Pierre Henry: The Avant-Garde Composer Who Shaped Rock’s Future

Pierre Henry at Studio D’Essai in 1951.
"A word to the wise: should you ever be asked, in the course of your next pub quiz, which young revolutionary was responsible for proclaiming, 'It is necessary to destroy music,' your mind might reflexively scroll through a Rolodex of iconoclasts and provocateurs including the likes of John Lydon, Frank Zappa, Thurston Moore, Conrad Schnitzler and Brian Eno. Credible guesses all; but these words were in fact expressed by Pierre Henry, a trailblazer in the sound-sourcing and -manipulating principles of musique concrète, in a short, pugnacious essay entitled For Thinking About New Music, which the composer, who was born on 9 December 1927, wrote as long ago as 1947, when he was just 20. ..."
udiscover (Video)
W - Pierre Henry
W - Musique concrète
Discogs (Video)

Around the World in 5 Kids’ Games

Girls playing a game from Yemen at a middle school in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
" On every schoolyard across the world you will find games invented by children. Hand-clapping routines, rhyming stanzas and intricate rules for tiny competitions; games born of the creativity, insight and idiosyncrasy of children’s minds. In New York City’s diverse playgrounds, kids play games in Haitian Creole, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Polish, just to name a few. Unlike nursery rhymes, lullabies, or children’s songs these games are conceived of, built upon and passed along by kids, largely by girls. Irene Chagal, who researched the history and spread of hand-clapping games for her documentary 'Let’s Get the Rhythm: The Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack,' describes these games as 'playground lore,' a rich body of folk literature that is just outside the attention of most adults. ..."
NY Times (Video)

A group from the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Occult information

Vanessa Redgrave and Madeleine Potter in The Bostonians, directed by James Ivory, 1984
"'On the whole', wrote R. H. Hutton, reviewing The Bostonians in the Spectator in 1886, 'though we can truly say that we have never read any work of Mr. Henry James which had in it so much that was new and original, we must also say that we have never read any tale of his that had in it so much of long-winded reiteration and long-drawn-out disquisition.' Of all James’s major novels from his middle phase, it is The Bostonians which so often seems to elicit qualifying 'thoughs' and 'buts', even (or especially) from its defenders and admirers. Indeed, its creator got a pre-emptive strike in first, remarking in a letter to his brother William that 'all the middle part is too diffuse and insistent – far too describing and explaining and expatiating'. ..."
TLS

2018 January: The Bostonians (1886), 2018 September: The Golden Bowl (1904), 2018 December: Washington Square (1880)

Hexagrams - Anna Blackmer (2019)

"These Hexagrams, written over a period of 30 years in response to the great Chinese book of divination and cosmology, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, form an autobiography of sorts. They also operate as meditations on the landscape, ciphers yearning to be free, arguments with the self, and snapshots of ordinary moments in flux. Anna Blackmer is a third-generation Californian who migrated to Vermont in the early 1970’s. She has an MFA in Writing from Goddard College, and worked as a poet in the schools, a bookstore owner, a freelance arts critic, and for many years taught writing and literature at Burlington College. She currently lives and writes in Essex Junction, Vermont."
Fomite Press
Quick Lit Review: 'Hexagrams' by Anna Blackmer
amazon

A Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition

"On December 3, the Green New Deal for Europe launched its new landmark report, A Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition. The publication coincides with the arrival of the new European Commission, which has promised to deliver a 'green deal' within its first 100 days (read the leaked contents of that 'green deal' here) — an all-together uninspiring vision that we believe is doomed to fail. The report sets out an alternative vision for a Green New Deal — one that gets Europe to carbon neutrality by 2030 while delivering environmental justice across the continent and around the world. ..."
ROAR
A Blueprint for Europe's Just Transition | Green New Deal
YouTube: 10 Pillars of the Green New Deal for Europe

The Return of Martin Guerre - Daniel Vigne (1982)

"The Return of Martin Guerre (Le Retour de Martin Guerre) is a 1982 French film directed by Daniel Vigne, and starring Gérard Depardieu. It was based on a case of imposture in 16th century France, involving Martin Guerre. The film relates a historical case of alleged identity theft. Martin Guerre leaves his young wife in a small French village to go fight in a war, and to travel. Eight or nine years later, Martin (played by Depardieu) returns to resume his life. The man is initially acknowledged and welcomed by the wife, family, and friends because he knows the intimate details of his former life. As time passes, however, vagabonds identify Martin as Arnaud of the neighbouring village of Tilh, but the villagers dismiss these claims as lies. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: The Return of Martin Guerre By Vincent Canby (June 10, 1983)
amazon
YouTube: The Return of Martin Guerre (4K Restoration) | Official US Trailer

A House on Royal Street

The Seignouret-Brulatour building and interior courtyard after a six-year historic renovation.
"What lies beneath the floors or behind the walls in your home? Archaeologists, curators, historians, and preservationists have been seeking answers to these questions at a Creole townhouse in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Begun in 1816, this three-story brick and stucco building located at 520 Royal Street was constructed for François Seignouret, a native of Bordeaux and veteran of the Battle of New Orleans who rose to become one of the city’s most prominent antebellum merchants. Also hailing from Bordeaux and a merchant in his own right, Pierre Ernest Brulatour purchased the house in 1870, and members of the Brulatour family continued to reside there for several decades. During the Crescent City’s nineteenth-century heyday, the house formed part of a larger urban compound that provided both Seignouret and Brulatour with commercial and utilitarian space on the lower levels and refined living areas upstairs. ..."
64 Parishes

18th-century trash becomes 21st-century treasure with these pieced-together fragments of a tin-glazed earthenware, or faïence, vessel recovered from a historic household trash pit.

Burning Deck Postcards

"I’ve been thinking for a while on what to write about Burning Deck’s Postcards, published in a series of four sets from 1974–1978, which are part of The Little Magazine in America Collection at DU Libraries. Where, exactly, does one start when addressing a small piece among nearly sixty years of Burning Deck publications, of Burning Deck publishers Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s presence in American poetry? To briefly revisit the last couple posts in this Commentary series, I’ll point out that Burning Deck published Pam Rehm’s The Garment in Which No One Had Slept in 1993, as well as Barbara Guest’s The Countess from Minneapolis in 1976 and her Biography in 1980. And Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop were contributing editors for apex of the M. ..."
Jacket2

Twin Peaks Actually Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demystifies It All

"I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algorithms can act like a nagging friend, suggesting a video for days until I finally give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tantalizing title: 'Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)'. First of all, before, during, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, theories were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Facebook groups. After the mindblowing Episode 8, they went into overdrive, including the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *overlayed* on each other. And I highlighted one in depth journey through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cultural event for this very site. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2008 September: Twin Peaks, 2010 March: Twin Peaks: How Laura Palmer's death marked the rebirth of TV drama, 2011 October: Twin Peaks: The Last Days, 2014 October: Welcome to Twin Peaks, 2015 June: David Lynch: ‘I’ve always loved Laura Palmer’, 2015 July: Twin Peaks Maps, 2016 May: Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played..., September: Twin Peaks Tarot Cards For The Magician Who Longs To See Through The Darkness Of Future Past, 2014 September: David Lynch: The Unified Field, 2014 December: David Lynch’s Bad Thoughts - J. Hoberman, 2015 March: Lumière and Company (1995), 2015 April: David Lynch Creates a Very Surreal Plug for Transcendental Meditation, 2015 December: What Is “Lynchian”?, 2017 March: Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me, 2017 April: Trading Card Set of the Week – Twin Peaks (Star Pics, 1991), 2017 April: Your Complete Guide to Rewatching "Twin Peaks", 2018 February: Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?, 2018 March: Twin Peaks VR Lets You Live Inside A Dream, 2018 November: An Echo Of Owls: watching repeats of Twin Peaks eleven years later

The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before

"New York City has changed a lot over the past 40 years. But the M.T.A subway map, designed in 1979, has largely endured. The city has changed drastically over the past 40 years, yet the M.T.A. map designed in 1979 has largely endured. New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s. Crime was on the rise, and subway ridership had dropped to its lowest level since 1918. The Hertz firm’s map was digitized in 1998, with many of the design elements from the 1979 map incorporated into the new version. The primary designer assigned to the 1979 redesign, Nobuyuki Siraisi, was a trained sculptor and painter. He prepared for the task of representing the subway lines using an unconventional method. ..."
NY Times

Their Soccer Club Vanished. They Kept Coming.

Curtis and his colleagues maintain Gigg Lane out of a combination of love, pride and hope.
"BURY, England — Michael Curtis still comes to Gigg Lane every day, Monday through Friday. He pulls in at 7:30 a.m., just as he used to, and makes the short walk to the building past a makeshift shrine — a jumble of different teams’ scarves, flags and jerseys from the days when Bury Football Club was fighting for its life. Half an hour or so later, the others start to arrive. ... It has been three months since Bury, unable to meet its financial obligations or find an owner to take over from the reviled Steve Dale, was thrown out of the English Football League. It is only a couple of weeks before it will be formally liquidated, before the club that traces its roots to 1885 ceases to exist entirely. ..."
NY Times
Bury, the inside story: Neil Danns explains what life was really like at a dying football club
W - Bury F.C.
Guardian - The Guardian view on the collapse of Bury FC: a tragedy bigger than mere football

It has been three months since Bury was thrown out of the English Football League.

Amy Sillman

Dub Stamp (detail), 2018–19, acrylic, ink, and silk screen on multiple sheets of paper. Installation view
"Amy Sillman (born 1956, Detroit) is a painter, drawer, writer and maker of zines and animated videos. Her work in all media is characterized by a playful, incisive humor and a direct, exuberant engagement with materials and ideas. Drawing on all spheres of learning, ancient and contemporary, as well as her own experiments with paint, paper, and other technologies in the studio for inspiration, she creates a restless, rollicking, panoply of ever-evolving images. ..."
Brooklyn Rail
Frieze: The Vicarious Warmth of Amy Sillman’s Paintings
The 5-Minute Journal: Artist Amy Sillman Opens Her Diary for Galerie
W - Amy Sillman
‘I’m working with and against painting’ – an interview with Amy Sillman
YouTube: Amy Sillman on Landline at Camden Arts Centre, 2018

SK37, SK38, 2017. Acrylic, ink and silkscreen on paper

Live in Lesotho - Hugh Masekela and Company

"For an artist as prolific and famous as Hugh Masekela, it is remarkable that the music and story of Live in Lesotho has remained buried for so long. On 28th December 1980, Masekela together with Miriam Makeba staged an unprecedented stadium-filled concert in Lesotho, an event that deeply challenged and disturbed apartheid South Africa’s oppressive fabric. It also uplifted a crowd of more than 75,000 South Africans and their fellow Southern African revelers. This recording evidences an extraordinary confluence of experiences linking music, defiance, exile, and reconnection. At the time South Africa’s front line neighbors Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, and Mozambique gave safe haven to South African volunteers going into exile to join organizations of the liberation movement. ..."
Africa is a Country: Music is the weapon
Trumpeter Hugh Masekela’s 1980 protest concert, Live in Lesotho, reissued on vinyl (Audio)
Live in Lesotho (Audio)
YouTube: Part Of A Whole (Live In Lesotho), Stimela (Live in Lesotho - Live)

2016 August: The Chisa Years: 1965-1975 (Rare and Unreleased), 2018 November: Jazz on 45 Vol. 5 Mixape – Hugh Masekela Special Edition

Inside a New York Depression-era “relief station”

"Saul Kovner was a Russia-born artist best known for his poetic glimpses of 1930s New York, from East Side tenement backyards to kids playing in a snow-blanketed Tompkins Square Park. But one painter Kovner completed in 1939 tells a story about what it was like to be poor in Depression-era New York. 'Relief Station' depicts a group of mostly strangers sitting on wood benches in a drab facility, facing forward as if they’re waiting for their names to be called. Where is this group? In a place New York new longer has, a relief station—where jobless people with no money to buy food or pay rent sought what was known as 'home relief.' ..."
Ephemeral New York

Anarchy Around The World: Punk Goes Global

“Forty years after it officially crash-landed in our midst, it’s easy to believe punk ‘sold out’ its lofty original ideals, not least because its leading acts all eventually signed to major labels and played ball with The Man. Yet regardless of its shortcomings, punk still had a seismic global impact during the mid-to-late 70s and its legacy can still be felt in everything from its inherent DIY ethos to its (broadly) anti-sexist stance. However, while countless revisions of this flawed – yet exhilarating – period have since been published, they nearly always fix punk as a purely transatlantic phenomenon. … This is entirely understandable, as both nations have reason to claim punk as their own. In North America, the 70s had barely dawned before New York was spawning remarkable proto-punk acts such as Suicide and New York Dolls, while across 1974-76, trailblazing US refuseniks such as Pere Ubu, Patti Smith, Ramones and Blondie were already hurling out remarkable, oeuvre-defining discs. …”
uDiscover (Audio)

Sex Pistols

The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Company

Sylvia Beach in front of her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, Paris, May 1, 1941
"One hundred years ago this month, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop opened its doors for the first time in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. As we celebrate the centennial, the popular story of the shop’s founding is sure to be retold. The origin story of the shop often goes as follows: during the 1920s, Sylvia Beach, a devoted enthusiast for the literary genius of her time, decided to set up shop a few steps from the Luxembourg Gardens. From there, Beach’s biography is often framed as a Cinderella story of Modernism. When James Joyce asked her, an amateur bookseller, to publish Ulysses, and she rose to the occasion, she underwent a transformation from an anonymous shopkeeper into an internationally famous figure. ..."
NYBooks

George Whitman with a group of women at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1980

2012 December: Shakespeare and Company, 2016 January: What It's Like to Live Inside the Legendary Paris Bookstore Shakespeare & Co., 2016 September: Shakespeare and Company, Paris - A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

7 Days: The City Below (Dec. 6, 1989)

"... Imagine grabbing Manhattan by the Empire State Building and pulling the en­tire island up by its roots. Imagine shaking it. Imagine millions of wires and hundreds of thousands of cables freeing themselves from great hunks of rock and tons of musty and polluted dirt. Imagine a sewer system and a set of water lines each three times as long as the Hudson River. Picture mysterious little vaults hidden just beneath the crust of the sidewalk, a sweaty grid of steam pipes 103 miles long, a turn-of-the-18th-century merchant ship buried under Front Street, rusty old natural-gas lines that could be wrapped 23 times around Manhattan, and huge, bombproof concrete tubes that descend almost 80 stories into the ground. ..."
Voice

An Illustrated Map of Every Known Object in Space: Asteroids, Dwarf Planets, Black Holes & Much More

"Name all the things in space in 20 minutes. Impossible, you say? Well, if there’s anyone who might come close to summarizing the contents of the universe in less than half an hour, with the aid of a handy infographic map also available as a poster, it's physicist Dominic Walliman, who has explored other vast scientific regions in condensed, yet comprehensive maps on physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and computer science. These are all academic disciplines with more or less defined boundaries. But space? It’s potentially endless, a point Walliman grants up front. Space is 'infinitely big and there are an infinite number of things in it,' he says. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

French New Wave film posters: ‘They broke the rules’

L-r: Lola (1961) by Maciej Hibner, Mon Oncle (1958) by Pierre Étaix, Alphaville (1965) by Andrzej Krajewski.
"When Tony Nourmand began collecting movie posters and other print memorabilia from the French New Wave 30 years ago, he could usually pick them up for next to nothing. 'I remember going to Paris and walking into poster shops and digging for hours,' he recalls, 'and then I’d suddenly find a poster for Breathless and it was 50 francs, and I’d be so excited. Nobody else seemed to care.' ... The poster design for films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and other boundary-pushing French directors of the late 1950s and 60s was anything but. For evidence, take a look at Nourmand’s hefty French New Wave: A Revolution in Design. ..."
Guardian

Redefining the Black Mountain Poets

Drawing of project for Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina.
"Grouping writers into 'schools' has always been problematic. The so-called Black Mountain poets never identified themselves as such, but the facts of their union spring from a remarkable instance of artistic community: Black Mountain College and the web of interactions the place occasioned. Founded in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1933 and closed by 1956, the college was one of the most significant experiments in arts and education of the twentieth century. In recent years, a number of international exhibitions and publications have showcased the range of artwork produced at the college’s two campuses, the first situated in the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, and the second at Lake Eden in the Swannanoa Valley. The list of famous names associated with Black Mountain is as impressive as it is unlikely, given that the college never housed more than a hundred students and faculty at a time, often far fewer. ..."
The Paris Review

The Black Mountain School of Poetry

2010 June: Black Mountain poets, 2013 August: The Black Mountain Review, 2015 October: Leap Before You Look - Black Mountain College 1933 - 1957

A Montreal Bagel War Unites Rival Kings

Fresh bagels being removed from a wood-burning oven at Fairmount Bagel, a Montreal institution.
"Irwin Shlafman, the owner of Fairmount Bagel, boasts that his bagels were the first in outer space, when his astronaut cousin brought them to the International Space Station. He also says Fairmount, founded in 1919, is the oldest bagel joint in town. Just don’t tell that to his arch-bagel-rival, Joe Morena, the jovial owner of nearby St-Viateur Bagel. He contends that his bagel place, opened in 1957, is Montreal’s longest continuously running bagel outfit, since Fairmount was closed for a time. ..."
NY Times

The Mile End neighborhood in Montreal, where hipsters and Hasidim often cross paths.

2013 October: Montreal Metro, 2014 July: Montreal, tales of gentrification in a bohemian city, 2016 August: Montreal-style bagel, 2016 August: Montreal-style bagel, 2017 April: St-Henri, the 26th of August - Shannon Walsh (2011), 2017 May: A family affair: St-Viateur Bagel celebrates 60 years, 2017 August: Saint Catherine Street / Underground City, Montreal, 2018 February: Counter Intelligence: Montréal, 2018 April: Le Spectrum de Montréal, 2019 November: The Vehicule Poets

Coyote Leaves The Res: The Art Of Harry Fonseca

Harry Fonseca, Carmen—First Act, 2006.
"... Joni Mitchell’s song, 'Coyote,' about a lover she describes as a shape-shifting trickster, seems a fitting soundtrack to the Autry Museum of the American West’s Coyote Leaves the Res: The Art of Harry Fonseca. The beautiful exhibition is the inaugural presentation of Fonseca’s work taken from the museum’s acquisition of the artist’s vast estate. In it, viewers meet an evolving humanization of the artist’s character of Coyote, an elusive figure who could very well have slipped into Mitchell’s heart and music. The vibrant, uniquely-Fonseca exhibition includes paintings, sketches, and lithographs primarily depicting Coyote, a trickster and storyteller who can move between different worlds. ..."
Riot Material
Coyote Leaves the Res: The Art of Harry Fonseca (Video)
Coyote as Clown, Cowboy, and Creator

Harry Fonseca, And Still We Dance, 1995.

Debatable: Turducken is blasphemy

"Despite what the poultry-industrial complex might have you believe, the meat of Thanksgiving is not turkey but tension: What celebration of shared humanity would be complete without an argument? (The gratitude part is important, too, I’m told, but we’ll get to that later.) In an effort to stoke festive controversy, I asked Pete Wells, The Times’s chief restaurant critic, Kim Severson, an Atlanta-based Food reporter, Julia Moskin, also a Food reporter, and Sam Sifton, the Food editor, to take sides in some of the holiday’s most entrenched culinary conflicts. ..."
NY Times: Sweet Potatoes Are Overrated. Turducken Is Performative.

Sun Ra Arkestra’s June Tyson Was the Queen of Afrofuturism

"If Sun Ra was the king of Afro-futurism, then Arkestra vocalist June Tyson was the queen. Married to Richard Wilkerson, who was the Sun Ra Arkestra’s light and sound designer and former manager, Tyson was the only woman invited into Sun Ra’s musical universe during her tenure with the group, which lasted from 1968 to her death in 1992. In addition to singing and reciting poetry, she designed and sewed costumes, choreographed dancers, managed the money on the road, and occasionally housed Arkestra members in her New York apartment. Tyson, born in Albemarle, North Carolina in 1936, had been dancing and singing in a series of outdoor Broadway musicals in New York’s Jackie Robinson Park, presented by promoter Simon Bly. ..."
bandcamp (Audio)
June Tyson: 50 Miles of Elbow Room (Video)
“Somebody Else’s World” By Harmony Holiday
W - June Tyson
Sundazed (Audio)
amazon: Saturnian Queen Of The Sun Ra Arkestra

June Tyson with the Sun Ra Arkestra in Willisau, Switzerland, February 1980.

Feminize Your Canon: Mary Heaton Vorse

One of the principal figures around which the Passaic, New Jersey, textile strike is surging is Mary H. Vorse, socialist, short story writer, globe trotter and correspondent.
"Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel I’ve Come To Stay calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life’s 'blue serge lining'—a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world. The lining stands for the inevitable conformity of class, getting, if not quite under the wearer’s skin, then next to it, holding her upright, constraining her imagination and her freedom. Camilla is constantly on the run from it. She embraces the pretensions of bohemian Greenwich Village—anarchist friends, artistic aspirations, a Polish violinist lover, and nights spent in smoky bars. ..."
The Paris Review
W - Mary Heaton Vorse
New Yorker: Mary Heaton Vorse
"THE TROUBLE AT LAWRENCE" (EXCERPT) - HARPER'S WEEKLY - 1912
The Women's Peace Party and Pacifism During WWI

American delegates to the International Congress of Women held in the Netherlands in 1915. The conference adopted much of the platform of Women's Peace Party, which Jane Addams and others had organized few months earlier in Washington.

Veniero’s has the East Village’s best neon sign

"On dark, chilly fall nights, Veniero’s neon sign glows with warmth and possibilities—of cannoli, tiramisu, pignoli, or any of this pasticceria’s other heavenly cakes, cookies, and Italian pastries tempting hungry customers from the long glass counter. The shop, on East 11th Street between Second and First Avenues, has a familiar history. In 1885, Antonio Veniero left his Southern Italy hometown and sailed to America. After working in a candy factory for eight years, he’d saved enough money to open a social club at 342 East 11th Street —then an enclave of Italian immigrants amid a larger neighborhood of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and other newcomers. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest - Bill Evans (2016)

"... Some Other Time: The Lost Session From the Black Forest is one of these. It was recorded when [Bill] Evans was on tour in Europe with a trio that included Eddie Gomez on bass and, on drums, a young Jack DeJohnette, who would go on to much greater fame with Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, and as a leader himself. It was cut between stops on a European tour by German producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt, with the idea that the rights and a release plan would be figured out later. ... The piano/bass/drums trio setting is where Evans did his most important and lasting work. He thrived on both the limitations and the possibilities of the set-up, and returned to it constantly over the course of his quarter-century recording career. ..."
Pitchfork
Jazz Times
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Some Other Time (Mini-Documentary)

2019 June: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 - Bill Evan (2005)