Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude
This interview looks at a huge can of worms poisoning American democracy.
He notes that Trump was identified as a potential KGB asset in the Cold War days, details a lavish junket held for powerful former GOP Congressman Tom DeLay, and talks about more than 250 million dollars that poured “without even breaking a sweat” into super-PACs aligned with Russian interests.
I have no idea. But you can’t read the last paragraph of “Civilization and Its Discontents” without believing he had written it only yesterday or without believing he had hope for the future. The fact that the book was written in 1929 does throw his hope into doubt, if it was intended as prognostication, which — to be frank — it was. But it’s still a great read.
Nelson Algren, as great a writer as ever came out of Chicago, was born on this day in 1909.
No more crowding those Kiosks
That look like guard towers
Protected by hard currency
And the insect eyes peering out of them
Human eyes preying off their own kind
No more tram drivers drinking their coffee
While you wait for hours to get home to your child . . . — William Cody Maher
‘The crows scream
and fly to town in whirring flight:
soon it will snow —
happy he who now still has a home!’ …
The world — a gate
to a thousand wastelands dumb and cold!
Whoever has lost
what you have lost, rests nowhere. … — Friedrich Nietzsche
Thinking of rasPutin, we laughed when a friend joked about the availability of refurbished Geiger counters on Amazon. Gallows humor helps to ease the anxiety of current conditions. Here’s a serious kind of distraction: Moloko Print’s volume of selected poems, ‘That’s the Way to Travel,” by Jan Heller Levi, with illustrations by Marlies Pekarek. (Levi’s first book, “Once I Gazed at You in Wonder,” earned the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.)
… especially this one: Marina Ovsyannikova, who held up an anti-war sign on Russia’s main TV news broadcast. She was reported missing but has now appeared in court.
This is balm for dreamers.
Where does George Herms and his 1985 assemblage “Dream” fit in the continuum of American art? After reading “The Nature of Art” by Armand Marie Leroi and having a look at the Connect Vermeer website, I wondered whether a similar analysis could be done about Herms and “Dream.”
‘You’re occupiers. You are fascists. Why the fuck did you come here with your guns?’ Ukrainian woman confronting Russian soldiers in Henichesk, in southern Ukraine. ‘Take these seeds and put them in your pocket so, at least, sunflowers will grow on your graves.’ (Translated by Alex Abramovich)
‘Bells ring / silently the evening / rolls in its void’ — Paul Celan
life is / kkkkrrrraaaazzzzy / for reasons / having nothing / to do with / rasPUTIN but / he could spitball / a nuke our way / in the time / it takes to say / ”oh shit.”
A still shot from Rich Allen’s latest movie. If you look at the shoes .. well, the sneakers … you can see these kids were not actors.
Two books by Mark Terrill have arrived with ekphrastic poems of great appeal: “The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express” and “Great Balls of Doubt.” Here are two poems with images from daily life and the thoughts they arouse.
The epigraph (“I’ll do penance with farts and groans / Kneeling on my marrowbones”) comes from a poem by James Joyce. The folio includes four deformed sonnets (“Cursed,” “Her Days All Flee,” “World of Trouble,” “Mirage”) and a poem (“After Carl”).
Paul Bowles wrote a short story called “The Garden” in 1963. Three years later Joseph McPhillips asked him to dramatize the story for students at the American School of Tangier. Bowles, who was in Thailand at the time and about to leave for Morocco by ship, wrote scenes for the play on his way back and airmailed them to McPhillips, who immediately started rehearsals. Following Bowles’s advice, McPhillips involved artists and writers such as Marguerite McBey, Ira Belline, Brion Gysin, and John Hopkins. The play was staged in Tangier in April 1967, but was never published. This documentation offers the original text of the play (translated as well into German) with an evocative motherlode of illustrations that trace the play’s genesis from page to stage.
The music-streaming service claims that “listening is everything.” But it’s tone deaf. And many agree. As do we.
Mohammed Mrabet, a young Moroccan painter from Tangier, met the American ex-patriate composer and writer Paul Bowles in 1965. Bowles, who lived in Tangier for decades, taped many of Mrabet’s spontaneous stories and translated them into English, eventually resulting in the publication of more than a dozen books. Mark Terrill, himself an American ex-pat writer and poet, recalls that during a kif-fueled visit with the two of them, in 1985, Mrabet began “improvising some of his crazy tales while Paul simultaneously translated for my benefit, and I quickly jotted this one down.” Terrill bought several of Mrabet’s drawings, including the one that illustrates this newly printed poster from Cold Turkey Press.
![Nelson Algren, 1962 [Photo: Steve Deutch]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Nelson-Algren-1962-Stephen-Deutch-copy-200x200.jpg)
