“Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” opens today at the New Museum, in New York, and runs through Oct. 3. It is the first U.S. retrospective of Gysin’s work as painter, performer, poet, and writer. Here’s the museum’s spiel: Working simultaneously in a variety of mediums, Gysin was an irrepressible inventor, serial collaborator, and subversive spirit whose […]
Archives for 2010
BACH & friends Heads to San Francisco
Mike Lawrence’s two-hour documentary — featuring Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet, Joshua Bell, and Philip Glass, to name just a few — has its San Francisco premiere on July 14 at the Sundance Cinema Kabuki Theater. Patty Gessner, executive producer of the San Francisco Classical Voice, set up the screening as a fund-raiser for the […]
Goo Goo GaGa …
Does this film by Andres Serrano and Francesco Carrozzini have the July 4th holiday written all over it, or wot? Brutus Faust – “Goo Goo GaGa” It reminds us of the many wonderful reasons to celebrate Independence Day, doncha think? EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Oh Yeah, Keep on Digging …
Josh Brown, a historian who heads the Social History Project / Center for Media Learning at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been posting his visual blog Life During Wartime once a week since 2003. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Auntie Foo Reports Again …
… I am happy to say … with another jaundice-yellow antidote to all things purple… …including purple prose. Which is just what the doctor ordered. As I was reminded by these remarks, per Claude Pélieu on Flypaper, ‘tiz “a voice w/out make-up.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Claude Pélieu: ‘I am a living cut-up’
By way of introduction … Claude Pélieu, «l’iconoclaste, le déflagrateur» Francœur dixit, s’est éclipsé, après bien des morflances, le 24 décembre 2002, à Norwich, dans l’état de N Y. Après avoir plaisanté avec Mary au téléphone en lui détaillant le programme des festivités organisées par l’hosto pour ce jour de Noël. Il a chambré une […]
Auntie Foo Says …
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Sweet Words for the Sweet Science
Here’s one for the books — an attractively designed boxing anthology with heart, The Fighter Still Remains, just out from Fore Angels Press and DIBELLA Entertainment. I’m told all profits will go to the Berto Dynasty Foundation to benefit Project Medishare for Haitian earthquake relief. The fact that the book has been brought out by […]
A New Orleans Killer Thriller
Susan Fleet’s first crime thriller, Absolution, is set in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Homicide detective Frank Renzi takes on a serial killer who preys on women. (Click for the Kindle edition.) Now why would a cultivated classical musician like Fleet — she plays a mean baroque trumpet and also happens to be a feminist music historian […]
Blue Wind’s Fresh Breeze
Blue Wind Press published Blade Runner, A Movie, by William S. Burroughs, for the first time in 1979. Since then it has gone through two editions and I don’t know how many printings. The latest edition has just been released in paperback, beautifully designed by Blue Wind publisher George Mattingly. He notes that Blade Runner, […]
‘Bach & friends’ Goes Live
Been meaning to mention the New York premiere of Bach & friends, the full-length documentary by Michael Lawrence, at Symphony Space last Sunday. After the screening, several of the musicians from the film gave virtuoso performances for a deeply appreciative audience that filled the 760-seat Peter Jay Sharp Theatre almost to capacity. The combo concert […]
Murder in Black and White
I just finished reading a juicy crime novel, Grace, set in the Bay Area in the summer of 1972. It’s about the murder of the title character, a race track worker whose body is fished out of San Francisco Bay. She was beautiful, white, and promiscuous — and she was in love with a black […]
Manhattan Muffdiver
A new novel hits the bookshelves in Vienna, and the Austrian television network ORF interviews the author on the news. Try getting a novelist interviewed on the evening news in America. Never happen. Besides, we’re talking about a book called Manhattan Muffdiver, not exactly a title that U.S. network censors would approve. It’s not altogether […]
Fossilized …
Definitely an aw gee! moment. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Bill & Tony With a Twist
This video experiment, first posted by realitystudio.org, was recorded on Dec. 21, 1971, as I wrote there, in William S. Burroughs‘ London flat at 8 Duke St. The filmmaker Antony Balch, who lived downstairs, brought his movie projector up to the flat, along with the unfinished footage of Bill & Tony, a movie he’d been […]
Obama Makes It His Top Secret, Too
It’s so secret, We Can’t Tell You. That’s the catchy headline on today’s New York Times editorial about “relentless efforts” to continue the aaaeulc‘s legacy of clandestine eavesdropping. If an Islamic charity is “subjected to warrantless surveillance” by the National Security Agency and is “declared a sponsor of terrorism,” what happens when it challenges those […]
Happy Birthday, Nelson
Algren was the author of more than a dozen books. I’m betting that his two most famous novels — The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, one a tragedy and the other a comedy — will last longer than any of the novels by Mailer, Vidal, Updike, Cheever, Kerouac, […]