The Acker Awards, now in their sixth year, are a tribute given to members of the avant-garde arts community who have made outstanding contributions in their discipline in defiance of convention, or else served their fellow writers and artists in outstanding ways. The award’s novelist namesake, in her life and work, exemplified the risk-taking and […]
Ferlinghetti: ‘Pity the Nation Whose Leaders Are Liars’
Lawrence Ferlinghetti must be wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, he’s only going to turn 100 on Sunday. What’s the big deal? I’m betting he would prefer that people take note of his twelve-year-old poem: “Pity the nation whose people are sheep . . .”
Patchel’s ‘Plinkout’
Keith Patchel, a New York-based composer and producer, has created a free online/mobile application called Plinkout, which he is touting as “the easiest way to teach anyone,” especially kids, how to play an instrument as well as how to learn “the core cognitive ideas of music.” He’s looking for funding to complete his project, and […]
A Silent Elegy in Motion
Have a look at this collective headstone for “the 1,337 journalists killed in the line of duty since 1992.” Watch their names coalesce on screen into the image you see here. It is a silent elegy in motion that makes it pure poetry.
Nancy & Sluggo Get Twisted
In a world where the difference between appropriation and exploitation can be hard to figure, Gary Lee-Nova’s devotion to the cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller makes all the difference. “I’m beyond being in love with his work,” says the author of these panels. “Although he passed in 1982, I feel like I’m collaborating with him.”
From ‘The White Poems’
‘This emptiness is my private lair. / It confines me like a clubman’s chair. / I am free of desire. / I don’t mind being here either.
Bombing the Culture
‘Culture, being the broad effect of art, is rotundly irrational and as such is perpetually operating against the economic workaday structure of society. The economic structure works towards stasis centered around static needs. It is centripetal. Culture forces change centered around changing appetites. It is centrifugal.’ — Jeff Nuttall
Beckett’s ‘Rockaby’ Set by William Osborne
In William Osborne’s setting of ‘Rockaby’ we hear the whispered thoughts of an old woman during the last twenty-five minutes of her life accompanied by the dirge of four distant trombones. “Those arms at last…”
Far Out Wasn’t Far Enough
The artist Tomi Ungerer has died at the age of 87. He was “a lifelong activist who protested against racial segregation, the Vietnam war and the election of US President Donald Trump . . .” Speaking about himself as an artist, Ungerer said, “I have the full respect of a piece of white paper, which I then shall rape with my drawing or my writing. When I draw, it’s the real me.”
‘Beyond the Vanishing Points …’
This old cartoon strip by Gary Lee-Nova has a black Sluggo, and it’s a form of appropriation art. Will that cause a storm of viral outrage?
Catching Up to the Past
“Buckle your seatbelt and fire up your time machine. You are about to blast yourself back nearly fifty years to a simpler time when America was at war, the country was polarized, a crazed and despised president of the United States was in charge, cops were considered racist pigs, cannabis was omnipresent, and young radicals […]
Deformed Sonnets for My Old Friend
The artist Norman Ogue Mustill was an extreme dissenter. Nothing pleased him more than reaming out the human race. His collages stopped you dead with their vicious satire, like the writings of William S. Burroughs, and for technical precision Max Ernst didn’t do better. But Mustill is little known, his work unseen, his praise unsung. […]
Auschwitz & the Art of Advertising
Something was horribly wrong with the full-page ad for an upcoming exhibition about the Auschwitz death camp. It appeared yesterday on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I know the folks behind the ad meant well. But really . . . Auschwitz and the art of advertising are a nauseating mix. Here’s the unthinking kicker which caught my […]
Election Day in America
Speaking of small-press publications, we are still waiting for Carl Weissner’s Le Regard d’Autrui to go live in a new posthumous trade edition, as promised. But Amazon KDP has been doggedly screwy. Please pardon the delay. (It is now available.) Meanwhile, Printed Matter, the best place in New York to find artists’ books, has just […]
Cold Turkey Press: A Bibliography
I don’t know exactly how many chapbooks, folios, broadsides, and poetry cards Cold Turkey Press has published. I never counted. But it must be in the hundreds. All of them—produced in handmade, illustrated, and limited editions—are unique manifestations of their publisher’s mind: scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure. They constitute an archive that […]
Martin Luther King Jr. Had a Dream . . .
Whatever the blowhard president of Trumpistan has to say about Martin Luther King Jr. tomorrow on MLK Day, a federal holiday, or about what King died for — if he says anything — rest assured it won’t be worth the pixels it’s written on. And for the record let’s not forget that when King made […]
Doowah… Doowah… Doowah…
![Portrait of William S. Burroughs © by R. Crumb [1985]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RCRUMB-portrait-of-Burroughs-366x470-200x200.jpg)
Have you ever seen a movie trailer about a writer that swings like this one?