Dutch American artist Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997) (center, with light hair) speaks with an unidentified couple at the top of a stoop next door to the Tanager Gallery (the storefront above the ‘Bar’ sign) on 10th Street, New York, New York, April 5, 1959.

“Perhaps no single photographer could be said to have captured the energy, the cultural ferment, the reverberating social change emanating from New York City in the second half of the 20th century as vividly as Fred W. McDarrah. McDarrah got his start covering the downtown beat of the Village Voice in the 1950s and ’60s, as that publication was defining a newly-emerged breed of independent journalism. McDarrah penetrated the lofts and coffeehouses of Lower Manhattan to shed light upon a new movement known as ‘The Beats’ and went on to capture on film the New York artists, activists, politicians, and poets who changed the…

The Golden Age of the American B-Movie Title Sequence – Part 2: The End of the Production Code. “The ’60s were a time of change, not only in politics and social norms, but also the arts, and cinema in particular. Hitchcock’s Psycho, released in 1960, became the first box office blockbuster to be distributed without official approval from the Motion Pictures Distributors Association of America (MPDAA), which set rigid guidelines for sex and violence in American film. … Thus began a decade-long game of chicken between Hollywood and its patrons, each prodding the other to their limits. The censorship goalposts were pushed so far back as to be lost in the fog of America’s ongoing free speech debate. The censors became so marginalized by this cinematic machismo, and so overwhelmed by the explosion of art house films and venues, that they could simply no longer hold the line. In…

#8 (June 1995), with 15 letters from Olson to Robin Blaser. “Charles Olson and I first met — head to head — in 1957, at The Tavern, which was, then, a white, weatherboarded, frame building with rooms, a bar-restaurant, and a swimming pool on the beach in Gloucester. The pool has since been filled, Tarmac’d and reformed into a parking lot. Don Allen, who had previously met Olson in New York, picked me up in Boston to take the train there — on a shining, early summer day. I’d come east of Chicago for the first time to Boston / Cambridge in July, 1955, hired from Berkeley as a librarian in the Widener Library. This move east was, it seemed to me, a reasonable response to an unanswered dream — out of my childhood reading of Hawthorne, I’d wanted to go to Bowdoin College. Since my desert west didn’t…

“Albert Ayler was a mysterious figure. His recording career was relatively brief, beginning in 1962 and ending in 1970, with several of the entries live performances released many years after his passing. His demise itself was a bizarre circumstance. Revenant Records, by all accounts the most ambitious and thorough of all box-set minded labels, has now released a nine+ CD set of Ayler whose mystery has rubbed off a little on the project. Its coming was announced by a series of all black ads with little on them but what has become the set’s slogan: ‘Trane was the Father…Pharoah was the son…I am the Holy Ghost.’ The result? Most probably the highwater mark in the often underwhelming realm of box sets. It is as if Ayler’s body had washed up on the banks of the East River dressed in a natty Armani suit. The box itself, though black plastic, was…

“As a child in the 1960s, my mother would routinely pass a secondary school on her way home in downtown Algiers named Lycée Frantz Fanon. To her, the name was quite peculiar, since all the other schools had newly Arabic names, alluding to different figures within the independence movement and Algerian history more broadly. She was perplexed as to why this school kept this seemingly white French name, only to learn much later in life—from her son, a particularly angsty postcolonial teen—that it was named for a black man from the Caribbean and that he had made contributions to Algeria’s independence movement. This story differs quite radically from today’s nostalgic renderings of Algerian independence from budding, self-proclaimed revolutionaries—both in the academy and activist circles in the West—that place Fanon and his works at the center of the struggle. The two have become so inseparable that I feel the need to…

Yvonne Rainer, 87, photographed in Fort Tryon Park.

“In 1966, Yvonne Rainer presented ‘Trio A,’ her celebrated solo that emphasized movement over expression. By stripping dance of narrative, of emotion and even of the dancer’s gaze — there is no looking at the audience — the steps could shine. And those steps, delivered with the same temperament no matter how simple or difficult, were the dance. What did Rainer banish? Affectation. In another iteration of ‘Trio A,’ in 1970, the work expanded to six dancers, including Rainer, who performed nude with American flags tied around their necks like halter tops, at the People’s Flag Show at Judson Memorial Church in New York. The event was a response to the prosecution of the gallery owner Stephen Radich for showing work that desecrated the flag. Censorship, the Vietnam War — these were issues of the day. Now at 87, with 61 years…

David DeMatthews and David S. Knight wrote in the San Antonio Express-News that Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher plan is “a terrible idea,” and they explain why. (Since I don’t have a subscription to the San Antonio Express-News, I am copying their tweet.)

David DeMatthews is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at The University of Texas at Austin.

David S. Knight is the associate director of the Center for Education Research and Policy Studies and an assistant professor of educational leadership at The University of Texas at El Paso.

To summarize:

1. The vouchers don’t cover the cost of most private schools.

2. The money spent on vouchers will hurt public schools, which most students attend.

3. Budget cuts will force public schools to cut popular programs, like dual language education, STEM programs, and vocational training. These cuts will hit low-income districts the hardest.

4. Private schools that…

“It does not matter if you have five books or five thousand, one’s own book collection is inherently the most important and most interesting. These are the books that mean the most to you personally otherwise you would not have taken the trouble of collecting them. Book collecting is egotistical and narcissistic. Book collectors are also envious and competitive. … That said, with the publication of Soft Need #23, Martin (and Udo Breger) looks to have created one of the great Burroughs-related collectibles of the past decade. I also believe he supports museum and gallery exhibitions with his collection. I was going to say that Martin does this discreetly, but I am not sure that is correct. He does it in Europe, which may be why his activities are not more well known in the States. So, I am not merely egotistical and narcissistic; I am also nationalist and…

“Read any biography of Jack Kerouac and here’s essentially what you’ll learn: that in the summer of 1956 he spent two months in a mountaintop shack as a firelookout for the US Forest Service in the North Cascades in Washington State, and nothing much happened. Mostly he was bored. Jack’s experience on Desolation Peak marked the climax of his involvement with Buddhism and of a decade of restless travel; it’s the high point of his journeying and spiritual seeking. A voracious reader, he nevertheless chose to go up the mountain without any books, only his personally typed copy of the Diamond Sutra, which he planned to read every day and transcribe yet again, this time in language more accessible to American readers, in order to achieve the enlightenment that he was certain would result. The extent of his solitude, thus, was acute. There were no radio stations from…