Burning Bush - Agnieszka Holland (2013)

Wikipedia - "Burning Bush (Czech: Hořící keř) is a 2013 three-part miniseries created for HBO by Polish director Agnieszka Holland. Based on real characters and events, this haunting drama focuses on the personal sacrifice of a Prague history student, Jan Palach, who set himself on fire in 1969 in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in the previous year. Dagmar Burešová, a young female lawyer, became part of his legacy by defending Palach's family in a trial against the communist government, a regime which tried to dishonour Palach’s sacrifice, a heroic action for the freedom of Czechoslovakia. The fight for freedom, for moral principles, self-sacrifice and protest in those desperate times led to the moral unification of a repressed nation, which twenty years later defeated the totalitarian regime. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: Czech Pawns In a System That Stifled by A.C. Scott
Burning Bush – Agnieszka Holland
BetaCinema
YouTube: Burning Bush - Official Trailer (Dir. Agniezska Holland)

Redux: The Rapturous Monotony of Metal, Water, Stone

"In honor of Bastille Day this past Sunday, The Paris Review is returning to its expatriate roots by highlighting some of the many French authors whose work resides within the archive. Read on for Simone de Beauvoir’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Baudelaire’s poem 'Parisian Dream' and Andre de Mandiargues’s brief story 'The Bath of Madame Mauriac.' If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. ..."
The Paris Review

Time After Time: The Lasting Legacy Of Chet Baker

"When the body of Chet Baker was found, crumpled and bloodied, on an Amsterdam pavement on Friday, 13 May 1988, beneath the third-floor window of the hotel where he was staying, at first no one recognised him. Years of drugs and alcohol abuse had rendered the 58-year-old unrecognisable from the clean-cut young man who, in the early 50s, with his chiselled good looks, was perceived as the iconic poster boy for West Coast cool jazz. Though Baker’s death was officially deemed to have been a tragic accident that resulted from him falling from his hotel window, the singing trumpeter’s demise was an ignominious one for a jazz musician whose career had begun so spectacularly. ..."
uDiscoverMusic (Audio/Video)

2018 September: Gerry Mulligan Quartet - Pacific Jazz Records (1952), 2019 May: Italian Movies (2014), 2019 June: Let's Get Lost - Bruce Weber (1988)

Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits = ሙዚቃ ሕይወቴ (1972)

"The Ethiopian saxophonist Tèsfa-Maryam Kidané was one of the most remarkable stylists of his generation and between 1965 and 1972 emerged as a brilliant, inspired player. Tesfa Mariam got his start with the Police Orchestra in Asmara. After his stints with the second Ras Band & The All Star Band. He left Ethiopia to study at Berkelee College of Music in ’72 and he stayed and settled in United States. Bass – Haylu «Zihon» Kèbbèdè, Ivo. Drums – Girma Zèmaryam, Tesfayé «Hodo» Mèkonnen. Electric Piano [Fender Rhodes], Organ, Percussion – Mulatu Astatqé. Guitar – Tèklè «Hukèt» Adhanom. Tenor Saxophone – Fekade Amde Maskal. Tenor Saxophone [First] – Tesfa-Maryam Kidané. Transferred By, Engineer [Restauration] – Wilfrid Harpaillé. Upright Piano – Girma Bèyènè/
YouTube: Tesfa Maryam Kidane - Heywete
Bandcamp: Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (Audio)
Discogs (Video)

Trump Sets the 2020 Tone: Like 2016, Only This Time ‘the Squad’ Is Here

During a news conference on Monday, Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced Mr. Trump’s comments.
"With three days of attacks on four liberal, minority first-term congresswomen, President Trump and the Republicans have sent the clearest signal yet that their approach to 2020 will be a racially divisive reprise of the strategy that helped Mr. Trump narrowly capture the White House in 2016. It is the kind of fight that the president relishes. He has told aides, in fact, that he is pleased with the Democratic reaction to his attacks, boasting that he is 'marrying' the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party to the four congresswomen known as 'the squad.' His efforts to stoke similar cultural and racial resentments during the 2018 midterm elections with fears of marauding immigrant caravans backfired as his party lost control of the House. But he is undeterred heading into his re-election campaign, betting that he can cast the entire Democratic Party as radical and un-American. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: House Condemns Trump’s Attack on Four Congresswomen as Racist (Video)

The Epic

"Surveying the scene at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York’s Greenwich Village last August, it was clear that something remarkable was afoot. The 200-seat capacity venue was completely sold out for a series of concerts by Los Angeles saxophonist Kamasi Washington and the West Coast Get Down, and the atmosphere thrummed with anticipation. Inside, the club was totally overstuffed, while outside on the street was even more chaotic, with hopeful standing-room purchasers lined up down West 3rd all the way to Sixth Avenue. This was the kind of reception more befitting an established jazz legend making a rare appearance after several decades away, not a young musician in his first ever New York City gigs as a bandleader. Packed houses also greeted Washington when he returned to the city for his BRIC JazzFest and Le Poisson Rouge sets that October, and at a February show at Webster Hall, over 1600 concertgoers responded to his performance with rapturous delight. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily
Red Bull Music Academy Daily - Interview: Kamasi Washington

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), 2019 March: Kamasi Washington’s Giant Step

Notre-Dame came far closer to collapsing than people knew. This is how it was saved.

"PARIS — The employee monitoring the smoke alarm panel at Notre-Dame cathedral was just three days on the job when the red warning light flashed on the evening of April 15: 'Feu.' Fire. It was 6:18 on a Monday, the week before Easter. The Rev. Jean-Pierre Caveau was celebrating Mass before hundreds of worshipers and visitors, and the employee radioed a church guard who was standing just a few feet from the altar. Go check for fire, the guard was told. He did and found nothing. It took nearly 30 minutes before they realized their mistake: The guard had gone to the wrong building. The fire was in the attic of the cathedral, the famed latticework of ancient timbers known as 'the forest.' ..."
NY Times
NY Times - How Notre-Dame Was Saved: 5 Things We Know

2019 April: A France in Turmoil Weeps for a Symbol of Paris’s Enduring Identity

Just how big is the Andromeda galaxy?

This image of the Andromeda galaxy, captured by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, shows the ultraviolet side of our familiar galactic neighbor.
"Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy (M31) are giant spiral galaxies in our local universe. And in about 4 billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide in a gravitational sumo match that will ultimately bind them forever. Because astronomers previously thought that Andromeda was up to three times as massive as the Milky Way, they expected that our galaxy would be easily overpowered and absorbed into our larger neighbor. But now, new research suggests we’ve overestimated our opponent. ..."
Astronomy (Video)
Space (Video)
W - Andromeda Galaxy

The Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (or M31), is one of the most distant objects visible to unaided human eyes. ..."

Sudan’s street protests have inspired another revolution—in art

“We are the revolution. And the revolution continues.”
"Galal Yousif sat hunched in a quiet studio at the Kuona art center west of Nairobi, his fingers moving deftly over a new sketchbook. The work in progress comprised elongated human faces crowded in tight formation, their fierce eyes searching the horizon. The drawing depicted a story of unease, especially by the way some of the profiles grimaced and furrowed their brows. But if the sketch was sharply incongruous with the tranquility of where it was being drawn, it was only because it reflected the reality of millions of people from Galal’s home country: Sudan. What began as spontaneous protests last December due to sluggish economic growth turned into a massive peaceful uprising that ended with the removal in April of one of Africa’s longest-serving dictators, Omar al-Bashir. ..."
Quartz Africa

Brian Cassidy, Bookseller

"Based in the Washington D.C. area, Brian Cassidy Bookseller deals broadly in 20th century popular culture and avant garde print materials: books, posters, manuscripts, ephemera, and the like. Specialties include artists' books, literature and poetry, little magazine and the mimeo revolution, punk, outsider and vernacular books, photography, and archival materials. We actively buy books, from single titles to entire libraries. ..."
Brian Cassidy, Bookseller
YouTube: Brian Cassidy, Bookseller

Yes We Can—Football and Nationalism

"The African Cup of Nations (Afcon), hosted by Egypt this year, is in its decisive stages. For football fans, this is an opportunity to watch the game together, to sing the anthem of their country together, to conspire against your opponent and insult the referee who is always too hard on our team and too tolerant of the opposition. The atmosphere requires the antagonism of 'us' versus 'them.' It’s all part of the game and the show. Nothing bad in itself because it starts from a very good feeling. For Moroccan fans everyday life seems more or less to stop on match day. The Afcon reveals, beyond the symbolic stakes, the fundamental characteristics of our society: the merit of certain players to be on the field, the construction and representation of collective identities, socialization, solidarity between Moroccans and the projection of the socio-economic structuring of a large part of society onto the players. ..."
Africa is a Country (Video)
YouTube: Morocco v Benin Highlights - Total AFCON 2019 - R1, Egypt v Zimbabwe Highlights - Total AFCON 2019 - Match 1

Roy Brooks - The Free Slave (1971)

"Roy Brooks The Free Slave may be one of his best though it is not well known outside of collectors of soul jazz. Brooks is credited playing with a lot of famous names, but he leads on The Free Slave, accompanied Cecil McBee, Hugh Lawson, Woody Shaw and George Coleman, in a live session recorded in 1970. We were at the cusp of jazz falling off the mainstream playlists as it became even more inventive (cause and effect? If not on a major label attempting to appeal to a broad audience, the artists had more freedom to experiment). This record, though, is not cacophonous. Just the opposite. The players are all-stars and the compositions sit somewhere between avant-garde and more soulful, lyrical jazz. In the center sits Roy Brooks, as leader and composer with lots of history as a sideman, and a reputation for being more than a little eccentric; Brooks was known for experimenting with novel ways to get his drums to sound different. ..."
The Vinyl Press
allmusic (Audio)
W - The Free Slave
amazon
YouTube: The Free Slave 46:05

The Virtue of Virtual Cables - Andrew Belt

"Over the past two years, a remarkable piece of free software has helped make modular synthesis widely available. The software is called Rack, from the company VCV, which like many small software firms is essentially a single person serving and benefiting from the efforts of a far-flung constellation of developers. Andrew Belt, who develops VCV Rack, this past week visited the San Francisco Bay Area from Tennessee, where he lives and works, to give talks and demonstrations. I caught his presentation at the Stanford University’s CCRMA department this past Wednesday, July 3. It was a great evening. ..."
disquiet
Open Source Synthesis: Behind The Scenes With VCV Rack Creator Andrew Belt (Audio)
VCV Rack - Switched On Rack Vol. 2 (Audio)
vimeo: VCV Scalar demo

Scalar is a quantizer with up to four IN 1V/oct pitch signals (suitable for polyphony) and sends the signal to the QN quantized outputs. Each input is normalized to the previous one, so for example, a single pitch patched into IN 1 will generate quantized values on all four QN outputs.

War & Peace (TV 2016)

"War & Peace is a historical period drama television serial first broadcast on BBC One on 3 January 2016, produced by BBC Cymru Wales, in association with The Weinstein Company, Lookout Point and BBC Worldwide. It is a six-part adaptation of the novel War and Peace by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, written by Andrew Davies and directed by Tom Harper. War & Peace aired on A&E, Lifetime and History Channel in the United States as four two-hour episodes, beginning on 18 January 2016. ... The saga begins in the Russian Empire in 1805. When Pierre (Paul Dano), Natasha (Lily James) and Andrei (James Norton) are first introduced to viewers, their youthful ambition, despite their privileged circumstances, is to find meaning in their lives. Kind-hearted but awkward Pierre, the illegitimate son of Russia's richest man, wants to change the world for the better. The spirited Natasha is searching for true love, while handsome and gallant Andrei, frustrated with the superficiality of society, seeks a higher purpose. At the same time, the French army under Napoleon edges ever closer to Russia's borders. ..."
Wikipedia
Guardian - Clive James: how did the BBC’s War And Peace measure up? (Video)
Top 5 Costume Inaccuracies – and Accuracies – in War & Peace
BBC: Ten Things You Need to Know About War And Peace
amazon
YouTube: War & Peace: Trailer - BBC One

"War and Peace (pre-reform Russian: Война и миръ; post-reform Russian: Война и мир, romanized) is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as a central work of world literature and one of Tolstoy's finest literary achievements. The novel chronicles the history of the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. ..."
W - War & Peace Leo Tolstoy
W - French invasion of Russia, W - Fire of Moscow (1812)

Napoleon watching the fire of Moscow in September 1812

Sam Shepard Saw It All Coming

"Last August, the actor Randy Quaid tweeted a photo of himself, stripped to his bike shorts and pretending to be passed out next to a body of water, probably in his adopted home state of Vermont. Quaid had not worked regularly since an apparent psychotic break in 2010, when he announced, looking agitated at a press conference in Vancouver, that a conspiracy of assassins called the “Star Whackers” intended to murder him and his wife, Evi. ... Next to him was a computer tablet, a big knife, a bottle of Perrier, and—splayed out on the sun-warmed stone, like Quaid himself—a copy of Seven Plays, by Sam Shepard. The book appeared to be open to True West, the play in which he and his real-life younger brother, Dennis, starred as the quarreling brothers Lee and Austin off-Broadway 35 years ago. Many of Shepard’s plays feel like journeys into psychosis, so it seems appropriate that Quaid would reach for Shepard as a guide to his own crack-up. That Shepard is starting to feel like a guide for the rest of us is more surprising. ..."
The Atlantic
Sam Shepard: Mystery and Magic, Freedom and Fire
The Paris Review: Sam Shepard, The Art of Theater No. 12
PERFECT SOUND FOREVER: Sam Shepard

2017 August: Sam Shepard (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017)

Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby - Geoffrey Wolff (1976)

"In the 1920's, some people, especially his wife Caresse, thought Harry Crosby a poet, but now 'The Oxford Companion to American Literature' knows as little of him as 'A Literary History of the ‘United. States.' What fame he has achieved he earned largely through his final act. Keats once said that he was half in love with easeful death. Harry Crosby was wholly in love with it and he consummated his affair with it in 1929 when at the age of 31 he calmly Shot his married girlfriend and then himself in a ninth‐floor apartment of the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street in New York. For once the tabloid headlines got it right: 'Tragedy and Disgrace.' What brought this rich, brave, drunken, self‐centered neurotic to this pass and what it all as to do with literature is the burden of Geoffrey Wolff's fascinating biography. ..."
NY Times: Black Sun (Aug. 22, 1976)
Studs Terkel (Audio)
amazon

2009 January: Harry Crosby, 2012 June: Transit of Venus

The Frick Collection

"Welcome to The Frick Collection. Internationally recognized as a premier museum and research center, the Frick is known for its distinguished Old Master paintings and outstanding examples of European sculpture and decorative arts. The collection was assembled by the Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) and is housed in his former residence on Fifth Avenue. One of New York City’s few remaining Gilded Age mansions, it provides a tranquil environment for visitors to experience masterpieces by artists such as Bellini, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough, Goya, and Whistler. The museum opened in 1935 and has continued to acquire works of art since Mr. Frick’s death. ..."
The Frick Collection: About
The Frick Collection (Tiepolo in Milan: The Lost Frescoes of Palazzo Archinto - Video)
W - The Frick Collection
The Controversial Origins of New York City's Frick Collection
Thirteen: The Frick Collection (Video)

Suzanne Ciani: a masterclass in modular synthesis

"'Here I am, forty years later, playing the Buchla again. It’s like riding a bicycle for me,' Suzanne Ciani muses, standing in the pulpit of a 15th century church in the Swiss mountain village of Lauenen. Her Buchla 200e synthesiser is set up to address a small congregation as part of Elevation 1049 festival, and there’s a sense of her work coming full circle. As a classically trained musician, Ciani is no stranger to sacred music, but it was in the visionary work of instrument builder Don Buchla that she found the true object of her devotion. After graduating with a master’s degree in composition at University of California, Berkeley, she joined Buchla to work on his nascent machines in both a practical and an artistic capacity. As she told the NY Times in 1974, Ciani 'sat and soldered joints and drilled holes for three dollars an hour,' saving enough money to purchase her own. ..."
The Vinyl Factory (Video)
W - Suzanne Ciani
Suzanne Ciani
Discogs
Soundcloud (Audio)

Ornette Coleman - Complete Science Fiction Sessions (2000)

"Finally, on a pair of CDs in one collection are the rest of Ornette Coleman's Columbia recordings, all of them done before Skies of America. Science Fiction was a regular part of Columbia's jazz catalogue, and Broken Shadows was released on LP in 1982. On this double set, both of those records and three previously unreleased cuts from those sessions are together at last. Coleman assembled mostly alumni for his September 1971 sessions in the Columbia studios. The sizes of the ensembles range from septet to quartet to up to 11 players. His classic early bands are reunited here with trumpeter Don Cherry, saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins. Augmenting these bands in places are pianist Cedar Walton, guitarist Jim Hall, trumpeter Bobby Bradford, vocalist Asha Puthi, and Science Fiction narrator, poet David Henderson. ... Science Fiction is a stellar collection of Ornette-ology assembled in one place. This is some of his very best material, archived and issued the way it should have been in the first place."
allmusic (Audio)
W - Science Fiction, W - Broken Shadows
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: The Complete Science Fiction Sessions 19 videos

The female gaze behind the Iron Curtain: the brilliant archive of Joanna Helander

Ewa at the coking plant, Ruda Śląska (1997)
"I’ve begun to wonder whether late artistic recognition — especially when it comes to female photographers — places too much importance on the size of the archive left behind. Important revisions to and rediscoveries in the canon seem to follow the same pattern: a massive, unseen body of work by a woman comes to light and photographic history is wrestled from male hands, once again. How else should we value the legacies of women overlooked by grand art historical narratives? And who else gets to be in the canon? You may be familiar with Vivian Maier, a Chicago nanny whose vast photographic archive was uncovered only after her death. Her story is fascinating: she went from total obscurity to being hailed one of the greatest street photographers of the 20th century. ..."
The Calvert Journal
The Calvert Journal - Zofia Rydet: how one photographer produced an invaluable record of communist Poland
How Zofia Rydet's Photography Intimately Revealed Polish Homes

Ladies Looking, Ruda Śląska (1977)

The Infinite Baseball Card Set

"The Infinite Baseball Card Set is a never-ending card set of baseball’s forgotten heroes: Negro League legends, barnstorming mercenaries, semi-pro sluggers, blacklisted bums, foreign phenoms, bush league oddballs, and the famous before they were famous."
Cieradkowski

Paul Derringer - Reds

2014 November: The League of Outsider Baseball: An Illustrated History of Baseball's Forgotten Heroes

Jeremy Sole • DJ Set • Le Mellotron

"Jeremy Sole is on a mission to show how music is a singular universal language, and that each culture’s rhythms and melodies are no more than slang–different accents of the same mother tongue. His DJ sets, remixes and original compositions juxtapose world sounds and experimental beats into a sonic ritual – a celebration of life out loud. As a teenager, Chicago-born Jeremy Sole’s loft parties were a culture clash of creative youth. Jeremy’s upbringing was seeped in the rich Chicago history of Blues, Jazz, Disco, Deep House and Soul – and he reveled in that sacred space where they all blend together. He expanded as a turntablist in Jazz, Dub, and experimental hybrid bands. Meanwhile his collection and performances grew to include music from every country in the world. In 2001 Sole moved to Los Angeles, and with his broad musical palette, felt right at home in the spiciest melting pot in the U.S. ..."
Picasso Moon Booking (Audio/Video)
Soundcloud (Audio)
YouTube: DJ Set • Le Mellotron 58:26, DJ Set • Le Mellotron 1:16:19

U.S. Wins World Cup and Becomes a Champion for Its Time

Megan Rapinoe, center, holds up the World Cup trophy at the end of the tournament.

"LYON, France — The chant was faint at first, bubbling up from the northern stands inside the Stade de Lyon. Gradually it grew louder. Soon it was deafening. 'Equal pay!' it went, over and over, until thousands were joining in, filling the stadium with noise. 'Equal pay! Equal pay!' Few sports teams are asked to carry so much meaning on their shoulders, to represent so many things to so many people, as the United States women’s soccer team. Few athletes are expected to lead on so many fronts at once, to be leaders for equal pay and gay rights and social justice, to serve as the face of both corporations and their customers. Fewer still have ever been so equipped to handle such a burden, so aware of themselves, so comfortable in their own skin, as those American women. Yes, they had acknowledged as the World Cup got underway last month, anything less than a trophy would be a failure. Yes, they were willing to be made symbols of different fights for equality around the world. Yes, they would be as spectacular on the field as they unabashedly insisted they were. ..."

NY Times (Video)
NY Times: Stars and Stripes (and Wins) Forever
NY Times: What’s a World Cup Title Worth? For U.S. Women, Six Figures and Counting
NY Times: U.S. Wins Record Fourth World Cup Title (Video)
NY Times: With No Argument on Substance, Critics Take Aim at U.S.’s Style
NY Times: Opinion - The Women’s World Cup Team Is the Most American Thing Out There
YouTube: USA v Netherlands - FIFA Women’s World Cup France 2019™ - THE FINAL

Rapinoe receives congratulations from FIFA President Gianni Infantino and French President Emmanuel Macron after the match.

2019 June: Women's World Cup: Record-breaking feats, empty seats -- the story so far

Mapping the Whitney Biennial

"The first Whitney Annual in 1932 was transgressive. The museum was a one-year-old fledgling, set in a rowhouse on West Eighth Street. Its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a collector and heiress, but also a serious sculptor. Invited artists chose what work they showed. In 1973, the exhibition became a Biennial, and its history is the history of American modern and contemporary art. Or, at least one version of that history: one centered in New York City, one heavily white and male. That is no longer the case. This year, a majority of the show’s artists are women, and they are racially and ethnically diverse. New York, however, remains home to nearly half of them. Until 1975, the exhibition catalogs listed the addresses of the artists who were included each year. Mapping these locations tells a story of influence and power — but also one of friendships and creative communities, of housing prices and economic change, of landscape and light. Here are some of its facets. ..."
NY Times

Dave Bartholomew - Shrimp And Gumbo/Ah Cubanas (1955)

"In conjunction with London's Jukebox Jam club night, Jazzman brings you regular doses of the wildest, rawest original rhythm and blues of the '50s and early '60s on DJ-friendly collectable 45 rpm format. Linked by a sequential catalog numbering system, each release will also boast a unique label design and title. For Jukebox Jam number four, Dave Bartholomew takes center stage with two solo sides from his prolific spell with Imperial Records, both with some distinctly Latin/Caribbean seasoning, hence the naming of this label, Mambo. You'd be hard-pressed to find a record which sounds more 'N'Awlins' than 'Shrimp And Gumbo,' a raucous percussion-heavy party-starter perfect for any Creole carnival. The flip-side is an earlier recording from Dave, and again one which could only have come from NOLA. The band pull off a sound so authentic, that you'd imagine it must surely be Cuban players responsible. All-in-all, a nice package then, two bags of mambo-Mardi Gras gris-gris sure to keep you safe from all manner of Voodoo ill-will."
Forced Exposure
W - Dave Bartholomew
NY Times: Dave Bartholomew, Mainstay of New Orleans R&B, Dies at 100
Discogs
YouTube: Shrimp and Gumbo, Ah Cubanas, Who Drank My Beer While I Was In The Rear, Carnival Day, JUMP CHILDREN

2019 Tour de France

Wikipedia - "The 2019 Tour de France is the 106th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's three grand tours. The start of the 2019 Tour (known as the Grand Départ) was in Brussels in honour of the 50th anniversary of the first Tour de France win of Eddy Merckx.^[1] It was the second time the Grand Depart has taken place in Brussels and is the fifth Belgian Grand Depart. The Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) presented the Grand Depart in a special conference in January 2018.^[2] The opening stage will visit Charleroi and loop back to Brussels, to connect the regions of Flanders and Wallonia in a stage. 176 riders are on the startlist to Tour de France 2019. The 100th anniversary of the yellow jersey will be celebrated on 19 July. Throughout the race, an individual jersey design will be issued for each day's race leader. ... 2018 Tour winner Geraint Thomas (Team Ineos) is expected to return to defend his title. After celebrating his victory, he was overweight at the start of the 2019 season. First signs of improving form came with a third-place finish at the Tour de Romandie. He then started the Tour de Suisse, but a crash on stage 4 saw him abandon the race and require recovery time. This put doubt in his ability to perform at the Tour. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Mountains classification in the Tour de France
Guardian: Tour de France 2019 (Video)
Le Tour (Video)
Telegraph (Video)
steephill (Video)
Bicycling (Video)
5 Ways the 2019 Tour de France Could Surprise the Hell Out of Us
YouTube: Route in 3D - Tour de France 2019

2008 July: Tour de France 2008, 2009 July: Tour de France 2009, 2010 July: Tour de France 2010,  2011 July: Tour de France 2011, 2012 July: 2012 Tour de France, 2015 July: 2015 Tour de France, 2015 July: Tour de France 2015: Team Time Trial Win Bolsters American’s Shot at Podium, 2015 July: Tour de France: Chris Froome completes historic British win, 2016 July: 2016 Tour de France, 2017 July: 2017 Tour de France, 2018 May: 2018 Giro d'Italia, 2019 July: 2018 Tour de France

The Empire is Crumbling

"Rails, waterways, pipes, bridges, airports, electricity, even the internet – America is falling apart."
The Nib
America's Infrastructure Is Slowly Falling Apart
"America is literally falling apart around us. Roads, built decades ago, are littered with potholes from carrying ten times the number of cars they were designed to carry. Crumbling Cold War–era gas pipes are exploding. One in nine of the country's bridges is structurally deficient. And some dam or levee is always just one rainstorm away from wiping out a neighborhood. ..."
VICE
Falling apart: America's neglected infrastructure
"... There are a lot of people in the United States right now who think the country is falling apart, and at least in one respect they're correct. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our airports are out of date and the vast majority of our seaports are in danger of becoming obsolete. All the result of decades of neglect. None of this is really in dispute. Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. ..."
CBS - Falling apart: America's neglected infrastructure (Video)

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)

In England (Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight)
"A leading Impressionist figure, Berthe Morisot remains to this day less well-known than her friends Monet, Degas and Renoir. Yet she was immediately recognised as one of the group’s most innovative artists. The exhibition traces the exceptional career of a painter who, at odds with the practices on her time and her circle, became a key figure of the Parisian avant-garde movement in the late 1860s up until her untimely death in 1895. Painting from a model allowed Berthe Morisot to explore several themes of modern life, such as the private life of the bourgeoisie, the popularity of holiday resorts and gardens, and the importance of fashion and women’s domestic work, while blurring the borders between the interior and exterior, the private and the public, the finished and the unfinished. It was her belief that painting should endeavour to 'capture something that passes'. ..."
Musée d'Orsay (Video)
W - Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot Brought a Radically Feminine Perspective to Impressionism
Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist
YouTube: Berthe Morisot: Inventing Impressionism

La Chasse aux Papillons. 1874.

Putumayo Presents: Brasileiro (1999)

"... A collection of Brazilian pop that spans 1974-1999, Brasileiro isn't as much of a musical roller coaster as some might expect from Putumayo -- you would have expected the collection to aim for maximum diversity and jump from forro, lambada and tropicalismo to bossa nova and serteneja before spotlighting a rap group from Bahia. But while Brasileiro isn't as far-reaching as it could have been, it's enjoyable and satisfying. Anyone who's seriously into Brazilian pop should be familiar with Beth Carvalho, João Bosco, Jorge Ben, Chico Buarque, and the late Clara Nunes, but Putumayo also turns its attention to some artists who weren't huge names in Brazil when the compilation came out, including Zeca Baleiro, Chico César (whose 'Mama Africa' combines Afro-Brazilian music with reggae) and Rosa Passos, who embraces the Portuguese lyrics to the Antonio Carlos Jobim standard, 'Waters of March.'"
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs
YouTube: Brasileiro 45:05

Bookchin’s Revolutionary Program

"The lifelong project of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was to try to perpetuate the centuries-old revolutionary socialist tradition by renovating it for the current era. Confronted with the failure of Marxism after World War II, many, perhaps most radical socialists of his generation abandoned the left. But Bookchin refused to give up on the aim of replacing capitalism and the nation state with a rational, ecological libertarian communist society, based on humane and cooperative social relations. Rather than abandon those ideas, he sought to rethink revolution. During the 1950s he concluded that the new revolutionary arena would be not the factory but the city; that the new revolutionary agent would be not the industrial worker but the citizen; that the basic institution of the new society must be, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the citizens’ assembly in a face-to-face democracy; and that the limits of capitalism were ecological. ..."
ROAR

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

Counter Intelligence: Atlanta

Wax N Facts
"... Ella Guru - If a record shop named after a classic Captain Beefheart track isn’t indicative of a music first mindset, what is? Don Radcliffe readily concedes that the Trout Mask Replica-inspired Ella Guru may not be the most practical name for a record store. But conventional marketing means little for this intimate 400-square foot vinyl destination in northern DeKalb County. Ella Guru is the only record store in the greater Atlanta area devoted 100% exclusively to used wax. And that in itself is enough to make EG a haven not only for record shoppers but a convenient face-to-face meeting spot for friends wanting to share music tips and recommendations. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily

Criminal Records