Essay
RMX
Jürgen Schneider
Amy Winehouse staggers in shortly before midnight. It doesn’t go without notice how unwell she is.
Amy will be DJ’ing. There is a yellow shimmer to her skin and her skinny body looks more fragile than ever, her hands ...
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Essay
John Ashbery – an Oblique Remembrance
Max Blagg
I was introduced to John Ashbery's poetry in the summer of 1971, by a beautiful young American poet living in London. We met at a church jumble sale in Belsize Square. Her flat was across the street. I woke up on her couch l...
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Essay
Sixty
Patrick O'Neil
There is nothing easy about turning sixty. The days whip by in a whirlwind, kids look younger, and you can’t understand what they’re even talking about. Cops, bosses, and doctors could be your daughters and sons. Films a...
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Writing
Tom Wolfe – Requiem for a Writer
Vincent Zangrillo
Tom Wolfe liked to match. When I saw him on the cross trainer at the gym in Southampton, pumping away, vigorously chewing a chiclet, his head bent over his Ichabod Crane frame, tall but exceedingly lank, his blonde bob part...
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Blade Runner 2049: The Enigma and Exegesis of ‘K’
James Reich
Zwei Selle wohnen ach! In meiner Brust. (Two cells live in my chest.) ... I must go on being a Christian, acting out the role of a genuine revolutionary apostolic Christian, as a strategy: in order to overthrow the Black Iro...
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Essay
I Blame Louise Hay for Trump
Larissa Shmailo
I am listening to Abraham Hicks, whom the well-loved New Age maven Louise Hay, may the Universe rest her soul, calls “one of the best teachers on the planet.” Abraham is an “ascended” energy being channeled by a woma...
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Essay
Some Reflections on Bertolt Brecht, on the Occasion of the 119th Anniversary of His Birth
Franklin Mount
Some Reflections on Bertolt Brecht, on the Occasion of the 119th Anniversary of His Birth
“Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
“Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat.” - Leben des Galilei, scene 1...
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Writing
Bob Dylan Deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature
Bernard Meisler
Bob Dylan just won the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature. Many are angry. But they're wrong. He deserves it.
Joni Mitchel says Dylan is a fake. I take her critique with a grain of salt. Certainly Dylan is a confabulist—in...
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Poem
What I Think Historians Will Say in 20 Years about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Eliot Katz
What I Think Historians Will Say in 20 Years about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
How crazy it was that America’s elders nominated the two most
unpopular major-party candidates in U.S. history. On the Democratic ...
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Essay
Jack the Ripper, Performance, Participation, Fans and Trolls
James Reich
During the autumn of 1888, the period of the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, London, an ephemeral canon of “Ripper letters” was established, notably the so-called “Dear Boss” letter delivered on September 27t...
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Essay
Mark McCawley RIP
bart plantenga
“I had become periodically insane, with long bouts of horrible sanity...”
--Mark McCawley, “Sick Lazy Fuck”
I knew something was up on 3 counts: I had just posted something on the 19 April death of Richard Lyons ...
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Essay
The Last Days of Gotham Book Mart
Erik La Prade
In the famous photograph taken by Maya Deren of Gotham’s Surrealist window display, designed and organized by Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton, we have an interesting view of a time capsule. This particular display was cre...
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Photographs
Detroit Punk Photographs
Sue Rynski
My work is about rock and roll, specifically the rock and roll environment(s) I live in, the subculture. In 1977, just after art school, I fell into the art-and-punk Detroit scene with my friends Destroy All Monsters (the ro...
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Essay
The First Surrealist Manifesto
André Breton
The First Surrealist Manifesto
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his des...
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Music
Enchanted Musics
Mark Howell
One fall night in the 1980s I went to the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach. After taking a seat in the balcony a part of me began fighting Michel Riseman's relentless ostinatos. Over and over and over t...
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