Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Burroughsian Credo: ‘Include Me Out’

by

“Learning a hieroglyphic language is excellent practice in the lost art of inner silence.” — William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind “Cup of tea at dawn a room with rose wall paper wind stirs cigarette ash on a naked thigh calm miracle of apomorphine dawn . . . . .” Burroughs Lecture Series: Iain Sinclair […]

The Evolving NY Times Nameplate

by

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.)

Norman Mailer on Almost Everything

by

If there’s a richer radio archive of interviews with cultural figures and others from all walks of life than the one amassed by Studs Terkel, I’m unaware of it. Here, for example, is Norman Mailer talking with him on March 17, 1960, about writing, critics, self-censorship, and American life. It’s great stuff. Mailer offers his […]

When Trump Hog-Called His Cabinet: Sooie!

by

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

by

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 […]

On View: Mary Beach’s Witty ‘Illaminations’

by

Mary Beach deserved to be an art star. Her collages are in a class with Richard Hamilton’s. But she was incapable of bullshitting her way to the top. She also submerged whatever ambitions she may have had to advance the work of her partner Claude Pélieu. She translated him, published him, promoted him and, when […]

As the French Say: Dégoûtant!

by

The print edition logo for Michael Kinsley’s new opinion slot in The New York Times says it all. Well, almost all. What it doesn’t say is how disgusting it is. Kinsley’s first column is not only awful, but worse, he will be “revisiting this theme regularly.” It looks like The Times is repositioning — a […]

Black Eye Porn

by

“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

by

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 […]

What Algren’s Legacy Doesn’t Need …

by

… 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 […]

Squatting at The Bunker in London

by

Cycle One (previews begin April 17) ‘Slummers’ by Sonal Bhattacharyya ‘The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency’ by Heathcote Williams with Sarah Woods ‘Back to Back to Back’ by Stef Smith Cycle Two (previews begin April 18) ‘The Table’ by Lin Coghlin ‘Put The Schwarzes Into De-Stat’ by Nessah Muthy ‘The House With the Yellow […]

Poetry of the Absurd

by

This is a tape cut-up I made with Carl Weissner way back in 1971. We used a recording of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley speaking to members of the city council. We “cut” the tape electronically, not manually, on a big old reel-to-reel that I had at the time. You can hear the cuts. Technically […]

What Went Wrong

by

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

They Had Their Own Fun

by

Back in the mid-1960s, when Carl Weissner discovered the British mimeo zine My Own Mag, he struck up a correspondence with its presiding genius, Jeff Nuttall, and soon took My Own Mag as a model for his own mimeo, Klactoveedsedsteen. The two of them became pen pals and freewheeling collaborators — Nuttall in Norwich, Weissner […]

Lynne Stewart, R.I.P.

by

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 […]

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog