“KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces have scored the most significant battlefield gains since they routed Russia from the area around Kyiv in April by reclaiming territory in the northeast, according to Ukrainian officials, Western analysts and battlefield imagery. In his overnight address to the nation Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Ukrainian military had captured scores of villages and large chunks of Russian-occupied territory across Ukraine since the offensive began. “In total, more than a thousand square kilometers of the territory of Ukraine have been liberated since the beginning of September,” he said. On Friday the Ukrainian military appeared to be moving rapidly to cut off the city of Izium, a critical logistical hub for Russian military operations. ...”
Is Aaron Judge Going to Banish that Asterisk for Good?
“Aaron Judge, like Hemingway’s definition of a great novelist, competes only with the dead. As we post this piece, Judge leads the league in Home Runs, Runs Batted In, Runs Scored, Total Bases, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Average, and a bunch of other categories that sound like they were invented by characters on The Big Bang Theory. Most spectacular, of course, is the Yankee outfielder’s 55-home-run mark, a whopping 19 dingers ahead of second-place Kyle Schwarber, of the Phillies. Judge is having the kind of season where any stat he’s not leading the league in doesn’t matter. ...”
Roger Maris has been immortalized for hitting 61 homers in ’61. Is Aaron Judge going to blast past that record – wait for it – 61 years later?
East Harlem “El Barrio”
“... Little Italy, Spanish Harlem, El Barrio. East Harlem runs from 96th St up to 143rd St from the east side of Fifth Avenue to the Harlem River. ... It was Manhattan’s first Little Italy and the political base for legendary New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. The Italian community largely moved on in the 1980s. The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Dancing of the Giglio are remnants of Italian East Harlem. Part of East Harlem became ‘Spanish Harlem’ after World War 1 (1914-1918). ... Like most of New York City, El Barrio was a tough neighborhood in the 1970s. But it also birthed community movements as young people turned from running gangs to running social programs. ...”
2011 November: Charlie Palmieri, 2014 October: Fania at Fifty, 2017 December: Nu Yorica: Culture Clash In New York City - Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77, 2018 December: Latin Underground Revolution: Swinging Boogaloo, Guaguanco, Salsa & Latin Funk from New York City 1967-1978, 2017 June: Eddie Palmieri - Unfinished Masterpiece (1976), 2018 July: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem / El Barrio: Sounds from the Spanish Harlem Streets, 2011 June: Mario Bauzá, 2017 June: Rhythm & Power: Salsa in New York, 2012 February: Rubén Blades, 2017 December: Carlos Vera: Barcelona's Boogaloo: Mixes and Mashups, 2019 April: An NYC Mambo, Boogaloo and Salsa Family Tree, 2021 February: Fania Records, 2022 January: East Harlem/Spanish Harlem/El Barrio
Mural in El Barrio East Harlem, NYC at 1645 Lexington at 104th St
As Crises Mount, Europe Turns Once Again to Big Spending
“BRUSSELS — Nationalizations. Subsidies. Cash handouts. Price caps. Profit taxes. It’s back to 20th-century economics in Europe. Governments are resorting to old-school solutions, long dismissed as bad policy, throwing vast amounts of money at the energy crisis engulfing the region, in a bid to avert a political, social and economic meltdown. The standoff with Russia over Ukraine is upturning European economic orthodoxy at rapid speed with barely a peep of dissent at the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels, a bastion of neoliberalism that not so long ago imposed brutal austerity on its own members, most notably Greece, even after it became clear it was harmful. ...”
Ukrainian servicemen work inside a Polish 155 mm self-propelled tracked gun-howitzer Krab at a position on the front line in the Donetsk region on Aug. 29.
Fishermen Carrying a Drowned Man by Jozef Israëls, 1861
“The crushed and hopeless forms of the people bringing home a fisherman drowned in his daily work are darkly framed against greyness in this compassionate scene of life and death by the North Sea. Dutch painter Israëls spent time living in Zandvoort, a fishing village near Haarlem in the Netherlands, before painting it in his Amsterdam studio. The closeness and common pain of the figures makes us feel the sorrow of an entire community. It is as if they have all drowned. The burden of grief won’t lift lightly. And beyond are the sea and sky, featureless, endless.”
The Slits – Typical Girls/I Heard It Through The Grapevine (1979)
“Following on from the more recent spiky, punky, dubby sound of MIA’s ‘Paper Planes’, we have this classic from proto riot girrrls The Slits. Their take on ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine‘ (Motown’s lament about ‘the rumor mill that swirls around a cheating lover‘) has been described as ‘the gold standard in violently recontextualized punk covers’ and ‘transcendent’. The song is memorable by virtue of it doing what all the best covers surely should: radically reinterpreting a song (a classic in its own right in this case, though I’d suggest it doesn’t have to be) and making it into something new. Apart from the genre shift, Ari’s vocal twists and ingenious insertion of ‘I heard it through the bassline’ at one point in the song give it a life of its own. Meanwhile, the lack of change in terms of heterosexist and standard gender appropriate alterations is refreshing. ...”
YouTube: Typical Girls, I Heard It Through The Grapevine, I've heard it through the Grapevine (Live)
2010 October: Ari Up (17 January 1962 – 20 October 2010), 2012 July: Subatomic Sound System meets Lee Scratch Perry & Ari Up of the Slits (7″ vinyl), 2014 September: Live in Cincinnati and San Francisco 1980, 2015 August: Return Of The Giant Slits (1981/2007), 2016 July: "Man Next Door" - Berlin 1981, 2021 April: Avant Gardening - New Age Steppers (2021)
‘We have already lost’: far-right Russian bloggers slam military failures
“’The war in Ukraine will continue until the complete defeat of Russia,’ Igor Girkin, a far-right nationalist, grumbled in a video address to his 430,000 followers on Telegram on Monday. ‘We have already lost, the rest is just a matter of time.’ Girkin, a former Russian intelligence colonel who became a commander of the pro-Russian separatist forces in 2014, is arguably the most prominent voice within an increasingly loud and angry group of ultra-nationalist and pro-war bloggers who have taken to berating the Kremlin for its failure to achieve its tactical objectives as the fighting in Ukraine has entered its seventh month. ...”
Russia has cut the amount of gas it sends to Europe by shutting the key Nord Stream 1 pipeline for the second time in recent months, saying the closure is necessary to allow repairs.
Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have lost their identity
“A crestfallen Jurgen Klopp walked across to the travelling Kop inside Stadio Diego Armando Maradona after the final whistle and held his hands up apologetically. ... Liverpool have given their supporters so many memories to cherish with their European exploits during Klopp’s reign. Last season, they became the first club in Champions League history to win all six away matches en route to the final in Paris. Yet the contrast between the team that dug deep to fight for glory on all fronts and the one that was humiliated by the rampant Serie A side on Wednesday could hardly be greater. Rarely has a team fallen so far, so quickly. ...”
Modernism
“Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to ‘Make it New’ was the touchstone of the movement's approach. Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, and divisionist painting. ...”
Piet Mondrian, View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg (1909)
Inside the fight to fend off hackers at Ukraine’s largest telecom
“The operator of Ukraine’s largest mobile phone network is fighting a two-front war: one on the ground and one in cyberspace. Kyivstar serves around 26 million mobile customers in Ukraine and has been jumping from crisis to crisis since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24. Russian rockets and other physical attacks have taken out almost 10 percent of its base stations. And in areas that have been taken back from Russian occupation, about 30 percent of the company’s infrastructure — including phone towers and lines — has been damaged, CEO Oleksandr Komarov said in an interview during a visit to Washington. ...”
AI takeovers in popular culture
“AI takeover—the idea that some kind of artificial intelligence may supplant humankind as the dominant intelligent species on the planet—is a common theme in science fiction. Famous cultural touchstones include Terminator and The Matrix. Fictional scenarios typically involve a drawn-out conflict against malicious artificial intelligence (AI) or robots with anthropomorphic motives. In contrast, some scholars believe that a takeover by a future advanced AI, if it were to happen in real life, would succeed or fail rapidly, and would be a disinterested byproduct of the AI's pursuit of its own alien goals, rather than a product of malice specifically targeting humans. ...”
The sad-eyed Wall-E.
Six Definitive Films: The ultimate beginner's guide to Elia Kazan
“Elia Kazan is one of the most celebrated filmmakers in American cinema history. He has been honoured by some of the all-time greats, including Stanley Kubrick, who once declared that Kazan was ‘without question, the best director we have in America, [and] capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses.’ When he was younger, Kazan was a brilliant student who studied dramatic traditions at Yale. Although he initially wanted to be an actor, Kazan eventually gravitated toward filmmaking. However, his deep understanding of the craft of acting influenced his directorial style in numerous ways. ...”
Zaporizhzhia: UN nuclear agency calls for Ukraine plant safety zone
“Shelling of Europe's biggest nuclear power plant could lead to unlimited release of radioactive materials and Russian military equipment on site could undermine its security, the UN's nuclear agency has warned. Russia occupied the Zaporizhzhia plant at the start of its invasion of Ukraine and it has come under repeated attack. After a visit last week, UN's nuclear watchdog has called for a safety and security protection zone. It said shelling must end immediately. The plant lies on the southern bank of the River Dnieper, across the water from Ukrainian-held towns and military positions. ...”
‘Deeply Problematic’: Experts Question Judge’s Intervention in Trump Inquiry
“A federal judge’s extraordinary decision on Monday to interject in the criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive government documents at his Florida residence showed unusual solicitude to him, legal specialists said. This was ‘an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation,’ said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at University of Texas. Siding with Mr. Trump, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, ordered the appointment of an independent arbiter to review the more than 11,000 government records the F.B.I. seized in its search of Mar-a-Lago last month. ...”
Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald J. Trump’s residence and private club in Palm Beach, Fla.
Elodie Lauten as Postminimalist Improviser
Delivered to the Minimalism Conference in Helsinki, September 2015 By Kyle Gann: “Elodie Lauten was born in Paris in 1950, moved to the US in 1972, and tragically died all too young on June 3, 2014. The daughter of the jazz pianist and drummer Errol Parker, she studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire at age seven, and started composing at age twelve. ... Despite these radical beginnings, Elodie poured the creative energy of her later years into the forms of opera and oratorio, beginning in 1985 with The Death of Don Juan, and including such large works as Deus ex Machina, Orfreo, and Waking in New York, this last based on [Allen] Ginsburg poems that he had selected for her. ...”
2010 July: Elodie Lauten, 2016 July: Orchestre Modern (EP - 1981), 2017 October: Transform EP (2014), 2019 November: Piano Works Revisited (2010)
Ukrainians in Rural Ireland Piece Together New Lives, Step by Step
“ARRANMORE ISLAND, Ireland — There are two flags flying over the youth hostel on Arranmore Island, a speck of land off Ireland’s northwestern coast, visible from the ferry as it pulls into its tiny port: the Irish tricolor and the blue and yellow banner of Ukraine. ... Since the middle of this summer, she and her children have been among 25 Ukrainian refugees living on the remote island, where the population had been steadily dropping for decades. They are among the countless Ukrainians grappling with the uncertainty of how the next chapter of their lives will unfold as the war with Russia enters its seventh month, making it clear that their temporary displacement could become long term. But the communities hosting them are also confronting the complexities of assimilating and providing for newcomers as they face their own economic and social challenges. ...”
A Ukrainian woman minding a child at a hostel that hosts Ukrainian families on Arranmore Island, Ireland.
Women in the Algerian War
“Women fulfilled a number of different functions during the Algerian War (1954–1962), Algeria's war for independence. The majority of Muslim women who became active participants did so on the side of the National Liberation Front (FLN). The French included some women, both Muslim and French, in their war effort, but they were not as fully integrated, nor were they charged with the same breadth of tasks as their Algerian sisters. The total number of women involved in the conflict, as determined by post-war veteran registration, is numbered at 11,000, but it is possible that this number was significantly higher due to underreporting. There exists a distinction between two different types of women who became involved: urban and rural. ...”
Last image of Zoulikha Echaïb, taken moments after her arrest by French troops on 10/15/1957 in the Algerian War. Tortured extensively, she died 10 days later after being thrown from a French Army helicopter while in handcuffs, her body not discovered until 1984 when a farmer found and buried her.
Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects
“Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects is a major publication of the work of one of today’s most important and influential artists. The book is a comprehensive catalogue of Hamilton’s (born 1956) object-based work from 1984 to 2006. The more than 130 color plates document photographs, sculpture, video, audio and language pieces (both unique and editioned), as well as multiples and prints. Many of the objects relate to the large-scale installations for which Hamilton is internationally known. Each object in the inventory is accompanied by a text by Joan Simon, who also contributes a significant new essay setting Hamilton’s objects in critical context. ...”
2007 November: Ann Hamilton, 2009 September: Songs of Ascension - Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton, 2010 March: Ann Hamilton - 1, 2011 January: stylus, 2011 April: indigo blue, 2011 December: Objects, 2012 November: phora , 2013 January: Gemini GEL, 2013 September: Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread
Untitled #8-16 (from The Body Object Series)
How Russia Uses Low Tech in Its High-Tech Weapons
“As Russian forces fire precision-guided weapons at military and civilian targets in Ukraine, officers in Ukraine’s security service working with private analysts have collected parts of the crashed missiles to unravel their enemy’s secrets. The weapons are top of the line in the Russian arsenal. But they contained fairly low-tech components, analysts who examined them said, including a unique but basic satellite navigation system that was also found in other captured munitions. Those findings are detailed in a new report issued Saturday by Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars around the world. The research team examined the Russian matériel in July at the invitation of the Ukrainian government. ...”
A composite image of a variety of circuit boards found in satellite navigation receivers of several models of Russian missiles.
Damnation - Béla Tarr (1988)
“Damnation (Hungarian: Kárhozat) is a 1988 black-and-white Hungarian film directed by Béla Tarr. The screenplay was co-written by Tarr and his frequent collaborator, László Krasznahorkai. The movie has been compared to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni. Damnation tells the story of Karrer (Miklós B. Székely), a depressed man in love with a married torch singer (Vali Kerekes) from a local bar, the Titanik. The singer breaks off their affair, because she dreams of becoming famous. Karrer is offered smuggling work by Willarsky (Gyula Pauer), a local bartender. Karrer offers the job to the singer's husband, Sebestyén (György Cserhalmi). This gets him out of the way, but things do not go as Karrer plans. Betrayals follow. Karrer despairs. ...”
The Ballad of Harlan County
“Mud sucked on my boots. Runoff flowed around my feet, gentle but quick. I was climbing the mountain of my relatives’ former coal mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, walking the land where my grandfather worked for nearly forty years. Brittle vines covered the old office building, the commissary, and the beer hall, which looked as though they could double as a movie set for a Wild West ghost town. This mine, called Brookside, attained national notoriety in the early 1970s after my family sold it to Eastover Mining, a subsidiary of Duke Power, one of the country’s largest energy corporations. ...”
‘We Do Not Want Unknown Graves’: The Struggle to Identify Bucha’s Victims
“BUCHA, Ukraine — It was supposed to be the bright spot in a grim day. Of a dozen unclaimed bodies set for burial recently at Bucha City Cemetery, one had just been identified. The dead man’s family was present and would be able to bury him with full ceremony. His grave would be marked with his name instead of just a number. But there was a hitch. No one could find the body. In a macabre drama, as the family wilted at the gravesite in the August heat, gravediggers climbed over stinking body bags in the back of a truck, checking the tags for the missing body. As they heaved bodies aside, the deputy mayor, clutching a sheaf of papers, looked on in silence. ...”
When Russian troops withdrew from the region around Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, at least 458 bodies were discovered in Bucha and the surrounding area, often found lying on the streets and in buildings, gardens, cellars and makeshift graves.
A Constellation of Stars From the Latin Art World
“Of the powerhouse exhibitions headed our way this season, ’Murillo: From Heaven to Earth’ at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (Sept. 18-Jan. 29) heads my list for its title alone. Given the state of our combusting, war-racked planet, we could use some outside help, and in the painterly cosmos of the 17th-century Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo it’s there: Angels and saints beam down to succor ordinary folk, and everyone looks touched by grace. A popular art of immense sophistication in a one-stop-only show. ...”
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, “The Marriage Feast at Cana,” circa 1672, from a powerhouse exhibition of the Spanish painter coming to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.
Sweet Reggae Music Pon di Attack: A History of Soundclash
“Jamaican culture is defined by competition. Athletics is a national virtue, showcased in force on track at the 2016 Olympics. The country has also managed to make a sport out of music. From lyrical contests to dance competitions to car stereo standoffs, there are numerous musical battles held in Jamaica, but none as fundamental to the culture as the sound clash. ... A soundsystem is often defined as a mobile discotheque, but it’s more than just speakers connected to music. ...”
Tenor Saw
Six months in, the Ukraine war is a brutal stalemate with no end in sight
“Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of staff for the Prussian army, once made the astute observation that no war plan survives ‘first contact’ with a hostile force. If there was ever a war to validate that claim, it’s the one currently churning in Ukraine. As the conflict in Europe’s largest country marks its six-month anniversary on Wednesday, 24 August, the main protagonists have all experienced their fair share of jolted assumptions, operational mistakes, and misplaced beliefs about what is and isn’t possible. Inflated expectations have been punctured, hopes have been dashed, and strategies crafted to cause the enemy discomfort instead produced unintended consequences that are just as painful. Take Russia as an example. Sensing Ukrainian forces would either flee or fold in matter of days, Vladimir Putin believed a military operation in Ukraine could easily dispose of the Volodymyr Zelenskiy administration with minimal resistance. ...”
An international agreement to unblock Ukraine's ports has allowed more of its crops to reach international markets
All of Aaron Judge’s Homers, From 1 to 51
“Aaron Judge did not stay at 50 home runs for long. One day after slugging No. 50 he connected for No. 51, crushing a high fastball to right-center for a three-run homer. While it had seemed as if Judge might have been slowing down a bit as the season stretched on, he has now homered in three of his last five games. As Judge pursues the Yankees’ single-season home run record — every non-Yankee who has hit at least 60 home runs has been connected to performance-enhancing drugs — we are tracking his progress against where Roger Maris was at in 1961 (when he hit 61) and where Babe Ruth was at in 1927 (when he hit 60). ...”
‘The Clones Of Dr. Funkenstein’: Parliament Unleashes An Intergalactic Funk Classic
“In an age when funk was ubiquitous as an expression of Black popular music, George Clinton and Parliament reigned supreme as its quintessential representatives. Wielding a rare combination of unbridled, free-form musicality; an Afrofuturism ethos; a critique of the American social order; and humor, Parliament was almost peerless within the pantheon of funk music. ...”
2009 January: George Clinton, 2010 December: Mothership Connection - Houston 1976, 2011 October: Funkadelic - One Nation Under A Groove, 2011 October: "Do Fries Go With That Shake?", 2012 August: Tales Of Dr. Funkenstein – The Story Of George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic, 2015 July: Playing The (Baker's) Dozens: George Clinton's Favourite Albums, 2015 August: Chocolate City (1975), 2016 February: Maggot Brain - Funkadelic (1971), 2016 June: P-Funk All Stars - Urban Dancefloor Guerillas (1983), 2017 March: Up for the Down Stroke - Parliament (1974), 2017 May: P-Funk mythology, 2019 September: Tear the Roof Off the Sucker: An Introduction to Parliament Funkadelic, 2019 December: Cosmic Slop - Funkadelic (1973), 2020 July: How George Clinton Made Funk a World View, 2021 November: ‘Computer Games’: How George Clinton’s Solo Debut Played To Win
Collective punishment or effective sanction? Europe weighs banning Russian tourists
“KYIV, Ukraine — Outraged and anguished after six months of war in Ukraine, Europe is wrestling over a question with deep diplomatic and moral implications: whether to ban Russian travelers. Kyiv’s allies have been aghast at the split-screen juxtaposition of Russian tourists sunning themselves on Mediterranean beaches while many Ukrainians spend some of their summer in bomb shelters, dodging missiles and artillery. Fueled by a plea from Ukraine’s government earlier this month, the debate over visa bans is raging from Brussels to Washington, underscoring longstanding fractures within the West over how aggressively to confront Russia in the war’s next phase. At the heart of the moral question hanging over European capitals is the Russian public’s culpability: Whether ordinary citizens, by putting up little visible opposition, are enabling President Vladimir Putin’s war. ...”
Documenta 15
“‘Ideas are to objects,’ suggested Walter Benjamin, ‘as constellations are to stars.’ This metaphor comes to me as I drift through the Fridericianum, which has been restyled as a school by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, artistic directors of Documenta 15. Etched across the walls on its ground floor are notes and diagrams elaborating the pedagogical methods of Gudskul, an alternative art school devoted to collective practices and ecosystem studies. ... Such inquiries drive Documenta 15, a sprawling affair that has taken over thirty-two venues in Kassel this summer and seeded further projects across the world. ...”
Gudskul banner, Fridericianum, Kassel, June 11, 2022.
The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp: August 2022
“All kinds of experimental music can be found on Bandcamp: free jazz, avant-rock, dense noise, outer-limits electronics, deconstructed folk, abstract spoken word, and so much more. If an artist is trying something new with an established form or inventing a new one completely, there’s a good chance they’re doing it on Bandcamp. Each month, Marc Masters picks some of the best releases from across this wide, exploratory spectrum. August’s selection includes VHS-inspired composition; bell and gong improvisations; far-out synth exploration; and the hectic sounds of ‘rummaging.’ ...”
