The Book Problem
Were the problem book people like us, it would soon go away. It is not our weaknesses, or our sentimentality, or our nostalgia. It’s As If’ we’ve become obsolete and we haven’t. By ‘we,’ I mean We...
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Occupy Strand
If you have ever sold a book for or to the Strand you know there is nothing new in being taken advantage of by the Bass’s. When we parted company in 1975, over the then deplorable working conditions,...
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The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry and Binding by Camilla Huey
Introduction to Camilla Huey’s The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry and Binding. May – September, 2013. The Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York City. By Kurt Thometz “You have heard me speak of...
View ArticleThe Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding by Dominique Nabokov
New York Review of Books. Aug. 19th, 2013 Jane McManus by Dominique Nabokov May 3, 2013 – September 12, 2013 In the introduction to her exhibition, “The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry and...
View Article10 books on Art
There is nothing wrong with lists of 10 so long as they are disassociated with being the BEST of anything. I may get more requests than most for 10 Best Books, with admonitions NOT to think...
View ArticleKurt Thometz’s Little Black Bookstore by Orestis Tsonopoulos
Kurt Thometz, a private librarian to the ultra-rich and a rare book collector with an affinity for African literature, surrounds himself with more than 15,000 obsessively organized books in an 1891...
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Comely attractions.
The Private Library and the House of Execution are collaborating on a boudoir library, fit for Catherine the Great, of libertine literature from the 18th century through the ’60’s and ’70’s and...
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The Book Problem, Pt. 2
03.18.14 Mayor Bill de Blasio, City Hall, New York, NY 10007 To: Mayor Bill De Blasio. cc: Scott Stringer, Jimmy Van Bramer, Anthony Marx, Vianella Rivas. Dear Mayor De Blasio, As you’re undoubtedly...
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Art in Transit
Time traveling to that once-upon-a-time without inhabitions, brother & sister looking back from Uptown today to Downtown then at Grey Art Gallery’s Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera...
View ArticleThe Whole Gritty City
Last week Richard Barber accepted a Christopher Award for everyone involved in the making of The Whole Gritty City, acknowledging the “higher purpose” behind it’s art. Sometimes the Maryknoll’s...
View ArticleAmerican Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry by Ned and...
“This sprawling and unsparing history of the American slave-breeding industry may be the most important book of the last decade. It is a vividly written, painfully documented alternative history of the...
View ArticleThe Loves of Aaron Burr (full length feature)
Something of a family production documenting Camilla’s exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in 2013.
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Occupy Strand
If you have ever sold a book for or to the Strand you know there is nothing new in being taken advantage of by the Bass’s. When we parted company in 1975, over the then deplorable working conditions,...
View ArticleThe Book Problem, revisited.
The Book Problem Were the problem book people like us, it would soon go away. It is not our weaknesses, or our sentimentality, or our nostalgia. It’s As If’ we’ve become obsolete and we haven’t. By...
View ArticleIf I Can’t Sell It I’ll Sit On It, I Just Won’t Give It Away.
A selection from the golden era of 42nd Street XXX bookshops, so far back that they only sold print-on-paper porn. In the 1970s and ’80s, when gender studies were a more an intimately personal...
View ArticleSaturday Night Disappointment
A flip book in more ways than one. Less “Uncooked” than Mad hard-boiling Negritude Noir from the Master Miller O. Albert. Boom Akalakalaka! [book id=’4′ /] To enlarge click on the small screen on the...
View ArticleBooks as Weapons, 2016
Tragedy: The Orestia by Aeschylus and Sophocles Electra. It was Richard Strauss’s version of the latter at the Met this spring (for me the artistic achievement of 2016) that set me off rereading...
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With a Weapon and a Grin:
Postcard images of France’s Black African Colonial Troups of WWI by Stephan Likosky. (Anglen, Pa.: Schiffer Military History, 2017) . “C’est le blanc qui crée le nègre.” – Frantz Fanon. In light of...
View ArticleShawshank time and then deported. Dempsey Hawkins.
After 38 years in a US prison, a British born man serving life is sent back to a country he barely knew. A cold and biting January wind was blowing through Washington DC as I sat in Dulles...
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Journeys of an Afro-Atlantic Envoy: With George Nelson Preston on Harlem Heights
frontis: Forever Between Two Renaisances. Triptych from Tristes Tropiques/Sadly, the Tropics (2016) The Museum of Art and Origins, 430 West 162nd St, NYC, NY 10032 As is our custom, I am having a...
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