A recent reminder about the “incredible translation job” done on Mary Beach’s Die Elektrische Banane by Walter Hartmann and Gregor Pott got me to thinking that somebody should say it: James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake meets William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in that book. It’s not the particulars of the subject matter so much as Beach’s attitude […]

More from the e-mail bag: Ah yes, what a BOLD approach to human physiognomy, I must admit, in those collages you show here! And yet, being a Höch aficionado I’ll have to insist it wasn’t Mr Paolozzi but Hannah Höch who first applied a human silhouette cut-out in her collage work, back in 1931, in […]

News from the e-mail bag: Austrian Federal Government cancels Vienna Philharmonic funding contract, but transfers money to twin orchestra, the Vienna State Opera By William Osborne On October 16, 2000, the Austrian Federal Government signed a contract with the Vienna Philharmonic that gave the orchestra yearly funding of $2.91 million (€2.29 million) for a period […]

Gone. But not forgotten. There will be a funeral service open to the public on Saturday, July 17th, 11:45 a.m.-3 p.m, at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery, 131 E.10th St., in Manhattan. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

The first time Auntie Foo checked in, an anonymous comment arrived with savvy guesswork about auntie’s identity and some excellent info and illustrations about the art of collage. A bit of sleuthing revealed that the anonymous commenter was Walter Hartmann, an old associate of Carl Weissner, Jorg Fauser, and Jurgen Ploog, from their GASOLIN 23 […]

“Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” opens today at the New Museum, in New York, and runs through Oct. 3. It is the first U.S. retrospective of Gysin’s work as painter, performer, poet, and writer. Here’s the museum’s spiel: Working simultaneously in a variety of mediums, Gysin was an irrepressible inventor, serial collaborator, and subversive spirit whose […]

Mike Lawrence’s two-hour documentary — featuring Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet, Joshua Bell, and Philip Glass, to name just a few — has its San Francisco premiere on July 14 at the Sundance Cinema Kabuki Theater. Patty Gessner, executive producer of the San Francisco Classical Voice, set up the screening as a fund-raiser for the […]

Does this film by Andres Serrano and Francesco Carrozzini have the July 4th holiday written all over it, or wot? Brutus Faust – “Goo Goo GaGa” It reminds us of the many wonderful reasons to celebrate Independence Day, doncha think? EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Josh Brown, a historian who heads the Social History Project / Center for Media Learning at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been posting his visual blog Life During Wartime once a week since 2003. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

… I am happy to say … with another jaundice-yellow antidote to all things purple… …including purple prose. Which is just what the doctor ordered. As I was reminded by these remarks, per Claude Pélieu on Flypaper, ‘tiz “a voice w/out make-up.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

By way of introduction … Claude Pélieu, «l’iconoclaste, le déflagrateur» Francœur dixit, s’est éclipsé, après bien des morflances, le 24 décembre 2002, à Norwich, dans l’état de N Y. Après avoir plaisanté avec Mary au téléphone en lui détaillant le programme des festivités organisées par l’hosto pour ce jour de Noël. Il a chambré une […]

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Here’s one for the books — an attractively designed boxing anthology with heart, The Fighter Still Remains, just out from Fore Angels Press and DIBELLA Entertainment. I’m told all profits will go to the Berto Dynasty Foundation to benefit Project Medishare for Haitian earthquake relief. The fact that the book has been brought out by […]

Susan Fleet’s first crime thriller, Absolution, is set in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Homicide detective Frank Renzi takes on a serial killer who preys on women. (Click for the Kindle edition.) Now why would a cultivated classical musician like Fleet — she plays a mean baroque trumpet and also happens to be a feminist music historian […]

Blue Wind Press published Blade Runner, A Movie, by William S. Burroughs, for the first time in 1979. Since then it has gone through two editions and I don’t know how many printings. The latest edition has just been released in paperback, beautifully designed by Blue Wind publisher George Mattingly. He notes that Blade Runner, […]

Been meaning to mention the New York premiere of Bach & friends, the full-length documentary by Michael Lawrence, at Symphony Space last Sunday. After the screening, several of the musicians from the film gave virtuoso performances for a deeply appreciative audience that filled the 760-seat Peter Jay Sharp Theatre almost to capacity. The combo concert […]

I just finished reading a juicy crime novel, Grace, set in the Bay Area in the summer of 1972. It’s about the murder of the title character, a race track worker whose body is fished out of San Francisco Bay. She was beautiful, white, and promiscuous — and she was in love with a black […]