Hegemony Changes Everything

 
Marco Borrelli - Antonio Gramsci

“... The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture—wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as ‘senso comune‘ (common sense)—that the ruling classes stay as such. This concept would become known as ‘cultural hegemony.’ In his early writings for socialist newspapers like Avanti! and later in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci analyzed folklore, serialized novels, theater, devotional literature—anything he could get his hands on in the prison library—to search for the ways that capitalist logic appeared as a self-evident truth (not some secret hiding in a remodeled bathroom). ...”

The History of Venus in Air, Rock, and Water

 
“Presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference usually focus on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and comets. But at this year’s symposium, an entire day’s worth of talks were dedicated instead to Venus. Why is Earth’s “evil twin” so hot right now?The unofficial end of NASA’s Venus program, following the completion of the Magellan mission, was part reactionary disappointment, part practicality. Instead of a primordial jungle teeming with alien life, we had found an impassable, barren hellscape. Departments all over the world shifted their focus to Mars, because although it’s further off, it’s a much easier planet to visit and study. ...”

As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership

 
A satellite image showing a Ukrainian strike on Russian equipment at an airport in Kherson, Ukraine, last week.

“In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be ‘pointless and extremely dangerous.’ It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten ‘the existence of Russia itself as a state.’ To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. ...”

Worm Moon - Nina MacLaughlin

 
Vinternatt - Nikolai Astrup

“What is the moon? The moon is a natural satellite, and it reflects the light of the sun. The moon is 4.5 billion years old. The moon is, on average, 240,000 miles away from this Earth. The moon is the fifth largest of the 210 that swing around the planets in this solar system, and the second densest, after Jupiter’s moon Io. The moon is made of iron and nickel at its heavy metal core; lighter crystals of solidified lava, like olivine and pyroxene, make up its mantle; and the lunar soil that makes up the surface crust is an even lighter mix of minerals and metals known as regolith, including anorthositic plagioclase feldspar, dusty and granular. Leave a footprint in it. ...”

2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon, 2021 August: Sturgeon Moon, 2021 September: Harvest Moon

​The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone

 
People examine the damage after shelling of a shopping center, in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 21, 2022. 

“In destructive power, the behemoths of the Cold War dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington’s biggest test blast was 1,000 times as large. Moscow’s was 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea was to deter strikes with threats of vast retaliation — with mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar was so high that nuclear strikes came to be seen as unthinkable.Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable. ...”

 
The Belchatow coal-fired power plant in Poland, run by PGE, is the largest of its kind in Europe.

​H-O-R-S-E

 
“The game of H-O-R-S-E is played by 2 or more players. The order of turns is established before the game starts. The player whose turn is first is given control, which means they must attempt to make a basket in a particular way of their choosing, explaining to the other players beforehand what the requirements of the shot are. If that player is successful, every subsequent player must attempt that same shot according to its requirements. If a player fails to duplicate the shot, they acquire a letter, starting with H and moving rightward through the word ‘Horse’. ...”

​How Surrealism Has Influenced the Animation Industry

 
Back Row, left to right: Man Ray, Jean Arp, Tanguy, Andre Breton. Front Row, left to right: Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel.

“The surrealism movement was founded in Paris by some writers and artist who wanted to use people’s subconscious minds to unlock their imagination. The movement was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud. The surrealists themselves thought that the unconscious mind blocked people’s imaginations. By the surrealists basing their ideas on the power of the imagination, this indicated that they were influenced by the traditional Romanticism movement, whose key ideas were based on emotions and intuitions. However, the surrealists were radically different to the romantics because they had the theory that the revelations may be found to be on the streets and in everyday life. ...”

​How Russia’s mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin’s war

 
For millions of internally displaced people, Lviv is the gateway to safety, however fleeting, in the west.

“The snarled up 65km Russian convoy that was stuck for days outside Kyiv neatly illustrated Moscow’s misplaced belief that it could achieve a lightning-fast victory in Ukraine. Western military analysts say Russia’s leadership initially thought its ‘special military operation’ would reach the capital and other big Ukrainian cities in days, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to capitulate and allow a puppet administration to be installed. ‘It’s clear that Russia was pursuing regime change in Ukraine,’ said Michael Kofman, Russia studies director at CNA, a US think-tank. ‘Regime change operations are often derived of hubris and bad assumptions — and they usually go terribly wrong.’ ...”

This 1899 Gilded Age fairy-tale mansion on Fifth Avenue has had only 4 owners

 
“New Yorkers have always used real estate to showcase their wealth and position. But in Gilded Age Manhattan, the one-upmanship reached crazy new heights—with rich Fifth Avenoodles, as they were mockingly called by the general public, constantly outdoing their neighbors by building more ostentatious mansions fronting Central Park. ...”

​Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War

 
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has tried to create an alternative reality. 

“In the tense weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian officials denied that it planned anything of the sort, denouncing the United States and its NATO allies for stoking panic and anti-Russian hatred. When it did invade, the officials denied it was at war. Since then, the Kremlin has cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a ‘special military operation’ against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children. Disinformation in wartime is as old as war itself, but today war unfolds in the age of social media and digital diplomacy. ...”

 
Sophia, a medical student, helps as a paramedic in the volunteer army.

William Parker Quartets: Meditation / Resurrection (2017)

 
“Bassist William Parker's Quartets (note the plural) presented here are, of course just a fraction of the ensembles he is currently organizing and working in. It is these 2 quartets that manifest the Yin and Yang that is Parker. The question might be, is his Quartet of trumpeter Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, alto saxophonist Rob Brown, and drummer Hamid Drake,  the Yang, or positive/active/male principal in nature, and his In Order To Survive quartet with pianist Cooper-Moore switching with Nelson the Yin, or negative/passive/female force? These two discs, Meditation / Resurrection, recorded on the same day with two differing approaches, exemplify the spiraling flow of Parker's music. ...”

Russia’s Brutality in Ukraine Has Roots in Earlier Conflicts

 Ukrainian emergency workers at a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol last week.

“As Russian artillery and rockets land on Ukrainian hospitals and apartment blocks, devastating residential districts with no military value, the world is watching with horror what is, for Russia, an increasingly standard practice. Its forces conducted similar attacks in Syria, bombing hospitals and other civilian structures as part of Russia’s intervention to prop up that country’s government. Moscow went even further in Chechnya, a border region that had sought independence in the Soviet Union’s 1991 breakup. During two formative wars there, Russia’s artillery and air forces turned city blocks to rubble and its ground troops massacred civilians in what was widely seen as a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population into submission. ...”

Aïda Gómez Sculpts Housing for Squirrels and Birds in Roma Verde MXCD

 

“An earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 reduced much of the Roma neighborhood to rubble, the remaining structures largely empty even now because of their unsafe condition. ‘Everywhere there are people living on the street while houses stand empty,’ says Spanish artist Aïda Gómez, ‘This is something I cannot understand. I believe that we are doing something wrong here.’ During her art residency in the neighborhood at Huerto Roma Verde at the end of last year, Gómez decided to draw attention to the housing problem in the public sphere using her education in sculpting at Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin; She built a series of multispecies houses that serve to provide shelter from the elements. ...”

 
“Multispecies real state”. Huerto Roma Verde Residency. Roma, Mexico City.

Laurent Bardainne & Tigre d’Eau Douce — Hymne au Soleil

 
“Paris-based composer, bandleader and tenor saxophonist Laurent Bardainne returns with his quintet project Tigre d’eau Douce, following the group’s impressive 2020 debut Love Is Everywhere, with a brilliant new cosmic jazz album on Heavenly Sweetness, titled Hymne au Soleil. Building off the core music elements of Love Is Everywhere, this superb new 11-track recording blends together Bardainne’s soaring saxophone lines with soulful B3 organ melodies, spacey synths, funky bass grooves, and layered percussion rhythms. The album ranges from spiritual and meditative-like astral jazz to tracks geared up for the dancefloor. ...”

​Citizens of Kyiv

 
Kateryna Hryshchenko 

“In the weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv, the capital, became a city transformed. Much of its population evacuated. New defense units gathered and took up arms. Impromptu social support — field kitchens, aid stations, bomb shelters, evacuation convoys — sprouted into functional shapes. The city endured intermittent bombardment throughout. This altered streetscape became the uneasy milieu of Alexander Chekmenev, a Ukrainian documentary and portrait photographer who since the 1990s has visually chronicled his country’s post-Soviet life. ...”

 
до війни—do viyny—before the war

Copyright is colonialism - Boima Tucker

 
“Africa Is a Country Radio continues its literary theme for its third season on Worldwide FM. The fourth installment takes a look at the politics of copyright, and the long history of resistance (or indifference) to that regime from the global margins. Larisa Mann aka DJ Ripley takes a look at the specific case of Jamaica in her book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power. This episode is essential for anyone who has an interest in music industry futures, from NFTs to streaming and beyond. We open the show with a selection of (colonial/copyright) resistance music, and DJ Ripley takes us out with a selection of classic jungle and dancehall tunes that inspired her work as a musician and academic. Listen below, or on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.“

George Inness - Green Landscape (1886)

 
“While working on this landscape, Inness shifted the female figure, originally positioned in the middle of the canvas, farther to the left. In the finished work, the shepherdess and grazing calf are perfectly balanced on either side of the vertical line of the central tree. This subtle adjustment typifies the care Inness took to enhance what he called the ‘great spiritual principle of harmony’ in his compositions.“

2009 August: George Inness, 2008 August: Hudson River School

​Russia Is Destroying Kharkiv

 
And the university gym was destroyed.

“Last month, Dmytro Kuzubov put on his headphones and walked around Kharkiv for hours. He felt that the war would start soon and he wanted to visit some of his favorite places. Kharkiv is his hometown: a vibrant, youthful city of nearly 1.5 million people steeped in academia, art and literature. The attacks started a few days later. Unable to take control of the city, Russia has resorted to destroying it. As in Syria and Chechnya, Russia aims to demoralize the city’s inhabitants with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower. It is following a similar plan in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv. ‘The most horrible thing was the whistle of jets. I will remember them all my life,’ said Mr. Kuzubov, who has since fled Kharkiv, along with hundreds of thousands of others. ...”

 
This was a kindergarten classroom.

​Using Thoreau’s Notebooks to Understand Climate Change

 
Site of Thoreau's Hut, Concord, Mass

Walden was more than a thought experiment. During Henry David Thoreau’s contemplative time by the pond, he recorded countless observations on spring flowering and bird arrivals. These notes are the backbone for a recent study that examines how the area surrounding Walden Pond has been gradually impacted by climate change. In a 2016 study, a team of scientists from Boston University examined Thoreau’s records and compared them to their own leaf-out (dates on which leaf buds begin to open) and spring flower notes from the same area, showing how citizen science can help scientists better understand how climate change is impacting ecosystems worldwide. ...”

 
Thoreau’s 1846 map of Walden Pond

Ghetto-ology Dub -- Sugar Minott (1979/2000

 
“... His roots side is most visible on the Ghetto-o-logy, Black Roots and African Soldier LP's. Ghetto-o-logy came out in 1979 and established his name in the reggae world. The musicianship is faultless, but the album is still outstanding today for the quality of the lyrics in songs like ‘Man Hungry,’ ‘The People Ought to Know,’ ‘Dreader Than Dread’ and of course the title-track which makes the claim that to Minott the ghetto was a university from which he graduated in ‘ghetto-ology’ whereas other people majored in science or biology. The jazz-like arrangements on tracks like ‘Walking Through the Ghetto’ distinguished the album from many other roots albums of the day and Minott's singing was full of passion. ...”

​Zelensky Evokes U.S. History in Appeal to Congress

 
President Volodomyr Zelensky

"President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made an urgent and emotional appeal to Congress on Wednesday to come to his country’s aid as it fights off a brutal Russian invasion, asking for help protecting its air space, military assistance and stronger sanctions as part of what he cast as a war for the cause of democracy itself.In a remarkably direct appeal by a wartime leader to policymakers in Washington, Mr. Zelensky addressed lawmakers on a large screen in a movie theater-style auditorium under the Capitol, invoking the memories of Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — when the United States came under attack — as he pleaded for support saying, ‘we need you right now.’ ...”

 
Residents leave the badly damaged residential building that was hit by a Russian shell.

Bernadette Mayer / Vito Acconci: 0 To 9

 
“Bernadette Mayer is one of the most acclaimed poets of the ‘New York School’ of poetry. Her avant garde and exquisitely rendered final pieces are a result of adventurous journal keeping and writing experiments, some of which will be evident September 13 when the Walker and Rain Taxi Review of Books co-present Bernadette Mayer along with poets Jennifer Karmin and Philip Good, an evening of collaborative literary mayhem. Mayer’s life as a literary artist has been well pronounced in the world of visual art. In the late 1960s, she — along with artist Vito Acconci — edited the groundbreaking mimeographed magazine 0 to 9, which brought together the era’s leading figures of experimental poetry and conceptual art. ...”

The Billion-Dollar Brackets of March Madness

 
“One in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That’s over nine quintillion, for those of you who gave up after the fourth comma. Those are the odds of a coin-flipping novice filling out a perfect March Madness bracket, calculated by realizing the two possible outcomes for every game in every round, expressed 2^63. The astronomical odds dwarf the likelihood of death by a vending machine falling on you (roughly 1 in 127 million) or winning Powerball (1 in 292 million). In fact, with the CDC stating the odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 500,000 in any given year, you’re more likely to be zapped 18 trillion times before predicting the outcome of every match in the famed college basketball tournament, which explains why nobody ever has since the tradition was born back in 1977 within the walls of a Staten Island bar called Jody’s Club Forest. ...”

​The Iconic Doomsday Clock Now Says It’s 100 Seconds to Midnight, Following Putin’s Nuclear Threats

 
“Last year, the fates handed the New York Times‘ Maria Cramer an enviably striking lede: ‘Humanity is 100 seconds away from total annihilation. Again.’ That we all know immediately what she was writing about speaks to the power of graphic design. Specifically, it speaks to the power of graphic design as practiced by Martyl Langsdorf, who happened to be married to ex-Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf. This connection got her the gig of creating a cover for the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She came up with a simple image: the upper-left corner of a clock, its hands at seven minutes to midnight. ...”

 
Protest signs against the invasion of Ukraine left outside the Russian embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Belfast - Kenneth Branagh (2021)

 
“Romanticism reigns in ‘Belfast,’ Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic memoir of his childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland. From the lustrous, mainly black-and-white photography to the cozy camaraderie of its working-class setting, the movie softens edges and hearts alike. The family at its center might have health issues, money worries and an outdoor toilet, but this is no Ken Loach-style deprivation: In these streets, grit and glamour stroll hand-in-hand. So when Ma (Caitriona Balfe) sits in her doorway to peel potatoes for dinner, what we notice is the soft afternoon light dancing on her luminous skin and brunette curls. And when Pa (Jamie Dornan), square of jaw and shoulder, strides toward home after a spell working in England, the camera shoots him like a returning hero. ...”

​Leaked Chats Show Russian Ransomware Gang Discussing Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine

 
“Internal chat logs leaked from the notorious Russian ransomware gang Conti reveal unfiltered conversations between ultranationalist hackers in which they repeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conspiratorial lies about Ukraine, discuss the impact of early Western sanctions against their country, and make antisemitic comments about Ukraine’s Jewish president. The logs were leaked late last month, reportedly by a Ukrainian security researcher, after Conti publicly announced its support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and threatened to retaliate against any cyber warfare targeted at the Russian-speaking world. The logs span two years and multiple chat services and were released alongside training documentation, hacking tools, and source code. ...”

 
Tens of thousands of Russians have fled to Istanbul, but tens of thousands more have gone to Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, which are better known as sources of migration to Russia.

​The road well travelled: 100 years of Jack Kerouac

 
“Jack Kerouac – anti-establishment icon, revolutionary author of the American classic On the Road, pioneer of the Beat Generation and, perhaps most of all, enduring symbol of cool.If a dog-eared paperback of On the Road slung in your back pocket was once the ultimate avant-garde accessory, 100 years after his birth, a Kerouac namecheck has become something of a trope on dating apps. New analysis by OkCupid has shown that mentions of the Beat poets and On the Road in profiles (more often on those belonging to men) have increased more than threefold in the past five years. With their themes of travelling, male friendship and flight from the nine-to-five to explore a world of sex, drugs and art, it’s easy to see why men want to align themselves with Kerouac’s books. ...”