​The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way

 

“I am sure that many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one. Coffee expert and author of The World Atlas of Coffee James Hoffmann introduces us to the appliance we think we know in the above video.Alfonso Bialetti didn’t originally get into the coffee business. In 1919, the Bialetti company was an aluminum manufacturer, with the Moka Express invented somewhere around 1933 by Luigi de Ponti, who worked for the company. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

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, 2021 November: Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship

Mario Batkovic - Introspectio (2021)

 

“Mario Batkovic plays the accordion. Sounds straightforward enough. Except he plays the accordion in the manner of Steve Reich or Terry Riley if they were entranced by the carnivalesque dancing of a youthful Alejandro Jodorowsky, their nimble fingers reenacting the exuberant choreography upon compressed keys. And Batkovic’s fingers work overtime, like Lubomyr Melnyk transported to a squeezebox. He approaches his instrument in the same way that Richard Dawson plays the guitar: it’s recognisable but the musician doesn’t appear to be following any of the rules or tropes that you would normally associate with that instrument. Instead, we’re treated to mantle-deep bellows, glistening twinkles, and squelchy, fuzz-caked riffage akin to the guitar work of Muse but with ideas beyond basic pageantry. This is music for classicists. ...”

The Quietus (Audio)

Mario Batkovic

Bandcamp: Introspectio (Audio)

YouTube: INTROSPECTIO   1 / 6

Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom

 

“On the title page of my paperback copy of Walden, an echo of a former self greets me. My name, written in loopy adolescent script, and the date: August 12, 1993. I was 17 when I bought the Vintage Books/Library of America edition at Waldenbooks in the Bridgewater Commons Mall, using proceeds from a summer job. I dutifully read it in those final weeks of summer, with pen in hand, underlining here, making embarrassing marginal comments there. One late afternoon, I was sitting alone at home, working my way through the book, when my boyfriend stopped by unexpectedly. I couldn’t have planned it better. I had wanted to be seen just so: dim room, puddle of light from a lamp, reading Thoreau. So goes a story about the Transcendentalists and my world. ...”

New Republic (Audio)

2020 April: Henry David Thoreau - I, 2020 May: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal - II

 

The Morgan Library & Museum: Henry David Thoreau’s journal, The Transcendentalist: 5 March 1853 (Audio)

Stargazing with Ice Cold Enthusiasm

“It was New Year’s Eve Eve — New Year’s Eve Squared? — and a friend sent an email to our writers’ group about greeting the coming year with deliberate passion and cheer. There was a reply chain about setting aside difficulties in order to appreciate the bigger picture, like celebrating that you’re on a hike in an old-growth forest instead of lamenting the cold rain. In short, we wanted to prioritize enthusiasm, re-centering our experiences to focus on the positive despite the humdrum, and to appreciate the awesomeness of each moment so that nothing becomes ‘old hat.’ It’s a worthy theme for a new year. ...”

Sky & Telescope

Elvin! - Elvin Jones (1962)

 

“No one can prove that Elvin Jones — or Buddy or Max or anyone else — was the greatest jazz drummer. But making the case for Elvin wielding a more profound influence than any rhythm master is a snap. Take him out of the history of this music and suddenly you have nobody there to prove that drummers could play in rhythm and out of meter at the same time. You have nobody making the case that the drums could play with rather than behind a soloist. You have nobody pushing way beyond the beat, into texture and dynamic interaction, where drummers once scarcely roamed. ...”

The Magnificent Life Of Elvin Jones

W - Elvin!

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Elvin!   Elvin Jones  1 / 7

​Lawmakers Speak After Biden Warns of ‘a Dagger at the Throat of America’

 

“President Biden forcefully denounced former President Donald J. Trump for promoting lies and tearing down democracy because he could not stand the fact that he lost a free and fair election, accusing his predecessor and his allies of holding ‘a dagger at the throat of America.’ In his most sustained and scathing attack on the former president since taking office, Mr. Biden used the anniversary of the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol to condemn Mr. Trump for waging an ‘undemocratic’ and ‘un-American’ campaign against the legitimacy of the election system that he likened to the actions of autocrats and dictators in faraway countries. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times - The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot

NY Times - Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation (June 2021)

 

Treasonous Clowns On January 6, 2021, a violent mob of Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. The attack resulted in five people dead and over 130 wounded. An investigation is ongoing. By Patricia Anderson Turner

Agnès Varda: From Here to There (2011)

 

“A freewheeling travelogue, a kaleidoscopic survey of the contemporary art scene, and a loving ode to creativity in all its forms, this five-part miniseries by the inimitable Agnès Varda takes us on a journey of discovery as she travels the globe—from Stockholm to St. Petersburg, Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City to Los Angeles—meeting with friends, artists, and fellow filmmakers. Along the way there are chats with titan auteurs Chris Marker (offering a window into his virtual reality world) and a 102-year-old Manoel de Oliveira (doing his best Chaplin impersonation); visits to the Hermitage Museum, the Venice Biennale, and the home of Frida Kahlo; glimpses into the studios of acclaimed visual artists like Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, and Pierre Soulages; and Varda’s casually profound musings on everything from rivers to the Dutch masters to her own photography and installation works. ...”

Criterion

Review: Agnès Varda: From Here to There

French Culture

Criterion Channel: AGNÈS DE CI DE LÀ VARDA: Episode 1

May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), 2017 February: Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017), 2018 July: Vagabond (1985), 2019 March: Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90, 2019 April: Mur Murs (1980), 2020 May: Socialism and cha-cha-cha: Agnès Varda's photos of Cuba forgotten for 50 years, 2020 August: Four Ways of Looking at Agnès Varda

​Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death

 

“1942 There is no longer any measure by which to gauge anything once the measure of human life no longer is the measure. Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. 1943  Freedom hates death most of all, but love is a close second. ...”

The Paris Review

​A Long, Hard Year for Republicans Who Voted to Impeach After Jan. 6

 

Before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, members of Congress gathered at a joint session to confirm the Electoral College votes cast in the 2020 election.

“The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump did so with the same conviction — that a president of their party deserved to be charged with inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — and the same hope — that his role in doing so would finally persuade the G.O.P. to repudiate him. But in the year since the deadliest attack on the Capitol in centuries, none of the 10 lawmakers have been able to avoid the consequences of a fundamental miscalculation about the direction of their party. The former president is very much the leader of the Republicans, and it is those who stood against him whom the party has thrust into the role of pariah. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Prosecutors Move Quickly on Jan. 6 Cases, but One Big Question Remains

NY Times: How Trump Kept His Grip After Jan. 6

NY Times: Capitol Police Chief Commits to Security Improvements

NY Times: Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

Best Chet Baker Pieces: 20 Jazz Essentials

 

“It can be difficult to untangle the romantic myth surrounding Chet Baker from the merits of his music. His stratospheric rise in the early 1950s owed much to the elegant style and rhythmic grace of his trumpet playing, but his good looks didn’t hurt, and by the time he started to sing in a fragile and androgynous tone that sounded unlike any other singer, he became a teenage pin-up and a celebrity, a rarity in the jazz world. Baker spent his early years in Oklahoma and moved to Southern California with his family as an adolescent. By 1952, he became a regular at jam sessions at the Hermosa Beach club The Lighthouse and played with Charlie Parker on a string of dates on the West Coast. ...”

udiscover (Video)

2019 May: Italian Movies (2014), 2019 June: Let's Get Lost - Bruce Weber (1988), 2019 July: Time After Time: The Lasting Legacy Of Chet Baker

The Five Kingdoms of Football

 

“... Farther up the snowy coast you meet a druid. Actually, he calls himself a ‘football data analyst’ — more impenetrable dialect from the locals, but in English, it seems to mean druid or mage or something. He’s carrying enchanted parchments painted with numbers and colourful shapes. You catch a glimpse of one that sort of looks like a pizza.The Counter Kingdom is at war, the druid tells you, against not one rival sovereign but four. The Five Kingdoms have always been at war. He says no one remembers exactly how it started but the whole conflict has to do with a ball. ...”

The Athletic

Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

 

“The Editorial Board. One year after the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6. (Audio)   “On the morning of Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards, a 31-year-old United States Capitol Police officer, was stationed by some stairs on the Capitol grounds when the energy of the crowd in front of her seemed to take on a different shape; it was like that moment when rain suddenly becomes hail. A loud, sour-sounding horn bleated, piercing through the noise of the crowd, whose cries coalesced into an accusatory chant: ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’ ...”

VOX: How does this end?  “Americans have long believed our country to be exceptional. That is true today in perhaps the worst possible sense: No other established Western democracy is at such risk of democratic collapse. January 6, 2021, should have been a pivot point. The Capitol riot was the violent culmination of President Donald Trump and his Republican allies’ war on the legitimacy of American elections — but also a glimpse into the abyss that could have prompted the rest of the party to step away. Yet the GOP’s fever didn’t break that day. ...”

POLITICO - Hundreds of crimes, little punishment: Inside the sentences since the Capitol attack

The Nation: The Uncanny Resemblance of the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6 Insurrection

NY Times: Jan. 6 Panel Faces Difficult Questions as Anniversary of Capitol Riot Approaches

NY Times: Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump

Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors

 

Camille Pissarro, Peasant Women Weeding the Grass, c. 1894

“Exploring the surprising but steady opposition to printed color in nineteenth-century France, Hue & Cry showcases the Clark’s extraordinary holdings of French color prints by artists including Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Jules Chéret, Maurice Denis, Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edouard Vuillard.Brightly colored prints and posters, synonymous with Belle Époque Paris in the 1890s, remain beloved images in our own era. Yet their extreme popular appeal masks the fact that, for a very long time, color in print was an outlier phenomenon. Not only was printed color difficult and expensive to achieve, it was also frowned upon as a matter of aesthetic taste. ...”

The Clark

Clark Art's 'Hue & Cry' examines the rise of color printmaking in late 19th-century France

YouTube: Opening Lecture for Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors  42:41

 

In the Times of Harmony (detail; c. 1896), Paul Signac.

Long Live the Microcinema

 

A screening at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, New York

“About a decade ago, I went to see Welcome, or No Trespassing at Spectacle. It’s still the only time I’ve known anyone to project the movie, a 1964 satire of Soviet summer camps that was the debut feature of Elem Klimov (Come and See). Walking into the compact space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I remember there being only two or three other people among the cluster of seats, and I thought I spotted a sink just behind the screen, but really, the room was immediately recognizable as a cinema. ... Though the term ‘microcinema’ has been applied since the 1990s to describe local DIY spaces or series curated with an idiosyncratic mix of programming (whether little- or well-known movies), the word has always had too clinical a ring for such spaces and their cozy, communal, handmade, human feel. ...”

Criterion

W - Spectacle Theater

Spectacle (est. 2010) is a collectively-run screening space in Brooklyn, NY

 

A street view of the Spectacle Theater

This 1930 neon hotel sign still illuminates East 42nd Street

 

“Rising 20-plus stories above 42nd Street, the old-school sign for what was once called the Hotel Tudor is a beacon for Tudor City, the apartment complex mini-city of 12 Tudor Revival-style buildings built in the late 1920s. Like so many vintage neon signs in New York, its future was threatened. ‘The sign dates from 1930 when the hotel opened, and has a fleeting brush with demolition in 1999,’ according to Tudor City Confidential, a blog that covers the complex. Community opposition helped keep it in place. Today the hotel is officially known as the Westgate New York Grand Central—and the red glow of the sign lights the way along the eastern end of 42nd Street.“

Ephemeral New York

Hania Rani

 

“I feel like ‘Home’ is a second part of the same book, that the start was in ‘Esja’, a musical prelude to a real plot. I feel Home is a story with an ending, so the next book can tell a totally different one. I am constantly looking for new ways of expression. I am curious where ‘Home’ will lead me and my music. One can be lost but can find home in his inner part – which can mean many things – soul, imagination, mind, intuition, passion. I strongly believe that when being in uncertain times and living an unstable life we can still reach peace with ourselves and be able to find ‘home’ anywhere’. This is what I would like to express with my music – one can travel the whole world but not see anything. It is not where we are going but how much we are able to see and hear things happening around us. ...”

Hania Rani (Video)

Handcamp (Audio)

YouTube: Hania Rani

YouTube: Hania Rani & Dobrawa Czocher – Malasana (Official Music Video), Hania Rani & Dobrawa Czocher – Con Moto, Hania Rani - Ombelico, F major (live) | Detect Classic Sessions

2021 April: Live from Studio S2 (2021)

Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction

 

What accounts for Fassbinder’s political evolution? To understand it, we must trace the arc of the West German New Left.

“Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is not Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most renowned work, but it’s certainly the legendary German filmmaker’s most politically sophisticated. The five-part television series revolves around a cast of working-class characters in Cologne: the young toolmaker Jochen, his coworkers, his family, and his girlfriend, Marion. Over the course of the series, the factory workers, led by the popular Jochen with encouragement from the inquisitive and principled Marion, grow increasingly determined to assert control over the production process and take a bigger share of the profits. The series aired on West German public television in the fall of 1972. ...”

Jacobin

Criterion - Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day: The Utopia Channel

Criterion (Video)

2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2014 June: Effi Briest (1974), 2014 July: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 2014 September: A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema, 2014 October: Lola - (1981 BRD Trilogy), 2014 October: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979 BRD Trilogy), 2014 December: Veronika Voss (1982 - BRD Trilogy), 2015 January: Digital Anthology: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - $0.99, 2016 February: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), 2019 June: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), 2020 October: Fassbinder and Kraftwerk: A Marriage Made in a New Germany

 

Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972)

When a Master Printer Picks Up the Camera

 

“John Bull’s Great Stone, Common Burying Ground, Newport, Rhode Island” (1973-8), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“Is technical wizardry enough to make someone an artist? Richard Benson was unrivaled as a printer of photographs before he became a photographer. Hired in his early twenties by an art-book printing company to make halftone negatives to run on an offset press, he realized, as he later wrote, ‘I couldn’t understand printing without first mastering photography, and so my career began.’ At the time of his death at 73 in 2017, Benson profoundly understood the processes and techniques of photographic printing. He was also a beloved professor and dean at Yale. His own work with a camera, however, received less attention. ...”

NY Times

MoMA

W - Richard Benson

 

Richard Benson, “Newfoundland (Green Boat),” ca. 2006.

Common Ground vol.1 (2021)

 

“... Common Ground vol.1 is a digital compilation of ambient music and field recordings, gathering together a roster of artists who’ve put their sonic imprint firmly on 2021, and who add up to a collective ‘who’s who’ of ambient and experimental contemporary music. The release features exclusive tracks from electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel, Room40 imprint founder Lawrence English, composer and filmmaker Christina Vantzou, Texan ‘bandcamp superstars’ and friends Claire Rousay and more eaze, the prolific and currently ubiquitous Kenyan producer KMRU, ambient and spoken-word artist Wayne Phoenix, Iranian duo Saint Abdullah, Korean-American experimental artist Lucy Liyou, French DJ/producer/trainer Flore as well as Safe Ground’s founder, LB Marszalek fka Juanita. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

​Tour 15 of the Brightest Stars on New Year's Eve

 

The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, in Canis Major. The open cluster M41 is nearby.

“Tour 15 of the sky’s brightest stars all in one night on this New Year’s Eve! This interactive Worldwide Telescope video will show you the way. Every year around the winter solstice, all 15 of the northern night sky’s brightest stars – those first-magnitude and brighter – are above the horizon and visible sometime between sunset and sunrise. Get the New Year off to a good start by coming along with Scott Levine and the Worldwide Telescope on our interactive video tour! ...”

Sky & Telescope (Video)

Black Print

“Printing arrived in the Americas in 1539, in Mexico City. A hundred years later, the first press, owned by Elizabeth Glover, was established in Cambridge Massachusetts shortly after the first slaves arrived in August 1619, in the then English colony of Virginia. Over the next 200 years print grew rapidly to cater for a burgeoning and increasingly literate population. The birth of African American printing and publishing coincides with a new momentum, a rising tide of anti-slavery and immediatist abolitionist movements weary of ‘indefinite deferral’. Their voices were disseminated and amplified through millions of printed pages of broadsides, pamphlets and books. ...”

ILT

 

Frontispiece and title-page to Phillis Wheatley’s  Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Published in London, 1773. Photo from the British Library

​Photos Of BSA 2021

 

John Fekner for Welling Court Mural Project NYC. Queens, NY 

“An earliest New York street artist – socio/political commentator, John Fekner has battled through many wars and storms in this city over the last four decades. Despite the hardships we’re enduring with Covid and economic near-collapse, we trust Fekner when he reassures us simply in his forthright unadorned stencil style. ...”

Brooklyn Street Art

​The Same Old Song: A Guide to Neonoir

 

Night Moves

”When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously mythic and fatalistic about the American crime fiction tradition: the idea of cautionary tales being told at street level. ... The same anxious malaise inflecting detective stories of Depression-era novelists like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—whose twisty plots doubled as picaresque guided tours through a newfangled urban wilderness—would manifest in the flow of postwar thrillers that either literally adapted their contents or else reconfigured their themes for a visual medium. Stories set in moral grey zones and gritty environments were transformed into cinematic shadow plays by filmmakers who recognized and exploited the material’s expressionist potential. ...”

Criterion

2018 September: Neo-noir

 

Chinatown

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Certain Blacks (1970; 2004)

 

“... The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz ensemble that grew out of Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s. The Art Ensemble is notable for its integration of musical styles spanning jazz's entire history and for their multi-instrumentalism, especially the use of what they termed “little instruments” in addition to the traditional jazz lineup; 'little instruments' can include bicycle horns, bells, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and a vast array of percussion instruments (including found objects). The group also uses costumes and face paint in performance. These characteristics combine to make the ensemble's performances as much a visual spectacle as an aural one, with each musician playing from behind a large array of drums, bells, gongs, and other instruments. When playing in Europe in 1969, the group were using more than 500 instruments. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Tracing the Roots: Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Great Black Music, Ancient To The Future (Video/Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Certain Blacks

​Siren (mythology)

 

Odysseus and the Sirens, Roman mosaic, second century AD

“In Greek mythology, the sirens (Ancient Greek: singular: Σειρήν, Seirḗn; plural: Σειρῆνες, Seirênes) were dangerous creatures, who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. It is also said that they can even charm the winds. Roman poets placed them on some small islands called Sirenum scopuli. In some later, rationalized traditions, the literal geography of the ‘flowery’ island of Anthemoessa, or Anthemusa, is fixed: sometimes on Cape Pelorum and at others in the islands known as the Sirenuse, near Paestum, or in Capreae. All such locations were surrounded by cliffs and rocks. ...”

Wikipedia

 

Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) by John William Waterhouse

Various Artists – Cryo Chamber Collaboration – Dagon (2021)

 

“Every year for the last eight, the Cryo Chamber label has worked with a slew of dark ambient artists on an extensive collaboration inspired by the horror works of H.P. Lovecraft. The difference between such a collaboration and a compilation is that this album consists of two very long tracks that were co-authored by all participants, whereas a collaboration is a grouping of individually composed and recorded material. As a result, Dagon offers up a sonically consistent set of drones, melodies, and effects that slowly explore a multi-dimensional musical space. ...”

AMN Reviews (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

Street Views | Kim Beil

 

A bootblack and his customer. Louis Daguerre’s 1838 photograph of Boulevard du Temple, Paris, was the first in history to capture the human form. 

“City streets seemed eerily empty in the early years of photography. During minutes-long exposures, carriage traffic and even ambling pedestrians blurred into nonexistence. The only subjects that remained were those that stood still: buildings, trees, the road itself. In one famous image, a bootblack and his customer appear to be the lone survivors on a Parisian boulevard. When shorter exposure times were finally possible in the late 1850s, a British photographer marveled: ‘Views in distant and picturesque cities will not seem plague-stricken, by the deserted aspect of their streets and squares, but will appear alive with the busy throng of their motley populations.’ ...”

Cabinet Magazine

 

Eadweard Muybridge’s panorama of San Francisco, 1877.

​James White And The Blacks - Off White (1979)

 

"For Off White, James Chance, a veteran of New York's avant-garde no wave scene, recast his seminal band the Contortions as a parody of a soul band, albeit one incorporating the rhythms of disco and funk rather than R&B. Thus, Chance became James White (as a nod to James Brown), the Contortions became the Blacks, and his music, previously a twisted, experimental brand of avant-jazz, became a disco/funk/free jazz hybrid. As bizarre as the fusion of Albert Ayler and Giorgio Moroder might sound, Off White works primarily because Chance commits to both sides of the music. ... By carefully constructing his music with such polar opposites, Chance manages to highlight how both of them have more similarities, especially in rhythm, than would appear at first listen. ...”

allmusic

W - Off White

BOMB: James White a.k.a. James Chance

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: James White and the Blacks-Off White 40:39

2009 December: James Chance, 2011 December: No New York, 2014 July: No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, 2014 July: Bush Tetras, 2015 January: Buy - James Chance and the Contortions (1979), 2015 October: Pat Place, 2016 January: Lost Chance (1981), 2017 January: Twist Your Soul: The Definitive Collection (2010), 2017 April: Contort Yourself / (Tropical) Heatwave full 12” (1979), 2017 May: Filmed by Libin+Cameron: James White & The Blacks (1980 Live Performance Hurrah NightClub), 2017 August: Live Aux Bains Douches - Paris 1980, 2017 September: Soul Exorcism Redux - James Chance & The Contortions (2007)

An Impressionist artist captures the rural feel of early 1900s Upper Manhattan

 

High Bridge at Night, New York City

“Throughout his life, painter Ernest Lawson lived in many places. Born in Halifax in 1873, Lawson moved to New York at 18 to take classes at the Art Students League. Over the years he studied and worked in Connecticut, Paris, Colorado, Spain, New Mexico, and finally Florida, where his body was found on Miami Beach in 1939—possibly a homicide or suicide. But if there was one location that seemed to intrigue him, it was Upper Manhattan—the bridges and houses, the woods, rugged terrain, and of course, the rivers. From 1898 to about 1908, while fellow Ashcan School artists focused their attention on crowded sidewalks and gritty tenements, Lawson lived in sparsely populated Washington Heights, drawing out the rural beauty and charm of the last part of Manhattan to be subsumed into the cityscape. ...”

Ephemeral New York

 

Ice in the RIver

The 10 Worst Americans of 2021

 

From top left, clockwise: Rupert Murdoch, Sen. Joe Manchin, President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

“At this time of year we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. But we’ve been trying that for millennia, and the results have been unsatisfactory. So let’s discard the accumulated wisdom of all humanity’s spiritual traditions and focus our mental energy instead on how much we dislike various awful people around us. Merry Christmas. ...”

The_Intercept

​Edward Said’s Orientalism and Its Afterlives

 

A painting by Henry Martens portraying the battle of Ferozeshah in the First Anglo-Sikh War, which resulted in defeat and partial subjugation of the Sikh empire to the British.

“Few works have had a greater influence on the current left than Edward Said’s Orientalism. In the first instance, it has become the lodestone for critical scholarship around the colonial experience and imperialism. But more expansively, in its status as a founding text of postcolonial studies, its imprint can be discerned across the moral sciences — in race studies, history, cultural theory, and even political economy. Indeed, it is hard to think of many books that have had a greater influence on critical scholarship over the past half century. There are some respects in which Said’s placement of colonialism at the center of the modern era has had a salutary effect, not just on scholarship, but also on politics. ...”

Jacobin

What does ‘postcolonial’ mean?

2018 April: Orientalism - Edward W. Said (1978), 2019 January: Orientalism’s Equestrian Eye, 2020 April: A Journey into the World of the Ottomans