Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 9

Rovings

may 2024 edition.Mary Tuttle, Metronome Painting, 2024.SoundsWadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers, Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and GardensJay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big SurKacey Lee Musgraves, Deeper WellKaia Kater, Strange MedicineCarols Niño & Friends, PlacentaMilton Nascimento & Esperanza Spalding, Milton + esperanzaPaul Cronin on Columbia 1968, Pure Non Fiction with Thom Powers, 7 May 2024The Limelighters, “Generic Up-Tempo Folk Song”WordsAdam Fleming, “Bad Dad Jokes: On Lucas Mann’s Attachments,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 May 2024Jeff Sommer, “The Perils of the Fed’s Vast Bond Holdings,” New York Times, 3 May 2024Julia Anguin, “Press Pause on the Silicon Valley Hype Machine,” New York Times, 15 May 2025Thomas Zimmer, “America’s Elites Fear the Ghost of 1968,” Democracy Americana, 3 May 2024David Dayen, “The Many Faces of Campus Activism,” American Prospect, 2 May 2024Henri de Corinth, “But What Is Ecstasy: Akio Jissoji’s The Buddhist Trilogy,” MUBI Notebook, 14 February 2020Dan Kois, Nitish Pahwa, and Luke Winkie, “The Oral History of Pitchfork, From the Careers It Made to the Bands It Killed,” Slate, 19 March 2024Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond,” American Affairs Journal, 20 November 2017Vicky Osterweil, “Image Without Metaphor.” All Cats Are Beautiful, 17 March 2024Carlos Fraenkel, “Was Spinoza’s Enlightenment so Radical after All?” Times Literary Supplement Blog, 4 May 2024Howard Brick, “Nelson Lichtenstein’s Essential Contributions to Understanding Class, Labor, Capitalism, and Democracy in the United States,” Labor 20, 4 (December 2023): 24–41Marcus J. Moore, “Kahil El’Zabar, Spiritual Jazz’s Dapper Bandleader, Keeps Pushing Ahead: At 70, he is releasing his 18th album with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble to celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary and his role in the music’s lineage,” New York Times, 5 March 2024Eiko Otake, “Dancing with and for the Dead: Site as Place,” Brooklyn Rail, May 2024 Sam Adler-Bell, “Between Victory and Defeat: How Can the Left Escape Burnout,” The Nation, 6 May 2024David Balkin, “Seeing the University More Clearly,” Balkinization, 6 May 2024 Anahid Nersessian, “Under the Jumbotron,” London Review of Books Blog, 6 May 2024 Pankaj Mishra, “The Shoah after Gaza,” London Review of Books, 21 March 2024Saree Makdisi, “For Whom Is Campus to Be Safe?,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 May 2024Nicolas Langlitz, “How Diversity Became the Master Concept of Our Age,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 May 2024Christopher Benfey, “Buildings Come to Life,” New York Review of Books, 23 February 2023Edward Luttwak, “Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future,” London Review of Books, 7 April 1994Celeste Marcus, “Our Liberalism,” Liberties, April 2024Benjamin Kunkel with Belinda Cooper, “Extravagances of Neoliberalism,” The Baffler, 13 May 2024Elias Rodriques, “Chronicles of Freedom: The Radical Histories of Nell Irvin Painter,” The Nation, 7 May 2024Dante A. Ciampaglia, “Ken Loach’s Cinema of Solidarity,” Brooklyn Rail, May 2024Nell Breyer and Emily Coates, “Dancing Inside and Outside the Box: Nell Breyer and Emily Coates continue their debate, considering recent live and digital dance productions,” Brooklyn Rail, May 2024Barbara Taylor, “E. P. Thompson and the ‘Woman Problem’,” History Workshop, 14 May 2024Eric Blanc, “Worker-to-Worker Unionism: A Model for Labor to Scale Up,” Jacobin, 24 March 2024 John Fordham, “Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers review – an elegiac homage to New York’s green lung,” The Guardian, 10 May 2024 Robert Kuttner, “Trendy Nonsense About Gen Z,” The American Prospect, 14 May 2024Stephen Winick, “Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus: Camille Moreddu on French American Traditions,” Folklife Today, 10 August 2022 Douglas D. Peach, “Botkin Folklife Lectures Plus: Dr. Melissa Cooper, Scholar of Gullah Geechee Cultural History,” Folklife Today, 13 May 2024James Brooke-Smith, Accelerate!: A History of the 1990sRuth Milkman, Deepak Bhargava, and Penny Lewis, eds., Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive FutureJordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives MatterAndrew Rice, The Year That Broke America: An Immigration Crisis, a Terrorist Conspiracy, the Summer of Survivor, a Ridiculous Fake Billionaire, a Fight for Florida, and the 537 Votes That Changed EverythingAbu El-Haj, Nadia. Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 AmericaJeff Madrick, Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present“Walls”Martha Tuttle, Touch / Stone @ Peter Blum GalleryJohn Chamberlain: The Tighter They’re Wound, the Harder They Unravel @ Aspen Art Museum Steve McQueen @ DIA BeaconLucy Puls, Here Everywhere: Selected Works: 1989–2003 @ Nicelle Beauchene GallerySarah Friedland, Social Guidance @ Visual Studies WorkshopCanon: Thomas Blair, Kunning Huang, and Waseem Nafisi @ Kapp Kapp GalleryJoy Curtis, Night Hike and Ocean Grandma @ Klaus von Nichtssagend GalleryNari Ward, Ground Break @ Pirelli HangarBicoccaPaul Pagk, Recent Works on Paper @ Miguel Abreu GalleryTemporary Arrangements @ Yancey Richardson GalleryGregory King, Strange Terrain @ Keystone GalleryJessica Jackson Hutchins: Wrecked and Righteous @ Frye Art Museum“Stages”Ella Baker for the 21st Century: Black Women and the Black Radical Tradition @ Barnard Center for Research on Women, 1 December 2023Douglas Coupland & William Gibson @ Key West Literary Seminar, 2 February 2012History Behind the Headlines: Approaches to Teaching Israel–Palestine @ American Historical Association, 12 December 2023Belle & Sebastian, “The Boy with the Arab Strap” @ Salt Shed, Chicago, 4 May 2024Gary Snyder @ Alta Journal California Book Club, 16 May 2024In Conversation: Nicole Eustace and Ned Blackhawk @ Humanities New York (HNY) at CUNY Grad Center, 11 April 2024Yvonne Rainer: Work, 1999-2022 @ Performa, 1 May 2024Marta Minujín, Payment of the Argentine Foreign Debt to Andy Warhol with Corn, The Latin American Gold @ Americas Society, 21 May 202450 Years of Combahee @ Black Women Radicals, 22 May 2024DoYeon Kim: Sun Shower @ Roulette, 15 May 2024Hamlet @ Public Theater/Delacorte Theater, 10 May 2024Rock-afire Explosion Oldies Medley @ ShowBiz Pizza, Blaine, MN, 1995ScreensThe DelinquentsThe Practice of the Wild: A Conversation with Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul SimonObama Presidency Oral History Project Haymarket: The Bomb, The Anarchists, The Labor Struggle A Time To Stir Cher, Beatles Medley with Tina Turner and Kate Smith, The Cher Show, 27 April 1975

2024 May 22—Developing a SUNY Historians Network

report on the first year of the suny historylab @ suny conference on instruction & technology.The SUNY Historians Network Webinar Series in action: Drs. Montgomery Hill, Maeve Kane, and Michael Leroy Oberg explore “Multiple Methods for Haudenosaunee History,” 1 May 2024.

Presentation at SUNY CIT Conference, 22 May 2024. Rough draft of notes for talk below (please pardon any typos).

A SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant (IITG) this past academic year allowed the SUNY HistoryLab to get started in trying to address two big issues we see before us as historians who research and teach in the SUNY system. The first is an issue of fragmentation and disconnection even within one discipline within SUNY’s decentralized system itself. The second is an issue of how to better connect SUNY faculty historical knowledge and student historical inquiry to public use and value in New York State as a whole. We see these two issues—one an intra-SUNY dilemma; the other a question of how to enhance SUNY’s public service role beyond campus—as intertwined. Addressing the first became a way, at a sustainable tempo, of beginning the more ambitious project of pursuing the second.

First, when it comes to the field of historical inquiry, how might we build a more robust community of scholarship across the very decentralized SUNY system? There is value to decentralization in a state as diverse and complicated as New York, but also challenges. We have all kinds of important historical research and teaching going on not only at research centers, but also at comprehensive campuses, community colleges, and other institutions within SUNY, not only in history departments but across many fields, yet there are few effective vehicles for bringing SUNY historians together, to share and test out work, to explore potential cross campus projects or teaching possibilities or other ideas of interest. To be sure, there has been a lot of emphasis on interdisciplinary work—conversations across the disciplines, and the like. These are important. These are good. These are necessary. But what about disciplinary work that then becomes a seedbed, a launching pad, a spring board (use the metaphor you wish to use) for interdisciplinary exploration. How might we address the study of the past in particular more robustly within SUNY?

Second, how might we better share the knowledge of SUNY historical research, teaching, and scholarship with citizens of New York State, which is to say how do we better deliver the value of SUNY to the public, and how do we help to emphasize the importance of historical knowledge for public use in a country that faces enormous civic issues and problems of our very democratic existence as a polity currently? In people’s particular lives, this can become a question of activism, but as an institution, as public servants, what can we contribute as historians to stabilizing and sustaining healthy civic engagement and life so that effective change or reform can take place within an infrastructure of carework and maintenance that persists and even, maybe, thrives? After all, as SUNY employees we are public servants. Yet when it comes to history, we again have only a few scattershot (but important nonetheless) modes of bringing SUNY expertise in historical inquiry to the broader public of the state. How might we disseminate new historical knowledge, but more crucially how might we contribute to, maintain, and expand communities of historical exploration and understanding together with other experts (teachers, librarians, municipal historians, museum professionals, knowledge keepers, and everyday people curious about the past and why it matters to the present and the future)?

Within SUNY, and beyond it, the SUNY HistoryLab is an experiment that seeks to model not only for history, but also for other disciplines better ways of connecting campuses to each other and, from there, connecting SUNY to the citizens of New York State. To do so, it insists on one important additional idea: rather than pitting research against teaching, we start with the value of faculty research for teaching. Generating new historical knowledge through empirical research of all sorts, engaging in historiographical debate and dialogue, and linking that to our teaching is essential to what we do. It forms the very core of the historical enterprise. Teaching needs research. Research needs teaching. They go together to form a scholarly ecosystem. How might we maintain this endeavor more successfully, particularly when there are enormous pressures, as much political as demographic, sometimes in bad faith and cynical as well as trying to be realistic, that seek to dismantle what universities do when it comes to historical inquiry and understanding.

OK, I’m getting a bit grandiose and a soapbox is suddenly appearing below the lecturn. Apologies. Back to basics. To address the big, troubling issues of preserving, maybe even enhancing and expanding, historical inquiry in New York State as SUNY faculty and staff, we had to start small, with our own disconnections from each other.

This year, with the support of our IITG, we created a basic website for the SUNY HistoryLab (hosted on the SUNY Brockport Department of History’s Reclaim webhosting platform and developed using WordPress) and we began conversations with faculty at our home institution of SUNY Brockport, outside Rochester, as well as with historians on other campuses, institutions such as the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Public History, the SUNY Albany Institute for History and Public Engagement, and the SUNY Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History, the Office of State History at the New York State Museum (run by the wonderful Devin Lander), and the Association for Public Historians of New York State, among others. The landscape of public historical work in NYS is complex, multifaceted, with many disparate grassroots activities going on, but not always a lot of SUNY involvement. That’s ok. The goal is not to replace anything, but rather to find ways to fit in, connect, enhance, and link. There is much more fascinating work to be done to connect SUNY historical knowledge to the state beyond the work we do with students in SUNY classrooms themselves, which is already crucial, important, and full of possibilities for more cross-campus interaction. The bigger issues—problem number two that I mentioned at the start of this presentation—will take investments and leadership from the central SUNY administration to move forward in any substantive way, but we can continue to add to the wonderful range of grassroots activities in the meantime.

Could we, for instance one day effectively offer SUNY research and teaching and scholarship to secondary school teachers for use in the classroom? Maybe SUNY students could acquire digital curation skills and professional internship experience by helping to package SUNY faculty research for use in the New York State high school social studies classroom? Could we better connect the mandated municipal historian program in New York State to SUNY faculty scholarship? How might SUNY students learn new skills and contribute to their communities through more robust interaction between SUNY campuses and local municipal historians (another good reason to maintain our campuses all across the state around the goal of enhancing local community strength)? What other ways might a HistoryLab stitch the investment the state makes in SUNY faculty research, teaching, and scholarship into the very fabric of SUNY’s public value? It’s not about research versus teaching or faculty and students on campus versus history out beyond campus. It’s about the tricky, slow, funky work of developing infrastructure that provides and sustains flexible support for historical inquiry across different people and places and institutions.

Oops, I’m getting grandiose again. Before we could get there with such big ambitions in terms of issue number two—the public value of SUNY for historical inquiry and awareness in the state as a whole—we had to attend first to issue number one—the lack of connection within the very decentralized system of SUNY campuses themselves. We quickly realized that the HistoryLab needed to facilitate more interaction among SUNY historical scholars. From there we can begin to bring in our own SUNY students. And from there we can begin to work with other people and institutions in the state.

We decided that bringing SUNY historians together might best work by focusing on faculty research and scholarship, with that creating a groundwork for more discussions of pedagogy and other issues. Start with what faculty care about, what they are trained in, what they sometimes feel they never have enough time to pursue. Build from there.

We settled on the development of a pilot webinar series and we found an amazing, extraordinarily competent, capable partner in the SUNY Center for Professional Development. Former CPD member Chris Price, current members Michaela Rehm, Lynn-Ann McCoy Hinds, and Nancy Motondo, not to mention ace IITG coordinator, dean, and SUNY strategist Lisa Stephens, helped us develop a pilot series in US history modeled after the Washington History Seminar coordinated by the Wilson Center and American Historical Association as well as the Newberry Library Scholarly Seminars. You can visit the website we created or just search “SUNY Historians Network” online to keep track of the pilot series, join the mailing list, and even watch the playlist of archived videos. Piloting the webinars allowed us to figure out how we might begin, step by step, presentation by presentation, webinar by webinar, scholar by scholar, campus by campus, to create a SUNY-wide community of historical inquiry that showcases faculty research and allows for exchange and dialogue.

Next year, the SUNY Historians Network will expand to include additional historical subfields through curation by history faculty at SUNY Brockport and we hope, even without IITG funding but with continued partnership with CPD, to carry the work of the webinar series forward. Our thought is that by fostering occasional but regular connection through webinars, we can begin to set the place for further projects and events and partnerships. Our mailing list and the creation, next year, of a listserv, will allow others to find their way to collaborations across the system. With administrative support, the possibility of cross-campus courses and public history projects begins to emerge on the horizon.

We might also begin to organize roundtables for historical perspective on current issues of ongoing concern when it comes to civic engagement in the system or the state, perhaps bringing the longer deep breath of historicla inquiry to bear on the breakdown of civic discourse and community engagement we are witnessing in American society currently. How might we model a different tempo, a different space, a different mode of taking on all the suffering and survival, all the traumas and triumphs, all that history can teach us about the human past and its bearings on the human present and future? Can we try to bring a different register of public dialogue, learning, and engagement to issues of contemporary rancor? Maybe not, but it’s worth trying.

So too, we hope to bring more student involvement to the webinar series and SUNY HistoryLab’s larger goals. This year, we received an NEH Humanities Connections Grant for faculty in SUNY Brockport’s History Department to work with our media production faculty in the Department of Journalism, Broadcasting, and Public Relations (Ginny Orzel and Warren “Koz” Kozireski) on implementing “digital historytelling” pedagogy into courses (video storytelling, audio podcasts, geomapping, 3D artifact modeling, virtual reality, basic website curation). By enabling faculty to bring together the professional skills development of both historical inquiry and digital storytelling in their teaching, we think we can help students make their way in the world. Coming out of these classroom experiences, students can then pursue public history internships at the SUNY HistoryLab to begin to assist with our work in fostering more connections among SUNY campuses and piloting ways of digitally curating faculty research, teaching, and scholarship for use by secondary school teachers, librarians, and municipal historians in the state. An emphasis on the sustained work of faculty on their research and teaching connects to larger efforts to help students at SUNY and citizens beyond SUNY bring history to bear on leading more fulfilling, engaged, successful lives as both citizens and in their careers—most of all as people. All kinds of possibilities might emerge from the simple but steady work of sustaining the webinar series as a start at the SUNY HistoryLab.

Maybe. To get there will require more commitment from SUNY’s central administration (yes, I’m going to say it: perhaps a more capacious, creative way of thinking beyond just the latest AI tech craze to the ongoing public value of historical inquiry, humanities scholarship, foreign languages, social sciences, and basic faculty research in all fields?). In the meantime, there are some resources and wonderful first steps: a continued partnership with CPD and more outreach to other institutions in the state, but most of all more work building a community of scholarship around cross-campus historical inquiry within SUNY—and then beyond it. The webinar has become a promising starting point for this work of connection: faculty research to teaching and public use when it comes to historical inquiry; bridges across our decentralized campuses; and more connection between what SUNY does and the public value of our work for both the students who pay tuition and the citizens whose taxes pay our salaries. Continuing forward, we hope to assert the centrality of historical inquiry to the larger public purpose of what SUNY does and, so too, we hope our approach can serve as a model not just for historical inquiry, but for parallel work in other disciplines and fields.

Body Projections

emily coates is “unmoved by a pixel.”Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019. Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. Reconstructed for Performa 19 by Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates.

To me choreography emanates from the body, and the strongest choreographic imagination, however far afield it may roam, retains a core understanding of our humanness, projected outward into new interfaces and scales. Choreography’s superpower is to connect the human and nonhuman, including that which we create—without leaving our humanity behind. The man who walked down the side of a building in Brown’s piece was a human. I am still very wedded to the embodied expression and live presence of humans. I am unmoved by a pixel.

— Emily Coates, “Dancing Inside and Outside the Box,” Brooklyn Rail, May 2024

The Human & the Nonhuman

emily coates on choreography.Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019. Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. Reconstructed for Performa 19 by Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates.

To me choreography emanates from the body, and the strongest choreographic imagination, however far afield it may roam, retains a core understanding of our humanness, projected outward into new interfaces and scales. Choreography’s superpower is to connect the human and nonhuman, including that which we create—without leaving our humanity behind. The man who walked down the side of a building in Brown’s piece was a human. I am still very wedded to the embodied expression and live presence of humans. I am unmoved by a pixel.

— Emily Coates, “Dancing Inside and Outside the Box,” Brooklyn Rail, May 2024

Rovings

april 2024 edition.Charles E. Burchfield, Untitled (Haloed Moon), ca. 1916.SoundsMerve Emre, The Critic and Her Publics“There is no ending to our quest”: Sonny Rollins in a rare conversation with David Sanborn (Part 1),” As We Speak with David Sanborn, 24 October 2023 David Byrne Presents Nigeria Theater Criticism in the 21st Century with Christine Toy Johnson, Leah Nanako Winkler, Jose Solís, and Theresa Rebeck, The Dramatist PodcastThe Shoah After Gaza, LRB Podcast, 20 March 2024Neil Young, Before and AfterNeil Young and Crazy Horse, Fu—kin’ UpMoney Gone, BBC SoundsWordsWalter Johnson, “Living Inside a Psyop,” n+1, 10 January 2024Bruce Robbins, “At Columbia,” LRB Blog, 22 April 2024Robert Reich, “Protesting against slaughter—as students in the US are doing—isn’t antisemitism,” The Guardian, 23 April 2024Thomas Zimmer, “Student Revolt and the Curtailing of Critical Speech” Democracy Americana, 27 April 2024Phillip Maciak, “How Curb Your Enthusiasm Went Beyond Cringe,” New Republic, 3 April 2024Wesley Morris, “Larry David’s Rule Book for How (Not) to Live in Society,” New York Times, 5 April 2024Daniel Bessner, “The Last Man: Larry David and the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm,” The Nation, 8 April 2024Will Glovinsky, “Is the World Enough?,” Public Books, 28 March 2024David Eaves, Mariana Mazzucato and Beatriz Vasconcellos, “Digital public infrastructure and public value: What is ‘public’ about DPI?,” UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose Working Paper Series: IIPP WP 2024-05Jasmine Erdener, “Prefigurative Politics at Bread and Puppet Theater.” Cultural Politics 20, 1 (March 2024): 92–111William Davies, “Antimarket,” London Review of Books, 4 April 2024Michael Hofmann, “In Florida,” LRB Blog, 4 April 2024David C.K. Curry, “The Gutting of the Liberal Arts: At Public Universities Such as SUNY Potsdam, the Humanities Are Being Hollowed Out,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 April 2024Aurelien Mondon, “Really Existing Liberalism, the Bulwark Fantasy, and the Enabling of Reactionary, Far Right Politics,” Constellations, 11 April 2024Isolde, Brielmaier, ed. Culture as CatalystEdward Baring, “Marxism of, by, and for the People: Karl Korsch and the Problem of Worker Education,” Modern Intellectual History 21, 1 (March 2024): 133–56Lucy Sante, “Rhapsodies in Bop: A recent exhibition at the Morgan showed how thoroughly at home the poet Blaise Cendrars was among visual artists,” New York Review of Books, 2 November 2023Ben Williamson, “Edtech has an evidence problem,” Code Acts in Education, 19 April 2024Samuel P. Catlin, “The Campus Does Not Exist,” Parapraxis, April 2024Michel Chaouli, Sergio Tenenbaum and Keren Gorodeisky, “An Immeasurable Field: Kant’s three hundredth birthday,” The Point, 22 April 2024Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, “Dance Dance Revolution? Shilling utopia at the rav,” The Baffler 73, April 2024Amanda Hess, “Kathleen Hanna’s Music Says a Lot. There’s More in the Book,” New York Times, 23 April 2024Heather Penatzer, “The False Death of Imperial Order: Global Economic Governance Before Bretton Woods,” Global Intellectual History, March 2024Mark Edmundson, “For the Love of Glamour: American Aristocracy from Twain to Trump,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 14 April 2023Ian Ellison, “A Transatlantic Metamorphosis: On Brian K. Goodman’s The Nonconformists,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 April 27, 2024Kevin John Bozelka, Duck Soup, Kevin John Bozelka Blog, 24 April 2024Maya Phillips, “In a Pair of Macbeth Productions, Only One Does Right by the Lady,” New York Times, 23 April 2024Charles Dickens, Bleak HouseJohn le Carré, *The Man Who Came In From the ColdShelton Trust, Culture and Democracy: The ManifestoThomas Haigh, ed., Exploring the Early DigitalMalcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World“Walls”Total Solar Eclipse & Astral Visions: Works by Charles E. Burchfield & Alan Friedman @ Burchfield Penney Art Center SUNY Buffalo State UniversityThe Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism @ Metropolitan Museum of ArtCaitlin MacBride, Palm to Poplar: Devotional Labor @ Shaker Museum Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now @ AGO Thomas Nozkowski, Everything in the World @ Pace GalleryStorywork: The Prints of Marie Watt @ Print Center New YorkSarah Sze @ Nasher Sculpture CenterChristopher Wool, See Stop Run @ 101 Greenwich St.Cauleen Smith, Mines to Caves @ Aspen Art MuseumPicasso: Drawing from Life @ Art Institute of ChicagoRadical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan @ Art Institute of ChicagoCraft Across Continents @ Mint MuseumAlexis Hunter, 10 Seconds @ Richard Saltoun GalleryKa’a Pûera, we are walking birds @ Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice BiennaleHolly Ward and Kevin Schmidt, Lost and Found @ Markham Public ArtTom Burckhardt, Ulterior Motif @ George Adams Gallery“Stages”Rochester Community Players, The Rivals @ MUCCC, 6 April 2024Takács Quartet @ Kilbourn Hall, Eastman School of Music, 14 April 2024John William Nelson, “Why Chicago History Matters to Early American History: Indigenous Canoe Networks and the Contest for a Continent?” @ Newberry Library, 6 April 2024Constellations @ National Theatre Live, 12 September 2021ScreensLos Angeles PlaysIn Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon Pullman and the Railroad Rebellion Cousin JulesOccupied CityWidowsLost Illusions

Smartbreak

adam shatz on intellectual history & heartbreak.Richard Mortensen, Coeur Inquiet (1969/1972).

It is impossible to study intellectual history without suffering heartbreak from time to time.

—Adam Shatz

Speck of Dust

louis block on the “thingliest paintings” of thomas nozkowski.

What would it mean for a painting to be described as disclosure, a hardening of a specificity, but also a lightness? It goes back to the thing-ness of this whole thing, the perception of certain forms as having agency based on certain characteristics. The thingliest paintings are worked-over, messy surfaces that cohere into ecstatic designations that are felt, not named. No coincidence that thing, in Old English, meant meeting, assembly, matter. Nozkowski’s paintings can conflate a speck of dust with the dimple in an old smile. The optical ringing that they create, clarion also in the shoulder and wrist, is worth more than words.

— Louis Block, “Thomas Nozkowski: Everything in the World,” Brooklyn Rail, April 2024

When Folk Music Met the Computer

the surprising story of how two american folklorists, alan lomax and harry smith, used ibm punchcards and new ideas about computation to study folk music during the cold war era.Alan Lomax in front of a Cantometric coding chart and audio equipment in the archives of the Association for Cultural Equity, ca. 1978. Photographer unknown. From the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity. Harry Smith, ca. 1970. Photographer: John Palmer. Courtesy of the Harry Smith Archives.

New essay published: Michael J. Kramer, “The Global Jukebox and the Celestial Monochord: Alan Lomax and Harry Smith Compute Folk Music in Cold War America” Modern American History uses archival research to uncover the surprising ways in which Lomax and Smith used computers and ideas about computation to study folk music in the United States and the world. Linking what Ross Cole describes as the “folkloric imagination” to what we might call the Cold War “computational imagination,” Lomax and Smith each examined folk music not through conventional ethnographic or musicological modes, but rather through computational lenses of data analysis, systems theory, informatics, and cybernetics. Both sought to expand cultural democracy by doing so, carrying 1930s Great Depression-era Popular Front ideals into the postwar milieu. Digital humanities scholars before such a term existed, they also presaged dilemmas found in today’s fraught context of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the application of digital technologies to almost all aspects of human culture.

Kramer_Global-Jukebox-and-Celestial-Monochord-Modern-American-History-April-2024

Research Assistants Visit Humbead’s World

grace murphy & kristin jorgensen report on their research assistance with the “revising humbead’s revised map of the world” project @ suny brockport scholars day, 15 April 2024.

Rovings

march 2024.Jaime Lauriano, novus brasilia typus: invasão, etnocídio, democracia racial e apropriação cultural. Photo: Filipe Berndt.SoundsEd Park, Weird MenaceNTS Guide to Boleros, 13 February 2024The Gaylads, “Peculiar Man”Long Beach Opera, Complete John Cage Edition 10: Europeras 3 & 4John Cage, Complete John Cage Edition 51: Radio Happenings (1966-1967)Elvis Costello, The Boy Named If (Alive at Memphis Magnetic)William Onyeabor, “Better Change Your Mind”Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, Shine A Light: Field Recordings from the Great American RailroadVampire Weekend, “Capricorn”Time CrisisStop Making Sense with Jon WeinerWordsAndrew Cockburn, “The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem: How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future,” Harper’s, March 2024Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American CapitalismAndrea Louise Campbell, “Policy Makes Mass Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 15 (June 2012): 333-51Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conspicuous Destruction,” New York Review of Books, 19 October 2023Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, “‘Give Me All the Power’,” New York Review of Books, 19 October 2023Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup, eds., Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of CultureIan Felice, The Moon Over EdgarRichard Preston and Romaissaa Benzizoune, “A Master of Dance Was Captured in a Film That Was Little Seen for Decades. Until Now.: Louis Johnson, the choreographer of “The Wiz,” could “outdance anyone.” Watch two rarely seen performances here,” New York Times, 27 February 2024Michelle Orange, “How the Village Voice Met Its Moment,” New Yorker, 1 March 2024Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of ReaganNicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990sJudith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the SeventiesThomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic InequalityDarby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of ColorSigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”James Brooke-Smith and Jack Smyth, Accelerate!: A History of the 1990sJohn D. Abromeit, “The Critical Historicism of the Early Frankfurt School,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 6 March 2024Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of NeoliberalismDavid Scott, “The Futures Past of the Postcolonial Present,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 13 March 2024 Matthew S. Adams and John-Erik Hansson, “Mobilizing William Godwin, the ‘Father of British Anarchism’: History, Strategy, and the Intellectual Cultures of Post-War British Anarchism,” Modern Intellectual History, March 13, 2024, 1–26Chal Ravens, “Too Big to Shut Down,” London Review of Books 46, 5 (7 March 2024)Adrian Searle, “Molten magnificence: how Richard Serra’s giant steel sculptures bent time and space,” The Guardian, 27 March 2024Paul Petrovic, ed., Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and TelevisionWilliam Gibson, The PeripheralOrhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence“Walls”Jaime Lauriano, Why don’t you know about western remains? @ Nara Roesler New YorkWilliam Cordova, can’t stop, won’t stop (geometria sagrada) @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co.Roy Dowell @ Miles McEnery GalleryNancy Holt: Inside Outside @ BildmuseetDuane Linklater, mymothersside @ Frye Art MuseumJessica Jackson Hutchins, Wrecked and Righteous @ Frye Art MuseumThe Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance @ National GalleryRemedios Varo: Science Fictions @ Art Institute of ChicagoSurrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 @ The Modern Art Museum of Fort WorthAcross the Avenues: Fairfield Porter in New York @ Parrish Art MuseumSimón Vega, Tropical Space Castaways @ Parrish Art MuseumLife Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now @ AGOCarol Bove, The Machine Age @ Gagosian GstaadRaymond Saunders @ Andrew Kreps GalleryMaureen Gallace @ Gladstone GalleryMichele Abeles, Turbo @ 47 CanalRichard Mayhew, Inner Terrain @ Santa Cruz Museum of Art & HistoryGabriel Orozco @ KurimanzuttoThe Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 @ Philadelphia Museum of ArtOnly the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s @ Guggenheim MuseumHallyu! The Korean Wave @ Museum of Fine Arts BostonGordon Park, Born Black @ Jack Shainman GalleryAmir Zaki, Nothing to Say @ Diane Rosenstein GalleryKay WalkingStick / Hudson River School @ New-York Historical SocietyWomen’s Work @ New-York Historical Society“Turn Every Page”: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive @ New-York Historical SocietyLucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Sonando el Suelo / Sounding the Ground @ SVA Flatiron Project SpaceCauleen Smith, The Wanda Coleman Songbook @ 52 Walker“Stages”On college & independent radio with Robin James & Katherine Rye Jewell @ Popular Music Books In Progress, 12 December 2023Dr. Wanda Hendricks, Dr. Deborah Gray White, and Dr. Glenda Gilmore, The Life of Madie Hall Xuma Virtual Book Launch, 26 October 2023Barbara Fields, “Is Race Identity?” @ Illinois State University, 28 February 2024Revisiting the Global 1960s @ Sharjah Art Foundation, 13 March 2023Małgorzata Fidelism, Imagining the World: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland, 1954-1974 @ Polonium WebinarsPankaj Mishra, The Shoah after Gaza @ St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell, London, 28 February 2024ScreensShōgunTokyo Vice Season 02Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12ArchangelDo the Right ThingHannah and her Sisters Fantastic Man: A Film About William Onyeabor Modern Philosophy: Men of Ideas with Bryan Magee New York Then and Now: A Video by Steven Siegel Dream City: A Video by Steven Siegel