A few highlights:

-A monograph put out by the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) for an 1956 exhibition of the paintings of the French artist Balthus. Even though most of the reproductions are in black and white this slim volume had an important impact on my art work for years (found in street trash on Mercer Street, NYC).

-Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt (with the name Alicia Locke written in marker along each side of the binder). An excessively dog-eared paper back autobiography of the enigmatic Oglala Sioux medicine man, Black Elk. The story reads as the heartbreaking first-person telling of the final stages of the white man’s systematic and brutal dismantling of a proud native American culture. Even though, throughout the book, Black Elk gives the reader clues to his non-conformist visions that will take him far beyond the confines of his tribe, its not until he hooks up with a white lady in London while on tour with a Wild West show that it becomes perfectly clear that he would have had an incredible career in TV had he been born 100 years later. (found in a box on the sidewalk near 4th ave & 16th, BKLYN)

-Babbit, by Sinclair Lewis, Harcourt&Brace, 1922- spot on send-up of the recent transition to entitlement and materialization of the US middle class. “In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is-a business administration!”-excerpt of Babbitt’s neighbor, Littelfield, making small talk about the upcoming Presidential election and the Republican candidate.

Virgina Woolf is quoted on the back cover- “The equal of any novel written in English in the present century” (Sat Eve Review). My theory is Virginia drowned herself based on the premonition that even Lewis’s critical observations laid bare in his novel would do nothing to stop western civ from tripping over itself to expand their unflinching trend towards unchecked greed. (found on 2nd place & Smith, Carroll Grdns, Bklyn)-

-THE NEW WAVE, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette; James Monaco, Oxford Univ Press, 1976; I found this book in a Williamsburg, BKLYN laundrymat between having made our first film in Sicily and our second in Argentina. Of course, I was aware of the French New Wave but, I hadn’t seen any of the films. It was strange to read the book without knowing the films (and admittingly, I have read only the Truffaut and Godard chapters). I became a big fan of Truffaut just from reading the passionate descriptions he gives of his motivations and those he assigns his characters. I have since watched Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) and loved it, and I watched Les Mistons (The Brats) on youtube.

Writing about James Dean in 1956, Truffaut had characterized adolescence as “modest of feeling, continual fantasy life, moral purity without relation to everyday morality but all the more rigorous, eternal adolescent love of tests and trials, intoxication, pride, and regret at feeling oneself ‘outside’ society, refusal of and desire to become integrated- and finally, acceptance-or- refusal- of the world as it is.”