Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

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

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.

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 […]

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 […]

Orwell Was a Genius at Fiction Right From the Start

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Jane Perlez reminds us in this morning’s New York Times of George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days. Orwell is best known for his later novels, of course, the dystopian 1984 and the allegorical Animal Farm, which are remembered less for their impact as fiction than for their prescient warnings about the reality of a totalitarian […]

A Difference Between the 16th Century and the 21st

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When I sent Heathcote Williams a photo of the Francis Bacon plaque in the Library Walk series … He replied with an ironic poem, like so … … which illustrates a difference between the 16th century and the 21st, doncha think?

From Laugharne Boathouse to Library Walk

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On my way to work I sometimes take a street in midtown Manhattan where an unsung marvel known as “Library Walk” celebrates the world’s great books and writers. For the length of two city blocks I’m distracted by bronze reliefs in granite plaques set into the sidewalk. They are beautiful to look at and inspiring […]

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