A review of my book, The Z Collection: Portraits & Sketches, in the June 17 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, accuses me of “restrained élan.” My wife may beg to differ, but I plead guilty to the charge — happily. The TLS reviewer, Douglas Field, whose biographical study of James Baldwin, All Those Strangers, […]
Archives for 2016
Remembered Depths
Ian Kershaw writes in a review of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, a newly published book by Nikolaus Wachsmann: Is it possible to say anything new about Nazi Germany? This is, after all, probably the most thoroughly researched period in modern history. … [C]an a major work that alters our perceptions and […]
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 […]
A Lesson About ‘Fake Opposition’
“The cult of Hitler’s personality set up a fake opposition between leader and party.” So says Neal Acherson in his review of Hitler: A Biography (Volume 1, Ascent 1889-1939) by Volker Ullrich. That idea as applied to Trump and the GOP leadership is worth taking seriously — it’s not nearly as alarmist as it sounds […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Diderot Had the Right Idea
“…neither the white silences / of Beckett, nor the black … / Grace & good nature / like a transparent forest / rooted in facts, / thoughts like crickets / in dry August grass. / Not to climb the ladder, / not to cling or sneer, but / to be invisible. / Though poor and […]
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 […]
‘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 […]
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 […]
Le Vent Macabre
Note to Henri Lefebvre: A long-track F2 tornado on Sept. 16, 2015, destroyed the home of two of my friends. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Three Centennial Parties for Harold Norse
Harold Norse, the late poet and memoirist, desperately wanted his name in lights. Now he has it — thanks to Todd Swindell. Swindell’s assiduous effort to memorialize him goes beyond dedicated. He has not only created a posthumous website for him and edited a posthumous collection of selected poems, I Am Going to Fly Through […]
Looking Back at Cuba (continued) …
Previously … Now you can fly to Havana direct from the U.S. without having to be part of a licensed group. You can even use credit cards in places equipped to handle them. Of course prices for tourists are higher than in 2002. But I’d bet that Cuban salaries aren’t. This was the first of […]
Looking Back at Cuba
So much is being made of the U.S.-Cuba raprochement and the arrival in Havana of cruise ships filled with tourists that I took a look at an old series of mine, part reportage and part travelogue, from 2002. I haven’t been back to Cuba since then. Fidel has retired from actively running the show. He’s […]
Mc Neill & Burroughs: Art Meets Occult
Hieronymous Bosch has nothing on Malcolm Mc Neill. And that’s not even counting the underlying theories Mc Neill has about time travel, biological mutation, and evolutionary transition that he and William Burroughs worked on together in Ah Pook Is Here, a failed word-and-image collaboration that led nearly 40 years later to Mc Neill’s memoir Observed […]
MoMA to Mount Tzara’s Magnum Opus
Samy Rosenstock’s idea for a great big book is getting a great big show nearly 100 years later. Dadaglobe Reconstructed reunites over 100 works created for Dadaglobe, Tristan Tzara’s planned but unrealized magnum opus, originally slated for publication in 1921. An ambitious anthology that aimed to document Dada’s international activities, Dadaglobe was not merely a […]