GAWKERS, GEEZERS AND OUTSIDERS

Gawker took note of the Straight Up item about right-wing navel-gazer Stephen Schwartz laying his dead hand on Hunter S. Thompson. Our staff of thousands says thanks to Gawker for boosting traffic and welcome to all you newbies. So, while we have your eyeballs ...

"The 80s: 326 Years of Hip," a group show of four octogenarian artists at the Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Museum on Manhattan's Lower East Side, has been extended "due to popular demand," gallery owner and co-curator Clayton Patterson says. To celebrate, the gallery will host a literary evening on Friday. Readings from the writings of Beat memoirist Herbert Huncke will feature actress/author Tatum O'Neal, performance artist Edgar Oliver, writer Jack Walls, video artist Anne Hanavan, screenwriter Jeremiah Newton, Warhol Superstar Taylor Mead, poet Ira Cohen, photographer Dash Snow, and plenty of others from the alternative underground. Be there, starting at 7 p.m. (161 Essex St.) (At right, "The Herbert Huncke Reader.")

The show's opening "was a smash," Patterson says. A jam-packed crowd of more than 100 underground and outsider luminaries showed up, including artist Andre Serrano, poet Gerard Malanga, photographer Ryan McGinley, writer Victor Bockris, writer Larry "Ratso" Sloman, publishers and writers Foxy Kidd and Romy Ashby, and performance artists Edgar Oliver, Penny Arcade and Karen Finley.

Oh yeah, mustn't forget: The octogenarian artists whose works are being exhibited in the show are Mary Beach, Boris Lurie, Taylor Mead and Huncke, who died at 81 in 1996. Have a look at this.

March 2, 2005 10:02 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on March 2, 2005 10:02 AM.

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