1. Getty’s Virtual Library, for readers who prefer shelves to summaries
The Getty Virtual Library is one of the cleaner acts of civilisational generosity still functioning online: books in art, photography, archaeology, architecture, conservation, and the humanities, available without paywall melodrama. This is not a feed. It is a stack. The useful habit is to enter without a narrow task and let one title lead to another until the afternoon improves.
2. WFMU’s playlists and archives, where radio still behaves like radio
WFMU Playlists & Archives offers live streams, show archives, live music, interviews, playlist reports, and a very good Random Archive Generator. In other words: a reminder that the internet does not have to sound like platform paste. Good radio still arrives with temperament, accident, and the possibility of hearing something no one has focus-grouped into submission.
3. The Great 78 Project, or how to let old shellac scratch its way back into the room
The Internet Archive’s 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings collection is a proper vault of early recorded sound: shellac records, cylinder recordings, dance bands, comic songs, opera fragments, sentimental oddities, the lot. It is not merely nostalgic. It is corrective. A culture that believes history begins at the edge of its own streaming interface deserves a little mechanical abrasion.
Amsterdam: three decent excuses to leave the house
Tonight at Perdu, Lines that run from each organ to the heart brings Martín Zícari and Danielle Vorthuys into the same room, with readings and performance moving through estrangement, disobedience, memory, breath, corsetry, and queer orientation across Spanish, English, and French. Precisely the kind of smaller, riskier evening larger institutions are usually too frightened to stage.
Also tonight at Splendor, Renske Vrolijk’s True Love Song Cycle sets the rhetoric of sexual power and Christian nationalism to music of deceptive lightness, paired with Elisabeth Kuyper’s Sechs Lieder. A lieder evening with teeth. Rare enough.
And if you want the cinema to bite back a little, LAB111 has Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom in a 4K restoration on Saturday morning, plus Tarantino’s rarely screened Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair across the weekend. The former is the better medicine; the latter is the better excess. Choose according to your sins.
Enough. Read one serious book online, let one old recording hiss back to life, and go stand in a room where something uncertain might still happen.