Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Reminder: Dahlberg’s Diagnosis

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Since it is the mind that is the vessel of all good and evil in the world, why is it that we so distrust its strength in opposing violence at large today? Thought is always prior to deed, war, history. Baudelaire said: “Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will.” […] “Justice,” […]

Reminder: The Statue of Liberty’s Burka*

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Words and narration by Heathcote Williams. Montage by Alan Cox. The President is obsessed with deporting Arabs Although, by a superb comic irony, It was an Arab who modeled for the United States’ icon – Namely the Statue of Liberty. The sculptor’s monument was initially designed For the opening of the Suez canal: The original […]

Ridgewood Radio

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… from a subterranean region of Queens, New York. Later today, beginning at 3 p.m.ET, David Weinstein’s web-only broadcast on WFMU.org will stream a program called “Spheres of Influence!” featuring David First‘s “Western Enisphere,” which you can also hear (and watch) here, something by Andrea Parkins & Brian Chase, Richard Kostelanetz‘s 1988 radio opera: “Americas’ […]

‘The Last Dodo and Dreams of Flying’

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A reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford from a book of poetry published by New River Press. ‘I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.’ — Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Eugenia Hall ‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do […]

Opera: America’s War Without End

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Anthony Haden Guest calls “The Plain of Jars” — a chamber opera by Keith Patchel about America’s secret war in Laos — “the lineal descendant of Stravinsky’s ‘Nightingale’ and Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’ and ‘Wozzeck.’” I haven’t seen it yet, but my staff of thousands tells me it “exposes the wounds caused by America’s use of […]

A Great One Died Today

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Updated with new information. ‘He was the Shelley of his age and more.’ — Gerard Bellaart A memorial service is to be held Friday (July 14), 3 p.m., at St. Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford. All welcome. July 17 — Malcolm Ritchie, whose friendship with Heathcote spanned decades, attended the service. This is his description: […]

Music Theater Where Truth Can Appear

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The last time we looked it was a work in progress. That was a year ago. William Osborne and Abbie Conant had been working on it for so long, Osborne said at the time, that it felt like “forever.” But now their music theater chamber piece is about to get its world premiere. The name […]

The Evolving NY Times Nameplate

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From 1851, to 1857, to 1896, to 1914, to 1967, to last week: David W. Dunlap’s story, “Modern Identity in Ancient Lettering,” does not include a reference to the overprinting that the designers of The NYT Magazine prefer. (Style aside, Matthew Shaer’s interview did deserve that kind of prominence.) EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

When Trump Hog-Called His Cabinet: Sooie!

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Trump’s first cabinet meeting was the perfect reminder of one of William S. Burroughs’s most satirical “routines.” Burroughs wrote the piece in 1953 and had it published for the first time in a little mimeo magazine called Floating Bear. Since then it’s been reprinted many times, most famously as a mimeographed booklet by Fuck You […]

Please Insert

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My staff of thousands thinks this paragraph by Barrett Brown should be inserted like an unsheathed stallion’s penis into every last one of the obituaries plaguing us about the late Roger Ailes . . . just in case the corpse hasn’t been properly mounted: I don’t really mind Fox on ideological grounds, as a nation […]

Black Eye Porn

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“Normally The Guardian publishes all of Rowson’s cartoons, but I don’t think this one. He mailed it to Heathcote who forwarded it to me. Heathcote wrote the lines when I asked him.” — Gerard Bellaart, editor/publisher Cold Turkey Press I think of H.W.’s stanza in the mode of G.G. Belli’s 19th-century Roman sonnets, which were […]

From a Secret Location

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Once upon a time hundreds of editors, mainly poets, and all manner of bohemian riffraff took to their mimeo machines. They produced an avalanche of little magazines, lovingly collected by Granary Books as a wonder of the age. This literary avalanche was documented in “A Secret Location on the Lower East Side,” a 1996 exhibition […]

A Man With Moxie Plus

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When Asger Jorn heard that he’d been awarded a Guggie, he told them to fuck off. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

My Midweek Music Relief

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Miramar plays a concert on Friday evening in the heart of Manhattan at Elebash Recital Hall (365 Fifth Ave., corner of 34th Street), which is located in the CUNY Graduate Center, where thousands of doctoral students — yes, nearly five thousand, god help them — mill around in the hope of enlightenment. For concert tickets, […]

What Algren’s Legacy Doesn’t Need …

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… is a museum for tourists that perpetuates clichés about him. The Northwest Indiana Times reports that a new museum, which opened Sunday in Gary, Indiana, where Nelson Algren once had a cottage, is being advertised by a “huge 8-foot-by-10-foot photo” of him “leaving a Gary liquor store with a six-pack.” A founder of the […]

What Went Wrong

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Spineless Democrats and Republican thugs: A 30-minute rap on why we are where we are. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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