Paper Trail

A Concert of Dance Nos. 14, 15, 16, by Robert Morris. Judson Dance Theater, 1964
"Three years ago, PPP Editions published a limited-edition book called 100 Fanzines / 10 Years of British Punk 1976–1985. I have a copy and keep intending to give it to any number of friends who know more about the Clash, the Mo-dettes, or Attila the Stockbroker than I do, but I haven’t yet handed it over. I certainly wasn’t a fixture of the Thatcher-era punk scene, but I nonetheless feel nostalgic when I look through the book. ... The very notion of ephemera is curious: objects of little value that weren’t meant to be preserved but whose vulnerability, I imagine, appealed to someone. Political buttons, business cards, seed packets, and train timetables—scrappy artifacts that otherwise would have been lost to the dustheap."
The Paris Review
MoMA: Please Come to the Show, Part 2

This Is Not a Vermeer ™

"I wanted a Vermeer. I knew this would not be easy. Johannes Vermeer, that seventeenth-century Dutch 'master of light,' produced only 35 known paintings, which today are among the most valuable objects in the world. Art historians reserve a certain adjective for precisely these types of cultish obsessions, which are not beyond value, but rather are, as they say, priceless — that is, without price, simply because the marketplace has not publicly accessed numerative value."
Medium - Part 1, Uber for Art Forgeries - Part 2

2009 September: Vermeer's Masterpiece, The Milkmaid, 2011 February: Vermeer: Master of Light, 2013 October: Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis.

A Cultural History of the Baseball Card

Baseball cards from 1910
"In a garage roughly 3,000 miles from where I’m writing this, there’s a long, white cardboard container filled with hundreds of cardboard rectangles—all the baseball cards I amassed as a child. I don’t think about that container very often these days, but somewhere in my mind lies the assumption—childish but still deeply held—that decades from now I’ll be able to sell the contents of that box for a modest fortune. Baseball cards, it strikes me now, were my first taste of capitalism. Sure, individual cards held sentimental value to me, but I also was conditioned to see my collection’s worth in monetary terms. It was a portfolio with training wheels. The series of historical events that led to the existence of this cardboard box—one of countless such boxes in countless garages—was catalyzed by a man named Sy Berger, who passed away last weekend."
Atlantic

Miles of Steam Pipes Snake Beneath New York

"First developed in the 1880s, New York City’s steam system is the largest in the world. No other urban steam system comes close. Today, 105 miles of steam pipe run beneath the streets of the city, delivering steam to 2,000 buildings for heating and cooling. Steam also sterilizes hospital equipment, presses clothes, and cleans restaurant dishes and cutlery. This episode of 'Living City,' a video series about New York’s infrastructure, looks at the history of the city’s steam system and explores how a technology that eliminated chimneys from the skyline in the early 20th century is helping reduce carbon emissions and provide a cleaner source of energy for New York in the 21st."
NY Times
W - New York City steam system
Slate: What’s That Thing? City Steam Edition
[PDF] Steam Distribution System

Battle of Hastings Street: Raw Detroit Blues & R&B from Joe's Record Shop 1953-1954

"My father, the late Joe Von Battle, was an important mid-century recorder and producer of blues and gospel music in Detroit, from 1945 until 1967. He owned the legendary Joe’s Record Shop, at 3530 Hastings Street, which, after the demolition of the Black Bottom community in the early 1960s, was relocated to 12th Street on Detroit’s West Side. Over the years he recorded legendary artists such as John Lee Hooker, Little Willie John, Johnnie Bassett, the Violinaires, the Serenaders, Little Sammy Bryant, Little Sonny, Jackie Wilson, Sonny Boy Williamson, and many, many others in his studio in the back of the shop, including a classic called The Hucklebuck by Paul Williams. He even recorded a Civil Rights song 'The Alabama Bus', by Brother will Hairston (backed by Washboard Willie), an obscure but significant Blues chronicle of the Alabama Bus Boycott."
Marsha Music
allmusic
Ace Records
amazon: Battle of Hastings Street: Raw Detroit Blues & R&B from Joe's Record Shop 1953-1954
YouTube: Marsha Music: Detroit's Black Bottom, Lafayette Park & Joe Von Battle
YouTube: Please Don't Think I'm Nosey - Eddie Kirkland, Dealing With The Devil - Eddie Burns, Vacation Blues Johnny Howard, Time For My Lovin' To Be Done - Eddie Kirkland, Hello Miss Jessie Lee - Eddie Burns, I Stayed Down - Johnny Wright, JB Boogie - Joe Weaver & his Blue Notes, Joe Weaver with the Don Juans - Baby I Love You So, Eddie Kirkland - Mistreated Woman, No Shoes - Eddie Kirkland

Dance at Le moulin de la Galette - Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1876)

Wikipedia - "Bal du moulin de la Galette (commonly known as Dance at Le moulin de la Galette) is an 1876 painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is housed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and is one of Impressionism's most celebrated masterpieces. The painting depicts a typical Sunday afternoon at Moulin de la Galette in the district of Montmartre in Paris. In the late 19th century, working class Parisians would dress up and spend time there dancing, drinking, and eating galettes into the evening. Like other works of Renoir's early maturity, Bal du moulin de la Galette is a typically Impressionist snapshot of real life. It shows a richness of form, a fluidity of brush stroke, and a flickering light."
Wikipedia
Musée d'Orsay
KhanAcademy (Video)

2010 February: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 2010 July: Late Renoir, 2012 February: Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, 2012 September: Renoir: Between Bohemia and Bourgeoisie.

American Hustle (2013)

Wikipedia - "American Hustle is a 2013 American crime comedy-drama film directed by David O. Russell, from a screenplay co-written by Eric Warren Singer and Russell, loosely based on the FBI ABSCAM operation of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It stars Christian Bale and Amy Adams as two con artists who are forced by an FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) to set up an elaborate sting operation on corrupt politicians, including the mayor of Camden, New Jersey (Jeremy Renner). Jennifer Lawrence plays the unpredictable wife of Bale's character."
Wikipedia
NY Times: Big Hair, Bad Scams, Motormouths (Video)
New Yorker: Grand Scam
YouTube: Official Trailer, Official TRAILER 1

A Fine Selection Of Independent Disco, Modern Soul and Boogie 1978-82

"It's fatal when a DJ tries to 'educate' their punters. It's not what you're there for. They've paid money for a good time, not to bask in the glory of your knowledge. It's fatal when a compilation tries desperately to hoodwink its listeners, clings to obscurantism and forgets to get people moving. Is this the compilation of the year? Quite possibly - certainly the collection that will put the most joy in your life, the most added urgency to your tarting up of a Saturday afternoon, the best gliding grace to your wee-smalls fumbling & stumbling later on. Those lovely Soul Jazz folks have put this comp together to accompany the equally well-appointed and lavishly covetable book DISCO: An Encyclopaedic Guide To The Cover Art Of Disco Records."
The Quietus
YouTube: Disco Sample Mix

‘Funk, God, Jazz & Medicine,’ Black Heritage in Brooklyn

“Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn” project
"New York City so knows how to lose — and save, and lose again — its history. Among notable rescues of the past several decades were material remains of the vanished 19th-century African-American village of Weeksville in Brooklyn, snatched from the jaws of 1960s urban renewal. Once in parts of what are now Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, the village is currently getting fresh and needed attention in an art project organized by the Weeksville Heritage Center and Creative Time called 'Funk, God, Jazz & Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn,' which runs Friday through Sunday."
NY Times: Time-Traveling to a Corner of Brooklyn’s Past
Creative Time (Video)
vimeo: BK Live 9/25/14: Black Radical Brooklyn

Spools Out's Out: Tristan Bath's Top Tapes Of 2014

Threes and Will & Huerequeque - Blue Thirteen
"As the year comes to a close, the world’s dedicated sect of tapeheads can proudly pat itself on the back. The format’s somehow become a burgeoning force to be reckoned with. Well, nearly. Last month at London’s Independent Label Market in Spitalfields, I was pleased to be met with sight of dozens of noble tapes stacked alongside the heaps of hastily shifting vinyl, with heavyweight labels like Drag City offering high grade doses of plastic - including Bitchin’ Bajas’ monumental double cassette tape, nonetheless still priced under a tenner. And it’s not just indies. Disney - the world’s second biggest entertainment company - saw fit to put out their first cassette tape in over a decade this year in the form of that Guardians Of The Galaxy mixtape. Though more gimmick than sea change, it still represents a small, vital turning point."
The Quietus (Video)

2013 December: Spool's Out: 2013's Best Tapes Reviewed, 2014 January: Spool's Out: A Cassette Reviews Column For January, 2014 March: Spools Out 3: A Cassette Reviews Column For March.

Susan Te Kahurangi King: ‘Drawings From Many Worlds’

An untitled 1965 work.
"Since the early 1960s, the New Zealand artist Susan Te Kahurangi King, 63, has been reworking Looney Tunes characters like a rogue animator, abstracting, distorting and disassembling them in surreal and psychedelic landscapes. A small installation of her drawings was the undisputed hit of this year’s Outsider Art Fair. She is now making her gallery debut, with a bigger presentation, organized (like her art fair display) by the independent curator Chris Byrne."
NY Times
Explosive Drawing: Susan King’s Mash-ups, Strange Landscapes, and Other Worlds
The Many Worlds of Susan Te Kahurangi King
YouTube: Susan Te Kahurangi King "Drawings from Many Worlds" Curated by Chris Byrne at ANDREW EDLIN, susanking sundayarts 2009 ep29

White Horse Tavern

Wikipedia - "The White Horse Tavern, located in New York City's borough of Manhattan at Hudson Street and 11th Street, is known for its 1950s and 1960s Bohemian culture. It is one of the few major gathering-places for writers and artists from this period in Greenwich Village (although the surrounding neighborhood is, more properly, the West Village) that remains open. The bar opened in 1880 but was known more as a longshoremen's bar than a literary center until Dylan Thomas and other writers began frequenting it in the early 1950s. Due to its literary fame, in the past few decades the White Horse has become a popular destination among tourists. ... Another of the White Horse's famous patrons is Jack Kerouac, who was bounced from the establishment more than once. Because of this someone scrawled on the bathroom wall: 'JACK GO HOME!' At that time, Kerouac was staying in an apartment in the building located on the NW corner of West 11th St."
Wikipedia
The White Horse Tavern | Academy of American Poets
PBS
YouTube: Attitude Adjustment Hour- "White Horse Tavern, NYC"

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (1965)

"Even after his death, Paul Butterfield's music didn't receive the accolades that were so deserved. Outputting styles adopted from Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters among other blues greats, Butterfield became one of the first white singers to rekindle blues music through the course of the mid-'60s. His debut album, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, saw him teaming up with guitarists Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, with Jerome Arnold on bass, Sam Lay on drums, and Mark Naftalin playing organ. The result was a wonderfully messy and boisterous display of American-styled blues, with intensity and pure passion derived from every bent note. In front of all these instruments is Butterfield's harmonica, beautifully dictating a mood and a genuine feel that is no longer existent, even in today's blues music."
allmusic
W - The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
YouTube: Our Love Is Drifting, Blues with a Feeling, SHAKE YOUR MONEY-MAKER, Got My Mojo Working, BORN IN CHICAGO - Live at The Newport Folk Festival, Mellow Down Easy, Our Love Is Drifting, Screamin', Look Over Yonders Wall

William S. Burroughs - The Dub Spencer & Trance Hill (2014)

"... When intoxicating, rock-infused dub meets the spirit of William S. Burroughs. The Dub Spencer & Trance Hill fellows conjure up the spirit of the highly influential beat poet, novelist, essayist, painter and spoken word performer, and mix it beautifully with their unique and exhilarating deep dub blend. The connection between Burroughs’ word currents and Dub Spencer’s playing works so naturally it feels like Burroughs was right there in studio with the band. These two entities intensify each other in a holy union. It’s a perfect match. Heavy weight basslines flow smoothly as solid yet elastic foundations, tightly united with sumptuous, dynamic layers of drums that push forward like mighty engines. Spacey guitars saw and inflame; magnetizing shades of organ, keyboards and melodica provide a vintage spark, and electronic shades twist and swirl."
Igloo (Video)
YouTube: In Dub (Selected by Dub Spencer & Trance Hill)

U.S. to Restore Full Relations With Cuba, Erasing a Last Trace of Cold War Hostility

"President Obama on Wednesday ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century as he vowed to 'cut loose the shackles of the past' and sweep aside one of the last vestiges of the Cold War. The surprise announcement came at the end of 18 months of secret talks that produced a prisoner swap negotiated with the help of Pope Francis and concluded by a telephone call between Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro. The historic deal broke an enduring stalemate between two countries divided by just 90 miles of water but oceans of mistrust and hostility dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times: Mistrust Erodes Relations Between U.S. and Cuba
NY Times: As Havana Celebrates Historic Shift, Economic and Political Hopes Rise (Video)
ESPN: The future of Cuban ballplayers (Video)

Mark Dion

Theatrum Mundi, Armarium, 2001
"Since the early 1990s, Mark Dion has examined the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, the artist creates works that address distinctions between objective scientific methods and subjective influences. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Dion questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society."
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (Video)
W - Mark Dion
art21 - SEGMENT: Mark Dion in "Ecology" (Video)
MASS/MoCA - Mark Dion: The Octagon Room
YouTube: MIA Artist in Residence, Tanya Bonakdar, NYC (March 2013), Walkthrough, Mark Dion, Mark Dion Lecture 1:12:08

Darren Waterston: Uncertain Beauty

"Painter Darren Waterston's installation Filthy Lucre -- the centerpiece of Uncertain Beauty -- is a contemporary re-imagining of James McNeill Whistler's 1876 decorative masterpiece Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. Waterston became fascinated with The Peacock Room both for its unrivaled union of painting and architecture and for its dramatic story of patronage and artistic ego. The original -- the dining room of the London home of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland -- was designed to showcase Leyland's collection of Asian ceramics, with Whistler's painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863-64) featured over the mantel."
MASS/MoCA (Video)
Darren Waterston
YouTube: Artist Talk: Darren Waterston’s "Filthy Lucre"

Billy Bragg - Don't Try This at Home (1991)

"After dipping his toes in the notion of using backing musicians on Talking With the Taxman About Poetry, Billy Bragg finally dove in headfirst with Worker's Playtime, but Don't Try This at Home was where Bragg first began to sound completely comfortable with the notion of a full band. With Johnny Marr (who helped produce two tracks), Peter Buck, Michael Stipe, and Kirsty MacColl on hand to give the sessions a taste of star power, Don't Try This at Home sounds full but uncluttered; the arrangements (most complete with -- gasp! -- drums) flesh out Bragg's melodies, giving them greater strength in the process, and Billy's craggy vocals wrap around the melodies with significantly more flexibility than on previous recordings. ..."
allmusic
W - Don't Try This at Home
YouTube: Tank Park Salute, Accident Waiting To Happen, Sexuality, Moving the Goalposts, Cindy of a Thousand Lives, Body of Water

2011 November: Billy Bragg, 2012 November: Strange Things Happen (Live on The Tube 1984), 2012 December: The Internationale, 2013 May: Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, 2014 June: Tooth & Nail (2013), 2014 September: Peel Session.

The Ides of March (2011)

Wikipedia - "The Ides of March is a 2011 American political drama film directed by George Clooney from a screenplay written by Clooney, along with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon. The film is an adaptation of Willimon's 2008 play Farragut North. ... Stephen Meyers is the junior campaign manager for Mike Morris, Governor of Pennsylvania and a Democratic presidential candidate, competing against Arkansas Senator Ted Pullman in the Democratic primary. Both campaigns are attempting to secure the endorsement of North Carolina Democratic Senator Franklin Thompson, who controls 356 convention delegates, enough to clinch the nomination for either candidate."
Wikipedia
NY Times
YouTube: The Ides of March Trailer 2011

Lennon or McCartney

Wikipedia - "Lennon–McCartney (also written Lennon/McCartney and occasionally known as McCartney–Lennon) was the rock music songwriting partnership between English musicians John Lennon (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) and Paul McCartney (born 18 June 1942) of the Beatles. It is one of the best known and most successful musical collaborations in history. Between 1962 and 1969, the partnership published approximately 180 jointly credited songs, of which the vast majority were recorded by the Beatles, forming the bulk of their catalogue. Unlike many songwriting partnerships that comprise separate lyricist and composer, both Lennon and McCartney wrote words and music. Sometimes, especially early on, they would collaborate extensively when writing songs, working 'nose to nose and eyeball to eyeball'. Later, it became more common for one of the two credited authors to write all or most of a song with limited input from the other."
Wikipedia
Atlantic: The Power of Two
Main composer of the Beatles songs
YouTube: Lennon or McCartney

Anne-Marie Albiach

Wikipedia - "Anne-Marie Albiach (9 August 1937 – 4 November 2012) was a contemporary French poet and translator. Anne-Marie Albiach's poetry is characterized by, among other things, an inventive use of spacing on the printed page. With Claude Royet-Journoud and Michel Couturier, she co-edited the magazine Siécle a mains, where she first published her translation of Louis Zukofsky's 'A-9'. Today, Albiach is associated in France with poets Claude Royet-Journoud and Emmanuel Hocquard, all three being, at various times, translated and published by the American poets Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop via Burning Deck, their influential small press."
Wikipedia
Poetry Foundation
Jacket2: Aleatory displacement
amazon: Anne-Marie Albiach
[PDF] Two Poems: - Shearsman Books

Angela Davis: ‘There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery’

"'There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan,' says Angela Davis. 'There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.' I had asked the professor, activist, feminist and revolutionary, the woman whom Richard Nixon called a terrorist and whom Ronald Reagan tried to fire as a professor, if she was angered by the failure of a grand jury to indict a white police officer for shooting dead an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri earlier this year."
Guardian

2011 September: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, 2013 February: Angela Davis.

The Passenger - Michelangelo Antonioni (1975)

Wikipedia - "The Passenger ... is a 1975 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Written by Antonioni and Peter Wollen, the film is about a British-American journalist, David Locke (Jack Nicholson) who assumes the identity of a dead businessman while working on a documentary in Chad, unaware that he is impersonating an arms dealer with connections to the rebels in the current civil war. Co-starring Maria Schneider, The Passenger was the final film in Antonioni's three-picture deal with producer Carlo Ponti and MGM, after Blowup and Zabriskie Point, and competed for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. ..."
Wikipedia
Roger Ebert
NY Times: Antonioni's Characters Escape Into Ambiguity and Live (Your View Here) Ever After
Diary Of A Screenwriter
Other Voices
YouTube: The Passenger (1975) | Original Film Trailer

2011 September: Red Desert (1964), 2011 November: Blow-Up (1966)

Trisha Donnelly

"The Serpentine comprises two galleries situated on either side of The Serpentine lake in the heart of the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens in central London. The Serpentine Gallery and the newly opened Serpentine Sackler Gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, present world-renowned exhibitions of art, architecture and design throughout the year."
Trisha Donnelly | Serpentine Galleries
W - Trisha Donnelly
Telegraph - Trisha Donnelly, Serpentine Gallery, review: 'a calculated non-event'
Culture Whisper

Sonny Boy Williamson - King Biscuit Time

Wikipedia - "King Biscuit Time is the longest-running daily American radio broadcast in history. The program is broadcast each weekday from KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, and has won the George Foster Peabody Award for broadcasting excellence. The first broadcast of King Biscuit Time was on November 21, 1941 on KFFA in Helena, and featured the African-American blues artists Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller) and Robert Lockwood, Jr. Williamson and Lockwood played live in the studio and were the key musicians in the original studio band, the King Biscuit Entertainers. Other musicians who joined the original band were Pinetop Perkins on piano and James Peck Curtis on drums. Williamson left the program in 1947 but returned for a stint in 1965 just prior to his death."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Sonny Boy Williamson II-King Biscuit Time (Full Album)

72 Hours in Detroit

"Forget for once Madonna, Eminem and Iggy Pop. Detroit, formerly known as Motor City, is a broken metropolis that nevertheless can still lay claim to being the epicenter of American black music. The Motown sound, funk and techno were all born in what was formerly the richest city in the US. Today, however, the city is bankrupt, and the majority of its largely black population is living in poverty. Diving into the city's musical history is a lot like being transported to a parallel dimension of hopeful projections. For many, Detroit's music and art scenes remain a unique opportunity for urban cultural renewal—albeit one not without the potential pitfall of a revitalization that excludes black communities."
72 hours in Detroit (Video)

2012 September: Andrew Moore: 'Detroit Disassembled', 2013 July: Motor City's Burning - Detroit from Motown to the Stooges, 2013 August: Detropia (2012), 2014 April: Detroit: Evolution of a City.

Doug Sahm and Band (1973)

"Doug Sahm began his solo career in 1972, after the Sir Douglas Quintet finished its contract with Smash/Mercury and after Atlantic Records co-owner/producer Jerry Wexler convinced him to sign to his label. Wexler gave the Texas maverick the chance to cut a star-studded, big-budget album, shuffling him off to New York where Wexler and Arif Mardin helmed a series of sessions with an ever-revolving cast of musicians featuring Bob Dylan, Dr. John, David 'Fathead' Newman, David Bromberg, and Flaco Jimenez, in addition to such Sir Doug stalwarts as Augie Meyers and the rhythm section of bassist Jack Barber and drummer George Rains. This group cut a lot of material, which was whittled down to the 12-track album Doug Sahm and Band, released in early 1973."
allmusic
W - Doug Sahm
Doug Sahm & Bob Dylan: Amigos de Musica
William Henry Prince
Grooveshark: Wallflower
YouTube: Is anybody going to San Antone, Faded love, Poison love, Dealer's Blues, Don't Turn Around, I Get Off

Walker Evans: Decade by Decade

"Is there anyone left who would not instantly recognise the terse black-and-white pictures of rural poverty in the US that American photographer Walker Evans made during the Great Depression of the 1930s? The photographs that Walker Evans (1903-1975) made on assignment from the Farm Security Administration have become some of the most iconic images in photographic history. Walker Evans documented America’s day-to-day life ‘with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon’ (in the words of the Metropolitan Museum) and his immaculate, documentary style found many imitators. He photographed workers on their way to the factory, subway commuters, roadside signposts, wooden churches, and village shops. He also wrote about them. Evans’ reception was long determined by the prominence of this early work."
Huis Marseille
amazon

2011 June: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 2011 May: A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now, 2013 June: Cotton Tenants: Three Families, 2014 May: “Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence by Tod Papageorge” (1981), 2014 October: Walker Evans: The Magazine Work.

How to Raise Hell in Three Steps: on RUN-D.M.C, Parliament, Blackness and Revolution

"In 1987, in a small Southwestern Pennsylvania steel town, I was the only black kid I knew. I was also the only kid with a copy of Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell. At the time those two facts seemed to be very much connected. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, being the only black kid in middle school is a little like having a disease that you don’t want to talk about and don’t want anyone else to talk about either. You feel ashamed. You feel guilty. When you get to the three or four paragraphs in your social studies book about slavery, you try to look so deeply engrossed in taking notes that you don’t even notice how many kids are stealing glances at you. And you don’t even take notes."
How to Raise Hell in Three Steps: on RUN-D.M.C, Parliament, Blackness and Revolution (Video)
“Fuck tha Police” in Historical Context (Video)
Killer Mike Discusses Police Militarization, Ferguson on CNN (Video)
When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America

Claude Monet - The Argenteuil Bridge

The Argenteuil Bridge, 1874
"In 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, Claude Monet painted the Argenteuil Bridge seven times, and the railway bridge which spans the Seine upstream from the village, four times. This shows how attached the artist was to the motif, using the flowing river as a counterpoint for the geometrical mass of the bridge and its piles reflected in the water. Here the foreground is filled with sailboats at their mooring. The effects of light on the masts and on the roofs of the houses on the bank in the background are an opportunity for the play of complementary colours (orange and blue) which accentuate the glittering light. The Argenteuil Bridge exhibits great variety in treatment: the still firm outlines of the solid or structured elements, such as the sailboats and the bridge, a smooth, even texture for the water in the foreground, and choppy brushstrokes capturing the reflections in the middle ground."
Musée d'Orsay
smarthistory (Video)
National Gallery of Art
The railway bridge at Argenteuil

CRISP

"CRISP is an Australian Street artist based in Bogota, Colombia. He was born to artist parents, and grew up in rural Australia. From a very young age he drew, painted, sculpted, pottered, carved, photographed and created anything he could as a form of personal expression. ... He has never looked back since, giving people in the street something more interesting to look at, through the use of stickers, bombing stencils, paste ups, ceramic street masks, carvings, posters, murals and more. CRISP believes in communities reclaiming the street aesthetic as their own from capitalist advertising, corporate slogans and even just the mundane boring obsession of sterile grey concrete walls, city councils tend to prefer today! His street art can vary from the purely aesthetic to the very thought provoking socio-political."
CRISP
Street Art NY: Speaking with Bogota-Based Australian Artist CRISP in NYC

"To Hell With Poverty" / "Capital (It Fails Us Now)" - Gang of Four (1981)

"Gang of Four wasn't as a brutal as some of their contemporaries, but the cheeky approach to their art didn't leave listeners with any lesser sense of meaning. This hyper-stylized single cover for 'To Hell With Poverty' is an excellent example of this; it's at once critical and accessible."
Complex
YouTube: "To Hell With Poverty" (TV Live), "To Hell With Poverty" (Live on Rockpalast, 1983), "Capital (It Fails Us Now)

June 2008: Gang Of Four, 2011 March: Gang Of Four - 1, 2012 August: "I Love a Man in a Uniform"

Jonathan Keys

"In the age of Photoshop, cell phone snaps, and digital photography, British photographer Jonathan Keys stands out with his passion for the collodion (or wet plate) process, an early photographic process that was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in the 1850s. Armed with his 130-year-old wooden Circa camera and a lens from the 1920s, Keys roams the streets of Newcastle, capturing striking images of present-day England in a classical, black-and-white aesthetic."
Photographer Uses 130-Year-Old Camera to Capture Images of Modern England
Photographer uses Victorian camera to capture modern Newcastle on glass

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