Monday, May 25, 2015

Jasper Johns, "Painting with Two Balls"

Jasper Johns, Painting with Two Balls (1960). Encaustic and collage on canvas with object. I saw this at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when the painting was on loan from the artist's collection.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

fascism not confined to the Twilight Zone

Rod Serling's antifascist closing narration to the March 4, 1960, episode of "The Twilight Zone"—"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." http://bit.ly/1a2tS7z (audio)


Monday, March 9, 2015

Whitman, Williams, Oppen

George Oppen in a letter to William Carlos Williams, Summer 1960: "People who are afraid to talk won't produce much poetry. Tho Whitman has been no use to me. Perhaps arriving after you I don't need him. I always feel that that deluge and soup of words is a screen for the uncertainty of his own identity." (Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, p. 39)

Sunday, March 1, 2015

the conservative's selection of Ez

Conservative publisher Henry Regnery put out a book of miscellaneous (and in some cases uncollected) essays on American civilization by Ezra Pound.


Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Jasper Johns, "Flashlight"




Jasper Johns, Flashlight (1960); cast 1980-81. Made of bronze and glass. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 2015, on loan from a collection of the artist.)

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Hannah Weinstein's "The Four Just Men"

Hannah Weinstein, living and working in England since 1952 to avoid anticommunist blacklisting and possible congressional prosecution in the U.S., created a British television series aired in 39 episodes in late 1959 and 1960 called The Four Just Men. Someone has done us the favor of making 37 of the episodes available on YouTube here. One episode features the resurgence of fascism by way of a weekly magazine that has caused fights between the "Americans" and Puerto Ricans in a boys' club. Below is a screenshot of what Mr. Rivera, father of a boy who is stabbed in a scuffle with "Americans," reads in Garnes Weekly.


Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Nam June Paik cuts off John Cage's tie

On October 6, 1960, at Mary Bauermeister's atelier in Cologne, while performing Etude for Pianoforte, shy young Nam June Paik suddenly and violently took a scissors and cut off John Cage's tie as Cage was sitting near the front of the audience.