Books and Magazines


Hardback, 464 pp  Verso Books, May 2025 A groundbreaking cultural history of 1960s New York, from the legendary writer on art and film Like Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1960s was a cauldron of avant-garde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Everything Is Now chron­icles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters, and, ultimately, the streets.The principals here are penniless filmmak­ers, jazz musicians, and performing poets, as well as less classifiable artists. Most were outsiders at the time. They include Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and many more. Some were associ­ated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Destruction Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Happenings, Mimeographed Zines, Pop Art, Protest-Folk, Ridiculous Theater, Stand-Up Poetry, Underground Comix, and Underground Movies). But there were also movements of one. Their art, rooted in the detritus and excitement of urban life, was taboo-breaking and confrontational.As J. Hoberman shows in this riveting his­tory, these subcultures coalesced into a counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.

J. Hoberman – Everything is now - the 1960's new york avant-garde - primal happenings, underground movies, radical pop

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large paperback 20x25cm,, 396pp Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Edited by Rosa Alcalá   Translators: Rosa Alcalá, Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, Edwin Morgan, Urayoán Noel, James O'Hern, Anne Twitty, Eliot Weinberger & Christopher Winks Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Vicuña began creating "precarious works" and  quipus in the mid 1960s in Chile, as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." Her multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. These ephemeral, site-specific installations in nature, streets, and museums combine ritual and assemblage. She calls this impermanent, participatory work “lo precario” (the precarious): transformative acts that bridge the gap between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. Her paintings of early 1970s de-colonized the art of the conquerors and the "saints" inherited from the Catholic Church, to create irreverent images of the heroes of the revolution. A partial list of museums that have exhibited her work include: The Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London; Art in General in NYC; The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; The Berkeley Art Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art in New York.Cecilia Vicuña has embodied a life of political and social activism through poetry, visual art, film and performance. New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states, and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry "the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other." In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads, and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.

cecilia vicuna – new and selected poems of cecila vicuna

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paperback, 312pp Litmus press, 2013   I’ve felt when writing these texts as if I were both looking down and gazing up simultaneously, infused with an insatiable vertigo not unlike strange moons casting occulted rays through heathen binary suns that seem to spin at once in conflicting dimensions at differing levels of speed. The result from this turbulent tidal seismicity is that light emits itself via frictive streaks and angles, through darting shards of voltage… This, for me, is The Coming Mental Range where psychic light naturally casts its rays out of ciphers.— Will Alexander, from the IntroductionThe Coming Mental Range brings readers deep into the revolutionary poetics and philosophy of multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and musician Will Alexander. Gathering together a group of Alexander’s short prose writings in his signature “vertical philosophy” with essays in poetics touching on the work of admired artists and poets (Byron Baker, Wanda Coleman, Pablo Jofré, Bob Kaufman, and Ghérasim Luca to name a few), in addition to several key interviews with the author, The Coming Mental Range serves as a critical introduction to Alexander’s work and thought, and as a companion to volumes in poetry and philosophy like Divine Blue Light (City Lights, 2022), Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021), and Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (O Books, 1998). In The Coming Mental Range, “language crystallizes as imaginal blazing, as musical incandescence,” and we are swept along in its roaring tides to other shores. As Alexander writes, “What is most concerning language must never fail at convincing, at emancipating its readership via transgressive spiral.”

will alexander – The coming mental range

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paperback, 110pp Litmus Press, 2nd edition, 2014   Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal Callaloo in 1999. Author of 20 books (including Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents, Inside The Earthquake Palace: 4 Plays, Aboce The Human Nerve Domain, and Exobiology As Goddess), Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.Now available as a second edition with a new preface from the author, Will Alexander’s Towards The Primeval Lightning Field (O Books, 1998) is a work of “vertical philosophy” revealing the strata of cultures and language, like geological layers seen all at once. These essays comprise Alexander’s “search for origins outside the warrens of the visible,” revealing a singular imagination that moves with the force of a manifesto and the impossible dexterity of the unknown. Alexander’s virtuoso arpeggios of linguistic realms explore language and perceiving, and resonate far beyond the constrictions of the rational world.

will alexander – towards the primeval lightning field

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Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations is a limited edition book of only 300 copies published by the writers own BUKU Press, an independent artisanal publisher in Cornwall. Each book is numbered by hand.  Graeme Ewens spent over 5 years recording interviews with Don Cherry on cassette tapes for this book project - a great opportunity to hear Don’s story in his owns words.    Published, December 2024  A5 printed in mono and colour with 176 pages  The eternal rhythm is the vital conduit that links music through breath to life itself. Don Cherry certainly lived music. And his music is alive.When he says that music is breath he talks of something much bigger than the blow needed to make the trumpets sound. From his prime instrument, the trumpet, to his beloved ‘ngoni via flutes, piano and melodica Don Cherry’s voice is unique; like the man from which it springs, it is instantly recognisable whatever instrument or angle it is coming from. THE DON CHERRY TAPES laid the foundation in 1979 of the Cherry Archives which preserve the memory of Don and his extended tribal family. The archive began with a series of taped autobiographical interviews and a box of ephemera and mementoes. Now, 30 years after his death, those transcribed conversations are finally being published, illuminated by Don’s own artworks and augmented by the author Graeme Ewens’ tour journals and contemporaneous notes made over three decades of collaboration. The material included here is previously unpublished and is a kind of top- and-tail treatment of one of the Jazz Great’s personal experience, combining autobiographical background alongside his mentor Ornette Coleman with objective reportage from some of his later tours and personal anecdotes that offer a unique perspective from the writer who had become Don’s confidant, travel companion, witness and friend. They hung out together in the 1970s and between 1979 and 1984 were collaborating, collecting and collating material for a multimedia extravaganza that Don called ‘The Project’, which was picked up again in 1994. This would tell his story from the inside and from alongside, aiming to glimpse the essence of a cosmic traveller and multicultural ‘organic’ musician, from the spiritual high spots to the low points of the jazz life. The pages on his later years include personal reflections on his contemporary musical travellers and reveals details of his collaboration with John Coltrane. Special Edition limited to 300 copies

Graeme Ewens – Don Cherry - Eternal Rhythm

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Includes a published transcription, collaged booklet of poetry and images by Yusuf Hassan, and cassette. Co-release by Séance Centre, BlackMass Publishing, and The Strangeness of Dub, March 2025 Limited and hand-stamped collaborative publication between Séance Centre, BlackMass Publishing, and The Strangeness of Dub. Includes a published transcription, collaged booklet of poetry and images by Yusuf Hassan, and cassette. In April 2022, Brandon Hocura huddled in the Séance Centre inventory closet to block out traffic noise and recorded a three hour conversation with Edward George. The exchange was modelled on The Wire magazine’s Invisible Jukebox where artist’s improvise responses to a number of songs, drawing out themes, memories, and critical reflections from their sonic praxis. In this case, the discussion sprung from George’s lauded TheStrangeness of Dub series as well as his longstanding work with Black Audio Film Collective and Hallucinator (Chain Reaction).  From the introduction: “In the 1996 film The Last Angel of History Edward George plays the Data Thief, a sonic archaeologist who travels back in time in search of fragments of Black musical technologies that hold the keys to the future of mankind. In life, as in fiction, he is a theorist of vibration, reading the melodic codes and subaltern tales embedded in sound for clues about the past, present, and future. In The Strangeness of Dub, he uncovers and elevates the discourses encapsulated within dub music — he reads King Tubby, Burning Spear, Don Drummond, and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry alongside Foucault, Benjamin, and Derrida. In this capacious methodology of listening, knowledge is non-hierarchical and non-linear — Jah Shaka is as much a metaphysician as Wittgenstein.” Edward George is a writer and broadcaster. Founder of Black Audio Film Collective, George wrote and presented the ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History (1996). George is part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion, and the electronic music group Hallucinator. He hosts Sound of Music (Threads Radio), Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows). George’s series The Strangeness of Dub (Morley Radio) dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and wide cross-genre musical selection. Edward George lives and works in London.

Edward George – Discrepant Echoes - Publications and Cassette

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