Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Bombing the Culture

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‘Culture, being the broad effect of art, is rotundly irrational and as such is perpetually operating against the economic workaday structure of society. The economic structure works towards stasis centered around static needs. It is centripetal. Culture forces change centered around changing appetites. It is centrifugal.’ — Jeff Nuttall

Far Out Wasn’t Far Enough

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The artist Tomi Ungerer has died at the age of 87. He was “a lifelong activist who protested against racial segregation, the Vietnam war and the election of US President Donald Trump . . .” Speaking about himself as an artist, Ungerer said, “I have the full respect of a piece of white paper, which I then shall rape with my drawing or my writing. When I draw, it’s the real me.”

Catching Up to the Past

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“Buckle your seatbelt and fire up your time machine. You are about to blast yourself back nearly fifty years to a simpler time when America was at war, the country was polarized, a crazed and despised president of the United States was in charge, cops were considered racist pigs, cannabis was omnipresent, and young radicals […]

Deformed Sonnets for My Old Friend

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The artist Norman Ogue Mustill was an extreme dissenter. Nothing pleased him more than reaming out the human race. His collages stopped you dead with their vicious satire, like the writings of William S. Burroughs, and for technical precision Max Ernst didn’t do better. But Mustill is little known, his work unseen,  his praise unsung. […]

Auschwitz & the Art of Advertising

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Something was horribly wrong with the full-page ad for an upcoming exhibition about the Auschwitz death camp. It appeared yesterday on Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I know the folks behind the ad meant well. But really . . . Auschwitz and the art of advertising are a nauseating mix. Here’s the unthinking kicker which caught my […]

Election Day in America

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Speaking of small-press publications, we are still waiting for Carl Weissner’s Le Regard d’Autrui to go live in a new posthumous trade edition, as promised. But Amazon KDP has been doggedly screwy. Please pardon the delay. (It is now available.) Meanwhile, Printed Matter, the best place in New York to find artists’ books, has just […]

Cold Turkey Press: A Bibliography

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I don’t know exactly how many chapbooks, folios, broadsides, and poetry cards Cold Turkey Press has published. I never counted. But it must be in the hundreds. All of them—produced in handmade, illustrated, and limited editions—are unique manifestations of their publisher’s mind: scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure. They constitute an archive that […]

Martin Luther King Jr. Had a Dream . . .

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Whatever the blowhard president of Trumpistan has to say about Martin Luther King Jr. tomorrow on MLK Day, a federal holiday, or about what King died for — if he says anything — rest assured it won’t be worth the pixels it’s written on. And for the record let’s not forget that when King made […]

Trump’s Sermon on the Mount

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His practiced pose makes him look positively beatific, doncha think?  Here he is at the Pentagon pushing the notion of building a wall in space with missile-defense technology that has never really worked in the past, doesn’t exist now, and isn’t likely to “for decades to come,” as one expert put it.  EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Gently, Gently, Stronger, Harder, Deeper’

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UPDATE: Jan. 23 — “Le Regard d’Autrui” may now be purchased in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, France, and Spain. CARL WEISSNER (1940-2012) was the preeminent German translator of dissident writers such as Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Zappa, and Nelson Algren, having published […]

No Shore Receives Them

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The front-page story by Patrick Kingsley in today’s print edition of the NY Times, “Rescued Migrants, at Sea for Weeks, Struggle to Reach a New Life,” calls from the depths. “We are crying,” said one of the migrants in an interview on the boat this week. “We can see Malta with our own eyes, but […]

‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’

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“A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown.  Institutionalized, she  attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but  can find no words to express her feelings.  She discovers she has no language of her own and recedes more and more into silence.  Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her […]

Goodbye to 2018—And Good Riddance

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poème d’occasion It was a small price to pay  for a poem, or maybe more than one— only $7.50 at 50% off. It wasn’t a book of poems but a dream palace— not even a palace but a pocketable retreat in the woods on sale at year’s end. So good riddance to 2018, annus horribilis. […]

Reality as a Metaphysical Construct

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It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. To be clear,  Jürgen Ploog is an author who does not write for everyone. The “story” he tells in Flesh Film has the pulpy tone of science fiction, a narrator who sounds like a globe-trotting private […]

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