Night Dreamer - Wayne Shorter (1964)

Wikipedia - "Night Dreamer is the fourth album by American jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter. It was released in November 1964 by Blue Note Records. With a quintet that includes trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Elvin Jones, Shorter performed six of his originals on this April 29 session. At this point of his career, Shorter felt his writing was changing. While the previous compositions had a 'lot of detail', this new approach had a simplistic quality to it. 'I used to use a lot of chord changes, for instance, but now I can separate the wheat from the chaff.' ... 'Night Dreamer' has mostly a minor feel, often perceived by Shorter as 'evening or night', hence the 'Night' in the title. It is a 3/4 'floating' piece, yet, 'although the beat does float, it also is set in a heavy groove. It's a paradox, in a way, like you'd have in a dream'. ..."
Wikipedia
Wayne Shorter: Night Dreamer (1964) Blue Note MM33 (mono update added) (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Night Dreamer 6 videos

Three Letters from Switzerland By Zelda Fitzgerald

"Between June 1930 and August 1931, after a series of mental health episodes had whittled away at her career, her marriage, and her overall well-being, Zelda Fitzgerald was a patient at Les Rives de Prangins, a clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, where she wasn’t allowed visitors until her treatment had been established. The experience, as one could imagine, was tremendously isolating: once at the center of a lively and glamorous scene, she now found herself utterly alone with her thoughts. Her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, sent short notes and flowers every other day. She wrote long letters in reply, tracing the contours of her mind, expressing both love for and frustration with Scott, and detailing, in luscious, iridescent prose, the nonevents of her days. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda collects more than three hundred of the couple’s letters to each other. Three of Zelda’s letters from Les Rives de Prangins—carefully transcribed with an eye for accuracy, misspellings and all—appear below. ..."
The Paris Review

2014 January: View the Passport Photos of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & Other Cultural Icons, 2014 August: Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection, 2014 November: Lost Generation, 2015 November: The Crack-Up (1945), 2017 December: Living Well Is the Best Revenge By Calvin Tomkins

Strata-East Records

"Next to the absence of Sun Ra, one of the most glaring omissions in Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary was the radical black music collectives that came out of America in the ‘70s. Burns saw the end of the 1960s as a break in the creative line of the art form. But rather than being the museum piece that Burns seemed to suggest, jazz in the new decade would make some of its most progressive statements. And it was in the creative freedom of independent ventures like New York’s Strata-East that the future would be mapped out. Alongside similar outfits like Tribe in Detroit, Black Artists Group in St. Louis, and The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, Strata-East consolidated the previous advancements from all corners of jazz with a hard-edged militancy and community ethos that suited the times. Inspired by the empowering ideology of the Black Power movement, these collectives were fiercely independent. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily: A Guide to Strata-East (Video)
An introduction to Strata-East in 10 records (Video)
W - Strata-East Records
Soundcloud: Strata East Mix Part 1, Strata East Mix Part 2

Is El Museo del Barrio Forsaking Its Roots, or Expanding Them?

"The exhibition “Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019” is a golden anniversary survey of wonderful art from the collection of a New York museum that is in the process of being torn apart. El Museo was founded half a century ago, in a politically agitated time, in Puerto Rican East Harlem, the Barrio. It identified itself as a community art space. Its first shows were in a public school classroom on East 123rd Street and it stayed within the immediate neighborhood until 1977, when it moved to its present address, a city-owned building on Fifth Avenue at 104th Street. ..."
NY Times (Video)
Culture and The People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019
Whose museum is it anyway? The story of El Museo del Barrio has always been about representation
As El Museo del Barrio Celebrates 50 Years, Critics Say It’s Straying From Its Mission
GothamToGo

Nicolás Dumit Estévez’s “The Flag,” 2003-6, a mixed-media installation at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan that blends artistry, artisanship and activism. His handmade flag represents Dominican New York — an act of unity.

The 1619 Project

"The Fourth of July in 1776 is regarded by most Americans as the country’s birthday. But what if we were to tell you that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August 1619? That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years and form the basis for almost every aspect of American life. The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times memorializing that event on its 400th anniversary. The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story. In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery. ..."
NY Times - Watch: The Times Presents the #1619Project
NY Times - The 1619 Project

What Contraception Meant to a Century of Women Writers

"In 1926, the year that the painter Alice Neel got married in Pennsylvania, effective contraception for women was still only a distant rumor emanating from New York City. Even if she could have obtained a diaphragm—but it was illegal then to send them, or even information about them, through the US mail—she went to live with her parents-in-law, where she lacked the privacy to use it. Neel once said, 'In the beginning I didn’t want children. I just got them.' In France, where Ursula K. Le Guin got married in 1953, all forms of contraception were illegal. The new couple’s most valued wedding gift was a gross of US military-issue condoms, sent by a friend in the armed forces in Germany, with suggestive comments written all over the box. When Doris Lessing had a tubal ligation in 1948, securing for herself the sexual freedom she celebrated in The Golden Notebook, she was undergoing a new and controversial procedure. ... The great 20th-century mother-writers and -artists whose work towers above us now—Lessing, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Susan Sontag, the list goes on—all owe their careers and lives to the right to reproductive health care. ...""
Lithub
The Atlantic: The Suffragists Who Opposed Birth Control (Video)
The Atlantic: Votes for Women

Stranger Than Paradise And The Resurrection Of Albert Ayler - John Lurie (1985)

"Haunting work by John Lurie – one side the soundtrack to his famous film appearance in Stranger Than Paradise, the other a sute of tracks on the theme of Ayler. The Stranger Than Paradise tunes are performed by The Paradise String Quartet – and are mostly darker atmospheric tunes from the Jim Jarmusch soundtrack. The Ayler tunes are more kinetic – played by a group that includes two violinists from the Paradise group, plus Curtis Fowlkes, Arto Lindsay, and Lurie himself. ..."
Dusty Groove
Discogs (Video)
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Stranger Than Paradise And The Resurrection Of Albert Ayler [Full Album] 35:32

2012 July: The Lounge Lizards, 2017 October: The Lounge Lizards - Lounge Lizards (1981)

The Sands Take You | tape loop, OP-1 - Hainbach (2019)

"The first single from the upcoming micro-cassette release on Lavender Sweep Records. This and the whole album was made from sounds send to me by listeners, from the Discord, Patreon and Subreddit. Here the contributors and their sounds are: Espacht - Overtone Trombone, Pedro Figueiredo - Cheap_Feedback, Monostich - nicepianothing. Album to be released later this summer. Filmed on location at Kamena Vourla, Greece, by the Luna Park seaside."
YouTube: The Sands Take You | tape loop, OP-1

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, 2019 June: Make Noise Morphage - My "Film Noir" Reel

Huckleberries on hot summer days

"Despite Thoreau’s achievements as a writer, environmentalist and social activist (he was, among other things, a passionate abolitionist and supporter of John Brown), many of his contemporaries considered him little more than a crank, a self-involved Pied Piper for the children of Concord, MA, whom he led in search of huckle­berries on hot summer days. As Lauren Dassow Walls makes clear in her excellent Henry David Thoreau: A Life, he was a man of obsessively high principles, self-contained, a stickler for details who insisted on his own way of seeing the world, however quirky. ..."
Times Literary Supplement
TLS: A real genius for staying at home by Virginia Woolf (July 1917)
Thoreau Farm: Particular Blue
W - Huckleberries
NPR - For The Love Of Huckleberries: August Brings Out Hunters Of Elusive Fruit
Gutenberg: Aug. 9. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU - JOURNAL, I 1837-1846

2009 April: Henry David Thoreau, 2012 September: Walden, 2015 March: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 2017 March: Civil Disobedience (1849), 2017 April: The Maine Woods (1864), 2017 June: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, 2017 July: Pond Scum - Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia. By Kathryn Schulz, 2017 July: Walden, a Game, 2017 October: Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece, 2017 December: Walden on the Rocks - Ariel Dorfman, 2018 March: A Map of Radical Bewilderment, 2018 April: On Tax Day, Reread Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’, 2018 October: Against Everything: Thoreau Trailer Park, 2018 November: Walking (1862)

The first New York tenement is on Mott Street

"The orange building in the middle of the photo below, 65 Mott Street, looks like an ordinary Manhattan tenement. It lacks a cornice, sure, and a renovation at some point in its history has erased any ornamental features on the facade. But that’s no different to countless other 19th century tenements across the city. Aside from this, you’d never know that this walkup has one distinction that makes it different from its neighbors. 65 Mott Street 'was apparently the very first New York building built specifically to serve as a tenement,' wrote historian Tyler Anbinder in his 2001 book, Five Points—his study of the horrific slum neighborhood this stretch of Mott Street used to be part of. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Woodstock’s Contradictions, 50 Years Later

Peace, love and lots of trash: The mythology of Woodstock is all well and good, but there was an unruly human side to the festival, too.
"... Overwhelmed and underprepared, the promoters declared that Woodstock was a free festival and welcomed the hordes that they couldn’t have turned back anyway. And as hundreds of thousands of people continued to arrive, the music and mythologizing began, along with the rain, the mud, the giddy sensation of being part of an unexpected multitude, the forecasts of disaster, the helicopter overflights to get musicians and food in and medical emergencies out, the uneven stage performances, the random and mostly friendly encounters, the lengthy set changes filled with urgent announcements, the waves of euphoria and discomfort, the sheer implausibility of the whole event. As a music critic, I have been to dozens of festivals since then, and none have been so makeshift, so precarious or so revelatory. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: How Santana Hallucinated Through One of Woodstock’s Best Sets (His Own)
NY Times: Woodstock 1969: A Story Vastly Bigger Than Editors Realized
W - Woodstock
Rolling Stone: Woodstock: ‘It Was Like Balling for the First Time (Video)
Woodstock (Video)
CNN - Drugs, dirt and hot German bikers: Two teens who ran away to Woodstock recall the adventure of a lifetime (Video)
YouTube: Messed Up Things That Happened At Woodstock

“One of the most important motivations for me going to this thing was to take pictures. I was caught up in all that music, but I was caught up more in photography.”

Montauk - Max Frisch (1975)

"Wikipedia - "Montauk is a story by Swiss writer Max Frisch. It first appeared in 1975 and takes an exceptional position in Frisch's work. While fictional stories previously served Frisch for exploring the possible behavior of his protagonists, in 'Montauk', he tells an authentic experience: a weekend which he spent with a young woman at the American East Coast. The short-run love affair is used by Frisch as a retrospective on his own biography. ... On their last weekend Lynn and Frisch come closer together and take a trip to Long Island, New York to the village of Montauk on the Atlantic coast. For the author this weekend sparks the desire to describe the shared days, without any addition. The presence of Lynn triggers reflections and memories in Frisch. He ponders on age and his growing feeling to be an imposition for others, his success and its effect on enviers, admirers and women."
Wikipedia
W - Max Frisch
Paris Review: Max Frisch, The Art of Fiction No. 113
[PDF] Montauk
amazon: Max Frisch

Brooklyn Museum

Wikipedia - "The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m²), the museum is New York City's third largest in physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn and founded in 1895, the Beaux-Arts building, designed by McKim, Mead and White, was planned to be the largest art museum in the world. The museum initially struggled to maintain its building and collection, only to be revitalized in the late 20th century, thanks to major renovations. ..."
Wikipedia
Brooklyn Museum
NY Times: Brooklyn Museum
How Might We Decolonize the Brooklyn Museum?
YouTube: Brooklyn Museum

People walk through the galleries of the Brooklyn Museum on May 20th, 2016.

Mississippi John Hurt (March 3, 1892 – November 2, 1966)

Wikipedia - "John Smith Hurt (March 3, 1892 – November 2, 1966), better known as Mississippi John Hurt, was an American country blues singer and guitarist. Raised in Avalon, Mississippi, Hurt taught himself to play the guitar around the age of nine. He worked as a sharecropper and began playing at dances and parties, singing to a melodious fingerpicked accompaniment. His first recordings, made for Okeh Records in 1928, were commercial failures, and he continued to work as a farmer. Dick Spottswood and Tom Hoskins, a blues enthusiast, located Hurt in 1963 and persuaded him to move to Washington, D.C. He was recorded by the Library of Congress in 1964. This helped further the American folk music revival, which led to the rediscovery of many other bluesmen of Hurt's era. Hurt performed on the university and coffeehouse concert circuit with other Delta blues musicians who were brought out of retirement. ..."
Wikipedia
Mississippi John Hurt – You Got To Walk That Lonesome Valley (Video)
Stefan Wirz
YouTube: You Got To Walk That Lonesome Valley (Live), John Henry, Spike Driver Blues, Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, Cocaine Blues, C.C. Rider, I'm satisfied, Richland Woman Blues, Goodnight Irene, Candy Man Blues
YouTube: King Of The Blues - Full Album 1:12:07

Hoss's Country Corner

"Located in the Hamlet of Long Lake, in the center of the Adirondack mountains, Hoss’s Country Corner is more than just a store. Hoss’s is an Adirondack landmark. For over 40 years, friendly customer service and a selection of great products have been cornerstones of our success. A real general store, Hoss's Country Corner has operated year-round since 1972. Hoss's features Adirondack books, clothing, gifts, sporting goods, camping & hunting supplies, souvenirs and wonderful NY State cheeses. DEC hunting & fishing licenses and live bait are available as well as maps and trail guides."
Tupper Lake
YouTube: Hoss's Country Corner Open House Long Lake, NY

Dave Seidel’s “Black Star Study”

"'Black Star Study' is a dense, lengthy, tumultuous drone, one occasionally fleshed out with jittery synthesizer fluctuations and the stuttered grunts of something more akin to an unloved catalytic converter. Which is to say, in drone/noise terms, it is fantastic. Dave Seidel perpetrates the live performance in full view, his synthesizers narrowing into the distance on his desk, the bleak intensity of the music only slightly undermined by the sewing machine seen toward the rear of the room. As you listen, pay attention to the layers of grit, the mesh of crunchy distortions that makes your speakers vibrate and your imagination soar. Video originally posted at Seidel’s YouTube channel. More from Seidel, who is based in New Hampshire, at mysterybear.net and mysterybear.bandcamp.com."
disquiet (Video)
Dave Seidel (Audio/Video)

Constellations from Around the World

"Two weeks ago I shared a map of all the stars you can see from Earth, alongside the Western constellations. But the Western constellations are only one of many patterns of stars invented by cultures around the world. This week’s map illustrates the animals, people, and objects imagined in the sky by more than 30 different civilizations. To make this map I used data from Stellarium, an open-source planetarium software that includes constellations from ancient Dakota, Hawaiian, and Mongolian cultures, among many others. Some of my favorite constellations were the Stars of Water, Rabbit Tracks, and the Hippopotamus, and I also really liked the star names The Oath Star, Lady of Life, and The Hand of the Mouse. ..."
Tabletop Whale
Stellarium, Source code

Rhythm and Blues Jazz Handbook, edited by Thurston Moore

"... Now this one, which is number 33, is a gem. It is the actual 1952 Rhythm and Blues Jazz Scrapbook edited by Thurston Moore. Published in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1952. Copywrited and patented, but we still copied every page - all 43 - for researchers since it's unlikely another document exists that consolidated so much information on Black radio announcers from 1952. We made a copy of it as well in here. This was given to us by Tommy Cox, and I know we have an oral history by him... and he was a big fan of WJLD and Bob Umbach during the Atomic Boogie Hour. He was a white gentleman, and he told us that he visited Bob Umbach at the Bessemer location on the Super Highway and he told him to go out and get the Rhythm and Blues Encyclopedia. ..."
The Birmingham Black Radio Museum

Portrait Diptych of Dürer's Parents - Albrecht Dürer (1490)

Portrait of Barbara Dürer, née Holper, c. 1490. Albrecht Dürer the Elder with a Rosary, 1490.
Wikipedia - "Portrait Diptych of Dürer's Parents (or Dürer's Parents with Rosaries) is the collective name for two late-15th century portrait panels by the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer. They show the artist's parents, Barbara Holper (c. 1451–1514) and Albrecht Dürer the Elder (c. 1427–1502), when she was around 39 and he was 63 years. The portraits are unflinching records of the physical and emotional effects of ageing. The Dürer family was close, and Dürer may have intended the panels either to display his skill to his parents or as keepsakes while he travelled soon after as a journeyman painter. They were created either as pendants, that is conceived as a pair and intended to hang alongside each other, or diptych wings. However, this formation may have been a later conception; Barbara's portrait seems to have been executed some time after her husband's and it is unusual for a husband to be placed to the viewer's right in paired panels. His father's panel is considered the superior work and has been described as one of Dürer's most exact and honest portraits. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Albrecht Dürer

The Canary Islands Connection

"I’m surrounded by date palms. Around them run dry watercourses that look like ones I find not far from my home in Tucson, Arizona. The traditional architecture in town would not be out of place in Tucson, either—or almost anywhere from southern Spain to Mexico and up into the southwest us. The fruit trees and grapevines hark back even further, to traditions of my ancestors from Syria and Lebanon. Perhaps this is what a visit to the Canary Islands is really all about. Indeed, much of what is cultivated on this Spanish archipelago of seven volcanic, mostly undersea mountains can be traced back to crops that came aboard ships from as far away as Phoenicia, in the eastern Mediterranean, as far back to the eighth century bce. ..."
Aramco World
W - Canary Islands

What Time Is It? - The Time (1982)

Wikipedia - "'777-9311' is the second track and lead single from The Time's second album, What Time Is It?. Recorded for the album at Prince's home studio in May–June 1982, the song was produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince with Morris Day later adding his lead vocals. The funky song opens with a drum machine beat, adds guitar, live playing on the cymbals, and finally the bass and keyboards. A similar extended version of this occurs after the main lyrics, but starts with the bass and also includes a lengthy rock guitar solo. The bass is truly the "star" of this song, and Prince has remarked that this is one of his signature basslines, remarking no one can play the line like himself. He also said the same about the bassline of 'Let's Work'. ..."
Wikipedia
W - What Time Is It?
"777-9311": How Prince Gave Away His Best Song To The Band He Admired & Envied Most
vimeo: 777-9311
YouTube: The Walk

Raymond Chandler: The Art of Beginning a Crime Story

"There are times in life when you need a good opener. Maybe you’re caught in a rut and need the charge of a new world, new characters, something that carries with it the quiet thrill of possibility. Maybe you’re looking for inspiration yourself. All writers, aspiring and established, have a few special works they return to time and again, those books and stories that seem to act like jumper cables for their own work—read a few paragraphs, a chapter or two, and you’re back on the road. Whatever your reason or need, you’d be hard pressed to find an author equal to Raymond Chandler in jolting a story alive. If Elmore Leonard was the king of the opening line, Chandler made a case for himself as the master of the opening paragraph. Whether he’s describing the weather, the face of a building, a street corner, or the glint in a doorman’s eye, Chandler brought the scene instantly to life and gave you an immediate and overwhelming feeling that you were in a real place, encountering real people caught up in the little dramas and tragedies that define all our lives. ..."
Crime Reads

W - The Big Sleep (1939)

2009 September: The Maltese Falcon, 2013 July: Raymond Chandler, 2014 November: Finding Marlowe

Which “East River Park” is in this 1902 painting?

East River Park, 1902
"When William Glackens painted 'East River Park' in 1902—contrasting the serenity of a city green space with the noisy industrial riverfront—the park that currently stretches along the riverfront called East River Park had yet to be created. So what East River park did he depict here? Perhaps Corlears Hook Park, at the bend where Manhattan tucks under itself between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges? This was certainly a smoggy, ship-choked channel at the turn of the last century. The city purchased land here in the 1880s for the creation of a park, completed in 1905. Neighboring East River Park didn’t exist until the 1930s, and according to the Brooklyn Museum, which owns the painting, a label on it indicates that the Brooklyn waterfront is depicted. ..."
Ephemeral New York

2015 April: Ashcan School, 2015 October: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917, 2016 June: "Crowd at the Seashore," 1910

Cami Layé Okun

"The HAPE collective was created in Havana in 2016. Quickly it became a stimulant for local talent. Due to their success, they were soon working with some of the most innovative Cuban underground artists like El Individuo and Eric Cimafunk, as well as international DJs and musicians like Gilles Peterson. For this edition, they will introduce you to Cami Layé Okún, a DJ from Cuba. Her music is characterised by Afro-Caribbean, tropical, Amazonian funky grooves and so on. Vinyl plays a major role in her work, as she collects records from all over the world and throws parties in a 100% vinyl format! ..."
DJs Cami Layé Okún (Hape) & SebCat (Rebel Up!)
Mixcloud (Audio)
YouTube: Cami Layé Okún • Vinyl Set • Le Mellotron 1:03:15

Pierless

"It’s 7 a.m. on a high-summer Friday, and Steeplechase Pier in Coney Island is already packed. A frail older woman spreads a large silk scarf on a wooden chaise lounge, then stretches out to catch the sun. A younger woman cruises by on a silver bicycle, then skids to a stop when she recognizes a neighbor, beginning an excited conversation in Jamaican patois. Two dozen fishermen line the pier, casting again and again, looking for the sweet spot, until most give in and leave their long ocean rods leaning against the railing while they chat in Russian, Spanish, and Chinese. The chaotic back and forth is broken up only briefly as a Russian cry of 'Ryba!' ('Fish!') cuts through the cacophony. A man has pulled in a foot-long sea robin, a bottom feeder known for its unattractive face and tasty tail. A man of 40 or so rolls determinedly up the pier in a wheelchair, the muscles in his arms flexing as he spins the chair’s wheels, mounting the ramp leading up to the elevated platform at the end of the pier. He stops on the platform and stares out over the pounding waves of the Atlantic Ocean. ..."
BKLYNR
14 Photos Of The Coney Island Boardwalk, 12 Days After Hurricane Sandy (Video)
W - Steeplechase Park

Vintage postcard of Coney Island’s original Steeplechase Ride (1898-1907), George C. Tilyou’s first Steeplechase Park.

2009 April: Coney Island, 2010 July: Nathan's Famous, 2011 March: "An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders", Owen Smith, 2013 August: Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, 2013 October: Last Days of Summer at Coney Island, 2014 July: Coney Island - Directors: Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler (1973), 2015 May: The Case for Riding the Subway to the Last Stop, 2016 December: Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, 2017 August: Here's What Coney Island Looks Like In The Empty Pre-Dawn Hours

Attarazat Addahabia, Faradjallah ‎– Al Hadaoui (1973)

"Re-connecting American blues music with its West African ancestry has become a well trodden path. The infectious beats of John Lee Hooker’s guitar licks are clearly present in the work of the legendary Ali Farka Touré, who began his musical education in traditional ceremonies on the banks of the Niger. Kel Tamasheq rock bands like Tinariwen and Tamikrest have since made blues’ African roots less obvious, with both citing a teenage love of Dire Straits as a key influence. This makes the melodies on German label Habibi Funk’s latest offering – a 1973 album from Moroccan band Attarazat Addahabia & Faradjallah- – all the rarer, with band leader Abdelakabir Faradjallah keen to give the listener a heady immersion in a traditional guitar-driven music he introduces as gwana. From the opening track, Al Hadaoui whips up a relentless pace. Hypnotic drumming patterns, castanet clacks and a militant-tight female backing choir compete with funky guitars, while the overriding gwana force evokes a deep spiritual awakening. ..."
The Quietus (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: El Hadaoui, Attarazat Addahabia - Unknown Title (Morocco, 1970s), Kaddaba, Taali, Aflana

11 Legendary Literary Parties We’re Sad to Have Missed

Truman Capote
"Everyone loves a good party. Especially literary people—who, aside from book parties, which technically count as “work” (ask their accountants) tend not to get out much. Or so the stories go. Literature abounds with great parties, but here I’m interested in the parties that actually took place in literary history—where famous authors met, or fought, or fell asleep, or got goaded into writing mega-famous, bestselling memoirs. Eleven of these historically relevant literary events are below, for all your FOMO/vicarious partying needs. ..."
Lithub

When Marcel Proust came to a party at 2:30 in the morning to meet James Joyce, who was asleep

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, August 2 – 10

"... Saturday, August 3. The Big Dipper hangs diagonally in the northwest after dark. It's starting to "scoop water," which it will dump from on high to become "spring showers" in the evenings a half year from now. From the Dipper's midpoint, look three fists to the right to find Polaris (not very bright) glimmering due north as always. Polaris is the handle-end of the Little Dipper. The only other parts of the Little Dipper that are even modestly bright are the two stars forming the outer end of its bowl. On August evenings you'll find them to Polaris's upper left (by about a fist and a half at arm's length). They're called the Guardians of the Pole, since they circle around Polaris throughout the night and throughout the year. ..."
Sky and Telescope