Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

50 Ways to See the Middle Ages

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Our tireless staff of thousands is often asked to review all sorts of books, and from time to time one or another seems worth noting. This one, for example, by Elina Gertsman and Barbara H. Rosenwein. Since the staff knows much too little about the Middle Ages — and even less about the 50 objects […]

The Nova Machine, Redesigned

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Gary Lee-Nova, who partnered with Johnny Strike on ‘The Nova Machine,’ writes: Thank you for posting an early version of page #1. After several pages had been rendered, I began to question the structure of giving a page five rows. I decided to reorganize all the existing pages into a structure of four rows, and […]

Talk About ‘Graphic Novels’ . . .

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How about a Burroughsian blast of a graphic cut-up by Gary Lee-Nova? He is looking for a publisher for ‘The Nova Machine.’ Here’s an excerpt. Any takers? “In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear and degradation on any planet.” Click to enlarge.

Old Misery at The Daily News

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The decimation of The Daily News brings back memories of the two-and-a-half miserable years I worked there. I had been hired away from the Chicago Sun-Times, where I’d spent happy times during the early 1980s — actually thrilling years — before Rupert Murdoch bought it. To my ridiculously innocent surprise I discovered that a NYC […]

Loose Screws in Politics

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Mike Ferguson’s permutation poem makes a whole lot of sense. It is also a reminder of the influence of Brion Gysin, who set the template for permutation poems back in the 1960s. Brion Gysin Let the Mice In includes texts by Gysin, William S. Burroughs, and Ian Sommerville. It is an expensive collector’s item these […]

Weinstein’s Rehab Reading

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“Harvey Weinstein entered New York State Supreme Court yesterday clutching a copy of A Talent for Trouble. Was Weinstein looking for someone to teach him about being a mensch?” — Leon Freilich He walked to the courthouse with a copy of “A Talent for Trouble,” the 1997 biography of “Ben-Hur” film director William Wyler, according […]

NNOI Festival = 90% Water

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Living organisms are gathering near the old water mill in Groswaltersdorf, 70 kilometers north of Berlin. NNOI Festival 2018 July 12 — Crossposted at IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance.

Celebrating Carl Weissner, Buk, and Burroughs

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They say Berlin is the place to be. Since I can’t be there myself, here’s the next best thing . . . This is the Maher-Mähler film about Carl that will be screened as part of the celebration: Always These Nightmares!      Toward the end of his life Carl was a writer on a […]

From the Pond Across the Street

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We would travel light years to find alien beings inhabiting fabulous worlds. — Malcolm Mc Neill Some things just won’t stay down. ‘The permutations are infinite: Whatever it is, the joke is on us.’

The Moody Splendor of Manchester

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I was corresponding by email recently with Jay Jeff Jones, an American expat playwright, journalist, and poet, who is working on a new edition of Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, a long-out-of-print classic about the British counterculture of the 1960s. Jones, who has lived in Manchester, England, for many decades, wrote that he was “in fine […]

Streaming What We Breathe

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Quantum Words for Bill Osborne Stealthy quantum words phantoms of expectation and suicides of time riddle us with springs and traps. Self-delusion streaming what we breathe we who breathe in silence holding worlds together   &    apart like ancient beacons bearing witness in halos of fading light. — JH

Edward Snowden on The Intercept

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Since I don’t tweet, this is the next best thing. Click to listen. Edward Snowden discusses surveillance, tools to help protect your privacy, and the likelihood of a Trump-Putin deal to extradite him.

‘Meeting Jim’ (Who’s Having the Time of His Life)

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I’ve never met Jim. We’ve only corresponded by email about the strange case of Orwell’s typewriter. But I know that Jim Haynes is a man for all reasons — pleasure, food, sex, mind, books, theater, life — and that to meet him in person all you have to do is show up at his door […]

Tribute to John Bryan from Cold Turkey Press

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John Bryan published so many underground papers and magazines over three decades — beginning in 1962 with renaissance, a San Francisco literary journal inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (which John said he read “half a dozen times,” and which turned him onto LSD) — that Warren Hinckle called him “the Peter Zenger of […]

Huge Wyler Retrospective in Paris

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One of the beauties of a William Wyler retrospective as big as the one that the Cinemathèque Française has currently mounted in Paris is the chance to see the immense variety of his work. I don’t think as thorough a retrospective (41 films, including some of the silents) has been screened since the 1996 Berlin […]

Big Moment for a B-17

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UPDATED May 21: When the 10-man crew of “The Memphis Belle” completed their 25th mission over Europe in 1943, they and their B-17 heavy bomber were brought home to the U.S. for a cross-country publicity tour and were made famous by William Wyler’s World War II live-action combat documentary (also called “The Memphis Belle”). I […]

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