![Los Angeles Review of Books [Aaron Shulman interviews Jan Herman, 2015]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/LARB-screenshot-750cropped-200x200.jpg)
If you think my staff of thousands doesn’t appreciate that, you don’t know how hungry they are to promote my new book. In this age of shameless self-promotion, it’s all about me, me, me. So I made a deal with them. One click gets them a penny, five gets them a dime. Make them rich. […]
Personal History: My Father Was a New York Cabbie
!['An Angel Rides Disguised as Cabbie' by Gabriel Pressman [New York World Telegram & Sun, ca. 1952 -'53]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Angel-Rides-Disguised-as-Cabbie-NY-World-Telegram-Sun-52-or-53-copy-200x200.jpg)
My father drove a cab at night. This was the early 1950s. A Brooklyn-born New Yorker, he knew the city’s streets the way a junky knows his veins. I thought of him because of a headline in today’s New York Times: American-Born Cabbies Are a Vanishing Breed in New York. Dad also knew doormen, theater […]
You Are There: Where Burroughs Once Lived in Mexico City
In more than 50 years not much had changed. Although the narrow street had been gentrified and renamed, the “run-down white apartment building” was still there looking like time had stood still for it.
How a Brilliant Writer Got in His Own Way
!['Humpty Dumpty' [1924]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/humpty-dumpty-book-cover200-e1388258523554.jpg)
I’m told Ben Hecht was recently inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. That could be why I was asked to write a piece about him for a special “Chicago Issue” of the Chicago Quarterly Review, but something tells me it was pure coincidence. I also have a feeling the Hall of Fame won’t […]
A Great One Died Today
![Norman O. Mustill and 'OU,' one of his large collages from the 1960s. [Photo: JH, 2007]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/mustill-and-OU-400.jpg)
Click and click and click and click and click and click and click and click again.
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 its website. I offer it here as a lost document for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. If you detect […]
A Poem from the Late 20th Century
The poet Nanos Valaoritis and I were good friends many years ago, in San Francisco. Here’s a poem of his, which I published in 1970, in a broadside edition of 500 or 1,000 copies — I can’t recall exactly. “Endless Crucifixion” is a collector’s item now. Jed Birmingham, who writes the RealityStudio column the Bibliographic […]
L’artiste Lui-même
Norman Ogue Mustill in his desert lair. [Self-Portrait With Collage] In 2007, at my request, he took a photo of himself with several of his collages from the mid-’60s. This is one of them. Blogs are personal (in case you hadn’t noticed).
Old Photos Never Die . . . Old Diners Fade Away
The Riss diner was on 8th Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets in Manhattan. It’s no longer there. In its place is a Murray’s Bagels shop. Much less interesting. This photo illustrated the front cover of Philip Corner’s The Identical Lunch, in 1973. Click to enlarge I published the book, which Graham Macintosh designed and […]
A Box of Chocolates
… for Valentine’s Day. There’s the Victorian way. And then there’s the Mustillian way. “February 14, is Valentine’s Day” © 1975 by Norman O. Mustill.
Obama W. Bush Does His Banana Republic Thing
When Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader or Glenn Greenwald or Paul Krugman or Chris Hedges or any number of Obama’s leftwing critics call him a disgrace and worse — ok, let’s say it, a finkified hypocrite — their opinions are dismissed on the right as the mutterings of ideologues who in some cases feel that […]
Janine Pommy Vega, R.I.P.
She was that rare human being whose identity transcended all the categories that defined her — poet, teacher, novelist, feminist, human-rights activist for prisoners and migrant farmworkers. Janine Pommy Vega died on Dec. 23. She was 68. Here’s her obit in today’s NYT. The last time I saw her was on the Lower East Side […]
Plat du Jour …
“The Unnatural Act Act,” by Norman O. Mustill [1974], is from the collectionof Knud Petersen. It appeared originally in a Copenhagen Fluxus show. More Mustill.
Cue ‘Ah POOK,’ ‘THE UNSPEAKABLE MR HART’
“Watchmen,” the movie, caused a stir at the box office when its opening weekend nabbed $55 million, the highest opening gross of the year and third-highest March opening ever. It’s a shame that none of the money will trickle down to the artist Malcolm Mc Neill, whose image of the Mayan Death God (right) in […]
Studs Terkel, R.I.P.
![Studs Terkel [from 'The End Is Nothing. The Road Is All.']](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/studs-370-e1429549595620.jpg)
Oh shit. Studs Terkel has died. He was 96. He was the blackest white man I ever met. Blacker even than his lifelong friend the novelist Nelson Algren, another black man who happened to be born white. Anyway, here’s what several former Chicago Sun-Times colleagues of mine had to say. Roger Ebert: “Was he the […]
Five Years Later
Words won’t do: No Penetration.
Putting Him Where He Belongs
President With His Head Up His Ass is well named. The column is also charming proof that Collins must be a fan of the 1940 screwball comedy