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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Review
where night and day become one—the french poems /1983-2017 by Steve Dalachinsky—review
Valery Oisteanu
where night and day become one
the french poems /1983-2017
by Steve Dalachinsky
Great Weather for Media, NYC, 2018
Steve Dalachinsky is a poet /cultural reporter of our time, not only via his essays, but also through...
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Review
A Hermit Has No Plural by Gabor G. Gyukics – Review
Ron Kolm
A Hermit Has No Plural by Gabor G. Gyukics, Singing Bone Press.
A Hermit Has No Plural, a collection of poems by the great Hungarian writer, Gabor G. Gyukics, is wonderfully unique. It is a surrealist vision of a world...
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Review
Sticky Fingers the Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine – review
Vincent Zangrillo
Sticky Fingers the Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
Joe Hagen. Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95 hardcover (545 pages)
The title tells the tale: first the rock cultural reference, then the editor, then ...
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Enthrall & Squalor: Photographing Downtown 1977-1987
John Weed
“Walking home at night was taking your life in your own hands.” Or so said one of the subjects of the documentary Blank City, about life in the East Village in the late seventies and early to mid-eighties. (By 1990, your...
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