May 2, 1959

“…. What is The 1959 Project? Most jazz fans find themselves suffering from golden age syndrome at some point or another; for the casual listener it might define their relationship with the music, given that so many of the genre’s seminal (and best-selling) records are now well-worn classics. A fair number of them, in fact, were released or recorded 60 years ago, and thus form the inspiration for this (quite probably foolhardy) endeavor. But for me, and I imagine for others, the best thing about jazz music isn’t the albums. It’s the privilege of getting to witness musicians’ search for authentic expression in real time; to see their masterful technique in service of some fleeting, genuine thought that will never be heard again in the exact same way. It’s a fundamentally live experience, which makes the golden age syndrome more painful — we might listen to Kind Of…

“The Fall (French: La Chute) is a philosophical novel by Albert Camus. First published in 1956, it is his last complete work of fiction. Set in Amsterdam, The Fall consists of a series of dramatic monologues by the self-proclaimed ‘judge-penitent’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence, as he reflects upon his life to a stranger. In what amounts to a confession, Clamence tells of his success as a wealthy Parisian defense lawyer who was highly respected by his colleagues. His crisis, and his ultimate ‘fall’ from grace, was meant to invoke, in secular terms, the fall of man from the Garden of Eden. The Fall explores themes of innocence, imprisonment, non-existence, and truth. In a eulogy to Albert Camus, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the novel as ‘perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood’ of Camus’ books. Clamence often speaks of his love for high, open…

“The Nazgûl (from Black Speechnazg, ‘ring’, and gûl, ‘wraith, spirit’), introduced as Black Riders and also called Ringwraiths, Dark Riders, the Nine Riders, or simply the Nine, are fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s Middle-earth. They were nine Men who had succumbed to Sauron‘s power through wearing Rings of Power, which gave them immortality but reduced them to invisible wraiths, servants bound to the power of the One Ring and completely under Sauron’s control. The Lord of the Rings calls them Sauron’s ‘most terrible servants’. Their leader, known as the Lord of the Nazgûl or the Witch-king of Angmar, had once been the King of Angmar in the north of Eriador. At the end of the Third Age, their main stronghold was the city of Minas Morgul at the entrance to Sauron’s realm, Mordor…

“A slice of greasy blues soul that draws from the Willie Dixon classic ‘Back Door Man,’ Clarence Carter’s ‘Back Door Santa,’ co-written with Marcus Daniel for the 1968 compilation Soul Christmas, adds a touch of raunch to the holiday celebrations. ‘I ain’t like old Saint Nick,’ Carter barks over a bleating horn section and chopping funk guitar, ‘he don’t come but once a year. I come runnin’ with my presents every time you call me dear.’ By 1968, Clarence Carter was no stranger to the cheating oeuvre, having scored a Top 6 pop hit in 1967 with the breathtaking ‘Slip Away‘ – two impeccably crafted minutes of Muscle Shoals soul that masterfully balances regret, longing and lust on the rough edge of Carter’s pleading, powerful voice. … Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Joe Tex, Arthur Alexander, Percy Sledge and countless others recorded signature, career-defining songs there…

“‘What is a body artist? Someone who is his own test tube,’ quips painter David Salle about performance artist, filmmaker, and writer Vito Hannibal Acconci, probably the prime example of an artist who experiments on himself and his own life, using his body and its movements as his materia artistica. Born in New York City in 1940, Acconci returned to the Lower East Side in 1964 to teach at Brooklyn College and the School of Visual Arts after graduating from Holy Cross College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Acconci was first a writer, and with his sister-in-law, Bernadette Mayer, edited one of the most experimental of all the early mimeo magazines. 0 to 9 included works by a phalanx of literary experimentalists, including the minimalist works of Aram Saroyan and Clark Coolidge, along with the graphic works of artists Sol LeWitt, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson, and performance-oriented work…

“A tiger stalking the house a young girl is holidaying in; middle-aged siblings who experience an enforced segregation in their home; a young man who cannot stop vomiting baby rabbits; a disaffected and drug-addled jazz musician via the eyes of his morose biographer-this is the rich tapestry from which Cortazar weaves his short stories, whether it be the lachrymose streets of Paris or the sultry neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, the constant theme which runs through Cortazar’s novel is the limitless wonders of story-telling; at times playful and at others meditative, Cortazar’s range is varied but brilliant. The title story, on which Antonioni’s famous film is based, in one of the stand out stories in the collection. In it the narrator believes he witnesses-and prevents-an attempted murder via the lens of his camera. Subjectivity is a central theme in Cortazar’s novels; the reader is at the behest of the narrator, whose…

In a remarkable bipartisan move, Congress passed a budget bill to finance the federal government until September 2023. Heather Cox Richardson describes the political maneuvering behind its passage. Republicans in the House wanted to wait until the new Congress is seated. They hold a slim majority. With Kevin McCarthy courting the MAGA caucus, who knows if the House would ever agree on a budget.

Jim Jordan—the Trump lackey from Ohio who seldom wears a jacket— keeps tweeting snide comments about the budget. But he never mentions that half the budget—$850 billion—is defense spending. I enjoy tweeting that fact to him.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote yesterday:

Today, by a vote of 225 to 201, the House passed the 4,155-page omnibus spending bill necessary to fund the government through September 30, 2023. The Senate passed it yesterday by a bipartisan vote of 68–29, and President Joe Biden has said he will…

“A historical exhibition aims to show us past life, but sometimes the retrospective becomes reflective, a two-way mirror seeing through to the present. So it is with New York 1962–1964 at The Jewish Museum, certainly at the moment our fair city’s most enveloping visual and aural museum experience. With more than 150 works spanning vanguard fine art, outré fashion, cult film, political periodicals, and documentary videos of radical dance and news, the real stars of the show are its wranglers. Selldorf Architects’s contextualized installation design is thrilling. At the entry, the stage is set: we are invited to imagine ourselves within a mural photograph of office workers attired in fitted suits and dresses at the lunch counter—its rear sign announcing a bank of phone booths—then, at a lurid juke box in front of it, to punch in the number of our favorite tune of the era, no coin required. That’s…

“I wish I could remember when I first read ‘Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.’ It could have been in 1963, when the eponymous book appeared, but if it had, it would have been a revelation (which I did not have for some years) that other women poets were grappling with the issues I was at twenty, that there might be dialogue and exchange, if not in conversations and letters, in the way a poem in a book calls another poet back to notebook and pen. Like Rich herself at twenty, my literary dialogues on and off the page were largely with men: on one hand, Auden, Lowell, Berryman, on the other, the acolytes of the ‘San Francisco Renaissance‘ talking of and reading the work of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan to their East Coast juniors. I read Ariel in 1963, and like other women poets of…

“… A newspaper ad appealing for witnesses even misidentified the victim. The deceased was a member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Over the preceding years he had clashed numerous times with far-right political groups in East London. Just six weeks before his death he had been arrested at the House of Commons for scattering leaflets and shouting, ‘This house stinks of racism!’ during a speech by the Ulster Unionist MP (and former Conservative Health Minister) Enoch Powell. In the coded communications of his Party, the dead man had been known as Ernest. But he was born Cornelius Cardew, in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, in 1936, and he was one of the most fascinating composers of the 20th century. Michael Nyman had first spoken of musical ‘minimalism’ in a review of one of his works; Brian Eno was a fan. So was Robert Wyatt, who called…