Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Magazine for Word and Image

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Andreas Hansen 3      Sabine Vogel 84 Tone Avenstroup 6      Caroline Hartge 86 Joshua Groß 7      Christian Geissler 88 Katja Horn 10      Sabine Peters 90 Wolf Ways 11      Bert Panenfuß 91 Kai Pohl 12      Stefan Döring 94 Kristin Schulz 15      Karl Krüll 95 Alexander Krohn 16      Monika Rinck […]

2017: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan

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A Straight Up greeting to mark the moment. 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 […]

‘Give Peace a Chance’

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here’s my attempt at images for oil transfer. wrote it on the full page ad in NYT, as you can see. Yoko Ono takes out the ad each year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s birthday. first wrote it with the carbon paper layered underneath the paper i wrote on. didn’t work. so i then […]

Had the Algorithm Been Misplaced?

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Drawing by Gerard Bellaart The corpse blinked. Dead but alive dreaming awake. Had the algorithm been misplaced? Was it “life-in-death” within the winding sheet or “death-in-life”? Signaling the dreamer, the corpse winked but could not speak — or would not. I woke and no sleep came. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Just Like Real Life’

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William Cody Maher & Signe Mähler “two people who have been living together for a long time have learned how to live together with the objects and the thoughts and the feelings that they have had for each other and when the thoughts and feelings and the rooms and the objects change and even the […]

Another Cold Turkey Card

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Drawing by Gerard Bellaart Past hopes rise like a ghost. Immutable. Indifferent. Are there no triumphs? Will dreams perform miracles? Strindberg said, “I dream, therefore I exist.” Stalked by a crazy sage dressed in weeds, I scribbled. The unguarded self is burdened with weariness like a dog shitting on the sidewalk. — Jan Herman (Indebted […]

‘That man is killing everybody!’

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From ‘Sonnet II’ in FOURTEEN Deformed Sonnets, published by Peter Engstler Verlag [2017]: . . . The ballroom of history bumped and cried. “Look out! That man is killing everybody!” The word SHAME crawled across the screen like broken teeth in the fist of time. A wilting sun had set. The night was threadbare. “This […]

Writer on a Rampage

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In a tribute to the late German author Carl Weissner, who wrote experimental fiction in both English and German in addition to translating more than 100 books by dissident American and British authors, the literary scholar Tomasz Stompor delivered a paper on Weissner’s novel, Death in Paris, at a recent meeting of the European Beat […]

Created Image = Moment in Time

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Speaking of maps (per William Burroughs), Malcolm Mc Neill has something to say: MAPS from Malcolm Mc Neill on Vimeo. Music from “Elements” by Ludovico Einaudi. A CREATED IMAGE is the map of a moment in TIME, embedded within it are all the energies that occurred during its making: the sounds, the feelings, the people, […]

Are You a Facebook Lemming?

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I disliked Facebook from the very beginning. Resisted it at first. Refused to open an account. But everybody was using it, so I figured I had to see what it is. To do that required an account. As soon as I opened one, I decided Facebook wasn’t for me. I tried to close the account […]

Beat Conference: ‘Paris Interzone’ 2017

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I wish I could be there when the European Beat Studies Network meets in Paris on Wednesday. Douglas Field (University of Manchester) will give a presentation about Harold Norse’s “Cosmographs.” I remember seeing them on the wall of Norse’s room at the Beat Hotel more than 50 years ago. As I’ve written in My Adventures […]

Paraphilia: Requiescat in Pace

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Paraphilia Magazine officially ceased to be an active publication on September 1, 2017. It was an uninhibited online publication that featured a variety of content “likely not found in the average publication,” according to its publisher, Dire McCain. Her primary motive was to enable writers and artists to escape “the grip” of the art and […]

Fantagraphics Has the Frontier Spirit

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Last time we looked Paul Buhle and Noah Van Sciver’s comic art biography of John Chapman, otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed, was published in a paperback edition by Alternative Comics. That was a year ago. It is now being re-issued in hardcover and digital editions by Fantagraphics Books. The production, typical of Fantagraphics, is gorgeous. […]

Caligula Gets Around

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A friend of mine, the author of four self-published books — one of which got 22 million YouTube views when a subversive porn star read from it on camera — occasionally prints bulletins in limited editions about whatever grabs his attention. Then he mails them to friends. The most recent, Bulletin #4, arrived at the […]

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