How a Presidential Rally Turned Into a Capitol Rampage

 

“When President Trump railed against the election results from a stage near the White House on Wednesday, his loyalists were already gathering at the Capitol. Soon, they would storm it. We analyzed a crucial two-hour period to reconstruct how a rally gave way to a mob that nearly came face to face with Congress. The day’s events were captured by protesters and witnesses who live-streamed the action or posted the scenes on social media. The footage shows the simultaneous and alternating perspectives of Mr. Trump at the podium, the lawmakers inside the Capitol and the swelling numbers  — and growing violence — of the rioters on the ground.  ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: ‘They Got a Officer!’: How a Mob Dragged and Beat Police at the Capitol (Video)

NY Times: ‘Our President Wants Us Here’: The Mob That Stormed the Capitol

NY Times: Impeach Trump Again

Where to Begin With Biosphere’s Dreamlike Electronica

 

“Say ‘biosphere’ and most people will think of the research site in Oracle, Arizona that has replicated seven of Earth’s biomes in order to study our ecosystems and place in the universe. But Biosphere is also the musical alias of Norwegian producer Geir Jenssen. The name is fitting; as Biosphere, Jenssen builds experimental electronic soundworlds that can be at once universal and site-specific—a closed system that feels seemingly infinite. Now thirty years into his career, Jenssen continues to make deep-focused and wide-ranging music, always seeking new vistas. He’s a tireless innovator and explorer, frequently mentioned alongside electronic legends like Aphex Twin, Carl Craig, and Autechre Inspired by the likes of New Order, Depeche Mode, and Brian Eno as a teenager in northern Norway, Jenssen utilized the synthesizer to begin making his own music. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Behold an Interactive Online Edition of Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants (1868)

 

“‘Who owned nature in the eighteenth century?’ asks Londa Schiebinger in Plants and Empire, a study of what the Stanford historian of science calls ‘colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic World.’ The question was largely decided at the time by ‘heroic voyaging botanists’ and ‘biopirates’ who claimed the world’s natural resources as their own. The matter was settled in the next couple centuries by merchants like Thomas Twining and his descendants, proprietors of Twinings tea. Founded as Britain’s first known tea shop in 1706, the company went on to become one of the largest purveyors of teas grown in the British colonies.One of Twining’s descendants, Elizabeth Twining, carried on the legacy as what Schiebinger calls one of many ‘armchair naturalists, who coordinated and synthesized collecting from sinecures in Europe,’ a role often taken on by women who could not travel the world. ...”

Open Culture

Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants: About the project 

An early image of ice skaters in Central Park

“The building of Central Park began in 1858. Later that year, the first section opened to the public: the 'skating pond,' aka the Lake. You’ve probably seen paintings and illustrations of 19th century New Yorkers ice skating in Central Park and on the ponds of Brooklyn. But this Currier & Ives lithograph (after a painting by Charles Parsons) might be the earliest.In ‘Central-Park Winter, the Skating Pond,’ it’s 1862, the middle of the Civil War. Yet the frozen pond is a scene of pure joy: couples in fancy skating outfits (yep, they were a thing) glided together, a rare opportunity for socially acceptable coed mingling. Kids play, adults fall, a dog is getting in on the fun, and everyone is enthralled by the magic of the ice under Bow Bridge. [Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art]”

Ephemeral New York

How Instruō Went Virtual

 

“Just as December 2020 was coming to a close, and the year’s surprises, both good and horrible, were seemingly behind us, a new surprise — quite the former — popped up for modular-synthesizer enthusiasts. The hardware manufacturer Instruō, based in Glasgow, Scotland, announced that it was making almost all of its modules available in software form, 17 total, and better yet: entirely for free. The modules run on the free VCV Rack software platform, which is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. (Visit Instruo at instruomodular.com, and VCV Rack at vcvrack.com.) ...”

disquiet (Video)

Beat Jazz Vol. 1 & 2: Pictures From The Gone World

 

“A mainstay favorite for years, this compilation collects music inpsired by the beatnik scene. The musical interpretation of blase on the New Bangs ‘Go Go Kitty’ is worth the admission all by itself. Way out poetry readings over bop combos, drugged up beret-wearers, and finger-popping hipsters making fifties pop. Featured artist: Jack Kerouac, Jack Hammer, Slim Gaillard, Gregory Corso, The Cosmic Rays with Sun Ra, Moondog and Coleman Hawkins. Beat poetry, hip Jazz and Be-Bop with the feel of a smoky club underground club in the early '60s, make this one of the coolest compilations you'll ever hear. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video), Discogs Beat Jazz:: Pictures From The Gone World Vol.2

YouTube: Beat Jazz: Pictures From The Gone World Vol. 2

Awe and Shock - How the world reacted to the Trumpist mob that sacked the heart of American democracy.

“Around the world, the shock of Wednesday’s assault on Capitol Hill brought into sharp focus a question that has been smoldering for four years among America’s allies and adversaries. ‘And again the doubt,’ wrote Emma Riverola in El Periódico de Catalunya, a Barcelona, Spain, daily, in painfully graphic terms. ‘Is this just a final burst of pus? Or has the infection spread, now threatening to cause a sepsis of the entire system?’ Was Donald Trump an aberration or the ominous onset of decline in the world’s premier democracy? The question echoed in democracies beset in recent years by populist movements nurtured by the same blend of far-right nationalism and blue-collar grievances as President Trump’s following. ... From the other end of the geopolitical spectrum, entrenched authoritarian regimes exulted in the disarray in a superpower accustomed to hectoring and sanctioning them over their suppression of democratic and human rights. ...”

NY Times

BBC - Capitol riots: World media see Trump ignite an 'insurrection' (Video)

YouTube: End times for President Trump, new dawn for Trump media? -  Al Jazeera

NY Times: The American Abyss

America Is Not Exceptional. Its History of Violence Cannot Be Denied.

Reuters: Factbox-World shocked by Trump supporters' attack on U.S. democracy

Open Culture - Mayhem Inside the Capitol: 40 Minutes of Footage (Video)

Rebecca Solnit: When the President of Mediocrity Incites an Insurrection

In These Times - Equating White Nationalists and "Left Radicals" Is What Got Us Here in the First Place

NY Times - America in 2021: Racial Progress in the South, a White Mob in the Capitol

How the Insurgent and MAGA Right are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington D.C.  - Robert Evans

Flair Magazine: The Short-Lived, Highly-Influential Magazine That Still Inspires Designers Today (1950)

 

“All magazines are their editors, but Flair was more its editor than any magazine had been before — or, for that matter, than any magazine has been since. Though she came to the end of her long life in England, a country to which she had expatriated with her fourth husband, a Briton, Fleur Cowles was as American a cultural figure as they come. Born Florence Freidman in 1908, she had performed on herself an unknowable number of Gatsbyesque acts of reinvention by 1950, when she found herself in a position to launch Flair. Her taste in husbands helped, married as she then was to Gardner ‘Mike’ Cowles Jr., publisher of Look, a popular photo journal that Fleur had helped to lift from its lowbrow origins and make respectable among that all-powerful consumer demographic, postwar American women. ...” Open Culture (Video)

2009 March: Jean Cocteau, 2016 February: In Which Jean Cocteau Gives Elan To This Milieu, 2019 October:  Orpheus (1950)

Sagitta

“Sagitta is a dim but distinctive constellation in the northern sky. Its name is Latin for 'arrow', not to be confused with the significantly larger constellation Sagittarius, the archer. It was included among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations defined by the International Astronomical Union. Although it dates to antiquity, Sagitta has no star brighter than 3rd magnitude and has the third-smallest area of all constellations. Gamma Sagittae is the constellation's brightest star, with an apparent magnitude of 3.47. It is an ageing red giant star 90% as massive as the Sun that has cooled and expanded to a diameter 54 times greater than it. Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, and Theta Sagittae are each multiple stars whose components can be seen in small telescopes. ...”

W - Sagitta

W - Urania's Mirror

Card 32 illustrates twelve constellations: nine modern ones (Corvus, Crater, Sextans [here Sextans Uraniæ], Hydra, Lupus, Centaurus, Antlia [here Antlia Pneumatica], and Pyxis [here Pyxis Nautica]), the now-subdivided Argo Navis, and the former constellations Noctua and Felis.

2021 storming of the United States Capitol

“On January 6, 2021, supporters of U.S. president Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol. The event disrupted a joint session of Congress during which the Electoral College vote was to be certified, affirming Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. The event followed numerous failed attempts by Trump and his supporters to overturn the election results. ... The demonstration culminated in a riot, in which the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters. Congress was in session at the time, conducting the Electoral College vote count and debating the results of the vote. As the protesters arrived, Capitol security evacuated the Senate and House of Representatives chambers and locked down several other buildings on the Capitol campus. Protesters broke past security to enter the Capitol, occupying the evacuated Senate chamber while guards drew handguns to prevent entry to the evacuated House floor. Several buildings in the Capitol complex were evacuated, and all buildings in the complex were subsequently locked down. ... The crowd was dispersed out of the US Capitol later that evening. The process to certify Electoral College results resumed shortly after 8 p.m. and continued to its conclusion the following morning. The riots and storming of the Capitol were described as insurrection, sedition, and domestic terrorism. Some news outlets labeled the act as an attempted coup d'état by Trump. The incident was the first time the Capitol had been overrun since the 1814 burning of Washington by the British during the War of 1812. ...”

Wikipedia (Video)

Politico - ‘Is This Really Happening?’: The Siege of Congress, Seen From the Inside (Video)

YouTube: Trump Supporters Storm US Capitol, US Lawmakers and Global Leaders Condemn Attack, Who Were The Capitol Hill Rioters, And The Woman Who Was Shot?, Inside the US Capitol as Trump supporters storm building

NY Times - Biden’s Win Is Confirmed, but Nation Is Shaken (Video)

Jacobin: Republican Elites Are Responsible for Today’s Storming of the Capitol

The Atlantic: The Sun Is Up. Impeach and Convict.

The Atlantic: What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America

MOB STORMS CAPITOL, INFLAMED BY ANGRY TRUMP SPEECH

“Protesters loyal to President Trump stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, halting Congress’s counting of the electoral votes to confirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as the police evacuated lawmakers from the building in a scene of violence, chaos and disruption that shook the core of American democracy. Around 2:15 p.m., as the House and Senate debated a move by a faction of Republicans to overturn the election results, security rushed Vice President Mike Pence out of the Senate chamber and the Capitol building was placed on lockdown after angry pro-Trump demonstrators surged past barricades and law enforcement toward the legislative chambers. For a time, senators and members of the House were locked inside their respective chambers. Images posted on social media showed scenes of supporters violently tussling with the police as at least one protester took to the rostrum of the House chamber to declare his support for Mr. Trump. ...”

NY Times: Pro-Trump Mob Swarms Capitol (Video)

*******NY Times: Trump Is to Blame for Capitol Attack

Love and Hate in a Different Time - Gabriels (2020)

“Introducing Gabriels - an LA based group made up of singer Jacob Lusk and producers Ari Balouzian and Ryan Hope. ‘Love and Hate in a Different Time’ is their new single and the perfect taster of their genre-defying sound. Their debut single ‘Loyalty’ was released on the seminal R&S Records, that and their follow up ‘In Loving Memory’ received support from the likes of Gilles Peterson, Virgil Abloh and Benji B. Both tracks served as solid stepping stones to reach this point in their fledgling career with a full debut EP due for release before the end of the year.  ...”

Piccadilly Records

Bandcamp (Audio/Video)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Love and Hate in a Different Time (Short Film)

Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism - Philippe Soupault (1963)

 

"Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism is a diminutive, stylish book that kicks off by appreciatively documenting a curiously seedy period of transition within the anti-rationalist French avant-garde: from Dada to Surrealism. Published by legendary City Lights in late 2016, this alluring collection of amiable reminiscences was penned by co-founding Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault (1897–1990) and first appeared in French in 1963 as Profils perdus. City Lights has bracketed this English translation with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, the director of the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an afterword by poet Ron Padgett. ..."  

A French Surrealist’s Eclectic Remembrances of His Cohort, Finally in English  

W - Philippe Soupault  

City Lights  

amazon

Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution

“Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is a revolutionary novel of profound scope and depth, about a day in the life of a woman who runs a few errands, sees an old suitor and gives a dull party. It’s a masterpiece created out of the humblest narrative materials. Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life, in more or less the way nearly every cell contains the entirety of an organism’s DNA. With ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ Woolf asserted as well that we are all embarked on epic journeys of our own, even though, to the untrained eye, some of us, many of us, might look as if we’re only there to tidy up or to do our best to amuse our bosses. ...”

NY Times

Michael Cunningham on the Novel That Would Become Mrs Dalloway

2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2020 August:  How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters

Interview: Suzanne Ciani, Synth Pioneer

“A synth pioneer and adventurous electronic composer since the early ’80s, Suzanne Ciani has defied hasty assumptions about genre, sound design and nerdism ever since. Suzanne’s ongoing romance with the synthesizer started at an early age, precisely when she was first introduced to sound modulation via the Buchla synth. And as a trained piano and keyboard player (Suzanne Ciani was also the first woman on the cover of Keyboard magazine), she devoted a large part of her musical endeavours to coaxing feminine sensibilities out of the machines, providing a stark counterpoint to the inherent machismo of the tech world. ...”

Red Bull Music Academy (Video)

Modular Love: Suzanne Ciani Interviewed

2019 July: Suzanne Ciani: a masterclass in modular synthesis

Trump, in Taped Call, Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Find’ Votes to Overturn Election

“President Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to ‘find’ him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with ‘a criminal offense’ during an hourlong telephone call on Saturday, according to an audio recording of the conversation. Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that he should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, would end up winning the state’s 16 electoral votes.’I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,’ Mr. Trump said during the conversation, according to a recording first obtained by The Washington Post, which published it online Sunday. The New York Times also acquired a recording of Mr. Trump’s call. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

NY Times: An Insurgency From Inside the Oval Office

NY Times: Republicans Begin New Congress Feuding Over Bid to Overturn Election

Washington Post: ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor (Video)

POLITICO: 117th Congress kicks off with GOP civil war, calls for impeachment and plexiglass

Fierce tigers and eagles on a 58th Street co-op Image

“Midtown East is the land of elegant 1920s-era apartment houses: handsome buildings of 10, 11, maybe 12 stories that usually feature understated brick and limestone facades. But 339 East 58th Street has something else going on: fierce creatures in cast stone above Medieval columns and decorative Romanesque arches. Adorning this co-op, built in either 1920 or 1929 depending on the source (I’m betting on 1929), are two eagle figures standing ramrod straight like soldiers high above the canopied entrance. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Hélène Vogelsinger

 

“... Illumination was born in March this year, exactly 5 days before the lockdown in France. But the process of its creation really started a month earlier, when I first visited the place, which was about to be my muse. What was your process when creating this piece? At that moment, I was experiencing different creative processes.On previous tracks, I used to first create the foundations and then search for a place to record it. A place which was aligned in terms of energies. I focused on abandoned places. I love the fact that they have layers of stories and histories, with different occupants, often crossing-times, and always full of beautiful and melancholic poetry. ...”

Chosen Waves 019: Hélène Vogelsinger – Illumination

Fifteen Questions Interview with Hélène Vogelsinger (Video)

Contemplation (Audio)

YouTube: Helene Vogelsinger

YouTube: Patch Notes: Hélène Vogelsinger***

‘Goodfellas’ at 30: Martin Scorsese’s Anthropological Goodlife Through a Lens

“As far back as I can remember, director Martin Scorsese has been synonymous with wiseguys, mooks, goombahs, and spin-on-a-dime funny-how guys delivering a gut punch to the senses, all choreographed to a wowser wall of sound. Young pretenders like Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright certainly learnt how to make up a killer score not, conversely, on the streets, but at the church of St Martin. The rest is bullshit (but that’s another film). We’re here to talk about Goodfellas (1990), surely his most guilty thrill ride until The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), the white-collar larcenous flip side to the saga of Henry Hill, an initial outsider like the young, asthmatic Scorsese in Little Italy, who finds an in to the neighbourhood mobster way of life. Scorsese indulges in the seductive surface appeal of these dodgy foot soldiers, gradually peeling away the layers like finely chopped garlic to reveal the lousy, grifting, desperate and moral hollow at the centre. ...”

Cinephilia & Beyond (Video)

2009 August: Marty Scorsese, 2015 March: Mean Streets (1973), 2015 April:  The Departed (2006), 2018 August: Taxi Driver - Martin Scorsese (1976), 2020 June: The Age of Innocence (1993), 2020 December: The Irishman (2019)

Eivind Aarset & Jan Bang - Snow Catches on her Eyelashes (2020)

 

“Although they had been collaborating since the early 90s, the first recording on which the Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset and American-born, Norway-resident Jan Bang appeared together was Bang's Pop Killer (Virgin, 1998). In the years since, Aarset and Bang have collaborated on many more albums, but this is the first to credit them as a duo. ... While Aarset's guitar, and Bang's production, mixing and sampling have been crucial ingredients in the sound of much modern Norwegian music, it would not be proper to neglect many other musicians who have also contributed, particularly as quite a few make appearances on this album, including trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, vocalist Sidsel Endresen and sampler and synth player Erik Honore. 

All About Jazz

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Snow Catches On Her Eyelashes 42:09

Vanitas

Abraham Mignon, The Nature as a Symbol of Vanitas, c. 1665-79

“I like flowers all right, I suppose. I like having them around, I like how they smell. I like their delicate skins, their manner of shedding yellow everywhere in a fine powder. I try to stop on the street, when I can, to bend down and look directly into their faces. I have mild flower preferences, in a bodega-selection way: ranunculus over chrysanthemums, peonies over roses, lilies over hydrangeas. Having lived in New York City my entire adult life, bodega-flower choice has been more or less the extent of the relationship. It’s possible that I no longer live in New York City, a fact that won’t be decided until next year sometime and which I only relay here because the place I currently inhabit has a lot of wildflowers and no bodegas....”

The Paris Review

Leatherstocking Tales – James Fenimore Cooper (1841-27)

"The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, set in the eighteenth century era of development in the primarily former Iroquois areas in central New York. Each novel features Natty Bumppo, a frontiersman known to European-American settlers as 'Leatherstocking', 'The Pathfinder', and 'the trapper'. Native Americans call him 'Deerslayer', 'La Longue Carabine' ('Long Rifle' in French), and 'Hawkeye'. ... The story dates are derived from dates given in the tales and span the period roughly of 1740–1806. They do not necessarily correspond with the actual dates of the historical events described in the series, which discrepancies Cooper likely introduced for the sake of convenience. ..."

W - Leatherstocking Tales

W - Natty Bumppo

The Complete Leatherstocking Tales (Audio), amazon

1919 endpaper illustration for The Last of the Mohicans by N. C. Wyeth.

Long Live the King: King Tub’s Dub in 5 Tracks

Oct. 2019 - “30 years since the assassination of Dub’s founder, the King’s legacy still looms large over the world of music. To pay tribute to the King, hailed as the godfather of dub, PAM focuses on 5 tracks that represent the diverse talents and innovations of the late King Tubby. Looking into King Tubby, born Osbourn Roddick in 1941 Kingston Jamaica, is like staring into the guts of an amplifier and trying to understand its relationship to sound. If you’re not an expert it’s one dense electronic mystery, but even to the untrained eye, there is an ordered beauty in the mangle of wires, power tubes, and speaker jacks. ...”

PAN (Video)