Dostoyevsky Got a Reprieve from the Czar’s Firing Squad and Then Saved Charles Bukowski’s Life

"Yesterday we featured Charles Bukowski’s first-ever recorded readings. Perhaps you found them, in their way, inspirational, but for me the feeling of inspiration always leads to a question — who inspired my inspirer? In the case of Bukowski, the poet has, in his work, clearly named one of his main inspirations: the work of 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The author of Crime and Punishment might at first seem to have little in common with the author of Ham on Rye, but often the most resonant inspirations don’t involve much direct resemblance."
Open Culture (Video)

Poets on Photography

Sergio Larrain, Boulevard Saint-Germain, Before the Deux Magots Café, 1959
John Ashbery: "I lived in Paris mostly from 1955 to 1965. This photograph, called Boulevard Saint-Germain, Before the Deux Magots Café, Paris 1959, is by Sergio Larrain. The Café Deux Magots was a favorite hangout of mine, at least when I was flush enough to afford it. I could conceivably have been there when the picture was taken. The photograph sums up beautifully the atmosphere of Paris on a rather chilly autumn afternoon, with well-dressed and well-behaved tourists sipping their café exprès and two fashionable cars, a sports car and a sedan. The three people chatting around the sports car are almost crystallizations of Parisians of that now distant era. The young man at far left, with his back to the camera, is an iconic silhouette of the time, with pleasantly rumpled clothes and both shoes planted firmly on the pavement. I keep this card tucked into a picture frame over my desk to remind me of the past in all its melancholy variety."
The Paris Review - John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach, Richard Howard, Ben Lerner

Raphael Soyer

Cafe Scene, 1940
"New York artist Raphael Soyer’s style of painting was seriously out of fashion during his lifetime. Born in Russia in 1899, his family arrived in the Bronx in 1912. Soyer soon went to work, holding menial jobs. But throughout the teens, he also studied art, taking free classes at Cooper Union and the Art Students League. Rather than the abstract style that was popular in the 1930s and beyond, his work was realistic—he cast his eye on the lonely and downtrodden working-class New Yorkers he saw in bars, employment agencies, and on city streets. ... Soyer sketched and painted compassionate images of lonely and dispossessed Bowery bums, shopgirls, and secretaries going about their lives and appearing ordinary, unheroic, yet deeply human. ..."
Ephemeral New York
W - Raphael Soyer
NY Times: Raphael Soyer, Social Realist Artist, is Dead at 87
amazon
YouTube: Raphael Soyer

Jem Cohen - This Is a History of New York (1987)

"And in its own way, it is. I've always felt that demythologising films about New York make me want to visit the place more than romanticised ones ever do - and I say that as a big Woody Allen fan (see also Fruitvale Station, which wraps a horrible story about racial injustice inside a warm, humane portrait of NYC communal spirit). In Jem Cohen's short the people are mostly marginal, the footage could be from a hundred years ago or from last week, and the monuments to America's progressive, space-racing past are in a state of melancholy disrepair."
Letterboxd
YouTube: This Is a History of New York

2014 January: Jem Cohen, 2014 June: Museum Hours (2012), 2014 November: Interview with Jem Cohen.

Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations

"The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public. The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. ... In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times: 7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report
NY Times: Republican Response to the Torture Report
NY Times: C.I.A.’s Response to the Senate Torture Report
NY Times: The Senate Committee’s Report on the C.I.A.’s Use of Torture

David Lynch’s Bad Thoughts - J. Hoberman

I Am Running Home from Your House, 2013
"Like Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali, David Lynch is a name-brand artist who confounds conventional categories. Lynch was the first American avant-garde filmmaker to direct a Hollywood blockbuster (the ill-fated Dune, 1984), the first to create a prime-time network TV show (the fabulously idiosyncratic Twin Peaks, 1990), the first to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes (Wild at Heart, 1990), the first to open a Paris nightclub (the ultra-finished sub-basement Silencio), and the first, save Warhol or Bruce Conner, to have a museum retrospective of his paintings, drawings, prints and assemblages."
NYBook (Video)

2014 September: David Lynch: The Unified Field

Robert Wyatt - Different Every Time (2014)

"Any compilation record fulfills two purposes: it provides a listening experience, and it makes an argument. At some basic level, the first is, as with any music, the most important, but it's the second that makes for the livelier discussion. Domino's Robert Wyatt anthology, entitled Different Every Time and split into two double-records, slaughters its opposition as a listening experience. As an argument about the substance of (rarefied language is in this case entirely appropriate) one of the genuinely great, if cruelly under-known, musicians of the past fifty years, there is a counter-argument to be made."
The Quietus
Pitchfork
Wire: Robert Wyatt: an extract from biography Different Every Time
amazom: Different Every Time
Juno: Different Every Time: Volume 1 - Ex Machina, Volume 2: Benign Dictatorships

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).

"Strange Fruit" - Billie Holiday (1939)

Wikipedia - "'Strange Fruit' is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939. Written by teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem and published in 1937, it protested American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the South at the turn of the century, but continued there and in other regions of the United States. Meeropol set it to music and, with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan, performed it as a protest song in New York venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden."
Wikipedia
NPR: The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit' (Video)
NY Times: Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights
YouTube: "Strange Fruit"

2010 April: Billie Holiday, 2013 May: Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black, Starring a 19-Year-old Billie Holiday

The Great War: WWI Starts - How Europe Spiraled Into the Great War - Week 1

"After the assasination of Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary is determined to put a lid on Serbia once and for all. Germany wanted to go to war with Russia sooner than later, because it was a affraid of a strong Czar. In our first episode, Indy explains how the conflicts in Europe spiraled into a world war."
YouTube: WWI Starts - How Europe Spiraled Into the Great War - Week 1

Welcome to Union Glacier - Wes Anderson (2013)

"Our main Antarctic camp is located in the southern Ellsworth Mountains, on the broad expanse of Union Glacier. The setting is spectacular. The accommodation spacious and comfortable. The meals fresh and delicious. The service and support unparalleled. Majestic peaks rise in all directions offering plenty of opportunities for scenic excursions, technical climbs and ski tours. At camp there is little wind, providing a comfortable environment to relax and take it all in. ... Union Glacier Camp is only accessible by air and your journey begins with a 4 ¼ hour flight from Punta Arenas, Chile. Our wheeled aircraft lands on a naturally-occurring ice runway on the Union Glacier, where you take your first steps in Antarctica. Climb aboard one of our specially adapted vans for the 5 mile (8km) ride to camp, where a warm welcome awaits you."
Union Glacier Camp
W - Union Glacier
vimeo: Welcome to Union Glacier 53:56

2013 November: Wes Anderson Honors Fellini in a Delightful New Short Film, 2013 November: Rushmore (1998), 2013 Decemher: Hotel Chevalier (2007), 2014 March: Wes Anderson Collection, 2014 April: The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies, 2014 July: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), 2014 August: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

"Road To Nowhere" - Talking Heads (1985)

"The first single from 1985's Little Creatures, 'Road To Nowhere' is gimmicky almost to the point of novelty. Starting with an earnest gospel-like a cappella introduction -- more in the austere four-square Methodist style of church singing than the flashier choirs -- the song slides into a thumping, accordion-led shuffle influenced by but not particularly beholden to traditional zydeco."
allmusic
W - "Road To Nowhere"
YouTube: "Road To Nowhere"

2008 September: Talking Heads, 2011 June: Talking Heads: 77, 2011 August: More Songs About Buildings and Food, 2011 October: Fear of Music, 2012 January: Remain in Light, 2012 April: Speaking in Tongues, 2012 June: Live in Rome 1980.

Face Control - A Moscow Travelogue

"The author makes his first trip to the Second World, and finds himself fascinated by The Third Rome. This 30-page comic contains stories about mysterious women bikers, dark chocolate with cheese curds, avant-garde Russian poetry, 'the 'Moscow Face', anti-cafes, Victor Tsoi and Vladimir Mayakovsky."
Face Control - A Moscow Travelogue
The secret life of a think-tank researcher in Singapore

The Making of an Underground Film

"There is simply too much pork for the fork in this wild CBS Evening News report on the then-new phenomenon of 'underground films' from New Year’s Eve of 1965/66. Seen here are Piero Heliczer filming the Velvet Underground, along with testimony from Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, a gorgeous young Edie Sedgwick, Al Aronowitz (the rock journo who introduced The Beatles to Dylan—and pot), Willard Van Dyke of the Museum of Modern Art, Chuck Wein, even shirtless and bodypainted Lou Reed and John Cale. Angus MacLise, who was still in the group when this was shot makes an appearance as well."
Dangerous Minds
W - Underground film
YouTube: The Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite

The Barbizon School: French Painters of Nature

Theodore Rousseau, Maison-atelier a Barbizon
"In early nineteenth-century France, landscape painting was narrowly circumscribed by an aesthetic code upheld by the conservative French Academy. Painters and sculptors were rigorously trained in the Neoclassical tradition to emulate artists of the Renaissance and classical antiquity. In the hierarchy of historical subjects recognized by the Academy, pure landscape painting was not a privilege. At best, artists could hope to paint an idealized nature inspired by ancient poetry. The grand classicizing subjects of the seventeenth-century painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain presented other acceptable models."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
W - Barbizon school

Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies

"Hanart TZ Gallery, pre-eminent gallery specializing in contemporary art of Greater China, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with 'Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies' comprising non-sale exhibitions across three venues and a symposium in Hong Kong. The event focuses on the concept of the 'Three Art Worlds' that have coexisted in China from the 1900s to present day: the literati tradition, the socialist state and our current global capital world. The exhibition serves as a testimony to years of hard work used to foster and promote Chinese contemporary art and is a timely reflection to the benefit of future development."
ArtAsiaPacific
ARTFORUM: Together Again

Two Lives (2012)

Wikipedia - "Two Lives ... is a 2012 German drama film written and directed by Georg Maas, and starring Juliane Kohler, with Liv Ullmann. Set in Norway and Germany, it is loosely based on an unpublished novel by Hannelore Hippe since released as Ice Ages. The film explores the history of the Lebensborn or war children, born in Norway and raised in Germany. It explores the lives of a grown woman who had claimed to have escaped from East Germany, where she was raised, and her Norwegian mother, with whom she is reunited."
Wikipedia
NPR: A Legacy Of War, Hitting Home Decades Later In Norway
NY Times: So Blissfully Nestled in Her Web of Lies
Variety: Film Review: ‘Two Lives’
YouTube: Two Lives

Jeff Bridges narrates Bob Dylan's road to Big Pink and 'Basement Tapes'

"Inside a pink house in tiny West Saugerties in 1967, Bob Dylan recorded The Basement Tapes. To get there, Dylan and The Band drove from a Manhattan hotel to that upstate New York house, known to music lovers simply as Big Pink. Now, fans can take a virtual ride of the route they traveled in a new short time-lapse film, From The Village to The Basement, narrated by actor Jeff Bridges. Watch, below. 'Big Pink is a pilgrimage for people,' Legacy Recordings' digital maestro Tom Mullen, who wrote and created the 180-second film, told Mashable."
Mashable (Video)
New Yorker: After the Fall
8 Things We Learned Diving Into Bob Dylan's 'Basement Tapes'
W - The Basement Tapes, W - List of Basement Tapes songs, W - The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete, W - The Basement Tapes (1975)
amazon: The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11(Deluxe Edition)
YouTube: Robbie Robertson Talks About Bob Dylan and the Basement Tapes

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Chant Avedissian’s “The Arab Resistance” (2008)
"The site of the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is desolate these days: just arid land and concrete pilings jutting out over a peninsula on Saadiyat Island, north of the city’s urban center here. But in about three years, it is poised to become an international tourist attraction, when a stunning museum designed by Frank Gehry, a graceful tumble of giant plaster building blocks and translucent blue cones, is scheduled to open. Spanning 450,000 square feet, the $800 million museum will be about 12 times the size of the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright landmark in New York and will showcase art from the 1960s to the present."
NY Times: A New Art Capital, Finding Its Own Voice (Video)
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Dublin Guitar Quartet

"Don't ask the members of the Dublin Guitar Quartet to play the time-honored classics of the Spanish repertoire. They might play traditional Spanish style classical guitars, but they're not your standard guitar ensemble. The Dubliners are strictly devoted to contemporary music. They've been commissioning new pieces and adapting others for both acoustic and electric guitars since 2002, when the group formed at the Dublin Conservatory of Music and Drama. Dressed more like stylish bankers than hipsters, the musicians filed behind Bob Boilen's desk in matching suits and proceeded to make string quartet music by Philip Glass shine in a completely new way."
NPR (Video)

Discover the 1950s & 1960s Computer & Cut-Up Animation of Pioneering Filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek

"Hey, lovers of animation and experimental film: do you know the name Stan VanDerBeek? If not, you’ll enjoy learning it, for more reasons than that it allows you to type four capital letters. Endlessly adventurous in his quest to find new ways to craft (not to mention display) moving images, VanDerBeek, who in college encountered the likes of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, mobilized for his animation a variety of technologies that, in his day, people didn’t have much of a sense of what to do with, artistically or otherwise."
Open Culture (Video)

2011 April: Visual Velocity: The Work of Stan VanDerBeek

Double Fantasy - John Lennon/Yoko Ono (1980)

"The most distinctive thing about Double Fantasy, the last album John Lennon released during his lifetime, is the very thing that keeps it from being a graceful return to form from the singer/songwriter, returning to active duty after five years of self-imposed exile. As legend has it, Lennon spent those years in domestic bliss, being a husband, raising a baby, and, of course, baking bread. Double Fantasy was designed as a window into that bliss and, to that extent, he decided to make it a joint album with Yoko Ono, to illustrate how complete their union was. For her part, Ono decided to take a stab at pop and while these are relatively tuneful for her, they nevertheless disrupt the feel and flow of Lennon's material, which has a consistent tone and theme."
allmusic
Wikipedia
BBC: John Lennon and Yoko Ono Double Fantasy Review
Top 10 Yoko Ono Songs
YouTube: Double Fantasy (Full Album), (Just Like) Starting Over (Double Fantasy: Stripped Down)

2009 September: John Lennon - Live in New York City (Madison Square Garden 1972), 2014 April: "Jealous Guy" (1971), 2014 May: Mind Games (1973), 2014 July: Out of the Blue.

Veronika Voss - Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982 - BRD Trilogy)

Wikipedia - "Veronika Voss ... is a black-and-white 1982 film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. ... She meets a sports reporter named Robert Krohn and is impressed that he does not know who she is. The two begin a love affair, even though Robert already lives with his girlfriend Henriette, who nevertheless realizes that Veronika has an irresistible allure. Veronika’s behavior is erratic and sometimes desperate, and as Robert delves into her life he discovers that she is essentially a captive to a corrupt neurologist named Dr. Marianne Katz. Dr. Katz keeps Veronika addicted to opiates and uses her power to give or deny drugs to bleed the actress of her wealth."
Wikipedia
Roger Ebert
NY Tines
Hollywood, Germany: The Longing of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss
YouTube: Veronika Voss - Official Trailer

2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2014 June: Effi Briest (1974), 2014 July: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 2014 September: A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema, 2014 October: Lola - (1981 BRD Trilogy), 2014 October: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979 BRD Trilogy).

No Agreement - Fela Anikulopo Kuti (1977)

"Recorded in 1977, No Agreement follows the Afro-beat template to a masterful level: amazingly catchy guitar lines that replicate a bass guitar in their construction, a second guitarist to add some JB's funk power, driving horn section proclamations, intricate saxophone, trumpet and organ improv solos, and then Fela Anikulopo Kuti's wit and message for the people. Even though Fela had vowed to speak his mind, he turns in a song where he proclaims to keep his mouth shut if it means that he will harm his brothers and sisters in the population (not that he actually does, as some of his most scathing songs have yet to come). 'No Agreement' is decidedly some of the most interesting instrumentation that he had turned in. ..."
allmusic
Boca Vasionski
MixCloud: No Agreement
YouTube: No Agreement [full album]

Yvonne Rainer: Dances and Films

"Dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer (American, b. 1934) is one of the most influential artistic figures of the last 50 years. Her work has been foundational across multiple disciplines and movements: dance, cinema, feminism, minimalism, conceptual art, and postmodernism. Rainer first came to prominence as a leading figure in the Judson Dance Theater movement, a loose collection of dancers and artists whose performances (often held at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City) crossed fluidly between the fields of dance and visual art, creating a striking and intellectualized form of performance that denied the theatricality and emotionalism of modern dance in favor of movements that seemed casual, spare, and cool."
Yvonne Rainer: Dances and Films (Video)
Guardian - Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works review – funny, anarchic and oddly moving
Yvonne Rainer’s Dance Works create a chorus of limbs
Grey on Grey

2010 Janury: Yvonne Rainer, 2012 July: Space, Body, Language

"The Beatnik Riot"

Wikipedia - "... On Sunday, April 9, 1961, folk music pioneer Izzy Young, owner of the Folklore Center (who had been trying to get permits for the folksingers) and about 500 musicians and supporters gathered in the park and sang songs without a permit, then held a procession from the park through the arch at Fifth Avenue, and marched to the Judson Memorial Church on the other side of the park. At about the time the musicians and friends reached the church, the New York Police Department Riot Squad was sent into the park, attacked civilians with billy clubs, and arrested ten people. The incident made the front pages of newspapers as far away as Washington, D. C.. The New York Mirror initially reported it as a 'Beatnik Riot' but retracted the headline in the next edition. These tensions did not die down for some time."
Wikipedia
Dan Draisin: Sunday Bloody Sunday
NPR: How The Beatnik Riot Helped Kick Off The '60s (Video)
"Sunday" April 9, 1961

Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden

The Image as Burden, Installation view including Models, 1994
"With almost two hundred drawings and paintings from private and museum collections throughout the world, Marlene Dumas – The Image as Burden is the first major solo exhibition of Dumas in the Netherlands in 20 years. It is the most comprehensive retrospective survey of her work in Europe to date and presents a compelling overview of her oeuvre from the late 1970s to the present. In addition to her most important and iconic works, the exhibition also presents lesser-known paintings and drawings, including many works never before seen in the Netherlands, and a selection of her most recent paintings. The title of the exhibition is derived from the work The Image as Burden (1993), which refers to the conflict between the painterly gesture and the illusion of the painted image."
Stedelijk Museum (Video)
ARTBOOK@
Marlene Dumas

Susan Sykes: Recent Watercolors; Based on 1930’s and 1940’s Urban Landscapes

Orchard and Hicks St., NYC 1938, 2007
"Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, in New York City, will feature this exhibition of watercolors by Susan Sykes through April 28. These paintings, inspired by photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, are imbued with a compelling charm and nostalgia. Salvaged from historical societies and local museums, the vintage black-and-white photos are revived through Sykes’ own realist vision. The artist brings these images of a bygone era—including architecture, automobiles, and fashions of the time—to life through the use of vivid colors and Photo Realistic detail."
Susan Sykes: Recent Watercolors; Based on 1930’s and 1940’s Urban Landscapes
Steven Scott Gallery
Bernarducci Meisel Gallery

"Good Morning, Mr. Orwell" by Nam June Paik

Wikipedia - "'Good Morning, Mr. Orwell' was the first international satellite 'installation' by Nam June Paik, a South Korean-born American artist often credited with inventing video art. It occurred on New Year's Day, 1984. The event, which Paik saw as a rebuttal to George Orwell's dystopian vision of 1984, linked WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris live via satellite, as well as hooking up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea. It aired nationwide in the US on public television, and reached an audience of over 25 million viewers worldwide. ..."
Wikipedia
Media Art Net
ARTFORUM: Nam June Paik, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, 1984

Sonni

Boombox, Art Basel - Primary Flight
"Sonni was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he studied graphic design and worked as an Art Director for animation and film companies, he resides in Brooklyn, New York. In his art, he is constantly searching for that lost moment in adolescence where adventure makes dreams a reality, where the imagination and playing develop invisible forces to re-capture those lost momeries from your childhood. He works with different mediums that include paper and pencil, illustrator, acrylic on canvas, and wooden sculptures. Yet, his passion is to paint murals in public spaces, finding that dialogue with the public through primary colors and playfulness!"
Sonni Studio (Video)
Street Art NYC: Speaking with Sonni

Rock Critic Greil Marcus Picks 10 Unexpected Songs That Tell the Story of Rock ‘n’ Roll

"Rock critic and scholar Greil Marcus has just released a book with Yale Press called The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs, and it appears to be an unusual take on a very hackneyed subject, as Marcus admits in the video trailer above: 'Everybody knows the history of rock ‘n’ roll,' he says, 'What if it was just about a few songs?' 'Unlike all previous versions of rock ‘n’ roll,' writes Yale, 'this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows.' This is not entirely true—you’ve got your Beatles, you’ve got your Buddy Holly, but you’ve also got… Joy Division. And a number of other surprising, offbeat choices that don’t necessarily sound like rock ‘n’ roll history, but certainly tell it their various ways."
Open Culture (Video)
Yale Press (Video)
NPR: The Other Rock History - A Cultural Mixtape From Greil Marcus (Video)
Pitchfork
Slate: Secret Chords
WSJ