Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Le Passeur, c.1870
"Corot is a pivotal figure in landscape painting. His work simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. Of him Claude Monet exclaimed in 1897, 'There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing.' His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Picasso pay overt homage to Corot’s influence. Historians have divided his work into periods, but the points of division are often vague, as he often completed a picture years after he began it. ..."
Atlas of Places
W - Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
YouTube: Camille Corot: A collection of 710 paintings

Paysage d'été avec sentier et lac, c.1870

During ‘The Last Dance,’ I’ll remember how Michael Jordan brought me closer to the most important man in my life

"Shortly before midnight on June 14, 1998, my Uncle John and I knew it was over. Only the light from a dim floor lamp, the fish tank and his TV — and our joint euphoria — illuminated his studio apartment. We high-fived. We hugged. And we yelled. Moments earlier, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won their sixth title in eight seasons, and did so in the absolutely most Jordan way possible. On fumes, Jordan drilled a clutch jumper over Bryon Russell of the Utah Jazz. The shot proved to be the game winner and life, as Uncle John and I knew it then, would be different moving forward. We just didn’t realize how different. The Bulls’ 1997-98 season is the subject of ESPN’s The Last Dance, which premieres Sunday in five weekly installments. ..."
theundefeated (Video)
W - The Last Dance (TV series)

Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective

"Roland isn’t just a synthesizer company. Its products are tied to the  development of electronic music as a genre and cultural movement. It’s impossible think of dance music’s trajectory from 1980 onwards without the TR-808 or TR-909—not to mention the TB-303 or the SH-101. In a new documentary called Land of the Rising Sound, Alex Ball sets out to explore this history. It tells the story of Roland through the machines themselves, revealing how minute technical innovations and inventions could come to revolutionize how we view and create sound."
Watch A New 70-Minute Documentary On Legendary Synth Company Roland (Video)
YouTube: Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective 1:12:00

Dame's Rocket

"Hesperis matronalis is an herbaceous plant species in the family Brassicaceae. It has numerous common names, including dame's rocket, damask-violet, dame's-violet, dames-wort, dame's gilliflower, night-scented gilliflower, queen's gilliflower, rogue's gilliflower, summer lilac, sweet rocket, mother-of-the-evening, and winter gilliflower. These plants are biennials or short-lived perennials, native to Eurasia and cultivated in many other areas of the world for their attractive, spring-blooming flowers. In some of those areas, it has escaped from cultivation and become a weed species. The genus name Hesperis was probably given because the scent of the flowers becomes more conspicuous towards evening. ..."
W - Hesperis matronalis
YouTube: Dame's Rocket: Edible & Other Uses

The City Reliquary

"The City Reliquary is a not-for-profit community museum and civic organization located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The museum traces the history of New York City's five boroughs with its exhibitions of cultural ephemera and relics. Besides a permanent display of New York City artifacts, the City Reliquary also hosts rotating exhibits of community collections and annual cultural events. ... Many items in the City Reliquary's permanent collection have some connection to historical events in New York, such as a shrine to Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers, memorabilia from both the 1939–40 and 1964–65 New York World's Fairs; and an interactive display relating the career of Little Egypt, a 19th-century burlesque dancer. Dave Herman’s collection of Statue of Liberty figures, which formed the original core collection, is also on view. ..."
Wikipedia
The City Reliquary
Atlas Obscura
YouTube: Do You Remember This? - City Reliquary Museum

Y Records

Pop Group
"Spanning reverb-heavy punk, disco and dub, in just three years, Y Records helped define a nascent British sound. As the 1980s dawned, two of post punk’s most inventive and closely related groups were without a label. The Pop Group had cut their ties with Jake Riviera’s Radar Records after their 1979 album Y, while The Slits were dropped by Island Records despite the equally pivotal LP, Cut. Enter their manager, Dick O’Dell, who founded Y Records to release a double-sided single, The Pop Group’s ‘Where There’s A Will There’s A Way’ and The Slits ‘In The Beginning There Was Rhythm’. ..."
The rebellious post-punk sound of Y Records (Video)
W - Y Records
Discogs

Y Pants - Water Wing

Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust

Musee d'Orsay
"... The Musée du Louvre in Paris has reported a tenfold increase in web traffic, from 40,000 to 400,000 visitors per day. Visits to the websites of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London are also up by huge multiples. Audiences are seeking out arts material for children — the Metropolitan Museum of Art reports an elevenfold uptick to #MetKids, its youth education initiative. Remember just a decade ago, when the Met raised hackles, within and beyond its walls, for its ambitious digitization initiative, as if it were dangerous to offer more than 400,000 high-resolution, free-to-download images of the collection? No one’s saying that now. ..."
NY Times


Uffizi Gallery

How To Buy John Coltrane: 11 Essential Albums

"In jazz circles, the smallest mention of John Coltrane usually invokes a mood of hushed reverence, and the discovery of a previously unreleased album, Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album, promises a Holy Grail-like revelation for fans. That’s because Trane – as his disciples refer to him – is regarded as a deity whose extraordinary musical powers far exceed those of other mere mortals. Indeed, since his death, on 17 July 1967, Coltrane and his music, aided by its pronounced spiritual and metaphysical dimensions, has inspired a kind of religious devotion that no other jazz musician has experienced (there’s even a church named after him in San Francisco – the St John Coltrane Church). But the sheer amount of his music can be intimidating, so how do newcomers start to buy John Coltrane? ..."
udiscover (Video)

In 3 steps, fold a T-shirt into a balaclava in 30 seconds (no elastic required)

"Do the elastics on your face mask hurt your ears? Would you rather not pay money on Amazon AMZN, -0.08% for a face mask that could take weeks to arrive? Do you need to go to the store in a hurry? Pull up a seat. Ronit Bose Roy, a Mumbai-based Twitter TWTR, +1.00% user whose near-325,000 followers include Salman Rushdie, showed the world how to fold a T-shirt into a face mask in 30 seconds. As of Thursday, his video has received more than 1.8 million views.
Step 1: Pull the T-shirt over your head until the neck opening lines up with your nose.
Step 2: Fold the bottom of the shirt up once, and double-fold it down across your face.
Step 3: Criss-cross the back of the T-shirt once and pull up over the top of your head.
Done and done!
MarketWatch (Video)
The Atlantic: The Real Reason to Wear a Mask

Rolling Stones - Living in a Ghost Town (2020) / The Specials - Ghost Town (1981)

"... ‘Living In A Ghost Town’, despite being The Stones’ first original song since 2012, is a similarly rushed and half-baked comment on our current predicament. Aiming at The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ and ending up like a deep bluesy take on Hard-Fi’s ‘Cash Machine’, it finds Jagger tremulous, forlorn and a little angry that humanity is no longer free to amass at his electrified gates. 'Feel like a ghost / Living in a ghost town,' he complains, strutting along palatial hallways to make his own bloody sandwich, 'I’m going nowhere, shut up all alone / So much time to lose just staring at my phone'. As songs about doing nothing go, he certainly doesn’t seem to have spent his spare time thinking too hard. ..."
NME
YouTube: Rolling Stones - Living in a Ghost Town
YouTube: The Specials - Ghost Town

2015 August: Exile on Main Street (1972), 2015 October: "Let's Spend the Night Together" / "Ruby Tuesday" (1967), 2015 December: Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971), 2016 January: Some Girls (1978), 2016 January: The Rolling Stones (EP), 2016 March: Five by Five (EP - 1964), 2016 May: "The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965", 2016 December: Singles Collection: The London Years (1989), 2017 June: Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), 2017 September: "Sister Morphine" - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull (1969), 2018 March: "Miss You" (1978) , 2019 February: Which Rolling Stones Records Should I Buy?
2009 October: The Specials, 2912 September: Ghost Town, 2013 November: Too Much Too Young - The Special AKA (1980), 2015 April: The Specials (1979)

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Revising

"There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—'Song of Myself,' 'The Sleepers,' 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,' and 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed'—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. ..."
The Paris Review

2012 August: Walt Whitman

Willem Dafoe Breaks Down His Career

"Vanity Fair: Willem Dafoe discusses the roles that make up his film career, including 'The Wooster Group,' 'Heaven's Gate,' 'The Loveless,' 'Platoon,' 'The Last Temptation of Christ,' 'Wild at Heart,' 'The Boondock Saints,' 'Shadow of the Vampire,' 'Spider-Man,' 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,' 'Antichrist,' 'The Florida Project,' 'At Eternity's Gate,' 'The Lighthouse' and 'Motherless Brooklyn.' You can see Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse and Motherless Brooklyn in theaters now!"
YouTube: Willem Dafoe Breaks Down His Career, from 'The Boondock Saints' to 'Spider-Man' 17:12

Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos

"March 17, 1992. It might have been when mobile DJs began rocking Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express in 1977 or when WBLS’s slogan shifted from 'the total black experience in sound' to 'the total experience in sound' to 'the world’s best-looking sound.' Or when dressing down to dress up be­came the new Saturday-night aesthetic of high school teens. Another clue was when Richard Pry­or’s blues-based life experience humor gave way to Eddie Murphy’s telegenic, pop-culture-oriented joking. Neither you nor I knows exactly when it happened. But we know what happened. Over the last 20 or so years, the tenor of African American culture has changed. I came up on the we-shall-overcome tradition of noble struggle, soul and gospel music, positive images. and the conven­tional wisdom that civil rights would translate into racial salvation. ..."
Voice
amazon: Buppies, B-boys, Baps, And Bohos: Notes On Post-soul Black Culture - Nelson George

Hound Dog Taylor and Little Walter

Little Walter
"... For years after his departure from Muddy's band in 1952, Little Walter continued to be brought in to play on his recording sessions, and as a result his harmonica is featured on most of Muddy's classic recordings from the 1950s. How can you go wrong with two of the best talents of the time. Here is a feature of Hound Dog with Little Walter playing an old Elmore James Song. Wild About You Baby."
Bman's Blues Report (Video)
YouTube: Hound Dog Taylor & Little Walter - Wild About you baby

Hound Dog Taylor

Overlay - Lucy R. Lippard (1983)

"... As the art world's most outspoken feminist/socialist critic, Lucy R. Lippard has always gone against the tide, insisting emphatically on art with a message. She is deeply troubled by the fact that we live in an era that produces increasing numbers of artists who are without any sense of purpose beyond their own professional aims and that, as a culture, we seem to have lost any notion of what our art is for. If this situation raises a question most art critics try to avoid, it is one that gives special resonance to Miss Lippard's writing, since what is at stake for her is nothing less than the reestablishing of connections among art, nature and society. ..."
NY Times: ART SHOULD MEAN AS WELL AS BE
W - Lucy R. Lippard
LUCY LIPPARD with Jarrett Earnest
[PDF] Overlay: Contemporary Art and the_Art of Prehistory
amazon

2012 October: Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, 2017 October: Interview with Lucy R. Lippard

Afrofuturism show in Berlin criticised over absence of black artists

"The organisers of an exhibition inspired by the unlikely bedfellows of the Afrofuturism movement and the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk have been criticised for not including a single black artist in its lineup. Opening in Berlin on Wednesday evening, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien’s Space is the Place exhibition – which takes its name from a song by the avant-garde free jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra – has fallen into 'old curatorial habits' that favour white men, according to the activist group Soup du Jour. In an open letter, the group – an anonymous collective of curators, cultural activists and museum workers that has previously highlighted the dearth of diverse artists shown in Berlin – said the gallery’s curator, Christoph Tannert, was promoting 'white muskulinity'. ..."
Guardian

Messages in the Maps

The earliest Islamic maps of the Mediterranean were drawn in the late 10th century ce by geographer and cartographer Ibn Hawqal in his Kitab surat al-ard (Book of a picture of the earth).
"Using a gentle two-finger pinch, Emilie Savage-Smith turns a page of an 800-year-old manuscript on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. She leans forward and pauses, carefully reviewing each illustration. 'This entire treatise is one of the universe,' says Savage-Smith, professor of the history of Islamic science at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, describing the Book of Curiosities, a 13th-century compendium of Islamic maps. 'It starts from the very outside where the stars are, and works its way down to the Earth. And then, when you get to the Earth, you get the diagrams of the winds, etcetera. This is the only treatise I can think of where the two are combined.' ..."
AramcoWorld

The Book of Curiosities includes this large, detailed map of Sicily. Like other maps of its era, it is schematic rather than mimetic, and it shows ports, cities and more. Maps were produced mostly on the basis of oral accounts.

Beware of Politicians Who Declare “War” on the Coronavirus

"When heads of state start using wartime rhetoric to talk about coronavirus, should that make us feel safer and more secure … or nervous? The above video essay argues that yes, this rhetoric is meant to conjure a sense of solidarity — which we desperately need — but it can also provide cover for eroding our civil liberties. But there could be a silver lining to all this. While we should be careful of ceding control of our rights and liberties, maybe the inequities exposed through tragedy and collective hardship will make us ask: What world do we want to live in when all this has passed?"
NY Times (Video)

Music Revelation Ensemble – Cross Fire (1997)

"Pretty good idea to rotate guest saxophonists as a means to keep James Blood Ulmer's Music Revelation Ensemble concept fresh. Pharoah Sanders and John Zorn are on board for Cross Fire, and a change to Calvin 'Fuzz' Jones' acoustic bass lowers the frenzy level that marked Knights of Power. Sanders, in particular, sounds inspired by the context, playing hard and pushing Ulmer and the music. His tracks all start out peaceful, go totally outside with high harmonic shrieks and thick, woolly tenor tone, and then bring it back to the serenity base. ... Music Revelation Ensemble seems to be the context that Blood Ulmer reserves his strongest melodies for, and he plays with the kind of fire and invention that made him a major figure. Cross Fire probably isn't the best place to plunge in and explore the music, but it's a very worthy addition to the catalog."
allmusic (Audio)
W - Cross Fire (album)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Music Revelation Ensemble (James Blood Ulmer) – Cross Fire (Full Album)

2015 November: Prime Time (1981), 2016 September: Black Rock (1982), 2017 May: Are You Glad to Be in America? (1980), 2017 June: James Blood Ulmer solo live @ Skopje Jazz Festival 2015

African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s (2008)

"... Analog Africa's Samy Ben Redjeb already had loads of cred for the way he handled his two previous releases, which featured Zimbabwe's Hallelujah Chicken Run Band and Green Arrows, respectively. He traveled to Zimbabwe and spent time with the creators, digging deep into their stories and emerging with great-sounding, informative compilations that thoroughly introduced the listener to both the music and the musicians. African Scream Contest moves a few thousand miles northwest to Benin and Togo, two chimney-shaped former French colonies (Togo was a German colony until WWI) squeezed between West Africa's Anglophone giants, Ghana and Nigeria. ..."
Pitchfork
bandcamp (Audio)
amazon
YouTube: African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Afro Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s [full album]

Baseball: Part 4: A National Heirloom

Babe Ruth
"The live-ball era, also referred to as the lively ball era, is the period in Major League Baseball beginning in 1920 (and continuing to the present day), contrasting with the pre-1920 period known as the 'dead-ball era'. The name 'live-ball era' comes from the dramatic rise in offensive statistics, a direct result of a series of rule changes (introduced in 1920) that were colloquially said to have made the ball more 'lively'. ... The impact of the rule changes was felt almost immediately. In 1920, the game changed from typically low-scoring to high-scoring games, with a newfound reliance on the home run. That year, Babe Ruth set a record for slugging percentage and hit 54 home runs (smashing his old record of 29). ... Seeing his success (and his popularity that followed), young players who debuted in the 1920s, including Lou Gehrig and Mel Ott, followed Ruth's example. ..."
W - Live-ball era
PBS Part 4: A National Heirloom (Video)
“Babe Ruth Days”
Baseball’s Golden Age: Part One – The 1920s

Rogers Hornsby
W - Murderers’ Row, The Man Who Created Yankees’ Murderers’ Row
W - Ray Chapman, W - Hack Wilson, W - Rogers Hornsby
W - Golden age, Negro National League 1920–31, Eastern Colored League, Negro World Series, Bill Sport's Maps
World Series: 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929
YouTube: A Championship Legacy: 1927, Indians v. Yankees 1920, World Series 1921, A Championship Legacy: 1923, Watch the Washington Senators Win the World Series in 1924, World Series 1925, World Series 1926, A Championship Legacy: 1928, 1929 World Series Philadelphia A's vs. Chicago Cubs
YouTube: HBO Sports Babe Ruth 59:17

Satchel Paige

The World of Finance is More Engaging Thanks to Julia Rothman’s Illustrated Reporting

"Last fall, illustrator Julia Rothman and writer Shaina Feinberg launched an illustrated column in The New York Times called Scratch. Published in the Sunday Business section every other week (and appearing online the Friday before), the series focuses on finance as told through human interest stories. The illustrative reporting features Julia’s paintings with handwritten text—often told in the first person–that reveals the cost of doing things like opening a coffee shop, being a drag queen in New York City, and having a baby through IVF. Her style gives this series warmth to dollars and cents that can sometimes feel so cold; I find the series fascinating and enjoy reading it every time it’s published. ..."
Brown Paper Bag (Feb. 12, 2020)
NY Times: How We Got By: New Yorkers’ Advice for Getting Through a Crisis (March 26, 2020)
NY Times: The Virus Closed Her Bakery. Now She’s Working Nonstop. (April 10, 2020)
Muck Rack

10 Surprising Facts about Books of Beasts from the European Middle Ages

A Large Bird and a Man (detail), about 1270, unknown illuminator, Franco-Flemish, made in France, possibly Thérouanne.
"The medieval book of beasts, a kind of encyclopedia of animals known as the bestiary, was full of fascinating creatures both real and fantastic. While the bestiary often linked animals to Christian beliefs, teaching readers moral and religious lessons, it is also a window into the European Middle Ages. This fascinating type of book is the subject of the special exhibition at the Getty Center, Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, from May 14 to August 18, 2019. From the illuminations—small paintings in radiant colors—in the bestiary, we can uncover the ways people thought about animals in the Middle Ages and how they used them to tell stories. We can also find clues about medieval European ideas, social attitudes, and culture. ..."
Getty

The Land of India (detail), about 1475, unknown illuminator, Flemish, made in Belgium.

The Lost Diaries of War

"Anne Frank listened in an Amsterdam attic on March 28, 1944, as the voice of the Dutch minister of education came crackling over the radio from London. 'Preserve your diaries and letters,' he said. Frank was not the only one listening. Thousands of Dutch people had been recording their experiences under German occupation since the Nazi invasion four years earlier. So the words of the minister, part of a government trying to operate from exile in England, resonated. ... Other diarists persevered too, and after the country was liberated in May 1945, they showed up at the National Office for the History of the Netherlands in Wartime, with their notebooks and letters in hand. More than 2,000 diaries were collected, each a story of pain and loss, fear and hunger and, yes, moments of levity amid the misery. ..."
NY Times

Take a Long Virtual Tour of the Louvre in Three High-Definition Videos

"So, you’ve had to put off a trip to Paris, and a long-awaited visit to the Louvre, which 'will remain closed until further notice,' has been pushed into the indefinite horizon. It could be worse, but the loss of engaging up close with cultural treasures is something we should all grieve in lockdown. Art is so important to human well-being that UK Secretary of Health Matt Hancock argued all doctors in the NHS should prescribe gallery visits and other art activities for everything from mental issues to lung diseases. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2014 August: Louvre, 2016 August: The Pocket Louvre: A Visitor's Guide to 500 Works by Claude Mignot, 2018 March: Jay Swanson

Oscar Peterson – Oscar Peterson Plays the Duke Ellington Song Book (1959), Playing the Truth: Charles Mingus’s Jazz in Detroit/ Strata Concert Gallery/ 46 Selden, Sam Jones ‎– Right Down Front: The Riverside Collection (1988)

'“Twice in the 1950s, pianist Oscar Peterson recorded an extensive series of songbooks devoted to one composer. From 1952-53, Peterson, guitarist Barney Kessel and bassist Ray Brown were extensively documented; in 1959, the pianist joined up with Brown and drummer Ed Thigpen to repeat many of the programs (since the group had changed and the music could now be cut in stereo) plus additional songbooks. This 1999 CD brings together both of Peterson‘s Duke Ellington tributes; the same dozen songs were recorded with each of the two groups. ... ”
allmusic (Audio)
W – Oscar Peterson Plays the Duke Ellington Song book
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: Oscar Peterson Plays The Duke Ellington Song Book 12 videos

“... [Charles] Mingus long adored the legendary composer publicly and privately, even signing on as the bassist with Ellington’s band. Ellington quickly sacked the bassist after Mingus attacked the trombonist Juan Tizol as the band opened a show, a story set to legend in Mingus’s autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. Published in 1971, it took Mingus almost two decades to write and did little to separate fact from fiction. The book, however, remains one of the most visceral depictions of a life in jazz. …”
Riot Material – BBC (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden

“For this compilation of small big-band performances, bassist Sam Jones — long recognized for his ability to anchor and swing a session — reliably grounds a collection of arrangements that have an affinity with the Count Basie Band‘s early-’60s book. The tracks are from three LPs that Jones recorded between 1960 and 1962, during his tenure with Cannonball Adderley‘s group. …”
allmusic (Audio)
W – Sam Jones
Discogs
YouTube: Right Down Front ( Full Album )

The Cantos - Ezra Pound

"The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 116 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to be an intense and challenging read. The Cantos is generally considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to the work's content. The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. ..."
Wikipedia
W - List of cultural references in The Cantos
Guardian - Ezra Pound: Posthumous Cantos edited by Massimo Bacigalupo review – fresh insights into an epic masterpiece
Cantos 1, 4, and 84 by Ezra Pound (Video)
New Republic - The Case of Ezra Pound (April 1, 1957)
A Short Analysis of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos
amazon
YouTube: Canto I, Canto 81, Canto XLV (With Usura), Canto XLV, Canto LXXXI

Ezra Pound in Venice, Italy, in 1964.

A History of Soccer in Six Matches

Hungary’s visit to Wembley in 1953 was a seminal moment in the modern game.
"A few weeks ago, I asked readers to submit ideas for what they would like to see in this column. Not because I am short of them, you understand, but because in this bleak new reality of ours writing about sports very much falls into the category of 'things you want,' rather than 'things you need.' There was a flurry of suggestions, on every topic under the sun, most of which I know absolutely nothing about. One theme that stood out, though, was that many would welcome the chance to immerse themselves in the comforting nostalgia of soccer history. Even with my understanding editors and generous word counts, that is a vast, unwieldy subject. You can write soccer history in a million different ways: through the lens of teams and individuals, through tactics or geography or culture. ..."
NY Times (Video)

World on Fire - Peter Bowker

"There’s something so fitting about the fact that the final episode of Peter Bowker’s second world war drama, World on Fire, will air on Remembrance Sunday. A sweeping look at events across Europe after the outbreak of war, from the start it has been clear that conflict has a heavy price, and that we should never forget both the sacrifice and the suffering of those who lived through it. This is not, however, the blind jingoism of those who trot out old canards about ‘our finest hour’ as though there is nothing better than viewing a nation through the prism of destruction and death. Instead, Bowker’s story – in addition to being cracking Sunday night viewing – has worked precisely because it has refused to shy away from the true cost of war. ..."
Guardian - World on Fire: thrilling TV that shows the true, terrifying cost of war
NY Times: In ‘World on Fire,’ War Is the Virus
salon - "It's our foundation myth": PBS' "World on Fire" challenges the World War II narrative we know (Video)
W - World on Fire (TV series)
PBS (Video)

Dutch Golden Age Art Wasn’t All About White People. Here’s the Proof.

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. II, Part 1 — 23: Reliquary bust of St. Maurice. Heiltumsbuch, fol. 228v. 1525-1527.
"Rembrandt’s 1661 painting, 'Two African Men,' s one of the Dutch old master’s more inscrutable works. One man, dressed in a Roman-style costume and shawl, seems to be giving a speech, while another man leans attentively over his shoulder. The canvas was painted with a thin layers of earth tones and looks unfinished, but it bears the artist’s signature. Why did Rembrandt paint it, and who were his subjects? These were some of the questions that came to mind for Stephanie Archangel in 2015 as she found herself lingering in front of the work at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague. A sociologist by training, she had been searching in paintings 'for black people in which I could recognize myself,' said Ms. Archangel, who was born and raised on Curaçao, an island that was once a Dutch colony. ..."
NY Times
Black in Rembrandt’s Time, The Black Figure in the European Imaginary, amazon: The Black Figure in the European Imaginary
The Image of the Black in Western Art, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (Video), Soundcloud: The Image of the Black in Western Art - National Gallery of Art (Audio)
Rediscovering the Black Muses Erased from Art History

Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870.