Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

New Year Greetings

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Greetings for 2019 keep showing up. Here are three — one from Scotland, one from France, and one from Germany. We’ve also received one from Sweden and one from Maryland, but these I think we’re free to post.

‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’

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“A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown.  Institutionalized, she  attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but  can find no words to express her feelings.  She discovers she has no language of her own and recedes more and more into silence.  Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her […]

Widjits for Idjits

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The software folks at WordPress, which provides the backend template for ArtsJournal, have updated the procedure for posting AJ blogs. The update is meant to simplify the process with widgets so that idiots can use it with blindfolds on. Unfortunately, my tireless staff finds the new procedure a helluva lot less helpful than supposed and […]

Goodbye to 2018—And Good Riddance

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poème d’occasion It was a small price to pay  for a poem, or maybe more than one— only $7.50 at 50% off. It wasn’t a book of poems but a dream palace— not even a palace but a pocketable retreat in the woods on sale at year’s end. So good riddance to 2018, annus horribilis. […]

Reality as a Metaphysical Construct

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It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. To be clear,  Jürgen Ploog is an author who does not write for everyone. The “story” he tells in Flesh Film has the pulpy tone of science fiction, a narrator who sounds like a globe-trotting private […]

Asher’s Algren: ‘Lovely’ Word Is Coming In

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UPDATE BELOW … The title of Colin Asher’s forthcoming biography of Nelson Algren, Never a Lovely So Real, is taken from Algren’s description of Chicago. But it might as well apply to the biography itself. E.g.: “This is the third biography of the great Nelson Algren, and it’s easily the best and simply an extraordinary […]

2018: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan

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To mark the moment, a Straight Up tradition continues. 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 . . . […]

Missing from the Warhol Retrospective

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The historic Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum is “the biggest in almost 30 years.” And it is being swooned over with raves like Peter Schjeldahl’s in the current New Yorker, or as the headline puts it on an Artsy review by Darren Jones, You May Think You Know Warhol–but His Whitney Retrospective Holds Surprises. […]

Dick Higgins’ Writings Are Back

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A new book by Dick Higgins? Posthumous, of course. He died 20 years ago, unexpectedly, his life cut short by a heart attack at age 6o. It was a terrible shock to all of us who knew him. The book — Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins — is […]

An Evolution of ‘Other Means’

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Speaking of drawing by other means, Gary Lee-Nova messages that “after first encountering things like Fuzz Against Junk,” he discovered Max Ernst’s collage novels, and in that neo-Victorian mode created his own collages during the mid- to late-1960s. Among his “very first” was “Immense Stone” (below). Another was “Detecting the Forgery” (left), which was later […]

Homage to Félicien Rops

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“The evil which the curiosity about the past uncovers marches in accelerating pursuit of the horrors lurking in the present . . . “ That comment by Cyril Connolly refers to a very different work from these two studies sketched by Gerard Bellaart for one of his paintings. But I can’t help thinking it applies […]

Drawing by Other Means

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Ladies and Gentleman — On the left, we have a collage by Max Ernst from Une semaine de bonté, a surrealist graphic novel published in 1934. Ernst reportedly made the entire book of collages in three weeks. A few of his sources were identified as illustrations from an 1883 novel by Jules Mary, Les damnées […]

Tax Cheat Circus King

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A poem received from an unnamed source with an illustration from the NY Times.   America’s top shitholer goes   whole hog at the public trough,   and never mind the rest of us,   because that is the hog’s nature.   A silly grin when he licks his lips,   a scowl like a lout’s mustache—   the toadstool dick, the […]

‘A Whole New Order of Hidden’

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A few excerpts from “Wooden Ships” by Malcolm Mc Neill that struck my indefatiguable staff of thousands, courtesy of IT: International Times, the Newspaper of Resistance: “The disclosure has begun of what was hidden from the first creation of the world,” wrote Peter Martyr when Columbus got back from his voyages. The creation of the […]

Long Before Cambridge Analytica, the Future Leaked Out

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Specialists. There is no record of the long colloquies which took place between the founding fathers of CrossRoads Publishing, nor the long dreamy nights of investigation which must have preceded their collective action. We have only hearsay. But we suspect they first set up in London and it was not a particularly impressive address . […]

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