​The new phase of the war in Ukraine, explained

 

People walk down a debris-laden Mariupol avenue on April 12.

“This week, the new phase of Russia’s war in Ukraine has taken form. It is a war over control of the Donbas, the eastern Ukrainian region where Russia has been supporting a separatist rebellion since 2014. Whereas the war — which began with the Russian invasion on February 24 — previously spanned the country, centering on a Russian push to seize Ukraine’s capital and most populous city, Kyiv, its newest offensive is narrowly focused on a region several hundred miles to the east. ‘The Russian troops have begun the battle for the Donbas,’ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in a Tuesday address.This is, in one sense, a smart move by the Russians. ...”

VOX

Aljazeera: At Venice Biennale, Ukrainian artists defy Russia’s invasion (Video)

Guardian - ‘We are fighting for our culture’: Ukrainian artists head to Venice Biennale

Guardian - Empty galleries and fleeing artists: Russia’s cultural uncoupling from the west (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | Acknowledging the Limits of Sanctions

Jacobin: The US Has No Idea Where Its Ukrainian Military Aid Is Going

 

People hide in one of the official underground shelters during an air alarm in Lviv, Ukraine, on March 22. - Ukraine war in photos, April 21: Life underground

Celebrate Spring with the Lyrids

 

“Lyra, the Lyre (an ancient kind of harp), gives its name to the annual Lyrid meteor shower. While they’re no summer Perseids — more like a gentle April shower — the Lyrids reliably return every year to add a little pizzazz to the early spring sky. Since the last significant shower (the Quadrantids) occurred in early January, these meteor-starved eyes welcome their return. The term 'Lyrids' is something of a misnomer because the shower's radiant — the point in the sky from which the meteors emanate — is located 8° southwest of Vega (Lyra's brightest star) in eastern Hercules. ...”

Sky & Telescope

NY Times: Watch the Lyrid Meteor Shower Peak in Night Skies

When to look up at the sky for the Lyrid meteor shower

​‘This is rarely taught’: an exhibition examining African-Atlantic history

 

Lois Mailou Jones - The Green Door, 1981

“Earlier that day she had presided over the US Senate confirmation of the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who would mark the occasion by quoting poetry: ‘I am the dream and the hope of the slave.’ Then, in the evening, Vice-President Kamala Harris headed to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a reception celebrating the opening of Afro-Atlantic Histories, a landmark exhibition that explores the brutal history of the transatlantic slave trade and cultural legacy of the African diaspora. ...”

Guardian

NGA: Afro-Atlantic Histories (Video)

amazon

​‘I Don’t Think It’s Going to Stop in Ukraine’: 10 Americans on Putin’s War

 

“The conventional wisdom is that Americans, scarred by the country’s involvement in wars for the last two decades, are by and large done with all that. When Russia invaded Ukraine, there was never a question of whether President Biden would send in U.S. troops to assist the Ukrainians. This wasn’t just because of a war-weary public: Pitting two nuclear powers against each other was incomprehensible. But in our latest Times Opinion focus group, 10 Americans — representing a range of political parties, ideologies and backgrounds — were clearly struggling with what the United States could or should do about the war and the daily evidence of brutality that increasingly alarms them. They had thought a lot about leadership, grit and hard decisions, especially as shown by Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and about how much they are willing to sacrifice, financially and otherwise, as the fallout from the war and Western sanctions continue. ...”

NY Times - Opinion (Audio/Video) 1:21:04

GRID: U.S. social media giants vowed to remove Russian war propaganda. It’s still there.

W - Media portrayal of the Ukrainian crisis

Aljazeera: US unveils new sponsorship programme for Ukrainian refugees (Video)

NY Times: He Was a Penniless Donor to the Far Right. He Was Also a Russian Spy.

 

Newspapers for sale at a shop in Bratislava, Slovakia. Outlets friendly to Russia routinely portray it as a champion of peace and lodestar of Christian values, while casting NATO as a warmongering menace.

Henry Cow - Concerts (1975)

 

“Avant-garde rock & roll of 1970s vintage -- especially, it must be said, of the British variety -- doesn't typically age very well. And although Henry Cow was quite a unique ensemble, even by the standards of the 1970s avant-garde, it would be silly to deny that much of the music captured on these two live discs (originally released on LP in 1976) sounds pretty dated. But this is much more true of the song-based material than the more free-form, improvised music, which still sounds remarkably fresh and surprising 25 years later. And even the more period-specific material is of very high quality: singer Dagmar Krause (previously of Slapp Happy, later of the Art Bears) delivers fine performances on ‘Beautiful As the Moon/Terrible As an Army With Banners’ and ‘Bad Alchemy,’ as does bassist John Greaves. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

BBC Review

W - Concerts (Henry Cow album)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Beautiful as the Moon; Terrible as an Army with Banners / Nirvana for Mice / Ottawa Song / Gloria Gloom (Video)

YouTube: Concerts 11 videos

​Keeping Scores: Women Writing Music

 

Sinéad Gleeson.

“In 2019 I met with Sinéad Gleeson ahead of her Edinburgh Book Festival appearance to interview her about music in Constellations, her book of essays on and of the body. ‘Music,’ she says in the book, ‘binds us together’. I felt strongly when reading it that it was in fact music that bound the book together. I was surprised when she told me that I was the first person to say this because the pages seep sound and vibrate with the pivotal music memories that we carry in our bodies, in how we map our lives. She told me then that she was working on a project that she couldn’t reveal but was sure I would love. That project was This Woman’s Work, a collection of essays on music, edited by Gleeson with Kim Gordon, written by and about women. She was right. ...”

The Quietus

This Woman’s Work

 

Kim Gordon.

​In the fog of dementia, one grandmother learns again and again that her country is at war.

 

Many elderly Ukrainians with dementia have woken up to a new war, day after day.

“Every morning, Olga Boichak’s grandmother wakes up at her home in western Ukraine, turns on the television and discovers anew that her country is at war.Panicked and flashing back to childhood memories of bombings during World War II, she starts packing to evacuate, her granddaughter said. Her husband of six decades hides the house keys and reassures her everything will be all right, and that their home is the safest place for them. Before long, the war, the fear and the reassurance will dissipate into the fog of dementia — as have all new memories in recent years. Until the next morning, or the next air raid siren, when the reality of the invasion that has subsumed Ukraine for more than 50 days will find her once more. ...”

NY Times

Ukraine war: Russia launches attacks along 300-mile eastern front as battle for Donbas begins (Video)

Guardian - ‘Fortress in a city’: steel plant becomes Ukrainian hold-out in Mariupol

Aljazeera - Russian forces seize Kreminna in eastern Ukraine, says governor (Video)

NY Times: The U.S. Races to Arm Ukraine With Heavier, More Advanced Weaponry

Charles Olsen: “The poet as pedagogue / Is the teacher”

 

“Charles Olson was a didactic poet, poetical pedagogue, a ‘poet-teacher’ par excellence. This inclination, however, must be understood as more than the mere juxtaposition or conjunction of two separate but equal vocations. For Olson, to be a poet was perforce to be a teacher and visa versa, the two inextricably entwined, the practices of one intending the principles of the other. Pedagogy necessitates a poetics, which I mean in both its narrowest sense—as the art, theory or study of any versified literary text—as well as more broadly—as the discursive formation of concepts. Olson believed tacitly that, since all communication is educative and poetry is the highest form of communication, poetry is naturally the preeminent means of educative communication. ...”

Black Mountain Research

Plan for the Operation of Black Mountain College after 1956, Charles Olson, ca. 1954

2009 January: Charles Olson, 2009 April: Rockport Harbor, 2010 September: Charles Olson: The Art of Poetry No. 12, 2011 July: Charles Olson: February 21, 1957, 2012 June: In Which We Lather Our Sensibilities At Length, 2013 January: Mass.Charles Olson, 2013 May: The Maximus Poems, 2013 November: A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson , 2015 March: "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" (1950), 2017 May: The Collected Poems of Charles Olson edited by George Butterick, 2017 May: Gloucester HarborWalk #: Charles Olson 3rd Letter on Georges, unwritten to Schooner Footage, 2020 March: A Trip to Charles Olson’s Gloucester, 2021 May: Projective Verse (1959)

​ROAR is closing down, but the struggle goes on

 

“A little over a decade ago, when the world was just emerging from the ruins of the financial crisis, two Dutch guys met in an Amsterdam apartment and set out on a mission: to build an online platform to cover the emerging wave of global uprisings. ... There was an urgent need for in-depth coverage and critical analysis of these historic developments, but few online platforms capable of providing it. It was in this context that we (the two Dutch guys) decided to set up a new activist publication, dedicated to providing grassroots perspectives on the global struggle for real democracy. We called it Reflections on a Revolution — or ROAR. Over the next years, this activist publication grew into a thriving online magazine with a diverse community of contributors and a growing international readership. ...”

ROAR

Ukraine’s Greatest Living Filmmaker Explains What the Images Online Aren’t Showing

“Although he’s long been acclaimed on the international festival circuit, with five movies at Cannes in the past decade, it has taken the war in Ukraine to bring Sergei Loznitsa his due attention in the U.S. His documentary Babi Yar. Context, about a notorious massacre of Jews that took place outside Kyiv during World War II, opened in the U.S. last week, and his 2018 movie Donbass, a fiction feature set during the 2014 conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Russian separatists, will see a belated theatrical release beginning April 8. New York’s IFC Center is pairing the latter with screenings of Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature and Maidan, the latter a documentary about the uprising that unseated Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, part of the anti-corruption movement that eventually swept Volodymyr Zelensky into office. ...”

SLATE

Guardian: 20 of the best films to help understand what’s happening in Ukraine (Video)

NY Times: Russia and Ukraine Have Long Been This Filmmaker’s Subject

W - Cinema of Ukraine

The European film industry reacts to the Russian attack on Ukraine

VOX: Will this grim satire help you understand what’s happening in Ukraine? Kind of., YouTube: Donbass new trailer clip official from Cannes

An Introduction to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Radical Nigerian Bandleader, Political Hero, and Creator of Afrobeat

 

“I cannot write about Nigerian bandleader, saxophonist, and founder of the Afrobeat sound, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with any degree of objectivity, whatever that might mean. Because hearing him counts as one of the greatest musical eye-openers of my life: a feeling of pure elation that still has not gone away. It was not an original discovery by any means. Millions of people could say the same, and far more of those people are African fans with a much better sense of Fela’s mission. In the U.S., the playfully-delivered but fervent urgency of his activist lyricism requires footnotes. Afrobeat fandom in many countries does not have to personally reckon with the history from which Fela and his band emerged—a Nigeria wracked in the 60s by a military coup, civil war, and rule by a succession of military juntas. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

The Ringer – “We Can’t Die, We’re With Fela”: The Revolutionary Greatness of the Black President

#AfroNation: Fela’s Vagabonds In Power (Video)

W – Afrobeat

How Did Roman Aqueducts Work?: The Most Impressive Achievement of Ancient Rome’s Infrastructure, Explained

 

“At its peak, ancient Rome enjoyed a variety of comforts that, once lost, would take centuries to recover. This process, of course, constitutes much of the story of Western civilization. Though some knowledge didn’t survive in any useful form, some of it remained lastingly embodied. The mighty ruins of Roman aqueducts, for example, continued to stand all across the former Empire. Together they once constituted a vast water-delivery system, one of whose construction and operation it took humanity quite some time to regain a functional understanding. Today, you can learn about both in the video from ancient-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan just above. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

​Atrocities in Ukraine War Have Deep Roots in Russian Military

 

Tetiana Petrovna reacted in horror in a garden where Roman Havryliuk, his brother Serhiy Dukhli and an unidentified victim were found on April 4 in Bucha, Ukraine.

“In a photograph from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, a woman stands in the yard of a house, her hand covering her mouth in horror, the bodies of three dead civilians scattered before her. When Aset Chad saw that picture, she started shaking and hurtled 22 years back in time. In February 2000, she walked into her neighbor’s yard in Chechnya and glimpsed the bodies of three men and a woman who had been shot repeatedly in front of her 8-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers had swept their village and murdered at least 60 people, raped at least six women and plundered the victims’ gold teeth, human rights observers found. ...”

NY Times

W - Battle of Kyiv (2022)

Aljazeera: Russia’s Putin says Western sanctions have failed (Video)

POLITICO: Ukraine refugees’ trauma creates ‘crisis on top of a crisis’ for Eastern Europe

It Looks Like Genocide

 

A participant displays a placard reading 'Say no to genocide' during a protest of pro-Ukrainian activists in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin on April 6, 2022.

An independence revue

 

"This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, we wrap up our literary theme with a show inspired by Chinua Achebe, and take a listen to music from the post-independence era. We start out with music from the early 1960s, the point at which many African nations first came into being (after many years of imagining what nationhood might mean), where we can hear how some of the threads of national identity we have today were formed—borrowing global influences, and inserting local perspectives into both the form and content of the music. ... The music recordings from throughout this era is some of the most inspired, popular, and globally influential the African continent has ever produced.Listen below, or on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.”

Africa Is a Country (Audio)

2012 October: Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebet

​Step Into the Morningside Heights rowdy resort district dubbed ‘Little Coney Island’

 

The elevated IRT Ninth Avenue Line, 110th Street station, New York 1905.

“Since 1892, West 110th Street has also been known as Cathedral Parkway. It’s a heavenly name for a stretch of Manhattan that had a citywide reputation for vice and sin at the turn of the 20th century. ‘Little Coney Island,’ as this quickly developing enclave of Morningside Heights was dubbed by residents, police, and politicians, consisted of a few blocks of newly opened pleasure gardens set in wood-frame buildings that attracted carousing crowds of fun-seeking men and women. ...”

Ephemeral New York

‘They Are Gone, Vanished’: Missing Persons Haunt Ukrainian Village

 

A cellar in Husarivka, Ukraine. At least three skulls were recovered there earlier this month.

“HUSARIVKA, Ukraine — The cows wouldn’t stop screaming. Russian soldiers had occupied this remote village in eastern Ukraine for about two weeks and were using a farm as a base. But the animals at the farm hadn’t been fed. Their incessant bleating was wearing on both occupiers and townspeople. A group of five residents from Husarivka, an unassuming agricultural village of around 1,000 people, went to tend the cattle. ... What transpired in Husarivka has all the horrifying elements of the more widely publicized episodes involving Russian brutality: indiscriminate killings, abuse and torture taking place over the better part of a month.Human rights workers around Kyiv, the capital, are gathering evidence of Russian atrocities, hoping to build the case for war crimes. ...”

NY Times

 

A list of people in Husarivka who died, some from natural causes, or went missing during the occupation.

The World - Edited by Joel Sloman, Anne Waldman, and others

 “In the Spring of 1966, I couldn’t wait to graduate from Bennington, and get back ‘home’ (which meant Macdougal Street and subsequently St. Mark’s Place) and the ‘literary life.’ I had edited Silo magazine at school, and Lewis Warsh and I had founded Angel Hair magazine and books at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in the summer of 1965. The fall of 1966 was a critical time for me with Frank O’Hara’s tragic death, but I was also hired as an assistant to the newly christened Poetry Project, a place where ‘only’ poets could get jobs. Troubadour translator and New York poet Paul Blackburn had hosted open readings in the Parish Hall at St. Mark’s the previous year, after moving the scene from the Metro coffeehouse. ...”

from a secret location

The Lives of Others - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2006)

 

“The Lives of Others ... is a 2006 German drama film written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck marking his feature film debut. The plot is about the monitoring of East Berlin residents by agents of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his superior Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Dreyman's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland. The film was released in Germany on 23 March 2006. ...”

Wikipedia

Guardian: How we made The Lives of Others

NY Times: A Fugue for Good German Men - A.O. Scott

YouTube: The Lives Of Others Trailer, A Film in Three Minutes

2013 July: The Legend of Rita - Volker Schlondorff (2001), 2013 August: Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), 2013 August: Der Tunnel (2001).

Putin’s Ukraine Gamble Pivots to a Very Different Battlefield

 

A Ukrainian soldier in February in Trokhizbenka, in the Luhansk region.

“KYIV, Ukraine — There are fields instead of city streets, farmsteads instead of apartment buildings. Open highways stretch to the horizon. The battles in the north that Ukraine won over the past seven weeks raged in towns and densely populated suburbs around the capital, Kyiv, but the war is about to take a hard turn to the southeast and into a vast expanse of wide-open flatland, fundamentally changing the nature of the combat, the weapons at play and the strategies that might bring victory. Military analysts, Ukrainian commanders, soldiers and even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin acknowledge that a wider war that began with a failed attempt to capture the capital will now be waged in the eastern Donbas region. ...”

NY Times

Is Ukraine the End of the End of History?

NY Times: As Russia Pivots East, Ukrainians Ask: Are We Next? (Video)

VOX: The banned weapon Russia (and the US) won’t give up (Video)

Bloody Borders or a Bloody Cross?

 

Aerial shots of a map of Kyiv and view of debris of buildings after shelling in Borodianka of Kyiv province

​Lightning Struck Itself: Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’ in Eight Phases

 

“So you say you want a revolution? Two rearguard beatniks banded together on the anything-goes streets of Manhattan in the early ’70s, at the height of its postapocalyptic glamour, when taxi cabs hated to venture below 14th Street but the see-and-be-seen crowd couldn’t resist it. Those who came from elsewhere came to define the scene. Richard Meyers and Tom Miller were two gifted reprobates who fled to New York from a well-to-do Delaware boarding school. They knocked around the stylish wilderness of the Lower East Side and the more civilized clubs and coffee houses of Greenwich Village. ...”

The Ringer

2013 October: See No Evil, 2014 October: Dreamtime (1981), 2014 November: Marquee Moon (1977), January: Adventure (1978), 2015 October: Tom Verlaine (1979)

Announcing New Brooklyn Underground Subway Tour!

 “We’re excited to announce our newest tour, the Brooklyn Underground Subway Tour, the BK version of our popular NYC Underground Subway tour! This new Untapped New York tour is led by Rayn Riel, a bona-fide subway expert and licensed tour guide. We have met a lot of subway experts here at Untapped New York, and there is no one more knowledgable about the Brooklyn subway system than Rayn. Now, after two sold-out tours with our Untapped New York Insiders, we’re bringing the Brooklyn Underground Subway Tour to the public. ...”

Untapped Cities

​War Brings New Iron Curtain Down on Russia’s Storied Ballet Stages

 The star ballerina Olga Smirnova with Semyon Chudin at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 2014.

“AMSTERDAM — Just days after the invasion of Ukraine, Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, posted an emotional statement on Telegram, the messaging app. ‘I am against war with all the fibers of my soul,’ she wrote. “I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia, but now I feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after.’ That’s certainly been true for Ms. Smirnova, 30. As the war got worse, and dissent in Russia was ruthlessly quashed, Ms. Smirnova, who had gone to Dubai to recover from a knee injury, realized that she could no longer return home. ‘If I were to go back to Russia, I would have to completely change my opinion, the way I felt about the war,’ Ms. Smirnova said in a recent interview in Amsterdam, adding that returning would be, ‘quite frankly, dangerous.’ ...”

NY Times

Guardian - ‘A completely different language’: how Ukrainian writers and artists are responding to the war (April 8)

NY Times: Journey to Transnistria: Inside Russia’s Disinformation Bubble (Video)

Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Scahill on the Russia-Ukraine War (Video) 1:02:21

‘I cry every day’: in the stands with Ukrainians as Dynamo Kyiv play again,   NY Times: Exiled by Russian Bombs, a Ukrainian Soccer Team Embraces Its Journey

New Journalism

 

Tom Wolfe

“New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, however, the journalist is ‘invisible’; facts are reported objectively. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Terry Southern, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others. ...”

Wikipedia

W – The New Journalism

Esquire: Why They Aren’t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore – Tom Wolfe

amazon: The New New Journalism

Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco (1956)

 

“... Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco is a full-length album that features six extended tracks from the golden age of the Moroccan record industry. After Morocco gained its independence in 1956, Moroccan-owned record labels sprouted and flourished in Casablanca. The inexpensive 45 rpm format allowed the record companies to release thousands of songs during the 1960s, creating a snapshot of the raw and hypnotic Berber music that thrived throughout Morocco. Powerful traditional styles were still alive and well at this time and untouched by international pop influences. Kassidat looks back at this era and presents it anew for audiences hungry for intense and authentic folk music. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Kassidat : Raw 45's From Morocco : Folk World & Country Music Compilation North Africa   31:34

​Hiding in Plain Sight, a Soviet-Era Air Defense System Arrives in Ukraine

 

The village of Dobra, Slovakia, where the S-300 antiaircraft system recently provided by the country to Ukraine was loaded on a train to be transferred over the border.

“DOBRA, Slovakia — Driving back to his village near the Ukrainian border last Thursday, the mayor had to stop to let a train pass, and assumed he wouldn’t have to wait long. But the flatbed wagons, stacked high with military equipment, just kept coming. He waited for nearly half an hour. ‘It was a very long train, much longer than usual,’ recalled Mikolas Csoma, the mayor of Dobra, a previously sleepy village in eastern Slovakia that, over the past month, has become a key artery funneling weapons and ammunition into Ukraine by rail from the West. The train that delayed Mr. Csoma’s drive home was not only unusually long but also signaled a singular escalation in Western efforts to help Ukraine defend itself. ...”

NY Times

POLITICO: Pentagon confirms explosion aboard Russian warship (Video)

NY Times: Despite Russian Warnings, Finland and Sweden Draw Closer to NATO

ARTFORUM: Latvia's Riga International Biennial Delayed Owing to Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

The Paris Review: Cooking with Sergei Dovlatov

​Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman

“Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman will be the first exhibition devoted to works on paper by the celebrated French artist who navigated vast artistic and political divides throughout his life—from his birth in Paris in 1748 to his death in exile in Brussels in 1825. His iconic works captured the aspirations and suffering of a nation, while addressing timeless themes that continue to resonate today. Through the lens of his preparatory studies, the exhibition looks beyond his public successes to chart the moments of inspiration and the progress of ideas. Visitors will follow the artist’s process as he gave form to the neoclassical style and created major canvases that shaped the public’s perceptions of historical events in the years before, during, and after the French Revolution. ...”

The Met Museum (Video)

Was Jacques-Louis David Really That Radical?

NY Times: The Dangerous Beauty of Jacques-Louis David

W - Jacques-Louis David

The Passages of Walter Benjamin - Judith Weschler (2014)

 

“In 1933, Walter Benjamin, one of the most brilliant literary and cultural critics of his time, fled Berlin when the Nazis took over and headed for Paris. There he sat, at the Bibliothèque nationale, working in poverty and relative obscurity on his most important project, ‘The Arcades Project.’ With the backdrop of totalitarianism spreading across the European continent, Benjamin explored the origins of modernity. Praising the poet Charles Baudelaire and employing his emblematic characters especially the flâneur and the rag picker, Benjamin wanted to counter the ‘false semblance of totality.’ This enormous incomplete study is both a collection of sources for a radical history of 19th century Paris and the basis for an allegorical critique of European fascism in the 1930s. ...”

UbuWeb (Video)

2015 September: In praise of dirty, sexy cities: the urban world according to Walter Benjamin, 2020 September: On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre), 2020 November: When Waking Begins, 2021 May: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1969)