Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

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 […]

Some Got Plenty and Some Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’

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Five years after the Wall Street crash of 1929, George Gershwin wrote what he called a “banjo song” for “Porgy and Bess.” It turned into “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” with lyrics by Edwin DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. The second verse goes like this: De folks wid plenty o’ plenty Got a lock on […]

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 […]

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 […]

Posting a Cold Turkey Card While Paris Burns

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By way of explanation, I was occupied searching for word pattern. Found a rangy young man whose authority was roughly 50 words retyped in columns from the beginning more habit-forming than his life. He hunkered across the columns and typed them again. Undsoweiter … And now for R. Crumb’s pièce de résistance: EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘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 […]

Incidental Intelligence: A Portrait of William Burroughs

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I once asked Nelson Algren what he thought of Naked Lunch. He grinned at me, as though he were being entertained by a wiseguy. I knew he had no love for the Beats. He had derided Jack Kerouac as a momma’s boy and dismissed Allen Ginsberg as a publicist. So his answer surprised me: “Burroughs […]

Everyone Is Thinking About the Cops

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Aw gee! David Brooks says “not enough attention is being paid to the emotional and psychological challenges of being a cop.” Such fragile flowers they are. I recall that William Burroughs gave it some thought back in 1968 when Flower Power was in bloom: “The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to […]

Dear Cannibals, Have a Sweet Thanksgiving

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Our delicious Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill has been a happy pairing. It still is. But the Straight Up staff of thousands wanted to add a sweetener, something like cranberry sauce, to this year’s celebration of gratitude. Here ‘tiz: Words by Heathcote Williams, narration and montage by Alan Cox.

‘Anatomy of Violence,’ a Prophetic Blast from the Past

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An article in the Washington Post declares that the riots in Ferguson have been “the most significant explosions of racial frustration since the election of the nation’s first black president, and so Ferguson forced the country out of the fantasy that America had entered a ‘post-racial’ era.” I’m not sure who really entertained that fantasy […]

Once Upon a Time, Ginsberg Kept City Lights Humming

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I’ve added a site to the blogroll, calling it “All Things Allen Ginsberg” instead of its official web address allenginsberg.org. I should have added it long ago. Bad housekeeping. The site is a goldmine of information, literary and otherwise, not just about Ginsberg, which is its main focus of course, but also about the Beat […]

Monday Morning Quiz: Who Said That?

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“Every once in a while, it’s nice to be wrong about something.” + Alan Dershowitz + Henry Kissinger + Dick Cheney + V.S. Naipaul + God + Click for the answer. But you get points for guessing it was The Albanian Idol of the BananaRepublic. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

More News from Paris: Huge Bookfair Opens Today

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Offprint Paris at the Beaux-arts de Paris showcases publishers of art, photography, design, and experimental music labels. The 2014 edition features more than 130 publishers from nearly two dozen countries, an exhibition (“Disarming Design from Palestine”), and a variety of public discussions and signings. Special guests include Paul Soulellis (Library of the Printed Web), Mathieu […]

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