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 the vote in New York's Republican primary and Hillary Clinton received 57.9% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Which might lead you to think, mistakenly, that they would run neck and neck there in a general election. But look at the … [Read more...]
Pélieu Show, With Norman Mailer Cocktail
Feeding Tube Records offered some swag at its exhibition of Claude Pélieu's Bosch-derived collages. "We made buttons as giveaways," Byron Coley says, "and we featured a urine-colored cocktail called Norman Mailer's Pocket." You can be sure that Pélieu is somewhere in Bosch heaven enjoying the joke. The little yellow buttons said, "je pisse dans la poche de norman mailer." Because that is exactly what he did. When I first heard the piss-pocket story a long time ago, I nearly fell off my chair laughing. The tale went like this: Pélieu was … [Read more...]
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 remarkable for a lot more than its lush production -- not least the way it debunked the Western cliché of score-settling violence. All of this is likely to be discussed by Wyler's daughter, the documentary film producer … [Read more...]
Meeting the Hangman
By Heathcote Williams I used to speak out against capital punishment From a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner. This was when it was thought that hanging people Was helpful in maintaining order. One day someone called Barry Trenoweth came over. His father, Gordon, had been hanged for murder. He’d killed a shopkeeper in Falmouth during the war In a robbery that went wrong. A non-starter. There was only four pounds ten shillings in the till And Gordon didn’t have the time to buy a drink Before the police called at 3, Mutton Row, … [Read more...]
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 Paper Snake, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art; and Rumanian-born Nouveau Réaliste artist Daniel Spoerri’s An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Re-Anecdoted Version). … [Read more...]
Orwell’s Typewriter, Meet Wold’s Bar Stool
Yesterday's blogpost, The Strange Case of Orwell's Typewriter, elicited some interesting remarks, only some of which were posted to it. One sent to me privately came from the California artist Kurt Wold. After posting a public comment, he wrote: "It occurs to me that I have a distantly related, lost typewriter story." Forty years ago, in San Anselmo, Norman [Mustill, our late mutual friend] showed me this chair he'd just purchased from a used furniture store. I remember he was rather giddy about its inherent feminine qualities. I convinced him … [Read more...]
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 it now? Orwell had died a sad lingering death from tuberculosis in 1950. His life had been bare in comforts, as severe as the gaunt look of him -- rail thin at 6-foot-3, almost cadaverous, his face a mask … [Read more...]
Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State
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 Chronicle, "I have a recommendation: Find a copy of It Can't Happen Here and give it a read. It's the most relevant commentary I've encountered in this crazy election year." Lewis, who was already famous as a best-selling novelist … [Read more...]
Headstone With Michaux Text Superimposed
This drawing is from a series of ‘Headstones’ by Gerard Bellaart. "buries everything outside of himself everything he has known up to now everything that surrounds him with scorn" -- Henri Michaux And here is the artist Arman's actual headstone 'Alone at Last' in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. The irony of course is that when you’re buried at Père-Lachaise you’re never alone. The place is a magnet for tourists. … [Read more...]
Horrorscope
Mary Beach could draw horoscope charts in great detail. It was a serious hobby of hers. She only did them for people she knew, and if they piqued her interest. I completely forgot she had done mine -- it was so long ago, circa 1967. An old friend reminded me the other day of what Mary said the future held for both of us. I'll leave that to the commentary on the card. Postscript: Coincidentally, the very funny palmistry cover for this week's New Yorker offers a lighter touch. … [Read more...]
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 with sprawling arrangements of strings, horns, percussion, and electronics." The 22-year-old composer is a founding member of the ensemble, which will perform live on Monday in Brooklyn to celebrate the album. Listen … [Read more...]
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 is a very good speaker," although the speech "was the usual claptrap ..." Orwell was struck by the "unnecessary violence" of Mosley's Blackshirt minions, who were "on duty" in the hall to enforce order … [Read more...]
The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries
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 the single "Blue Monday," which became a dance-club sensation. But Butterwoth's tale really begins in Manchester, where he and his writing partner David Britton founded Savoy Books and where they fought a decades-long battle against … [Read more...]
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 feature" and, he reports, has since become "a cult classic in Spain." Shulman is now writing a collective biography of the family, the Paneros, to be published by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco Books, in 2018. Its … [Read more...]
Not a Peep about the Oscars, Thank God
I've said his writing "had the density of Hart Crane poems" and that I was exaggerating "only a little." That's because I was recalling his column in the Chicago Sun-Times, when he roved the art galleries reviewing photography shows. (He had been the film critic of the Chicago Daily News before it folded, but that slot at the Sun-Times was already filled by Roger Ebert.) When he went on to USA Today as its film critic and still later to the San Diego Union-Tribune, it seemed to me he was forced to simplify both the complexity of his ideas … [Read more...]
From ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’
He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a limbo purged of desire . . . If that is what is meant by going back into one’s heart, could anything be better, in this world or the next? The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente, thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futile sallies supressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare … [Read more...]
Extracted, Diffracted, Destroyed
The poem is composed of words extracted from Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March and mashed up in a collage that bends their meaning, so that it’s a diffraction as much as an extraction. The drawing by Gerard Bellaart is titled "Study Apotheosis Lubertus Swaanzwijk." It was executed in 2014, in color pencil and casein tempera, as the basis for an oil painting on canvas. The painting was destroyed in 2015 by a freak tornado that tore apart Bellaart's home and studio in the French countryside. When I look at Bellaart's artworks, I see … [Read more...]