Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Among the Laptoppers

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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

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“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, […]

A Book That Brings Her Back Alive

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Mary Beach’s Electric Bananas, a brilliant posthumous collection put together by her daughter Pam Plymell, uncovers a writer who has the kind of filthy wit that belongs in James Joyce’s league. Beach is more dangerous, however, because she is more accessible. She has mastered a style along the lines of Finnegan’s Wake, but simplified it. […]

Goodbye to a Depressing Year

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The image is a detail from a drawing by Paul Klee. The poem owes a debt to George Grosz and Gerard Bellaart. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Quad Cinema Hosts Wyler Festival

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WNYC’s Sara Fishko has produced a terrific audio piece about William Wyler and two of his best films — “Dodsworth” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” — both of which are playing among the 25 being screened at the Quad through Dec. 11. Listen: Click for the schedule. “Jan Herman’s biography of William Wyler […]

A Magazine for Word and Image

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Andreas Hansen 3      Sabine Vogel 84 Tone Avenstroup 6      Caroline Hartge 86 Joshua Groß 7      Christian Geissler 88 Katja Horn 10      Sabine Peters 90 Wolf Ways 11      Bert Panenfuß 91 Kai Pohl 12      Stefan Döring 94 Kristin Schulz 15      Karl Krüll 95 Alexander Krohn 16      Monika Rinck […]

2017: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan

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A Straight Up greeting to mark the moment. From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands … thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . thanks […]

‘Give Peace a Chance’

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here’s my attempt at images for oil transfer. wrote it on the full page ad in NYT, as you can see. Yoko Ono takes out the ad each year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s birthday. first wrote it with the carbon paper layered underneath the paper i wrote on. didn’t work. so i then […]

Had the Algorithm Been Misplaced?

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Drawing by Gerard Bellaart The corpse blinked. Dead but alive dreaming awake. Had the algorithm been misplaced? Was it “life-in-death” within the winding sheet or “death-in-life”? Signaling the dreamer, the corpse winked but could not speak — or would not. I woke and no sleep came. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Just Like Real Life’

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William Cody Maher & Signe Mähler “two people who have been living together for a long time have learned how to live together with the objects and the thoughts and the feelings that they have had for each other and when the thoughts and feelings and the rooms and the objects change and even the […]

Another Cold Turkey Card

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Drawing by Gerard Bellaart Past hopes rise like a ghost. Immutable. Indifferent. Are there no triumphs? Will dreams perform miracles? Strindberg said, “I dream, therefore I exist.” Stalked by a crazy sage dressed in weeds, I scribbled. The unguarded self is burdened with weariness like a dog shitting on the sidewalk. — Jan Herman (Indebted […]

‘That man is killing everybody!’

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From ‘Sonnet II’ in FOURTEEN Deformed Sonnets, published by Peter Engstler Verlag [2017]: . . . The ballroom of history bumped and cried. “Look out! That man is killing everybody!” The word SHAME crawled across the screen like broken teeth in the fist of time. A wilting sun had set. The night was threadbare. “This […]

Writer on a Rampage

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In a tribute to the late German author Carl Weissner, who wrote experimental fiction in both English and German in addition to translating more than 100 books by dissident American and British authors, the literary scholar Tomasz Stompor delivered a paper on Weissner’s novel, Death in Paris, at a recent meeting of the European Beat […]

A Book With Extra Thrust

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This is the way to promote a book, especially when it won’t be available on Amazon or Barnes & Noble websites and won’t be readily distributed to brick-and-mortar bookstores: Click to view Rocket 88’s webpage for In the Sixties: Illustrated. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Beat Conference: ‘Paris Interzone’ 2017

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I wish I could be there when the European Beat Studies Network meets in Paris on Wednesday. Douglas Field (University of Manchester) will give a presentation about Harold Norse’s “Cosmographs.” I remember seeing them on the wall of Norse’s room at the Beat Hotel more than 50 years ago. As I’ve written in My Adventures […]

Paraphilia: Requiescat in Pace

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Paraphilia Magazine officially ceased to be an active publication on September 1, 2017. It was an uninhibited online publication that featured a variety of content “likely not found in the average publication,” according to its publisher, Dire McCain. Her primary motive was to enable writers and artists to escape “the grip” of the art and […]

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