The Lord of the Rings

Wikipedia - "The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel written by philologist and Oxford University professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit (1937), but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in stages between 1937 and 1949, much of it during World War II."
Wikipedia - The Lord of the Rings, W - The Hobbit, W - J. R. R. Tolkien, video

Recommended Records

Wikipedia - "Recommended Records (RēR) is a British independent record label and distribution network founded by Chris Cutler in March 1978. RēR features largely 'Rock in Opposition' and related music, but it also distributes selected music released on other independent labels."
Wikipedia, ReR

In Sugar Hill, a Street Nurtured Black Talent When the World Wouldn’t

"New York is a city of blocks, each with its own history, customs and characters. Yet from these small stages spring large talents. Anyone who doubts that need look no further than a stretch of Edgecombe Avenue perched on a bluff near 155th Street."
NYT

Spiraling Out of Control: The Greatest Spiral Stairs in the World

"Recently the Loretto Chapel was entered into the Atlas. The chapel is known for a very cool looking set of spiral stairs built in 1877 by a mysterious stranger. With no central support the stairs are said by the sisters of Loretto Chapel to be miraculous in construction."
Atlas Obscura

4′33″

Wikipedia - "4′33″ (pronounced Four minutes, thirty-three seconds or, as the composer himself referred to it, Four, thirty-three) is a three-movement composition by American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912–1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements (the first being thirty seconds, the second being two minutes and twenty-three seconds, and the third being one minute and forty seconds). Although commonly perceived as 'four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence', the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Over the years, 4′33″ became Cage's most famous and most controversial composition."
Wikipedia, Solomons Music, Classical Notes, John Cage, «4'33''», 1952, YouTube, (1) - David Tudor, (2)

Nick Gentry

"This represents a big shift away from physical, real world objects, driving towards a human existence that is ultimately governed by billions of invisible data files. This release of information from the physical form allows personal data and identities to now be revealed and infinitely shared online. At the same time many of us consider individuality and privacy to be more precious than ever. Will humans be forever compatible with our own technology?"
Nick Gentry

Art of Noise

Wikipedia - "Art of Noise (also The Art of Noise) were an avant-garde synthpop group formed in 1983 by producer Trevor Horn, music journalist Paul Morley, and session musicians/studio hands Anne Dudley, J.J. Jeczalik, and Gary Langan. The group's mostly instrumental compositions were novel melodic sound collages based on digital sampler technology, which was new at the time."
Wikipedia, last.fm, HipOnline, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

Zeppelin mail

Wikipedia - "Zeppelin mail was mail carried on zeppelins, the German airships that saw civilian use from 1908 to 1939. Almost every zeppelin flight carried mail, sometimes in large quantities; the covers usually received special postmarks, and a number of nations issued postage stamps specifically intended for use on mail carried by the zeppelins."
Wikipedia, Airships, YouTube

The Trans-Siberian Railway

Wikipedia - "The Trans-Siberian Railway or Trans-Siberian Railroad ... is a network of railways connecting Moscow and European Russia with the Russian Far East provinces, Mongolia, China and the Sea of Japan. Today, the railway is part of the Eurasian Land Bridge."
Wikipedia, YouTube

Roberto Clemente

Wikipedia - "Roberto Clemente Walker (August 18, 1934 – December 31, 1972) was a professional baseball player and a Major League Baseball right fielder. He was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, the youngest of seven children."
Wikipedia, Smithsonian Institution, American Experience

Passport Photos - Famous Artists

Ezra Pound 1922 - Passport Photo
"Passport photos gleaned from passport applications files of writers actors, poets, artists, photographers, etc. The quality is pretty gritty, but I find them interesting, not the least because they are glimpses of these people without their artistic personas showing. Just another traveller submitting to the demands of the state."
flickr

Kate McGarrigle 1946 – 2010

Wikipedia - "Kate McGarrigle, CM (February 6, 1946 – January 18, 2010) was a Canadian folk music singer-songwriter, who wrote and performed as a duo with her sister Anna McGarrigle."
Wikipedia, W - (1), Kate and Anna McGarrigle, NPR, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

kunst-by-rob

Clessé, France
"Saturday. January 9, 2010. Bergün, Switzerland (lower 3 images) I have been away from my scanner the last couple of weeks as we have been on vacation. The top image shows the location I mentioned earlier where we stayed with two other families for a few days. The second sketch was from a village near the chateau, and the final three sketches were done in Bergün, where we spent a week with several other families from Kandern."
kunst-by-rob

Arcadia

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1834
Wikipedia - "Arcadia (Greek: Ἀρκαδία) refers to a Utopian vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature. The term is derived from the Greek province of the same name which dates to antiquity; the province's mountainous topography and sparse population of pastoralists later caused the word Arcadia to develop into a poetic byword for an idyllic vision of unspoiled wilderness. The Utopian vision, Arcadia, is associated with bountiful natural splendor, harmony, and is often inhabited by shepherds."
Wikipedia

Sound Sculptures

"Published by Wergo in 1985, Sound Sculptures is a gorgeous, state-of-the-art overview of Austria and West Germany's instrument builders and sculptors curated by composer and music critic Klaus Hinrich Stahmer."
UbuWeb

Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders

Wikipedia - "Wayne Fontana (born Glyn Ellis on 28 October 1945, Manchester, Lancashire), is a singer. In 1962, he formed his group Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and got a recording contract."
Wikipedia, YouTube, (1)

Robert Watts

SafePost/Jockpost/K.U.K. Feldpost, c. 1962.
Wikipedia - "Robert Watts was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the international Avant-garde art movement Fluxus. Born in Burlington, Iowa June 14th 1923, he became Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Jersey in 1953, a post he kept until 1984."
Wikipedia

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wikipedia - "Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist and prominent leader in the American civil rights movement. His main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the United States, and he has become a human rights icon: King is recognized as a martyr by two Christian churches."
Wikipedia, Seattle Times, Stanford U., YouTube

Berthe Morisot

Summer Days
Wikipedia - "Berthe Morisot (January 14, 1841 – March 2, 1895) was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. Undervalued for over a century, possibly because she was a woman, she is now considered among the first league of Impressionist painters."
Wikipedia, WebMuseum

Marina Abramović

Wikipedia - "Marina Abramović (... born 30 November 1946, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia, present day Serbia) is a New York-based Serbian and Yugoslavian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the 'grandmother of performance art'."
Wikipedia, Sean Kelly Gallery, Seven Easy Pieces, artnet, Guardian, YouTube

13th Floor Elevators

Wikipedia - "The 13th Floor Elevators were an American rock band from Austin which existed 1965-1969. During their career, the band released four LPs and seven 45s for the International Artists record label."
Wikipedia, 13th Floor Elevators, last.fm, Texas Psych Ranch, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

Martin Wilner

"Much of Martin Wilner’s work is diaristic in nature, done in a quotidian fashion, with time playing a role as variable as pen and ink, where a work evolves in a steady manner over an extended time period to unpredictable conclusions, where preset conditions collide head-on with randomness, chance and the unknown."
Martin Wilner: More Drawings About History and Evidence, Martin Wilner, Google

Jacques Derrida

Wikipedia - "Jacques Derrida ... (15 July 1930 – 8 October 2004) was a French philosopher born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. Derrida's best known work is Of Grammatology."
Wikipedia, Stanford University, IEP, Mythos and Logos

The Bioscope

"The Bioscope is dedicated to the subject of early and silent cinema. It is designed to be a news and information resource on all aspects of the motion picture before sound. It covers news, publications, events, discoveries, documents, critical theory, filmmakers, performers, audiences and technology, and aims to encompass film production, distribution and exhibition in the silent era, as well as ‘pre-cinema’, chronophotography, optical toys, and related media, across the world."
The Bioscope

Shocking Blue

Wikipedia - "Shocking Blue was a Dutch rock band from The Hague, the Netherlands, formed in 1967. Their biggest hit, 'Venus,' went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1970, and the band had sold 13.5 million discs by 1973, but the group disbanded in 1974."
Wikipedia, Shocking Blue, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

Naomi Vanderkindren

"All memories and all photographs are works of fiction, whose meanings are intertwined with elements of truth. Interpretations of both are transient, constantly incorporating new ideas and experiences."
Naomi Vanderkindren

Dagmar Krause

Wikipedia - "Dagmar Krause (born 4 June 1950) is a German singer, best known for her work with avant-rock groups like Slapp Happy, Henry Cow and Art Bears. She is also noted for her coverage of songs by Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler. Her unusual singing style makes her voice instantly recognisable and has defined the sound of many of the bands she has worked with."
Wikipedia, MySpace, last.fm, YouTune, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

Philip Taaffe

Easter Choir, 1989-1990
Wikipedia - "Philip Taaffe (born 1955) is an American artist. Taaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and studied at the Cooper Union in New York, gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977. An admirer of Matisse’s cut-outs and of Synthetic Cubism, from the mid 1980s he began to borrow images and designs directly from more recent artists."
Wikipedia, Philip Taaffe, (1), artnet, Google

Zhang Enli

Tree in Winter 4, 2008
Wikipedia - "Zhang Enli ( b. 1965 Jilin Province, China ) is an artist living and working out of Shanghai. A graduate of the Arts & Design Institute of Wuxi Technical University, Wuxi, he is noted for his stark paintings of everyday objects, and his depictions of solitude."
Wikipedia, Shangh Art Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Art Zine

Artists' books

Bushfire, Judy Barrass
Wikipedia - "Artists' books are works of art realized in the form of a book. They are often published in small editions, though sometimes they are produced as one-of-a-kind objects referred to as 'uniques'. Artists' books have employed a wide range of forms, including scrolls, fold-outs, concertinas or loose items contained in a box as well as bound printed sheet. Artists have been active in printing and book production for centuries, but the artist's book is primarily a late 20th century form."
Wikipedia, Otis Collections Online, Mission Creek Press, Artists' Book Collection, Personal Visions: Artists' Books at the Millennium, Science and the Artist's Book, The Journal of Artists' Books, The Artist Turns to the Book - Getty, National Museum of Women in the Arts

Gargoyle

Wikipdedia - "In architecture, a gargoyle is a carved stone grotesque with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building."
Wikipedia

Sly and Robbie

Wikipedia - "Sly and Robbie are one of reggae's most prolific and long lasting production teams. The rhythm section of drummer Lowell Dunbar (nicknamed Sly after Sly Stone, one of his favorite musicians) and bass guitarist Robert Shakespeare started working together in the mid 1970s, after having established themselves separately on the Jamaican music scene."
Wikipedia, Sly and Robbie, MySpace, History, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

Hubertine Auclert

Wikipedia - "Hubertine Auclert (April 10, 1848 – August 4, 1914) was a leading French feminist and a campaigner for women's suffrage."
Wikipedia

Post-punk

Wikipedia - "Post-punk is a rock music movement with its roots in the late 1970s, following on the heels of the initial punk rock explosion of the mid-1970s. The genre retains its roots in the punk movement but is more introverted, complex and experimental. Post-punk laid the groundwork for alternative rock by broadening the range of punk and underground music, incorporating elements of Krautrock (particularly the use of synthesizers and extensive repetition), Jamaican dub music (specifically in bass guitar), American funk, studio experimentation, and even punk's traditional polar opposite, disco, into the genre."
Wikipedia, Guardian

Judson Memorial Church

Wikipedia - "The Judson Memorial Church is located in Greenwich Village of Manhattan on the south side of Washington Square Park. It is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA and with the United Church of Christ."
Wikipedia

The Flying Lizards

Wikipedia - "The Flying Lizards were a British experimental rock band, who were formed in 1978 in London, England. They are best remembered as New wave one-hit wonders, thanks to their deliberately eccentric cover of Barrett Strong's 'Money', which became a surprise UK and US chart success in 1979."
Wikipedia, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

Roller coaster

Roller Coaster 1928
Wikipedia - "The roller coaster is a popular amusement ride developed for amusement parks and modern theme parks. LaMarcus Adna Thompson patented the first coasters on January 20, 1885. In essence a specialized railroad system, a roller coaster consists of a track that rises in designed patterns, sometimes with one or more inversions (such as vertical loops) that turn the rider briefly upside down."
Wikipedia, Ultimate Roller Coaster

MAPCO

War Map Of The Gallipoli Peninsula 1915
"MAPCO's aim is to provide genealogists, students and historians with free access to high quality scans of rare and beautiful antique maps and views. The site displays a variety of highly collectable 18th and 19th century maps and plans of London and the British Isles, and also 19th century maps and engravings relating to Australia."
MAPCO

Big Rock Candy Mountain

Wikipedia - "'Big Rock Candy Mountain' is a song about a hobo's idea of paradise - a modern version of the medieval concept of Cockaigne, and similar to the cavalryman's concept of Fiddler's Green. The song describes a hobo's vision of utopia, a place where the 'hens lay soft boiled eggs' and there are 'cigarette trees'."
Wikipedia, PBS, YouTube - Burl Ives, (1)- 1920s

The Women of the Avant-Garde

"Sound clips from Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Caroline Bergvall, Denise Levertov, Lydia Lunch, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, and many more."
Poetry Foundation, (1)

Greek and Roman

"The collection of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum—more than seventeen thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312—includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America."
Met Museum, NYT - The Met's New Greek and Roman Galleries

Just intonation

Wikipedia - "In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval; in other words, the two notes are members of the same harmonic series."
Wikipedia, UbuWeb - Tellus #14 'Just Intonation' (1986), Just intonation, Just Intonation Explained, American Mavericks, Music Resource Development, Harmonic Theory and Just Intonation, YouTube, La Monte Young - The Well Tuned Piano, Philip Glass - Changing Opinion, The Beatles - PURE intonation, Harrison: "Bells"

Salon (Paris)

Salon de la Commission du Personnel, Adolphe Willette
Wikipedia - "The Salon (French: Salon), or rarely Paris Salon (French: Salon de Paris), beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the western world. Since 1881 it was organized by the Société des Artistes Français."
Wikipedia, W - Société des Artistes Indépendants

Granary Books

Turning Leaves of Mind, 2003
"For over twenty years, Granary Books has brought together writers, artists, and bookmakers to investigate verbal/visual relations in the time-honored spirit of independent publishing. Granary's mission—to produce, promote, document, and theorize new works exploring the intersection of word, image, and page—has earned the Press a reputation as one of the most unique and significant small publishers operating today."
Granary Books, Jacket magazine, ARTBOOK&, Too Much Bliss: Twenty Years of Granary Book

Nouveau Réalisme

Travailleurs Communistes by Raymond Hains
Wikipedia - "Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan. Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group, titled the 'Constitutive Declaration of New Realism,' in April 1960, proclaiming, 'Nouveau Réalisme - new ways of perceiving the real.'"
Wikipedia, New Realism, Google

Chris Cutler

Wikipedia - "Chris Cutler (born January 4, 1947) is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and (briefly) Gong/Mothergong."
Wikipedia, Chris Cutler, Perfect Sound Forever, ReR, YouTune, (1), (2)

Baltimore Orioles

Wikipedia - "The Baltimore Orioles are a professional baseball team based in Baltimore, Maryland. They are a member of the Eastern Division of Major League Baseball's American League. Since 1992, the Orioles have played their home games at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The 'Orioles' name refers to the official state bird of Maryland. Nicknames for the team include the O's and the Birds."
Wikipedia

Elizabeth Forbes

Zandvoort Fishergirl, 1884
"Canada-born Elizabeth Adela Forbes, nee Armstrong, was one of the leading women artists of her day. Her marriage to Stanhope Forbes was a partnership of equals, and their School of Painting was very much a joint enterprise."
Penleehouse, Cybermuse

Einstein on the Beach

Wikipedia - "Einstein on the Beach is an opera scored and written by Philip Glass and designed and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson. It also contains writings by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs."
Wikipedia, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3)

Fascinated by the Orient: Aurel Stein (1862-1943)

"The Hungarian Orientalist, archaeologist and explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein was interested in the meeting points of the great civilizations of the East and the West. His name and works have become inseparable from the history of the Silk Road, which was not merely an Eurasian trade route linking China with the Mediterranean, but a conduit of ideas, beliefs, styles of art and technologies."
Fascinated by the Orient, Aurel Stein, British Explorations in Chinese Central Asia

The Sites of Latin American Abstraction

"The exhibition intends to explore a rarely addressed aspect of Latin American abstract art: To what extent the simultaneous development of an abstract movement in different artistic centers (Argentina and Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela) responded to the cultural and socio-political need of reconsidering, on the basis of modernist art, the prospect of a previously much-discussed Latin American identity."
cifo, LA Times, YouTube