The running head on these two pages of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up text “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin” reads: “if you are gay I am right seconds with Karate you are wrong you are he kicks him into 1914 movie.” The spread appeared in an exhibition, “Liberated Images,” at the University of Iowa […]
Teaming Burroughs & Mustill for Thanksgiving
A Straight Up tradition continues. But this year William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day are posted with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. That completes the package. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through […]
‘The Lord of the Drones and the White House Fly’
My staff of thousands reminds me there’s an election coming up in the U.S. of A. For all the voters going to the polls, here’s a poem to cheer them on by the British poet Heathcote Williams. Part two … enter the realm of litrichur, narrated and montaged by Alan Cox. And here’s part three, […]
The Not-So-Perfect Storm
Ecuador contends that the British Foreign Office has yet to renounce a threat to storm its embassy in London, where Julian Assange has taken refuge from British authorities. So says The Guardian. A British court has ordered the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition to Sweden to face questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct, although no formal charges […]
Assange Speaks
WHILE ALL EYES were on the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Julian Assange has been granted political asylum for good reason, there was a two-man demonstration on Sunday at the British consulate (875 Third Ave.) in midtown Manhattan. Yoni Miller, 18, identified himself as an “occupier” who believes in “direct action.” Articulate and steadfast, he […]
‘A Budding Police State’
Human Rights Watch reports: Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees. Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a budding police state. — Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human […]
Off He Goes Into the Wild Blue Yonder
You can say a lot of things about Christopher Hitchens’s role as a cheerleader for the war in Iraq, most of all that it stank to high heaven. Of course it’s pure coincidence that he died on the same day that marked the official end of the war. But it’s a fitting irony that Secretary […]
Jess Bravin Explains It All for You
The U.S. Supreme Court, the Constitution, & the health care law. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Health and Safety . . . Oh Yeah
That’s the pretext for the cop sweep of OWS protestors at Zuccotti Park. Or as NYC’s billionaire mayor claims, that’s the reason for the eviction by what he called “the world’s greatest police department.” It’s the same police force recently convicted of planting drugs and currently charged with smuggling guns, armed robbery, making false arrests, […]
Godfrey Reggio’s Vision of ‘Life Out of Balance’
A day in February, 1983. Godfrey Reggio is standing in front of the old Reichstag in Berlin. A tall, gaunt man with pale blue eyes and a graying beard that looks like stubble, he has just presented Koyaanisqatsi at the Berlin Film Festival. The notices have been gratifying. One critic called it “a masterpiece . […]
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). EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Manhattan Muffdiver
A new novel hits the bookshelves in Vienna, and the Austrian television network ORF interviews the author on the news. Try getting a novelist interviewed on the evening news in America. Never happen. Besides, we’re talking about a book called Manhattan Muffdiver, not exactly a title that U.S. network censors would approve. It’s not altogether […]
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 […]
Boris Lurie, R.I.P.
!['Pinup with Flower' by Boris Lurie [1959]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1959_flower1-200x200.jpg)
The epigraph on “NO!art MAN,” a major 2001 documentary about Boris Lurie, who died earlier this month, says it all: “In a time of wars and extermination, aesthetic exercises and decorative patterns are not enough.” Those are Lurie’s words, and now they might as well serve as his epitaph. obit by Colin Moynihan in The […]
Before I Forget
Here’s a tale you won’t find in It was the winter of 1970, probably in February. I’m not sure of the exact date. It must have been around the time that Tom Hayden and four others of the Chicago Seven were convicted of inciting a riot in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The place […]
Mad Magazine + Tom Hayden = SDS
“Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History,” a new book due out in January from Hill and Wang. “My own radical journey began with Harvey Pekar and comics and politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, on Monday — Dec. 10 — which also marks International Amnesty International Global Write-a-Thon. Pekar is best known for […]