Straight Up | Jan Herman

Leave it to Jed Birmingham to make the connection between Mad Men and William S. Burroughs, via Minutes to Go, cut-ups, and Wilhelm Reich, with a bit of feminist name-dropping shoehorned in. The connection is complex and full of complications, a specialty of Birmingham’s literary sleuthing. And here’s Eddie Woods offering some corrective history about […]

Just read the excerpt in Vanity Fair of the new Joseph Heller biography, which includes this graf: Candida (pronounced Can-dih-duh) Donadio, who would become Heller’s new agent, was about 24 years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants. … In time, her client roster came to include some of the most prominent names in […]

Four years after posting Over the Cliff With Rupe, about Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal takeover, I think he’s beginning to resemble Wile e Coyote.

Annie Sprinkle led off her review of Chester Brown’s Paying For It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John by pointing out that in her “nearly 40 years in the world of sex workers,” she knew of only one person ever “to come out voluntarily — with honesty, integrity and pride –” as a “john.” […]

Let’s see: Torture crimes officially, permanently shielded. Photo by Norman O. Mustill.

Or should I say, welcome back to the BananaRepublic — land of the red, white & blue, and home of the brave. Al Capp must be smiling. And by the way, don’t take the subhead on that article at face value. That’s the WSJ putting an editorial slant on the news story. Here, in the […]

Supervert has just redesigned his Fleursdumal.org Web site, which was first launched in 2004 and is “the definitive online edition” of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). The elegant new design is simple, and it works quickly. The site also has lots of levels, so you can dive deep. Its scholarship and […]

“The attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks is clearly a leading prong in the Obama administration’s truly odious and dangerous war on whistleblowers.”— Glenn Greenwald (See: WikiLeaks Grand Jury investigation widens.) Postscript: Don’t forget to watch Greenwald’s 30-minute speech on media propaganda. It’s in three parts on YouTube. Here’s the beginning (you can skip the introductory speaker’s […]

This video was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, where the exhibition ran from March 23 to April 30. Curated by Monte Beauchamp, editor of “The Life and Times of R. Crumb,” the show was a retrospective that presented key pieces culled from the underground art collection […]

We’ve focused for so long on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we tend to forget that the worst U.S. war crimes of our time — of mine anyway — were committed in Vietnam. Here’s a well-told reminder from several years ago: Vietnam: American Holocaust Read the comment, below, and click the link it […]

Click on the hand.

Surely you’ve read the news that Gadhafi is being sought for war crimes. You may recall that America’s BananaRepublican gangsters never committed any war crimes — not in Iraq and not in Afghanistan. Unlike Gadhafi, our very own gang of culprits is above reproach. Postscript: May 21 — Let this be a reminder: Stupidity, Arrogance, […]

FRISKO © by Norman O. Mustill No comment required … but I don’t think Tony Bennett’s nostalgia quite applies.

Isn’t editorializing in a news story supposed to be out of bounds at The New York Times? Here’s the third graf of Bin Laden’s Secret Life in a Diminished World, which (with a headline describing his Shrunken World) dominates the print edition of today’s front page: Videos seized from Bin Laden’s compound and released by […]

It’s no more than a coincidence. Osama Bin Laden was killed on this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. But it’s worth noting, given that the man was motivated by one thing above all else: his hatred of Jews.