Stick McGhee & John Lee Hooker - Highway of Blues (1959)

"Rare King Records material from these two postwar blues greats – each of whom get a single side of the record! Sticks McGhee really shines on side one – with that playful, jazzy approach to blues that he used on his late 40s recordings for Atlantic – almost somewhere in the territory of Louis Jordan, especially given Sticks' sense of wit – but served up in more of an R&B mode, with similar styles to Roy Brown's King material of the early 50s. Titles include 'Head Happy With Wine', 'Get Your Mind Out Of The Gutter', 'Jungle Juice', 'Whiskey Women & Loaded Dice', and 'Sad Bad Glad'. John Lee Hooker is in a much rootsier mode on side two – recorded in a rough-edged style that's almost back to the delta, save for the use of electricity on the guitar! The spare setting really unlocks Hooker's power – and titles include 'Nightmare Blues', 'Devil's Jump', 'Thinking Blues', 'Late Last Night', and 'Moaning Blues'."
dusty groove
YouTube: Sticks McGhee - Whiskey, Women and Loaded Dice (1953), Jungle juice, John Lee Hooker - Devil's Jump, John Lee Hooker - Moanin ' Blues
YouTube: Stick McGhee & John Lee Hooker - Highway of Blues (1959)

Ramadi, Reclaimed by Iraq, Is in Ruins After ISIS Fight

"As his armored vehicle bounced along a dirt track carved through the ruins of this recently reconquered city on Wednesday, Gen. Ali Jameel, an Iraqi counterterrorism officer, narrated the passing sites. Here were the carcasses of four tanks, charred by the jihadists of the Islamic State. Here, a police officer’s home that the jihadists had blown up. Here, a villa reduced to rubble by an airstrike. And another. And another. In one neighborhood, he stood before a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood. He paused when asked how residents would return to their homes. 'Homes?' he said. 'There are no homes.' The retaking of Ramadi by Iraqi security forces last week has been hailed as a major blow to the Islamic State and as a vindication of the Obama administration’s strategy to fight the group by backing local ground forces with intensive airstrikes. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi

2014 August: The Islamic State, 2014 September: How ISIS Works, 2015 February: The Political Scene: The Evolution of Islamic Extremism, 2015 May: Zakaria: How ISIS shook the world, 2015 August: ISIS Blows Up Ancient Temple at Syria’s Palmyra Ruins, 2015 November: Times Insider: Reporting Europe's Refugee Crisis, 2015 November: Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS, 2015 November: The French Emergency, 2015 December: A Brief History of ISIS, 2015 December: U.S. Seeks to Avoid Ground War Welcomed by Islamic State.

Pazuzu

Wikipedia - "In Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, Pazuzu (sometimes Fazuzu or Pazuza) was the king of the demons of the wind, brother of Humbaba and son of the god Hanbi. He also represented the southwestern wind, the bearer of storms and drought. Pazuzu is often depicted as a combination of diverse animal and human parts. He has the body of a man, the head of a lion or dog, talons of an eagle, two pairs of wings, a scorpion's tail, and a serpentine penis. Pazuzu is the demon of the southwest wind known for bringing famine during dry seasons, and locusts during rainy seasons. Pazuzu was invoked in apotropaic amulets, which combat the powers of his rival, the malicious goddess Lamashtu, who was believed to cause harm to mother and child during childbirth. Although Pazuzu is, himself, considered to be an evil spirit, he drives and frightens away other evil spirits, therefore protecting humans against plagues and misfortunes."
Wikipedia
Metropolitan Museum of Art - Pazuzu: Beyond Good and Evil (Video)
Louvre: Statuette of the demon Pazuzu with an inscription

Reality Studios, 1978–88 (ed. Ken Edwards)

"Over the course of its ten-year span, Reality Studios introduced a vital new interface between the various permutations around the British Poetry Revival in the UK and emergent strands of Language writing in the US. Edited by Ken Edwards and published in London, the magazine followed Alembic (1973–78) and immediately preceded Edwards’s Reality Street press, which continues publishing experimental poetry and prose to this day. First released in April of 1978, the magazine was originally published as a monthly corner-stapled newsletter. ... Investigating experimental language arts across international borders and beyond local poetic coteries, Reality Studios delivered a wildly heterogeneous array of writing that ranged from Neo-Dadaist and Situationist experiments to sound-text poetry, experimental prose, conceptual writing, and graphic art. ..."
Jacket2
Reality Street

Leon Bridges: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

"We probably should have shot this Tiny Desk Concert in black-and-white. Listening to Leon Bridges, I hear a sound with its heart and soul rooted in 1962. There's purity in his soulful voice that's unadorned, untouched and unaffected by 21st-century pop. Still, the songs from this 26-year-old Texas singer feel refreshing in the context of the day. Surely there are touches of Sam Cooke's sound, but Bridges has a way of making the familiar feel adventurous and new. That may be because this is new to him. Bridges only picked up the guitar around age 20, and only began listening to classic soul music after friends told him he sounded like R&B musicians from long ago. What he's tapped into on his debut album Coming Home — recorded with fellow Fort Worth musicians, including Austin Jenkins from White Denim — is a universal sound. He's easy to love and tough to resist, and his performance at the Tiny Desk with his fabulous band is a testament to that."
NPR (Video)

2015 June: Leon Bridges

The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death - John Fahey (1965)

Wikipedia - "The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death is a 1965 album by American fingerstyle guitarist and composer John Fahey. Originally issued in a hand-lettered edition of 50, it was Fahey's first album to be released by a label other than his own Takoma Records. As with all of Fahey's independently released early albums, it had little critical recognition upon release. The album has grown in stature since its reissue on CD in 1997 and is now highly regarded critically. ... The title refers to a fictional bluesman named Blind Joe Death, first introduced by Fahey on his debut album Blind Joe Death. For years Fahey and Takoma Records continued to treat the imaginary guitarist as a real person, including booklets with their LPs containing biographical information about him and that he had taught Fahey to play. ..."
Wikipedia
Ace
Tiny Mix Tapes
YouTube: 1965 - The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death

2009 March: John Fahey, 2011 March: Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965), 2012 September: Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier's Choice), 2013 February: The Mill Pond, 2013 August: Railroad (1983), 2013 December: Dances of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg (1973).

Solar System Featured on New U.S. Stamps

"What do Pluto, Shirley Temple, and quilting have in common? This year the U.S. Postal Service will issue stamps highlighting all three. In fact, recently the USPS unveiled three sets of stamps that celebrate the solar system and NASA's exploration thereof. The ones likely to draw most interest involve Pluto and NASA's New Horizons mission. The USPS plans to issue a sheet of four stamps, titled 'Pluto — Explored,' that showcase an image of the dwarf planet and of New Horizons. It's sweet vindication for the mission's scientists — not only because July's flyby proved spectacularly successful but also because they've been trying to get their spacecraft on a stamp since 2012. At that time, an online petition drew only 12,000 supporters — far short of the 100,000 needed. ..."
Sky & Telescope

James Casebere: Fugitive

Mosque (After Sinan), 2006
"The photographic works of James Casebere (born in 1953, Lansing, Michigan, United States) explore architectural subjects such as domestic settings, flooded corridors of grand mansions, bare spaces of prison interiors, Moorish and Islamic architecture, ancient water tunnels in Bologna, or the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. However, these images emerge from a singular approach of production: they are photographs of detailed, self-made architectural models in which completely imagined and fabricated scenes are subsequently transposed into a pictorial record. Thus Casebere generates images that hover somewhere between the fugitive and the sublime, between the representational and the staged. ..."
SKNY
Hausder Kunst
Lisson Gallery
W - James Casebere
ArtNet

PJ Harvey - Rid of Me (Big Day Out festival...Sydney, 2001)

"Tie yourself to me, no one else / No, you're not rid of me, you're not rid of me / Night and day I breathe, hey, you're not rid of me / Yeah, you're not rid of me, yeah, you're not rid of me / Yeah, you're not rid of me // I beg you my darling don't leave me, I'm hurting / Lick my legs I'm on fire, lick my legs of desire ..."
YouTube: Rid of Me (Live), Rid Of Me (Private Remaster)

2009 November: PJ Harvey, 2011 May: Let England Shake, 2013 May: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, 2013 July: White Chalk (2007), 2014 July: LSO St Luke's in London (2005), 2015 March: Who Will Love Me Now (1996).

Mulatu Astatke - New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975 (2009)

"Ethio jazz. That's what Mulatu Astatke called his style of music when he invented it back in the 1960s, and it means exactly what it implies: Ethiopian melodies played on Western instruments with room for improvisation. Astatke was a pioneer for his country's modern music. His concept of instrumental music as an end in itself was a bit foreign in his homeland, where singers rule the popular music sphere, and he was among the very first musicians from Ethiopia to learn about music while abroad. He started playing as a teenager at school in Wales, and after a stint at London's Trinity School of Music, he jumped the Atlantic for a brief stay at Boston's Berklee College of Music, ultimately winding up in New York City in the mid-60s. There, he was exposed to sounds he simply couldn't have heard back home in Addis Ababa, and his exposure to jazz and Western harmonic concepts led him to formulate Ethio jazz, the perfect hybrid of the traditional and the modern. ..."
Pitchfork
W - New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975
... my passion for ethiopian music ... (Video)
YouTube: Mulatu Astatke - New York-Addis-London [Full Album]

Alienation and anxiety in a 1950s subway station

"Brooklyn-born painter George Tooker depicts the disquietude of a mundane trip into a contemporary subway station in The Subway, on display at the Whitney Museum. 'Made in 1950 with egg tempera paint, George Tooker’s The Subway, takes as its subject the alienating effects of modern life,' states the museum website. 'Just as the positioning, color, and facial expressions of figures in the painting suggest a dark side to modern life, so too does Tooker’s choice of subject matter: a subway station,' according to the website. 'This location emphasizes feelings of alienation, as any New York subway passenger knows. Subways are labyrinthine and almost prison-like, with low ceilings and barred areas. Tooker accentuates this effect by removing all signs from the subway station of his imagination, so that a person who is lost might never find his or her way out.'”
Ephemeral New York
Wikipedia
NY Times: George Tooker, Painter Capturing Modern Anxieties, Dies at 90
Whitney (Video)
American Art: The Waiting Room, 1959 (Video)
YouTube: GEORGE TOOKER part 1 of 3, part 2 of 3, part 3 of 3

JUDSON AT 50: Robert Morris

Simone Forti, Platforms, 1961. Performance view, Loeb Student Center, New York University, 1961. Foreground: Robert Rauschenberg.
"... Looking back half a century to the days of Judson Dance, it is difficult not to historicize a little. After all, the work that emerged from that time and place did not come out of nothing. In the larger sense it continued the project launched half a century before, when Marcel Duchamp christened that hulking hull of modernism with the fizzy champagne bottle of the readymade. John Cage’s subsequent explorations of chance and indeterminacy were well known by the early 1960s. The awe of 4'33" was part of the conversation. But perhaps the more significant precedent for the new dance seen at Judson was the work of Simone Forti. As part of a series of performances and events organized by La Monte Young at a loft on Chambers Street in 1961, Forti presented an evening of radical dance works that attacked the notion of dance as a format that required the trained body of the dancer. ..."
ARTFORUM
MoMA - Performance 2: Simone Forti. March 7–8, 2009
[PDF] The Minimal Presence of Simone Forti
W - Simone Forti
Where Sculpture and Dance Meet: Minimalism from 1961 to 1979
vimeo: ± I96I Simone Forti@Reina Sofia

Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds - Michael Nyman

Wikipedia - "Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds is a piece of minimalist music from the soundtrack for The Draughtsman's Contract, written by Michael Nyman. In the thirty years since its release it has been much quoted and sampled and performed by various ensembles. It is based on a ground bass from the Prelude to Act III, Scene 2 of Henry Purcell’s opera, King Arthur. There are different arrangements of this piece, one of which is broadcast on Classic FM TV, performed by the Michael Nyman Band, which was not the original arrangement for the film. ..."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds, Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds (Live)

2008 April: Michael Nyman, 2010 August: Decay Music, 2010 December: After Extra Time, 2011 March: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2011 August: Michael Nyman Band, 2011 December: The Draughtsman's Contract - Peter Greenaway, 2012 March: Time Lapse, 2013 July: Composer in Progress, In Concert (2010), 2015 September: An Eye for Optical Theory (Live at Studio Halle, 2010).

Downton Abbey Returns for a Feel-Good Final Season

"When you’re alone, and life is making you lonely, you can always go … to Downton. Not that it’s an easy ride: The past five seasons of Julian Fellowes’s early 20th-century aristocratic soap opera have been fraught with drama, heartbreak, aristocratic disgrace, and the specter of socialism, which looms over the ridiculously privileged Crawley family even more insistently than rain clouds hover over Yorkshire. Still, there’s something about the combination of upstairs/downstairs antics, manor-house glamour, and the Dowager Countess’s bon mots that makes even the silliest storylines bearable. ..."
The Atlantic
NY Times: ‘Downton Abbey’ Season 6, Episode 1: Off They Go
PBS

2012 March: Downton Abbey, 2013 February: Downton Abbey 3, 2015 January: ‘Downton Abbey’ and History: A Look Back, Recap: Rumble With Lord G!, 2015 February: Recap: Prayers for Lord G’s Truest, Furriest Love, 2015 February: Recap: The Crawleys Should Have Sent Their Regrets, 2015 February: Recap: Yes, It’s Called the Hornby Hotel, 2015 March: Recap: In the Finale, Mary Meets Mr. Handsome.

Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting

"This major retrospective exhibition—the first in the United States in more than 35 years and the most comprehensive ever mounted—showcases the pioneering work of Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–1995). Exploring the beauty and complexity of Burri’s process-based works, the exhibition positions the artist as a central and singular protagonist of post–World War II art. Burri is best known for his series of Sacchi (sacks) made of stitched and patched remnants of torn burlap bags, often combined with fragments of discarded clothing. ..."
Guggenheim (Video)
Guggenheim: The Trauma of Painting
NY Times: Alberto Burri, a Man of Steel, and Burlap
VOGUE: Why You Should See the Guggenheim’s Alberto Burri Retrospective for Veterans Day
artbook

Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs

"You almost certainly know the name of William S. Burroughs, and more than likely you know him as the author of the novel Naked Lunch. If the idea of plunging straight into his writing intimidates you, given how drug-saturated, psychologically unconventional, and formally 'cut-up' that writing can get, where should you go to get some background on this unstoppably influential member of the Beat Generation? After all, knowledge of Burroughs’ work seems creatively beneficial: so many different kinds of artists found inspiration in his chaotic, fragmented work and even more chaotic, fragmented life that he wound up making collaborative appearances in nearly every medium known in his lifetime: film, music, television, performance art, rock videos. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
YouTube: Commisioner of Sewers 1991 (full documentary) 52:03

2009 May: Cut-up technique - 1, 2010 March: Cut-up technique, 2010 December: The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag, 2012 August: The Nova Trilogy, 2014 February: William Burroughs at 100, 2014 September: The Ticket That Exploded, 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2015 June: The Electronic Revolution (1971), 2015 August: Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914 – 2014, 2015 December: Destroy All Rational Thought.

Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection

"***, the symbol was called. When *** was handwritten on books and periodicals in the New York Public Library’s permanent collection, it meant one thing: supervision required. The triple-star code, created some time in the first part of the 20th century, identified the printed works that were considered too hot for the general reader to handle. Playboy was once classified with a triple star. So were raunchy pulp novels, fliers for Times Square massage parlors, business cards offering phone sex for $2 a minute, even playing cards with illustrations of naked women. For decades, they were kept in locked cages, accessible only with special permission and viewed in a small, secured area in the main research library. More recently, hundreds of works that make up the triple-star collection have been liberated from the restricted controls. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Pere Ubu - Live at the Longhorn: April 1, 1978

"I saw Ubu 4-5 times, but the show that made the biggest impression on me was on the tour the undertook for their 1st album, The Modern Dance. I saw them about 5 weeks before this show and they were crazy and splendid. Finally, you (and I) can hear what I heard then. Not a perfect recording by any means, but pretty good and certainly good enough. Conditionally recommended! Pere Ubu's Live at the Longhorn is as much an indispensable live rock album as Modern Dance is an indispensable studio album. The show consists mainly of material from Modern Dance, only rocked out and swinging, more raw-nerved yet seasoned than their studio counterparts. What becomes apparent, especially on repeated listening is how well-made this music is, how the drama and comedy flows within the modules of each song, how the songs fit together to give an audience an experience that - while sharpened to paranoia and sensitive to harsh realities - is as ineffable as it is concrete."
Wayside Music
amazon
YouTube: Humor Me (Live, 1978), "Heart of Darkness" live (12.6.78), Street Waves (Theatre 140, Brussels 1978-05-05)

2008 April: Pere Ubu, 2010 July: Pere Ubu - 1, 2012 November: David Thomas And The Pedestrians - Variations On A Theme, 2013 February: Dub Housing, 2014 September: Carnival of Souls (2014), 2015 June: Street Waves / My Dark Ages (1976).

Chumley's

Wikipedia - "Chumley's is a historic pub and former speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was established in 1922 by the socialist activist Leland Stanford Chumley, who converted a former blacksmith's shop near the corner of Bedford and Barrow Streets into a Prohibition-era drinking establishment. The speakeasy became a favorite spot for influential writers, poets, playwrights, journalists, and activists, including members of the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation movements. Some features remain from Chumley's Prohibition-era history. Notably, the Barrow Street entrance has no exterior sign, being located at the end of a nondescript courtyard ('The Garden Door'), while the Bedford Street entrance, which opens to the sidewalk, is also unmarked. Inside, Chumley's is still equipped with the trap doors and secret stairs that composed part of its elaborate subterfuge. ..."
Wikipedia
Famous West Village Speakeasy Chumley's One Step Closer To Reopening
NY Times: At Chumley’s, a Former Speakeasy, the Password Doesn’t Work
Chumley's Hopes to Keep History Alive in a 'Changed' Neighborhood

Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting

Black Monolith, II: Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man, 1994
"For 50 years, Jack Whitten has explored the possibilities of paint, the role of the artist, and the allure of material essence in his innovative studio process. With compositions that are abstract and elegiac, Whitten foregrounds the material properties of paint—pigmentation, viscosity, and mark—to capture the momentary and suggest the enduring. ... Whitten’s poetic and physically compelling compositions reinvent the medium of painting time and again—from his series of small 'ghost' paintings of the 1960s, his smeared test slabs and dragged canvases of the 1970s, and his collaged acrylic 'skins' of the 1980s to his more recent tessellated constructions of paint tiles. ..."
Walker
Artbook@
Alexander Gray Associates
W - Jack Whitten
YouTube: Five Decades of Painting, The Art of Jack Whitten

Secondhand Stories in a Rusting Steel City

"A SECONDHAND STORE IN A SECONDHAND TOWN IS ABOUT WHAT YOU’D EXPECT. A bit derelict, a bit kooky. Rows of thin gold necklaces, mostly crosses and hearts too small to melt down for scrap. Four Sony PlayStations, only two of which work. Boxes of cords to who knows what. Tools — piles of screwdrivers and buzz saws and toolboxes and doohickeys on collapsible tables. Scuffed guitars hanging by their necks. Guns and more guns — some mounted on a pegboard wall and others stuck in a cardboard barrel, butts up. Unopened, unwatchable movies. 'Kitchen' scales never purchased for cooking. In a place like Braddock, Pennsylvania, nothing much surprises you. It’s a poor place, mostly black, mostly a shadow of the boomtown steel days. ..."
Wilson Quarterly

Francis The Great :- Ravissante Baby / Look Up In The Sky (2015)

"Repressed. Rare funk and avant-garde soul from a seven-year-old kid singer featuring the best musicians of France and the Cameroonian diaspora, recorded in Paris in 1977. The album contains two nicely dramatic tracks: 'Ravissante Baby (Negro Phasing)' is a long, hypnotic, funky soukous track with a tremendous lead guitar and a long spoken-word and soulful kid vocal about the beauty of nature; 'Look Up in the Sky (Negro Nature)' is a stretched funk groove with psych synth by Michel Morose, bubbling bassline by the great Victor Edimo, the famous Toto Guillaume on guitar, and a brilliant poetic lyric by Francis the Great, who at that time studied in Ménilmontant, Paris. Originally produced by his father, a great impresario of African artists in Paris during the '70s, and coordinated by his mother, this album is unique, fresh, and almost unclassifiable."
Forced Exposure
amazon
YouTube: Ravissante Baby / Look Up In The Sky

Some Girls - Rolling Stones (1978)

"During the mid-'70s, the Rolling Stones remained massively popular, but their records suffered from Jagger's fascination with celebrity and Keith's worsening drug habit. By 1978, both punk and disco had swept the group off the front pages, and Some Girls was their fiery response to the younger generation. Opening with the disco-blues thump of 'Miss You,' Some Girls is a tough, focused, and exciting record, full of more hooks and energy than any Stones record since Exile on Main St. Even though the Stones make disco their own, they never quite take punk on their own ground. Instead, their rockers sound harder and nastier than they have in years. ... Some Girls may not have the back-street aggression of their '60s records, or the majestic, drugged-out murk of their early-'70s work, but its brand of glitzy, decadent hard rock still makes it a definitive Stones album."
allmusic
W - Some Girls
Some Girls Sessions
Rolling Stones – Some Girls Live In Texas
Concerts: Some Girls (Live)
YouTube: Beast of Burden (Live), Respectable, Miss You, Just My Imagination (Live), Shattered, Far Away Eyes
YouTube: SOME GIRLS ALBUM COMPLETO + BONUS TRACKS 1:39:40, Some Girls Revisited (Disc 1) Alternate Mixes 1:18:10, Some Girls Revisited (Disc 2) Studio Leftovers 1:18:17

2015 August: Exile on Main Street (1972), 2015 October: "Let's Spend the Night Together" / "Ruby Tuesday" (1967), 2015 December: Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971)

Chicago Blues (1972)

"'CHICAGO BLUES' is an angry film. To document Chicago blues at its source, the British director Harley Cokliss went to South Side clubs, storefront churches and homes. He wound up with both a performance film and an anti-travelogue on ghetto life. It is a stark, forceful combination. Although it was made in 1972, 'Chicago Blues' is having its New York theatrical premiere tonight at the Bleecker Street Cinema as part of the Greenwich Village Jazz Festival's film series. Without condescending to viewers, 'Chicago Blues' sketches the history of the music - the rural blues that came to Chicago with black migrants from the South and was transformed by urban life and electric guitars. Johnie Lewis, who moved to Chicago in 1943, plays a country-blues about being a 'poor boy in a strange city,' and later a bluesy gospel song. Willie Dixon, a major blues songwriter, improvises a Mississippi-style field holler. Floyd Jones, in his living room, plays a country-style blues about the stockyards. And the congregation at the Liberty Union Church sings an exuberantly out-of-tune hymn - the blues in its Sunday clothes. ..."
NY Times
amazon: Chicago Blues Featuring Muddy Waters, Johnnie Lewis, Buddy Guy, Junior Well, J. B. Hutto
YouTube: Chicago Blues 49:31

The 2015 Jacobin Mixtape

Nostalgia Musical, Kamillo Reis / Flickr
"It’s that time of year again. And by 'that time of year again,' we mean it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re eager to go home to our tiny apartments, watch Netflix, and down champagne with our pet ferrets. What better way to get the day over with than a hastily assembled compilation post? You can excuse the laziness, because we did manage to publish close to eight hundred essays in 2015. And many of them were quite good. Before the rundown of our 2015 hits, a public service announcement. It’s still December, which means we’re still fundraising, just like every other organization you made the mistake of once giving your email to. ..."
Jacobin

Rumor and Sigh - Richard Thompson (1991)

"While Richard Thompson's devotees will tell you the man is a triple-threat genius -- passionate vocalist, compelling songwriter, and sterling guitarist -- even his most loyal supporters will concede that the dour nature of his songs and the no-frills production of many of his albums make the bulk of his catalog tough sledding for the uninitiated. Given this, 1991's Rumor and Sigh is arguably the best album for those wanting to sample Thompson's work for the first time. It captures Thompson at the top of his form on all fronts, but also gives his songs just enough polish to make them approachable for the unconverted, and though it's several shades darker than the average adult-contemporary album, it honors Thompson's obsession with romantic despair and the less pleasant quirks of fate without sounding depressing in the process. ..."
allmusic
W - Rumor and Sigh
Sway into emotion by Anil Prasad
Revisit: Richard Thompson: Rumor and Sigh
YouTube: I Misunderstood (Live on Sound Opinions), I Feel So Good, 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
YouTube: Rumor and Sigh Album

2011 July: Shoot Out the Lights - Richard and Linda Thompson, 2012 February: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, 2014 March: Videowest 81, 2015 October: Richard & Linda Thompson - Rafferty's Folly (1980)

John Sloan, "Red Kimono on the Roof," 1912

"Red Kimono on the Roof is an oil painting by American artist John Sloan, located in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. ... Red Kimono on the Roof is a matter-of-fact depiction of a woman in a vibrant red wrap hanging laundry on a New York roof, clothespin in her mouth. Sloan's spontaneous brushwork give the painting a sense of immediacy, while his careful attention to light and shade suggests the passage of time. This particular slice of the Lower East Side probably caught Sloan's eye due to the kimono worn by the woman, a charmingly bohemian sartorial choice that meshed well with the novel Maratta color system Sloan had just begun using on his typically sober paintings. This painting also marks a shift from horizontal to vertical in Sloan's canvases, an artistic and perceptual shift that occurred between 1909 and 1915. ..."
Wikipedia
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS - On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art. Patricia McDonnell

Kid Thomas (20 June 1934 - 5 April 1970)

"Louis Thomas Watts, commonly known as Kid Thomas (20 June 1934 - 5 April 1970) was an American musician, who created music in the rock, rock & roll and blues genres. Kid Thomas was born in Sturgis, Mississippi. As a child he moved to Chicago, Illinois and learned the harmonica. While he later switched to rock and roll, he initially played blues. By the early 1950s, he played regularly with Muddy Waters, Elmore James and Bo Diddley, and as a solo performer. In 1955 he recorded his first single, 'Wolf Pack', for Federal Records. However, it was not successful, and other recordings he made for Federal went unissued for many years. ... The record has been described as 'one of the wildest rock'n'roll discs of all time with Kid Thomas blowing his harmonica and shouting out the lyrics in a frantic frenzy.' ..."
Wikipedia
allmusic
YouTube: Rockin' this Joint Tonight, The Wolf Pack, You Heard What I Said, Wail Baby Wail

The Wes Anderson Collection, Chapter 8: "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

"... All of Wes Anderson’s films are comedies, and none are. There is always a melancholic undertone, buried just deep enough beneath artifice and artistry that you don’t see it right away. Such is the case with The Grand Budapest Hotel, his eighth and most structurally ambitious movie. After a first viewing, you come away remembering the wit and motion, and wit in motion, of this tale within a tale within a tale. A dowager countess is murdered, a foppish concierge named Gustave is framed and imprisoned, a nation is plunged into war as fascism’s specter looms, but these dire events are cushioned by colors, textures, and madcap chases. ..."
Roger Ebert: The Wes Anderson Collection, Chapter 8: "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (Video)
Open Culture: What’s the Big Deal About Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel? Matt Zoller Seitz’s Video Essay Explains (Video)

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), 2014 December: Welcome to Union Glacier (2013), 2015 January: Inhabiting Wes Anderson’s Universe, 2015 July: Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles, 2015 November: Moonrise Kingdom (2012).

The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn

"The following essay describes work featured in the exhibition 'The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn,' on view at the Beinecke Library from January 13 to March 27, 2010 and in an online exhibition. Both exhibitions high-light the Beinecke Library’s outstanding collection of Erica Van Horn’s work, representing aspects of the artist’s development over more than thirty years, calling special attention to several themes: the artist’s frequent exploration of the details of her life, the objects around her, the routines of her days, and her most familiar relationships; her long fascination with the ways language both describes and creates community, even as it determines individual identity and shapes personal memory; Van Horn’s interest in the essential elements of narrative forms and structures, in both word and image; and the artist’s frequent use and re-use of saved or salvaged materials as the raw materials of her work, documenting her creative process and making both beauty and meaning from fragments and remainders. ..."
[PDF] visualsyntax
Erica Van Horn
Medieval Miniature books by Ericka VanHorn
WSWorkshop
amazon: The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn

The one-cent coffee stands for poor New Yorkers

"The first booth opened on Ann Street off Broadway in 1887, close to City Hall and the high-octane newspaper offices of Park Row. Called St. Andrew’s One Cent Coffee Stand, it served a half-pint of coffee (plus milk, sugar, and a slice of bread) for a penny. Within months, four more one-cent coffee stands appeared on busy downtown intersections. The menu included hearty fare like beef soup, pork and beans, fish cakes, and fish chowder—with no item costing more than a cent. The concept sounds like a 19th century version of today’s sidewalk coffee and donut cart. But St. Andrew’s wasn’t catering to busy commuters. The clientele was the city’s down and out—the 'newsboys, emigrants, poor families, and street waifs,' as one writer put it in Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine. ..."
Ephemeral New York
1¢ coffee
Half a pint of coffee, with milk and sugar and a slice of bread, 1 cent

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

"It's hard to overestimate the importance of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the record that firmly established Dylan as an unparalleled songwriter, one of considerable skill, imagination, and vision. At the time, folk had been quite popular on college campuses and bohemian circles, making headway onto the pop charts in diluted form, and while there certainly were a number of gifted songwriters, nobody had transcended the scene as Dylan did with this record. ... This is rich, imaginative music, capturing the sound and spirit of America as much as that of Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, or Elvis Presley. Dylan, in many ways, recorded music that equaled this, but he never topped it."
allmusic
W - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
The Atlantic: Bob Dylan and John Lennon's Weird, One-Sided Relationship
Telegraph: Touring Bob Dylan's New York
Guardian: Suze Rotolo obituary
YouTube: Girl From The North Country (Freewheelin' Alternate Take 1963), A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (Freewheelin' Alternate Take 1963), Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (The Gaslight Cafe 1962), Let Me Die In My Footsteps (Finjan Club 1962), Talkin' John Birch Society Blues (Mono Master Rare Recalled Early Pressing 1962), Bob Dylan's Dream (Freewheelin' Alternate Take 1963), I Shall Be Free (Freewheelin' Alternate Take 1962 - Take 5), Ballad Of Hollis Brown (Freewheelin' Outtake 1962 - Take 2), Blowin' In The Wind (Freewheelin' Alternate Take 1962 - Take 1), Rocks And Gravel (Freewheelin' Outtake 1962 - Acoustic Take 3), Corrina Corrina (Freewheelin' Alternate Take 1962 - Acoustic Take 1)

Cassette culture

Wikipedia - "Cassette culture, or the cassette underground, refers to the practices surrounding amateur production and distribution of recorded music that emerged in the late 1970s via home-made audio cassettes. It is characterized by the adoption of home recording by independent artists, and involvement in ad-hoc self-distribution and promotion networks - primarily conducted through mail (though there were a few retail outlets, such as Rough Trade and Falling A in the UK) and fanzines. The culture was in part an offshoot of the mail art movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and participants engaged in tape trading in addition to traditional sales. The culture is related to the DIY ethic of punk, and encouraged musical eclecticism and diversity. Several factors led to the rise of cassette culture. ..."
Wikipedia
Pitchfork: This Is Not a Mixtape
Cassette Culture with Stretch Armstrong
Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture
Tales of the Tape: Cassette Culture in the Digital Age
Cassette Culture by Richie Unterberger
Still Rolling: A Revival of Cassette Culture

2010 March: The idea of the cassette: A gallery with musings, 2015 August: Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture - Thurston Moore (2005), 2015 September: OP Magazine / Tape Op

Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershoi From SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark

“Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor” (1901)
"One of Denmark’s most celebrated artists, Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916), was known in his day as 'the painter of tranquil rooms.' He worked during an era of great changes in Western art: Around the turn of the 20th century, traditional realism no longer seemed an adequate way to express the myriad revolutionary ideas percolating all over Europe. As viewers may observe in 'Painting Tranquility: Masterworks by Vilhelm Hammershoi From SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark,' a beautiful small exhibition at Scandinavia House, his paintings convey a distinctively modern psychological complexity. But unlike another famous Scandinavian, the Expressionist Edvard Munch, Hammershoi practiced a kind of representational painting dating back to Rembrandt and Vermeer. With their severely muted colors, Hammershoi’s portraits and pictures of women in nearly empty rooms may call to mind the suavely subdued paintings of James McNeill Whistler. ..."
NY Times: Vilhelm Hammershoi’s Paintings at Scandinavia House
Scandinavia House
Vidinfo: Painting Tranquility

The Epic - Kamasi Washington (2015)

"The Epic is saxophonist Kamasi Washington's aptly titled, triple-length, 172-minute debut album for Brainfeeder. He is a veteran of L.A.'s music scene and has played with Gerald Wilson, Harvey Mason, Flying Lotus, and Kendrick Lamar (his horn is prominently featured on To Pimp a Butterfly), to name but a few. Most of his bandmates have played together since high school, and it shows. There are two drummers (including Ronald Bruner), two bassists (including Stephen 'Thundercat' Bruner on electric), two keyboardists, trumpet, trombone, and vocals (Patrice Quinn). ... The Epic isn't fusion, retro, or remotely academic. It's 21st century jazz as accessible as it is virtuosic -- feel matters to Washington. Holistic in breadth and deep in vision, it provides a way into this music for many, and challenges the cultural conversation about jazz without compromising or pandering."
allmusic
Pitchfork (Video)
W - The Epic
amazon: The Epic
Guardian - Best albums of 2015: No 8 – The Epic by Kamasi Washington (Video)
YouTube: The Epic in Concert

Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist

"Featuring more than 200 color illustrations, the catalogue Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist accompanies the first full-scale survey of the work of Archibald Motley, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from January 30, 2014, through May 11, 2014. Archibald John Motley, Jr., was an American painter, master colorist, and radical interpreter of urban culture. Among twentieth-century American artists, Motley is surely one of the most important and, paradoxically, also one of the most enigmatic. ... Motley's brilliant yet idiosyncratic paintings—simultaneously expressionist and social realist—have captured worldwide attention with their rainbow-hued, syncopated compositions. The exhibition includes the artist's depictions of African American life in early-twentieth-century Chicago, as well as his portraits and archetypes, portrayals of African American life in Jazz Age Paris, and renderings of 1950s Mexico."
amazon

2015 June: Archibald Motley

Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933

Ludwig Meidner's I and the City (1913) is part of Neue Galerie.
"New York has just added another outstanding museum exhibition to its autumn roster, this one at the Neue Galerie. 'Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933' is an ambitious effort in a limited setting that successfully combines historical sweep, clockwork organization and an egalitarian approach to mediums. Its nearly 350 pieces — expertly shoehorned into six themed spaces — cover the cultural ferment of the fragile Weimar Republic, as it came to be known, which was sandwiched between the end of World War I and the onset of the Third Reich and was Germany’s first attempt at full democracy. ..."
NY Times: Hope and Dread Are Infused in ‘Berlin Metropolis’
Neue Galerie
Neue Galerie: Thumbnails | Slideshow
Brooklyn Rail

Tales From the Cold War

Defaced cars outside the Stasi headquarters in Berlin.
"'We gain our experiences of life in the form of catastrophe,' said Bertold Brecht in his discussion of the detective novel. Catastrophes give us insight into our society: its depressions, revolutions, and wars. Yet as we follow the unfolding narrative, Brecht goes on, 'we sense that somebody must have done something to precipitate the catastrophe. So, who did what? The murder has taken place. What transpired beforehand? What situation resulted? Now, we might be able to work it out.' Brecht’s observation applies equally well to Cold War spy stories such as Deutschland ’83 and The Americans. Reading detective — or spy — fiction can be likened to interpreting the catastrophes of our age. ..."
Jacobin
YouTube: DEUTSCHLAND 83 Season 1 TRAILER (2015)
hulu: The Americans (Video)
IMDb: Bridge of Spies (Video)

The Band With The Hawks - The Silver Dome 1989

The Band With The Hawks: Levon, Rick, Garth and Terry with The Band and The Hawks 1989
YouTube: Rain Down Tears, Ophelia, W S Walcott Medicine Show, Twilight
YouTube: The Band With The Hawks

2009 July: The Band, 2011 June: Music from Big Pink, 2011 September: The Last Waltz, 2012 December: King Harvest 2012 January: Rare Concert Footage of The Band, 1970, 2015 January: Stage Fright (1970), 2015 October: The Band (1969)

Photographs of everyday life in 1950s New York City discovered in an attic 45 years later

"The vintage photographs you're about to see have an interesting history. They all came from a cardboard box filled with negatives that was unopened and virtually forgotten for over 45 years. When undiscovered photographer Frank Larson passed away in 1964, his wife Eleanora boxed up all of their possessions and moved out of their retirement home in Lakeville, Connecticut. The box of negatives was one of these items, and it has remained with the family ever since, tucked away in storage. ...Inside the box were over 100 envelopes filled with mostly medium-format, 2 1/4" x 2 1/4" negatives. The packets were marked by date and location, carefully sealed and left exactly as he packed them 50 years ago."
Creative Boom

An Introduction to Novelist Gilbert Sorrentino’s Bay Ridge

"... Bay Ridge is a neighborhood in the southwestern corner of Brooklyn. ... By the time Gil was born, in 1929, Bay Ridge wasn’t the countryside. Anyone who’s read Steelwork or Crystal Vision or Red the Fiend or Little Casino or A Strange Commonplace or The Abyss of Human Illusion knows Gil’s Bay Ridge was no artists’ colony. The streets in his Brooklyn books are home to an insular neighborhood-culture of poolrooms, taverns and candystores, populated by the unhappily married and the miserably unattached, vets and laborers and middle managers, all addicted to alcohol, all sexually frustrated—or, rather, sexually frenzied—people whom Sorrentino succinctly describes in A Strange Commonplace as 'tough, flexible and distrustful of crude irony.' ..."
Hey Ridge
The First Gentrifiers
Gilbert Sorrentino: The Lost Laureate of Brooklyn
The Beat Poets of the Forever Generation: Gilbert Sorrentino

2012 January: Gilbert Sorrentino, 2015 April: The Orangery (1978)

Can the Unbeatable Warriors Be Beaten?

"The Golden State Warriors will take an intimidating 27-1 record into their Christmas Day showdown with LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, the group they conquered in six games in last season’s N.B.A. finals. As good as the Warriors were then, they are better now, led by the increasingly amazing Stephen Curry, who has bumped James aside as the most dynamic player in the league. So how do you beat Curry and his supporting cast? How do you cope with a team that ranks No. 1 in the league in offense, and a respectable No. 7 in defense, and uses the 3-pointer to simply overwhelm the opposition? The New York Times posed those questions to some smart basketball minds at all levels of the game — high school, college and the pros. ..."
NY Times

Wayne Shorter - JuJu (1964)

"Fulfilling the potential promised on his Blue Note debut, Night Dreamer, Wayne Shorter's JuJu was the first great showcase for both his performance and compositional gifts. Early in his career as a leader, Shorter was criticized as a mere acolyte of John Coltrane, and his use of Coltrane's rhythm section on his first two Blue Note albums only bolstered that criticism. The truth is, though, that Elvin Jones, Reggie Workman, and McCoy Tyner were the perfect musicians to back Shorter. Jones' playing at the time was almost otherworldly. He seemed to channel the music through him when improvising and emit the perfect structure to hold it together. Workman too seemed to almost instinctively understand how to embellish Shorter's compositions. ... From the African-influenced title track (with its short, hypnotic, repetitive phrases) to the mesmerizing interplay between Tyner and Shorter on 'Mahjong,' the album (which is all originals) blooms with ideas, pulling in a world of influences and releasing them again as a series of stunning, complete visions."
allmusic
W - JuJu
Wayne Shorter’s masterpiece album Speak No Evil turns 50 (VIdeo)
Spotify
YouTube: JuJu

Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949

Fork, Andre Kertesz
"The creative possibilities explored through photography were never richer or more varied than in the years between the First and Second World Wars, when photographers approached figuration, abstraction, and architecture with unmatched imaginative fervor. This vital moment is dramatically captured in the more than 300 photographs that constitute the Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art. This remarkable group of objects is presented together for the first time to coincide with the culmination of the Thomas Walther Collection Project—a four-year collaboration between the Museum’s curatorial and conservation staff, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has transformed our understanding of the medium’s material history from this era. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions or the printed page, these objects provide unique insight into the radical intentions of their creators. ..."
MoMA
MoMA: Object:Photo
MoMA: Thomas Walther Collection
New Yorker: Image Conscious
NY Times: Black and White and Accessible All Over

The Peel Sessions Album - Wire (1989)

"In 1978 and 1979, Wire taped three sessions for the John Peel show. Most artists might have taken the opportunity afforded by a coveted Peel session to promote a recent or forthcoming release. Wire did otherwise. Wire often moved swiftly on to new projects once material had been committed to vinyl. Consequently, only one of the numbers chosen by the group for its first BBC session in January 1978 was from the recent debut album, Pink Flag. ... Although The Peel Sessions hints at early Wire's weaknesses without regular producer Mike Thorne -- who seemed uniquely capable of bringing the group's sound into focus -- the material collected here does nothing to diminish Wire's status as the most innovative and influential band of the punk era."
allmusic
W - The Peel Sessions Album
Pink Flag: The Peel Sessions
I Love Total Destruction
YouTube: On Returning (The Peel Sessions), German Shepherds, Boiling Boy, Mutual Friend, Drill

2009 January: Wire, 2012 January: On the Box 1979., 2013 September: Chairs Missing (1978), 2014 June: 154 (1979), 2014 July: Document And Eyewitness (1979-1980), 2015 April: The Ideal Copies: Graham Lewis Of Wire's Favourite Albums, 2015 July: Pink Flag (1977).

A View from the Bridge - Arthur Miller (1955)

Wikipedia - "A View from the Bridge is a play by American playwright Arthur Miller, first staged on September 29, 1955 as a one-act verse drama with A Memory of Two Mondays at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway. The play was unsuccessful and Miller subsequently revised the play to contain two acts; this version is the one with which audiences are most familiar today. The two-act version premièred in the New Watergate theatre club in London's West End under the direction of Peter Brook on October 11, 1956. The play is set in 1950s America, in an Italian American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It employs a chorus and narrator in the character of Alfieri. Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love of, and almost obsession with, Catherine. Miller's interest in writing about the world of the New York docks originated with an unproduced screenplay that he developed with Elia Kazan in the early 1950s (entitled The Hook) that addressed corruption on the Brooklyn docks. Kazan later directed On the Waterfront, which dealt with the same subject. Miller said that he heard the basic account that developed into the plot of A View from the Bridge from a lawyer who worked with longshoremen, who related it to him as a true story. ..."
Wikipedia
Guardian: A View from the Bridge five-star review – Ivo van Hove reinvents Arthur Miller
NY Times - Review: ‘A View From the Bridge’ Bears Witness to the Pain of Fate
NPR: Brits Doing Brooklyn: 'A View From The Bridge' Crosses The Sea To Broadway (Video)
[PDF] A View from the Bridge - Arthur Miller
amazon

2011 April: The Misfits (1961), 2012 June: Before Air-Conditioning (1998), 2014 December: The Crucible (1953)

Atlanta: Darker Than Blue

"Here's a deep dive to keep you occupied through the holidays. Atlanta: Darker Than Blue is a fascinating history of the city presented by Blvck Vrchives. A sobering decades-long look at black life in the black mecca, it covers the trials, tragedy, and triumphs. It's easily the most compelling photographic retrospective of Atlanta that I have ever seen. Set to the music of Curtis Mayfield's 'We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue,' the video component (embedded below) starts with civil rights-era Atlanta and the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then travels through the rise of Mayor Maynard Jackson, the decimation of the Atlanta Child Murders, the destitute condition of public housing in the ’70s/’80s; to the hip-hop era, Freaknik, and Dre's proclamation giving rise to the South. ..."
Creative Loafing
Atlanta: Darker Than Blue
vimeo: Atlanta: Darker Than Blue (Introduction)

Red Rackham's Treasure - The Adventures of Tintin (1943)

Wikipedia - "Red Rackham's Treasure (French: Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge) is the twelfth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised daily in Le Soir, Belgium's leading francophone newspaper, from February to September 1943 amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. Completing an arc begun in The Secret of the Unicorn, the story tells of young reporter Tintin and his friend Captain Haddock as they launch an expedition to the Caribbean to locate the treasure of the pirate Red Rackham. ..."
Wikipedia
amazon
Tintin: Red Rackham's Treasure
Timberdoodle
YouTube: Red Rackham's Treasure 20:13

2008 May: Georges Remi, 1907-1983, 2010 July: The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free, 2011 December: Prisoners of the Sun, 2012 January: Tintin: the Complete Companion, 2012 December: Snowy, 2015 August: The Black Island (1937), 2015 September: King Ottokar's Sceptre (1938)