Just caught the PBS American Masters documentary on Mike Nichols, in essence a smartly made interview directed by Elaine May. It’s thrilling from start to finish — and doubly so because, unexpectedly, he gives Willy Wyler a shout out. I especially appreciated what Nichols said (45 minutes in) about “the froggy conspiracy.” In A Talent […]
Archives for January 2016
Do You See Something Wrong Here?
On the left is the cover of the New York Times Magazine for its migrant story, ‘Out of Syria.’ On the right is a condo ad for the one percent on the first page of the magazine. Draw your own conclusion. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Huge Counterculture Archive Comes to Market
So the Ed Sanders Archive, a massive hoard of literary and countercultural materials, is finally for sale. Steve Clay, the publisher of Granary Books, is the dealer. I have no idea what price is being asked, but you can bet it’s liable to set some kind of record. Beginning with his first poems written while […]
Carl Weissner: Master Writer, Cherished Friend
![Carl Weissner [Photo by Michael Montfort, 19XX, from 'Nachtmaschine']](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/PORTRAIT-OF-CARL-BY-MONTFORT-NACHTMASCHIN220-copy.png)
A great one died four years ago today. Carl was also a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg), and a literary agent who spread the work of dissident […]
What the Horse’s Mouth Had to Say
I wanted to get the lowdown, so I went over to the Council on Foreign Depredations. The horse’s mouth was as smart as I expected. But to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane, which seemed more important. When Tom Brokaw asked him “how well the country is being served” by the current political debate […]
Honoring MLK With a Clever Starbucks Ad
Watch Martin Luther King Jr. giving his greatest address, the “I have a dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Listen to his peerless “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of April 16, 1963, in which he defends direct-action nonviolence, explains its principles, expresses his disappointment with […]
With Bicycle: Nightmares and Dreams
Flann O’Brien wrote a comic novel. Kurt Wold made a performance piece. Bicycles figure in both. Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down […]
The Day David Bowie Died, a Poet Wondered Why
‘What Are People Doing Fucking Dying?’ What are people doing fucking dying? Haven’t they got better things to do? No sooner than you’re on someone’s wavelength Then suddenly they’re whisked away from you. I saw Bowie at the first Glastonbury in 1971.* He was performing at five in the morning. With golden locks he was […]
Charlotte Moorman Gets a Full-Dress Close-Up
![Moorman and Paik performing 'Human Cello Variation' as part of John Cage's "26'1.1499 for String Player" [Photo: Peter Moore © 1965]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Moorman-and-Paik-performing-Human-Cello-Variation-as-part-of-John-Cages-261.1499-for-String-Player-Pmoore©1965220-3-200x200.jpeg)
On a visit I made years ago to Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections its curator at the time, Russell Maylone, showed me a room piled with ramshackle cartons that had recently arrived. He pointed to them with pride and said they were Charlotte Moorman’s archival materials, a lifetime’s worth of hoarding. […]
Abolishing Time: Baudelaire & Cocteau Side by Side
![Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Gerard Bellaart [Cold Turkey Press © 2016]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/baudelaire-portrait-by-bellaart-Cold-Turkey-Press370-1-200x200.jpg)
I have been involved so deeply in so many things that they slip from my memory, and not just one, fifty. A wave from the depths brings them back to the surface for me with, as the Bible says, all that in them is. It is incredible how few traces are left in us of […]
Ben Hecht on the Real Margaret Anderson
I’ve been re-reading Ben Hecht’s massive 1954 memoir, A Child of the Century, which Gary Giddins rightly calls “his masterpiece.” I think of it as Bennie’s wised-up wisdom book. It reads for delicious stretches like the essays of a Midwestern Montaigne and is filled with scenes of an unforgettable Chicago, where Hecht first came to […]
Progress for Women at Vienna Philharmonic
For the first time in three years, William Osborne, an expert on the sociology of German-speaking orchestras, has posted an update about the latest developments at the VPo. “It’s the most positive I’ve ever written,” he tells me. Which is saying a lot when you know how critical he’s been of the orchestra’s all-male ideology […]