Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

The Nature of the Beast

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Furthermore . . . “As Matisse noted, black is a colour too & in certain hands the superior one.” — Gerard Bellaart EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Speaking of Hans Magnus Enzenberger . . .

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His poem “last will and testament”  begins: “get your flag out of my face, it tickles!” Jerome Rothenberg’s appealing translation from the German continues: and get that tinny wreath off my chest, it’s rattling too much; toss it over with the statues on the garbage heap, and give the ribbon to some biddies to doll […]

‘Majestically lonely and white . . .’

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Now that you’ve had a look at the moody green splendor of the moors near Manchester, England, take a look at the brilliant skyscape near Bordeaux, France (courtesy of our staff), and a favorite poem of theirs. ‘A History of Clouds’ Hans Magnus Enzensberger Appearing as they do, overnight, or out of the blue, they […]

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 […]

The Sorrows

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War is always a poison to the soul, even the most just wars. No more important victory was ever achieved than World War II, but America was poisoned, perhaps fatally, by the aftermath of its own success, because we never faced what war really is. It’s very difficult. There are no words for it. — […]

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 […]

Not Witty Enough

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A promo from The Paris Review: Withering maybe, but hardly a quip. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]

‘Officially Verboten’

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U.S. cities with the fastest-growing wealth gaps. Monster Nor’easter The first day of spring a blinding white curtain kidnapped the cit​y. It was a true blast of winter. We solemn jurors braved the monster nor’easter and did our solemn duty at forty dollars a day, the price of a shovel. Like heavily falling snow white […]

C.L.R. James: Cricket Shaped Him

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I know nothing about cricket. My only sense of the game came from Frank Harris’s portrait of H.G. Wells. But now that I’ve read The Young C.L.R. James: A Graphic Novelette (PM Press Pamphlet), which traces the early development of the Pan-Africanist writer and Trotskyite revolutionary who was a cricket star as a young man […]

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