Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis.
From acclaimed cultural and film historian James Curtis—a major biography, the first in more than two decades, of the legendary comedian and filmmaker who elevated physical comedy to the highest of arts and whose ingenious films remain as startling, innovative, modern—and irresistible—today as they were when they beguiled audiences almost a century ago.
The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Polizzotti
Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith.
The photographs in Mary Ellen Bartley’s series Morandi’s Books – meditative still life compositions in muted colors transformed by collage elements – are gently disorienting despite their formal precision.
Cover of Twenty-five Years Ago, by Joan Lyons (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1998)
In the January/February issue of frieze, Terence Trouillot profiles artist Henry Taylor ahead of shows at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Plus, one year after Russia declared war on Ukraine, artists and writer respond to the crisis in a dossier, including: a personal essay by painter and writer Kateryna Aliinyk; Adam Mazur profiles Taras Gembik, an artist and performer organising picnics to raise money for Ukraine in Warsaw, Poland; Nikita Kadan on what art can mean in a time of war; editor-in-chief Andrew Durbin interviews Olha Honchar, the director of Territory of Terror Museum, which documents war crimes, and the coordinator for the Museum Crisis Center, an organization helping Ukrainian museums rescue their holdings from occupied zones.
Profile: Henry Taylor “I became the observer because I was trying to understand my own life and that’s why I started making pictures. I just like looking at people.” Terence Trouillot considers how Henry Taylors oeuvre goes far beyond the canvas.
Presidents have been impeached, but none has ever been asked, after leaving office, to turn himself in for arraignment. The January 6th committee’s final actions could help change that.
Literature once filled in archival gaps by saying the unsayable. Now a younger generation is devising new modes of telling the story and finding new stories to tell.
Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath
Boomers Daily 