Duke & Jill
Price: $13.00
Duke & Jill
Stories by Ron KolmFrom a review by Mike Lindgren:
For years I have been clamoring for a book that collects all of the hard-to-find Duke and Jill stories of my friend and mentor, the downtown writer and poet Ron Kolm, and finally I have been obliged. Thanks to Bud Smith and his Unknown Press, these iconic tales of the East Village of yore are now snugly in place between two paperback covers.
Some background is in order. Ron Kolm is perhaps best known as one of the co-founders of the Unbearables, a loose literary collective of writers and poets who take their founding principles from a grab-bag of postmodernist dicta, including the literature of constraint and the concept of the temporary autonomous zone: a scruffy tribe of proudly low-rent situationists.
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Kolm himself came to New York in 1970, worked at the Strand alongside Patti Smith and Richard Hell,...State in Time
Price: $32.00
State in Time
Edited by IrwinBecome a citizen of the first global state of the universe! The NSK State in Time emerged in 1992, evolving in the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the transformation Neue Slowenische Kunst. Existing both as artwork and social formation, a state that encompasses all time but holds no territory, the NSK State in Time has for two decades pushed the boundaries of artistic and political practice. This volume collects together for the first time analyses of the NSK State in Time, including its relationship with the changing context of Eastern Europe, the connection between aesthetics and the state, the rise of NSK folk art, and documents the First NSK Citizen’s Congress in 2010.
ISBN:9781570272608
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180pp. 7½’’x10½” $32.00Class Wargames
Price: $39.95
Class Wargames
Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism
Richard BarbrookWhy should radicals be interested in playing wargames? Surely the Left can have no interest in such militarist fantasies? Yet, Guy Debord – the leader of the Situationist International – placed such importance on his invention of The Game of War that he called it his most significant accomplishment. Intrigued by this claim, a multinational group of artists, activists and academics formed Class Wargames to investigate the political and strategic lessons to be learnt from playing his ludic experiment. While the ideas of the Situationists continue to be highly influential in the development of subversive art and politics, relatively little attention has been paid to their strategic orientation. Determined to correct this deficiency, Class Wargames is committed to exploring how Debord used the metaphor of the Napoleonic battlefield to propagate a Situationist analysis of modern culture and politics.
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ISBN:9781570272936 448 pp. 5.5”x8.5” $39.95Lives of the Orange Men
Price: $23.95
Lives of the Orange Men
A Biographical History of the Polish Orange Alternative Movement
Major Waldemar FydrychIn Communist Poland, Surrealism Paints You!!! Between 1981 and 1989 in Wroclaw Poland, in an atmosphere in which dissent was forbidden and martial law a reality, the Orange Alternative deployed the power of surrealist creativity to destabilise the Communist government. It worked. The militia were overwhelmed by thousands of unruly dwarves; celebrations of official festivals so disturbingly loyal that the Communist forces had to arrest anyone wearing red; walls covered in dialectical graffiti; new official festivals to assist the secret police with their duties; and a popular restaging of the storming of the Winter Palace using cardboard tanks and ships. Lives of the Orange Men tells for the first time the story of this activist-art movement and its protagonists that played a key role in the 1989 revolution in Poland. Written by its central figure and featuring an appendix of newly-translated key texts including the ‘Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism’,...
Read more about: Lives of the Orange Men »Afghanistan: From Herat to Balkh and Back Again
Price: $10.00
Afghanistan: From Herat to Balkh and Back Again
Poems by Tom Savage“Tom Savage wrote these poems during his travels through Afghanistan. He was twenty-three at the time but his words ring with unparalleled maturity. His journey took place before the Taliban came to power and had a chance to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas, a 20th century tragedy for all mankind. He describes their glory, giving us a guided tour of his spiritual and physical states while doing so. These are love poems: They are tender, witty and full of compassion, wisdom and insight. Savage says it
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plainly yet ever so deeply when he chants: ‘my book is my pillow / my fireplace is breath / my friends are my food / the tree-swept is singing.’ While reading these gems, which are not unlike their great eastern predecessors Rumi or Jami, you too might make this book your pillow, your breath and your food as you let these poems sing to you.” — Steve Dalachinsky,...Suburban Ambush
Price: $7.95
Suburban Ambush
Ron Kolm“Ron Kolm’s poems leave you with a lot of images and lines to savor and ponder — ‘absolute gravity / In a zero-cold zone,’ the lone nightfighter ‘out beyond the edge of love’ — but he’s no mere cleverist. There’s a deep and devious wisdom here, and a big heart.’’ — John Strausbaugh, author of The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, A History of Greenwich Village.
“Ron Kolm is a master of the short line. His poems are filled with wit and pathos. He once said of me that I was a populist poet but in all truth this honor belongs to him. He is a lover of humanity; the common man and the artist as well. He fills his short lines with the long breath of life, and his sensibilities range from low art to high art in one fell swoop with simple, straight forward language that everyone can understand....
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