Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Catching Up to the Past

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“Buckle your seatbelt and fire up your time machine. You are about to blast yourself back nearly fifty years to a simpler time when America was at war, the country was polarized, a crazed and despised president of the United States was in charge, cops were considered racist pigs, cannabis was omnipresent, and young radicals […]

Election Day in America

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Speaking of small-press publications, we are still waiting for Carl Weissner’s Le Regard d’Autrui to go live in a new posthumous trade edition, as promised. But Amazon KDP has been doggedly screwy. Please pardon the delay. (It is now available.) Meanwhile, Printed Matter, the best place in New York to find artists’ books, has just […]

Cold Turkey Press: A Bibliography

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I don’t know exactly how many chapbooks, folios, broadsides, and poetry cards Cold Turkey Press has published. I never counted. But it must be in the hundreds. All of them—produced in handmade, illustrated, and limited editions—are unique manifestations of their publisher’s mind: scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure. They constitute an archive that […]

Infected by Light Verse

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A rational deformation that should have been left in the drawer to ferment into something deranged as well as deformed, this is instead a poème d’occasion. As Ikkyū once said, “Ask nothing from words on a page.”

New Year Greetings

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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.

‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’

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“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

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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

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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. […]

Reality as a Metaphysical Construct

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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

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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 […]

2018: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan

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To mark the moment, a Straight Up tradition continues. From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands … thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . […]

Nuttall’s ‘Bomb Culture’ Is Back

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When I ​first ​read ​Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, I ​saw ​the title ​two​ ways​ — descriptive ​and​ prescriptive — “bomb culture” (the​ kind that made nuclear annihilation possible​) and “bomb the culture”​ ​(a​ call for revolution​​). ​A half-century later I still see it that way.​ Far from being bound by its time, Nuttall’s 1968 investigation […]

Missing from the Warhol Retrospective

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The historic Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum is “the biggest in almost 30 years.” And it is being swooned over with raves like Peter Schjeldahl’s in the current New Yorker, or as the headline puts it on an Artsy review by Darren Jones, You May Think You Know Warhol–but His Whitney Retrospective Holds Surprises. […]

‘Steps Toward the Invisible’

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Take a look at Edward O’Donnelly’s stunningly beautiful short film made with and about the poet Malcolm Ritchie on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Click the image for a video of the film.

Dick Higgins’ Writings Are Back

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A new book by Dick Higgins? Posthumous, of course. He died 20 years ago, unexpectedly, his life cut short by a heart attack at age 6o. It was a terrible shock to all of us who knew him. The book — Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins — is […]

An Evolution of ‘Other Means’

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Speaking of drawing by other means, Gary Lee-Nova messages that “after first encountering things like Fuzz Against Junk,” he discovered Max Ernst’s collage novels, and in that neo-Victorian mode created his own collages during the mid- to late-1960s. Among his “very first” was “Immense Stone” (below). Another was “Detecting the Forgery” (left), which was later […]

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