Two news stories -- an "exclusive" in The Guardian ("Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres") and a front-pager in The New York Times ("C.I.A.’s History Poses Hurdles for an Obama Nominee") -- are reminders that more than seven years ago Straight Up's staff of thousands was onto the story about the American strategy to (democratize) Salvadorize Iraq with death squads and torture chambers. Have a look at our blogpost "Hidden in Plain Sight" of Dec. 20, 2005. Today's tie-in to the top U.S. military brass, particularly to retired … [Read more...]

"In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for nearly six months. Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. 'Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over … [Read more...]

If you can't get to the screening of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi at Avery Fisher Hall (on Nov. 2 and 3 in New York), where Philip Glass's score for the film will be performed live by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, or if you can get over there but can't afford to get in, screw it. You can watch the flick online for free (full screen, too). Music included, of course. There are five interruptions for one-minute ads, but you can skip each of them after five seconds. Postscript: As soon as I can get it scanned, I'll … [Read more...]

Apparently not. I didn't know it, But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics--its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making--are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar. Yes, really. But you knew that. If you didn't, then go read Dan Barrett in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the intellectual roots of the Wall Street protest. Barrett writes: It was on this island nation off … [Read more...]

In 1989, Michael Lawrence filmed Steve Jobs for Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. "I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him," Lawrence messages in an email. "I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me." "Like so many people around the world," he writes, "I have been thinking of him since his passing. I could not have made BACH & friends without his computers and software." A few years ago, Lawrence posted a clip of Jobs, excerpted from Memory & Imagination. "It has been viewed … [Read more...]

The "vulgo:cynicism" of Carl Weissner's Die Abenteuer von Trashman -- his term for the humor of his latest book -- was already on display in last year's Manhattan Muffdiver. Both books, from Vienna-based Milena Verlag, are written in German. Although I read German desperately, like a beachcomber sifting sand on a bad day, even I could make out the tone. Vulgo-cynicism certainly describes the tone of the two books he wrote in English. I can read them, easily: The Braille Film, a Burroughsian cut-up text published decades ago in San … [Read more...]

Fifty-four years ago two undercover cops in San Francisco arrested a clerk at City Lights Bookstore for selling them an "obscene" book of poetry. The clerk was Shigeyoshi Murao. The book was Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Several months later, on October 3rd, a municipal court judge ruled that the book was protected by the First Amendment because it had "redeeming social importance." If not for the bust and the trial, Howl might never have become as important as it did, either culturally or literarily. More than a million copies are now in print. … [Read more...]

Samuel Beckett says: Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire. Glenn Greenwald says it like so: What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens -- [in this instance, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn] -- far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. … [Read more...]

Susan Fleet -- trumpet player and feminist music historian -- set her first crime thriller, Absolution, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, where homicide detective Frank Renzi takes on a serial killer who preys on women. Fleet's new killer thriller, Diva, is subtitled "a novel of psychological suspense." That's an understatement. Renzi is back, now in post-Katrina New Orleans, pitted this time against a lethal stalker whose prey is a beautiful classical musician on the cusp of stardom. The psycho in Diva (paperback, Kindle, Nook) is not only a … [Read more...]

If you guessed Billie Whitelaw doing Samuel Beckett's "Not I," you get a Google star. Here's the complete version at UbuWeb (beginning at 2:51 on the counter), preceded by a short interview with Whitelaw. … [Read more...]

Today's three-fer . . . 1) Richard Hamilton, British Painter and a Creator of Pop Art, Dies at 89 2) Carl Oglesby, Antiwar Leader in 1960s, Dies at 76 3) John Calley, Hollywood Chief, Dies at 81 Taking the long view . . . Doncha just luuhv zat akzent? Postscript: Arman's epitaph -- Enfin Seul! -- puts it best. Well, almost. There's no topping Jack MacGowran reading from Beckett's Malone Dies: I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. … [Read more...]

It's a different kind of memorial. … [Read more...]

Jimmy Breslin was right. It's a lousy idea to turn the victims of 9/11 into martyrs and just as lousy to turn Ground Zero into a glorified cemetery. It was wrong in 2003, when he railed against both ideas in his newspaper column; and it is now, when the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is about to be commemorated exploited in a solemn fit of national mourning. It's not that Breslin failed to sympathize with the families of those who died in the attack, as I've written before. It's that many more who have died under ordinary circumstances, caused not … [Read more...]

The tale I wrote at MSNBC.com back in 2002 on December 18, the day nine "visions of Ground Zero's future" were unveiled in a design competition to rebuild the site, has long since been deleted from cyberspace. I offer it here as a lost document for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. If you detect a skeptical tone, ignored by the headline, you aren't wrong. … [Read more...]

Sometimes you get lucky. This was a long time ago. When the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were about to be announced, an editor assigned me to write an appreciation of the book that won the poetry prize: What Work Is, by Philip Levine. It would also win a National Book Award later that year. Now Levine has been appointed poet laureate by the Library of Congress, and suddenly, as you'd expect, everybody is writing about him. There's a profile by Jessica Goldstein in The Washington Post; not one but two stories in The New York Times, one by … [Read more...]

Leave it to Jed Birmingham to make the connection between Mad Men and William S. Burroughs, via Minutes to Go, cut-ups, and Wilhelm Reich, with a bit of feminist name-dropping shoehorned in. The connection is complex and full of complications, a specialty of Birmingham's literary sleuthing. And here's Eddie Woods offering some corrective history about the identity of Panama Rose, author of The Hashish Cookbook. Ira Cohen, it was not; he merely took the credit. To which a friend replies, "Given the clues -- the influence of Brion Gysin, the … [Read more...]

Just read the excerpt in Vanity Fair of the new Joseph Heller biography, which includes this graf: Candida (pronounced Can-dih-duh) Donadio, who would become Heller's new agent, was about 24 years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants. ... In time, her client roster came to include some of the most prominent names in American letters: John Cheever, Jessica Mitford, Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, and Peter Matthiessen. "She really was the agent of her generation," a … [Read more...]

Four years after posting Over the Cliff With Rupe, about Murdoch's Wall Street Journal takeover, I think he's beginning to resemble Wile e Coyote. … [Read more...]