Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Looking Back at Cuba

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So much is being made of the U.S.-Cuba raprochement and the arrival in Havana of cruise ships filled with tourists that I took a look at an old series of mine, part reportage and part travelogue, from 2002. I haven’t been back to Cuba since then. Fidel has retired from actively running the show. He’s […]

Mc Neill & Burroughs: Art Meets Occult

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Hieronymous Bosch has nothing on Malcolm Mc Neill. And that’s not even counting the underlying theories Mc Neill has about time travel, biological mutation, and evolutionary transition that he and William Burroughs worked on together in Ah Pook Is Here, a failed word-and-image collaboration that led nearly 40 years later to Mc Neill’s memoir Observed […]

MoMA to Mount Tzara’s Magnum Opus

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Samy Rosenstock’s idea for a great big book is getting a great big show nearly 100 years later. Dadaglobe Reconstructed reunites over 100 works created for Dadaglobe, Tristan Tzara’s planned but unrealized magnum opus, originally slated for publication in 1921. An ambitious anthology that aimed to document Dada’s international activities, Dadaglobe was not merely a […]

Oy Feckin’ Vey! My Grub Street

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There I was, feigning interest. It was my job. Readers wanted to know all about their movie stars, or at least about my encounters with them. From A-listers and B-listers right down to Z-listers. The whole stupid Hollywood alphabet top to bottom. Names like this one to be forgotten as quickly as my own. They […]

‘The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft’

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I’ve discovered that my recent blogpost, An Experiment in Reading, doesn’t work on mobile devices. The gizmo that embeds the book (to let you turn the pages) gets hung up. So here’s a static presentation of George Gissing’s preface. There’s more, of course. But I’ll leave it there. You may have guessed that The Private […]

Where Have You Gone, Jackie Robinson?

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Pianist Kathleen Supové is to perform “Achilles Dreams Of Ebbets Field” by Dylan Mattingly in a world premiere at the Di Menna Center for Classical Music in New York. The Brooklyn Dodgers will be there in memory only. A massive, visionary piece in 24 parts, the solo piano work deals with heroism, passion, loss, grief, […]

Back to Reality: Torma on Michelangelo’s Art

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“Colossal as his works were, he saw them still too much as garlands and sought some immoderation wherewith to botch them. He was so successful that he left everything unfinished. Never push things.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

An Experiment in Reading

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The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is one of George Gissing’s novels. Click the arrow (bottom left) so that it is pointing down. Then click “plain text.” Click on righthand or lefthand page to turn the pages. No need to login. If technical confusion sets in, you can start over by refreshing the page. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Nope! Trump and Clinton Ain’t Neck ‘n’ Neck

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Today’s lead story on the front page of the New York Times, Trump Wins Big and Clinton Ends Sanders’s Streak, which jumps inside to an entire page in the print edition, never mentions the actual number of votes the two winners received — only the percentages. So we read that Donald Trump received 60.5% of […]

Pélieu Show, With Norman Mailer Cocktail

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Feeding Tube Records offered some swag at its exhibition of Claude Pélieu’s Bosch-derived collages. “We made buttons as giveaways,” Byron Coley says, “and we featured a urine-colored cocktail called Norman Mailer’s Pocket.” You can be sure that Pélieu is somewhere in Bosch heaven enjoying the joke. The little yellow buttons said, “je pisse dans la […]

A Big Picture: ‘The Big Country’

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William Wyler’s anti-macho Western “The Big Country,” which is remarkable for its imposing visual beauty and sonorous musical score, makes it to the (relatively) big screen at the New York Historical Society (as in bigger than your flatscreen TV but smaller than the screens it was made for back in 1958). The movie is also […]

Meeting the Hangman

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By Heathcote Williams I used to speak out against capital punishment From a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner. This was when it was thought that hanging people Was helpful in maintaining order. One day someone called Barry Trenoweth came over. His father, Gordon, had been hanged for murder. He’d killed a shopkeeper in Falmouth during the […]

Books That Truly Were Something Else

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My staff of thousands informs me that “The Something Else Press Collection” just went on the market. Although some of the books are rarer than others, it’s the collection as a whole that’s notable. Early titles included Jefferson’s Birthday / Postface, Dick Higgins’ collection of performance scores and art polemics; correspondence art pioneer Ray Johnson’s […]

The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter

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My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]

Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State

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Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the […]

Headstone With Michaux Text Superimposed

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This drawing is from a series of ‘Headstones’ by Gerard Bellaart. “buries everything outside of himself everything he has known up to now everything that surrounds him with scorn” — Henri Michaux And here is the artist Arman’s actual headstone ‘Alone at Last’ in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. The irony of course is […]

Horrorscope

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Mary Beach could draw horoscope charts in great detail. It was a serious hobby of hers. She only did them for people she knew, and if they piqued her interest. I completely forgot she had done mine — it was so long ago, circa 1967. An old friend reminded me the other day of what […]

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