As San Francisco prepares to celebrate Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday on Sunday, City Lights Books will be the focus of much attention. The little paperback bookshop he launched in 1953 is now so large that it occupies an entire block of storefronts and doubles as a North Beach tourist attraction. This is what the storefront […]
2019 NY Acker Awards To Be Held March 26
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 […]
Ferlinghetti: ‘Pity the Nation Whose Leaders Are Liars’
Patchel’s ‘Plinkout’
Keith Patchel, a New York-based composer and producer, has created a free online/mobile application called Plinkout, which he is touting as “the easiest way to teach anyone,” especially kids, how to play an instrument as well as how to learn “the core cognitive ideas of music.” He’s looking for funding to complete his project, and […]
A Silent Elegy in Motion
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.
Shulman’s ‘Age of Disenchantments’ Has Arrived
Aaron Shulman’s collective biography of the Spanish Panero family, The Age of Disenchanments—just out from Ecco— has a cast of dramatic characters that is nothing less than stunning. “No one’s ever told their story in English, and only in fragments in Spanish,” Shulman says.
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.”
From ‘The White Poems’
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
Beckett’s ‘Rockaby’ Set by William Osborne
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 …’
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 […]
Deformed Sonnets for My Old Friend
The artist Norman Ogue Mustill was an extreme dissenter. Nothing pleased him more than reaming out the human race. His collages stopped you dead with their vicious satire, like the writings of William S. Burroughs, and for technical precision Max Ernst didn’t do better. But Mustill is little known, his work unseen, his praise unsung. […]
Auschwitz & the Art of Advertising
Something was horribly wrong with the full-page ad for an upcoming exhibition about the Auschwitz death camp. It appeared yesterday on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I know the folks behind the ad meant well. But really . . . Auschwitz and the art of advertising are a nauseating mix. Here’s the unthinking kicker which caught my […]
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 […]