Deep Art Nature

so you wanna get into... zeena parkins

“welcome to issue #33 of ‘tusk is better than rumours,’ a newsletter featuring primers and album rankings of experimental and ‘outsider’ musicians. artist primers are published every other monday, and on off-weeks i (occasionally) publish a variety of articles ranging from label and genre primers to interviews to guest writers.this week we dive into the rich and varied career of harpist zeena parkins. parkins did for the harp what john cage did for the piano—expanded its possibilities by testing its limits. she experiments with techniques on both acoustic and electric harp (did you know electric harps existed?), summoning sounds out of the instrument that prove it’s much more than simply soothing and somnolent. on top of this, she’s a composer and improviser who has collaborated with musicians from Björk to John Zorn. ...”

tusk is better (Video)

amazon: Zeena Parkins

2011 January: Zeena Parkins, 2012 December: Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins / sound. at REDCAT, 2014 October: Janene Higgins & Zeena Parkins (2000), 2012 October: Ikue Mori, 2015 March: Phantom Orchard: Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori, 2016 April: News from Babel (1983-1986), 2016 May: Something Out There (1987), 2017 February: Mouth=Maul=Betrayer (1996)

Bob and Doug McKenzie

“Bob and Doug McKenzie are a pair of fictional Canadian brothers who hosted ‘Great White North’, a sketch which was introduced on SCTV for the show's third season when it moved to CBC Television in 1980. Bob is played by Rick Moranis and Doug is played by Dave Thomas. Although created originally as filler to both satisfy and mock network Canadian content demands, the duo became a pop culture phenomenon in both Canada and the United States. ... ‘Great White North’ (originally known as ‘Kanadian Korner’) is a panel show that played upon Canadian stereotypes. Bob and Doug, two dim-witted beer-swilling brothers wearing heavy winter clothing and tuques, would comment on various elements of Canadian life and culture, frequently employing the interjection ‘Eh?’ and derisively calling each other ‘hoser.’ ...”

Wikipedia

Jacobin: A People’s History of the Hoser, Canada’s Blue-Collar Icon

YouTube: Great White North: Back-Bacon and Long Underwear, French Canadian Problem, Beer Nog, Mouse in a Bottle

Official Map: Stockholm Archipelago Ferry Network Diagram, 2021

“Waxholmsbolaget is a big ferry operator in Stockholm, connecting most of the small islands in the Stockholm archipelago. They have recently updated their line map to a very diagrammatic style. The idea is good, to make it easier to find the lines and where you are going, but it massively distorts the network and the omission of geographic features makes it very difficult to orient yourself. What do you think? I commented briefly on this diagram on Twitter last week, but I’ll record my thoughts here in a little more detail as well.First off, it looks to me like the design of this diagram has been heavily influenced by the current Stockholm rail network diagram (PDF link), as it uses similar typography, design elements and symbology. ...”

Transit Map

W - Stockholm Archipelago

Paying the Price for Premier League Riches

Andreas Pereira is known as the Preseason Pirlo. But he has nowhere to go.

“The headed clearance did not quite get the requisite power, or direction. It floated, rather than fizzed, out of Brentford’s penalty area, the danger not quite clear. Two Manchester United players converged on it, sensing opportunity. The ball bounced off the turf, not too high, not too quick, and hung in the air for just a second. And that is where Andreas Pereira met it.There is a reason some Manchester United fans have come to know Pereira — with equal parts affection and admonishment — as the Preseason Pirlo. ...”

NY Times

Nighttime in Nairobi

President Records Ltd present Matata, London, 1971, photo: unknown, (c) President Records Ltd.

“As a child, one of my favorite Soukous songs was ‘Nairobi Night’ by the Soukous Stars. I loved the rolling bassline, percussive guitars, and the language-neutral singalong chorus. I knew little about nightlife, only from parties my parents threw in their basement on occasions like New Years Eve, but seeing the title, perhaps I imagined what a Nairobi night might feel like thousands of miles away. So it is in the spirit of that imagining that I present the next episode of Africa Is a Country Radio, where we continue our look at club culture across the African continent, and take a visit to Nairobi. ...”

Africa Is a Country (Audio)

Tim Berners-Lee

“Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989, then implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He co-founded (with his wife-to-be Rosemary Leith) the World Wide Web Foundation. ...”

Wikipedia

Vanity Fair - “I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets

Tim Berners-Lee (Video)

Vague, but exciting

TED: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (Video)

Richard Parkes Bonington

A Sea Piece, probably 1824

“This breezy painting of sailing boats in the Channel is alive with sea spray, grey waves, misty clouds and glimpses of blue. It is a spontaneous response to the restless play of sea and weather that looks as if it was painted on a boat – it puts you there so directly you can smell salt and hear seagulls. Richard Parkes Bonington lived and worked between two European art traditions. Born British, he moved to France at 14 and shook up French art with his robust, spontaneous eye so like those of his contemporaries Constable and Turner. By popularising that British freshness in France he helped pave the way for impressionism. But four years after making this painting he was dead, aged 25, from tuberculosis. This little seascape is part of the small deathless legacy of a doomed Romantic.”

Wallace Collection

W - Richard Parkes Bonington

Hauntings in the Imagination: New Books on Bluesman Robert Johnson - Greil Marcus

“... The blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, grew up in Memphis, and was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband during a performance at a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. He recorded twenty-nine of his own songs for the Vocalion label in San Antonio in 1936 and in Dallas in 1937. In 1938, with the blues musician Johnny Shines, he traversed most of the eastern part of the country, playing from St. Louis to Chicago to Detroit to Harlem. Later that year the producer John Hammond, who had celebrated his recordings in New Masses, knew Johnson had to perform at his historic ‘Spirituals to Swing’ concert at Carnegie Hall; learning of his death, Hammond played two of his songs on a phonograph on the stage. ...”

Riot Material

Forms

“Audio and Video content created by the musician Forms. Forms is a London, UK based producer that aims to explore the imprecise beauty of the natural world through the medium of sound. ...”

YouTube: Forms

Symbolism

Victor Vasnetsov, The Knight at the Crossroads, 1878

“Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through metaphorical images and language mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The term ‘symbolist’ was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of art. Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism in art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism and Impressionism....”

Wikipedia

Henri Fantin-Latour, By the Table, 1872, depicting: Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d'Hervilly and Camille Pelletan (seated); Pierre Elzéar, Emile Blémont, and Jean Aicard (standing)

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy (1984)

“Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. ... Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defined the Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic, from the early mainframe hackers at MIT, to the self-made hardware hackers and game hackers. Immediately following is a brief overview of the issues and ideas that are brought forward by Steven Levy's book, as well as a more detailed interpretation of each chapter of the book, mentioning some of the principal characters and events. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Books of The Times; Hackers as Heroes (Dec. 1984)

NY Times: When Hacking Was in Its Infancy (Oct. 2012)

amazon

YouTube: Steven Levy Talks about Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition 27:35

The Mark I and other early computers are on display at Harvard. As a student, Peter Neumann had the run of the Mark IV on weekends.

“Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" - Jimmie Cox (1923)

“‘Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out‘ is a blues standard written by Jimmie Cox in 1923. It is written in a Vaudeville-blues style. The lyrics sung in the popular 1929 recording by Bessie Smith are told from the point of view of somebody who was once wealthy during the Prohibition era, reflect on the fleeting nature of material wealth and the friendships that come and go with it. Smith was the preeminent female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Since her 1929 recording, the song has been interpreted by numerous musicians in a variety of styles. ... When he was an art student in the early 1960s, Eric Clapton was attracted to London's folk-music scene and the fingerpicking acoustic guitar-style of Big Bill Broonzy. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Jimmie Cox, Bessie Smith, Scrapper Blackwell, Derek & The Dominos, Eric Clapton (Live)

Russia’s New Form of Organized Crime Is Menacing the World

“The screen goes blank. A message appears in crude, Google Translate English, advising that all your files have been encrypted — rendered unusable — and can be restored only if you pay a ransom. After some back and forth, you pay out in Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency, most likely to a Russian-based gang. There’s no choice: It’s cheaper and far quicker to pay up than to rebuild a computer system from scratch. To avoid further trouble or embarrassment, many victims don’t even notify the police. A few years ago, the ransom may have been a few hundred bucks. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - ‘It’s quite feasible to start a war’: just how dangerous are ransomware hackers?

New Republic - Eastern Ukraine Has Been a Mafia State for Years. Can Kiev Break the Cycle of Violence?

Departing the ferry across the monolith of Lower Manhattan

“Born in Michigan in 1865, William Samuel Horton was a prolific Impressionist painter of many landscapes and water scenes, especially in Europe and his adopted country of France, where he died in 1936. Students League and National Academy of Design, left for Europe, and returned to New York for an unknown period of time in 1924, according to Cincinnati Art Galleries, Inc. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Discover the Stettheimer Dollhouse: The 12-Room Dollhouse Featuring Miniature, Original Modernist Art by Marcel Duchamp

“The Stettheimer Dollhouse has been wowing young New Yorkers since it entered the Museum of the City of New York’s collection in 1944. The luxuriously appointed, two-story, twelve-room house features tiny crystal chandeliers, trompe l’oeil panels, an itty bitty mah-jongg set, and a delicious-looking dessert assortment that would have driven Beatrix Potter’s Two Bad Mice wild. Its most astonishing feature, however, tends to go over its youngest fans’ heads — an art gallery filled with original modernist paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, George Bellows, Gaston Lachaise, and Marguerite Zorach. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

The Stettheimer Dollhouse - Johanna Fateman

W - Stettheimer Dollhouse

amazon: The Stettheimer Dollhouse

Hollywood blacklist

“The Hollywood blacklist was the colloquial term for what was in actuality a broader entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War. The blacklist involved the practice of denying employment to entertainment industry professionals believed to be or to have been Communists or sympathizers. Not just actors, but screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios. This was usually done on the basis of their membership in, alleged membership in, or even just sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or on the basis of their refusal to assist Congressional investigations into the party's activities. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Blacklist: Hollywood on Trial 58:43

A "Hollywood 10" newspaper from the 2015 biopic Trumbo. The film follows Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) and the blacklist of other Hollywood artists amid the Red Scare in 1947.

The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists

“In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Ruskin (1819–1900), the most influential art critic of the Victorian era, the National Gallery of Art will present more than 90 paintings, watercolors, and drawings created by American artists who were profoundly influenced by Ruskin’s call for a revolutionary change in the practice of art. ‘The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists’ includes a number of recently discovered works never before exhibited publicly. Ruskin’s rejection of traditional academic art and his plea for works that reflected a deep reverence for both the spiritual and scientific qualities of the natural world found a sympathetic audience in America among a group of like-minded artists, architects, scientists, critics, and collectors. ...”

Fine Art Connoisseur

W - American Pre-Raphaelites

Antiques and the Arts

amazon

YouTube: Introduction to the Exhibition: The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists 48:25

2014 March: John Ruskin, 2021 February: Modern Painters (1843–1860)

Henry Farrer, “On Whitehead, Coast of Maine,” 1875, watercolor on paper

Various Artists: The Story of Jamaican Music: Tougher Than Tough

“A superlative introduction to the world of Jamaican music, Tougher Than Tough is a treasure trove of information, filled with unforgettable music. Across four discs and 95 songs, this set spans the entire history of the island's vibrant music scene, hitting all the major stylistic bases along the way, and rounding up many of Jamaica's greatest artists. It's evident that a great amount of thoughtful time and effort went into this package and, although collectors will howl at the many omissions and some of the selections, this set wasn't intended for them, but for a general audience interested in beginning to explore the music more deeply. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

Discogs

YouTube: The Story of Jamaican Music: Tougher Than Tough 74 videos

Strat-O-Matic Baseball

“Strat-O-Matic is a game company based in Glen Head, New York, that develops and publishes sports simulation games. ... Strat-O-Matic's statistical research and game development methods are implemented with the intent of replicating athletes' abilities as accurately as possible, giving the gamer the feel of making managerial decisions. ... In a Strat-O-Matic game, each athlete is represented by a player card, on which are printed various ratings and result tables for dice rolls. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Strat-O-Matic, the Throwback, Endures the Era of the X-Boxes

How Strat-O-Matic Baseball Changed My Life Forever

Stuck in the ‘60s

amazon

YouTube: Evolution of Strat-o-matic Baseball Cards: 1962-present, How-To Strat: Baseball Basic Version Board Game, Strat-O-Matic Computer Version Instructional

Dazzling Doubles for Compromised Skies

This map locates double stars in the northern and eastern sky. Click to enlarge.

“The sky is broken. For weeks now, Western and Canadian wildfires have released a pall of smoke that blankets both countries. July 8th was the last smoke-free night at my observing site in northeastern Minnesota. Daytime skies are generally pale blue, with nights starved of stars. Often, the limiting magnitude is 2 or 3. For many, smoke from wildfires has transformed summer nights, blotting out stars and familiar deep-sky sights. But through it all, double stars keep on shining. Because of constant smoke I've had to change up my observing from comets and deep-sky to brighter fare. Among the astronomical objects least affected by wildfires and haze are double stars. ...”

Sky & Telescope

Stars are classified into spectral types according to temperature and the elements and molecules that dominate their spectra.

Grupo de Orfeu

“The Geração de Orpheu (Orpheus's Generation) or Grupo de Orfeu were a Portuguese literary movement, largely responsible for the introduction of Modernism to the arts and letters of Portugal through their tri-monthly publication, Orpheu (magazine) [pt] (1915). Following the lead of other European vanguard movements of the early twentieth century, and inspired by the Futurist Vladimir Maiakovsky's urgings, the poets Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada Negreiros, and the painters Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Guilherme de Santa-Rita formed a journal of art and literature based in Lisbon's Baixa district, with the principal aim of agitating, subverting and scandalizing the Portuguese bourgeoisie and social conventions. ...”

Wikipedia

W - José de Almada Negreiros, An artist to discover: José de Almada Negreiros, José de Almada Negreiros

[PDF] World War I and the Arts: The “Geração de O r p h e u ” and the Emergence of a Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde

2008 March: Fernando Pessoa, 2012 October: The Book of Disquiet, 2012 November: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, 2014 May: Aspects by Fernando Pessoa, 2016 March: Passoa's Trunk - 13+ ways of looking at a poem, 2017 September: Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act, 2020 February: Strange Music Of Silence: Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

Portugal Futurista, the art journal that published Campos' "Ultimatum" in 1917.

‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins.

“One officer described how rioters attempted to gouge out his eye and called him a traitor as they sought to invade the Capitol. Another told of being smashed in a doorway and nearly crushed amid a ‘medieval’ battle with a pro-Trump mob as he heard guttural screams of pain from fellow officers. A third said he was beaten unconscious and stunned repeatedly with a Taser as he pleaded with his assailants, ‘I have kids.’ A fourth relayed how he was called a racist slur over and over again by intruders wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ garb. ... One by one, in excruciating detail, Sergeant Gonell and three other officers who faced off with the hordes that broke into the Capitol told Congress of the brutal violence, racism and hostility they suffered as a throng of angry rioters, acting in the name of President Donald J. Trump, beat, crushed and shocked them. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | Trump and His Allies Still Aren’t Telling the Truth About Jan. 6

NY Times: Trump officials can testify in inquiries into efforts to subvert election outcome and Jan. 6 riot, Justice Dept. says.

NY Times: U.S. Capitol Riot (Video)

2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 February: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack., 2021 February: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack , 2021 March: Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol, 2021 March: ‘We’ve Lost the Line!’: Radio Traffic Reveals Police Under Siege at Capitol, 2021 April: Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds, 2021 May: Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence, 2021 June: Senate Report Details Security Failures in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot, 2021 July: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol

Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Cards

“... Sylvia Plath’s Tarot cards, a 24th birthday present from her husband, poet Ted Hughes, just went for £151,200 in an auction at Sotheby’s. ... The auction house’s description indicates that a few of the cards were discolored — evidence of use, as supported by Plath’s numerous references to Tarot in her journals. Recall Tarot’s appearance in 'Daddy,' her most widely known poem, and her identification with the Hanging Man card, in a poem of the same name. This century has seen her collection Ariel restored to its author’s intended order. The original order is said to correspond quite closely to Tarot, with the first twenty-two poems symbolizing the cards of the Major Arcana. ...”

Open Culture

Guest Post: Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and The Hanging Man

Sylvia Plath's Spell on Ariel: Conjuring the Perfect Book of Poems Through Mysticism and the Tarot

Foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition

The Astro Poets: A Field Guide to Scorpios

2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2019 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story, 2021 June: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

Manhattan Egos · Sonny Simmons (1969)

“This collection consists of recordings by avant-garde jazz musician Huey ‘Sonny’ Simmons. The first session from 1969 finds Simmons on alto saxophone and English horn paired with trumpeter and future wife Barbara Donald. Their playing style is influenced by the early free-jazz music of saxophonist John Coltrane and trumpeter Donald Ayler. On ‘Seven Dances of Salome,’ Simmons plays English horn, giving the music a Middle Eastern flavor. The second session from 1970 pairs Simmons with jazz violinist Michael White on four numbers. Simmons’ career went into decline in the 1970s, but rebounded in the 1990s. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

W - Sonny Simmons

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Coltrane in Paradise, Seven Dances of Salome, Manhattan Egos

The 1916 stunt that made Nathan’s Famous a Coney Island hot dog icon

Nathan’s expanded its menu by 1939

“No summer visit to Coney Island is complete without a stop at Nathan’s Famous, the iconic boardwalk restaurant that offers everything from burgers to frog legs (really) but made its name back in 1916 selling delicious, cheap hot dogs. Yet the five cent frankfurters Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker began hawking from a stand on the then-unfinished boardwalk wouldn’t have caught on—if not for a clever stunt he came up with to convince the crowds on Surf Avenue to give his hot dogs a try. ...”

Ephemeral New York

2009 April: Coney Island, 2010 July: Nathan's Famous, 2011 March: "An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders", Owen Smith, 2013 August: Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, 2013 October: Last Days of Summer at Coney Island, 2014 July: Coney Island - Directors: Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler (1973), 2015 May: The Case for Riding the Subway to the Last Stop, 2016 December: Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, 2017 August: Here's What Coney Island Looks Like In The Empty Pre-Dawn Hours, 2019 August: Pierless

I will walk 500 miles … on an art trail along the Suffolk and Essex coasts

“... I’m at Kessingland Ness, a small spit of shingle on the Suffolk coast south of Lowestoft and I’m starting a long-distance walk, a real marathon. The plan is to walk the Suffolk and Essex coasts from Lowestoft to Tilbury, accompanying an arts project called Beach of Dreams that hopes to bring people together around walking, and start some discussion about what’s happening to our coasts. ... I’ve been talking and writing about long-distance walking for a long time, but not actually done much of it. Like many people during the pandemic, I wanted to get out on something significant, but given that challenges such as the Appalachian Trail or GR10 are off the agenda, I was thinking of the British coast, maybe that of Wales or south-west England. Then Ali Pretty, founder and artistic director of arts group Kinetika, suggested I accompany their walk and write a daily account. ...”

Guardian, I will walk 500 miles … on an art trail along Essex’s lost coast

Beach of Dreams

Was (Not Was) - What Up Dog? (1988)

“I’ve got to be the only twentysomething I know that’s this excited over Pick of the Litter 1980-2010, the new compilation by pop-funk band Was (Not Was). Quirky aficionados may know them for left-field, late-’80s hits like ‘Walk the Dinosaur’ and ‘Spy in the House of Love.’ Others may know them as the band that put producers Don Was and David Was on the map (they would, either separately or together, work on such albums as Cosmic Thing by The B-52’s, Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan’s odd Under the Red Sky). But no matter how you know them, there’s little to deny their place as one of the funniest, funkiest bands that time almost forgot.The core of Was (Not Was) – David on keyboards, Don on bass and the dual soul vocals of Harry Bowens and Sweet Pea Atkinson – was as smooth, funky and soulful as they come. ...”

the second disc

W - What Up, Dog?

SPIN: The 10 Most Essential Was (Not Was) Tracks (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Was (Not Was) - What Up, Dog? (1988) Full Album (Missing "Anytime Lisa")