The Journals - Paul Blackburn (1975)

 

“THE JOURNALS to my mind are Blackburn's quintessential work, and demonstrate the way his work knew to go, the power of music he could charm out of everything that came his way, or even looked as if it were thinking about it. The poems and entries are also his last work. The latest writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September 1971. From his papers, it is clear that in those last weeks he tried to collect the Journal pages together, and did sense them (as many of his readers from 1968 onward did) as a continuous and coherent book. The present text follows generally the order of what he had collected together and erratically paginated as The Journals. When repetitions, revisions, and versions have been taken away, our inheritance in this particular amounts to a typescript of some 160 pages. ... - Edited By Robert Kelly“

UPenn

Poem Essay

Burt Kimmelman: On The Journals by Paul Blackburn

2008 August: Paul Blackburn, 2012 November: Yankee go home (PoemTalk #59), 2013 January: Cronopios and Famas - Julio Cortazar (Paul Blackburn), 2013 August: Paul Blackburn and Das Rhinegold, 2015 May: The Grinding Down, 2015 August: The Cities (1967). , 2016 March: Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit: A Bouquet for Flatbush (1960), 2017 July: Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry, 2017 November: The Nets (1961)

Perfection, Art and Manchester City

 

“... The iteration of Manchester City that Pep Guardiola has crafted this season is, without question, a marvel of engineering: fine-tuned and slick and working in almost flawless, mechanical synchronicity. The Premier League has been unable to resist: City has won 15 league games in a row, conceding only five goals in the process and building an unassailable 14-point lead over its nearest challenger, and this weekend’s opponent/victim, Manchester United. Guardiola’s team has one foot in the Champions League quarterfinals. It has already reached the same stage of the F.A. Cup, and the final of the Carabao Cup.  ...”

NY Times

Futuro Antico ‎- Futuro Antico (1980)

 

“For the first time on vinyl and CD this obscure gem of the italian project Futuro Antico, released just on tape in 1980, this record contains the hypnotic session of Walter Maioli (Aktuala) and Riccardo Sinigaglia. Analog and warm sounds, a perfect mix of drone synth and ancient flutes (found in oriental countries) gives you the idea to fly on a spaceship towards some exotic sites. This records terribly remember the astonishing live Köln jam of Terry Riley and Don Cherry, the comparison fits! This reissue maintains the first tape artwork + info and photos in the innerfolder. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Prog Archives

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Futuro Antico ‎- Futuro Antico (1980) FULL ALBUM 40:20

Forty Daze of R. Crumb: The Complete Collection and Then Some

 

“It was the Bicentennial year. What could be more appropriate than to give an avatar of the counterculture free rein across the pages of the Village Voice? The country was still floundering after Watergate and almost two years of bumbling from the appointed caretaker in the Oval Office, Jerry Ford. Many years later, speaking to an interviewer about a collected edition of the Voice’s Mr. Natural strips, Crumb said, ‘Well, by the mid-Seventies I was feeling kind of lost. The hippie thing was falling apart. The whole optimism of the Sixties was getting ground down.’ ... Crumb can never be accused of viewing the world through rose-colored glasses, and the backgrounds behind Mr. Natural’s ruminations are chockablock with junked cars, smokestacks, discarded tires, and other blots on the American arcadia. We get classic Mr. Natural: Sage or crackpot or charlatan? ...”

Voice

2008 August: Robert Crumb, 2010 October: Comics No. 1, 2011 October: Pioneers of Country Music Trading Cards, 2012 August: R. Crumb: The Complete Record Cover Collection, 2015 May: R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instantly Discovered His Artistic Style, 2015 June: Heroes of the Blues Boxed Trading Card Set by R. Crumb, 2018 March: Aline Kominsky-Crumb, 2019 March:R. Crumb’s Portraits of Aline and Others, 2020 January: Survey: Robert Crumb & 78 rpm records, 2020 June: Bad Diet & Bad Hair Destroy Human Civilization - Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb

In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers

 

“It’s one of the mightiest rivers you will never see, carrying some 30 times more water than all the world’s freshwater rivers combined. In the North Atlantic, one arm of the Gulf Stream breaks toward Iceland, transporting vast amounts of warmth far northward, by one estimate supplying Scandinavia with heat equivalent to 78,000 times its current energy use. Without this current — a heat pump on a planetary scale — scientists believe that great swaths of the world might look quite different. Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week, suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep. ...”

NY Times

Jazz legend, after house partially collapses, gets help from philanthropist, neighbors

 

Marshall Allen, 96, has led Sun Ra's Arkestra since 1993 and still lives in the Sun Ra House in Germantown.

“The terrestrial headquarters of the Sun Ra Arkestra is a three-story rowhouse in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, where the famously intergalactic jazz ensemble has lived, rehearsed, and pushed the boundaries of music for more than 50 years.The house has partially collapsed, but Marshall Allen, 96, the band’s founding saxophone player and current leader, still lives and works there. The first Sun Ra Arkestra album in 20 years, ’Swirling,’ was released last October to wide acclaim. The house is now undergoing major structural repairs funded by a Miami-based art and jazz philanthropy, the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation.The pump for the radiator heating system can’t heat the upper floors of the house, and the basement had been deteriorating for years. Allen has lived in the house since 1968, with a rotating cast of band members, and took over leadership of the Arkestra after Sun Ra’s death in 1993. ...”

WHYY

A Sun Ra poster remains affixed to the wall above the space where the floor collapsed into the sub-basement at the Sun Ra house in Germantown.

Erica Hunt

Erica Hunt at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York City, 2010

“Erica Hunt (born March 12, 1955) is a U.S. poet, essayist, teacher, mother, and organizer from New York City. She is often associated with the group of Language poets from her days living in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but her work is also considered central to the avant garde black aesthetic developing after the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hunt worked with several non-profits that encourage black philanthropy for black communities and causes. ... Hunt attended University of Vermont - where she studied the philosophy of language, anthropology and folklore — and received in 1980 a BA in English from San Francisco State University, where she studied poetry with Kathleen Fraser and Michael Palmer. During her time in the Bay Area in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hunt was an active part of the poetry scene, particularly the group of so-called Language poets who held readings at The Grand Piano, a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street in San Francisco. ...”

Wikipedia

Ten Questions for Erica Hunt

Jacket2 - On Erica Hunt’s 'Arcade': control / temporality / the past in the present

amazon: Jump the Clock: New & Selected Poems

PennSound (Video)

Soul Of A Man: Al Kooper Live (1995)

 

“A gift from heaven is the only adequate way of describing this superb double-CD set, which comes in a slipcase with a neat little booklet. It is the definitive Al Kooper solo project, and a career reconsideration and retrospective, but it's also damn close to definitive as a document of the Blues Project and the original Blood, Sweat & Tears as well. At three February 1994 gigs at New York's Bottom Line, Kooper got together the original members of both bands (with BS&T billed as ‘Child Is Father to the Man’) and his own Rekooperators, including John Simon and Harvey Brooks, with John Sebastian sitting in on harmonica, to perform new versions of 33 years' worth of repertory. ... The beautiful part of this set, beyond the superb performances and the excellent sound quality, is that the music has been treated with respect in the packaging -- the heavily annotated booklet even lists each soloist on every number, in the manner of proper jazz releases. ...”               

allmusic (Audio)

100 Essential Albums: #99 — “Soul of a Man” by Al Kooper (1995) (Video)

Discogs

amazon

YouTube: Soul Of A Man - Live - Full Album 1:53:45

2009 February: Al Kooper, 2011 September: The Blues Project, 2012 January: Child Is Father to the Man - Blood, Sweat & Tears , 2013 April: I Stand Alone, 2013 January: Cafe Au Go Go, 2014 July: Live at The Cafe Au Go Go - The Blues Project (1965)

The Speaker is Present: A Conversation with Lesley Flanigan

“Lesley Flanigan’s music is full of seemingly familiar sounds that, in her compositions, elude any sense of their precise origin. Flanigan is a New York electronic musician who uses her background in sculpture to build her own instruments, amplifying and looping feedback through homemade speaker systems. Referred to as ‘speaker feedback instruments’ in our interview, the handmade pieces of equipment are similar in structure and amplifying circuits, yet vary in size and source, imbuing each with their own unique voice. ...”

Impose Magazine (Audio/Video)

disquiet: Livestream Reviewstream (Video)

Lesley Flanigan (Video)

Discogs (Video)

vimeo: 19 videos

YouTube: :: watsON? NOISE 2013?

How Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot Image

“At 1:51 p.m. on Jan. 6, a right-wing radio host named Michael D. Brown wrote on Twitter that rioters had breached the United States Capitol — and immediately speculated about who was really to blame. ‘Antifa or BLM or other insurgents could be doing it disguised as Trump supporters,’ Mr. Brown wrote, using shorthand for Black Lives Matter. ‘Come on, man, have you never heard of psyops?’ Only 13,000 people follow Mr. Brown on Twitter, but his tweet caught the attention of another conservative pundit: Todd Herman, who was guest-hosting Rush Limbaugh’s national radio program. Minutes later, he repeated Mr. Brown’s baseless claim to Mr. Limbaugh’s throngs of listeners: ‘It’s probably not Trump supporters who would do that. Antifa, BLM, that’s what they do. Right?’ What happened over the next 12 hours illustrated the speed and the scale of a right-wing disinformation machine primed to seize on a lie that served its political interests and quickly spread it as truth to a receptive audience. The weekslong fiction about a stolen election that President Donald J. Trump pushed to his millions of supporters had set the stage for a new and equally false iteration: that left-wing agitators were responsible for the attack on the Capitol. ...”

NY Times

2021 February: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack, 2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election

Pro-Trump Republicans have succeeded in warping their voters’ realities, deploying disinformation and exhibiting sheer gall to try to minimize a violent riot perpetrated by their own supporters.

Harry Smith: The Beat Artist Who Rescued Paper Planes from the Streets of NYC

 

"Every kid appreciates the improbable heights of a well-crafted paper airplane, but rare are the adults who take notice. Prolific 20th-century polymath Harry Smith, who’s best known for his experimental filmmaking but also dabbled in painting, anthropology, music, and the occult, picked up every paper airplane he saw on the streets of Manhattan from 1961 to 1983. Only 251 survive from the Beat artist’s collection. All were crisply photographed by Jason Fulford for Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith, Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I, edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert and out now from J&L Books and Anthology Film Archives. ...”

Hyperallergic

WIRED: Beautiful Beatnik-Era Paper Planes From the Streets of NYC

John Klacsmann & Andrew Lampert on Harry Smith, 'Paper Airplanes' & 'String Figures'

W - Harry Smith

amazon: Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I, String Figures: The Collections of Harry Smith: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II

Two men, an el train, and a produce market in a 1945 mystery painting Image

 

“Figuring out the location of a long-ago image depicting some part of New York City is a fun challenge. So when a reader sent me this painting—the basis for a 1945 Mack truck ad—looking for information on where the scene was set, I was intrigued. ‘The caption for the ad said An old AC Mack Bulldog Nose truck at the New York Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Market,' explained the reader. ‘Peter Helck, the artist who painted this scene (also my grandfather) was born in Manhattan and lived or worked there most of his life, so he knew the city very well. I believe this represents an actual location and I am hoping you might be able to identify it.’ References to the ‘New York Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Market’ turned up vague information. ...”

Ephemeral New York

The Eternal Life Aquatic with Laraaji

 

“In recent years, there has been much discussion about distinctions between ‘ambient’ music and ‘new age’ music. It is quite likely that the primary distinction between the two is a matter of just how foregrounded are spiritual matters — in the music’s conception, and in its presumed consumption. If anyone can weigh in authoritatively on such distinctions, it is Laraaji, the longtime, holistic-minded musician whose most prominent release, 1980’s Ambient 3: Days of Radiance (Editions EG), was produced by a world-famous skeptic: ambient godfather Brian Eno. As has been well documented over the years, Eno came upon Laraaji playing his electric-enhanced zither in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. That chance encounter helped introduce Laraaji to the world, and to this day he travels widely and records and performs frequently, often as part of spiritual conferences. ...”

disquiet (Audio/Video)

YouTube: Laraaji Boiler Room London - Deep Listening Session 1:04:44

Tennessee William - A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

 

“A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1951 American drama film, adapted from Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 play of the same name. It tells the story of a southern belle, Blanche DuBois, who, after encountering a series of personal losses, leaves her aristocratic background seeking refuge with her sister and brother-in-law in a dilapidated New Orleans apartment building. The Broadway production and cast was converted to film with several changes. Tennessee Williams collaborated with Oscar Saul and Elia Kazan on the screenplay. Kazan, who directed the Broadway stage production, also directed the black and white film. Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden were all cast in their original Broadway roles. Although Jessica Tandy originated the role of Blanche DuBois on Broadway, Vivien Leigh, who had appeared in the London theatre production, was cast in the film adaptation for her star power. ...”

W - A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 film), W - A Streetcar Named Desire

Guardian: A Streetcar Named Desire review – hard times in the Big Easy (Video)

15 Facts About Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

YouTube: Streetcar Named Desire' | Critics' Picks | The New York Time

Vincent van Gogh Paris painting from 1887 to make public debut

 

Scène de rue à Montmartre/Montmartre Street Scene (February-April 1887)

“A major Paris work by Vincent van Gogh that has been part of the same French family’s private collection for more than a century is to go on public display for the first time since it was painted in the spring of 1887. Scène de rue à Montmartre is part of a very rare series depicting the celebrated Moulin de la Galette, on the hilltop overlooking the capital, painted during the two years the Dutch artist spent sharing an apartment with his brother Theo on rue Lepic. Acquired by a French collector in 1920, it has remained in the same family ever since and never been shown in public, despite being listed in seven catalogues. ...”

Guardian

The Art Newspaper

2010 March: Van Gogh Museum, 2010 May: Why preserve Van Gogh's palette?, 2012 April: Van Gogh Up Close, 2015 May: Van Gogh and Nature, 2016 January: Van Gogh's Bedrooms, 2016 November: Wheat Fields - Van Gogh series, 2019 April: At Eternity’s Gate - Julian Schnabel (2018), 2020 April: The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen  (1884)

Mapping Jah Wobble’s Interdimensional Dub Image

“In 1980 Jah Wobble left his role as bassist for Public Image Limited to pursue a vast range of other projects—like the border-crossing fusion of his long-running Invaders of the Heart, and a series of DIY releases on his own label Lago Records. He’s explored everything from dub and funk to jazz, electro, ambient, and various regional musical styles. He’s worked with a wide range of similarly restless figures, including Bill Laswell and Brian Eno. His recent work includes a deluge of tracks uploaded to Bandcamp during lockdown, along with a second LP of Chinese dub recorded with his wife, acclaimed harpist Zi Lan Liao, and their two sons. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

2011 September: Can, 2011 February: Plight & Premonition, 2011 June: Persian Love, 2013 October: Flux + Mutability - David Sylvian and Holger Czukay (1989) , 2014 June: Holger Czukay - Der Osten Ist Rot, Rome Remains Rome (1984/7), 2012 June: The Lost Tapes, 2016 March: Invaders Of The Heart - Jah Wobble (1982), 2017 April: Jah Wobble, The Edge, Holger Czukay - Snake Charmer (1983), 2017 June: The Legend Lives On… Jah Wobble In Betrayal (1980), 2017 July: Can - The Singles (2017), 2017 September: Holger Czukay (1938-2017), 2019 September: Holger Czukay - Cinema (2018), 2020 December: Future Days (Remastered) - Can (2014)

Selected Media 2016 - 2018: Bartosz Kruczyński

 

“Emotional Response is delighted to present a special project, a collection of music from Bartosz Kruczynski, recorded for “Selected Media” and presented here as a time-piece of his continuing works. Initially known as one half of sample based project Ptaki (The Very Polish Cut Outs / Transatlantyk), Kruczynski first appeared for Emotional Response as The Phantom for the first series of Schleißen in 2015. Featuring two works of deep ‘fourth world’ sounds, they highlighted a shift to more mellow, synthetic and hazy compositions. ... Here though, Kruczynski returns to the ambient and ethereal - plus a touch of dub techno - to showcase his expansive collaborative work with Polish studio, TVP Culture. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Producer Bartosz Kruczynski fuses pastoral ambient and dub on new collection (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Selected Media 2016 - 2018  45:01

What Qualifies as Street Art?

 

JR, The Wrinkles of the City, Los Angeles - Brewery Downtown - USA, 2011

“The ascent of so-called street artists into the moneyed realms of the blue chip is not exactly a new phenomenon—it’s been nearly two years since KAWS skyrocketed to a new auction record of HK$116 million (US$14.8 million) with the sale of The Kaws Album (2005) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, which was followed six months later by the record-breaking sale of Banksy’s Devolved Parliament (2009) for £9.8 million ($12.1 million). These two mononym artists could be seen as the loosely defined category’s twin princes, despite their stylistic differences—KAWS’s vibrant cartoon riffs and Banksy’s wry stencils are two of the most easily recognizable, not to mention consistently lucrative, styles in contemporary art. But as collectors the world over continue to be fascinated with ‘Companion’ figures and Girl With Balloon prints, the exact parameters of what constitutes ‘street art‘ remain nebulous. ...”

Artsy

Walter Kaufmann’s Classic Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

 

“Walter Kaufmann spent 33 years (1947-1980) teaching philosophy at Princeton. And more than anyone else, Kaufmann introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to the English-speaking world and made it possible to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker – something there wasn’t always room to do in American intellectual circles. Without simplifying things too much, Kaufmann saw Nietzsche as something of an early existentialist, which brings us to these vintage lectures recorded in 1960 (right around the time that Kaufmann, a German-born convert to Judaism, also became a naturalized American citizen). The three lectures offer a short primer on existentialism and the modern crises philosophers grappled with. Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion begins the series, followed by Nietzsche and the Crisis in Philosophy and Sartre and the Crisis in Morality.  Kaufmann’s talks are now listed in the Philosophy section of our collection of 1100 Free Online Courses. …”

Open Culture (Audio)

W - Walter Kaufmann

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 101

 

“Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet, publisher and political iconoclast who inspired and nurtured generations of San Francisco artists and writers from City Lights, his famed bookstore, died on Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 101. The cause was interstitial lung disease, his daughter, Julie Sasser, said. The spiritual godfather of the Beat movement, Mr. Ferlinghetti made his home base in the modest independent book haven now formally known as City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. A self-described ‘literary meeting place’ founded in 1953 and located on the border of the city’s sometimes swank, sometimes seedy North Beach neighborhood, City Lights, on Columbus Avenue, soon became as much a part of the San Francisco scene as the Golden Gate Bridge or Fisherman’s Wharf. ...”

NY Times (Video)

W - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In Memory of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Immortal Beat (Audio)

Guardian - The soul of the city: San Francisco honors literary hero Lawrence Ferlinghetti

from a secret location: City Lights Nos. 1–4 (1963–78)

PennSound: Ferlinghett (Video/MP3)

Outlaw country

 

“Outlaw country is a subgenre of American country music, most popular during the 1970s and early 1980s. Outlaw country often centers around outlaws or prisoners opposing law enforcement, or on the lifestyles of criminals ‘on the lam’ and their relationships with substance abuse and poverty. It is sometimes referred to as the outlaw movement or simply outlaw music. The music has its roots in earlier subgenres like honky tonk and rockabilly and is characterized by a blend of rock and folk rhythms, country instrumentation and introspective lyrics. The movement began as a reaction to the slick production and popular structures of the Nashville sound developed by record producers like Chet Atkins. The outlaw sound has its roots in blues music, honky tonk music of the 1940s and 1950s, rockabilly of the 1950s, and the evolving genre of rock and roll. ...”

Wikipedia

Original Outlaws: 10 Country Heroes Who Paved The Way For Americana (Video)

Jostijn Ligtvoet

 

“My father made a recording for his sonology study in 1973 for a mime festival called 'opposites'. It is a recording with the organ in the lead, long notes, dissonant. Very nice. I wanted to shape the composition by starting atonal, listening carefully to the recording, finding contradictions therein and playing with them. Chaos is very important in my work, so it is there too. It really feels like I was there at the time, understanding why he composed and recorded the music. In that regard, there is no boundary between that time and this one, even though it was 48 years ago. My father passed away 11 years ago, but this brings me closer to him than ever. It is also an ode to my mother, who passed away last December. Thanks to my mother, my father was able to channel all his wild ideas. Modules used: Morphagene + Maths + Erbe-Verb ... Cello ...”

YouTube: Opposites, Twilight and fire

YouTube: Jostijn Ligtvoet

Mutual aid: Kropotkin’s theory of human capacity

 

“In March 1889 Peter Kropotkin agreed to give six lectures to William Morris’s Socialist Society in Hammersmith, London. Labeling the series ‘Social Evolution,’ he planned to explore ‘the grounds’ of socialism. As it turned out, he never delivered the talks, but the title and timing, just a year before he published his first essay on mutual aid, hint at the content. He left a bigger clue when he told Morris’s daughter May that he had been working on the series during his recent tour of Scotland. According to local press reports, one of the issues on Kropotkin’s mind was the feasibility of socialism. Perhaps rashly, given that one critic had dismissed his socialism as a futile, dangerous scheme to ‘reach Arcady through anarchy,’ he told an Aberdeen meeting that too many workers attracted to socialism still believed it impractical. ...”

ROAR

W - Peter Kropotkin

Grauzone - Die Sunrise Tapes (1998)

 

“When I first met Marco Repetto, I barely had a clue about his past. It was in May 1994, as I was getting ready to move into his old flat in the centre of Bern. I knew that Repetto was a renowned techno producer, something underlined by the presence of a Roland Jupiter 6 in one of the rooms. However, it took me years to realize that Repetto was once the drummer of Grauzone: the band responsible for ‘Eisbär,’ one of the biggest Swiss pop epiphanies of the ’80s. Somewhere between Neue Deutsche Welle and Cure-inspired new wave, Grauzone had pressed angry lyrics, à la mode muted guitar playing and quirky synthesizer experiments into a dazzling conglomerate of not quite dance music. ...”

Interview: Marco Repetto on Grauzone’s “Eisbär” and Beyond (Video)

Grauzone: The ice cold sounds of classic 80s Swiss new wavers

W - Grauzone

Discogs

amazon: 1980-1982 Remastered

YouTube: Die Sunrise Tapes (Full Album) 51:11

What an 1850s winter scene says about New York life

 

“At first glance, ‘Winter Scene on Broadway’ does what colorized engravings are supposed to do, which is to offer a dramatic, romantic view of life in New York City, mainly for nonresidents. In this case, the overview is the hustle and bustle of Gotham’s most famous thoroughfare between Prince and Spring Streets in wintertime: icicles hanging from handsome buildings, pedestrians of all stripes navigating the sidewalks, and a jam-packed streetcar fitted with sled rails and pulled by three teams of horses making its way through the snow. But when you look a little closer, a series of mini stories appear. And these small narratives tell us a lot about how New Yorkers experienced day-to-day life in the mid-1850s—the time period when French painter Hippolyte Victor Valentin Sebron completed his depiction of the wintry city. ...”

Ephemeral New York

A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack

 

“As federal prosecutors unveil charges in the assault on the Capitol last month, they have repeatedly highlighted two militant groups — the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys — as being the most organized, accusing them of planning their strategy ahead of time and in some cases helping escalate a rally into an attack. The two organizations stand in contrast to a majority of the mob. Of the more than 230 people charged so far, only 31 are known to have ties to a militant extremist group. And at least 26 of those are affiliated with the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys. The groups differ in their focus and tactics: The Oath Keepers are part of an anti-government militia movement that emphasizes military-style training, while the Proud Boys espouse an ideology of male and Western superiority, with members often expressing white-supremacist and anti-immigrant views. But the groups have been united in their allegiance to former President Donald J. Trump. ...”

NY Times

******NY Times - The Lost Hours: How Confusion and Inaction at the Capitol Delayed a Troop Deployment

2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election

A Collision at Anfield Does Little to Slow Liverpool’s Fall

 

Mohamed Salah cut down by Tom Davies, a fair reflection of Liverpool’s afternoon, its month, its season.

“LIVERPOOL, England — It is every week, now, that Liverpool seems to lose another little piece of itself. An unbeaten home record that stretched back more than three years disappeared in January, spirited away by Burnley. The sense of Anfield as a fortress collapsed soon after, stormed in short order by Brighton and then by Manchester City. The golden afterglow of the long-awaited Premier League crown that arrived last summer has been dimming for some time, but it darkened for good last week, with Jürgen Klopp conceding the Premier League title while still in the bitter grip of winter. And then, as fireworks boomed and car horns blared across Merseyside on Saturday evening, came what may be the most hurtful shift of all. Everton had not tasted victory at Anfield this century. ...”

NY Times

Jazz On Film...Michel Legrand

 

“Celebrating the life of the legend that is Michel Legrand and music for the New Era, this stunning stand-alone collection, compiled by label owner Jason Lee Lazell for Record Store Day 2020, features the jazz cuts from some of the most iconic films of the French New Wave era….  Michel has collaborated with jazz greats such as, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan, Bud Shank, Lena Horne and in later times, contemporary artists such as  Iggy Pop, Carla Bruni, Rufus Wainwright, Jamie Cullum, Madeline Peyroux… Legrand’s songwriting skills flowered in the early 1950s through intimate acquaintance with the modern chanson movement in Paris, at first as a gifted piano accompanist. ...”

Moochin' About (Audio)

W - Michel Legrand

Modern Painters - John Ruskin (1843–1860)

 

“Modern Painters (1843–1860) is a five-volume work by the eminent Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, begun when he was 24 years old based on material collected in Switzerland in 1842. Ruskin argues that recent painters emerging from the tradition of the picturesque are superior in the art of landscape to the old masters. The book was primarily written as a defense of the later work of J.M.W. Turner. Ruskin used the book to argue that art should devote itself to the accurate documentation of nature. In Ruskin's view, Turner had developed from early detailed documentation of nature to a later more profound insight into natural forces and atmospheric effects. In this way, Modern Painters reflects ‘Landscape and Portrait-Painting’ (1829) by American art critic John Neal by distinguishing between ‘things seen by the artist’ and ‘things as they are.’ ...”

W - Modern Painters

Radicals On Film: The Intertwining Legacies Of John Ruskin & Peter Fuller (Video)

Gutenberg - Modern Painters

amazon

2014 March: John Ruskin

The Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858-9.