Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Gonzo Style

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Gonzo Today brings us a gonzo poem by Heathcote Williams that begins: The Parisian atrocities were born in Libya / Where Cameron, Sarkozy, and Obama / Murdered twelve thousand Libyans between sips / Of Downing Street and Oval Office coffee. Read the complete poem here. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Say Hello to ‘A Better Goodbye’

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An interviewer recently asked me about influences. I told her about a number of journalists in Chicago back in the day. Among them was John Schulian, a sportswriter whose 1,000-word columns four times a week were graceful tapestries. He wove sentences together like threads of embroidery that gave everything he observed a texture you could […]

Jenny Diski Speaks of Death and Dying

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Jenny Diski learned some months ago that she had inoperable lung cancer and, at best, another three years to live. She now writes about the experience and her treatment. Something she said about writers and writing reminds me of what William Burroughs pointed out (summarized in The Z Collection as “no mummy needed.”) April 28, […]

Redux: Dear Cannibals, Have a Happy Thanksgiving

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Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill has been a happy pairing. It still is. But the Straight Up staff of thousands added a sweetener, something like cranberry sauce, to last year’s celebration. Here ‘tiz again: Words by Heathcote Williams, narration and montage by Alan Cox. And from Straight Up’s Thanksgiving […]

I’m Getting My 15 Minutes . . .

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If you think my staff of thousands doesn’t appreciate that, you don’t know how hungry they are to promote my new book. In this age of shameless self-promotion, it’s all about me, me, me. So I made a deal with them. One click gets them a penny, five gets them a dime. Make them rich. […]

Carl Weissner: ‘Always These Nightmares . . .’

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Updated below. Carl Weissner’s novel Death in Paris — first published online in 2009, then as a paperback in 2012, and finally as an ebook in 2014 — was about a different kind of death from the terrorist assault on Saturday night. Writing in English, his second language, Weissner drew on the trappings of detective […]

‘Not a One-Trick Pony . . .’

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So says Jed Birmingham in #23: The Dead Star, the first of his picks for “The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.” The Burroughs Nova Broadcast pamphlet, which I published in 1969 and designed as a foldout in covers, is ancient history. It makes me an old pony. But I can live with that. The […]

Cartoon Artist Kate Evans Does Rosa Luxemburg

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I notice that the NYT Sunday Book Review’s not-so-special “Special Issue” on graphic books (Oct. 18) makes no mention of ‘Red Rosa’ by Kate Evans, forthcoming from Verso (Nov. 3). My tireless staff of thousands decided to right that wrong. Kate Evans, aka Cartoon Kate, is no ordinary biographer. Her in-depth account of the socialist […]

A Blistering Attack on Wall Street — and Not Only That

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It’s also “a celebration of words that changed the world” directed by Paul Hodson, with live music by Dr. Blue. Poetry Can F*ck Off will feature “verse, lyrics, and music by Maya Angelou, Jim Morrison, Billie Holiday, Sophie Scholl, Emily Dickinson, Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, Martin Luther King, William Blake, Arundhati Roy, Victor Jara, Gil Scott-Heron, […]

A Sentence for the Ages

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Seriously … He might spend a blessèd day with a bottle of absinthe, oblivious to the sun that fell like a stone, dozing peacefully under the muddled stars in a pool of his own vomit. That sentence — from page 164 of Graham Robb’s Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris — is hard to beat. […]

Going Whole Hog: The Prime Minister & the Pig’s Head

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The British press has been having a field day with tales of Prime Minister David Cameron’s crush on a pig during his student days at Oxford. Maybe “crush” is the wrong term. How about “necrophiliac oral sex.” My tireless staff of thousands doesn’t presume to know the gory details. But it has taken notice of […]

LARB Video Interview: Miles on William S. Burroughs

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Dunno how my tireless staff of thousands missed this. It’s as striking a summary of Burroughs’s life and writing as I’ve seen. His best biographer gives a sense of the man and his work that is very different from the public impression of him. Here’s a transcript of the first three minutes of the video: […]

Tripping With Andy

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‘It is Deborah Davis’s style to pan to a faraway object, complete its history, then cinematically bring it into the focus of the story. John Huston becomes cinema verité. Her style permits one to learn everything related to the trip. Even things Andy Warhol’s diarist didn’t know.’ By Charles Plymell “The Trip” it was … […]

From Fleet Street to Biafra . . . and to MI6

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When I interviewed Frederick Forsyth in 1982, he spoke about his time as a BBC correspondent in Biafra during the late 1960s. He had predicted a genocidal race war there, but his editors didn’t want to hear about it. This led to his departure from Fleet Street and a two-year odyssey as a freelance reporter […]

‘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. […]

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