Deep Art Nature

Leni Sinclair

"Leni Sinclair, born Magdalene Arndt, is an American photographer and radical political activist who lives in Detroit. She has photographed rock and jazz musicians since the early 1960s. She was the co-founder of the White Panther Party along with John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon. Magdalene Arndt was born on March 8, 1940, in Königsberg, Germany, later renamed Kaliningrad when it became territory of the Soviet Union. She grew up in the village of Vahldorf near Magdeburg in East Germany where she listened to American jazz artists such as Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on Radio Luxemburg. ...”

Wikipedia

Jacobin: When Detroit Was Revolutionary

Kresge Arts in Detroit: Leni Sinclair (Video)

Leni Sinclair Shares on Life, Detroit, and More Ahead of Her Motor City Underground Exhibition

Public display of poem by Medgar Evers B&W photograph, undated image, by Leni Sinclair

Afghanistan Live Updates: Afghan President Said to Have Fled as Taliban Enter Kabul

“President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan has fled the country, a top political figure said on Sunday, as the Taliban’s relentless, rapid advance brought them into the capital, Kabul, and the last major city controlled by the government fell into chaos. Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of the council appointed to lead peace talks, said in a Facebook video that Mr. Ghani, who had resisted calls for him to step down, had left Afghanistan. Afghan media also reported his departure, which many analysts said was needed to prevent a bloody battle for control of Kabul. On Sunday evening, former President Hamid Karzai announced on Twitter that he was forming a Coordinating Council together with Mr. Abdullah and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hesb-i-Islami party, to manage a peaceful transfer of power. He called on both government and Taliban forces to act with restraint but resolutely to curb any individuals causing chaos or acting irresponsibly. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: A Week Into Taliban Rule, One City’s Glimpse of What the Future May Hold

NY Times: Taliban Sweep in Afghanistan Follows Years of U.S. Miscalculations

Guardian: Taliban orders fighters into Kabul as US evacuates embassy (Video)

The Atlantic: What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan

The Atlantic: Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy

New Yorker: The Return of the Taliban

The Taliban have completed their sweep of the country’s south on Friday, as they took four more provincial capitals

A fresh angle: The revolutionary gaze of Margaret Watkins – in pictures

Still Life – Bathtub, New York, 1919

“Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins rejected traditional gender roles to become a pioneering modernist photographer with Renaissance flair. ... Still Life – Bathtub, New York, 1919. Watkins’ world, like many women at the time, was that of the interior, the home. Watkins had the ability to see it as a pretext for inventing new forms. ... Untitled, Glasgow, 1928-1938. Watkins moved to Glasgow, the city her parents had left to emigrate to Canada, in 1928. The last series of photographs she took was of the city’s building sites. ...”

Guardian

W - Margaret Watkins

Untitled, Glasgow, 1928-1938.

George-Thérèse Dickenson, 1951-2021

“Poet, editor and activist George-Thérèse Dickenson died on June 15, 2021, in New York. The cause was a brain hemorrhage, according to her brother, John Dickenson. With Will Bennett, Dickenson edited the magazine Assassin in the late 1970s. ... After a brief stint at UC-Berkeley, she moved to Vermont and then Boston in the early 1970s, where she became involved with the anarchist circle around Murray Bookchin. She also connected with a group of poets. In the late 1970s, she moved to lower Manhattan, where, over the next decade, Dickenson was closely involved with Larry Estridge and Peter Seaton. During that time, she taught poetry in the prisons through Janine Pommy Vega’s Incisions Arts Project. ...”

Seven Days

Jacket2: Charles Bernstein - George-Thérèse Dickenson (1951–2021)

The Hidden Melodies of Subways Around the World

“Ted Green has been collecting the sounds and sights of transit systems for more than a decade. He travels frequently for work, as a civil engineer, and in every city he visits, he rides the mass transit system and films video of the closing doors, replete with the announcements and the telltale chimes — beeps, ding-dongs, jingles and arpeggios that warn riders around the world to stand clear. ... Like many aspects of mass transit systems, door chimes may seem banal, the dull background track to daily commutes. If you listen more closely, though, you’ll notice regional patterns and distinctions. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

The Ashcan School Painted the American Working Class

New York (1911) by George Bellows.

“At the turn of the twentieth century, many Western painters sought to enhance the visual world through glorification. Portraits of politicians and socialites instilled pride in their moneyed subjects, while landscapes and narrative works told epic tales across massive canvases. In the United States, the industrial revolution altered the landscape of every major city, with skyscrapers rising rapidly and workers pressing their noses further to the grindstone. Bourgeois painters were ill-equipped to portray urban development and its effects on everyday people, but one tight-knit group of working-class artists captured the spirit of this time by going against the mainstream. These artists, commonly known as the Ashcan school, had cut their teeth as political cartoonists during the rise of investigative journalism. Working in newspapers brought them closer to this rapidly industrializing social environment, instilling a sense of journalistic presence. They served the press in ways the camera would just a few decades later, leading their art from postimpressionism to documentary realism. ...’

Jacobin

Ashcan Artists - Bill Davis

The City from Greenwich Village (1922) by John Sloan.

A History Of Hip-Hop In 20 Essential Songs

“A history of hip-hop in 20 songs? It’s difficult enough to condense one artist’s career into 20 songs, but any attempt to do the same for an entire genre is a fool’s errand. It’s an interesting exercise, nonetheless. If you were speaking to someone that wasn’t familiar with the genre, what songs would you pick to tell the history of hip-hop? You’d of course need to start at the beginning. And, hip-hop, perhaps uniquely among all musical forms, has a generally accepted start date. That came on August 11, 1973, when the teenage DJ Kool Herc played his sister’s birthday party in the basement of their apartment complex in the Bronx, New York. Herc was behind the style’s early innovations, particularly the isolating and repeating of percussion sections of funk records, using a second copy of the same record, and extending the breakdowns so the athletically inclined dancers could let loose. ...”

udiscover (Video)

The Best Kind of Vanishing

ShaiHuludKitty, NYC Subway Car at Sunset, 2019

“As of today, March 26, 2021, I no longer know how to write a poem. I have no idea how I wrote the poems in this book.In some ways, this state of unknowing is exciting. A poetry teacher of mine once said, quoting the poet Muriel Rukeyser, ‘You need only be a scarecrow for poems to land on.’ Perhaps, then, my amnesia as to how I made these poems indicates that I’ve been, at times, a scarecrow: a landing place, a vessel, a channel for poems. I like that. To me, it seems preferable to be a channel than what I usually am: a self-will-er, a scrambler, a filler of holes, a looker in ‘glittery shitdoors’ for love (as I note in the poem ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’). ...”

The Paris Review

W - Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser

Guillevic: Selected Poems - Eugene Guillevic, Denise Levertov (1969)

“... In her book of translations of selected Guillevic poems, the poet Denise Levertov observed that: 'The great ritual places of the Celts . . . the places where the great and small stones or menhirs, are gathered in powerful and enigmatic testimony to forgotten certainties, are landscapes of a profound austerity.' ... The relationships that bind forms together in nature cannot be pure chance, and what we call ‘natural life’ is in effect a relationship between forms, so inexorable that without it this natural life could not exist. So it is with art as well. The formal relationships within a work of art and among different works of art constitute an order for, and a metaphor of, the entire universe.' For many years while travelling I always carried a set of ink pens and a field sketchbook and close by a copy of a book of poems by Eugene Guillevec that had been translated by Denise Levertov. ...”

The Surrealistic Druids: Part 2, Part 1

Poetry Foundation: Eugene Guillevic

W - Denise Levertov

W - Menhir

amazon

Large menhir located between Millstreet and Ballinagree, County Cork, Ireland

Two Space Probes to Pass by Venus Next Week

“Venus is a brilliant beacon in the western sky after sunset right now. Look toward it and you will be looking at three spacecraft as well: Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter and two others, both European, that are fast approaching for their second gravity-assist flybys. Solar Orbiter passes by on August 9th and BepiColombo on August 10th. Both plan lots of science throughout their close encounters — and they are looking for amateurs’ photography to bolster their coordinated science campaigns. The two spacecraft are using Venus to steer them toward their eventual science targets. Both are approaching Venus from its night side, with the planet appearing as only the thinnest of crescents. ...”

Sky & Telescope (Video)

so you wanna get into... zeena parkins

“welcome to issue #33 of ‘tusk is better than rumours,’ a newsletter featuring primers and album rankings of experimental and ‘outsider’ musicians. artist primers are published every other monday, and on off-weeks i (occasionally) publish a variety of articles ranging from label and genre primers to interviews to guest writers.this week we dive into the rich and varied career of harpist zeena parkins. parkins did for the harp what john cage did for the piano—expanded its possibilities by testing its limits. she experiments with techniques on both acoustic and electric harp (did you know electric harps existed?), summoning sounds out of the instrument that prove it’s much more than simply soothing and somnolent. on top of this, she’s a composer and improviser who has collaborated with musicians from Björk to John Zorn. ...”

tusk is better (Video)

amazon: Zeena Parkins

2011 January: Zeena Parkins, 2012 December: Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins / sound. at REDCAT, 2014 October: Janene Higgins & Zeena Parkins (2000), 2012 October: Ikue Mori, 2015 March: Phantom Orchard: Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori, 2016 April: News from Babel (1983-1986), 2016 May: Something Out There (1987), 2017 February: Mouth=Maul=Betrayer (1996)

Bob and Doug McKenzie

“Bob and Doug McKenzie are a pair of fictional Canadian brothers who hosted ‘Great White North’, a sketch which was introduced on SCTV for the show's third season when it moved to CBC Television in 1980. Bob is played by Rick Moranis and Doug is played by Dave Thomas. Although created originally as filler to both satisfy and mock network Canadian content demands, the duo became a pop culture phenomenon in both Canada and the United States. ... ‘Great White North’ (originally known as ‘Kanadian Korner’) is a panel show that played upon Canadian stereotypes. Bob and Doug, two dim-witted beer-swilling brothers wearing heavy winter clothing and tuques, would comment on various elements of Canadian life and culture, frequently employing the interjection ‘Eh?’ and derisively calling each other ‘hoser.’ ...”

Wikipedia

Jacobin: A People’s History of the Hoser, Canada’s Blue-Collar Icon

YouTube: Great White North: Back-Bacon and Long Underwear, French Canadian Problem, Beer Nog, Mouse in a Bottle

Official Map: Stockholm Archipelago Ferry Network Diagram, 2021

“Waxholmsbolaget is a big ferry operator in Stockholm, connecting most of the small islands in the Stockholm archipelago. They have recently updated their line map to a very diagrammatic style. The idea is good, to make it easier to find the lines and where you are going, but it massively distorts the network and the omission of geographic features makes it very difficult to orient yourself. What do you think? I commented briefly on this diagram on Twitter last week, but I’ll record my thoughts here in a little more detail as well.First off, it looks to me like the design of this diagram has been heavily influenced by the current Stockholm rail network diagram (PDF link), as it uses similar typography, design elements and symbology. ...”

Transit Map

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Paying the Price for Premier League Riches

Andreas Pereira is known as the Preseason Pirlo. But he has nowhere to go.

“The headed clearance did not quite get the requisite power, or direction. It floated, rather than fizzed, out of Brentford’s penalty area, the danger not quite clear. Two Manchester United players converged on it, sensing opportunity. The ball bounced off the turf, not too high, not too quick, and hung in the air for just a second. And that is where Andreas Pereira met it.There is a reason some Manchester United fans have come to know Pereira — with equal parts affection and admonishment — as the Preseason Pirlo. ...”

NY Times

Nighttime in Nairobi

President Records Ltd present Matata, London, 1971, photo: unknown, (c) President Records Ltd.

“As a child, one of my favorite Soukous songs was ‘Nairobi Night’ by the Soukous Stars. I loved the rolling bassline, percussive guitars, and the language-neutral singalong chorus. I knew little about nightlife, only from parties my parents threw in their basement on occasions like New Years Eve, but seeing the title, perhaps I imagined what a Nairobi night might feel like thousands of miles away. So it is in the spirit of that imagining that I present the next episode of Africa Is a Country Radio, where we continue our look at club culture across the African continent, and take a visit to Nairobi. ...”

Africa Is a Country (Audio)

Tim Berners-Lee

“Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989, then implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He co-founded (with his wife-to-be Rosemary Leith) the World Wide Web Foundation. ...”

Wikipedia

Vanity Fair - “I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets

Tim Berners-Lee (Video)

Vague, but exciting

TED: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (Video)

Richard Parkes Bonington

A Sea Piece, probably 1824

“This breezy painting of sailing boats in the Channel is alive with sea spray, grey waves, misty clouds and glimpses of blue. It is a spontaneous response to the restless play of sea and weather that looks as if it was painted on a boat – it puts you there so directly you can smell salt and hear seagulls. Richard Parkes Bonington lived and worked between two European art traditions. Born British, he moved to France at 14 and shook up French art with his robust, spontaneous eye so like those of his contemporaries Constable and Turner. By popularising that British freshness in France he helped pave the way for impressionism. But four years after making this painting he was dead, aged 25, from tuberculosis. This little seascape is part of the small deathless legacy of a doomed Romantic.”

Wallace Collection

W - Richard Parkes Bonington

Hauntings in the Imagination: New Books on Bluesman Robert Johnson - Greil Marcus

“... The blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, grew up in Memphis, and was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband during a performance at a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. He recorded twenty-nine of his own songs for the Vocalion label in San Antonio in 1936 and in Dallas in 1937. In 1938, with the blues musician Johnny Shines, he traversed most of the eastern part of the country, playing from St. Louis to Chicago to Detroit to Harlem. Later that year the producer John Hammond, who had celebrated his recordings in New Masses, knew Johnson had to perform at his historic ‘Spirituals to Swing’ concert at Carnegie Hall; learning of his death, Hammond played two of his songs on a phonograph on the stage. ...”

Riot Material

Forms

“Audio and Video content created by the musician Forms. Forms is a London, UK based producer that aims to explore the imprecise beauty of the natural world through the medium of sound. ...”

YouTube: Forms

Symbolism

Victor Vasnetsov, The Knight at the Crossroads, 1878

“Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through metaphorical images and language mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The term ‘symbolist’ was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of art. Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism in art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism and Impressionism....”

Wikipedia

Henri Fantin-Latour, By the Table, 1872, depicting: Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d'Hervilly and Camille Pelletan (seated); Pierre Elzéar, Emile Blémont, and Jean Aicard (standing)

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy (1984)

“Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. ... Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defined the Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic, from the early mainframe hackers at MIT, to the self-made hardware hackers and game hackers. Immediately following is a brief overview of the issues and ideas that are brought forward by Steven Levy's book, as well as a more detailed interpretation of each chapter of the book, mentioning some of the principal characters and events. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Books of The Times; Hackers as Heroes (Dec. 1984)

NY Times: When Hacking Was in Its Infancy (Oct. 2012)

amazon

YouTube: Steven Levy Talks about Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition 27:35

The Mark I and other early computers are on display at Harvard. As a student, Peter Neumann had the run of the Mark IV on weekends.

“Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" - Jimmie Cox (1923)

“‘Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out‘ is a blues standard written by Jimmie Cox in 1923. It is written in a Vaudeville-blues style. The lyrics sung in the popular 1929 recording by Bessie Smith are told from the point of view of somebody who was once wealthy during the Prohibition era, reflect on the fleeting nature of material wealth and the friendships that come and go with it. Smith was the preeminent female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Since her 1929 recording, the song has been interpreted by numerous musicians in a variety of styles. ... When he was an art student in the early 1960s, Eric Clapton was attracted to London's folk-music scene and the fingerpicking acoustic guitar-style of Big Bill Broonzy. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Jimmie Cox, Bessie Smith, Scrapper Blackwell, Derek & The Dominos, Eric Clapton (Live)

Russia’s New Form of Organized Crime Is Menacing the World

“The screen goes blank. A message appears in crude, Google Translate English, advising that all your files have been encrypted — rendered unusable — and can be restored only if you pay a ransom. After some back and forth, you pay out in Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency, most likely to a Russian-based gang. There’s no choice: It’s cheaper and far quicker to pay up than to rebuild a computer system from scratch. To avoid further trouble or embarrassment, many victims don’t even notify the police. A few years ago, the ransom may have been a few hundred bucks. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - ‘It’s quite feasible to start a war’: just how dangerous are ransomware hackers?

New Republic - Eastern Ukraine Has Been a Mafia State for Years. Can Kiev Break the Cycle of Violence?

Departing the ferry across the monolith of Lower Manhattan

“Born in Michigan in 1865, William Samuel Horton was a prolific Impressionist painter of many landscapes and water scenes, especially in Europe and his adopted country of France, where he died in 1936. Students League and National Academy of Design, left for Europe, and returned to New York for an unknown period of time in 1924, according to Cincinnati Art Galleries, Inc. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Discover the Stettheimer Dollhouse: The 12-Room Dollhouse Featuring Miniature, Original Modernist Art by Marcel Duchamp

“The Stettheimer Dollhouse has been wowing young New Yorkers since it entered the Museum of the City of New York’s collection in 1944. The luxuriously appointed, two-story, twelve-room house features tiny crystal chandeliers, trompe l’oeil panels, an itty bitty mah-jongg set, and a delicious-looking dessert assortment that would have driven Beatrix Potter’s Two Bad Mice wild. Its most astonishing feature, however, tends to go over its youngest fans’ heads — an art gallery filled with original modernist paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, George Bellows, Gaston Lachaise, and Marguerite Zorach. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

The Stettheimer Dollhouse - Johanna Fateman

W - Stettheimer Dollhouse

amazon: The Stettheimer Dollhouse

Hollywood blacklist

“The Hollywood blacklist was the colloquial term for what was in actuality a broader entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War. The blacklist involved the practice of denying employment to entertainment industry professionals believed to be or to have been Communists or sympathizers. Not just actors, but screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios. This was usually done on the basis of their membership in, alleged membership in, or even just sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or on the basis of their refusal to assist Congressional investigations into the party's activities. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Blacklist: Hollywood on Trial 58:43

A "Hollywood 10" newspaper from the 2015 biopic Trumbo. The film follows Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) and the blacklist of other Hollywood artists amid the Red Scare in 1947.

The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists

“In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Ruskin (1819–1900), the most influential art critic of the Victorian era, the National Gallery of Art will present more than 90 paintings, watercolors, and drawings created by American artists who were profoundly influenced by Ruskin’s call for a revolutionary change in the practice of art. ‘The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists’ includes a number of recently discovered works never before exhibited publicly. Ruskin’s rejection of traditional academic art and his plea for works that reflected a deep reverence for both the spiritual and scientific qualities of the natural world found a sympathetic audience in America among a group of like-minded artists, architects, scientists, critics, and collectors. ...”

Fine Art Connoisseur

W - American Pre-Raphaelites

Antiques and the Arts

amazon

YouTube: Introduction to the Exhibition: The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists 48:25

2014 March: John Ruskin, 2021 February: Modern Painters (1843–1860)

Henry Farrer, “On Whitehead, Coast of Maine,” 1875, watercolor on paper

Various Artists: The Story of Jamaican Music: Tougher Than Tough

“A superlative introduction to the world of Jamaican music, Tougher Than Tough is a treasure trove of information, filled with unforgettable music. Across four discs and 95 songs, this set spans the entire history of the island's vibrant music scene, hitting all the major stylistic bases along the way, and rounding up many of Jamaica's greatest artists. It's evident that a great amount of thoughtful time and effort went into this package and, although collectors will howl at the many omissions and some of the selections, this set wasn't intended for them, but for a general audience interested in beginning to explore the music more deeply. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

Discogs

YouTube: The Story of Jamaican Music: Tougher Than Tough 74 videos

Strat-O-Matic Baseball

“Strat-O-Matic is a game company based in Glen Head, New York, that develops and publishes sports simulation games. ... Strat-O-Matic's statistical research and game development methods are implemented with the intent of replicating athletes' abilities as accurately as possible, giving the gamer the feel of making managerial decisions. ... In a Strat-O-Matic game, each athlete is represented by a player card, on which are printed various ratings and result tables for dice rolls. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Strat-O-Matic, the Throwback, Endures the Era of the X-Boxes

How Strat-O-Matic Baseball Changed My Life Forever

Stuck in the ‘60s

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YouTube: Evolution of Strat-o-matic Baseball Cards: 1962-present, How-To Strat: Baseball Basic Version Board Game, Strat-O-Matic Computer Version Instructional

Dazzling Doubles for Compromised Skies

This map locates double stars in the northern and eastern sky. Click to enlarge.

“The sky is broken. For weeks now, Western and Canadian wildfires have released a pall of smoke that blankets both countries. July 8th was the last smoke-free night at my observing site in northeastern Minnesota. Daytime skies are generally pale blue, with nights starved of stars. Often, the limiting magnitude is 2 or 3. For many, smoke from wildfires has transformed summer nights, blotting out stars and familiar deep-sky sights. But through it all, double stars keep on shining. Because of constant smoke I've had to change up my observing from comets and deep-sky to brighter fare. Among the astronomical objects least affected by wildfires and haze are double stars. ...”

Sky & Telescope

Stars are classified into spectral types according to temperature and the elements and molecules that dominate their spectra.