Jan Herman – General Municipal Election

General Municipal Election was published by Jan Herman’s legendary Nova Broadcast Press (San Francisco) in 1969-71. The 7″ record was pressed (on one side) in 1969, the ballot was printed in the same year, and the sleeve was printed in 1971. Some of the ballots were signed by Jan Herman in 1969. Sea Urchin has a limited stock of both signed and unsigned copies of General Municipal Election, which we received directly from Jan Herman. All copies are in excellent condition.

The sleeve is printed b/w on one side; the front shows a collage of images of Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy just before his assassination. The back shows two photographs of a woman pulling Jan Herman’s fake ballot and his magazine VDRSVP #2 from a towel dispenser. The cut-up text on the back of the sleeve describes a polling booth on election day: “The levers are covered with warm fur and stink of fish eyes and odorous come. The sinner believes he is going to make some real pussy. He pulls out his John prick and ejaculates a long de-anxietized sigh of relief…”

The one-sided 7″ vinyl record is called Election Day Tape and was produced with the assistance of Clark Coolidge. The noisy sound collage was meant to be “broadcast in the streets or at your local polling place on Election Day only”. The record comes in a small sleeve that is attached to the inside of the outer sleeve.
The sample ballot for the General Municipal Election, November 4, 1969 has been attached to the sleeve and can be folded out to its full lenth of 89 cm. The ballot is a collage of voting instructions, a pornograhic text, meat advertisements, and images of a razorblade and broken cigar labelled The Death Of Politics. Some of the ballots have been signed in 1969.

Jan Herman (1942), editor, publisher, author and journalist, founded Nova Broadcast Press as well as the journal San Francisco Earthquake (1967-1971.) He published Beat, post-Beat and Fluxus writers and artists such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, Norman Mustill, Claude Pelieu, Mary Beach, Liam O’Gallagher and Nanos Valaoritis. He worked with Higgins at Something Else Press, becoming the editor (1972-1974). He co-wrote Cut Up or Shut Up with Carl Weissner and Jurgen Ploog, and published other experimental fiction. He is also the author of A Talent for Trouble, the biography of the director William Wyler. As a journalist, he was a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News and the Los Angeles Times (1981-1998), a National Arts Journalism fellow at Columbia University (1998-1999), and a senior editor at MSNBC.com (1999-2003). Jan Herman’s Straight Up columns are published here: http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/.