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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Archives for December 2018

New Year Greetings

December 31, 2018 by Jan Herman

Card from Gerard Bellaart (by Dutch painter Jan Steen, 1626-1679)

Greetings for 2019 keep showing up. Here are three — one from Scotland, one from France, and one from Germany. We’ve also received one from Sweden and one from Maryland, but these I think we’re free to post.

Doowah… Doowah… Doowah…

December 30, 2018 by Jan Herman

Portrait of William S. Burroughs © by R. Crumb [1985]

Have you ever seen a movie trailer about a writer that swings like this one?

‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’

December 27, 2018 by Jan Herman

Abbie Conant as Miriam in 'The Chair, Part 2' (music by William Osborne)

“A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown.  Institutionalized, she  attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but  can find no words to express her feelings.  She discovers she has no language of her own and recedes more and more into silence.  Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her […]

Widjits for Idjits

December 25, 2018 by Jan Herman

HUH? The Straight Up staff calls the new Wordpress shortcuts 'widgets to idjits.'

The software folks at WordPress, which provides the backend template for ArtsJournal, have updated the procedure for posting AJ blogs. The update is meant to simplify the process with widgets so that idiots can use it with blindfolds on. Unfortunately, my tireless staff finds the new procedure a helluva lot less helpful than supposed and […]

Goodbye to 2018—And Good Riddance

December 19, 2018 by Jan Herman

'Victorian Smoker' [Undated collage by Norman O. Mustill]

poème d’occasion It was a small price to pay  for a poem, or maybe more than one— only $7.50 at 50% off. It wasn’t a book of poems but a dream palace— not even a palace but a pocketable retreat in the woods on sale at year’s end. So good riddance to 2018, annus horribilis. […]

When Cinephiles Celebrate Reading

December 18, 2018 by Jan Herman

Milestone Films celebrates their cinephile friends and family EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Reality as a Metaphysical Construct

December 13, 2018 by Jan Herman

It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. To be clear,  Jürgen Ploog is an author who does not write for everyone. The “story” he tells in Flesh Film has the pulpy tone of science fiction, a narrator who sounds like a globe-trotting private […]

Tales of Doomsday Eros

December 8, 2018 by Jan Herman

Supervert is — as he writes—  “the assumed name of a writer using the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to explore novel sexual pathologies.” His latest book, the fifth in a series of six he has planned, is Apocalypse Burlesque: Tales of Doomsday Eros. You could easily call his books transgressive. Consider the titles: Extraterrestrial Sex […]

The Z Collection at Printed Matter in NYC

December 7, 2018 by Jan Herman

Finally, you can buy it in the States without paying the exorbitant cost of international postage. The Z Collection is an illustrated memoir in the form of personal essays about Nelson Algren, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron, Abbie Hoffman, among others, and about the literary underground of the 1960s. “Herman, a […]

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.
Another strange fact... Read More…

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Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

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The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

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