Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Poem for N.O.M.

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“Coraggio!” — My old friend said. And then he put The gun to his head. Coraggio — That’s what it took To kill the pain With a hunk of lead. Coraggio — It’s no walk in the park. The night is dark, And my friend is dead. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]

On View: Mary Beach’s Witty ‘Illaminations’

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Mary Beach deserved to be an art star. Her collages are in a class with Richard Hamilton’s. But she was incapable of bullshitting her way to the top. She also submerged whatever ambitions she may have had to advance the work of her partner Claude Pélieu. She translated him, published him, promoted him and, when […]

As the French Say: Dégoûtant!

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The print edition logo for Michael Kinsley’s new opinion slot in The New York Times says it all. Well, almost all. What it doesn’t say is how disgusting it is. Kinsley’s first column is not only awful, but worse, he will be “revisiting this theme regularly.” It looks like The Times is repositioning — a […]

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 […]

Squatting at The Bunker in London

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Cycle One (previews begin April 17) ‘Slummers’ by Sonal Bhattacharyya ‘The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency’ by Heathcote Williams with Sarah Woods ‘Back to Back to Back’ by Stef Smith Cycle Two (previews begin April 18) ‘The Table’ by Lin Coghlin ‘Put The Schwarzes Into De-Stat’ by Nessah Muthy ‘The House With the Yellow […]

Poetry of the Absurd

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This is a tape cut-up I made with Carl Weissner way back in 1971. We used a recording of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley speaking to members of the city council. We “cut” the tape electronically, not manually, on a big old reel-to-reel that I had at the time. You can hear the cuts. Technically […]

What Went Wrong

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

Wonders Never Cease

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EPITAPH FOR MY TYPEWRITER I’ve learned to keep cheerful by committing all my suicides on the typewriter. A shot into the keyboard’s brain equals one p o + e m THE UNIVERSAL BUBBLE* The Universe — more like a great thought than a great machine — a soap bubble with corrugations — not the interior […]

They Had Their Own Fun

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Back in the mid-1960s, when Carl Weissner discovered the British mimeo zine My Own Mag, he struck up a correspondence with its presiding genius, Jeff Nuttall, and soon took My Own Mag as a model for his own mimeo, Klactoveedsedsteen. The two of them became pen pals and freewheeling collaborators — Nuttall in Norwich, Weissner […]

Beckett’s Letters: ‘Dull, Dull, Dull,’ But —

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Serious readers of Samuel Beckett have been treated to four massive volumes of his letters. I haven’t read any of the collections. So I have to take the word of two readers who have, and both tell me the experience has been a form of slow torture. The letters are mundane and largely disappointing: “Dull, […]

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