![Election Ballot (from 'General Municipal Election') [Nova Broadcast Press,1969]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/general-municipal-election.combined-750-200x182.jpg)
The trouble is, “fiction has to make sense,” as Tom Clancy and others have said. Observe the celebrity known as Donald Trump saunter onto the stage at Boca Raton, twenty minutes after his helicopter swoops in. The slow and ponderous walk, the extended chin, the pursed mouth, the slowly swiveling head, the exaggerated look of […]
Who Are the World’s Most Famous People?
You’d be surprised. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the world’s best-known American, followed by — are you ready? — Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, and Ben Franklin. Those are the top five. How do I know this? And on what basis? I checked Pantheon 1.0 at the MIT Media Lab, which did the elaborate […]
Three Centennial Parties for Harold Norse
![Harold Norse Centennial 1916-2016 [poster]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Norse-Centennial-poster-280-200x200.jpg)
Harold Norse, the late poet and memoirist, desperately wanted his name in lights. Now he has it — thanks to Todd Swindell. Swindell’s assiduous effort to memorialize him goes beyond dedicated. He has not only created a posthumous website for him and edited a posthumous collection of selected poems, I Am Going to Fly Through […]
Mc Neill & Burroughs: Art Meets Occult
Hieronymous Bosch has nothing on Malcolm Mc Neill. And that’s not even counting the underlying theories Mc Neill has about time travel, biological mutation, and evolutionary transition that he and William Burroughs worked on together in Ah Pook Is Here, a failed word-and-image collaboration that led nearly 40 years later to Mc Neill’s memoir Observed […]
MoMA to Mount Tzara’s Magnum Opus
Samy Rosenstock’s idea for a great big book is getting a great big show nearly 100 years later. Dadaglobe Reconstructed reunites over 100 works created for Dadaglobe, Tristan Tzara’s planned but unrealized magnum opus, originally slated for publication in 1921. An ambitious anthology that aimed to document Dada’s international activities, Dadaglobe was not merely a […]
Oy Feckin’ Vey! My Grub Street
!['My Grub Street' Jan Herman [Cold Turkey Press, 2016]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/my-grub-street-CT-recto-363-200x200.jpg)
There I was, feigning interest. It was my job. Readers wanted to know all about their movie stars, or at least about my encounters with them. From A-listers and B-listers right down to Z-listers. The whole stupid Hollywood alphabet top to bottom. Names like this one to be forgotten as quickly as my own. They […]
Where Have You Gone, Jackie Robinson?
Pianist Kathleen Supové is to perform “Achilles Dreams Of Ebbets Field” by Dylan Mattingly in a world premiere at the Di Menna Center for Classical Music in New York. The Brooklyn Dodgers will be there in memory only. A massive, visionary piece in 24 parts, the solo piano work deals with heroism, passion, loss, grief, […]
Nope! Trump and Clinton Ain’t Neck ‘n’ Neck
Today’s lead story on the front page of the New York Times, Trump Wins Big and Clinton Ends Sanders’s Streak, which jumps inside to an entire page in the print edition, never mentions the actual number of votes the two winners received — only the percentages. So we read that Donald Trump received 60.5% of […]
A Big Picture: ‘The Big Country’
William Wyler’s anti-macho Western “The Big Country,” which is remarkable for its imposing visual beauty and sonorous musical score, makes it to the (relatively) big screen at the New York Historical Society (as in bigger than your flatscreen TV but smaller than the screens it was made for back in 1958). The movie is also […]
Books That Truly Were Something Else
My staff of thousands informs me that “The Something Else Press Collection” just went on the market. Although some of the books are rarer than others, it’s the collection as a whole that’s notable. Early titles included Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, Dick Higgins’ collection of performance scores and art polemics; correspondence art pioneer Ray Johnson’s […]
The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter
My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]
There Is Joy in Making Music
In a video trailer for Finnegan Shanahan’s debut album from New Amsterdam Records, David Bloom conducts the new music ensemble Contemporaneous in a passage from “The Two Halves: Music for a Hudson River Railroad Dream Map.” The piece is a 35-minute song cycle described in a press release as “deft violin work and ethereal vocals […]
Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally
Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It’s worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump’s rallies these days. Writing in his diary that “M […]
The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries
![Meng & Ecker No. 5 [Savoy Books, 1992]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/meng-ecker-no.-5-200x200.jpg)
Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]
Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros
When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets “during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship,” Aaron Shulman writes in the current issue of The Believer, it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled “El Desencanto” (“The Disenchanted”), the film “ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute […]
This High Jiver Is One Helluva Surviver
“I am sociable, outgoing, quite extroverted, misanthropic at times yet other times quite philanthropic. I tend to contradict myself, wear a peculiar countenance from lack of sleep, despise insipid conversations, I get on my own nerves, spell like a fifth grader, use my diagnosis of florid ADHD as an excuse for the loquacious tendencies I […]
Poet Takes Aim at Election Campaign
Health Warning ” … Only the religious slaves / Of a militarized state / Will be elected …” Saturation Coverage Of the US Election Can cause brain damage. For nine months US Supremacism Indulges itself In an election For the US President. Somehow or other This always involves The US electorate Watching candidates Spending billions […]