Los Texmaniacs present free Saturday concert

The first of the city of Fallon’s free concerts is tomorrow on the Centennial Stage in Oats Park in front of the Art Center. The Grammy winning artists Los Texmaniacs perform a variety of Texas-styled songs, fusing traditional Tex-Mex conjuntos with rock grooves and covers of some unexpected country songs.

The show will be a great opportunity to get together with family and friends — bring snacks or a picnic supper — for an evening of great music under the stars. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. and the Center’s galleries and Art Bar will be open following the show, For more information on the show you can call Churchill Arts at 775-423-1440.

Kirk’s interesting books to read this summer:

British author, Iain Sinclair, is a compelling prose stylist and his latest offering is “American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light” (Faber and Faber). Sinclair was influenced — as were a lot of us — by his early readings of works by a group of writers who came to be known as the Beats.

Sinclair is a self-described Travelodge tramp and “middle-class drop out with a gift for bullshit.” Here voyages across the pond in search of the stories, haunted landscapes and remnants of the Beat group of writers who had a profound effect upon American literature.

In his journey to try and track down the remains of a literary movement, Sinclair walks in the footsteps of most of the major figures in the Beat pantheon: Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and many others.

Not a biography but rather a lively and anecdotal travelogue, Sinclair explores the haunts of Olson’s Gloucester and Kerouac’s roots in Lowell, interviews Ginsberg, Michael McClure and others, recounts Olson and director John Huston’s discussion of the script for the movie version of “Moby Dick” and much more. Sinclair is an excellent guide to this group of literary outlaws.

One of the most important artists of Dada movement is the subject of the recent “Hannah Hoch” (Whitechapel Gallery/Prestel) by Dawn Ades.

Hoch’s strikingly original collages during the Weimar Period in Germany still resonate today. The book is the catalog of a show held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London earlier this year and documents her entire career. From the early works which presented acute critiques of the racial and social stereotypes prevalent in between-the-wars Germany to the latter works which are lyrical, and erotic, abstractions.

Hoch was an major figure in the development of collage as the, perhaps, most important artistic movement of the twentieth century and this volume on her work and life is highly recommended.

Kirk Robertson covers the arts.