“It wasn’t until much later in my life that I started to see these biases and flawed representations pop up in games — having studied anthropology definitely pushed me in that direction and having the chance to discuss games at conventions and on social media really allowed me to start thinking more critically about themes like colonialism. Digging into this a little more, it’s fascinating to consider the way we engage with games and their representation of our world and our history. We can learn as we play — about values, about history, about ourselves. The intersection of these things is particularly relevant when considering games with thematic overtones of colonialism. What are the values we’re experiencing with games that represent this? Whose history are we encountering? ...”
The Holy Grail - Jack Spicer (1962)
2007 November: Jack Spicer, 2010 February: mad cartographer (PoemTalk #28), 2010 April: Manroot and Acts, 2011 January: 5 Poems by Jack Spicer, 2012 July: The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, 2015 January: 'Absolutely temporary': Spicer, Burgess, and the ephemerality of coterie, 2015 March: San Francisco Renaissance
Watching my name go by - Graffiti Documentary (1976)
The True Value of Gold
The Mournfulness of Cities
“I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes. What’s mourned is hard to say. Not that the mourner needs to know. It seems so basic. One refers to certain Edward Hopper paintings—people gazing out of windows right at sunset or late at night. They’ve no idea. ...”
2008 July: Edward Hopper, 2010 October: Finding Nighthawks, 2010 December: Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, 2012 Wednesday: Through Edward Hopper's eyes: in search of an artist's seaside inspiration, 2013 July: Hopper Drawing, 2014 May: INTERVIEW: “An Interview with Edward Hopper, June 17, 1959″., 2014 September: How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks, 2015 February: Edward Hopper's New York: A Walking Tour, 2015 September: Edward Hopper life and works, 2016 May: "Night Windows," 1928, 2016 July: Sunday (1926), 2016 September: Drug Store (1927), 2018 January: Seven A.M. (1948), 2018 February: Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun, 2019 August: Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947), 2020 January: Queensborough Bridge, 1913
The John Wright Trio – South Side Soul (1960)
The Trauma of the Civil War Lives On in Faulkner’s Fiction
Charlotte Corday
“Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed by guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible for the more radical course the Revolution had taken through his role as a politician and journalist. Marat had played a substantial role in the political purge of the Girondins, with whom Corday sympathized. His murder was depicted in the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which shows Marat's dead body after Corday had stabbed him in his medicinal bath. In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination). ...”
2014 February: French Revolution Digital Archive, 2015 July: A Guide to the French Revolution, 2016 April: VigĂ©e Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France, 2017 March: Paris Commune 1871, 2018 February: Flash Mob: Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will, 2020 February: The French Rural Revolution 1789-1793, 2021 June: Sans-culottes
Jazzman Records reissues Ron Everett’s 1977 obscure soul jazz holy grail ‘Glitter of The City’
Fela Kuti and Afrika '70 -"I Go Shout Plenty"/"Why Black Man Dey Suffer"
The Louvre’s Art Sleuth Is on the Hunt for Looted Paintings
“PARIS — In a frenzied, four-day auction in the grand hall of the Savoy Hotel in Nice in June 1942, buyers bid on paintings, sculptures and drawings from ‘the cabinet of a Parisian art lover.’ Among the 445 pieces for sale were works by Degas, Delacroix, Renoir and Rodin. The administrator monitoring the sale, appointed by the French collaborationist Vichy regime, and RenĂ© Huyghe, a paintings curator at the Louvre, knew the real identity of the art lover: Armand Isaac Dorville, a successful Parisian lawyer. They also knew that he was Jewish. ... The full history of the Dorville auction might have remained secret had it not been for Emmanuelle Polack, a 56-year-old art historian and archival sleuth. The key to her success in discovering the provenance of works that suspiciously changed hands during the Nazi Occupation was to follow the money. ...”
William S. Burroughs - A Word Is a Word Is a Collage (1965)
"... Voice dry as the voice of T.S. Eliot droning from a recording, accent still American after years away from America. Appearance as anonymous as a bank clerk’s, forgettable as a bank robber. Writer of books compared with Kafka, Joyce, and dirty postcards. His bruised readers nurse a sense of outrage and assault after trips through the Burroughs landscape, a desert of screams. All the time he talks he moves around the room, or groping for cigarettes, or gesturing with nervous hands. He lines the cigarette pack up with invisible parallels, rearranges the ash pattern in the ash tray. His work is sentences from newspapers, conversations, other authors, the title of something he is reading, things he hears, what is happening around him; it all makes a sort of collage. ...”
2009 May: Cut-up technique - 1, 2010 March: Cut-up technique, 2010 December: The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag, 2014 February: William Burroughs at 100, 2014 September: The Ticket That Exploded, 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2015 June: The Electronic Revolution (1971), 2015 August: Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914 – 2014, 2015 December: Destroy All Rational Thought, 2016 January: Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs, 2016 June: Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1981), 2016 September: # 1 – A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 2016 December: #6 – Call Me Burroughs LP, 2017 January: A Visit to William S. Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Summer, 1958, 2017 December: The Nova Trilogy (The Cut-up Trilogy), 2018 September: Material - The Road to the Western Lands (1998), 2019 March: Insect Trust Gazette (1964 / 1968), 2020 June: Broadsides - William S. Burroughs Collecting
Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited
“Sharply silhouetted against a pale evening sky is the Saxon fortress of Königstein. Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780) painted this historic site – a stronghold located approximately 25 miles south-east of Dresden, in the picturesque Elbe valley –not just once, but five times. In this exhibition we reunite these five monumental views, which includes our recently acquired view from the north, for the first time in more than 250 years. ...”
Joni Mitchell - The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Demos
2015 July: Blue (1970), 2015 Novemer: 40 Years On: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Revisited, 2016 August: On For the Roses (1972), 2016 November: Court and Spark (1974), 2017 February: Hejira (1976), 2017 August: Miles of Aisles (1974), 2017 October: Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius, 2018 March: Joni Mitchell: We look back over her extraordinary 50 year career, 2018 November: Free Man In Paris (1974), 2019 April: Mingus (1979), 2019 July: The Guide to Getting Into Joni Mitchell, the Blueprint for Human Experience, 2021 June: 50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’
Basketball Is Nothing Without Net
“One of the most gratifying sounds in sports is the whoosh of a basketball snapping the netting on a perfect swish. Take away the net and all that’s left is the unsatisfying silence of a ball pushing air molecules around as it sails through the rim. Did it even go through? Sometimes it is hard to tell. That's why Anibal Amador, a 55-year-old former real estate agent from Manhattan, regularly dips into his own pocket to buy brand-new nets for playground rims. The city does not provide nets for the most part, but anyone who has played even one game of Hustle knows that the muted hush of a ball drifting through a netless rim turns even the most perfectly executed shot into an airball. ...”
Gloria - John Cassavetes (1980)
2008 September: John Cassavetes, 2010 December: Shadows (1959), 2012 February: His Life and Work, 2012 July: A Constant Forge, 2013 June: Minnie and Moskowitz, 2013 July: BAM: Cassavetes - Jul 6—Jul 31, 2013, 2021 May: A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Requiem for a Dream
“The idea of an avant-garde museum has something of the head-scratching quality of the oxymoron to it—because didn’t the avant-garde turn its back on institutions in hopes of engaging directly with life? (That said, why people consider institutions anathema to life has always been another head-scratcher for me.) In his 1909 Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti promised to destroy museums and other dusty sites of knowledge (’libraries, academies of every kind’) in order to make space for speed and dynamism. ...”
Before & After Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’
Christ Stopped at Eboli: Memories of Exile
2013 July: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), 2013 July: Hands Over the City (1963)
The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?
2010 September: Espresso, April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard
Breaking down England’s penalty heartbreak: At 10.49pm, Maguire slashes penalty home. At 10.54pm, everything changes
A photographer's journey across California's iconic Route 66
“Route 66, also known as the Will Rogers Highway, is arguably the most famous original road in the entirety of the United States. Having been established all the way back in 1926, it ran from Santa Monica, California, to Chicago, Illinois. As time rolled on, the route was bypassed by the Interstate road system and was officially removed from the US highway system in 1985. Since then, however, the journey has taken on a whole new meaning.As a historic reminiscence, its remnants are now labelled as a scenic byway with ‘Historic Route 66’ signs. Many roadside reminiscences and curiosities are left reminding the traveller of the exciting past when the country was developed for long-distance car travels. ...”
Lionel Messi and Argentina Beat Brazil in Copa América Final
“Lionel Messi finally ticked the last empty box in his glittering soccer career on Saturday night, leading Argentina past host Brazil, 1-0, in the final of the Copa AmĂ©rica in Rio de Janeiro.The trophy was Messi’s first with Argentina after a string of painful, agonizing, maddening failures, including perhaps the most demoralizing defeat of his career — against Germany in the World Cup final — inside the same stadium, Rio’s hulking MaracanĂ£, in 2014.When the whistle blew to end the final, Messi — his relief palpable — dropped to his knees and was immediately surrounded by his teammates. Moments later, they were lifting him above their shoulders and tossing him in the air. ...”