Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

From a Townhouse to the Vasty Deep

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Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? Glendower: Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command the Devil Hotspur: And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the Devil By telling the truth. […]

Queen of the Arms Trade

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“Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is one of the world’s richest women, worth £17 billion. Her investments in the arms trade include firms that produce the uranium used in depleted uranium (DU) shells. The deployment of these shells by the US military in its attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 is believed to […]

Back-to-Back Writings From Underground Dos-à-Dos

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+++ Incidental Intelligence: Anyone who cherishes raw truth, and especially those of us who were warmed by Carl Weissner’s friendship, will appreciate EINE ANDERE LIGA as a mammoth achievement. But Milena Verlag ought to correct two claims on its Web site: 1) that this posthumous collection of his underground writings has a foreword written by […]

‘It’s a Boy!’

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Someone asked what I thought about the royal birth in Britain. Nima Shirazi said it for me. And let’s not forget this: +++ Or the latest addition to the Royal Babylon video archive on YouTube: Inheritance.

Connecting Kim Dotcom and Edward Snowden

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To have a staff of thousands that keeps me informed is one of the privileges of this blog. Had I not been tipped about the projection of Kim Dotcom’s face with the words “United Stasi of America” on a wall of the U.S. embassy in Berlin, I would not have made a connection between N.S.A. […]

More Than Just Opinion, Osborne Has Information

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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 […]

Transgressive Otto Muehl Set Radical Template

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Just in time for the Acker Awards, newly established to recognize noncomformity in the arts, obituaries for Otto Muehl have popped up in the news as if on cue. Muehl was a 1960s Vienna Actionist (along with Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler) whose “radical performance art,” as Margalit Fox put it in The […]

Assange: It’s U.S. Security State vs. First Amendment

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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 […]

From Ralph Richardson to Alan Cox in ‘Cornelius’

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Any actor taking on what the savvy, longtime drama critic of The Guardian calls “a monumental leading role” expressly written for the great Ralph Richardson, is either crazy or brave — possibly both. Which partly explains why the role hadn’t been done in more than 70 years until Alan Cox brought it back to life […]

‘Sacred Elephant’ Is Coming to New York’s La MaMa

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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 […]

Damning Account of ‘Rough Justice’ at Guantanamo

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Jess Bravin has a new book out, The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, just published by Yale University Press. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a damning, brave book by an author who is legitimately outraged by what he uncovered.” Here’s an excerpt from the Prologue: November 24, 2001. Around Noon. Checkpoints were common as […]

It Ain’t in Staten Island, the Rockaways, or Red Hook

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…but shitstorm Sandy had a ball here, too. The venerable Argosy Book Store took a hit on Manhattan’s East 59th Street within spitting distance of Bloomingdale’s and other posh emporiums. Here’s something to ponder: Different floors, but you get the picture.

Ground Zero ‘Visions’ That Never Happened

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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 […]

A Poem from the Late 20th Century

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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

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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

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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 […]

Janine Pommy Vega, R.I.P.

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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 […]

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