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 […]
Cold Turkey Press: ‘Ikkyū Sojun Nine Poems’
The Rinzai Zen master Ikkyū Sojun (1394-1481) was a poet, musician, artist, and rebel. He led a life of whoring and drinking. “Sex became a transcendental and sacred act,” Malcolm Ritchie writes in an afterword to this chapbook. Ikkyū’s poems —”often erotic, argumentative, contradictory, judgmental, self-doubting, and occasionally shaded with guilt”—are still as startling as the day they were written.
Shulman’s ‘Age of Disenchantments’ Has Arrived
Aaron Shulman’s collective biography of the Spanish Panero family, The Age of Disenchanments—just out from Ecco— has a cast of dramatic characters that is nothing less than stunning. “No one’s ever told their story in English, and only in fragments in Spanish,” Shulman says.
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
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?
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 […]
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 […]
Trump’s Sermon on the Mount
His practiced pose makes him look positively beatific, doncha think? Here he is at the Pentagon pushing the notion of building a wall in space with missile-defense technology that has never really worked in the past, doesn’t exist now, and isn’t likely to “for decades to come,” as one expert put it. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘Gently, Gently, Stronger, Harder, Deeper’
UPDATE: Jan. 23 — “Le Regard d’Autrui” may now be purchased in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, France, and Spain. CARL WEISSNER (1940-2012) was the preeminent German translator of dissident writers such as Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Zappa, and Nelson Algren, having published […]
No Shore Receives Them
The front-page story by Patrick Kingsley in today’s print edition of the NY Times, “Rescued Migrants, at Sea for Weeks, Struggle to Reach a New Life,” calls from the depths. “We are crying,” said one of the migrants in an interview on the boat this week. “We can see Malta with our own eyes, but […]