Tear the Roof Off the Sucker: An Introduction to Parliament Funkadelic

Parliament Funkadelic, circa 1974
"If you don’t know much about funk, P-Funk—the legendary Parliament Funkadelic—is a great place to start. (Yes, you can make the same case for James Brown, Sly Stone, the Ohio Players, and myriad others.) P-Funk emerged in the late ‘60s and dominated the 1970s. They went through at least four somewhat distinct periods, pioneered a unique approach to groove—especially once bassist Bootsy Collins, resh from a stint with James Brown, joined the band—and combined that with psychedelia, humor, space travel, and subtle yet cutting social commentary. They were a guitar-centric outfit, but often had a horn section, embraced synthesizers, and never lost sight of their vocal roots. Parliament and Funkadelic were not two separate bands. P-Funk, under the guidance of vocalist and ringleader George Clinton, was a collective of musicians—which numbered about 50 people during their mid-’70s peak. ..."
Reverb LP (Video/Audio)

2009 January: George Clinton, 2010 December: Mothership Connection - Houston 1976, 2011 October: Funkadelic - One Nation Under A Groove, 2011 October: "Do Fries Go With That Shake?", 2012 August: Tales Of Dr. Funkenstein – The Story Of George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic, 2015 July: Playing The (Baker's) Dozens: George Clinton's Favourite Albums, 2015 August: Chocolate City (1975), 2016 February: Maggot Brain - Funkadelic (1971), 2016 June: P-Funk All Stars - Urban Dancefloor Guerillas (1983), 2017 March: Up for the Down Stroke - Parliament (1974), 2017 May: P-Funk mythology

World’s Most Famous Replica of NYC Gets a New Shine

The Panorama of the City of New York
"On long-term view at the Queens Museum, the Panorama of the City of New York was once the highlight of the World’s Fair in 1964. The miniature replica of New York City (including all five boroughs) took over 100 full-time workers nearly three years to build, and is still the largest architectural model of any city in the world to date. The Panorama was the brainchild of 'master builder' Robert Moses, who saw it as a tool for urban design and planning after it left the fair. The City of New York spent $672,662 in 1964 to construct the miniature metropolis, which included 830,000 buildings (now there are 895,000 buildings) over an area of 9,335 square feet. The meticulously crafted, hand-painted design continues to fascinate New Yorkers and global travelers alike, even after 53 years. ..."
The Culture Trip (Video)

10 essential UK dub and reggae albums

"Reggae was born in Jamaica, but it found a second home in the UK – the result of waves of post-war Caribbean migration, and the curatorial ambitions of labels like Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, who took names like Bob Marley and made them international celebrities. Early on, the idea that Britain could turn out reggae artists to compete with the Jamaicans seemed absurd. But around the mid-‘70s, a new wave of musicians and studio hands started bubbling up from the UK’s multiracial centres, taking the style, sound and themes of the Caribbean groups and giving them a distinctly UK twist. Red Bull Music caught up with three legends of the UK reggae and dub scene – broadcaster and DJ Don Letts, On-U Sound don Adrian Sherwood and BBC 1XTRA’s Seani B – and asked to talk through 10 essential UK reggae and dub landmarks. ..."
Red Bull (Video/Audio)

The Tale of Dirty, Old, Leaky Zalinski

Brigadier General M. G. Zalinski sank off the coast of British Columbia in 1946. Full of munitions and fuel, it began leaking oil nearly six decades later.
"An officer aboard the United States Army transport ship Brigadier General M. G. Zalinski described an autumn rainstorm on British Columbia’s north coast as a fluid wall 'so heavy that one could not distinguish rain drops falling.' Even the steel bow of the 76.5-meter ship disappeared from his view. The ship was on a routine mission in 1946 to deliver military and general cargo from Seattle, Washington, to Whittier, Alaska, a 2,500-kilometer voyage north. The crew navigated without radar, an important, but nascent, technology in the Second World War. Instead, they used echoes from the ship’s whistle to indicate proximity to shore in tight passages. The ship found safe anchorage in British Columbia’s Inside Passage—but not for long. ..."
Hakai Magazine (Audio)

Map data by OpenStreetMap via ArcGIS

The anti-liberal moment

"Shortly after its post-World War I creation, the foundations of Germany’s Weimar Republic began to quake. In 1923, Hitler staged an abortive coup attempt in Bavaria, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch — a failure that nonetheless turned Hitler into a reactionary celebrity, a sign of German discontent with the post-war political order. One contemporary observer, a legal theorist in his mid-30s named Carl Schmitt, found the seeds of the crisis within the idea of liberalism itself. Liberal institutions like representative democracy, and the liberal ideal that all a nation’s citizens can be treated as political equals, were in his view a sham. Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups. ... Schmitt’s critique of liberalism proved terrifyingly accurate. The struggle between the Nazis and their opponents could not be resolved through parliamentary compromise; the Weimar Republic fell to fascism and took the rest of the continent down with it. ..."
Vox
The Atlantic: Will the Left Go Too Far?

6 of the Most Legendary Grateful Dead Shows That Happened at The Cap 47 Years Ago

"The early 1970s were arguably the most iconic time period for the Grateful Dead. 1971 laid the groundwork for years like 77 and 78. The stage had been set and the band began to experiment, taking the music even further than the formative years of the 60s. It was vital that the band had the right venues, with the right energy, to do this; The Capitol Theatre was one of those venues. Starting February 18, 1971, and ending February 24, 1971, the Grateful Dead played 6 legendary shows at The Cap. These historic shows capture the magic of the Grateful Dead in the early 1970s – purity, passion, musicianship, and fearlessness. The Dead pushed the improvisational boundaries of music and psychedelia in a way that changed live music forever...."
The Capitol Theatre (Video/Audio)

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera (1984)

Wikipedia - "The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, a dog and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in a French translation (as L'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être). The original Czech text was published the following year. The Unbearable Lightness of Being takes place mainly in Prague in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It explores the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and three other Warsaw Pact countries and its aftermath. The main characters are: Tomáš, an adulterous surgeon; his wife Tereza, a photographer anguished by her husband's infidelities; Tomáš’s lover Sabina, a free-spirited artist; Franz, a Swiss university professor and lover of Sabina; and finally Šimon, Tomáš’s estranged son from an earlier marriage. ..."
Wikipedia
Guardian - Light but sound: John Banville rereads The Unbearable Lightness of Being
20 Quotes From The Unbearable Lightness of Being To Heal A Broken Heart
New Yorker: The Unbearable Lightness of Being By Milan Kundera and Michael Henry Heim (March 11, 1984)
amazon

Why No One Watches Baseball Anymore

"... This past weekend is not just a snapshot, or an unrepresentative sample. It speaks to a broader problem about the future of the sport. For years, articles bemoaning baseball’s ability to attract a younger audience have shot up like weeds, but in 2019 they have more currency, because we have more data. A recent Gallup poll shows that only 9 percent of people in the United States are listing baseball as their favorite sport. That’s the lowest number since Gallup started asking the question in 1937. Recent statistics also show that ballpark attendance is down in 19 of the 30 stadiums around the league. Camera shots of games being played in front of near empty crowds are now plentiful. There is also the embarrassing spectacle of the sparsely watched Tampa Bay Rays looking to play half their games in Montreal. Baseball also has the oldest average fan base of any of the major sports. ..."
The Nation
Guardian: Baseball no longer a supergiant but it is still the most American of sports
This is why baseball is so white (Video)

When Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, he ushered in an era of great black players. But the number of African American fans and baseball stars is on the decline.

The Sculptor Who Reconceives Classical Myths

Yoko Kubrick sculpting at her workshop in Pietrasanta, Italy. At right is “Tides” (2019).
"To understand the ethereal sculptures made by the American artist Yoko Kubrick, you have to know your Greek mythology: The quarrels and trysts of those gods and goddesses inform her work just as they’ve inspired sculptors since the Athenian master Phidias, who, in the fifth century B.C., carved anthropomorphic statues of Zeus, Athena and their cohort in fine detail, from their flared nostrils down to their sandaled feet. Kubrick, who works primarily in Tuscany, uses the same milky Italian marbles and handwork techniques as her mostly male predecessors, but to experience her abstract pieces is less to stare into the face of the divine than to encounter three-dimensional renderings of divinity’s ineffable essence. ..."
NY Times
Yoko Kubrick
NY Times: Italy's Marble Mecca (Aug. 8, 1993)
Massimo Galleni - Sculptor in Pietrasanta

Kubrick’s workbench.

From John Cage to Kool Herc: A Brief History of Turntablism

John Cage
"Coined by DJ Babu of the Beat Junkies crew, the term ‘turntablism’ emerged in 1995 to reflect the artistic practices of the hip hop DJ and, specifically, to denote the difference between playing back records and using turntables to manipulate sound. What’s described as turntablism today however, extends beyond hip hop, and its history starts much earlier. In fact the creative use of reproductive technology started early in the development of the equipment. From the mid-to-late 1800s, buyers of cylinder phonographs and graphophones were using the equipment not only to listen to pre-recorded music, but also to make their own vocal and instrumental recordings. ..."
The Vinyl Factory (Video)
A Brief History of Turntablism (Video)
W - Turntablism

DJ Grandmaster Flash

Holger Czukay - Cinema (2018)

"'Holger has been probably the best editor with tape I ever came across,' says producer and recording engineer Rene Tinner, who worked closely with his studio partner Czukay from the seventies to the nineties. 'He could have 90 or 100 slices of tape on a table, and he could by magic put them back together with music, perfectly. In that, he was a pure master.' The music in this box set does indeed demonstrate masterful arrangements of sounds and sources, movement and melody, humour and seriousness, that can well be described as magical. It is also a set of unpredictable keys and ciphers, revealing a unique worldview where high artistic rigour meets continual openness to chance and serendipity. In this, Holger not only cut and pasted music, but time, place and mindsets, when such things in popular culture were not only technically near impossible, but virtually unprecedented. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Cinema - CD1 (Anthology), CD2, CD3

2011 September: Can, 2011 February: Plight & Premonition, 2011 June: Persian Love, 2013 October: Flux + Mutability - David Sylvian and Holger Czukay (1989) , 2014 June: Holger Czukay - Der Osten Ist Rot, Rome Remains Rome (1984/7), 2016 March: Invaders Of The Heart - Jah Wobble (1982), 2017 April: Jah Wobble, The Edge, Holger Czukay - Snake Charmer (1983), 2017 June: The Legend Lives On… Jah Wobble In Betrayal (1980), 2017 July: Can - The Singles (2017), 2017 September: Holger Czukay (1938-2017)

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, September 6 – 14

"... Saturday, Sept. 7. Look left of the gibbous Moon at dusk for Saturn, as shown above. Much farther to the Moon's right is brighter Jupiter. Once night is fully dark, can you piece out the Sagittarius Teapot below the Moon and behind its light? Sunday, Sept. 8. Now Saturn glows to the Moon's right at dusk, as shown above. A winter preview: Step out before the first light of dawn this week, and the sky displays the same starry panorama it does at dinnertime around New Year's. Orion is striding up in the southeast, with Aldebaran and then the Pleiades high above it. Sirius sparkles far down below Orion. The Gemini twins are lying on their sides well up in the east. See Bob King's Good Morning, Orion! ..."
Sky and Telescope

America America - Elia Kazan (1963), The Immigrants - Criterion

"... This epic, physical, elemental, almost monomaniacal film is an important touchstone for [Martin] Scorsese, a talisman of the passage from and between the old world of Classical Hollywood and the new, more distinctly personal and modern cinema of such directors as John Cassavetes, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Scorsese’s varied contemporaries in the soon to emerge New Hollywood. Kazan’s film is also a driven tale of the passage from the old world of Europe and Asia Minor to the new, ambivalently cleansing world of America. Kazan’s film itself sits between these opposed and entwined worlds. Its extensive use of European locations in Greece and Turkey (mostly the former due to the Turkish authorities’ objections to Kazan’s choice of locations and subjects), deployment of modish techniques associated with the new waves of Europe such as the jump cut and a more episodic, novelistic narrative structure, dexterous deployment of Haskell Wexler’s lucid and fluid hand-held camera, and reliance on non-professional actors and less well-known faces, all combine to grant the film both a freshness and a sense of grounded authenticity. ..."
sensesofcinema - “People are waiting”: Elia Kazan and America America
W - America America
MoMA
amazon
YouTube: America America, America America - Elia Kazan, The Dance of Vartan

Why President Trump’s Sharpied weather map was likely a crime — and should be

The Best Weather Map - New Yorker
"On Wednesday, President Trump displayed a National Weather Service map in the Oval Office showing Hurricane Dorian’s cone of uncertainty (the probable paths of its center). The map had been crudely altered with a Sharpie to extend the cone into Alabama in an attempt to align the map with the president’s earlier tweet falsely claiming that the hurricane was forecast to hit the state. Social media commentators and late-night talk show hosts mocked #Sharpiegate as an absurd and brazen falsehood that not only flouted reality but also broke the law. That last criticism was news to many. Until this week, few Americans knew that a provision in the U.S. Code titled 'False weather reports' makes it a crime to falsely claim the authority of government weather science. ..."
Washington Post
NY Times: The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV
****NY Times: Commerce Chief Threatened Firings at NOAA After Trump’s Dorian Tweets, Sources Say
TIME: President Trump Displays Altered Hurricane Dorian Forecast Chart Showing It Was Expected to Hit Alabama (Video)

President Trump on Wednesday holds a chart showing the original projected track of Hurricane Dorian that appears to have been extended with a black line to include parts of the Florida Panhandle and Alabama.

The Streets of New York - Phil Penman

West Side Highway, New York City, September 14, 2012
"If I was to say what I hope to achieve with my street photography, it would be to keep documenting the ever-changing streets of New York City in all its rat-infested, garbage-piled glory. Perhaps I’m fascinated by all the grime and grit this city has to offer because I grew up in the countryside in the United Kingdom with only the sound of cattle moving in the night. On my path to New York, I’ve done just about everything, working as a street-cleaner, garbage-hauler, milkman, paper delivery boy, Champagne waiter, nightclub barman, DJ, and real-estate broker. I was willing to learn everything and anything, so when I was offered a job as a photographer with a celebrity news agency in New York, I jumped at the opportunity. ..."
NYBooks
Interview: Dynamic Street Shots Document the Quirky Everyday Scenes of New York City
amazon

West Village, New York City, September 15, 2015

American Swamp - Katy Tur / Jacob Soboroff

"Katy Tur and Jacob Soboroff have been talking to each other since they were teenagers growing up around Los Angeles. Now MSNBC audiences will get to see them discuss what are likely to be much more serious subjects. The two NBC News journalists will lead the new four-part MSNBC documentary series 'American Swamp,' which launches Sunday, July 28 at 9 p.m. Each week, the duo will travel across the United States and examine areas of political dysfunction. In the first broadcast, Tur and Soboroff journey to Arizona and Montana to look at how big money influences local elections. In another, they examine who has influence at Mar-A-Lago, the Florida club controlled by President Donald Trump. ..."
Variety
MSNBC: American Swamp (Video)
NY Times: Why Has Trump’s Exceptional Corruption Gone Unchecked?
YouTube: American Swamp: Following The Dark Money Buying Our Elections | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC

Music of Ethiopia

Wikipedia - "The music of Ethiopia is extremely diverse, with each of Ethiopia's ethnic groups being associated with unique sounds. distinct modal system that is pentatonic, with characteristically long intervals between some notes. The music of the Ethiopian Highlands uses a fundamental modal system called qenet, of which there are four main modes: tezeta, bati, ambassel, and anchihoy. ... From the 1950s to the 1970s, Ethiopian popular musicians included Mahmoud Ahmed, Alemayehu Eshete, Hirut Bekele, Ali Birra, Ayalew Mesfin, Kiros Alemayehu, Muluken Melesse and Tilahun Gessesse, while popular folk musicians included Alemu Aga, Kassa Tessema, Ketema Makonnen, Asnaketch Worku, and Mary Armede. Perhaps the most influential musician of the period, however, was Ethio-jazz innovator Mulatu Astatke. Amha Records, Kaifa Records, and Philips-Ethiopia were prominent Ethiopian record labels during this era. ..."
Wikipedia
The 10 Best Ethio-Jazz Tracks, according to Hejira (Video)
An introduction to Ethio-Jazz in 10 records (Video)
NY Times: In Ethiopia’s Capital, a Resurgent Jazz Scene (Video)


2016 January: New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975, 2017 March: Mulatu Astatke - Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974, 2018 March: Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics - Inspiration Information (2009), 2018 March: Ernesto Chahoud presents TAITU - Soul-fuelled Stompers from 1960s - 1970s Ethiopia

Interview: Designer Restores Beloved 19th-Century Botanical Catalog and Places It Online

Water Lily tribe
"Designer Nicholas Rougeux has spent the last year combining his love for data visualization with his tech skills to lovingly restore and place 19th-century texts online. After the success of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours and the geometry tome Byrne’s Euclid, Rougeux is tackling a new topic—botanical illustration. After scouring the internet for different 19th-century botanical catalogs, Rougeux set his sights on Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants by Elizabeth Twining. This 1868 two-volume catalog is the second edition of a work first published in 1849 (volume 1) and 1855 (volume 2). The rare first edition can go for upward of £40,000 (about $49,000), but luckily for Rougeux, the second edition is available for consultation online at the Internet Archive (volume 1, volume 2) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. ..."
My Modern Met

Scan of the Camellia tribe and description from the 1868 edition

scanner - Unearthly Powers (2019)

"A little unreleased work from a forthcoming album. I was given access to tapes by a famous deceased British writer, and amongst recordings of his messages and notes were examples of him playing the piano. I took one of these hissy ancient portable cassette recordings and put it through the Make Noise Morphagene sampler and Strymon Magneto. In many ways the Morphagene and Magneto emulate old tape recorder technology. What you hear here is the slowly decaying material, disappearing into the distance, as the tapes collapse."
soundcloud (Audio)

2012 October: Scanner, 2015 December: Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), 2017 September: The Great Crater (2017), 2018 January: Podcast 523: Scanner

What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

The Basque town of Guernica after its devastation by German bombs in 1937.
"What emotion did you feel the first time you saw Picasso's Guernica? Perhaps curiosity or fascination, and maybe even surprise, given how different the painting looks from everything else in a museum or an art-history textbook. There was almost certainly a dash of confusion as well, but you probably didn't feel the kind of shock you would have if you had learned what many of its early viewers did. Just what gave Guernica its early impact is the central question of the animated TED-Ed video above, written by humanities scholar Iseult Gillespie. 'How can we make sense of this overwhelming image,' asks its narrator, 'and what exactly makes it a masterpiece of anti-war art?' ..."
Open Culture (Video)
salon - Picasso's weapon against fascism: Why "Guernica" is the greatest of all war paintings
Guardian: Eighty years on, Spain may at last be able to confront the ghosts of civil war

Picasso, Guernica, 1937

2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2011 August: Down and Out in Paris and London, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016)

Grant Phabao Afrofunk Arkestra - Grant Phabao Afrofunk Arkestra (2018)

"Access to groovy, funkin', rockin', psychedelic, revolutionary (etc.) African music as we've grown to like it at Paris DJs was not for everyone before the internet age. For Paris DJs co-founder Loik, it began in the early 80s when he met with a former Fela Kuti horn player, who introduced him to Afrobeat. When Loik arrived at Radio Nova in 1986 (he was radio programmer there between 1987 and 1997), he then discovered marvels of African Music (other than Fela), through the radio's vast record collection, which soon led to the word-famous 'La Sono Mondiale' concept. At the same time, Grant Phabao, in his late teens, discovered Congolese music through friends from Zaire. ..."
Paris DJ's (Audio)
Discogs

Les Pieds-Noirs: Algeria’s Forgotten Footballers

"They were war criminals, Nobel Prize laureates and World Cup record-setters. History often shuns them into that dark corner where it tends to stash the unspeakable atrocities too tender for recollection. They were les Pieds-Noirs. The word Pied-Noir literally translates as 'black foot', and it refers to North African settlers of French origin. The vast majority of these settlers ended up in Algeria. In fact, when the Franco-Algerian war began in 1954, 1 million of Algeria’s 9 million inhabitants were Pieds-Noirs. But in the span of a few years, the heart of their identity was arrested by a hideous infarction – decolonization. ... Stuck in a peculiar identity limbo, les pieds-noirs forged their own identity and subsequently stamped a significant impression on footballing folklore. ... The five champions of each league would then participate in an ancient version of the Champions League called the North African Cup. Part One of our series homes in on a special goalkeeper in the league in Algiers: Albert Camus. ..."
French Football Weekly
Africa is a Country - Algerian history as graphic novel: “The past flows into the future”
W - Pied-Noir

Map of French Algeria

2011 October: Albert Camus on Nihilism, 2014 November: Albert Camus: Soccer Goalie, 2015 May: LISTEN: New Cave And Ellis Soundtrack, 2016 April: Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche, 2016 April: Algerian Chronicles (2013), 2017 November: The Stranger (1942), 2018 July: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960)

Can Instagram and Egg Creams Save the Last Punk Rock Bodega?

The (possible) birthplace of the egg cream, which became Gems Spa in the 1950s, has long been a magnet for bohemian East Villagers, as above in 1969.
"Gem Spa had been open for only 40 minutes before the first tour group of the day came by. It was early on a Saturday, and a potbellied guy with bleached blonde hair and a goatee who calls himself Bobby Pinn was lecturing to a devastatingly bored preteen and four adults who did not seem to know what he was talking about. He was explaining the concept of an egg cream — the quintessential New York fountain drink that some people say was invented at this location. 'It’s very refreshing,' he said. 'Almost like a Yoo-Hoo.' Then Mr. Pinn flipped through a laminated book to show the tourists a black-and-white photo of the New York Dolls posing in front of Gem Spa’s iconic signage before shifting gears. ..."
NY Times

The making of an egg cream.

2015 December: Gem Spa

Babylon - Franco Rosso (1980)

"'Babylon' is a 39-year-old nugget of a movie about young British Jamaicans and their itinerant reggae scene built around sound systems, freestyling and parties with rich, low lighting. The film is making its American debut on Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and it’s got an episodic vividness and blanket-load of warmth, but also a harsh view of day-to-day life for black people in South London — on its streets, in its public housing, at its video arcades. If the police aren’t trying to shake down and beat up these guys, some fed-up white lady has come to their chill spot to complain (not unreasonably) that their music is too loud by telling them (unreasonably) to go back to their country and calling them 'jungle bunnies.' The movie is more interested in what feels real than what seems right. What was real, when the movie opened in Britain in November 1980, was the poverty and racism its characters dealt with. Apparently, it was too real. ..."
NY Times - ‘Babylon’ Review: A Clear View of Black Londoners When Few Films Saw Them (Video)
Rolling Stone - ‘Babylon’ Rising: The Resurrection of a Controversial U.K. Reggae Movie (Video)
W - Babylon (film)
YouTube: BABYLON • Official Trailer, Babylon - Franco Rosso - Trailer

Make your own Joe Brainard collage (out of fragments he chose but never used)

"Have you ever looked at a collage by an artist like Picasso or Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters or Joe Brainard, and felt a powerful urge to immediately go make a collage yourself?  Perhaps there’s something about the tactile, playful, anyone-can-do-it premise of collage (unlike, say, oil painting) that invites us to try it ourselves. Fortunately now you can, thanks to a delightful new interactive website called 'Make Your Own Brainard,' created by the scholar Rona Cran (an expert on, among other things, collage in twentieth-century literature and art). Not only does the site enable you to design your own collage, but rather miraculously, you can create one using actual materials that Brainard himself selected, cut out, but never used. ..."
Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets
Joe Brainard and the New York School: Material Texts and Digital Cultures

2008 February: Joe Brainard, 2010 November: I Remember, 2011 October: A State of the Flowers Report, 2011 November: Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, 2012 March: Bolinas Journal, 2012 September: I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard by Matt Wolf (2012), 2014 November: Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Fearless and Well-Fed, New York City's Red-Tailed Hawks Are Flourishing

The number of known Red-tailed Hawk nests in Manhattan has more than doubled in the past six years. The birds usually stick to trees, but will sometimes lay claim to A/C units, fire escapes, and balconies.
"On a mellow evening this past June, a very unexpected guest was entertaining Mateo Suarez while he grilled chicken on his balcony in Flatbush, Brooklyn. His visitor didn’t say anything—it just stared at Suarez with unblinking, yellow eyes and gripped the rail with its sharp talons. The stranger was a Red-tailed Hawk, and it hung out with Suarez as he cooked for the better part of an hour. ... A Brooklyn balcony is an unexpected place for a hawk to turn up—but it's far from the weirdest encounter New Yorkers have had with the birds. In the past few years, the number of close encounters with the birds of prey in New York City seems to have spiked. There was the hawk that got stuck in the window on the Upper East Side, and then the dazed individual sitting on a Midtown street during rush hour. ..."
Audubon
Audubon: Pale Male Is a Legend—But Is He Still Alive?
W - Pale Male

Pale Male in Central Park circa 2011. Or was it?

Lee Fields & The Expressions

"Soul music pours out of Lee Fields, as free and unstinting as God’s love. It has ever since the 1960s, when he was a teenager in North Carolina sweating it out on juke joint stages, crumpled dollars hailing at his feet. It continues now that the living legend is in his late sixties, ushering in the most successful and fruitful period of his career. Like any living legend worth their salt, Fields has suffered despair, obscurity, defeat. Although he now tours stages around the world, and although he helped fellow soul legends like Sharon Jones (who was once Fields’ backup singer) and Charles Bradley (whom Fields took on his first tour) get their first break, he did not always have this position. There were years—they were known as 'the 1980s'—when Fields nearly gave up. His success these days, then has a bittersweet tinge: His dear friends Bradley and Jones have both passed, leaving Fields to outlive them and carry their legacy forth. ..."
Big Crown
W - Lee Fields
YouTube: Wish You Were Here, Faithful Man (Yours Truly Session), You're The Kind Of Girl, Don't Leave me this way | A Take Away Show
YouTube: Full Performance (Live on KEXP) 34:26, "Special Night" (Full Album Stream) 39:14, Full Performance (Live at The Dolhuis - 36 minutes) 36:36

Dissent

"Dissent is a quarterly magazine of politics and ideas. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A. Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin, Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and many others. ..."
Dissent