![CLICK FOR THE VIDEO [Steve Martin & Edie Brickell: "Love Has Come For You" ]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/typography-meets-country-music.jpg)
Hat’s off to the designer whoever that is. The kinetic typography put me in mind of the clever card sequence in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan, “Don’t Look Back.” The design is more ingenious now, and of course the technology is far more sophisticated. But you get the idea. As to the stylish […]
Two Artists, Two Video Trailers: Ungerer and Mc Neill
Here are two video trailers, totally different from each other — one for a new movie about the peerless Tomi Ungerer, “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough,” the other for a dance inspired by Observed While Falling, a spellbinding memoir by the incomparable Malcolm Mc Neil. Many years ago Burt Britton kept a self-portrait by Ungerer […]
More Than Just Opinion, Osborne Has Information
Bill Osborne’s comment about Edward Snowden’s amazing interview says what needed to be said: The abuse of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning was designed to intimidate whistle blowers like Edward Snowden. It is good to see that at least in this case it has not worked. We should soon expect a campaign of character assassination […]
My Re-Tweet: Edward Snowden’s Amazing Interview
Watch Edward Snowden speaking to Glenn Greenwald. According to the British newspaper The Guardian: Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations – the NSA. In a note accompanying […]
‘Leaked’ Teaser Video
‘Orwell’s Recipe for Tea’
Narration and montage by Alan Cox. “Orwell exposed the state’s Ministry of Truth, / As controlling man’s desire to be free / With its lies and doublespeak and doublethink, / But he’d always break off for tea.” — Heathcote Williams
For Nonconforming Artists, the Envelope Please
Update: Click for the 2015 Acker Awards. And read this captivating feature story by Nicole Disser: ‘Helen Keller Was an Asshole,’ and Other Things You’ll Learn at the Acker Awards Are awards the staff of life? Of course not. But they certainly seem like food for the hungry. The list of awards is nearly endless. […]
Assange: It’s U.S. Security State vs. First Amendment
In a 40-minute Web & television interview on Democracy Now! WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discussed U.S. Justice Department spying on journalists and what the “abuse of the Espionage Act” against a reporter means. He also talked about the future of WikiLeaks, the financial blockade against it, and his nearly year-long political asylum in the Ecuadorean […]
Richard Feynman’s ‘Ode to a Flower’
The Guardian posted a tribute to a bongo-playing physicist the other day, with the subhed “Flowers, music, strip clubs…Richard Feynman’s scientific curiosity knew no bounds.” Linked to a cute cartoon video based on a 1981 BBC documentary, it gives a sense of the man as a fabulous paradox. Which is perfectly illustrated in the video […]
Can a Royal Party Boy Really Change His Stripes?
So how do you, in the words of Heathcote Williams, “turn a plutocratic oaf into a lovable national treasure instead of a casually racist and unthinking parasite”? With difficulty. Unless you can get the press behind you and send Prince Harry on an American tour. Trouble is, during Harry’s former deployment in Afghanistan, as Williams […]
Unbuttoned: Samuel Beckett Meets William Osborne
I knew my friend Bill Osborne and Samuel Beckett had met and spoken about Osborne’s musical settings of Beckett’s plays. But I had never heard the details. Now at last the full story! By William Osborne I spent seven years doing nothing else but setting the works of Beckett to music. At the end in […]
‘Sacred Elephant’ Is Coming to New York’s La MaMa
!['Sacred Elephant' by Heathcote Williams [Naxos]. Read, unabridged, by the author.](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/SACRED-ELEPHANT-NAXOS-100.jpg)
I haven’t seen much theater lately, for reasons I may already have mentioned — so much is dull dull dull — but the dramatization of Heathcote Williams’s epic poem, “Sacred Elephant,” has got my attention as nothing has in years. The show, not yet officially announced, is coming in September to La MaMa‘s First Floor […]
‘Gossip Column’ Cut-Up by Rooney & Beiles
Found in a drawer 44 years later. Still funny, too. And maybe you’ll recognize the references. Click the photos if you don’t know who they are. I almost forgot Dick Rover.
Death of a Mensch, Roger Ebert, R.I.P.
Rick Kogan has written a fine obituary, “A film critic with the soul of a poet,” with a beautiful lede: It was reviewing movies that made Roger Ebert as famous and wealthy as many of the stars who felt the sting or caress of his pen or were the recipients of his televised thumbs-up or […]
‘Peter Bayliss and the Breatharians’
The obituary in The Telegraph, in 2002, said: “He wanted no memorial, but his near-lunatic appetite for life will be impossible to forget.” The poet Heathcote Williams certainly remembers Peter Bayliss. He remembers, too, “the Bayliss Mischief” that “might still be working / From beyond the grave.” Here given their due are the vaunted philanthropic […]
Iraq Invasion Time Capsule: March Madness Redux
This is the week to remember the “The Ides of March, 2003.” Can’t let it pass without recalling what I posted at the time on MSNBC.com, links included. (Miracle of miracles, many still work). Looking back, I see the posts are very tame. I tried not to be, but I knew I could go only […]
Kid Congo & The Pink Monkeybirds: ‘Conjure Man’
I think of it as “Four Notes and the Dreamachine.”