Stockholm, Berlin 1966 – Albert Ayler

“Stockholm, Berlin 1966 is a live album by saxophonist and composer Albert Ayler, recorded in Europe in 1966 and released on the Swiss hatOLOGY label in 2011. The Berlin tracks were previously released on The Berlin Concerts – 1966 (Relyable Records), Albert Ayler Live In Europe 1964 – 1966 (Landscape Records), and the compilation Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962–70) (Revenant). All of the tracks were reissued on a 2021 Hat Hut release titled Albert Ayler Quintet 1966: Berlin, Lörrach, Paris & Stockholm. Revisited.  The Stockholm and Berlin recordings were made during Ayler’s thirty-day 1966 European tour, which lasted from November 3 through December 2.^[4] The tour, which also included Lörrach, Rotterdam, Paris, and Copenhagen, came about when Joachim-Ernst Berendt, director of the Berlin Jazz Festival, asked promoter George Wein to include Ayler’s group in his annual festival tour. (John Coltrane had also been invited to participate, but declined due to health issues.) Henry Grimes and Sunny Murray were unable to accompany the band on the tour, so Ayler asked bassist William Folwell and drummer Beaver Harris to join him. The group also included Ayler’s brother Donald on trumpet and violinist Michel Sampson. According to Ayler biographer Jeff Schwartz, the recordings show Ayler using a modular approach to his music, with thematic sections that can be reshuffled interspersed with improvisations, including brief solos by Harris and Folwell. Schwartz noted that Ayler’s vocalizations on Pharoah Sanders‘ ‘Japan’ on the European recordings are the first time he is heard as a singer. He also suggested that the singing may be an extension of the moaning sounds that Sunny Murray emitted while playing the drums. In a review for The Guardian, John Fordham wrote: ‘Ayler’s blazing shows were following sets by Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz and other more orthodox jazz artists, but his finales roused the European crowds to ecstatic acclaim just the same. Sometimes the music sounds like the work of a dishevelled Salvation Army band, sometimes like a series of strange, hooting operatic arias, in which jaunty themes Sonny Rollins might edge their way into the midst of big, rapturously lamenting harmonies. The repertoire is much the same from both gigs…, and has an even more emotional quiver for the addition of fine Dutch violinist Michel Samson, meshing evocatively with the vibrato and clarion lead-lines of Ayler’s trumpeter brother Donald.’ …”
Wikipedia
YouTube: ALBERT AYLER Quintet Live in Berlin, 1966 | THE JAZZ LIBRARY

Gloria Steinem (March 25, 1934 – September 2, 2026)

“Gloria Marie Steinem (/ˈstaɪnəm/ STY-nəm; March 25, 1934 – September 2, 2026) was an American journalist and social movement activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who remained particularly prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Steinem was a columnist for New York magazine, and co-founder of Ms. magazine. In 1969, she published ‘After Black Power, Women’s Liberation’, an article that brought her national attention and positioned her as a feminist leader. In 1971, she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, which provided training and support for women seeking elected and appointed office. Also in 1971, she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, which until 1997 supported a network of feminist activists and worked to advance feminist causes and legislation. In the 1990s, Steinem helped establish Take Our Daughters to Work Day, an occasion for young girls to learn about future career opportunities.^[8] In 2005, Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan co-founded the Women’s Media Center, an organization that ‘works to make women visible and powerful in the media’.  She traveled internationally as an organizer and lecturer and was a media spokeswoman on issues of equality. In 2015, Steinem, alongside two Nobel Peace laureates (Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia) and other prominent women peace activists, undertook a journey from the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, to South Korea, crossing the Korean Demilitarized Zone. … In 1972, Steinem co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. alongside founding editors Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Pat Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Mary Peacock; it began as a special edition of New York, and Clay Felkerfunded the first issue.^[33] Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days. Within weeks, Ms. had received 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 reader letters.  In 1974, Ms. collaborated with public television to produce the television program Woman Alive!, and Steinem was featured in the first episode in her role as co-founder of Ms.magazine.  The magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001; Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and served on the advisory board.  Also in 1972, Steinem became the first woman to speak at the National Press Club. Steinem spoke at the 1977 National Women’s Conference among other speakers, including Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, Bella Abzug, Barbara Jordan, Cecilia Burciaga, Lenore Hershey, and Jean O’Leary. …”
Wikipedia
NY Times: Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92 (Video)
Guardian: Gloria Steinem personified America’s feminist movement
YouTube: Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Dies at 92, Feminist icon Gloria Steinem dies at 92

Deutsche Courage: The Boundary-Breaking Minds Behind Experimental German Music

“Thanks in large part to Kraftwerk’s weighty influence on synth-pop, hip-hop, and subsequent strains of dance music, German music has long since overturned the preconceptions that initially (and insultingly) went with the territory. Nevertheless, in certain quarters there is still a bewildering inclination to lump it all together. The common ground between, say, Scorpions and Faust is negligible at best, but the despised appellation ‘krautrock’ did little to encourage the expectation of stylistic diversity. (Faust, cheeringly, up-ended the term with their sarcastically monomaniacal ‘Krautrock,’ from the 1973 album Faust IV.) It’s perhaps fairest to suggest that the minds behind the most experimental German music in the transitional period between 1967 and 1976 shared a commonality of purpose. Out on a limb, and largely working in isolation from each other, they were nevertheless unified by a compulsion to forge ahead, to experiment with modes and means of expression, and consequently to establish an entirely new milieu. In so doing, they were tacitly seceding from the American and British rock, pop and soul archetypes that had previously held sway. That said, there were certain British and American totems whose influence fed directly into the development of Germany’s new music. Pink Floyd’s solemn galactic bleeps echoed right across the kosmische firmament; Jimi Hendrix’s sonic boldness heralded revolution, even if his scorching flamboyance found little purchase in the broader context of drone-based minimalism; and Frank Zappa’s subversive cynicism chimed with then-prevalent student insurrection – much to his distaste. Tellingly, appearing alongside Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention at the Internationale Essener Songtage festival in Essen, in September 1968, were three pivotal new German bands who pointed towards the future of German music: Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream and Guru Guru. The first of these were a loose collective, living communally in a house in Munich and intermittently flailing away at instruments. Their fitful, floating line-up included relatively accomplished players and some decidedly less competent accompanists whose presence represented a political or artistic gesture: as a result, the group unavoidably split into factions. …”
udiscover (Video)

Stepping Into A New Age 1980–2012

“There was always so much more to the legacy of punk than the orthodoxy that followed in its wake. Indeed, the seeds were sown right from the early days thanks to the punk’s interface with the reggae that soundtracked the early club nights as well as the covers that followed. Even Bob Marley gave his seal of approval. But while the less inspired purveyors that followed stuck to rigid formulas, the influence of reggae was keenly felt in the wave that immediately followed punk’s brief but seismic blast. Formed by The Slits’ Ari Up and reggae fan and producer Adrian Sherwood, New Age Steppers were a collective of sorts that included contributions from members of Aswad, The Pop Group, The Raincoats, and others who swan-dived into deep bass work-outs and dub-inflected dread to soundtrack the increasingly heavy times in which they were recorded in. This comprehensive boxset sees New Age Steppers’ first three albums – New Age Steppers (1980), Action Battlefield (1981) and Foundation Steppers(1983) – on vinyl for the first time since their release, as well as 2012’s posthumous Love Forever and a collection of outtakes and rarities in the shape of Avant Gardening. Presented together, they tell an intriguing story of musical development as well as the launch of the celebrated On-U Sound record label. The eponymous debut finds the collective at its most adventurous. Blending cover versions such as Junior Byles’ ‘Fade Away’ with righteous originals, this is a sonic feast that tests speakers and bowels in equal measure. Crucially, it brings to together the spirituality of Rastafari with political awareness, most notably on the spaced-out neo-dub of ‘Crazy Dreams And High Ideals’ wherein The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart intones, ‘We refuse to be the stepping stone / That paves the way for the small minority.’ But it’s the aural delivery that truly lingers as dub techniques are deployed and twisted to create a new, domestic vernacular of the form. From here on in, the albums become more song-based though no less arresting. Action Battlefield’s reliance on covers doesn’t count against it, not least as the playing and production are absolutely on point. Ari Up’s vocals on ‘My Whole World’ are some of the best she ever committed to posterity, while a pre-fame Neneh Cherry makes her presence felt on a sweet reading of BB Seaton’s ‘My Love’. The absence of Ari Up on Foundation Steppers is more than made up for thanks to Bim Sherman’s honeyed contributions though, as evidenced by the likes of ‘5 Dog Race’, Sherwood’s taste for studio chicanery was still firmly in evidence. …”
The Quietus
Bandcamp (Audio)
YouTube: New Age Steppers

Hip-hop culture

DJ Grandmaster Flash 
“Hip-hop culture is an art movement that emerged in New York City, in the borough of the Bronx, primarily within the black community. Hip-hop as an art form and culture has been heavily influenced by both male and female artists. It is characterized by the key elements of rapping, DJing and turntablism, and breakdancing; other elements include graffiti, beatboxing, street entrepreneurship, hip-hop language, and hip-hop fashion. Many cite hip-hop’s emergence as beginning in August 1973 when brother–sister duo DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell hosted the first documented indoor hip-hop party and culture event in the Bronx; Helping to spark the rise of the genre. However many hip-hop pioneers and historians contend that hip-hop did not have just one founding father. …  Since then hip-hop culture has spread to both urban and suburban communities throughout the United States and subsequently the world. These elements were adapted and developed considerably, particularly as the art forms spread to new continents and merged with local styles in the 1990s and subsequent decades. Even as the movement continues to expand globally and explore myriad styles and art forms, including hip-hop theater and hip-hop film, the four foundational elements provide coherence and a strong foundation for hip-hop culture. … In the 1970s, an underground urban movement known as ‘hip-hop’ began to form in the Bronx, New York City. It focused on emceeing (or MCing) over house parties and neighborhood block party events, held outdoors. Hip-hop music has been a powerful medium for protesting the impact of legal institutions on minorities, particularly police and prisons. Historically, hip-hop arose out of the ruins of a post-industrial and ravaged South Bronx, as a form of expression of urban Black and Latino youth, whom the public and political discourse had written off as marginalized communities. … Graffiti is the most controversial of hip-hop’s elements, as a number of the most notable graffiti pioneers say that they do not consider graffiti to be an element of hip-hop, including Lady Pink, Seen, Blade, Fargo, Cholly Rock, Fuzz One, and Coco 144.  … Hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash has also questioned the connection between hip-hop and graffiti, saying, ‘You know what bugs me, they put hip-hop with graffiti. How do they intertwine?’ In America in the late 1960s, before hip-hop, graffiti was used as a form of expression by political activists. …”
W – Hip-hop culture
HIP HOP- A CULTURE OF RESILIENCE, RESISTANCE, AND REVOLUTIONARIES
HIP HOP HISTORY: FROM THE STREETS TO THE MAINSTREAM (Video)
YouTube: The Birth of Hip Hop, How ‘Apache’ Became Hip-Hop’s National Anthem
An aerosol paint can, a common tool used in modern graffiti

 

Bill Cunningham

“William John Cunningham Jr. (March 13, 1929 – June 25, 2016) was an American fashion photographer for The New York Times, known for his candid and street photography. A Harvard University dropout, he first became known as a designer of women’s hats before moving on to writing about fashion for Women’s Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune. He began taking candid photographs on the streets of New York City, and his work came to the attention of The New York Times with a 1978 capture of Greta Garboin an unguarded moment. Cunningham reported for the paper from 1978 to 2016. Cunningham was hospitalized for a stroke in New York City in June 2016 and died soon after. … Cunningham contributed significantly to fashion journalism, introducing American audiences to Azzedine Alaïa and Jean Paul Gaultier.^[12] While working at Women’s Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune, he began taking candid photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. He was a self-taught photographer. He took one such photograph of Greta Garbo, though he later said he had not recognized her while photographing her nutria coat. … In 1977, Cunningham contributed a photo style feature to the SoHo Weekly News. He then published a group of impromptu pictures in the New York Times in December 1978, which soon became the regular series On the Street. His editor at the New York Times, Arthur Gelb, called these photographs ‘a turning point for the Times, because it was the first time the paper had run pictures of well-known people without getting their permission.’ Cunningham nevertheless joked about his role at the paper: ‘I’m just the fluff. I fill around the ads, if we have any.’ Although then-executive editor A. M. Rosenthal was virulently homophobic and consciously neglected coverage of the LGBT community during this period (precipitating editorial conflicts with the likes of fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg), Cunningham helped to subvert this stance by photographing a fundraising event in the Fire Island Pines in 1979 and letting the perceptive reader interpret his photos without verbal clues. Following Rosenthal’s retirement from the role in 1988, Cunningham was able to integrate AIDS benefits, pride parades and Wigstock into his coverage. …”
Wikipedia
NY Times: Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87 (Photo)
YouTube: The Times of Bill Cunningham | Official Trailer, How To Photograph Street Fashion Like Bill Cunningham

Canal Street station (IND Eighth Avenue Line)

“The Canal Street station (alternatively signed Canal Street–Holland Tunnel) is an express station on the IND Eighth Avenue Line of the New York City Subway. Located at the intersection of Canal Street, Vestry Street, and Sixth Avenue(Avenue of the Americas) in Lower Manhattan, it is served by the A and E trains at all times, and the C train at all times except late nights. There is also a New York City Police Department (NYPD) transit precinct at the station. … Most of the Eighth Avenue Line was dug using a cheap cut-and-cover method. The Canal Street station was to be one of three Eighth Avenue Line stations underneath Sixth Avenue in Lower Manhattan; the other two stations were to be at Spring Street and West Fourth Street. As part of the construction of the Eighth Avenue Line in Lower Manhattan, Sixth Avenue was extended south to Church Street starting in 1926. This required the demolition of dozens of buildings along the route. …When the IND Concourse Line opened on July 1, 1933, the C express train started operating, while all locals became CC trains to the Concourse Line. The E began using the local tracks on August 19, 1933, when the IND Queens Boulevard Line opened. One real-estate expert said the station’s construction had encouraged the construction of large developments around the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, such as the Holland Tunnel Plaza Building. … At either end of the station is a diamond crossoverbetween each local and express tracks. Northbound C and nighttime A trains cross from the express track to the local track past the north end of the platforms and southbound C and nighttime A trains cross from the local track to the express track past the south end of the platforms. The platforms are offset, and a signal tower is located at the south end of the southbound platform. The walls of the station contain cobalt blue tile bands^[33] with darker blue borders.^[34] Since Canal Street is an express station, it has a wider tile band than local stations.^[34] The tile colors are intended to help riders identify their station more easily, part of a color-coded tile system for the entire Independent Subway System. The tile colors were designed to facilitate navigation for travelers going away from Lower Manhattan; on the Eighth Avenue Line, the tiles change color at the next express station to the north. As such, the blue tiles used at the Canal Street station were also used on Spring Street, the local station to the north; the next express station, West Fourth Street, used a different tile color. …”
Wikipedia
YouTube: IND 8th Avenue Line: (A) (C) & (E) Trains @ Canal Street.(R160A,R160B,R179,R211A)
Detail of “A Gathering” sculpture on mezzanine

Building East-West Bridges in Tune

“Demonstrating the ways music has created connections among disparate cultures has become a minor industry within the classical concert world. Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project has ranged freely through musical history, reviving ancient works and commissioning new ones. Early-music specialists like Joel Cohen and Jordi Savall have taken a more scholarly but equally lively approach, and Mr. Savall’s offerings have been particularly ambitious. One area he has mined devotedly is the interaction among the musicians of Arab cultures — including the Sephardic Jews who lived in Muslim countries after they were expelled from Spain in 1492 — and those of Christian Europe. That relationship animates ‘Orient-Occident: A Dialogue of Souls,’ a program based on a 2006 recording, which he presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday evening. Mr. Savall’s choice of instruments told some of the story. He switched between the rebab, an Arabic bowed instrument with a timbre that can sound either raspy or lyrical, depending on how you play it, and its smaller, lighter-voiced European descendant, the rebec. Dimitri Psonis played the santur, a Persian dulcimer, and the oud, a fretless Middle Eastern cousin to the lute. And David Mayoral performed on drums and tambourines of various kinds, sizes and origins, usually with an appealing subtlety born of playing with fingertips and palms rather than sticks and mallets. This was a Middle Eastern ensemble at heart. But in the 14th and 15th centuries you might have found one like it playing in Spain or Italy. … Not that there were no differences between the Eastern and Western styles. The Arabic and Sephardic pieces tended to be more intricately modal and to allow for more extended, virtuosic improvisation, which these players essayed with their characteristic energy and nuance. The European pieces, including a pair of popular saltarellos and the 13th-century ‘Lamento di Tristano,’ by contrast, were generally brighter, zestier and more compact. The program’s political message — that coexistence is more durable than warfare — was not rooted entirely in antiquity. Introducing a section of the program that included a Sephardic song from Sarajevo and a traditional Armenian song, Mr. Savall said that the performances were in memory of the destruction of Sarajevo in the 1990s and the Armenian massacre of 1915. He offered a more personal and affecting dedication before the encore. Noting that he was performing this repertory for the first time without Montserrat Figueras, his wife, musical partner and muse, who died last November, he said, “She is still with us.” She was, electronically. A recording of Ms. Figueras singing ‘Una Matica de Ruda,’ a Sephardic song, was played, and after sitting quietly through the first verse, Mr. Savall and his colleagues picked up their instruments and provided a warm, graceful accompaniment. …”
NY Times
amazon

Orient-Occident: From left, Jordi Savall, David Mayoral and Dimitri Psonis at the Met Museum on Tuesday.

Masterpieces of Minimalism

“It’s easy to think of ‘minimalism’ as only the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but the word also encompasses painting and sculpture and architecture—and beyond. Visual artists like Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd used simple materials and configurations; theater director Robert Wilson designed stagings with slow movements in austere settings, while musicians from Morton Feldman to Arvo Pärt worked with the bare minimum of plain phrases and rhythms. Paradoxically, minimalist works across all mediums are often maximal in physical size and scope, and duration. Obscuring definition and style, Judd, Reich, and others long objected to the term itself. Minimalism was never an ideology, and it emerged almost spontaneously—one of those mysterious, complex cultural shifts—in the middle of the 20th century. It became, after the fact, an essential part of the history of classical music. But not only did the classical music world reject it for more than a decade, the style itself began both inside the classical tradition (Glass and Reich) and outside it (La Monte Young and Terry Riley). In one way or another, each of these four foundational composers were inspired by non-Western musical and philosophical ideas. Working from different personal aesthetics and musical backgrounds, they ended up sharing a fundamental concept of extended repetition while using it in vastly different styles. And what styles! Minimalism has been one of the most powerful forces in all of music over the last 50 years. Glass has scored Koyanisqaatsi (1982), Candyman (1992), and other films and produced albums for the new-wave band Polyrock; the Orb sampled Reich’s Electric Counterpoint for ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’; Reich and Glass and Meredith Monk have been treated to remix albums; Terry Riley’s In C is played by every type of ensemble imaginable around the world; and on Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed acknowledged La Monte Young’s drone concepts. Not only are these composers still active, but the following post-minimalist generations of musicians continue to extend the style. The best explanation of minimalism still belongs to Reich and his short essay Music as a Gradual Process, published in Source magazine. …”
Bandcamp (Audio)
W – Minimal music
ALLMUSIC
YouTube: Top 50 Best Minimalism albums of all Time (RYM) Rate Your Music / Essential Minimalism Albums, Top 50 Best Post-Minimalism albums of all Time (RYM) Rate Your Music / Post-Minimalism Albums

Four-Color Revolution: Underground Newspapers Of, By, and For the People

An illustration from The Chicago Seed (1969).
“In his introduction to this superbly illustrated compendium of underground newspapers, editor Geoff Kaplan channels the 1960s’ exuberant ad-hoc vibe by referring to his book as ‘Power of the People,’ despite the title on the cover—Power to the People. The more inclusive of offers insight into the cultural power exuded by the 700 color reproductions gathered here, all culled from papers published between 1964 and 1974. Kaplan posits that the brash, sometimes outrageous graphic treatments used by underground designers represented a ‘vehement challenge to the dominance of official media.’ A revolution in information technology back in the mid-’60s made it possible for anyone to become a publisher — the only requirements were ‘an IBM typewriter with interchangeable typefaces, a lot of artwork (cartoons, photographs, drawings, illustrations) and an urge to express his or her social, political, or cultural point of view.’ A confluence of history and demographics helped give rise to this onslaught of smudgy newsprint. The Baby Boomers were confronted with an unpopular war, and, as one essayist in the book points out, ‘the friction between draft age (18) and voting age (21).’ Additionally, the use of LSD among many editors and designers ‘gave the social insurgency of the sixties, and the underground newspapers associated with it, their peculiar and distinctive stamp.’ With youthful fervor shaping the politics and psychedelic drugs driving the look of the underground press, readers expected, and received, visual invective: The New York–based Other Scenes depicted a naked woman’s rear end expelling the names of 1968’s presidential candidates — Humphrey, Nixon, Wallace — in curling, piled-up letters. Often just as polemical, the London-based papers Oz and The International Times featured complex typography entwined with vivid illustrations. Like Beatles songs, the graphics coming out of Swinging London were a mix of sterling talent and witty production—one Oz cover splattered red ink over the famous photograph of South Vietnam’s police chief executing a Vietcong infiltrator with a shot to the temple. (The caption ridicules President Johnson: ‘The Great Society Blows Another Mind.’) An International Times cover gave theorist Guy Debord’s seminal treatise, ‘Society of the Spectacle,’ the comic-strip treatment, with a female character proclaiming, ‘Culture? Ugh! The ideal commodity—the one that helps sell all the others!’ …”
Voice
An illustration from Old Mole (1969).

Halal cart

A halal cart in Jamaica, Queens, New York

“A halal cart is a food cart which serves primarily halal food, particularly in New York City, but also in other metropolitan areas in the United States. A halal cart platter consists of chicken shawarma or lamb gyro, yellow rice, and salad, with optional red and/or white sauce on top. The red sauce is believed to derive from harissa, while the white sauce may come khyar bi Laban (similar to tzatziki). The origin of the halal cart is disputed, but The Halal Guys was one of the first, starting off as a hot dog cart in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, before switching to halal food in the 1990s. As early as 2007, halal carts had already begun displacing hot dog carts as the city’s dominant form of street food. A Queens College study showed that there were 306 street vendors who immigrated from Germany and Italy to New York City in 1990, and none in 2005; over the same period, those from Egypt, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan had risen from 69 to 563. The ubiquity of halal carts in New York City has been compared to that of Taco trucks in Los Angeles.”
Wikipedia

The Best Halal Carts in New York
“… In New York, ‘halal’ has two meanings: There is halal food, made according to Islamic dietary laws, and there are halal carts, the rice-and-meat stands that are ubiquitous on city streets. The cuisine — chicken, lamb, rice, red sauce, ‘white sauce’ — is a mishmash of cooking from Trinidad, Egypt, Pakistan, and Greece, remixed into its own thing. The carts’ origins go back to 1990, and the most famous purveyor is the Halal Guys, which has expanded from a midtown cart to dozens of restaurants around the world. …”
Grub Street
YouTube: My Most Popular Recipe, Updated: Halal Cart-Style Chicken and Rice

Dennis Bovell – Mek It Run (1986)

“Dennis Bovell gave me the initial spark for my interest in Dub Thanks to: my enthusiasm for Linton Kwesi Johnson moved me in the early 1980s to buy an album that was still unknown to me: ‘LKJ in Dub’. The initial disappointment that I already knew all of the pieces soon gave way to fascination with the new form in which they could be heard here: as DubVersions. After that discovery, I bought all of the Bovell / BlackbeardDub-Albums that I could get hold of and fell in love with his style, Dubto mix s. It was finely balanced, highly precise, clear, tidy, harmonious, but at the same time surprising, full of tension and full of bass power. Now, 30 years later, the label Pressure Sounds, which specializes in old reggae, is conjuring up a new, old work by Bovell: ‘Mek It Run‘ (Pressure sounds). Allegedly, Bovell found a shoebox with raw recordings from 1978 to 1986 in his archive and was so impressed by them that he went straight to Neil Fraser, the crazy professor, bought a few days of studio time and worked on completing the previous one unfinished work. The result is 16 fresh Dubs based on well hung recordings, played by the best UK studio musicians of the time. And? Is the old craze for Bovells Dubs awakened again? I’m just wondering and I have to admit: not quite. Thirty years more extensive Dub-Consumption has left its mark on me. It will never be as beautiful as the first time anyway. In addition, the evolution of the Dub did not stand still, so that when listening to ‘Mek It Run’ the historical interest outweighs the musical. Perhaps Mr. Bovell left those recordings unfinished for a reason. …”
Dubblog
YouTube: Dennis Bovell – Mek It Run (Full Album)

Then Again – Henry Now (2025)

“Then Again is a 2025 live album by experimental music and free improvising group Henry Now. It comprises extracts taken from recordings of two of the group’s concert performances in Italy at Teatro President, Piacenza on 18 November 2022, and at Sala Michele Perriera, Palermo on 19 November 2022. The album was released on CD and LP in December 2025 by Italian musician and producer Max Marchini’s record label, Dark Companion [it]. Henry Now was formed in 2022 by four of the former members of Henry Cow, namely Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, John Greaves and Tim Hodgkinson, to perform at Teatro President, Piacenza, Italy during the Musiche Nuove a Piacenza Festival on 18 November 2022. The occasion was to celebrate Italian musician and producer Max Marchini’s 60th birthday. Then Again was derived from recordings made at this concert and their next live performance at the second Solo per Lelio (Only for Lelio) festival in Sala Michele Perriera, Palermo on 19 November 2022. The editing and mixing of the CD and LP releases of Then Again are slightly different. The CD release has seven tracks, whereas the LP release has only six. The CD and LP album cover art work is by Chris Cutler,^[8] which he described in the CD booklet. … In a review of Then Again in Exposé, Peter Thelen found the album largely ‘quite interesting and engaging’, with moments, as is often the case with free improvisation, when the group ‘struggles to get off the ground’. Thelen stated that, ‘depending on your like or dislike of free improvisation, this could be an interesting diversion into unexpected musical worlds, or a quick trip through hell and back.’ Reviewing the album in the Italian music magazine, Rockol, Franco Zanetti stated that Henry Now is not a Henry Cow reunion, and that on Then Again the four ex-Henry Cow members do not ‘recreate the past’ (ricreare il loro passato), but drawing on fifty years of experience, ‘improvise the present’ (improvvisare il presente). Zanetti added that Then Again ‘is proof that the old fire still burns’ (prova che il vecchio fuoco arde ancora), and that it offers listeners unfamiliar with Henry Cow an introduction to one of the most important experimental music groups. …”
Wikipedia
YouTube: Henry Now – Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson, John Greaves (UK) – Jazzinec 2023

Behind the Mysterious Symbols Spray-Painted on Our Streets

“You may have registered but never stopped to think about all those colored markings around the city. The marks are everywhere, hiding in plain sight. A cross between hieroglyphics and graffiti tags, they’re mostly put there to tell excavators what’s below ground before crews start digging up the streets. Tom Wilson and I have spent this summer noticing them. Wilson began to photograph painted dots on sewer drains and then he started to focus on funny signs and words and small colored discs, called A-tags, embedded in the asphalt. Now, he says, he can’t notsee tags and markings whenever he’s walking around town. Subways are almost the least of what’s under the streets of New York City. Some 7,000 miles of water pipes providing a billion gallons of drinking water a day snake below ground. There are thousands of miles of gas mains, more than 100 miles of steam pipes and 7,500 miles of brick and ceramic sewers sluicing more than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day. Add to that an untold assortment of tree roots pushing through asphalt and pavement; pneumatic mail tubes from the Flash Gordon era; abandoned tunnels; post-Sandy riverine flood walls, air raid shelters and ConEd’s 94,000 miles of electric cables. They’re all scrambled together, buried in dirt several stories deep — the largest, messiest bowl of plastic, concrete and metal spaghetti in America, dispersed in no sane order. And they require endless repair. Each year New York processes hundreds of thousands of applications for excavations around the five boroughs to fix what’s broken underground. If you live in the city and think your street is constantly victimized by jackhammers and street saws, you may not be wrong. All digs begin with spray-painted lines and dots on the sidewalks and streets that are akin to the surgical markings doctors draw on patients before operating. These excavators’ hieroglyphs were standardized decades ago by the American Public Works Association, after a breached petroleum pipeline in California blew up a city block, killing nine people. Now, across the country, prospective diggers start by dialing 811, a federally-mandated call center, which combines GPS and old records to geolocate pipes and wires in a dig area. …”
NYT (Video)

The Complete Guide To The English Premier League

“So, you think football is just a game? Think again! From Nottingham to Newcastle, Aston to Arsenal, The Complete Guide To The English Premier League is your ultimate passport into the wild, wonderful world of the most thrilling sports competition on Earth. Whether you’re a curious newcomer, a lapsed fan, or someone who once thought ‘Premier League’ was a subscription TV package, this updated book for the 2026/27 season is your backstage pass to 20 clubs, a hundred years of grudges, and millions of chanting, swearing, heartbroken fans. Written with love, and no small amount of mischief by Ross Carlisle and Joe Andrich, this is football with a pint in hand, not a calculator. Club-by-club, match-by-match, chant-by-questionable-chant, you’ll uncover the histories, rivalries, myths, magic and madness that make the Premier League a global obsession. Learn why learn why eagles hate seagulls, what Robin Hood has to do with Forest, why Villa fans still dream of 1982, and what it really means when someone yells ‘UTV!’ or ‘You Reds!’ in the rain. No dry stats. No tedious tactics. Just a proper love letter to football’s greatest soap opera. Because the Premier League isn’t just the only thing in life. It’s far more important than that.”
amazon

Battlefield Ghosts in Prospect Park

Haze drifts over the grassy curves of the Long Meadow at Prospect Park.
“I used to write a lot about Long Island and Queens, but it’s taken me a long time to write about Brooklyn. I’ve been living here eight years now, in the neighborhood variously known as Prospect Lefferts Gardens, north Flatbush or Little Caribbean. Brooklyn is where all my ancestors who came to New York City from central Europe once lived, but I never lived here myself until now. The May 2026 episode of the World BEYOND War podcast is where I finally start talking about Brooklyn, though I finished the episode a week ago and I don’t think I’m done talking yet. I had fun with this one, taking my listeners on a stroll into Prospect Park for a tour of an American Revolutionary War battle fought 250 years ago this summer. The weirdest thing about this history is that neither Brooklyn nor New York City nor New York State nor USA have ever made much effort to preserve or signify the battle whose grounds spread today all over Gravesend, Fort Hamilton, New Utrecht, Bensonhurst, Red Hook, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Greenwood Cemetery, Kensington, Midwoods, Flatlands, Flatbush, Crown Heights, East New York, Jamaica, Woodhaven, Richmond Hill, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights – the battle known as the Battle of Brooklyn or Battle of Long Island. I live near a wonderful and surreal famous city park, the beautiful Prospect Park, constructed gradually during the second half of the 19th century, led by the same team of architects that earlier created Central Park and were now intent on creating the best work of their lives. This is a beautiful, amazing park that I’m thrilled to live near. It’s also a terribly ahistorical park, though, because it was literally designed to obliterate the remains of the old battlefields of August 1776 that stood a century later among the busy farmlands of north Flatbush. I suppose it’s commendable that city planners managed to get a plan into play at all, especially when you consider that during this time Flatbush was not yet a part of Brooklyn or New York City, but just an old farm town outside the bustling city. Instead of signifying history with a plan to preserve the battlefield, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Faux and their massive team of builders did the opposite. They created Prospect Park by flattening the long, jagged series of hills that were the battle’s defensive line into two plateaus, the breathtaking Long Meadow in the north, and the area of the Nethermead and the large lake below. …”
Literary Kicks
This map showing the Prospect Park Lake and the peninsula resembling the boot of Italy is from hiddenwatersblog.wordpress.com

The Harlem Trilogy: Harlem Shuffle (2021)

“Harlem Shuffle is a 2021 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is the follow-up to Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The first book in Whitehead’s ‘Harlem Trilogy,’ it is a work of crime fiction and a family saga  that takes place in Harlem between 1959 and 1964. It was published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021. … In 1959, Ray Carney lives in Harlem with his wife Elizabeth, with whom he is expecting a second child. Although descending from a criminal family, Ray makes his living working as an upstanding furniture salesman on 125th Street. However, he occasionally fences stolen goods through his furniture store, including those from his cousin Freddie. Whereas Ray has steered his way toward an honest living, Freddie is descending into Harlem’s criminal underworld. Freddie volunteers a reluctant Ray to fence the stolen goods in a robbery of the Hotel Theresa he and his associates, Arthur, Pepper and Miami Joe, are planning, to Ray’s fury. …”
Wikipedia

“Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Harlem Shuffle, is the epic and captivating story of Ray Carney—furniture salesman, family man, entrepreneur on the rise and a vivid, walking, breathing, living exemplar of that classic archetype, the striver. Harlem Shuffle is a bravura performance, an immersive, laugh-out-loud, riveting adventure whose narrative energy is boosted by its memorable hero and a highly relevant backdrop of social injustice. … When a job goes sideways, Carney gets taken for a ride by the formidable Pepper, a cold, calculating enforcer who happens to have been one of Big Mike Carney’s old cronies. Pepper is as enigmatic and charismatic a crook as any in modern fiction. His tentative, slow-burning partnership with Carney is one of the novel’s most engaging touches. Key to Whitehead’s accomplishment is his virtuosic handling of the distinct lingo and arcane codes of Carney’s various worlds. Pepper, especially, is portrayed with hard-boiled economy and delicious wit. …”
Harvard Review
Guardian: Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead review – a zinging wiseguy noir thriller
Esquire – In ‘Harlem Shuffle,’ Colson Whitehead Masters a New Genre: The Crime Caper
amazon – Bill’s Books
YouTube: Colson Whitehead talks about his new book ‘Harlem Shuffle’
‘The Waldorf of Harlem’: Hotel Theresa, July 1964.

How Often Do Air Conditioners Fall Out of NYC Windows and Kill People?

Hot town, summer in the city — only the baseball bobbleheads are keeping cool.
2011: “Ah, New York City in the summer!Generally, we really do love it, despite the on-the-way-to-work sweatiness and fish-in-an-old-sweat-sock smells. But with summer comes air conditioners, and with air conditioners come inept installations into apartment windows, and with inept installations come the occasional, every so often, reports that an air conditioner has fallen from the sky and bashed someone in the head. Which would be awful. Truly, truly awful. So, how much should we worry about this, really? We took to the Internet, place of great knowledge, to find out. … But should we be so easily placated? After all, it’s only THE INTERNET. So, we carried on with our research. The 2006 post on Gothamist reveals that a woman was indeed hit by an air conditioner unit falling out of a window on East 104th Street, as reported by the Post. Her ‘right leg was crushed, the bone shattered. She also suffered broken ribs, a broken pelvis, fractured vertebrae, and internal bleeding.’ She was, fortunately, expected to recover. Another person, on the mixed martial arts forum of Sherdog, suggests that there might be a greater conspiracy at work with regard to plummeting air conditioners. And lo, we recall that in September of last year there was another air-conditioning incident, near Village Voice HQ, in fact. We even wrote about it. … Just a couple of months later there was another A.C. plummet, this one in West New York. As reported by the Jersey Journal, 24-year-old New Jersey man Esidra Valles was hit by an air conditioner that fell 15 stories and struck him in the head. … The New York Times was worried about air conditioners falling out of windows and hitting people back in 2004, as related to co-op liability. Earlier this year, EV Grieve reported on a piece of an air conditioner that had fallen on East 10th Street, prompting a response from the FDNY. Air conditioners have also struck people in London and Chicago (they — the people, that is — survived). In fact, in our admittedly unscientific search, we found zero confirmed cases of death by air conditioner, and only a few mentions. A child was critically injured when he fell from a window (that lacked bars, which had been removed to put in an air conditioner) and landed on another air conditioner unit. But, air conditioners can save lives, too. So what’s the deal? Has anyone in New York City ever been killed by a falling air conditioner? …”
Voice

In the dark days of the Depression, a Jazz Age artist captures a luminous, magical New York

“He’s hardly a household name today. But Utah-born John Held, Jr. helped create the popular imagery of the 1920s. Held made Jazz Age icons out of bobbed-hair flappers, college guys in raccoon coats, sporty women wielding tennis rackets, and tuxedoed partygoers dangling cigarette holders from their lips. His gently satirical drawings depicting a carefree and exuberant era appeared on dozens of national magazine covers as well as inside periodicals and newspapers. His distinct style of work even made it to the book jacket of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age. Then came the stock market crash. Held turned 40 in 1929, lost a lot of money, suffered a nervous breakdown, and found that his once-constant and highly lucrative artwork commissions had mostly dried up. He was now free to do what he came to New York in 1912 for: to pursue the fine arts and become a watercolor painter. Then came the stock market crash. Held turned 40 in 1929, lost a lot of money, suffered a nervous breakdown, and found that his once-constant and highly lucrative artwork commissions had mostly dried up. He was now free to do what he came to New York in 1912 for: to pursue the fine arts and become a watercolor painter. A watercolor painting depicting a city skyline with tall buildings, featuring a prominent structure with a green roof and others in varying shades of blue and white. In the Depression of the 1930s, when the city’s new skyscrapers might look to some like tall gray husks, Held depicted them as magical and luminous—radiant under the lavender, pink, blueish-white skies of dawn and dusk. They’re a radical departure from his work a decade earlier, which featured stylish youth drawn in exaggerated angular proportions that suggest motion and energy. His watercolors, on the other hand, depict no people at all. …”
Ephemeral New York

John Coltrane – Live in France July 27/28 1965: The Complete Concerts (2009)

“Live in Paris is an album by jazz musician John Coltrane originally issued as 2 separate volumes in 1974 by BYG Japan and later reissued on CD by Charly Records. Live in Paris was recorded in the middle of one of Coltrane’s busiest summers. On June 28, 1965, he recorded the groundbreaking album Ascension, followed by New Thing at Newport four days later. This was followed by a two-week double bill with Thelonious Monk‘s quartet at the Village Gate from July 6–18. Coltrane and his quartet then embarked on a one-week tour of Europe, playing at the sixth International Jazz Festival at Juan-les-Pins in Antibes, France on July 26 and 27, followed by a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on July 28, and winding up with a performance at a jazz festival in Comblain-la-Tour, Belgium on August 1. The July 26 concert, on which Coltrane shared billing with Jimmy McGriff, featured his only live performance of A Love Supreme, a 48-minute version which took up the entire program. (A recording of this concert appears on the 2002 Deluxe Edition and the 2015 Super Deluxe Edition of A Love Supreme.) The following day, at the request of the festival, Coltrane performed material that was more familiar to the audience. The versions of ‘Naima’ and ‘Impressions’ on Live in Paris were recorded that day. The remaining tracks, ‘Blue Valse’, ‘Afro-Blue’, and a second version of ‘Impressions’, were recorded at the July 28 concert in Paris. (‘Blue Valse’ is actually a quartet version of ‘Ascension’, and was mis-titled due to a miscommunication with concert personnel.) Some of the music recorded in France during the tour was also released in 1988 on Live in Antibes.The July–August 1965 tour marked Coltrane’s last appearance in Europe. On the tour, during breaks, Coltrane frequently ‘remained… in his hotel room, practicing as usual, playing along to a tape of an [Albert] Ayler concert.’ In a review for AllMusic, Stephen Cook wrote that Live in Paris shows Coltrane ‘dismissing solo structure in favor of volcanic flights’, and said that his performance on ‘Naima’ was ‘one of his most beautiful and emotionally bare solos.’ He stated: ‘This disc provides a valuable document of Coltrane’s playing during a fertile and protean period (one of many).’ …”
Wikipedia
YouTube: John Coltrane – Live in France July 27/28 1965: The Complete Concerts (2009) [Full Album]

Lydia Davis Loved Learning the Word ‘Look.’ These Essays Show Why.

“Why did Emma Bovary have to die? Adultery was not her real sin. Flaubert sentenced his most famous character to a protracted and gruesome death — suicide by arsenic — for what was, to his mind, a far more serious infraction: ‘The heroine, infatuated with romanticism, comes to grief because of it — because of her craving for impossible dreams, her refusal to accept the ordinariness of her own life and its limited possibilities for happiness.’ That is the assessment of Lydia Davis, the translator of Flaubert, Proust, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris, among others, and herself a celebrated writer who reifies, as it happens, precisely what Emma Bovary so decisively rejected: ordinary life. … In 2009, her landmark ‘Collected Stories’ was published; 30 years of her writing life (minus her novel, ‘The End of the Story’) contained in just 750 pages. … The book allows us backstage, into the creation and revision of her stories, her notes on her influences: Beckett, Babel, Paley, Kafka. A few pieces offer straightforward writing advice. …”
NY Times

The Eccentricity of Lydia Davis’s Essays
“Ironic, self-conscious and full of weird humour, in Lydia Davis’s hands the short story is economical to the point of obsession. …While Davis remains less well-known outside the United States, for readers familiar with her writing, her style is unmistakable. Her most recent book, Essays (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) encompasses Davis’s meditations on style, the writing process, and the literary forms which have influenced her own eccentric brand of writing. Davis’s Collected Stories fits with a recent movement away from ‘epiphany’ writing in short fiction, largely out of vogue in contemporary collections. Among her core influences, Davis cites Kafka in particular, whose writing she admires for its sparseness, humility and bizarre imagination. (Essays notes, by way of example: ‘He was interested in the possibility of two hands suddenly alien to each other’.) Rather than writing narratives with hackneyed call-backs and specious twists, Davis’s stories disturb essential relationships between observation and invention, and often unfold around seemingly unremarkable experiences, like eating alone, or of absentmindedly letting a cat into the house; or trivial dilemmas such as whether one is interesting to one’s friends, or when to check one’s answer phone. …”
The London Magazine
Harpers: Demanding Pleasures by Lydia Davis
amazon: Essays One, Essays Two

Habibi Funk 036: Pieces of a Dream

“Recorded between 1988 and 1989 in a small 8-track home studio in Amman, Pieces of a Dream captures a side of the Arab music scene rarely documented: a group of musicians deeply inspired by jazz, soul, yacht rock and city pop, creating music that sounds closer to late-night LA or London than what most would associate with Jordan at the time. Nechazz was formed by Palestinian-Jordanian musician Basim Said & Khaldoon Nasser and Iraqi singer and guitarist Kassim Sabounchi. While the trio became locally known for their live shows at the iconic Amman club Rumours, the music they wrote and recorded together was never officially released and remained unheard even among friends and family of the band. The album blends smooth RnB, jazz and sophisticated pop arrangements, drawing inspiration from artists such as Bobby Caldwell, Steely Dan, Michael Franks, early George Michael, Tears For Fears, Level 42 and Stevie Wonder, while still sounding entirely their own creation. Tracks like ‘Love Meeting Love’ and ‘Over You’ showcase the band’s smooth harmonies, synths and musicianship. The release began as a cassette found in a family archive and has now eventually became one of our most pleasantly surprising resurgences of late 1980s Arab independent music: a timeless collection of songs made between rehearsals, nightlife shifts, aviation careers and everyday life in Amman. …”
Bandcamp (Audio)

UEFA, Concacaf and AFC maintain pressure on FIFA president Gianni Infantino to resign

“This comes after FIFA, world football’s governing body, released a statement on Saturday that hit out at what it described as a “concerted and ongoing effort by some to undermine” Infantino and the organisation. The failed FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) plan, which has heaped immense pressure on Infantino, would have seen FIFA make stakes in its commercial and event operations, including the World Cups and Club World Cups, available for private investment. Following a crisis meeting of select members of FIFA’s management in Morocco on Wednesday, Infantino, who apologised with Mattias Grafstrom, FIFA’s secretary general, for the FFE proposal, received the “full support” from his senior leadership team. The open letter from UEFA, Concacaf and AFC read: ‘This recent meeting, where a select number of members of the FIFA Management Committee — not the full Committee — were summoned abroad, rather than leadership going to Zurich to address the heart of FIFA, its staff, only reinforces these concerns and represents a continuation of the very pattern of conduct that brought us to this moment. ‘It is not the conduct of a custodian of the game, but of one who believes the game is answerable to him. There is silence where there should be accountability, distance where there should be openness. These are not the qualities football deserves in its leadership. That is why we have taken this stance: not lightly and not alone, but together, and out of duty to the game we serve.’ Last week, UEFA doubled down on its threat of European member associations boycotting future men’s and women’s World Cups. … Sources with knowledge of the confederations’ thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, admit there is an acknowledgement that at some point talks may have to be had on developing possible new competitions but the hope is they will not be necessary and Infantino will instead step down. Following the meeting in Morocco, FIFA added that ‘a review will now be conducted, and a report will be presented to the FIFA council at its next scheduled meeting’. However, UEFA, Concacaf and the AFC have made clear that they do trust FIFA to oversee this review, and have instead called for it to be carried out by an independent party. …”
NYT/ATH

The Falklands pub crawl: sinking pints in Las Malvinas

“There aren’t many places more sacred and special to the British than the pub, and in the Falkland Islands, the South Atlantic archipelago, some 7,900 miles from London, that’s especially true. In this remote, windswept British territory, the pub isn’t just somewhere to grab a beer; it’s an essential part of the community. Through the years, the pub has been a town hall, recruitment office and even, during the 1982 Falklands War, a refuge for civilians. Just over 3,600 people live across the Falklands, with just shy of 3,000 of those living in the capital of Port Stanley. Based in East Falklands, Stanley offers us one of the world’s most unique pub crawls, taking just 20 minutes of walking for five pints of the good stuff and over 180 years of history. The first stop would have been The Globe Tavern on Ross Road. It was a boozer that dated back to the 19th century, when Stanley wasn’t much more than a pit stop for the Royal Navy as they went around Cape Horn. Whether it was sailors, sealers or whalers, everyone would pack into the Globe and share their stories from the seven seas and every corner of the British Empire. This is a pub that’s survived it all. It’s weathered brutal winters, economic crashes and even the defining event in the Falklands’ history, the Argentinian invasion that came in 1982. However, it recently shuttered its doors. The war might not have taken the pub, but it’s an event that still has a grip on the psyche of both countries today. The recent clash between England and Argentina in the 2026 World Cup and subsequent actions of both Argentina’s players and politicians stoked the fires once again, but in the Falklands, they are fiercely British with the Union Jack flying everywhere. Unsurprisingly, the pub trade in the Falkland Islands suffered during the occupation, with people worried about having a session, given that Argentine troops were stationed throughout Stanley and had implemented a curfew. For those Islanders who did venture out, they’d find themselves at the Globe, or elsewhere, sharing rumours of the conflict and listening to the BBC World Service for any news of their impending freedom. Now we start two minutes along Ross Road to enter the Victory Bar. Given its name, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it had been opened post-1982, but the truth is that it’s carried this name far longer. The war cast a shadow over the Victory Bar too, which was a hotbed for celebrations when British troops and islanders celebrated the Argentinian surrender on June 14th, 1982, just 74 days after the initial invasion. …”
Far Out
W – Falkland Islands
YouTube: Why Anyone Lives On The Falkland Islands (And Why You Can’t)

Football is too powerful to have one king. It’s time to abolish the FIFA presidency

“Among the statements of support for the FIFA president Gianni Infantino, there is competition to be the most craven. In a congested field, the Argentinian Football Association, which is very keen on an expansion to a 64-team World Cup in 2030, may have just nosed ahead. ‘We address you, dear President,’ it wrote in a public statement issued on Thursday, ‘and through you to the FIFA board, to express our support for the management carried out during the last 10 years, which had as its main axes the development of football throughout the world and the institutional solidity based on a clear, stable and transparent governance model. These pledges have now come from nations in Africa, Asia and both Central and South America, and are similar enough in tone and structure to have come from a template. They have all addressed Infantino with the same reverence, loudly applauded him for abandoning his private-equity scheme, which would have seen a portion of FIFA’s business sold to external investors, and then praised him for a style of leadership — clear, stable, transparent — that he stands accused of not showing. Infantino is being praised for having to abandon a plan that was conceived in the dark, but then exposed against his will by the media. It might be one of the only times in recent history that someone has drawn a standing ovation for being forced into an embarrassing U-turn. Strange? No, this is football, where cognitive dissonance is a survival skill. These are less gestures of support, more sacred oaths at the feet of a monarch. The lack of dissent is startling. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
Telegraph – Exclusive: Gianni Infantino’s ‘lover’ was paid off by Uefa
***NYT/ATH: FIFA says there is ‘concerted and ongoing effort’ to oust Gianni Infantino as president***

Mr Infantino in Colombia on Friday with the governor of Valle del Cauca, Dilian Francisca Toro, and the president of Colombia’s Football, Federation Ramon Jesurun

Tarot Was a Courtly Card Game. How Did It Become a Tool for Divination?

“Around 1442, the Duke of Milan gave his daughter a deluxe set of handcrafted playing cards for the courtly game of tarot. The cards, featuring meticulously illustrated figures like Death, the Chariot and the Emperor on gold- and silver-leaf backgrounds, were created by a renowned Renaissance workshop. They cost about 1,500 ducats, 10 times the annual salary of an average courtier. Before its use in spiritual divination, tarot was a card game played by Italian nobility — mostly women — and each card was a hand-held work of art. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York is presenting surviving cards from that tradition in ‘Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions.’ The show explores the 600-year evolution of tarot from a game to an occult practice and popular entertainment, from those early gilded exemplars through decks made by artists including Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington and the contemporary British painter Chris Ofili. The show demonstrates that tarot cards are, perhaps above all else, an artistic and intellectual form of expression, created initially by leading artisans of 15th-century workshops, then later rediscovered and reinvented across the centuries. ‘These are actually, front and center, really exquisite works of art,’ said Joshua O’Driscoll, senior curator and department head of Medieval Renaissance manuscripts for the Morgan, who curated the show with Claire Gilman and Frank Trujillo. The show also taps into a popular current tarot fascination, which has grown since the coronavirus pandemic, said Gilman, who mentioned new decks, like the Pulp Tarot, the Black Power Tarot and RuPaul’s Drag Race Tarot. Gilman, the Morgan’s curator and department head of modern and contemporary drawings, added that today’s spike in interest is just one of tarot’s periodic resurgences, which occurred amid the late-19th-century British Occult Revival, the era of European Surrealism, and as part of the worldwide cultural upheaval of the 1960s. ….”
NY Times
History of Tarot Cards: Origins & Timeline (2026)
***Tarot Deck: Rider-Waite, Tarot de Marseille, Sola Busca***
1960s: Days of Rage – Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Cards

Blood and Fire Record

“Blood and Fire was a British reggae record label active from 1993-2014, specialising in reissues of 1970s dub. Steve Barrow (Reggae historiographer, chronologist and archivist) and Bob Harding (former vocalist with post-punk band The Mothmen) worked with Simply Red‘s singer Mick Hucknall and management Elliot Rashman and Andy Dodd to form the record label in Manchester in 1993 with the objective of reissuing roots reggae, dub and DJ albums with the integrity of jazz reissues. In the process, Blood and Fire influenced the overall aesthetic of other labels issuing archival Jamaican recordings in the 1990s and beyond. The company logo and album covers were designed by Intro. Initial releases drew on mid-1970s Bunny Lee and King Tubby produced material. As Barrow said in 1999: The majority of the Blood & Fire catalogue went through King Tubby’s [studio]. There are exceptions but, by and large, most of those records were mixed by King Tubby or one of his pupils, and they were voiced there. We think that King Tubby is one of the most important figures this century, so indirectly the catalogue celebrates King Tubby and his contribution. We think that King Tubby is probably more important than Bob Marley.  The label subsequently reissued material produced by Yabby You and Glen Brown along with the Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry produced Congos set Heart of the Congos and a three-CD Big Youth set, Natty Universal Dread. Heart of the Congos would sell 80,000 copies over a ten year period.>Despite the reissue objective, the label released two one-riddim albums with newly-recorded vocals. The first was Tree of Satta(2003) which used the original ‘Satta Massagana‘ riddim featuring a mixture of new and vintage voicings over the riddim along with the original version of the song by The Abyssinians. The second, Fisherman Style (2006), used The Congos’ ‘Fisherman’ riddim and featured new material from a variety of singers including Horace Andy, U Roy, Big Youth, Luciano, Tony Tuff and Dillinger. The label also had a sound system which has featured original Jamaican artists such as Dilinger, Trinity, Ranking Joe, U Brown, Horace Andy, Dennis Alcapone, U Roy, Spikey Tee, Country Culture, Raggamonica along with Steve Barrow and Dom Sotgiu. …”
W – Blood and Fire
YouTube: Blood and Fire
YouTube: Blood and Fire Records Mixtape Series

‘Fifa Super League’: Infantino discussed having governing body’s name on European breakaway

“Gianni Infantino held talks about rebranding the ill-fated European breakaway competition the ‘Fifa Super League’, with negotiations going as far as the term sheet for an agreement that would have changed the face of European football. The term sheet, whose full contents can be revealed for the first time, is dated October 2020 and proposes renaming any new competition under Fifa’s branding. It outlines the extent to which Infantino’s administration were implicated in a scheme that caused widespread revulsion among fans and excluded clubs in April 2021. It also reveals that Fifa was prepared to sideline its member associations in pushing plans to cut back the number of international windows and outlines how global football’s governing body would have been given special governance and political rights with a ‘golden share’. In a week when football is reeling from the fallout after Infantino scrapped his plan to sell chunks of the World Cup to private investors, the document shows Fifa’s leadership was deeply involved in another attempt to put the sport’s major competitions under corporate control. …”
Guardian
BBC: Infantino sorry for errors but stays Fifa president
YouTube: UEFA criticises FIFA’s ‘secret schemes from faceless individuals’, Fifa scraps controversial plan after global outrage | BBC News
NYT/ATH:***Gianni Infantino fights on as FIFA president after leadership backing. So, what now?***

It Was 1984 – and ‘Neuromancer’ Caught Lightning in a Klein Bottle

“Editor’s note, August 4, 2026: Recently, we were struck by a tableau in Penn Station that reminded us of an unnerving scene in William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer. Using our own battered and stained paperback to research the piece, we came across this blurb, near the front of the book. We immediately poked around online to see whether, in other editions, the blurb included a byline, since we are always interested in finding another prime example of the paper’s often prescient criticism, and it would help us find the full review in the archives more quickly. We had no luck, though we did see the quote occasionally landing on the covers of various reprints, sometimes shortened to ‘A mindbender of a read.  —Village Voice’. Since Neuromancer was originally published on July 1, 1984, we began plodding through the June issues of the Voice, getting no hits until the July 3 issue, which featured a summer beach reads section in which Geoffrey O’Brien tackled a long list of ‘Whodunits’ while Debra Rae Cohen wrapped up a roundup of recent sci-fi novels and anthologies. She had luminous praise for Gibson’s debut, though not the line we were looking for. But for those who love to while away their time in the Strand’s aisles, Cohen’s labor-intensive multi-review blast from the past offers plenty of other keepers from a particularly fertile period for the genre, the mid-’80s, which also gave us such novels as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, and Carl Sagan’s Contact (all from 1985), along with Blade Runner and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (both 1982) and The Terminator (1984) thrilling huge audiences in theaters. We will continue to seek out the Voice review that has, over the decades, been a bonanza for PR reps and book designers alike, but in the meantime, here is Cohen’s insightful hot take on a tome for the ages. —RCB …”
Voice
1960s: Days of Rage: – Cyberpunk

The Fifa family: which confederations could support Infantino or turn against him?

“The pressure is growing on the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, with many countries withdrawing their support following the bungled World Cup sell-off. However, how key is Infantino’s relationship with each confederation and is it likely that an election contest will actually happen? We look at the key considerations, confederation by confederation. 1) How does each confederation view Infantino’s re-election? Uefa (Europe) has firmly led the moves under way to achieve Infantino’s removal. The threat last week to boycott all Fifa competitions if the Fifa Forward Enterprise scheme was not scrapped contributed hugely to its failure. In a scathing statement on Saturday, Uefa said the current Fifa leadership had “not only lost Uefa’s confidence, but also that of many other members of the football family”, and pledged to push for change. Some Uefa member associations, including the English and Welsh FAs, have withdrawn their letters of support for Infantino’s re‑election and efforts are continuing to ensure others follow suit in a bid to weaken his position irretrievably. … Reports of AFC (Asia) support for Uefa are premature; the confederation is divided. The AFC has spoken out, strongly in relative terms compared to its usual pronouncements, against the proposed World Cup deal and has called for reform of Fifa. The AFC has been a staunch supporter in the past but if it looks as if Infantino is in trouble the AFC leadership, which was genuinely angry at how the proposal was made (probably more so than the actual details of the deal), could switch sides, which would probably confirm Infantino’s downfall if Uefa and Concacaf oppose but it is not a foregone conclusion – some in Asia are not convinced that Uefa has the numbers. The big problem is that, while the AFC leadership may want Infantino out, most individual Asian federations do not want him to be replaced. The AFC president, Sheikh Salman, has ambitions of his own and has been historically successful at preserving AFC unity but this will be tricky especially as west Asian nations such as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia support Infantino and are influential in Asia. …”
***Guardian***
NYT/ATH: President of Jordanian FA accuses FIFA of ‘blackmail’ over Infantino reelection
NYT/ATH: How do FIFA presidential elections work? Who can challenge Gianni Infantino? (Video)
Guardian: Concacaf countries considering withdrawing support for under-fire Gianni Infantino (Video)
YouTube: Fifa scraps controversial plan after global outrage | BBC News

A Genius Hitting His Stride: Watch Pharoah Sanders Live at Antibes, 1968

“By the summer of 1968, Pharoah Sanders had emerged from the long shadow of John Coltrane’s final years to chart his own ecstatic path. Coltrane had died less than a year earlier, in July 1967, but Sanders, who had played with him on Ascension, Meditations, and Live in Japan, was still seen by many as a feral offspring of his mentor’s free jazz gospel. Tauhid, recorded not long after Coltrane’s death, signaled a new direction: still volcanic and free, but more ritualistic, spacious, and spiritual. Eager to tap the enthusiasm that Europeans had for jazz, Sanders accepted an offer to play at the Festival Européen de Jazz (later renamed the Antibes Jazz Festival), a set of concerts in Juan-les-Pins, France that gathered players from across Europe in a naturally stunning space. Each night’s set was broadcast live over French radio, capturing a scene in motion. Founded in 1960, the festival took root at La Pinède Gould, a seaside stage flanked by stone pines. From the start, the event welcomed the American originators — Charles Mingus, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington, among them — who carried the tradition forward. Sanders described his playing as an act of pursuit: if a line couldn’t be finished with the horn, he’d sing it instead, repeating phrases until he reached something true. ‘I have been trying to get a tone,’ he said, ‘my tone… that seems to be one of the most important things now.’ Chord changes, he explained, couldn’t contain the range of feeling and rhythm he wanted to express. Club sets felt too short, the industry machinery too tight. Creativity took energy, and most systems weren’t built to hold it. ‘A lot of people just don’t have that kind of energy to give to the music,’ he said, ‘or they haven’t learned yet how to release it.’ The natural acoustics and open-air intimacy of La Pinède Gould made it a magnet for recordings, and not just because of the sound. The space itself carries a sacred weight. Landmark sets from John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Charles Lloyd, Keith Jarrett, Bobby Hutcherson, and others have imbued the pine grove with a kind of mysticism, a place where jazz doesn’t just echo but communes. …”
In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi (Video)

More European countries’ FAs withdraw support for Infantino as pressure intensifies

Gianni Infantino’s decade-long reign at the head of Fifa remains under intense scrutiny.
“European countries began turning their backs on Gianni Infantino as moves intensified across the globe to end his crisis-hit tenure as Fifa president. The Football Association was the highest-profile of several Uefa member associations to drop its support for Infantino’s proposed re-election next year. It will write to Fifa confirming it no longer endorses Infantino for a fourth term in charge after the intense controversy surrounding his failed plan to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors. Wales and Serbia publicly confirmed that they had withdrawn their backing, following a lead taken by Finland last week. Along with the FA, those federations had all previously written letters in favour of Infantino prolonging his tenure but patience has run out across the continent. …”
Guardian

Scrapped proposals, statement wars and the ongoing Infantino furore
“Here we go again. And, no, we are not talking about the start of the new Scottish Premiership season or the preliminary round of the Carabao Cup – although that Tranmere v Rochdale shootout was a cracker. Yes, after a week of talk about money, greed and Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother, the hot topic around the water cooler on Monday was again Gianni Infantino and, more specifically, the English and Welsh FAs’ decisions to row back on their supportof a stalling ship. Along with Finland, they’re the first of Uefa’s 55 members to withdraw their letters of support for next year’s Fifa overlord elections. By the time Football Daily hits your inboxes, there could be a flurry of other nations frantically clicking unsend on those endorsement emails – more than 200 had their flags planted on Terra Gianni just a matter of weeks ago. …”
Guardian

Race and ethnicity in Latin America

The Three Races or Equality before the Law, c. 1859, Francisco Laso, Peru

“There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially. In Mexico, for example, the category mestizo^[1] is not defined or applied the same as the corresponding category of mestiço in Brazil. In spite of these differences, the construction of race in Latin America can be contrasted with concepts of race and ethnicity in the United States. The ethno-racial composition of modern-day Latin American nations combines diverse Indigenous American populations, with influence from Iberian and other Western European colonizers, and equally diverse African groups brought to the Americas as slave labor, and also recent immigrant groups from all over the world. Racial categories in Latin America are often linked to both continental ancestry or mixture as inferred from phenotypical traits, but also to socio-economic status. Ethnicity is often constructed either as an amalgam national identity or as something reserved for the indigenous groups so that ethnic identity is something that members of indigenous groups have in addition to their national identity. Racial and ethnic discrimination is common in Latin America where socio-economic status generally correlates with perceived whiteness, while indigenous status and perceived African ancestry is generally correlated with poverty, and lack of opportunity and social status. In Latin American concepts of race, physiological traits are often combined with social traits such as socio-economic status, so that a person is categorized not only according to physical phenotype but also social standing. Ethnicity on the other hand is a system that classifies groups of people according to cultural, linguistic and historic criteria. An ethnic group is normally defined by having a degree of cultural and linguistic similarity and often an ideology of shared roots. Another difference between race and ethnicity is that race is usually conceptualized as a system of categorization where membership is limited to one category and is externally ascribed by other who are not members of that category without regards to the individuals own feeling of membership. Whereas ethnicity is often seen as a system of social organization where membership is established through mutual identification between a group and its members. The construction of race in Latin America is different from, for example, the model found in the United States, possibly because race mixing has been a common practice since the early colonial period, whereas in the United States it has generally been avoided or severely sanctioned. Moreover, phenotypical appearance determines racial classification more than strict ancestry. …”
W – Race and ethnicity in Latin America
YouTube: The Truth About Race In Latin America

Buenos Aires streetview. Examines the construction of racial and ethnic difference and the history of race relations in Latin America from European contact to the present, with emphasis on indigenous, Africa-descended, and mixed-race peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Inside the week that shook Gianni Infantino, FIFA and the football world

“The grand announcement was supposed to come on the eve of the World Cup final at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, when FIFA president Gianni Infantino planned to unveil his plan to sell a stake in its competitions to private investors, including Joshua Kushner, the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared. The previous evening, he held court alongside the U.S. president at Trump Tower. Infantino described the 2026 World Cup as ‘the greatest human, social and cultural event mankind has ever witnessed.’ In front of a room of billionaires, extended Trump family members and soccer federation executives, Infantino’s grip on the sport appeared impregnable. He wrote on Instagram that he had already received pledges of support from more than 200 of the 211 member federations for re-election in 2027, having announced his candidacy in April, with the African, Asian and South American confederations unanimously backing him. The World Cup may have been mired in the scandals of rejected visas, Trump interferenceand numerous statewide investigations into FIFA’s ticketing practices, but it yielded $15billion (£11bn) in revenues, which had a muzzling effect on those who were uneasy with Infantino’s leadership. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: UEFA threatens FIFA, Joshua Kushner with legal action over World Cup investment plan (Video)
Al-jazeera: Infantino’s FIFA World Cup crisis: Who could replace president? (Video)
A World Cup without UEFA would be worthless – and FIFA know it
Guardian: Pressure on Gianni Infantino increases as Uefa members prepare to oppose re-election

Hania Rani ~ On Giacometti (2023)

“… When I was asked to compose a soundtrack for a movie about the family of Giacometti I didn’t think twice. Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss artist, who worked mainly as painter and sculptor has been one of my favourite artists for a long time. His individual style, aesthetics and the character of his creative process is still fascinating to me on many levels, so being able to dive even deeper into his universe, getting to know not only him but also his family was an opportunity that I couldn’t miss. Little did I know how far this ‘yes’ will take me – not only mentally and on a creative level but also physically. Thanks to the director of the documentary – Susanna Fanzun and by a stroke of luck and a couple of extra questions I decided to move for a couple of months to the Swiss mountains, not far away from the place where Giacometti was born and where the place he called home was, although he didn’t live there. Susanna showed me a place close to her hometown where I could rent a studio and work on the soundtrack but also for my other projects. It was the middle of a winter, the area was full of ice and snow, just like only it can happen still in the mountains. The residency house was located in a valley surrounded by high mountains and the sun in the winter season was not coming up for too long during the day. I remember she told me about it and added ‘that not everyone is feeling well there, but I hope you will’. I did. Being almost separated from reality, the city and its entertainments, people rushing and everything that usually takes my attention I could fully concentrate on the music and soundtrack, spending most of the day with my own thoughts and having enough space to experiment and be free in a creative process. This soundtrack would probably be a very different thing if composed in a place that I am usually living in. I took this a chance to explore something new about myself as a composer and human being, taking the opposite direction that I would usually choose for myself. …”
Bandcamp (Audio)
A Closer Listen (Audio)
YouTube: On Giacometti: A live performance at Atelier in Stampa

The Bronx Pyramid – Carlos Henriquez (2016)

“There is topographical significance in the musical architecture of Carlos Henriquez’s record, The Bronx Pyramid and it is a bold thesis, one that has gained considerable momentum in recent years. It attempts to create a quadrangular base that stretches from Havana, New Orleans, The Bronx and San Juan with Mother Africa as its apex. While the idea of such a cultural nexus may not be new, Mr. Henriquez has, like a musical architect of considerable talent, created something truly noteworthy. It is music, that is, rooted in a dramatically enriched cultural sod and the bassist’s roots run very deep. Tito Puente (though not the first protagonist) had a great deal ‘to say’ about this in his music when he was alive. And like this illustrious ancestor, Carlos Henriquez has added not just to the conversation, but to the musical language as well. Why has there been such an urge to make music since Mr. Puente, redefined the idiom so many years ago? While reference points cannot be changed articulation can. But before all of that there is an upending of much of the established vocabulary and the voicing of a talented artist can alter even language – the line from bebop to hip-hop is a case in point. Interestingly as in that example, the challenge here has also been to alter the language of the basslines in the case of Carlos Henriquez’s music. So not only has Mr. Henriquez been extremely clever in adapting an established idiom to the performance style of the day, but he has also updated the sound world, relocating the profound and sophisticated milieu of Afro-Cuban music to the swirling, changing ethos of Afro-American – that is Jazz – music further enriching the writing of horizontal and vertical music and adding a new standard of bassline writing to enhance the virtuoso playing of his particular instrument. Carlos Henriquez has also added a wonderful cast of musicians to the performance of this music. There seems like a lot more musicians than there actually are on this disc. Of course, sophisticated arrangements will not do it alone for you. … And the addition of such luminaries as Rubén Blades and Pedrito Martinez with vocalists Renzo Padilla and Kike Gonzalez are their own sense of drama to the music. Together these musicians help achieve the right effect, the richness in Mr. Henriquez’s scoring that you can catch from the first notes of ‘The Bronx Pyramid’, which sets the tone for the whole album. …”
Latin Jazz Net (Video)
The Bronx Pyramid – Carlos Henriquez (Video)
YouTube: Carlos Henriquez, Mike Rodriguez The Bronx Pyramd Live at Dizzy’s 2016 2nd Set

FIFA insists ‘nobody is selling football’, pushes ahead with consultation plan despite backlash

“FIFA has insisted ‘nobody is selling football’ after criticism of its decision to launch a consultation on selling stakes in a World Cup commercial entity to private investors. The world governing body of football stopped short of saying it would be withdrawing the plan and instead reaffirmed its commitment to press ahead with the consultation period. It comes as the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) joined the European confederation UEFA and Concacaf, the confederation of North, Central America and the Caribbean, in rejecting FIFA’s notion of selling stakes in the World Cup. The Athletic reported FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s future leadership of the organisation was questioned during the meetings of UEFA and Concacaf on Thursday. UEFA and Concacaf released statements rejecting the plans following their respective meetings, with UEFA announcing that all 55 European members would boycott all FIFA competitions unless the proposals were abandoned. The AFC, Concacaf and UEFA make up 137 of the 211 FIFA member associations. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
NYT/ATH: This is Gianni Infantino’s Icarus moment – the FIFA president has finally flown too close to the sun (Video)
NYT/ATH: Gianni Infantino’s senior advisor quits over FIFA’s World Cup plans: ‘It is mortgaging football’s future’ (Video)

Are FIFA and UEFA in a forever war?
“For an insight into the one-upmanship between FIFA, the governing body of football worldwide, and UEFA, its European counterpart, let us begin with an anecdote about the prize money for last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup. A pet project of FIFA president Gianni Infantino, he described the newly expanded 32-team tournament, held in the United States, as the ‘most coveted’ trophy in club football. According to multiple people briefed on FIFA’s planning for the competition, who wished to remain anonymous to protect relationships, Infantino was determined to make a splash and, in FIFA-land, nothing makes a splash quite like dollar signs. Infantino wanted the winner of the Club World Cup to earn even more than the winner of the UEFA Champions League, to show it really was a bigger deal than UEFA’s prized asset, and to be able to unveil a figure that immediately captured the world’s attention. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
YouTube: ‘A bad deal for football’: Senior FIFA adviser resigns over World Cup investment proposal

Carlos Cordeiro had worked at FIFA since 2021.

Jazz on Film – Black Cast Musicals by Various

“Jazz and cinema grew up together in the twentieth century, each feeding the other with rhythm, improvisation, and spectacle. From the earliest sound features to the polished MGM musicals and the independent ‘race films’ that played exclusively in Black theaters, the screen became a vital archive of African American musical genius. The films gathered in this Jazz on Film collection—**Check and Double Check, Paradise in Harlem, Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather, Beware, Hi-De-Ho, Jivin’ in Be-Bop, Killer Diller, Look Out Sister, O’Voutie O’Rooney, Reet, Petite and Gone, and Sepia Cinderella—span nearly two decades of that history. They range from major-studio productions to low-budget independents, from big-band swing to jump blues and early bebop. At their center stand two towering figures of showmanship and innovation: Cab Calloway, the high-energy ‘Hi-De-Ho’ man of the Cotton Club era, and Louis Jordan, the saxophonist-singer whose Tympany Five helped invent the rhythmic language that would become rhythm and blues and, later, rock and roll. Together these pictures document not only great performances but the complex reality of Black artists working inside and outside the Hollywood system during the era of segregation. The earliest (debatable) entry, **Check and Double Check (1930), is a curious and often uncomfortable artifact. Produced by RKO as a vehicle for the radio stars Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll in blackface as Amos and Andy, the film is primarily a comedy of taxicab mishaps and romantic mix-ups. Yet it contains one of the first major Hollywood appearances by Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra. Ellington’s band performs ‘Three Little Words’ and ‘Old Man Blues,’ offering audiences a glimpse of sophisticated big-band jazz at a moment when the music was still largely associated with nightclubs and ‘race records.’ The production’s racial anxieties are revealing: lighter-skinned band members Juan Tizol and Barney Bigard were required to wear dark makeup so the ensemble would appear uniformly ‘Black.’ Despite the surrounding blackface comedy, Ellington’s sequence helped propel him toward national recognition and demonstrated that jazz could sell tickets even when confined to a specialty number. …”
Bandcamp (Audio)

Breaking down FIFA’s stake sale, how it compares to other sports and whether it’s necessary

FIFA are proposing the sale of 20 per cent of a new subsidiary

“The news on Tuesday, first reported by the Financial Times, that FIFA is preparing to sell off part of its commercial operations spread shock and outrage across the sporting world. Football’s world governing body plans to sell a 21 per cent slice in FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), a new subsidiary under which commercial operations and events — such as the World Cup, which, as detailed recently by The Athletic, is the key driver in FIFA’s finances — will be consolidated. The intention is to raise $4.2billion (£3.2bn) from outside investors and the narrative quickly formed: FIFA wants to sell (part of) the World Cup. The rebukes have been swift. By Wednesday night, three of the six confederations under FIFA’s hand had criticised the move, as had several member associations — none of whom were apparently consulted before plans broke into the public domain. Shows of support have been a minority act. Money, as ever with FIFA and football generally, is central to the plot. But what, exactly, is FIFA proposing under these plans? How do they compare to other sports and other entities within football? And why all the controversy? As is often the case, FIFA led its argument on this with big numbers. FFE is designed to be a specific, purpose-built entity, maximising FIFA’s take from commercial and events operations. Citing valuation forecasts carried out by JP Morgan Chase, a global bank, FIFA reckons FFE will be worth $20billion. Of that, it hopes to raise $4.2bn via an equity sale — hence the 21 per cent stake on offer to external investors. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)

In a sport obsessed by money, is Gianni Infantino’s indecent proposal really such a surprise?
“When Gianni Infantino looks in the mirror, what does he see? How does he feel as he returns to his seat on the private jet provided by one of FIFA’s sponsors? What goes through his mind as he pulls a napkin over his lap at Cipriani and carries on dining with the FIFA legends? He must feel pretty good upon returning to the VVIP suite at Los Angeles’ $5.5billion (£4.1bn at the current rate) SoFi Stadium to pick up where he left off with the billionaire class, not to mention the stars of stage and screen. Bravo, Gianni. Not bad for the kid who didn’t fit in. The kid picked on at school for his freckles and ginger hair. The kid who didn’t speak good German upon arriving in Switzerland from Italy. The son of economic migrants. Look at him now, the self-made Infantino. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
Guardian: Uefa agrees to boycott Fifa competitions if World Cup sell-off plans proceedjt
YouTube: FIFA in clash with UEFA over plan to sell World Cup stakes, How Did The World Cup Become A $40 Billion Crime Scene?

FIFA’s $4.2bn World Cup stake sale: Who will invest? Who is the money for? Who could stop this?

“He is very online but does not like the media. He flies all over the world in a fancy private plane provided by Qatar. He presides over a large organisation, with committees and a big rulebook, but makes all the key decisions and only tells a few people what he is doing. He loves shiny things and fireworks. He wants to do more business with the Kushner family and believes he is underpaid. His preferred strategy is to double down, flood the zone and ask for more — it is an approach that has worked well for him so far. Some people think he is amazing, some do not. Can you tell who it is yet? No, not him, the other one. Yes! It’s FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who is back in the news again after a break of… 24 hours? The newest Infantino headline is that he wants to put all the money-making parts of FIFA into a new company and then sell 20 per cent of it to private investors because… well, never mind about that. Have I mentioned that by letting him do this, each of FIFA’s 211 member countries will get $40million (£30m) over the next four years, as opposed to just $10m they are currently down for? I hadn’t? Right, well, that is the pitch, and those member associations have until September 19 — a whole 52 days away — to decide if they are in or out. For his supporters, the choice is simple. More money is the answer to every problem a national football federation might have. If you ran the game in Aruba or Zimbabwe, why wouldn’t you do this? Seriously. But, for his critics, this is the last chance to say ‘Enough!’ or, at very least, ‘Hang on. Can we have a moment to think about this, please?’ Given Infantino’s desire to move fast and fix/break things, this story will progress quickly. On one side, votes are being counted, contracts drawn up and logos designed, but on the other, potential rebels are firing off Zoom invites to federation chiefs for emergency meetings from their post-World Cup sun beds. So, without further ado, here is The Athletic’s attempt to answer five questions that jumped out to us on Tuesday evening. …”
NYT/ATH (Video)
Al-jazeera: FIFA proposes plan to sell stakes in the World Cup, angering UEFAf (Video)
Guardian: Uefa has to show backbone: concrete action can make Fifa’s World Cup plans untenable (Video)
Guardian: Uefa calls emergency meeting as opposition to Fifa plan hardens (Video)
Guardian: Infantino’s World Cup plan is part of a desire for expansion that was clear from the start
Guardian: Uefa accuses Fifa of ‘enriching themselves and their friends’ over World Cup sell-off (Video)
cablgram: FIFA
YouTube: FIFA plan for Kushner-backed $20 billion operation to run World Cup meets fury from Europe’s UEFA, FIFA hit by furious backlash over plans to sell stake in competitions