It's rare that the tireless staff of thousands agrees to post a guest review. But there are exceptions. Review by Jerome Sala The Street Gangs of the Lower East Side offers a provocative eyewitness history of gang culture in the context of the whole diverse, eccentric and sometimes revolutionary LES scene of the '70s through the early '90s. More than that, however, the book contains revelatory moments that make you realize that gangs, though often perceived as something “other” and consigned to the outer darkness of the outlaw world, are … [Read more...]
In Case Facebook Is Watching
AP Photographer Nick Ut's famous Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War photo illustrating the terror of war was censored for nudity by Mark Zukerberg's minions. Facebook deigned to restore the image to its site, but did not apologize. It issued instead a boilerplate claim that the image could have been mistaken for kiddie porn in some countries, proving that Facebook was one of them. "In this case," it added, "we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.” So helpful of them. Here's … [Read more...]
Leonard Weinglass, Our ‘Modern Clarence Darrow’
Other defense attorneys may have been more famous -- William Kunstler, for example -- but radical leftists of a certain age remember the late Leonard Weinglass with special feeling. On the back cover of Seth Tobocman's graphic biography Len, A Lawyer in History, the publisher's description says (and I believe every word of it): "In a field dominated by egomaniacs, Weinglass was known for his humility, his common touch, his ability to work collectively, his kindness, and his attention to detail." Not least, he was also known for his legal … [Read more...]
The Dark Side of Boris Johnson
Back in April, before the Brexit vote, Heathcote Williams wrote a merciless pamphlet, subtitled "A Study in Depravity," about the most notorious cheerleader for the British exit from the European Union. Completely factual, replete with scores of footnotes, it was circulated to friends and then taken up by the London Review of Books, which republished it after the LRB's bookshop customers began asking for it. Of course it did no good. The "little Englanders" -- as Williams says Orwell "would doubtless have called the anxious xenophobes" -- won … [Read more...]
Still Counting . . .
And here's what your tax dollars could have paid for instead. Meanwhile, anybody who follows the news is familiar with the flight of Edward Snowden, who is arguably the most important whistleblower in American history for his massive leak of secret NSA documents. Even so, the Danish-made film "Chasing Edward Snowden" about the details of his risky escape from the U.S. to avoid arrest -- and, some have contended, possible assassination -- tells the story with an authority, clarity, and drama that make it too gripping to miss. It was recently … [Read more...]
Nuttall Show Comes With a Warning
The John Rylands Library at The University of Manchester is close to launching "Off Beat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground," a comprehensive exhibition of artworks, writings, correspondence, books, and little magazines produced by or associated with an "all-round genius" whose stunning countercultural career half a century ago is little remembered today. Jeff Nuttall was a painter, poet, actor, and sculptor, a performance artist, pioneer of "happenings," cultural critic, and the author of nearly 40 books. The exhibition opens … [Read more...]
Total Obscenity of the American Dream
Heathcote Williams's verse polemic delivered by Alan Cox. "Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton -- A Foaming Sleazeball from Hell versus An Iron Lady, Hands Dripping with Blood" And now for the video: … [Read more...]
Trump Wrestles for President
A friend tipped me to this video. It's no secret. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have seen it, but I hadn't. My friend also sent along his comment: How could the man in this video be a presidential candidate? Our media has debased people with trash for half a century and has shaped what we have become as a nation. Trump’s fear-mongering is a natural result of our political system and culture. When the hyped-up Cold War ended, we moved on to the hyped-up War On Terror. Uniting people through fear and bigotry has been a central … [Read more...]
Rugged Norwegian Art Show by War Vets
While traveling recently in Norway, I came across "Camouflage," a group exhibition by military veterans of wars and other armed conflicts that doubled as a form of therapy. It was presented in Bergen, Norway's second largest city, and was curated by Per Ruttledal with the assistance of Suellen Meidell and Robert Rodrigues. Meidell told me she had served with the Norwegian military in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2007, as part of a NATO force-protection unit. Because I could not record the sound track on her video, which could only be heard on … [Read more...]
‘Dadaglobe’: Art for Dada’s Sake
Although "Dadaglobe Reconstructed" at MoMA is a magnificent project of deep-dive reclamation, the catalogue that recreates Tristan Tzara's never-realized Dadaglobe anthology also recreates the limitations of Tzara's original concept. The catalogue is printed as he would have done it -- in black and white. I prefer seeing the works submitted to him in their original form. Francis Picabia's "Pharmarcie Duchamp$," for example . . . . . . or Sophie Taeuber's "Dada Composition (Flat Head / tête au plat)." As the curators point out, a … [Read more...]
A Music Theater Work in Progress
Truth, or at least the effort to capture it, can be problematic. William Osborne and Abbie Conant have been working for several years on "Aletheia," a music theater chamber piece for performance artist and digital piano. It feels like "forever," he says. "The deeper we go the slower it reveals itself." The ambition of the piece, suggested by its title, may have something to do with that. Osborne notes on their web site: The ancient Greeks had several words for truth. Aletheia is one and means creating a space where truth can … [Read more...]
Boris Lurie’s ‘NO!art’ Mounted in Berlin
NO COMPROMISES! | The Art of Boris Lurie at the Jewish Museum Berlin looks like a major, absolutely must-see show. But the title reminds me of a huge compromise at the heart of it. Lurie, a Holocaust survivor, lived in New York like a pauper. But when he died he left about $80 million. He'd made that fortune pretty much in secret, playing the stock market (starting with penny stocks) and investing in real estate. Since his death, in 2008, a gallerist and her attorneys have been using that money to promote his artworks through the creation of … [Read more...]
MoMA’s Hidden ‘Electro-Library’ Show
It's only a couple of vitrines, and they seem like overflow storage -- as though they've been placed out of the way in the downstairs mezzanine of the Museum of Modern Art's education building on 54th Street. But the slide show for THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY: European Avant-Garde Magazines from the 1920s is magnificent. In visual richness, and with the added wealth of historical detail, the online presence of the show dwarfs the actual exhibit (closing Monday). I haven't asked the bibliographer of the MoMA Library, David Senior, who organized the … [Read more...]
Legally, Is Trump a ‘Poxy-Arsed Whore’?
And is it libellous to say so? I ask because a friend recalls this medieval definition of libel from his days as a law student at Oxford: Ye may say that a woman be a whore and that be not libellous. Ye may say that a woman be poxy-arsed and that be not libellous. But to say that a woman be a poxy-arsed whore that be libellous for you do injure her in her profession. Now we all know there's a federal class-action lawsuit coming to trial, filed by victims of Donald Trump and his so-called Trump University. We also know that Trump U. employees … [Read more...]
Speaking of Politics: ‘A Study in Depravity’
Pamphleteering in England goes back nearly 300 years, represented most famously by such 18th-century polemicists as Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, and in America by the British-born Thomas Paine. Even the poet John Milton was a pamphleteer. The tradition continues. Ken Livingstone, the former socialist mayor of London, was on his way to the University of Cambridge to give a talk on current British politics when he was handed an unsigned pamphlet about Boris Johnson, who defeated him in his bid for re-election in 2008. The damning title of the … [Read more...]
‘Donald Trump Is a Work of Fiction’
The trouble is, "fiction has to make sense," as Tom Clancy and others have said. Observe the celebrity known as Donald Trump saunter onto the stage at Boca Raton, twenty minutes after his helicopter swoops in. The slow and ponderous walk, the extended chin, the pursed mouth, the slowly swiveling head, the exaggerated look of knowing authority: with the exception of the red “Make America Great Again” ball cap perched atop his interesting hair the entire passage is quoted whole cloth from the patented boardroom entrance of The Apprentice, … [Read more...]
Who Are the World’s Most Famous People?
You'd be surprised. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the world's best-known American, followed by -- are you ready? -- Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, and Ben Franklin. Those are the top five. How do I know this? And on what basis? I checked Pantheon 1.0 at the MIT Media Lab, which did the elaborate math so I didn't have to. Pantheon is "a manually verified dataset of globally famous biographies" that maps historical cultural production and corrects for linguistic and statistical biases. Here are the U.S. rankings for the top 100 … [Read more...]