![Art Shay [Photo by Steve and Dick Shay]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/art-shay-with-camera-247x355-200x200.jpg)
He was 94. His classic book of photographs, Nelson Algren’s Chicago, was published three decades after shooting them for Life during the height of Algren’s fame in the 1950s. The magazine never used them. Shay was kind enough to sign a copy of the book for me. According to Shay’s obit in the Chicago Tribune […]
Archives for April 2018
‘Peculiar Shortcomings’
A word of warning from a century ago … Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred […]
‘Officially Verboten’
U.S. cities with the fastest-growing wealth gaps. Monster Nor’easter The first day of spring a blinding white curtain kidnapped the city. It was a true blast of winter. We solemn jurors braved the monster nor’easter and did our solemn duty at forty dollars a day, the price of a shovel. Like heavily falling snow white […]
C.L.R. James: Cricket Shaped Him
I know nothing about cricket. My only sense of the game came from Frank Harris’s portrait of H.G. Wells. But now that I’ve read The Young C.L.R. James: A Graphic Novelette (PM Press Pamphlet), which traces the early development of the Pan-Africanist writer and Trotskyite revolutionary who was a cricket star as a young man […]
Filthy Rotten T.S. Eliot, the Mofo
When my staff of thousands sent me this book cover, APRIL IS A MOTHERFUCKER, by none other than T.S. Eliot, it put me in mind of Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, which includes Eliot’s fithy rotten early poems. They are so much fun, despite their sometime racism, that they naturally give the P.C. […]
What Would Daumier Make of Trump?
![Lithograph by Honoré Daumier [1831]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/daumier_honore_1-200x200.jpg)
Here’s the perfect hint: A mocking depiction of King Louis-Philippe as the Rabelais character Gargantua. The caricature might as well be Trump. He feeds on bundles of swag delivered by his obsequious minions and, from his outhouse throne, he shits out appointments, titles, and other rewards for the privileged class. Not incidentally, Honoré Daumier went […]