Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Female Power (from Medusa to Merkel)

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I love reading Mary Beard. She may be a professor, the highest of high-brow professors, but she writes — and speaks (albeit with a British accent) — like an actual human. Enjoy. Her talk begins: In 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy […]

Juggling Ideas About the Avant Garde

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So much art is called “avant garde” these days that my tireless staff of thousands wonders whether it’s just a label. Some think that the entire culture, no matter how far out, has gone mainstream and that there’s nothing legitimately avant garde anywhere — not since the good old days of Dada, surrealism, cubism, futurism, […]

This Dog Has the Right Idea

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My tireless staff of thousands sent a one-minute video. Banksy doesn’t do it better. The little flourish at the end is priceless. And for your further diversion, catch this: The Statue of Liberty’s Burka. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Why Are Americans So Stupid?’

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My staff of thousands has reminded me of an opinion piece that appeared a little more than a dozen years ago in the Oslo-based Norwegian newspaper VG. I had stashed it away and forgot about it. Notice the dateline: September 30, 2004. Since my piece never appeared in English, here it is — a little […]

James ‘No Name’ Baldwin, the Maverick

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In his critique of “I Am Not Your Negro,” the movie bringing renewed attention to James Baldwin, Hilton Als comments on a key moment: It’s the summer of 1979, and Baldwin is working on a book that he does not want to write but knows he must write. Titled “Remember This House,” it will tell […]

The Gilded Toad & Social Corrosion

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Poem by Heathcote Williams Video Montage and Narration by Alan Cox • From IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance • EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Picturing the President

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Insect brain, cold-blooded eye, bared teeth of a human predator. The total obscenity of the American Dream Comes to fruition in Donald John Trump … — Heathcote Williams, from a poem in American Porn The collage was published in 2016 by Verlag Peter Engstler in Paulus Böhmer das es Euch gibt: Collagen, a collection of […]

Carl Weissner: Master Writer, Cherished Friend

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A great one died five years ago today. Carl was also a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg), and a literary agent who spread the work of dissident […]

‘American Porn’ for Inauguration Day

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On the day Twitter Fingers is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of “investigative poems about American history, culture and politics” by Heathcote Williams. The […]

Meryl Streep’s Truth to Power

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Her remarks ran for four minutes, 55 seconds. At two minutes in, she said this: There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended […]

Bookstores in Their Anecdotage

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Garrison Keillor, who owns a bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, called Common Good Books, writes in a foreword to FOOTNOTES* from the WORLD’S GREAT BOOKSTORES: *True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers that “the little independent bookstore is dying out, they say. Too bad. Someday mine will, too.” The author […]

2016: Giving Thanks on Thanksgiving Day

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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 . . . thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the […]

Why I’m Waiting for Asher’s Algren

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Having said in The Revenge of the Mediocre that both Bettina Drew and Mary Wisniewski fail to capture Nelson Algren’s personality in their biographies of him, I realize I didn’t mention something equally and, some would say, more important. Sure, they get his so-called skid-row lyricism, which Blake Bailey recently harped on, but that shortchanges […]

Going Cold Turkey (in Cyberspace)

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The computer screen has become a substitute for reality, dominating us not just by way of social media but — old news — by making artifacts like books on paper seem obsolete. I plead seriously guilty, witness this blogpost with its images and descriptions. A package that came in the mail with several new items […]

Trump Centaur

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An insult to pigs . . . “The Republican Party has become the most dangerous organization in world history.” — Noam Chomasky

Where Black Lives Did Not Matter

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Headline: ‘A Tender Bond Confronts Racism. Racism Wins.’ One can only hope that headline does not apply to the outcome of today’s U.S. elections. In the many years I spent on Grub Street writing about the theater, Athol Fugard and the plays I saw of his stand out in memory for their eloquence and humanity. […]

Tom Hayden: Gone But Not Forgotten

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Looking back: Mad Magazine + Tom Hayden = SDS. And before I forget. Meanwhile, the obits are pouring in for Hayden, who died yesterday. Here are three (with great photos) from The Washington Post; from The Huffington Post; from The New York Times. And here is a video of him speaking about the need to […]

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