How to Pretend You're in Paris Tonight

Empty embankment on the Seine during a Covid-19 lockdown in Paris on April.

“Paris is a collective fantasy, from the booksellers along the Seine to the gray zinc rooftops of its cream stone buildings. For ages, the city has been the place to turn for lessons in l’art de vivre, the art of living, influencing fashion, philosophy, culture, art and gastronomy around the world. Today, pop-up shops and hipster brunch spots are as much a part of Paris as street lamps and Gothic architecture. But the romance of the city is timeless. ... Take your time contemplating masterpieces and monuments through virtual tours. Get up close to paintings by Renoir and van Gogh at the Musée d’Orsay. Zoom in on the brush strokes of Monet’s Water Lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie. ... And relish vertiginous views from the Eiffel Tower. ...”

NY Times

Google - Musée d’Orsay

amazon: Paris Movie Walks

 

 Due to the Coronavirus epidemic, the Musée d’Orsay

2018 July: Markets of Paris (2012), 2015 June: Musée d'Orsays, 2014 August: Louvre, 2016 August: The Pocket Louvre: A Visitor's Guide to 500 Works by Claude Mignot, 2018 March: Jay Swanson, 2020 April: Take a Long Virtual Tour of the Louvre in Three High-Definition Videos, 2012 December: Shakespeare and Company, 2016 January: What It's Like to Live Inside the Legendary Paris Bookstore Shakespeare & Co., 2016 September: Shakespeare and Company, Paris - A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, 2019  December: The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Companys, etc.

This brownstone is an anachronism in Tudor City

“Tudor City belongs firmly in the 20th century. This quiet ‘city within the city’ built on a bluff west of First Avenue between 41st and 43rd Streets consists of 13 residential buildings, almost all reflecting the Tudor Revival style popular in the 1920s. In 1925, Tudor City’s developer, Fred French, bought up five acres of land and former middle class brownstones in the neighborhood—brownstones which by that time had been turned into tenements or carved into apartments, according to a 1926 New York Times story. He bulldozed them to revitalize an area that in the early 1900s had become a slum, putting up modern new ‘efficiency’ units that appealed to young professionals working in Midtown. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Sometimes Our Favorite Sports Need to Love Us Back

Donations to a food bank outside a Newcastle match. Soccer’s billion-dollar business is often disconnected from its far more local connection with its fans.

“Clutching his phone in one hand and his passport in the other, Ruben Gabrielsen sprinted through his apartment. Duty had called, and he would answer. He had even tied a makeshift cape around his neck for the occasion. He would be the one to save his country in its hour of need.A 28-year-old defender playing in France’s second division, Gabrielsen probably would not have chosen these to be the circumstances in which he made his first international appearance. Not long ago, he probably would not have been able to imagine them. ...”

NY Times

Bill Evans - Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (1968)

 

"With so many previously unissued trio recordings by Bill Evans crowding shelves and 'the cloud,' it’s fair to ask whether another archival discovery adds anything of real significance to the piano icon’s legacy—particularly since the latest, Another Time: The Hilversum Concert, comes on the heels of two other Resonance sets from 1968, Live at Art D’Lugoff’s Top of the Gate and Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest, as well as Fantasy’s On a Monday Evening, from 1976. The answer, in this case, is a decided yes, for completists and non-completists alike. ..." 

Jazz Times  

Discogs (Video) 

amazon 

YouTube: Another Time 1 / 9

2019 June: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 - Bill Evan (2005), 2019 November: Some Other Time (2016)

Venice - Jan Morris (1960)

 

“Now that spring is bringing back its gentle warmth, it’s time to go travelling. Specifically, to Venice: a place that often seems like a feat of imagination as much as a real bricks-and-mortar city. A place that is forever being made and remade in fiction by writers as impressive and various as Shakespeare, Byron, Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh, Daphne Du Maurier, Goethe, Stendhal, Dante.  ... No one captures this elusive quality better than Jan Morris. We’re going to look at her 1960 classic Venice, as well as exploring the broader literature of Venice and its history. I’m also delighted to say that Jan Morris has agreed to answer questions from you about this book and her long, brilliant career.Just in case you don’t know why this is so very exciting, a quick overview.  ...”

Guardian - April’s Reading group: Venice by Jan Morris

Vanity Fair - Jan Morris Remembers the Magic of Venice, Then and Now

amazon: Venice, Jan Morris

No Papers, No Jobs: The New Street Vendors of Queens

“The stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Queens teemed with people weaving their way through carts and stands that offered everything from sweet-scented roast corn to masks.The regular roar of the 7 train often drowned out the sound of haggling. On one corner, Cristina Sanchez stood forlornly at a produce stand. She had not sold a single thing. During the pandemic she had lost her job, and then her rented room, triggering a frantic hustle to survive: First she sold produce, then tacos, then produce again. ... She is among the city’s more than half a million undocumented immigrants whose lives have been upended by the pandemic but who are ineligible for most financial assistance, including stimulus money and loans. ...”

NY Times

Atangana Records exhume sound treasures from mythical Guadeloupean studio

“The producer Henri Debs was a real visionary. The creator of Latin biguine, also called Creole salsa, this musical style thrilled the ‘Gran Moun ball’ generation, something we can relive the Mizik la ka dansé compilation. The Debs Studio, ran by Henri Debs in Guadeloupe, recorded the greatest tracks of Latin biguine, also known as Creole salsa. This visionary was addicted to music and production and gave 52 years of his life to Caribbean sounds. The first compilation from the Atangana Records label is the result of a year and a half of listening to his studio’s archives, a long job since they needed to whittle two hundred tracks down to twelve. Get ready to discover the Super Combo, Les Aiglons, Les Maxel’s, Lola Martin, Camille Soprane, Max and Henri, plus many more.  ...”

PAN (Audio)

Cakes and Ale

 

“The club has six members. Maks and I bring the cake. Beth brings drinks. Talia sets out chairs in front of the bookshop. Penelope carries the metal grill and turns the shop sign to CLOSED. Follie, the black dog, goes wild. She jumps and licks and runs in circles. Then she goes in search of an empty bookshelf to curl into. We have a joke about Follie reading all the books inside while the club congregates on the shop terrace, across from the gates to the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s really not that funny. But somehow at a gathering, it can become hysterical. The club is called Cakes and Ale. That might be my favorite of Maugham’s books, though it’s Penelope who came up with the name. She’s been a bookseller for thirty-five years, which means that she’s a master punner. ...”

The Paris Review

W - Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham

María Berrío

“Based in Brooklyn, María Berrío grew up in Colombia. Her large-scale works, which are meticulously crafted from layers of Japanese paper, reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration seen through the prism of her own history. Populated predominantly by women, Berrío’s art often appears to propose spaces of refuge or safety, kaleidoscopic utopias which in the past have been inspired in part by South American folklore, where humans and nature coexist in harmony. To these apparently idealised scenes, however, Berrío brings to light the hard realities of present-day politics. ...”

Victoria Miro

Guardian - ‘Like magical realism’: María Berrío on her surreal collages

W - María Berrío

ARTFORUM: From Victoria Miro: María Berrío (Video)

YouTube: Maria Berrio at Praxis - Sep 16, 2017 (Video)

Can America Restore the Rule of Law Without Prosecuting Trump?

“Early in November, as President Trump challenged the integrity of the election with baseless lawsuits, Joe Biden delivered his first speech as president-elect, declaring it a 'time to heal.' It was a phrase that many Americans were surely longing to hear, given the precarious state of the nation’s political culture. But it was also one that carried significant historical weight and possible implications for the future. ... Whether Biden intended to do so, his words provided an early signal about one of the first questions he is going to confront as president: What to do about Donald Trump? Biden faces many daunting challenges — mitigating the ongoing damage from the pandemic, repairing institutions, restoring faith in government — but how to deal with his predecessor’s flagrant and relentless subversion of the rule of law is in many ways the most vexing. Last year, one of Trump’s lawyers, William Consovoy, memorably argued in open court that a sitting president could shoot a man in public and not be prosecuted. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

2020 October: Trump

Robert Wyatt - Nothing Can Stop Us (1982)

“Founding member of art rock group Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, helped set the tone of the sixties psychedelic scene in the UK. With his distinctive drumming and vocals, Wyatt attracted a massive following across Europe. An accident in 1973 left the drummer paralyzed forcing him to shift efforts on solo recordings. His distinct style of mixing simple and effective keyboard melody lines with poignant lyrics, often filled with personal and political references, have proved both haunting and reflective. Signing to Rough Trade in the early 80s, on the understanding from his former label Virgin that he wouldn't release any lps for a while, Wyatt released a series of singles of cover versions. The set was recorded with a straight, simple, beauty informed by the experience of geopolitics just as the term was being invented. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

W - Nothing Can Stop Us (album)

Discogs (Video), amazon

YouTube: nothing can stop us 13 videos

2010 November: Robert Wyatt, 2012 October: Comicopera, 2013 March: The Last Nightingale, 2013 September: Solar Flares Burn for You (2003), 2014 March: Cuckooland (2003), 2014 October: Robert Wyatt Story (BBC Four, 2001), 2014 December: Different Every Time (2014), 2016 March: Interviews (2014), 2016 June: Dondestan (Revisited)(1998), 2016 September: Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975), 2017 January: '68 (2013), 2017 May: Shleep (1997), 2020 January: Rock Bottom (1972)

No Walk Is Ever Wasted

“What are the politics of walking in the city? What are its poetics? In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. ...”

The Paris Review

2016: DADA Companion, 2016: The Growing Charm of Dada, 2012 December: Impressionism and Fashion, 2017: How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature, 2017: The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology - Mary Ann Caws, 2018 May: Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism, 2020 October:  What is Surrealism? (1924)

Constantly Wrong: Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson Makes the Case Against Conspiracy Theories

“Discordian writer and prankster Robert Anton Wilson celebrated conspiracy theories as decentralized power incarnate. ‘Conspiracy is just another name for coalition,’ he has a character say in The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. According to Wilson, any sufficiently imaginative group of people can make a fiction real. Another statement of his sounds more ominous, read in the light of how we usually think about conspiracy theory: ‘Reality is what you can get away with.’ When historian Richard Hofstadter diagnosed what he called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ he was quick to point out that it predated the ‘extreme right-wingers’ of his time by several hundred years. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2018 October: Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracys, March 2020: Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?, 2020 October:  QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic

A Few Words about F. Scott Fitzgerald

“With Fitzgerald as with no one else in American literature save Poe, the biography gets in the way. Never mind that F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of one exquisite short novel as perfect as anything in our literature and of another longer, more chaotic novel of tremendous emotional power. Never mind that he has written a couple of dozen stories that by any standard deserve the designation of ‘masterful.’ Ignoring those legacies, much of the general public still tends to think of him in connection with the legends of his disordered and difficult life, and to classify him under one convenient stereotype or another. So diminished in stature, Fitzgerald becomes the Chronicler of the Jazz Age, or the Artist in Spite of Himself, or – most prevalent stereotype of all – the Writer as Burnt-Out Case: a man whose tragic course functions as a cautionary tale for more commonsensical aftercomers. ...”

Public Domain Review

2014 January: View the Passport Photos of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & Other Cultural Icons, 2014 August: Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection, 2014 November: Lost Generation, 2015 November: The Crack-Up (1945), 2017 December: Living Well Is the Best Revenge By Calvin Tomkins, 2019 August: Three Letters from Switzerland By Zelda Fitzgeralds

The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Before the Workshop: Daphne Oram manipulates a tape loop at Broadcasting House, watched by Frederick Bradnum, 1956 or '57.

“50 years ago this month, the most celebrated electronic music studio in the world was established. We trace the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, talking to the composers and technical staff who helped to create its unique body of work. ... Although it never felt like a 'job', I did eventually get to work in the Radiophonic Workshop. I was only there for three months, but I've never stopped going on about it. Wouldn't you too, if you'd been lucky enough to have worked in the most famous electronic music studio in history?The story of the Radiophonic Workshop began half a century ago, in 1958. Britain in the 1950s was a bleak place, as the nation struggled to rebuild itself after the devastation of war. ...”

SOS

Discogs: BBC Radiophonic Workshops

YouTube: The Radiophonic Workshop (Video)

Glenn Branca Interview: Sounds From the Subconscious

“’I had to squeeze the music out of that thing!’ Feel the good vibes in this laid back interview with legendary American avant-garde composer and noise-guitarist Glenn Branca, who has influenced bands like Sonic Youth. ‘I want people to do what they want to do, not what culture wants them to do.’ In this interview Glenn Branca talks about how he learned to play on a guitar which was really cheap and hard to play, and how he feels lucky to have been a young man in the ’60s, when there was an explosion of good music and lots of amazing sounds to get into. Branca is always looking for new sounds and his primary interest is ‘opening music up to ambiguity,’ he says. ...”

Louisiana Channel (Video)

2017 October: Theoretical Girls - U.S. Mille / You Got Me (1978), 2018 May: Rorschach Audio: Glenn Branca Discusses Reading, Writing & Volume, 2018 July: Glenn Branca: A Guide to the Symphonies

The Westward Journeys of Buttons Image

Above, top row, left to right People in other regions later produced ornamental buttons, too: Both of these carved, polished shell buttons were likely used on harnesses between the ninth and seventh centuries bce in Assyria; a button of gold with a male face relief was made between the eighth and seventh centuries bce and found in Megara, Greece; a finely tooled gold disc dates to a sixth-century-bce Etruscan site.

“From the rear storage room of her country cottage outside Budapest, Hungary, Sylvia Llewelyn holds up a framed display of antique buttons as if it were a portrait of a family member known for telling good stories. ‘This one is from China, and it’s made of jade. This one is glazed ceramic; this one is glazed turquoise. This one is made from apricot nut. You see this one here that looks like a cherry tomato? This is carnelian, the second hardest stone to jade, and it’s about 500 years old,’ she says, moving through her 4,000-piece collection, some of which are up to 1,500 years old. An antiques and art appraiser originally from London, Llewelyn is also the former owner of Old Buttons Shop in her town of Ráckeve. She is also the author of Old Buttons (Anno, 2011), a book of rare and artful buttons around the world. ...”

Aramco World

W. H. Auden - The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952)

“We think of Søren Kierkegaard as one of the poetic philosophers. His restless experimentation with the forms of his books, his many pseudonyms and his running battle against group thinking make him attractive to an anarchic sensibility. And he seems to fit our inborn existentialism, even to illuminate it with his leap into the absurd. This remains my view as an amateur coming to Kierkegaard through poetry—particularly the poetry of W. H. Auden, who lived in an era when Kierkegaard’s works were newly translated and widely influential on a range of theologians and scholars, including Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. The Dane, who lived from 1813 to 1855, seemed accessible and relevant, not only to a time of global conflict, but also to the personal conflicts experienced in relation to one’s identity, one’s apprehension of meaninglessness and the stultifying conventions of society. Above all, Kierkegaard wrote as a person in time, impatient with philosophical systems and a discourse of purified abstraction. ...”

Kierkegaard’s Leap

[PDF] W. H. Auden - The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard

NY Times: Truth Is Inwardness'; THE LIVING THOUGHTS OF KIERKEGAARD. Presented by W. H. Auden.

amazon

2011 July: Søren Kierkegaard, 2013 April: Repetition (1843), 2013 December: The Quotable Kierkegaard, 2014 October: Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard (1843), 2014 December: The Dark Knight of Faith - Existential Comics, 2015 July: I still love Kierkegaard, 2015 October: The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 2016 October: Cruel intentions, 2017 July: Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, 2018 January: Either/Or (1843), 2018 November: The Seducer’s Diary (1843), 2020 July:  Søren Kierkegaard’s Struggle with Himself

Black Music History Library

“This digital library was born out of a need to make resources about Black music history as comprehensive and accessible as possible. It contains well over one thousand entries (and counting) in the form of books, articles, documentaries, series, radio segments, and podcasts about the Black origins of popular and traditional music, dating from the 18th century to the present day. These materials range from informal to scholarly, meaning there is something in the library for everyone. There are many notable archives doing similar work, yet it isn’t uncommon for some to have a limited view of Black music—one which fuels US-centrism and a preference for vernacular music traditions. ...”

Black Music Library: About

Black Music Library

Liverpool And Manchester City Look Ordinary. Are They?

Sadio Mané of Liverpool and Kyle Walker of Manchester City battle for a ball during their Nov. 8 draw.

“Before the 2020-21 Premier League season began, we wrote that the title was Liverpool’s and Manchester City’s to lose. The new-ish rivals from the northwest dominated the league during the previous three seasons like no other teams in the history of the English top flight, and they each returned large chunks of their rosters, which are stocked with some of soccer’s biggest superstars. As such, FiveThirtyEight’s club soccer prediction model gave City and Liverpool the best and second-best probabilities, respectively, to win the Premier League. ...”

Five Thirty Eight

BBC: Man City 1-1 Liverpool: Why Reds will be happier with Etihad Stadium draw (Video)

French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

“The Impressionists rebelled against the old-fashioned values of the French art world. Their modern subjects, loose brushwork and bright colours soon inspired other new techniques. In 1874 a group of French artists made a defiant stand against the important state-run Paris Salon exhibition. Among them were Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. The strict Salon selection committee considered their paintings gaudy and unfinished-looking. In response, they chose to hold their own independent exhibition. Amid the controversy which followed they became known as the ‘Impressionists’. Their art was unashamedly modern with informal subjects taken from everyday Parisian life. ...”

National Museum Cardiff

BBC: New art galleries open at National Museum, Cardiff

YouTube: Impressionist and Modern Art galleries, National Museum of Art, Cardiff

The Rolling Stones: Singles 1963-1965

“... Consequently, some general audiences might wonder what the purpose of this 12-disc, 33-track set is, especially since almost all of the tracks are on the triple-disc set The Singles Collection: The London Years, which is far easier to digest. And for most audiences, who simply want to hear this music, that indeed is a more logical place to turn, but as an archival release The Singles 1963-1965 -- the first installment of a three-box set series containing all of their American and British singles and EPs until 1971 -- is both excellent and instructive. As a production, this is splendid. Each disc is given its own separate sleeve that recreates the original artwork (when there was no picture sleeve, a paper sleeve is recreated), there are inserts of classic promo photos, there's an excellent book with rare photos and liner notes by Nigel Williamson, and in perhaps the neatest touch, each CD is black, so it looks a bit like a mini-45. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

W - Singles 1963–1965

Discogs

YouTube: Singles 1963-1965 33 videos

2015 August: Exile on Main Street (1972), 2015 October: "Let's Spend the Night Together" / "Ruby Tuesday" (1967), 2015 December: Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971), 2016 January: Some Girls (1978), 2016 January: The Rolling Stones (EP), 2016 March: Five by Five (EP - 1964), 2016 May: "The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965", 2016 December: Singles Collection: The London Years (1989), 2017 June: Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), 2017 September: "Sister Morphine" - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull (1969), 2018 March: "Miss You" (1978) , 2019 February: Which Rolling Stones Records Should I Buy?, 2020 April: Living in a Ghost Town (2020)

Alex Katz Online Exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

ALEX, 2013

“The Thaddeus Ropac Gallery continues to curate some great online exhibitions, announcing the Soup to Nuts, by renowned American artist Alex Katz. The exhibition includes over forty works, selected by curator Robert Storr and installed in four virtual rooms.The online-only exhibition also features some of the rarely seen archival material, in the form of historical portraits and studio views, as well as several of Katz’s favourite poems that have informed his artistic work. ...”

SCENE Magazine (Video)

2008 February: Alex Katz, 2010 December: Life Imitates Art, 2012 June: Alex Katz Prints, 2013 April: On Painting: Alex Katz & Felix Vallotton, May 2016: Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov, and Homer in Maps

"When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the culmination of a flurry of activity extending back to the previous summer. James Joyce had begun writing his novel in late 1914. By the spring of 1915, he was already onto the third episode, which would become ‘Proteus’. Yet it was not until the summer of 1921 that Joyce began receiving the proofs of these early episodes – having augmented the typescripts which he had previously provided for the serialisation of his novel in The Little Review, then sent these off to Maurice Darantière, his printer based in Dijon. ..."

culturedarm

2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2010 March: Ulysses Seen, 2013 February: ULYSSES “SEEN” is moving to Dublin!, 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell, 2014 July: Digital Dubliners, 2014 September: Read "Ulysses Seen", A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Classic, 2015 January: The Mapping Dubliners Project, 2015 February: Davy Byrne’s, 2016 January: Port and Docks, 2016 February: Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Different Artists, 2016 April: Nassau Street, 2016 May: Stephen’s Green, 2016 October: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 2016 November: Skerries, 2017 January: Walking Ulysses | Joyce's Dublin Today, 2018 October: Bloomsday Explained, 2020 March: Ireland’s Voices, June: Stephen Dedalus

A Brief Guide to the Shape of “Jazz Rap” Today

"When the term 'jazz rap' first entered into general use in the early ‘90s, it was meant to suggest a fusion moment for the two genres—the moment when rap producers started sampling jazz records and collaborating with jazz artists. But now, some 30 years later, the artists operating in that broad field express reticence over the “othering” that term suggests, instead embracing it as part of the continuum of Black American music. As jazz drummer and rapper/producer Kassa Overall puts it, both art forms come from the same people; it’s just a different moment in time. ... In some ways, the emergence of the term marked a watershed moment; generations of black musicians suddenly became artistic peers. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio)

Top 10 Misinformation Storylines on Election Week

 

 

"Election week was a misinformation event of Super Bowl-size proportions. Most false and misleading narratives about the election focused on baseless allegations of voter fraud or Democrats stealing the election. Those false accusations often spiked when President Trump and his allies — including his family members — shared those claims on social media. But there were also plenty of misleading storylines to go around. Zignal Labs, a media insights company, analyzed topics related to the election in which misinformation was a major part of the storyline. The company tallied all the mentions of those topics on social media, cable news and print and online news outlets. Here are the Top 10 misinformation storylines it found from Nov. 3 to Nov. 9 ..."

   

NY Times