Cool Cats Invasion: 102 tracks for lovers of highlife, palm‑wine and jùjú

"This gigantic compilation from the Moochin’ About label brings together a collection of classics from the Ghanaian and Nigerian music of the 1950s and 1960s. Cool Cats Invasion (Highlife, Juju & Palm-wine) offers a captivating musical journey through time. The selection of tracks is impressive: it includes the Nigerian juju singer and guitarist Tunde Nightingale, one of the disciples of the great Tunde King, as well as the first highlife and calypso records from Fela Kuti, captured in London in 1959. To better understand what is at stake in this compilation, let’s start with a bit of history. Highlife is a type of popular West African music and dance that originated in Ghana at the end of the 19th century, then spread to western Nigeria and flourished in both countries during the 1950s. ..."

PAM (Video/Audio)  

Moochin About (Audio)

Historical Close-Up: Modern Cuban Painters at MoMA, 1944

In a photographic detail, María Luisa Gómez Mena stands with a core group of artists and critics in the doorway of Galería del Prado, c. 1942-1944. Gómez Mena stands sixth from the left, in front. Others in the shot include José Gómez Sicre, Mario Carreño, Cundo Bermúdez, Alfredo Lozano, Amelia Peláez, Mestre, MLGM, Roberto Diago, and Eugenio Rodríguez. 

"... On March 17, 1944, the Museum of Modern Art opened the exhibition Modern Cuban Painters. Organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. in consultation with a young Cuban art critic and curator by the name of José Gómez Sicre, the exhibition was hailed by the art criticism establishment, from the conservative Royal Cortissoz to the more liberal Edward Alden Jewell. In Art News, H.F. Kraus described it as 'an exhibition of color and verve and home grown baroque sensibility . . . very different from the Mexican work seen in these very galleries four years ago.' Cuban art was not a complete stranger to New York audiences. ..."

Historical Close-Up: Modern Cuban Painters at MoMA, 1944, Part 2: Spotlight on María Luisa Gómez Mena, Part 3: More on Maria Luisa Gómez Mena

An exhibition at the Galería del Prado, c. 1942. The works on view include pieces by Amelia Peláez, Mario Carreño, Felipe Orlando, and Mariano Rodríguez.

How the Iconic Colors of the New York City Subway System Were Invented: See the 1930 Color Chart Created by Architect Squire J. Vickers

"There may be no more welcome sight to a New Yorker than their own Pantone-colored circle on an arriving subway train. (Provided it’s also the right train number or letter; is making local stops (or express stops); has not been rerouted due to track work, death or injury, etc.) The psychological effect is not unlike a preschooler spotting her brightly-colored cubby at the end of a long day. Therein lies the comforting lovey—screen time, climate control, maybe a nap in a window seat on the way home…. But as every New Yorker also knows, the color-coded subway system didn’t always have such a cheerful, Sesame Street-like look. Buried beneath the MTA’s modern exterior, with those colored circles adopted piecemeal over the chaotic 1970s, is a much older system—three systems, in fact—that had far less navigable signage. ..."

Open Culture  

The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway


Ras I-Dre & Ranking Joe – Up Deh!

 
 
"We’re always excited when the Happy As A Lark crew out of Chicago has a new release. Why you ask? We’ll tell you. Ushering in the best of new reggae artists while also keeping the spirit and moxie of reggae itself alive, HAAL in our opinion is one of the best reggae labels out there today. An authentic purveyor of riddims and real deal reggae music, this latest forty-five featuring Chicago newcomer Ras I-Dre and veteran deejay Ranking Joe is no less than a heat rock. The talented duo both toast over a version of the world-renowned 'Lecturer Riddim' from the veteran band Akasha (which includes the bass sounds of the present day and the total vibe of say ’68 or ’69). ..."   
 
 
 

When Waking Begins

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy (detail), 1760

"Glowing brighter and brighter. Slowly the eyes open. Rays fall across retinas. Drowsily they roam about and, for a brief spell, memory of reality meshes with this most current impression and the space becomes both familiar and strange. Then waking begins. Walter Benjamin writes that every true waking is a reshaping of reality. He describes this waking as a technique: the reclamation of what is past, not as complete facts or truths but as a period of time that can be reshaped simply by making contact with the waker’s present. ..."

The Paris Review

2015 September: In praise of dirty, sexy cities: the urban world according to Walter Benjamin, 2020 September: On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

A Plague Infects the Land, as Passion Vexes Hearts

 

"It’s no surprise that one of the best scenes in the latest and third film iteration of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel 'The Painted Veil' doesn’t happen in the book. It’s the 1920s, and as China seethes with revolutionary unrest and cholera, an unhappily married British couple, played by Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, drift into a new state of coexistence, carried aloft on opium smoke and their newly liberated desire. ... First published in 1925, 'The Painted Veil' recounts the moral awakening of a vain, careless young woman, Kitty (Ms. Watts), who has been raised for a life of abject uselessness. Thrown into a panic after her younger sister marries, and encouraged by her revolting mother, Kitty hastily marries a bacteriologist, Walter Fane (Mr. Norton) and moves with him to Shanghai. ..."  

NY Times  

W - The Painted Veil (2006 film), W - The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham (novel), amazon  

YouTube: The Painted Veil (2006) Trailer #1


Over and Over and Over Again, History Has Vindicated Edward Snowden

"At the heart of the case of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who leaked a massive tranche of agency documents in 2013 and revealed the breathtaking scope of US government spying, there was always a fundamental absurdity. Snowden was hunted, pushed into exile, and forced to live knowing he could have SEAL Team Six kick down his door any moment and spirit him off to some clammy military prison, all for doing something that authorities and even the people going after him tacitly admitted was a vital public good. ... He even put together a panel of national security luminaries and his own loyalists to review surveillance policy, which eventually recommended a range of limits to it. ..."

Jacobin 

2015 October: Citizenfour (2014), 2017 July: Snowden - Oliver Stone (2016)

Robert Fisk

"Robert Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was a writer and journalist who held British and Irish nationality. He was an international correspondent, and covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria and Syria, the Iran-Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Fluent in Arabic, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 1993 and 1997. The journalist began his career at the Sunday Express. From there, he went to work for The Times as a correspondent in Northern Ireland, Portugal and the Middle East, in which he was based on Beirut intermittently since 1976. ... Fisk also wrote books, such as Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War and The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. ..."

Wikipedia  

Independent  

amazon: Robert Fisk  

YouTube: Life after ISIS (2016) 58:09, Full Lecture: From the Frontline: An Eyewitness Account from the Middle East (2016) 54:07

November 2020: Cassiopeia Rules

"This episode is sponsored by Celestron, manufacturer of high-quality telescopes and an industry leader in developing exciting optical products with revolutionary technologies. About three fists to the upper right of Polaris, look for five medium-bright stars crudely shaped like a '3' or like a broad 'W' tipped up on its left corner. This is the constellation Cassiopeia, who is a queen in Greek mythology. Ancient poets say Cassiopeia was queen of either Ethiopia or Joppa, the city now called Jaffa in Israel. In any case, she was both beautiful and boastful. Cassiopeia’s misdeeds landed her up in the sky, doomed to hang upside down half the time and clinging to her throne so she doesn’t fall off. But there's much more to this story, as you'll learn in this month's Sky Tour astronomy podcast. ..."

Sky & Telescope (Audio)  

W - Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia


Decapitation in the “Low” Surrealist Revolution

"The legacy and concept of 'revolution' resonated with the Surrealists. This is best exemplified by the more archetypal journals associated with the Surrealist movement, such as La Révolution Surréaliste (1924-1929) or La Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930-33). Emerging in Paris during the interwar period, the Surrealist revolution responded to a set of conditions, including economic decline, inequality, xenophobia and populism during a period punctuated by political unrest. Their revolutionary agenda was concerned with both economic and existential liberation and was expressed through an intersection of innovative cultural production and political activism. The Surrealists of the entre guerre were emphatically radical politically, having had an uneasy affiliation with the French Communist Party from around 1927. ..."

Age of Revolutions  

The Pivotal Role That Women Have Played in Surrealism

2016: DADA Companion, 2016: The Growing Charm of Dada, 2012 December: Impressionism and Fashion, 2017: How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature, 2017: The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology - Mary Ann Caws, 2018 May: Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism (1978), 2020 October: What is Surrealism? - André Breton (1924)

La Calavera Catrina - José Guadalupe Posada

'El jarabe en ultratumba', (c.1910). Zinc etching.

"La Calavera Catrina or Catrina Ljazmun a Calavera Garbancera ('Dapper Skeleton', 'Elegant Skull') is a 1910–1913 zinc etching by the Mexican printmaker, cartoon illustrator and lithographer José Guadalupe Posada. She is offered as a satirical portrait of those Mexican natives who, Posada felt, were aspiring to adopt European aristocratic traditions in the pre-revolution era. La Catrina has become an icon of the Mexican Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead. The zinc etching depicts a female skeleton dressed only in a hat. Her chapeau en attente is related to European styles of the early 20th century. The original leaflet describes a person who was ashamed of her indigenous origins and dressed imitating the French style while wearing much makeup to make her skin look whiter. This description also uses the word garbancera, a nickname given to people of indigenous ancestry who imitated European style and denied their own cultural heritage. ..."

Wikipedia  

José Guadalupe Posada, the Illustrator Who Made Catrinas an Iconic Symbol of Día de Muertos  

José Guadalupe Posada: Skulls, Skeletons and Macabre Mischief  

W - José Guadalupe Posada  

YouTube: Day of the Dead: Political cartoonist Jose Posada

Earth Couldn’t Contain Sun Ra’s Ideas. His Arkestra Is Still Exploring Them.

 

"In the early 2000s, the pianist Farid Barron read that his idol John Coltrane had once received a papyrus from Sun Ra that was said to stop time. 'That’s why I came over here, to look for the manuscript,' Mr. Barron, 49, said on a recent Saturday afternoon, standing on the steps outside the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra, where he now lives. An unassuming stone rowhouse in this city’s Germantown neighborhood, it is where Ra — a pianist, composer, poet and mystic whose influence on culture has only seemed to grow since his death in 1993 — held court for the last quarter-century of his life. Members of his ensemble, the Sun Ra Arkestra, continue to live and rehearse there, surrounded by his artifacts and aura. ..."

NY Times  

The Quietus - Angels & Demons At Play: Swirling By The Sun Ra Arkestra (Audio)  

Discogs (Video)  

amazon  

YouTube: Tusk Virtual 2020 - Sun Ra Arkestra (Live) 1:08:00, Angels and Demons at Play, Sea of Darkness / Darkness, Queer Notions

City Bakery founder opening a hot chocolate bar in Greenwich Village

 

"City Bakery founder Maury Rubin has spent the past weeks in a 'Wonka-ish frenzy,' Grub Street tells us, as he prepares to launch his latest venture: the Wonderbon Chocolate Co. Rubin and his partner have taken out a three-month lease on a storefront at 257 Bleeker Street—most recently occupied by Sugar and Plumm—which will feature a menu of twelve hot chocolate flavors in an espresso-bar setting. The opening comes just in time for February, the month Rubin made famous for his hot chocolate festival at City Bakery, a tradition he began in 1992 that attracted more than 50,000 customers each year. ..."

6sqft 

NY Times: A New Home for the City Bakery’s Hot Chocolate  

Wonderbon

The Real Deal - The Warriors (1979)

 

"I don’t know with absolute certainty if The Warriors is a kids movie, but it’s a movie about kids that I saw as a kid myself. So let’s start there. The premise is simple enough: a New York street gang from Coney Island, the titular Warriors, must get from the Bronx back to their home turf after being framed for a murder they didn’t commit. It’s a survive-the-night feature—a premise much scarier and realer to me as a child than as an adult. As a kid, I was afraid of the dark and by extension, the night. ... The Warriors packs a slightly different punch as an adult. First of all, it’s silly. Really silly. Maybe even a little campy. ..." 

Bright Wall/Dark Room 

2015 September: Cast of 'The Warriors' to Reunite in Coney Island One Last Time

Art Blakey And His Jazz Messengers With Sabu ‎– Cu-Bop (1959)

 

"... A fantastic Johnny Griffin leads this Latin-tinged session along with Bill Hardman's unmistakable trumpet. The album opens with an excellent rendition of Dizzy's 'Algo bueno (Woody 'n' You)' and is followed by a rather intense jam ('Sakeena') in which Sabú Martínez shines throughout while the rest of the guys try to keep up on various percussion instruments. The tune resolves sensationally in a very Cuban way, although Dockery could have added a bit of mambo there. ... More jamming can be heard on the last track, 'Dawn on the Desert' (originally composed by Charlie Shavers), with its memorable riff that Charlie Parker used to quote so much. This is the Messengers' most Latin album and one I would always recommend to fans of Cuban and jazz music alike. ..."

Holland Tunnel  

W - Cu-Bop  

YouTube: Cu-Bop! (Full Album)


Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

 

"Like the artist himself, the long-anticipated Raphael exhibition that opened in Rome on March 5, 2020, was struck down by infectious disease. Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever on April 6, 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday. The exhibition that marked the five hundredth anniversary of his death lasted only four days. On March 9, the Italian government issued a decree prohibiting 'every form of gathering in public places' to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and every public institution in Italy shut its doors. Raphael’s birthday came and went with his legacy under lockdown. ..."

Riot Material  

YouTube: A walk in the exhibition 12:51



Fassbinder and Kraftwerk: A Marriage Made in a New Germany

 

 "According to Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür, it was toward the end of the group’s first U.S. tour when his bandmates Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider grew fascinated by the phenomenon of American radio. Their time in the States had been successful largely thanks to local stations in the U.S., which, in the halcyon days before corporations like Clear Channel dictated playlists, had disseminated their music and conducted interviews with them. But the concept was a novelty to these nerdy young men—at that time, there were no local German radio stations on either side of the wall. ..."

Criterion (Video)

2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2014 June: Effi Briest (1974), 2014 July: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 2014 September: A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema, 2014 October: Lola - (1981 BRD Trilogy), 2014 October: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979 BRD Trilogy), 2014 December: Veronika Voss (1982 - BRD Trilogy), 2015 January: Digital Anthology: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - $0.99, 2016 February: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), 2019 June: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

2008 April: Kraftwerk, 2011 March: Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution, 2011 March: Kraftwerk - Documentary, 2011 April: Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, 2011 May: Autobahn, 2011 October: Trans-Europe Express, 2012 February: Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, 2012 October: Radio-Activity, 2014 May: "The Telephone Call" (1987), 2014 November: Kraftwerk - live at Cirkus, Stockholm, 2020 September: Tour de France Soundtracks (2003)

Harvey Pekar: The Splendor of Ordinary Life

 

"Harvey Pekar carried himself with a slouch. He had a disheveled comb-over and dark, haunted eyes. A file clerk at the Veterans Administration hospital in Cleveland, he spoke with a cantankerous rasp. If you sat next to him on the bus, you might not even notice him. Yet this ordinary man, who died this week at age 70, made his unremarkable day-to-day life in a typical city immortal, thanks to his comic, 'American Splendor.' Through these autobiographical comic books, Pekar found a devoted following, moved by the way he captured the particular loneliness of American life. ..."

Collectors Weekly

2009 December: Harvey Pekar, 2018 August: Jazz Jams With Harvey Pekar, 2020 August: Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History 

An Apocalyptic Collage Made Entirely of Media Images From Trump’s Presidency

 


"At eye level, artist Chris Santa Maria’s six-foot-high collage 'PRESIDENT TRUMP' (2016-2020), currently on view at Jim Kempner Fine Art in Manhattan, depicts a gargantuan figure hovering above a densely populated landscape. However, a closer look reveals thousands of individual photographs — some as small as three-eighths of an inch — meticulously cut out from newspapers, magazines and internet print-outs in the last four years. Patches of orange-tinted skin, tiny puckering mouths, and eyes evocative of genitalia crystallize into the immediately recognizable head of the giant. He floats in a galaxy of emojis, jungle animals, reclining nudes from famous paintings, and tabloid shots of pop culture figures, from Barack Obama to Kanye West. Every element in the cacophonous scene, a hybrid of a Where’s Waldo puzzle and Hieronymus Bosch’s 'Garden of Earthly Delights,' has been culled from the unsettlingly familiar visual torrent of Trump’s presidency. ..." (Mike B.)

Hyperallergic  

Chris Santa Maria

Jo Johnson & Hilary Robinson - Antenna Echoes (2020)


 "Jo Johnson and Hilary Robinson’s album Antenna Echoes has its origins in chance and error: a meeting in a shared neighborhood, and a broken piano. The result of those external influences is a Covid-era collaboration of deeply interior music, all cavernous echoes and warm feedback. Piano is the near constant through the album’s three tracks ('Maze Echoes,' 'Antenna Gain,' 'Fresh Air and the Usual Low-grade Hedonism'), but it would be inaccurate to claim its presence necessarily grounds the plush synthesizer and pervasive sound-design drones. ..."

disquiet (Audio)  

Discogs


182 Days of Marcel Proust

 

"This is a journal about reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time at the rate of at least ten pages a day. The text I've chosen is the recent Penguin translation, the first four volumes of which were published in America by Viking. The last three have not been published here because of copyright limitations, but are available in paperback editions imported from Britain. The page numbers, unfortunately, may not correlate with other editions, so I've added the beginning and ending phrases for each day's section. ..."

182 Days of Marcel Proust  

182 Days of Marcel Proust: Day-by-Day Summary  

182 Days of Marcel Proust: People, Places, Things, Ideas  

Got a Spare 153 Hours? Listen to Proust’s Masterpiece, Unabridged, Naxos Audio

"Landscape with a Calm (Un Tem[p]s calme et serein)," Nicolas Poussin, 1650 - 1651.

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online, 2017 December: The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925), 2018 May: Time Regained (1927), 2018 September: Céleste Albaret, 2018 November: In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust, 2019 February: On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist

The Ghosts of Newspaper Row

 

Newsboys and newsgirls on Newspaper Row, Park Row, NYC.

"The reporters would pant up five flights of stairs to reach their dingy, dim newsrooms, where light eked through the dirt-cloaked windows and the green shades over the oil lamps were burned through with holes. They wended through hobbled tables piled high with papers, walked past cubbies so chaotically stuffed with scrolled proofs no outsider could guess the system. The reporters reeked of five-alarm smoke, or had coat pockets bulky with notes and a pistol from the front, or were tipsy from a gala ball, or dusty from a horse race. If they held important news in those notebooks, a copy boy would crowd by their elbow as they wrote, snatch the ink-wet sheets from their hands, and rush them off to the copyholder to 'put them into metal.' The center of news in the nineteenth century lined the streets around City Hall Park, only a short sprint to Wall Street, close to the harbor. ..."

The Paris Review

R.I.P., G.O.P.

 

"Of all the things President Trump has destroyed, the Republican Party is among the most dismaying. 'Destroyed' is perhaps too simplistic, though. It would be more precise to say that Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals. Tomato, tomahto. However you characterize it, the Republican Party’s dissolution under Mr. Trump is bad for American democracy. ..."

NY Times: The Editorial Board  

Rolling Stone - R.I.P., GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party (Video)  

Pell Center: R.I.P., G.O.P. 

amazon: RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans, Stanley B. Greenberg  

YouTube: 6 Crucial Races That Will Flip the Senate | Robert Reich, Kornacki Breaks Down Where Things Stand In Battleground States Heading Into Final Debate, Battleground Tracker: Tight race in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina

2020 October: Trump

1959 The Year that Changed Jazz

 

"1959 was the seismic year jazz broke away from complex bebop music to new forms, allowing soloists unprecedented freedom to explore and express. It was also a pivotal year for America: the nation was finding its groove, enjoying undreamt-of freedom and wealth social, racial and upheavals were just around the corner and jazz was ahead of the curve. Four major jazz albums were made, each a high watermark for the artists and a powerful reflection of the times. Each opened up dramatic new possibilities for jazz which continue to be felt Miles Davis Kind of Blue Dave Brubeck, Time Out Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um; and Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come. Rarely seen archive performances help vibrantly bring the era to life and explore what made these albums vital both in 1959 and the 50 years since. ..."

YouTube: 1959 The Year that Changed Jazz 58:58


Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe

 

"What shall we read before bed? Georgia O’Keeffe was a fan of cookbooks, telling her young assistant Margaret Wood that they were 'enjoyable nighttime company, providing brief and pleasant reading.' ... In addition to recipes—inscribed by the artist’s own hand in ink from a fountain pen, typed by assistants, clipped from magazines and newspapers, or in promotional booklets such as the one published by the Waring Products Company—the box housed manuals for O’Keeffe’s kitchen appliances. The booklet that came with her pressure cooker includes a spattered page devoted to cooking fresh veggies, a testament to her abiding interest in eating healthfully. O’Keeffe had a high regard for salads, garden fresh herbs, and simple, locally sourced food. ..."

Open Culture  

NY Times: Own the Recipes of Georgia O’Keeffe  

amazon


Horace Andy - In the Light/In the Light Dub (1977)

"Regarded as one of reggae's most distinctive voices, vocalist Horace Andy had wild success early on with his career-defining single 'Skylarking' as well as a host of other hits. As far as full-length statements are concerned, Andy's 1977 album In the Light may be his strongest. The album's ten tracks found Andy's quivering vocals floating in a dreamlike tension above tightly wound rocksteady rhythms, looming darkly on pensive tracks like 'Problems' (a tune that revisits the burning bassline from one of Andy's earlier hits, 'Mr. Bassie'), exploding on fun jaunts like 'Do You Love My Music,' and lingering meditatively on the lighthearted anthem of self-awareness and cultural pride that is the title track. ... Skillfully remastered and even stronger with both originals and dubs occupying the same space, In the Light/In the Light Dub is a triumph of roots reggae and a necessary chapter for anyone even remotely enthusiastic about Jamaican music and culture, especially at this critical point of reggae's evolution in the late '70s. ..."

all music (Audio)W - Horace Andy  

Discogs: In The Light (Video), In The Light Dub (Video) 

amazom  

YouTube: In The Light + Dub, Government Land + Dub

Get the Birds To Come To You

 

"Hosting a gathering of friends at your home may not be advisable at this time, but getting together with a flock of feathered friends is a great diversion. During the pandemic, birding has become a popular escape with sales for seed suppliers, birdhouse builders and other bird related businesses 'through the roof,' according to Audubon Magazine. Extending an invitation to the bird community is simply a matter of offering a meal. A backyard rich with trees and shrubs is an ideal place to hold the get together, but a patio or rooftop will suffice. ..." 

NY Times

Wild Days, New Faces and a Ticking Clock

 

"The season is still young. The sample size is far too small to draw conclusions. Over the next month or two, order most likely will be restored. As the weeks clog with matches, as muscles tire and injuries occur, chances are that the familiar faces will be the ones left standing. That is the privilege of having deep pockets, of course: They tend to contain the deepest squads. But a glance at the standings across Europe’s major leagues this week is enough, at least, to make you wonder if something strange is happening, if something, however small, has shifted, if all those factors that might have made this season less predictable — the absence of fans, the shortened preseason, the compacted schedules — have had some sort of effect. ..."

NY Times - Rory Smith

Leventhal Map & Education Center

 

"... This trivia event, hosted by the Leventhal Map & Education Center in collaboration with the Boston Public Library's Department of Special Collections, utilizes ATLASCOPE, a completely free online and app-based resource for exploring and browsing the Map Center's incredible digitized urban atlases collection. The atlases appear as continuous, zoomable web layers, allowing users to pull up specific maps for all areas of Boston, and compare the current streetscapes with historical records to answer questions in a geographic scavenger hunt. ..."

The Boston Calendar Blog  

Leventhal Map & Education Center  

YouTube: Leventhal Map & Education Center

Marcus Belgrave ‎– Gemini II (1974)

 

'Originally released in 1974 on the independent Tribe Records, this album features many of the Detroit heavyweight artists such as Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin, who have both had releases on Chicago's Hefty Records where they have worked with and been re-mixed by current artists such as Telefon Tel Aviv, Morgan Geist, Prefuse 73 and Kirk Degiorgio amongst others. Marcus Belgrave's musical career spans over 4 decades. He has worked with everyone from Sun Ra to Charles Mingus, from McCoy Tyner to Clifford Brown. He worked as part of the Tribe collective in Detroit, working with the same ideology as their musical neighbours, The Art Ensemble of Chicago. ..."

Holland Tunnel  

Discogs (Video)  

YouTube: Gemini II 38:50