Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A New Poster from Cold Turkey Press

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The first flash mob in Europe Met in Rome on 24 June 2003. 300 people entered ‘Messaggerie Musicali’, A large book and music store, To ask its staff either for non-existent books, Or for the most obscure books By untraceable authors. One flash mobber asked for a copy of the New Testament Translated from Coptic […]

Typography Meets Country Music

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Hat’s off to the designer whoever that is. The kinetic typography put me in mind of the clever card sequence in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan, “Don’t Look Back.” The design is more ingenious now, and of course the technology is far more sophisticated. But you get the idea. As to the stylish […]

‘Artaud’s Hammer’: A Dissident Series Carries On

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Antonin Artaud by René Char I haven’t the voice to sing your praise, great brother If I bent over your body which light is going to scatter Your laugh would repel me The affection between us, during what We improperly call a fine storm Falls several times, kills, digs & burns, Then is reborn afterwards […]

‘Artaud’s Hammer’: A Dissident Portfolio Begins

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It’s weird that the cloaca of Central Europe is also the mouth of English literature. May Rotterdam be blessed by every English tongue in all the cloisters of the English-speaking world. — Sinclair Beiles EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Artaud’s Hammer’: A Dissident Portfolio Continues

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This is one of two new cards in the continuing series. Cold Turkey Press publications have a flavor all of their own; there’s a kind of wild, mad goodness about them — you know you’re going to be taken on a trip. Somewhere edgy and dangerous. You may not get back. You don’t care. You’re […]

Two Artists, Two Video Trailers: Ungerer and Mc Neill

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Here are two video trailers, totally different from each other — one for a new movie about the peerless Tomi Ungerer, “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough,” the other for a dance inspired by Observed While Falling, a spellbinding memoir by the incomparable Malcolm Mc Neil. Many years ago Burt Britton kept a self-portrait by Ungerer […]

Transgressive Otto Muehl Set Radical Template

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Just in time for the Acker Awards, newly established to recognize noncomformity in the arts, obituaries for Otto Muehl have popped up in the news as if on cue. Muehl was a 1960s Vienna Actionist (along with Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler) whose “radical performance art,” as Margalit Fox put it in The […]

‘Orwell’s Recipe for Tea’

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Narration and montage by Alan Cox. “Orwell exposed the state’s Ministry of Truth, / As controlling man’s desire to be free / With its lies and doublespeak and doublethink, / But he’d always break off for tea.” — Heathcote Williams EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

American ‘Voodoo’: Signs of the Times

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I don’t know what to say about this collage, except that it has nothing to do with religion — unless it’s the religion of the road — and was made long before the advent of photoshop. Full stop. Postscript: June 4 — Hell, it just occurred to me that American “voodoo” has moved from the […]

For Nonconforming Artists, the Envelope Please

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Update: Click for the 2015 Acker Awards. And read this captivating feature story by Nicole Disser: ‘Helen Keller Was an Asshole,’ and Other Things You’ll Learn at the Acker Awards Are awards the staff of life? Of course not. But they certainly seem like food for the hungry. The list of awards is nearly endless. […]

‘John Barleycorn’ & ‘Death to Alejandro’

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Ben Schot does all his drawings on the hotel stationary of Les Fregates in Royale-les-Eaux, a fictional seaside resort in Normandy described in Casino Royale as “just north of Dieppe.” He also keeps a running count by numbering them in sequence. These two were done back in March. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Gerard Bellaart Sends Greetings From France

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The resident genius of Cold Turkey Press has a thing for Artaud. Can you blame him?Not I. Neither can Hemingway. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our […]

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