​Leo Tolstoy Square, Street, and Metro Station

May 14, 2022: “Pushkin Street is located one kilometer from the Drama Theater in Mariupol where 1,000 civilians hid and an estimated 300 died after Russians dropped a bomb on it. In Kharkiv, it’s the same distance from the bombed-out central square of the city to the Pushkinska metro station. Pushkin’s streets can be found throughout war-torn Chernihiv, Kyiv, Sumy, Mykolayiv, and Kherson. There are even Pushkin streets in Bucha and Kramatorsk. The President of PEN Germany recently declared that ‘the enemy is Putin, not Pushkin,’ relying on word games to protest against the idea of a ‘blanket boycott’ of Russian culture. ...”

LA Review

NY Times - ‘Such Bad Guys Will Come’: How One Russian Brigade Terrorized Bucha

POLITICO: Fate of 2,500 Ukrainian POWs from steel plant stirs concern

The Quietus - Bloody Ground, Fertile Soil Part 2: Russian Influenced Music & Ukraine (Video/Audio)

Kharkiv

Unsettling the Score: Sasha Frere-Jones on the art of Éliane Radigue

“’I only have one trick,’ Éliane Radigue told me a few years ago. ‘It is the cross-fade!’ She pulled her fingers apart as if stretching taffy and laughed. She was sitting on the couch in her apartment on rue Liancourt in Paris. Athena, con una Espada (Athena, as a Sword), a bronze sculpture by the late artist Arman, to whom Radigue was married from the 1950s until the late ’60s, stood by the wall. For decades, Athena shared the premises with an ARP 2500 synthesizer and a pair of huge Altec Voice of the Theatre speakers. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, though, they were packed away. What Radigue did before she divested herself of this equipment is exactly what she does now: listen. ...”

ARTFORUM

2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993), 2018 October: The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue, 2019 February: Adnos I-III, 2019 May: Occam Ocean, Vol. 1 (2017), 2022 February: Éliane Radigue: For a Composer at 90, There’s Nothing but Time

Nice, France, ca. 1950s.

Matisse: The Red Studio

“For many years after its creation, Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911)—which depicts the artist’s work space in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux—was met with bafflement or indifference. Today it is known as a foundational work of modern art and a landmark in the centuries-long tradition of studio painting. Matisse: The Red Studio will reunite this work with the surviving six paintings, three sculptures, and one ceramic by Matisse depicted on its six-foot-tall-by-seven-foot-wide canvas. This will be the first reunion of these objects since they were together in Matisse’s studio at the time The Red Studio was made. ...”

MoMA (Video)

2012 May: Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia, 2015 April: Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: The Art of the Flower, 2016 April: Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, 2017 May: Matisse in the Studio, 2018 August: The apartment rooftop that hosted Henri Matisse

​Ukraine endgames 2.0: Can either side ‘win’ this war?

“One week after the war in Ukraine began, Grid laid out five scenarios for how it might end. It was already apparent then that the war would not be the quick and decisive Russian rout that many had expected, but two months later, it’s clear that the article still gave the Russian military too much credit. Two of those scenarios — a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine and a division of the country in two, with a new border along the Dnieper River — are now off the table. Before the war, many predicted the Ukrainian resistance to transform into an underground insurgency against a Russian occupation. Instead, Ukraine’s military is intact and still fighting a conventional war. ...”

GRID

NY Times: Forced From Kharkiv, Russian Troops Regroup and Dig In

Aljazeera: Russia says Azovstal siege is over, in full control of Mariupol (Video)

Guardian - ‘We collect symbols of the resistance’: the Ukrainian museum working through the war

NY Times: New Evidence Shows How Russian Soldiers Executed Men in Bucha (Video)

Carnac - Eugène Guillevic (1999)

“One of France’s most important contemporary poets, Eugène Guillevic (1907-97) was born in Carnac in Brittany, and although he never learned the Breton language, his personality is deeply marked by his feeling of oneness with his homeland. His poetry has a remarkable unity, driven by his desire to use words to bridge a tragic gulf between man and a harsh and often apparently hostile natural environment. For Guillevic, the purpose of poetry is to arouse the sense of Being. ...”

Bloodaxe Books

W - Menhir

amazon

2014 September: Eugène Guillevic, 2021 August: Guillevic: Selected Poems - Eugene Guillevic, Denise Levertov (1969)

Stuart Dempster – Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel (1995)

“... Every so often I have arranged one of the trombone master classes to take place in the cistern at Fort Worden, Port Townsend, the infamous two million gallon 186 foot diameter water tank about 70 miles northwest of Seattle. The most recent time, on 18 June 1994, consisted of nine current and former students, ten trombones in all including me. This excursion turned into a recording session that served the purpose of making this CD as well as providing sources for the Meet the Composer commission through their Composer/Choreographer project for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. ...”

New Albion

allmusic (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel (full album) 1:01:57

Surviving the Siege of Kharkiv

“The residents of Kharkiv were required by emergency decree to darken their homes at night, so as not to provide Russian planes or artillerists with targets. If they had to keep a light on — if they were lucky enough to have electricity — they covered their windows with blankets or plastic tarps or shards of broken furniture. Though Kharkivites may have known to do this anyway, without the decree, and not only because the war had knocked out their windowpanes, along with their power, and heating, and water. They just seemed to have an instinct for how to act under siege. So when the rocket struck Lesia Serdiuka Street after sunset, in the last week of March, a month into the war, the sky above the city was not like an urban night sky, but more rural, the ambient light absent. The starlight was obscured by the sodden cloud cover of early spring. The rocket hit a gas main, and the blast reverberated through the city. It shook the panes of my hotel-room windows two miles away. The flames rose and were reflected in the clouds, turning the sky a hellish scarlet. ...”

NY Times Magazine (Audio)

Near the rocket strike on Serdiuka Street in the Saltivka neighborhood of Kharkiv.

​How U.S. Soccer and Its Players Solved the Equal Pay Puzzle

“The new collective bargaining agreements approved this week by the United States Soccer Federation and its men’s and women’s national teams will, at last, bring an end to a decades-long, emotionally exhausting and wildly expensive fight over equal pay. For the first time, the women’s team, which has won the last two Women’s World Cups and four overall, will be paid at the same rate for game appearances and tournament victories as the men’s team, which has historically (and persistently) failed to even sniff that kind of success. In addition to those new (and higher) per-game payments, the new contracts also include an unprecedented redistribution of the millions of dollars in World Cup prize money the men’s and women’s teams can earn by playing in the tournament every four years. …”

NY Times

The Athletic – USWNT, USMNT achieve equal pay: How they reached a historic benchmark

NY Times: U.S. Soccer and Top Players Agree to Guarantee Equal Pay

William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary

“Few artists have anticipated, or precipitated, the fragmented, heroically individualist, and purposefully oppositional art of modernity as William Blake, a man to whom the cliché ahead of his time can be applied with perfect accuracy. Blake strenuously opposed the rationalist Deism and Neoclassical artistic values of his contemporaries, not only in principle, but in nearly every part of his artistic practice. His politics were correspondingly radical: in opposition to empire, racism, poverty, patriarchy, Christian dogma, and the emerging global capitalism of his time. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2009 April: William Blake, 2010 December: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2011 June: The Ghost of a Flea, 2012 August: Isaac Newton (1795), 2015 November: America a Prophecy (1793), 2019 May: The Notebook of William Blake, 2019 October: ‘To Particularize Is the Alone Distinction of Merit’: Blake’s Visionary Imagination, 2021 September: William Blake’s 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen

​In Russia, as Prices Soar, the Outlook for Its Economy Grows ‘Especially Gloomy’

“LONDON — After sanctions hobbled production at its assembly plant in Kaliningrad, the Russian automaker Avtotor announced a lottery for free 10-acre plots of land — and the chance to buy seed potatoes — so employees could grow their own food in the westernmost fringe of the Russian empire during ‘the difficult economic situation.’ In Moscow, shoppers complained that a kilogram of bananas had shot up to 100 rubles from 60, while in Irkutsk, an industrial city in Siberia, the price of tampons at a store doubled to $7. Banks have shortened receipts in response to a paper shortage. Clothing manufacturers said they were running out of buttons. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Opinion | We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.

Aljazeera: How the capture of Azov fighters affects the Russia-Ukraine war (Video)

Empty shelves in a supermarket in Moscow in March. Food prices have shot up, especially for items like imported fruit.

​Cornufolkia: A Hidden History of Psychedelic-Folk from the British & Emerald Isles

“... Audio Archives label offers a special double CD containing 43 ultra rare underground psychedelic-folk gems and medieval sounds from the British & Emerald Isles. The tracks here a ultra rare sound sources from folk bands recorded in recorded in England/Scotland/Wales/Ireland during the 1960s and 1970s. Rare tracks , such as acid folk, psychedelic folk, and trad folk and includes works never before on CD, and from sound sources released only at the time. Comes with large poster sleeve crammed full of rare memorabilia and artifacts together with detailed info on each artist. This is one of the best ever folk offerings celebrating the rich history of alternative psych-folk rarely heard. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video)

mixcloud (Audio)

YouTube: Cornufolkia: A Hidden History Of 60s Psychedelic-Folk From British & Emerald Isles Part 1, Part 2

​A painter’s mystery scene on the Sixth Avenue elevated after midnight

“Elevated trains were the fastest mode of mass transit in the late 19th century. Lurching and groaning high above the sidewalks along almost all of New York’s avenues, they whisked people to work, to school, to the theater, to Central Park, to department store shopping—all for a nickel per ride. At night, the elevated invited intrigue. Everett Shinn, former newspaper illustrator best known as a member of the Ashcan School of social realism painting, captures a moment at one end of a poorly lit all-male car in his 1899 work, ‘Sixth Avenue Elevated After Midnight.’”

Ephemeral New York

2017 January: 34th Street (1903), 2019 September: The fantasy of window shopping in New York City, 2020 December: A food vendor’s Christmas on 14th Street in 1904

​Why Germany is hooked on Russian gas

“Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU has sanctioned much of Russia’s economy, but Russia’s natural gas trade remains untouched. The EU gets nearly a quarter of its energy from natural gas, and almost half of that comes from Russia, the world’s largest gas exporter. As the EU’s largest economy, Germany is Russia’s biggest customer, paying Russia’s state-owned gas company 200 million euros. So while Germany has even sent Ukraine weapons, in a historic shift of military policy, through its gas supply Germany is helping to pay for the war it’s trying to stop. ... Today, as the world tries to punish Russia through sanctions, that dependence is getting in the way. ...”

YouTube

VOX: What Mariupol’s fall means for Russia — and Ukraine

NY Times: Ukrainian Holdouts in Mariupol Surrender to an Uncertain Fate

Aljazeera: Russia expels dozens of diplomats from France, Italy and Spain (Video)

Three Tales - Gustave Flaubert (1877)

“I’ve got the old 1961 Penguin translation by Robert Baldick. It has no notes but a handy nine-page introduction in which Baldick places the Tales in the context of Flaubert’s life and work. Born in 1821, Flaubert spent his whole adult life living off a small private income in the remote Normandy village of Croisset and devoting his life to literature. But he was far from successful. ... In other words the mid-1870s found Flaubert at a financial, emotional and artistic low point. And yet he not only wrote these three short tales relatively quickly but, when they were published, the volume turned out to be his most critically acclaimed and popular book. In fact, it turned out to be the last book he published during his lifetime. ...”

Book & Boots

W - Three Tales (Flaubert)

2012 August: On Cataloguing Flaubert, 2013 March: Sentimental Education - 1(1869), 2017 August: The Sentimental Education (1869), 2018 May: In Which Our Tragic Effects Remain Purely Professional, 2019 March: The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1911), 2021 November: Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph, 2021 December:  In Which a Direct Line is Drawn From Flaubert’s Unfinished Novel

Sun Ra House in Philadelphia Is Now a Historic Landmark

“Sun Ra House, the three-story Philadelphia building that has been a cradle for Sun Ra’s evolving Arkestra outfit since the 1960s, has been listed as a historic landmark in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. The building at 5626 Morton Street, also known as the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra, reportedly still houses a number of Arkestra members, including current bandleader Marshall Allen. Allen had lived in the house since 1968. In 2021, he reported that the building had partially collapsed. On May 13, the Philadelphia Historical Commission unanimously voted to grant the protected status, a representative for the register said. ...”

Pitchfork

​The staggering amount of US military aid to Ukraine, explained in one chart

“American weapons are pouring into Ukraine. President Joe Biden requested that Congress send $33 billion of emergency aid to the country at war with Russia, and the US House increased the pot to $40 billion, with about 60 percent going toward security assistance in some form or another. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is expected to approve it this week. It’s an unprecedented ramp-up that builds on the rapid transfer of billions’ worth of weapons already sent. ...”

VOX

NY Times: Poor Countries Face a Mounting Catastrophe Fueled by Inflation and Debt

GRID - Ukraine war in photos: Farming in the middle of a war

NY Times: On a Russian talk show, a retired colonel stuns his colleagues by pointing out that the invasion isn’t going well. (Video)

POLITICO: More than 260 Ukrainian fighters evacuated from Mariupol steel works (Video)

Smoke rises from the steel works in Mariupol on May 5, 2022. The steel plant has a maze of more than 30 bunkers and tunnels. 

​An Architect Breaks Down the Design Details of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel

“Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel features many notable players: Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, and presiding above all, Ralph Fiennes as celebrated concierge Monsieur Gustave H. But it is Gustave’s domain, the titular alpine health resort, that figures most prominently in the film, transcending place, time, and political regime. Such an establishment could only exist within Anderson’s cinematic imagination, which dictates the manner in which he introduces it to his viewers. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2013 November: Wes Anderson Honors Fellini in a Delightful New Short Film, 2013 November: Rushmore (1998), 2013 Decemher: Hotel Chevalier (2007), 2014 March: Wes Anderson Collection, 2014 April: The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies, 2014 July: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), 2014 August: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), 2014 December: Welcome to Union Glacier (2013), 2015 January: Inhabiting Wes Anderson’s Universe, 2015 July: Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles, 2015 November: Moonrise Kingdom (2012), 2015 December: Chapter 8: "The Grand Budapest Hotel", 2016 June: Here's pretty much every song used in a Wes Anderson film, 2016 November: Watch Come Together, Wes Anderson’s New Short Film...., 2018 September: Isle of Dogs (2018), 2020 May: Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie, 2020 July: Exploring Wes Anderson’s wonderful cinematic commercials, 2020 September: Steal Like Wes Anderson..., 2021 October: In the Company of Wes Anderson

Quartering Jerusalem

“Maps of Jerusalem show the Old City divided into four: top left Christian Quarter, top right Muslim Quarter, bottom left Armenian Quarter and bottom center Jewish Quarter. Such neat divisions. Nearly all modern maps do this. Many are even color coded, with blocks of shading for each quarter and precise borders marking frontiers from one quarter to the next. But it’s no surprise to learn that in reality no city functions like this. The busiest of Jerusalem’s lanes is Suq Khan al-Zeit. ...”

Aramco World

Following its introduction by Williams in 1849, the idea of “four quarters” took hold in outsiders’ imaginations, and it became a standard feature of maps of the city up to our own time, including this poster-size illustrated map for sale in the city to tourists. 

Can Ukraine hold Russia accountable for environmental crimes?

“As forensic investigators in Ukraine uncover evidence of killings that may amount to war crimes, experts of a different kind are at work to document the effect of Russia’s war on the environment.Ukraine’s ministry in charge of environmental protection said in a briefing last month that destroyed military equipment and ammunition, as well as exploded missiles and air bombs, pollute the soil and groundwater with chemicals, including heavy metals. Nickolai Denisov, deputy director of the Geneva-based Zoï Environmental Network, is part of a team mapping incidents of war-related damage or disruption. By the end of April, the group had reported 3,300 incidents in some 600 settlements, including cities, towns and villages. ...”

Aljazeera

CBC: Ukrainian environmentalists tracking possible Russian eco crimesSocial Sharing (Video)

Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence in Russia’s Shadow - 1991-2022

POLITICO: 3 Scenarios for How Putin Could Actually Use Nukes

A local resident stands next to unexploded mortar shells left during Russia's invasion, in the village of Yahidne, Ukraine, on April 20. While there is little published research on contamination from munitions, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says the First and Second World Wars have left soils in some parts of Europe contaminated for decades.

Richard Thompson :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

“You’d have to imagine that Werner Herzog is not a man who is easily impressed. But there’s a moment in In The Edges, Erik Nelson’s short film documenting the sessions for the Grizzly Man soundtrack, where the legendary filmmaker seems positively overcome. As Richard Thompson improvises a dark, shimmering elegy on electric guitar, Herzog, seated nearby, appears to blink away tears, smiling in rapture. Music From Grizzly Man, which is receiving a handsome reissue this week from No Quarter records, is full of similarly stunning moments. ...”

Aquarium Drunkard (Audio/Video)

2011 July: Shoot Out the Lights - Richard and Linda Thompson, 2012 February: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, 2014 March: Videowest 81, 2015 October: Richard & Linda Thompson - Rafferty's Folly (1980), 2015 December: Rumor and Sigh (1991), 2016 March: Hand of Kindness (1983), 2018 December: You? Me? Us? (1996), 2019 July: Across a Crowded Room—Live at Barrymore’s 1985, 2020 July: Bloody Noses (EP 2020)

​Daou ~ Sanctuary

“The idea of sanctuary is inviting: a place of safety, where no harm will come; a welcoming nation for refugees; a place of worship, free from the outside world.  In Georges Daou‘s album of the same name, sanctuary refers to an escape from the pressures of society, technology and the daily grind, although the journey there is hard-won, fraught with rumination and regret.  The tape loops contain this feeling of looking back, repeating old thoughts and problems, wishing that things could have been different. ...”

a closer listen (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

A Mini-Russia Gets Squeezed by War

“TIRASPOL, TRANSNISTRIA — At the Back in the U.S.S.R. cafe, it is like the Soviet Union never collapsed.Busts of Lenin greet visitors at the door. Red hammer and sickle flags hang on the wall. Huge plastic Soviet-era telephones sit on the tables, next to bowls of traditional borscht and lumps of Stolichnaya potato salad. This cafe and the whole Transnistria region, a Russia-supported breakaway republic wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, feels like a Soviet-themed vintage shop. The cafe may be intentionally kitschy, but still, it speaks to a real nostalgia for a long-gone era and a deep appreciation for Russia. ...”

NY Times (Video)

Aljazeera: Ukraine praises ‘liberation’ in the Battle of Kharkiv (Video)

The Nation: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon (1966)

“The Crying of Lot 49 is a 1966 novel by American author Thomas Pynchon. The shortest of Pynchon’s novels, the plot follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies; one of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed (1806–1867) and was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Like most of Pynchon’s output, Lot 49 is often described as postmodernist literature. ...”

Wikipedia

Pynchon’s Demon: Entropy in The Crying of Lot 49

John Pistelli

The Crying of Lot 49 Chapter 1

amazon

2020 May: V.

A Peterson Field Guide To Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-central North America - Roger Tory Peterson

“Find what you're looking for with Peterson Field Guides—their field-tested visual identification system is designed to help you differentiate thousands of unique species accurately every time. Grouped by color and by plant characteristics, 1,293 species in 84 families are described and illustrated. Included here are all the flowers you're most likely to encounter in the eastern and north-central U.S., westward to the Dakotas and southward to North Carolina and Arkansas, as well as the adjacent parts of Canada. ...”

amazon

Ukraine: The spy war within the war

“The decades-long spy conflict between Russia and the West is intensifying over the Ukraine war. But what are Russia's intelligence services suspected of doing and how will their officials' expulsion from capitals affect Putin's clandestine overseas operations? When Russia first targeted its military forces on Ukraine in 2014 it also unleashed its intelligence services on the West - from interfering with the US elections using cyber attacks to poisonings and sabotage in Europe. But in recent months the spy war has intensified as Western countries have sought to hit back and inflict lasting damage on the ability of Russian intelligence to carry out covert operations. ...”

BBC

NY Times: Vladimir Putin, Family Man

Guardian: Moscow set to call referendum on Mariupol joining Russia, says Ukraine (Video)

World Soccer June 2022

“Our countdown to the 2022 World Cup continues in this issue as we preview the remaining European, Asian and inter-confederational play-offs to determine the final three qualifiers for Qatar. Three players already with their eyes on the World Cup are this issue’s cover stars – Netherlands hot-shot Cody Gakpo, Portugal forward Diogo Jota and United States wonderkid Brenden Aaronson – and we shine the spotlight on the talented trio who are all having terrific seasons for their clubs. The Ukraine conflict continues to cast its shadow, but countries around the world persist in showing their support for the war-torn nation. ...”

World Soccer (Video)

 

Karim Benzema

Peter Rehberg (1968–2021)

“In 1995, I received a fax from Peter Rehberg stating that Mego, the label he co-ran, wanted to work with me. It was the start of a twenty-six-year relationship that ended with the album I released this year. To reflect on the late artist, who performed as Pita, one might start with his work there. Mego’s first release, General Magic and Pita’s 1995 ‘Fridge Trax,’ is a twelve-inch record that features four pieces constructed using recordings of refrigerators. For decades of avant-gardists, utilizing found sounds evoked musique concrète, but in nonacademic electronic music, at the intersection of techno, house, and ambient where many early Mego releases staked their claim, the staging of such mundane sounds marked a distinct otherness, a new vocabulary. ...”

ARTFORUM

NPR: Peter Rehberg, Influential Electronic Musician And Label Head, Has Died At 53 (Audio)

W - Peter Rehberg

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: MEET THE ARTIST: PETER REHBERG, A.K.A PITA., Black Holes

Ukraine decimated Russian forces trying to cross a river in the east, Britain’s defense ministry says

 

In this handout photo provided by the Ukraine Armed Forces on Thursday, May 12, 2022, a ruined pontoon crossing with dozens of destroyed or damaged Russian armored vehicles on both banks of Siverskyi Donets River after their pontoon bridges were blown up in eastern Ukraine.

“The British defense ministry on Friday said satellite imagery has confirmed that Ukrainian forces decimated a Russian battalion as it tried to cross a series of pontoon bridges over a river in northeast Ukraine earlier this week, a dramatic setback for Russian forces already struggling to make significant progress along the eastern front.While it was not clear how many soldiers were killed trying to cross the Seversky Donets River, the numbers of burned-out and destroyed vehicles scattered along the riverside suggested that Russian forces suffered heavy losses. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Russian Shipping Traffic Remains Strong as Sanctions Take Time to Bite

NY Times: Russia’s Attacks on Ukraine Hospitals Show a Sinister Pattern (Video)

GRID - Ukraine war in photos: Mothers and children — in search of safety

Finland and Sweden Deserve to Be in NATO Now

Meet the New Old Book Collectors

 

Amy Winehouse’s copy of “Howl, Kaddish, and Other Poems,” by Allen Ginsberg.

“Late last month, during the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, Rebecca Romney withdrew a copy of ‘Howl, Kaddish, and Other Poems,’ by Allen Ginsberg from her booth’s display case. She did so not to recite from its pages but to show off the writing in the margins. Amy Winehouse had puzzled out lyrics to an unrecorded song alongside Ginsberg’s lines. ..;. The Ginsberg text is the centerpiece of Ms. Winehouse’s 220-book collection, which Ms. Romney’s company, Type Punch Matrix, near Washington, D.C., is in talks to sell as a unit for $135,000. ...”

NY Times

Thoreau and the Language of Trees - Richard Higgins (2017)

 

“... Two generations earlier, another poet laureate of nature and the human spirit made trees a centerpiece of his emotional universe. For Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862), they were creative and spiritual companions, sane-making and essential. His love of them comes alive in Thoreau and the Language of Trees (public library) — a selection of the great Transcendentalist poet and philosopher’s meditations on trees, drawn from his two-million-word journal by writer and photographer Richard Higgins, whose beautiful black-and-white photographs complement Thoreau’s arboreal writings. ...”

Thoreau on Nature as Prayer

Henry David Thoreau, Tree-Hugger - Richard Higgins

Thoreau & Trees: A Visceral Connection - Richard Higgins

amazon

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, 2022 March: Using Thoreau’s Notebooks to Understand Climate Change

 

A white oak near Spencer Brook in Concord, 19 1/2 feet in circumference, as it looked in 2005; it sprouted around the time Thoreau was born, in 1817.

These Dancers Escaped the War. Their Journeys Are Just Beginning.

 

Victoria Glazunova, Kate Myklukha and Polina Loshchylina of the Dutch National Ballet.

“AMSTERDAM — Kate Myklukha pushed herself up onto the tip of her left foot, then stretched her arms out in front of her as if hugging a tree.As a pianist at the Dutch National Ballet here played a jaunty tune, several of Myklukha’s classmates wobbled from side to side, struggling to hold the delicate pose. But Myklukha held her balance, then spun around and dipped into a knee bend, before gracefully waving an arm skyward.During that short sequence last month, Myklukha, 17, looked as if she had been a member of the ballet’s junior company for years. Yet, she had arrived in Amsterdam only two and a half weeks before, having escaped the war in Ukraine. ...”

NY Times

W - Kyiv National Academic Molodyy Theatre, W - Kyiv Modern-Ballet

The Quietus - Bloody Ground, Fertile Soil 1: Making Music Under Fire In Ukraine (Audio)

 

“When my aunt gave her passport to the russian he asked, 'Why are your hands shaking?'"

Flight Paths - Omar El Akkad

“1. 2010. The word for invoice is the same in Arabic and Italian: fattura. We learned this, my mother and I, on the outskirts of a cemetery in Naples, as we tried to navigate the final arrangements for the transfer of my father’s body. It was a beautiful day, sunny, the sky Riviera-blue, and somewhere in the periphery of my vision, focused on this undertaker in his ill-fitting suit, there was a family mourning their own newly dead. They were of this place. We were not. ...”

The Paris Review