News from Elsewhere

It seems unfair that this deserving Indiegogo campaign didn’t meet it’s target; I can’t be alone in hoping they revisit the possibility of getting this important Jazz-age cache of photographs out into the world (which is not to diminish its value as the hugely under-noted moment in San Francisco history that it also is). Smart publishers take note.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund has been instrumental in keeping such uniquely British artifacts as the Flying Scotsman steam locomotive, William Wordsworth’s cottage, and the poet Siegfried Sassoon’s archive not only preserved but in the UK. Last week, they saved Charles Dickens’ desk for the nation.

In stark contrast, France loses out to New Jersey for this.

Derrida’s library in Paris | photo © Andrew Bush, 2001

Postcards from Picasso.

The filmmaker Jem Cohen, best known to many for Instrument, a documentary about the band Fugazi, has a new film and is the subject of a nice profile in the Guardian by Sukhdev Sandhu. 

There’s a lot of talk these days about interdisciplinarity and cross-pollination in the arts, but on the approach of the 100-year anniversary of the Cabaret Voltaire, this essay is a good reminder that Dada got there first.

Speaking of cross-pollination: music composition and income inequality: a sociological, moving musical diagram that you can compose yourself (especially if you know the NYC subway system). How long till we have London, San Francisco, Beijing, Mumbai, and Washington D.C. versions of this?

—Eugenia Bell

Homepage image: Celebrating a record release in the Fillmore Diner, San Francsico, 1950s | photo by Steve Jackson Jr. Part of the “Harlem of the West” project.