Anthony Haden Guest calls "The Plain of Jars" -- a chamber opera by Keith Patchel about America's secret war in Laos -- "the lineal descendant of Stravinsky’s 'Nightingale' and Alban Berg’s 'Lulu' and 'Wozzeck.'" I haven't seen it yet, but my staff of thousands tells me it "exposes the wounds caused by America’s use of Laos as a testing ground for new military weapons during the Vietnam War era, including the birth of drone technology." The opera opens next week in New York University's Impact Festival, starring mezzo-sopranos Xi Yang in the … [Read more...]
A Great One Died Today
Updated with new information. 'He was the Shelley of his age and more.' -- Gerard Bellaart A memorial service is to be held Friday (July 14), 3 p.m., at St. Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford. All welcome. July 17 -- Malcolm Ritchie, whose friendship with Heathcote spanned decades, attended the service. This is his description: Dear Gerard, I stayed overnight in London with John Lahr, an old writer friend, and we both went together to the funeral. First, everyone convened at H's old house (an artisan's cottage in … [Read more...]
Music Theater Where Truth Can Appear
The last time we looked it was a work in progress. That was a year ago. William Osborne and Abbie Conant had been working on it for so long, Osborne said at the time, that it felt like "forever." But now their music theater chamber piece is about to get its world premiere. The name of the piece, "Aletheia," comes from the ancient Greeks, who "had several words for truth," he pointed out. "'Aletheia' is one and means creating a space where truth can appear." Conant is to perform the work on Friday in Southern California at the University of … [Read more...]
Burroughsian Credo: ‘Include Me Out’
"Learning a hieroglyphic language is excellent practice in the lost art of inner silence." -- William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind "Cup of tea at dawn a room with rose wall paper wind stirs cigarette ash on a naked thigh calm miracle of apomorphine dawn . . . . ." Burroughs Lecture Series: Iain Sinclair from The Photographers' Gallery on Vimeo. … [Read more...]
The Evolving NY Times Nameplate
From 1851, to 1857, to 1896, to 1914, to 1967, to last week: David W. Dunlap's story, "Modern Identity in Ancient Lettering," does not include a reference to the overprinting that the designers of The NYT Magazine prefer. (Style aside, Matthew Shaer's interview did deserve that kind of prominence.) … [Read more...]
Norman Mailer on Almost Everything
If there's a richer radio archive of interviews with cultural figures and others from all walks of life than the one amassed by Studs Terkel, I'm unaware of it. Here, for example, is Norman Mailer talking with him on March 17, 1960, about writing, critics, self-censorship, and American life. It's great stuff. Mailer offers his thoughts about "affirmative" literary works, apathy, and a lack of passion in modern life generally; about Samuel Beckett and theater; about Jack Kerouac and Beat writers, and their reception in the United States; and … [Read more...]
When Trump Hog-Called His Cabinet: Sooie!
Trump's first cabinet meeting was the perfect reminder of one of William S. Burroughs's most satirical "routines." Burroughs wrote the piece in 1953 and had it published for the first time in a little mimeo magazine called Floating Bear. Since then it's been reprinted many times, most famously as a mimeographed booklet by Fuck You Press. It begins like this: Immediately after the Inauguration the President* appeared on the White House balcony dressed in the purple robes of a Roman emperor and, leading a blind toothless lion on a gold chain, … [Read more...]
A Better Idea for the Guggenheim
One of Frank Lloyd Wright's fantasies for his design of the Guggenheim Museum was to color it pink. You can see what that might have looked in a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive. If you can't get to MoMA, you can see what it might also have looked like colored cherokee red or orange -- which Wright also had in mind -- by clicking Michael Kimmelman's takeout about the show and Wright's flights of fancy. Or you can have a look here: Either of those colors would have been an … [Read more...]
Poem for N.O.M.
“Coraggio!” — My old friend said. And then he put The gun to his head. Coraggio — That’s what it took To kill the pain With a hunk of lead. Coraggio — It’s no walk in the park. The night is dark, And my friend is dead. … [Read more...]
Rauschenberg Had a Sense of Humor
And it's now on view at MoMA, too. To hell with the god of music, poetry, and art ... … [Read more...]
Please Insert
My staff of thousands thinks this paragraph by Barrett Brown should be inserted like an unsheathed stallion's penis into every last one of the obituaries plaguing us about the late Roger Ailes . . . just in case the corpse hasn't been properly mounted: I don’t really mind Fox on ideological grounds, as a nation with this many prisons and military bases clearly merits at least one openly fascist news network, but I do object to the shamelessness with which it insists on coarsening the culture. For half a century, there was an unspoken … [Read more...]
On View: Mary Beach’s Witty ‘Illaminations’
Mary Beach deserved to be an art star. Her collages are in a class with Richard Hamilton's. But she was incapable of bullshitting her way to the top. She also submerged whatever ambitions she may have had to advance the work of her partner Claude Pélieu. She translated him, published him, promoted him and, when she had money, supported them both on their restless odyssey from Paris to San Francisco to Hawaii to London to New York and other landing points before finally touching down in upstate NY's Cherry Valley. Mary died in 2006. She would … [Read more...]
As the French Say: Dégoûtant!
The print edition logo for Michael Kinsley's new opinion slot in The New York Times says it all. Well, almost all. What it doesn't say is how disgusting it is. Kinsley's first column is not only awful, but worse, he will be "revisiting this theme regularly." It looks like The Times is repositioning -- a better term might be auditioning -- to accomodate el presidente Twitter Fingers and his tweet followers. Which is even more disgusting. Postscript: May 8 -- This is the tagline for the column: The president’s flaws are well known to … [Read more...]
Black Eye Porn
"Normally The Guardian publishes all of Rowson’s cartoons, but I don’t think this one. He mailed it to Heathcote who forwarded it to me. Heathcote wrote the lines when I asked him." -- Gerard Bellaart, editor/publisher Cold Turkey Press I think of H.W.'s stanza in the mode of G.G. Belli's 19th-century Roman sonnets, which were written in street dialect (and were translated into their colloquial American equivalent by Harold Norse). … [Read more...]
360 Degrees of Separation . . .
. . . from Madhattan . . .... where Straight Up's tireless staff of thousands took a break. … [Read more...]
From a Secret Location
Once upon a time hundreds of editors, mainly poets, and all manner of bohemian riffraff took to their mimeo machines. They produced an avalanche of little magazines, lovingly collected by Granary Books as a wonder of the age. This literary avalanche was documented in "A Secret Location on the Lower East Side," a 1996 exhibition at the New York Public Library. The curators also produced a catalogue with the same title. Unlike the mimeos it describes, the catalogue was not mimeographed. It is still in print (also unlike the mimeos). The "mimeo … [Read more...]
A Man With Moxie Plus
When Asger Jorn heard that he'd been awarded a Guggie, he told them to fuck off. … [Read more...]