Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

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 […]

Another Stenciled Text: ‘No Mind Fits 5’

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At the urging of my staff of thousands, examples from Gerard Bellaart’s word-based series of artworks have been a continuing feature of recent blogposts. The others so far have been “Artaud Fragmentations,” “tric trac du ciel,” “Throws Up Words,” and “ROT NOT.” There are more to come. Bellaart is a Dutch artist and writer now […]

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. […]

‘John Barleycorn’ & ‘Death to Alejandro’

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Ben Schot does all his drawings on the hotel stationary of Les Fregates in Royale-les-Eaux, a fictional seaside resort in Normandy described in Casino Royale as “just north of Dieppe.” He also keeps a running count by numbering them in sequence. These two were done back in March. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]

Gerard Bellaart Sends Greetings From France

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The resident genius of Cold Turkey Press has a thing for Artaud. Can you blame him?Not I. Neither can Hemingway. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our […]

Say Hello to Claes Oldenburg’s Cheeseburgers

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“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. … I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete. … I am for an art that takes its forms […]

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