Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Who Are the World’s Most Famous People?

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You’d be surprised. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the world’s best-known American, followed by — are you ready? — Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, and Ben Franklin. Those are the top five. How do I know this? And on what basis? I checked Pantheon 1.0 at the MIT Media Lab, which did the elaborate […]

Where Have You Gone, Jackie Robinson?

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Pianist Kathleen Supové is to perform “Achilles Dreams Of Ebbets Field” by Dylan Mattingly in a world premiere at the Di Menna Center for Classical Music in New York. The Brooklyn Dodgers will be there in memory only. A massive, visionary piece in 24 parts, the solo piano work deals with heroism, passion, loss, grief, […]

Books That Truly Were Something Else

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My staff of thousands informs me that “The Something Else Press Collection” just went on the market. Although some of the books are rarer than others, it’s the collection as a whole that’s notable. Early titles included Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, Dick Higgins’ collection of performance scores and art polemics; correspondence art pioneer Ray Johnson’s […]

There Is Joy in Making Music

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In a video trailer for Finnegan Shanahan’s debut album from New Amsterdam Records, David Bloom conducts the new music ensemble Contemporaneous in a passage from “The Two Halves: Music for a Hudson River Railroad Dream Map.” The piece is a 35-minute song cycle described in a press release as “deft violin work and ethereal vocals […]

The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries

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Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]

Huge Counterculture Archive Comes to Market

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So the Ed Sanders Archive, a massive hoard of literary and countercultural materials, is finally for sale. Steve Clay, the publisher of Granary Books, is the dealer. I have no idea what price is being asked, but you can bet it’s liable to set some kind of record. Beginning with his first poems written while […]

With Bicycle: Nightmares and Dreams

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Flann O’Brien wrote a comic novel. Kurt Wold made a performance piece. Bicycles figure in both. Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down […]

The Day David Bowie Died, a Poet Wondered Why

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‘What Are People Doing Fucking Dying?’ What are people doing fucking dying? Haven’t they got better things to do? No sooner than you’re on someone’s wavelength Then suddenly they’re whisked away from you. I saw Bowie at the first Glastonbury in 1971.* He was performing at five in the morning. With golden locks he was […]

Charlotte Moorman Gets a Full-Dress Close-Up

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On a visit I made years ago to Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections its curator at the time, Russell Maylone, showed me a room piled with ramshackle cartons that had recently arrived. He pointed to them with pride and said they were Charlotte Moorman’s archival materials, a lifetime’s worth of hoarding. […]

AC Institute Is Having a Launch Party

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Listen to “Speed Bump 4 Eva.” My staff of thousands says it’s perfect music for the image. AC Institute christens its new space in midtown Manhattan. The event will feature a short reading by The Z Collection author Jan Herman followed by music from accomplished cellist Hamilton Berry. Publisher’s note: The Z Collection, a “time […]

‘Plato’s Frogs’: A Long Way from ‘Saturday Night Live’

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In 1984 Malcolm Mc Neill won an Emmy for “outstanding graphics and title design” for the opening title sequence of “Saturday Night Live,” which he conceived, designed, and art directed. Here’s his storyboard: Thirty years later, contemplating a famous passage in the “Phaedo,” Mc Neill made “Plato’s Frogs.” I have not asked him about it. […]

Tibet Comes to Taos at ‘Enchanted Mountain’ Salon

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The composer Andrea Clearfield will present her Tibetan Recording Project at the Enchanted Mountain Performance Space in downtown Taos, New Mexico, next Sunday, Aug. 30. It’s free and open to the public. (See details of time and place.) “Clearfield’s orchestral and choral works have been performed around the world,” according to an advance program note. […]

And Now for a Different Kind of Music

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It wasn’t intended as such. All the gear-shifting — the whining, growling, screaming soundtrack — makes the difference. Minus that it’s just a meandering road trip (at high speed, granted, on Paris streets). And that kiss? Strictly branding. Mere advertising. C'était un rendez-vous – 1976 from LeCatalog on Vimeo. Here’s the music again, Hollywood-style: EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Of Poetry and Fakery, Cultural Theft, and Stolen Identity

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The title of Heathcote Williams’s memoir, Of Dylan Thomas and his Deaths, reflects the author’s belief that the great Welsh poet died not once but twice. He writes, “It can be said that he was to suffer no less than two deaths at American hands.” The first death, contrary to the accepted claim that he […]

Recapped: R. Crumb Epic Home Video (Un, Deux, Trois)

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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 […]

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