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 […]
Three Centennial Parties for Harold Norse
![Harold Norse Centennial 1916-2016 [poster]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Norse-Centennial-poster-280-200x200.jpg)
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 […]
Where Have You Gone, Jackie Robinson?
Pianist Kathleen Supové is to perform “Achilles Dreams Of Ebbets Field” by Dylan Mattingly in a world premiere at the Di Menna Center for Classical Music in New York. The Brooklyn Dodgers will be there in memory only. A massive, visionary piece in 24 parts, the solo piano work deals with heroism, passion, loss, grief, […]
Nope! Trump and Clinton Ain’t Neck ‘n’ Neck
Today’s lead story on the front page of the New York Times, Trump Wins Big and Clinton Ends Sanders’s Streak, which jumps inside to an entire page in the print edition, never mentions the actual number of votes the two winners received — only the percentages. So we read that Donald Trump received 60.5% of […]
A Big Picture: ‘The Big Country’
William Wyler’s anti-macho Western “The Big Country,” which is remarkable for its imposing visual beauty and sonorous musical score, makes it to the (relatively) big screen at the New York Historical Society (as in bigger than your flatscreen TV but smaller than the screens it was made for back in 1958). The movie is also […]
Books That Truly Were Something Else
My staff of thousands informs me that “The Something Else Press Collection” just went on the market. Although some of the books are rarer than others, it’s the collection as a whole that’s notable. Early titles included Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, Dick Higgins’ collection of performance scores and art polemics; correspondence art pioneer Ray Johnson’s […]
The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter
My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]
Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State
![IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE First edition, 1935 [Doubleday, Doran and Company]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ItCantHappenHere-200x200.jpg)
Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the […]
There Is Joy in Making Music
In a video trailer for Finnegan Shanahan’s debut album from New Amsterdam Records, David Bloom conducts the new music ensemble Contemporaneous in a passage from “The Two Halves: Music for a Hudson River Railroad Dream Map.” The piece is a 35-minute song cycle described in a press release as “deft violin work and ethereal vocals […]
Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally
Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It’s worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump’s rallies these days. Writing in his diary that “M […]
The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries
![Meng & Ecker No. 5 [Savoy Books, 1992]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/meng-ecker-no.-5-200x200.jpg)
Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]
Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros
When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets “during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship,” Aaron Shulman writes in the current issue of The Believer, it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled “El Desencanto” (“The Disenchanted”), the film “ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute […]
Interview: The Skinny on the Beats
![The Skinny on the Beats [IT: International Times]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/SKINNY-ON-THE-BEATS-e1455799290893.png)
Hilary Holladay: How would you size up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than as personalities? Jan Herman: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I’m sure that more people have read On the Road than ever read “Howl.” But Ginsberg may be more significant as a writer than Kerouac in […]