Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Fantagraphics Has the Frontier Spirit

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Last time we looked Paul Buhle and Noah Van Sciver’s comic art biography of John Chapman, otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed, was published in a paperback edition by Alternative Comics. That was a year ago. It is now being re-issued in hardcover and digital editions by Fantagraphics Books. The production, typical of Fantagraphics, is gorgeous. […]

Caligula Gets Around

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A friend of mine, the author of four self-published books — one of which got 22 million YouTube views when a subversive porn star read from it on camera — occasionally prints bulletins in limited editions about whatever grabs his attention. Then he mails them to friends. The most recent, Bulletin #4, arrived at the […]

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’ […]

‘Ghost’ + ‘Smarty’ = Opposite Attractions

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Updated with new information. “A short video and electronic music work created in 2008, inspired by Theresa Duncan’s blog. It is a small tribute to her memory.” — William Osborne + Theresa Duncan’s video. Postscript: Aug. 9 — Per William Osborne’s comment, here is her best video. Theresa Duncan's The History of Glamour from M.Duncan […]

‘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 […]

‘After the Revolution’: Heathcote Williams as Playwright

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Jay Jeff Jones writes in London’s Theatre Record: Like [Jeff] Nuttall, Williams was multi-talented and constant in his espousal of utopian anarchy. He was as uncompromising as he was compassionate; an intellectual force that alternated poetry and playwriting with direct action for causes that included the homeless, battered women and the environment. His first major […]

Lost: Whatever Happened to ‘Severe Joy’?

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When Heathcote Williams died recently, I heard from many people who recalled the lasting impact he’d had on them. Jay Jeff Jones, Michael Butterworth, and David Britton were three. They remembered a manuscript of Heathcote’s called “Severe Joy” that never saw the light of day. John Calder, a major London publisher, had failed to bring […]

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 […]

Burroughsian Credo: ‘Include Me Out’

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“Learning a hieroglyphic language is excellent practice in the lost art of inner silence.” — William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind “Cup of tea at dawn a room with rose wall paper wind stirs cigarette ash on a naked thigh calm miracle of apomorphine dawn . . . . .” Burroughs Lecture Series: Iain Sinclair […]

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

Norman Mailer on Almost Everything

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If there’s a richer radio archive of interviews with cultural figures and others from all walks of life than the one amassed by Studs Terkel, I’m unaware of it. Here, for example, is Norman Mailer talking with him on March 17, 1960, about writing, critics, self-censorship, and American life. It’s great stuff. Mailer offers his […]

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 […]

A Better Idea for the Guggenheim

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One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s fantasies for his design of the Guggenheim Museum was to color it pink. You can see how that might have looked in a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive. If you can’t get to MoMA, you can see what it […]

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