For the first time outside of China, over 200 photographs by recently released artist Ai Weiwei are on view in Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983 – 1993, an exhibition presented by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing in association with the Asia Society Museum in New York. Before Ai became an internationally recognized artist and activist, he lived in the East Village amongst expatriate Chinese intellectuals and artists. His images document some of the most critical and defining events of the period, as well as the general atmosphere of the time; highlights of the exhibition include photos of a reading by Allen Ginsburg, riots in the parks of the East Village, drag queens at Wigstock, and a visit by Bill Clinton, as well as artful self-portraits, and portraits of notable Chinese intellectuals, like the filmmaker Chen Kaige and composer Tan Dun. In addition to the beauty and significance of these images as artifacts, the show offers a rare look into the thoughts and attitudes of a burgeoning conceptual artist. Click through for a preview.
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From Jagger to Warhol, Bronx-born photographer Ken Regan has captured some our cultural history’s greatest icons. And now we bring you his previously unpublished shots of Bob Dylan playing shirtless backgammon backstage on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, laughing up with young Patti Smith at a Greenwich Village party and reading a paper at convenience store in 2000. Starting May 20th, the Morrison Hotel Gallery in SoHo is showing off un-seen gems and seen classics from Regan’s impressive body of work, from crinkling white-face close-ups to tour bus poker games with the band. To celebrate the folk juggernaut’s upcoming 70th birthday, check out some of our favorite photos from the Ken Regan Presents Bob Dylan exhibit.
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Artists love other artists. Perhaps there is an electric connection between two people whose minds are always whirring, or literary snobs can’t bear to date laymen, or perhaps for some writers, the only way they know their partner will understand them is if that person is also a writer. No matter what it is, there’s something powerful about a couple on the same team in the same industry. Plus, everybody loves a celebrity couple, and we particularly love literary celebrity couples. We like to imagine their arguments as poetic and their children as geniuses, and their lives spent sitting around in oaken rooms drinking brandy and scribbling between loving looks. Well, maybe that’s not realistic. But to each their own celebrity fantasy, right? Click through for our list of ten of our favorite real-life literary power couples — and let us know which ones we’ve missed in the comments!
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Writer, philosopher, artist, and co-founder of the Beat Generation, William S. Burroughs — who died in 1997 at the age of 83 — continues to be a vital cultural force today. The author of books like Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch, Burroughs forged the cornerstone of a modern American cultural movement with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other visionary writers and artists. His buttoned-up, three-piece exterior cloaked a dark genius that hungered for hustlers and heroin — way back in the 1940s. On February 5, William S. Burroughs would have been 97, but his spirit undoubtedly lives on, with more about him still coming out.
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Everybody doodles. There’s just something about an idle moment and a blank space on a page that invites a little design or two. Plus, there is some evidence that active doodlers are also active thinkers and imaginers. After all, John Keats doodled flowers in the margins of his manuscripts, and Leonardo DaVinci is famous for his love of doodling. There’s even a whole book dedicated to the doodles our various presidents have scribbled – we hope not while they were supposed to be paying attention to anything important. But everybody’s doodles are different – like dreams, they are culled directly from the loose bits floating around in our brains, and their expression is really only inhibited by the doodler’s physical abilities and/or hand-eye coordination. Authors – especially those who wrote with pens instead of those soulless computer things – are prime doodlers. They have a million ideas going through their heads at once, so it makes sense that something would spill out as a little drawing on the side. Check out our gallery of doodles by famous authors, and let us know what (if anything) you think it tells us about them.
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What do your glasses say about you? And more importantly, which famous spectacle-sporters do they make you look like? We’ve picked out some four-eyed artists, writers and cultural figures as our guides, and analyzed the shapes of their specs to determine what category you might fall into if you choose to rock their signature frames.
After all, whether round or square, big or small, glasses are always a statement, and we think the kind of statement you make on your face probably has some bearing on the kind of statement you make in your art. Do aesthetic choices track from accessories to prose to song lyrics? Or can you get a little closer to writing like David Foster Wallace if you appropriate his specs — literally the lenses through which he sees the world? We speculate on a few spectacles after the jump.
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Last week, Tina Fey was awarded the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and over the weekend PBS aired the made-for-TV ceremony. While they might have cut out some of the Sarah Palin digs, they left in a hilarious cameo by Alec Baldwin as Mark Twain. (In case you’re wondering, Baldwin looked and sounded more like Colonel Sanders than Twain.) It got us thinking about previous portrayals of famous writers, particularly in film. After the jump, we examine 10 of our favorite examples and try to determine which actors pulled it off best.
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The history of book banning reflects the history of social fear. From political dissidence to obscenity to excessive realism, the reasons for literary censorship tend to reflect a residing (or self-appointed) authority’s narrow analysis on behalf of everyone apparently incapable of passing judgment for themselves. Although some censoring rationales simply dissipate with time, other explanations for a book’s unfitting nature remain too absurd to ignore. To coincide with Banned Books Week 2010, here’s a sample of classic books that were censored for particularly ridiculous reasons.
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In this biopic of famed American poet Allen Ginsberg, Jon Hamm, Mary Louise-Parker, Treat Williams, and Jeff Daniels join lead actor James Franco to reenact the 1957 trial following the publication of Howl.
A year after printing the epic Beat poem, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged with obscenity. The film takes us up to that point through insightful chronicling of Ginsberg’s early years as a writer and revolutionary, carrying us through to the case that represented American society’s conflicting values during a time of change.
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For anyone who has ever felt drawn to the Beat Generation, yet has never fully comprehended its history, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
provides a long-awaited context for the lives, loves, and poetry of its founders. Beginning in 1944, Kerouac and Ginsberg’s correspondence stretched nearly 20 years, spurred by a murder and sustained by a mutual love of the written word.
In Viking’s new publication, the depth and cultural significance of the two writers’ works takes on a new perspective. Their letters chronicle the authors’ complex relationship, including Ginsberg’s early admiration of the hyper-heterosexual Kerouac, as well as their numerous publication rejections, and the establishment of a literary movement that defined a generation.
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