Cinévardaphoto - Agnès Varda (2004)

"... In Cinévardaphoto, a collection of three cinematic essays, Varda includes two shorts, Ulysses, made in 1982, and Salut Les Cubains (1963), with a new short, Ydessa, The Bears and etc., about an exhibit of teddy-bear photos by a Canadian collector. The only obvious link among the three films is that photos provided the inspiration. ... Salut les Cubains is a curiosity, but a delightful one. On a trip to Cuba a few years after the revolution, Varda shot thousands of black-and-white photos which in the short become a celebration of socialism and of the Cuban love of dance and music."
Film Journal International
Cinema Guild Home Entertainment
NYT: The Innocence Is Deceptive in This Teddy Bear World
NYT: Cinevardaphoto (Video)

August 2010: Agnès Varda, May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000).

Flying Burrito Brothers - Live At The Avalon Ballroom 1969

"It’s difficult to describe the full impact The Gilded Palace of Sin, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ debut album, had on me in February 1969, when I came across a promotional copy of the A&M Records album as an 18-year-old college disc jockey. Gram Parsons -- shaggy-haired and draped in a Western suit from Nudie’s of Hollywood festooned with marijuana leaves, pills, and naked women -- squinted out coolly from the record’s cover, looking glamorous, dangerous, and alien, a rock ‘n’ roller with attitude to burn in spangled country mufti."
Amoeba
W - Live At The Avalon Ballroom 1969
YouTube: Flying Burrito Brothers - Avalon Ballroom 1969 1:10:54

2008 March: Gram Parsons, 2011 March: Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris. Liberty Hall, Texas, 1973, 2012 May: Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 2013 January: Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel.

Art Made from Books: Altered Sculptured, Carved, Transformed

Paper Typerwriter, 2011, by Jennifer Collier 
"Art Made from Books: Altered Sculptured, Carved, Transformed, released this month by Chronicle Books, is a collection of incredibly detailed works by more than 25 artists who use books as their medium. Using a variety of techniques — from carving to stitching — artists transform the bound pages into thought-provoking sculptures. A relatively new art form that was started in the late 1960s by artist Tom Phillips, the finished products often present layers of meaning that speak to the source material as well as the artist's interpretations of the texts."
The Week
amazon

Christian Boltanski

Altar to the Chases High School (Autel Chases), 1987
Wikipedia - "Christian Boltanski (born 1944) is French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker. He is the brother of Luc Boltanski and the partner of Artist Annette Messager. ... In the 1970s, Boltanski started using mainly photography for expressing form, exploration of consciousness, and remembering. After 1976, he started treating photography as painting, making collages of sliced photographs of still nature and everyday life banality in order to reflect collective aesthetic condition of modern civilization in ordinary, stereotypical way. As a departure from his earlier medias, he started using readymade objects. His use of small, colorful figures made from cardboard, thread and cork, transposed photographically into large picture formats, helped him creating effective theatrical compositions. These works encouraged him to start creating kinetic installations."
Wikipedia
MoMA | The Collection
artnet
NYT: Exploring Mortality With Clothes and a Claw
Armory On Park
BOMB: Christian Boltanski by Irene Borger
YouTube: Christian Boltanski at Grand Palais Paris, Théâtre d'ombres, Chance. French Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2011, Possible Lives - Les vies possibles 52:12

Slave Capitalism

"In 1835, at the height of the Southern cotton boom, the master class of the Mississipi Delta region had an attack of its worst phobia: fear of slave rebellion. One slaveholder in the countryside saw some of her slaves acting unusually, seeming defiant, appearing to plot. She began to eavesdrop and overheard one slave fantasize about being 'her own mistress.' In another conversation, she caught the word 'kill.' Her son squeezed a slave for information and drew out details of a coming insurrection. The masters sounded the alarm: patrols were instituted, investigators fanned out, the countryside came alive with tipsters."
n+1: Walter Johnson. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
NYT: King Cotton’s Long Shadow By Walter Johnson
W - Wage slavery
amazon
YouTube: River of Dark Dreams

CBGB's Final Show With Patti Smith - 15 October 2006

"Legendary punk club CBGB closed five years ago tomorrow. In its final week, the venue hosted a string of shows paying tribute its storied thirty year run, and it all culminated with a headlining set from Patti Smith. There were only a couple hundred people lucky enough to get tickets to that last hurrah, and one of them was me."
RFT
CBGB: Closing Night with Patti Smith Group [uncut#10] (Video)

2009 April: CBGB, 2011 January: CBGB's the roots of punk documentary

Villa that inspired Lawrence Durrell faces demolition, as Egypt allows heritage to crumble

" The term 'faded grandeur' might have been invented for Alexandria. So much of the resort's cosmopolitan elegance has faded that one more crumbling palace in this part of Egypt might not seem to make much difference. But the planned demolition of one particular house, Villa Ambron, though already a tumbledown wreck, has provoked a reaction that may yet save something of the city's unusual heritage just as it seemed about to be buried. With its belle époque architecture, and the Roman columns built into the wall of its purpose-built artists' atelier, the house has distinctive qualities in its own right. But it is as the home and inspiration of Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet preserved in high-flown prose the city's international flavour, that it is now honoured, and is the reason a campaign is growing to save it."
Telegraph
Guardian: Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria – in pictures

2011 December: The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell

Across 110th Street (1972)

Wikipedia - "Across 110th Street is a 1972 American crime drama film starring Anthony Quinn, Yaphet Kotto, and Anthony Franciosa, and directed by Barry Shear. Commonly associated with the blaxploitation genre at the time, it has received considerable critical praise from writer Greil Marcus and others for surpassing the limitations of that genre. This film is set in Harlem, of which 110th Street is an informal boundary line. By-the-book African-American Lieutenant William Pope (Kotto) has to work with crude, racist but streetwise Italian-American Captain Frank Mattelli (Quinn) in the NYPD's 27th precinct."
Wikipedia
Discogs
YouTube: Bobby Womack "Across 110th Street", Across 110th St. REMIX, Across 110th Street Instrumental by J. J. Johnson And His Orchestra

Re : Rosas!

"Precisely 30 years ago, dance company Rosas put itself on the map with the production Rosas danst Rosas. This choreography has since been staged all over the world. And now it’s your turn. Dance your own Rosas danst Rosas, make a video film of it and post it on this site. In the following videos choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and dancer Samantha van Wissen will teach you the moves, step by step, from the second part of the performance."
Re : Rosas
Re : Rosas! (Video)

2009 July: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, 2012 December: Rosas Danst Rosas (1983).

Lost to the Ages. 20th Anniversary

"... You are standing on a dock beside the jutting masts and crow's nest of a sunken ship, water lapping calmly under your feet. A hill rises in front of you, with what appear to be two giant gears perched atop it, and a short concrete staircase curves up the side. To the left, you see a Greek-looking dome structure made of marble, and, as you turn 360 degrees to see your surroundings, there's not a soul in sight. You take a step forward. And another step. Everything is disarmingly still, save for a pair of seagulls flying overhead in the hazy marine layer. You make your way up to a walkway running parallel to the water and see a path constructed of what looks to be railroad ties leading up past the dome and toward another classical edifice. Lying to the side of the path is a weathered piece of paper. You pick it up."
Grantland

2010 December: Myst, Riven

5th Biennale Opens Main Exhibit, 'More Light'

Chinese artist Song Dong
"The Fifth Moscow Biennale will open its long-awaited main exhibit, 'More Light,' in Moscow's Manezh on Friday. With works from nearly 100 artists from six continents, the exhibit fills the immense space of Manezh with a wealth of art, much of it large installations, built around the theme of 'More Light.' ... The exhibit is clearly divided into two sections on separate floors of Manezh. The lower, 'dark' level is dominated by video projections, as well as some large hanging installations which stand in pools of warm light, starkly contrasting with their murky surroundings in Manezh's basement."
5th Biennale Opens Main Exhibit
Anna Tolstova - 5th Biennale Opens Main Exhibit, 'More Light'
NYT: Pinpricks, but No Dagger in Putinland
“More Light,” 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

Buffalo Skinners - Woody Guthrie

Still-hunting Buffaloes on the Range: from a painting by J. H. Moser
"Come all you jolly skinners, and listen to my song,
There are not many verses, it will not detain you long:
It's concerning some young fellows who did agree to go
and spend one summer pleasantly of the range of the buffalo."
Woody Guthrie
Bob Dylan: Trail of The Buffalo - traditional (Video)
YouTube: Buffalo Skinners - Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston

Einstürzende Neubauten - Alles Wieder Offen (2007)

"If Einsturzende Neubauten's 2007 effort Alles Wieder Offen ('All Open Again') seems to be more of a follow-up to 2000s Silence Is Sexy than 2004's Perpetuum Mobile, it could be because it delivers on EN's 2002 dream of a listener-supported official album. Mobile appeared on the band's usual home label Mute so a tour could be financed. Even if it was hardly a throwaway album, the group's hunger for progress seemed undercut by the use of air horn blasts, metal crashes, and other devices that referenced the sound that made early Neubauten so infamous. Alles, on the other hand, was paid for by 'supporters' who received interim recordings and an expanded final product different from the general release with bonus tracks and a DVD. ..."
allmusic
W - Alles Wieder Offen
Einstürzende Neubauten - Alles Wieder Offen
YouTube: Nagorny Karabach, Alles was irgendwie nützt, Die Wellen, Weil Weil Weil, Ich hatte ein Wort, Ich Warte

2010 September: Einstürzende Neubauten, 2012 September: Imaginary Sounds Feature

Little Syria

Harper's Weekly Aug. 10, 1895
"'When one leaves the hurry and roar of lower Broadway and walks southward through narrow Washington-st., the average New-Yorker of Caucasian descent might easily believe he was in the Orient. A block to the east roar the trains of the elevated. A little further eastward are the rushing throngs of Broadway. In the midst of all this tumult and confusion is situated the quiet village of Ahl-esh-Shemal.' And so, in 1903, the New-York Tribune endeavors to take its readers into Little Syria. ..."
The Paris Review
W - Little Syria, Manhattan
Saudi Aramco World : Little Syria, NY
Little Syria, NY: The Life & Legacy of an Immigrant Community
Helene Wecker
NYT - A Brief Encore for Little Syria: Sights, Sounds and Even Smells
NPR: Trying To Preserve What's Left Of Manhattan's Little Syria (Video)
BBC: Preserving New York City's 'Little Syria' (Video)
YouTube: Little Syria @ Washington Street, Manhattan, New York City

Sensitive Geometries. Brazil 1950s – 1980s

Anna Maria Maiolino — Capítulo II, from Mapas Mentais series, 1976
"In the years after World War II, Brazil found itself in a state of dramatic change. Economic prosperity, political democratization, and social reorganization marked the decade of the 1950s as one of the most expansive in Brazilian history. In the cultural realm, urban renewal propelled the construction of Brasilia and witnessed the creation of modern art museums in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The first São Paulo Biennale was held in 1951, signaling the advent of an artistic revolution that would capture the attention of both the Brazilian public and wider circles of artists, intellectuals, and critics abroad. Brazil in the mid-20th century was emerging as a dynamic cultural center of international significance."
Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth - 1

Horace Andy Meets Naggo Morris/Wayne Jarrett -- Mini Showcase (2002)

"This intriguing reissue (packaged to look like a vintage Jamaican dub plate) brings together two samplers of 12" singles from Lloyd 'Bullwackie' Barnes' New York-based Wackies label, both of which were originally released in 1983. The first sampler (originally called Wayne Jarrett-Mini Showcase) features five tracks by Wayne Jarrett, along with dubs of three of the songs, while the second (originally entitled Horace Andy Meets Naggo Morris) offers two songs each (and their corresponding dubs) from Horace Andy and Naggo Morris."
allmusic
YouTube: Satta Dread, Bubble Up, Magic in the air, Brimstone & Fire, Every Tongue Shall tell, Holy Mount Zion

Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: Images of Land and Sea

Anne Packard, Dusk, Provincetown
"27 artists included in the show are Donald Beal, Mark Brennan, Ed Chesnovitch, Carmen Cicero, Salvatore Del Deo, Jon Friedman, Elspeth Halvorsen, Megan Hinton, Jim Holland, Brenda Horowitz, Larry Horowitz, Joyce Johnson, Maryalice Johnston, Marc Kundmann, Bao Lede, Mary Moquin, Sky Power, Daniel Ranalli, Paul Resika, Paul Schulenburg, Matthew Schulz, Cleber Stecei, Donald Stoltenberg, Tabitha Vevers, Peter Watts, and Bert Yarborough."
Cape Cod Today
Addison Art Gallery
amazon: Contemporary Cape Cod Artists

Outerbridge Reach - Robert Stone (1993)

"... In Outerbridge Reach the Converse figure, much cleaned up, is a handsome fortyish husband and father named Owen Browne. A 1968 graduate of the Naval Academy who served in Vietnam, Browne uses no drugs and drinks very sparingly, reads, keeps himself fit and tries to be a good man around the house. Soon after we meet him, he thinks about the morning he left Penn Station bound for Annapolis and wonders how the Owen Browne of those days might have imagined himself 20 years later: 'The image would have been a romantic one, but romantic in the postwar modernist style. Its heroic quality would have been salted in stoicism and ennobled by alienation. As an uncritical reader of Hemingway, he would have imagined his future self suitably disillusioned and world-weary.'"
NYT: Sailing Over The Edge
LRB: Where mine is at - Gordon Burn
LATimes: Against the Tides of Mediocrity
amazon

"What Moves Me" - Pina Bausch

"... The war experiences are unforgettable. Solingen suffered a tremendous amount of destruction. When the air raid sirens went off, we had to go into the small shelter in our garden. Once a bomb fell on part of the house as well. However, we all remained unharmed. For a time, my parents sent me to my aunt's in Wuppertal because there was a larger shelter there. She thought I would be safer there. I had a small black rucksack with white polka dots, with a doll peering out of it. It was always there packed ready so that I could take it with me when the air raid siren sounded. I remember too our courtyard behind the house. There was a water pump there, the only one in our area. People were always lining up there to fetch water. ..."
[PDF] "What Moves Me" (English version) - Pina Bausch

2008 May: Pina Bausch, 2009 June: Pina Bausch 1940-2009, 2012 August: Pina Bausch Costumes.

Fela Kuti - Unknown Soldier (1981)

"... This thing wey happen
Happen for my country
Na big big thing
First time in the whole world
If you hear the name, you go know
Government magic
Tell me the name now"
YouTube: Unknown Soldier 31:10

Großes Wasser - Cluster (1979)

Wikipedia - "Großes Wasser is the seventh album by the electronic music outfit Cluster. It was co-produced by former Tangerine Dream member Peter Baumann. Großes Wasser marked the return to Cluster working as a duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius after two albums collaborating with Brian Eno. Großes Wasser was recorded and released in 1979 on the Hamburg, Germany based Sky label."
Wikipedia
iskspZ
YouTube: Grosses Wasser 35:49

2009 July: Kluster, 2010 April: Cluster, 2012 September: Conrad Schnitzler (1937–2011).

Montauk - Max Frisch

Wikipedia - "Montauk is a story by Swiss writer Max Frisch. It first appeared in 1975 and takes an exceptional position in Frisch's work. While fictional stories previously served Frisch for exploring the possible behavior of his protagonists, in 'Montauk', he tells an authentic experience: a weekend which he spent with a young woman at the American East Coast. The short-run love affair is used by Frisch as a retrospective on his own biography. ... On their last weekend Lynn and Frisch come closer together and take a trip to Long Island, New York to the village of Montauk on the Atlantic coast. For the author this weekend sparks the desire to describe the shared days, without any addition. The presence of Lynn triggers reflections and memories in Frisch. He ponders on age and his growing feeling to be an imposition for others, his success and its effect on enviers, admirers and women."
Wikipedia
W - Max Frisch
Paris Review: Max Frisch, The Art of Fiction No. 113
amazon: Max Frisch

Janet Cardiff - The Forty Part Motet

"The Forty Part Motet (2001), a sound installation by Janet Cardiff (Canadian, born 1957), will be the first presentation of contemporary art at The Cloisters. Regarded as the artist's masterwork, and consisting of forty high-fidelity speakers positioned on stands in a large oval configuration throughout the Fuentidueña Chapel, the fourteen-minute work, with a three-minute spoken interlude, will continuously play an eleven-minute reworking of the forty-part motet Spem in alium numquam habui (1556?/1573?) by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505–1585)."
Metropolitan Museum - Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller | The Forty Part Motet | 2001 (Video)
W - Janet Cardiff
NYT: Moved to Tears at the Cloisters by a Ghostly Tapestry of Music (Play)

Watch Audio Ammunition: Google’s New Documentary Series on The Clash and Their Five Classic Albums

"The Clash are big in music news again with the arrival of their box set Sound System, which Mick Jones promises will be their final official release of all time. Jones also tells The Guardian it’s the 'best box set ever,' and I just might believe it. It’s certainly one of the coolest looking. The band’s music holds up perfectly well; in fact it’s taken on renewed relevance as so much of the cultural and economic conflicts they wrote in response to have emerged like zombies from the grave to torment us again (this time, perhaps, pace Marx, as zombie farce)."
Open Culture (Video)
Guardian: The Clash to release new box set of remastered albums and rarities (Video)
The Clash to Release Massive Box Set Shaped Like a Boombox, Plus Greatest Hits Comp (Video)
Google (Video)
amazon: 5 Album Studio Set, Hits Back (2-CD Set)

Robert Wyatt - Solar Flares Burn for You (2003)

"Coinciding almost concurrently with the issue of Cuckooland, an entirely new studio recording by composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Robert Wyatt on Hannibal, Solar Flares Burn For You is a welcome 'other-dimension.' This is not a repackaging of material that has been released countless times before. While certain tracks, such as the title and 'I'm A Believer' have been released elsewhere, these versions have not; they come from projects where their inclusion here is not only warranted but necessary. What is included here are both of Wyatt's BBC Top Gear Shows, one from 1972 with Francis Monkman, and another from 1974 on solo piano, the original soundtrack version of the title cut, and the film it was composed for, two new tracks with Hugh Hopper, and a brand new demo."
allmusic
Dusted Magazine
YouTube: 'twas brillig, blimey o'riley, God Song, Alifib, Little Child, The Verb, Solarflares Burn For You (1973), Sea song (Peel Session) 1974

2010 November: Robert Wyatt, 2011 October: Sea Song, 2012 October: Comicopera, 2013 March: The Last Nightingale.

Ismini Samanidou

‘Ismini Fabric’, Interior textile woven with cotton and paper.
"Athens born and London based artist Ismini Samanidou trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art specialising in woven textiles. Her practice touches on the boundaries of craft, art and design and involves developing textile works through commissions and interdisciplinary collaborations. Weaving is used as a language to communicate and express ideas through a ‘hands on’ approach integrating digital technologies and craft skills. Ismini has travelled and researched textile techniques worldwide and is interested in the way weaving exists as an autonomous language. Crossing cultural and political boundaries, weaving retains local identity with global connections, articulating narrative, space and history."
Ismini Samanidou
Artists' stories | Artists talking
Weave Waves
YouTube: Ismini Samanidou

Sweet Revenge - John Prine (1973)

"Prine's third album is louder and more jaded than his first efforts, a set of rowdy country-rockers that tear along at a reckless speed. Sympathy takes a back seat to cynicism here, and while that strips the record of some depth, Prine's irreverence is consistently thrilling, making this one of his best. It's not as uniformly brilliant as the debut, but it did steer his music in a new direction -- where that record is often hallmarked for its rich sensitivity, Sweet Revenge established cynicism as Prine's dominant voice once and for all. Although he could still crank out a great ballad when he felt like it, from now on his records largely followed a more conventional rock & roll muse, a choice that eventually gained him more mainstream attention. 'Please Don't Bury Me,' 'Christmas in Prison,' 'Blue Umbrella,' and 'A Good Time' are a few of the jewels on this one."
allmusic
Wikipedia
YouTube: Please Don't Bury Me, Christmas in Prison, Sweet Revenge, Dear Abby (Old Grey Whistle 1973), Grandpa Was A Carpenter, The Accident, Blue Umbrella, A Good Time

Stasi Museum

"The Stasi was an Eastern Germany version of the KGB, established by the Soviets in 1952. Just like the KGB, the Stasi was mostly busy looking for enemies of the people, employing round-the-clock surveillance, and eavesdropping on German citizens. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, people assaulted the Stasi headquarters, dissolved the organization, opened its archives to the public, and created a museum in the main building."
Egor Egorov
Stasimuseum Berlin
W - Stasi
W - Stasi Museum
39 things you might learn if you visit the Stasi Museum with a 10½ week old baby…
YouTube: A visit to the Stasi Museum - Berlin, Stasi Files: The Lives of Others, Secret Files: How shredded Stasi files are reconstructed

The Ugly American

Wikipedia - "The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer upon which a 1963 movie starring Marlon Brando was based. The novel became a bestseller, was influential at the time, and is still in print. The book is a quasi-roman à clef; that is, it presents, in a fictionalized guise, the experience of Americans in Southeast Asia (Vietnam) and allegedly portrays several real people who are represented by pseudonyms. [1958 novel] The novel takes place in a fictional nation called Sarkhan (an imaginary country in Southeast Asia that somewhat resembles Burma or Thailand, but which is meant to allude to Vietnam) and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed. The book describes the United States's losing struggle against Communism—what was later to be called the battle for hearts and minds in Southeast Asia—because of innate arrogance and the failure to understand the local culture. ... [1963 film] The story of this novel was made into a film in 1963 starring Marlon Brando as Ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite. Its screenplay was written by Stewart Stern, and the film was produced and directed by George Englund."
Wikipedia
NYT: Still ‘Ugly’ After All These Years
NYT: The Ugly American Telegram
Atlantic: How Chinese Tourists Usurped the Ugly Americans
amazon: The Ugly American
YouTube: The Ugly American (1963, George Englund) - Trailer

Bryan Schutmaat

"My name is Bryan Schutmaat. I’m a photographer and this is my blog. In the 'news' section you’ll find announcements about my work – exhibitions, publications, awards, press, etc – as well as new photos that typically haven’t been shown on the net before. The 'inspiration' section contains other people’s work that I like and want to remember. I rarely reblog material, as I like to put stuff on tumblr that I haven’t seen on tumblr before. You can find my portfolio and more info about me on my main site, here. Thanks for stopping by."
Bryan Schutmaat Tumblr
Bryan Schutmaat
aperture
vimeo: Grays the Mountain Sends