A friend writes from Brooklyn: “I’ll spare you our preparations for Passover, which begins tonight. It seems weird to celebrate God deciding a plague should pass over the Jews when we’re sitting around with the coronavirus on our heads.” I agree. His comment called to mind my own thoughts about a different observance.
GC CUNY Keeps the Conversation Going:
Milanovic, Piketty, Stiglitz, and Krugman
While events are postponed at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the heart of Manhattan, videos of recent public programs will be featured from its archive for your enjoyment. The videos provide illuminating discussions in two main categories: insights into current events and conversations with leading writers and artists. (Courtesy of GC CUNY’s Public Programs archive.)
Trump to the Rest of Us: Drop Dead
President Twitter Fingers had the Center for Disease Control send a mailer to promote himself of course. It showed up in my mailbox yesterday touting his “coronavirus guidelines for America.” But we know what he really means. The caricature is by Donkey Hotey.
Out of Stock
President Twitter Fingers and his cabinet officials. Questions have come in asking if those beak masks are real or a made-up joke. The answer is they are real. The headline and caption are the joke of course.
Artaud for Our Time
“And I told you: no works of art, no language, no words, no thought, nothing. Nothing except a sort of incomprehensible and totally erect stance in the midst of everything in the mind. And don’t expect me to tell you what all this is called, and how many parts it can be divided into; don’t expect me to tell you its weight; or to get back in step and start discussing all this so that I may, without even realizing it, start THINKING.”
What . ? . No Patti Smith?
Just kidding . . .
Last Breath, Memorialized
Cold Turkey Press has printed a card of this photo and poem in a limited edition.
Last Breath
There are things / closer than rain / that keep hope alive— /
tenement flowers / seasoned with heartbreak, / chattering weeds / and the silence of fireflies— / things that may not be / more brilliant / than a wine-stained shirt / and crow’s-feet eyes. / But they will do …
‘I Do Not Think. I Am Thought. I Am Thought in Action.’
I am that I am that I happen. /
I am a resultant. /
—a coincidence of fields. /
Am is my here. /
That is I there. /
What am I here for? . . . /
I am here to go. /
When the magnetic fields shift / There / is no here. / I am gone.
Kurt Wold: ‘Stradoferous’
“I dreamt I could play the bicycle. This performance artwork plays with a number of themes, not the least of which is the continual contemporary pressure to present oneself as larger-than-life, in the hope that one might be noticed in a distracted culture. Of course the work also revels in those distractions.” — Kurt Wold
If This Was an Actual Real-Time Photo . . .
. . . which it was . . . You have to wonder what floor can I get out? [Insert punchline, pls.]
A Poem and Its Genesis: Malcolm Ritchie’s ‘Writing It’
… and my hand held up against the sky / as if a naked bird singing in sign language / to an empty page lying somewhere / in an uninhabited house where / only dust is moving / from room to room … — from “Writing It”
And From the Outlaw End of the Writing Spectrum
“At age 84, Plymell continues to write, publish and perform—“doing nuttin”, as he says—from his home in Cherry Valley, New York. His activities keep Plymell in steady correspondence with a crowd of like-minded hellions, including rockabilly’s Bloodshot Bill, Sonic Youth founders Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, bassist Mike Watt, filmmaker Mark Hanlon, guitarist Bill Nace, photographer Philip Scalia and musicologist Byron Coley. Plymell and his wife, Pam, first happened upon Cherry Valley in late 1969 in coming to visit Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky at their East Hill farm. Moving there for good in early 1970, the Plymells have set into adding to their immense creative legacy.” – Benito Vila
Before the Day Is Over . . .
… and the occasion becomes a nothing burger, here are a few greetings for the New Year … from Jürgen Schneider, Frank Diersch, Gerard Bellaart, and Charles Plymell.
Malcolm Ritchie: ‘The Wake’
“… we killed a few bottles / and drank to the dead …” — Malcolm Ritchie
NYT Magazine’s Designers Push the Envelope
The print edition of the New York Times this morning made note of the “Corrections We Remembered in 2019” (see the renamed, redesigned online version), pointing out that correcting a mistake is “more than a procedural obligation … it’s ‘an ethical responsibility.’” In that spirit I might as well point out that The Times can screw up badly when its highly trained and forward-looking designers push the envelope too far, particularly in the print edition of the magazine.
Fluxus Impresario Readied for His Closeup
A feature documentary about the impresario of the international avant-garde art movement Fluxus from 1962 to 1978. Interviews with artists include Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, and Nam June Paik. Dedicated to cooperative methods and expanded processes, Fluxus could be everything and almost anything: kits, shops, festivals, islands, weddings, food, or Flux Lofts—a network of artist-owned lofts in SoHo, New York. The iconoclastic George Maciunas and the spirit of Fluxus provoke questions still critical to many working artists . . . and a helluva lot of silly serious fun.