1960s Dial-a-Poem

                                          John Giorno at Dial-a-Poem in 1969

"On any given night in 1970, a teen somewhere in rural America could dial a number and hear the radical wisdom of Patti Smith, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Bourroughs – the list of poets was long, and painfully hip. One needed only the ten sacred digits of 'Dial-a-Poem,' a revolutionary hotline that connected millions of people to a room of telephones, linked up to an evolving selection of live-recorded poems, speeches, and inspired orations. And frankly, we’d kill to dial up that hotline right now. It all began in the 3rd floor Manhattan loft of the hotline’s founder, artist, and activist, John Giorno, who also happened to be Andy Warhol’s lover at the time. John was on the phone one morning with someone and feeling cranky. ...”

Before the Internet, there was the 1960s Dial-a-Poem Hotline (Video)

W - Dial-A-Poem, W - John Giorno

John Giorno’s Archives

NY Times: Dial-A-Poem Enters the Internet Age (April 2005)

On Dial-A-Poem

YouTube: "You're a Hook"—The 15 Year Anniversary of Dial-a-Poem (1968-1983) full album, UbuWeb: Giorno Poetry Systems / Dial-A-Poem Poets

2012 June: The Dial-A-Poem Poets: The Nova Convention, 2014 March: The Dial-A-Poem Poets (1972), 2015 January: Dial-A-Poem Poets - Big Ego (1978), 2018 November: I ♥ John Giorno and So Should You, 2019 November: John Giorno – the New York radical who broke art and poetry's boundaries

Tri-Cornered Baseball Game

 

“The Tri-Cornered Baseball Game was a three-way exhibition baseball game held at the Polo Grounds on June 26, 1944, among the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and New York Yankees. The game, a Second World War fundraiser, was played with a round-robin format in which each team batted and fielded during six innings and rested for the other three. The Dodgers won by scoring five runs in their times at bat; the Yankees scored one run, while the Giants were unable to score. The game came 20 days after the Normandy landings in 1944. It was devised by the War Loans Sports Committee as a method of selling war bonds to aid in the U.S. war efforts. ... New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young described the event as ‘the wackiest diamond battle ever conceived.’ ...”

Wikipedia

SABR -June 26, 1944: The Tri-Cornered War Bond Baseball Game

Various Apocalyptic Scenes from the Prophetic Messenger (ca. 1827–61)

“These colored lithographs, labelled as apocalyptic scenes by the Wellcome Collection, were printed in conjunction with the astrological magazine the Prophetic Messenger, aka Raphael’s Almanac, which ran from 1827 to 1861. Raphael, a pen name, was intended to invoke the power of the archangel Raphael — traditionally linked to Mercury, the messenger of the gods. It was used by several British astrologers in the first half of the nineteenth century, who together contributed to the revival of astrology. While the lithographs are difficult to interpret on their own, they do give us a sense of how Raphael’s astrological predictions differed from the ones generally found in newspapers today. ...”

Public Domain Review

The Incredible Lightness of Being

Brest téléphérique from station atop a historic stone building

“After the Emirates Air Line fiasco, most people in the UK had written off cable cars as a valid public transport mode. But reading about the official gondola proposal for Vancouver’s Burnaby Mountain university campus as an ideal solution, this mode warrants another look. Niche transport modes are ideal solutions, but only for specific geographic transport problems – funiculars, catamarans, hydrofoils, and cable cars. The key is not to fall for the salesperson’s or politician’s pitch, but to apply them appropriately. Cable cars are increasingly being constructed to connect topographically constrained urban areas in an inexpensive and quick manner. ...” 

London Reconnections

                                       Two stations, Vieux Port and Notre Dame, with a supporting pylon

Nights of Ballads & Blues - McCoy Tyner (1963)

“Pianist McCoy Tyner is best known for being a member of the John Coltrane Quartet beginning in 1960. During those years, Tyner re-invented the piano as a highly percussive, stirring instrument that churned the waters for Coltrane's abstraction and spiritual solos. For some strange reason, in late 1962 and the first half of 1963, Tyner was commissioned by producer Bob Thiele to record more straightforward jazz albums as a leader. These albums included Reaching Fourth, Today and Tomorrow and McCoy Tyner Plays Duke Ellington. But the finest of these after-midnight piano recordings was Nights of Ballads and Blues. ...”

All About Jazz (Video)

W - Nights of Ballads & Blues

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: NIGHTS OF BALLADS & BLUES, SIDE  ONE, SIDE  TWO

Brian Eno - Film Music 1976-2020

 “... Eno is now putting out a compilation called ‘Brian Eno (Film Music, 1976-2020),’ though he admits he just as well could have called it ‘Music That Has Found Films.’ These 17 tracks comprise only a fraction of his music that has appeared as scores or on soundtracks: ‘There are quite important pieces, in terms of my film music career, that are missing from this album,’ he said. ‘But they just wouldn’t fit in this particular version.’ ... Across two video interviews this fall Eno promised new (but different) work to come, and spoke thoughtfully about technology, composition and the odd drift of music through a listener’s everyday life. These are edited excerpts from the conversations. ...”

NY Times: Brian Eno’s Music for Anxious Times (Video)

a closer listen (Video)

Brian Eno Soundtrack Collection, ‘Film Music 1976-2020’ Set For Release (Video)

amazon

When Sun Ra Went to Egypt in 1971: See Film & Hear Recordings from the Legendary Afrofuturist’s First Visit to Cairo

“Sun Ra died in 1993 (or he returned to his home planet of Saturn, one or the other). Twenty-seven years later his Arkestra is still going strong. ‘No group in jazz history has embodied the communal spirit like the Arkestra,’ writes Peter Margasak at The Quietus. ‘Their hardcore fans are the closest thing jazz has to Deadheads.’ We could further compare Sun Ra and Jerry Garcia as bandleaders—their embrace of extended free form playing against a background of traditionalism. Folk, and country in Garcia’s case and big band swing in the work of the man born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914. ...”

Open Culture (Video/Audio)

Inside Sun Ra’s 1971 trip to Egypt (Video)

John Lennon and the Politics of the New Left

“When John Lennon was murdered forty years ago, on December 8, 1980, we believed Richard Nixon had been the worst president ever — because of the war in Vietnam, because of the repression that he called ‘law and order’ and the racism of the Southern Strategy, and also because of his treatment of Lennon. Nixon had tried to deport Lennon in 1972 when the former Beatle made plans to lead an election-year effort to challenge the Republican president’s reelection with a campaign to register young people to vote.In the end, of course, Lennon stayed in the United States and Nixon left the White House in disgrace. But the seemingly endless battle in the immigration courts ruined his life for the next few years. ... He and Yoko had a son, and he declared himself a househusband. ... Then he was shot and killed by a deranged fan. ...”

Jacobin

Watch “Jackson Pollock 51,” a Historic Short Film That Captures Pollock Creating Abstract Expressionist Art on a Sheet of Glass Image

“Jackson Pollock was described as an ‘action painter,’ a label that surely wouldn’t have stuck if the public never had the chance to see him in action. In that sense, only the era of photography could have produced an artist like him: not just because that technology pushed painting toward abstraction, but because it could disseminate images of the artist himself far and wide. One photographer did more for this cause than any other: the German-born Hans Namuth, who despite a lack of initial interest in Pollock’s work nevertheless took up the challenge of capturing his creative process — and thereby doing much to craft the artist’s image of raw, intuitive and individualistic physicality. Namuth accomplished this even more memorably with a motion picture: the short ‘Jackson Pollock 51,’ which you can watch above. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2014 October: Jackson Pollock's Mural

August Wilson, American Bard

 

“In the woods of Barnesville, Ga., two Black men are running, barely visible in the dusk. There are crickets chirping, dogs barking in the distance and, more immediately, the urgent pants of their breath. This seems to be a familiar horror, but the men aren’t being chased; they’re heading toward a tent. Inside, Ma Rainey — played by Viola Davis, her lips painted burgundy, eyelids smoked with black, cheeks stained merlot — beckons the audience in a royal blue dress. ‘Daddy, daddy, please come home to me,’ she sings, shimmying in the heat. ‘Anytime you see two Black people running in the South, you think the Klan’s somewhere, but, no, they’re not running from something. They’re running to something — to this woman whose voice is telling their story,’ says George C. Wolfe, the director of ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,’ the Netflix film version of August Wilson’s beloved play, which debuts this month. The scene feels appropriate for the opening of a Wilson adaptation: One of the most acclaimed Black playwrights in America, he spent more than three decades telling the story of Black America with pride and verve, with language that beckoned like Ma’s voice in that tent. ...”

NY Times (Video)

                                                Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982)

2017 July: Fences (2016), 2017 August: The Ground on Which I Stand, a Speech on Black Theatre and Performance (1992), 2018 July: Pittsburgh Cycle, 2018 August: August Wilson in St. Paul: A MN Original Special, 2020 May: August Wilson's Blues Poetry, 2020 July: On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitneys

Gramsci in the postcolony

“... Because I was simultaneously thinking about Marxism in the context of North Africa, I had already been exploring Antonio’s Gramsci’s work. I found Gramsci an interesting Marxist to think with because of the way he connected the material to the ideational, as well as his own identity as a Southern Italian and how this influenced the way he thought about dependency, power, and inequality. I found his concept of hegemony especially interesting, not least because it seemed to me one way of answering the question: how might we understand the power of the Nasserist project? Hegemony, as a concept, is many things to many people. ...”

Africa Is a Country

Antonio Gramsci 1891-1937

[PDF] The Gramsci Reader, amazon

2013 July: Gramsci Monument, 2018 January: The Fate of the Party

Bird bath

A male House Sparrow in a birdbath in Makawao, Maui

“A bird bath (or birdbath) is an artificial puddle or small shallow pond, created with a water-filled basin, in which birds may drink, bathe, and cool themselves. A bird bath can be a garden ornament, small reflecting pool, outdoor sculpture, and part of creating a vital wildlife garden. A bird bath is an attraction for many different species of birds to visit gardens, especially during the summer and drought periods. Bird baths that provide a reliable source of water year round add to the popularity and ‘micro-habitat’ support. Bird baths can be pre-made basins on pedestals and columns or hang from leaves and trees, or be carved out depressions in rocks and boulders. ...”

W - Bird bath

12 Simple Tips to Attract Birds to Your Bird Bath (2020)

Greatest Hits Music issue: Playlists

“How does the South inform my music? It’s just me. You see, the South just has a thang. It gets INTO you. It’s its own thing, its own culture. It has its own sound. Everything in motion, wrangling to survive like a tumble of vines. The air, pungent, so thick with humidity it has a taste, it fills your senses. It’s hard not to be informed by it when you are breathing it, swimming in it. Even the way the light shines here is different. The shadows here are different. ...”

Oxford American (Audio)

8 Famous Writers Writing About Not Writing

"Hey—are you writing right now? If you aren’t, and I know you aren’t, because you’re reading this sentence, it’s okay. It may seem like the phenomenon of writers constantly agonizing over not being able to write is a modern one (one of the great ironies of book Twitter is how the moment you hashbrag #amwriting you necessarily make it a lie—though let’s get real, it had probably been a lie for a while before that), but in fact, it goes back at least a century or two. Many canonical authors, whose work is now beloved by millions of readers, also wrote depressive or hand-wringing journal entries and letters about their failure to get words on the page. Writer’s block, it turns out, can (and does) happen to anyone. To prove it, I’ve pulled out a few selections from the journals and letters of a few great writers, which I hope, if you are procrastinating right now, or just in a dry spell, will make you feel feelings of solidarity and encouragement. After all, Kafka may not have written for days at a stretch—but hey, almost everyone has read at least something by him now. ...”

LitHub

Rise of The Troubadour Warriors - Tropical Grooves & Afrofunk International Vol.3

“Paris DJs and Elvis Martinez Smith team up for 'Rise Of The Troubadour Warriors - Tropical Grooves & Afrofunk International Vol.3' - taking up where the second volume left off with another a fully-licensed compilation of Afrofunk, Afrobeat, Latin or Brazilian Funk & Ethio-Jazz from the 21st century. ... On an entire album of amazing, energetic tracks, this one stands out for not only its propulsive rhythm, but the fantastic pitch change in the middle as everything stretches like taffy into a dub bliss interlude before swooping back into a staggering finale. ...”

ParisDJs: Bandcamp (Audio)

ParisDJs Soundsystem (Audio)

Roman Polanski’s ‘Tess’ is a work of great pastoral beauty as well as vivid storytelling

 

“Roman Polanski’s arguably only romance film, Tess, is one his critically best accepted works, and the performance of 18-year-old Nastassja Kinski, along with Paris, Texas, is probably the high point of her career. ‘Without Mr. Polanski’s name in the credits,’ wittily stated the New York Times, ‘this lush and scenic Tess could even be mistaken for the work of David Lean.’ This great compliment is wholeheartedly justified–Polanski created one of the best literary adaptations to date. His inspiring vision of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles was greatly empowered by the terrific screenplay he was helped to write by Gerard Brach and John Brownjohn. Interested to see what makes for a truly great adaptation of a 19th century classic? Take a look at this scarce screenplay we were lucky enough to stumble upon. ...”

Cinephilia Beyond

YouTube: Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Philipe Sarde)

2014 March: Tess (1979),  2014 July: Chinatown (1974), 2020 February:  The Enduring Vision of Chinatown

Because of a Flower - Ana Roxanne (2020)

 

“The sublime songs comprising New York-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with ‘a drone element and a mood,’ then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

amazon

YouTube: Because of a Flower  39:02

December Stargazing: The Meaning of Meteorites Image

 

“Last month, as the Taurids meteor shower was unfolding, the Bay Area was beneath a dome of heavy clouds that obscured the stars above. So I sat on my couch, flipping through a seemingly infinite universe of movies on my Apple TV, until I came upon Werner Herzog’s new documentary, Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds. In it, the inimitable filmmaker explores the strange world of meteors and the unexpected ways these celestial objects have blazed through our imaginations, influencing history, culture, religion, and politics. The film is full of the wonderfully strange quips and idiosyncratic cinematography that we have come to expect from Herzog. But there was one exchange with a historian of science named Simon Schaffer that I found particularly fascinating. Schaffer recounted the story of a famous meteorite strike in 1492 in a field near the walled city of Ensisheim on the border of Germany and France. Today, Ensisheim is a sleepy, bucolic place. ...”

Sierra Club

Looking for a Berenice Abbott bar on 56th Street

“Wouldn’t you love to go back in time and have a drink at Billie’s Bar? The hand-carved bar, antique fixtures, brass handles, tiled floor, and simple, red-checked tablecloths evoke the Gilded Age. Which makes sense, as the bar first opened in either 1871 or 1880 (depending on the source) by a Michael Condron at 1020 First Avenue, at 56th Street. This remarkably preserved late 19th century-style saloon was captured by Berenice Abbott in four photos she took in 1936—when Billie’s grandson, William Condron, Jr., was running the place.It looks like a true neighborhood joint, and perhaps the only change from the Gilded Age to the Depression is that women are allowed in (definitely a no-no in the 19th and early 20th centuries). ...”

Ephemeral New York

Handpumps (Decorate?) The Bar In 1930’s Manhattan

Various Artists – From Brussels with Love

 

“Sometimes the past is better experienced in the now. The reissue of the legendary From Brussels with Love cassette wallet is a case in point. First released forty years ago as the debut issue of the iconic Les Disques du Crépuscule, this elusive, almost mystical artefact has now returned, in a guise of high luxury. It wouldn’t be the twenty-first century if the potential purchaser wasn’t dazzled by the choice on offer. One can be as authentic as possible and buy a facsimile cassette package in the PVC wallet. Otherwise one can plump for a gatefold double vinyl edition pressed on coloured vinyl (one black, one white) with the booklet pages printed on the inner gatefold. Or be seduced by the glorious 2XCD pack, demurely encased in a stunning, (it really is stunning), hardback 60 page 10-inch square earbook. There is even a ‘multibundle format’ of various post-punk  sweetmeats, which I dare not describe here... “

The Quietus (Video)

Les Disques du Crepuscule

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: From Brussels With Love 17 videos

Bruegel as Cinema

 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Hunters in the Snow, 1565

“Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow is a study of apocalypse. In 1565, the year the painting was completed, as a number of climatologists and historians have noted, Europe was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. People starved. Agricultural communities regressed to hunting and gathering. Good Christians regressed to survival of the fittest. Except for one dead fox and a tiny, full-ish game bag, Bruegel’s hunters have come home empty-handed. They pass a tavern whose sign shows Hubertus, the patron saint of hunting. The sign hangs crookedly, one stiff gust away from falling. ... Bruegel seems like a better fit for a certain type of film than for poetry. His indiscriminate eye; his contempt for obvious ‘takeaways’; his wide, lucid images withholding judgment—in all these ways, he anticipates the ‘slow cinema‘ of the last few decades. It seems appropriate that director Andrei Tarkovsky, a pivotal figure in the flourishing of this kind of cinema, should be the first major filmmaker to put Hunters to work onscreen. ...”

Art In America

 

Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, 1972

2010 May: Peasant, 2011 March: "The Harvesters", Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 2012 February: The Mill and the Cross - Lech Majewski, 2012 December: The Lord of Misrule and the Feast of Fools., 2013 July: Netherlandish Proverbs, 2014 August: Children's Games (1560), 2016 May: The Hunters in the Snow (1565), 2018 November: Peeling Back the Paint to Discover Bruegel’s Secrets    2012 May: Solaris, 2018 October: Andrei Rublev (1966)

The Libraries of My Life By Jorge Carrión Image

 

The Chemists’ Club library in New York, New York, ca. 1920.

“I was thirteen and wanted to work. Someone told me that you could get paid to referee basketball games and where to go to find out about such weekend employment. I needed income to bolster my collections of stamps and Sherlock Holmes novels. I vaguely remember going to an office full of adolescents queueing in front of a young man who looked every inch an administrator. When my turn came, he asked me if I had any experience and I lied. I left that place with details of a game that would be played two days later, and the promise of 700 pesetas in cash. Nowadays, if a thirteen-year-old wants to research something he’s ignorant about, he’ll go to YouTube. That same afternoon I bought a whistle in a sports shop and went to the library. ...”

The Paris Review

How Jorge Carrión trek through the world's bookstores reveals the world itself

The Paris Review: The Strange Magic of Libraries

amazon: Bookshops, A Reader’s History

The Sopranos - Season 6

“The sixth and final season of the HBO drama series The Sopranos began on March 12, 2006, and concluded on June 10, 2007. ... The season was initially meant to consist of twenty episodes, but creator David Chase asked for one more to properly round out the story. ... The first part of the season focuses on the possibility of redemption as various members of the New Jersey crime family are offered chances to change their behavior, especially mob boss Tony Soprano, who confronts a spiritual awakening following a near-death experience. The second part focuses on the Soprano crime family suffering through the consequences of their actions as they come into conflict with their New York enemies. Ratings and critical reception were both strong during the sixth season of The Sopranos, but the ending of the final episode was controversial. ...”

Wikipedia

W - List of The Sopranos episodes

Top 6 Episodes: The Sopranos – Season 6 (Video)

The Sopranos: 10 Best Episodes Of Season 6 (According To IMDb)

The Sopranos Season 6 Songs by Episode (Audio)

YouTube: Season 6 Trailer - Official HBO, The Sopranos - Season 6 107 videos

2020 July: The Sopranos - Season 1, 2020 July: Season 2, 2020 August: Season 3, 2020 August: Season 4, 2020 September: Season 5

Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink Image

 

“In the fall of 2019, before any rumours of a strange new virus that had taken root, far away in China, Ralph and his family sat down to a pub lunch at their local haunt, The Chequers Inn in Loose. With them was Steve Crist, publisher of Proud to Be Weird keen to discuss the idea of a retrospective book covering Ralph entire 60 year career, from his student days to his most recent work. The project began as one might expect, with calls to agents, contract negotiations and the sharing of extensive visual files from the Ralph Steadman Art Collection Archives. The book would be 300 pages long so Steve Crist spent November 2019 until January 2020 slowly whittling down the choices ready to have originals photographed during the first week of February. A local photographer, Ollie Harrop, who had previously photographed Ralph for a book called The Artist in Time was hired to take the stills while the studio elves would scurry around locating the selected artworks. ...”

Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink – A Pandemic Project

SPLAT!: The Art of Ralph Steadman

amazon

Trump’s Crazy and Confoundingly Successful Conspiracy Theory Image

“... He will not, because no such fraud exists, according to the diligent debunking of reporters, weary fact checkers, Democrats and a slowly increasing number of Republicans, too. ‘NO FRAUD,’ read the headline at the top of the front of Wednesday’s New York Times. On Thursday, in the Wall Street Journal, none other than GOP lion Karl Rove said there’s ‘no evidence’ of the level of malfeasance Trump is not only alleging but requires to reverse the results of the election. All of this is necessary, norm-adhering, invaluable pushback—and also misses perhaps the most crucial point. The shocking lack of specifics, which Trump’s critics mock as laughably unserious for something so consequential, is not a deficiency. It is the feature of his strategy. ...”

Politico

CNN: Trump digs deeper into debunked conspiracy theories instead of embracing reality

Trump’s Long History With Conspiracy Theories

W - Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory

***Taking Giuliani’s Insane, Un-American Press Conference Seriously (Video)

****** NY Times: He Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It. 

March 2020: Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?, 2020 October: QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic