Idle Hands: Surrealism versus the work ethic

“... This sensational conflict is recounted by art historian Abigail Susik in her recent book Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. Taking the amorphous if persistent ‘anti-work position’ of Surrealist artists in interwar Europe and postwar United States as its purview, Susik’s account considers symbolic, rhetorical, and ‘parapolitical’ manifestations of sabotage in the writing and automatist practices of the Parisian Surrealists, the paintings and sculpture of Canary Islander and late-coming Bretonian Óscar Domínguez, and, across the Atlantic, the protest performances and exhibitions of the Chicago Surrealists in the 1960s. The book interprets these artistic interventions alongside contemporaneous political movements and material cultures, with particular attention paid to a shifting gendered division of labor. ...”

ARTFORUM

Man Ray, Séance de réve éveillé (Walking Dream Séance), 1924, Left to right: Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Simone Breton, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Naville, Robert Desnos, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault, Jacques Baron.

Ukrainian Strikes May Be Slowing Russia’s Advance

“KYIV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian military extended the fight deeper into Russian-controlled territory on Friday, as it sharpens a strategy of trying to degrade Moscow’s combat capabilities by striking ammunition depots and supply lines in the occupied Crimean Peninsula and other areas the Kremlin had long thought to be safe. Crimea, a key staging ground for Russia’s invasion, has been firmly under Kremlin control since it was illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. But it has been rocked by several recent attacks, some carried out by clandestine Ukrainian fighters operating behind enemy lines. Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security council, said on Friday that Kyiv would target sites in Crimea as part of a ‘step-by-step demilitarization of the peninsula with its subsequent de-occupation.’ ...”

NY Times

Guardian: Ukraine launches fresh strike on Russia’s Black Sea fleet headquarters (Video)

GRID - World in Photos: Fears of catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant

An Ukrainian Emergency Ministry rescuer attends an exercise in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Wednesday.

​Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color

“Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was once colorful, vibrantly painted and richly adorned with detailed ornamentation. Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color reveals the colorful backstory of polychromy—meaning “many colors,” in Greek—and presents new discoveries of surviving ancient color on artworks in The Met’s world-class collection. Exploring the practices and materials used in ancient polychromy, the exhibition highlights cutting-edge scientific methods used to identify ancient color and examines how color helped convey meaning in antiquity, and how ancient polychromy has been viewed and understood in later periods. ...”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Video)

NY Times - That Painted Greek Maiden at the Met: Just Whose Vision Is She?

​Smoking Harry Whitaker: A Village Jazz Story

“One night at Smalls, the venerable jazz club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, I asked Spike Wilner, the venue’s proprietor, ‘Whatever happened to that beautiful cat that used to haunt this place?’ (Though I can’t verify it as fact, it’s possible that across America, many jazz clubs have an official house cat that slinks around the club. A cat amongst cats, as they say in the jazz world.) ... I did remember the late Harry Whitaker. Beginning in the late 1990s, Harry was a regular performer at Smalls. He was a piano player of prodigious talents. I never met Harry, but I saw him play a few times at the club. ...”

Voice

Harry Whitaker – Blues For Piano Players (Video)

 

​Odesa Is Defiant. It’s Also Putin’s Ultimate Target.

“ODESA, Ukraine — The Odesa Fine Arts Museum, a colonnaded early-19th-century palace, stands almost empty. Early in Russia’s war on Ukraine, its staff removed more than 12,000 works for safe keeping. One large portrait remained, depicting Catherine the Great, the Russian empress and founder of Odesa, as a just and victorious goddess. Seen from below in Dmitry Levitzky’s painting, the empress is a towering figure in a pale gown with a golden train. The ships behind her symbolize Russia’s victory over the Ottoman Turks in 1792. ... The decision to let Catherine’s portrait hang in isolation in the first room of the shuttered museum reflects a sly Odesan bravura: an empress left to contemplate how the brutality of Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president who likens himself to a latter-day czar, has alienated the largely Russian-speaking population of this Black Sea port, established by her in 1794 as Moscow’s long-coveted conduit from the steppe to the Mediterranean. ...”

NY Times

W - Odesa

 

Private Parts - Robert Ashley (1978)

“Robert Ashley’s Private Parts has a plot, but you wouldn’t know it. The 1978 LP, which would later serve as the foundation for the composer’s seven-part televised opera Perfect Lives, discusses at length the inner workings of two characters, a man and a woman, anonymous to us and perhaps even to each other. Words flood its 40-plus minute runtime, circling meaning but never arriving at a conclusion. What’s explored by Ashley, in his drawling monologues, seems to be everything that isn’t happening—an inversion that slinks and dances among the shadows. We are privy to his subjects’ fidgety obsessions, tics of behavior, heady ruminations and psychic detritus, but narrative, insight, or meaning remain as elusive as a not-quite-remembered dream. Private Parts is built on emptiness. It is startling just how riveting that emptiness can be. ...”

Pitchfork

40 Years Later, Robert Ashley's 'Private Parts' Is Still a Hilarious Mystery (Audio)

GENIUS

YouTube: Private Parts (1978) FULL ALBUM

2008 March: Robert Ashley, 2012 April: Sonic Arts Union, 2012 July: Various - Lovely Little Records, 2013 October: The Old Man Lives in Concrete, 2014 March: Robert Ashley, 1930-2014, 2016 March: Perfect Lives (1977-83), 2016 June: Music Word Fire and I Would Do It Again: The Lessons (1981), 2018 January: Sound Portraits Radio #15 Robert Ashley w/ Doron Sadja

​The magnificent iron window railings on an 1850s Murray Hill mansion

“There’s a lot to love about the aristocratic brownstone mansion at 231 Madison Avenue, at the southeast corner of 37th Street. Built as one of three freestanding mansions between 1852-1853 by members of the copper-baron Phelps family just as Murray Hill was transitioning from countryside to a posh urban neighborhood, the house was enlarged in the 1880s—then purchased by J.P. Morgan in 1904 as a 45-room family home for his son and business partner, Jack. A study in harmony and symmetry, the mansion possesses the kind of elegant restraint of many Murray Hill townhouses. ...”

Ephemeral New York

 

​Sleepy Greek Port Becomes U.S. Arms Hub, as Ukraine War Reshapes Region

“ALEXANDROUPOLI, Greece — It is an unlikely geopolitical flash-point: a concrete pier in a little coastal city, barely used a few years ago and still occupied only by sea gulls most of the time. But the sleepy port of Alexandroupoli in northeastern Greece has taken on a central role in increasing the U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe, with the Pentagon transporting enormous arsenals through here in what it describes as the effort to contain Russian aggression. That flow has angered not only Russia but also neighboring Turkey, underlining how war in Ukraine is reshaping Europe’s economic and diplomatic relationships. Turkey and Greece are both NATO members, but there is longstanding animosity between them, including conflict over Cyprus and other territorial disputes in the Mediterranean, and Ankara sees a deeper relationship between Athens and Washington as a potential threat. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera: The real role of pro-Russian Chechens in Ukraine

GRID - The Ukraine War in data: Counting Russian casualties — in the ‘fog of war’

Guardian: 19 retired generals and ex-officials urge US to increase arms supplies to Ukraine

Alexandroupoli was a sleepy Greek port and a tourist hub before U.S. military supplies started arriving.

King Scratch (Musial Masterpieces from the Upsetter Ark-ive) - Various Artists

“Arguably the greatest Jamaican record producer of all time, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry was instrumental in transforming the island’s national sound throughout the Sixties and Seventies, with his unique approach to music making pushing the music beyond previously perceived boundaries. To mark the first anniversary of his passing, the very best of his work is showcased across a number of products, all of which effectively demonstrate why Perry was widely venerated figure for so long.. ...”

Rough Trade

amazon

YouTube: Lee 'Scratch' Perry: King Scratch (Official Trailer), Lee 'Scratch' Perry: Jungle Lion (Official Visualiser)

2021 September: Lee "Scratch" Perry

​Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum Is Looking Toward the Next 150 Years

“Looking out his window at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, Ned Friedman sees 150 years of history — and also millions. He knows this collection of nearly 16,000 woody plants holds clues on how to navigate an increasingly extreme ecological future. ‘When I see a tree, I always end up musing on time,’ said Dr. Friedman, who has been the Arnold’s director for 12 years. In the arboretum’s century-and-a-half history — an anniversary it is marking this year — he is only its eighth leader. There is the timeline of seasonal changes a tree may pass through in any given year, of course — including subtleties that Dr. Friedman urges us to notice, like the purples, pinks and reds of early spring’s ephemeral female conifer cones. ...”

NY Times

Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University

YouTube: Celebrating a Sesquicentennial: The Founding of the Arnold Arboretum

Russians are realising Crimea is ‘not a place for them’, says Zelenskiy

“Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said that panicking Russians have realised that Crimea is ‘not a place for them’ after three mysterious and devastating strikes on the peninsula over the past week, thought to have been carried out by Ukrainian operatives. In his latest video address Zelenskiy said long queues of cars streaming across the Crimea Bridge leading to the Russian mainland proved that the ‘absolute majority’ of Russian citizens had got the message. At least 38,000 cars crossed on Tuesday – a record. The mass exit came after an ammunition dump and electricity sub-station blew up near the town of Dzhankoi, a significant railway hub. Another apparent Ukrainian strike took place outside the regional capital Simferopol, where a Russian airbase was destroyed. ...”

Guardian

Aljazeera - Russia-Ukraine war by the numbers: Live Tracker

NY Times: Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe’

GRID - No Dumb Questions: What is a tactical nuke? (Video)

In this image taken from video provided by the RU-RTR Russian television on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2022, smoke rises over the site of  an explosion near the village of Mayskoye, Crimea. 

​How We Humans Created the Universe

By Moiya McTier: “Do you understand how lucky you are to be learning this kind of vital information directly from me, an actual galaxy? You’d probably be just as nonplussed if it were that almost-dwarf Larry writing this, though I guarantee you wouldn’t find Larry’s explanations nearly as entertaining. My telling you this story—my story—is a gift. It’s like if you learned about…oh, what’s something you humans admire? It’s like Beyoncé taking time out of her ‘busy’ schedule to personally give you singing lessons. Even that falls short, though—she’s not supervising a hundred billion stars. ...”

LitHub

amazon: The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy

Mountains Hidden by Clouds: A Conversation with Anuradha Roy

“I met the novelist Anuradha Roy in Delhi in the mid-nineties, when she was an editor at Oxford University Press and I had just published my first book. Not long after that, she moved to a Himalayan town to set up Permanent Black, now India’s premier intellectual publisher, with her husband, Rukun Advani. She also began to write fiction. Her fifth novel, The Earthspinner, which was released in the United States this summer, is about the war on reason and on imagination in a world consumed by political fanaticism. ...”

The Paris Review

2008 May: Arundhati Roy, 2010 April: "Walking With The Comrades", 2015 November: Politics by Other Means, 2018 July: What is the Morally Appropriate Language in Which to Think and Write?, 2018 August: Arundhati Roy: Brilliant, troubled and troubling, 2021 April: We are witnessing a crime against humanity

​How many Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine? What we know, how we know it and what it really means.

“Last week, after Ukraine’s dramatic and deadly strike on a Russian air base in Crimea, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a particularly blunt message for the Kremlin. ‘If almost 43,000 dead Russian soldiers do not convince the Russian leadership that they need to find a way out of the war,’ Zelenskyy said, ‘then more fighting is needed, more results are needed to convince.’ We don’t really know how many Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine. But there is no shortage of estimates.The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which provides a daily running tally on social media, put the number of enemy ‘liquidated’ at around 43,000 as of Aug. 11 — hence Zelenskyy’s figure. The Russian government has not published its own losses since March 25, when it gave a total of 1,351 killed and 3,825 wounded. (Wartime casualties are a state secret in Russia, and revealing them is punishable by up to seven years in prison.) ...”

GRID

Guardian: Ukraine aiming to create chaos within Russian forces, Zelenskiy adviser says (Video)

Aljazeera: Russia says ‘sabotage’ behind arms depot blasts in Crimea (Video)

NY Times: Russia Fights Efforts to Declare It an Exporter of ‘Blood Diamonds’

A Ukrainian serviceman inspects a destroyed Russian tank at an abandoned Russian position near Bilogorivka, Ukraine, on June 17.

​The Coming California Megastorm

“California, where earthquakes, droughts and wildfires have shaped life for generations, also faces the growing threat of another kind of calamity, one whose fury would be felt across the entire state. This one will come from the sky. According to new research, it will very likely take shape one winter in the Pacific, near Hawaii. No one knows exactly when, but from the vast expanse of tropical air around the Equator, atmospheric currents will pluck out a long tendril of water vapor and funnel it toward the West Coast. This vapor plume will be enormous, hundreds of miles wide and more than 1,200 miles long, and seething with ferocious winds. It will be carrying so much water that if you converted it all to liquid, its flow would be about 26 times what the Mississippi River discharges into the Gulf of Mexico at any given moment. ...”

NY Times

Exploring Qatar’s eight World Cup 2022 stadiums and what fans can expect in November

“... The World Cup is just months away and the Al Janoub Stadium manager is showing a group of reporters around his pride and joy, the air-conditioned venue that will host seven games, including the holders France’s opening game against Australia on November 22.The Athletic asked the question which, to a Brit visiting Qatar for the first time, feels like the elephant in the room. This tournament has been relentlessly condemned by human rights groups for the circumstances in which these stadiums were built. How do tournament organisers respond to that?It’s not what they want to talk about now the football is about to begin. ...”

The Athletic

​To Escape the War, Ukraine’s Factories Are Moving West

“It is an unusual  arrangement for unusual times: Above a factory floor in Lviv, Ukraine, where Volodomyr Mysysk has relocated his furniture-making business, he and his 15 employees have become roommates. They have brought their children and their dogs, and share a kitchen above the machinery where they spend their days reviving a company that could have been destroyed by the war. But Mr. Mysysk, 23, and his workers, who came to Lviv from the bombarded city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, have benefited from a spirit of solidarity and a government policy that aims to rescue  industries threatened by an invading Russian army and help reassemble them, piece by piece, in cities along Ukraine’s western frontier. ...”

NY Times

NY Times - Six Weeks of ‘Hell’: Inside Russia’s Brutal Ukraine Detentions

NY Times - Threat to Ukraine Nuclear Plant Increases as Fighting Rages

Aljazeera - Putin calls Russian arms ‘significantly superior’ to rivals (Video)

Workers at Matro Luxe, one of Ukraine’s biggest mattress makers, which relocated to Ukraine’s western frontier.

​Sun Ra: Art on Saturn

“Drawn from private collections around the world, this is the first comprehensive collection of the Saturn label’s printed record covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels decorated by Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra. Considered the foremost exponent of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra mastered a wide array of styles that spanned jazz, R&B, exotica, Afro-hybrids, electronic, big band, solo piano, orchestral, experimental, and chamber works. In his 45-year recording career, he issued an epic number of albums and he was one of the first Black musicians to own an independent label, which he named Saturn, after the planet on which he claimed to have been born. ...”

Fantagraphics

amazon

Full Circle - Holger Czukay, Jah Wobble and Jaki Liebezeit (1982)

“... Reading between the lines of the  statements made about this collaboration by all concerned it seems that Wobble’s relationship with Czukay and Liebezeit wasn’t totally harmonious. Maybe this is the reason why there is a distinct lack of the mawkish sunniness which ruined later Can records, although the fallout from Jah Wobble’s involvement in PIL’s ‘Metal Box’ is also a major factor. Whatever the reasons, there is definitely a darker, more sinister edge to this record than anything the Can members had recently recorded. ‘How Much Are They?’ is a dubby dance tune with klanky rhythm-box and beautiful, warm bass. The music flies all over the room. Infact the same could be said of all the tracks on this LP. Tapes play backwards, instruments sound like they’re being played outside one minute, then right next to your ears the next. ...”

Head Heritage

W - Full Circle (Holger Czukay, Jah Wobble and Jaki Liebezeit album)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Full Circle   41:05

​An Orchestra Supports Ukraine, and Reunites a Couple Parted by War

“WARSAW — After years of struggling to make a living as musicians in Ukraine, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova felt they had finally built a stable life. They were husband-and-wife artists in the Odessa Philharmonic — he plays the cello, she the violin — sharing a love for Bach partitas and the music from “Star Wars.” They lived in an apartment on the banks of the Black Sea with their 8-year-old daughter, Daryna. Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Vikhrova fled for the Czech Republic with her daughter and mother, bringing a few hundred dollars in savings, some clothes and her violin. Dovbysh, 39, who was not allowed to leave because he is of military age, stayed behind and assisted in efforts to defend the city, gathering sand from beaches to reinforce barriers and protect monuments and playing Ukrainian music on videos honoring the country’s soldiers. ...”

NY Times

Guardian: As Putin’s war spreads panic across Europe, Ukrainians must fear a stab in the back

BBC: Ukraine says it has taken out vital bridge in occupied Kherson

NY Times: The first U.N. ship carrying Ukrainian grain for Africa prepares to depart

First UN ship to carry Ukraine grain for Africa prepares to leave

 

Hew Locke with Emann Odufu

“Guyanese British artist Hew Locke is at a pivotal moment in his thirty-plus year career as a fine artist. Most recently, Locke received the Tate Commission and created a sprawling installation composed of 140 human-sized figures and five horses in the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain. This installation, on view until January 2023, has been his most ambitious and significant artistic endeavor to date and has received much critical acclaim. In September, Locke will be having another milestone moment as he will be installing a new series of work for the Met Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade niches. I sat down with Hew in his Brixton studio a few weeks after the opening of The Procession. ...”

Brooklyn Rail

Emann Odufu (Video)

An Artist’s Palette Reflects Community and Adversity

Installation view: Hew Locke: The Procession, Tate Britain, London, 2022. 

​An introduction to Latin jazz in 20 records

“Few musical influences that have played such a significant and consistent a role in jazz as those of Latin America. Cubop was the first revelation. It was the hip sound of 1950s New York, as migrant musicians from Cuba and Puerto Rico started playing with the bebop originators. Then, the sounds of samba and bossa nova entered the scene, and a new craze for bossa jazz took over. With a continuous flow of musicians from the Caribbean and Brazil, as well Argentina and Uruguay, the US continued to be a hotbed of Latin jazz into the ’70s, and though things started to tail off in the following decade, the genre has continued to find new ways to reinvent itself. ...”

The Vinyl Factory (Video)

Machito - Afro Cuban Jazz (1951)

​His Next Move: A Ukrainian Boy Starts a New Life Through Chess

“YORK, England — Pints in hand, a group of men sat hunched over chessboards under the sloping ceiling beams of the Eagle and Child pub in York, in northern England. Among them sat Maksym Kryshtafor, an 8-year-old Ukrainian boy with freckles and an impish smile, who navigated his pieces across the board with intense focus. The group had moved its weekly meeting to an earlier time to accommodate its young guest’s bedtime, and he was soon impressing these chess aficionados with decades more experience. ... More than six million refugees have left Ukraine for Europe, according to the United Nations, each facing the challenges of a life ripped apart by war: a strange land, an unfamiliar language and tenuous ties to support systems like education and health care — if they have any ties all. Finding a pursuit that provides focus and stability can help exiles navigate the anxieties and upheaval of restarting life far from home. For Maksym, it was chess. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - ‘It’s madness’: Ukraine holds breath as Putin turns nuclear plant into frontline

NY Times: Shelling at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant Is Raising Fears of an Accident. Here’s a Look at the Risks.

BBC - Ukraine war: Predicting Russia's next step in Ukraine

Maksym staring down his opponent before winning a game of speed chess in the Delancey U.K. Schools Chess Challenge in June.

​Best Political Punk Songs: 20 Essential Anti-Establishment Tirades

“Punk’s anti-establishment stance means it openly thrives on controversy and the desire to provoke, so its spearhead acts have inevitably been drawn to commenting on socio-political issues since the genre’s inception in the 70s. Accordingly, punk has sired some of music’s most potent political critiques, and while few were written with longevity in mind, many of the best political punk songs have retained their relevance. ...”

udiscover (Video)

​The Arrival of the Harmony

“A photograph. A cold and harsh place.  The Moravian Church Mission ship the Harmony somewhere on the Labrador coast.  Ice hardens the earth between the mission buildings. The date is 1907.  Each year mission ships would sail from Greenland Dock in Rotherhithe to Stromness in Orkney to take on water and crew, waiting for a break in the Westerlies, beating out through the Hoy Sound for the voyage to St. John’s in Newfoundland, then north up the Labrador coast to the mission stations beyond Hamilton Inlet.Makkovik. Hopedale. Zoar. Nain. Okak. Hebron. Ramah. Killinik.The largely German missionary Brethren re-mapped the land with bleak toponyms and Biblical typologies that settled over the coast like a prophetic fog. ...”

NiCHE

Paul Schmidt, Rear view of Okak Station, with views of the Harmony in the Bay with an iceberg (1907).

 

​Ukrainian attack on Russian airbase sends message to Moscow and beyond

“In Paldiski, Estonia, abandoned Soviet-era bunkers, splattered with graffiti and overgrown with weeds, are a reminder of the centuries-long domination that Russia once exerted over the Baltic region. Now this port city in the northwestern corner of the country is hastily being turned into a bulwark against Russian efforts to politically pressure Europe. Ever since Moscow threatened to withhold natural gas as retribution for countries opposed to its invasion of Ukraine, workers in Paldiski have been constructing an offshore terminal for non-Russian gas at a round-the-clock pace. The project is one piece of Europe’s strategy to quickly wean itself off the Russian energy that is heating homes and powering factories across the continent. ...”

NY Times

Guardian: Ukrainian attack on Russian airbase sends message to Moscow and beyond (Video)

Ukraine’s Strike in Crimea Could Be a Turning Point in the War (Video)

NY Times: Rescuing Art in Ukraine with Foam, Crates and Cries for Help, How the War Changed a Kyiv Museum’s View of Its Past (Video)

A floating facility in Estonia will take in shipments of natural gas and pipe it to a network that serves the Baltics and Finland.

​Why the through ball is becoming a dying art in European football

“The number of through balls in the UEFA Champions League dropped 50 per cent between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 seasons. In Europe’s top five leagues, the number of through balls dropped on average 30 per cent over the same period. In the Europa League, it dropped 24 per cent. The through ball is not extinct, but it is endangered.Before examining why, we need to define the term. FBref data define a through ball as a: ‘Completed pass sent between the back defenders into open space.’ It is a complex pass to complete, hence the number of through balls is never particularly high and is in fact lower than the goals-per-game total in Europe’s top divisions. ...”

The Athletic

 

Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island.

“’The idea is to make a representation where you can read the hard years of the construction of a ‘modern’ city from scratch,’ says Aryz in a press release, ‘representing all the anonymous workers who built it, representing the American Industrial Revolution and the workers in their labors’. Funded by donations from perhaps some of todays’ captains of industry, the mural lends a grace to that toil, a dignity to the classes who fought for union rights, better working conditions, a minimum wage, an end to child labor. Providence itself is known as the location of America’s first Labor Day Parade on August 23, 1882, with thousands of union members parading through downtown. 11 years later Labor Day became a holiday in Rhode Island. ...”

Brooklyn Street Art

 

How Russia Took Over Ukraine’s Internet in Occupied Territories

“Several weeks after taking over Ukraine’s southern port city of Kherson, Russian soldiers arrived at the offices of local internet service providers and ordered them to give up control of their networks. ... Russian authorities then rerouted mobile and internet data from Kherson through Russian networks, government and industry officials said. They blocked access to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as to Ukrainian news websites and other sources of independent information. Then they shut off Ukrainian cellular networks, forcing Kherson’s residents to use Russian mobile service providers instead. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera: In the face of Russian attacks, what motivates Ukrainian troops? (Video)

VOX: Where in the world are Russians going to avoid sanctions? (Video)

Guardian: Russian airbase on western coast of Crimea damaged in explosions

Russia’s ministry of defence said it was trying to discern the cause of the incident.

​Three Female Artists Who Helped Create Abstract Expressionism: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning & Helen Frankenthaler.

“... The three artists that gallerists James Payne and Joanne Shurvell have chosen to represent New York City in their series Great Art Cities Explained are as refreshing as they are surprising. ... Three female NYC-born Abstract Expressionists – Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler.These women’s contributions to the movement were considerable, but Krasner and deKooning spent much of their careers overshadowed by celebrated husbands – fellow Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.The New York-based Abstract Expressionism deposed Paris as the center of the art world, and was the most macho of movements. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2019 April: Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (2018), 2019 June: The Irrepressible Emotion of Lee Krasner, 2014 February: Jane Freilicher, 2015 June:Jane Freilicher (1924-2014), 2014 February: Jane Freilicher, 2019 August:  Painters of the East End - Mary Ann Caws

​Olena Rybka: Ukraine’s Literary Identity

“Ukrainian literature, like Ukrainian identity, has developed and lasted into the twenty-first century despite centuries of repression under various ruling powers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during a long era of evolving Russian rule, printing books and teaching in schools in Ukrainian was banned. In the 1930s, when Stalin ruled Russia, Ukrainian poets and writers were arrested and sometimes killed, their generation now known as the Executed Renaissance. In 2014, Ukraine’s concession to Russian pressure to nix an agreement that would have brought the country closer to the EU sparked the Maidan Revolution, which toppled the sitting government and paved the way for a new, more independent Ukrainian government that has since made Ukrainian language (rather than Russian) compulsory in many public settings. ...”

Guernica

With Enough Help, Ukraine Can Win

LitHub: When Stories Aren’t Enough: How Do You Write About the War in Ukraine?

POLITICO - Gas wars: How Putin sent EU energy prices rocketing

The editor discusses publishing books in a time of war and working to preserve the Ukrainian language.

​Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution

“The Cuban communist revolutionary and politician Fidel Castro took part in the Cuban Revolution from 1953 to 1959. ... Restructuring the MR-26-7, he fled to Mexico with his brother Raul Castro, where he met with Argentine Marxist-Leninist Che Guevara, and together they put together a small revolutionary force intent on overthrowing Batista. In November 1956, Castro and 81 revolutionaries sailed from Mexico aboard the Granma, crash-landing near to Los Cayuelos. Attacked by Batista's forces, they fled to the Sierra Maestra mountain range, where the 19 survivors set up an encampment from which they waged guerrilla war against the army. ...”

W - Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution

amazon: Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): An American History, Ada Ferrer

W - Celia Sánchez, BBC - Celia Sanchez: Was she Castro's lover?, W - Granma (yacht), W - Cuban Revolution

YouTube: Castro and Cuba: First Films From Behind Rebel Lines, 1958, Celebrations in Havana Cuba as rebels under Fidel Castro evict Batista, Cubans Demand More Executions (1959)

YouTube: Fidel Castro on Face the Nation in 1959   28:30

​The people of the cloud

“The ‘cloud’ is not an intangible monolith. It’s a messy, swelling tangle of data centres, fibre optic cables, cellular towers and networked devices that spans the globe. From the tropical megalopolis of Singapore to the remote Atacama Desert, or the glacial extremes of Antarctica, the material infrastructure of the cloud is becoming ubiquitous and expanding as more users come online and the digital divide closes. Much has been written about the ecological impact of the cloud’s ongoing expansion: its titanic electricity requirements, the staggering water footprint required to cool its equipment, the metric tonnes of electronic waste it proliferates, and the noise pollution emitted by the diesel generators, churning servers and cooling systems required to keep data centres – the heart of the cloud – operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. ...”

aeon (Audio)

Employees at the BMIT data centre in SmartCity Malta, 22 June 2017.

Ukraine, Russia Trade Blame On Shelling At Nuclear Power Plant As Fighting Rages In Donetsk

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia must take responsibility for an ‘act of terror’ after Kyiv and Moscow traded blame for strikes at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant in Ukraine. ‘Today, the occupiers have created another extremely risky situation for all of Europe: they struck the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant twice. Any bombing of this site is a shameless crime, an act of terror,’ Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. ... The world's response should be harsh sanctions against the entire Russian nuclear industry from Rosatom to all related companies and individuals, he added. Ukraine's Energoatom state nuclear power company said earlier that a high-voltage power line at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant had been hit by Russian shelling. ...”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

NY Times: Amnesty International Assessment That Ukraine ‘Put Civilians in Harm’s Way’ Stirs Outrage

POLITICO: The Bizarre Soviet Movie That Predicted Putinism

Guardian: Nuclear apocalypse was postponed in 1968. Now it’s back on the agenda

A soldier with a Russian flag on his uniform stands guard near the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant outside the Russian-controlled city of Enerhodar on August 4.