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’
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
Remembering Bukowski
The animation, directed by John Hodgson, dates to 1999. A tip of the hat to IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance, for reminding us of it. The poem is included in The Last Night of the Earth Poems, published by HarperCollins in a 2009 reprint. The first edition was published in 1992 by Black […]
50 Ways to See the Middle Ages
Our tireless staff of thousands is often asked to review all sorts of books, and from time to time one or another seems worth noting. This one, for example, by Elina Gertsman and Barbara H. Rosenwein. Since the staff knows much too little about the Middle Ages — and even less about the 50 objects […]
Remembering Emmett Williams
These are not Fluxus poems. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Hamilton & Beach, 32 Years Apart
Sweethearts. Click the images to enlarge them. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Where Haughty Celia Sits
This poem was spurred by email exchanges among Liliane Lijn, Gerard Bellaart, and myself. It takes phrases from them and from the three sources noted below. The impulse to compose it arose from this blogpost. MUSE In the sawdust heart of a puppet world, where haughty Celia ingloriously sits, her failed prophecy is buried by […]
Valedictory in a Taxi Cruising Slowly
“Here are Sinclair’s ‘Last Words,’ written in Paris long before he would have been aware of any pressing need to devise a valedictory.” — HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS, from a tribute to Sinclair Beiles, in BONE HEBREW, a collection of Beiles’s writings published in 2013, in a limited edition, by Cold Turkey Press. Let me utter my […]