About...

...Straight Up 
The agenda is just what it says: arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said: "Man is the only animal clever enough to build the Empire State Building and stupid enough to jump off it." more

...Books 'n Stuff 
I'm the author of "A Talent for Trouble," the biography of Hollywood director William Wyler. Putnam published it in hardcover.

It is now in paperback (Da Capo Press).

I've also co-written "Cut Up or Shut Up," experimental fiction, with Carl Weissner and Jurgen Ploog (with a "tickertape" intro by William S. Burroughs).

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...My Checkered Career 
Writing of mine has appeared in "little magazines," among them VDRSVP, Ricochet, Unmuzzled Ox, San Francisco Earthquake and John Bryan's Notes From Underground, as well as in Partisan Review, The New York Times Book Review, Trans-Atlantik and The Journal of Film History. more

...Jan Herman 
When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind. more

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jan.herman@gmail.com

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Checkered Career

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'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.