Otis “Big Smokey” Smothers - Sings The Backporch Blues (1962)

"Otis 'Big Smokey' Smothers (March 21, 1929 – July 23, 1993) was an African-American Chicago blues guitarist and singer. He was a member of Howlin' Wolf's backing band and worked with Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Bo Diddley, Ike Turner, J. T. Brown, Freddie King, Little Johnny Jones, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon. His younger brother, Abe (born Albert, January 2, 1939 – November 20, 2010), was the bluesman Little Smokey Smothers, with whom he is sometimes confused. Smothers was born in Lexington, Mississippi, and was taught by his aunt to play the harmonica and the guitar. He relocated to Chicago in 1946. ... His album Smokey Smothers Sings the Backporch Blues, produced by Sonny Thompson, with Freddie King on lead guitar, was released in 1962. A subsequent session produced four tracks, including 'Twist with Me Annie', a reworked version of 'Work with Me, Annie'. As a part-time member of Muddy Waters's backing band, Smothers played on 'I Got My Eyes on You' in 1968. ..."
Wikipedia
Record Fiend
Blues On Stage
YouTube: Sings The Backporch Blues (Full)

Bedford Park: An Undisturbed Suburb in the North Bronx

The New York Botanical Garden’s conservatory hosts its annual holiday model train show each December.
"Bedford Park, a sleepy community in the northern section of the Bronx, is home to tight two-way streets running parallel to the super-wide Grand Concourse, and century-old Victorian- and Tudor-style homes abutting Art Deco apartment buildings. The neighborhood began to develop in 1869 after George Caulfield bought a 25-acre tract of land from a large plot owned by financier Leonard Jerome, Winston Churchill’s grandfather. Three years later, Caulfield sold the property to the Twenty-Fourth Ward Real Estate Association. Bedford Park’s suburban design was inspired by the London town of the same name, which was the first 'garden suburb.' The neighborhood’s early settlers — working-class Irish and Italian immigrants — lived in freshly built suburban villas on a street now known as Villa Avenue. Many residents lived where they worked, helping to construct the nearby Jerome Park Reservoir, the site of a former racetrack also bearing Jerome’s name. ..."
Voice

The Bedford Café is an all-hours oasis on Bedford Park Boulevard.

2009 June: City Island, Seaport of the Bronx, 2015 January: Anna Matos on WallWorks NY — A New Gallery Space in the South Bronx, 2015 July: ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, 2015 November: Bronx Cheer, 2016 February: Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (2014), 2016 May: The Birth of the Bronx's Universal Hip Hop Museum, 2016 June: Who Makes the Bronx, 2017 March: New York by New Yorkers: A Local's Guide to the City's Neighborhoods, 2017 August: From Lagos to the Bronx, Photographer Osaretin Ugiagbe Documents the In-Between, 2017 September: The Bronx, 2018 January: Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier

Slick Leo, the Godfather of DJ Culture in New Orleans

"It’s seafood Tuesday at Caesar’s on the West Bank of New Orleans, and it is cold and blustery and, believe it or not, hailing outside. A bummer of an East Coast winter night, perhaps – but for a January in Louisiana, damn near apocalyptic. The next few days will see the city covered with a thin patina of frost, enough to induce power outages, shuttered schools, panicked city-wide travel warnings and an intense-sounding 'boil-water advisory.' Which means the folks who have left their homes to party tonight with Captain Charles and Papa Smurf must be the hardcore of the hardcore. The club’s a quarter full at best, but there are half-pints of cognac for sale and a plastic tub of Trustex condoms in the bathroom, and the floor stays covered with packs of line-dancers falling easily into synchronized formations. In here, it’s all ages: A memorable scene breaks out when a 60-something fellow in a fedora grinds up on a 20-something woman with platinum hair, and, in the process, to great cheers, drops his cane. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily
Soundcloud: SLICK LEO SNIPPET FROM THE FAMOUS DISCO '83 ON WAIL 105 FM NEW ORLEANS (Audio)

Tales from the far-flung Faroes

"When it comes to remote, the Faroe Islands has it all. Tucked between Norway and Iceland, in the dark waters of the North Atlantic, the 18 tiny islands are home to a population of just over 50,000. Half of those residents live in the archipelago's capital Tórshavn 'Thor's Town'. But some of the islands are sparsely populated, with just a handful of people living on them. The Faroese are self-reliant, modest people, with a rich heritage of storytelling and a deep desire to share information with one another. The self-governing nation has a well-developed communication network - courtesy of the Kingdom of Denmark of which it is part - but many still rely on the postal service. Some of the islands are connected by tunnels and bridges, but on others, mail bags arrive by boat or even helicopter. A network of hard-working postal workers then criss-cross islands on old mountain routes used since the 19th Century delivering the post. The fittest people used to be nominated to walk these routes, but these days 4x4 postal vehicles cross the rugged terrain. But still, on the smaller islands, post is delivered on foot by locals. Meet some of them. ..."
BBC
W - Faroe Islands
YouTube: Top Places to See in the Faroe Islands, Faroe Islands 27:52

The Mystery of Caliphate

"Six episodes into a 10-episode series, the New York Times’ podcast Caliphate is a handsomely produced collection of riveting audio in search of a stable identity. In the podcast’s short prologue, the Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi tells producer Andy Mills that her mission is to answer the question 'Who are they?'—meaning the Islamic State, Callimachi’s beat. But is Caliphate a news podcast, like the Times’ hugely popular The Daily, in which host Michael Barbaro interviews the journalists responsible for the paper’s biggest stories of the moment—with Mills as Barbaro and Callimachi as the reporter conveying her scoops? Or is it, as its limited run suggests, a story, with a beginning, middle, and end? The Daily works so well because it’s symbiotic with the paper. Listeners feel like they’ve been seated next to the reporter at a dinner party and are getting both the version of a six-column feature and a bit of the reporter’s personality and attitudes. Without the institutional rigor of the Times behind it, however, all this insider talk would be little more than gossip, yet another take in a world brimming with free-floating opinions. ..."
Slate: The Mystery of Caliphate
NY Times: Caliphate (Audio)
twitter

2018 April: NY Times: The ISIS Files

The Death and Life of a Great American Building - Jeremiah Moss

The St. Denis, 2017
"I am one of the last tenants of the St. Denis, a 165-year-old building on the corner of Broadway and East 11th Street, just south of Union Square in New York City, that is in the process of being emptied and readied for gutting. It is quiet in my office, early morning before my psychotherapy patients arrive. My four large windows overlook a courtyard and the angled back sides of three buildings, their walls a geometric patchwork of brick. Pigeons purr on a sill. In the NYU dormitory across the way, a student has decorated her window with paper snowflakes. It is winter and I hope to see a real snowfall one more time before I go. The St. Denis is desolate. Only two dozen tenants are left. There used to be hundreds. For decades, the St. Denis has been a haven for psychotherapists of every sort: classical Freudian analysts and new-age Zen psychologists, existential counselors and gender specialists, therapists who use art, dance, and neurofeedback. We’ve shared the building’s six floors (plus one semi-secret half-floor on the un-seventh) with other small businesses, mostly providers of wellness—Rolfers, Reiki healers, craniosacral balancers, Feldenkrais practitioners, acupuncturists, Pilates instructors, and at least one psychic who does past-life regressions. ..."
NYBooks

A staircase inside the St. Denis, 2017

The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time: A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork

"What makes a good ambient record? I’m not sure I can even begin to answer that question, and I count myself a longtime fan of the genre, such as it is. Though conceived, ostensibly, by Brian Eno as modernist mood music—'as ignorable as it is interesting,' he wrote in the liner notes to 1978's Ambient 1: Music for Airports—the term has come to encompass 'tracks you can dance to all the way to harsh noise.' This description from composer and musician Keith Fullerton Whitman at Pitchfork may not get us any closer to a clear definition in prose, though “cloud of sound” is a lovely turn of phrase. Unlike other forms of music, there is no set of standards—both in the jazz sense of a canon and the formal sense of a set of rules. Reverberating keyboards, squelching, burping synthesizers, droning guitar feedback, field recordings, found sounds, laptops, strings… whatever it takes to get you there—'there' being a state of suspended emotion, 'drifting' rather than 'driving,' the sounds 'soothing, sad, haunting, or ominous.' (Cheerful, upbeat ambient music may be a contradiction in terms.) ..."
Open Culture (Audio)
Pitchfork: The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time (Video)

The Maltese Falcon (1941 film)

Wikipedia - "The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut, and based on Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel of the same name. The film stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade and Mary Astor as his femme fatale client. Gladys George, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet co-star, with Greenstreet appearing in his film debut. The story follows a San Francisco private detective and his dealings with three unscrupulous adventurers, all of whom are competing to obtain a jewel-encrusted falcon statuette. The film premiered on October 3, 1941, in New York City, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. The Maltese Falcon was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1989. ... In San Francisco in 1941, private investigators Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) meet prospective client Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor). She claims to be looking for her missing sister, who is involved with a man named Floyd Thursby. Archer agrees to follow her that night and help get her sister back. Spade is awakened by a phone call early in the morning and the police inform him that Archer has been killed. ..."
Wikipedia
Vanity Fair: The Mystery of the Maltese Falcon, One of the Most Valuable Movie Props in History
Guardian - After The Maltese Falcon: how film noir took flight
YouTube: The Maltese Falcon (1941) Trailer, 'The Maltese Falcon' | Critics' Picks | The New York Times (A. O. Scott)

Third Coast Percussion

"Back at the beginning of time, the human voice was the very first instrument. Probably close in second place were folks banging on stuff – in other words, percussionists. The quartet of gentlemen who form the Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion takes primordial pounding into a completely distinctive new league. To be sure, in this Tiny Desk performance, they'll play their sophisticated, modern marimbas and vibraphones, but be on the lookout for the subtleties of tuned cowbells and 3/4" galvanized steel pipes, like those found at the local hardware store. Add to that a glockenspiel, a MIDI synth, a melodica, a drum kit, children's deskbells, crotales, a Thai gong and a singing bowl, and you've got significant noise-making potential behind Bob Boilen's desk. The mesmerizing opening number, 'Niagara,' written by the group, is from the band's latest album, the aqua-centric Paddle to the Sea. This water is fast-moving, with pulsing, repeating patterns in the vibraphone, punctuated by drum beats and a bed of low synth. The Third Coasters follow with another from the album, their own arrangement of a slowly rippling ode to the Amazon River by Philip Glass. Beginning with droplets on the glockenspiel and evocative bowing of both vibraphone and crotales (small bronze discs), the music flows softly, taking its time to fan out in all its quiet beauty. ..."
NPR (Video)
W - Third Coast Percussion
Third Coast Percussion
YouTube: Ritual Music, Fractalia by Owen Clayton Condon, "Torched and Wrecked" by David Skidmore

William Ferris: The Man Who Shared Our Voices

"They don’t teach mule trading at Yale University, but Bill Ferris had a sneaking suspicion the blue-blooded Ivy Leaguers he ran with in the 1970s might benefit from some practical knowledge, the kind you don’t find in books. That’s how Ray Lum, an 84-year-old Vicksburg, Mississippi, mule trader, wound up spending a late September day in 1975 outside Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, holding forth to any student or professor who would listen. Ferris had grown up on a Mississippi Delta farm called Broadacres — '16 miles on a gravel road,' he says, from Vicksburg. He had known Lum 'from the time my father would take me to the auction barn' where Lum held his weekly livestock sales. At this stage of his career, Ferris was 33 years old and in his third year as an associate professor in Yale’s American and Afro-American Studies programs. He had long since understood the spell a drawling, self-made raconteur from Mississippi could cast upon the unSouthern. He’d learned it well after years of up-North and overseas education at a Massachusetts boarding school, Chicago’s Northwestern University, Trinity College in Ireland, and finally the University of Pennsylvania. ..."
THE BITTER SOUTHERNER (Audio)

The Sistine Chapel of Comic-Strip Art

What remains of the cartoon wall at the Overlook, a Midtown sports bar.
"In a dark booth at the Overlook, which resides in a little brick building that has defied demolition below the skyscrapers of East Midtown, two men were having a beer. The bar was rowdy with people eating wings and watching basketball on televisions, but the men were busy studying the cracked, aging wall beside them. Twenty feet wide and spanning the room’s length, it was covered with dozens of fading drawings of classic American cartoon and comic strip characters. ... This crumbling, beer-splotched wall in the back of a sports bar on East 44th Street is one of New York’s more neglected cultural treasures. Created in the 1970s, it is a veritable Sistine Chapel of American comic-strip art: the 30-some drawings across its face were left by a who’s who of cartooning legends, including a Spider-Man by Gil Kane, a Beetle Bailey by Mort Walker, a Dondi by Irwin Hasen, a Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff, a Hagar the Horrible by Dik Browne, and a Dagwood Bumstead by Paul Fung Jr. There’s also a self-portrait by Al Jaffee, a doodle by Bil Keane, and a Mad magazine-style gag by Sergio Aragonés. Old regulars are familiar with the wall’s past, and comic book scholars make occasional pilgrimages to the bar, but the Overlook’s cartoon mural remains largely unknown and untended. ..."
NY Times

A group of artists works to restore the original James Thurber murals at Costello's, April 1972.

A Woman’s Place

"It starts more like a Nike commercial than a political ad. The camera pans over a wintry landscape, and a woman appears, wearing a hot-pink racing jacket, hair in a ponytail, music building as she runs. Her voice comes in, telling the story of a race she ran with her father as a young girl: Just as a boy and his dad moved ahead of her, her father asked if she was going to let the kid beat her. ... The woman is Erin Collier, candidate for Congress. After touting her family’s eight generations in upstate New York and her work as an agricultural economist for the Obama administration, she says, 'I’m a woman, I’m an economist, I’m a farmer, I’m a triathlete, I’m a feminist. I’m not going to let those boys beat me.' It’s an extraordinary ad, and not just because of its girl-power, pink-sneaker aesthetic. Collier doesn’t just embrace her gender. She speaks to a woman who has rarely existed before in the American political imagination: ambitious, successful, and, most notably (even jarringly), competitive. A record number of women are running for office this year. A few are Republican, but the vast majority are Democrats. ..."
New Republic

Moving Out - Sonny Rollins (1954)

"When the title Moving Out is applied to this album, it bears no reference to leaving one domicile for another but means stepping out into high gear while playing. Those of you who are familiar with Sonny Rollins' playing know that he does a lot of moving out, stepping out (right out of his shoes) and stretching out (extending himself to play interesting parts of the chords). These are vintage Rollins recordings made in a New York period prior to his year of study and self-evaluation in Chicago. They are from a steadily flowing Sonny who only hinted at future experiments with rhythmic figures and time breaking. That he has matured and become even more personal is evident in his more recent recordings but it is equally evident in listening to the selections in this LP, gathered from two 1954 sessions, that Sonny's talent did not go begging before 1955. Four of the selections were recorded on August 18, 1954 and feature trumpeter Kenny Dorham in unison with Sonny. At this writing, the two are re-united in the Max Roach quintet. ..."
Tripod
W - Moving Out (album)
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Moving Out 31:41

2012 September: The Singular Sound of Sonny Rollins, 2012 December: Village Vanguard, 2015 September: Rollins Plays for Bird (1957), 2016 February: Saxophone Colossus (1956), 2016 May: Plus 4 (1956), 2017 June: Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem, 2018 April: Tenor Madness (1956)

An Illustrated History of the Picnic Table

Picnic grove at Cedar Point, an amusement park on Lake Erie, Sandusky, Ohio; postcard dated 1911.
"From campground to crab shack to suburban backyard, the picnic table is so ubiquitous that it is nearly invisible as a designed object. Yet this ingenious form — a structurally bolted frame that unites bench seats and table into a sturdy package — has remained largely unchanged since the 1930s. Having transcended the picnic, it is now the ideal setting for any outdoor event that compels us to face one another squarely across a shared surface. Even a conversation between the former President and Secretary of State is transformed. There is something intensely familiar about this massive table on the White House grounds; though it is off-limits to the public, we can imagine sitting there ourselves. The table seems to humanize its powerful occupants, even as it curiously diminishes them with its over-sized components. These qualities of familiarity and abundance have made the picnic table an American icon. ..."
Places Journal

Arthur Wigram Allen and his brother Boyce picnic in Sutton Forest, Australia, 1900.

Spotlight on … Ted Berrigan: The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan

Alex Katz / Ted Berrigan
"'Mess and Message,' the final three words of a poem in Ted Berrigan’s 1969 book, Many Happy Returns, describe perfectly and succinctly what makes his poetry compelling. The message of his poetry is the mess that is life. Appropriation figures in large and fascinating ways in this message. The very words 'mess and message' are copied, as is the entire poem in which they appear, 'Frank O’Hara’s Question from Writers and Issues by John Ashbery'. Berrigan produced surprisingly numerous kinds of meaning by pilfering all sorts of pre-existing sentences, fragments, and whole passages of writing (literary and prosaic), not to mention visual imagery. Berrigan understood that from time immemorial poets had imitated, if not downright copied, earlier poets in order to establish their literary genealogy. A helpful genealogy of appropriative writing—with the earliest example dating to the late nine- teenth century, and including Ted Berrigan—was recently drawn up by the poet and art critic Raphael Rubenstein, who aptly puts himself into the genealogy, just as Berrigan would have done. ..."
Dennis Cooper Blog (Video)

Leon Golub: Raw Nerve

Gigantomachy II, from 1966. ‘He was an artist, historian and an advocate for social justice – he wanted to suss out oppression and throw it all into his paintings.’
"New York artist Leon Golub wrote an essay about art in 1986. 'Artists manage extraordinary balancing acts,' he wrote, 'not merely of survival or brinkmanship but of analysis and raw nerve.' That last phrase explains his entire career in two words. Now, they are the title of a sprawling exhibition called Leon Golub: Raw Nerve, which opens this week at The Met Breuer. Over 45 artworks from 1940 to 2004 show the darker side of politics. There are paintings of dictators, terrorism, interrogations and beheaded victims from the Vietnam war. The exhibition starts with Golub’s masterpiece Gigantomachy II, a 25ft mural of nude men fighting, from 1966. 'This artwork inspired the show,' said the curator, Kelly Baum. 'It’s a mashup of 10 men in an endless struggle – it’s unclear who is hero, villain or why they’re fighting – but there is violence and destruction.' It sets the theme for the exhibition; violence, destruction and war. It comes from an artist and activist who was a member of the anti-war group, Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam, in New York. 'Golub’s paintings were a response to the brutality he saw in the media,' said Baum. 'As an activist, his paintings represent the violence he was opposed to.' ..."
Guardian: 'He wanted to get a rise out of people' - the violent paintings of Leon Golub
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Critiques of Power and Toxic Masculinity — Kelly Baum on Leon Golub: Raw Nerve
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New Yorker

Vietnamese Head, 1970

The Specials: 10 of the best

Jerry Dammers with Specials fans in Paris, 1980.
"1 Gangsters. The itchy, restless energy of ska – reggae’s uptight, joyful ancestor – was a perfect complement to the dynamism of punk, as the Automatics discovered in 1977, when they began plying the mixture at pubs and clubs in their hometown of Coventry. But while the group soon cut a demo tape with an eye to getting a record deal, or at least some airtime on the John Peel Show (neither of which happened), it took the intervention of Clash manager Bernie Rhodes to bring Coventry’s finest to the wider world. By the time they appeared as support on the Clash’s On Parole tour in the summer of 1978 – an arrangement aided by singer Neville Staple’s supply of weed to Clash guitarist Mick Jones – the Automatics had renamed themselves the Coventry Automatics and then, finally, the Special AKA, and while their skanks drew more phlegm than applause from the Clash’s pogoing fanbase, they impressed Rhodes enough that he signed them as clients. As part of his plan to whip his new charges into road-ready shape, he shipped them off to France, on a character-building trip beset by disasters. ..."
Guardian (Video)
Guardian - Chalkie Davies’s best photograph: the Specials in Paris

2017 August: Too Much Pressure (1979)

Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War On

Edward Burra. The Snack Bar. 1930
"Marking the 100 years since the end of World War One, Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One looks at how artists responded to the physical and psychological scars left on Europe. Art was used in many ways in the tumultuous period after the end of the war, from documenting its destructive impact, to the building of public memorials and as a social critique. This fascinating and moving exhibition shows how artists reacted to memories of war in many ways. George Grosz and Otto Dix exposed the unequal treatment of disabled veterans in post-war society, Hannah Höch and André Masson were instrumental in the birth of new art forms dada and surrealism, Pablo Picasso and Winifred Knights returned to tradition and classicism, whilst others including Fernand Léger and C.R.W Nevinson produced visions of the city of the future as society began to rebuild itself. ..."
Tate
Tate: Edward Burra, The Snack Bar, 1930

Fragile but Fixable: The Collages of Deborah Roberts

"'Fragile but Fixable,' Deborah Roberts’s Los Angeles solo debut, is on view at Luis De Jesus through June 16. In her collages, Roberts takes found images of black women and girls and alters them with pigment and paint, manipulating the optics of advertisement to create new fictions of beauty. 'My art practice,' she writes, in her artist statement, 'takes on social commentary, critiquing perceptions of ideal beauty. Stereotypes and myths are challenged in my work; I create a dialogue between the ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity by addressing beauty in the form of the ideal woman.' ..."
The Paris Review
Deborah Roberts
Artsy

Metro and Tram Network of Marseille, France

"... This is my version of the tramway and metro network of Marseille, France. It is one of my recent maps and I have tried to give it a 80s look but I am not sure I got it right. Overall, it’s not necessarily a map for daily use but more an interpretation of the system. Transit Maps says: For a relatively simple network like Marseille’s (with just two Metro lines and three tram lines), a diagram like this is perfectly workable for daily use, Chris. It’s simple, clear and still retains a good sense of how the lines fit together spatially… perhaps with the exception of the way that the M1 Metro dips inside the T2 tram line between Réformés/Canebière and Cinq Avenues. In the end, the way you’ve shown it allows your labelling to remain consistent and all the stations are still in the right place, so it’s really not that big an issue. ..."
TransitMap
Urban Rail
W - Marseille tramway
YouTube: Tramway de Marseille, France

World Cup 2018 team previews: what you need to know about all 32 teams

"The 2018 World Cup might be missing some big nations, but that's what makes this tournament the best in sports. Brazil are looking to bounce back from a travesty in 2014, while Spain, Argentina and France are hoping to dethrone defending champions Germany and their typically deep squad. Can Belgium or Portugal make a splash? Do England have what it takes to challenge too? ESPN FC is previewing every team ahead of the opening game on June 14 in English, Spanish and Portuguese to give a truly global feel to our team profiles. Here's what you need to know about the 32 teams set to do battle in Russia beginning on June 14. ..."
ESPN

Van Morrison live at The London’s Rainbow Theatre on 24th July 1973

"The Caledonia Soul Orchestra was the band created by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison in 1973. The band is often considered one of the tightest performing backup groups of the 1970s. The band was named after an eighteen minute instrumental outtake on the His Band and the Street Choir album. In 1973 Van Morrison and the Caledonia Soul Orchestra went on a three-month tour of the United States, and Europe with the result of which was the seminal live double album It’s Too Late to Stop Now. The title is taken from the last line in the lyrics in one of Morrison’s songs: 'Into the Mystic' from the 1970 Moondance album. In live performances with The Caledonia Soul Orchestra, he would close the concert with a dynamic, stretched out version of the Astral Weeks song, 'Cyprus Avenue' and then shout out 'IT’S TOO LATE TO STOP NOW!' as he quickly exited stage. ..."
Born To Listen (Video)
Dailymotion: Cyprus Avenue + Wild night

Bookstalls - Joseph Cornell (1930s)

"Bookstalls shows a young boy at the Paris bookstalls, dreaming of travel: dramatic sea voyages, tourists milling about, buying post cards. But we also see the day-to-day life of the Isle of Marken in this found footage; people forking hay and hanging the wash. There's a sharp cut, then, to an Asian country, and for a few moments before the return to Paris, there's the reality, again, of the dream of travel: a rice paddy being harvested, fields being cleared, no labor-saving devices. The bookstalls re-appear, and the boy is done with the fantasy. Within a few a dissolves, the boy seems to have grown into a young man. Cornell's travels through secondhand bookstores were vital to his art, but the film doesn't feel like Cornell's dream life; it feels more like a tentative exercise. Bookstalls is interesting in that its footage looks old and is thus clothed with a feeling of nostalgia. It is also interesting as an exercise in putting pieces of film together. A boy leafs through volumes at a Paris bookstall and he imagines faraway places. The whole film has a homely quality which is endearing. ..."
UbuWeb (Video)

2007 November: Joseph Cornell, 2011 April: Rose Hobart (1936), 2012 December: Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels, 2015 May: Joseph Cornell: Navigating The Imagination, 2016 January: Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box (1991).      2009 April:Stan Brakhage, 2011 December: Burial Path/The Process/The Machine of Eden, 2012 August: The Dante Quartet (1987) - Stan Brakhage, 2016 July: Gnir Rednow (1960) - Joseph Cornell / Stan Brakhage

Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists

A rally last September in Berlin for Martin Schulz, the Social Democrats’ candidate for German chancellor.
"The warning signs are flashing red: Democracy is under threat. Across Europe and North America, candidates are more authoritarian, party systems are more volatile, and citizens are more hostile to the norms and institutions of liberal democracy. These trends have prompted a major debate between those who view political discontent as economic, cultural or generational in origin. But all of these explanations share one basic assumption: The threat is coming from the political extremes. On the right, ethno-nationalists and libertarians are accused of supporting fascist politics; on the left, campus radicals and the so-called antifa movement are accused of betraying liberal principles. Across the board, the assumption is that radical views go hand in hand with support for authoritarianism, while moderation suggests a more committed approach to the democratic process. Is it true? Maybe not. My research suggests that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism. ..."
NY Times

Listen to the Stars

"This seven-minute performance video by State Azure focuses tight on a few modules in a larger synthesizer rig. There is no mess of spaghetti wires. There is a limited set of blinking lights. There is a single hand adjusting knobs on a single device. The accompanying liner note references some on-screen technical details, some off-screen support equipment, and some minor post-production activity. Otherwise, 'Starfall,' as the track is called, is just this: a blissfully thin expanse of near-static time, a live ambient performance in which a seeming hush is nudged into the foreground and left to sway slowly this way and that, to pause for a moment, to let little details linger. It’s the music of a planetarium after hours. The lights are simply from the music equipment, not the stars, and those are more than enough. This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted to State Azure’s YouTube channel. More at stateazure.bandcamp.com and soundcloud.com/state-azure. State Azure is based in the U.K."
disquieet (Video)

Boss Tenor - Gene Ammons (1960)

'Tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons' tone can be best described using the qualities of an ideally brewed cup of joe: rounded, bold, smooth, and exhilarating after first taste. Widely regarded as an original founder of the "Chicago school of tenor sax,' Ammons' nonchalant, yet indelible sound—echoing the soft, breathy tone of Lester Young—drove him to a great deal of fame within the post- World War II jazz crowds of the '50s. Ammons, famously nicknamed 'Jug,' had an inherent ability to cultivate new emotion within any obsolete standard, stemming from his signature timbre that was steeped in the blues, gospel, and R&B. Renowned for his versatility, Ammons was well-versed in the bebop tradition, yet greatly influenced the marketable 'soul jazz' movement of the '60s. ..."
All About Jazz
W - Boss Tenor
Discogs
amazon
NPR - Gene Ammons: Boss Tenor Sax
YouTube: Boss Tenor 8 videos

Counter Intelligence: NYC

"From the East River to the Pacific Coast, the map of America is dotted by record stores – some famous, some wildly obscure. On Counter Intelligence, RBMA Radio gets the stories of these storefronts straight from the personalities who run them, soundtracked by their signature records. This week, our episodes focus on shops based in New York City. In advance of their premiere on RBMA Radio, we sent Maxwell Schiano to document each one. ... Other Music – a fiercely independent record shop smack in the middle of one of downtown Manhattan’s most gentrified neighborhoods – has occasionally felt like the sole survivor of a bygone era of the New York music world. When a tiny brick-and-mortar sits right across the street from Tower Records and manages to outlast it by at least ten years, it can feel practically eternal. And few shops are as reliably bustling as this East 4th Street storefront. The specter of rising rents and the music industry’s shift away from physical releasing are finally catching up with Other Music, and at the end of June, the shop will end its two-decade run. Beloved for its deep commitment to a wide range of underground styles, Other Music has helped break bands like Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend, and putting obscurities from Japan, Brazil, France and beyond into wider circulation. Listen in on Friday, as we hear their story."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily

Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (1958-60)

"Perhaps more than any other postwar avant-garde American artist, Robert Rauschenberg matched, and maybe exceeded, Marcel Duchamp’s puckish irreverence. He once bought a Willem de Kooning drawing just to erase it and once sent a telegram declaring that it was a portrait of gallerist Iris Clert, 'if I say so.' Rauschenberg also excelled at turning trash into treasure, repurposing the detritus of modern life in works of art both playful and serious, continuing to 'address major themes of worldwide concern,' wrote art historian John Richardson in a 1997 Vanity Fair profile, 'by utilizing technology in ever more imaginative and inventive ways…. Rauschenberg is a painter of history—the history of now rather than then.' What, then, possessed this artist of the 'history of now' to take on a series of drawings between 1958 and 1960 illustrating each Canto of Dante’s Inferno? 'Perhaps he sensed a kindred spirit in Dante,' writes Gregory Gilbert at The Art Newspaper, 'that encouraged his vernacular interpretations of the classical text and his radical mixing of high and low cultures.' ..."
Open Culture

2018 Giro d'Italia

Wikipedia - "The 2018 Giro d'Italia is the 101st edition of the Giro d'Italia, one of cycling's Grand Tour races. The Giro started in Jerusalem on 4 May with a 9.7 km (6 mi) individual time trial, followed by two additional stages in Israel. After a rest day, there will be 18 further stages in Italy to reach the finish in Rome on 27 May. The 2018 Giro d'Italia Israel start also paid tribute to Italian cyclist, Gino Bartali, a three-time winner of the Giro d’Italia. Bartali helped rescue hundreds of Italian Jews during the Holocaust and was recognized by Yad Vashem in 2013 as Righteous Among the Nations. ... The 21-day race began with a 10-kilometer time trial in Jerusalem, a 167-kilometer race from Haifa to Tel Aviv and a 229-kilometer race from Beersheba to Eilat. They were the first stages of any Grand Tour event ever that have been held outside Europe. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Giro d'Italia
Discover the route of the Giro d'Italia 2018! Select a stage and see the details
Guardian: Giro d'Italia
Cycling News (Video)

2008 July: Tour de France 2008, 2009 July: Tour de France 2009, 2010 July: Tour de France 2010,  2011 July: Tour de France 2011, 2012 July: 2012 Tour de France, 2015 July: 2015 Tour de France, 2015 July: Tour de France 2015: Team Time Trial Win Bolsters American’s Shot at Podium, 2015 July: Tour de France: Chris Froome completes historic British win, 2016 July: 2016 Tour de France, 2017 July: 2017 Tour de France

A Most Violent Year

"It was neither the best nor the worst of times. But in contrast to the relative placidity of the 1950s, the events of 1968 opened up previously unimaginable vistas to people all across the globe. 'We knew about the Paris commune,' the surrealist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel tells Mitchell Abidor in May Made Me, a new collection of oral histories of that year. 'This was going to happen again' in May 1968, he had felt. 'So you could have the near orgasmic joy of taking part in something much greater than yourself.' The protests began with calls for an end to same-sex dormitories at French universities and quickly developed into a general strike involving some 10 million workers from every segment of French society. By the end of that year, students and, to a lesser degree, workers in nearly every part of the world would rise up. The spirit of 1968 was not merely political. Simultaneously individualist and collectivist, as well as both sober and psychedelic, it was cultural, economic, sexual, hedonistic, spiritual, and transcendental. In a few of its more crucial aspects, it was a wild success. Two 68ers—Jack Straw in Britain and Joschka Fischer in Germany—became foreign secretaries of their countries. The women’s movement, galvanized in large part by the unrelenting male chauvinism of 1968’s leaders, intervened in history, as did movements for racial and ethnic equality. Protests against the war in Vietnam played a role, however indirectly, in ending it. Soviet-style communism did, eventually, topple. Universities were transformed, as was, for a brief moment in time, the Catholic Church. Conscription ended. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix changed music. ..."
New Republic

In August 1968, Warsaw Pact tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, putting an end to Alexander Dubček's reforms.

The Greatest Refreshment By Janet Flanner

Janet Flanner and Ernest Hemingway at Deux Magots Café in Paris, 1945.
"It is now more than a half century since Paris for the first time began to be included in the memories of a small contingent of youngish American expatriates, richer than most in creative ambition and rather modest in purse. For the most part, we had recently shipped, third class, to France across the Atlantic. We had settled in the small hotels on the Left Bank near the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, itself perfectly equipped with a large corner café called Les Deux Magots and an impressive twelfth-century Romanesque church with a small garden of old trees, from whose branches the metropolitan blackbirds sang at dawn, audible to me in my bed close by in the Rue Bonaparte. Though unacquainted with one another, as compatriots we soon discovered our chance similarity. We were a literary lot. Each of us aspired to become a famous writer as soon as possible. After the New York publication of Ernest Hemingway’s 'The Sun Also Rises,' he was the first one to touch fame. As I look back on the stir created by his individual style of writing, what stands out in my memory is the fact that his heroes, like Ernest himself, were of outsize masculinity even in small matters. In a letter he wrote to me, he said that he liked to hunt because he liked to kill. ..."
New Yorker

The Hot New Millennial Housing Trend Is a Repeat of the Middle Ages

A contemporary illustration of a 14th-century dormitory
"For most of human history, people were hunter-gatherers. They lived in large camps, depending on one another for food, childcare, and everything else—all without walls, doors, or picket fences. In comparison, the number of people living in most households in today’s developed countries is quite small. According to the Census Bureau, fewer than three people lived in the average American household in 2010. The members of most American households can be counted on one hand, or even, increasingly, one finger: Single-person households only made up about 13 percent of all American households in 1960. Now, that figure is about 28 percent. ..."
The Atlantic
W - Hunter-gatherer

Why Do Some Parts of New York Have So Many Subways While Others Have None?

"The New York City Subway is the lifeblood of the city, yet it seems perpetually embroiled in crisis; though it’s currently caught in a terrible backlog of deferred maintenance, the city can’t function without it, as the mounting panic over next year’s L train shutdown makes clear. Yet as a circulatory system, it leaves certain limbs significantly undernourished. Why was there only one line for the whole East Side of Manhattan until the Second Avenue line finally opened last year? Why does the G train wind so lonely and awkwardly from Brooklyn to Queens? Why are the Downtown Brooklyn lines such a chaotic thicket of difficult transfers, while other densely populated parts of the borough, like East Flatbush, are devoid of service? The answers are embedded in the subway’s historic origins. While you may know that the subway opened in 1904, that’s not the whole picture. .... Some of those elevated lines — including parts of the M and J/Z in Brooklyn and Queens — are still in use today. And those vanished lines are crucial for understanding why today’s subway system goes where it goes — and why its gaps are where they are. ..."
Voice

Nancy Baker, described in the original Daily News caption as a ‘pretty Manhattanite’ who ‘appears perplexed while studying subway map of new routes,’ peruses the latest iteration of the MTA map after the opening of the Christie Street Connection in 1967.

Farsi Funk, Bosphorus Beats

"A few months ago on a lazy Sunday afternoon, as I was strolling down the quirky fashion drag that is Toronto’s Queen Street, I spotted something in the corner of my eye that seemed just ever so slightly out of context. Stopping for a moment, I looked into the display window of a trendy vinyl store, and eyed there amongst the colourful sleeves of obscure folk and rock albums the word Zendooni (Persian for ‘Prisoner’) in garish yellow lettering above a conspicuously Iranian-looking woman in a field of sunflowers; Funk, psychedelia and pop from the Iranian pre-revolution generation read the description. Lacking a record player, I immediately looked up the album on the Internet upon arriving at home (after enjoying a dose of coffee and pre-Revolution Iranian pop art at nearby R², of course), and discovered that it was yet another pressing by the American record label Light in the Attic, which had previously released albums in a similar vein such as Khana Khana!, as well as a formidable compilation of hits by the Iranian rocker Kourosh Yaghmaei and a previously unreleased selection of songs by the hitherto unknown Tehran-based garage band The Jokers. ..."
Reorient (Video)
Soundcloud: Turkish 70s Groovy Funk, Psychedelic Rock on Vinyl, Turkish 70's Groovy Funk, Psychedelic Rock on Vinyl (Part II)
YouTube: Turkish 70s Groovy Funk, Psychedelic Rock on Vinyl, Turkish 70's Groovy Funk, Psychedelic Rock on Vinyl (Part II)

2017 August: March selection - Ceints de Bakélite, 2018 February: Before And After Bandits: Marc Hollander Of Aksak Maboul & Crammed Discs

Aude White

NY Times: A Love Letter to Italo Calvino, and to New York City
"Aude White is a full-time publicist and some-time artist and writer living in Brooklyn. More of her work is available here. ..."
Aude White - About
Aude White
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The Clothes You Inherit From Your Exes
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