Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Carl Weissner: Master Writer, Cherished Friend

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A great one died four years ago today. Carl was also a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg), and a literary agent who spread the work of dissident […]

What the Horse’s Mouth Had to Say

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I wanted to get the lowdown, so I went over to the Council on Foreign Depredations. The horse’s mouth was as smart as I expected. But to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane, which seemed more important. When Tom Brokaw asked him “how well the country is being served” by the current political debate […]

Honoring MLK With a Clever Starbucks Ad

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Watch Martin Luther King Jr. giving his greatest address, the “I have a dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Listen to his peerless “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of April 16, 1963, in which he defends direct-action nonviolence, explains its principles, expresses his disappointment with […]

With Bicycle: Nightmares and Dreams

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Flann O’Brien wrote a comic novel. Kurt Wold made a performance piece. Bicycles figure in both. Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down […]

The Day David Bowie Died, a Poet Wondered Why

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‘What Are People Doing Fucking Dying?’ What are people doing fucking dying? Haven’t they got better things to do? No sooner than you’re on someone’s wavelength Then suddenly they’re whisked away from you. I saw Bowie at the first Glastonbury in 1971.* He was performing at five in the morning. With golden locks he was […]

Charlotte Moorman Gets a Full-Dress Close-Up

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On a visit I made years ago to Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections its curator at the time, Russell Maylone, showed me a room piled with ramshackle cartons that had recently arrived. He pointed to them with pride and said they were Charlotte Moorman’s archival materials, a lifetime’s worth of hoarding. […]

Abolishing Time: Baudelaire & Cocteau Side by Side

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I have been involved so deeply in so many things that they slip from my memory, and not just one, fifty. A wave from the depths brings them back to the surface for me with, as the Bible says, all that in them is. It is incredible how few traces are left in us of […]

Ben Hecht on the Real Margaret Anderson

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I’ve been re-reading Ben Hecht’s massive 1954 memoir, A Child of the Century, which Gary Giddins rightly calls “his masterpiece.” I think of it as Bennie’s wised-up wisdom book. It reads for delicious stretches like the essays of a Midwestern Montaigne and is filled with scenes of an unforgettable Chicago, where Hecht first came to […]

Progress for Women at Vienna Philharmonic

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For the first time in three years, William Osborne, an expert on the sociology of German-speaking orchestras, has posted an update about the latest developments at the VPo. “It’s the most positive I’ve ever written,” he tells me. Which is saying a lot when you know how critical he’s been of the orchestra’s all-male ideology […]

A Cool Way to End the Year

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The countdown continues at the Bibliographic Bunker, where Jed Birmingham’s top 23 most interesting Burroughs collectibles has reached Carl Weissner’s Klacto 23 International, the seventh of the Klacto zines, which Birmingham terms “one of the great mimeo mags of the post-WWII era.” Coincidentally, a friend stopped by the rare books room at the Strand and […]

In RAIN TAXI: Paul Buhle on ‘The Z Collection’

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“Once, a mere blink in the eye of eternity but actually several generations ago, literary essays were considered a high art form. Not the kind written in pursuit of academic self-advancement …” Click to enlarge. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Brion Gysin: ‘Poets Don’t Own No Words’

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Ian Sommerville programmed software to generate [Gysin’s] computer poems, which was reenacted by Joseph Moore as the “Permutation” software for the exhibition Brion Gysin: Dream Machine (2010) at the New Museum in New York. Postscript: Dec. 14 — Per William Osborne’s comment, here is Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ song “Can’t Hold Us” as performed by […]

Gonzo Style

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Gonzo Today brings us a gonzo poem by Heathcote Williams that begins: The Parisian atrocities were born in Libya / Where Cameron, Sarkozy, and Obama / Murdered twelve thousand Libyans between sips / Of Downing Street and Oval Office coffee. Read the complete poem here. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Rent a Rammer for Homeland Security

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Norman O. Mustill died two years ago today. Here are two postcard he sent his friend Kurt Wold back in the 1980s. Although only postcards, they are like all Norm’s work, as Wold says: “the manifestation of the man.” And they haven’t aged a nanosecond. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Say Hello to ‘A Better Goodbye’

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An interviewer recently asked me about influences. I told her about a number of journalists in Chicago back in the day. Among them was John Schulian, a sportswriter whose 1,000-word columns four times a week were graceful tapestries. He wove sentences together like threads of embroidery that gave everything he observed a texture you could […]

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