La Notte - Michelangelo Antonioni (1961)

"Michelangelo Antonioni was a cinematic cubist. Fragmenting time and space, the Italian master created a potent new language for storytelling, and in the process charted a topography of modern ennui. His work’s glamorously broody visual surfaces might have been mimicked in perfume commercials — they were hardly the only artistic invention to be co-opted by advertising — but no one has quite duplicated the way he built poetic depth from narrative shards. However exquisitely his characters suffer, their search for meaning is real. Two of the screen’s most melancholic beauties, Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, are the searchers in 'La Notte,' which is receiving its first major stateside reissue in more than half a century. The virtuosic 1961 drama is the second film in what’s regarded as a trilogy, beginning with 'L’Avventura,' Antonioni’s international breakthrough, and concluding with 'L’Eclisse.' Made in quick succession, the three pictures explore disillusion and romantic emptiness, and they all feature Monica Vitti. ..."
LA Times: Michelangelo Antonioni's melancholy classic 'La Notte' gets a stunning restoration
W - La Notte
senses of cinema
Guardian
YouTube: La Notte Trailer, 1961

2011 September: Red Desert (1964), 2014 December: The Passenger (1975), 2017 April: Blow-Up (1966), 2017 October: L'Avventura (1960)

Work in Progress - Robert Wyatt EP (1983)

"Though I love the sparse keyboard and percussion sound of much of his 80s' work the songs don't always suit the style, but here everything works beautifully. Three of the songs are covers but when they're of this quality who can complain? His cover of Peter Gabriel's Biko is restrained and haunting where Gabriel's original - though good - was a touch bombastic. Equally great is the one original song, Amber And The Amberines, inspired by the Reagan administration's illegal invasion of Grenada in 1983. - silver_plane"
Rate Your Music
Discogs
YouTube: Biko (Robert Wyatt version), Amber & the Amberines, Yolanda, Te Recuerdo Amanda

2010 November: Robert Wyatt, 2011 October: Sea Song, 2012 October: Comicopera, 2013 March: The Last Nightingale, 2013 September: Solar Flares Burn for You (2003), 2014 March: Cuckooland (2003), 2014 October: Robert Wyatt Story (BBC Four, 2001), 2014 December: Different Every Time (2014), 2016 March: Interviews (2014), 2016 June: Dondestan (Revisited)(1998), 2016 September: Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975), 2017 January: '68 (2013), 2017 May: Shleep (1997)

What to Wear to Smash the State

"In late August, a crowd of thousands — primarily leftists and liberals — cascaded down Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, Calif. They were marching on a spattering of right-wingers, Trump supporters and Nazis who were gathering under the mission to say 'no to Marxism in America.' At the front of the march were about 100 people dressed in head-to-toe black. According to many people present, this was the largest so-called black bloc they’d seen. This medley of black-clad anarchists, anti-fascists (known as 'antifa' activists) and their fellow travelers was a response to the previous week’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. There, protests ended with 19 injured and 32-year-old Heather Heyer killed when James Fields, an admirer of Hitler who demonstrated with white supremacists, drove his car into a crowd. This mass of solid black descending upon the park in Berkeley, hunting for fascists, was an intimidating aesthetic. That’s by design. ..."
NY Times
The Femme’s Guide to Riot Fashion
W - Antifa
THE BLACK BLOC WHICH WAS NOT
A Taxonomy of Protest Clothing
Staying Safe in the Streets
the accidental uniform of the antifa

Spinal columns: the joy of the collection

DISCO by Mark Vessey
"‘A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot,” Alan Bennett once wrote. For a while, e-readers and music streaming appeared set to replace their physical counterparts, but the resurgence in vinyl and printed book sales suggests otherwise. For the past decade, Brighton-based photographic artist Mark Vessey has been capturing the beauty of these objects in a series of photographs: his Collections series documents magazines, books, vinyl records and other assorted items, stacked on top of one another or neatly lined up. For Vessey, 35, the passion for collecting started with Attitude magazine. Growing up in Chingford, on the outskirts of north-east London, Vessey would pick up the gay lifestyle title every time he was in central London – it wasn’t stocked in Chingford – and it showed him a life outside the 'bland, safe area' where he was. ..."
Guardian
Guardian - Collectors' corner: book and music libraries – in pictures

Fela Kuti - Koola Lobitos / The '69 Los Angeles Sessions (1969)

"A new reissue that unearths a series of previously unreleased sides recorded between 1964 and 1968 with Fela's first band, Koola Lobitos. These songs are steeped in the style of highlife jazz that was popular in African clubs, a fiery hybrid of Latin jazz, rhythm and blues, even calypso. With most of the vocals sung in his native Nigerian, the music is bubbling over with punchy brass arrangements, simmering percussion, and bass grooves that mortar the sound. Highlights include an ode to Nigerian nightlife, 'Highlife Time,' and 'Omuti Tide,' with Fela's tongue-in-cheek phrasing of 'When the Saints Go Marching In' during his trumpet solo. The '69 L.A. Sessions find Fela & Nigeria '70 fleshing out the sound that would bring him acclaim and popularity. Ensconced in the knowledge of the American black struggle of the time from a female companion in Los Angeles, his approach went from bright and snappy to contemplative and hypnotic without compromising the groove. ..."
allmusic
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: The '69 Los Angeles Sessions

Paterson - Jim Jarmusch (2016)

"Jim Jarmusch is among the rarest and most precious filmmakers of our time, because, at his best—as he is in his new film, 'Paterson'—he conjures an entire world of his own imagination. He does so with his wry and tamped-down tone, his loping rhythms, his puckishly frontal compositions, his worn-in sense of design, the winking terseness of his dialogue—and the loving precision of his documentary-rooted observations, which anchor his microcosmic cinematic world, with its austerely whimsical passions, in the world at large. 'Paterson,' the story of a poet and his poems, is set in Paterson, New Jersey, and its protagonist is a bus driver named Paterson, who is played by Adam Driver. Paterson the driver writes poetry; he thinks poetry while walking to and from the depot, he writes in his notebook (his so-called secret notebook) at the wheel of his bus while waiting for his shift to begin; he writes during his lunch hour while sitting on a bench beside his favorite place, the Great Falls of the Passaic River, with his copy of Frank O’Hara’s 'Lunch Poems' beside his lunchbox; he writes at his cramped desk in his basement, surrounded by building supplies and hardware. ..."
New Yorker: Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” and the Myth of the Solitary Artist By Richard Brody
W - Paterson
TIME: Jim Jarmusch Talks About His New Movie, Paterson, and the Exuberance of Great Poetry
The Atlantic: Paterson Is a Quiet, Considered Masterpiece
YouTube: Official Trailer #1 (2016)

2014 October: Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, 2015 December: Broken Flowers - Jim Jarmusch (2005).,2016 October: An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch, 2016 July: The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona, 2016 December: Jim Jarmusch Lists His Favorite Poets: Dante, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery & More

Marcel Proust - The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925)

Wikipedia - "Volume Five: The Prisoner. The Narrator is living with Albertine in his family's apartment, to Françoise's distrust and his absent mother's chagrin. He marvels that he has come to possess her, but has grown bored with her. He mostly stays home, but has enlisted Andrée to report on Albertine's whereabouts, as his jealousy remains. ... Volume Six: The Fugitive. The Narrator is anguished at Albertine's departure and absence. He dispatches Saint-Loup to convince her aunt Mme Bontemps to send her back, but Albertine insists the Narrator should ask, and she will gladly return. The Narrator lies and replies he is done with her, but she just agrees with him. He writes to her that he will marry Andrée, then hears from Saint-Loup of the failure of his mission to the aunt. Desperate, he begs Albertine to return, but receives word: she has died in a riding accident. ..."
W - In Search of Lost Time
The 14-Minute Marcel Proust
amazon

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: "Paintings in Proust" - View of the Piazza del Popolo, Giovanni Battista Piranes, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online

Live Textural Ambient Synthesizer Performance

Live Jam #25 - Slow evolving drone / Ambient - Self playing patch on Eurorack modular synthesizer
"Monorail, the solo musician not the retro-futuristic vision of transportation utopia, has a running series of live synthesizer jams on his YouTube channel. The styles and tools vary from jam to jam, though there is usually a modular synth at the core. Some might argue that the contemporary rise of the modular synth is itself a form of retro-futurism. If you scroll through his video archive you can chart, in the thumbnail images, the steady progression of his studio:

... This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at Monorail’s YouTube channel. Monorail is Rijnder Kamerbeek, based in Berlin, Germany."
disquiet (Video)

Walden on the Rocks - Ariel Dorfman

J.M.W. Turner: Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, 1834
"The bodies are strewn everywhere along the beach. Burials are complicated because nobody knows the names of the dead—mostly women and children fleeing famine and poverty, trying to reach the land of plenty that has been promised to them but finding, instead, an early end in turbulent waters. Spectators gape at the debris from the recent shipwreck 'cracked up like an eggshell on the rocks,' while others go about their business. ... This scene of devastation and indifference seems torn from the latest headlines or photos from around the world, just one more group of refugees appearing fleetingly on our screens and in our consideration. ... The eyewitness referred to above, without whom we might not remember the incident at all, was none other than Henry David Thoreau. ..."
NYBooks

November 2007: J. M. W. Turner, 2009 April: Turner & Italy, 2011 June: J. M. W. Turner - 1, 2014 June: In Which We Find His Theory Of Color Implausible, 2014 May: Ruin Lust, 2014 September: The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free, 2016 June: Turner’s Whaling Pictures, 2017 March: Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time, 2017 July: Turner set free: Nature as roughhouse theater by W.S. Di Piero

2009 April: Henry David Thoreau, 2012 September: Walden, 2015 March: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 2017 March: Civil Disobedience (1849), 2017 April: The Maine Woods (1864), 2017 June: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, 2017 July: Pond Scum - Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia. By Kathryn Schulz, 2017 July: Walden, a Game, 2017 October: Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece

As Greenland Melts, Where’s the Water Going?

"In the summer of 2015, two New York Times journalists joined a team of researchers in Greenland that was conducting a unique experiment: directly measuring a river of meltwater runoff on the top of the ice. Now, the scientists have published the results of that work. A key finding — that not as much meltwater flows immediately through the ice sheet and drains to the ocean as previously estimated — may have implications for sea-level rise, one of the major effects of climate change. The scientists say it appears that some of the meltwater is retained in porous ice instead of flowing to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to sea. ..."
NY Times

Vermont Progressive Party

Wikipedia - "The Vermont Progressive Party is a political party in the United States. It was founded in 1999 and is active only in the U.S. state of Vermont. The party is largely social democratic and progressive. ... The Vermont Progressive Party originated with the independent campaign of Bernie Sanders for mayor of Burlington (prior to being elected mayor Sanders was a leader in the VT Liberty Union Party). ... Progressives started running for the Burlington City Council and getting elected from the poor, student, and middle-class areas of Burlington. They cleaned up the waterfront, which had been left trashed by industry, started citywide recycling, and established a public/private partnership with a land trust to make low- and moderate-income rental and home ownership available. The Progressive Administration started a women’s small business technical assistance program and an affirmative action ordinance for the awarding of city contracts. ..."
Wikipedia
Vermont Progressive Party
Vermont’s Cautionary Tale
Dare to Win: A Brief History of Vermont’s Progressive Party
NY Times: As Vermont Goes, So Goes the Nation?

Hirtle’s Beach - Rose Bay NS

"A nature enthusiast’s paradise. Categorized as a living beach because the beach moves and shifts at the whim of the ocean. Hirtle’s Beach is ever changing. Here you will find more than three kilometers of white sand, rolling surf, fresh sea air, drumlin cliffs and breathtaking views. Hirtle's Beach appeals to the whole family, as there are 2 small lakes for kids to swim in, and those not up to the chill of the atlantic ocean waves!"
South Shore Connect
W - Kingsburg, Nova Scotia
YouTube: Hirtle's Beach

2015 October: History of the Acadians, 2012 February: Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 2012 December: Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, 2011 June: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood - Alistair MacLeod, 2016 February: Island (2001), 2016 October: Alistair MacLeod - No Great Mischief (1999), October: Nova Scotia Lighthouse

Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline (2007)

"After the near symphonic exercise of engaging the void that was Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid in 2001, it was hard to believe there was anything left to do. Wrong. Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie emerged from the studio in early 2007 with the equally huge And Their Refinement of the Decline. The notion of symphonic here is, without doubt, still present, but not in any normal way. Over two very differently themed discs, and three LPs, Stars of the Lid engage long conceptual ideas from a place one can only call micro-minimalism. An obsession with drones fading in and out on all kinds of instruments is what takes precedent here, whether that be a string section, a solo cello, harp, trumpet or a children's choir. (Yes, all of them are here, and more.) Don't worry, all this deep fixation with drones and classical music doesn't mess up Stars of the Lid's sense of humor. ..."
allmusic
Pitchfork
W - And Their Refinement of the Decline
amazon
YouTube: "...And Their Refinement of the Decline" - Full Album

impLOG – Holland Tunnel Dive / On B’Way (1979)

"impLOG was the solo project of Don Christensen after leaving New York No Wave group The Contortions in 1979. He began making music using found sounds, a Univox drum machine, guitar stomp boxes, Casio keyboards and percussion instruments. Eventually Don gave a demo tape to Charles Ball at Lust/Unlust Records, who loved it, and released the 'Holland Tunnel Dive' b/w 'On B’way' 12” in 1980. 'Holland Tunnel Dive' is a monotone lament, with a narrator reciting a list of all that is missing in his life along to a sparse, mechanical beat. A variable speed Milwaukee drill creeps its way into the song, eventually reaching cacophonous levels. After four minutes of industrial motorik, an upbeat saxophone riff breaks out unexpectedly, unsettling the listener even further. On the B-side is a deranged version of the Lieber and Stoller show tune 'On Broadway', featuring lead guitar by Jody Harris of the Contortions. The record perfectly captures the dark and seedy vibe of downtown New York in the early 80’s. All songs have been remastered from the original master tapes for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The jacket is an exact replica of the original. On the front cover is an illustration of a hydraulic pump against a taxi-cab yellow background. Each copy includes a double sided insert with lyrics, never before seen photos and liner notes by Don Christensen."
Dark Entries Records (Video)
Juno Download
YouTube: Holland Tunnel Dive, On B’Way

The Comedic Beauty of Laura Owens’s Work

“Untitled” (2013)
"A new self-awareness entered painting toward the end of the 20th century, which initiated an irreverent, sometimes but not always loving interrogation of the medium. Artists of several generations and many stripes pushed this approach forward, ransacking painting’s history and conventions, examining it as both a commodity and an object in space, toying with its taboos and its pursuit of a signature style. One of the most innovative explorers of this vanguard has been Laura Owens, the subject of a jubilant, chameleonic midcareer survey now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ms. Owens loves painting but she approaches it with a rare combination of sincerity and irony. Distinguished by a sly, comedic beauty, her work has a playful, knowing, almost-Rococo lightness of being in which pleasure, humor, intelligence and a seductive sense of usually high color mingle freely. ..."
NY Times
New Yorker: The Radical Paintings of Laura Owens
YouTube: Laura Owens: Hugo Boss Prize 2016 Nominee

2013 March: Laura Owens, 2015 March: The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World

After The Heat - Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim (1978)

Wikipedia - "After The Heat is a 1978 album by Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (the latter two being the core members of Cluster), credited to 'Eno Moebius Roedelius'. The album represents the second collaboration by the trio, the first being 1977's Cluster & Eno. As with the previous album, After The Heat was created in collaboration with the influential 'krautrock' producer Conny Plank. ... Comparing the album to the musicians' previous collaboration Cluster & Eno (1977), Pitchfork wrote in their favourable retrospective review: 'A few piano-centered instrumentals hint at the sound of the earlier record, but After The Heat exists in a fantastic sphere of its own.' All songs composed by Brian Eno, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. ..."
Wikipedia
Remembering Dieter Moebius of Cluster (Video)
Discogs
YouTube: After the Heat [Full Album]

Living Well Is the Best Revenge By Calvin Tomkins

Gerald and Sara Murphy with friends at a beach in the French Riviera, late 1920s.
(July 28, 1962) "A writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose life can almost be said to have attracted more attention than his work, may have to wait a long time before his literary reputation finds its true level. Although 'Tender Is the Night,' the novel Fitzgerald liked best of the four he published during his lifetime, was generally considered a failure when it first appeared (even by Fitzgerald, who tried to improve its standing by writing a revised version that nearly everybody agreed was much worse), it has been quietly assuming, over the years, something like the status of an American classic. Sales in the past twelve months exceeded five hundred and fifty thousand copies, or about forty-five times the sale of the original edition. The book, which was out of print when Fitzgerald died, in 1940, is now available in four editions, and is required reading in a large number of college courses in American literature. ..."
New Yorker

2014 January: View the Passport Photos of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & Other Cultural Icons, 2014 August: Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection, 2014 November: Lost Generation, 2015 November: The Crack-Up (1945)

Lines

Lines 1 (September 1965).
"Aram Saroyan, the son of one of America’s most beloved novelists, grew up on New York’s West End Avenue and attended Trinity School, a private prep school in the same neighborhood. He attended the University of Chicago for a while and had his first poem published in the Nation. Returning to New York, he worked at Bookmasters bookstore near Times Square and at Virginia Admiral’s Academy Typing Service (she was a poet and the mother of actor-to-be Robert De Niro). After traveling cross-country to show his poems to Robert Creeley, then in Placitas, New Mexico, Saroyan was finally ready, at age twenty-one, to start his own little magazine, Lines, in 1964. ..."
From a Secret Location
Reality Studio: Lines Archive
W - Aram Saroyan
Lines Magazine (Ed.) Aram Saroyan
Jacket2: Stone Cutting All The Way
[PDF] Works – Saroyan Complete - Cuneiform Press

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt

"There is a tradition that places the archive amidst a set of notions indebted to Jacques Derrida’s meditations on ‘fever’, ‘spectres’ and ‘hauntings’. The archive, in this respect, represents an exploration of the dark side of history; a navigation of, exploration of, hidden pasts. ‘A: The Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt’ at ChertLüdde, Berlin, takes a wholly different tact, luminously associating the archive with fluid concepts such as networks, friendships and anonymity. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt was born in East Germany in 1932 and relocated to Berlin in 1950, where she met her husband, the experimental artist Robert Rehfeldt. In 1970, she began her ‘Typewritings’ series, which she continued until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Her recently rediscovered catalogue comprises almost 1,000 of these works: geometric visual poems, typewritten on A4 paper so as to be distributed by mail, which range from abstract typographic repetitions to emotional linguistic experiments to renderings of architectural shapes, objects and human silhouettes. ..."
frieze
A –The Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt
Paulo Bruscky & Robert Rehfeldt “Home Archives” and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt “Signs FIction”at Chert, Berlin
“SIGNS FICTION: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt” and “HOME ARCHIVES: Paulo Bruscky & Robert Rehfeldt’s Mail Art Exchanges from East Berlin to South America”
W - Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
W - documenta

Michael Flynn Pleads Guilty to Lying to the F.B.I.

"President Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the F.B.I. about conversations with the Russian ambassador last December during the presidential transition, bringing the special counsel’s investigation into the president’s inner circle. Mr. Flynn, who appeared in federal court in Washington, acknowledged that he was cooperating with the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian interference in the 2016 election. His plea agreement suggests that Mr. Flynn provided information to prosecutors, which may help advance the inquiry. The development came at a particularly sensitive moment for the White House, just as Mr. Trump and Republican congressional leaders are toiling to hold together a tenuous coalition to push through a large tax cut plan. It marked an unwelcome headline at a time when the president’s team is hoping to focus public attention on what they argue is an impressive list of accomplishments in his first year. ..."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times: Trump Is Cracking Up
Flynn pleads guilty to lying to the FBI (Video)

Peter Gordon: The Love of Life Orchestra Founder’s Formative Years

"Peter Gordon’s music embodies many things: funk, minimalism, rock, disco, classical music, post-punk, and the creative ferment of downtown New York. Stumbling upon his odd and rich discography – much of it performed with his long-running, rotating group known as the Love of Life Orchestra – is like uncovering a hidden treasure. Many of Gordon’s old friends and collaborators, such as the late Arthur Russell, have been extensively documented in recent years through books and reissues, but Gordon remains a bit of an enigma. His music received a high-profile push thanks to James Murphy, who prominently featured Gordon and the Love of Life Orchestra in his Fabriclive.36 mix, assembled with LCD Soundsystem drummer Pat Mahoney in 2010. Later that same year, a revelatory reissue of Gordon’s music from the ’70s and ’80s was released on DFA Records, which included two little-heard tracks recorded with Russell. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily

2010 December: Love of Life Orchestra, 2015 November: Extended Niceties EP (1980), 2017 April: Various Artists - The Fruit of the Original Sin (1981)

Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter (1948)

"A policeman's lot is not a happy one. The white (and dark) man's burden must always be heavy. And man's debt to man will be forever in arrears -- from West Africa to the West End, from Brooklyn to Bucharest. Generations of novelists have wrestled with these melancholy truisms. It is a pleasure to report that Graham Greene, in 'The Heart of the Matter,' has wrestled brilliantly with all three -- and scored three clean falls. Mr. Greene (as a well-earned public knows) is a profound moralist with a technique to match his purpose. From first page to last, this record of one man's breakdown on a heat-drugged fever-coast makes its point as a crystal-clear allegory -- and as an engrossing novel. Mr. Greene has chosen a carefully unnamed spot on Africa's coastline as his backdrop: we are told merely that it adjoins Vichy-held territory across one of its sluggish, tan-colored rivers, that the time is the wrong end of World War II. ..."
NY Times (July 1948)
W - The Heart of the Matter
Crime and the City: Freetown and Its Colonialist Vice
[PDF] Heart of the Matter
amazon

Watch Footage of the Velvet Underground Composing “Sunday Morning,” the First Track on Their Seminal Debut Album The Velvet Underground & Nico (1966)

"Before its many layers of well-deserved hagiography, the Velvet Underground’s first album emerged in 1967 on its own terms, in near obscurity, introducing something so mysteriously cool and hauntingly grim and beautiful. Goth and punk and post-punk and New Wave and chamber pop and shoegaze and indie folk and Britpop and noise and drone and No Wave… all came decades later. But first there was The Velvet Underground & Nico. ... [Tyler] Wilcox describes in his history how all of those qualities—luck, and Andy Warhol, included—brought the five original VU members together in 1965; how the band debuted with Nico at the Delmonico Hotel 1966, occasioning the New York Herald Tribune’s headline, 'Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists'; and how their lo-fi drone and Medieval folk meets decadent, literary 60s pop derived from influences like Booker T. & The MG’s and avant-garde minimalist La Monte Young. It’s one thing to read about this total re-imaging of rock and roll, and another thing entirely to see it. Unfortunately, little film of the band exists from that time—some of it very fragmentary or very rare. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2010 August: Heroin, 2011 June: All Tomorrow's Parties - The Velvet Underground, 2011 June: The Velvet Underground, 2012 November: Songs for Drella - Lou Reed and John Cale, 2013 October: Lou Reed (1942 - 2013), 2014 June: The Bells (1979), 2014 August: New York (1989), 2015 June: Capitol Theatre Passaic, NJ 9/25/1984, 2015 October: The Blue Mask (1982), 2016 March: New Sensations (1984), 2016 May: Coney Island Baby (1976), 2017 March: Celebrating Lou Reed: 1942–2013

The Treasures Blooming in Canada’s Largest Seed Catalog Archive

"The Royal Botanical Gardens—an 87-year-old, 2,422-acre swath of historic parks and gardens headquartered in Burlington, Ontario—is home to wonders animal, vegetable, and mineral. There’s a turtle tank in the main building’s lobby, native fish in the wetlands, and wild ducks and bald eagles flying over patches of protected land. Plants, of course, are everywhere, from rock gardens to nature trails to a two-story indoor greenwall. When I visited in early November, workers were building a miniature train set that snakes around an entire atrium, through scale models of Niagara Falls and the CN Tower. ..."
Atlas Obscura
W - Royal Botanical Gardens (Ontario)

Life Style - Barrington Levy (1983)

"Originally released in 1983 'Life Style' is probably the most sought after and one of the best Roots Reggae albums by Barrington Levy. Born in 1964 Barrington Levy started his career at the age of 15.He became famous early with his hits produced by Henry 'Junjo' Lawes on the 'Roots Radics' Riddims. Recorded at Channel One, Arranged & Produced by Alvin 'GG's' Ranglin 'Life Style' is reissued on vinyl for the first time."
Sounds of the Universe
Barrington Levy
YouTube: Barrington Levy's Life Style (1983 Full Album)

2012 September: Barrington Levy, 2015 July: Love Your Brother Man: The Early Years

The glorious mansions on a lovely Harlem block

"Nineteenth century New York had lots of freestanding, single-family mansions. Few survive today, but one Harlem block is host to four. These bells-and-whistles monuments to wealth and status do a pretty good job blending in with the walkups that surround them. You’ll find these mansions at St. Nicholas Place and 150th Street, in the middle of Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood. Sugar Hill is roomy and lovely, but I don’t think the name was in use when James Bailey (of Barnum and Bailey Circus fame) decided to build this magnificent castle of a home in 1888 (below, in 1895). It’s a Medieval limestone mansion with 64 windows of mosaic glass and 30 rooms at 10 St. Nicholas Place—an offshoot of St. Nicholas Avenue, a high and wide road popular among the Gilded Age rich who went coaching there. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Spain’s Conflict Over Catalonia Is Covering Up Massive Political Corruption

A pro-independence demonstration asking for the release of jailed Catalan activists and leaders in Barcelona, November 11, 2017.
"'Franco has died,' read the tongue-in-cheek headline of the November 11 editorial in El País, Spain’s self-proclaimed newspaper of record. The headline recalled the televised announcement on November 20, 1975, by then prime minister Arias Navarro informing the nation of its leader’s passing—and, unwittingly, of Chevy Chase’s running gag on Saturday Night Live ('Generalissimo Franco is still dead'). The editorial meant to poke fun at foreign commentators who resort to comparisons with the Franco regime to describe the way Spain’s central government has handled Catalonia’s bid for independence. On November 5, Belgium’s former prime minister Elio Di Rupo branded Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy an 'authoritarian Francoist' on Twitter. These comparisons are 'absurd,' El País wrote, calling Di Rupo’s claim 'offensive,' 'intolerable,' and equivalent to calling Angela Merkel 'a totalitarian Nazi.' ..."
The Nation

2017 October: Catalonia Leaders Seek to Make Independence Referendum Binding, 2017 October: Catalonia: Past and Future - Luke Stobart, 2017 October: Spain moves to take over Catalonia after region declares independence

One Stop Record Shop

"Legendary guitarist Earl King ('Lonely, Lonely Nights' and 'Let the Good Times Roll') claimed that he walked into the One Stop Record Shop one day in late 1963 and was told 'All your gang is in the back.' Sure enough, behind the stacks of 45s and LPs he found Professor Longhair, Tommy Ridgley, Eddie Bo, and others huddled around the store’s piano. This was the same room where in early 1960 a teenaged Irma Thomas auditioned for Ron and Ric Records’ Joe Ruffino, which led to her cutting the hit 'Don’t Mess With My Man' (the preceding lyric is 'You can have my husband, but please…'). The record jumpstarted the career of the future Soul Queen of New Orleans. ..."
A Closer Walk (Video)
YouTube: JOHNNY 'GUITAR' WATSON - Those Lonely, Lonely Nights, Don't Mess With My Man - Irma Thomas, Let The Good Times Roll- Shirley & Lee

2014 February: Johnny "Guitar" Watson - Space Guitar: The Essential Early Masters, 2015 October: Don't Mess With My Man - Irma Thomas (1959)

Cinematic Atlas: A Guide to Martin Scorsese's New York

"New York means a great deal to many filmmakers, perhaps none more so than Martin Scorsese. Part of the generation that included Coppola and Spielberg, Scorsese was born in 1942 in Queens. His work, so often tied closely to his Italian-American, Roman Catholic background, stands among the best in American cinema. New York has a mythic status for natives and non-New Yorkers alike, in no small part because of the dozens of movies that are set in the city. Scorsese's New York films capture the darker sides of the city. His camera fixates on the violent and unseemly. For this project, Complex visited outdoor locations from six of Scorsese's New York films—Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), After Hours (1985), Goodfellas (1990), Bringing Out the Dead (1999)—and photographed the sites as they look today. Many have changed dramatically, some have not. Some remain static within neighborhoods that are barely recognizable now compared to what the filmmaker's camera captured. ..."
Complex

2009 August: Marty Scorsese, 2010 September: The Directors: Martin Scorsese (2000), 2012 February: The Vision Thing, 2015 March: Mean Streets (1973)

Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Moroccans Outside the Walls of Tangier, 19th century, watercolor and opaque white watercolor over graphite on wove paper
"This exhibition highlights more than 150 master drawings from the Thaw Collection, one of the world’s finest private collections containing over 400 sheets. Assembled over the last fifty years, and made a promised gift to the Morgan in 1975, the collection has now been given in full to the museum by Life Trustee Eugene V. Thaw and his wife, Clare. Drawn to Greatness focuses on pivotal artists and key moments in the history of draftsmanship. Works by major masters from the Renaissance to the modern era will be on view, including Mantegna, Rubens, Rembrandt, Canaletto, Piranesi, Watteau, Fragonard, Goya, Ingres, Turner, Daumier, Redon, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and Pollock. Listen to the audio guide narrated by Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, and curators John Marciari, Jennifer Tonkovich, Isabelle Dervaux, and Ilona van Tuinen. ..."
The Morgan (Video)

Sun Ra - Spaceship Lullaby (1954-60)

"Evidence Records' Singles collection was the first inkling for many that Sun Ra had rehearsed and led vocal groups during his Chicago phase. Now Atavistic is shedding considerably more light on the subject with the release of Spaceship Lullaby, a collection of rehearsals Ra held with the Nu-Sounds, the Lintels, and the Cosmic Rays. The first batch of tunes are the Nu-Sounds with Ra on piano and Robert Barry on drums. ... The Lintels sound like a considerably less professional group, and it is unknown whether Ra worked with them beyond this session. There's another set with the Nu-Sounds and just Ra on piano, but the best is probably saved for last with the Cosmic Rays rehearsing with the full Arkestra. There's a bit more distortion on these tracks (the rest sound remarkably good for home rehearsals), but it's worth hearing if only for the vocal version of 'Africa,' which appeared on Nubians of Plutonia. There are some flaws in the tapes, but given the rarity of this material, that's a minor quibble. Sun Ra fans will be thrilled that this material exists at all to be heard, and the chance to hear Sun Ra giving directions is like a peek behind the curtain. Excellent."
allmusic
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: Chicago 1954-60 [FULL ALBUM] 1:16:52

How Spike Lee and Denzel Washington Turned ‘Malcolm X’ Into a Hollywood Epic

"In the aftermath of the L.A. riots, a determined filmmaker and a brilliant actor overcame budget concerns and voices of dissent to transform the life story of a radical black thinker into a cinematic masterpiece. ... Here’s a footnote to that history. Elsewhere in Los Angeles the very same day, in a screening room on the Warner Bros. lot, a group of studio execs were finally getting to see the four-hour cut of their latest gamble, a $33 million epic that had gone so far over budget the editor and director had at one point been locked out of the editing room by the bond company hired by the studio. The movie was Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. From the start, it’d been a storied production. There’d been 20-odd years of false starts, a public shake-up of directors, protests decrying the potential mishandling of the material, and constant fights over money, length, and scope. ..."
The Ringer (Video)
Voice: Read Our 1992 Profile of Spike Lee and the Making of “Malcolm X” (Video)
W - Malcolm X (1992 film)
amazon

2008 August: Malcolm X, 2012 August: Malcolm X at Oxford, 1964, 2016 February: The Legacy of Malcolm X,  2017 February: Firsthand Account: The Assassination of Malcolm X, 2017 November: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

New York Mixtape (1+2)

"After two and half months away, Jenny and I returned to New York. We spent our time in London well – hanging with friends, writing, reading and patching our bruised psyches back together. We were better for it. Coming back felt strange – at once like we had never left and no longer belonged. We only spent a week in the city. It was mostly a social call, checking in with those closest to our hearts before departing south to Mexico City. My only plan was to wander between my favorite record shops and take some photos for the New York installment of my series The Big Dig. I had told myself I wasn’t allowed to buy any records during our travels. It didn’t make any sense to add any weight to my already overflowing bags. ..."
The Hum (Video)

Andrew Castrucci and Bullet Space: An Art Squat in the 1980s & ’90s

"In the mid-1980s, as gentrification encroached on the East Village, the neighborhood’s eastern fringe remained a lawless landscape of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots. Here in 'Alphabet City,' amid the thriving drug trade, intrepid squatters surreptitiously reclaimed unused real estate. In 1986, a group of artist squatters led by Tenesh Webber sledgehammered their way into 292 East Third Street, between Avenues C and D. Accommodating living spaces as well as an exhibition space, Bullet Space quickly became a nexus for the East Village tradition of politically radical, semi-legal street art, producing works like the handmade artists’ book Your House Is Mine, an unrivaled embodiment of the downtown aesthetic. ..."
Gallery 98 - 98 Bowery

Paris Wants to Build a Few Garden Bridges

The pedestrian Pont Des Arts in central Paris
"London had been fielding serious plans to construct a green link across the river Thames for five years before ultimately cancelling the project last spring. Now, it’s apparently Paris’s turn and the French capital is going a step further—it wants three of them. New plans for car-free urban river bridges ripe with trees and shrubs comes as part of a huge international city redevelopment project piloted by the C40 Cities group. Called Reinventing Cities, its inspiration is specifically Parisian, as it is modeled on the French Capital’s Reinvent Paris architectural competition, currently in its second round. Right now, City Hall is inviting applicants to tender projects for three sites on the eastern section of the River Seine, to construct planted bridges that would allow pedestrians and bikes to cross with greater ease. ..."
CityLab

We Be All Africans - Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids (2016)

"Spiritual jazz has always been a fringe denomination. And it's difficult to pin down for good reason; its name is less to do with the sound of this particular jazz, rather more that it’s jazz with a particular message – religious, political or both. Although more celebrated today, the cosmic messages chanted through Sun Ra's music were previously seen as esoteric, perhaps occultish, with focus mostly being on his mental instability. But now, it's this 'spiritual' jazz that Ackamoor draws from the most: Sun Ra and Pharaoh Sanders are paid reference to in nods across his new album, We Be All Africans. ..."
The Quietus
amazon
Soundcloud: We Be All Africans
YouTube: We be all Africans (Full album) 37:37

SPK - Zamia Lehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers (1986)

" Everything else SPK did was either industrial grind or fluffy dance-pop. Zamia Lehmanni lies along the axis of Graeme Revell's other solo projects (see below) and is gorgeous throughout. Its cover is red, gold, and black and the liner notes quote decadent poets in the original French along with a description of copper-colored blossoms from 'Against Nature.' by J. K Huysmans. You can see the dew on the leaves in a garden enclosed by mold-covered stone walls. The music is urgent gamelan with sampled laments by the former residents of Bikini Atoll (they were removed for the US atomic bomb tests and as a result lost their sense of place. They never again flourished--they only persisted). Byzantium and bikinis aside, you can also use it as music for a drowned world resurrected. In peaceful lagoons, amid the seaweed-wrapped ruins, one can take one's solitary ease and dream of growing gills for a return to the sea. ..."
soundohm
W - SPK
W - Zamia Lehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers
Discogs
YouTube: Zamia Lehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers [FULL ALBUM] 48:17

Watch At the Museum, MoMA’s 8-Part Documentary on What it Takes to Run a World-Class Museum

The Museum of Modern Art's atrium has hosted works like James Lee Byars's “The Mile-Long Paper Walk,” performed, above, by Katie Dorn.
"If you've ever visited the Museum of Modern Art — and probably even if you haven't — you'll have a sense that the place doesn't exactly run itself. As much or even more so than other museums, MoMA keeps the behind-the-scenes operations behind the scenes, presenting visitors with coherent art experiences that seem to have materialized whole. But that very purity of presentation itself stokes our curiosity: No, really, how do they do it? Now, MoMA has offered us a chance to see for ourselves through a new series of short documentaries called At the Museum, a look at and a listen to the nuts and bolts of one of America's mostly highly regarded art institutions. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

A Priceless Pizzeria in Brooklyn

"Over 50 years ago, in 1965, Italian immigrant Domenico DeMarco opened Di Fara Pizza in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. To this day, it's considered by critics and locals alike to be 'the best of the best,' as former chef Anthony Bourdain reportedly put it back in 2007. There's a lot of pizza in New York City. It's a cliché maybe, but Di Fara Pizza is considered by many to be New York City's best pizza. It's notoriously expensive ($30 for a regular cheese pizza), and has a notoriously long wait (over an hour, easy). It's also dangerously delicious. And I should know — I ventured deep into Brooklyn to try Di Fara's legendary pizza for myself. This is what it's like! ..."
The 'best' pizza in NYC costs $30 for a regular pie — and it's ridiculously delicious
New Yorker: A Priceless Pizzeria in Brooklyn (Video)

2014 June: Pizza, 2014 October: Viva La Pizza! The Art of the Pizza Box (NYC), 2016 July: Q&A: Antoinette Balzano and Cookie Cimineri of Totonno’s, 2017 September: The Pizza Show

Cabaret Voltaire - The Original Sound Of Sheffield '83 / '87 (2001)

"When Cabaret Voltaire signed to Some Bizarre in 1983, it was an industrial band with a cult following. That all changed when the first album under the deal hit the streets: The loss of founding member Christopher Watson forced a rethink, and the group emerged as a lean electronic duo, still dedicated to experimental funk but with a much colder and danceable format. Some Bizarre's distribution deal with Virgin also brought the Cabs to a much wider audience, both at home and on the dancefloor.  ... Those broken up by the omission can find a bunch of it on this album's companion work, the Conform to Deform box set, which also includes a number of the flip sides of the tracks found here, as well as a number of rarities.) This is the sound that launched a thousand techno acts."
allmusic
W - The Original Sound Of Sheffield '83 / '87
amazon
YouTube: The Original Sound of Sheffield '83/'87 [Full Album] 1:14:28

2009 December: Cabaret Voltaire, 2015 June: #7885 (Electropunk to Technopop 1978-1985)

Dead Ball Situation

Tostão, No. 9, and Pelé, No. 10, celebrate Carlos Alberto’s final goal for Brazil in the World Cup final against Italy on June 21, 1970, Mexico City
"Begin, as Wallace Stevens didn’t quite say, with the idea of it. I so like the idea of Simon Critchley, whose books offer philosophical takes on a variety of subjects: Stevens, David Bowie, suicide, humor, and now football — or soccer, as the US edition has it. (As a matter of principle I shall refer to this sport throughout as football.) 'All of us are mysteriously affected by our names,' decides one of Milan Kundera’s characters in Immortality, and I like Critchley because his name would seem to have put him at a vocational disadvantage compared with Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, or even, in the Anglophone world, A. J. Ayer or Richard Rorty. (How different philosophy might look today if someone called Nobby Stiles had been appointed as the Wykeham Professor of Logic.) ..."
Harpers
amazon: What We Think About When We Think About Soccer