GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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On the road with Ron Jacobs
JOHN GREEN finds an ideal travelling companion as he works his way from New England to Florida
Miller Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
[Ron Jacobs]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation
Ron Jacobs, Fomite, £11.99
I SUPPOSE living in a country as massive as the United States, with its diverse landscapes and people, it is easy to get itchy feet and a wish to set out to explore the essence of a country that is yours but which you know little about. There are also, of course, famous precedents like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley to mention just two.
Here Ron Jacobs follows their examples, chronicling his journeys from New England to Oregon, Texas to Minnesota and beyond, observing the US as it struggles to remember and redefine itself on its way towards an uncertain future.
During the 1970s and 1980s, as a footloose wage-slavery refusenik and recreational drug user, Jacobs hitchhiked around the USA, absorbing its ambience. In many ways that was a benign era compared with today. Beginning in 2021, he decided to retrace his own footsteps and take the pulse of the nation once again, but this time seeing it through the eyes of a wiser and older traveller.
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