Critics Corner
Dead Kennedys at Irving Plaza
Zine-making is a dying art. Recently I found an old zine in my room called Broken Nights Brooklyn. I remember picking it up at an old guitar shop a couple years ago and thinking that it was one of the best zines I had ever read. Which it probably still is, I’ll be honest. When I rediscovered it , I went on a long search to find a more recent issue, only to learn that the issue I had was the only one ever made.
Sadly, most zines nowadays are discarded like trash or used by aging Lower East Side hipsters to wipe their chins after eating a falafel sandwich. But looking back, Broken Nights Brooklyn contained a prophecy of my future taste in music. So many of the bands that I didn’t know existed when I first read it are now some of my local favorites. It even included a review of a show that featured T.S.O.L. and Black Flag. But, …
Bouquets and Brickbats
To US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for embarking on a “massive testing and research effort” to help understand the causes of the alarming rise in autism, a condition that was vanishingly rare fifty years ago but now affects about 3 percent of American children under the age of 8. “Everything is on the table,” Kennedy said, during a recent interview with Fox News, “our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kinds of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.”
While Kennedy critics were quick to denounce the Health Secretary for a multitude of sins, from being willing in the past to consider the possible role of some early childhood vaccines in triggering the illness to noting that some autistic …
Dan Reeder
When being an outsider means being yourself.
A self-exiled maker of earworms appeals to the child and the grown-up in each of us.
All hail HJ Linderman!
In 1972, art critic Roger Cardinal introduced the term “outsider art” in his book of the same name. The label was his own version of French artist Jean Dubuffet’s earlier art brut — a label describing, in Cardinal’s words, “the only art which can truly be described as inventive, the art engendered outside the influence of society: by those certified insane; by those who claim inspiration from the spirit world; and by the innocent, upon whom the stamp of stereotyped culture has failed to make an impression.”
It’s a bit of a flex to be an outsider these days, with society being both intrusively omnipresent as well as something people feel increasingly guilty to be a part of. Everywhere we turn, media personas are peddling ideas, lifestyles, and aesthetics in a nonstop onslaught of suggestion. Our transformation into mirrored mosaics of impersonal impressions, with many (if not most) of us …
