Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Poem for the Cleaning Women: ‘We Are All Holy’

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Courtesy of Bart de Paepe’s Sloow Tapes This is a historical recording by Judith Malina, who died two weeks ago. I’ve transcribed the text the way it struck my ear, but its true power can’t be fully appreciated until you’ve heard her read the poem for yourself. — JH every one of the cleaning women […]

Algren for Real: ‘The End Is Nothing. The Road Is All’

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Here he is on the big screen at last, an hour and a half of who Nelson Algren was and what he meant. It’s a documentary with the sources — authoritative sources (Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel, for example, who give their personal impressions of the man). Radical sources, too (Paul Buhle for one, who […]

realitystudio.org Launches Jed Birmingham’s Podcast

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I am STAGGERED! Of course I would be, for obvious reasons. Did I say I want this embedded in my headstone? Click to listen. It is utterly, inescapably humbling. The really wonderful thing about JB’s devotion to books as artifacts is the way he appreciates them as mysteries and teases out their hidden meanings. This […]

Sinclair Beiles: Poet of Many Parts and Places

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Dyehard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his association with the Beats. He collaborated on […]

From the East Village, ‘Ten Talk New York’

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Thanks to Clayton Patterson, “the great connector,” I met his friend Simon J. Heath the other day. Simon is an Australian-born filmmaker who’s in love with New York City. The latest evidence is “Ten Talk New York,” a fast-moving flick that features interviews with New Yorkers thinking out loud about sex, love, race, and death. […]

A Savoyard’s First Brush With Censorship

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Have a look at this Kickstarter campaign: Savoy Books is an independent publishing house based above a locksmith shop in the South Manchester district of Didsbury, founded and run by Michael Butterworth and David Britton. In 1989 they published Lord Horror, the last book to be banned in the UK under the 1959 Obscene Publications […]

Because She Can . . . Therefore She Is

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Hanne Lippard’s ‘Orbit’ was first posted here last year. I was reminded of it yesterday when she performed the piece at the Kunsthalle Vien as part of an exhibition, “The Future of Memory.”

David Carr Wanted to Get Stuff Right, Large or Small

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Like many NYT readers, I admired David Carr’s media column. It always made the paper worth reading on Monday mornings. Today his final column ran posthumously under the headline “David Carr’s Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students.” Cobbled together by his editors from his course curriculum at Boston University, where he’d recently begun teaching, […]

Three Expats and One Reporter Explain It All For Us

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In about five minutes, starting roughly 45 minutes into a conversation with NYT reporter David Carr, Edward Snowden explains why President Obama — or for that matter any American president — is captive to the intelligence community and what it means for democratic values. Carr leads him into the explanation by remarking that the Obama […]

Burroughs Central This Is Not

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Anyone who thinks this blog is Burroughs Central has no idea. The fact is, I’m just skimming. The real Burroughs Central is RealityStudio, where the true aficionados congregate for deep postings by Jed Birmingham’s Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker. For example, he recently made the case that le maître’s cut-ups in the mimeo mags of […]

Beckett But Not Beckett: ‘Being Human’

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It begins in blackness with whispers. Jumps to a face with eyes closed. The eyes open. Words form: “I was almost human. But then something went wrong. I was a human being. But then I became a victim. I was almost a human being but then I ran out of time.” I wish I could […]

About That Remarkable Surge for Charlie

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I’ve noticed that the “Je suis Charlie” phenomenon has come in for rightwing contempt. The argument goes that it’s self-righteous to claim you stand with the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo when all you do is gather in the street and carry signs. There’s some truth to that, especially when it comes to politicians. But I’ve […]

‘Death in Paris’ Struck Prescient Note

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Apropos today’s headline about the hacked U.S. CENTCOM Twitter Account . . . a friend was looking over our late amigo Carl Weissner’s “Doomsday Lit” novel Death in Paris. Boy, is that title apt. Not to mention the chapter headings. How about this one? >im in ur base killin ur d00dz

We Are All Charlie Now

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As many as 100,000 people gathered across France, according to Agence France-Presse. The crowds expressed their solidarity against the Charlie Hebdo attack. At least 35,000 Parisians, by one estimate, gathered at La Place de la République. They were silent at first, then began to sing: “Charlie! Charlie!” “We are Charlie!” “Free expression!” Cartoonists are having […]

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