Socialism, but in Iowa

Many members of the Central Iowa DSA think that the state’s caucus system is undemocratic, but they are preparing to confront the 2020 candidates at events around the state.
"DES MOINES — Caroline Schoonover has two immediate goals. One of them is to systematically dismantle capitalism. The other is to finish watching all seven seasons of Vanderpump Rules. ... Schoonover, who grew up near Martensdale, Iowa, just south of the state capital, is one of the thousands of Millennials across the country who joined the Democratic Socialists of America after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. I met her one evening in mid-March during a visit to Iowa, my home state, right before she led a monthly chapter meeting. ... Iowa is a state that most Americans associate with straw polls and horse-race politics, and whose residents are generally thrilled to soak up the national-media spotlight every four years ahead of the caucuses. It isn’t, in other words, where most people would expect to find participants of a budding movement to overthrow the country’s political and economic system. One popular perception of socialism in America is that it’s a sort of pastime for affluent and cerebral hipsters. ..."
The Atlantic
Jacobin: A Socialist Wave in Chicago
W - Green Corn Rebellion
The Atlantic: The Myth of Beto O’Rourke
Pinkos Have More Fun
The Atlantic: Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism (Aug. 2018)

Socialist Chicago city council candidate Rossana Rodriguez hugs campaign volunteer Ken Barrios. Rodriguez's race is too close to call, but she ended the night sixty-four votes ahead of incumbent Deb Mell. Socialist city council member Carlos Rosa (cheering, left), who won his race by twenty points in February, looks on.

The Handwritten Heritage of South Africa’s Kitabs

Da Costa's heirloom kitab, handwritten by her father, is one of a few remaining today.
"In an orange house along one of the sloped lanes of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’s Muslim neighborhood, 92-year-old Abdiyah Da Costa deftly climbs the stairs to the second floor to what essentially has become a personal museum. Meticulously dressed and made up—she used to own what she describes as four 'high-fashion' clothing shops—she’s been waiting to show us around. Outside her window is a view of Cape Town’s iconic, flat-topped Table Mountain, which overlooks the city and the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, her walls are covered with black-and-white photos of her husband, parents, siblings and other relatives long gone. Her beaded wedding dress is on display, as are souvenirs from her pilgrimage to Makkah as well as awards and certificates received over the years. But we didn’t come to see these things. We came to see her kitabs. ..."
AramcoWorld

Ebraheim holds one of many kitabs he has collected from self-taught families over the years, which he donates to the Simon's Town Heritage Museum.

The man in a concrete wall in the tenement city

Office in a Small City, 1953
"Edward Hopper spent four decades chronicling the isolation of modern urban life: people unconnected to each other in a cafe, a lone person on an elevated train, and building facades almost empty of humanity. Yet perhaps none of his paintings are as haunting as Office in a Small City, from 1953. Here, Hopper gives us a symbolic everyman with his shirtsleeves rolled up—sitting at a desk inside an office with windows so large it almost resembles a zoo exhibit. He’s gazing past the tenement tops across the street, ostensibly imagining a bigger life for himself, one not confined by the low-rise cityscape he’s part of right now. ..."
Ephemeral New York

2008 July: Edward Hopper, 2010 October: Finding Nighthawks, 2010 December: Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, 2012 Wednesday: Through Edward Hopper's eyes: in search of an artist's seaside inspiration, 2013 July: Hopper Drawing, 2014 May: INTERVIEW: “An Interview with Edward Hopper, June 17, 1959″., 2014 September: How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks, 2015 February: Edward Hopper's New York: A Walking Tour, 2015 September: Edward Hopper life and works, 2016 May: "Night Windows," 1928, 2016 July: Sunday (1926), 2016 September: Drug Store (1927), 2018 January: Seven A.M. (1948), 2018 February: Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun

Dark Ambient 101: Understanding the Technicalities

Pär Boström with analog devices.
"Dark ambient is a genre that is still quite a mystery, even to many dedicated fans, though it’s been around for several decades. An important factor in the dark ambient scene is the minuscule number of followers, in comparison to many other genres, scattered over the entirety of the globe. From Argentina to Siberia, dark ambient listeners seek something unique, something that is wholly outside the lines of modern trends. During my own personal discovery of the genre, I waded through numerous interviews and live performances, trying to discern exactly what the hell is going on, how these musicians were creating such beautifully blackened ambient soundscapes. Years later, I understand a whole lot more than I did in the beginning. But it is still a daunting task, attempting to understand the machinations and sorcery of these musicians. Dark Ambient 101 was born of this search for understanding. ..."
This Is Darkness (Video/Audio)

Pär Boström’s creation: The Shipwreck Device

Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture

"Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture is the first major exhibition in the United States to focus on the portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80). A painter of portraits and religious subjects, Moroni is celebrated as an essential figure in the northern Italian tradition of naturalistic painting that includes Leonardo da Vinci, the Carracci, and Caravaggio. This exhibition, shown exclusively at The Frick Collection, brings to light the innovation of the artist, whose role in a larger history of European portraiture has yet to be fully explored. His famous Tailor (National Gallery, London), for example, anticipates by decades the 'narrative' portraits of Rembrandt, and his Pace Rivola Spini (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo), arguably the first independent full-length portrait of a standing woman produced in Italy, prefigures the many women that Van Dyck would paint in this format in the following century. The Frick presents about twenty of the artist’s most arresting portraits together with a selection of complementary objects — jewelry, textiles, armor, and other luxury items — that evoke the material world of the artist and his sitters and reveal his inventiveness in translating it into paint. ..."
The Frick Collection
The Frick Collection: All Objects
The Frick Collection: Lecture Video (Video) 48:43
YouTube: Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture

Africando in Colombia

"This month’s INTL BLK episode takes a deep dive into the African-influenced music scene of the Colombian Caribbean coast, co-presented by Palmwine.it in celebration of their Guarapo album. Before that we run through some of the latest tunes from the contemporary Afropop landscape with stops in Nigeria and Kenya, as well as take a stop in Brazil to celebrate Carnival. Last but not least, RIP Hugh Masekela."
Africa is a Country (Audio)
mixcloud (Audio)

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War

"In 2019, Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents a vital new four-hour documentary series on Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The series explores the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself in the face of profound loss, massive destruction, and revolutionary social change. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy, with millions of former slaves and free black people seeking out their rightful place as equal citizens under the law. Though tragically short-lived, this bold democratic experiment was, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, a ‘brief moment in the sun’ for African Americans, when they could advance, and achieve, education, exercise their right to vote, and run for and win public office. The first two hours of the series centers on this pivotal decade following the rebellion, charting black progress and highlighting the accomplishments of the many political leaders who emerged to usher their communities into this new era of freedom. ..."
PBS: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War - About
PBS: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (Video)
PBS: Reconstruction| Extended Trailer (Video)

Evergreen Review, Volume 1, Number 3, 1957

"At a campus library book sale this week I bought for $1.00 a copy of Volume 1, Number 3, of the Evergreen Review. The price new was $1.00 in 1957. It’s a 5 and ¼ by 8 inch paperback, 160 pages. It’s in good condition. There are four black and white photographs, in the middle of the issue, of Jackson Pollock and his studio. Pollock had died in a car wreck the previous year, 1956, on August 11. The opening essay is by Albert Camus, 'Reflections on the Guillotine,' an argument against capital punishment (ironic, considering recent events in our own time). ... The issue contains poems by William Carlos Williams and Gregory Corso, including Corso’s delightful 'This Was My Meal,' and also a prose piece by Beckett, whom Evergreen Review and Grove Press editor Barney Rosset introduced to the US. ..."
The Coming of the Toads
[PDF] Evergreen Review - Issue 3 (1957)

2017 January: Evergreen Review

The Criminal Investigations That Sprouted From Mueller

"The special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is over, but federal prosecutors are pursuing a slew of criminal inquiries that grew out of the investigation. Several investigations stemmed from the inquiry into Michael D. Cohen, Donald J. Trump’s former personal lawyer. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, turned the Cohen investigation over to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York early last year. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to arranging two hush money payments to women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. Prosecutors have examined the involvement of Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization in arranging and concealing the payments. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Mueller Has Delivered His Report. Here’s What We Already Know.
NY Times: Some on Mueller’s Team Say Report Was More Damaging Than Barr Revealed (Audio/Video)

Feminize Your Canon: Violet Trefusis

Young Violet Trefusis
"'O darling, aren’t you glad you aren’t me?' wrote Violet Trefusis to her pined-for lover, Vita Sackville-West, in the summer of 1921. 'It really is something to be thankful for.' On the face of it, Trefusis—née Keppel—didn’t deserve anyone’s pity. At twenty-seven, she was brilliant, beautiful, and privileged beyond compare. Both her grandfathers had titles: an earl on one side and a baronet on the other. She had grown up in various grand homes with frequent foreign trips, spoke French and Italian fluently, and planned to be a novelist. Influenced by Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti, she was an aesthete whose god was Beauty. 'If ever I could make others feel the universe of blinding beauty that I almost see at times,' she wrote, 'I should not have lived in vain.' The only black mark on Trefusis’s illustrious background was the question mark over her father’s identity. As was then customary among the upper classes, her parents had an open relationship. All through Trefusis’s childhood her mother, Alice Keppel, was the mistress of Edward VII, whom the young Violet knew as Kingy. ..."
The Paris Review
The Paris Review - Category Archives: Feminize Your Canon

Vita Sackville-West (left), Violet Trefusis (center), and Virginia Woolf (right)

Mingus - Joni Mitchell (1979)

"In the months prior to the passing of legendary jazz bassist Charles Mingus, Joni Mitchell had been personally summoned by the bop pioneer to collaborate on a musical version of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The project would entail Mitchell to condense the text for Mingus to score instrumentally. He planned on utilizing a full orchestra, as well as the more traditional guitar and bass. They would accompany Mitchell's vocals and the narration of selected portions of the text. ... Sprinkled amongst these soulfully jazzy pieces are five 'raps,' or aural snapshots of the time Mitchell and Mingus spent together. Sadly, Charles Mingus passed before he was able to listen to this timeless and ageless paean to his remarkable contributions to bop and free jazz."
allmusic
Mingus & Joni Mitchell: The Black Saint & the Singer Lady
W - Mingus
Discogs
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (Live)
YouTube: Mingus (Studio album, 1979) 8 videos

2015 July: Blue (1970), 2015 Novemer: 40 Years On: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Revisited, 2016 August: On For the Roses (1972), 2016 November: Court and Spark (1974), 2017 February: Hejira (1976), 2017 August: Miles of Aisles (1974), 2017 October: Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius, 2018 March: Joni Mitchell: We look back over her extraordinary 50 year career, 2018 November: Free Man In Paris (1974)

How Chris Beard Built Texas Tech Into College Basketball’s Most Unlikely Juggernaut

"... In just a few years, [Chris] Beard has taken a largely irrelevant Texas Tech program and turned it into a powerhouse. The Red Raiders registered losing records in five of the six seasons before he was hired in 2016. It had been more than a decade since the program had a player picked in the NBA draft, and almost 20 years since the school produced its only first-round pick, Tony Battie. In Beard’s second year on the job, he lifted Texas Tech to its first Elite Eight and saw freshman Zhaire Smith selected 16th overall. Now Tech has made its first Final Four, and star Jarrett Culver is projected as a lottery pick. The Red Raiders have gotten here by embracing an aggressive and unique defensive scheme that baffles every opposing team. Texas Tech has the best defense in college basketball this season, but leaving it at that undersells the team’s accomplishment. ..."
The Ringer (Video)
The Ringer: What to Expect From Michigan State, Texas Tech, Virginia, and Auburn in the Final Four (Audio)
SI: Final Four Runs by Texas Tech and Virginia Symbolize What March Madness Is All About (Video)
SI: Jarrett Culver, Chris Beard and Texas Tech Press Into Uncharted Territory With Final Four Berth
SI: Tom Izzo Is Still Chasing Duke, and the Same Hurdles Loom for Michigan State (Video)
ESPN: First look at the 2019 Final Four (Video)

2019 March: A Handy Guide for Filling Out Your March Madness Bracket, 2019 March: How College Basketball’s Cinderella Became a Blue Blood

How the South Won the Civil War

Black political power during Reconstruction was short-lived—eclipsed, in significant part, by a campaign of terror.
"Not so long ago, the Civil War was taken to be this country’s central moral drama. Now we think that the aftermath—the confrontation not of blue and gray but of white and black, and the reimposition of apartheid through terror—is what has left the deepest mark on American history. Instead of arguing about whether the war could have turned out any other way, we argue about whether the postwar could have turned out any other way. Was there ever a fighting chance for full black citizenship, equality before the law, agrarian reform? Or did the combination of hostility and indifference among white Americans make the disaster inevitable? ..."
New Yorker
W - American Civil War alternate histories
amazon: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Networking the New American Poetry

"A partnership between the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University, Networking the New American Poetry uses over 10,000 data points to question key narratives about American literary culture in the second half of the twentieth century. The project began as an attempt to test a taxonomy of postwar poetic schools that appeared in Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. Curious about exactly how the anthology has shaped the way we think about American poetry, we looked to the Danowski Poetry Library’s wide-ranging archive of postwar magazines, periodicals, newsletters, and literary journals—materials we thought could shed new light on how Allen’s schools fit into the actual shape of the publishing community. ... To visualize the networks, we undertook thorough data collection, recording bibliographic and other information from twelve journals of midcentury American poetry—Beatitude, The Black Mountain Review, Origin, Measure, The Floating Bear, Intrepid, Yugen, 'C': A Journal of Poetry, Big Table, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, J: A Magazine of Poetry, and Evergreen Review. Through our investigation we are making the data from several of these journals available digitally for the first time. The resulting resource documents over 750 different authors, editors, and translators, and includes over 10,000 pieces of data. ..."
Learn About the Project
Browse the Journals
Journal Contributors
View the Connections

2010 September: The New American Poetry 1945-1960

My Conception - Sonny Clark (1959)

"Sonny Clark's conception of modern jazz is not far removed from his peer group of the late '50s, in that advanced melodic and harmonic ideas override the basic precepts of swing and simplicity. What sets Clark apart from other jazz pianists lies in his conception of democracy to allow his bandmates to steam straight ahead on compositions he has written with them in mind. Though the bulk of this session features the marvelous trumpet/tenor tandem of Donald Byrd and Hank Mobley, it is drummer Art Blakey whose demonstrative presence is heard in full force. ... Kudos to the great bassist Paul Chambers who plays on all of these cuts with Clark, and is unquestionably in his prime. Except the extraordinary Leapin' and Lopin, this album of contrasts, depth, and spirit showcases Clark's dual concepts brilliantly, and is only a half step below his best."
allmusic
The 1959 Project (Video)
W - My Conception
The Van Gelder Studio: Peek inside the room where classic jazz happened (Audio)
Discogs
YouTube: My Conception 9 videos


2014 September: Cool Struttin' (1958)

The Beginning Of The End: The Existential Psychodrama In Country Music (1956-1972)

"30 timeless tales of existential angst wrought from backwoods ballads and anguished urbane odes. Plaintive fiddles, furtive banjos and lonesome voices soundtrack a bleak vista of endless, eternal questions and unquenchable wanderlusts. Apocalyptic laments, harrowing self-examinations, faltering ids, devastated inebriates and tortured misfits. Many originally waxed on private press labels and distributed in tiny amounts, these troubled but marginalised troubadours sing of collapsing egos and stygian landscapes of molten self-doubt. Years in the making – ‘The Beginning Of The End’ presents existential howls and Freudian diatribes from broken preachers and disrupted transgressives. All for your bewildered listening pleasure. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
2018 In Music: Short Reviews
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: The Beginning Of The End: The Existential Psychodrama In Country Music 20:38
YouTube: The Beginning Of The End: The Existential Psychodrama In Country Music 7 videos

Jonny Go Figure

As a reggae guy it’s very important to have 7s because, especially when you play big tunes at a reggae dance, 9 out of 10 times someone is going to ask you to play it back, to pull it up.
"'I’m sorry I didn’t pretty this up for you guys,' Jonny Go Figure says, walking into the center of his Flatbush, Brooklyn living room which is littered with records. 'I know it looks like a clusterfuck in here, but this is just how it is. And I know where everything is.' Jonny closes his eyes and thinks of a record he hasn’t played in a while before digging into a stack and pulling out reggae breakbeat LP by Paul Nice and DJ Wisdom called Beef Patty Breaks. He explains the history of the album cover, which features an iconic image of model Sintra Arunte-Bronte in a wet, red Jamaica t-shirt. Jonny can pick random hidden records from his collection and throw facts at you all day, but never in a condescending way. He began DJing at age 4 after his father, who was also a DJ, gave him vinyl to play with. He easily rattles off history, producers and connections behind the music in the same way others might talk about their favorite sci-fi worlds. Now in his 30s, Jonny Go Figure’s deep appreciation for the underground, producers, one hit wonders, underdogs and canonical knowledge of reggae has put him in deep with New York’s varied reggae community. ..."
DUST & GROOVES (Audio)

The Mighty Diamonds – Africa. I got to DJ for The Mighty Diamonds a few weeks back, which was cool because they’re one of my favorite groups. Harmonies, harmonies, harmonies.

Bagels Weren't Always Soft

"Today it’s a breakfast staple, but as recently as 1960, The New York Times had to define it for readers—as 'an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.' That’s right, this episode is all about the bagel, that shiny, ring-shaped, surprisingly dense bread that makes the perfect platform for cream cheese and lox. Where did it come from? Can you get a decent bagel outside New York City? And what does it have in common with the folding ping-pong table? Come get your hot, fresh bagel science and history here! Though the bagel is most closely associated with the American Jewish community, its actual origins in eastern Europe have become the stuff of myth. Competing tales offer explanations as to how, as early as the 1600s, Jews in Poland came to relish the bagel at childbirths, celebrations, and funerals. ..."
The Atlantic (Audio)
The Atlantic: The Secret History of Bagels

2014 November: Bagel, 2016 February: Bialy, 2016 August: Montreal-style bagel, 2017 May: A family affair: St-Viateur Bagel celebrates 60 years

James Baldwin Might Have Been Most at Home in Istanbul

"You spend your whole life being told some place is home, only to get there and realize you don’t really belong. For me, it happened the summer after I turned eight. My mom and I boarded a plane from Canada to England, our first time in Europe. We stayed overnight at a hotel near London’s Hyde Park: its lobby floors a polished wood, the terrifying taxidermy head of a wild cat affixed to the wall. I’d never been in a hotel like this. My parents—immigrants, frugal—generally favored off-the-highway establishments, with buzzy neon signs, and wood-paneled rooms that open directly onto a parking lot. I remember how different the taxidermy hotel was, how there were fresh flowers near the elevators, how Mom and I ordered room service for dinner. A splurge. My hamburger arrived hidden under a metal warming dome, and I remember thinking: this burger costs five times as much as a Big Mac, but does it taste five times as good? ..."
LitHub

2017 May: I Am Not Your Negro - Raoul Peck (2019)

Clemente to Marden to Kiefer: It’s the All-Eighties Art-Stars

"Art lovers in New York and baseball fans everywhere get weird in October. For the former, it is the season of undulled appetite, when an unleashed flood of new objects and images temporarily scintillates with interest and promise. For the latter, it is the ferociously accelerating climax to long languorous months of foreplay. What, then, of those of us for whom both art and baseball are chronic passions? Pity us! Each addiction being, in its own way, total, we are besides ourselves. A tendency is noted around dinner tables to discuss the aesthetics of baseball at very great length, as the sane and the innocent tiptoe from the room. Another tendency suggests itself as a heretofore neglected possibility: view the world of October art through the lambent October mists of baseball. A method for such madness happens to be ready-made in a brilliant little book of several years back by poet Charles North, Lineups (reprinted in his Leap Year, Kulchur Foundation, 1978). ..."
Voice
amazon: Complete Lineups by Charles North

A Maid in Bedlam - John Renbourn Group (1977)

"A Maid in Bedlam is credited to the John Renbourn Group, not to John Renbourn alone, and that is an important distinction, since this is not another album of Renbourn's acoustic guitar stylings. It really is the work of a group, consisting of Renbourn on guitar and vocals, his Pentangle partner Jacqui McShee on vocals, Tony Roberts on vocals and wind instruments, Sue Draheim on vocals and fiddle, and Keshav Sathe on tabla and finger cymbals. The song list consists of traditional British folk music dating back to the Renaissance, with three instrumentals mixed in with the vocal numbers and one -- the concluding hymn 'Talk About Suffering' -- an a cappella performance. The most familiar number to contemporary listeners is likely to be 'John Barleycorn,' if only because of the Traffic recording, and the Renbourn Group is careful to present a different arrangement with an altered time signature. The arrangements are traditional, with the singers giving the words a madrigal feel. It's true that the tabla is not a traditional British instrument, but as Sathe plays it, it resembles a bodhran enough to get by. Thus, A Maid in Bedlam works as a collection of music that inspired the members of Pentangle in their contemporary folk-rock, played by some members of that band and their associates. ..."
allmusic
W - A Maid in Bedlam
Discogs
YouTube: A Maid In Bedlam 10 videos

2011 September: Faro Annie, 2012 November: John Renbourn - Sir John Alot, 2013 May: The Lady and the Unicorn, 2014 February: Bert &; John (1966), 2014 October: The Hermit (1976), 2015 March: John Renbourn: ceaseless explorer of song – appreciation., 2015 November: The Attic Tapes - John Renbourn (2015), 2016 November: Cruel Sister (1970) - Pentangle, 2016 December: Lost Sessions (1973), 2017 October: The Black Balloon (1979)

Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90

"Agnès Varda, a groundbreaking French filmmaker who was closely associated with the New Wave — although her reimagining of filmmaking conventions actually predated the work of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and others identified with that movement — died on Friday morning at her home in Paris. She was 90. Her death, from breast cancer, was confirmed by a spokeswoman for her production company, Ciné-Tamaris. In recent years, Ms. Varda had focused her directorial skills on nonfiction work that used her life and career as a foundation for philosophical ruminations and visual playfulness. 'The Gleaners and I,' a 2000 documentary in which she used the themes of collecting, harvesting and recycling to reflect on her own work, is considered by some to be her masterpiece. ..."
NY Times
NPR: Director Agnes Varda, A Giant Of French Cinema, Dies At 90 (Video)
The Atlantic: The Indefatigable Spirit of Agnès Varda
W - Agnès Varda
NY Times - Agnès Varda

May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017), 2018 July: Vagabond (1985)

How College Basketball’s Cinderella Became a Blue Blood

"There were few surprises during the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. The Sweet 16 features 14 of the field’s top 16 seeds, including no. 1 seed Gonzaga, which advanced to the second weekend for the fifth consecutive year. The Bulldogs are at home in the company of traditional power programs like Duke, North Carolina, and Kentucky, but that wasn’t the case 20 years ago, when the Jesuit university from Spokane, Washington, first captured the nation’s imagination during a surprise run to the Elite Eight. Since 1999, Gonzaga has become a March Madness mainstay, rising from a mid-major to a bona fide blue blood. During that span, the Bulldogs have reached 10 Sweet 16s, three Elite Eights, and one Final Four and have as many first-team All-Americans as UCLA or Michigan State. ..."
The Ringer
The Ringer: The Entire NCAA Tournament Field Now Has the Blueprint to Stop Duke

2019 March: A Handy Guide for Filling Out Your March Madness Bracket

Tintype Portraits of Old-Time Musicians from Appalachia

“Aviva and Roy.”
"Lisa Elmaleh traded her Brooklyn apartment in 2012 for a wood cabin with no running water — but a 'quite lovely' outhouse — on the outskirts of Paw Paw, West Virginia. Urban anonymity was soon replaced by small-town intimacy as she pursued her project of photographing traditional string musicians in Appalachia using, appropriately enough, traditional photographic processes. She had decided to move there the very day she had done tintypes of Sam Herrmann and her husband, Joe, a couple dedicated to keeping old-time music alive. Paw Paw may not have Brooklyn’s hipster cachet, but it also 'has everything that Brooklyn doesn’t' she added. ..."
NY Times
YouTube: Tintype Portraits of Old-Time Musicians from Appalachia

“Hogslop String Band.”

A Bathroom of One’s Own

Edgar Degas, La Toilette, c. 1884-1886
"The door of my childhood bedroom didn’t have a lock on it, so I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. Every human wants privacy, but no one more so than a teenage girl. Though I ostensibly shared the bathroom with my little brother, I claimed it as my domain. I spent hours reading on the tiled floor, my body bracketed between the sink and the door. In my memory, it’s a slightly steamy, always warm, watery place—but I never spent that much time in the bath. If I wasn’t reading or sulking after a fight with my parents, I was performing those charmless beauty rituals teenage girls are so fond of—shoving my A-cup breasts together in the mirror trying to make cleavage magically appear; waxing my legs with an at-home sugaring kit I’d surreptitiously tipped into the family shopping cart; dyeing the tips of my hair hot pink. ..."
The Paris Review

ISIS Caliphate Crumbles as Last Village in Syria Falls

A discarded Islamic State flag in Baghuz, eastern Syria, on Monday.
"A four-year military operation to flush the Islamic State from its territory in Iraq and Syria ended on Saturday as the last village held by the terrorist group was retaken, erasing a militant theocracy that once spanned two countries. Cornered in Baghuz, Syria, the last 1.5-square-mile remnant of the group’s territory in the region, the remaining militants waged a surprisingly fierce defense and kept the American-backed coalition at bay for months. They detonated car bombs and hurled explosives from drones. Suicide bombers ran across the front line under cover of darkness to attack the sleeping quarters of the coalition. In the last weeks, the militants’ families fled for their lives, their black-clad wives streaming into the desert by the tens of thousands. Some of them defiantly chanted Islamic State slogans and lobbed fistfuls of dirt at reporters. But after a grueling campaign, the last speck of land was finally wrested from the Islamic State. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Opinion - ISIS Is Like a Chronic Disease
NY Times: ISIS Lost Its Last Territory in Syria. But the Attacks Continue.
NY Times: Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)

Coalition forces searching for ISIS fighters in the days before the battle to recapture the last ISIS-held territory.

2018 July: NY Times: Caliphate (Audio), 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, 2016 January: Ramadi, Reclaimed by Iraq, Is in Ruins After ISIS Fight, 2016 February: Syrian Officer Gave a View of War. ISIS Came, and Silence Followed., 2016 March: Brussels Survivors Say Blasts Instantly Evoked Paris Attacks, 2016 April: America Can’t Do Much About ISIS, 2016 June: What the Islamic State Has Won and Lost, 2016 July: ISIS: The Cornened Beast, 2016 October: Archaeological Victims of ISIS Rise Again, as Replicas in Rome, 2016 December: Battle Over Aleppo Is Over, Russia Says, as Evacuation Deal Reached, 2017 January: Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra, 2017 February: Tour a City Torn in Half by ISIS, 2017 March: Engulfed in Battle, Mosul Civilians Run for Their Lives, 2017 May: Aleppo After the Fall, 2017 July: Iraqi forces declare victory over Islamic State in Mosul after grueling battle, 2017 July: The Living and the Dead, 2017 October: ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse, 2018 August: After ISIS, Iraq Is Still Broken, 2018 September: Fight to Retake Last ISIS Territory in Syria Begins, 2018 December: Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge

Hear Electronic Ladyland, a Mixtape Featuring 55 Tracks from 35 Pioneering Women in Electronic Music

"Given that we've previously featured two documentaries on electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, an introduction to four other female composers who pioneered electronic music (Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliveros), and seven hours of electronic music made by women between 1938 and 2014, no loyal Open Culture reader could claim ignorance on the theme of this new mixtape, Electronic Ladyland. It comes from the French musical project Arandel, whose members remain anonymous and could therefore be of any gender, but who, in these 45 minutes (made of 55 different tracks by 35 female composers), display a mastery of the field. ..."
Open Culture (Audio)

2014 February: Women And Their Machines: A Think-piece About Female Pioneerism in Electronic Music, 2016 June: Meet Four Women Who Pioneered Electronic Music: Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliveros

RRRecords

Wikipedia - "RRRecords (pronounced 'Triple R Records', based in Lowell, Massachusetts) is a used and new record shop. RRRecords is distinguished as being the first American record label to specifically publish underground noise music in the early 1980s, and published the first American vinyl by Merzbow, Masonna, The Hanatarash, Violent Onsen Geisha, and many more artists who have subsequently become well known in the world of noise music. In its first 20 years, RRR has issued hundreds of releases. The label's owner, Ron Lessard, is a tireless supporter of new artists, and created several sub-labels and series to specifically highlight unknown and underground musicians. One of the most popular of the RRR sub-labels is the Recycled Music series, which consists of used cassette tapes of pop and rock music that have been taped over with new music by a noise band. ..."
Wikipedia
Ron Lessard Is a Noise Music Hero (Video)
Radio Black Forest (Video)
RRR Records
Discogs

Thomas Hardy's Wessex

Locations in Wessex, from The Wessex of Thomas Hardy by Bertram Windle, 1902, based on correspondence with Hardy.
Wikipedia - "The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his major novels in the south and southwest of England. He named the area 'Wessex' after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In an 1895 preface to the novel Far From the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as 'a merely realistic dream country'. The actual definition of 'Hardy's Wessex' varied widely throughout Hardy's career, and was not definitively settled until after he retired from writing novels. ..."
Wikipedia
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy.
Where is Thomas Hardy's Wessex?
Hardy's Wessex
Independent: Too little has changed since Thomas Hardy wrote about sexual assault

Far From the Madding Crowd - 1895

2014 March: Tess (1979)

Desolation and isolation on the East River in 1909

"Social realist painter George Bellows completed 'Bridge, Blackwell’s Island,' in 1909, which is also the year of the opening of the Queensboro Bridge, as this span over the East River was called at the time. Like the East River waterfront, Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) was to Bellows a place on the margin—where refuse, industry, and those who were edged out by 20th century urban life were relegated. This look at the bridge almost devoid of people seems to say something about the desolation and isolation of the contemporary city. Smokestacks belch, a tugboat speeds through the choppy river, a lone man not much bigger than a speck is tending to something on the dock—and four children shrouded in darkness peer across the water—perhaps contemplating the modern metropolis they’re part of."
Ephemeral New York

The Hum of the City: La Monte Young and the Birth of NYC Drone

"For the last 20 years, passersby on Church Street, just south of the triangle now occupied by the Tribeca Grand Hotel, may have noticed a magenta glow coming from a third-floor loft window. Ring the buzzer, ascend the stairs, and you will find yourself at The Dream House, an electronic sound and light installation. Maintained by composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela, it realizes an idea Young conceived 50 years ago of a building in which single tones would be sustained around the clock. Young – a teenage jazz saxophone prodigy who turned to the avant-garde and became virtually synonymous with drone music – is elusive; he hardly ever gives concerts and his music is rarely performed by anyone other than himself or ensembles of his own making. He has only a handful of officially released recordings to his name, all of which are out of print and command large sums on the collectors’ market (and his own website). ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)
I went to see La Monte Young playing in his New York loft, and you should do the same
[PDF] La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Dream House

Just about the only picture you can legitimately take of the Dream House.

2009 May: La Monte Young, 2010 January: Just intonation, 2014 August: The Well-Tuned Piano - La Monte Young (1987)

Poem on the Page: A Collection of Broadsides

 Richard Brautigan. Five Poems.
"Broadsides proliferated during the small press and mimeograph era as a logical offshoot of poets assuming control of their means of publication. When technology evolved from typewriter, stencil, and mimeo machine to moveable type and sophisticated printing, broadsides provided a site for innovation with design and materials that might not be appropriate for an entire pamphlet or book; thus, they occupy a very specific place within literary and print culture. Poem on the Page: A Collection of Broadsides includes approximately 500 broadsides from a diverse range of poets, printers, designers, and publishers. It is a unique document of a particular aspect of the small press movement as well as a valuable resource for research into the intersection of poetry and printing. See below for a list of some of the poets, writers, printers, typographers, and publishers included in the collection. ..."
Granary Books