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 […]
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 […]
Tax Cheat Circus King
A poem received from an unnamed source with an illustration from the NY Times. America’s top shitholer goes whole hog at the public trough, and never mind the rest of us, because that is the hog’s nature. A silly grin when he licks his lips, a scowl like a lout’s mustache— the toadstool dick, the […]
‘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 […]
Long Before Cambridge Analytica, the Future Leaked Out
!['CUT UP OR SHUT UP' by Jan Herman, Carl Weissner, and Jürgen Ploog (with tickertape by William S. Burroughs), published by Agenztia [Paris, 1972].](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/1-CUT-UP-OR-SHUT-UP-Chapter-4-1-JH-cropped-750enh-200x200.jpg)
Specialists. There is no record of the long colloquies which took place between the founding fathers of CrossRoads Publishing, nor the long dreamy nights of investigation which must have preceded their collective action. We have only hearsay. But we suspect they first set up in London and it was not a particularly impressive address . […]
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
Documentary Spotlight at NY Film Fest
A newly restored print of William Wyler’s World War II air-combat documentary The Memphis Belle and Erik Nelson’s new documentary The Cold Blue (created from recently discovered raw footage shot during the filming of Memphis Belle) are to be featured in screenings at the 56th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, accompanied by interviews […]
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
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 […]
The Nova Machine, Redesigned
Gary Lee-Nova, who partnered with Johnny Strike on ‘The Nova Machine,’ writes: Thank you for posting an early version of page #1. After several pages had been rendered, I began to question the structure of giving a page five rows. I decided to reorganize all the existing pages into a structure of four rows, and […]
Talk About ‘Graphic Novels’ . . .
How about a Burroughsian blast of a graphic cut-up by Gary Lee-Nova? He is looking for a publisher for ‘The Nova Machine.’ Here’s an excerpt. Any takers? “In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear and degradation on any planet.” Click to enlarge. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘So Much Sour Salami’
Frank Scully, a long-forgotten journalist, was recalling the first time he met Luigi Pirandello in Paris in the cocktail lounge of a movie theater on the Champs Elysée. It was well before World War II, but he could have been writing about the here and now in Trumpistan. Pirandello was “on the lam from his […]
Q & A With Sinclair Beiles
“Incandescent poet in your solitary cell, answer please what no prayer or deity can tell.” * * * * * “To make sense of what is meant by your obscurities, the consequence— have little doubt— of an accident, your gospel may not be truth, but the clouds and planets, patterns in the sky. The proper […]
What a Beast!
“The Captain” is the best flick I’ve seen in years. If you need to read a review, you might as well read David Edelstein’s. My only demurral is that I see the setup as feral. He sees it as farcical. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit