Lucrecia Dalt (@lucreciadalt.bsky.social) is coming to Baltimore to release her new album, A Danger to Ourselves (2025). At Hopkins, Dalt will join me for a conversation & listening session of tracks directly from her vinyl records. Oct. 29, 2025, 12:00 PM, at the Levering Arellano Theater.

Today at noon in Gilman 479, Johns Hopkins hosts an open class by art historian Tatiana Flores (UVA) on Mexican avant-gardes, examining the intersections of art and literature in Maples Arce’s landmark manifesto "Actual No. 1" (1921)—open to all.

Ceci n'est pas une livre

Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune Venice Film Festival, 1961 bit.ly/k41Nye

Resonance (UC Press) is looking for humanities research across the following topics: Sound in Political Crisis, Sound and Social Justice, Experiments in Sound, Sound Archives and Preservation, and we're convening a permanent series that'll examine "Film and Cinema Sound" in 2026. Please circulate!

Elis Regina gostava de cozinhar e mandava bem nas panelas, inclusive gostava de fazer feira e era rigorosa nas escolhas. Quando chamava os amigos pra jantar na sua casa e ganhava elogios, respondia: -- É que você ainda não me viu cantando!

The only conceivable GG biopic ever: youtu.be/aZU4qJsujjo?...

Publishers, please take note that at least one person just bought three books SOLELY based on the viscerally appealing covers designed by a human being.

Like an artist’s book, artists’ records are fascinating objects. In my latest article, I examine the long trajectory of the renowned Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles with vinyl records. The article is available as open access and can be downloaded for free. doi.org/10.1080/1356...

My new article, "Disculpture: Cildo Meireles’s Vinyl Records as Sculptural Objects," has just been published in the latest issue of the JLACS (Vol. 34, No. 2)—and the PDF is available as open access for free download. doi.org/10.1080/1356...

Mujica entendeu que fact-checking não nos salvará: "Minha geração, racionalista com uma visão programática da história, não compreendeu que os humanos muitas vezes decidem com a intuição e então sua consciência constrói argumentos para justificar as suas decisões." jacobin.com.br/2025/05/minh...

Elis Regina and Tom Jobim: two giants in one record. The 16mm footage is a lasting gift. Pure joy, music as high art. Now free to watch. Don’t miss it. youtu.be/469gcz-oyBA?...

Opportunity for MA and PhD students in the US—deadline on May 16. islaa.org/updates/rese...

Just finished this excellent book on the cultural backgrounds to ‘The Waste Land’ and its relationship to the work of Eliot’s contemporaries, with a refreshing emphasis on women modernists. A good book to read alongside Matthew Hollis’s ‘The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem’ (2022).

O grande (e grande amigo) Ailton Krenak levando a palavra da floresta para a Neuropa ouvir.

True. I've been off Spotify for three months now, and my music-listening habits are doing great—better now, actually. Opting out looked impossible at first, but let me tell you this: it is not only possible, it is liberating and transformative. Just do it! open.substack.com/pub/littledo...

Movie theaters are struggling because people no longer assemble in front of the big screen. I went to Baltimore's coolest place for “One to One: John & Yoko” just to find an empty room. The film is magnificent, inspiring, galvanizing; but people were “absolutely elsewhere.” youtu.be/Oiw_WJeiv4Q?...

Billie Holiday 110 today and we're making our annual April 7 late at night pilgrimage to Billie’s Alley here in Baltimore—which is literally 3 blocks from home. Gonna drop a few of her tunes out there with a portable speaker. Lady Day's day! www.udiscovermusic.com/news/billie-...

My daily memento/mantra—to be recited every morning for the foreseeable future: "The world changes according to the place we place our attention. This process is additive and energetic." John Cage

Back from spring break here at the office—spent the afternoon with my old copy of Sterne’s groundbreaking masterpiece, the book a friend gave me when I was still a grad student at Duke and that changed my life.

Here's a more fulsome post from the Press. So sad. Farewell to Jonathan Sterne dukeupress.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/f...

Profoundly sad with such untimely loss. Sterne has changed the way we listen to the world. Audible past, present, and future! Rest in power!

Baltimore's High Zero experimental music festival will throw a fundraising event this Wednesday at Fadensonnen! See you there! www.redroom.org/high-zero-ni...

Adrien Brody took home the award for Best AI-Assisted Overacting and didn’t even bother to thank the software Respeecher that made him “sound authentic” in Hungarian. No need to learn anything when you can just have the editor, a native speaker, feed his own voice into an AI and patch over your act.

Bernie Krause is such a wonderful person. I am glad his lifelong pursuit of listening to nature keeps drawing the attention of other creators. He needs to be heard. An excellent short film about him is just out. youtu.be/w-0IzU1EDdk?...

Excited about Natalia Lafourcade's vision for her new tour, centered around the concept of 'Cancionera'—sus canciones, una silla, guitarra y voz. NL: “Mi deseo es compartir la intimidad que vivo con mis canciones en mi habitación. En mi casa, en mi universo personal o mi propia imaginación.” 🫶

Students & faculty from BU Dept of Romance Studies have collaborated on the first-ever exhibition on the archive of poet Federico García Lorca. The exhibition Lorca y el archivo: Memoria en movimiento is the largest ever organized by the Centro Federico García Lorca. www.bu.edu/rs/2025/01/2...

SOUND SCENE 2025: CONNECTED MAY 31, 2025 | Hirshhorn, Washington DC hirshhorn.si.edu/event/sound-...

Antonio Dias, "The Occupied Country," 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 130 x 195 cm.

The women in TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land [published 2022] — www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Noise, of course… www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/r...

Channeling Lola Flores vibes tonight for everyone. Happy New Year!

Another accidental Adorno find today. The apocryphal single copy of “Music in Radio,” written for the Princeton Radio Research Project in 1938, hidden in an untitled black binder. This analysis, among other disagreements with quantitative research, infamously got Adorno expelled from the project.

Gracias, Beatriz Sarlo (1942-2024), por tanto. Nos hiciste mejores lectores y nos enseñaste a mirar el mundo con más lucidez y estilo. ¡Buen viaje, gran maestra!

I just got an email from Ticketmaster saying that Joaquin Sabina had to cancel his concert in Washington, DC. There's no explanation, and I haven’t seen anything in the news yet. Does anyone know what’s going on? I hope the poet is okay.

“When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me” — Andy Warhol

Hobsbawm writing about the Belle Époque and 1914: ‘As Europe moved in growing material comfort towards its catastrophe, we observe the curious phenomenon of a bourgeoisie, its youth and its intellectuals, which plunged willingly, even enthusiastically into the abyss.’

la rebelión consiste en mirar una rosa hasta pulverizarse los ojos — Alejandra Pizarnik

Conociendo a Jacqueline Nova – Incluye el testimonio de Ana María Romano, quien realizó la curaduría e investigación del doble LP "Creación de la tierra - Ecos palpitantes de Jacqueline Nova (1964-1974)", dedicado a la gran compositora colombiana. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjLV...

In my popular music class, it’s basically Spotify creatures vs Apple Music diehards. Nobody’s at YouTube Music. And then there’s the old-school P2P me, the lost-gen 2.0, assigning “rare” MP3 files and missing in silence the endless nights of trading the good stuff on Napster/Soulseek. Anything goes.

The last time I climbed a tree using a dumb smartphone in place of a camera, I ended up falling into a creepy river swamp in the Amazonian rainforest. Nothing but respect for the Portapak generation! 🫶

The earliest known ‘country’ recording has been found. The singer? A Black man. www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

Lucrecia Martel: “Cuando en un país la realidad se está negando, la lengua sufre mucho”.

R. Piglia: "hay que construir un complot contra el complot, para resistir al complot".

Entrevistador: ¿Usted es chileno, español o mexicano? Roberto Bolaño: Soy latinoamericano.

Is it just me, or do you also feel that most of our professional associations and journals are taking too long to establish accounts on alternative platforms like Bluesky? 🤔

Of all things, I would say Sylvia Plath's Tarot de Marseille deck. It went up for sale in 2021, with an initial estimate of 4,000 to 6,000 GBP at Sotheby's auction, but ultimately sold for 151,200 GBP. www.sothebys.com/en/buy/aucti...

"Y me ofrezco a ser devorado por los campesinos españoles" [Verso antropófago, escrito y luego echado, del primer borrador del poema 'Oficina y denuncia' de Federico García Lorca en su Poeta en Nueva York.]

The Stern Center @johnshopkins.bsky.social has a new website! Check it out here: sterncenter.library.jhu.edu

Thrilled to see this online: Dionysus in 69—Brian De Palma's doc showing The Performance Group's seminal adaptation of The Bacchae. A remarkable document on Richard Schechner's 'environmental theater' theories & the exciting 1960s demolition of the 4th wall. sites.dlib.nyu.edu/hidvl/mcvdncsq