Matthias Penzel’s obituary about Carl Weissner, more an appreciation than an obit, appeared this past Sunday in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. He has kindly translated it from the German for me, and I post it here with his permission. Penzel, a Berlin-based author of several books, including TraumHaft (a rock ‘n’ roll novel) and Rebell […]
Cody’s Conversation
When I asked Cody Mahler to write something for me about the friend we both lost, he wrote back: “I have to sit down with Carl and discuss what he would like me to say.” They must’ve had a great conversation, because this is what he wrote: I CALLED HIM MISTER MOOCH Everybody knows that he is […]
Carl Weissner, In Memoriam
There is nothing I cherished more than my friendship with Carl. He was my dearest, oldest friend. We didn’t just go back to the ’60s together, we exchanged torrents of letters and collaborated on literary projects; we remained the warmest of friends through all the years since. I am devastated by his death. It came […]
‘A Budding Police State’
Human Rights Watch reports: Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees. Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a budding police state. — Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human […]
A Decade of Poetry, Politics, and Rock ‘n’ Roll
Speaking of Lower East Side legends, Ed Sanders has written a new memoir, FUG YOU {An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, The Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side}. Just out from Da Capo Press, with a dust jacket based on an historic Life magazine cover, it’s a […]
Color Them In: Legends of the Lower East Side
I can’t let the year end without taking note of a new coloring book — yes, a coloring book — titled Legends of the Lower East Side. It’s a collaboration of the artists Troy Harris, Orlando Bonilla and the unstoppable documentarian Clayton Patterson. The book features their confederates in nonconformity, artistry, community activism, and “colorfulness.” […]
Off He Goes Into the Wild Blue Yonder
You can say a lot of things about Christopher Hitchens’s role as a cheerleader for the war in Iraq, most of all that it stank to high heaven. Of course it’s pure coincidence that he died on the same day that marked the official end of the war. But it’s a fitting irony that Secretary […]
Into the Toilet: NYT Has Fun on the Front Page
Was an online editor for the New York Times being cute? Have a look at the photo of a woman sticking her head in the toilet. It sat like an illustration from The Onion next to the headline “Putin Says Clinton Incited Protests Over Russian Vote.” Here it is on the digital front page of […]
When Billboards Are Ripped and Abstracted
Richard Sargent likes to take pictures of them. “Photographing torn posters is a cliché in which I continue to indulge,” he writes. In fact, his photos of “decaying urban billboards” — all of them shot in northern California’s East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and Richmond — transform that cliché into brilliant works of […]
Jess Bravin Explains It All for You
The U.S. Supreme Court, the Constitution, & the health care law. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Health and Safety . . . Oh Yeah
That’s the pretext for the cop sweep of OWS protestors at Zuccotti Park. Or as NYC’s billionaire mayor claims, that’s the reason for the eviction by what he called “the world’s greatest police department.” It’s the same police force recently convicted of planting drugs and currently charged with smuggling guns, armed robbery, making false arrests, […]
Mustill’s Message on a Postcard
© 1996 by Norman O. Mustill. From a postcard series of six. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Godfrey Reggio’s Vision of ‘Life Out of Balance’
A day in February, 1983. Godfrey Reggio is standing in front of the old Reichstag in Berlin. A tall, gaunt man with pale blue eyes and a graying beard that looks like stubble, he has just presented Koyaanisqatsi at the Berlin Film Festival. The notices have been gratifying. One critic called it “a masterpiece . […]
Life in Turmoil, Life Out of Balance
If you can’t get to the screening of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi at Avery Fisher Hall (on Nov. 2 and 3 in New York), where Philip Glass’s score for the film will be performed live by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, or if you can get over there but can’t afford to […]
Is Occupy Wall Street All About the Signs?
Apparently not. I didn’t know it, But Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics–its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making–are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar. Yes, really. But you knew that. If you didn’t, then go […]
Jobs Loved Computers, of Course … and Bach
In 1989, Michael Lawrence filmed Steve Jobs for Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. “I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him,” Lawrence messages in an email. “I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me.” “Like so many people around the world,” he writes, […]
The Mind Sashays
The “vulgo:cynicism” of Carl Weissner’s Die Abenteuer von Trashman — his term for the humor of his latest book — was already on display in last year’s Manhattan Muffdiver. Both books, from Vienna-based Milena Verlag, are written in German. Although I read German desperately, like a beachcomber sifting sand on a bad day, even I […]