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Archives for 2012
Fresh From My Hot Little Paws
A review posted at RealityStudio of Malcolm Mc Neill’s spellbinding memoir, Observed While Falling, recently published by Fantagraphics Books, about his relationship with William S. Burroughs and their artistic collaboration. Mc Neill is an artist who can write. Really write. He brings a fresh analytical eye to the familiar Burroughsian fixations — synchronicity and doppelgangers, […]
‘Shelley at Oxford,’ a Timely Polemic for Christmas
Written by Heathcote Williams, montaged and narrated by Alan Cox, it has just arrived on YouTube and begins like this … In Oxford High Street, in 1810, Slatter & Munday’s Bookshop Had a large, bow-fronted window For displaying their latest wares. Aged 19, Shelley flooded it with a pamphlet On ‘The Necessity Of Atheism’. Which […]
‘Drawing Surrealism’: Arriving Soon at the Morgan
Somebody at the Morgan Library and Museum knows how to tout an upcoming show. Certainly the Morgan knows how to promote a press release, let alone how to have it written. Or maybe it’s a work product of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the show being touted — Drawing Surrealism — has […]
Who Is Heathcote Williams? Not for Sale, That’s Who
“He is one of a few of genius who did not sell out and who peaks in (relative) old age. That’s quite something nowadays.” — Gerard Bellaart +++ “Fame is the first disgrace because God knows who you are.” — Heathcote Williams, “The Local Stigmatic” +++ The videos comprise Parts 1 and 2 of a […]
Heathcote Williams on the Real American President
Narration and montage by Alan Cox. Musical accents by Louis Armstrong. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
More Dissident Literature from Cold Turkey Press
The title of Heathcote Williams’s poem puts it country simple. You can’t get more direct than “The United States of Porn.” The poem, which runs to 208 lines, nearly all based on facts, is part of a portfolio called American Porn. It was published in 2011 in a beautifully produced first edition of 36 copies […]
Petition to Stop Warhol Exhibit at the Nat’l Arts Club
Boris Lurie, who died in 2008, was a Holocaust surivor and one of the founders of a radical art protest movement known as NO!art. I’ve blogged about him before. His close friends Clayton Patterson and Dietmar Kirves are sending around a petition to halt an exhibition of Warhol works that opened last week at the […]
A First-Class Letter From the Lost and Found
When I read Heathcote Williams’s description of a bizzare project that for a time obsessed the South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who wanted to plant “the barren Sahara desert” with “industrial quantities of discarded tea-leaves,” I remembered a letter Carl Weissner once wrote. March 30th, 1971 Dear Sinclair: The Sahara is irrigated. Now what? While […]
Democracy Now! Exclusive: Assange on WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Cypherpunks, Surveillance State
“In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for nearly six months. Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s […]
In Iowa, ‘The Subversive Culture of Collage and Zines’
The running head on these two pages of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up text “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin” reads: “if you are gay I am right seconds with Karate you are wrong you are he kicks him into 1914 movie.” The spread appeared in an exhibition, “Liberated Images,” at the University of Iowa […]
Teaming Burroughs & Mustill for Thanksgiving
A Straight Up tradition continues. But this year William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day are posted with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. That completes the package. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through […]
It Ain’t in Staten Island, the Rockaways, or Red Hook
…but shitstorm Sandy had a ball here, too. The venerable Argosy Book Store took a hit on Manhattan’s East 59th Street within spitting distance of Bloomingdale’s and other posh emporiums. Here’s something to ponder: Different floors, but you get the picture. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
The Idiot’s Voice: More Dissidence from Cold Turkey
Leonard Cohen, who is not given to easy praise, has called Sinclair Beiles “one of the great poets of the century.” Meaning the 20th century — they met back in the early 1960s on the Greek island of Hydra. Was Cohen being uncharacteristically hyperbolic? Well, William S. Burroughs, also not given to easy praise, once […]
‘The Lord of the Drones and the White House Fly’
My staff of thousands reminds me there’s an election coming up in the U.S. of A. For all the voters going to the polls, here’s a poem to cheer them on by the British poet Heathcote Williams. Part two … enter the realm of litrichur, narrated and montaged by Alan Cox. And here’s part three, […]
If Hurricane Sandy Were to Hit San Francisco . . .
Would the city look like this? EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t)’
Have you noticed lately that the art on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times is tamer than it used to be? I haven’t made a study of it, but that’s how it seems to me. Proof, if needed, comes with the paperback publication of All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some […]