Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

My Midweek Music Relief

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Miramar plays a concert on Friday evening in the heart of Manhattan at Elebash Recital Hall (365 Fifth Ave., corner of 34th Street), which is located in the CUNY Graduate Center, where thousands of doctoral students — yes, nearly five thousand, god help them — mill around in the hope of enlightenment. For concert tickets, […]

What Algren’s Legacy Doesn’t Need …

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… is a museum for tourists that perpetuates clichés about him. The Northwest Indiana Times reports that a new museum, which opened Sunday in Gary, Indiana, where Nelson Algren once had a cottage, is being advertised by a “huge 8-foot-by-10-foot photo” of him “leaving a Gary liquor store with a six-pack.” A founder of the […]

What Went Wrong

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Spineless Democrats and Republican thugs: A 30-minute rap on why we are where we are. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Lynne Stewart, R.I.P.

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The radical leftist civil rights attorney has died. She was among the bravest. Some background. The feds were aiming to fry her. She served four years of a 10-year sentence when she was granted “compassionate release” on New Year’s Day, 2014, due to a terminal case of late-stage breast cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. Thousands […]

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, […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

Now a Country Named for Him

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When Twitter Fingers takes the oath of office, we will have official confirmation that we are now living in the United States of Trumpistan. So add it to the list. Whoever coined the term “Trumpistan” deserves attribution in the O.E.D. The earliest reference I can find is from eight years ago — Jan. 10, 2009, […]

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 […]

Trump’s America

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Here’s to the end of a lousy year, with no apologies for our tinkered layout: EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Horse’s Mouth Changes His Tune

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Or maybe I was hearing the wrong tune when I went to listen to what the horse’s mouth had to say at the Council on Foreign Depredations. At the time, last January, I wrote “to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane.” At one point, speaking of Putin, he said that unlike Bush, who claimed […]

Love That Irish Brogue

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Are there any video promos for a play as inviting as this one for “The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal”? An exchange of comments: To my ears, Irish is the most beautiful English, an impression reaffirmed by three long bicycle trips through the West of Ireland. How did a country with half the population of […]

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 […]

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