Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Opera: America’s War Without End

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Anthony Haden Guest calls “The Plain of Jars” — a chamber opera by Keith Patchel about America’s secret war in Laos — “the lineal descendant of Stravinsky’s ‘Nightingale’ and Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’ and ‘Wozzeck.’” I haven’t seen it yet, but my staff of thousands tells me it “exposes the wounds caused by America’s use of […]

A Great One Died Today

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Updated with new information. ‘He was the Shelley of his age and more.’ — Gerard Bellaart A memorial service is to be held Friday (July 14), 3 p.m., at St. Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford. All welcome. July 17 — Malcolm Ritchie, whose friendship with Heathcote spanned decades, attended the service. This is his description: […]

Music Theater Where Truth Can Appear

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The last time we looked it was a work in progress. That was a year ago. William Osborne and Abbie Conant had been working on it for so long, Osborne said at the time, that it felt like “forever.” But now their music theater chamber piece is about to get its world premiere. The name […]

The Evolving NY Times Nameplate

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From 1851, to 1857, to 1896, to 1914, to 1967, to last week: David W. Dunlap’s story, “Modern Identity in Ancient Lettering,” does not include a reference to the overprinting that the designers of The NYT Magazine prefer. (Style aside, Matthew Shaer’s interview did deserve that kind of prominence.)

When Trump Hog-Called His Cabinet: Sooie!

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Trump’s first cabinet meeting was the perfect reminder of one of William S. Burroughs’s most satirical “routines.” Burroughs wrote the piece in 1953 and had it published for the first time in a little mimeo magazine called Floating Bear. Since then it’s been reprinted many times, most famously as a mimeographed booklet by Fuck You […]

Please Insert

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My staff of thousands thinks this paragraph by Barrett Brown should be inserted like an unsheathed stallion’s penis into every last one of the obituaries plaguing us about the late Roger Ailes . . . just in case the corpse hasn’t been properly mounted: I don’t really mind Fox on ideological grounds, as a nation […]

Black Eye Porn

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“Normally The Guardian publishes all of Rowson’s cartoons, but I don’t think this one. He mailed it to Heathcote who forwarded it to me. Heathcote wrote the lines when I asked him.” — Gerard Bellaart, editor/publisher Cold Turkey Press I think of H.W.’s stanza in the mode of G.G. Belli’s 19th-century Roman sonnets, which were […]

From a Secret Location

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Once upon a time hundreds of editors, mainly poets, and all manner of bohemian riffraff took to their mimeo machines. They produced an avalanche of little magazines, lovingly collected by Granary Books as a wonder of the age. This literary avalanche was documented in “A Secret Location on the Lower East Side,” a 1996 exhibition […]

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.

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 […]

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