Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Whose Side Are They On? Not Nelson Algren’s

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It doesn’t take much for headline writers, editorialists, reporters, columnists, sports writers, what have you, to grab the reader’s attention with a catchy phrase. Some phrases have become such favorites that you see them used over and over. But I would bet that in plenty of cases the journalists who make use of them don’t […]

‘Plato’s Frogs’: A Long Way from ‘Saturday Night Live’

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In 1984 Malcolm Mc Neill won an Emmy for “outstanding graphics and title design” for the opening title sequence of “Saturday Night Live,” which he conceived, designed, and art directed. Here’s his storyboard: Thirty years later, contemplating a famous passage in the “Phaedo,” Mc Neill made “Plato’s Frogs.” I have not asked him about it. […]

Islam’s Pashtun Warrior for Peace: Badshah Khan

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Heathcote Williams is not a Muslim and finds the Koran “about as enjoyable as eating gravel.” But his belief in, and devotion to, the “Muslim Ghandi” led him to write a book-length investigative poem Badshah Khan: Islamic Peace Warrior, published in June by the London-based Thin Man Press. It is one of Williams’s best polemics […]

Tibet Comes to Taos at ‘Enchanted Mountain’ Salon

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The composer Andrea Clearfield will present her Tibetan Recording Project at the Enchanted Mountain Performance Space in downtown Taos, New Mexico, next Sunday, Aug. 30. It’s free and open to the public. (See details of time and place.) “Clearfield’s orchestral and choral works have been performed around the world,” according to an advance program note. […]

Time Capsule: Algren, Burroughs, Mailer, et al . . .

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UPDATE The Z Collection is available for ordering on line. My staff of thousands insisted on a plug for me: The Z Collection: Portraits & Sketches — my reflections on many of the writers and artists I have known, worked with, or written about — is being published by AC Books in New York in […]

A Little-Known Master Artist’s ‘Uncollected’ Works

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The pages of Uncollected illustrate the variety of the artworks that a little-known master artist produced over the years. Most of the pieces have appeared in scattered places but have never been collected in one place — thus the title. Norman O. Mustill, who died in 2013, also produced many other works that haven’t been […]

A Look Ahead: They’re Putting on a Party and a Show

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My staff of thousands informs me that the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the Granary Books archive. So publisher and library will mark the occasion with a bit of hoopla and an exhibition that opens Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day. It’s called . . . The Book Undone: Celebrating […]

‘Outside In’: Clayton Patterson at the Howl Gallery

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Now that ​A​i Weiwei has his passport back, ​will he​ ​​make it to New York in time to catch Clayton Patterson’s art exhibition, “​O​utside In”? Ai says he’s heading to Berlin, and he’s planning shows of his own in London. Since ‘Outside In” at the Howl Gallery runs only through mid-August, chances are he won’t […]

And Now for a Different Kind of Music

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It wasn’t intended as such. All the gear-shifting — the whining, growling, screaming soundtrack — makes the difference. Minus that it’s just a meandering road trip (at high speed, granted, on Paris streets). And that kiss? Strictly branding. Mere advertising. C'était un rendez-vous – 1976 from LeCatalog on Vimeo. Here’s the music again, Hollywood-style:

‘Freedom Is a Career’ — Obituary for Mike Lesser

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By Heathcote Williams His approach to life and politics was fueled by emotion rather than the twisted logic of compliance. Finding himself born into an era when life on earth seemed daily–and increasingly–under threat, Mike Lesser’s logic was visceral. Other Angry Young Men long ago may have mellowed and somehow come to terms with a […]

The Outsider Writer on the Inside of the Outside

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Charles Plymell (Charley to those who know him, Charlie to those who don’t) has been an outsider for decades, self-declared and otherwise, railing against everything that smacks of the inside — especially the arbiters of government arts grants, who have unfailingly overlooked him, even against his old friend Allen Ginsberg, whom he relentlessly excoriates for […]

Mike Lesser, R.I.P.: ‘In Conversation With a Dying Friend’

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Heathcote Williams’s elegy is a meditation on death. Alan Cox reads it. The collage portrait of Mike Lesser as a young man is by Claire Palmer. The text of ‘In Conversation With a Dying Friend’ is posted for reading at IT: International Times. “ . . . my atoms will just disappear. “There’ll be a […]

Artist Bronzes Writer’s Life and Work in a Store Window

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The German artist Vera Bonsen has a window assemblage currently on display in a Heidelberg storefront that bronzes the life and writings of the American expatriate poet Cody Maher. The paper hangings consist of poems, diaries, photos and so on from 30 years’ worth of manuscripts. The artifacts include hats, a pair of boxing gloves, […]

A Spanking New German Edition of ‘Royal Babylon’

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And now if you just care to look this way … it’s bi-lingual, too. The dark side of the English royal family From the publisher: Did you know that Queen Elizabeth II is the largest landowner in the world? She owns 10 times more land than the recently deceased King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The […]

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