Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

MoMA’s Hidden ‘Electro-Library’ Show

by

It’s only a couple of vitrines, and they seem like overflow storage — as though they’ve been placed out of the way in the downstairs mezzanine of the Museum of Modern Art’s education building on 54th Street. But the slide show for THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY: European Avant-Garde Magazines from the 1920s is magnificent. In visual richness, […]

Diderot Had the Right Idea

by

“…neither the white silences / of Beckett, nor the black … / Grace & good nature / like a transparent forest / rooted in facts, / thoughts like crickets / in dry August grass. / Not to climb the ladder, / not to cling or sneer, but / to be invisible. / Though poor and […]

Who Are the World’s Most Famous People?

by

You’d be surprised. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the world’s best-known American, followed by — are you ready? — Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, and Ben Franklin. Those are the top five. How do I know this? And on what basis? I checked Pantheon 1.0 at the MIT Media Lab, which did the elaborate […]

Le Vent Macabre

by

Note to Henri Lefebvre: A long-track F2 tornado on Sept. 16, 2015, destroyed the home of two of my friends. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Three Centennial Parties for Harold Norse

by

Harold Norse, the late poet and memoirist, desperately wanted his name in lights. Now he has it — thanks to Todd Swindell. Swindell’s assiduous effort to memorialize him goes beyond dedicated. He has not only created a posthumous website for him and edited a posthumous collection of selected poems, I Am Going to Fly Through […]

Mc Neill & Burroughs: Art Meets Occult

by

Hieronymous Bosch has nothing on Malcolm Mc Neill. And that’s not even counting the underlying theories Mc Neill has about time travel, biological mutation, and evolutionary transition that he and William Burroughs worked on together in Ah Pook Is Here, a failed word-and-image collaboration that led nearly 40 years later to Mc Neill’s memoir Observed […]

Oy Feckin’ Vey! My Grub Street

by

There I was, feigning interest. It was my job. Readers wanted to know all about their movie stars, or at least about my encounters with them. From A-listers and B-listers right down to Z-listers. The whole stupid Hollywood alphabet top to bottom. Names like this one to be forgotten as quickly as my own. They […]

‘The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft’

by

I’ve discovered that my recent blogpost, An Experiment in Reading, doesn’t work on mobile devices. The gizmo that embeds the book (to let you turn the pages) gets hung up. So here’s a static presentation of George Gissing’s preface. There’s more, of course. But I’ll leave it there. You may have guessed that The Private […]

An Experiment in Reading

by

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is one of George Gissing’s novels. Click the arrow (bottom left) so that it is pointing down. Then click “plain text.” Click on righthand or lefthand page to turn the pages. No need to login. If technical confusion sets in, you can start over by refreshing the page. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Meeting the Hangman

by

By Heathcote Williams I used to speak out against capital punishment From a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner. This was when it was thought that hanging people Was helpful in maintaining order. One day someone called Barry Trenoweth came over. His father, Gordon, had been hanged for murder. He’d killed a shopkeeper in Falmouth during the […]

Books That Truly Were Something Else

by

My staff of thousands informs me that “The Something Else Press Collection” just went on the market. Although some of the books are rarer than others, it’s the collection as a whole that’s notable. Early titles included Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, Dick Higgins’ collection of performance scores and art polemics; correspondence art pioneer Ray Johnson’s […]

The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter

by

My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]

Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State

by

Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the […]

Horrorscope

by

Mary Beach could draw horoscope charts in great detail. It was a serious hobby of hers. She only did them for people she knew, and if they piqued her interest. I completely forgot she had done mine — it was so long ago, circa 1967. An old friend reminded me the other day of what […]

Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally

by

Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It’s worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump’s rallies these days. Writing in his diary that “M […]

The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries

by

Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]

Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros

by

When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets “during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship,” Aaron Shulman writes in the current issue of The Believer, it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled “El Desencanto” (“The Disenchanted”), the film “ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute […]

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog