It’s a different kind of memorial. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Archives for 2011
Empty Ceremonies: Grandees to Gather for 9/11
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 […]
Ground Zero ‘Visions’ That Never Happened
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 […]
Levine’s Factory Stiffs, Society’s Throw-Aways
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 […]
Tell It to Gertrude
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 […]
Algren? Never Heard of Him. What’s the Catch?
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 […]
Over the Cliff With Rupe Again
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. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
A ‘John’ Named Nelson Algren
Annie Sprinkle led off her review of Chester Brown’s Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John by pointing out that in her “nearly 40 years in the world of sex workers,” she knew of only one person ever “to come out voluntarily — with honesty, integrity and pride –” as a “john.” […]
Obama Cultivates His Own Parcel of Dogpatch
Let’s see: Torture crimes officially, permanently shielded. Photo by Norman O. Mustill. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Welcome to Dogpatch
Or should I say, welcome back to the BananaRepublic — land of the red, white & blue, and home of the brave. Al Capp must be smiling. And by the way, don’t take the subhead on that article at face value. That’s the WSJ putting an editorial slant on the news story. Here, in the […]
Supervert’s Labor of Love … One of ‘Em Anyway
Supervert has just redesigned his Fleursdumal.org Web site, which was first launched in 2004 and is “the definitive online edition” of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). The elegant new design is simple, and it works quickly. The site also has lots of levels, so you can dive deep. Its scholarship and […]
Read All About It
“The attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks is clearly a leading prong in the Obama administration’s truly odious and dangerous war on whistleblowers.”— Glenn Greenwald (See: WikiLeaks Grand Jury investigation widens.) Postscript: Don’t forget to watch Greenwald’s 30-minute speech on media propaganda. It’s in three parts on YouTube. Here’s the beginning (you can skip the introductory speaker’s […]
All Together Now
This video was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, where the exhibition ran from March 23 to April 30. Curated by Monte Beauchamp, editor of “The Life and Times of R. Crumb,” the show was a retrospective that presented key pieces culled from the underground art collection […]
Old News: 4 Million Vietnamese Civilians Killed
We’ve focused for so long on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we tend to forget that the worst U.S. war crimes of our time — of mine anyway — were committed in Vietnam. Here’s a well-told reminder from several years ago: Vietnam: American Holocaust Read the comment, below, and click the link it […]
Art? Software? Graphics? Design? What Is It?
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More Crumb From ‘Lines Drawn on Paper’
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Now This Is Rich
Surely you’ve read the news that Gadhafi is being sought for war crimes. You may recall that America’s BananaRepublican gangsters never committed any war crimes — not in Iraq and not in Afghanistan. Unlike Gadhafi, our very own gang of culprits is above reproach. Postscript: May 21 — Let this be a reminder: Stupidity, Arrogance, […]