Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Surrealism in a Classic Tarot Card Deck

"Tarot began as a card game and became a tool of occult divination. In that form, with its usually elaborate illustrations, the tarot deck found a major cultural role as an art object: here on Open Culture we've featured decks either designed or inspired by the likes of Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger, Philip K. Dick, and Salvador Dalí. That last, whose limited edition was published in 1984, has proven to be enough of an object of desire to gain the attention of Taschen, the publisher of visually (and often, in terms of dimensions and weight, physically) intensive photo and art books. Next month they're bringing out a new edition of Dalí's tarot deck, boxed with a companion book by tarot scholar Johannes Fiebig. ..."
Open Culture

Call for cultural and academic boycott of Turkey

"We call on academics, artists and intellectuals around the world to oppose the Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria by boycotting Turkish government sponsored academic, artistic and musical events taking place inside and outside of Turkey. The Turkish state’s invasion of northeastern Syria has brought a dangerous state of war to the only relatively stable region in the country, threatening the lives of thousands with indiscriminate shelling, mass displacement and continuous bombardment. The Turkish attack threatens to do enormous, perhaps irreversible, damage to international standards of law, human rights and human freedom. It also threatens to destroy a unique experiment in feminist social transformation. ..."
ROAR
Noam Chomsky signs call to boycott Turkey and prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kurdish people (Audio)

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: A Long March for Justice in Turkey, 2017 July: Radical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve, 2017 September: Istanbul: Memories and the City - Orhan Pamuk, 2018 January: Turkey’s State of Emergency, 2018 April: The Unlikely New Hero of Turkeys, 2018 June: How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy, 2018 June: How Nietzsche Explains Turkey, 2018 August: The West Hoped for Democracy in Turkey. Erdogan Had Other Ideas.

Pop Ambient from Aldo

"Simple music made with simple tools. The idea might seem obvious, but on YouTube — where many musicians, experienced and new, known and not, share works-in-progress in the form of demos and tutorials — simplicity often isn’t the order of the day. Comprehensiveness is. Here, refreshingly, a single sound source and a single tool for looping combine to let Aldo, a French musician living in London, accumulate and manipulate material. ... This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at Aldo’s YouTube channel. More from Aldo at instagram.com/aldo.is.taken."
disquiet (Video)

Jon Hassell ‎– Aka / Darbari / Java - Magic Realism (1983)

"The beautiful cover painting by Mati Klarwein serves as an appropriate visual analogy for the music contained herein: an abutting of two worlds, an insinuating blend of early-'80s high tech with ancient Southeast Asia. Over varying, non-specific rhythms supplied by Abdou Mboup, Jon Hassell weaves a music both evocative and plaintive, his modified trumpet sighing like an old Javanese horn pulled into the digital age on its way to what he calls a 'coffee-colored' future where all ethnic traditions become one. The astonishingly vocal sound he gets from that treated trumpet is certainly one of the signatures of this album and one of the more lovely sounds heard anywhere. His compositions have a bit too much direction and drive to comfortably settle into the term ambient, but they remain as relaxed and gently meandering as a jungle stream. One especially nice feature is the subtle electronic burblings that whisper in the background, creating an enticingly busy sense of space. Aka/Darbari/Java is an early high-water mark at the juncture between world and ambient musics."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Empire ii, Empire iii, "Darbari Extension" 1.1, Empire V

Orpheus - Jean Cocteau (1950)

"Orpheus (French: Orphée; also the title used in the UK) is a 1950 French film directed by Jean Cocteau and starring Jean Marais. ... Set in contemporary Paris, the story of the film is a variation of the classic Greek myth of Orpheus. The picture begins with Orpheus (Marais), a famous poet, visiting the Café des Poètes. At the same time, a Princess (Casares) and Cégeste (Édouard Dermit [fr]), a handsome young poet whom she supports, arrive. The drunken Cégeste starts a brawl. When the police arrive and attempt to take Cégeste into custody, he breaks free and flees, only to be run down by two motorcycle riders. ... Instead, they drive to a chateau (the landscape through the car windows is presented in negative) accompanied by the two motorcycle riders as abstract poetry plays on the radio. This takes the form of seemingly meaningless messages, like those broadcast to the French Resistance from London during the Occupation. ..."
Wikipedia
Criterion - Orpheus: Through a Glass, Amorously
Roger Ebert
amazon
YouTube: Mark Kermode reviews Orphée (1950) | BFI Player, Orphée Bande-annonce HD

2009 March: Jean Cocteau, 2016 February: In Which Jean Cocteau Gives Elan To This Milieu

How Gordon Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to 70s New York

Hole in the wall gang … work on Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect, 1975.
"Bare-chested and swinging high on a suspended platform in the vast interior space of a derelict steel-trussed warehouse on a New York pier, Gordon Matta-Clark, acetylene torch in hand, cut into the walls, the floors and the roof, letting the light in. Along with the sparks raining from his torch, the light cascaded from the sky through the building’s empty void to the water beneath. Arcs of light moved with the sun’s passage through the day. The camera filming all this is alternately dazzled and consumed by mysterious gloom. Hidden then exposed, Matta-Clark is glimpsed hard at work, oblivious to the height and the danger, swaying on his little platform. ..."
Guardian
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte - Reina Sofía: Day's End

New build … the latest Garbage Wall, at the London exhibition.

2011 October: Gordon Matta-Clark, 2018 January: Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier, 2019 October: The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop

The Astros Have Reached the World Series—and Walkoff Hero José Altuve Has Carved His Name Into Baseball’s Eternal Lore

"Bobby Thomson. Bill Mazeroski. Chris Chambliss. Joe Carter. Aaron Boone. Magglio Ordóñez. Travis Ishikawa. Before Saturday night, only those seven men had reached or won a World Series with a walkoff home run, so each name immediately conjures a memory or vision of a specific swing of the bat. Mazeroski lofted a high, black-and-white fly ball to left. Chambliss tomahawked a homer and met a mob on the basepaths. Carter golfed a line drive and danced all the way home. Such is the material of baseball lore and eternal highlight reels. An eighth player now belongs on that list, and in the future, if the name 'José Altuve' doesn’t immediately inspire the thought of his perfect, pennant-winning swing—bat coiling through the zone, legs pivoting to the pull side, hung slider caroming toward the Minute Maid Park train tracks or, more accurately, the heavens above Houston’s roaring crowd—it will only be because the Astros second baseman is already a franchise legend with copious playoff memories to his name. ..."
The Ringer (Video)
NY Times: Altuve’s Homer Stuns Yankees and Sends Astros to World Series (Video)
MLB: Yanks 0-for-WS in decade for 1st time since 1910s (Video)

J.D. Salinger, Unbound

One of Salinger’s spiritual journals.
"When J.D. Salinger was 18, unpublished and spending long hours at his typewriter, he received an encouraging letter from an admirer. 'I accept your story. Consider it a masterpiece. Check for $1,000 in the mail. Curtis Publishing Co.' It wasn’t really from a publisher — those notices wouldn’t arrive for years. It was from Salinger’s mother, who slipped it under his bedroom door one night when she heard him typing. He kept the note for 73 years, until his death in 2010. The handwritten note is now on display at the New York Public Library, in the first public exhibition from Salinger’s personal archives. ..."
NY Times

“When he was working at his desk, his door was usually closed,” his son Matt Salinger said. “I’d hear the typewriter and I’d sometimes hear him laughing. He had a loud laugh, more of a roar. I never knew exactly what he was working on, I just knew he was working.”

2010 January: J. D. Salinger, 2012 July: The Catcher in the Rye, 2014 September: Franny and Zooey, 2016 July: Nine Stories (1953)

Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions - Eric Dolphy

"The discography of the late and very great Eric Allan Dolphy remains one of the gleaming jewels of ’60s jazz, but he’s still too often summarized as an outstanding, highly distinctive collaborator who produced one true masterpiece as a leader. Resonance Records’ Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions is poised to help eradicate this misnomer, reissuing two superb but frequently underrated LPs in mono with 85 minutes of additional material and contextualizing it all with a 100-page book offering a range of perspectives and a wealth of photographs. Featuring the outstanding bassist Richard Davis and the recording debt of trumpeter Woody Shaw, it’s out on 3LP for RSD Black Friday. ..."
The Vinyl District
Pitchfork
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions (The Story)

2013 August: Out to Lunch! (1964), 2015 November: Eric Dolphy His Life and Art, 2016 February: Outward Bound (1960), 2016 April: Straight Ahead - Oliver Nelson With Eric Dolphy (1961), 2017 April: Far Cry (1960)

In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met

"Dutch paintings of the 17th century—the Golden Age of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer—have been a highlight of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection since the Museum's founding purchase in 1871. Opening October 16, the exhibition In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met will bring together some of the Museum’s greatest paintings to present this remarkable chapter of art history in a new light. Through 67 works drawn exclusively from The Met’s permanent collection and organized thematically, the exhibition will orient visitors to key issues in 17th-century Dutch culture—from debates about religion and conspicuous consumption to painters’ fascination with the domestic lives of women. ..."
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art: In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces (Video)

Wheat Fields, Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29–1682), circa 1670.

Sartoris - William Faulkner (1929)

"Sartoris is a novel, first published in 1929, by the American author William Faulkner. It portrays the decay of the Mississippi aristocracy following the social upheaval of the American Civil War. The 1929 edition is an abridged version of Faulkner's original work. The full text was published in 1973 as Flags in the Dust. Faulkner's great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, himself a colonel in the American Civil War, served as the model for Colonel John Sartoris. Faulkner also fashioned other characters in the book on local people from his hometown Oxford. His friend Ben Wasson was the model for Horace Benbow, while Faulkner's brother Murry served as the antetype for young Bayard Sartoris. ... In the autumn or winter of 1926, William Faulkner, twenty-nine, began work on the first of his novels about Yoknapatawpha County. ..."
Wikipedia
William Faulkner: Novels, 1926 - 1929
Internet Archive: Sartoris
amazon

2011 September: Southern Gothic, 2014 February: William Faulkner, 2015 October: William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels, 2015 November: Interviews William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12, 2016 April: Absalom, Absalom!! (1936), 2016 May: The Sound and the Fury (1929), 2016 October: The Snopes Trilogy (1940, 1957, 1959), 2016 December: Light in August (1932), 2017 February: As I Lay Dying (1930), 2017 June: The Wild Palms (1939), 2017 August: Sanctuary (1931). 2017 September: The Unvanquished (1938), 2017 October: 20 Pieces of Writing Advice from William Faulkner, 2017 November: Yoknapatawpha County, 2018 February: Go Down, Moses (1942), 2018 June: Flags in the Dust (1973)

What Happened to the West Village?

"I arrived in New York in 2013 and moved into a rent-stabilized apartment on a prime stretch of Bank Street in the West Village. My circumstances suggested time travel: the cracking plaster on my living room walls and my monthly rent had barely been altered since the early Eighties. From my rear window, I gazed at the privacy-glass panes enclosing the four-story townhouse next door, formerly owned by A-Rod. I dropped downstairs to Little Marc Jacobs—the brand’s now-closed children’s clothing outpost, then in my building’s ground-floor—to pick up babysitting jobs with the store’s customers, later finding myself in the living rooms of their nearby townhouses, worth millions. ..."
NYBooks

Best Fania Samples: 20 Latin Grooves That Helped Build Hip-Hop

"From its earliest days in the late 70s, hip-hop has relied on recycling old beats to make fresh sounds. Initially, DJs used two turntables to mix different records together, but in the early 80s, when the first samplers became commercially available, hip-hop artists began to loop short segments taken from vinyl records – a funky drum beat or a horn lick – and use them as foundations for making new music. While many producers plundered James Brown’s back catalogue for samples, the legendary New York Latin label, Fania, also proved a sampling gold mine, and the best Fania samples, from salsa music to boogaloo, are as essential to hip-hop history as any soul and funk records. ..."
udiscover (Video)

2011 November: Charlie Palmieri, 2014 March: Harlem River Drive - Harlem River Drive (1971), 2014 October: Fania at Fifty, 2017 December: Nu Yorica: Culture Clash In New York City - Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77, 2018 December: Latin Underground Revolution: Swinging Boogaloo, Guaguanco, Salsa & Latin Funk from New York City 1967-1978, 2017 June: Eddie Palmieri - Unfinished Masterpiece (1976), 2018 July: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem / El Barrio: Sounds from the Spanish Harlem Streets, 2011 June: Mario Bauzá, 2017 June: Rhythm & Power: Salsa in New York, 2012 February: Rubén Blades, 2017 December: Carlos Vera: Barcelona's Boogaloo: Mixes and Mashups, 2019 April: An NYC Mambo, Boogaloo and Salsa Family Tree

A City Transformed: Photographs of Paris, 1850-1900

Charles Marville, French, 1816–1879,  Place et rue de l’École Polytechnique, from rue Descartes, 1865–69
"Paris transformed into the 'City of Light' through grand-scale architectural renovations, demolitions, and new construction set in motion during the Second Empire (1852–70). With absolute power, Emperor Napoleon III remapped the French capital from the ground up, appointing civil servant Georges-Eugène Haussmann to redesign Paris toward improved safety, public health and sanitation, and traffic circulation. A self-described artiste démolisseur (demolition artist), Haussmann razed densely settled areas of the medieval city center, its labyrinthine streets rapidly giving way to new axes of orderly, wide boulevards anchored by monuments and open spaces for recreation. ..."
The Clark
The Clark: Map of Paris, 1890

Garnier frères, Nouveau Paris monumental. Itinéraire pratique de l'étranger dans Paris (detail), 1890.

Treasures in the Trash: A Secret Museum Inside a New York City Department of Sanitation Garage

"Like many New Yorkers, retired sanitation worker Nelson Molina has a keen interest in his fellow citizens' discards. But whereas others risk bedbugs for the occasional curbside score or dumpster dive as an enviro-political act, Molina’s interest is couched in the curatorial. The bulk of his collection was amassed between 1981 and 2015, while he was on active duty in Carnegie Hill and East Harlem, collecting garbage in an area bordered by 96th Street, Fifth Avenue, 106th Street, and First Avenue. At the end of every shift, he stashed the day’s finds at the garage. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

Fela’s stories: Confusion Break Bone

"Abidjan, 2001: I receive an unlikely offer. I’m invited to stage the play Le Fou du Carrefour ['the crossroads’ madman'] in Lagos, Nigeria, under the title Madness Junction. This urban fable was penned by the great Ivorian playwright Hyacinthe Kakou in 1994, and depicts a frenetic African city invaded by garbage and other toxic waste originating from industrialized countries. The city’s arteries are blocked. Vehicles can no longer move freely, workers can no longer get to their respective occupations… The people grumble. The cops beat them down. The economy is blocked, the country is suffocated. Everyone complains, but no one does anything. One day, one of the inhabitants feels he has had enough and starts cleaning the city. ... With these lyrics in mind, here I am, deep in what Fela called the 'underground spiritual game'. Read: the connection to the world of underground energies… The inalienable spirits who keep on fighting, generation after generation, against the gravediggers of Nigeria and Africa. ..."
Pan African Music (Video)

Lagos

Can the Rebirth of a Negro League Stadium Revive a Distressed City?

Hinchliffe Stadium, vacant since 1997, is one of the few stadiums from the Negro leagues still standing.
"PATERSON, N.J. — There used to be a ballpark here, at the corner of Maple and Liberty. Baseball royalty once rounded the bases, and city residents once packed the stands. Now defaced with graffiti, Hinchliffe Stadium looks like a blighted lot about to be razed. Weeds and trees have uprooted the bleachers, and asphalt and trash cover the infield. ... Hinchliffe, vacant since 1997, is one of the few stadiums from the Negro leagues still standing. An architectural gem and a symbol of perseverance amid racial injustice, it became a casualty of this economically distressed city’s more pressing needs. After multiple failed attempts to fund its revival, a ninth-inning save seemed unlikely. Until now. ... After Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Doby followed three months later with the Cleveland Indians, the doors finally opened for players of color, lessening the necessity of Negro leagues. ..."
NY Times

Construction is expected to begin next year, in time for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro leagues.

Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen (1966)

"Beautiful Losers is the second and final novel by Canadian writer and musician Leonard Cohen. It was published in 1966, before he began his career as a singer-songwriter. Set in the Canadian province of Quebec, the story of 17th-century Mohawk saint Catherine Tekakwitha is interwoven with a love triangle between an unnamed anglophone Canadian folklorist; his Native wife, Edith, who has committed suicide; and his best friend, the mystical F, a Member of Parliament and a leader in the Quebec separatist movement. The complex novel makes use of a vast range of literary techniques, and a wealth of allusion, imagery, and symbolism. It is filled with the mysticism, radicalism, sexuality, and drug-taking emblematic of the 1960s era, and is noted for its linguistic, technical, and sexual excesses. ..."
Wikipedia
Visiting Hydra: Leonard Cohen’s Bohemian Idyll
Guardian - Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen: the love affair of a lifetime
amazon
YouTube: Leonard Cohen reading an excerpt from Beatiful Losers

Marianne & Leonard

2008 September: Leonard Cohen, 2009 November: Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen, 2011 June: I'm Your Man, 2012 May: Old Ideas, 2013 February: "Dance Me To The End of Love", 2016 November: The Words and Work of Leonard Cohen, 2017 February: Songs of Love and Hate (1971)

The Unstable Artist Who Helped Invent Expressionism

“Life in the Alps,” a triptych made by the artist from 1917-19.
"... But to linger on Kirchner’s lurid biography would be unfair to the mesmerizing technical genius of his style, amply on display in 'Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,' the Neue Galerie’s generous and essential overview of a peripatetic and unconventional career. Surrounding more or less sober portrait subjects with backgrounds of flat but brilliant color, as Kirchner did, wasn’t just a youthful revolt against the staid academic painting of the late 19th century, or a bid to put German visual culture on the map. (Of course, it did those, too.) It was also an ingenious way to articulate subjective experience in an increasingly materialist modern world. ..."
NY Times
Neue Galerie
MoMA: German Expressionist

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Girl in White Chemise,” 1914.

Tyrone Evans - How Sweet It Is (1980)

"b. Garth Evans, c.1944, Jamaica, West Indies, d. 19 October 2000, New York, USA. While vocalist Evans was enjoying success with the Paragons he also recorded the little known solo side ‘I Don’t Care’, at Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One alongside his early collaborator Bob Andy. ... He embarked on a solo career recording sporadic hits, notably with Lloyd Barnes, although by the late 70s Evans was back at Studio One. Dodd released the sublime, ‘How Sweet It Is’, that revitalised the singer’s career. The song proved a false start following the success of Blondie’s cover version of the Paragons’ ‘The Tide Is High’ that resulted in the re-formation of the group for the release of Sly & Robbie Meet The Paragons and Now. ..."
allmusic
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: How Sweet It Is

Should the House Just Start Jailing Trump Officials?

"What just happened: The White House declared war on the House impeachment inquiry on Tuesday in an eight-page letter to Democratic leaders that condemned the investigation as 'illegitimate' and 'a naked political strategy' to undo the 2016 election, portending a legal standoff with Congress that could result in a constitutional crisis. The letter (which led the prominent libertarian legal scholar Ilya Somin to wonder on Facebook whether 'the White House counsel was sick the day they taught law at law school') came shortly after the administration blocked Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, from testifying before Congress about President Trump’s efforts to pressure the president of Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden. ... The debate: How should the House respond? ..."
NY Times

Éthiopiques 30: Mistakes on Purpose - Girma Bèyènè & Akalé Wubé

"The two-decade-strong Éthiopiques series on the French label Buda Musique has shone a light on the fruitful output of Ethiopia in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with strikingly fresh amalgams of traditional flavors infused in Western-world genres including jazz (such as Mulatu Astatke’s “Ethio-jazz”), funk and soul. Éthiopiques Volume 30, entitled Mistakes on Purpose, pairs pianist Girma Bèyènè—who can be heard on the very first Éthiopiques collection—with the Paris-based Ethio-revivalists Akalé Wubé. This isn’t the first time contemporary material has been released under the Éthiopiques banner—for example, there have been new collaborations between Ethiopian legends and the Boston jazz group Either/Orchestra—and it’s all in line with the series’ classic 'Golden Years' aesthetic. ..."
The Pulse
bandcamp (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Mèlèwètesh Menèw, Ené Nègn Bay Manèsh, For Amha, Enkèn Yèlélébesh

Your Guide to Jamaica: Queens’ First, Bustling Downtown

"Since its urbanization in the early twentieth century, Jamaica has been a mix of hundreds of ethnicities, religions, and styles. Considered Queens’ 'downtown' well before the build-up of Long Island City and Flushing, Jamaica became a popular destination in the 1940s for black families fleeing a crowded Harlem, who found they were able to rent apartments and buy homes after whites moved on to then-segregated communities like nearby St. Albans (now also a predominantly black and immigrant neighborhood). ..."
Voice

Jamaica Avenue reggae shrine VP Records.

2012 August: Springfield Gardens, Queens, 2017 May: The Queens landscape by Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld, 2017 June: Saving Queens’ Secret Wetlands, 2018 April: Corona Is Queens’ Cultural Smorgasbord, 2018 April: The Many Languages (and Foods) of Jackson Heights

Lost Blue Note Albums: 12 Buried Treasures You Need To Discover

"Numbering around 1,000 albums, the Blue Note discography is one of the most revered in the history of jazz. Ranging from bebop and hard bop to soul jazz, post-bop and even avant-garde music, Blue Note’s most essential albums should be in every jazz fan’s collection. But not everything this iconic label recorded during its most prolific years in the 50s and 60s was released, as Grammy-winning producer and Mosaic Records co-founder, Michael Cuscuna, discovered in 1975 when he was given permission to go through the then dormant company’s archives. He found over 100 albums’ worth of sessions that had never been heard before and, understandably, wanted to share them with the world. The results were an extensive archival release programme of lost Blue Note albums that could finally receive their due. ..."
udiscover (Video)

Forget What You Know About the Black Sox Scandal - John Thorn

The 1919 White Sox, before the Black Sox scandal came to light.
"A century ago this week, eight players from the Chicago White Sox conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the World Series, enabling the underdog Cincinnati Reds — and bettors in the know — to win. The scandal, which was uncovered almost a year later, has come to be seen as baseball’s 'loss of innocence,' the cause of fans’ diminished feelings for the game they once adored and a mortal blow to the nation’s confidence as it entered the 1920s, a decade of disrespect for elders, contempt for institutions and worship of the fast life and the fast buck. After a puzzlingly inept performance by his White Sox in Game 1, the club’s founder and owner, Charles Comiskey, heard rumors that the 'sporting set' had been looking for a big score and that maybe some of his players had agreed to throw the series. ..."
NY Times
W - Black Sox Scandal

Buck Weaver, left, and Swede Risberg, who were indicted in the Black Sox scandal.

In Praise of Graffiti: The Fire Down Below - Richard Goldstein (December 1980)

"John Lindsay hated graffiti. He vowed to wipe it off the face of the IRT, and allocated $10 million to its obliteration. But the application of vast resources is no match for disciplined determination, as we should have learned in Vietnam. Graf­fiti survived Lindsay’s defoliation plan, and it has thrived on every subsequent attempt to curb its spread. In 1973, there may have been a few hundred ghetto kids writing in a few definable styles. Now thousands call themselves 'writers.' They come from ev­ery social stratum and range in age from nine to 25. Their signatures — called 'tags' — have transformed the subway into what the Times calls 'some godawful forest.' And now that the perpetrators have moved above ground, trucks and elevators, monuments and vacant walls look as if they have suddenly sprouted vines. It is, says Claes Oldenburg, 'a big bouquet from Latin America.' It is, says Rich­ard Ravitch of the MTA, 'a symbol that we have lost control.' ..."
Voice

Janie Cohen: Rogue Cloth Work

"I carried a security blanket as a little kid. It was a pale, bluish-green with a satiny binding across the top, which I sucked on. I realized years later why the smell of mildew was comforting to me. When I was 4, my family moved to Palo Alto for my father’s sabbatical year. My mom worried that if I lost my blanket it would scar me for life. So, with my permission, she cut it into 8 pieces and meted them out to me during the course of the year. I think I consumed the whole blanket. Cloth carries associations of comfort, security, warmth, not just for me, but historically. For centuries, cloth was central in the lives of women: spinning, weaving, sewing, darning, mending, quilting, swaddling, shrouding. I am drawn to its histories and humanity, its evocative traces of age and use. ..."
Rogue Cloth Work: About
Rogue Cloth Work
‘Rogue Cloth Work’: Janie Cohen at the Supreme Court

'Transcription of handwritten note: Testmony (Detail) by Janie Cohen

Giovanni Boccaccio’s One and Only Good Book

Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
"Decameron—that’s a long book. I powered through it this past summer. I was like a self-propelled lawn mower, had to be. I had a lot of big books on my to-do list. Each one of ’em was allotted two weeks and no more. I 'had a good experience' with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, though I did not love it. I only liked the stuff where Boccaccio speaks in his own voice. That is, I liked the frame narrative and the interruptions. He does that thing medieval writers do: he plays dumb. And I love it when authors play dumb. But 95 percent of the book is devoted to ten young people telling their stories—you know the deal—and those I did not care for. ..."
The Paris Review
New Yorker: Renaissance Man
W - Giovanni Boccaccio
U. Chicago: Boccaccio - A Critical Guide to the Complete Works

Circes: illustration of one of the women featured the 1374 biographies of 106 famous women, De Claris Mulieribus, by Boccaccio – from a German translation of 1541

Before & After ‘The B-52’s’

"The B-52’s were ’70s punks molded not from the syringes and leather of New York City, but from the campy detritus you might have found in the thrift stores and garage sales of their home of Athens, Ga.: bright clothes, toy pianos, old issues of Vogue, tall wigs and discarded vinyl. They channeled spy soundtracks, exotica, surf music, long-abandoned dance crazes and garage rock — music that was gathering dust by their 1979 self-titled debut LP. Much of it (alongside their obsessions with Yoko Ono and the Velvet Underground) would reveal itself as bedrock of alternative culture years later. The B-52’s were a sui generis clash of sounds that help bring punk to the suburban kids more likely to watch 'Saturday Night Live' than visit CBGB: Fred Schneider’s sing-shout poetry, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s alien girl-group harmonies, Ricky Wilson’s tricky guitar riffs and Keith Strickland’s art-funky drums. ..."
NY Times (Audio)

2008 October: The B-52's, 2012 October: The B-52's -1, 2013 May: "Private Idaho", "Give Me Back My Man", 2014 August: "Rock Lobster", 2016 January: Invisible Hits: The Miracle of The B52's, Live in the Early Days