Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

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

Back to Reality: Torma on Michelangelo’s Art

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“Colossal as his works were, he saw them still too much as garlands and sought some immoderation wherewith to botch them. He was so successful that he left everything unfinished. Never push things.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

But W.’s Name Is Missing From the List

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This day should not pass without acknowledging the lead editorial in this morning’s New York Times: Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses. It points out, among other things, that Any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and […]

Personal History: My Father Was a New York Cabbie

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My father drove a cab at night. This was the early 1950s. A Brooklyn-born New Yorker, he knew the city’s streets the way a junky knows his veins. I thought of him because of a headline in today’s New York Times: American-Born Cabbies Are a Vanishing Breed in New York. Dad also knew doormen, theater […]

‘Omit Dead Ends’ … Yes, Please

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At the urging of my staff of thousands, examples from Gerard Bellaart’s word-based series of artworks have been a continuing feature of recent blogposts. Other stenciled texts of his that have appeared so far include “Artaud Fragmentations,” “tric trac du ciel,” “Throws Up Words,” “ROT NOT,” and “No Mind Fits 5.” There are more to […]

Another Stenciled Text: ‘No Mind Fits 5’

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At the urging of my staff of thousands, examples from Gerard Bellaart’s word-based series of artworks have been a continuing feature of recent blogposts. The others so far have been “Artaud Fragmentations,” “tric trac du ciel,” “Throws Up Words,” and “ROT NOT.” There are more to come. Bellaart is a Dutch artist and writer now […]

Orwell Was a Genius at Fiction Right From the Start

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Jane Perlez reminds us in this morning’s New York Times of George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days. Orwell is best known for his later novels, of course, the dystopian 1984 and the allegorical Animal Farm, which are remembered less for their impact as fiction than for their prescient warnings about the reality of a totalitarian […]

Still Hidden in Plain Sight, a Reminder of Old Times

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Two news stories — an “exclusive” in The Guardian (“Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres”) and a front-pager in The New York Times (“C.I.A.’s History Poses Hurdles for an Obama Nominee”) — are reminders that more than seven years ago Straight Up’s staff of thousands was onto the story about the American strategy to […]

Teaming Burroughs & Mustill for Thanksgiving

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A Straight Up tradition continues. But this year William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day are posted with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. That completes the package. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through […]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

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It’s a breakfast doodle by Malcolm Mc Neill. He writes in an email, “If only …” Mc Neill has two books coming out at the end of October from Fantagraphics Books: The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here: Images from the Graphic Novel and the memoir Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and […]

Life in Turmoil, Life Out of Balance

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If you can’t get to the screening of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi at Avery Fisher Hall (on Nov. 2 and 3 in New York), where Philip Glass’s score for the film will be performed live by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, or if you can get over there but can’t afford to […]

Is Occupy Wall Street All About the Signs?

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Apparently not. I didn’t know it, But Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics–its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making–are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar. Yes, really. But you knew that. If you didn’t, then go […]

Jobs Loved Computers, of Course … and Bach

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In 1989, Michael Lawrence filmed Steve Jobs for Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. “I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him,” Lawrence messages in an email. “I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me.” “Like so many people around the world,” he writes, […]

The Mind Sashays

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The “vulgo:cynicism” of Carl Weissner’s Die Abenteuer von Trashman — his term for the humor of his latest book — was already on display in last year’s Manhattan Muffdiver. Both books, from Vienna-based Milena Verlag, are written in German. Although I read German desperately, like a beachcomber sifting sand on a bad day, even I […]

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