Milestone Films celebrates their cinephile friends and family … [Read more...]
Reality as a Metaphysical Construct
Published by Moloko Print It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. To be clear, Jürgen Ploog is an author who does not write for everyone. The "story" he tells in Flesh Film has the pulpy tone of science fiction, a narrator who sounds like a globe-trotting private eye down on his luck, and a title that signals the author's take on reality as a metaphysical construct. The story is in fact nothing more — or less — than a collage of words written in Ploog’s … [Read more...]
Tales of Doomsday Eros
Supervert is — as he writes— "the assumed name of a writer using the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to explore novel sexual pathologies." His latest book, the fifth in a series of six he has planned, is Apocalypse Burlesque: Tales of Doomsday Eros. Apocalypse Burlesque by Supervert You could easily call his books transgressive. Consider the titles: Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, Necrophilia Variations, Perversity Think Tank, Post-Depravity. But he would disagree. When I write, transgression is the furthest thing … [Read more...]
The Z Collection at Printed Matter in NYC
Finally, you can buy it in the States without paying the exorbitant cost of international postage. The Z Collection is now available from Printed Matter. The Z Collection is an illustrated memoir in the form of personal essays about Nelson Algren, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron, Abbie Hoffman, among others, and about the literary underground of the 1960s. “Herman, a former assistant to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, and a seasoned editor, publisher and journalist, … [Read more...]
Asher’s Algren: ‘Lovely’ Word Is Coming In
UPDATE BELOW ... The title of Colin Asher's forthcoming biography of Nelson Algren, Never a Lovely So Real, is taken from Algren's description of Chicago. But it might as well apply to the biography itself. E.g.: "This is the third biography of the great Nelson Algren, and it's easily the best and simply an extraordinary book in its own right. Asher is a first-rate story-teller, and his book reads like a deeply researched novel about the strange and wayward life of a determined outsider. More than any first-rate American novelist of the … [Read more...]
2018: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan
!['American Porn' by Heathcote Williams [Thin Man Press, 2017]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/American-Porn-by-Heathcote-Williams-Thin-Man-Press-2017400-200x200.jpg)
To mark the moment, a Straight Up tradition continues. From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands ... thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams. … [Read more...]
Nuttall’s ‘Bomb Culture’ Is Back
When I first read Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, I saw the title two ways -- descriptive and prescriptive -- “bomb culture” (the kind that made nuclear annihilation possible) and “bomb the culture” (a call for revolution). A half-century later I still see it that way. Far from being bound by its time, Nuttall's 1968 investigation of Britain's underground political and literary protest culture was a prophetic critique, and applicable as well to the American scene. An exhibition to launch the 50th anniversary edition of Bomb … [Read more...]
A Centenary of Mass Butchery . . .
. . . marking the end of the war to end all wars. From The Limping Messenger: Away with the glorification of the battlefield, the courage of soldiers, and how we are indebted to their futile sacrifice for whatever honoured the pride of nations . . . Speak rather about those who refused to be called to arms, about those who refused to climb out of the trenches right into the spitting canons and had to be forced at gunpoint by “their” officers, about the mutineers on all fronts . . . Glorifying the corpse spill: … [Read more...]
Missing from the Warhol Retrospective
The historic Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum is "the biggest in almost 30 years." And it is being swooned over with raves like Peter Schjeldahl's in the current New Yorker, or as the headline puts it on an Artsy review by Darren Jones, You May Think You Know Warhol--but His Whitney Retrospective Holds Surprises. So my diligent staff of thousands decided that a surprise not to be found at the Whitney -- Andy's aerobic workout aka "cab catching" -- was a glaring oversight. With suppressed guffaws, here 'tiz: … [Read more...]
‘Steps Toward the Invisible’
Take a look at Edward O'Donnelly's stunningly beautiful short film made with and about the poet Malcolm Ritchie on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Click the image for a video of the film. … [Read more...]
Dick Higgins’ Writings Are Back
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 being published by Siglio. I haven't seen it yet, but I have no doubt it will be a great reminder of the fertility of Dick's mind and of how well he expressed it, particularly if it quotes heavily from foew&omb, a favorite of mine. Also, notwithstanding the … [Read more...]
An Evolution of ‘Other Means’
!['Immense Stone' [ca. mid-1960s]](http://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 remade as a silkscreen. Much more recently, in collaboration with the late San Francisco punk rocker and writer Johnny Strike, Lee-Nova went on to making comic-strip graphic novels … [Read more...]
Homage to Félicien Rops
"The evil which the curiosity about the past uncovers marches in accelerating pursuit of the horrors lurking in the present . . . " That comment by Cyril Connolly refers to a very different work from these two studies sketched by Gerard Bellaart for one of his paintings. But I can't help thinking it applies here. … [Read more...]
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 de Paris, and possibly a volume of works by Gustave Doré. Ernst used scissors and paper. Below, we have a collage titled "One Trip Pony." by Robert Schalinski. He made it last month for a book by Wolf Pehlke not yet published. Schalinski used … [Read more...]
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 hellish grunts, the squeals, the bogus outrage of the ring, all are brazen matches for his silly pompadour. … [Read more...]
‘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 modern world that is -- the “civilized” world that would become his Renaissance Europe. There would indeed be disclosure, but there would also be obfuscation and concealment, a whole new order of hidden. … [Read more...]
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].](http://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 . . . With their lightning canvassers [they] decided to team up again in New York City -- considering themselves specialists in the rather peculiar votive trade of human forgery. -- excerpted from CUT UP OR SHUT … [Read more...]