Tonight’s Performance Will Contain Blood and Nudity said a sign on the door of the Leo Koenig gallery in Chelsea.  This comes as no surprise.  The gallery is resurrecting one of the last surviving Viennese Aktionists, artists so hell-bent on shocking conservative post-war Austrian society, they ranged from the mischievous to the criminal.  Hermann Nitsch, whose exhibition “Die Apotheke/The Pharmacy” runs through the end of April, falls squarely in the middle. 

To prepare for the show, we huddled in a corner drinking.  The performance space was demarcated by an enormous white sheet.  An audience formed around a naked man tied at the wrists to a wooden structure resembling – what else? – a crucifix.  Above him was the splayed carcass of a pig, its gut slit.  The performer, bearded and dark-eyed, gazed benignly at the onlookers, who snapped photos and waited expectantly.  Nitsch emerged from the throng.  Born in 1938, once notorious, he was now a stout gnome in a suit.  He had a big round stomach and a long white beard.  He pottered, removed his jacket and faced the crowd.  The black eyes gleamed.  He took out a knife, flashing it provocatively. 

This is the moment of foreboding that Nitsch has been exploiting for decades now, the sense that something terrible might happen.  Taking control of our imaginations for an instant, that’s Nitsch’s game, a stunt.  The haphazard canvases on view in the front gallery were just residue.  More interesting were the inevitable associations of the crowd as we wondered what he might do to the young, vulnerable victim with that blade.  Images hovered like ancient shadows.  The story had been told repeatedly, but no one turned away. 

Nitsch began to saw at the carcass.  His movements were workmanlike as he carved at the dead animal flesh.  Uncorking a test tube, he poured blood over the wound, an aging child playing out a private fantasy.  The blood dripped on the thin thigh of the naked man, who’d been blindfolded.  A woman in a lab coat approached.  Proffering a vial, she extended a cotton swab soaked in oil.  I took a sniff.  “African musk,” she said gravely.  God.  Really?  She circled the floor, a clerk escaped from the Clinique counter at Macy’s.  The anarchic Aktionist ethos had been bottled and put up for sale on 23^rd Street, where humanity gets cured with aromatherapy.

M+M is hailed as the future of publishing in a rave write-up in the Financial Times. We already knew that, of course, but it’s nice to see the rest of the world is catching up.

With thanks again to Colin Robinson of OR Books for the tagline…

Here are some pictures from this past Friday night. Akashic Books presented three readers in celebration of the release of Lonely Christopher’s The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse. Also notable: Dale made a rare appearance in the wilds of Brooklyn.

Lonely Christopher, Dale Peck, & Rachel Levitsky

Dale Peck

Lonely Christopher

M+M friend Alex Nazaryan has published an interesting piece on the bankruptcy of Borders in The Daily News. Check it out:

Borders Is Bankrupt

Women taught me to read—twice. The first time was in grade school: a kindergarten teacher whose name I’ve forgotten, a first-grade teacher whose name I always thought was Miss Cannon Bomb, and a second-grade teacher whose name was Miss Brady, and who once wrote on the blackboard:

Do you know what happened today?

and, when everyone shook their heads:

The Vietnam War ended.

CONTINUED

Oh no! Daniel Mendelsohn has called me out for not being intellectually rigorous! And he called me hysterical too! Me?! Hysterical?! What?!?!?! Now I’m NEVER going to get to write for the New York Review of Books!

[Insert fake sad emoticon here] *

For your reading convenience (and of course because I want everyone to see this), I’ve cut and pasted Mendelsohn’s response to my response to his review of Mad Men here:

The New York Review forwarded a link to this piece, and I want to respond only to two points of fact:

1) As Dale Peck well knows, publishers routinely send dozens of advance copies of books to potential blurbers, with or without the author’s knowledge; in this case, without. This 2011 blog posting is the first I ever heard that my book had been sent to him for a blurb, and the suggestion that my negative review of his essay collection, in 2004, was in any way a tit-for-tat, because he never sent a blurb for my first book (!) is both incorrect and grotesque. But not atypically grotesque, because…

2) Anyone who read my piece about Dale Peck’s criticism knows that I did not characterize him as a “good critic and bad novelist.” The piece makes it very clear that I think he’s a bad critic and a middling novelist—for reasons that this posting makes very clear: he perpetually indulges his taste for the hysterical, the extreme, and the ad hominem at the expense of measured responses. The “critic” who is happy to admit that “intellectual rigor isn’t my first priority”? is not someone to be taken seriously. As indeed we don’t.

Daniel Mendelsohn

CONTINUED