Literary Paper Dolls: Clarissa By Julia Berick and Jenny Kroik Image
A Love I Can Feel (John Holt, Freddie McGregor, Johnny Clarke, Leroy Smart, Cornell Campbell)
Ebo Taylor: The Lost Tapes
2020 June: Dance Time, across the Diaspora
Shutdown of Charlotte-Essex ferry raises outcry on both sides of lake
The ferry Grand Isle arrives in Charlotte from Essex last Thursday.
“Commuters and town officials are protesting plans to suspend ferry service between Charlotte and Essex, New York, which many use daily to cross Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain Transportation Co. announced last week that the route will close indefinitely on Jan. 4, attributing the suspension to dwindling ridership numbers due to the pandemic.The suspension will whittle the company’s ferry routes across Lake Champlain down to just one, between Plattsburgh and Grand Isle. The popular Burlington/Port Kent crossing remains closed ‘for the moment,’ Lake Champlain Transportation says, and no timeline has been set for reopening. ...”
The ferry Grand Isle arrives in Charlotte after crossing Lake Champlain from Essex, New York, last Thursday.
The coal company helped the city survive winter
2017 June: Stuart Davis: In Full Swing
The Weeping Meadow - Eleni Karaindrou (2004)
YouTube: The Weeping Meadow, Eleni Karaindrou - The Waltz Of Hope - Tous Des Oiseaux (Live), "The Weeping Meadow" Accordion Audition, Eternity And a Day
2008 June: Eleni Karaindrou, 2012 October: Ulysses' Gaze
Form and Function: On the Object Lessons of Summer Hours
2017 June: Summer Hours (2009)
Live Cassette Loop Jam
Accountability After Trump
March 2020: Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?, 2020 October: QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic, 2020 December: Trump’s Crazy and Confoundingly Successful Conspiracy Theory Image
How Capitalism Changed Football for the Worse
Manchester United vs. Wigan Athletic (4-0) in the FA Cup, on January 29, 2017 in Manchester, England.
“Seven years ago, two teams from England’s North West went down to Wembley Stadium to play out one of football’s great David-and-Goliath stories. In the final moments of the FA Cup Final, Ben Watson’s bullet header won the game for plucky Wigan Athletic against cash-rich Manchester City, whose two strikers cost four times more than Wigan’s entire team. It was a moment that proved football could still throw up the odd fairy tale. Yet three days later, Wigan were relegated from the Premier League, and they haven’t been back since.Last month, the prospect of them returning became more distant than ever: the club announced it had entered financial administration — the first professional club in England to do so during the COVID-19 crisis. ...”
The Great Fear of 1776
Burning of Coreorgonel by Colonel Dearborn, September 24, 1779
“Sometime in mid-1776, just as colonists were declaring their independence from Great Britain, an unnamed Shawnee addressed an assembly of representatives from multiple Indigenous nations who had gathered at the Cherokee capital of Chota. Taking a wampum belt in hand, the Shawnee spoke of a long history of injustice at the hands of the ‘Virginians,’ a term many Native people applied to greedy settlers from Virginia and other colonies. The ‘red people,’ he said, had once been ‘Masters of the whole Country,’ but now they ‘hardly possessed ground enough to stand on.’ Not only did the Virginians want their land, the Shawnee contended, they wanted their lives. It is ‘plain,’ he said, that ‘there was an intention to extirpate them.’ Although the term genocide had not been invented, this is precisely what the Shawnee feared Native people were up against: a project that threatened their very existence. ...”
A Brief History of Talking Heads: How the Band Went from Scrappy CBGB’s Punks to New Wave Superstars
“We could split hairs all day. Are Talking Heads punk? Are they New Wave? Are they ‘art rock’? Why not all of the above. Consider their cred. Two art students, David Byrne and Chris Frantz, move to New York in the late 70 with their three-chord, two-piece band The Artistics. With minimal musical ability and no experience in the music business, they thought, said Byrne, ‘we’d have a serious try at a band.’ Unable to recruit new members in the city, they asked Frantz’s girlfriend, fellow art student Tina Weymouth, who did not play bass, to be their bassist. ... What could be more of a prototypically punk origin story? But then there’s the evolution of Talking Heads from jangly, nervous art rockers to confident re-interpreters of funk, disco, and polyrhythmic Afrobeat in their 80s New Wave epics. ...”
2008 September: Talking Heads, 2011 June: Talking Heads: 77, 2011 August: More Songs About Buildings and Food, 2011 October: Fear of Music, 2012 January: Remain in Light, 2012 April: Speaking in Tongues, 2012 June: Live in Rome 1980, 2014 December: "Road To Nowhere" (1985), 2015 May: And She Was (1985), 2011 August: David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve, 2012 January: The Knee Plays, 2015 October: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - Brian Eno / David Byrne (1981), 2016 August: Fear Of Music: Amazing Early Talking Heads Doc From 1979, 2016 June: Performance (1979), 2020 March: Stop Making Sense - Talking Heads (1984)
The 400-Year Rhythm of Great Conjunctions
“We have known for thousands of years that the sky is full of harmonies and rhythms. Pythagoras called it the ‘music of the spheres.’ Great conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn follow a number of such rhythms. The most obvious is the roughly 20-year gap between each conjunction, when the two giants appear close together on the sky. During this period, Saturn completes two-thirds of its 30-year orbit, while Jupiter completes one lap of its 12-year orbit plus two-thirds of its next one. The odd two-thirds of an orbit mean that successive conjunctions are separated in the sky by about 240 degrees. ...”
Amha Eshèté, the dreamer who cut the grooves of Ethiopia’s golden sounds onto wax Image
“Born in Addis Ababa at the end of World War II, Amha Eshèté was never predestined to follow a career in music. Everything changed however in 1969, when the modest record seller dared eventually, to take on the state monopoly of recording and cutting records – and therefore defying ‘Negus’ Haile Selassie I, the Emperor of Ethiopia –, by recording a 45-rpm single of Alèmayèhu Eshèté. Both ran the risk of going to jail for cutting the ‘double-sided’ vinyl in India. ‘It was the first time you could listen to Ethiopian pop music on vinyl. Even those who didn’t have a turntable bought a copy! The first run sold out in a matter of days,’ said Francis Falceto, the sound archaeologist behind the Éthiopiques collection, a series of records that positioned the little-known and mostly fantasized-of country and its African Union headquarters, front-and-center in the music world. ...”
Gemechu Itana – Yakolele / Shemermare Tiya
2016 January: New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975, 2017 March: Mulatu Astatke - Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974, 2018 March: Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics - Inspiration Information (2009), 2018 March: Ernesto Chahoud presents TAITU - Soul-fuelled Stompers from 1960s - 1970s Ethiopia, 2019 September: Music of Ethiopia, 2019 November: Akalé Wubé - Sost (2014)
A push to recognize the statistics of Black players from baseball’s era of apartheid
Josh Gibson
“Move over, Babe. You too, Ted Williams. More than six decades after taking their last swings, two of baseball’s top sluggers could soon be dropping down the sport’s most hallowed leaderboards to make room for Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Turkey Stearnes. Major League Baseball is considering giving major-league status to six long-defunct Negro Leagues, where 35 Hall of Famers played during the sport’s segregated era. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ said Scott Simkus, a former Chicago limousine driver who spent much of the last two decades helping build a statistical database of the Negro Leagues by tracking down and chronicling box scores of once-forgotten games. ... ‘Negro Leaguers should be compared against themselves,’ said Larry Lester, a pioneer of Negro League studies and the chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research’s Negro Leagues committee. ...”
MLB elevating the status of Negro Leagues is the problem, not the solution
******NY Times: M.L.B.’s Records Were Never Real. But the Racism Was. Ask Satchel Paige.
Outside The Confines: The Negro Leagues are finally qualified as major league (Audio)
From left to right, the pitchers John Stanley, Frank McAllister and Gene Smith of the Negro National League's New York Black Yankees standing on the top step of their dugout in 1942.
“Although the first organized and sustainable Negro League, the original Negro National League (NNL), founded by Rube Foster in 1920, did not survive the Great Depression, it was the forerunner of several other Negro Leagues. In the 1920s, the Eastern Colored League (ECL) was formed as a counterpart to the NNL. It lasted from 1923 through the early part of 1928, then was succeeded by the American Negro League (ANL) for one year in 1929. The first NNL, largely based in the Midwest, continued its operations into the 1930s, but was replaced in 1932 by another short-lived organized league called the East-West League. Like the ANL, the East-West League survived only one year.In 1933, several events of marked importance occurred: Franklin Delano Roosevelt started his 12-year presidency, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany — and the second NNL began operations. ...”
Satchel Paige
2015 March: Negro league baseball, 2017 May: Negro National League (1920–31), 2019 October: Can the Rebirth of a Negro League Stadium Revive a Distressed City?
Song For A Winter's Night - Gordon Lightfoot (1967)
“’Song For A Winter's Night’ (song clip), by Gordon Lightfoot, is one of his most beautiful love songs. Lightfoot recorded Song For A Winter's Night in the studio twice: the first, original recording is on the United Artists album The Way I Feel; the rerecording is on the Warner/Reprise album Gord's Gold. Unlike all his other rerecordings, Lightfoot uses a different guitar and playing style in the rerecording: the original is finger-picked, Travis-style, on his 6 string Martin; the rerecording is strummed on his 12 string Gibson. Both are exquisite, and you will probably have trouble choosing your favorite. Interestingly, Song For A Winter's Night was not written during the winter with the snow falling; instead, it was written in July, during a thunderstorm, in Cleveland, OH! Lightfoot enjoys telling this story, and occasionally does so as an introduction to the song in concert. ...”
2013 September: SS Edmund Fitzgerald
The Magnetic Fields - André Breton and Philippe Soupault (1920) Image
The First Christmas Meal
“These days, British and American Christmases are by and large the same hodgepodge of tradition, with relatively minor variations. This Christmas Eve, for example, when millions of American kids put out cookies and milk for Santa, children in Britain will lay out the more adult combination of mince pies and brandy for the old man many of them know as Father Christmas. For the last hundred years or so, Father Christmas has been indistinguishable from the American character of Santa Claus; two interchangeable names for the same white-bearded pensioner garbed in Coca-Cola red, delivering presents in the dead of night. But the two characters have very different roots. Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, was given his role of nocturnal gift-giver in medieval Netherlands. Father Christmas, however, was no holy man, but a personification of Dionysian fun: dancing, eating, late-night drinking—and the subversion of societal norms. ...”
Inhuman communication: Søren Kierkegaard versus the internet
“The story is, by now, a familiar one: some person ― whether a celebrity or a relative unknown ― says something racist, misogynistic, or just plain stupid online. We see it, we're angry, we tell them so. Within hours, they've received thousands of replies, ranging from the politely critical to the clearly abusive. The perpetrator then either lashes out defiantly, issues an apology (whether sincere or not) or simply withdraws from the social media space altogether. This is what's called a ‘pile-on.’ Now, you might be one of those people who thinks the ‘victim’ of a pile-on had it coming. Speaking and writing are, after all, actions, and actions have consequences; free speech doesn't mean freedom from being called out. ...”
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, 2020 November: W. H. Auden - The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952)
Socialism Informs the Best of Our Politics - Michael Harrington
“... Is socialism relevant to the late 20th and 21st centuries? And if so what does one mean by ‘socialism’? In any case, why identify as a socialist in the United States where the very word invites misunderstanding, at best, and a frantic, ignorant rejection at worst? Finally, given all of these problems why build a socialist organization in this country? First, the socialist critique of power under both capitalism and Communism is not only substantial in and of itself; it also makes a significant contribution to the cause of incremental reform as well as to a radical restructuring of society. ...”
2016 May: The Other America (1962)
Warm Up 2020 | MoMA
“Warm Up wherever you are and celebrate NYC’s music communities online and outdoors. MoMA PS1 presents an all-day streaming edition of Warm Up to support New York City’s music communities in light of the COVID-19 pandemic with eight hours of continuous music streamed live from MoMA PS1’s iconic courtyard. Tune in for 12 DJ sets and live performances by artists who represent NYC’s expansive music community, framed by stage design created by New York-based artist Cécile McLorin Salvant. ... Broadcast globally in partnership with music streaming platform Boiler Room, this one-day-only program will also stream at outdoor music venues across the city, allowing audiences to patronize the open, outdoor cultural spaces in their neighborhoods. ...”
John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War Thrillers, Dies at 89
“John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted Cold War thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both Western and Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery, betrayal and personal tragedy, died on Saturday in Cornwall, England. He was 89. The cause was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, said on Sunday.Before Mr. le Carré published his best-selling 1963 novel ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,’ which Graham Greene called ‘the best spy story I have ever read,’ the fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s James Bond — suave, urbane, devoted to queen and country. With his impeccable talent for getting out of trouble while getting women into bed, Bond fed the myth of spying as a glamorous, exciting romp. Mr. Le Carré upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to call and in which it is rarely obvious whether the ends, even if the ends are clear, justify the means. ...”
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