!['Victorian Smoker' [Undated collage by Norman O. Mustill]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/victorian-smoker-enh-200x200.jpg)
poème d’occasion It was a small price to pay for a poem, or maybe more than one— only $7.50 at 50% off. It wasn’t a book of poems but a dream palace— not even a palace but a pocketable retreat in the woods on sale at year’s end. So good riddance to 2018, annus horribilis. […]
When Cinephiles Celebrate Reading
Milestone Films celebrates their cinephile friends and family EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Reality as a Metaphysical Construct
It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. To be clear, Jürgen Ploog is an author who does not write for everyone. The “story” he tells in Flesh Film has the pulpy tone of science fiction, a narrator who sounds like a globe-trotting private […]
Tales of Doomsday Eros
Supervert is — as he writes— “the assumed name of a writer using the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to explore novel sexual pathologies.” His latest book, the fifth in a series of six he has planned, is Apocalypse Burlesque: Tales of Doomsday Eros. You could easily call his books transgressive. Consider the titles: Extraterrestrial Sex […]
2018: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan
!['American Porn' by Heathcote Williams [Thin Man Press, 2017]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/American-Porn-by-Heathcote-Williams-Thin-Man-Press-2017400-200x200.jpg)
To mark the moment, a Straight Up tradition continues. From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands … thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . […]
Nuttall’s ‘Bomb Culture’ Is Back
When I first read Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, I saw the title two ways — descriptive and prescriptive — “bomb culture” (the kind that made nuclear annihilation possible) and “bomb the culture” (a call for revolution). A half-century later I still see it that way. Far from being bound by its time, Nuttall’s 1968 investigation […]
Missing from the Warhol Retrospective
The historic Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum is “the biggest in almost 30 years.” And it is being swooned over with raves like Peter Schjeldahl’s in the current New Yorker, or as the headline puts it on an Artsy review by Darren Jones, You May Think You Know Warhol–but His Whitney Retrospective Holds Surprises. […]
‘Steps Toward the Invisible’
Take a look at Edward O’Donnelly’s stunningly beautiful short film made with and about the poet Malcolm Ritchie on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Click the image for a video of the film.
Dick Higgins’ Writings Are Back
A new book by Dick Higgins? Posthumous, of course. He died 20 years ago, unexpectedly, his life cut short by a heart attack at age 6o. It was a terrible shock to all of us who knew him. The book — Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins — is […]
An Evolution of ‘Other Means’
!['Immense Stone' [ca. mid-1960s]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Gary-Lee-Nova-IMMENSE-STONE-365-200x200.jpg)
Speaking of drawing by other means, Gary Lee-Nova messages that “after first encountering things like Fuzz Against Junk,” he discovered Max Ernst’s collage novels, and in that neo-Victorian mode created his own collages during the mid- to late-1960s. Among his “very first” was “Immense Stone” (below). Another was “Detecting the Forgery” (left), which was later […]
Homage to Félicien Rops
“The evil which the curiosity about the past uncovers marches in accelerating pursuit of the horrors lurking in the present . . . “ That comment by Cyril Connolly refers to a very different work from these two studies sketched by Gerard Bellaart for one of his paintings. But I can’t help thinking it applies […]
Drawing by Other Means
Ladies and Gentleman — On the left, we have a collage by Max Ernst from Une semaine de bonté, a surrealist graphic novel published in 1934. Ernst reportedly made the entire book of collages in three weeks. A few of his sources were identified as illustrations from an 1883 novel by Jules Mary, Les damnées […]
‘A Whole New Order of Hidden’
A few excerpts from “Wooden Ships” by Malcolm Mc Neill that struck my indefatiguable staff of thousands, courtesy of IT: International Times, the Newspaper of Resistance: “The disclosure has begun of what was hidden from the first creation of the world,” wrote Peter Martyr when Columbus got back from his voyages. The creation of the […]
Are Pictures Worth More Than Words?
They are at The New York Times, it seems. My tut-tutting staff has noticed they have been for some time. Yesterday the print edition provided the most recent example in which the ratio of photo to text, for a book feature no less, is ridiculous. The subject of the article, having written an evocative novel, […]
Weapons of Choice: Mustill’s MESSKIT
“Mess kit” is defined as “a portable set of usually metal cooking and eating utensils, used especially by soldiers and campers.” For Norman O. Mustill, America’s “messkit” consisted of silent weapons, play money, dancing the two-step, and industry in art. During the Vietnam War, when MESSKIT was published, that meant flamethrowers, napalm, Agent Orange, billions […]
#MeToo: ‘The No Holes Bard’
A bit of bawdy verse-and-drawing by Heathcote Williams. With thanks to Jay Jeff Jones, who sent it along. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
She Knows the Nuances of No
Hanne Lippard updates Molly Bloom. Audio kicks in at 1:23 on the video track. Wait for it. Some on the staff here call it a #MeToo moment before its time. Maybe. But whatever it is, prick up your ears. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit