Off the Beaten Track - African Head Charge (1986)

 

“In 1986, when African Head Charge released this album it was a newly remade ensemble lead by a percussionist and including a live kit drums, melodica/keyboardist, and bass backed by samples and tape loops. The resulting album still sounds modern, fresh, and innovative in the electronica plethora. Programmed chants and unexpected sounds (barking dogs, breaking glass, etc.) are salient features of this rhythmic, international dub. Particularly strong tracks are the title cut (featuring Jah Wobble on bass) and the ambient selection ‘Language & Mentality,’ crafted around an Albert Einstein monologue of the same name. These lengthy and dense loops and samples are showcased in attenuated, flowing rhythm beds. Largely made of slinky rhythms from a segmented funk, Off the Beaten Track is both a landmark recording in the use of sound-bite technology and an excellent example of the integration of live instrumentation and programmed music. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

​Solskjaer Out at Manchester United After a Loss Too Far

 

“Manchester United had not done it after a humiliation by Liverpool. And the club’s executives had managed to tolerate the sight of Manchester City’s cruising to victory at Old Trafford while barely breaking a sweat. After each defeat, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the manager who had overseen both calamities, somehow remained in his post. He could not, though, survive a third. Solskjaer had promised, two weeks on since that defeat against Manchester City, that his team would react, that it would use the embarrassment as fuel for the rest of the season. ...”

NY Times

A Friend, An Enemy

 

“On April Fool's Day, 1965, Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones) sent a postcard to the poet Kenneth Koch. The image on the front of the postcard is racist: three alligators chase a Black man, who looks up to heaven with tears streaming down his face. A four-line poem presents his ‘prayer’: Dese gater looked so feary / And yet dey 'peered so tame / But now that I done met 'em / I'll neber be de same. According to the Newberry Library, the Curt Teich Company began producing postcards with this image in 1940. But Teich produced similar postcards as early as 1918, and the ‘alligator bait’ stereotype has a much longer history. On the back of the postcard, Baraka writes: Dear Kenneth,  Better start saying your prayers, if you think you can spend your time playing chess while millions struggle!  Love, LeRoi 2X  The postcard was sent to Koch's apartment at 69 Perry Street in New York's West Village, using a five cents John Kennedy stamp. ... What kind of April Fool's Day joke was this? Was the postcard even a joke? Or was it a threat? The case for reading the postcard as a joke is precarious, yet plausible. We have the date. We know that Baraka and Koch were friends. ...”

Post45

How German Expressionism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Camera Shot That Defined Classic Films by Welles, Hitchock, Tarantino & More

 

“Expressionism was an art movement that set out to take the internal—emotions, the human condition itself—and make it external, with paintings that made no attempt to recreate reality. It was a break with the classical schools of art that had come before. It was modern, very modern, very colorful, and exciting as hell. And it was soon to run headlong into that most modern of art forms, filmmaking, in the 1920s.In the above mini-doc on the Dutch Angle, that canted framing so beloved of film noir, and apparently every shot in the first Thor movie, Vox traces its roots back to Expressionism, and particularly back to Germany of the 1910s where schools like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were assaulting realism with brutal paintings. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

MoMA: German Expressionist (Video)

W - Dutch angle

Sylvère Lotringer (1938 – 2021)

 

“Sylvère Lotringer (15 October 1938 – 8 November 2021) was a French born literary critic and cultural theorist. Initially based in New York City, he later lived in Los Angeles and Baja California, Mexico. He is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements as founder of the journal Semiotext(e) and for his interpretations of theory in a 21st-century context. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others. ... In 1964, he entered the École Pratique des Hautes Études, VIe section (Sociology) writing a doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf's novels under the supervision of Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann. ...”

Wikipedia

Theory Daddy

Semiotext(e) written by Entropy

MIT Press: Sylvère Lotringer

Frieze: Sylvère Lotringer

 

This is the nineteenth in Entropy’s small press interview series, where we ask editors about their origins, their mission, and what it’s like to run a press.

​Radical Tea Towel

 

“... I received a very nice note and thanks from the co-owner of the Radical Tea Towel Company for my mentioning them in my previous post about tea towels.  ... Since we humans first emerged from the primeval swamps we’ve needed to keep our cooking utensils dry. No wonder we’ve developed such a fascination with that most fundamental of accessories, the tea towel – or dish towel as it is sometimes called in the US.Fast forward to the 18th century. The tea towel has reached the pinnacle of its perfection (never again to be matched until the arrival on the scene of the Radical Tea Towel Company in the 21st century).Tea towels are now gracing the highest tables of the land and are made of linen, a delicate fibre derived from the flax of linseed plants. ...”

Tea Towel History – The Radical Tea Towel Company

Radical Tea Towel

​Did a Comet Explode Over South America 12000 Years Ago?

 

This twisted glass slab was found in Puquio de Núñez

“A decade ago, researchers discovered huge chunks and slabs of dark green and black glass strewn across a 75 kilometer–long swath of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.  New evidence suggests they were created by an incoming fireball.The glass pieces are uncannily similar to trinitite, the glassy mineral forged by the heat of the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Carbon-14 dating of organic matter in soil directly beneath and in contact with the glass indicated that the chunks formed about 12,000 years ago, when the area was a grassy wetland dotted with trees. ...”

Sky & Telescope

The Avon Bard series of Latin American literature

 

“The Avon Bard series of Latin American literature was a unique publishing venture for its time, for any time really. Their assemblage of extraordinary titles from authors all over Latin America translated by many of the finest translators -  Gregory Rabassa, Harriet De Onis, Barbara Shelby Merello, and Alfred MacAdam to name a few - allowed an American reading public to experience a literature that had not benefited from the level of exposure that some other world literatures had traditionally enjoyed. The professed goal of the imprint was to publish ‘distinguished Latin American Literature’, and that they did. ...”

Zenosbooks

​Whatever Happened to the New York Auteur?

 

Sal’s Famous Pizzeria—we’ve all been there. Spike Lee and Danny Aiello in 'Do The Right Thing' (1989).

“... The city was his first subject. (Martin) Scorsese is what has been called a New York auteur; wherever else his moviemaking jones has taken him, he always returns to the city. He has been, in fact, part of a lineage of New York filmmakers—voices that have found their quintessence on the street corners and rooftops, in the long bars and half-finished lofts and too-small apartments and late-night diners and subway cars. Ever since the postwar era found its footing culturally, the New York auteur has been a vital megafauna in American film, the calloused, smart-mouthed countercharge to the homogenized, corporatized Hollywood model of film artist. But look around, in 2021: Where are they? ...”

Voice

​25 Essential Jazz Soundtracks You Should Own

 

“What American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the Jazz Age coincided with the demise of silent movies and the birth of talking pictures in the late 20s. In fact, the very first full-length motion picture with synchronized sound was 1927’s groundbreaking flick The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Though in musical terms it featured very little of what we recognize today as jazz, it began a long and often fruitful relationship between jazz and the cinema, with many of the best jazz soundtracks now recognised as classic albums in their own right. ...”

udiscover (Video)

​The lovely Art Nouveau window grille on a Riverside Drive row house

 

“There’s a lot of enchantment on Riverside Drive, the rare Manhattan avenue that deviates from the 1811 Commissioners Plan that laid out the mostly undeveloped city based on a pretty rigid street grid. Rather than running straight up and down, Riverside winds along its namesake park, breaking off into slender carriage roads high above the Hudson River. (We have Central Park co-designer Frederick Law Olmsted, who also conceptualized Riverside Park and what was originally called Riverside Avenue, to thank for this.) ...”

Ephemeral New York

​My Own Jazz: An Interview With A Guy Called Gerald

 

“It is hard to speak about some cult figures without coming across like a complete fan boy. Even more so, if the person in question is not only a leading figure of the early UK acid house scene; the author of ‘Voodoo Ray’, arguably one of the most influential dance music tracks of all time; but also one of the pioneers of early breakbeat science, who in 1995 delivered Black Secret Technology, one of the most singular jungle albums ever released. Luckily, in the case of Gerald Simpson, aka A Guy Called Gerald, it becomes much easier when you actually get to speak with them, and realise how nice they are in person, seemingly unaltered by their awe‐inspiring legacy. ...”

The Quietus (Video)

W - A Guy Called Gerald

Discogs

Nomadland - Chloé Zhao (2020)

 

“Nomadland is a 2020 American drama film written for the screen, produced, edited, and directed by Chloé Zhao. Based on the 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, the film stars Frances McDormand (who is also a producer on the film) as a van-dwelling working nomad who leaves her home after her husband dies and the sole industry in her town closes down, to be 'houseless' and travel around the United States. David Strathairn also stars in a supporting role. A number of real-life nomads appear as fictionalized versions of themselves, including Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times - ‘Nomadland’ Review: The Unsettled Americans (Video)

Guardian - ‘It’s an utter myth’: how Nomadland exposes the cult of the western

amazon

W - Nomadland (book), amazon

The Rumba Kings

 

“The Rumba Kings, a documentary film by Alan Brain that traces the history of Congolese rumba and its contribution to world music, is finally being released. North American audiences will be the first to see it when it is broadcast online at the DOXA festival in Vancouver. This will take place on 6th May – don’t miss it! Without doubt the hour-and-a-half-long film is the one that all you music lovers have been waiting for.  Why is that? Well first, because it pays tribute and does justice to this original sound, born of the meeting between Congolese and Cuban rhythms after the slave trade had scattered the children of Africa all over the lands of America. ...”

PAN - The Rumba Kings: Film gets world premier at DOXA festival (Video)

Africa Is a Country: Musically, Congo is the mothership

Alan Brain on Congo Music Documentary: "The Rumba Kings" (Video)

YouTube: The Rumba Kings - Trailer

​College Basketball Begins With Plenty of Changes

 

“A showcase in Madison Square Garden raised the curtain on the men’s college basketball season on Tuesday night, with No. 9 Duke beating Kentucky, 79-71, and No. 3 Kansas topping Michigan State, 87-74, in front of a big crowd ‘“To be on this stage, be in this moment, lead my team to a win — that’s why I came back,’ said Ochai Agbaji of Kansas, who led the Jayhawks with 29 points after spending part of the off-season considering whether to enter the N.B.A. draft. The games begin a 2021-22 season that is likely to look much different from last season because of changes in the game and players switching teams. ...”

NY Times

ESPN - 2021-22 men's college basketball preview: Preseason picks, rankings, complete coverage

CBS Sports - United States of College Basketball 2021-22: Where every team ranks in each state, from top to bottom

SI - Ranking Every Team in Men’s College Basketball, From Gonzaga (No. 1) to UMES (No. 358)

Top Freshman in College Basketball 2021-2022

The Ringer - The Legend of Chet Holmgren, 7-Foot String Bean, Has Just Begun (Video)

W - 2021–22 NCAA Division I men's basketball season

Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship

 

A cupping session at Los Papales, a coffee farm in Jinotega, Nicaragua.

“Wilston Vilchez, a third-generation coffee farmer in the mountains of Nicaragua, has witnessed drastic climatic changes on his 25-acre coffee and cacao farm for years, but when two hurricanes hit within 15 days last year, many other farmers he knows realized they needed to be part of the solution. ... Mr. Vilchez, who also manages an agricultural cooperative of about 300 farmers, said that the effects of climate change — rising temperatures, less predictable rainfall, wild swings from drought to flooding, new pests and more — were making it more and more difficult to earn a living from coffee, an experience felt by farmers around the world. ...”

NY Times

2010 September: Espresso, 2013 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, 2021 July:  The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented, 2021 October: Brew: A Brief History of Coffee

 

Sacks of coffee in the Zona de los Santos area of Costa Rica.

How Kraftwerk Made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

 

Ralf Hütter, left, Florian Schneider, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos of Kraftwerk in 1981.

“... In this vein, we might call German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk a ‘seminal matrix’ of musical activity, an economy of creative work led by two fathers — Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter  — who midwived a techno/electro revolution, and — indirectly — through early spin-off projects like NEU!, an experimental post-punk/New Wave revolution. The best known of the ‘Krautrock’ bands to emerge in the 1970s, early versions of Kraftwerk included in its ranks German producer Conny Plank (unofficially) as well as drummer Klaus Dinger, and guitarist Michael Rother, both of whom went on to play in the aforementioned NEU! and ‘seminal’ avant-garde bands like Harmonia and La Düsseldorf. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

NY Times: A Techno Group Wary of Technology

2008 April: Kraftwerk, 2011 March: Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution, 2011 March: Kraftwerk - Documentary, 2011 April: Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, 2011 May: Autobahn, 2011 October: Trans-Europe Express, 2012 February: Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, 2012 October: Radio-Activity, 2014 May: "The Telephone Call" (1987), 2014 November: Kraftwerk - live at Cirkus, Stockholm, 2020 September: Tour de France Soundtracks (2003), 2020 October: Fassbinder and Kraftwerk: A Marriage Made in a New Germany

​Football Manager 2022

 

“Welcome, friend. Welcome to a brave new world. Forget about the metaverse — Football Manager is the only alternative reality people like us will ever need. For here, within the confines of our laptops, we can live our dreams, write our stories and be the people we always knew we could be. But, by thunder, there’s a lot going on, isn’t there? Stick with me and I’ll guide you through it. We’re going to strip it all down and work on the basics. So start a new game, select career mode and, for the sake of argument, pick Tottenham Hotspur and hit ‘Quick Start’. There will be a short pause as your computer rumbles through the set-up process. Use this time to remind yourself that nothing good comes easily. …”

FM22: The definitive beginner’s guide to Football Manager

Football Manager 2022 (Video)

Football Manager 2022: The 20 best non-European teams to manage in the new game

FM22: Managing Newcastle United on Football Manager (Part 1)

Football Manager 2022 wonderkids: The 20 best young players to sign in FM22

Football Manager 2022: The 20 best teams to manage in the new game

Michael Gibbs & NDR Bigband - In My View (2015)

 

“... With In My View, and forty years after first working with the NDR Bigband, Zimbabwe-born arranger, composer and musician Michael Gibbs returns with one of his most personal statements. Roughly divided between originals and arrangements of compositions by Ron Carter, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk and Carla Bley, the NDR Bigband is joined by guest drummers Gene Calderazzo and Adam Nussbaum in what surely ranks as a definitive entry in Gibbs' discography to date. Gibbs' compositions explore strikingly different terrain. ...”

All About Jazz

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs

amazon

YouTube: ‘Tis As It Should Be

​Roadrunning: Joshua Clover in Conversation with Alex Abramovich

Jonathan Richman around 1972, with Modern Lovers

“What follows is part of an email exchange between Alex Abramovich and Joshua Clover about Jonathan Richman’s song ‘Roadrunner.’ Their conversation takes the scenic route, beginning with a materialist definition of rock ’n’ roll and ending by arguing over the Velvet Underground (too ironic? Too elitist?). Along the way, they touch on the nature of influence, poetry versus criticism, art versus revolution, the specificity of rock ’n’ roll freedom, and what it means to drive with no way out. ...”

The Paris Review

Judge Rejects Trump’s Bid to Keep Papers Secret in Jan. 6 Inquiry

 

Former President Donald J. Trump can assert executive privilege, a judge ruled, but President Biden is not obliged to honor that assertion.

“A federal judge on Tuesday night rejected a bid by former President Donald J. Trump to keep secret papers about his actions and conversations leading up to and during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters.In a 39-page ruling, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held that Congress’s constitutional oversight powers to obtain the information prevailed over Mr. Trump’s residual secrecy powers — especially because the incumbent, President Biden, agreed that lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 riot should see the files. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: At the Willard and the White House, the Jan. 6 Panel Widens Its Net

NY Times: Trump Officials Illegally Campaigned While in Office, Watchdog Finds

****NY Times: Swift Ruling Tests Trump’s Tactic of Running Out the Clock

***NY Times: Man Sentenced to 41 Months for Assaulting Officer in Capitol Riot

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, 2021 July: ‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins., 2021 September: Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant, 2021 October: Jan. 6 Was Worse Than We Knew, 2021 October: 90 Seconds of Rage

Downtown 81 - Edo Bertoglio (1980-81)

 

“Downtown 81, a ‘lost’ no-budget film shot on location in Manhattan some nineteen years ago, finally had its debut last month, at Cannes. Directed by Edo Bertoglio and written by Glenn O’Brien, this lighthearted document of the East Village scene stars a twenty-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat as himself, with countless hipster cameos, including hip-hop pioneer Fab Five Freddie, ’80s Fiorucci designer (and the film’s producer) Maripol, record-label guy Marty Thau, and Blondie chanteuse Debbie Harry as the fairy princess. But the real star of the film is the gritty milieu of a New York long gone. A lot has happened in nineteen years. Now that the Lower East Side has become something of an Epcot simulacrum of itself, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for Ye Olde Loisaida’s antique bohemian realities: brazen dope dealers, trash-strewn lots connecting burned-out buildings, artist-musician inhabitants lugging their own equipment to gigs. ...”

ARTFORUM

GQ: Downtown 81 Will Help You Understand Your ‘80s NYC Nostalgia (Video)

W - Downtown 81

Criterion (Video)

Discogs: Downtown 81 (Video)

YouTube: Downtown 81 Clip - "New York Is My Kind of Town"

2013 April: Saving Basquiat: Seeing the Art Through the Myth-Making at Gagosian, 2015 February: Now's the Time, 2015 May: Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, 2015 December: The Notebooks, 2017 June: New Art, New Money (February 10, 1985)

Dark Waters - Todd Haynes (2019)

 

“Dark Waters is a 2019 American legal thriller film directed by Todd Haynes and written by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan. The story dramatizes Robert Bilott's case against the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont after they contaminated a town with unregulated chemicals. It stars Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, along with Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Camp, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, William Jackson Harper, and Bill Pullman. The film is based on the 2016 New York Times Magazine article ‘The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare’ by Nathaniel Rich. ...”

Wikipedia

The Atlantic: A Chilling True Story of Corporate Indifference

NY Times - ‘Dark Waters’ Review: The Killing Fields of West Virginia (Video)

Slate: What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Dark Waters

amazon

YouTube: DARK WATERS | Official Trailer

2016 April: Carol (2015), 2016 April: Far from Heaven (2002), 2016 July: Mildred Pierce - Kate Winslet (2011)

​The mystery of the “same sky” postcards

 

“James Brouwer has been collecting postcards for more than 30 years. His collection numbers over 11,000; images of old-age homes, ugly restaurants, onlookers, and 1960s advertising are neatly organized in boxes in his Canadian home. But James started to notice that some of his postcards — dozens, in fact — appeared to have the exact same sky. Looking even closer, he noticed that the same-sky postcards were all made by one publisher: Dexter Press out of West Nyack, New York. ...”

VOX (Video)

​Guest Mix: Arabic Tapes and Records with Habibi Funk

 

“Jannis from Habibi Funk played some awesome gems from his Berlin flat on My Analog Journal guest mix. As a collector and music lover, Zag is a huge fan of his label and him as a selector, owning almost all of the releases that they release. Last week when Jannis asked if he can make a guest mix for the channel, Zag was thrilled! In this mix, you will hear some legends like Ziad Rahbani and Ahmed Fakroun. And he’s playing both tapes and records. Honestly, we enjoyed every second of it and hope you will too. ...”

Arabic Tapes and Records with Habibi Funk (Video)

SoundCloud (Audio)

2017 June: Ahmed Malek and Other Treasures From Habibi Funk’s North African Crate - Digging Expeditions, 2017 July: Lebanon: Various artists - Jakarta Radio 010 Mix, 2017 December: From the Counter: Beirut, 2018 June: "Habibi Funk 001 Mix" by Jannis of Jakarta Records (Mix of Arabic 60s & 70s), 2019 September: Habibi Funk, the label playing hide and seek in Medina, 2021 January: Habibi Funk’s Musical Revivals

​Down and out in George Orwell’s Paris: A guide to the secret Paname

 

“To begin our guide to Paris: the city of love, luminosity and four macaroons for a mortgageable fee — we start with a little-known condition called Kalopsia. This alluring word denotes the delusion of things appearing more beautiful than they actually are. It is commonly induced in Asian tourists when visiting the French capital owing to a sizeable smack of a Parisian culture shock. That is not to say that Kalopsia sufferers overrate the beauty of the Sine or marvel a little too much at the Eiffel Tower, but that they sport such rose-tinted eyes that coughed out phlegm on the pavement is transfigured into a tramp’s oyster that somehow represents an abstraction of civility. ...”

Far Out Magazine (Video)

W - Down and Out in Paris and London

2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016), 2019 September: What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

 

Cafe du Dome

Driving by the Lake With John Ashbery

 

“It was convenient for John Ashbery, and dumb luck for me, that I was living in Rochester and could pick him up at the airport whenever he arrived from New York to visit his mother. Sometimes, because he didn’t like to fly, he’d arrive at the bus station instead; but I could meet him there too. It was an arrangement from which we both might profit, he explained, not profit in the American sense but in a way best expressed if you said it in French, profiter de. And thus we began my unexpected education, a kind of improvised fellowship with visiting tutor and bonus bits of wisdom delivered in French. ...”

LitHub: By Douglas Crase (October 28, 2020)

​When the Solution Is the Problem

 

That split-second when everyone thinks the ends justify the means.

“Not once, in two decades, had David Beckham heard the moment. He had witnessed it at the time, of course. More than that, in fact: He had summoned it and created it and lived it. He had, presumably, watched the moment more than once in the intervening years, too. But it was not until a couple weeks ago that he sat down and listened to it. The moment he did was — obviously — captured for posterity, a social media post as meta as they come: a man recording his own reaction to a recording of himself. As Beckham listens, he has a look of fierce concentration on his face, mixed with just a little genuine concern, as if he really does not know how it all ends. The audio plays in the background, an echo of his past: the last couple minutes of the BBC radio commentary of England’s meeting with Greece on the road to the 2002 World Cup. …”

NY Times (Audio)

 

Reading Around New York

 

1979 | The New York Public Library

“On Thursday, May 3, 1979, the New York Times staff photographer Fred Conrad visited the main branch of the New York Public Library. A crowd had gathered on the steps outside — in groups, in pairs, talking, eating. But among this gathering, a few sat slightly apart, heads bent. They appeared oblivious to those around them, unaware of the photographer’s lens. They were reading. Even in the busiest of places, if you have a good book, you can retreat into solitude. And when you live in a city like New York, a book can be even more than a story at your fingertips. It can also be a respite, an escape, a sanctuary, a diversion and a travel companion. ...”

NY Times

2015 August: The New York Public Library, 2015 August: Underground New York Public Library, 2016 January: Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection, 2016 March: 11 Essential Feminist Books: A New Reading List by The New York Public Library, 2017 September: Get NYPL Digital Collections Tab for Your Browser, 2017 September: Ex Libris: The New York Public Library

 

1961 | Barnard College