Fifty-four years ago two undercover cops in San Francisco arrested a clerk at City Lights Bookstore for selling them an “obscene” book of poetry. The clerk was Shigeyoshi Murao. The book was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Several months later, on October 3rd, a municipal court judge ruled that the book was protected by the First Amendment […]

Samuel Beckett says: Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire. Glenn Greenwald says it like so: What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new […]

Susan Fleet — trumpet player and feminist music historian — set her first crime thriller, Absolution, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, where homicide detective Frank Renzi takes on a serial killer who preys on women. Fleet’s new killer thriller, Diva, is subtitled “a novel of psychological suspense.” That’s an understatement. Renzi is back, now in post-Katrina […]

If you guessed Billie Whitelaw doing Samuel Beckett’s “Not I,” you get a Google star. Here’s the complete version at UbuWeb (beginning at 2:51 on the counter), preceded by a short interview with Whitelaw. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Today’s three-fer . . . 1) Richard Hamilton, British Painter and a Creator of Pop Art, Dies at 89 2) Carl Oglesby, Antiwar Leader in 1960s, Dies at 76 3) John Calley, Hollywood Chief, Dies at 81 Taking the long view . . . Doncha just luuhv zat akzent? Postscript: Arman’s epitaph — Enfin Seul! […]

It’s a different kind of memorial. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Jimmy Breslin was right. It’s a lousy idea to turn the victims of 9/11 into martyrs and just as lousy to turn Ground Zero into a glorified cemetery. It was wrong in 2003, when he railed against both ideas in his newspaper column; and it is now, when the 10th anniversary of 9/11 is about […]

The tale I wrote at MSNBC.com back in 2002 on December 18, the day nine “visions of Ground Zero’s future” were unveiled in a design competition to rebuild the site, has long since been deleted from cyberspace. I offer it here as a lost document for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. If you detect a […]

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. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]