Far, Far Away

“To reach Tristan, roughly halfway between Africa and South America, Kelly Green crossed 1,738 miles of the South Atlantic from Cape Town aboard the M.V. Edinburgh, a 205-foot lobster boat. She had never been to sea before, and she worried about seasickness, but it never came. After a week at sea, the ship dropped anchor off Calshot Harbour, in front of Tristan da Cunha’s only settlement — Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. Its two small piers, jutting into the water, looked to Kelly like arms reaching out to welcome her. Kelly could see most of the island’s residents (then 264 people) waving, including her mother and father, Marina and Sean Burns. Her father had been sent to the island, a British Overseas Territory, to serve as its administrator. He persuaded his reluctant 22-year-old daughter to visit, though Kelly, living in Britain, was more interested in clubs than remote islands. Kelly remembers him saying: ‘You have to come out, because you’ll never get the chance again.’ Among the men who helped carry her bags off the boat was Shane Green, 21. They met again that night at the island’s only pub. They danced. Kelly went home after six weeks. The first night back in Cape Town, South Africa, where most ships leaving Tristan travel to, her hotel phone rang. It was Shane. They talked every night for months. That was in 2012. Two years and several visits later, Kelly made the decision that would change her life: She moved to Tristan and became the first woman in over a century to settle there for good. The last had been three Irish sisters, in 1908. Tristan was first sighted in 1506 by Tristão da Cunha, a Portuguese naval commander. Britain annexed the island in 1816 and set up a garrison for a year. A Scottish corporal stayed behind with his wife, their two children and two English stonemasons. That was the beginning of the community that lives there today. Only 220 people now call it home, down from a peak of 300 in 1993. In the past three years, there have been 21 deaths and only six births. A few islanders have emigrated over the years. …”
NY Times

Music From Yemen Arabia

“… These songs originate from the city of Sanaa, the sheikdom of Lahej and the port of Aden. Samar is the delicious, luxury time when people gather for relaxation, refreshment and music. This record contains oudh playing, percussion and singing from Yemen. The three Kawkabani brothers sing traditional poems and play oudh (lute), double drums, tambourine and, occasionally, the kanoun (zither). They were recorded in Sanaa in 1973. The oudh player Hassan al Zabeede and his double drum playing brother sing songs in the Lahej style and were recorded in Taez in 1973. …”
Bandcamp (Audio)

Yemen: Searching for a sign of peace
“Known for its coffee and moccasin-style shoes called “yemeni” in Turkey, Yemen was once the cradle of world’s oldest civilizations. The great story of Yemeni Queen of Sheba, who married Prophet Solomon, makes the country more famous. Centuries before, the fertile and greenery region surrounded with dams and natural water sources was home to the wealthy Himyarite Kingdom. However, this remarkable civilization perished after a violent flood and the destruction of the Ma’rib Dam. Representing the ancestors of Arab people, the Yemeni tribe ‘Qahtani’ spread around the world. The Curhum tribe of Mecca, the tribe of Evs and Hazrej tribes in Medina, the Kingdom of Hira in Iraq and the Kingdom of Ghassan in Syria came from the same Yemeni tribe referred above. Over years, Yemen flourished again, yet was unable to return its glorious days. Afterwards, the region was dominated by Ethiopia. Abraha, who advanced toward Mecca with his elephants one year before the birth of Prophet Muhammad was the governor of Yemen under Ethiopian rule. Yemen was also one of the first regions that accepted the invitation of Islam. Prophet Muhammad once said about it: “May Allah bless Damascus and Yemen for us!”. Ali, Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and Muaz bin Cebel served as the governor of Yemen. The region turned out to be a science and civilization center, where numerous scholars trained. …”
Daily Sabah

YouTube: Music from Yemen, Arabia: Samar (1973 Arabian Traditional) FULL ALBUM

Ambient music

“Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Often ‘peaceful’ sounding and lacking composition, beat, and/or structured melody, ambient music uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening, and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre evokes an ‘atmospheric’, ‘visual’, or ‘unobtrusive’ quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and some works use sustained or repeated notes, as in drone music. Bearing elements associated with new-age music, instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer. The genre originated in the 1960s and 1970s, when new musical instruments were being introduced to a wider market, such as the synthesizer. It was presaged by Erik Satie‘s furniture music and styles such as musique concrète, minimal music, Jamaican dub music and German electronic music, but was prominently named and popularized by British musician Brian Eno in 1978 with his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. … It saw a revival towards the late 1980s with the prominence of house and techno music, and had a cult following by the 1990s. …”
Wikipedia

Neither scene nor heard: a journey through ambient music
“I’ve seen a few articles over the past few years detailing the best ambient albums, the state of ambient or the return of ambient, and whilst they’re often very positive for the genre, the artists and every other person involved in making this type of music, I can’t help but feel a bit empty after reading them. These articles rarely scrape the surface of a genre that has never gone away, and will probably never ‘make a comeback’ but instead, the genre continues to evolve. Ambient music will always remain a sub-culture of many popular music styles out there, or more to the point of this article, be the hidden undercurrent that’s helped inspire many other styles of music. …”
A STRANGELY ISOLATED PLACE (Video/Audio)

YouTube: The Origin & History of Ambient Music | Brian Eno, William Basinski, Erik Satie

Decoding the original cast-iron subway entrance that’s been on a Brooklyn corner for 110 years

“From afar, the R train subway entrance at the northwest corner 77th Street and Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge doesn’t warrant a second glance. It looks like any other street-level entryway, with the Helvetica signage, the concrete staircase, and the no-slip step tread at the top of the stairs. But look closer, and some unique details emerge—like the unusually thick cast iron sides of the entrance. On those slightly rusty cast-iron sides, you can see strange design motifs. One appears to be a cross, and under the cross a series of rings. The spikes on the back of the entrance are also curious. Is it part of the design, or a way to keep people from sitting down and lounging around? With all of these odd features, it’s clear the 77th Street entrance belongs in another era. A little backstory from the archives and an early photo of the station offer some clues. The station opened in 1916, part of the BMT Fourth Avenue extension that brought subway service to Brooklyn neighborhoods like Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, and Bensonhurst. The photo, from January of that year, captures the station when it made its debut. Though the sign at the top of the entrance and the lights that illuminated it no longer exist, it’s the same entrance New Yorkers use today to get to and from this stretch of Bay Ridge—which at the time was transitioning from a country retreat lined with fine houses and mansions to an urbanized part of New York City. The opening of the BMT subway accelerated this change. Between 1910 and 1924, the population of Bay Ridge doubled, according to the Historic Districts Council. By 1940, when the fifth photo was taken, Fourth Avenue and 77th Street still resembled a suburban neighborhood of Queen Anne–style single-family homes. The station entrance’s original sign and lights must have been removed later, as they’re still visible in the photo. …”
Ephemeral New York

Charlie Parker Residence

“The Charlie Parker Residence is a Gothic Revival-style rowhouse at 151 Avenue B in the East Village of Manhattan in New York City, New York, US. The house is notable as the onetime residence of jazz musician Charlie Parker, who lived in the basement with his wife Chan Richardson from 1950 to 1954. Based on the house’s association with Parker, the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a New York City designated landmark, and Avenue B between 9th and 10th Streets is co-named ‘Charlie Parker Place’. The building was built around 1849 as a single-family house before being split into two apartments in 1880. A third apartment and a penthouse level were added in the 1940s. The house consists of three stories above a raised basement and is three bays wide, with a brownstone facade. A stoop is placed asymmetrically on the facade, and another entrance leads to the basement. Inside, the house retains details such as decorative plasterwork, wall pilasters, moldings, and a fireplace. The Charlie Parker Residence is located at 151 Avenue B in the East Village of Manhattan, New York City.^[3][4] It is on the east side of the street, directly opposite Tompkins Square Park. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Placesand is designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) as the onetime residence of Charles “Bird” Parker Jr. (1920–1955), an American jazzmusician from Kansas City, Kansas. Parker, who moved to New York City in 1938 or 1939, was a highly influential figure in the development of bebop, a subgenre of jazz.  The house is built in the Gothic Revival style. It is part of a group of three mid-19th-century brick and brownstone rowhouses at 149–153 Avenue B, along Tompkins Square Park’s eastern boundary. 151 Avenue B is the most substantially intact of these houses. A 1999 LPC report was unable to ascertain the identity of the house’s architect but wrote that the house’s Gothic Revival decorations may have been inspired by the nearby St. Brigid Roman Catholic Church. It is one of a relatively small number of remaining Gothic Revival houses in New York City, as that style fell out of favor in the late 19th century, when the introduction of more stringent fire codes led to growing adoption of other styles such as the Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate. …”
Wikipedia

Phil Pratt: Studio One / Coxsone Dodd

“Phil Pratt worked at Studio One for Coxsone Dodd as a box-loader during the rocksteady period when Lee Perry was operating there, before moving to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. Pratt returned to Jamaica in 1965, and as a singer, he recorded in 1967 a song called ‘Safe Travel’ together with Hemsley Morris released on his own Wiggle Spoon label. He moved to Ken Lack‘s label Caltone and recorded a few tunes there. In 1966, Pratt decided to get into production and while at Caltone recorded the young Horace Andy. During the rocksteady period, he recorded singers such as Ken Boothe, John Holt and Pat Kelly, backed by session men such as Lynn Taitt, his productions appearing on the Caltone, Wiggle Spoon and WIRL labels before he launched his own label, Jon Tom. Throughout the 1970s, Pratt enjoyed successes with Ken Boothe (‘Artibella’, ‘I’m Not For Sale’), Al Campbell, Delroy Wilson, Bobby Kalphat, and Keith Poppin, and had a major hit with ‘My Heart Is Gone’ by John Holt, Dennis Brown‘s ‘Let Love In’ and ‘Black Magic Woman’, and Pat Kelly’s ‘How Long’, ‘Soulful Love’ and ‘They Talk About Love’. More particularly, from 1971 to 1975 Pratt produced many DJs including Dennis Alcapone (‘This Is Butter’), Dillinger (‘Platt Skank’), I-Roy (‘My Food Is Ration’) or U Roy (‘Real Cool’) and Jah Woosh (‘Psalm 21’ and ‘Zion Sound’), but he remains mostly known for the singles he recorded in 1972 with Big Youth(among his earliest songs), ‘Tell It Black’ and ‘Phil Pratt Thing’. Pratt mainly recorded in the Channel One Studios, working with the musicians who would later be called The Revolutionaries but also teamed with Lee Perry again, at Black Ark Studios producing among others Linval Thompson‘s first single. Pratt set up his own label Terminal in London in order to release his productions worldwide. He moved to London by the beginning of the 1980s and opened a restaurant there. In 1985, he produced the Clash of the Andy’s album, featuring Horace Andy and Patrick Andy. …”
Wikipedia
Bandcamp: Safe Travel (Audio)
YouTube: PHILL PRATT THING SIDE A, SIDE B

Kafka Was the Rage – Anatole Broyard

“I think I discovered Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage as a consequence of reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Some years back it was alleged that Coleman Silk, the professor who ‘passes’ as white in The Human Stain, was based on Anatole Broyard, himself a Louisiana Creole of mixed race said by some to have ‘passed’ in the metropolitan literary world of New York city and the New York Times where he was literary editor, reviewer and columnist for eighteen years. Roth strenuously denied using Broyard as a model – and indeed, whether or not Broyard did ‘pass’ is still hotly disputed. (Broyard himself never commented on this charge directly, I don’t think, although in a 1979 column he did say, ‘I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel…Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity.’). In any case, this is not really significant as far as Broyard’s tragically slender but wonderfully readable output is concerned. He only published four books, and two of these came out after he died aged 70 in October 1990. Kafka Was the Rage is a short, elegant, whip-smart memoir of life in Greenwich Village immediately after the war. It is written in a deceptively simple prose that is rich in short, epigrammatic paradoxes and self-deprecating wit. The first line I remember reading was this: ‘If it hadn’t been for books, we’d have been completely at the mercy of sex.’ I was hooked. Broyard writes of the Village as others did of Paris in the 20s – indeed, for him and his friends, Greenwich Village was Paris in the 20s: it was the place they migrated to in order to make an artistic, cultural, modern life of ‘high seriousness’ (one of their favourite phrases, he says). Intellectual ideas and the importance of ideas are central themes in this memoir, yet there is nothing po-faced or worthy about it. This is high seriousness done with humour; perhaps even the high seriousness of humour. Fascinated by painting – literature was what Broyard really wanted but the New York school of abstract expressionism was a sort of gateway to high seriousness – Broyard moves in with a woman he calls Sheri Donatti, his first New York lover, an abstract painter and ‘a more radical version of Anais Nin’, whose protégé she had been. …”
Letter Press Project
BOOK REVIEW: ANATOLE BROYARD, WHEN KAFKA WAS THE RAGE: A GREENWICH VILLAGE MEMOIR
amazon

Huge Riots in France Prompt Shock and Blame Game

A fire burning during demonstrations in Paris on Saturday.
“France was in a state of shock on Sunday, as citizens walked through streets lined with shattered storefronts, charred cars and burned-out government buildings after the country’s largest demonstrations in years devolved into riots and looting. The unrest on Saturday — which led to some 2,000 arrests — caused widespread damage to several symbols of the state, including a 19th-century city hall in Limoges, a town in central France renowned for its porcelain, that was largely destroyed in a nighttime arson attack. More than 600 police officers were injured, Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, said on social media on Sunday. Rioters attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where they broke into the local government headquarters and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic. A fire also destroyed a tourist office in Lyon, and 1,500 shops were damaged or looted nationwide, according to Alexandre Bompard, head of the French federation of commerce and distribution, who estimated that the cost of repairs could run into hundreds of millions of dollars. ‘I’ve never seen this before, I am disgusted,’ said Sophie Vanpoperinghe, 47, as she gazed at ransacked shops on Boulevard Magenta, the road in Paris where she has lived for 22 years and which is frequently used for demonstrations. More than half a million demonstrators marched on Sunday to protest the rising cost of living and poor conditions in schools, among other grievances. Many were stunned on Sunday at how rioters had used those demonstrations as a smoke screen for vandalism. Estelle Grandidier, a nonprofit worker who had marched in Paris, said she was ‘shocked’ to see scenes reminiscent of those she has observed in crisis zones overseas. On Sunday, the violence and protests had largely subsided, apart from sporadic skirmishes involving small numbers of rioters in Paris, as the unrest gave way to a political blame game. Government officials and far right leaders accused the far left of stirring up the unrest, and left-wing leaders blamed the government. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu placed the blame for the chaos squarely on a far-left party, France Unbowed. The leader of that party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, stands a chance of beating centrists to the runoff in next year’s presidential election to succeed President Emmanuel Macron. Mr. Lecornu accused France Unbowed of sowing distrust about the police among student protesters all week. He also said that the earliest rioters had started attacking riot police and government buildings before official protests were set to begin and were members of the ‘ultra-left.’ …”
NY Times (Video)
A street in Marseille, France, on Sunday.

Max Richter – Exiles (2021)

Composer-pianist Max Richter: ‘Creativity is activism’ “When Max Richter sat down to compose a new ballet score in 2015 he knew what he wanted to say. In April of that year, an overcrowded vessel sank off the coast of Libya, en route to Italy, killing at least 800 trapped migrants – including children aged between 10 and 12. From his (then) home town of Berlin, the crisis was impossible to ignore. The German chancellor Angela Merkel uttered the words Wir schaffen das (we can do this), but as the number of refugees applying for asylum rose, attacks on their homes did, too. Richter’s response was instinctive: a 33-minute work titled Exiles, composed for Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s Singulière Odyssée at the Nederlands Dans Theater, inspired by what Richter calls ‘the big question at that time’. Five years after it premiered in 2016, this reflective piece now forms the heart and soul of Richter’s new album, Exiles, recorded in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2019, and set to be released on 6 August. It is a retrospective collection comprised of newly orchestrated tracks taken from his back catalogue. Yet Richter tells me, on a video call from his home in Oxfordshire, that it remains relevant despite our quick-turn news cycle: ‘This crisis is still with us in different forms.’ The theme of exile, journeys and borders is something that Richter kept in mind when picking the orchestra to play his music, a loose gathering of musicians from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia and Sweden. Richter believes the Baltic Sea Philharmonic has a ‘peacemaking’ function: ‘The idea of music being a shared space where people with different experiences, viewpoints and social contexts can come together and make something.’ The post-Brexit isolationist position of the UK has only emboldened this ethos for Richter. ‘I’m a European,’ he says. ‘These kinds of transnational problems call for collaboration, they call for a fundamental working together, and a rethinking of what boundaries and borders even mean in 2021. …”
Guardian
W – Max Richter
YouTube: Exiles

Sound Propositions 012: Marcus Fischer

“Marcus Fischer (b. 1977) first came to our attention with his 12k debut Monocoastal (2010) and his subsequent collaboration with Taylor Deupree, In A Place Of Such Graceful Shapes (2011).  That disc’s soothing sounds, pleasing packaging, and accompanying book of 45-sized photographs of a frozen February in the Hudson Valley earned it a guest spot on our list of Best Winter Albums.  Like Deupree, Fischer also used a public blog to spur a year of daily creative projects. Beginning in 2009, Dust Breeding served to document ‘a thing a day…maybe more,’ an impetus for creating everyday for one year. Fischer cemented his reputation, receiving additional acclaim for his 2012 follow-up Collected Dust drawn from those sessions. M. Ostermeier chose his favorite stand out tracks made throughout the project’s first year, which Fischer reworked into the final album. Duepree has already told us a bit about his experiences working with Marcus Fischer, most recently on Twine (12k, 2015) and Lowlands (IIKKI, 2017), the latter of which also accompanies a book of photographs, this time by Ester Vonplon. Like Deupree, Fischer too is working with the Minnesota THESIS PROJECT, a new label which brings together artists who might not otherwise think to collaborate. (The Thesis Project will be the subject of a feature to be published later this year.) For THESIS 15,   Fischer will make a collaborative 10″ record with Matthew Cooper (Eluvium). Fischer’s work is often collaborative and multi-media in nature, but his practice has also been, at times, participatory.  Disquiet‘s Marc Weidenbaum created his ongoing Disquiet Junta project in part taking inspiration from Fischer’s daily creations for Dust Breeding. As explained at the start of each project: Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. Though rapidly approaching their 300th weekly project,  Fischer’s work was the subject of the fourth installment, helping to set the tone as the series developed. Fischer provided the group with ten audio samples which made up ‘Nearly There,’ from Collecting Dust.  …”
a closer listen (Video/Audio)
Marcus Fischer
Bandcamp (Audio)

Happiness Is A Warm Gun (2018 Mix) – The Beatles (1968)

“‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1968 album The Beatles (also known as ‘the White Album’). It was written by John Lennon and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. He derived the title from an article in American Rifleman magazine and explained that the lyrics were a double entendre for guns and his sexual desire for Yoko Ono. Although tensions were high during the recording sessions for the White Album, the Beatles worked together as a unit to complete the song’s challenging rhythmic structure and time signature changes. A demo of the song, recorded at George Harrison‘s Kinfauns home before the album’s recording sessions, showed the song in its initial stage, with only a few portions present. Harrison helped with the time signature changes through his knowledge of Indian classical music. The final portion of the song features backing vocals by Harrison and Paul McCartney. … This results in a three-part through-composed structure. The song begins with surreal imagery inspired by an acid trip that Lennon and Derek Taylor experienced, with Lennon and Taylor collaborating on the opening lines. The three sections were described by Lennon as ‘the Dirty Old Man’, ‘the Junkie’ and ‘the Gunman (Satire of ’50s R&R)’. Author John Winn divides the completed composition into five sections: the fingerpicked guitar intro, with the line ‘She’s not a girl who misses much’; the portion when the full band enters, containing more of the lyrical images supplied by Taylor; the blues-based ‘I need a fix’ section; the ‘Mother Superior’ refrain; and the doo wop-style section exploring the ‘warm gun’ theme. The composite structure features several changes in time signature. … The demo recorded by Lennon in May 1968 shows the song in its initial stage, with only the ‘I need a fix’ and ‘Mother Superior jump the gun’ portions present. Lennon extends the ‘Mother Superior’ part, segueing into a portion addressing Ono by name, which does not appear in the Beatles’ recording. The section that became the rock ‘n’ roll and doo-wop satire was partly previewed at the end of Lennon’s performance of ‘I’m So Tired‘ from the same demo tape. …”
Wikipedia
Recording and mixing “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”
YouTube: Happiness Is A Warm Gun (2018 Mix)

Lost and Found Sounds By Captain Beefheart, Can and A Mother of Invention

“Don Van Vliet – the late singer-composer-provocateur known as Captain Beefheart – was recovering from the deepest nadir of his musical life, two mid-Seventies albums of straight-line rock and sugar-rhyme ballads, when he hit another: the 36-year exile of his comeback shot, Bat Chain Puller(Vaulternative). Recorded in the spring of 1976 with a new Magic Bandcombining old crew – drummer John French – and two new guitarists, Denny Walley and Jeff Tepper, the album was greasy, muscular R&B with an erotic tang in Van Vliet’s art-wolf baritone. But Bat Chain Puller went straight to purgatory after legal war broke out between Van Vliet’s high-school pal Frank Zappa  – who was to release the LP on his DiscReet label – and Herb Cohen, Zappa’s manager. Van Vliet – and his career – never fully recovered from the blow; in 1982, he quit music entirely for painting. Although he eventually recut all of the material from the 1976 sessions across his last three triumphs, Shiny Beast, Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow, the recent liberation of the original Bat Chain Puller – in a clear, vibrant master issued, fittingly, by the Zappa Family Trust – is a blast for me, after years of being grateful for grim-audio boots. The rubber-and-silver tangle of the guitars and French’s buoyant charge suggest an improbable, weirdly commercial blend of the garage-pop on 1967’s Safe as Milk and Doc‘s exuberant surrealism. And there is a delightful new coda: the living-room blues ‘Hobo-Ism,’ a ‘Hey Joe’ story told with Walley’s advanced-Delta guitar and Van Vliet stomping his foot in transcontinental-railroad time. …”
Rolling Stone
YouTube: Why this awful sounding album is a masterpiece

Your Crate Digging Guide To Cairo

“The resurrection of vinyl records is no longer news — according to Pitchfork, more than 14 million records were sold in 2018. It has surpassed a hipster trend, as all the youth began to dig in their parents’ basements for vintage vinyl, turntables and hi-fi systems,  realizing the advantages and pleasures of returning to analog over digital. When it comes to records, it’s more about the warmth of the sound and the fact that it’s a tangible medium that makes audiophiles build a massive collection of their favorite records. There are some electronic genres that rely on being obscure and unavailable in the digital world, and only being pressed on vinyl, for example minimal, which keeps the genre underground. And let’s be honest, you actually listen to music, and appreciate it far more when you hold it, remove the record from the sleeve, savor the artwork, and place the record on the player; it is the sum of many senses, an experience lost on digital music. While the reasons may vary from one person to another on why to start building a record collection, the industry is definitely rotating back towards vinyl, as well as cassettes, with CDs basically in the grave. We explored these stores in Cairo, and compiled a list of them that will keep any devoted digger busy. Anything you can think of is there — from the typical jazz, psychedelic and Arabic music to more obscure Pakistani film music, animal recordings, and recordings made in ancient Egyptian temples.  SHERRY’S.  Located in Zamalek’s Metro Tower, Sherry’s originally began as an antique and collectibles shop, converting to a record store due to the rising demand for vinyl in 2010. Aside from the typical jazz, rock, and classical, Sherry’s has an impressive Arabic collection, ’45s and LPs alike. You can also find a myriad of Greek, Armenian, Turkish and Eastern European ’45s, along with some weird old recordings such as old radio sound effects (cats, for example), which can be manipulated into a unique tool for producers to sample. In addition to their collection of records, vintage turntables, gramophones, tape recorders and other obscure gear, they also sell typewriters and analog cameras for the vintage freaks. The owners are friendly, and will invite you to drink a cup of tea while getting lost in their 5000+ record collection. …”
Scene Noise

The Divas of the Arab World

Umm Kulthum at the Olympia, November 14, 1967 Paris
“Imagine stepping into a dark exhibition space where a life-sized black and white film is projected onto fabric panels, transporting you to Cairo in the 1930s: Street trolleys weave around busy streets where women and men are in Eastern and Western dress. Painted crimson red, the next rooms are dedicated to the first Egyptian feminists. A 78 rpm acoustic gramophone plays a record of songs by Munira al-Mahdiyya, one of the rare women to produce a commercial recording before World War I. One floor up, parting red velvet curtains, you enter an extraordinary world of cinema and music; one that played a major role in the cultural life of the greater Middle East from the 1920s to the 1970s. This is the long-awaited exhibit on Arab divas at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris that runs from May to September. It celebrates the lives of Arab feminists who emerged in the early 20th century and female artists in film and music in Egypt during what is known as the country’s golden age of cinema from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s. At the same time, ‘Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s,’ a book by Raphael Cormack, an academic specializing in Egyptian theatre, just launched in the U.K. and Egypt (it was released in the U.S. in March). The themes in both the exhibit and the book include female grit, feminism, glamour, stardom, empowerment, and an ebullience of artistic and intellectual creativity. These subjects are rarely included in portrayals of the Arab world today. Yet this world most certainly did exist, and over the past 30 years there has been a steady increase in cultural productions inspired by Egypt’s golden age, not to mention more recently a number of nostalgic social media sites dedicated to photographs of the Arab world during this period. Take the Egyptian photographer Youssef Nabil, who began his career shooting portraits in hand-colored gelatin silver prints inspired by Egyptian cinema of the 1950s and ’60s that he loved as a child. The Lebanese musician Yasmine Hamdan began to sing in Arabic after hearing a song by the Druze princess, singer, actor, and spy, Asmahan — née Amal al-Atrash — who gained stardom in Egypt in the 1930s and ’40s. …”
New Lines
Vinyl of Fairuz in Baalbeck “Ya amar ana wiyak – Ma fi hada” 1960/Abboudi Bou Jawde collection

Space Wars

PBS NOVA Features Mitchell Institute Experts in ‘Space Wars’ Documentary “AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies spent two years advising PBS on NOVA’s ‘Space Wars,’ a documentary on growing threats to space security and how Earth orbit is becoming the next battlefield. The documentary, which aired Oct. 7, also features commentary and insights from PBS’ interview with retired Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, the Explorer Chair of the Mitchell Institute Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence (MI-SPACE), a former commander of U.S. Strategic Command, and a former NASA astronaut. … Chilton’s interview was filmed at the Air & Space Forces Association’s headquarters in Arlington, Va. In the film, he explains why the space domain matters to national security, including the critical role of GPS in defense and everyday life, and how difficult it often is to tell military and civilian space capabilities apart. Drawing on his long career with the Air Force and NASA, he also delivers the film’s closing line, a caution from history: ‘There has not been a domain that human beings have not figured out how to fight in: underwater, on top of the water, on land, in the air. Why is space any different? It was an honor to contribute to NOVA’s ‘Space Wars’ and help bring the realities of an increasingly contested space domain to a national audience,’ Reeves said. ‘Space is fundamental to our national security and our everyday lives, and I hope this excellent and engaging documentary helps Americans better understand both what’s at stake and why protecting our ability to operate in space matters. It was a thrill to work with the NOVA team on this special,’ Galbreath said. ‘Then to watch the finished product was simply amazing. They did such a great job pulling it all together and making what can be a complicated subject approachable to everyone.’  ‘Space Wars’ explores how satellites, vital to daily life and the economy, face threats from adversaries and from orbital debris, and how experts are weighing the implications. The film is available to stream at pbs.org/nova and on the PBS app. …”
PBS
PBS (Video)

Five Nick Cave lyrics so beautiful they don’t even need the music

“In a bid to teach to satiate the simple appetite of these hungover 21-year-olds, our professor decided to bring music into the equation, simultaneously making it pop culture-friendly while proving how literature and lyrics were so closely intertwined. In this simple game of guessing what song played host to the lyrics onscreen, we all thought the safe familiarity of the year’s indie heroes would be presented to us. Not foolish enough to think pop would be on offer, we waited for Arctic Monkeys, The 1975 or maybe even at a push, Courtney Barnett. After the room fell upon nine songs of pure confusion, the last seemed to bring on a sigh of relief, for Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ lyrics appeared on the large electronic screen. Murmurs of Arctic Monkeys spread across the room, as eagle-eyed fans spotted the B-side from a mile off. At this point, I knew they were bound to score a flat-out zero out of ten, as by question five, I had twigged what self-indulgent game my professor was playing. He hadn’t wasted a single question on any other artist besides one he clearly loved, one he clearly viewed brilliant enough to be folded into an English Literature lecture, one iconic artist, named Nick Cave. It all made sense when I thought about it. There were only a few artists who could seamlessly blend a term that was built around John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy and not make it feel so jarring to move into music. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell were all fair nominees, but none of them quite like Cave, who proved to a group of spaced-out millennials that even without the grand arrangements of his music, he was a true poet in every sense of the word. One whose lyrics were packed with bright and bold stories, with narrative tropes intertwined seamlessly. As smug as my Cave-loving professor was, he was right. The musician was a lyrical genius, worthy of a whole quiz based on him. If you don’t believe me, then allow my list in honour of the quiz to prove you wrong and show that the words written on the page are just as glorious as when he sings them. …”
FarOut (Video)

‘King of Injustice’: Golden naked Trump statue installed at European Parliament

Danish artist Jens Galschiøt poses next to his sculpture “The Orange Plague,” which was installed in Strasbourg, France, the official seat of the European Parliament.

“At a busy thoroughfare inside the European Parliament, passing politicians are now confronted with a grotesque and gilded vision of American power: an 8.5-foot-tall statue of President Donald Trump, naked but for a thin layer of 23-karat gold leaf. ‘Trump likes gold,’ said Danish artist Jens Galschiøt, the statue’s creator, over the phone after it was unveiled Tuesday. ‘In a way, I think he would like this sculpture.’ Titled ‘The Orange Plague,’ the artwork has been installed in Strasbourg, France, the official seat of the European Parliament. The copper sculpture, also dubbed the ‘King of Injustice,’ imagines the US president on the shoulders of a frail smaller figure. His thighs and sagging belly wrap tightly around the man’s head; his hands clutch at a long golf club and the scales of justice. ‘I am sitting on the back of a man,’ reads the text on the statue’s plinth. ‘He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except step down from his back.’ For Galschiøt, the work symbolizes what he sees as the US president’s threats to the environment and the rules-based world order. ‘Trump is destroying all the things I believe in,’ he said. This is not necessarily a rebuke from the European Union, but rather from Danish politician Per Clausen, who sponsored the exhibit. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are entitled to host displays on parliament grounds, though all exhibitions must be approved by officials. Parliamentary rules prohibit events or exhibitions deemed ‘offensive or of an inflammatory nature or contradictory to the values on which the Union is founded,’ or those that ‘undermine the dignity of Parliament.’ Permission is not tantamount to explicit endorsement of their contents. Nonetheless Galschiøt, who had feared the application would be rejected, considers the green-light to be a form of tacit approval from Europe’s parliamentarians. ‘I think a lot of American people say, ‘OK, this is our president, but he’s also ridiculous in a way.’ And I think most Europeans see him like that, too,’ he said. Galschiøt is known for provocative political artworks including the ‘Pillar of Shame,’ a memorial to victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre that was controversially removed from a Hong Kong university in 2021. He said his decision to depict Trump naked alludes to Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ in which a vain emperor parades the city in the nude. ‘Dictators don’t like you laughing at them,’ he explained. …”
CNN
YouTube: Gold-plated with a golf club… ‘Naked Trump’ statue displayed at European Parliament headquarter…

The Debut Album from SANAM is Inspiring and Iconoclastic

“The debut album from the Beirut-based band SANAM, titled Aykathani Malakon ص​ن​م – أ​ي​ق​ظ​ن​ي م​ل​ا​ك (Awoken by an Angel) is a feast for the senses—an amalgam of krautrock, free rock, Arabic maqams, and poetry. The post-folk album unfolds slow and dreamlike, opening with echoing bells, resonating beats, and the melancholy melodies of the buzuq (a fretted string instrument with a pear-shaped body and long thin neck, popular in the folk music of the Levante), followed by striking guitar riffs and the sentimental voice of Lebanese singer Sandy Chamoun. ‘There are poets within the album invoking hallucinatory vibes,’ explains Chamoun. ‘They are philosophizing our lives because this is what we need: to philosophize and think over our society and our reality.’ It’s fitting that a group as experimental as Sanam can trace its origins to Faust’s Hans Joachim Irmler. Irmler was invited to participate in Lebanon’s Irtijal Festival by the festival’s co-founder, Sherif Sehnaoui. ‘It was Sheriff’s idea to ask Anthony [Sahyoun] if he could bring together a band from different backgrounds, to experiment with Irmler during a three-day residency,’ Chamoun recalls. ‘Anthony was the connection between us. He knew me, Pascal [Semerdjian], Marwan [Tohme], and Antonio [El Hajj Moussa] and I knew Farah [Kaddour]; so we met.’ Hajj brought his bass; Kaddour her buzuq; Sahyoun his guitar and synths; Semerdjian drums; and Tohme played an array of guitars, carving out a new sound from within one of the most challenging periods of Lebanese modern history, drawing on the haunting poetry of Arabic language giants like Paul Shaouland the songs of Sayyed Darwish. ‘[At first] I didn’t feel that Irmler was very active,’ Chamoun recalls. ‘But when we played together, he played things we didn’t expect. He told us things during the workshop that we didn’t understand. I really respect him, and how he left us to independently figure things out; he would only listen, observe, and make the random comment here and there. He comes from a completely different background, yet I had the feeling that it was refreshing for him to listen to new sounds.’ …”
Bandcamp (Audio)
Bandcamp (Audio) Aykathani Malakon
YouTube: Aykathani Malakon صنم – أيقظني ملاكٌ SANAM

Reggae Britannia

Reggae Britannia rediscovers Britain’s soul  “BBC4’s Reggae Britannia series continues tonight with another raft of excellent programmes. Following last week’s Reggae Britannia documentary, tonight sees Toots and the Maytals’ Reggae Got Soul film, an archival round-up of Reggae at the BBC, Toots live from Glastonbury and an Arena film on Bob Marley. This whole series – with its attendant concerts and web content – has been a long overdue tribute to Britain’s reggae scene. While there’s been some online grizzling about a few glaring omissions from the documentary’s roll call (David Rodigan, Misty In Roots, Black Slate etc) one would have to assume that these people were unavailable, rather than deliberately left on the cutting-room floor in favour of the distinctly un-dread Boy George and Stewart Copeland. Condensing any 50-year-old scene down into an hour – particularly one as nuanced and fragmented as British reggae – is always going to lead to a degree of oversimplification. Overall, the series has been a good corrective to British reggae’s frequent dismissal by casual observers as having been either a weak imitation of the original source material, or unimaginative mainstream fodder. As with all the Britannia series (Pop, Synth, Metal and Festivals), Reggae Britannia attempted to place the music in the context of the society around it. While there was plenty of enjoyment to be had in the vintage clips of Dave and Ansell Collins on British television, Prince Buster arriving at Heathrow airport and black and white archive of Sir Coxsone’s sound system, the real punch came from juxtaposition of the music with incidental shots of the contemporaneous wider world: black boys walking through grubby English markets, juvenile suedeheads eyeballing each other at youth clubs, tracking shots of council estates, record shops, NF graffiti and empty London streets at dawn. The combination of music and social documentary is far more revealing of the time than the resolutely upbeat, false memory that usually makes up retrospective talking heads shows. It’s closest antecedent is the BBC’s much overlooked Rock ‘n’ Roll Years (1985-1994) which also worked from the principle that pop music and the real world were inseparable and that the negative was as historically important as the positive. …”
Guardian
YouTube: Reggae Britannia Documentary Part 1, Part 2

The School Near Paris That Shows Why French Students Are Protesting

“When students at Paul Éluard, a high school in a working-class suburb north of Paris, arrived for the first day of school, they found classrooms lacking chairs, tables and reliable electricity, students and teachers said. With the school under renovation, students were being taught instead in prefabricated buildings with bad insulation, filthy toilets and regular power outages, they said. Then came the staffing shortage. Two mathematics professors were moved to another school, leaving no one to cover their classes for over a week. There were no replacements for the school’s absent psychologist or careers adviser, they said, and there was only a single part-time nurse to provide on-site medical care to roughly 2,000 students. ‘It was a completely chaotic way to welcome students,’ said Irène Cailleteau, a mathematics teacher at Paul Éluard since 2020. ‘It was an extremely difficult way to start the year.’ Those are among the frustrations that have fueled a surge of student protests since late September, both at Paul Éluard — one of the wellsprings of the unrest — and at hundreds of high schools across France. Thousands of students, sometimes backed by teachers like Ms. Cailleteau, have blockaded their schools to protest widespread teacher shortages, creaking school infrastructure and grueling schedules — and to demand an overhaul of the national system that allocates places in higher education programs. The movement, which was bolstered on Tuesday by union-led rallies in more than 40 French cities, has divided the country and inflamed political tensions, particularly after many demonstrations descended into violence. Some protesters have shot off mortar-style fireworks, burned public buildings and looted shops, while rights groups and jurists have accused the police of disproportionate force. In just over two weeks, more than 6,500 people have been arrested, and more than 750 police officers, as well as roughly 300 students and staff members, have been injured, according to French officials. At the demonstrations at Paul Éluard, footage showed largely peaceful protesters, disrupted by some participants who pulled down part of the school fence and set fires in the street outside. That led the authorities in late September to order the school’s closure, ban protests in front of it and arrest several students. The school’s principal and the local branch of the Education Ministry declined to comment on the accounts in this article. The office of the regional president, Valérie Pécresse, said that her administration had recently invested about $50 million to improve the school, which is among more than 50 in the area, a suburb called Seine-St.-Denis, that has been newly renovated. …”
NY Times
1960s: Days of Rage – The Walls Speak: Art And The Revolution In May ’68

Terry Iacuzzo and Tony Oursler Talk Tarot

“On a sun-blasted afternoon in July, I stepped into the low-lit galleries of New York’s Morgan Library & Museum to study the mantic arts. I was there with Terry Iacuzzo and Tony Oursler—a psychic and an artist, respectively—to see ‘Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions.’ The exhibition unites the three original tarot decks commissioned by the Sforza and Visconti families in fifteenth-century Milan, placing them alongside midcentury and contemporary work that charts the transformation of the card game into a tool for divination. ‘This is the holy grail,’ Terry announced as we entered the first room, where gilt cards from the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, ca. 1456–58, were displayed in tall cases. The objects were large and surprisingly dimensional, with intricate tooling punched into layers of gold and silver leaf affixed to pasteboard. Terry leaned in to marvel at the newly conserved artifacts, whose Major Arcana—painted in lustrous glazed colors—mapped a Renaissance cosmology based on the virtues promoted by the poet and scholar Petrarch. ‘Birth, death, mother, father, fears, time, destiny, religion, government, law,’ she said, inspecting one of the spreads. ‘There is no more than this in life.’ She furrowed her brow when she noticed that the cycle was installed in reverse. ‘This is not set up right.’ Apparently, you’re supposed to read right to left, starting with the Fool and ending with the Magician. ‘Why didn’t they call me?’ she quipped. Terry, who is seventy-eight years old, has been reading tarot for more than sixty years. I had invited her to explore the show with Tony, who had just returned to New York from installing ‘Tech/Gnosis—Magic, Media, Art,’ a major retrospective at the Mori Art Museum’s Tokyo Node space in Japan. Tony, who has assembled a fabled collection of esoterica, comes from enchanted stock: His father was the founder of a journal dedicated to real-life encounters with angels, and his grandfather was an accomplished magician (and a mystery writer). You know,” Tony told us as we glided along, ‘my grandfather worked with Houdini, debunking psychics around Manhattan.’ Was he going to debunk Terry right there and then, continuing a bitter rivalry I had unwittingly resurrected? Terry dispelled the tension: ‘I consider Houdini my mentor because he was the debunker of mediums!’ The duo went on to explain how disreputable mediums promising contact with the dead had flourished after the devastation of World War I. These charlatans sparked a countermovement of ragtag crusaders­—many of them magicians—who revealed the hidden devices sham mediums used to produce ‘spooky’ effects. …”
ARTFORUM
1960s: Days of Rage – Tarot Was a Courtly Card Game. How Did It Become a Tool for Divination?

Hotel Exile – Jane Rogoyska (2026)

“The word ‘hotel’ is cognate with ‘hostel’ and ‘hospital’, and for a few short years in the middle of the 20th century, one Paris establishment functioned as all three. Hôtel Lutetia sits on the city’s Left Bank and exudes a certain nonconformist swagger. Opened in 1910 and built in a style that bobbed between art nouveau and art deco, it soon attracted an artistic and bohemian crowd. Hemingway hung out there in the 1920s, as did Picasso, Matisse and André Gide. James Joyce, resident in the city for 20 years, wrote a chunk of Ulysses sitting at one of its tables. In this outstanding book, which has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction, Jane Rogoyska reports that by the mid-1930s the Lutetia had become headquarters to German political dissidents fleeing Hitler. ‘The Lutetia Crowd’, as the Nazis disdainfully dubbed them, comprised the intellectual cream of the Weimar Republic. Heinrich Mann, novelist brother of the more famous Thomas, was the head of the organising committee that worked to bring down the Nazi regime from a distance. To this end, fake tomato-seed packets were sent into Germany containing a diatribe against the Third Reich and The Communist Manifesto was rebound into classic literature and pumped into the Fatherland. When they weren’t tampering with tomato seeds, these former lawyers, academics and journalists spent their days tramping around the City of Light in increasingly shabby clothing, trying to persuade someone to give them a job, any job. Even this misery, though, was nothing compared with the hellish conditions that arrived with the occupation of Paris in 1940. Under Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) initiative, any émigré or refugee could now be arrested without legal due process. Most of the Lutetia circle found themselves reclassified as stateless aliens, an utterly defenceless position. For those who were Jewish, there was every chance of being sent to concentration camps in the east. Having set up the Lutetia as the focus of her book, Rogoyska then traces a number of individual stories. Some of these have been told many times before. There is Walter Benjamin, who spends all his days at the Bibliotheque Nationale perfecting his life’s work on The Arcades Project, a study of the street life of 19th-century Paris. Then there is Irène Némirovsky, the Ukraine-born author who is secretly writing Suite Française, a novel depicting the fear, desperation and moral compromises of ordinary citizens during the German invasion. Gisèle Freund, a young German photographer and a lesbian, has already taken the precaution of making a mariage blanc to a Frenchman in order to gain citizenship. …”
Guardian
‘Hotel Exile’: The Riveting Wartime History of the Landmark Lutetia
amazon

Stephen Dedalus

“Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce‘s literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and as a major character in his modernist novel Ulysses(1922). Stephen mirrors many facets of Joyce’s own life and personality. Joyce was a talented singer, for example, and in Ulysses Leopold Bloom notes the excellence of Stephen’s tenor voice after hearing him sing Johannes Jeep‘s song ‘Von der Sirenen Listigkeit’. In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait, Stephen’s surname is spelled ‘Daedalus,’ a more obvious allusion to the mythological figure Daedalus, a brilliant artificer who constructed a pair of wings for himself and his son Icarus as a means of escaping the island of Crete, where they had been imprisoned by King Minos. Buck Mulligan makes reference to Stephen’s mythic namesake in Ulysses, telling him, ‘Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!’ His surname also suggests his desire to ‘fly’ above the constraints of religion, nationality, and politics in his development as an artist. Daedalus had been contracted by King Minos to build the Labyrinth in which he would imprison his wife’s son the Minotaur. Stephen’s surname may also reflect the labyrinthine quality of his developmental journey in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen’s first name recalls the first Christian martyr. The theme of martyrdom runs throughout the novel. … The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but sensitive to his feelings. The reader experiences Stephen’s fears and bewilderment as he comes to terms with the world in a series of disjointed episodes.^[5] Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour. While he cannot yet grasp their significance, at a Christmas dinner he is witness to the social, political and religious tensions in Ireland involving Charles Stewart Parnell, which drive wedges between members of his family, leaving Stephen with doubts over which social institutions he can place his faith in. Back at Clongowes, word spreads that a number of older boys have been caught ‘smugging’ (the term refers to the secret homosexual horseplay that five students were caught at); discipline is tightened, and the Jesuits increase use of corporal punishment. Stephen is strapped when one of his instructors believes he has broken his glasses to avoid studying. Prodded by his classmates, Stephen works up the courage to complain to the rector, Father Conmee, who assures him there will be no such recurrence, leaving Stephen with a sense of triumph. …”
W – Stephen Dedalus
W – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
NY Times: On Reading ‘Portrait of the Artist’ as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus has an aesthetic epiphany along Dollymount Strand.

The 10 Best Americana Albums Of All Time

“Before we recommend the ten best Americana albums of all time, maybe we should define the term. In our mind, Americana is more a spirit than a sound – certainly based in the blending of country and rock, but with a rebellious attitude and probably more respect for tradition than you’d find in a lot of contemporary country-pop. And it doesn’t hurt if the main songwriter has a rugged personality that infuses every track. Put it this way: if the music makes you ask whether you’re sure Hank done it this way, then it’s probably Americana. … 10: Creedence Clearwater Revival: Willy And The Poor Boys (1969) It’s unthinkable to have a best Americana albums list without some Creedence Clearwater Revival. Willy And The Poor Boys was built around the single ‘Fortunate Son/Down on the Corner,’ which defined what the band was all about: disdain for the ruling class on one side and a celebration of common values on the other. They sustained that mood across the whole of this album, which was conceptual as CCR ever got. … 9: The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace Of Sin (1969) If you don’t already love this album, Americana just might not be your thing. Widely celebrated as the album that crystallized Gram Parsons’ vision of ‘cosmic American music,’ The Gilded Palace Of Sinwasn’t strictly a country-rock album. For one thing, there was very little rock on it. For another, its two classic non-originals come from the Stax/Volt catalogue. Otherwise, Parsons (and The Flying Burrito Brothers’ co-writer and co-singer, the eternally overlooked Chris Hillman) forges some timeless country ballads steeped in psych-era imagery and mystery. … 2: Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (1998) Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is not the only essential Lucinda Williams album, but arguably it’s the most accessible. From the elegiac ‘Drunken Angel’ to the proudly sexy ‘Right In Time’ and the road song ‘Metal Firecracker,’ it covers all the bases. And it doesn’t hurt that the title track has one of the most memorable chorus hooks Williams ever penned. This album’s troubled birth got plenty of press at the time (she recorded it three times before it was just right) and led to the perception that Williams was a difficult artist. She has long since had the last laugh, having been on a prolific creative tear ever since, releasing some of the best Americana albums in the cannon. …”
udiscover (Video)

Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

DJ Schmolli

“DJ Schmolli from Vienna (Austria) has established himself to a fixed size in the DJ business over the years. In his energetic shows musical boundaries are broken and songs from different genres and eras get mixed up to rock every party. Mashup is the magical word to thrill the audience, worldwide. Party goers in Berlin, Moscow and Rio know the score! He produced his first mashups during the time as an active musician in 2000, parallel to this he gained some experience on the turntables. Since 2007 he has devoted himself entirely to DJing. In addition to his role as resident DJ in Munich and Frankfurt he also played DJ sets in Vienna (eg Pratersauna, U4 and Ottakringer brewery), Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Zurich, Moscow, New York, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, to name just a few. Not to forget the legendary performance in the birthplace of the “Bootie” mashup parties San Francisco where over 1,300 ecstatic fans celebrated with him. At festivals Schmolli is a frequently booked act, such as the Paaspop festival in Holland or the VOLT Festival in Sopron (Hungary). Until now DJ Schmolli has produced over 350 mashups that also get lots of radio airplay, for example on BBC Radio1 or Austria’s biggest station OE3. But above all the internet is the largest platform for his productions. His videos are reaching hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube, making him one of the most successful mashup producers in the world. He easily blended 80s cult hits with current chart toppers, mixes Coldplay with the Beach Boys, Sean Paul with Falco. Or why not taking all the stadium hymns & singalongs and blending them into the ‘Super Bowl Anthem’? Even print media such as the ‘Washington Post’ and the ‘Toronto Star’ have already become aware of him. …”
DJ Schmolli – About
DJ Schmolli (Video)
YouTube: Mix – DJ Schmolli

These salvaged relics in a Brooklyn subway station are the ghostly remains of old New York buildings

“Dating back to 1824 when it was a free library founded specifically for tradesmen, the Brooklyn Museum is a magnificent repository of 140,000 pieces of art spanning ancient Egypt to contemporary America. But beneath the museum at the grimy subway stop that takes you directly in front of the Beaux Arts building (which took 29 years to finally complete in 1926) are intentionally placed relics of another kind. Inside the station is an underground mini-museum of salvaged relics—from corbels to rosettes to human faces with eyes that follow you as you move toward the platform—taken out of the rubble of demolished New York City buildings. These 78 artifacts of terra cotta and stone are mounted on station walls with the care and precision of the mounted paintings inside the Museum’s halls and rooms. What are they doing here, besides giving passengers a reason to hang out and experience art underground? The relics come from the Brooklyn Museum’s longtime collection of ornamental architecture, and they were donated as part of the MTA’s Arts and Design program, which brings art installations to city subway stations. ‘New mosaic designs were added to frame the objects and make connections with the architecture of the station,’ states the MTA on a web page explaining the backstory of this underground exhibition. The Brooklyn Museum provides a bit more context, stating that this ‘long-term installation’ got its start in 2004 and was apparently planned to run through 2020, but the relics remain in what seems to be a permanent exhibit. The MTA also explains that the Brooklyn Museum ‘has long served as a repository for ornamental architectural forms salvaged from significant buildings that were being demolished.’ I wish we knew which ‘significant buildings’ these remnants came from, and if anyone recognizes them, let us know in the comments. But for now, they’re the ghostly remains of anonymous city architecture of the 19th and early 20th centuries felled by the wrecking ball. …”
Ephemeral New York

John Coltrane – Alabama (1963) | A Historic Performance

“… On November 18, 1963, two months after the funeral oration, Coltrane brought his quartet to the studio to record a new song called ‘Alabama,’ a musical memorial for the four murdered girls in Birmingham. (Incidentally, the recording session took place just days before U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated; this was an especially tumultuous time in American history.) Pianist Tyner later recounted the effect of King’s words: ‘The song ‘Alabama’ came from a speech. John said there was a Martin Luther King speech about the four girls getting killed in Alabama. It was in the newspaper—a printed medium. And so John took the rhythmic patterns of his speech and came up with ‘Alabama.’’ Coltrane did not need lyrics to say what was in his mind and heart; he instead imbued the song with the essence of King’s eulogy. King’s words are not heard in ‘Alabama,’ yet they are felt. Coltrane begins and ends the song with aching expressions of grief. In the middle, as observed in JAZZIZ Magazine, ‘like the speech, ‘Alabama’ shifts its tone from one of mourning to one of renewed determination for the struggle against racially motivated crimes.’ One of Coltrane’s most emotional works, “Alabama” was one of two studio-recorded songs on the album Live at Birdland, released to the public on January 9, 1964.  …”
Kennedy Center Education
YouTube: Alabama (1963) | A Historic Performance
1960s: Days of Rage – Bombingham – Birmingham, Alabama

‘Roll With The Punches’: Van Morrison’s Knockout Blues Album

“Seminal, genre-blurring records imbued with folk, jazz, and mysticism, including Astral Weeks, Moondance and Veedon Fleece, have long since crowned Van Morrison king of Celtic soul. Yet the artist’s first love was always the blues, and on September 23, 2017, he went back to the blues with his hard-hitting 37th album, Roll With The Punches. As a young man, the Belfast-born icon-to-be had a head start. Having lived in Detroit during the 50s, his father had acquired one of Ulster’s largest record collections, ensuring that Morrison Jr was exposed to artists ranging from jazz greats such as Charlie Parker to folk trailblazer Woody Guthrie while still a child. As Morrison freely acknowledges, however, it was the pioneering blues artists with whom he really empathized during his formative years. ‘From a very early age, I connected with the blues… it was an attitude,’ Morrison reflects. ‘I was lucky to have met people who were the real thing – people like John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Little Walter and Mose Allison. I got to hang out with them and absorb what they did. They were people with no ego whatsoever and they helped me learn a lot.’ Van Morrison’s long and distinguished career began with him fronting fiery Belfast outfit Them, whose evergreen mid-60s hits ‘Here Comes The Night,’ ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ and ‘Gloria’ (the latter covered by Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Patti Smith) displayed Morrison’s love of R&B. The Northern Irish star has come full circle, returning to the genre with a vengeance on Roll With The Punches, wherein a series of blues standards rub shoulders with a selection of freshly-minted Morrison originals. Equal parts hungry and accomplished, Roll With The Punches was recorded with an incredible team of studio collaborators including Chris Farlowe, Georgie Fame, Jeff Beck, Paul Jones and Jason Rebello. Collectively, they show off their chops on a raw’n’slinky version of Bo Diddley’s ‘I Can Tell’ and a spirited medley of T-Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday’ and Doc Pomus’ ‘Lonely Avenue,’ while Morrison flexes his versatile vocal cords on two of the album’s best self-penned numbers: the subtle, James Carr-esque “Transformation” and the pugnacious, Chicago-style blues of the title track. …”
udiscover (Video)

Music for Ancient Catacombs – Various Artists (2023)

“Music for Ancient Catacombs is the fourth installment in a series of thematic compilation albums from Eighth Tower Records that has established itself as a consistently rewarding project in drone and experimental ambient. The series began in 2023 with Music for Abandoned Monasteries, which invited fifteen artists to contemplate sacred spaces left to crumble and be reclaimed by silence. Later that same year, Music for Haunted Asylums turned its gaze to the deinstitutionalized psychiatric hospitals that litter the landscape of the post-war Western world. Most recently, Music for Alien Temples pushed the concept outward into speculative and cosmic territory, imagining the ritual spaces of non-human civilizations. That album earned a spot on our Best of the First Half of 2025 list. Now the series goes figuratively underground, a ‘back to basics’ release using drones, texture, percussion, and atmosphere to evoke states of dread, mystery, desolation, and the sublime. Thirteen artists, veterans of the form alongside newer voices, explore varying temperaments, from haunted stillness to barely-contained noise. Kammarheit opens with In Quiet Depths, a masterclass in restraint. Hushed and synth-driven, the track is suffused with a darkness that feels geological in its patience. Underground Sorrow from progettosonoro is sepulchral in the truest sense. The listener can feel the weight of stone overhead, and something unseen moving just ahead. Nerthus conjures a funerary atmosphere in Missa Tenebrarum, echoing percussion marking time in vaulted spaces while haunted melodic passages drift and dissolve.Ashtoreth & Penumbral Aethyr’s Khthon is the album’s most unpredictable offering, an abstract, shifting amalgam of noise and disembodied vocalizations that refuses to settle into any particular form. Adonai Atrophia fills The Lowest Chamber with echoing percussive thuds and wafting, processed vocal fragments implying presence while leaving its source unidentifiable. PNÉVMMA’s kry-pti is brief but effective, church bells submerged in gloom, a short passage that is transitional rather than absolute. Aconis continues this trend with Sanctum in the Depths, a quietly unsettling piece built on pulsating static and background crackling. …”
Avant Music News (Audio)
Bandcamp (Audio)

A Prospect Heights manhole cover reveals the source of Brooklyn’s water supply a century ago

“It’s not the only Brooklyn manhole cover with ‘Catskill water’ embossed in iron. But it’s the one that caught my eye when I found myself at St. Marks Place and Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights earlier this summer. And it led me to do a little research and discover that in 1917, Brooklyn began getting the bulk of its fresh water from the then-new Catskill Aqueduct. I knew about the Croton Aqueduct—the engineering marvel that brought clean water to Manhattan in 1842 and helped the city develop into a modern metropolis (and stop residents from relying on fetid wells and polluted ponds, which spread disease). But the Catskill Aqueduct? This upstate watershed, meant to ease the enormous demand for water in the early 1900s, featured 92 miles of tunnels and distribution pipes that carried water under the East River to the faucets of the borough’s homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses. Click into the map in the second image for a closer look at the route the Catskill Aqueduct was to take when construction began in 1905. It’s hard to imagine just how important healthy water was to Brooklyn in the late 19th century. It was so crucial, the promise of a mightier water source helped motivate the independent city to consolidate with Manhattan and form the City of Greater New York in 1898, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Before the building of the Catskill Aqueduct, Brooklyn relied on a system that brought fresh water from Long Island to the Ridgewood Reservoir, a distribution reservoir on the Brooklyn-Queens border. That worked in the 1850s, when the system was created. But with the population of Kings County booming toward the end of the 19th century, officials realized that a more modern water source would be needed. ‘With the completion of the Catskill Aqueduct (third photo) and City Water Tunnel No. 1 in 1917, Brooklyn was connected to the New York City water supply system, which brought water from watersheds located north of the city,’ states ASCE. The Ridgewood Reservoir was still in use, particularly as a backup water source later in the 20th century. In 1989, however, it was officially decommissioned. …”
Ephemeral New York

Hôtel Lutetia

“The Hôtel Lutetia (French pronunciation: [otɛl lytesja]), branded since 2025 as the Mandarin Oriental Lutetia, Paris, located on Boulevard Raspail, in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, is one of the best-known hotels on the Rive Gauche. Opened in 1910, it is noted for its architecture and historical role during the German occupation of France in World War II. The Lutetia was built in 1910 in the Art Nouveau style to designs by architects Louis-Charles Boileau and Henri Tauzin. It was established by Boucicaut family,^[1] owners of the Bon Marché department store, which sits opposite it facing Square Boucicaut. The Lutetia is located at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and rue de Sèvres, adjacent to Sèvres-Babylone metro station. The hotel is named for an early pre-Roman town that existed where Paris is now located. Famous guests over the years have included Pablo Picasso, Charles de Gaulle, Marianne Oswald, André Gide, Peggy Guggenheim,Fritz J. Raddatz and Josephine Baker. James Joyce stayed at the hotel in January-February 1940, and it was his final Paris address. Dawn Powell lived at the Lutetia for three months in the fall of 1950, during her only visit to Europe. In the late 1930s, the Lutetia was a frequent gathering place for anti-Nazi German exiles, among them Heinrich Mann, Willi Mutzner and the young Willy Brandt. In the Nazi regime’s propaganda of the time, these exiles were disparagingly called ‘The Lutetia Crowd’. The war began in September 1939, and numerous refugees fled to Paris from conflict areas and places occupied by German forces. The Lutetia attempted to accommodate as many as possible. Because of its reputation, it was filled with a number of displaced artists and musicians. However, the French government evacuated Paris beginning June 14, 1940 and the Germans entered and occupied the city. A number of the Lutetia’s residents escaped; others were captured by the Germans. The hotel itself was requisitioned by the Abwehr (counter-espionage), and used to house, feed, and entertain German officers such as Alfred Toepfer and the French collaborator Rudy de Mérode. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, the hotel was abandoned by German troops and taken over by French and American forces. From then until after the end of the war, it was used as a repatriation center for prisoners of war, displaced persons, and returnees from German concentration camps. …”
W – Hôtel Lutetia
YouTube: Hotel Lutetia, the only palace on the Left Bank in Paris.

I’m Waiting for the Man – The Velvet Underground Live 1969

“Audio taken from October 19, 1969, End of Cole Ave. club, Dallas. Picture taken from October 15, 1969, Dallas Peace Moratorium. For such a groundbreaking band, the Velvet Underground has little footage of them performing live. That was why in 2019 is was extremely exciting to see Texas film archives uncover three films of the Velvet Underground performing at the Dallas Peace Moratorium on October 15th, 1969. These films where: a short 16mm documentary of the event with some audio and picture of the Velvets performing (and Sterling Morrison being interviewed), a silent 16mm B-roll of outtakes from this doc, and a silent 8mm home movie shot from the audience. I was curious, would it be possible to take all of this footage and try to sync it to a live recording for an approximation of what it would’ve been like to see the Velvet Underground perform live? Luckily only a few days after the event on October 19th, a fan would make one of the best live recordings of the Velvet Underground at the End of Cole Ave. club in Dallas. So now the hard part was, which song has the most footage them playing? From the doc there were sync sound snippets of ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, ‘Beginning to See the Light’, and ‘I’m Set Free’. To figure out the silent footage, I had to do a lot of lip reading. And as luck would have it, most of the other silent footage was also of ‘Waiting for the Man’. With another stroke of luck, it appears like they performed ‘Waiting for the Man’ almost identically across the two shows. So with a little bit of fudging, I tried to get ‘Beginning to See the Light’, ‘I’m Set Free’, and all the other footage synced up to the best of my ability. It’s not perfect, but I’m very happy with the results. A big thanks to the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, and the G. William Jones Film & Video Collection at SMU for posting such incredible footage!”
YouTube

Dirty Water · The Standells, The Who – Magic Bus, etc.

“‘Dirty Water’ is a song by the American rock band the Standells, written by their producer Ed Cobb. Recorded and released in 1965, the song is a mock paean to the city of Boston, Massachusetts, and its then-famously polluted Boston Harbor and Charles River. According to Standells keyboardist Larry Tamblyn, at least some of the song (notably the reference to ‘lovers, muggers, and thieves’) was inspired by a mugging of producer Ed Cobb in Boston. In addition to the Charles River, other local interest items in the song include the Boston University women’s curfew—’Frustrated women … have to be in by 12 o’clock’—and a passing mention of the Boston Strangler—’have you heard about the Strangler? (I’m the man I’m the man).’  The well-known guitar riff that opens the song was recorded with a Fender Telecasterthrough a Vox AC30 amplifier by Standells guitarist Tony Valentino. …” W – “Dirty_Water”
Dirty Water · The Standells
Tell Her No – The Zombies
Blues Magoos – We Ain t Got Nothin Yet
Canned Heat Woodstock Boogie
Ten Years After- I’m Going Home
The Doors – Road House Blues (Live At The Isle Of Wight Festival 1970)
The (Young) Rascals – Groovin’
The Grass Roots – Midnight Confession
Cream’s Epic Farewell: “Sunshine of Your Love” Live in 1968
The Who – Magic Bus – Live At Leeds HQ
“‘Magic Bus’ is a song recorded by the English rock band the Who. It was written by their guitarist Pete Townshend during the time that their debut album My Generationwas being recorded in 1965.  … The arrangement for ‘Magic Bus’ uses a Latin percussion instrument called claves, which is a pair of small wooden sticks that make a distinctive high pitched sound when struck together. The Who used this instrument on the song ‘Disguises‘, which was recorded in 1966. The song makes use of the Bo Diddley beat. …”
W – “Magic Bus”

Artforum

“Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably, the Artforum logo is a bold and condensed iteration of the Akzidenz-Grotesk font, a feat for an American publication to have considering how challenging it was to obtain fonts favored by the Swiss school via local European foundries in the 1960s. Artforum is published by Artforum Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Media Corporation. John P. Irwin Jr. named the magazine after the ancient Roman word forum hoping to capture the similarity of the Roman marketplace to the art world’s lively engagement with public debate and commercial exchange. The magazine features in-depth articles and reviews of contemporary art, as well as book reviews, columns on cinema and popular culture, personal essays, commissioned artworks and essays, and numerous full-page advertisements from prominent galleries around the world. …”
Wikipedia

Bruised by War-Related Boycott, Artforum Seeks a Reset
“A skeleton crew of editors needed to take a hacksaw through the December issue of Artforum magazine. There were only a few weeks between the sudden firing of its editor in chief and a print deadline for the glossy’s annual ‘Year in Review’ issue. The fallout had been swift when Artforum’s owner fired the editor, David Velasco, after the magazine published an open letter about the Israel-Hamas war that supported Palestinian liberation and initially omitted mention of the victims of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. At least six members of the editorial team resigned and nearly 600 writers signed letters boycotting the magazine and its sister publications like ARTnews and Art in America. Regular contributors like the critic Jennifer Krasinski and the art historian Claire Bishop requested to have their articles pulled from the December issue. Others such as the filmmaker John Waters, the curator Meg Onli and the artist Gordon Hall also withdrew their writing. The ‘Year in Review’ issue that has begun arriving to subscribers is a week later than usual and noticeably slimmer. At 150 pages of articles and advertisements, it is about a third smaller than last December’s 224-page issue. …”
NY Times (2023)
The Resounding Influence of John Coplans’s Artforum
YouTube: Artforum

Soul Survivors – “Expressway to Your Heart” (1967)

“The Soul Survivors are an American, Philadelphia-based, soul and R&B group, founded by New York natives Richie and Charlie Ingui along with Kenny Jeremiah. The Soul Survivors are known for their 1967 hit single ‘Expressway to Your Heart‘, which was the first hit by Philadelphia soul record producers and songwriters Kenny Gambleand Leon Huff. The Soul Survivors first played together in New York under the name The Dedications, founded by Kenny Jeremiah, who released several singles under this name in 1962 and 1964. They adopted the name Soul Survivors in 1965. They signed to Philadelphia labelCrimson Records, who put them in touch with Gamble & Huff. ‘Expressway to Your Heart‘ was a #1 hit regionally in Philadelphia and New York in the fall of 1967, and the tune reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 nationally. ‘Expressway to Your Heart’ spent 15 weeks in the charts and sold over one million copies.  The follow-up was ‘Explosion in Your Soul’, which was not as successful (U.S. #33); a third release, ‘Impossible Mission’, also was a minor hit in 1969 (U.S. #68). They quit playing for a few years, but re-formed with a different lineup in 1972. They had one more hit, ‘City of Brotherly Love’ in 1974. In the 1970s, the group lost its record contract and its manager and eventually disbanded. Charlie Ingui became a landscaper, Richie Ingui became a house painter, Paul Venturini became a restaurateur, and drummer Joe Forgione owned an auto body shop. At that time, Steely Dan noted in their song ‘Hey Nineteen‘ It’s hard times befallen the Soul Survivors’. …”
Wikipedia
YouTube: Expressway (To Your Heart)

Disco Maghreb: The Legendary Raï Label That Revived Oran’s Musical Soul

“Discover the fascinating story behind Disco Maghreb, the iconic music label that shaped the sound of Raï and brought Oran to the world’s stage. Once dormant, this legendary brand has risen from the ashes to celebrate Algeria’s rich musical heritage and inspire new generations. A Musical Legacy Born in Oran: Disco Maghreb was founded in the early 1980s by Boualem Benhaoua in the Ras el Aïn district of Oran. Starting as a modest cassette and music shop called Maghreb Musique, it quickly transformed into a major label that discovered and launched the careers of some of the greatest Raï stars, including Cheb Hasni, Cheb Khaled, Cheb Mami, and Hasni. Boualem’s exceptional ear for talent and passion for music turned Disco Maghreb into the beating heart of the Raï movement — a genre blending traditional Algerian folk melodies with modern rhythms and rebellious spirit. The Golden Era of Raï and Disco Maghreb: Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Disco Maghreb’s releases dominated airwaves and cassette players across Algeria and beyond. The label not only popularized Raï worldwide but also became a cultural symbol during Algeria’s turbulent decade of the 1990s — the ‘décennie noire.’ Even amid political unrest and violence, Disco Maghreb’s music remained a source of hope and expression for Algerians. The Decline and Revival: The rise of digital piracy in the early 2000s hit Disco Maghreb hard. With illegal downloads and free sharing online replacing physical sales, the label closed in 2005 after a quarter-century of success. But in 2022, global star DJ Snake, a French-Algerian with deep roots in Oran’s Raï scene, released a viral tribute song and video called ‘Disco Maghreb.’ The clip’s massive success sparked the label’s revival, inspiring Boualem Benhaoua to reopen the vintage boutique — now a nostalgic museum and symbol of cultural pride. Presidential Recognition and Cultural Impact: French President Emmanuel Macron visited Disco Maghreb during his 2022 Algeria trip, praising the label as the ‘epicenter of Raï’ and sharing a selfie with Boualem Benhaoua. His visit underscored the label’s ongoing importance in Algerian culture and its role in bridging Franco-Algerian friendship. Why Visit Disco Maghreb? Visiting the Disco Maghreb boutique in Oran means stepping into the birthplace of modern Raï music. The shelves still hold classic cassettes and CDs, echoing the spirit of a bygone era, preserved like a cultural museum for locals and tourists alike. …”
Visit Algeria
W – Raï: International_success
YouTube: DJ Snake – Disco Maghreb (Official Music Video)

The Harlem Trilogy: Cool Machine (2026)

“Cool Machine is the third novel in Colson Whitehead‘s Harlem Trilogy series. It was released by Doubleday on July 21, 2026. Cool Machine is the third and final novel in Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, preceded by Harlem Shuffle, set in the 1960s, and Crook Manifesto, set in the 1970s. The book takes place in New York City, specifically Harlem, during the 1980s. This is a period with real estate development, homelessness, and high crime rates. The story centers on Ray Carney, a successful furniture store owner who also lives a double life as a part-time criminal fence, in other words, someone who buys and sells stolen goods. The novel is divided into three connected sections, each set in a different year of the 1980s. So, in 1981, after his wife Elizabeth is denied a bank loan to start her own travel agency, Carney decides to help fund her business by joining a crew for a major heist at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. In 1983, the focus shifts to Pepper, Carney’s noticeably older criminal associate. Elizabeth hires Pepper to act as a bodyguard for an art dealer transporting a valuable African mask. When the mask goes missing, Pepper searches the gritty East Village for it while dodging a violent hitman. In 1986, Carney is forced to use his criminal connections and skills to protect his nephew, Robert, the son of his late cousin Freddie, who is being framed for the murder of a corrupt lawyer.  In this book, the city becomes a character. Hence, New York City is central to the story, with its changing landscape that mirrors the characters’ lives and decisions. There are also themes of survival and morality. In other words, the book shows how the characters navigate a corrupt system. They have to juggle their family obligations and lives with their criminal activities to survive and protect the people they care about. According to Evan Kindley, writing for The New Republic, in recent decades, there has been a meaningful rebirth in the historical fiction genre. He says that it has become the most respected genre in contemporary literature. Kindley, citing a literary scholar, also points out that most of the novels nominated for major American awards since 2000 are historical fiction. …”
Wikipedia
NY Times: With His Latest, Colson Whitehead Pulls Off Another Score
YouTube: Colson Whitehead Talks New Book, Unusual Writing Process, More
amazon
1960s: Days of Rage – The Harlem Trilogy: Harlem Shuffle (2021), Crook Manifesto (2023)

Please Stand Clear of the Accidental Art Museum

“Over nearly two decades as a photographer for The Times, I’ve spent innumerable hours in the subway system. It’s not always the most pleasant place to work. Sometimes, as a diversion from the relentless onslaught of train clatter and the endless flood of humanity — hustling, jostling, trying to make it through the commute inside traveling bubbles of indifference — I stop to look for art. I don’t mean the excellent sculptures and mosaics commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to brighten up the commute. I mean the accidental kind. I look for the colorful scenes of decay on the tunnel walls, the rusted iron beams, patterns formed in crumbling tiles and peeling paint. I’m drawn to the strange forms found in discarded bubble gum and to the delicate sketches etched in HVAC soot. They appear to me as secret works of art just waiting to be noticed and appreciated. I like to imagine them under glass, on pristine white mats inside deep black wood frames on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art. I’ve come to think of it as the ‘M.T.A. Modern,’ a public museum open to all New Yorkers for a mere $3 — if only they knew where to look. Water is the key medium for much of the naturally occurring art within the subway. It acts as both builder and destroyer. As water permeates the surrounding bedrock, it picks up mineral passengers and slowly deposits them where it seeps through, streaks and evaporates. Shallow beds of milky white and amber crystals emerge, glistening, from the primordial solution. As water oxidizes steel, the chemical transformation creates streams of leathery ocher hues. The M.T.A. estimates that its workers — and 753 pumps — drain the equivalent of 15 Olympic-size swimming pools of groundwater every day. When there’s a storm or a water main break, the volume becomes almost unfathomable. It courses through an aging system, much of which still relies on its original infrastructure, sometimes more than 120 years old. It forces that water to surface in strange and surprisingly beautiful ways. It pushes its way under thick layers of ‘M.T.A. Green’ paint slathered on structural supports and emerges in bright orange streaks that seem perfectly picked from the opposite side of a color wheel. Several I-beams in Times Square Station display this kaleidoscope of texture and color. On a tunnel wall at 47th-50th Streets-Rockefeller Center, storm clouds stream down showers of acid rain against a foreboding night sky, while farther down the platform a form reminiscent of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting blossoms from an ivory canvas. …”
NY Times

Bistro

At the Bistro, Jean Béraud
“A bistro or bistrot (/ˈbiːstroʊ/), in its original Parisian form, is a small restaurant serving moderately priced, simple meals in a modest setting. In a 2007 survey of national cuisines, a bistro is characterised as typically: a neighborhood restaurant where one can partake of French home cooking, typically robust, earthy dishes such as cassoulet …. Bistros are not temples of haute cuisine, but places for affordable and simple country food. A Paris newspaper in 1892 referred to dishes served at a bistro, including escargots, veal with sauce ravigote, navarin of lamb, hachis Parmentier, eggs, sausages and hot roast chicken. The Oxford Companion to Food comments that the idea of simple inexpensive food served in a French atmosphere has wide appeal, so that by the end of the 20th century the term had ‘begun to be annexed by more pretentious premises’. Plaque about the legend of the origin of the word ‘Bistro’ at La Mère Catherine, 6, place du Tertre, Paris. (English: On March 30, 1814, the Cossacks were the first to launch their very famous ‘bistro’ here and, on the hill, the worthy ancestor of our bistros was born. 180th anniversary. Tourist Office of Old Montmartre) The etymology is unclear. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française dates the word from the 19th-century term bistro (‘innkeeper’) and suggests that it may be linked to the Poitevin word bistraud (‘little servant’) or to bistrouille (‘cheap liquor’). It recommends the spelling “bistrot” in preference to ‘bistro’. The word was used to describe a drinking establishment, estaminet (‘saloon’), or small popular local restaurant where alcoholic beverages were served. In the early part of the 19th century, the term ‘gargote’ signified a basic style of restaurant,^{[n 2]} but the term ‘bistro’ or ‘bistrot’ was not recorded until toward the end of the century. An early appearance of the term in print is in Les deux gosses by Pierre Decourcelle, published in 1880. A popular folk etymology, not attested by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, claims that the word originated among Russian troops who, following the Battle of Paris in March 1814,occupied the city and visited these tiny places to drink a coffee. They might have shouted Bistro! Bistro! (Russian: быстро, lit. ‘quickly‘) when they wished to be served quickly. This etymology has been dismissed by linguists, because there is no attestation to the occurrence of the term until the late 19th century. …”
Wikipedia
What is a Bistro Restaurant?

Plaque about the legend of the origin of the word “Bistro” at La Mère Catherine, 6, place du Tertre, Paris.

The Storyteller – A Musical Tribute to Yusef Lateef – The Nat Birchall Quartet

“With 20 years passing since his first foray into recorded jazz, Nat Birchall now ranks as one of the premier saxophonists of his generation. With several highly acclaimed albums in the locker, he now returns with his most ambitious project yet – a tribute to the legend that is Yusef Lateef. When Jazzman Gerald first mentioned to me the idea of doing an album as a tribute to the jazz giant Dr Yusef A. Lateef, my first thought was ‘Where on earth do I start?’ Lateef was such a colossus of music, and his scope so broad, that I couldn’t hope to begin to cover his musical universe. He was a master of the tenor saxophone, a master of the flute, a master ballad player, a master blues player. Not to mention his skills as a composer and arranger and of course his exploration and use of musical methodology and instruments from all over the world. I’ve always been a great admirer of Lateef, and the challenge was intriguing, so I decided to give it go. We interpreted some of his own compositions (Brother John, Morning & Ching Miau) as well as some compositions by others that he made his own by careful arrangement and interpretation (Love Theme from Spartacus, Ringo Oiwake). I also wrote some original songs that, while certainly not written in his style, might be said to fall into his very broad approach to music making. I also wanted to utilise as many different instruments as possible, something I hadn’t explored too much until this album. So it was a nice opportunity to finally get around to playing some of the many small instruments I’ve collected over the years; the Turkish zurna, the mbira from Zimbabwe, the balaphon from Mali and the arghul from Egypt. We have also tried to use varied time signatures in the music, so we have songs in 3/4, 5/4 and 7/4 time, as well as the standard 4/4. Ultimately the best music tells a story to the listener and takes them to places they might not have imagined themselves. Yusef Lateef certainly did that, and as such was a master storyteller.’ – Nat Birchall
Bandcamp (Audio)