William Levy, sometimes called “the Talmudic Wizard of Amsterdam,” has died at the age of 80. A prolific expatriate American writer and editor, he left the United States in 1966 and earned a reputation as one of the leading intellectual and sexual subversives in Europe. Levy was a master of literary outrageousness, an editor of The Insect Trust Gazette, International Times, publisher and editor of Suck magazine, and producer of the Wet Dreams Film Festival, as well as a poet and radio broadcaster.
‘Flesh Film’: A Book as Artist’s Fever Dream
When a book reads like an hallucination and looks as magnificent as Flesh Film, it’s an artist’s book as much as a writer’s. The designer Robert Schalinski has given the author’s text the appearance of a manuscript duplicated on an old copying machine and punctuated it with the author’s visual collages. It’s gorgeous stuff, published in English by the German publisher Moloko Print, and it’s available for the first time in the U.S. from printedmatter.org.
Variation on a ‘Clap Trap’ Theme
Personally, I prefer Brion Gysin’s versified lines: “In the beginning / was the Word— / been in You / for a toolong time /I rub out the word . . .” But unlike that one, this one was made to order.
Power Malu Shines at 2019 Ackers
The honorees at the 2019 NY Acker Awards made some terrific statements about the history of the Lower East Side and their commitment both to the community and to the arts, but a rap performance by Power Malu about the devastation in Puerto Rico, where people are still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria and from the Trumpistan government’s failure to provide proper help, was the most notable of the evening.
2019 NY Acker Awards Held at Theater for the New City
The Acker Awards, now in their sixth year, are a tribute given to members of the avant-garde arts community who have made outstanding contributions in their discipline in defiance of convention, or else served their fellow writers and artists in outstanding ways. The award’s novelist namesake, in her life and work, exemplified the risk-taking and […]
A Silent Elegy in Motion
Have a look at this collective headstone for “the 1,337 journalists killed in the line of duty since 1992.” Watch their names coalesce on screen into the image you see here. It is a silent elegy in motion that makes it pure poetry.
Cold Turkey Press: ‘Ikkyū Sojun Nine Poems’
The Rinzai Zen master Ikkyū Sojun (1394-1481) was a poet, musician, artist, and rebel. He led a life of whoring and drinking. “Sex became a transcendental and sacred act,” Malcolm Ritchie writes in an afterword to this chapbook. Ikkyū’s poems —”often erotic, argumentative, contradictory, judgmental, self-doubting, and occasionally shaded with guilt”—are still as startling as the day they were written.
Nancy & Sluggo Get Twisted
In a world where the difference between appropriation and exploitation can be hard to figure, Gary Lee-Nova’s devotion to the cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller makes all the difference. “I’m beyond being in love with his work,” says the author of these panels. “Although he passed in 1982, I feel like I’m collaborating with him.”
Bombing the Culture
‘Culture, being the broad effect of art, is rotundly irrational and as such is perpetually operating against the economic workaday structure of society. The economic structure works towards stasis centered around static needs. It is centripetal. Culture forces change centered around changing appetites. It is centrifugal.’ — Jeff Nuttall
Far Out Wasn’t Far Enough
The artist Tomi Ungerer has died at the age of 87. He was “a lifelong activist who protested against racial segregation, the Vietnam war and the election of US President Donald Trump . . .” Speaking about himself as an artist, Ungerer said, “I have the full respect of a piece of white paper, which I then shall rape with my drawing or my writing. When I draw, it’s the real me.”
‘Beyond the Vanishing Points …’
This old cartoon strip by Gary Lee-Nova has a black Sluggo, and it’s a form of appropriation art. Will that cause a storm of viral outrage?
Catching Up to the Past
“Buckle your seatbelt and fire up your time machine. You are about to blast yourself back nearly fifty years to a simpler time when America was at war, the country was polarized, a crazed and despised president of the United States was in charge, cops were considered racist pigs, cannabis was omnipresent, and young radicals […]
Election Day in America
Speaking of small-press publications, we are still waiting for Carl Weissner’s Le Regard d’Autrui to go live in a new posthumous trade edition, as promised. But Amazon KDP has been doggedly screwy. Please pardon the delay. (It is now available.) Meanwhile, Printed Matter, the best place in New York to find artists’ books, has just […]
Cold Turkey Press: A Bibliography
I don’t know exactly how many chapbooks, folios, broadsides, and poetry cards Cold Turkey Press has published. I never counted. But it must be in the hundreds. All of them—produced in handmade, illustrated, and limited editions—are unique manifestations of their publisher’s mind: scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure. They constitute an archive that […]
Infected by Light Verse
![Drawing by Malcolm Ritchie [2018]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Drawing-by-Malcolm-Ritchie-2018border-360x528enh-200x200.jpg)
A rational deformation that should have been left in the drawer to ferment into something deranged as well as deformed, this is instead a poème d’occasion. As Ikkyū once said, “Ask nothing from words on a page.”
New Year Greetings
Greetings for 2019 keep showing up. Here are three — one from Scotland, one from France, and one from Germany. We’ve also received one from Sweden and one from Maryland, but these I think we’re free to post.
‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’
“A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown. Institutionalized, she attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but can find no words to express her feelings. She discovers she has no language of her own and recedes more and more into silence. Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her […]