Deep Art Nature

Burnside: ‘It’s Not Much Over Here’

The Burnside neighborhood in March 2022.

“It only makes sense to arrive in Burnside by train, at the Metra Electric’s Chesterfield stop, on 91st Street. Burnside is defined by railroads: the Illinois Central to the west, the Rock Island Line to the south, the New York Central to the east. They form a triangle of tracks so compact that Burnside is the smallest of Chicago’s 77 community areas: 970 acres in size, with a population of 2,000. ... St. Mark’s copper dome is topped with a Ukrainian cross, two straight cross beams, one crooked. A cornerstone on the church’s addition is marked with another such cross, and the date 1962. The church was built in 1913, as Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Church, to minister to immigrants from Dobra, Ukraine, who arrived in Chicago to labor on the Illinois Central. ...”

Chicago

Crossing Paths with the Spirit of Sylvia Plath – Helen Humphreys

“... Before I went to Britain, I had devoured Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ariel. I especially loved the poetry, with its sharpness and candor, and so, when Plath’s Collected Poems were first published, I skipped writing for the day and made the one-hour train journey to London to buy a copy. I read the poems slowly and often out loud, saying the words over and over again, like a spell, to ward off the four p.m. darkness, the winter, the acute loneliness. I came to know the poems intimately. The words drilled their way into my brain, and even now, I can quote large sections of them from memory. I finished Plath’s book and my own. ...”

LitHub

On Sylvia Plath’s Creative Breakthrough at the Yaddo Artists’ Colony by Heather Clark

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, 2021 July: Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Cards, 2022 January: Foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition written by Frieda Hughes

Bide denounces Russian invasion, casting it as part of a decades-long attempt to crush democracies.

Aljazeera: Two rockets fired in the first attack injured five people, according to Lviv's governor

“WARSAW — President Biden delivered a forceful denunciation of Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Saturday, declaring ‘for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power’ and casting the military clash in Europe as the ‘test of all time’ in a decades-long battle to defend democracy. In a speech from a castle that served for centuries as a home for Polish monarchs, Mr. Biden described the face-off with Mr. Putin as a moment he has long warned about: a clash of competing global ideologies, of liberty versus oppression. ‘Russia’s choice of war is an example one of the oldest human impulses — using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control,’ he declared before a crowd of hundreds of people in the courtyard of the Royal Castle and several thousand more outside its stone walls, watching on a large screen. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: The Making of Vladimir Putin

Aljazeera: Russian rockets hit Ukraine’s Lviv in two attacks (Video)

The Baffler: The View from Warsaw

****ARTFORUM: Letters from Kyiv - A wartime diary by Yevgenia Belorusets, KYLV: THE WAR DIARY

NY Times: Germany says it is moving quickly to cut the cord on Russian energy. (Video)

Germany’s vice chancellor and economic minister estimated that Germany could be independent of Russian gas by the middle of 2024.

Exiles - Max Richter (2021)

“The pianist has spent his career reflecting on many of the senseless tragedies taking place in the world. The Kosovo War, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, the 7/7 bombings, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp are all issues he’s grappled within his music. His latest album, Exiles, which features a 33-minute title track composed as the score to Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s ballet Singulière Odyssée, tackles the refugee crisis. ‘I was trying to get away from the political, the language of conflict, finger-pointing, and name-calling to get to the heart of the emotional question, which is really a basic human matter of compassion,’ says the 55-year-old musician. ...”

Max Richter on the Meaning Behind his New Album Exiles (Video)

Guardian - Composer-pianist Max Richter: ‘Creativity is activism’

Discogs (Video), udiscover (Audio), amazon

‘Like a Weapon’: Ukrainians Use Social Media to Stir Resistance

Empty strollers were placed in Lviv, Ukraine, last week to represent the children who had been killed during Russia’s invasion.

“KRAKOW, Poland — A peace activist in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv rolled 109 baby strollers into a square last week to represent the children who had been killed in the war with Russia. Hours later, the image was available to millions on their phones. A little girl sheltering in a basement in Kyiv sang a haunting rendition of ‘Let it Go,’ from the movie ‘Frozen,’ and the clip sped around the world. A cellist performed a somber Bach suite on a street in Kharkiv, with debris and the windowless facade of a damaged building serving as his backdrop, and thousands watched. These heart-wrenching glimpses of life in Ukraine since the Russian invasion have become powerful ammunition in an information war playing out on social media. For some, the messaging has become a crucial battleground complementing the Ukrainian military’s performance on the physical front lines, as images and information ripple out on Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and TikTok. ...”

NY Times

Ukraine war in photos, March 24: One month of war

Aljazeera: Russian focus on ‘liberating’ Donbas hints at shift in strategy (Video)

The intercept_: .Why Aren't We Calling for Diplomacy to End War in Ukraine? (Audio)

The Paris Review - Conversations to the Tune of Air-Raid Sirens: Odesa Writers on Literature in Wartime

Odesa Monument to the Duke de Richelieu.

Ahmed Abdul-Malik pioneering Arabic jazz

[Ahmed] Pays Tribute to a Titan of Islamic Jazz: “An eruption of cyclic motifs, pounding clusters, and insistent grooves, [Ahmed]’s Nights On Saturn is an inspired reimagining of Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s pioneering Arabic jazz. It’s the third album from the Anglo-French quartet, which consists of pianist Pat Thomas, alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, bassist Joel Grip, and drummer Antonin Gerbal, and their first for American label Astral Spirits—timely recognition for one of the most adventurous groups in contemporary music. A singular musician, the Oxford-based Thomas has been active since the 1980s, bringing his avant-garde pianism and wild electronics to collaborations with Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Orphy Robinson and Irreversible Entanglements, whose bassist Luke Stewart provides the sleeve notes to Nights On Saturn. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

W - Ahmed Abdul-Malik

Discogs

Spiritmuse Records presents Ahmed Abdul-Malik (Audio) 1:31:43

Russia’s Attacks on Civilian Targets Have Obliterated Everyday Life in Ukraine

“In the weeks since Russia began its invasion, at least 1,500 civilian buildings, structures and vehicles in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed. More than 953 civilians have been killed, including at least 78 children, according to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, who noted that the real toll was likely to be considerably higher. The map above shows some of the buildings and other civilian infrastructure attacked in the first weeks of the war. This devastation, identified and cataloged by The New York Times, included at least 23 hospitals and other health-care infrastructure, 330 schools, 27 cultural buildings, 98 commercial buildings, including at least 11 related to food or agriculture, and 900 houses and apartment buildings. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera: The human toll of the Russia-Ukraine war - One month of war through the eyes of its people (Video)

Hegemony Changes Everything

Marco Borrelli - Antonio Gramsci

“... The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture—wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as ‘senso comune‘ (common sense)—that the ruling classes stay as such. This concept would become known as ‘cultural hegemony.’ In his early writings for socialist newspapers like Avanti! and later in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci analyzed folklore, serialized novels, theater, devotional literature—anything he could get his hands on in the prison library—to search for the ways that capitalist logic appeared as a self-evident truth (not some secret hiding in a remodeled bathroom). ...”

BOOKFORUM

2013 July: Gramsci Monument, 2018 January: The Fate of the Party, 2020 December: Gramsci in the postcolony, 2021 June: Bringing Antonio Gramsci Back to Turin

The History of Venus in Air, Rock, and Water

“Presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference usually focus on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and comets. But at this year’s symposium, an entire day’s worth of talks were dedicated instead to Venus. Why is Earth’s “evil twin” so hot right now?The unofficial end of NASA’s Venus program, following the completion of the Magellan mission, was part reactionary disappointment, part practicality. Instead of a primordial jungle teeming with alien life, we had found an impassable, barren hellscape. Departments all over the world shifted their focus to Mars, because although it’s further off, it’s a much easier planet to visit and study. ...”

Sky & Telescope

As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership

A satellite image showing a Ukrainian strike on Russian equipment at an airport in Kherson, Ukraine, last week.

“In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be ‘pointless and extremely dangerous.’ It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten ‘the existence of Russia itself as a state.’ To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera - Ukraine war: Why is Russia encouraging foreign fighters to join? (Video)

NY Times: Odessa and the Ukraine That Should Have Been

Open Culture: Marina Abramović Brings Back Her Iconic Performance Art Piece, The Artist Is Present, to Raise Money for Ukraine (Video)

NY Times: As Big Shows of Russian Art End in Europe, Some Wonder What’s Next

Africa is a Country: Ukraine and the left’s imperialist economism

Worm Moon - Nina MacLaughlin

Vinternatt - Nikolai Astrup

“What is the moon? The moon is a natural satellite, and it reflects the light of the sun. The moon is 4.5 billion years old. The moon is, on average, 240,000 miles away from this Earth. The moon is the fifth largest of the 210 that swing around the planets in this solar system, and the second densest, after Jupiter’s moon Io. The moon is made of iron and nickel at its heavy metal core; lighter crystals of solidified lava, like olivine and pyroxene, make up its mantle; and the lunar soil that makes up the surface crust is an even lighter mix of minerals and metals known as regolith, including anorthositic plagioclase feldspar, dusty and granular. Leave a footprint in it. ...”

The Paris Review

2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon, 2021 August: Sturgeon Moon, 2021 September: Harvest Moon

The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone

People examine the damage after shelling of a shopping center, in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 21, 2022.

“In destructive power, the behemoths of the Cold War dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington’s biggest test blast was 1,000 times as large. Moscow’s was 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea was to deter strikes with threats of vast retaliation — with mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar was so high that nuclear strikes came to be seen as unthinkable.Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable. ...”

NY Times

POLITICO: The Real Goal of Kremlin Disinformation Isn’t What You Think

The Intercept_: What Biden Got Right About Arming Ukraine — and Wrong About Sanctioning Russia

Harpers: The Battle for Kyiv - Photographs from Ukraine

NY Times - Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

NY Times: Will War Make Europe’s Switch to Clean Energy Even Harder?

The Belchatow coal-fired power plant in Poland, run by PGE, is the largest of its kind in Europe.

H-O-R-S-E

“The game of H-O-R-S-E is played by 2 or more players. The order of turns is established before the game starts. The player whose turn is first is given control, which means they must attempt to make a basket in a particular way of their choosing, explaining to the other players beforehand what the requirements of the shot are. If that player is successful, every subsequent player must attempt that same shot according to its requirements. If a player fails to duplicate the shot, they acquire a letter, starting with H and moving rightward through the word ‘Horse’. ...”

W – H-O-R-S-E

The Game Theory of HORSE

How to play horse in basketball

How Surrealism Has Influenced the Animation Industry

Back Row, left to right: Man Ray, Jean Arp, Tanguy, Andre Breton. Front Row, left to right: Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel.

“The surrealism movement was founded in Paris by some writers and artist who wanted to use people’s subconscious minds to unlock their imagination. The movement was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud. The surrealists themselves thought that the unconscious mind blocked people’s imaginations. By the surrealists basing their ideas on the power of the imagination, this indicated that they were influenced by the traditional Romanticism movement, whose key ideas were based on emotions and intuitions. However, the surrealists were radically different to the romantics because they had the theory that the revelations may be found to be on the streets and in everyday life. ...”

Ryan O'Leary

The Surrealist Compliment Generator

How Russia’s mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin’s war

For millions of internally displaced people, Lviv is the gateway to safety, however fleeting, in the west.

“The snarled up 65km Russian convoy that was stuck for days outside Kyiv neatly illustrated Moscow’s misplaced belief that it could achieve a lightning-fast victory in Ukraine. Western military analysts say Russia’s leadership initially thought its ‘special military operation’ would reach the capital and other big Ukrainian cities in days, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to capitulate and allow a puppet administration to be installed. ‘It’s clear that Russia was pursuing regime change in Ukraine,’ said Michael Kofman, Russia studies director at CNA, a US think-tank. ‘Regime change operations are often derived of hubris and bad assumptions — and they usually go terribly wrong.’ ...”

Financial Times

NY Times: An Ancient City Transformed by War

Aljazeera: Russia and Ukraine fight for control of besieged Mariupol (Video)

Racist Europe – Ukraine, human rights & the wretched of the earth

How to send messages in Ukraine if the internet shuts down

This 1899 Gilded Age fairy-tale mansion on Fifth Avenue has had only 4 owners

“New Yorkers have always used real estate to showcase their wealth and position. But in Gilded Age Manhattan, the one-upmanship reached crazy new heights—with rich Fifth Avenoodles, as they were mockingly called by the general public, constantly outdoing their neighbors by building more ostentatious mansions fronting Central Park. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has tried to create an alternative reality.

“In the tense weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian officials denied that it planned anything of the sort, denouncing the United States and its NATO allies for stoking panic and anti-Russian hatred. When it did invade, the officials denied it was at war. Since then, the Kremlin has cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a ‘special military operation’ against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children. Disinformation in wartime is as old as war itself, but today war unfolds in the age of social media and digital diplomacy. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Ukraine War Threatens to Cause a Global Food Crisis

BOOKFORUM - Read for Ukraine: A Literary Dispatch from Kyiv to New York (Video)

The Essential Value—and Deep Cost—of Reporting From

***ARTFORUM: Letters from Kyiv - A wartime diary by Yevgenia Belorusets

Sophia, a medical student, helps as a paramedic in the volunteer army.

William Parker Quartets: Meditation / Resurrection (2017)

“Bassist William Parker's Quartets (note the plural) presented here are, of course just a fraction of the ensembles he is currently organizing and working in. It is these 2 quartets that manifest the Yin and Yang that is Parker. The question might be, is his Quartet of trumpeter Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, alto saxophonist Rob Brown, and drummer Hamid Drake, the Yang, or positive/active/male principal in nature, and his In Order To Survive quartet with pianist Cooper-Moore switching with Nelson the Yin, or negative/passive/female force? These two discs, Meditation / Resurrection, recorded on the same day with two differing approaches, exemplify the spiraling flow of Parker's music. ...”

All About Jazz (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

amazon

YouTube: In Order To Survive - Sunrise In East Harlem

2022 January: A Guide to William Parker, 2022 February: Raining On The Moon – Corn Meal Dance (2007)

Russia’s Brutality in Ukraine Has Roots in Earlier Conflicts

Ukrainian emergency workers at a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol last week.

“As Russian artillery and rockets land on Ukrainian hospitals and apartment blocks, devastating residential districts with no military value, the world is watching with horror what is, for Russia, an increasingly standard practice. Its forces conducted similar attacks in Syria, bombing hospitals and other civilian structures as part of Russia’s intervention to prop up that country’s government. Moscow went even further in Chechnya, a border region that had sought independence in the Soviet Union’s 1991 breakup. During two formative wars there, Russia’s artillery and air forces turned city blocks to rubble and its ground troops massacred civilians in what was widely seen as a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population into submission. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: The Battle for Kyiv Looms as a Long and Bloody Conflict

VOX: Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map

PBS - Zelenskyy: The Man Who Took On Putin (Video) 25:40

The Intercept_: Why Are There So Few Marina Ovsyannikovas - In Russia and Everywhere Else? (Video)

Aïda Gómez Sculpts Housing for Squirrels and Birds in Roma Verde MXCD

“An earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 reduced much of the Roma neighborhood to rubble, the remaining structures largely empty even now because of their unsafe condition. ‘Everywhere there are people living on the street while houses stand empty,’ says Spanish artist Aïda Gómez, ‘This is something I cannot understand. I believe that we are doing something wrong here.’ During her art residency in the neighborhood at Huerto Roma Verde at the end of last year, Gómez decided to draw attention to the housing problem in the public sphere using her education in sculpting at Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin; She built a series of multispecies houses that serve to provide shelter from the elements. ...”

Brooklyn Street Art

“Multispecies real state”. Huerto Roma Verde Residency. Roma, Mexico City.

Laurent Bardainne & Tigre d’Eau Douce — Hymne au Soleil

“Paris-based composer, bandleader and tenor saxophonist Laurent Bardainne returns with his quintet project Tigre d’eau Douce, following the group’s impressive 2020 debut Love Is Everywhere, with a brilliant new cosmic jazz album on Heavenly Sweetness, titled Hymne au Soleil. Building off the core music elements of Love Is Everywhere, this superb new 11-track recording blends together Bardainne’s soaring saxophone lines with soulful B3 organ melodies, spacey synths, funky bass grooves, and layered percussion rhythms. The album ranges from spiritual and meditative-like astral jazz to tracks geared up for the dancefloor. ...”

beat caffeine (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Laurent Bardainne & Tigre d'Eau Douce - Hymne au Soleil 1 / 16

Citizens of Kyiv

Kateryna Hryshchenko

“In the weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv, the capital, became a city transformed. Much of its population evacuated. New defense units gathered and took up arms. Impromptu social support — field kitchens, aid stations, bomb shelters, evacuation convoys — sprouted into functional shapes. The city endured intermittent bombardment throughout. This altered streetscape became the uneasy milieu of Alexander Chekmenev, a Ukrainian documentary and portrait photographer who since the 1990s has visually chronicled his country’s post-Soviet life. ...”

NY Times

Chomsky: Peace Talks in Ukraine “Will Get Nowhere” If US Keeps Refusing to Join

Voice: Fear and Loathing – the View From Moscow

e-flux: A T T E N T I O N ! Air Raid Sirens in Kyiv!

NY Times: Opinion | Why You Haven’t Heard About the Secret Cyberwar in Ukraine

Sky & Telescope: Russia-Ukraine War: Impacts on Space (Updates)

до війни—do viyny—before the war

Copyright is colonialism - Boima Tucker

“Africa Is a Country Radio continues its literary theme for its third season on Worldwide FM. The fourth installment takes a look at the politics of copyright, and the long history of resistance (or indifference) to that regime from the global margins. Larisa Mann aka DJ Ripley takes a look at the specific case of Jamaica in her book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power. This episode is essential for anyone who has an interest in music industry futures, from NFTs to streaming and beyond. We open the show with a selection of (colonial/copyright) resistance music, and DJ Ripley takes us out with a selection of classic jungle and dancehall tunes that inspired her work as a musician and academic. Listen below, or on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.“

Africa Is a Country (Audio)

George Inness - Green Landscape (1886)

“While working on this landscape, Inness shifted the female figure, originally positioned in the middle of the canvas, farther to the left. In the finished work, the shepherdess and grazing calf are perfectly balanced on either side of the vertical line of the central tree. This subtle adjustment typifies the care Inness took to enhance what he called the ‘great spiritual principle of harmony’ in his compositions.“

The Clark Art Institute

2009 August: George Inness, 2008 August: Hudson River School

Russia Is Destroying Kharkiv

And the university gym was destroyed.

“Last month, Dmytro Kuzubov put on his headphones and walked around Kharkiv for hours. He felt that the war would start soon and he wanted to visit some of his favorite places. Kharkiv is his hometown: a vibrant, youthful city of nearly 1.5 million people steeped in academia, art and literature. The attacks started a few days later. Unable to take control of the city, Russia has resorted to destroying it. As in Syria and Chechnya, Russia aims to demoralize the city’s inhabitants with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower. It is following a similar plan in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv. ‘The most horrible thing was the whistle of jets. I will remember them all my life,’ said Mr. Kuzubov, who has since fled Kharkiv, along with hundreds of thousands of others. ...”

NY Times

VOX: The biggest funder of anti-nuclear war programs is taking its money away

The Nation: Stop the Fighting in Ukraine

NY Times: As Russia Digs In, What’s the Risk of Nuclear War? ‘It’s Not Zero.’

POLITCO: Biden will talk to Xi Friday amid Russian war in Ukraine

This was a kindergarten classroom.

Using Thoreau’s Notebooks to Understand Climate Change

Site of Thoreau's Hut, Concord, Mass

“Walden was more than a thought experiment. During Henry David Thoreau’s contemplative time by the pond, he recorded countless observations on spring flowering and bird arrivals. These notes are the backbone for a recent study that examines how the area surrounding Walden Pond has been gradually impacted by climate change. In a 2016 study, a team of scientists from Boston University examined Thoreau’s records and compared them to their own leaf-out (dates on which leaf buds begin to open) and spring flower notes from the same area, showing how citizen science can help scientists better understand how climate change is impacting ecosystems worldwide. ...”

JSTOR Daily

2020 April: Henry David Thoreau - I, 2020 May: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal - II, 2022 January: Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom

Thoreau’s 1846 map of Walden Pond

Ghetto-ology Dub -- Sugar Minott (1979/2000

“... His roots side is most visible on the Ghetto-o-logy, Black Roots and African Soldier LP's. Ghetto-o-logy came out in 1979 and established his name in the reggae world. The musicianship is faultless, but the album is still outstanding today for the quality of the lyrics in songs like ‘Man Hungry,’ ‘The People Ought to Know,’ ‘Dreader Than Dread’ and of course the title-track which makes the claim that to Minott the ghetto was a university from which he graduated in ‘ghetto-ology’ whereas other people majored in science or biology. The jazz-like arrangements on tracks like ‘Walking Through the Ghetto’ distinguished the album from many other roots albums of the day and Minott's singing was full of passion. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Ghetto-Ology + Dub (2000) Roots Reggae 1 / 10