Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Archives for January 2018

Screwed Beyond Repair?

by

UNPATCHED for Simon Schama At the secular end of days when unconfined freedom means gusts of opportunity for all our computers to screw every one of us beyond repair, will the unspeakable terrors reappear? What tech service will patch our human flaws? Not the rolling disaster of holy water & passwords. Not infernal church bells […]

Is Dante for Our Time?

by

‘Forget your hopes.’ (As quoted in a modern translation by Clive James) Traditionally: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Take your choice. One or both may help. For those with the ears and minds to hear them, the notes of pianos are full of ghosts. Each piano hammer and string is different, as is […]

Two Sides of a ‘Small Electrical Storm’

by

Nearly 50 years ago, Gary Lee-Nova sent a pair of two-sided silkscreen prints to Marshall McLuhan. He had seen McLuhan’s copy of Finnegans Wake with handwritten comments on a subject Joyce had treated: “the electrification of the entire world.” He says his print drawing “was a crude, almost rude emulation of the comments.” If the […]

Acker Awards to Honor One-of-a Kind Artists

by

I don’t know what the late Kathy Acker would think of an award given in her name to non-conforming artists. I assume an experimental punk novelist and poet would like the idea of supporting artists who don’t conform. Although awards are besides the point especially for non-conformists, they do generate publicity. And unless I’m wrong, […]

The Shithole and the Shithouse

by

By now roughly 23 million people have seen the rebranded Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Or if they haven’t, at least that many have googled it. If you’re the one person who hasn’t seen it, here it is. And here, not incidentally, is Trump’s Shithouse in Washington D.C., also known as The White House. […]

Michelangelo, poet

by

Before Michelangelo, Divine Draftsman & Designer leaves The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, here’s a sweet little item from the show. It’s about how he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and it brings him down to earth. Jackson Pollock anyone? I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture, Hunched up as […]

A Rising Composer’s Calling

by

Dylan Mattingly’s work-in-progress opera “Stranger Love” is to be performed at Roulette in a world premiere next week in New York City on Jan. 16 & 17. STRANGER LOVE Music by Dylan Mattingly Libretto by Thomas Bartscherer Concept by Thomas Bartscherer and Dylan Mattingly Act I is the tale of two lovers, in the tradition […]

McLuhan’s Notes on Finnegans Wake

by

When Gary Lee-Nova read a recent blogpost about a new posthumous collection of Mary Beach’s writings, Electric Bananas, it drew him to Marshall McLuhan’s notated copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Gary was kind enough to send along a couple of sample pages of those notations, as well as McLuhan’s comment about “stupidity” and “indifference.” […]

Among the Laptoppers

by

MORTAL COIL for Heathcote The coffee house loop that never ends sounds heavenly among the laptoppers. Failure is not an option. The fanfare of the horns and the swell of the hi-hat roll on like spooky dreams. Fingers dance — they fly like bats in a cave. The gods if there are any shall protect […]

The Lust to Consume

by

“The people who run Tesco’s must be Buddhists. You go in there … and there is nothing you could possibly want.”–Heathcote Williams Tesco PLC is a global retailer based in the U.K. It owns and operates supermarkets throughout Europe and in recent years has expanded to Turkey, China, Thailand, and the U.S. the Middle East, […]

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog