Every word in Thomas Pynchon’s deranged dance macabre, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow,’ seems, like HTML, to link out to some other subject. The book seems for me to exist in-between worlds, barely attached to this one while trying desperately to connect us with another fuzzily glimpsed, just-hinted, vague world, suggested by pure chance connections between ideas and [...]

Spanish film director and original member of the Surrealist movement, Luis Buñuel, directed this version of Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe‘ in 1954. It’s a very good and straightforward telling of the story with a totally convincing island locale. The Defoe novel is now more important reading than it’s ever been. That’s because it is the [...]

I have very mixed feelings about the core group of writers known as ‘The Beats.’ They were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ is one of the milestones (or millstones, depending on point of view) of American literature. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ is one of the great twentieth century poems, and [...]

It’s nearly impossible to find film adaptations of Thomas Pynchon novels anywhere. I frankly don’t know why anyone would even try to film such books. It seems almost suicidally foolish. But this plucky fellow, Jeff Hoyt, has at least given it a small go. He’s filmed a sort-of version of the opening pages of Pynchon’s [...]

Krystal Cannon (PersonTV) made this short documentary about the Beat Generation in which she not only narrates as Queen Elizabeth, but also plays various roles including Allen Ginsberg, Joan Vollmer, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, John Lennon, Edie Sedgwick and Abbie Hoffman. She gives a clear account of the Beat movement then moves into the general [...]

Here’s a re-post of an art game I programmed. It just makes an animated image using math and provides you with a simple drawing program that offers markers, spray paints, and an eraser. The point is for you to draw something on top of my atomic galaxy artwork and make something totally original. There’s a [...]

MATURE CONTENT – NUDITY: The great American writer, Henry Miller, walks into his bathroom in 1973 and talks about all the fascinating pictures on the walls. Here’s a guy who can kill zombies with his words. I’ve always considered him to be an antidote to the lifeless people one must engage with on a daily [...]

My latest artwork is an image that is never quite the same twice. I worked hard on it. Framed it. Hung it in a gallery. Now you come along with your paints and markers and mess it all up. I’m curious to see what you decide to do. So when you deface my best work [...]

B. Traven was the mysterious best-selling author of the novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was made into a classic film by director John Huston in the 1940s. But who was B. Traven? The mystery surrounding his identity remains fascinating to this day. There have been many theories about who he was, whether [...]

Oh boy have I found a great book!  Poet Jim Carroll was finishing this thing up when he passed away in 2009.  I have only read 73 pages so far but I recognize this as one of the greatest novels I have ever read.  A New York painter reacts strongly to some paintings by Velazquez, [...]