Pay It All Back: Adrian Sherwood On 30 Years Of On-U Sound

Adrian Sherwood's garden shed, Annie Anxiety and Lee Scratch Perry. Annie lived in the shed.
"To someone who believes in rebel music, the coincidence of the 30-year anniversary of Adrian Sherwood's label On-U Sound with the populist political uprisings of 2011 could seem almost astrological - like a shift in the alignment of the stars causing an inevitable surge in energies. Adrian Sherwood has a phenomenal CV. Inspired by reggae to teach himself sound engineering in his teens, Sherwood has forged a career that has epitomised the inter-racial trajectory of dub through England, from putting UK production on the map, right through the mutually inspiring transfusion of reggae and punk, acid house and experimental hip hop. ... To celebrate of 30 years of On-U, Sherwood is releasing a series of reissues of key releases from what has been an awesomely prolific label. ..."
The Quietus

2011 September: Adrian Sherwood, 2012 April: Dub Syndicate, 2013 August: Don't Call Us Immigrants (2000), 2014 May: Bim Sherman - Across the Red Sea (1998), 2016 November: Keith Hudson - Brand (1979), 2017 February: Sherwood at the Controls, Vol. 2: 1985-1990, 2017 March: Becoming A Cliché / Dub Cliché (2006)

Reissued: African Vinyl in the 21st Century

"The golden age of vinyl records is long past in Africa, but the market for rare and reissued African vinyl outside the continent has been growing steadily since the early 2000s. DJs and collectors have turned an obsession with rare records and forgotten gems from Cape Town to Tangiers into an international reissue and compilation industry, led by record labels such as Soundway, Strut and Analog Africa. This program explores some of the complex and shifting dynamics of neocolonialism, cultural ownership and audience in the African vinyl market. We’ll hear stories from label owners, DJs and artists, touching on controversies around Nigerian disco funk reissues, new career opportunities for sometimes-obscure African artists, the unique vinyl culture in South Africa, and much more. Produced by Morgan Greenstreet and Alejandro Van Zandt-Escobar, with Nenim Iwebuke."
Afro Pop (Audio)
Afro Pop - Temi Kogbe: Friday Night in Lagos
Afro Pop - Reissued: African Vinyl Playlist (Video/Bandcamp)

The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas - Gustave Flaubert (1911)

Wikipedia - "The Dictionary of Received Ideas (or Dictionary of Accepted Ideas; in French, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues) is a short satirical work collected and published in 1911–13 from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the Second French Empire. It takes the form of a dictionary of automatic thoughts and platitudes, self-contradictory and insipid. It is often paired with the Sottisier (a collection of stupid quotations taken from the books of famous writers). ... The idea of a spoof encyclopedia had fascinated him all his life. As a child, he had amused himself by writing down the absurd utterances of a friend of his mother's, and over the course of his career he speculated as to the best format for a compilation of stupidities. ..."
Wikipedia
Flaubert’s ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’
OnBooks: The Dictionary of Received Ideas by Gustave Flaubert.
Scribd: Flaubert, Gustave - Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1954)
amazon

2012 August: On Cataloguing Flaubert, 2013 March: Sentimental Education - 1(1869), 2016 December: Three Tales (1877), 2017 August: The Sentimental Education (1869), 2018 May: In Which Our Tragic Effects Remain Purely Professional

Hear Patti Smith’s New Work With The Soundwalk Collective, a Tribute to the Avant-Garde Poet Antonin Artaud

"The Soundwalk Collective has made music art out of found sounds since 2004. They recorded 2012’s Medea while traversing the Black Sea and fishing for sounds using a scanner and high powered aerial antennas; 2014’s Last Beat used contact microphones on the architecture of a music club to collect vibrations instead of music; 2017’s Before Music There Is Blood collaged deep echoing recordings of classical music played in various halls. This time, in their upcoming The Peyote Dance, they have brought in poet and rock goddess Patti Smith for a trip into Mexico. The above track 'The New Revelations of Being' is a preview of what’s to come. The album title comes from a book by Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde theater director and author, who traveled to Mexico to explore revelatory visions with the Rarámuri people in 1936. Artaud was hoping that peyote would shake his opioid addiction. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith

2009 November: Antonin Artaud, 2011 August: La Coquille et le Clergyman - 1926, Germaine Dulac, 2014 September: You Are Quite Unnecessary, Young Man!, 2016 November: Mapping Antonin Artaud

Firing up Weird Science at the Whitney

"A couple of weeks ago, the artist Kevin Beasley was vroom-vrooming his maroon muscle car, a 2010 Dodge Challenger, from his Queens studio to a temporary Brooklyn outpost in a cold, steady rain. 'I’m a car guy,' said the affable Mr. Beasley, who once studied automotive design. It wasn’t a hot rod engine he was racing to see, however, but a century-old cotton gin motor (75 horsepower) that is the centerpiece of his solo exhibition 'Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape,' which opens on Saturday at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As part of the show, and with the help of complicated sound equipment, he will occasionally “play” the motor like a musical instrument and has invited his own scheduled guests to do the same; they may also perform in other ways he hasn’t yet decided. In doing so, he will contrast that joyous new activity with King Cotton’s legacy of slavery and poverty in the South. ..."

NY Times
Brooklyn Rail: KEVIN BEASLEY with Yasi Alipour
Whitney - Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape (Video)
art21 (Video)
YouTube: Kevin Beasley's Raw Materials | Art21 "New York Close Up"

The Forgotten Borough's Forgotten Industry: The History Of Lighthouses On Staten Island

An overhead view of the entire Lighthouse Depot circa 1890.
"In our digital age, lighthouses are perhaps known better for providing Instagram content from a New England getaway than for their original function. But behind those picturesque vistas lies a piece of American history that was essential to the founding of the new nation. Today there are 400 active lighthouses in the U.S., and New York City has its own unique history as a center for the luminous navigational beacons. The Statue of Liberty, for example, originally served as a lighthouse, with beams shining out of its torch. The oldest lighthouse in the entire country, on New Jersey’s Sandy Hook, serves as a landmark for New York boaters as they return to shore. And Staten Island—known more today for its Italian-American reality TV shows—was the supply headquarters for the nation’s entire lighthouse industry for over 100 years. You can learn all this at the National Lighthouse Museum, which is tucked in next to the St. George Ferry Terminal. ..."
gothamist

"Assemblage of the Statue of Liberty in Paris, showing the bottom half of the statue erect under scaffolding, the head and torch at its feet." (NYPL)

The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight

Markings on the floor showing that Thuban was the North Star for the ancient Egyptians at the time of the Great Pyramids.
"On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures. The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth. I was particularly interested in this monument because this axial precession is also the slowest cycle that we track in Long Now’s 10,000 Year Clock. Strangely, little to no documentation of this installation seemed to be available, except for a few vacation pictures on Flickr. So the last time I was in Las Vegas, I made a special trip out to Hoover Dam to see if I could learn more about this obscure 26,000-year monument. ..."
The Long Now Foundation
The Long Now Foundation: About - Stewart Brand

Description overlaid on the original technical drawing for the layout of terrazzo floor.

2009 April: CoEvolution Quarterly, 2013 December: THE WHOLE EARTH: California and The Disappearance of The Outside, 2015 July: Watch Stewart Brand’s 6-Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno, 2016 October: Whole Earth Catalog

Pioneering Canadian Women In Electronic Music

"Recent lists of pioneering women in electronic music have bolstered the fact that women were right there making significant work during the nascence of electronic music, from the late ’50s to ’70s, on a quest for sounds and sequences never heard before. Yet most of the women who helped pioneer electronic music in Canada don’t pop up in those lists. On the surface, the early electronic era in Canada looks like a man’s game, yet looking a little deeper you’ll find Canadian women on the margins, surrounded by tape machines, computers and instruments of their own making. The dearth of women in the early days of electronic music in general was a product of its time: electroacoustic music developed in the last century within a Western music canon and within institutional confines dominated by male scholars and prodigies. On top of that, rather than only requiring an acoustic instrument such as a piano, electronic composers needed access to an electroacoustics lab or commercially funded studio or the means to buy the necessary equipment to produce and record sound. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video/SoundCloud)

H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic

A colored transmission electron micrograph of the H.I.V. virus, in green, attaching to a white blood cell, in orange.
"For just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate. The surprise success now confirms that a cure for H.I.V. infection is possible, if difficult, researchers said. The investigators are to publish their report on Tuesday in the journal Nature and to present some of the details at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle. Publicly, the scientists are describing the case as a long-term remission. In interviews, most experts are calling it a cure, with the caveat that it is hard to know how to define the word when there are only two known instances. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Spiritmuse Records presents MADONJAZZ #155: Deep listening

"Spiritmuse Records presents MADONJAZZ 155: Deep Listening. An 1hr set from Mark Gallagher of deep, spiritual jazz gems from Sunny Murray, Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, to Italian and French avant-garde sounds, to African, M. Eastern and global raw field recordings and psych folk sounds. ..."
Mad On Jazz (Mixcloud)

Beats of Zion - Rocky Dawuni (2019)

"... In a time when divisive rhetoric is on the rise and the political climate prefers to build walls over bridges, Rocky’s album Beats of Zion is a refreshing message about global unity and a worldview of oneness. Rocky passionately states, “We live in a time when the elements of international morality need to be proclaimed as a guiding principle for how we engage and deal with each other, between individuals, between communities and among nations. It is a time for global mobilization for action on challenging socio-political issues like the environment and the refugee crisis. Beats of Zion is the drumbeat of war against apathy and re-energizing the forces of love and hope.' He concludes, 'Beats of Zion is the rhythm of change beating from a distance and getting louder to awaken positive consciousness.' ..."
Rocky Dawuni
Rocky Dawumi drops new track – Beats of Zion
iTubes
YouTube: Beats of Zion

Thomson and Thompson

Wikipedia - "Thomson and Thompson (French: Dupond et Dupont [dy.pɔ̃]) are fictional characters in The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. They are two incompetent detectives who provide much of the comic relief throughout the series. While their different (albeit similar) surnames would suggest they are unrelated, they look like identical twins whose only discernible difference is the shape of their moustaches. They are afflicted with chronic spoonerisms, are extremely clumsy, thoroughly clueless, and usually bent on arresting the wrong character. In spite of this, they somehow get entrusted with delicate missions. ..."
Wikipedia
The Thomsons

2008 May: Georges Remi, 1907-1983, 2010 July: The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free, 2011 December: Prisoners of the Sun, 2012 January: Tintin: the Complete Companion, 2012 December: Snowy, 2015 August: The Black Island (1937), 2015 September: King Ottokar's Sceptre (1938), 2015 December: Red Rackham's Treasure (1943), 2016 July: Captain Haddock, 2017 April: Cigars of the Pharaoh (1934), 2018 March: Destination Moon (1950), Explorers on the Moon (1954), 2018 July: The Calculus Affair (1956), 2018 October: Professor Calculus

Lee Quiñones Says, “If These Walls Could Talk”

"'Shit man we were 15 years old,' Lee says while painting his train, 'There was a bunch of us painting together, doing it solo, as a duo, or as a group.' An NYC original whole-car graffiti writer and painter in the 1970s/80s, Mr. Quiñones is now prepping for his latest gallery show, a solo at Charlie James Gallery in LA’s Chinatown. 40 years after his first gallery show in Rome that many point to as groundbreaking for graffiti writers transitioning to contemporary art, Lee is easily time-travelling to those days while he is working on new canvasses that invariably include imagery from that era, even as his own style has continued to evolve and he has greatly expanded his visual repertoire. ..."
Brooklyn Street Art
W - Lee Quiñones
Lee Quiñones
Here’s Everything You Should Know About Supreme Collaborator Lee Quiñones
vimeo: Lee Quiñones Studio Visit. December 2018
YouTube: Art | Graffiti | Lee Quinones

Insect Trust Gazette - William Burroughs (1964 / 1968)

"Little magazines tend to streak across the literary sky like a comet briefly full of passion, poetry and prose before disappearing out of view. Few little magazines last several issues and fewer make a lasting cultural or artistic impression. For every Paris Review and Evergreen Review (if these magazines can be considered true littles), there are thousands of one-shots. Interest on the part of publisher and reader soon dries up as does the material worth printing. William Burroughs’ appearances in the late fifties and throughout the sixties are astonishing for being in definitive, lasting examples of the medium. ... Insect Trust Gazette is a case in point. The Gazette ran for only three issues from 1964 to 1968. Leonard Belasco, Jed Irwin, Robert Basara, and Bill Levy edited the magazine in Philadelphia and later California. The magazine got its name from a line in a Burroughs novel. Not surprisingly, Burroughs appeared in the first two issues. ..."
Reality Studio
W - Insect Trust Gazette
Reality Studio: Jed Irwin on the Insect Trust Gazette
[PDF] ]the insect trust gazette

2009 May: Cut-up technique - 1, 2010 March: Cut-up technique, 2010 December: The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag, 2014 February: William Burroughs at 100, 2014 September: The Ticket That Exploded, 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2015 June: The Electronic Revolution (1971), 2015 August: Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914 – 2014, 2015 December: Destroy All Rational Thought, 2016 January: Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs, 2016 June: Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1981), 2016 September: # 1 – A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 2016 December: #6 – Call Me Burroughs LP, 2017 January: A Visit to William S. Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Summer, 1958, 2017 December: The Nova Trilogy (The Cut-up Trilogy), 2018 September: Material - The Road to the Western Lands (1998)

Terry Riley - Assassin Reverie (2005)

"It seems particularly timely and appropriate to be writing about Terry Riley in 2005, the year of his seventieth birthday, when a spirit of festive celebration fills the air. A free spirit, maverick par excellence, creator of a personal compositional style that has spawned entire generations of epigones, he certainly deserves these sumptuous celebrations. Terry Riley is the kind of intellectual who embodies the best aspects of the American pioneer spirit, the positive and uncorrupted image of America (and California, in particular) that still holds abroad: an America free from the weight of European tradition, a privileged space where a fusion of Western and Eastern cultural trends can be produced. ... For more than forty years Riley’s music has engaged us, relentlessly developing in intensity and enlarging its scope, its author courageously exploring ever-new styles and compositional devices and smelting them into a unique syncretic synthesis. ..."
DRAM Online
#2472: Assassin Reverie (Audio)
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: Tread on the Trail (version for 12 saxophones)

December 2007: Terry Riley, March 2010: In C, December 2010: Terry Riley & Gyan Riley, April 2011: Terry Riley - Shri Camel: Morning Corona, Terry Riley rare footage, live in the 70s, 2014 March: Kronos Quartet Plays Terry Riley: Salome Dances for Peace (1989), 2014 June: Solo piano works, Moscow Conservatory. April 18th, 2000, A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), 2017 August: “A Particular Glow” – On Loving Terry Riley, 2017 September: Terry Riley On Tape Loops 

To Sleep with Anger - Charles Burnett (1990)

"A slow-burning masterwork of the early 1990s, this third feature by Charles Burnett is a singular piece of American mythmaking. In a towering performance, Danny Glover plays the enigmatic southern drifter Harry, a devilish charmer who turns up out of the blue on the South Central Los Angeles doorstep of his old friends. In short order, Harry’s presence seems to cast a chaotic spell on what appeared to be a peaceful household, exposing smoldering tensions between parents and children, tradition and change, virtue and temptation. Interweaving evocative strains of gospel and blues with rich, poetic-realist images, To Sleep with Anger is a sublimely stirring film from an autonomous artistic sensibility, a portrait of family resilience steeped in the traditions of African American mysticism and folklore."
Criterion
Voice: An Old Friend Brings Bad Tidings in Charles Burnett’s Masterful ‘To Sleep With Anger’
New Yorker: The Front Row: “To Sleep with Anger” (Video)
W - To Sleep with Anger
amazon
YouTube: To Sleep With Anger

Dust On The Nettles - A Journey Through The British Underground Folk Scene 1967-1972

"With 63 tracks and a total running time of just under four hours, Dust On The Nettles examines the metamorphosis that British folk underwent during the late 1960s, when the influence of psychedelia and the counterculture saw the idiom being twisted into all kinds of new and exotic shapes, as the finger-in-the-ear folk clubs of yore were inexorably drawn into a brave new world of Arts Labs, free festivals and the nascent college/university circuit. ... Balancing the familiar with the obscure, we feature acknowledged brand leaders like Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle and Steeleye Span alongside acts who made music purely for the local communities that nurtured them: Shide & Acorn on the Isle of Wight, Folkal Point in Bristol, Music Box in Coventry, Chrissie Quayle in Cornwall. We incorporate a large number of recordings that weren't issued at the time, sample impossibly rare albums by the likes of Oberon, Dry Heart and Benjamin Delaney Lion, and feature key recordings from a number of bands who underpinned the thriving live scene of the era. Housed in a clambox featuring a lavishly illustrated and annotated 36-page booklet, the painstakingly-assembled Dust On The Nettles is surely the most comprehensive and wide-ranging anthology to appear thus far of the UK underground hippie folk movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s. ... -Stuart Jefferson"
Wayside Music
A Folking Great Community
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: Dust On The Nettles 60 videos

The Incredible String Band

They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi

"On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You’re in one place, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you’ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on—you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting—is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate you. The pontificators and the screamers have their say. Some of us have no interest in you, but the simulacrum makes sure we know who you are. We parse from all of this what we consider pleasure: love, hate, indifference. ..."
The Paris Review

Kamasi Washington’s Giant Step

The only tenor saxophone that Kamasi Washington has ever played was once his father’s.
"On a late October afternoon in South Central Los Angeles, Kamasi Washington was facing what is for him an increasingly familiar problem: making a lot of big ideas fit into a single space, even one as large as the nearby Club Nokia, a rock-star-size venue where he would be performing in December. His recent triple album, ‘The Epic,’ is a nearly three-hour suite for a 10-piece jazz band, backed by a 32-piece orchestra and a 20-person choir. Washington’s show promised to be a typical swirl of activity, a sprawling procession of dancers, musicians, DJs and singers unified by the magisterial sound of Washington himself, a 34-year-old tenor saxophonist who has emerged as the most-talked-about jazz musician since Wynton Marsalis arrived on the New York scene three decades ago. ..."
NY Times (Jan. 21, 2016)

2015 December: The Epic - Kamasi Washington (2015), 2016 December: Throttle Elevator Music featuring Kamasi Washington (2016), 2017 April: Harmony of Difference (EP - 2017), 2017 June: "The Rhythm Changes", 2017 August: What's in my Bag?, 2017 August: Harmony of Difference EP (2017), 2018 July: Heaven and Earth (2018)

Impeach Trump? Defend Him? Cohen Hearing Shows Perils for Both Parties

A copy of Mr. Cohen’s testimony on the floor of the hearing room.

"The searing portrait that Michael D. Cohen delivered on Wednesday — of a lying, cheating, racist president who used money and threats to conceal immoral and illegal behavior — will test both parties as they hurtle toward a confrontation over the fate of the presidency. Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, ripped away the veneer of loyalty that he had maintained for more than a decade and further imperiled the president by offering an insider account at the heart of the criminal investigations that have consumed Washington for nearly two years. The five-hour hearing offered a glimpse of a confrontational year ahead between Republicans still loyal to Mr. Trump and newly empowered Democrats seeking to investigate and weaken the president by demanding his tax returns and business records, and appearances before Congress by his former advisers and associates. ..."

NY Times (Video)
NY Times: Michael Cohen Accuses Trump of Expansive Pattern of Lies and Criminality (Video)
Guardian: Michael Cohen's explosive allegations suggest danger for Trump on two fronts (Video)
Guardian: Trump-Russia investigation
NY Times: Opinion - ‘He Is a Racist, He Is a Con Man, and He Is a Cheat’
NY Times: Michael D. Cohen’s Congressional Testimony (Video)

John Dean testifying before the Senate Watergate committee in 1973.

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science - Edited by Larry McCaffery (1992)

"The term 'cyberpunk' entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde. By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. ..."
Duke Press [PDF]
W - Storming the Reality Studio
iTunes

2015 May: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology - edited by Bruce Sterling (1986)

Viola da Gamba

Wikipedia - "The viol /ˈvaɪəl/, viola da gamba [ˈvjɔːla da ˈɡamba], or (informally) gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitch of each of the strings. Frets on the viol are usually made of gut, tied on the fingerboard around the instrument's neck, to enable the performer to stop the strings more cleanly. Frets improve consistency of intonation and lend the stopped notes a tone that better matches the open strings. Viols first appeared in Spain in the mid to late 15th century and were most popular in the Renaissance and Baroque (1600-1750) periods. Early ancestors include the Arabic rebab and the medieval European vielle, but later, more direct possible ancestors include the Venetian viole and the 15th- and 16th-century Spanish vihuela, a 6-course plucked instrument tuned like a lute (and also like a present-day viol) that looked like but was quite distinct from (at that time) the 4-course guitar (an earlier chordophone). ..."
Wikipedia (Audio)
NY Times: How a Movie Helped Fuel a Viola da Gamba Revival
Fiddles, Violas da Braccio, and Violas da Gamba
YouTube: Phantasm - Viol Consort

Jan Verkolje, Dutch, c. 1674, Elegant Couple (A Musical Interlude).

Eek-A-Mouse (Ripton Hylton)

Wikipedia - "Eek-A-Mouse (born Ripton Joseph Hylton, 19 November 1957) is a Jamaican reggae musician. He is one of the early artists to be described as a 'singjay'. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Eek-A-Mouse began his music career when he was in college, releasing two roots reggae singles under his own name, which were produced by his mathematics tutor, Mr. Dehaney. These early works were influenced by the music of Pablo Moses. He then went on to work for various sound systems over the next few years and also released a few more singles. He adopted the stage name 'Eek-A-Mouse' in 1979, taking the name of a racehorse he always bet on; it was a nickname his friends had used for some time. ..."
Wikiedia
YouTube: My Fathers Land, No Wicked Can't Reign, Terrorists In The City 12" Mix, Creation, WA-DO-DEM, Slowly But Surely, queen elizabeth

Cairo’s House of Knowledge

Although the building that held Cairo’s Dar al-’Ilm, or House of Knowledge, disappeared long ago, it stood not far from the Mosque of al-Aqmar, right, along Muizz Street, a thoroughfare that dates back to the founding of Cairo in the 10th century.
"On March 24, 1005, a man reputed for madness came to his senses long enough to establish one of the most progressive and influential academic institutions of the Middle Ages. 'On this Saturday ... the so-called House of Knowledge in Cairo was inaugurated,' wrote the chronicler al-Musabbihi, a friend of the new institution’s founder, Caliph al-Hakim, who had assumed his title nine years before. Though al-Musabbihi’s original manuscript is lost, copied sections survive in the writings of 14th-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi. As al-Musabbihi and others at court well knew, staying on al-Hakim’s good side could be tricky. The 'Mad Caliph,' as he was later called, could be mingling jovially with his subjects in the streets at one moment and ordering the summary execution of an esteemed courtier the next—or the extermination of the city’s dogs because their barking annoyed him. ..."
AramcoWorld

Dar al-’Ilm drew scholars from across the Muslim world. It was established in 1005 with books donated by Caliph al-Hakim, whose own palace library was said to hold some 400,000 volumes.

Hainbach - Gear Top 7: My Personal Favorites In 2018

"Ever since Nick Hornby invented lists in the nineties, humans never got tired of things ordered by numbers. Here is my completely biased and absolutely personal list of instruments and gear released in 2018 that inspired me, be it bought or endorsed. SPOILERS: 1. Koma Elektronik Field Kit FX 2. AC Noises AMA 3. Morfbeats Gamelan Strips 4. David Bellinger eKalimba (Patch Point) 5. Bastl Thyme 6. Oto Machines Boum 7. Squarp Hermod. Disclaimer because transparency is important to me: no company colluded with me to make this list. I did get endorsed with a few products over the year but with no set of directions or agreements to promote them, especially not in a video like this. Also, there is a joke about lists in the opening statement of this description. Happy New Year!"
YouTube: Gear Top 7: My Personal Favorites In 2018

2018 October: Distressed Tape, 2019 February: Sandpaper Is a Form of Change

Remember the Warriors: Behind the Chaotic, Drug-Fueled, and Often Terrifying Making of a Cult Classic

"The D, F, N, and Q trains all converge at Stillwell Avenue near the southernmost tip of Brooklyn. Visitors are funneled through the newly polished Coney Island Terminal, past the growing line of souvenir shops, until they are shot out toward the bustle of Surf Avenue and Bowery Street. The boardwalk’s iconic Wonder Wheel spins lazily behind Nathan’s Famous, the 99-year-old hot dog joint, which serves as something of a welcome center for those seeking the winding row of amusements that line the beach. Amid the refurbished boardwalk and laughter of children, it’s easy to forget that Coney Island was once a place where tourists did not venture. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, street gangs dominated this neighborhood. They ran rampant through the area’s neglected housing projects, tearing along Surf and Neptune avenues toward West 8th Street. Those gangs, or gangs like them, and that incarnation of Coney Island would form the backbone of author Sol Yurick’s 1965 debut novel, The Warriors, about the young members of a street gang. More than a decade after the novel’s publication it would be optioned and, eventually, turned into a major motion picture of the same name. ..."
Voice

2010 August: The Warriors, 2014 September: BAM: Retro Metro, 2015 January: Screaming Phantoms, Tomahawks, Phantom Lords, Dirty Ones and other gangs of 1970s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2015 September: Cast of 'The Warriors' to Reunite in Coney Island One Last Time

Sonny Stitt Plays Jimmy Giuffre Arrangements (1959)

Wikipedia - "Edward Hammond Boatner Jr. (February 2, 1924 – July 22, 1982), known professionally as Sonny Stitt, was an American jazz saxophonist of the bebop/hard bop idiom. Known for his warm tone, he was one of the best-documented saxophonists of his generation, recording more than 100 albums. He was nicknamed the 'Lone Wolf' by jazz critic Dan Morgenstern because of his relentless touring and devotion to jazz. Stitt was sometimes viewed as a Charlie Parker mimic, especially earlier in his career, but gradually came to develop his own sound and style, particularly when performing on tenor sax. ..."
Wikipedia
The 1959 Project - February 16, 1959 (Video)
W - Sonny Stitt Plays Jimmy Giuffre Arrangement
Discogs (Video)
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: For All We Know, New York Blues, Giuff, For All We Know

2018 March: Stitt Meets Brother Jack (1962)

Cooking with Patrick O’Brian By Valerie Stivers

"The discovery of a new series of novels to love is often accompanied by joy (a new lifelong friend!) and resentment (why did none of you tell me about this?). These were precisely my feelings upon finding the Aubrey–Maturin books, a series of twenty naval adventures written by the brilliant British historical novelist Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000). The books take place during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) and explore the friendship between Jack Aubrey, a jolly and bellicose naval captain, and Stephen Maturin, his ship’s surgeon, a laudanum-addicted naturalist. Most of the action occurs at sea—the first volume starts on the island of Minorca (at the time a British possession), with Jack waiting desperately to be assigned a ship and Stephen ducking out on his lodgings because he’s unable to pay the rent. Shore time, when it comes in the second volume, is set in the carriages and country houses of England. I realized about halfway through Post Captain that O’Brian is like a male Jane Austen, writing from the point of view of the soldiers who populate Austen’s fiction. ..."
The Paris Review

2009 September: Patrick O'Brian, 2013 July: Harbors and High Seas - Dean King and John B. Hattendorf, 2015 October: HMS Surprise (1973), 2016 May: Post Captain (1972), 2019 February: Aubrey–Maturin series

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

"There is possibly a no more overwhelming death in cinema than the one that ends this adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella of homosexual desire. Feted composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), his face smeared with tragically unbecoming makeup, sits on the beach at Venice Lido watching the object of his affections. To the unbearably bittersweet strains of the adagietto from Mahler's 5th symphony, Aschenbach sees the beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, get beaten up by an older boy, before he himself is carried off in a Wagnerian liebestod. In Mann's novella, Aschenbach is a novelist. Visconti's decision to make him a composer instead opened the treasure houses of Mahler's 3rd and 5th symphonies. Otherwise the film is faithful to its source: Aschenbach has come to Venice to recover from personal and artistic stresses. ..."
Guardian - Death in Venice: No 14 best arthouse film of all time
Guardian - Digested classics: Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
W - Death in Venice (film)
W - Death in Venice
[PDF] Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
YouTube: Death In Venice - Official Trailer - Luchino Visconti

2017 November: Albert Camus - The Stranger (1942), 2019 January: The Leopard - Luchino Visconti (1963)

Black History Trail Makes 200 Stops Across Massachusetts

The slave quarters were close to the manor house so slaves could keep the grand house functioning around the clock for the Royalls.
"MEDFORD, Mass. — During Black History Month, Massachusetts likes to point out its reputation as the enlightened 19th-century hub of the abolition movement. The state was one of the first to end slavery, long before the 13th Amendment formally banned it nationwide in 1865. Less well known is that Massachusetts was the first to legalize slavery, in 1641. Even before then, merchants in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had enslaved Native Americans, and by 1638 were bartering them for Africans in the West Indies. The slave trade grew from there and soon became a pillar of the colonial economy. Two professors at Tufts University, Kendra Field and Kerri Greenidge, are among the many scholars who have been tracing the history of Massachusetts’s African-American residents, from slavery to Black Lives Matter. Their research, a collaboration with students and nonprofit organizations, has evolved into what they call the African American Trail Project, a website that maps out more than 200 historic sites across the state. ..."
NY Times
African American Trail Project

The mural “Faces of Dudley” depicts actual residents of Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, including Malcolm X, who lived nearby in the 1940s.

L’ENTOURLOOP

"Breeding in open air since 1964, Sir James and King Johnny are the figureheads of the mysterious L’ENTOURLOOP collective. Feed with good grains from Sounds Systems, vinyle’s culture (Scratchs / Beatmaking / Sampling) and rocked by the epic dialogues of a certain cinema, L’ENTOURLOOP concocte with love a music half-way between Kingston, London and New York! With already a lot of collaborations & remixes in their pocket, the first album. ..."
Discogs (Video)
L’ENTOURLOOP (Video)
Soundcloud: (Audio)
YouTube: L'Entourloop • DJ Set • Le Mellotron 55:43

"Downtown Train" / "Tango Till They're Sore" - Tom Waits (1985)

"Tom Waits would never be described as a particularly commercial artist. Depending on if you ask someone like my mother about albums like Mule Variations or Bone Machine, he could also be described as incoherent, cacophonous, or The-Reason-Why-We-Ask-You-To-Keep-Your-Door-Closed-Upstairs. But before Waits had the gravel / broken glass / whiskey throat transplant that music writers have carbon dated to sometime before 1983, he wrote piano-based lounge music that even Lorise Reed could stomach. Waits released his debut record, Closing Time, along with its lead single 'Ol’ 55' in the spring of 1973 and snagged himself some of that sweet, sweet 70s stadium rock cash when The Eagles covered the song a year later. Waits described their cover as 'antiseptic.' Somewhere between the gentle crooning of his early work and the moment he started writing songs about how God has turned his back on the human race, Tom Waits released Rain Dogs in 1985. ..."
WRITERS ROUND: Tom Waits - "Downtown Train" (Video)
W - "Downtown Train"
Genius (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Downtown Train, Tango till they're sore

2012 July: Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, 2013 March: Burma Shave, 2013 May: "Ol' '55", 2013 July: The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), 2014 January: Blood Money, 2014 March: Telephone call from Istanbul (1987), 2014 November: Rain Dogs (1985), 2015 February: Mule Variations (1999), 2015 April: Swordfishtrombones (1983), 2015 July: Alice (2002), 2015 September: Tom Waits On The Tube Live UK TV 1985, 2015 December: Franks Wild Years (1987), 2016 January: "Bad as Me" (2011), 2016 April: 'It's perfect madness', 2016 May: Real Gone (2002), 2016 October: Tom Waits Sings and Tells Stories in "Tom Waits: A Day in Vienna", a 1979, 2017 January: Bone Machine (1992), 2017 April: Bad as Me (2011)

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, February 22 – March 2

In the dawn sky, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn are all pulling away from each other.
"Friday, February 22 • Winter still has a month to go, but a preview of spring stars awaits you if you step outside after about 11 p.m. By then tonight, the waning gibbous Moon will have risen in the east. Look for Spica to its lower right by about 7° (less than a fist at arm's length). Four times farther to the Moon's upper left shines brighter Arcturus, pale yellow-orange. Both are iconic stars of warm spring evenings. ..."
Sky & Telescope (Video)