Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Spike, Smalls, and Mezzrow

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Spike Wilner is a ragtime jazz pianist with an unusual background. He’s also the major domo of not one but two great jazz clubs across the street from each other in Manhattan. As a tireless partisan for music of all kinds, especially for the kind that keeps audiences coming back to Smalls and Mezzrow every […]

Speaking for Myself

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Death comes in all sizes / — sequoia, oak, and elm / maple, birch, fir, and pine, / elephants and whales / bumble bees and snails, / the Jews in the ovens, / Armenians slaughtered, / all the genocides before / and since. I am also dead . . . EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Fourteen: Deformed Sonnets

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What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry, As poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, Under unbearable duress and only with the hope That good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. — Czeslaw Milosz IV I was there in asphalt in ozone dreams. I was waiting for a cool stare […]

‘Righteous Poles’ Make an Appeal

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Following Ronald S. Lauder’s open letter (“It’s Time to Dial Back the Rhetoric”) about the Holocaust and recent anti-Semitic developments in Poland, another open letter has appeared (also in The New York Times). This one is signed by 50 Polish citizens, “the remaining living Righteous representing the 6,850 Righteous Poles” who have been recognized by […]

Poland Dials the Wrong Number

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An open letter from Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, took up a full page yesterday in The New York Times. The heading was “It’s Time to Dial Back the Rhetoric in Poland.” I have no expertise in the matter, but I couldn’t help recalling Tuvye Tenenbom‘s take on the situation of […]

A Burroughs-Gysin ‘Motherlode’

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SEE UPDATE BELOW My staff of thousands informs me that the Smithsonian Institute has posted scans of three notebooks by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin dating from 1963 to 1973, and 1977. It was described to me as “a motherlode” of writings and collages. And indeed it is. Have a look by clicking the […]

R. Crumb Classic Portraits

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Charles Plymell writes: I sent Robert some old political cartoons on crumbling paper from 20’s-30’s & some extra sheets of the plain parchment which had beautiful tan sheen like I ran the first ZAP on. I had remembered the old comics I found in Lawrence of Andy Gump & another one of The Katzenjammer Kids […]

Thinking of Auden . . .

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Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives. — W.H. Auden EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Aletheia’ to Tour Northeastern U.S.

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Composed by William Osborne for singer-instrumentalist, computer-controlled piano, and quadraphonic electronics, “Aletheia” is a music theater work featuring the solo performance of Abbie Conant as the title character. Osborne writes, “Aletheia is an opera singer who is delighted that she has been asked to perform for an opera gala. She only needs to go down […]

Grub Street Deformation

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BEACHED On the sunny island of friendship ash was falling from our faces. “This is not subtle,” the doc said. He prescribed a regimen of pills the size of Montaigne’s chateau. My head shrank to a bungalow in Far Rockaway, and I recalled the ghost ship of our childhoods beached against the boardwalk where a […]

Oh Say Can You See . ? .

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Some ideas are so good that they’re too good to steal. Norman O. Mustill had many of them. This was one. But good ideas get around –or go around — landing many times in many places. Sonia Polido’s good idea landed yesterday as an illustration for the lead editorial “What Trump Doesn’t Get About the […]

Screwed Beyond Repair?

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UNPATCHED for Simon Schama At the secular end of days when unconfined freedom means gusts of opportunity for all our computers to screw every one of us beyond repair, will the unspeakable terrors reappear? What tech service will patch our human flaws? Not the rolling disaster of holy water & passwords. Not infernal church bells […]

Is Dante for Our Time?

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‘Forget your hopes.’ (As quoted in a modern translation by Clive James) Traditionally: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Take your choice. One or both may help. For those with the ears and minds to hear them, the notes of pianos are full of ghosts. Each piano hammer and string is different, as is […]

Two Sides of a ‘Small Electrical Storm’

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Nearly 50 years ago, Gary Lee-Nova sent a pair of two-sided silkscreen prints to Marshall McLuhan. He had seen McLuhan’s copy of Finnegans Wake with handwritten comments on a subject Joyce had treated: “the electrification of the entire world.” He says his print drawing “was a crude, almost rude emulation of the comments.” If the […]

Acker Awards to Honor One-of-a Kind Artists

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I don’t know what the late Kathy Acker would think of an award given in her name to non-conforming artists. I assume an experimental punk novelist and poet would like the idea of supporting artists who don’t conform. Although awards are besides the point especially for non-conformists, they do generate publicity. And unless I’m wrong, […]

The Shithole and the Shithouse

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By now roughly 23 million people have seen the rebranded Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Or if they haven’t, at least that many have googled it. If you’re the one person who hasn’t seen it, here it is. And here, not incidentally, is Trump’s Shithouse in Washington D.C., also known as The White House. […]

Michelangelo, poet

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Before Michelangelo, Divine Draftsman & Designer leaves The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, here’s a sweet little item from the show. It’s about how he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and it brings him down to earth. Jackson Pollock anyone? I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture, Hunched up as […]

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