“This is the 20th anniversary expanded edition of one of Soul Jazz Records earliest definitive releases: ‘Nu Yorica : Culture Clash In New York City – Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77’, a stunning and ground-breaking collection of music bringing together Latin, Soul, Jazz, Funk and more from the melting pot of New York City in the 1970s. Out-of-print for more than ten years this new edition has been fully digitally remastered with new tracks, additional photography and is released as a deluxe 2CD pack + large outsize booklet, as well as a new edition of two super-loud super-heavy separate volumes of double vinyl. The album is also available for the first time as a worldwide digital release. Nu Yorica! is one of Soul Jazz Records most critically acclaimed albums of all time. The album features seminal Latin artists such as Eddie Palmieri, Joe Bataan, Machito, Ocho, Grupo Folklorico, Cortijo…

As you surely know, any kind of protest against the war is forbidden in Russia. Anyone who dares to speak against the war is immediately arrested and jailed. Even calling the war a war is illegal. Protestors may be sent away for years. In this climate of repression, some bold Russians have found a way to express their anti-war views. The New York Times published some examples of these tiny acts of rebellion. Learn how a fish became an anti-war symbol.

Last year in St. Petersburg, an artist uploaded a few images of tiny clay figurines in a public space to Instagram under the account Malenkiy Piket, meaning Small Protest. In a separate post, he invited others to join him in his silent demonstration.

One of Malenkiy Piket’s first posts.

Since that post, he has received almost 2,000 images containing homemade figurines, many holding posters of protest with curious symbology…

A distinguished roster of speakers attend the opening day of the General Conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in West Berlin June 16, 1960.

“‘The past is a foreign country,’ L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in the line, as Hartley intended, and it holds if the topic is lost love, the joys and errors of youth, all the roads not traveled. But anyone who thinks the thought applies to our institutions, ideologies, and policies, as we are incessantly encouraged to assume, needs to think again. In the political context we must revert to the other noted mot (Faulkner’s) on the topic: The past is not even past. It would be hard to bring this point home more saliently now than Joel Whitney does in Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers. Whitney’s topic is “the instrumentalization…

… Edited David E. James “Workonthis collectionoftexts began some three years ago, whenwehoped to publish it in2003to celebrate Stan Brakhage’s seventieth birthday. Instead, belatedly, it mourns his death. The baby who would become James Stanley Brakhagewasborn on 14January 1933 in an orphanage in Kansas City, Missouri.Hewasadopted and named by a young couple, Ludwig, a college teacherofbusiness, and his wife, Clara, who had herself been raised by a stepmother. The family moved from town to town in the Middle West and, sensitive to the stressesofhis parents’ unhappy marriage, Stanleywasa sickly child, asthmatic and overweight. … He attempted to write a novel and renewed his friendship with the Gadflies, attending movies with them and beginning to read some of the classics of film theory. Especially taken with Cocteau’s Orpheus and

“The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism. Anarchist ideas are so much at variance with ordinary political assumptions and the solutions anarchists offer so remote, that all too often people find it hard to take anarchism seriously. This classic text is an attempt to bridge the gap between the present reality and anarchist aspirations, ‘between what is and what, according to the anarchists, might be.’ Through a wide-ranging analysis—drawing on examples from education, urban planning, welfare, housing, the environment, the workplace, and the family, to name but a few—Colin Ward demonstrates that the roots of anarchist practice are not so alien…

Heather Cox Richardson hits it out of the park with this column. Republicans are screaming that Hunter Biden got a slap on the wrist for his crimes, and that the Justice Department went easy on him. But Richardson points out that President Biden left the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware in place, and he prosecuted the case. For those upset about Hunter Biden, when will they demand to know why the Saudis gave Jared Kushner $2 billion six months after he left office?

She writes:

After years of accusations and rumors swirling around Hunter Biden, the 53-year-old son of President Joe Biden, the Department of Justice has reached a tentative deal with the younger Biden: He will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of failing to file income tax returns for 2017 and 2018 by the filing date, for which he owed more than $100,000 each year. Biden’s representatives…

“I have never understood the impulse of some Burroughsians to quarantine the life and work of their idol. Why this desire to make Burroughs unique, to focus on his solitary nature, to deny his influences and origins? Me, I want the virus to spread and infect every aspect of our lives. If I can tie Burroughs and his work to sentimental Victorian romance novels (after all, he is connected through Nuttall to Victorian Boy’s Magazines), I will be happy to do it. To get the full force of the Burroughs fix, it is all about set and setting. Check out the performance schedule for the American Theatre of Poets in 1965. You’ll see Burroughs reading there on St. Valentine’s Day of course, but look at all the other performances as well. Judson Theater dance people, Black Mountain College alums, Beat poets, New York School writers, avant-garde musicians, Art Happenings, Fluxus…

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian journalist, author, and dissident who was sentenced to 25 years in jail for speaking out against the war on Ukraine. This article appeared in the Washington Post.

Vladimir Kara-Murza has prepared the following remarks for an upcoming appearance before a Moscow appeals court. In April,he was sentencedto 25 years in prison on treason charges — an accusation based entirely on his public statements about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Throughout this process — first in the Moscow City Court, now here in the Court of Appeal — a very strange feeling has never left me. Judicial procedures, by their nature, must be somehow connected with the law. But everything that has happened to me has nothing to do with the law; if anything, what I have witnessed is precisely the opposite.

“The law — both Russian and international — prohibits the waging of…

“At the end of the 60s, superstar drummer and angriest man in rock Ginger Baker was on the verge of collapse. Strung out on heroin, deeply grieving Jimi Hendrix’s death, and alienated from his former Cream and Blind Faith bandmates, he needed a new direction. He found it in Nigeria, where he decamped after driving a Range Rover from Algeria across the Sahara Desert. (A madcap adventure captured in the 1971 documentary Ginger Baker in Africa). Once in Lagos, Baker started jamming with Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti. The meeting of these two musical forces of nature produced a suite of recordings. ‘Baker’s drumming appeared on several albums alongside the Nigerian king of afrobeat,’ writes Okay Africa, ‘including Why Black Man Dey Suffer (1971), Live! (1972) and Stratavarious (1972).’ Kuti’s longtime drummer and arranger—and inventor of the “afrobeat”—Tony Allen was highly impressed with Baker’s range, and Nigerians, as Jay…