Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Two Sides of a ‘Small Electrical Storm’

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Nearly 50 years ago, Gary Lee-Nova sent a pair of two-sided silkscreen prints to Marshall McLuhan. He had seen McLuhan’s copy of Finnegans Wake with handwritten comments on a subject Joyce had treated: “the electrification of the entire world.” He says his print drawing “was a crude, almost rude emulation of the comments.” If the […]

Acker Awards to Honor One-of-a Kind Artists

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I don’t know what the late Kathy Acker would think of an award given in her name to non-conforming artists. I assume an experimental punk novelist and poet would like the idea of supporting artists who don’t conform. Although awards are besides the point especially for non-conformists, they do generate publicity. And unless I’m wrong, […]

The Shithole and the Shithouse

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By now roughly 23 million people have seen the rebranded Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Or if they haven’t, at least that many have googled it. If you’re the one person who hasn’t seen it, here it is. And here, not incidentally, is Trump’s Shithouse in Washington D.C., also known as The White House. […]

McLuhan’s Notes on Finnegans Wake

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When Gary Lee-Nova read a recent blogpost about a new posthumous collection of Mary Beach’s writings, Electric Bananas, it drew him to Marshall McLuhan’s notated copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Gary was kind enough to send along a couple of sample pages of those notations, as well as McLuhan’s comment about “stupidity” and “indifference.” […]

Among the Laptoppers

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MORTAL COIL for Heathcote The coffee house loop that never ends sounds heavenly among the laptoppers. Failure is not an option. The fanfare of the horns and the swell of the hi-hat roll on like spooky dreams. Fingers dance — they fly like bats in a cave. The gods if there are any shall protect […]

The Lust to Consume

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“The people who run Tesco’s must be Buddhists. You go in there … and there is nothing you could possibly want.”–Heathcote Williams Tesco PLC is a global retailer based in the U.K. It owns and operates supermarkets throughout Europe and in recent years has expanded to Turkey, China, Thailand, and the U.S. the Middle East, […]

A Book That Brings Her Back Alive

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Mary Beach’s Electric Bananas, a brilliant posthumous collection put together by her daughter Pam Plymell, uncovers a writer who has the kind of filthy wit that belongs in James Joyce’s league. Beach is more dangerous, however, because she is more accessible. She has mastered a style along the lines of Finnegan’s Wake, but simplified it. […]

Goodbye to a Depressing Year

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The image is a detail from a drawing by Paul Klee. The poem owes a debt to George Grosz and Gerard Bellaart. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Quad Cinema Hosts Wyler Festival

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WNYC’s Sara Fishko has produced a terrific audio piece about William Wyler and two of his best films — “Dodsworth” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” — both of which are playing among the 25 being screened at the Quad through Dec. 11. Listen: Click for the schedule. “Jan Herman’s biography of William Wyler […]

A Magazine for Word and Image

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Andreas Hansen 3      Sabine Vogel 84 Tone Avenstroup 6      Caroline Hartge 86 Joshua Groß 7      Christian Geissler 88 Katja Horn 10      Sabine Peters 90 Wolf Ways 11      Bert Panenfuß 91 Kai Pohl 12      Stefan Döring 94 Kristin Schulz 15      Karl Krüll 95 Alexander Krohn 16      Monika Rinck […]

2017: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan

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A Straight Up greeting to mark the moment. 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 . . . thanks […]

‘Give Peace a Chance’

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here’s my attempt at images for oil transfer. wrote it on the full page ad in NYT, as you can see. Yoko Ono takes out the ad each year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s birthday. first wrote it with the carbon paper layered underneath the paper i wrote on. didn’t work. so i then […]

Had the Algorithm Been Misplaced?

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Drawing by Gerard Bellaart The corpse blinked. Dead but alive dreaming awake. Had the algorithm been misplaced? Was it “life-in-death” within the winding sheet or “death-in-life”? Signaling the dreamer, the corpse winked but could not speak — or would not. I woke and no sleep came. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Just Like Real Life’

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William Cody Maher & Signe Mähler “two people who have been living together for a long time have learned how to live together with the objects and the thoughts and the feelings that they have had for each other and when the thoughts and feelings and the rooms and the objects change and even the […]

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