June 2

Jason Crane at The Jazz Session is running a series of interviews with proprietors of jazz clubs. Spike Wilner manages (and plays at) Small's Jazz Club in New York:

http://thejazzsession.com/2010/05/27/the-jazz-session-172-spike-wilner-of-smalls-jazz-club/

One of Wilner's projects has been a comprehensive digitalization of this great venue, with live streaming of concerts, archiving of almost all the music played, and biographical pages on all the hundreds of musicians who have appeared at the club. It's an astonishing resource. And this is the way the arts are headed: we are going to be able to "attend" events all over the world -- musical performances, live theater and opera, film festivals -- on our computers. I am neither a hard-core technophile nor a Luddite, but this is one development I can embrace happily. We should not let technology tell us what to do; we should use it to enhance the good things of the world.

http://www.smallsjazzclub.com/index.cfm

Woody Haut not only rediscovers John Summerfield's 1936 novel May Day, but also points us toward other vibrant examples of "working class London fiction":

May Day even today is a moving and poetic novel, sometimes satirical, but always lyrical and even pastoral, reminiscent of the film Naked City, John Dos Passos's USA, Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God, and Mass Observation's Humphrey Jennings. Like Simon Blumenfield's Jew Boy, Robert Westerby's Wide Boys Don't Work and Alexander Baron's Low Life, it's part of a genre that's no longer with us- working class London fiction.

http://woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2010/06/may-day-by-john-summerfield.html

An author from the other side of the pond at the same period who has been lost to consciousness despite plenty of attention at the time is Hans Otto Storm:

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=330

Bill Crider is delighted to have received a positive tip about William Hogan's novel The Quartzsite Trip, which I remember seeing in a bookstore or library when it came out:

It's a coming-of-age novel, a road novel, a nostalgia trip (first published in 1980, and even more nostalgic now), and more. If you're around the right age, you'll find a lot to remember and identify with. It's written in an unusual style, with the kind of repetition of certain words and phrases that will either grow on you or put you off. I thought it was quite effective. It's hilarious and touching.

http://billcrider.blogspot.com/2010/05/quartzsite-trip-william-hogan.html

For someone who has never taken an illegal drug because I am scared shitless of them, I certainly perk up at the mention of psychedelics and their influence. It's an extremely interesting subject; Jay Stevens's incredible Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream is only one of a number of books that map the territory. So I am pre-receptive to the art of Fred Tomaselli:

Tomaselli’s work reveals a uniquely American vision that celebrates the psychedelic and the alternative. Growing up near the desert in southern California, Tomaselli was influenced by both the manufactured reality of theme parks and the music and drug countercultures of Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. His distinctive melding of these influences forms an updated, personalized, folk-driven vision of the American West. An avid and idiosyncratic collector who is interested in botany and ornithology, Tomaselli amasses prescription pills, hallucinogenic plants, and other drugs, along with images of plants, flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations carefully cut from books. Pulling from this visual archive, he creates richly decorated surfaces that are composed of hundreds of found images. Combining these unusual materials and paint under layers of clear epoxy resin, Tomaselli’s highly stylized artworks merge the printed image or the photographic image with areas painted by hand.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38331  

http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/10/29/pills/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Tomaselli 

M.S. Sathyu's 1973 Garm Hava, about the partition of India and Pakistan, goes largely unmentioned in discussions of world film classics but has an intense under-the-radar reputation:

http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2010/05/scorching-winds-of-change-rediscovering.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073034/usercomments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garm_Hava

Among notables born on this date are novelists Thomas Hardy, Barbara Pym, the Marquis de Sade (it is just plain funny to think of Pym and de Sade sharing a birthday), Dorothy West, and Karl Gjellerup (Denmark), children's writer Norton Juster, critic/columnist Frank Rich, publisher John Lehmann, First Lady Martha Washington, astronaut Pete Conrad, composer Edward Elgar, theatre composer Marvin Hamlisch, conductor Felix Weingartner, film historian Kevin Brownlow, film directors Juan Antonio Bardem and Lasse Hallstrom, animator Lotte Reiniger, rock drummer Charlie Watts, and actors Jonny Weissmuller, Milo O'Shea, Sally Kellerman, Stacy Keach, Charles Haid, and Dennis Haysbert. Among the books that have had the most influence on me is Kevin Brownlow's majestic The Parade's Gone By, which hooked me for life on the silent film era. In its combination of appreciative prose and gorgeous photography, the volume is completely enrapturing.