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Just Another Asshole #6
Just Another Asshole
Edited by photographer and musician Barbara Ess from 1978 to 1987, Just Another Asshole was a seminal and now legendary series of publications that helped define New York’s No Wave community. Each issue took a different form: zine, LP record, large-format tabloid, magazine, exhibition catalog and paperback book.
Just Another Asshole number six was the famous fiction issue, designed in the style of a pulp paperback. It was co-edited with composer Glenn Branca and contained a diverse mix of artists, musicians and writers from the early ‘80s downtown scene―among them Kathy Acker, Lynn Tillman, Cookie Mueller, Richard Prince, Judy Rifka, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, Lee Ranaldo, David Wojnarowicz and Michael Gira.
The work in the publication was transgressive, unapologetic and unrelenting in its style and subject matter. Today it presents a bleak yet romantic view of life in New York City before the AIDS crisis, before gentrification, before Rudy Giuliani and before the real-estate boom pushed the underground out of Lower Manhattan.
Just Another Asshole number six was the famous fiction issue, designed in the style of a pulp paperback. It was co-edited with composer Glenn Branca and contained a diverse mix of artists, musicians and writers from the early ‘80s downtown scene―among them Kathy Acker, Lynn Tillman, Cookie Mueller, Richard Prince, Judy Rifka, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, Lee Ranaldo, David Wojnarowicz and Michael Gira.
The work in the publication was transgressive, unapologetic and unrelenting in its style and subject matter. Today it presents a bleak yet romantic view of life in New York City before the AIDS crisis, before gentrification, before Rudy Giuliani and before the real-estate boom pushed the underground out of Lower Manhattan.
Paperback
First published August 1, 1983
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 20, 2019
Classic Lower East Side no-wave / art / lit time capsule, found at a zine shop in Philadelphia. With over 60 short prose pieces, mostly by seeming mysterious unknowns who turn out on closer investigation to be familiar through their other contributions to the era, this seems worth some deep cataloguing and further investigation. (Note: still annotating. This is only about 1/3 of this.)
Kathy Acker - My Death :: Sets the tone well with a familiar bit that became her Pasolini-solves-his-own-murder novel, I believe. More narrative than most, despite the jarring signature cut-up.
Constance Ash - Ring Around the Moon :: A medieval legend bleakly blurring death and desire. She went on to write a series of "jarringly brutal" equestrian fantasy novels (I can see it given the harsh fairy-tale feel here) that one of the very few GR reviews calls "interesting enough to get me to stop netflix binge watching and actually read some everyday."
Josh Baer - Hurry up and die :: A miserable marathon in reverse. I suspect it's this Josh Baer, based on period art/music ties (involved in White Columns, put out the first Sonic Youth records).
Barbara Barg - Jihad :: Dense fascinating, formally fluid collage text that I'd have to re-read to really comment on. Barg is a good prototype for the sort of writers I'm finding in here: of course an experimental poet mainly, but also tied to the lower east side art scene (1984 chapbook with Nan Goldin), music scene (all-poet rock band Homer Erotic, which I may be making this up, but I think Eileen Myles was involved in at some point as well), and semiotext(e), who published a collection of her work in 1994.
Judith Barry - (Vamp r y . . .) :: repurposed pulp vignette precursor to all those east village diy vampire films of the 90s perhaps. "from a videotape in progress." Judith Barry's a pretty noted artist, interesting to see her here in purely text form.
Nan Becker - The Only Difference Between a Bayonet and a Hunting Knife Is What You Stick It in :: Chimpanzee behavior narrative as universal. Worth looking into further, but she's hard to find. She was in a 1983 chapbook on eugenics and forced sterilization. Her first publication on GR is a 2011 book of poetry if I can even be sure it's the same Nan Becker after that gap of years.
Eric Bogosian - Notes for a Play (The New World) :: An unsurprising inclusion given that I most recently encountered him as screenwriter for nocturnal lower east side portmanteau film Arena Brains. I don't actually care for the ply fragment here so much, but it was produced in 1981.
Glen Branca - Running Through the World Like an Open Razor :: A kinetic essay on overriding human needs/desires. Great no wave guitarist/composer Branca was co-editor of this volume of Just Another Asshole, along with founder Barbara Ess, making some of the music connections make sense.
Brian Buczak - He Who Loves the More Is the Inferior and Must Suffer :: Bluntly interwoven sex vignettes, by a painter whose life was cut short by AIDS in 1987. Philip Glass wrote a quartet to commemorate him.
Mitch Corber - Rickets :: Total noise, maybe to be read aloud for max weirdness, or screamed over a mass of feedback. His poetry has zero attention here on GR, but he's remembered for his NYC public access career, and he made a strange John Cage documentary.
Peter Cummings - City Gates of Sand and Glass :: A love story between a women and a building. I suspect this is his work, not all those thriller novels from Peter Cummings, MD. Copies are pricey though.
Margaret De Wys - The Fluted Cup :: a perplexing prose-poetic text in four parts. DeWys is primarily a sound artist and composer, but after diagnosis with breast cancer in 1999 sought shamanic healing in the Ecuadoran Amazon, an experience which she's now written two books about.
Barbara Ess - This Is It? :: This swirling memoir is the work of the primary instigator of this collection, part of a series running 1978 - 1987. Though Ess, primarily a photographer, co-edited this volume, as well as 5 (an LP compilation) and 7 (a photography book with accompanying essays), with Branca, 1 & 2 were zines she edited alone, and 3 and 4 were co-edited with J.M. Sherry and seem to have focused on visual arts (and 4 included in ArtForum). Ess was also in NYC no wave band Y Pants, so the art-music crossover thoughout this collection is far from incidental.
Richard Fantina - Andrea Feldman: A Remembrance :: A somewhat self-indulgent memoir of the author's relationship with the Factory-associated actress who appeared in Trash and Heat, but it's a good snapshot of that scene and world. Fantina has also written about writers and writing (Hemingway, non-normative heterosexuality in literature, and Victorian genre fictions) as well as (no-wave link!) liners for a live album recored by Malaria! at Danceteria.
Matthew Geller - Windfalls :: Dialogue excerpts from another video work. Feels like a collage of many intercut monologues and conversations, perhaps (given the title) some incidentally acquired. I doubt any of the Matthew Gellers haunting GR are him, but he's currently engaged in land art-style outdoor sculptural installations: https://matthewgeller.com/
Michael Gira - Some Weaknesses :: Harsh vignettes of feverish sexualities and violent impulses, often colliding. The no wave connection in full effect here -- the eviscerating first Swans record, Filth, came out the same year. These text works later became part of Gira's 1995 The Consumer, in a section titled "Various Traps, Some Weaknesses, Etc".
Jack Goldstein :: A set of epigrams and aphorisms for art and aesthetics. Spontaneity is a metaphor for risk. Dangerous objects are glamorous places to be. Art should be a trailer for the future. Goldstein was film/video/performance artist who turned to painting in the 80s. Some other Jack Goldstein is responsible for the vomit of pop culture "amazing facts" books on Goodreads (101 Amazing One Direction Facts, 101 Amazing Harry Potter Facts, 101 Amazing Slenderman Facts, etc) whereas I could have read another 101 aphorisms on art and aesthetics.
Dan Graham - Rock Religion :: A dense collage essay on the historical ties between religion, trance, music, and sex from the ecstatic repetitions of Quaker ritual right up into the rock present of the 70s/80s. Packs a lot of densely interconnected ideas into a short span. Graham was mainly an artist and curator, responsible for showcasing early work by Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson among others, but also one of the first in the art world to embrace punk and no-wave. Several collections of his essays and writings would seem to hinge on this piece.
Rudolph Grey - "The Box" from "Like Mice" (1972), A Screenplay :: an absurd horror vignette in many quick shots and stage directions. Oddly nothing of Grey's films seems forthcoming -- was this ever made? Instead, his contribution to film history is Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood which became the Burton film, and his contribution to music is in his participation in foundational Eno-recorded no wave band Mars and various other noise/jazz guitar.
Sue Hanel - The Ideal Hour :: A slew of violence and nightmarish dream-logic continuity, but unusually coherent-feeling for this sort of loosely-narrative sequence of striking poetic imagery. I instantly thought: here's someone who definitely has published a completely killer novel or collection. But no! Turn out that almost nothing is known about Sue Hanel, besides that she was the original guitarist for Swans before their first recordings, "the most ferocious noise guitarist in the city", and after a scattering of other projects through the 80s seems to have descended into drugs, living in an furnitureless lower east side apartment, then disappeared entirely. Literally no one knows what happened to her or if if Sue Hanel was even her real name.
Lindsay Amoss (curated by Steven Harvey) - Nevertheless Later :: a film-vignette of a man rock-climbing up the vertical streets of the city. Absolutely nothing of seeming relevance on either of the people involved in this.
Jenny Holzer - Survival Series :: WITH ALL THE HOLES IN YOU ALREADY THERE'S NO REASON TO DEFINE THE OUTSIDE ENVIRONMENT AS ALIEN. A thematic set of statements, Holzer doing what she does so well. A well-placed text bleed from the art world.
Barbara Kruger - Utopia: the Promise of Fashion when Time Stands Still :: An allegory and its assessment. Better known in contemporary art for her collages of black and white image with red and white text, often with a feminist angle.
Peggy Katz - Cows :: A house, a bomb, a cow. Collage text mixing dairy and meat industry stats, the arms race, and Grandma Moses. An artist? Not a lot to find on her, besides this piece in Bomb Magazine.
...jumping ahead 20 entries or so...
Cookie Mueller - Route 95 South 1969 :: If it were a film, it would be perfect for my Dirtbag Roadtrip list. Baltimorean Cookie Mueller was in most of John Waters' films up through Desperate Living or so and writes here about hitchhiking to Florida with a crappy boyfriend with a suitably Waters camp-grime (though I've not read his own hitchhiking book). Anyway, I want to read the collection of her writing that semiotext(e) put out just after her 1989 death. Another tragic AIDS casualty of the decade.
...So this is fascinating to me, but is going to take forever to fully inventory. Expect more entires to trickle in as I have time here and there to research them.
Kathy Acker - My Death :: Sets the tone well with a familiar bit that became her Pasolini-solves-his-own-murder novel, I believe. More narrative than most, despite the jarring signature cut-up.
Constance Ash - Ring Around the Moon :: A medieval legend bleakly blurring death and desire. She went on to write a series of "jarringly brutal" equestrian fantasy novels (I can see it given the harsh fairy-tale feel here) that one of the very few GR reviews calls "interesting enough to get me to stop netflix binge watching and actually read some everyday."
Josh Baer - Hurry up and die :: A miserable marathon in reverse. I suspect it's this Josh Baer, based on period art/music ties (involved in White Columns, put out the first Sonic Youth records).
Barbara Barg - Jihad :: Dense fascinating, formally fluid collage text that I'd have to re-read to really comment on. Barg is a good prototype for the sort of writers I'm finding in here: of course an experimental poet mainly, but also tied to the lower east side art scene (1984 chapbook with Nan Goldin), music scene (all-poet rock band Homer Erotic, which I may be making this up, but I think Eileen Myles was involved in at some point as well), and semiotext(e), who published a collection of her work in 1994.
Judith Barry - (Vamp r y . . .) :: repurposed pulp vignette precursor to all those east village diy vampire films of the 90s perhaps. "from a videotape in progress." Judith Barry's a pretty noted artist, interesting to see her here in purely text form.
Nan Becker - The Only Difference Between a Bayonet and a Hunting Knife Is What You Stick It in :: Chimpanzee behavior narrative as universal. Worth looking into further, but she's hard to find. She was in a 1983 chapbook on eugenics and forced sterilization. Her first publication on GR is a 2011 book of poetry if I can even be sure it's the same Nan Becker after that gap of years.
Eric Bogosian - Notes for a Play (The New World) :: An unsurprising inclusion given that I most recently encountered him as screenwriter for nocturnal lower east side portmanteau film Arena Brains. I don't actually care for the ply fragment here so much, but it was produced in 1981.
Glen Branca - Running Through the World Like an Open Razor :: A kinetic essay on overriding human needs/desires. Great no wave guitarist/composer Branca was co-editor of this volume of Just Another Asshole, along with founder Barbara Ess, making some of the music connections make sense.
Brian Buczak - He Who Loves the More Is the Inferior and Must Suffer :: Bluntly interwoven sex vignettes, by a painter whose life was cut short by AIDS in 1987. Philip Glass wrote a quartet to commemorate him.
Mitch Corber - Rickets :: Total noise, maybe to be read aloud for max weirdness, or screamed over a mass of feedback. His poetry has zero attention here on GR, but he's remembered for his NYC public access career, and he made a strange John Cage documentary.
Peter Cummings - City Gates of Sand and Glass :: A love story between a women and a building. I suspect this is his work, not all those thriller novels from Peter Cummings, MD. Copies are pricey though.
Margaret De Wys - The Fluted Cup :: a perplexing prose-poetic text in four parts. DeWys is primarily a sound artist and composer, but after diagnosis with breast cancer in 1999 sought shamanic healing in the Ecuadoran Amazon, an experience which she's now written two books about.
Barbara Ess - This Is It? :: This swirling memoir is the work of the primary instigator of this collection, part of a series running 1978 - 1987. Though Ess, primarily a photographer, co-edited this volume, as well as 5 (an LP compilation) and 7 (a photography book with accompanying essays), with Branca, 1 & 2 were zines she edited alone, and 3 and 4 were co-edited with J.M. Sherry and seem to have focused on visual arts (and 4 included in ArtForum). Ess was also in NYC no wave band Y Pants, so the art-music crossover thoughout this collection is far from incidental.
Richard Fantina - Andrea Feldman: A Remembrance :: A somewhat self-indulgent memoir of the author's relationship with the Factory-associated actress who appeared in Trash and Heat, but it's a good snapshot of that scene and world. Fantina has also written about writers and writing (Hemingway, non-normative heterosexuality in literature, and Victorian genre fictions) as well as (no-wave link!) liners for a live album recored by Malaria! at Danceteria.
Matthew Geller - Windfalls :: Dialogue excerpts from another video work. Feels like a collage of many intercut monologues and conversations, perhaps (given the title) some incidentally acquired. I doubt any of the Matthew Gellers haunting GR are him, but he's currently engaged in land art-style outdoor sculptural installations: https://matthewgeller.com/
Michael Gira - Some Weaknesses :: Harsh vignettes of feverish sexualities and violent impulses, often colliding. The no wave connection in full effect here -- the eviscerating first Swans record, Filth, came out the same year. These text works later became part of Gira's 1995 The Consumer, in a section titled "Various Traps, Some Weaknesses, Etc".
Jack Goldstein :: A set of epigrams and aphorisms for art and aesthetics. Spontaneity is a metaphor for risk. Dangerous objects are glamorous places to be. Art should be a trailer for the future. Goldstein was film/video/performance artist who turned to painting in the 80s. Some other Jack Goldstein is responsible for the vomit of pop culture "amazing facts" books on Goodreads (101 Amazing One Direction Facts, 101 Amazing Harry Potter Facts, 101 Amazing Slenderman Facts, etc) whereas I could have read another 101 aphorisms on art and aesthetics.
Dan Graham - Rock Religion :: A dense collage essay on the historical ties between religion, trance, music, and sex from the ecstatic repetitions of Quaker ritual right up into the rock present of the 70s/80s. Packs a lot of densely interconnected ideas into a short span. Graham was mainly an artist and curator, responsible for showcasing early work by Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson among others, but also one of the first in the art world to embrace punk and no-wave. Several collections of his essays and writings would seem to hinge on this piece.
Rudolph Grey - "The Box" from "Like Mice" (1972), A Screenplay :: an absurd horror vignette in many quick shots and stage directions. Oddly nothing of Grey's films seems forthcoming -- was this ever made? Instead, his contribution to film history is Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood which became the Burton film, and his contribution to music is in his participation in foundational Eno-recorded no wave band Mars and various other noise/jazz guitar.
Sue Hanel - The Ideal Hour :: A slew of violence and nightmarish dream-logic continuity, but unusually coherent-feeling for this sort of loosely-narrative sequence of striking poetic imagery. I instantly thought: here's someone who definitely has published a completely killer novel or collection. But no! Turn out that almost nothing is known about Sue Hanel, besides that she was the original guitarist for Swans before their first recordings, "the most ferocious noise guitarist in the city", and after a scattering of other projects through the 80s seems to have descended into drugs, living in an furnitureless lower east side apartment, then disappeared entirely. Literally no one knows what happened to her or if if Sue Hanel was even her real name.
Lindsay Amoss (curated by Steven Harvey) - Nevertheless Later :: a film-vignette of a man rock-climbing up the vertical streets of the city. Absolutely nothing of seeming relevance on either of the people involved in this.
Jenny Holzer - Survival Series :: WITH ALL THE HOLES IN YOU ALREADY THERE'S NO REASON TO DEFINE THE OUTSIDE ENVIRONMENT AS ALIEN. A thematic set of statements, Holzer doing what she does so well. A well-placed text bleed from the art world.
Barbara Kruger - Utopia: the Promise of Fashion when Time Stands Still :: An allegory and its assessment. Better known in contemporary art for her collages of black and white image with red and white text, often with a feminist angle.
Peggy Katz - Cows :: A house, a bomb, a cow. Collage text mixing dairy and meat industry stats, the arms race, and Grandma Moses. An artist? Not a lot to find on her, besides this piece in Bomb Magazine.
...jumping ahead 20 entries or so...
Cookie Mueller - Route 95 South 1969 :: If it were a film, it would be perfect for my Dirtbag Roadtrip list. Baltimorean Cookie Mueller was in most of John Waters' films up through Desperate Living or so and writes here about hitchhiking to Florida with a crappy boyfriend with a suitably Waters camp-grime (though I've not read his own hitchhiking book). Anyway, I want to read the collection of her writing that semiotext(e) put out just after her 1989 death. Another tragic AIDS casualty of the decade.
Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free.
...So this is fascinating to me, but is going to take forever to fully inventory. Expect more entires to trickle in as I have time here and there to research them.
May 6, 2020
I'm not sure what I just read but I enjoyed some of it. Little tidbits, I felt like I was a fly on the wall taking a peek at different lives in different times.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews