What region has the nation’s best pizza?

"America is not a pizza monoculture. A cheeseburger in New York might not be so different from a cheeseburger in Chicago, but the pizzas between those two cities are barely in the same category of food. Our pies—like our people—span many styles, shapes, creeds, and appearances. Every region has its own pizza patois, with syntaxes and phrasings so specific to its birthplace that it may as well be Esperanto anywhere else. But take your emotions out of it for a minute. Can we just say some pizzas are demonstrably better than others? The quality gap between the best and worst regional styles is a wide chasm. This doesn’t apply to any other food in America with the exception of maybe barbecue (but even with barbecue, we’re talking about a genre, not a specific dish). And frankly, some city’s pizza styles are half-assed ideas that get disproportionate championing in the name of civic duty. ..."
The Takeout

White clam pizza

2014 June: Pizza, 2014 October: Viva La Pizza! The Art of the Pizza Box (NYC), 2016 July: Q&A: Antoinette Balzano and Cookie Cimineri of Totonno’s, 2017 September: The Pizza Show, 2017 November: A Priceless Pizzeria in Brooklyn, 2018 December: State of the Slice, Part 2: The 27 Pizza Spots That Define New York Slice Culture, 2019 January: How the Slice Joint Made Pizza the Perfect New York City Food

W.P. Kinsell

"Three paragraphs in, there it is: W.P. Kinsella's most famous sentence, and no doubt the most misquoted line of his writing career as well. 'If you build it, he will come.' The he (not 'they') referred to in the instruction was Shoeless Joe Jackson, the baseball star disgraced for allegedly throwing the 1919 World Series and the eponymous hero of Mr. Kinsella's seminal novel, Shoeless Joe. The novel, about a struggling Iowa farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn field, was adapted for film as Field of Dreams – a critically acclaimed blockbuster that made the already beloved novel a sensation. For Mr. Kinsella, baseball wasn't simply a game – it was poetry, and a metaphor for life. ..."
Shoeless Joe author W.P. Kinsella saw baseball as a metaphor for life
Guide to Baseball Fiction: W. P. Kinsella
ESPN - Where it began: 'Shoeless Joe' by W.P. Kinsella
W - W.P. Kinsell
W.P. Kinsell
amazon: W.P. Kinsell, Field of Dreams ($)
W - Field of Dreams
YouTube: Field of Dreams Trailer

The Poetry Project’s Half-Century of Dissent

"February 10, 1971, on a Wednesday night in the East Village, a full moon glowed in the wintry sky over St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Inside, a group of New York’s most cutting-edge scene-makers gathered at the Poetry Project to hear a reading by poet and Warhol aide-de-camp Gerard Malanga. Andy was there, as was Lou Reed, along with poets Gregory Corso, John Giorno, Joe Brainard, and Bernadette Mayer. First up that night was a dark-eyed, lanky young poetess by the name of Patti Smith. An up-and-coming playwright named Sam Shepard, with whom she’d recently become involved, was there in support, as was her closest friend and collaborator, Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith knew she didn’t just want to read that night; rather, she wanted to electrify the audience with poems that possessed the power of rock ‘n’ roll. ..."
Voice

Poet John Giorno keeps his audience rapt at one of the Poetry Project’s marathon New Year’s Day readings, in 1981.

Slumber, Awakening - Alastair Wilson

"A dark, melodic, semi-self-generating modular patch using 2 Mother 32s sent through an Eventide Space hall reverb, using Ableton Live as a tempo source. A slight bit of compression is added to tame some of the more insistent bass surges. The patch is only semi-random because the notes come from sequences based off the C minor triad; the Assign outputs' random stepped voltages do the rest! If you want to recreate this patch, you can find it here. ... This is a melodic, improvised demo of how a single Mother 32 can play a bass line and melody at once, sent through an Eventide Space shimmer reverb, without any other processing or effects. The LFO is used as the bass here. The idea is that the Assign output can send a clock out pulse on each step of the sequence. ... You now have a Mother 32 which can play a bass line and melody at the same time! Stop and start the sequencer to change the bass note. If you want to recreate this patch, you can find it here. ..."
Matrix Synth (Video)
YouTube: 001//Slumber, 002//Awakening

The Irrepressible Emotion of Lee Krasner

Shattered Light (1954)
"In 1959, Lee Krasner was in crisis. She was still mourning her husband—who’d died in a car crash three years earlier—when her mother died, compounding her grief. An exhibition of her work planned by the critic Clement Greenberg had been canceled when Greenberg decided he didn’t appreciate her newer paintings. Plagued by insomnia, Krasner began painting at night in her husband’s old studio, and since she disliked working with color under artificial light, she used only shades of umber and white. The paintings Krasner made during this period, described by her friend Richard Howard as her 'Night Journeys,' are extraordinary. The confinement of her color palette is coupled with a wild range of motion and space, in works that erupt with feeling. The Eye Is the First Circle, completed in 1960 and named after an Emerson quote, is a tempest that engulfs the viewer in chaotic, feathery strokes, a 16-foot-wide sweep of circular emotion. Krasner’s grief, her rage, her power, are all contained within the canvas, layered in jagged streaks of dark brown and daubs of white. Her state of mind is locked in paint, but seeps outward. ..."
The Atlantic
Guardian: Reframing Lee Krasner, the artist formerly known as Mrs Pollock (Video)
Guardian: Storms of colour from a wild destructive genius – Lee Krasner review
Lee Krasner - Living Colour (Video)
W - Lee Krasner
Then and Now: Lee Krasner’s Land of Her Own Invention
Sotheby's: Lee Krasner from the Depths of Despair to the Height of her Career (Video)

2019 April: Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (2018)

Where We Are: An At-A-Glance Spacecraft Locator

"The last quarter has seen few changes in the roster of planetary exploration spacecraft. SpaceIL’s lunar lander Beresheet is now on the lunar surface. Its descent on 11 April seemed to go nearly perfectly. Unfortunately, a cascade of events shortly before its planned landing caused it to hit the ground too fast, and it did not survive. I’ve corrected an earlier omission (spotted—as they always are—by a sharp-eyed reader): the map at right now includes ESA’s Gaia star-mapping spacecraft, which orbits in step with Earth at the gravitationally stable L2 point, farther from Earth than the Sun. ..."
Planetary: Where We Are
[PDF] The Planetary Report • June Solstice 2019
Planetary

In the Heart of Syria's Darkness, a Democratic, Egalitarian and Feminist Society Emerges

Kurdish women of the Kobani canton in Rojava marching in a demonstration calling for the release of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, Syria, 2015
"The most amazing thing about Rojava is that hardly anyone knows it exists. We hear plenty about Syria – the battlefields and chemical attacks, the brutality of ISIS and barbarity of the Assad regime. But very little has been written about the fact that in northeastern Syria an anarchist-feminist autonomous region has arisen that is the antithesis to everything around it. ... Yet this is precisely the vision that the people of Rojava – known officially as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria – are realizing in practice, in an appallingly hostile environment, surrounded by enemies bent on their destruction. ... The theorist who influenced Ocalan most profoundly was Murray Bookchin, a Jewish-American writer and anarchist who formulated the theory of social ecology. Drawing on the connection between the environmental crisis and capitalist society, Bookchin argued that the enslavement and destruction of nature is the continuation of the enslavement of other human beings. ..."
Haaretz

Kurdish demonstrators holding a banner bearing Ocalan’s image.

2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right, 2015 October: The Ecology of Freedom (1982), 2016 July: Murray Bookchin’s New Life, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 April: The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (1977).
2016 February: The Feminist, Democratic Leftists Our Military Is Obliterating - Debbie Bookchin, 2016 May: Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn, 2016 July: How Turkey Came to This, 2017 March: As repression deepens, Turkish artists and intellectuals fear the worst, 2017 July: mRadical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve, 2018 May: Bookchin: living legacy of an American revolutionary, 2018 July: How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy - Debbie Bookchin

New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Sparkle Moore
"'For sixty years, conventional wisdom has told us that women generally did not perform rock and roll during the 1950s,' writes Leah Branstetter, Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University. Like so many cultural forms into which we are initiated, through education, personal interest, and general osmosis, this popular form of Western music—now a genre with seventy years under its belt—has functioned as an almost ideal example of the great man theory of history. ... The recognition of rare exceptions, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, does not challenge the rule. But Branstetter’s Women in Rock and Roll’s First Wave project almost single-handedly does. ..."
Open Culture (Audio)
Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Why everyone went to the 8th Street Bookshop

"The handsome brick storefront at West Eighth Street and MacDougal Place has been occupied by countless businesses since it went up on this Greenwich Village corner in 1838. But perhaps it's best remembered as the home of the Eighth Street Bookshop—one of dozens of booksellers centered around Eighth Street or Fourth Avenue that made the Village a bibliophile paradise in the 1950s and 1960s. "Operated by the brothers Elias and Ted Wilentz, the Eighth Street Bookshop gained fame as a literary gathering place with close ties to the nonconformist writers of the day, whose works and lifestyle gave rise to the term 'Beat Generation,' states the Village Alliance. ..."
Ephemeral New York
Reality Studio: Eighth Street Bookshop

Oonops Drops - African Roots 2 (Brooklyn Radio)

"... After many years Oonops is back again with another African special about the spirits of African roots from the early 70s, fresh'n'highly motivated contemporary bands from around the globe to futuristic afro inspired heavy beats. This time he invited John Warr (UK) who has been promoting and DJing African and Latin Music since the early 80s with clubs and radio shows like Afro Base on Reverb Nation. Next up is Peter Piper (Germany), an expert in Ethiopian 45s and LP albums of the 60s and 70s with a little exclusive set of his gems. But before Oonops opens up the show with a selection out of his crates including brand new releases and rare tunes from the past. Let's begin this 2,5h-musical experience now by hitting the play button and spread the word. ..."
Mixcloud (Video)

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1980)

"Until its self-described two-hour epilogue, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is an engrossing psychological portrait of Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), a Weimar-era worker bee whose slow corrosion of self both parallels and paves the way for the impending rise of Nazism. He’s a vividly realized allegorical golem, at moments passive and acquiescent, at others viciously in control. Emerging from a four-year prison stint at the start of Fassbinder’s 15-hour-plus epic, he plugs his ears and contorts his mouth in silent scream (the on-screen title reads: 'The Torment Begins'), though he’s no mere victim of the pogrom’s progress slowly infecting the German id. In retrospect, Biberkopf is more of an accumulative symbol, as he wears his ideologies—Nazi newspaper seller, drunk, underground criminal, pimp—like the latest fashions, discarding them when they violently fester or cease to be useful. The residue of his experiences—multifaceted, oft-contradictory—nonetheless remains, so the impression in the moment is one of revelation: With each narrative step forward, Biberkopf seemingly gains in clarity (the length of the work is a benefit, allowing for a novelistic density and, at times, a mesmeric depth of character), though Fassbinder is, in fact, merely setting up his metaphor-slathered patsy for an empty-headed last-act kill. ..."
Slant
NY Times: Wandering in Weimar Purgatory By A. O. SCOTT
The Paris Review - Mean Streets: The Life and Afterlife of Berlin Alexanderplatz
NY Times: BY FASSBINDER, 'BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ' by Vincent Canby
W - Berlin Alexanderplatz (miniseries)
amazon (Video)
YouTube: Berlin Alexanderplatz trailer, Barbara Sukowa on Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Harry Baer on Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Hanna Schygulla on Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz

Book review: Nothing lost in translation of 'Berlin Alexanderplatz'
W - Alfred Döblin
NYRB: Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin

2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2014 June: Effi Briest (1974), 2014 July: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 2014 September: A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema, 2014 October: Lola - (1981 BRD Trilogy), 2014 October: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979 BRD Trilogy), 2014 December: Veronika Voss (1982 - BRD Trilogy), 2015 January: Digital Anthology: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - $0.99, 2016 February: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971)

MLB Ballpark Beer Guide

Oriole Park at Camden Yards
"Nothing pairs better with baseball—and its wild and weird stadium foods—than an ice-cold beer. But gone are the days of light lagers and limited choices. Major League Baseball’s ballparks offer an extensive list of draft and packaged beers, from big-brand standbys to hyper-local breweries and ballpark-only brews. ... With so many choices, its understandable if you’re undecided on what to sip on for nine innings. Luckily, whether you’re in search of a bargain brew or a craft beer from a local brewery, we’ve got you covered. Ahead of the 2019 season, Sports Illustrated reached out to all 30 MLB teams to find out details on each ballpark’s beer offerings. ..."
SI
Craft Beer Line-Ups at All 30 MLB Stadiums (2015)
Comparing Beer, Hot Dog, and Ticket Prices at Major League Baseball Parks

Schaefer Beer and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The Glory Days of Baseball and Beer Marketing
"Beer has been closely associated with professional baseball since the game’s earliest days, but it was not initially a marriage welcomed by owners. In fact, the National League once expelled teams for selling beer at the ballpark. But over the years that relationship changed, and over time baseball became a prime marketing tool for breweries. Here are some notable examples. ... And what better way to reach a mass market of beer drinkers in the 1950s and 1960s than through sponsorship of baseball games? Some brewery owners even went to the point of buying baseball teams. ..."
The Glory Days of Baseball and Beer Marketing

4 Disturbing Details You May Have Missed in the Mueller Report

"After two years of silence, the special counsel Robert Mueller recently made his first public remarks — to complain, it seemed, that no one had read his report. 'We chose those words carefully,' Mr. Mueller said, 'and the work speaks for itself.' But at a dense 440-plus pages, if the report speaks for itself, it takes a great deal of time and focus to listen to what it has to say. Mr. Mueller tells a complicated story of 'multiple, systematic' efforts at Russian election interference from which the Trump campaign was eager to benefit. And he describes a president eager to shut down an investigation into his own abusive conduct. This is far from, as the president put it, 'no collusion, no obstruction.' The document is packed with even more details, ranging from the troubling to the outright damning. Yet these have been lost in the flurry of discussion around the report’s release. Even the most attentive reader could have trouble keeping track of the report’s loose ends and dropped subplots. Here are four of the most surprising details that you might have missed — and none of them are favorable to the president. ..."
NY Times
W - Mueller Report

Loïs Mailou Jones

Seventh Street Promenade, 1943, watercolor with graphite underdrawing on paper
"Loïs Mailou Jones (November 3, 1905 – June 9, 1998) was an influential artist and teacher during her seven-decade career. Jones was one of the most notable figures to attain notoriety for her art while living as a black expatriate in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Her career began in textile design before she decided to focus on fine arts. Jones looked towards Africa and the Caribbean and her experiences in life when painting. As a result, her subjects were some of the first paintings by an African-American artist to extend beyond the realm of portraiture. Jones was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance movement and her countless international trips. Lois Mailou Jones' career was enduring and complex. Her work in designs, paintings, illustrations, and academia made her an exceptional artist that continues to receive national attention and research. ..."
Wikipedia
Loïs Mailou Jones: Creating A New African-American Image
Voices of the Harlem Renaissance‎ (Video)
SAAM
YouTube: Loïs Mailou Jones paved a path for black artists who had been shut out of the world of fine art

Gris-Gris - Dr. John (1968)

"... Ahmet Ertegun, head of Atlantic Records and feeling quite generous after the number one hit single saved his company from being sold to ABC-Paramount, flew the singers with their entourage and five piece backup band from the west coast. The keyboard player in that band was Mac Rebennack, at the time an unknown entity to Ertegun and most anyone else. Two years later Ertegun would come to learn a whole lot more about the keyboard player, this time under the moniker of Dr. John, who would deliver to him a strange LP oozing southern psychedelic voodoo no ears have yet to hear. This is the story of Dr. John’s Gris-Gris. ..."
The Music Aficionado (Audio)
LINER NOTES FOR DR. JOHN'S GRIS-GRIS
W - Gris-Gris
Genius (Audio)
amazon
YouTube: Dr. John Talks about Professor Longhair (Live)
YouTube: Gris-gris 7 videos

The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

"Sasha Trubetskoy, an undergrad at U. Chicago, has created a 'subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.' Drawing on Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary, Trubetskoy's map combines well-known historic roads, like the Via Appia, with lesser-known ones (in somes cases given imagined names). If you want to get a sense of scale, it would take, Trubetskoy tells us, 'two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzantium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.' You can view the map in a larger format here. ..."
Open Culture

Where Birds Meet Art . . . After Dark

Red-faced Warbler by ATM. Location: 601 W. 162 St., New York, NY 10032
"The Audubon Mural Project is a collaboration between the National Audubon Society and Gitler & Gallery to create murals of climate-threatened birds throughout John James Audubon's old Harlem‐based neighborhood in New York City. The project is inspired by the legacy of the great American bird artist and pioneering ornithologist and is energized by Audubon’s groundbreaking Birds and Climate Change Report, which reveals at least half of all North American birds are threatened by a warming climate. The project commissions artists to paint murals of each of the report's 314 species, and has been widely covered in the media, including The New York Times. ... Want to take a tour of the Harlem murals? New York City Audubon has you covered. Visit 30 installations on a Sunday morning escapade, along with John James Audubon's final resting place. More details and registration here. You can also take a self-guided tour using our printable map. ..."
Audubon (Video)
NY Times: Public Art Takes Flight
[PDF] THE AUDUBON MURAL PROJECT
topic: Birds of North America - Jason Ward (Video)

Calliope Hummingbird​ by Kristy McCarthy. Location: Apollo Pharmacy, 3569 Broadway (at 146th St.), New York, NY 10031

Beach Life

Martin Parr, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014.
"No one captures the colorful, blissful chaos of the beach like the British photographer Martin Parr. Some of his seaside shots swim with the verve of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Others are spare, dotted with tiny figures who are nearly swallowed up in the sprawl of the dunes. Everywhere there are stories: a seagull going about its day; surfers cresting and crashing; a couple, still wet from a dip, canoodling across their towels. Martin Parr: Beach Therapy collects and reproduces the latest in Parr’s long-running series of sandy photographs. A selection of images from the book appears below. ..."
The Paris Review
artbook: Martin Parr: Beach Therapy

Let's Get Lost - Bruce Weber (1988)

"Let's Get Lost is a 1988 American documentary film about the turbulent life and career of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker written and directed by Bruce Weber. The title is derived from the song 'Let's Get Lost' by Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loesser from the 1943 film Happy Go Lucky, which Baker recorded for Pacific Records. A group of Baker fans, ranging from ex-associates to ex-wives and children, talk about the man. Weber's film traces the man's career from the 1950s, playing with jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, and Russ Freeman, to the 1980s, when his heroin addiction and domestic indifference kept him in Europe. By juxtaposing these two decades, Weber presents a sharp contrast between the younger, handsome Baker — the statuesque idol who resembled a mix of James Dean and Jack Kerouac — to what he became, 'a seamy looking drugstore cowboy-cum-derelict', as J. Hoberman put it in his Village Voice review. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: A Jazzman So Cool You Want Him Frozen at His Peak
Roger Ebert
Chet Baker Sings and Plays from the Film "Let's Get Lost" (Audio)
YouTube: Let's Get Lost - Trailer
YouTube: Let's Get Lost 1:59:47

2018 September: Gerry Mulligan Quartet - Pacific Jazz Records (1952), 2019 May: Italian Movies (2014)

Skin Flesh & Bones Meet The Revolutionaries - Fighting Dub 1975-1979

"Monday 15th May sees the re-release of Skin, Flesh & Bones Meet The Revolutionaries album, Fighting Dub 1975 - 1979 on Cooking Vinyl imprint, Hot Pot. Originally recorded in 1975 on the Love Label, the album is reissues here in its entirety. Most of the tracks were laid at Randy’s studio, and subsequently mixed at Joe Gibbs studio by the late Eroll ‘ET’ Thompson. The original album features dub cuts of many of Lloyd Campbell’s hits up that time, including 'Dread Out Deh', 'Jacket', 'Won’t You Come Home', 'First Cut Is The Deepest' and others. Listening to the album with hindsight, it can be seen as a blueprint for the ‘rockers’ sound developed by Sly Dunbar at Channel One in the period shortly after its release. In fact, Lloyd was to work consistently with Sly and the Revolutionaries throughout the late 1970s. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Slavery Dub, Argument, Boxer Dub, Danny Special, Jack Ruby Special, Third Cut Dub, In Tone Rock, Peace, Freedom, Dub & Happiness

Syd Shelton discusses his exhibition of antiracist protest photographs in London

Bagga, 1979
"... I became involved with Rock Against Racism after the Battle of Lewisham in southeast London in 1977. This was when a racist march by about one hundred National Front supporters was met with five thousand antiracist activists who had traveled down from all over the country. The Metropolitan Police were determined that the National Front be able to march, so they deployed a quarter of their force, suited with riot gear. This was the first time the police in Britain were militarized, and the officers’ use of riot shields really shifted the goalposts for activists—we were up against something different now. At the same time, Eric Clapton had just delivered a horribly racist tirade onstage, in support of Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s 'rivers of blood' speech. We realized we needed to grab the headlines to counter the right-wing media’s high profile, and our first major event was a carnival in April 1978—a huge concert in the Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets. We didn’t want it to just be a free rock concert, though; we wanted it to be a demonstration. ..."
ARTFORUM
Guardian - Rock Against Racism: the Syd Shelton images that define an era
Interview – Syd Shelton
Rock Against Racism: Syd Shelton's photographs of a movement in 1970s Britain
W - Rock Against Racism
vimeo: Archive in Focus: Syd Shelton, Rock against Racism 7:19

Darcus Howe (with loudhailer) addresses a crowd from on top of a toilet block, 1977.

Why New York Can’t Have Nice Things

"On approximately the same timeline that London has been building Crossrail, our Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been building East Side Access, which will bring Long Island Rail Road trains into a new terminal beneath Grand Central. The Regional Plan Association, an urban-planning think tank for the New York region, describes East Side Access as 'a commuter-line extension similar to London’s Crossrail in scope and scale.' This is true only in the sense that the core, underground section of East Side Access will cost about the same amount as Crossrail’s underground core and will take just a few years longer to deliver. For that same amount of money, more or less, London is getting three times as much infrastructure. ESA will eventually serve 160,000 passengers a day; Crossrail will serve half a million. ..."
Intelligencer

Paris, $168 million per station. Adding nine miles and seven stations to Line 14 will cost the city $4.4 billion in total — a lot for a city that usually spends between $90 million and $135 million per station.

Gerry Mulligan ~ Night Lights (1963)

"This album titled song was composed by Gerry Mulligan and this particular piece to me is straight out of the jazz history books. It is a timeless mood for those of us who like the wee hours of the morning and the dark we seem so accustomed to as if 3:00am is the norm. It reminds me of either driving around or sitting down by Detroit’s riverfront on a hot summer night when it’s still 80 degrees out in the middle of the night. Mulligan took to the piano himself on this 63′ rendition and laid down one of jazz’s most beautiful pieces. I could have picked a thousand that he did on sax. This mans bio reads like the who of who’s playing with almost every big known jazz musicians there was. ..."
Longshot's Blog (Video)
LondonJazzCollector (Audio)
W - Night Lights
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Night Lights 31:30

June 2019: Peekaboo Planets

"This month's Sky Tour starts with a solstice update and a rundown of lunar phases, then helps you find four planets in the evening sky along with the best stars and constellations of early summer. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, June offers the shortest nights of the year. This month’s solstice occurs on June 21st at 11:54 a.m. EDT. Astronomically speaking, that’s when summer begins in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Once again the lunar phases track the calendar closely. New Moon comes on June 3rd, first quarter on June 10th, and full Moon on the 17th. Traditionally, this is called the Full 'Strawberry' Moon, signaling when these tasty treats get ripe. But many Europeans know it as the full Rose Moon. Last quarter follows on June 25th, and a week later the cycle starts again. Each lunation, from new Moon to new Moon, takes 29½ days — so it's no wonder our words month and Moon sound alike! ..."
Sky & Telescope (Audio)

Fred Frith - Traffic Continues (2000)

"For the past quarter century the varied recordings of peripatetic musical renegade Fred Frith have provided a far-flung tour of the worldwide avant-garde fringe. On Traffic Continues, he composes for and plays guitar with Ensemble Modern, the venerable 21-piece new music assemblage based in Frankfort, Germany. This handsomely packaged Winter & Winter CD is one of the strongest statements of Frith's career, a finely balanced work that contains concert hall and street sensibilities in equal measure, preserving the full vitality of the composer's idiosyncratic musical personality. There are two lengthy pieces on the recording, the 29-minute 'Traffic Continues' written in 1996 and the 35-minute 'Traffic Continues II: Gusto (for Tom Cora)' written in 1998 as an homage to the late Tom Cora, the phenomenal cellist who was a member of the avant rock band Skeleton Crew with Frith and harpist Zeena Parkins. ..."
allmusuc (Audio)
Ensemble Modern / Fred Frith - Traffic Continues
W - Traffic Continues
Discogs (Video)
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Traffic Continues: First Riddle, Traffic Continues-Ensemble Modern-Traffic III / Traffic I, One Never Knows Do One? Adage Coda, Long Fade, II "Gusto": XII. No Convenient Time

Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy

"Roberto Rossellini was one of the seminal directors of the Italian neo-realist era. A filmmaker rooted in documentary style approach, he applied that to chronicling the change in people and places after the trauma of World War II. This was perhaps never more effective than his defining works Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero. Now Criterion brings together these three connected films with a wealth of extras in this superb package. It’s a fitting release to mark Criterion’s 500th spine number. Roberto Rossellini is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. And it was with his trilogy of films made during and after World War II — Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero — that he left his first transformative mark on cinema. With their stripped-down aesthetic, largely nonprofessional casts, and unorthodox approaches to storytelling, these intensely emotional works were international sensations and came to define the neorealist movement. Shot in battle-ravaged Italy and Germany, these three films are some of our most lasting, humane documents of devastated postwar Europe, containing universal images of both tragedy and hope. ..."
Criterion Review: ROBERTO ROSSELLINI’S WAR TRILOGY
Criterion: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy
W - Rome, Open City (1945), W - Paisan (1946), W - Germany, Year Zero (1948)

Germany, Year Zero (1948)
"Unlike the more aesthetically and intellectually conceived French New Wave, Italian neorealism was above all an ethical initiative — a way of saying that people were important, occasioned by a war that made many of them voiceless, faceless, and nameless victims. But this was, of course, a conviction that carried plenty of aesthetic and intellectual, as well as spiritual, consequences, including some that we’re still mulling over today. Deliberately or not, Germany Year Zero concludes Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy by posing a kind of philosophical conundrum, a fact already signaled by its title, which he borrowed, with permission, from a book by French sociologist Edgar Morin. ..."
The Humanity of the Defeated: GERMANY YEAR ZERO
Slant - Blu-ray Review: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy
senses of cinema - Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero: A Child’s Journey through the Crumbling Skeleton of War-torn Germany
amazon: Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy
MUBI: Rome, Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero
vimeo: Children in Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy

Roberto Rossellini

2016 March: Journey to Italy - Roberto Rossellini (1954), 2016 March: Stromboli - Roberto Rossellini (1950), 2018 August: 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman

An Artist on Paying Homage to Harlem, and Using Found Fabrics in Paintings

The artist Tschabalala Self sits in front of one of her textile paintings in her studio in New Haven.
"On a drizzly morning in April, the artist Tschabalala Self, 28, straps on kneepads and pulls back her braids to kneel above a quilt-like painting. Her textile works are sewn from fabric scraps — brick-stamped canvas, Timberland-colored beige, acid-washed denim — and imagine black women and men in her home neighborhood of Harlem as exaggerated characters. ... Self’s body of work, called 'Street Scenes,' is a series of eight paintings with trompe l’oeil brick walls that coalesce to form one scene — a narrative continuation of 'Bodega Run,' currently up at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, her garishly lit installation of sculptural paintings depicting women in a neighborhood corner store. ..."
NY Times
W - Tschabalala Self
Meet Fast-Rising Artist Tschabalala Self

After she plans out a composition for a new work, Self cuts fabric swatches and arranges them on the ground.

2019 UEFA Champions League Final: Liverpool 2 Tottenham Hotspur 0

"The 2019 UEFA Champions League Final was the final match of the 2018–19 UEFA Champions League, the 64th season of Europe's premier club football tournament organised by UEFA, and the 27th season since it was rebranded the UEFA Champions League. It was played at the Wanda Metropolitano in Madrid, Spain on 1 June 2019, between English sides Tottenham Hotspur, in their first European Cup final, and Liverpool, in their ninth final overall and their second in a row, having been defeated by Real Madrid in 2018. It was the seventh Champions League final – and the fourth of the decade – to feature two teams from the same association, and the second all-English final after 2008. It was also the first final since 2013 to not feature at least one Spanish team, with Barcelona and Real Madrid having shared the previous five titles between them. Liverpool won the final 2–0, with a penalty after 106 seconds from Mohamed Salah and a strike by substitute Divock Origi after 87 minutes. ..."
Wikipedia
BBC: Tottenham Hotspur 0 Liverpool 2 (Video)
NY Times: Scoring Early and Late, Liverpool Wins Sixth Champions League Title
Guardian - Champions League final 2019: Tottenham 0-2 Liverpool – in pictures
UEFA - Madrid 19
Washington Post - Champions League final: Liverpool defeats Tottenham, 2-0, for sixth Champions League title

Harry Winks, right, with Mohamed Salah.