another, more important way, it is entirely novel. Designed and edited by Seth of Palookaville fame, and luxuriously published by New York Review Books, it gathers together between hard covers a variety of work by Chris Reynolds, the cult Welsh-born artist who remains both underrated and too little known. The result is a collection that isn’t only beautiful to look at and to hold; turning its pages, it strikes you that though these ineffably strange strips were written in another time, they work better in ours. Here, after all, is a world where technology must be treated with suspicion, workers perform random jobs whose nature is essentially pointless, and loneliness is the presiding spirit of the age. Could this be Reynolds’s moment? Perhaps. ..."
Guardian - The New World: Comics from Mauretania by Chris Reynolds – review
Investigating Mauretania

2018 May: Black and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds

800 Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Are Now Online: Browse & Download Them Courtesy of the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de France

"Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant begins with an immersive depiction of what it might have been like to live in a European village during the middle ages. Or what it might feel like for us moderns, at least. The couple at the center of the story spends several pages fretting over the loss of a candle, their only one. Without it, their nights are pitch black. In the day, they wander in a fog, unable to remember anything. Though the cause of this turns out to be dark magic, one can’t help thinking that a smartphone would immediately solve all their problems. This was a time not only before mobile video, but when images of any kind were scarce, when every book was painstakingly copied by hand in careful, elegant script. ..."
Open Culture

Lou Reed, John Cale And Nico - Le Bataclan '72 (1972)

"After decades of being circulated on inferior-sounding bootlegs, the January 1972 reconvergence of Velvet Underground (VU) co-founders Lou Reed (vocals/acoustic guitar), John Cale (guitar/viola/piano/vocals), and Nico (vocals/harmonium) in Paris at Le Bataclan has been committed to commercial release. A suitably noir mood hangs over them as they stonily amble through VU staples and key entries from their concurrent solo endeavors. They commence with a slow and almost methodical "Waiting for the Man" as Cale offers up a simple piano accompaniment to Reed's casual guitar and lead vocal. Reed aptly describes the bleak torch reading of 'Berlin' as his 'Barbra Streisand song' before unveiling a profoundly minimalist interpretation. It captures the unnerving mood inescapably defining the city in the wake of WWII. ... While fans and pundits hopefully proclaimed the performance as the return of the Velvets, alas it would not be so. Le Bataclan '72 (2004) is a no-brainer for all dimension of VU, John Cale, Lou Reed, and/or Nico enthusiasts."
allmusic
W - Le Bataclan '72
Pitchfork
Discogs
YouTube: Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico at Le Bataclan 1972 (Live) 17:39
YouTube: Le Bataclan '72 Live (Full Album) 1:17:59

2010 August: Heroin, 2011 June: All Tomorrow's Parties - The Velvet Underground, 2011 June: The Velvet Underground, 2012 November: Songs for Drella - Lou Reed and John Cale, 2013 October: Lou Reed (1942 - 2013), 2014 June: The Bells (1979), 2014 August: New York (1989), 2015 June: Capitol Theatre Passaic, NJ 9/25/1984, 2015 October: The Blue Mask (1982), 2016 March: New Sensations (1984), 2016 May: Coney Island Baby (1976), 2017 March: Celebrating Lou Reed: 1942–2013, 2017 November: Watch Footage of the Velvet Underground Composing..., 2018 February: Street Hassle (1978), 2018 October: Lou Reed at The Ritz (07-16-1986)

‘The Hooligans Were the Club’

The stadium where Wisla Krakow won eight championships over the past two decades. More recently, the team has been in dire straits and needed one of its former players to rescue it.
"MYSLENICE, Poland — The dark, uneven soil at Wisla Krakow’s training facility in this village 40 minutes south of Poland’s second largest city was frozen solid last month as a few hundred supporters trudged through the snow to greet Jakub Blaszczykowski. Blaszczykowski, a 33-year-old midfielder, has played in some of soccer’s biggest matches, including the 2013 Champions League final as a member of Borussia Dortmund, two European championships, and a World Cup with Poland’s national team. But on this January afternoon, Blaszczykowski was a long way from those moments. Instead, he was about to play his first exhibition game since rejoining Wisla Krakow, one of Poland’s most decorated teams. Wisla is the club Blaszczykowski made his name with, and the team he had promised to someday return to when he signed with Dortmund in 2007. ..."
NY Times

What CTA Workers Know

"Most of the hundreds of thousands of people who ride the L or take a city bus every day don’t pay much attention to transit employees — at least until something goes wrong. When that happens, those workers get an earful, and sometimes worse. They also routinely have to deal with sick passengers, rowdy teen­agers, violent drunks, fare skippers, suicide jumpers, and homeless people desperate for shelter, to say nothing of the demands of keeping trains and buses running on time 24 hours a day in a congested city in all kinds of weather. Chicago asked a dozen CTA workers to speak anonymously about their jobs. Their anecdotes and observations are by turns funny, disturbing, moving, and just plain bizarre, an account of everyday encounters colored by both custom­ers’ astonishing rudeness and their incredible compassion. Few of the men and women we talked to see their job as a calling, but most exhibited a deep­-seated sense of pride in keeping the city moving. Here are their stories, nuggets of wisdom, rants, and revelations, in their own words. ..."
Chicago Mag

Three pebbles

"What is a pebble? Is it an object or a thing? A weapon or a tool? Is it naïve or is it sentimental? Is it a token of the real, or a fragment of ideology? Can you do more than skip it or hurl it or mark a grave with it? What is the pebble to poetry? Of what might the poem make it speak? ... The pebble is a thing, a fragmentary rock, a bit of nature that fits easily in the hand, yet which can scarcely serve effectively as any sort of weapon or simple tool. The pebble is an individual marked by its participation in and never more than partial emergence from multiplicity; a heap of pebbles is a figure for, or metonymic of, multiplicity itself. To pick up a pebble is to separate it from its fellows, arbitrarily removing it from the multitude of other pebbles — on the beach, in a ravine, out of a quarry — among which it is invariably found. Each pebble is marked by its never more than partial emergence from something larger: rounded, worn, unimaginably old, each the result, if Francis Ponge is to be believed, of 'scission from the same enormous grandfather,' the primeval 'hero' of the earth itself, a 'fabulous body' that, 'having been liberated from Limbo … is nowhere to be found.' ..."
Jacket2

Francis Ponge

2008 February: Francis Ponge, 2011 September: Soap, 2012 March: Things, 2018 May: Nioque of the Early-Spring

The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Volume Eight (1956-58)

Wikipedia - "The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Volume Eight is an album by pianist Art Tatum and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, with Red Callender on double bass and Bill Douglass on drums. The 1956 session was originally released in 1958 on a Verve Records album produced by Norman Granz, but Granz re-acquired the masters in the 1970s after the album was allowed to go out of print. He reissued the material as one of a series of eight Group Masterpieces featuring Tatum in collaboration with other artists, also issuing it as part of a boxed set, The Complete Pablo Group Masterpieces. The album has been reissued on CD, including a January 31, 1992 version with bonus tracks. The album was critically well-received, with critics singling out the combination of Webster's tone with Tatum's elaborate piano playing. The album is listed in several volumes as among the best in jazz and is recommended by the Music Library Association as an important piece for music libraries. ..."
Wikipedia
amazon
YouTube: The Tatum Group Masterpieces 57:15

Black History Month: Post-Soul Culture Circa 1992

"... In the March 17, 1992, issue of the Voice, contributor Nelson George surveyed the 'post-soul' landscape and discovered that, 'as a musical genre, a definition of African American culture, and the code word for our national identity, soul has pretty much been dead since Nixon’s reelection in 1972. But what’s replaced it? Arguing in these pages in 1986, Greg Tate tried to establish a ‘new black aesthetic’ as a defining concept. He had a point, though I’d argue there was more than one aesthetic at work. For better and worse, the spawn of the postsoul era display multiple personalities.' Indeed, over seventeen pages George explores a broad spectrum of post-soul black aesthetics, and the Voice’s art department helped with diptychs comparing and contrasting Malcolm X to KRS-One and Muhammad Ali and Bundini Brown to Chuck D and Flavor Flav, as well as triptychs of Lisa Bonet and Magic Johnson. ..."
Voice

"

Opinion: Phony Wall, Phony Emergency

President Trump on Friday after he declared a national emergency.

"'I didn’t need to do this,' President Trump insisted at a Rose Garden appearance on Friday, as he declared a national emergency aimed at shaking loose a few billion dollars in financing for his beloved border wall. The president’s assertion was both ludicrous and self-defeating. If a declaration was unnecessary and the wall on track (the wall is 'very very on its way,' the president said earlier in the week), how could he claim to be addressing an emergency? As Mr. Trump explained it, 'But I’d rather do it much faster.' A presidential desire for speed does not constitute a crisis — no matter how eager a president is to camouflage his failures. In reality, the wall is not a done deal, and Mr. Trump has spent the past few months — the past two years, really — failing to convince either Congress or Mexico to pay for it. ..."

NY Times

Eliane Radigue - Adnos I-III

"These three magisterial compositions were realized between 1973 and 1980 by Paris-based composer Eliane Radigue, who was formerly a student of musique concrète guru Pierre Henry, until he uncharitably dismissed her immaculate slow-motion minimalism out of hand. Time has happily proved him quite mistaken. Describing Radigue's work with the simple (and these days overused) epithet "drone" is somewhat misleading, for unlike classic examples of the genre, from La Monte Young and his erstwhile violinist Tony Conrad, Radigue's music is almost constantly on the move. But very, very slowly, putting ARP synthesizer to use in ways Herbie Hancock never even dreamed of, Radigue builds the sonic geology of her works in strata. ... here's a lot of 'drone' music around these days, because people misguidedly think it's easy to do, but when confronted with authentic masterpieces such as these, the difference between the wheat and the chaff is abundantly clear. Hopefully, Pierre Henry, if he's still wearing a hat, will doff it in reverence. ..."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
MixCloud (Audio)
YouTube: Adnos I-III

2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993), 2018 October: The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue

Gravity - Fred Frith (1980)

"Gravity is a 1980 solo album by English guitarist, composer and improviser Fred Frith from Henry Cow and Art Bears. It was Frith's second solo album and his first since the demise of Henry Cow in 1978. It was originally released in the United States on LP record on The Residents's Ralph record label and was the first of three solo albums Frith made for the label. Gravity was recorded in Sweden, the United States and Switzerland and featured Frith with Swedish Rock in Opposition group Samla Mammas Manna on one side of the LP, and Frith with United States progressive rock group The Muffins on the other side. Additional musicians included Marc Hollander from Aksak Maboul and Chris Cutler from Henry Cow. Gravity has been described as an avant-garde 'dance' record that draws on rhythm and dance from folk music across the world. AllMusic called it one of the most important experimental guitar titles from Fred Frith. ..."
Wikipedia
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Gravity [Full Album] 1:09:37

Green New Deal

"... Their last big plan — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — passed the House in 2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since then, there’s been nothing to replace it. Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution — renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like — but those policies do not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary. Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND) — a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the 1930s — and it has become the talk of the town. ..."
Vox: The Green New Deal, explained (Video)
NY Times: “The Argument” (Audio)
W - Green New Deal
Jacobin: A Green New Deal for Housing

Sonny Rollins ‎– East Broadway Run Down (1966)

"Around the ten-minute mark of the title track, things get very interesting indeed -- moody and spooky as Jimmy Garrison hangs on a single note, making his bass throb along while Elvin Jones widens the space and fires drum and cymbal hits in all directions. Coming off bass and drum solos that never seem to fit anywhere in the piece, it's a supreme moment of tension-building, one that gets repeated after Rollins and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard restate the theme in unison. This is the sound of Rollins' group working in unity. For much of 'East Broadway Run Down,' though, the rhythm section is off doing their thing, usually together, while Rollins meanders about in limbo, seemingly trying to figure out what it is that he should be doing. That Rollins was having an off day for this recording is a suspicion that's strengthened by Hubbard's part -- where Rollins is wandering, Hubbard is charging ahead, focused and tight, fitting with the rhythm section, keeping the tension up. ..."
allmusic (Audio)
New York Mag: When Sonny Gets Blue
W - East Broadway Run Down
Discogs (Video)
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: East Broadway Run Down ( Full Album )

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, 2018 April: Tenor Madness (1956), 2017 May: Moving Out (1954), 2018 November: The Bridge (1962)

Digging Out

The Sunset Park waterfront.
"Growing up in South Texas, blizzards were the stuff of fantasy. A few flurries could shut down the streets of San Antonio, and a snow day was almost inevitable in the unlikely event that the white stuff stuck. After living in New York City for seven years, I still react with the childlike glee when the first flakes fall. How quickly that feeling fades after New Year’s, when New York winters settle in for the long haul.I braved the snow on Tuesday to capture this seasonal slump in photos, exploring the Sunset Park waterfront I’ve grown so fond of after calling the neighborhood home for the past three years. ..."
BKLYNR

A statue at St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church, on 42nd Street.

Gharamophone

"Launched in 2017, Gharamophone.com is dedicated to preserving North Africa’s Jewish musical past, one record at a time. For much of the shellac era (roughly the first half of the twentieth century), Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian Jewish vocalists and instrumentalists played an outsized role in pioneering and preserving the various Arabic-language musical forms of North Africa –– and then some. These records, then, provide a soundtrack to the twentieth century Maghrib. In fact, these brittle discs –– surviving until the present against all odds –– reveal not just their time and the music animating it but so too lay bare a world of Jewish-Muslim cultural entanglement from the not too distant past. In other words, when it came to music in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, Jews and Muslims –– performers and fans alike –– were inseparable well into the twentieth century. For years, I have been collecting these records –– one by one. In the process, I have assembled the first archive of North African 78 rpm records of its kind. That archive now has an online home at Gharamophone.com. ..." Montreal, Quebec
Gharamophone | About
The Life and Death of North Africa's First Superstar - Chris Silver (Audio)
Gharamophone (Video)
Soundcloud (Audio)
twitter, Facebook

The Duncan/Olson dichotomy

Photos of Robert Duncan (left) and Charles Olson (right) by Jonathan Williams, from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection.
"Here are two elusive pieces of the context of midcentury American poetics. The Robert Duncan/Charles Olson letters have been available, until now, only in the brief reviews of each other that the poets extracted from them ('near-far Mister Olson' and 'Against Wisdom as Such'), passages quoted by scholars who have been able to visit the archive at Storrs, and handfuls in Sulfur, Poetry, and Olson’s Selected Letters. Duncan’s lectures on Olson can be heard at PennSound, but his idiosyncratic delivery, an incredible contrast with the mastery of his prose, makes the recordings, and the verbatim transcript of one of them published by Lost and Found, hard to follow. In these two companion volumes from the University of New Mexico Press, edited by Robert Bertholf and Dale Smith, the letters are complete, the lectures are beveled, and a nimble apparatus of introductions, notes, glossaries, bibliographies, and indices nearly half as long as the texts themselves collapses the distance between these documents’ moment and our own. The middle of the American century is itself a key context for our own practice. ..."
Jacket2

2009 January: Charles Olson, 2009 April: Rockport Harbor, 2010 September: Charles Olson: The Art of Poetry No. 12, 2011 July: Charles Olson: February 21, 1957, 2012 April: A Trip to Charles Olson’s Gloucester, 2012 June: In Which We Lather Our Sensibilities At Length, 2013 January: Mass.Charles Olson, 2013 May: The Maximus Poems, 2013 November: A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, 2015 March: "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" (1950)

2008 March: Robert Duncan, 1919-1988, 2011 May: Robert Duncan: May 18, 1959, 2012 January: Ten Poems, 1940 to 1980, 2013 May: An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, 2017 January: Robert Duncan's notes on Ron Silliman's 'Opening'

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 - Ilya Repin (1883 / 1885)

Wikipedia - "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 is a painting by Russian realist artist Ilya Repin made between 1883 and 1885. The picture portrays a grief-stricken Ivan the Terrible cradling his mortally wounded son, the Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich. The elder Ivan himself is believed to have dealt the fatal blow to his son. The work is variously referred to as Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, with or without the date, or Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son. Repin's painting has been called one of Russia's most famous paintings, and is also one of its most controversial. It has been vandalised twice, in 1913 and again in 2018. The artist used Grigoriy Myasoyedov, his friend and fellow artist, as the model for Ivan the Terrible, with writer Vsevolod Garshin modelling for the Tsarevich. In 1885, upon completion of the oil on canvas work, Repin sold it to Pavel Tretyakov, for display in his gallery. It remains on display in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. ..."
Wikipedia
Guardian: Ivan the Terrible painting 'seriously damaged' in pole attack
NY Times: ‘Ivan the Terrible’ Painting Damaged in Russia in Vodka-Fueled Attack

Which Rolling Stones Records Should I Buy?

"If one band came in on a wave of danger, kicked everything over, and looked great doing it, it has to be The Rolling Stones. Few bands are as mythologized, imitated, revered, or (to be honest) as lampooned as they are. But, instead of focusing on Keef, illicit behavior, creative dance moves, and high-priced tickets, we’re going to take a look at the records. The Rolling Stones are one of the biggest bands in the world and they absolutely deserve to be. The more you dig into their discography, the more great stuff you’ll find. For those new to navigating the expanse of their releases, here are some quick choices. ..."
LP Reverb


2015 August: Exile on Main Street (1972), 2015 October: "Let's Spend the Night Together" / "Ruby Tuesday" (1967), 2015 December: Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971), 2016 January: Some Girls (1978), 2016 January: The Rolling Stones (EP), 2016 March: Five by Five (EP - 1964), 2016 May: "The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965", 2016 December: Singles Collection: The London Years (1989), 2017 June: Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), 2017 September: "Sister Morphine" - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull (1969), 2018 March: "Miss You" (1978)

Dele Sosimi - You No Fit Touch Am (2015)

"Dele Sosimi is one of the leading forces carrying the torch of afrobeat. A longtime keyboardist for Fela Kuti‘s Egypt 80, bandleader for Femi Kuti‘s Positive Force, and the founder of his own orchestra, Sosimi is preparing the release of his new album 'You No Fit Touch Am,' a 7-track collection of compositions that are steeped in socio-political messages and showcase classic 1970s Lagos songwriting. Okayafrica spoke with Sosimi via e-mail about the concept behind the new full-length, his first in almost a decade. Read our interview with Dele Sosimi and stream our premiere of 'You No Fit Touch Am,' due May 25 on Wah Wah 45s, below. ..."
okayafrica (Audio)
Dele Sosimi (Audio)
W - Dele Sosimi
Discogs (Video)
iTunes
YouTube: You No Fit Touch Am (Felabration 2016 - Live)
YouTube: E Go Betta [Wah Wah 45s], You No Fit Touch Am, I Don't Care, Where We Want Be, E Go Betta (O'Flynn Re-Edit)

The writing on the wall of an East Side tenement

"Sometimes in New York you come across a building that’s trying to tell you something. Take this red-brick tenement on the corner of Second Avenue and 109th Street. At some point in the past, ads were painted on the facade—designed to catch the eyes of Second Avenue El riders and pedestrians in a neighborhood that was once a Little Italy, then became Spanish Harlem by the middle of the century. Now, perhaps nine decades later, enough faded and weathered paint remains to give us a clue as to what the ads were about. The ad on the right side of the facade might look familiar to faded-ad fans; that familiar script used to be painted all over the city. Fletcher’s Castoria was a laxative produced by Charles Fletcher all the way back in 1871. The company promoted the product until the 1920s with ads on the sides of buildings, a few of which can still be seen today. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Lagos, City of Hustle, Builds an Art ‘Ecosystem’

"LAGOS, Nigeria — Cars snaked out from the hideous traffic and deposited the city’s elite, dressed to impress, at the Civic Center, a concrete-and-steel edifice fronting Lagos Lagoon. Women exuding Vogue beauty and power paused on the patio to give television interviews. Art X Lagos was living up to its reputation as a happening. Not just collectors, but the hip, the curious, the Instagram crowd, thronged West Africa’s principal fair in November. ... This enormous city — with no official census, population estimates range from 13 million to 21 million — is dynamic by disposition. Yes, the roads are clogged, political corruption is rampant, and the power cuts trigger armies of generators spewing noxious fumes. But Lagosians — who are proud of their 'hustle,' a mix of effort, imagination, and brash optimism — will turn any challenge into enterprise. ..."

NY Times
Art X Lagos
Okay Africa: Here's What Went Down at the Third Edition of ART X Lagos (Audio)
Art X Lagos: More Than an Art Fair, a Platform for Pan-African Creativity (Video)

Untitled (Igbo Landing) (group of figures from series; 2018), Gerald Chukwuma.

Blues Jukes & Jazz Streets with Bill Ferris and Doreen Ketchens

"We travel from Mississippi juke joints to the streets of the French Quarter to hear from those who record and perform music. Folklorist Bill Ferris recounts his experience documenting blues, gospel, fife & drum music and folk arts in the Mississippi delta and hill country. Ferris recently compiled his recordings in the Voices of Mississippi boxed set. Then, New Orleans’ queen of the clarinet Doreen Ketchens serenades us from her post at Royal and St. Peters Street. Doreen tells how the clarinet brought her from the family’s sweet shop in Treme to a global stage. Plus, hot takes from Hot Tuna, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Lavern Baker and Marvin Gaye."
American Routes (Audio)
Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris (Audio)
Forced Exposure (Audio)
amazon

On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist

The gate to “Charles Swann’s Garden” at Illiers-Combray.
"With the publication of Swann’s Way on November 14th, 1913, Marcel Proust found immediate fame. In the weeks that followed publication, a number of laudatory reviews appeared. Lucien Daudet, in a long front-page article in Le Figaro, praised Proust’s novel in terms that still hold true. Among his many astute remarks, this one singles out a major aspect of Proust’s achievement: 'Never, I believe, has the analysis of everything that constitutes our existence been carried so far.' Daudet called his friend a genius and his book a masterpiece. Robert Dreyfus, in another article in Le Figaro, characterized Swann’s Way as a 'strong and beautiful work.' Jean Cocteau, in Excelsior, also called the book a masterpiece, saying that it 'resembles nothing I know and reminds me of everything I admire.' With such acclaim and all the tremendous amount of work that remained to complete and publish what Proust assumed would be the two remaining volumes, The Guermantes Way and Time Regained, he had no inkling that a catastrophic, global event was about to alter the world as he knew it and also cause him to greatly enlarge the scope of his novel, already a work of nearly unprecedented length. When World War I began in August 1914, one of its immediate consequences for Proust was that publishing houses closed because all able-bodied men and all the lead used for setting type were needed in the war effort. Proust found himself without a publisher, a press, or a deadline. ..."
LitHub

The beach in front of the Grand-Hôtel in Cabourg.

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

Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Wikipedia - "The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill/leak, the BP oil disaster, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the Macondo blowout) is an industrial disaster that began on April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, considered to be the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry and estimated to be 8% to 31% larger in volume than the previous largest, the Ixtoc I oil spill, also in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 million barrels (210 million US gal; 780,000 m³). After several failed efforts to contain the flow, the well was declared sealed on September 19, 2010. Reports in early 2012 indicated that the well site was still leaking. A massive response ensued to protect beaches, wetlands and estuaries from the spreading oil utilizing skimmer ships, floating booms, controlled burns and 1.84 million US gallons (7,000 m³) of oil dispersant. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Deepwater Horizon (film)
Guardian: Deepwater Horizon and the Gulf oil spill - the key questions answered
Guardian: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Guardian: The 'well from hell' – my fight with BP to film Deepwater Horizon (Video)
YouTube: Deepwater Horizon Blowout Animation, Deepwater Horizon (2016) Official Movie Trailer

Frank Robinson 1935-2019

"Frank Robinson, a trailblazing figure who was Major League Baseball's first African-American manager and one of its greatest players during a career that spanned 21 seasons, died Thursday after a prolonged illness. He was 83. Known as much for his leadership, toughness and raging competitive fire as his sheer greatness as a player -- that is, crowding home plate so much that he dared pitchers to throw inside -- Robinson was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame with 89.2 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility in 1982. 'Frank Robinson's resume in our game is without parallel, a trailblazer in every sense, whose impact spanned generations,' Commissioner Rob Manfred said. 'He was one of the greatest players in the history of our game, but that was just the beginning of a multifaceted baseball career.' ... Robinson hit 586 home runs and was a 14-time All-Star and the only player to win Most Valuable Player Awards in both leagues -- 1961 for the Reds in the National League, '66 for the Orioles in the American League. ..."
MLB (Video)
ESPN: Frank Robinson, MVP, first black manager, dies at 83 (Video)
W - Frank Robinson
Baseball Reference

‘Essence of Son Oriental’ – A Brief Moment With Compay Segundo

"Cuban guitarist, singer and songwriter Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz Telles (1907 – 2003), better known by his artist name Compay Segundo (second voice/vocals) is one of those artists who’s music and story are one of a kind. Ranging in styles from Afro-Cuban Son to Guaracha and Danzon Repilado is rightfully considered by some to be one of the most influential Cuban musicians to date. With his distinct sound Repilado enjoyed some popularity in Cuba and elsewhere from 1950’s to 70’s but after that slowly drifted into obscurity. He was all but forgotten and working as a cigar roller when US producer Ry Cooder went to Cuba in the late 1990’s to preserve the dying artform and the original sound of Son. Cooder assembled the band Buena Vista Social Club from elderly Cuban musicians and chose Segundo, then in his 90’s to be the frontman of the band. Their eponymous album became a worldwide hit and was responsible for restoring life to the traditional Cuban music. ..."
Musicama Condo (Audio)
Soundcloud (Audio)
AfroCubaWeb
W - Compay Segundo
YouTube: Colección Perlas Cubanas #1. (Full Album/Álbum Completo) 47:52

10 Books That Capture Paris In The 1920s

"Countless movies, plays and books have been written about Paris in the 1920s, and together they give a sense of the unique atmosphere of the city during the années folles (crazy years). A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. This novel is an ode to Hemingway’s time spent living in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and their baby. It is during these years that Hemingway became familiar with Gertrude Stein, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound, among many other artists and writers of the ‘Lost Generation’. In his direct and to-the-point prose, Hemingway beautifully and simply describes Paris as he sees it. A Moveable Feast is an excellent guide to Hemingway’s favourite haunts in the Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain-des-Près and Rue Mouffetard. ..."
culture trip

2014 November: Lost Generation

A Short History of Punk: From Late 50s Rockabilly and Garage Rock to The Ramones & Sex Pistols

"Seems there was a time when the dominant story of punk was the story of British punk. If you knew nothing else, you knew the name Sid Vicious, and that seemed to sum it up. Maybe it was only in the mid-nineties, around the time Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain released Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk that more people began to popularly understand the lineage of late sixties garage rock, the Velvet Underground, Detroit’s Iggy and the Stooges, and the early CBGB scene in the mid-seventies crowned by the sound of The Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Talking Heads. Now even that story can seem oversimplified, sketched out in brief on the way to discussing the literary triumph of Patti Smith, cultural interventions of David Byrne, career highlights of punk power couple Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, or the many, always fascinating doings of Iggy Pop. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

The Hopes and Fears of Afghanistan’s Generation Z

Doctor Mohammad Jawed Momand, 22, poses for a picture in Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 30, 2019.
"As the Donald Trump administration signals the possibility of cutting the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan after more than 17 years of conflict, Mohammad Ismail, a photographer with Reuters, spent time visiting with and photographing some of the young adults living in the city of Kabul. This generation is war-weary and ready for peace, but they are now contemplating an uncertain future as talks take place that might allow the Taliban to regain some level of power. Ismail: 'For young people who were babies when the Taliban were driven from power by a U.S.-led campaign in 2001, the prospect of peace with the hard-line Islamists brings a daunting mix of hope and fear. For villagers in rural Afghanistan, where traditional ways have always counted for more than central government law, life may not change much. But for the young of Kabul and other cities, there is much to lose, in particular the freedoms restored after the Taliban were ousted—from playing music, to modeling and adopting trendy haircuts—which they’ve grown up with.'”
The Atlantic

Jazz on Film… Film Noir (5 CD set)

"I love jazz, I love film soundtracks, and I love film noir. So when a new label Moochin’ About released a lavish five-CD set entitled Jazz on Film: Film Noir, it didn’t take too much arm-twisting to get me to have a listen. It also helped that this collection came heralded by some of the most universally favourable reviews and comments I’ve read in a long time. Not to mention awards. But despite all that, when I sat down to listen I was taken by surprise. And completely knocked out. Assembled by Jazzwise writer Selwyn Harris and CD compilation producer Jason Lee Lazell, this set is a treasure trove. The first score, on Disc 1 is A Streetcar Named Desire composed by Alex North. Perhaps most famous for writing the melody for Unchained (that’s right, the ‘Unchained Melody’) Alex North has some serious jazz connections. Streetcar is often spoken of as the first film score to make real use of jazz, while Yusef Lateef’s rapturous version of his ‘Love Theme from Spartacus’ is a classic, as is Paul Horn’s album of North’s music from Cleopatra. We could argue over whether A Streetcar Named Desire is a film noir —but Selwyn Harris makes a strong case for it in the booklet notes. ..."
London Jazz News
moochin about (Audio)
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: MOOCHIN ABOUT Jazz on Film... Film Noir 7 videos

Pound Notes, Canned Soup and Common Goals

John McCorry, the chief executive of the West End food bank in Newcastle, collecting donations before a match at St. James’ Park.
"NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, England — Bill Corcoran is in his usual spot, in the shadow of St. James’ Park, opposite Shearer’s bar, rattling his bucket, when a pack of a dozen Manchester United fans marches past. They are wearing black jackets, hoods raised to stave off the cold. Just as they reach Corcoran, they launch into a deeply unflattering, mildly profane chant about the man after whom the bar is named: Alan Shearer, favorite son of both Newcastle the city and Newcastle the team. A few home fans jeer in response. The heckling just makes the interlopers sing louder. Toward the tail of the group, one man spots Corcoran, and veers in his direction. He pulls his wallet from his pocket, and leafs through a fistful of green, orange and purple notes. ..."
NY Times

Where Does Art Belong?

Hilma af Klint’s Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17, 1915.
"Whom is an artwork for, and where does it belong? Every modern or contemporary artist has either had to answer these questions, or else accept the ready-made answer that our culture offers: Just do your work and let the invisible hand of the market sort out its fate. Hilma af Klint was among the few who rejected that idea. She thought her work was for people who didn’t exist yet, and that it belonged in a temple—where, as we all know, money changers have no place. It’s hard to think of any artist more determined to take the eventual fate of her art into her own hands than this Swedish painter, whose work is now on view at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through April 23. Curated by Tracey Bashkoff with David Horowitz, the exhibition, 'Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,' is the first comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work in the United States. ..."
The Nation
Guggenheim - Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (Video)
Whitney - Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again (Video)
MoMA - Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts(Video)

Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies, i through vii (detail). 2015/16. Seven-channel video.

Sandpaper Is a Form of Change - Hainbach

"Repetition may be, as Brian Eno famously put it, a form of change, but so too is slow deterioration as a result of sharp edges and rough surfaces. The latter is the process employed by the musician Hainbach in 'Three Tape Loops Destructing Over Three Hours.' (It’s actually close to three and a half hours.) The source audio is piano that Hainbach recorded himself. In the extended video, the resulting tape recordings are seen and heard to slowly come apart as they are exposed to various knife blades and sandpaper. Soft tones give way to serrated noise. The ear hears continuity amid the destruction, as the abbrasive texture itself becomes a sonic element in the mix. It’s worth noting that the project began as a challenge from Simon the Magpie, whose curse-laden, manic proposal is about as distinct from Hainbach’s sedate, reflective pace as could be imagined. This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at Hainbach’s YouTube channel."
disquiet (Video)
Hainbach (Video)
YouTube: Three Tape Loops Destructing Over Three Hours, Performing Electronic Music | My Live Setup 16:27