Elevated rails, rooftops, and McSorley’s: How painter John Sloan captured 20th-century Manhattan

"Many artists have been inspired by the scenes of life in New York City, particularly Lower Manhattan. But perhaps no artist captures the feeling of New York during the hot, heavy days of August like the painter John Sloan. Sloan was one of the leading figures of the 'Ashcan School' of artists of the early 20th century, a loosely-defined movement which took its name from a derisive reference to the supposed lowbrow quality and themes of their work, and the smudgy, impressionistic brushstrokes they utilized. His workaday subjects and hazy images of city life capture the heaviness of the air of New York during its dog days. Here’s a look at some of those paintings of life in our city 100 years ago. ..."
6sqft

Yeats at Petitpas’ (1910-1914)

2009 August: John Sloan, 2011 November: American realism, 2012 December: Old New York, 2015 May: Spectator of Life, 2015 October: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917, 2015 October: Tenderloin, 2015 October: McSorley's Bar - John Sloan (1912), 2015 December: "Red Kimono on the Roof," 1912, 2016 January: “The Hell Hole,” 1917, 2016 February: Gloucester Days, 2016 March: “Hanging Clothes,” 1920, 2016 May: "Roof, Summer Night," 1906, 2016 October: "Spring Rain," 1912, 2016 October: "The Lafayette" (1927), 2016 December: The Old House at Home by Joseph Mitchell (April 1940)

Why This Renaissance Painting Glows

Lorenzo Lotto, Saint Catherine, 1522
"Even when on view in a gallery full of striking works, Lorenzo Lotto’s half-length portrait of Saint Catherine has an unusual presence. Part of the sense of its loveliness comes from the beauty of the saint herself, but it’s not only her face that makes this painting so engaging. The colors reverberate; green and red are arranged in strong opposition. The green is intense, with hints of yellow in the highlights. The reds range from the deep burgundy hue of the velvety brocade curtain behind the saint to the bright-hot color of her dress. That dress adds amazing power—opulent, undulating folds of fabric reflect light, suggesting lustrous silk. ..."
National Gallery of Art
Why Renaissance Paintings Aren’t as Green as They Used to Be
Material Innovation and Artistic Invention: New Materials and New Colors in Renaissance Venetian Paintings

This detail of Sandro Boticelli's "The Mystical Nativity" contains verdigris pigment.

Prince's Sign O' The Times: An oral history

"On 29 March, 1987, Prince swept the board at the Razzies. ... Behind that dizzying scope lay a disorganised, almost chaotic, recording process. Prince was creatively on fire, sometimes completing two or three songs in a day. At the same time, he got engaged to and separated from his creative muse, Susannah Melvoin; and fired his beloved backing band, The Revolution. The turmoil resulted in a huge outpouring of creativity. Seldom can so much work have been recorded, shelved, recycled or thrown away as in the period 1985 to 1987. In the end, Sign O' The Times was a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together from the remains of three completed, but discarded albums: Dream Factory, Camille and the triple-disc Crystal Ball set. Now, 33 years on, Prince's estate is releasing an expanded version of Sign O' The Times which includes 45 unreleased tracks from the recording sessions. ..."
BBC (Video)
NY Times: Prince’s Vault Reveals a Brilliant Trove With ‘Sign O’ the Times’ (Video)
amazon: Sign O The Times (Deluxe Edition)

The master tapes for Sign O' The Times, submitted to Warner Bros in early 1987

2020 May: “Prince and the Revolution: Live,” the Historic 1985 Concert Is Streaming Online

Fadi Tabbal is the Thread Connecting Lebanon’s Imperiled Indie Scene

"Producer and studio owner Fadi Tabbal is reflecting on the impact that the cataclysmic August 4th blast at Beirut’s port had on the country’s thriving alternative music scene. Not only did the explosion claim over 200 lives and damage more than half of the capital’s buildings, it also brought a weakened Lebanon to its knees. Drained from an overdrawn, 10-month-long revolution, the nation was already fending off economic collapse when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Lebanon is a beacon of arts and culture in the Middle East. ..."
Bandcamp (Audio)

Fadi Tabbal 'Music For The Lonely Vol. 1 (2017-2018)'

The Archaeologist Who Helped Mexico Find Glory in Its Indigenous Past

Zelia Nuttall, who began an academic career in archaeology after she divorced her archaeologist husband in 1888, is best known for her work on ancient Mexican manuscripts.
"Historically, 19th century archaeology has centered on heroic histories of white men’s conquest and exploration of foreign lands. Mexican-American archaeologist Zelia Nuttall was neither a man, nor an explorer in the traditional sense. Perhaps her unique perspective helps account for her unconventional approach: For over 30 years, Nuttall investigated Mexico’s past to give recognition and pride to its present—a project Western archaeology had largely ignored in favor of bloody, salacious narratives of Mesoamerican savages. ..."
Smithsonian
An Introduction to pre-Hispanic Mixtec Codices
Codex Nuttall; facsimile of an ancient Mexican codex belonging to Lord Zouche of Harynworth, England

Map of the Aztec Empire lead by Tenochtitlan circa 1519, before the arrival of the Spanish.

Powerful Bushwick Photographer Documents What Changes, What Stays the Same

Street photographer Andre D. Wagner takes a self-portrait.
"When celebrated New York street photographer Andre D. Wagner found himself close to tears on the subway earlier this year, he realized it was time to take a step back. It was May 29, and he’d planned to take the train from his home in Bushwick to document one of New York’s first protests for George Floyd in Foley Square. But on his way to the platform, he spotted a white construction worker pointing an iron rod at him like a gun, mimicking a shooting motion, laughing. Wagner snapped a photo, but the image was already burned in his memory. ..."
BKReader

A scene from Wagner’s neighborhood in Bushwick.

2017 August: Capturing Love, the Brooklyn Way, 2017 September: An Ode to Acts of Kindness on the New York City Subway, 2018 March: Here for the Ride: Andre D. Wagner’s Subway Photographs

Vice and virtue: 10 super rare Miami soul 45s

"Quickly building a reputation as the go to for rare funk, soul and disco 45s, reissue label Athens Of The North dig out ten essential but nigh on untraceable 7″s from the sunshine state. Few city scenes are as evocative as quintessential Miami soul of the early ’70s. Practically synonymous with open-shirted, medallion-wearing gentlemen cruising down Collins Avenue under the Atlantic sun, a decade of vice and virtue on Miami Beach was soundtracked by some of the country’s most adept, and often under-rated musicians. The funk and soul that emerged from the sunshine state had a certain unmistakable swagger, combining the urban drama of James Brown-influenced funk, with a Latin flair drifting over the Gulf of Mexico. ..."
The Vinyl Factory (Video)

An Animated Introduction to Albert Camus’ Existentialism, a Philosophy Making a Comeback in Our Dysfunctional Times

"When next you meet an existentialist, ask him what kind of existentialist s/he is. There are at least as many varieties of existentialism as there have been high-profile thinkers propounding it. Several major strains ran through postwar France alone, most famously those championed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus — who explicitly rejected existentialism, in part due to a philosophical split with Sartre, but who nevertheless gets categorized among the existentialists today. We could, perhaps, more accurately describe Camus as an absurdist, a thinker who starts with the inherent meaningless and futility of life and proceeds, not necessarily in an obvious direction, from there. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2011 October: Albert Camus on Nihilism, 2014 November: Albert Camus: Soccer Goalie, 2015 May: LISTEN: New Cave And Ellis Soundtrack, 2016 April: Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche, 2016 April: Algerian Chronicles (2013), 2017 November: The Stranger (1942), 2018 July: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960), 2019 September: Les Pieds-Noirs: Algeria’s Forgotten Footballers, 2020 March: The Plague (1947)

The Bronze Age Collapse - Mediterranean Apocalypse

"Sometime around the year 1100 BC, right at the end of the Bronze Age, a wave of destruction washed over the Eastern Mediterranean. It wiped whole civilizations off the map, and left only ash and ruin in its wake. This catastrophe, known as “the Late Bronze Age Collapse”, has become one of the enduring puzzles of archaeology. I want to explore how so many societies could collapse all at once, and seemingly without warning, as well as examine the lessons it might teach us in our increasingly globalised and interconnected world. ..."
Soundcloud (Audio)
YouTube: The Bronze Age Collapse - Mediterranean Apocalypse (Audio)
W - Late Bronze Age collapse

2020 September: Roman Britain - The Work of Giants Crumbled

Shiva Feshareki

"Shiva Feshareki is an internationally acclaimed composer & electronic artist, and the 'cutting-edge expression of turntablism'(SSFB). Her diverse output explores electronics, acoustics, context and perspective through wide ranging practices that incorporate classical craft and experimental methodology. ... Her signature turntable performances fuse together sonic palettes using hyperphysical electronic manipulations and sampling techniques. Cuts from drum and bass, garage, gabber, deep minimalism and her own orchestral works are yielded to create complex live compositions that are as kinetic as they are delicate. ..."
Shiva Feshareki (Video)
The original turntablist – Daphne Oram by Shiva Feshareki
Cave Story: Shiva Feshareki is taking Éliane Radigue and Lee Gamble deeper underground (Video/Audio)
Composer Shiva Feshareki selects her favourite minimalist compositions (Video)
W - Shiva Feshareki
YouTube: NTS Live at Uniqlo Tate Lates 16:57, Shiva Feshareki & Kit Downes Live from St John-at-Hackney Church- 10.10.16 36:35, Against The Clock 12:13

Michael Prophet ‎- Warn Them Jah, The Abyssinians - Declaration Of Rights, Delroy Wilson - Have Some Mercy, Fabian Miranda - Destiny, Freddy Clarke & I Roy - I Man, The Tamlins - Baltimore, Andy Sax Hornsman's Share

"Michael Haynes (3 March 1957 – 16 December 2017), known professionally as Michael Prophet, was a Jamaican roots reggae singer known for his 'crying' tenor vocal style, whose recording career began in 1977. ... The impoverished Greenwich Farm district had long been a hotbed of musical activity, and during the late 1970s Michael Haynes began singing on local sound systems. In 1978 he recorded his first singles, The Woman I Love, Super Star and True Born African, but they made little impact. Haynes then formed a vocal trio with friends from the neighbourhood, but when they auditioned for the visionary producer Vivian “Yabby You” Jackson, Jackson convinced him to ditch the other vocalists, renamed him Michael Prophet and shifted the focus of his lyrics to Rastafari philosophy and the harshness of ghetto life. ..."
W - Michael Prophet, Michael Prophet ‎- Warn Them Jah, The Abyssinians - Declaration Of Rights, Delroy Wilson - Have Some Mercy + Version, Fabian Miranda - Destiny, Freddy Clarke & I Roy - I Man 12' (Jungle Beat label), The Tamlins - Baltimore (& Dub), Andy Sax Hornsman's Share & dub

How RBG Made Old Age Look Cool

"Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 80 the year she transformed from public figure to pop culture icon. It was 2013, Ginsburg had issued a scathing dissent in the Shelby County v. Holder voting rights case, and an admiring New York University law student created the Notorious RBG Tumblr feed. The blog was sprinkled with pictures of the justice in a crown like rapper Biggie Smalls’, along with cheeky lyrics from R&B songs—drawing parallels, years before 'Hamilton,' between the subversive spirit of hip-hop and the power of American institutions. ... This new character, Notorious RBG, had the same intelligence and drive—the blog was deeply respectful and often intellectual, quoting passages from Ginsburg’s court opinions—but she was also a badass and, better, a meme. ..."
Politico

A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp (1956)

"Filmed amidst the Arensberg collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where 35 works by Marcel Duchamp are gathered, this 1956 NBC interview features the artist talking with James Johnson Sweeney, former director of the Guggenheim Museum. Duchamp describes his transition away from Impressionism toward a Cubist, and then post-Cubist, approach, providing commentary while standing before Nude Descending a Staircase ('I was not aware of Italian Futurism when I painted it') and The Large Glass ('The two crackings are symmetrically arranged and there is… almost an intention there… a ready-made intention, in other words, that I respect and love.'). These concepts are paradoxically, although quite logically, articulated alongside his desire for 'dryness' and mechanical precision. Viewers also gain insight into Duchamp’s thoughts on painting for an 'ideal' public—a notion he clearly distinguishes from ivory-tower elitism. ..."
UbuWeb: A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp (Video) 29:47
Tate - An Unpublished Drawing by Duchamp: Hell in Philadelphia

Marcel Duchamp in conversation with Beatrice Cunningham in the Philadelphia Museum of Art 1955.

2009 May: Marcel Duchamp, 2009 September: Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, 2009 November: Étant donnés, 2016 April: A Marcel Duchamp Collection, 2017 June: Rebel Ready-Made (1966)

“We Translate Every Experience into the Same Old Codes”: In Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger,’ Jack Nicholson Attempts a Transference of Self

"Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger is a languid thriller in which not much seems to happen, beautifully. The protagonist, David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a weary journalist chasing rebels in Chad, on a seeming whim swaps identities with a similar looking fellow traveler Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill) he finds dead from a heart attack in their dusty hotel, after their previous evening’s drinking. Locke seeks to leave his old life behind ('I’ve run out of everything… Everything except a few bad habits I couldn’t get rid of.'), following a bread crumb trail of appointments in the other man’s diary across Europe, picking up a fellow passenger, 'The Girl' (Maria Schneider) along the way. ... This is a film where the language of cinema itself plays out the drama of the human mind, in which architecture and the daring use of cross-cutting from present to past tense in the same scene, can both illuminate and explore time, memory, identity, and the sense of freedom and entrapment that surround our passengers. ..."
Cinephilia & Beyond (Video/Audio)

2011 September: Red Desert (1964), 2014 December: The Passenger (1975), 2017 April: Blow-Up (1966), 2017 October: L'Avventura (1960), 2017 December: La Notte (1961), 2018 February: L'Eclisse (1962)

Saturday mornings

November 10, 2019, Bronx, NY, At the NY Dragons' semifinal league match, Jeffery Konvelbo, originally from Burkina Faso, awaits the signal to come onto the field.
"On a Saturday morning last September, Samuel Komolafe-Nath stood next to his older brother on the sidelines of a pickup game on Staten Island’s North Shore. The weekly soccer match brings together players from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and of course Liberia, which counts a significant diaspora on the island. The 18-year old Komolafe-Nath, wearing a FC Barcelona No.10 Lionel Messi jersey, patiently awaits the moment to come onto the field for the first time since arriving here a week earlier from Lagos. He moved back to Staten Island, where he was born, after 15 years in Nigeria. ..."
Africas Is a Country

September 14, 2019, Bronx, NY, Abubakar Ahmed Ali, who had several caps with the Nigerian national soccer team in the 1970s, shows off his silver medal from the 1978 All Africa Games.

The Art of Dreams

Job's Evil Dreams (1805), by William Blake
"Dreams have long proved a fertile ground for human creativity and expression, and no less so than in the visual arts, giving rise to some of its most arresting images. In addition to the many and varied dreams so important to religion and myth there has emerged, in the last few centuries since the birth of Romanticism, an exploration of the more personal dream-world. Indeed, with its link to the unconscious, the form has perhaps proved the perfect vehicle for those artists looking to surface that which lies submerged - desire, guilt, fear, ambition - to bring to light the truth the waking mind keeps hid. ..."
The Public Domain Review

Jacob’s Dream (late 16th century), by Adam Elsheimer

Watching a Choreographer Build: Trisha Brown’s Unusual Archive

"In a video recorded in 1989, the choreographer Trisha Brown demonstrates a few restless seconds of movement, as dancers in her studio try to follow along. An arm darts across the torso; the legs appear to slip and catch themselves. It happens fast. As the dancers attempt to do as she does, a viewer can imagine how useful the video would be for anyone learning this material. There’s no easy way to explain what she’s doing; you just have to keep watching. In her decades of dazzling experiments with the body, gravity and momentum, Brown invented movement so complex — so capricious yet precise — it could be hard to remember from one day to the next, let alone years later if the work were to live on. As if to keep tabs on her discoveries, the camera became a regular presence in her studio, a tool as pragmatic as her choreography was wild. ..."
NY Times

A 1974 Boyd Hagen photograph of Brown, right, and Carol Goodden in “Leaning Duets II” (1971).

2008 May: Trisha Brown, 2010 December: “A Walk Across the Rooftops”, 2011 January: Trisha Brown - Floor of the Forest (1970), 2011 March: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s, 2012 February: Dance/Draw, 2016 January: Dance, Valiant & Molecular, 2016 February: Set and Reset (1983), Newark (1987), Present Tense (2003), 2017 March: Trisha Brown, Choreographer and Pillar of American Postmodern Dance, Dies at 80, 2017 April: From Stage to Page: Unpacking a Shelf of New Dance Publications, 2017 June: Accumulated Vision: Trisha Brown and the Visual Arts By Susan Rosenberg, 2018 June: Private Gestural Language, Unfolding Poetically

Dengue Dengue Dengue and 10 years of experiments in rhythm

"A short word to those who only know the duo from their mysterious masked image: 'I do love Daft Punk, but I don’t think we have a lot in common!' Felipe is clearly addressing the fact of the matter. He is indeed more aligned with the exploration of rhythm than producing postmodern house music. However; Beating Heart, Enchufada and On the Corner: some of the current hottest labels around are fighting over signing up the Peruvians who now celebrate a lengthy 15-year friendship and 10-year career. 'We went to Argentina to play in 2009, Rafael remembers, and there were these guys experimenting with cumbia. That was the first time we heard that kind of music in a club. After that, when we came back to Lima, we started experimenting with cumbia and a few months later we became Dengue Dengue Dengue.' ..."
PAN (Video)
Bandcamp (Audio)
SoundCloud (Audio)
YouTube: XLR8R Podcast 458 58:08, Siete Raíces (2016) - Full Album 37:35, Semillero (2018 - Album) 29:25

Semillero

Steal Like Wes Anderson: A New Video Essay Explores How Wes Anderson Pays Artful Tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman & Other Directors in His Films

"Although not the debut film of director Wes Anderson, and certainly not of star Bill Murray, Rushmore introduced the world to the both of them. Anderson's first feature Bottle Rocket (an expansion of the short film previously featured here on Open Culture) hadn't found a particularly large audience upon its theatrical release in 1996. But quite a few of the viewers who had seen and appreciated it seemed to run in Murray's circles, and in a 1999 Charlie Rose interview the actor told of being sent copy after unwatched copy by friends and professional contacts alive. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2013 November: Wes Anderson Honors Fellini in a Delightful New Short Film, 2013 November: Rushmore (1998), 2013 Decemher: Hotel Chevalier (2007), 2014 March: Wes Anderson Collection, 2014 April: The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies, 2014 July: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), 2014 August: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), 2014 December: Welcome to Union Glacier (2013), 2015 January: Inhabiting Wes Anderson’s Universe, 2015 July: Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles, 2015 November: Moonrise Kingdom (2012), 2015 December: Chapter 8: "The Grand Budapest Hotel", 2016 June: Here's pretty much every song used in a Wes Anderson film, 2016 November: Watch Come Together, Wes Anderson’s New Short Film...., 2018 September: Isle of Dogs (2018), 2020 May: Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie, 2020 July: Exploring Wes Anderson’s wonderful cinematic commercials

Hubble Captures Crisp New Image of Jupiter and Europa

"This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing colour — again. The new image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. A unique and exciting detail of Hubble’s new snapshot appears at mid-northern latitudes as a bright, white, stretched-out storm moving at 560 kilometres per hour. This single plume erupted on 18 August 2020 and another has since appeared. ..."
Hubble Space Telescope
‘Chaos Terrain’ of Jupiter’s Moon Europa Shown in Crisp Detail in NASA Galileo Images

The above map shows locations where each image, showcasing a variety of features, was captured by Galileo during its eighth targeted flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Maine’s Sublime Canvas of Contradictions

Edward Hopper: Haunted House, 1929
"Every August, the public library in my hometown of Blue Hill, Maine holds a wet paint auction. Local artists, some seasoned, some aspiring, go out in the early morning to find their subjects: the dawn on the mudflats; blue islands slouching across the horizon; the nostalgic white pentagon of the post office. In the afternoon, seasonal residents linger in the Biography section with plastic cups of wine, bidding on studies of water and sky to add to their collections. The landscape of Maine—glacially gouged, furred with pines—precludes other muses, offering up endless variations on its theme with every change of the light, season, and tide. It is relentlessly consumed, reproduced, and sold, albeit in a less extractive way than the mining and lumber industries once used it. The art economy and its bedfellow, tourism, have made nature more valuable unspoiled. ..."
NYBooks

Marsden Hartley: After the Storm, Vinalhaven, 1938-1939

Sweet Smell of Success - Alexander Mackendrick (1957)

"In the swift, cynical Sweet Smell of Success, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, Burt Lancaster stars as the vicious Broadway gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the unprincipled press agent Hunsecker ropes into smearing the up-and-coming jazz musician romancing his beloved sister. Featuring deliciously unsavory dialogue, in an acid, brilliantly structured script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, and noirish neon cityscapes from Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, Sweet Smell of Success is a cracklingly cruel dispatch from the kill-or-be-killed wilds of 1950s Manhattan. ..."
Criterion (Video)
W - Sweet Smell of Success
‘Sweet Smell of Success’: A Visceral and Vicious Depiction of the Evil that Power-Hungry Men Do (Video)

From Aksak Maboul to Crammed Discs, Marc Hollander Envisions a Musical Melting Pot

"'Growing up in Belgium, there wasn’t just one dominant scene or style of music,' says Marc Hollander, who founded Aksak Maboul with his friend Vincent Kenis in Brussels in the spring of 1977. ... Described as 'a significant record…way ahead of its time' by Gilles Peterson, Onze danses pour combattre la migraine was a visionary album that incorporated minimalism, fake jazz, avant-pop, world exotica, and proto-techno into something that is still hard to pin down more than 40 years later. Released on Marc Moulin’s short-lived Kamikaze label, the LP would create the template for Hollander’s own Crammed Discs imprint, which he formed in 1980 to release Aksak Maboul’s second LP Un Peu de l’Âme des Bandits...."
Bandcamp (Audio)

2014 November: Aksak Maboul, 2017 July: Made to Measure, Vol. 1 (1984), 2018 February: Before And After Bandits: Marc Hollander Of Aksak Maboul & Crammed Discs, 2020 March: Tout a une fin / Blaue Bleistift (2020), 2020 August: Aksak Maboul ‎– Figures (2020)

Fairfield Porter: An Introduction

The Porch, 1962
"Fairfield Porter is one of those painters I’d never heard of as a kid, but with whose work I became obsessed as soon as he was introduced to me in art school. There’s a directness to his work and a deceptive simplicity. While primarily known today as a figurative painter, he was also an art critic. He wrote passionately in support of Abstract Expressionism, helping the public understand the complexity of abstraction. ... Upon a deeper look at Porter’s work, it’s no surprise he’s a champion of abstraction. His compositions — in their deceptive simplicity — employ many of the strategies and structures found within 20th c. abstraction. Working primarily in three locations — his family home in Maine, New York City, and his home in Southhampton, NY — Porter is a documentarian of everyday life. ..."
Pete Hocking
From The Studio

Farmland, 1959

2008 May: Fairfield Porter, 2010 June: Fairfield Porter - 1, 2011 August: "Respect For Things As They Are" - by John Ashbery, 2013 March: "The Great Spruce" by Alex Carnelevale, 2013 July: In Fairfield Porter / James Schuyler country: Penobscot Bay, Maine, 2020 May: Fairfield Porter: Raw—The Creative Process of an American Master

OP Magazine

'“OP Magazine, based in Olympia, Washington, was a music fanzine published by John Foster and the Lost Music Network (leading to the title, which extends the abbreviation LMN to LMNOP) from 1979 to 1984. It was known for its diverse scope and the role it played in providing publicity to DIY musicians in the midst of the cassette culture. The magazine was co-founded by Foster, Toni Holm, Dana Squires, and David Rauh. An emphasis of the magazine was ‘articles about music written by musicians’, and regular contributors included Victoria Glavin (Victoria Barreca), Peter Garland, Eugene Chadbourne, and Larry Polansky. ...”
Wikipedia
The Handmade Tale: by Kathleen McConnell
Tape OP

James Clay & David "Fathead" Newman - The Sound Of The Wide Open Spaces (1960)

“Think of the combi’s Johnny Griffin/Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, Dexter Gordon/Wardell Gray, Arnett Cobb/Buddy Tate or of the Clifford Jordan/John Gilmore album Blowing In From Chicago. The Sound Of The Wide Open Spaces!!!! (the use of multiple exclamation marks is hyperbolic fancy, but I like the way it looks on the jacket) fits into that high calibre category. Clay and Fathead, two ‘tough’ Texan tenors (and alto’s, flutes) battle it out with the hard-driving support of Art Taylor, Sam Jones and Wynton Kelly. The album was supervised by Cannonball Adderley. Adderley, who had signed with Riverside in 1960 and recorded the highly succesful and influential live album In San Francisco, struck up a good rapport with label owner Orrin Keepnews, immediately getting into fruitful A&R territory. …”
Flophouse Magazine (Audio)
W – The Sound of the Wide Open Spaces!!!!
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: The Sound Of The Wide Open Spaces (1960) (Full Album)

Maps: Fires and Air Quality in California, Oregon and Washington

"California, Oregon and Washington are enduring a wildfire season of historic proportions. More than two dozen people have died since early September, when powerful winds helped spark fires and propel existing ones, leaving millions of acres charred and thousands of structures destroyed. See our live coverage here. Air quality has become a large concern, as clouds of ash and smoke spread across the region. The health effects of wildfire smoke are not fully understood, but it has been linked to serious health problems and research suggests that the effects don’t necessarily go away when skies clear. ..."
NY Times
NY Times - Wildfires Live Updates: Month of Foul Air in Bay Area; Smoke Crosses U.S. (Video)
NY Times - Wildfires

At least 20 people have died in massive fires spreading through parts of California, Oregon and Washington.

The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece

Michelangelo as Heraclitus

"In art, it’s always the little things. Take The School of Athens by the Italian High Renaissance master Raphael, whose death 500 years ago in 1520 is currently being commemorated around the world by major exhibitions and displays from Milan to London, Berlin to Washington DC. Millions of eyes have marvelled at the eternal gathering of ancient philosophers and mathematicians, statesmen and astronomers that Raphael luminously imagines in his famous fresco. Yet it would seem that a small detail near the centre foreground of the painting, from which the true meaning of the masterpiece arguably spills, has gone almost completely unnoticed by historians and critics for half a millennium. ..."
BBC
W - The School of Athens

Bramante as Euclid

Paul Bowles in Exile - Jay McInerney

"As the faithful poured into the mosque for prayer, I searched for the door to a restaurant reputedly just across the street and tried to seem inconspicuous. It was my second night in Tangier. Men in dark robes huddled on the street corners, lowering their voices as I approached. The few women in evidence were upholstered in black from head to foot and looked like bandit nuns. I came upon an entrance gate at which two men in djellabas were either lounging or standing guard. I tentatively pronounced the name of my destination. They looked at each other, nodded, and ushered me inside. ... I recognized the situation immediately. It had all the ingredients of a Paul Bowles story. I never found out what the hissing was about. ..."
Stranger in Tangier: Paul Bowles Under The Sheltering Sky (Video)
Analysis of Paul Bowles’s Novels
amazon: The Stories of Paul Bowles by Paul Bowles

Gregory Corso, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Tangier

2007 November: The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site, 2010 February: Paul Bowles (1910-1999), 2011: January: Halfmoon (1996), 2013 July: Tellus #23 - The Voices of Paul Bowles, 2014 January: Let It Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles (1998), 2014 March: The Sheltering Sky (1949), 2015 January: Things Gone & Things Still Here, 2015 October: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles – a cautionary tale for tourists, 2015 November: The Rolling Stone Interview (May 23, 1974), 2016 June: Let It Come Down (1952), 2016 December: Paul Bowles & the Music of Morocco, 2017 July: Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles, 2018 July: The Sheltering Sound, 2019 September: Jane Bowles, 2019 December: So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles?, 2020 June: A Distant Episode (1947)