Review
ON VALENCIA STREET – Jack Micheline – Review
Marc Olmsted
ON VALENCIA STREET
Jack Micheline
Edited by Tate Swindell
Introduction by Eric Mingus
Lithic Press
$20.00
Jack Micheline is not so much an unsung but undersung member of the Beat Generation, a fixture on the San Fra...
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Review
Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century by Gerald Nicosia – Review
Jim Feast
Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century
Gerald Nicosia
Corte Madera, CA: Noodlebrain Press, 2019
Gerald Nicosia's Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century is an absorbing and crucial book, laying out repeatedly how commerce triumphed over art and any real literary values in Kerouac's story. That story culminates with the scandal of auctioning off the roll manuscript of On the Road to a sports franchise owner, who obviously could not care less about the literary qualities of the text and knows it only as the work of a cult author, which may appreciate in value. It is also the story of the inheritance battle scandal which arises around will-tampering and high-priced lawyers.
Putting aside that Kerouac died nearly penniless and now others are making millions off his legacy, the real crime is the fact that the values he espoused in On the Road and other texts, the importance of spirituality, comradeship, adventuring and giving zero atten...
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Review
The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces by Max Wolf Valerio – Review
Marc Olmsted
The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces
by Max Wolf Valerio
Eoagh Books, $20.00
Reviewed By Marc Olmsted
MAX WOLF VALERIO said, “Before I transitioned, I was 19 and showed Allen Ginsberg a poem of mine ...
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Review
Something’s Happening But You Don’t Know What It Is
Vincent Zangrillo
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
Reviewed by Vincent Zangrillo
I’ll tell you my own Bob Dylan story. Or maybe two or three. I can guarantee you that these are the god’s honest truth, ...
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Review
Birds of Passage – Review
Franklin Mount
The indigenous people of the Guajira Peninsula of Colombia, the Wayuu, are the stars of Birds of Passage. Their resilience and pride (they were never conquered by the Spanish) is evident in everything they do. The Wayuu hold...
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Review
Victory City by John Strausbaugh – Review
Jim Feast
John Strausbaugh, Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers During World War II (New York: Twelve, 2018), 488 pages.
John Strausbaugh’s Victory City is a chronicle of New York City right before, during and after World War II in a book that is at times sweeping in its marshaling of data, at others intimately in-depth in characterizing individual lives. Moreover, with an exemplary judiciousness, the book, while showing many instances of social solidarity as the city pulls together to battle the Axis, also reveals in every depiction, the counter-stresses that would maintain sexual and racial hierarchies, even to the point (before the U.S. directly enters the war) of many New Yorkers rooting for pro-fascist and anti-Semitic groups.
His description of the Stage Door Canteen, for example, highlights this dual energy. The club on West 44th Street “was rather like a USO, only staffed with stars [who pitched in to aid the w...
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Review
One Hundred Years Among the Daisies, poems by George Wallace – Review
Ron Kolm
One Hundred Years Among the Daisies, poems by George Wallace. Published by Stubborn Mule Press, 2018.
I have this notion that the chunk of time we’re going through in ‘our’ American culture, under Mr. Trump, is ...
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Review
Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World – Review
Marc Olmsted
Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World
By Tosh Berman
City Lights Books
$17.95
reviewed by Marc Olmsted
I first came across Wallace Berman's artwork in an underground newspaper in the late '60s - I can no long...
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Purgatory & Paradise: Sassy ‘70s Suburbia & the City – Photographs by Meryl Meisler
Franklin Mount
Purgatory & Paradise: Sassy ‘70s Suburbia & the City
Meryl Meisler, Bizarre Publishing, 2016
Do you remember New York before Reagan and the cult of the Free Market? Before it became Singapore on the Hudson? Meryl Meisl...
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DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS—William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg–reviewed
Marc Olmsted
DON'T HIDE THE MADNESS
William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg
(Steven Taylor, ed.)
Three Rooms Press
$26.00
Those lucky enough to have socialized with William Burroughs report the best situations had...
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Review
The Bouncer by David Gordon – Review
Bernard Meisler
The Bouncer, a novel by David Gordon
The Mysterious Press, New York, 259 pages
Legend has it that when criminals and others in "the game" would read Elmore Leonard's novels, they always assumed he was a crook who had don...
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Poem
Three Poets, Three Books — Café Crazy, We Became Summer, and Blue Lyre
William Considine
Café Crazy, by Francine Witte
We Became Summer, by Amy Barone
Blue Lyre, by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
On Wednesday, June 13, three well-known Downtown New York poets read together from their new books, published w...
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Review
The Brothers Allman
Vincent Zangrillo
In 1969, Duane Allman founded the Allman Brothers, recruiting his brother, Gregg, on keyboards and vocals, a second guitarist, Dickie Betts, bassist Berry Oakley and a set of drummers, Butch Trucks and Jaimoe Johansen. In Ju...
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