Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Celebrating Carl Weissner, Buk, and Burroughs

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They say Berlin is the place to be. Since I can’t be there myself, here’s the next best thing . . . This is the Maher-Mähler film about Carl that will be screened as part of the celebration: Always These Nightmares!      Toward the end of his life Carl was a writer on a […]

From the Pond Across the Street

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We would travel light years to find alien beings inhabiting fabulous worlds. — Malcolm Mc Neill Some things just won’t stay down. ‘The permutations are infinite: Whatever it is, the joke is on us.’ EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

The Moody Splendor of Manchester

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I was corresponding by email recently with Jay Jeff Jones, an American expat playwright, journalist, and poet, who is working on a new edition of Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, a long-out-of-print classic about the British counterculture of the 1960s. Jones, who has lived in Manchester, England, for many decades, wrote that he was “in fine […]

Streaming What We Breathe

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Quantum Words for Bill Osborne Stealthy quantum words phantoms of expectation and suicides of time riddle us with springs and traps. Self-delusion streaming what we breathe we who breathe in silence holding worlds together   &    apart like ancient beacons bearing witness in halos of fading light. — JH EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Edward Snowden on The Intercept

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Since I don’t tweet, this is the next best thing. Click to listen. Edward Snowden discusses surveillance, tools to help protect your privacy, and the likelihood of a Trump-Putin deal to extradite him.

‘Meeting Jim’ (Who’s Having the Time of His Life)

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I’ve never met Jim. We’ve only corresponded by email about the strange case of Orwell’s typewriter. But I know that Jim Haynes is a man for all reasons — pleasure, food, sex, mind, books, theater, life — and that to meet him in person all you have to do is show up at his door […]

Tribute to John Bryan from Cold Turkey Press

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John Bryan published so many underground papers and magazines over three decades — beginning in 1962 with renaissance, a San Francisco literary journal inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (which John said he read “half a dozen times,” and which turned him onto LSD) — that Warren Hinckle called him “the Peter Zenger of […]

Huge Wyler Retrospective in Paris

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One of the beauties of a William Wyler retrospective as big as the one that the Cinemathèque Française has currently mounted in Paris is the chance to see the immense variety of his work. I don’t think as thorough a retrospective (41 films, including some of the silents) has been screened since the 1996 Berlin […]

Big Moment for a B-17

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UPDATED May 21: When the 10-man crew of “The Memphis Belle” completed their 25th mission over Europe in 1943, they and their B-17 heavy bomber were brought home to the U.S. for a cross-country publicity tour and were made famous by William Wyler’s World War II live-action combat documentary (also called “The Memphis Belle”). I […]

Connecting With Burroughs

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I was walking down Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan the other day when I saw someone reading Naked Lunch. I know the shot looks posed, but it wasn’t. This is exactly how he was sitting (below left). The guy was in front of an office building at 777 Third Ave., between E. 48 and E. […]

Trump’s Corrupt Precursor

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Carl Weissner and I made this track in 1971 during the Vietnam War before Nixon resigned his corrupt presidency. The collage shows Nixon’s customary “V” for victory salute, which was as hollow and phoney as he was, with his wife Pat behind him looking over his shoulder against a backdrop of two pots, one clean […]

Art Shay, Man With a Camera, R.I.P.

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He was 94. His classic book of photographs, Nelson Algren’s Chicago, was published three decades after shooting them for Life during the height of Algren’s fame in the 1950s. The magazine never used them. Shay was kind enough to sign a copy of the book for me. According to Shay’s obit in the Chicago Tribune […]

‘Peculiar Shortcomings’

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A word of warning from a century ago … Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred […]

What Would Daumier Make of Trump?

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Here’s the perfect hint: A mocking depiction of King Louis-Philippe as the Rabelais character Gargantua. The caricature might as well be Trump. He feeds on bundles of swag delivered by his obsequious minions and, from his outhouse throne, he shits out appointments, titles, and other rewards for the privileged class. Not incidentally, Honoré Daumier went […]

Once Upon a Time in India . . .

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There was a mimeo magazine called ppHOO69 *Intercontinental*1969. It was edited by Pradip Choudhuri and published by Subhas Ghose, with a front cover by Alejandro Jodorowsky and a back cover by Claude Pélieu. The poems and prose were divided into two sections, one in Tamil and one in English (with some French). CLICK THE IMAGES […]

‘Righteous Poles’ Make an Appeal

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Following Ronald S. Lauder’s open letter (“It’s Time to Dial Back the Rhetoric”) about the Holocaust and recent anti-Semitic developments in Poland, another open letter has appeared (also in The New York Times). This one is signed by 50 Polish citizens, “the remaining living Righteous representing the 6,850 Righteous Poles” who have been recognized by […]

Poland Dials the Wrong Number

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An open letter from Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, took up a full page yesterday in The New York Times. The heading was “It’s Time to Dial Back the Rhetoric in Poland.” I have no expertise in the matter, but I couldn’t help recalling Tuvye Tenenbom‘s take on the situation of […]

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