Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Big Picture: ‘The Big Country’

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William Wyler’s anti-macho Western “The Big Country,” which is remarkable for its imposing visual beauty and sonorous musical score, makes it to the (relatively) big screen at the New York Historical Society (as in bigger than your flatscreen TV but smaller than the screens it was made for back in 1958). The movie is also […]

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 […]

The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter

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My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]

Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State

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Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the […]

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 […]

Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally

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Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It’s worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump’s rallies these days. Writing in his diary that “M […]

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 […]

Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros

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When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets “during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship,” Aaron Shulman writes in the current issue of The Believer, it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled “El Desencanto” (“The Disenchanted”), the film “ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute […]

Interview: The Skinny on the Beats

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Hilary Holladay: How would you size up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than as personalities? Jan Herman: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I’m sure that more people have read On the Road than ever read “Howl.” But Ginsberg may be more significant as a writer than Kerouac in […]

‘Buried Child’ Surfaces in New Revival

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Sam Shepard recently referred to “Buried Child” as “the same clunky play” it always was, rewrites notwithstanding. That’s Shepard being candid. That’s Shepard being Shepard. Never mind that awkward dramaturgy and a little too much speechifying dialogue didn’t keep the play from winning the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama or Shepard from being declared the […]

Nelson Algren’s Walk Through Appalachia

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I have always loved the way A Walk on the Wild Side begins. Show me a more perceptive opening of an American novel with its historical tracing of an Appalachian clan (let alone the lyrical brilliance of its prose) and I’ll buy you dinner. The novel introduces Fitz Linkhorn on the first page — a […]

And the Beat Goes On … And On

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It was too good to pass up this collage by Norman O. Mustill. He made it in 1968 as a comment on the Vietnam War, but it seems to me as accurate now as it was then. The only difference is that the wars have changed. A little “I don’t care” music please … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Do You See Something Wrong Here?

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On the left is the cover of the New York Times Magazine for its migrant story, ‘Out of Syria.’ On the right is a condo ad for the one percent on the first page of the magazine. Draw your own conclusion. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]

What the Horse’s Mouth Had to Say

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I wanted to get the lowdown, so I went over to the Council on Foreign Depredations. The horse’s mouth was as smart as I expected. But to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane, which seemed more important. When Tom Brokaw asked him “how well the country is being served” by the current political debate […]

Honoring MLK With a Clever Starbucks Ad

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Watch Martin Luther King Jr. giving his greatest address, the “I have a dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Listen to his peerless “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of April 16, 1963, in which he defends direct-action nonviolence, explains its principles, expresses his disappointment with […]

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 […]

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