If Beale Street Could Talk - Barry Jenkins (2018)

"If Beale Street Could Talk is a 2018 American romantic drama film directed and written by Barry Jenkins, and based on James Baldwin's novel of the same name. It stars KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, Michael Beach, Dave Franco, Diego Luna, Pedro Pascal, Ed Skrein, Brian Tyree Henry and Regina King. The film follows a young woman who, with her family's support, seeks to clear the name of her wrongly charged lover and prove his innocence before the birth of their child. ... While the film is presented in a non-linear structure, this plot summary is written in a linear fashion. Clementine 'Tish' Rivers and Alonzo 'Fonny' Hunt have been friends their whole lives, and begin a romantic relationship when they are older. It is the early 1970s, and they struggle to find a place to live as most New York City landlords refuse to rent apartments to black people. ..."
Wikipedia
W - If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin
The Atlantic: If Beale Street Could Talk and the Urgency of Black Love
The Atlantic: How James Baldwin’s Writings About Love Evolved
What Barry Jenkins Missed in His Adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk
Slate: The Long Silence of Beale Street
YouTube: IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK | Official Trailer

2017 March: Moonlight (2016), 2018 February: 28 Days, 28 Films for Black History Month

Beyond The Streets New York

Style Wars Car by NOC 167 with Door Open, Man Reading Newspaper 96th Street Station, New York, NY 1981 Photo Martha Cooper
"BEYOND THE STREETS, the premier exhibition of graffiti, street art and beyond, announces today that it will head to the art form’s epicenter: New York, on June 21, 2019. The show celebrates society’s most pervasive mark makers and rule breakers with a sprawling showcase of work by more than 150 artists from around the world. Continuing its mission to elevate the artform and defy conventions, BEYOND THE STREETS New York will take over two floors of Twenty Five Kent, a new creative office building located on the waterfront in North Williamsburg. The exhibition will be comprised of more than 100,000 square feet of space and feature programming including performances, lectures and films. ..."
Beyond The Streets New York - Introducing: Beyond The Streets New York
Beyond The Streets
Beyond The Streets New York: Featured artists
Beyond The Streets New York - Beyond Banksy: This Massive LA Exhibition Dramatically Expands the Story of Graffiti
YouTube: Beyond the Streets NYC

Left: Estevan Oriol – L.A. Fingers, 1995 / Right: Martha Cooper – Lil’ Crazy Legs during shoot for Wild Style RIVERSIDE PARK, NY, 1983

Women's World Cup: Record-breaking feats, empty seats -- the story so far

"The group stages have concluded, to the knockout stages we go. After 36 games, 106 goals, 84 yellow cards, and plenty of VAR controversy, 24 teams have been whittled to 16 and the pressure now turns up a notch or two at the Women's World Cup. The big-hitters have come through their opening tests unscathed, though there have been a few headlines along the way, while all four debutants -- Jamaica, Chile, South Africa and Scotland -- have now departed but left their mark nonetheless. From record-breaking matches to empty seats and ferocious debates, a lot has been learned from the group stages of the Women's World Cup. ..."
CNN (Video)
W - 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup
BBC - Women's World Cup: Players to watch in the last 16 (Video)
BBC - Women's World Cup 2019: Who do the stats suggest will win the tournament in France? (Video)
Guardian: Women's World Cup 2019 (Video)

Lindsay Horan, Hina Sugita, Sam Kerr, Lucy Bronze and Amandine Henry.

Become Ocean - John Luther Adams (2013)

"Become Ocean is an American orchestral composition by John Luther Adams. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra commissioned the work and premiered it at Benaroya Hall, Seattle, on 20 and 22 June 2013. The work won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. The work, in a single movement, was inspired by the oceans of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The composer took his title from a phrase of John Cage in honour of Lou Harrison, and further explained his title with this note placed in his score: 'Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.' ..."
Wikipedia
bandcamp (Audio)
amazon
YouTube: Become Ocean

2012 January: John Luther Adams, 2015 June: Leaving Alaska

Routine Pleasures - Jean-Pierre Gorin (1986)

"Jean-Pierre Gorin, its French-born director, describes 'Routine Pleasures' as a film essay about 'America - under-budget and in a shoe box,' which is accurate as far as it goes. The film is also a funny, very personal meditation on the activities of a group of model-railroad buffs in Del Mar, Calif., crosscut with random examples of the wit and wisdom of the seminal film critic Manny Farber, two of whose paintings are also examined in detail.'Routine Pleasures,' opening today at the Film Forum 1, makes a point of never quite coming to a point. It's a movie that ponders possibilities and then moves on to other possibilities. It examines the vaguely interconnecting obsessions of the model railroaders and those of Mr. Farber, whose appreciation for Hollywood B-movies of the 1930's, especially those that deal with blue-collar workers, predates the 'discovery' of those films by the Cahiers du Cinema critics in the 1950's and 1960's. ..."
NY Times: THE OBSESSIONS OF 'ROUTINE PLEASURES'By VINCENT CANBY
Termite Tracks: “Routine Pleasures” and the Paradoxes of Collectivity (2009)
Criterion
YouTube: driver 8 demo (Routine Pleasures edit)

The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 - Bill Evan (2005)

"The music recorded by Bill Evans on June 25, 1961, has long since acquired legendary status. Evans, a brilliant pianist whose unique voicings have influenced over a generation of jazz pianists who have followed him, weaves one masterpiece after another with bassist Scott LaFaro (a promising composer and phenomenal bassist) and the equally valuable drummer Paul Motian. The interplay between them is phenomenal throughout each of their five sets from the final day of a summer gig at the Village Vanguard. This beautifully remastered three-CD collection restores the previously omitted take of 'Gloria's Step' (marred only by a brief power outage) and the humorous finale by Evans at the end of the night (first issued in the massive Complete Riverside Recordings box set). The songs are in their original recorded sequence, adding a bit of ambience and audience reaction between numbers. Sadly, it was the trio's final recording, as LaFaro died in a car crash ten days later. The selections from this three-CD box set have been reissued numerous times over the years, but this is the first time that all of them have been collected in one U.S. release. ..."
allmusic
W - The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961
W - Bill Evans
All About Jazz
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 1/20

A Literary Guide to the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC

"Local and visiting fans of New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge should consider themselves in good company—the immigrant-built symbol of the connection between the Old and New Worlds has been honored by everyone from Walt Whitman to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In celebration of National Reading Month, add this literary guide to New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge to your reading list. ...'
The Culture Trip
15 Novels Set in Brooklyn
NY Times: Brooklyn by the Book
Modern American Poetry
amazon: Literary Brooklyn by Evan Hughes

2013 January: Brooklyn Bridge

Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian (1978)

"Desolation Island is the fifth historical novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. It was first published in 1978. Jack Aubrey is in funds from his successful mission to take the islands of Mauritius and Reunion. His house has additions, but he is ready for another voyage. The story includes a voyage meant to reach Australia, and occurs prior to the War of 1812. Critics have praised the novel's 'literate, clear-eyed realism' at initial publication, and stirring naval action in the cold southern ocean in the chase of the Dutch ship, 20 years after initial publication at the re-issue. ... The real-life Leopard's earlier involvement in the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair is described in the novel. The appearance of the American whaler reveals the tension between the English and the Americans on the eve of the War of 1812. O'Brian based the account of the near sinking of the Leopard (after striking an iceberg) on an actual event involving HMS Guardian and her commander Edward Riou in 1789. ..."
Wikipedia
The voyage of the world: Patrick O’Brian’s Desolation Island
amazon, Audiobooks

2009 September: Patrick O'Brian, 2013 July: Harbors and High Seas - Dean King and John B. Hattendorf, 2015 October: HMS Surprise (1973), 2016 May: Post Captain (1972), 2019 February: Aubrey–Maturin series, 2019 February: Cooking with Patrick O’Brian By Valerie Stivers

From The Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader

"Over a decade and a half in the making, From The Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader is the first comprehensive look at Barney Rosset and Grove Press’s contribution to film culture, collecting close to four dozen articles of the Evergreen Review’s film section, contextualized with an in-depth introduction by Ed Halter and brilliantly laid out in the distinguished style of the erstwhile magazine. That such a work has finally arrived forty-five years after the demise of the Review is a testament to Rosset’s repeated lament that Grove’s place in film history is overlooked. ..."
Brooklyn Rail
LARB: Booking Film
amazon

Our Man In Havana – Graham Greene (1958)

"Our Man In Havana (1958) is a novel set in Cuba by the British author Graham Greene. He makes fun of intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants. The book predates the Cuban Missile Crisis, but certain aspects of the plot, notably the role of missile installations, appear to anticipate the events of 1962. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1959, directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness. In 1963 it was adapted into an opera by Malcolm Williamson, to a libretto by Sidney Gilliat, who had worked on the film. In 2007, it was adapted into a play by Clive Francis, which has since toured the UK several times and been performed in various parts of the world. Greene joined MI6 in August 1941. ..."
Wikipedia
W – Our Man in Havana (film)
Exploring Cuba, Guided by Graham Greene
NY Times: Out of a Need for Money By JAMES M. CAIN (October 26, 1958)
Drinking and Drink in “Our Man in Havana”
amazon, Criterion ($)
YouTube: Our Man in Havana trailer, Our Man in Havana: Tropicana Scene - Ernie Kovacs

2017 December: The Heart of the Matter (1948)

Make Noise Morphage - My "Film Noir" Reel

"In this video, Hainbach (Stefan Paul Goetsch) gives a hands-on demo of the Make Noise Morphagene and the ‘reel’ that he made for it. The video is not intended to be demo or review of the Morphagene, but instead is more of a look at its musical applications. Hainbach has shared his reel as a free download. Here’s what he has to say about his ‘Noir’ reel: 'I call it Noir, since it is has a vibe of film noir to it. I made this with scoring for picture or theatre in mind, recording piano, percussion, synths on a Telefunken M15 and Nagra III and playing that back on half speed. All music is harmonically related, so it should not grind too much when switching apruptly. I left some space for new splices in the end, as I feel that makes it more playable.'”
Synthtopia
YouTube: Make Noise Morphage - My "Film Noir" Reel

2018 October: Distressed Tape, 2019 February: Sandpaper Is a Form of Change, 2019 February: Hainbach - Gear Top 7: My Personal Favorites In 2018, 2019 May: The Sound of Architecture and Design | Bauhaus, Piezo Microphones and FX

Personal Appearance - Sonny Stitt (1957)

"Few artists recorded as prolifically as Sonny Stitt; over the course over 100+ albums, he seemed to play with anybody willing to pick up an instrument and join him in the studio. Inevitably, there was a lot of mediocre material released, and it can be a little tricky finding Stitt's best stuff. Personal Appearance is one of the better ones, an outing which finds the saxophonist playing in a Parker-influenced style over a selection of bebop favorites like 'Easy To Love' and 'Autumn In New York.' Stitt's most famous and highly regarded recordings are those in which he is paired with another horn (most notably Gene Ammons or Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis), yet as the sole lead instrument he proves that he has more than enough ideas to hold his own and doesn't require the interplay the extra horn provides. ..."
All About Jazz
W - Personal Appearance
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Personal Appearance 10 videos

2018 March: Stitt Meets Brother Jack (1962), 2019 February: Sonny Stitt Plays Jimmy Giuffre Arrangements (1959)

Literary Paris: A Photographic Tour

"An essential addition to the library of every booklover and Francophile, this unique love letter to Paris offers an immersive photographic stroll through its literary delights, from historic bookstores to hidden cafes. Paris in Color author Nichole Robertson turns her lens onto spots both legendary and little-known, highlighting quiet moments that every booklover savors—inviting cafe scenes, comfy chairs, enticing book nooks—and the weathered charm of places steeped in centuries of literary history. Quotes by great writers such as Balzac and Colette are interspersed throughout, while a timeline and an index of featured locations round out the volume. This bijou treasure of a book will inspire every creative soul who dreams of following in the footsteps of their literary heroes."
Chronicle Books
Inside the Great Bookstores of Paris

La Bibliothèque Idéale

The Case Against Quantum Computing

"Quantum computing is all the rage. It seems like hardly a day goes by without some news outlet describing the extraordinary things this technology promises. Most commentators forget, or just gloss over, the fact that people have been working on quantum computing for decades—and without any practical results to show for it. We’ve been told that quantum computers could 'provide breakthroughs in many disciplines, including materials and drug discovery, the optimization of complex systems, and artificial intelligence.' We’ve been assured that quantum computers will 'forever alter our economic, industrial, academic, and societal landscape. We’ve even been told that 'the encryption that protects the world’s most sensitive data may soon be broken' by quantum computers. ..."
IEEE Spectrum

Soundwalk Collective - Trasmissions (2017)

"... Among the most engaging trajectories in contemporary creative avant-garde practice, are those which entirely defy the standard classifications of genre and context - pooling from a startlingly diverse range of fields. The trio of Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi, who, with an evolving cast of collaborators, account for the Soundwalk Collective, are among the most noteworthy within this fascinating realm of production. Based between New York City and Berlin, their efforts span fine art and music, digesting anthropological, ethnographic, and psychogeographic study, through the lens of electronic sound - recording, processing, and synthesis. Marking the debut of the new imprint Dischi Fantom, Transmissions - a four LP anthology, gathers four previously unreleased studio compositions into a single sprawling hit. ..."
Soundohm (Audio)
Forced Exposure (Audio)
Discogs

A tenement in the summer is a “fiery furnace”

Tenement's Hester Street, Everett Shinn
"'With the first hot nights in June police despatches, that record the killing of men and women by rolling off roofs and window-sills while asleep, announce that the time of greatest suffering among the poor is at hand,' wrote Jacob Riis in 1890 in How the Other Half Lives. Riis, a former newspaper reporter who immigrated to New York from Denmark 20 years earlier, hoped his book would open the city’s eyes to the lives of the city’s poorest—people who resided mainly in the cramped, filthy tenement districts of the Lower East Side. No season illustrated how harsh life was for these tenement dwellers than summer, or 'the heated term' in Gilded Age parlance. That’s when the heat and humidity turned their substandard homes into what Riis described as 'fiery furnaces,' forcing people to seek a cool breeze on flimsy roofs, shabby fire escapes, and filthy courtyards. ..."
Ephemeral New York

John Sloan, Summer Roof

Why Were Medieval Europeans So Obsessed With Long, Pointy Shoes?

At a royal Parisian wedding the standard footwear was very pointy.
"In 1463, London outlawed the shoes of its fanciest men. These dapper lords had grown ridiculous in their dapperness, and had taken to ambling streets shod in long, carrot-shaped shoes that tapered to impish tips, some as long as five inches beyond the toe. These shoes were called 'crakows' or 'poulaines' (a term also used to refer to the tips alone), and the court of King Edward IV eventually found them offensive enough to pass a sumptuary law prohibiting shoe tips that extended over two inches beyond the toe. Perhaps one of the silliest and most fascinating trends in medieval fashion, these shoes probably first emerged around 1340 in Krakow, Poland—both names refer to this origin—according to Rebecca Shawcross, the author of Shoes: An Illustrated History. ..."
Atlas Obscura
amazon: Shoes: An Illustrated History by Rebecca Shawcross

This poulaine, uncovered on the Thames, features an ankle strap and a sexy, plunging front.

Bernie’s Red Vermont

"It was in a Burlington coffee shop known as a hangout for 'alternative' people—as well as an occasional FBI observation spot for new-left activities—that Bernie Sanders told Greg Guma, the editor of the radical Vermont Vanguard Press, that he wanted to run for mayor. Guma was in the midst of organizing his own mayoral candidacy in the upcoming 1981 election as part of the Citizens Party, a newly formed left-wing band of reformist candidates and activists that had already run a candidate for Vermont’s sole congressional seat in 1980, getting a quarter of the vote in Burlington. But Sanders convinced him otherwise. ... And his brand of left-wing politics has proven far more influential than he or Guma or anyone else in Burlington’s tightly knit leftist world could have dreamed. Sanders’s ideology is the product of the winding circumstances of his long career, tracing an unlikely trajectory from radical New England gadfly to U.S. senator. ..."
New Republic
The Bernie Sanders Paradox: When Socialism Grows Old
Wikipedia - Liberty Union Party
W - Vermont Green Party
amazon: The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution by Greg Guma

Liberty Union

2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right, 2015 October: The Ecology of Freedom (1982), 2016 July: Murray Bookchin’s New Life, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 April: The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (1977).

2016 April: Bernie Sanders and the History of American Socialism, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 July: Don’t March, Organize for Power, 2017 December: Vermont Progressive Party, 2017 December: The 2017 Progressive Honor Roll, 2018 February: Catalyst, 2018 April: Are You Progressive?, 2017 April: Capitalism and the Family, 2017 August: America Has a Long and Storied Socialist Tradition. DSA Is Reviving It., 2017 August: Socialism: As American As Apple Pie, 2018 May: A Democratic Spring: 12 Left Challengers Taking On the Party Establishment in 2018, 2018 July: The Ballot and the Break, 2018 August: What You Need To Know About Democratic Socialism, 2018 August: The New Socialists, 2019 May: Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington

What region has the nation’s best pizza?

"America is not a pizza monoculture. A cheeseburger in New York might not be so different from a cheeseburger in Chicago, but the pizzas between those two cities are barely in the same category of food. Our pies—like our people—span many styles, shapes, creeds, and appearances. Every region has its own pizza patois, with syntaxes and phrasings so specific to its birthplace that it may as well be Esperanto anywhere else. But take your emotions out of it for a minute. Can we just say some pizzas are demonstrably better than others? The quality gap between the best and worst regional styles is a wide chasm. This doesn’t apply to any other food in America with the exception of maybe barbecue (but even with barbecue, we’re talking about a genre, not a specific dish). And frankly, some city’s pizza styles are half-assed ideas that get disproportionate championing in the name of civic duty. ..."
The Takeout

White clam pizza

2014 June: Pizza, 2014 October: Viva La Pizza! The Art of the Pizza Box (NYC), 2016 July: Q&A: Antoinette Balzano and Cookie Cimineri of Totonno’s, 2017 September: The Pizza Show, 2017 November: A Priceless Pizzeria in Brooklyn, 2018 December: State of the Slice, Part 2: The 27 Pizza Spots That Define New York Slice Culture, 2019 January: How the Slice Joint Made Pizza the Perfect New York City Food

W.P. Kinsell

"Three paragraphs in, there it is: W.P. Kinsella's most famous sentence, and no doubt the most misquoted line of his writing career as well. 'If you build it, he will come.' The he (not 'they') referred to in the instruction was Shoeless Joe Jackson, the baseball star disgraced for allegedly throwing the 1919 World Series and the eponymous hero of Mr. Kinsella's seminal novel, Shoeless Joe. The novel, about a struggling Iowa farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn field, was adapted for film as Field of Dreams – a critically acclaimed blockbuster that made the already beloved novel a sensation. For Mr. Kinsella, baseball wasn't simply a game – it was poetry, and a metaphor for life. ..."
Shoeless Joe author W.P. Kinsella saw baseball as a metaphor for life
Guide to Baseball Fiction: W. P. Kinsella
ESPN - Where it began: 'Shoeless Joe' by W.P. Kinsella
W - W.P. Kinsell
W.P. Kinsell
amazon: W.P. Kinsell, Field of Dreams ($)
W - Field of Dreams
YouTube: Field of Dreams Trailer

The Poetry Project’s Half-Century of Dissent

"February 10, 1971, on a Wednesday night in the East Village, a full moon glowed in the wintry sky over St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Inside, a group of New York’s most cutting-edge scene-makers gathered at the Poetry Project to hear a reading by poet and Warhol aide-de-camp Gerard Malanga. Andy was there, as was Lou Reed, along with poets Gregory Corso, John Giorno, Joe Brainard, and Bernadette Mayer. First up that night was a dark-eyed, lanky young poetess by the name of Patti Smith. An up-and-coming playwright named Sam Shepard, with whom she’d recently become involved, was there in support, as was her closest friend and collaborator, Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith knew she didn’t just want to read that night; rather, she wanted to electrify the audience with poems that possessed the power of rock ‘n’ roll. ..."
Voice

Poet John Giorno keeps his audience rapt at one of the Poetry Project’s marathon New Year’s Day readings, in 1981.

Slumber, Awakening - Alastair Wilson

"A dark, melodic, semi-self-generating modular patch using 2 Mother 32s sent through an Eventide Space hall reverb, using Ableton Live as a tempo source. A slight bit of compression is added to tame some of the more insistent bass surges. The patch is only semi-random because the notes come from sequences based off the C minor triad; the Assign outputs' random stepped voltages do the rest! If you want to recreate this patch, you can find it here. ... This is a melodic, improvised demo of how a single Mother 32 can play a bass line and melody at once, sent through an Eventide Space shimmer reverb, without any other processing or effects. The LFO is used as the bass here. The idea is that the Assign output can send a clock out pulse on each step of the sequence. ... You now have a Mother 32 which can play a bass line and melody at the same time! Stop and start the sequencer to change the bass note. If you want to recreate this patch, you can find it here. ..."
Matrix Synth (Video)
YouTube: 001//Slumber, 002//Awakening

The Irrepressible Emotion of Lee Krasner

Shattered Light (1954)
"In 1959, Lee Krasner was in crisis. She was still mourning her husband—who’d died in a car crash three years earlier—when her mother died, compounding her grief. An exhibition of her work planned by the critic Clement Greenberg had been canceled when Greenberg decided he didn’t appreciate her newer paintings. Plagued by insomnia, Krasner began painting at night in her husband’s old studio, and since she disliked working with color under artificial light, she used only shades of umber and white. The paintings Krasner made during this period, described by her friend Richard Howard as her 'Night Journeys,' are extraordinary. The confinement of her color palette is coupled with a wild range of motion and space, in works that erupt with feeling. The Eye Is the First Circle, completed in 1960 and named after an Emerson quote, is a tempest that engulfs the viewer in chaotic, feathery strokes, a 16-foot-wide sweep of circular emotion. Krasner’s grief, her rage, her power, are all contained within the canvas, layered in jagged streaks of dark brown and daubs of white. Her state of mind is locked in paint, but seeps outward. ..."
The Atlantic
Guardian: Reframing Lee Krasner, the artist formerly known as Mrs Pollock (Video)
Guardian: Storms of colour from a wild destructive genius – Lee Krasner review
Lee Krasner - Living Colour (Video)
W - Lee Krasner
Then and Now: Lee Krasner’s Land of Her Own Invention
Sotheby's: Lee Krasner from the Depths of Despair to the Height of her Career (Video)

2019 April: Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (2018)

Where We Are: An At-A-Glance Spacecraft Locator

"The last quarter has seen few changes in the roster of planetary exploration spacecraft. SpaceIL’s lunar lander Beresheet is now on the lunar surface. Its descent on 11 April seemed to go nearly perfectly. Unfortunately, a cascade of events shortly before its planned landing caused it to hit the ground too fast, and it did not survive. I’ve corrected an earlier omission (spotted—as they always are—by a sharp-eyed reader): the map at right now includes ESA’s Gaia star-mapping spacecraft, which orbits in step with Earth at the gravitationally stable L2 point, farther from Earth than the Sun. ..."
Planetary: Where We Are
[PDF] The Planetary Report • June Solstice 2019
Planetary

In the Heart of Syria's Darkness, a Democratic, Egalitarian and Feminist Society Emerges

Kurdish women of the Kobani canton in Rojava marching in a demonstration calling for the release of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, Syria, 2015
"The most amazing thing about Rojava is that hardly anyone knows it exists. We hear plenty about Syria – the battlefields and chemical attacks, the brutality of ISIS and barbarity of the Assad regime. But very little has been written about the fact that in northeastern Syria an anarchist-feminist autonomous region has arisen that is the antithesis to everything around it. ... Yet this is precisely the vision that the people of Rojava – known officially as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria – are realizing in practice, in an appallingly hostile environment, surrounded by enemies bent on their destruction. ... The theorist who influenced Ocalan most profoundly was Murray Bookchin, a Jewish-American writer and anarchist who formulated the theory of social ecology. Drawing on the connection between the environmental crisis and capitalist society, Bookchin argued that the enslavement and destruction of nature is the continuation of the enslavement of other human beings. ..."
Haaretz

Kurdish demonstrators holding a banner bearing Ocalan’s image.

2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right, 2015 October: The Ecology of Freedom (1982), 2016 July: Murray Bookchin’s New Life, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 April: The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (1977).
2016 February: The Feminist, Democratic Leftists Our Military Is Obliterating - Debbie Bookchin, 2016 May: Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn, 2016 July: How Turkey Came to This, 2017 March: As repression deepens, Turkish artists and intellectuals fear the worst, 2017 July: mRadical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve, 2018 May: Bookchin: living legacy of an American revolutionary, 2018 July: How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy - Debbie Bookchin

New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Sparkle Moore
"'For sixty years, conventional wisdom has told us that women generally did not perform rock and roll during the 1950s,' writes Leah Branstetter, Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University. Like so many cultural forms into which we are initiated, through education, personal interest, and general osmosis, this popular form of Western music—now a genre with seventy years under its belt—has functioned as an almost ideal example of the great man theory of history. ... The recognition of rare exceptions, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, does not challenge the rule. But Branstetter’s Women in Rock and Roll’s First Wave project almost single-handedly does. ..."
Open Culture (Audio)
Women in Rock & Roll’s First Wave

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Why everyone went to the 8th Street Bookshop

"The handsome brick storefront at West Eighth Street and MacDougal Place has been occupied by countless businesses since it went up on this Greenwich Village corner in 1838. But perhaps it's best remembered as the home of the Eighth Street Bookshop—one of dozens of booksellers centered around Eighth Street or Fourth Avenue that made the Village a bibliophile paradise in the 1950s and 1960s. "Operated by the brothers Elias and Ted Wilentz, the Eighth Street Bookshop gained fame as a literary gathering place with close ties to the nonconformist writers of the day, whose works and lifestyle gave rise to the term 'Beat Generation,' states the Village Alliance. ..."
Ephemeral New York
Reality Studio: Eighth Street Bookshop