Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Some Got Plenty and Some Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’

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Five years after the Wall Street crash of 1929, George Gershwin wrote what he called a “banjo song” for “Porgy and Bess.” It turned into “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” with lyrics by Edwin DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. The second verse goes like this: De folks wid plenty o’ plenty Got a lock on […]

Burroughs Central This Is Not

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Anyone who thinks this blog is Burroughs Central has no idea. The fact is, I’m just skimming. The real Burroughs Central is RealityStudio, where the true aficionados congregate for deep postings by Jed Birmingham’s Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker. For example, he recently made the case that le maître’s cut-ups in the mimeo mags of […]

By Burroughs Possessed >>>>>> Burroughs 101

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Being a serious writer hardly means leading the life of a saint. In 1951, in Mexico City, long before the publication of Naked Lunch, which made him famous, William S. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken stunt. He was trying to prove his marksmanship William Tell-style. Instead of […]

In Memory: Carl Weissner, So Rudely Interrupted

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Carl died unexpectedly three years ago today. On the first anniversary of his death, I posted a tribute from friends and others. Here’s a photo from a trip he took to Marseille, where he was gathering impressions for a novel he wanted to write, which wasn’t all that long before he died. His absence among […]

Kick That Habit? Bellaart Does Burroughs

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This pencil drawing of William S. Burroughs by Gerard Bellaart is one of two portraits. It’s the introspective Burroughs. The other drawing, a charcoal sketch to be posted soon, catches Burroughs in a wholly different state of mind, as if possessed by the Ugly Spirit that Burroughs believed had dogged him throughout his life. The […]

Beckett But Not Beckett: ‘Being Human’

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It begins in blackness with whispers. Jumps to a face with eyes closed. The eyes open. Words form: “I was almost human. But then something went wrong. I was a human being. But then I became a victim. I was almost a human being but then I ran out of time.” I wish I could […]

About That Remarkable Surge for Charlie

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I’ve noticed that the “Je suis Charlie” phenomenon has come in for rightwing contempt. The argument goes that it’s self-righteous to claim you stand with the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo when all you do is gather in the street and carry signs. There’s some truth to that, especially when it comes to politicians. But I’ve […]

Posting a Cold Turkey Card While Paris Burns

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By way of explanation, I was occupied searching for word pattern. Found a rangy young man whose authority was roughly 50 words retyped in columns from the beginning more habit-forming than his life. He hunkered across the columns and typed them again. Undsoweiter … And now for R. Crumb’s pièce de résistance:

‘Death in Paris’ Struck Prescient Note

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Apropos today’s headline about the hacked U.S. CENTCOM Twitter Account . . . a friend was looking over our late amigo Carl Weissner’s “Doomsday Lit” novel Death in Paris. Boy, is that title apt. Not to mention the chapter headings. How about this one? >im in ur base killin ur d00dz

We Are All Charlie Now

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As many as 100,000 people gathered across France, according to Agence France-Presse. The crowds expressed their solidarity against the Charlie Hebdo attack. At least 35,000 Parisians, by one estimate, gathered at La Place de la République. They were silent at first, then began to sing: “Charlie! Charlie!” “We are Charlie!” “Free expression!” Cartoonists are having […]

Consumer Poem for the Occasion: A Global Love Bomb

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The wisdom of the words, the wit of the montage — to say nothing of the pitch-perfect narration — make “True Love in the Impossible Emporium” a media keeper for this holiday season and all the ones to come. Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. The poem, which begins like this, […]

But W.’s Name Is Missing From the List

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This day should not pass without acknowledging the lead editorial in this morning’s New York Times: Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses. It points out, among other things, that Any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and […]

Leonardo’s Notebooks: Seeing Him in His Drawings

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The opening of the new 3-D flick “Inside the Mind of Leonardo da Vinci” grabbed me right from the start and had nothing to do with its “stereoscopic” quality. We follow a librarian on a winding trail to the vault at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Italy, where the drawings in Leonardo’s notebook collection, the […]

Art in Disguise: A Koons or Not a Koons?

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I see in a report from Paris that someone is threatening to sue Jeff Koons for copyright infringement over his depiction of a pig and seminude mannequin. Koons has been accused of infringment before, three times successfully. He has also accused others of copyright violation of his balloon dog. Here in New York I was […]

Incidental Intelligence: A Portrait of William Burroughs

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I once asked Nelson Algren what he thought of Naked Lunch. He grinned at me, as though he were being entertained by a wiseguy. I knew he had no love for the Beats. He had derided Jack Kerouac as a momma’s boy and dismissed Allen Ginsberg as a publicist. So his answer surprised me: “Burroughs […]

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