Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Say It Ain’t So . . .

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Last Bohemian Turns Out the Lights Clayton Patterson, Rebel and Photographer, Plans to Leave the Lower East Side for Europe

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in Midtown Manhattan

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A marvel known as “Library Walk” runs the length of two city blocks, memorializing the world’s great writers with 96 bronze reliefs set into the sidewalk on granite plaques. This is one of them. And here is Dylan Thomas’s plaque.

A Woman’s Point of View from a Tough-Guy Novelist

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There was no chance to note Nelson Algren’s birthday two days ago because ArtsJournal was taken down by hacker bots. But now that we’re back, herewith a belated blogpost to celebration of a novelist who had a reputation as a tough guy but who wrote with deep sensitivity about women.

In a Light Mood: ‘No Severed Bodies or Bloody Stumps’

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The front of this hallucinatory postcard, published by Cold Turkey Press in a limited edition of 36 copies, shows a collage by the late Norman Ogue Mustill. It is “Mustill in a light sorta mood, or so he thought,” I wrote Ben Schot, Cold Turkey’s distributor. “Light for him, anyway: no severed bodies or bloody […]

‘Eating the Rich and Famous, or Celebrity Roadkill’

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“Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” — Thomas Jefferson, from his letters Words by Heathcote Williams. Montage and narration by Alan Cox. “I have been […]

‘America: How It Works’ by Heathcote Williams

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The fierce dissidence of Williams’s polemical poetry is as radical as Shelley’s. “America: How It Works” bears witness to the monster within “the most dangerous country in world history.” Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. The business of America is business, And it’s number one business is war. It uses Hollywood […]

Remembering Norman Mailer, Sorta Policy Wonk

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I’m no policy wonk on Russia and neither was Norman Mailer. But the crisis in the Ukraine and an article in today’s New York Times about the impact of thinning ranks of Russia experts on U.S. policy reminded me of remarks Mailer once made about the former Soviet Union, as though he were an expert. […]

‘Clapping Music,’ Talking Music, and a ‘Mallet Quartet’

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Steve Reich has been called “our greatest living composer” by a New York Times critic. Was that hyperbole or just ink-stained enthusiasm? Listening to a performance of Reich’s “Mallet Quartet” a few nights ago at the CUNY Graduate Center (followed by his conversation with New York magazine’s music critic Justin Davidson), I understood why Reich […]

Music for Organ, With Encore for Bosendorfer Pianos

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A friend of mine, Ben Schot, sent a photo he recently took of the Brooklyn-born minimalist composer and performance artist Charlemagne Palestine (born Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine, or Charles Martin) and his daughter Puck, a student at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. “He used to live in Rotterdam for a couple of years […]

Charley Plymell Tells and Shows in Strings of Emails

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Charley Plymell’s long, seemingly endless strings of emails are fascinating to read. He has known so many Beat writers and artists and has popped up in so many places with them that I can’t help thinking of him — half in wonder and half in disbelief — as the Zelig of the Beat Generation. Unlike […]

SOS: An American Poet Is Waiting to Be Rescued

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Cody Maher, expat American poet and world traveler living in Heidelberg, writes in an email message that he was sitting around “watching countries go to the dogs feeding the people nothing but lies” when it occurred to him that “the only safe place one day might be international waters.” This must have been before the […]

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