“Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors, real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings. But another one of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In the one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it. The fantasy to be discovered in science fiction films does both jobs. These films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the…

“.. Fire Music must be one of  Shepp’s most interesting albums, blistering and intense,  a half-way house between Free and the Avant Garde. The musical territory ranges from the haunting recitation and requiem for Malcolm X (quick history lesson here, it is not what you might assume), to the kitsch reworking of the  Girl From Ipanema, with Shepp as Webster/Hawkins reincarnated as Freddie Kreuger’s Nightmare on Elm Street, ripping into the tune at will while caressing it. Shepp found more ways to force sound from the tenor than probably any other player, punctuating expressive breathiness with shouts, shrieks and dissonaces, sometimes choosing its own direction own irrespective of ‘the tune’. The septet surrounds him in rich and varied textures, full of surprises, with moments of Mingus but burning bright, angry and on fire, as befits its title, Fire Music. Commentators often draw connections with this mid-’60s jazz and social/ political issues of…

Historian Heather Cox Richardson summarized Secretary of State Anthony Blinken‘s address to the U.N. Security Council Ministerial Meeting on Ukraine Sovereignty and Russian Accountability. We must never forget that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and it is irrelevant that it belonged to Russia in the past or during the repressive era of the Soviet Union. Ukraine belongs to the people of Ukraine. I have highlighted sections of his speech that touched me. Open the link to read the footnotes.

She wrote:

“One year and one week ago—on February 17th, 2022—I warned this council that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the United Nations Security Council Ministerial Meeting on Ukraine Sovereignty and Russian Accountability today.

“I said that Russia would manufacture a pretext, and then use missiles, tanks, soldiers, cyber attacks to strike pre-identified targets, including Kyiv,” Blinken continued, “with the aim of toppling Ukraine’s…

No major media outlet did more to spread the lie that Trump won the 2020 election than FOX NEWS. It gave a platform to election deniers, including those who baselessly claimed that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the vote to favor Biden. Dominion is suing FOX and some of the leading exponents of this view. The case will be heard in April.

We now know, after publication of the depositions, that no one at FOX believed Trump’s lies. They agreed to spread them to protect their ratings. We will be watching to see if FOX is held accountable for allowing liars to undermine our democracy.

George Will wrote about the case. He does not defend FOX.

Five days after the 2020 presidential election, Sidney Powell, the fabulist lawyer, appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show to say there has been “a massive and coordinated” effort to “delegitimize and destroy” Trump votes…

“Bowles holds a unique place in American literature. As an exile, he shared with 1920’s expatriate novelist Gertrude Stein, among others, a distanced perspective on his native culture. Through his translations, he earned an international reputation as an author with a North African sensibility. His fiction reflects a world akin to that written about by existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, and indeed he has been described as America’s foremost existentialist writer, a label more likely to restrict him to a time period than to characterize his fiction accurately. Although his nihilism does strike one as a bit pretentious, it also has a modern application, reflecting as it does a dark vision of the world as contemporary as the times demand. Bowles became a guru of sorts to the Beat generation, although Bowles’s attraction for them was as much for his writings about drugs as for his generally pessimistic…

Guy Debord’s “Naked City”, map of Paris

“Psychogeography is the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes. It was developed by members of the Letterist International and Situationist International, which were revolutionary groups influenced by Marxist and anarchist theory as well as the attitudes and methods of Dadaists and Surrealists. In 1955, Guy Debord defined psychogeography as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’ One of the key tactics for exploring psychogeography is the loosely defined urban walking practice known as the dérive. As a practice and theory, psychogeography has influenced a broad set of cultural actors, including artists, activists and academics. … The Lettrists’ reimagining of the city has its precursors in aspects of Dadaism and Surrealism. The concept of the flâneur

As many as one million Russians have fled their country in protest against Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The exiles include intellectuals, journalists, and high-tech workers, as well as draft-age men who refused to go to war for Putin’s territorial ambitions. This weekend, exiles plan to demonstrate against the war in 44 countries.

Russian opposition groups in more than 100 cities in 44 countries around the world — from Berlin to Seoul to Los Angeles — plan to mark the anniversary of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Friday with three days of demonstrations outside of Russian diplomatic missions or on public squares.

The organizers are calling the protests a test of whether their historically fractious groups, which operate outside of Russia, can work in a coordinated manner to oppose the Kremlin. The groups are hoping to achieve “an unprecedented level of cooperation within the diaspora,” said one coordinator…

Timothy Snyder, the noted historian of democracy and tyranny at Yale University, wrote a post listing fifteen reasons why the world needs Ukraine to win and defeat Russian aggression against its very existence as a nation. Most important is to stop the genocidal slaughter of Ukrainians. The New York Times documented 339 significant cultural sites—museums, performing arts centers for theater, music, and dance, historical sites, and other cultural treasures—that have been destroyed in the Russian effort to eliminate Ukrainian existence as a nation.

He writes:

Why does the world need a Ukrainian victory?

1. To halt atrocity. Russia’s occupation is genocidal. Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered.

2. To preserve the international legal order. Its basis is that one country may not invade another and annex its territory, as Russia seeks…

“Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 – April 5, 2006) was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the ‘Environment‘ and ‘Happening‘ in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of them — evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called ‘Activities’, intimately scaled pieces for one or several players, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, performance art, and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work. … It was here that he started with a style of action painting, which greatly influenced his Happenings pieces in years to come. He went on to study composition with John Cage in his class at the New School…

“The journal entry above, dated October 4, 1969, was written during the second week of shooting Tristana (1970), Catherine Deneuve’s second—and final—collaboration with Luis Buñuel after the enormous success of Belle de Jour (1967). Abounding in bizarre detail, the jotting succinctly captures Tristana’s impeccable balance of precision and perversion. As in Belle de Jour—in which Deneuve’s character, Séverine, a YSL-clad haute bourgeoise, finds erotic liberation through byzantine psychosexual fantasies and part-time work at a boutique bordello, where she is christened with the nom de pute of the title—Tristana hinges on the defilement of its eponymous character. When the film opens, Tristana is all in black, still in mourning for her recently deceased mother. The innocent, timid, orphaned teenager becomes the ward of Don Lope (Buñuel regular Fernando Rey), a lecherous, hypocritical, overweening Manchegan aristocrat who wastes no time in seducing her. ‘I’m your father and your husband,’ the…