Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Wrapping Up the ‘Dutch Mordant’ Series

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Cold Turkey Press publisher Gerard Bellaart writes that he “got rather carried away.” There are now about 40 cards in the series. Consequently the 36 portfolios of 12 cards each “will differ slightly in composition.” The “sacred nose” comes from the Bellaart family album, dated 1755.+++ A photo by Frederick Sommer illustrates the “kleine Welten” […]

Hurray for Independence Day. Hmmph …

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William Osborne writes in an email: It is astonishing to see how deeply militarized American culture has become. The military colors every aspect of our lives. You could pick a thousand examples. Americans don’t see it, but Washington is essentially a military base posing as a seat of government. Even if America doesn’t have a […]

From the Cut-Up Department

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Long ago and far away (in other words, back in the 1960s), when greed & human smallness became history, I kept a cut-up diary — now lost — as something to tilt the museum, something small to fold up against, to tell what was meant. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

MLK Warned of ‘Guided Missiles and Misguided Men’

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Forget the adoring crowds. When Barack Obama spoke the other day at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, there was “a remarkable difference from the rock-star welcome” that greeted him in 2008 before his election as U.S. president and his acceptance of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. This time he was greeted by a justifiable meme […]

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 […]

My Re-Tweet: Edward Snowden’s Amazing Interview

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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 […]

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 […]

‘Orwell’s Recipe for Tea’

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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 EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

American ‘Voodoo’: Signs of the Times

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I don’t know what to say about this collage, except that it has nothing to do with religion — unless it’s the religion of the road — and was made long before the advent of photoshop. Full stop. Postscript: June 4 — Hell, it just occurred to me that American “voodoo” has moved from the […]

Only Man to Enter Parliament With Honest Intentions

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Guy Fawkes’ Lantern Guy Fawkes’ lantern Is a surreptitious Point of pilgrimage For anonymous Armies of anarchists who Visit the glass case Where it is preserved In the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. ‘What if?’ they wonder, ‘What if Guy Fawkes had done it? ‘Had done the business – ‘For what’s changed?’ they ask, ‘Kings and Parliaments […]

For Nonconforming Artists, the Envelope Please

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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

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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 […]

Can a Royal Party Boy Really Change His Stripes?

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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 […]

‘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 […]

Topor Nails It: Drone Attack Avant la Lettre

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And for further edification, there’s “A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood” about the “origins of the C.I.A.’s drone war in Pakistan” by Mark Mazzetti and “Targeted Killing Comes to Define War on Terror,” about the policy of the “drone campaign” by Scott Shane. They’re part of a continuing NY Times series. Mazzetti’s latest […]

‘Peter Bayliss and the Breatharians’

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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 […]

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