Henry Cow - Concerts (1975)

 
“Avant-garde rock & roll of 1970s vintage -- especially, it must be said, of the British variety -- doesn't typically age very well. And although Henry Cow was quite a unique ensemble, even by the standards of the 1970s avant-garde, it would be silly to deny that much of the music captured on these two live discs (originally released on LP in 1976) sounds pretty dated. But this is much more true of the song-based material than the more free-form, improvised music, which still sounds remarkably fresh and surprising 25 years later. And even the more period-specific material is of very high quality: singer Dagmar Krause (previously of Slapp Happy, later of the Art Bears) delivers fine performances on ‘Beautiful As the Moon/Terrible As an Army With Banners’ and ‘Bad Alchemy,’ as does bassist John Greaves. ...”

​Keeping Scores: Women Writing Music

 
Sinéad Gleeson.

“In 2019 I met with Sinéad Gleeson ahead of her Edinburgh Book Festival appearance to interview her about music in Constellations, her book of essays on and of the body. ‘Music,’ she says in the book, ‘binds us together’. I felt strongly when reading it that it was in fact music that bound the book together. I was surprised when she told me that I was the first person to say this because the pages seep sound and vibrate with the pivotal music memories that we carry in our bodies, in how we map our lives. She told me then that she was working on a project that she couldn’t reveal but was sure I would love. That project was This Woman’s Work, a collection of essays on music, edited by Gleeson with Kim Gordon, written by and about women. She was right. ...”

 
Kim Gordon.

​In the fog of dementia, one grandmother learns again and again that her country is at war.

 
Many elderly Ukrainians with dementia have woken up to a new war, day after day.

“Every morning, Olga Boichak’s grandmother wakes up at her home in western Ukraine, turns on the television and discovers anew that her country is at war.Panicked and flashing back to childhood memories of bombings during World War II, she starts packing to evacuate, her granddaughter said. Her husband of six decades hides the house keys and reassures her everything will be all right, and that their home is the safest place for them. Before long, the war, the fear and the reassurance will dissipate into the fog of dementia — as have all new memories in recent years. Until the next morning, or the next air raid siren, when the reality of the invasion that has subsumed Ukraine for more than 50 days will find her once more. ...”

Charles Olsen: “The poet as pedagogue / Is the teacher”

 
“Charles Olson was a didactic poet, poetical pedagogue, a ‘poet-teacher’ par excellence. This inclination, however, must be understood as more than the mere juxtaposition or conjunction of two separate but equal vocations. For Olson, to be a poet was perforce to be a teacher and visa versa, the two inextricably entwined, the practices of one intending the principles of the other. Pedagogy necessitates a poetics, which I mean in both its narrowest sense—as the art, theory or study of any versified literary text—as well as more broadly—as the discursive formation of concepts. Olson believed tacitly that, since all communication is educative and poetry is the highest form of communication, poetry is naturally the preeminent means of educative communication. ...”

​ROAR is closing down, but the struggle goes on

 
“A little over a decade ago, when the world was just emerging from the ruins of the financial crisis, two Dutch guys met in an Amsterdam apartment and set out on a mission: to build an online platform to cover the emerging wave of global uprisings. ... There was an urgent need for in-depth coverage and critical analysis of these historic developments, but few online platforms capable of providing it. It was in this context that we (the two Dutch guys) decided to set up a new activist publication, dedicated to providing grassroots perspectives on the global struggle for real democracy. We called it Reflections on a Revolution — or ROAR. Over the next years, this activist publication grew into a thriving online magazine with a diverse community of contributors and a growing international readership. ...”

Ukraine’s Greatest Living Filmmaker Explains What the Images Online Aren’t Showing

“Although he’s long been acclaimed on the international festival circuit, with five movies at Cannes in the past decade, it has taken the war in Ukraine to bring Sergei Loznitsa his due attention in the U.S. His documentary Babi Yar. Context, about a notorious massacre of Jews that took place outside Kyiv during World War II, opened in the U.S. last week, and his 2018 movie Donbass, a fiction feature set during the 2014 conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Russian separatists, will see a belated theatrical release beginning April 8. New York’s IFC Center is pairing the latter with screenings of Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature and Maidan, the latter a documentary about the uprising that unseated Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, part of the anti-corruption movement that eventually swept Volodymyr Zelensky into office. ...”

An Introduction to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Radical Nigerian Bandleader, Political Hero, and Creator of Afrobeat

 
“I cannot write about Nigerian bandleader, saxophonist, and founder of the Afrobeat sound, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with any degree of objectivity, whatever that might mean. Because hearing him counts as one of the greatest musical eye-openers of my life: a feeling of pure elation that still has not gone away. It was not an original discovery by any means. Millions of people could say the same, and far more of those people are African fans with a much better sense of Fela’s mission. In the U.S., the playfully-delivered but fervent urgency of his activist lyricism requires footnotes. Afrobeat fandom in many countries does not have to personally reckon with the history from which Fela and his band emerged—a Nigeria wracked in the 60s by a military coup, civil war, and rule by a succession of military juntas. ...”

How Did Roman Aqueducts Work?: The Most Impressive Achievement of Ancient Rome’s Infrastructure, Explained

 
“At its peak, ancient Rome enjoyed a variety of comforts that, once lost, would take centuries to recover. This process, of course, constitutes much of the story of Western civilization. Though some knowledge didn’t survive in any useful form, some of it remained lastingly embodied. The mighty ruins of Roman aqueducts, for example, continued to stand all across the former Empire. Together they once constituted a vast water-delivery system, one of whose construction and operation it took humanity quite some time to regain a functional understanding. Today, you can learn about both in the video from ancient-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan just above. ...”

​Atrocities in Ukraine War Have Deep Roots in Russian Military

 
Tetiana Petrovna reacted in horror in a garden where Roman Havryliuk, his brother Serhiy Dukhli and an unidentified victim were found on April 4 in Bucha, Ukraine.

“In a photograph from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine, a woman stands in the yard of a house, her hand covering her mouth in horror, the bodies of three dead civilians scattered before her. When Aset Chad saw that picture, she started shaking and hurtled 22 years back in time. In February 2000, she walked into her neighbor’s yard in Chechnya and glimpsed the bodies of three men and a woman who had been shot repeatedly in front of her 8-year-old daughter. Russian soldiers had swept their village and murdered at least 60 people, raped at least six women and plundered the victims’ gold teeth, human rights observers found. ...”

 
A participant displays a placard reading 'Say no to genocide' during a protest of pro-Ukrainian activists in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin on April 6, 2022.

An independence revue

"This month on Africa Is a Country Radio, we wrap up our literary theme with a show inspired by Chinua Achebe, and take a listen to music from the post-independence era. We start out with music from the early 1960s, the point at which many African nations first came into being (after many years of imagining what nationhood might mean), where we can hear how some of the threads of national identity we have today were formed—borrowing global influences, and inserting local perspectives into both the form and content of the music. ... The music recordings from throughout this era is some of the most inspired, popular, and globally influential the African continent has ever produced.Listen below, or on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.”

​Step Into the Morningside Heights rowdy resort district dubbed ‘Little Coney Island’

 
The elevated IRT Ninth Avenue Line, 110th Street station, New York 1905.

“Since 1892, West 110th Street has also been known as Cathedral Parkway. It’s a heavenly name for a stretch of Manhattan that had a citywide reputation for vice and sin at the turn of the 20th century. ‘Little Coney Island,’ as this quickly developing enclave of Morningside Heights was dubbed by residents, police, and politicians, consisted of a few blocks of newly opened pleasure gardens set in wood-frame buildings that attracted carousing crowds of fun-seeking men and women. ...”

‘They Are Gone, Vanished’: Missing Persons Haunt Ukrainian Village

 
A cellar in Husarivka, Ukraine. At least three skulls were recovered there earlier this month.

“HUSARIVKA, Ukraine — The cows wouldn’t stop screaming. Russian soldiers had occupied this remote village in eastern Ukraine for about two weeks and were using a farm as a base. But the animals at the farm hadn’t been fed. Their incessant bleating was wearing on both occupiers and townspeople. A group of five residents from Husarivka, an unassuming agricultural village of around 1,000 people, went to tend the cattle. ... What transpired in Husarivka has all the horrifying elements of the more widely publicized episodes involving Russian brutality: indiscriminate killings, abuse and torture taking place over the better part of a month.Human rights workers around Kyiv, the capital, are gathering evidence of Russian atrocities, hoping to build the case for war crimes. ...”

 
A list of people in Husarivka who died, some from natural causes, or went missing during the occupation.

The World - Edited by Joel Sloman, Anne Waldman, and others

 “In the Spring of 1966, I couldn’t wait to graduate from Bennington, and get back ‘home’ (which meant Macdougal Street and subsequently St. Mark’s Place) and the ‘literary life.’ I had edited Silo magazine at school, and Lewis Warsh and I had founded Angel Hair magazine and books at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in the summer of 1965. The fall of 1966 was a critical time for me with Frank O’Hara’s tragic death, but I was also hired as an assistant to the newly christened Poetry Project, a place where ‘only’ poets could get jobs. Troubadour translator and New York poet Paul Blackburn had hosted open readings in the Parish Hall at St. Mark’s the previous year, after moving the scene from the Metro coffeehouse. ...”

The Lives of Others - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2006)

 
The Lives of Others ... is a 2006 German drama film written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck marking his feature film debut. The plot is about the monitoring of East Berlin residents by agents of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his superior Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Dreyman's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland. The film was released in Germany on 23 March 2006. ...”

Putin’s Ukraine Gamble Pivots to a Very Different Battlefield

 
A Ukrainian soldier in February in Trokhizbenka, in the Luhansk region.

“KYIV, Ukraine — There are fields instead of city streets, farmsteads instead of apartment buildings. Open highways stretch to the horizon. The battles in the north that Ukraine won over the past seven weeks raged in towns and densely populated suburbs around the capital, Kyiv, but the war is about to take a hard turn to the southeast and into a vast expanse of wide-open flatland, fundamentally changing the nature of the combat, the weapons at play and the strategies that might bring victory. Military analysts, Ukrainian commanders, soldiers and even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin acknowledge that a wider war that began with a failed attempt to capture the capital will now be waged in the eastern Donbas region. ...”

 
Aerial shots of a map of Kyiv and view of debris of buildings after shelling in Borodianka of Kyiv province

​Lightning Struck Itself: Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’ in Eight Phases

 
“So you say you want a revolution? Two rearguard beatniks banded together on the anything-goes streets of Manhattan in the early ’70s, at the height of its postapocalyptic glamour, when taxi cabs hated to venture below 14th Street but the see-and-be-seen crowd couldn’t resist it. Those who came from elsewhere came to define the scene. Richard Meyers and Tom Miller were two gifted reprobates who fled to New York from a well-to-do Delaware boarding school. They knocked around the stylish wilderness of the Lower East Side and the more civilized clubs and coffee houses of Greenwich Village. ...”

2013 October: See No Evil, 2014 October: Dreamtime (1981), 2014 November: Marquee Moon (1977), January: Adventure (1978), 2015 October: Tom Verlaine (1979)

Announcing New Brooklyn Underground Subway Tour!

 “We’re excited to announce our newest tour, the Brooklyn Underground Subway Tour, the BK version of our popular NYC Underground Subway tour! This new Untapped New York tour is led by Rayn Riel, a bona-fide subway expert and licensed tour guide. We have met a lot of subway experts here at Untapped New York, and there is no one more knowledgable about the Brooklyn subway system than Rayn. Now, after two sold-out tours with our Untapped New York Insiders, we’re bringing the Brooklyn Underground Subway Tour to the public. ...”

​War Brings New Iron Curtain Down on Russia’s Storied Ballet Stages

 The star ballerina Olga Smirnova with Semyon Chudin at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 2014.

“AMSTERDAM — Just days after the invasion of Ukraine, Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, posted an emotional statement on Telegram, the messaging app. ‘I am against war with all the fibers of my soul,’ she wrote. “I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia, but now I feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after.’ That’s certainly been true for Ms. Smirnova, 30. As the war got worse, and dissent in Russia was ruthlessly quashed, Ms. Smirnova, who had gone to Dubai to recover from a knee injury, realized that she could no longer return home. ‘If I were to go back to Russia, I would have to completely change my opinion, the way I felt about the war,’ Ms. Smirnova said in a recent interview in Amsterdam, adding that returning would be, ‘quite frankly, dangerous.’ ...”

New Journalism

 
Tom Wolfe

New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, however, the journalist is ‘invisible’; facts are reported objectively. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Terry Southern, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others. ...”

Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco (1956)

 
“... Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco is a full-length album that features six extended tracks from the golden age of the Moroccan record industry. After Morocco gained its independence in 1956, Moroccan-owned record labels sprouted and flourished in Casablanca. The inexpensive 45 rpm format allowed the record companies to release thousands of songs during the 1960s, creating a snapshot of the raw and hypnotic Berber music that thrived throughout Morocco. Powerful traditional styles were still alive and well at this time and untouched by international pop influences. Kassidat looks back at this era and presents it anew for audiences hungry for intense and authentic folk music. ...”

​Hiding in Plain Sight, a Soviet-Era Air Defense System Arrives in Ukraine

 
The village of Dobra, Slovakia, where the S-300 antiaircraft system recently provided by the country to Ukraine was loaded on a train to be transferred over the border.

“DOBRA, Slovakia — Driving back to his village near the Ukrainian border last Thursday, the mayor had to stop to let a train pass, and assumed he wouldn’t have to wait long. But the flatbed wagons, stacked high with military equipment, just kept coming. He waited for nearly half an hour. ‘It was a very long train, much longer than usual,’ recalled Mikolas Csoma, the mayor of Dobra, a previously sleepy village in eastern Slovakia that, over the past month, has become a key artery funneling weapons and ammunition into Ukraine by rail from the West. The train that delayed Mr. Csoma’s drive home was not only unusually long but also signaled a singular escalation in Western efforts to help Ukraine defend itself. ...”

​Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman

Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman will be the first exhibition devoted to works on paper by the celebrated French artist who navigated vast artistic and political divides throughout his life—from his birth in Paris in 1748 to his death in exile in Brussels in 1825. His iconic works captured the aspirations and suffering of a nation, while addressing timeless themes that continue to resonate today. Through the lens of his preparatory studies, the exhibition looks beyond his public successes to chart the moments of inspiration and the progress of ideas. Visitors will follow the artist’s process as he gave form to the neoclassical style and created major canvases that shaped the public’s perceptions of historical events in the years before, during, and after the French Revolution. ...”

The Passages of Walter Benjamin - Judith Weschler (2014)

 
“In 1933, Walter Benjamin, one of the most brilliant literary and cultural critics of his time, fled Berlin when the Nazis took over and headed for Paris. There he sat, at the Bibliothèque nationale, working in poverty and relative obscurity on his most important project, ‘The Arcades Project.’ With the backdrop of totalitarianism spreading across the European continent, Benjamin explored the origins of modernity. Praising the poet Charles Baudelaire and employing his emblematic characters especially the flâneur and the rag picker, Benjamin wanted to counter the ‘false semblance of totality.’ This enormous incomplete study is both a collection of sources for a radical history of 19th century Paris and the basis for an allegorical critique of European fascism in the 1930s. ...”

​Russian Tech Industry Faces ‘Brain Drain’ as Workers Flee

 
Zvartnots International Airport in Yerevan, Armenia. The country has become a landing spot for tech workers leaving Russia.

“In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee. Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin. The planes flew south past the Black Sea to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where thousands of other Russian tech workers fled in the weeks after the invasion. ...”

 
Protesters in Krakow, Poland, staged a silent demonstration against the mass killing of Ukrainian civilians by the Russian army on April 9.

Key to a Kingdom: Ronda’s Secret Water Mine

 
From the southwest, Ronda's limestone ramparts are split by the Tajo, or gorge, spanned since 1793 by the picturesque "New Bridge." ...

“Approaching the region of the Serranía de Ronda, just inland from the Mediterranean’s Costa del Sol, one passes through mountains and rugged surroundings that have challenged settlers, merchants, travelers and invaders for thousands of years. Over the last ridges, a broad valley opens, circled around by hills and hazy massifs. Near its center, set like a jewel in this natural crown, a small tableland rises some 200 sheer meters above the fields: Ronda, spectacularly cleft by its famous Tajo, a narrow, nearly vertical gorge cut over five million years ago by the river Guadalevín, a name that comes from the Arabic wadi al-laban (valley of milk), after the prosperity its waters brought to the grazing lands below. ...”

How Lucinda Williams Wore Her Pain On Her Sleeve With ‘World Without Tears’

 
“They say time heals all wounds, but that maxim has never applied to Lucinda Williams. On her seventh studio album, 2003’s World Without Tears, Williams brings her unique mix of heartache, carnal desire, and strong-willed resolve, and lays it out for all to witness. ... Not that she’s ever shied away from dark subjects. Williams is a blues singer, after all – that’s reflected in the structure and impassioned delivery of her songs. But one thing is clear: she was mad as hell when she recorded World Without Tears, and she was not going to take it anymore. Nobody’s martyr Williams has made a career wearing her pain on her sleeve, but she’s nobody’s martyr. ...”

​No More ‘Have a Nice Day’: Lviv Learns to Live With War

 
Central Lviv on Saturday.

“LVIV, Ukraine — When war came to Ukraine in February, Helen Polishchuk made some adjustments in the six-story bar she manages in central Lviv.The Mad Bars House in Lviv’s historic central square stayed open, but served coffee and hot food instead of alcoholic drinks. They turned off the rock music. And as displaced Ukrainians began pouring into the city from places devastated by Russian attacks hundreds of miles away, she had instructions for the wait staff. ... Now, instead of tourists, there are displaced Ukrainians fleeing the war-torn east of the country. ...”

 
A zoomed-in view of Edgar Degas' Ukrainian Dancers, previously known as Russian Dancers.