Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

50 Years Apart: ‘American Porn’ & ‘Call Me Burroughs’

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The similarity was unintended, which makes it even better. The 1965 vinyl “Call Me Burroughs” is a classic.The 2014 vinyl “American Porn” will be.The 1965 vinyl “Call Me Burroughs” is a classic.The 2014 vinyl “American Porn” will be a classic.Here it is with a different sleeve. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Mc Neill’s Diagnosis: ‘Reflux’ in the Metaphysical Sense

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Updated: See video below. Malcolm Mc Neil is up to no good again — I loved it the last time — with a new book of essays, titled Reflux. I take that to mean he’s describing a metaphysical case of esophagitis. In other words, as a toddler of my acquaintance, pointing to the vomitus on […]

Malcolm Ritchie’s ‘small lines on the great earth’

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… showed up in the mail. It’s a pristine book of gem-like beauties, the poems finely cut and paired with the author’s drawings. small lines on the great earth is divided into six sections. The section titles strung together make the perfect Malcolm Ritchie poem on their own. Like so: small lines on the great […]

Nelson Algren on “the American writer” . . .

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uh, before Amazon … “The American writer as often as not is a middle-aged man with a wife and children, two or three books behind him, and eleven dollars in his pocket. He’s up against a conglomerate that deals in millions. He will take what they offer.” —– Nelson Algren, 1980 EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

When War Criminals Fall in Love . . .

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Bush and Blair: ‘Let’s go to war.’ ‘Let’s go to bed.’ Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox.Click to watch the video. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Glory, in Our Time, Smiles Only on the Rich …’

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Apparently not much has changed since Céline wrote that 82 years ago in Journey to the End of the Night, his first semi-autobiographical novel. The narrator Ferdinand Bardamu is talking about the Joseph Bioduret Institute, which “is clearly the Pasteur Institute,” according to Ralph Mannheim, who translated the novel. Here’s the complete passage: Glory, in […]

Carl Weissner’s ‘Death in Paris’ Published as an e-Book

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UPDATE: The book is now easily and inexpensively available in paperback. It’s lousy to promote anything on the Amazon these days because its effort to control the book trade has become repulsive. But here’s the rub: Death in Paris, by the late Carl Weissner, is now available as a Kindle e-book because Amazon has made […]

‘People Power vs. Money Power’

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Written by Heathcote Williams, narration and montage by Alan Cox, with photos by Adrian Arbib. Professor Nanjunda’s Direct Actions “What India needs today is the Gandhian formula for progress, not the presence of the West which is interested in stealing our wealth.” This was Professor Nanjundaswamy’s war cry As he fended off corporate kleptocrats And […]

Echoes of Micheline and Norse at 16th and Valencia

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The San Francisco poet Alejandro Murguía reads his poem ’16th and Valencia’ in this short video edited with footage from street protests against the recent killing of Alejandro Neito who was shot in his Bernal Heights neighborhood by the SFPD.” — Todd Swindell Alex Nieto from Juan Ruiz on Vimeo. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

More Words to Live By

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“Death is a good old farce which stops us taking life too seriously. It pardons us. This is why people want, at any cost, not to die, to be immortal, to be even more alive afterwards than before: so that they can remain serious. Death liberates us from that.” — Julien Torma in a letter […]

‘American Porn’ on Vinyl LP, with CD

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Heathcote Williams has recorded his poems “Mr. President,” “The United States of Porn,” “Forbidden Fruit, or The Cybernetic Apple Core,” and “Snuff Films at the White House.” “In their uncompromising nakedness they are CT scans of history.” [from JH liner notes] “All his work is deeply political. I think it’s informed not only by violent […]

New from Cold Turkey Press: Remembering Pinter

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Heathcote Williams’s memory piece about Harold Printer is intimate, probing, and dramatic. Candid yet loving, not out of mere affection but from deep understanding and acceptance, it is an honest portrait — not in the least hagiographic. Previously posted: Pinter’s ‘Art, Truth & Politics’ EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

William S. Burroughs: The Life, the Myth, the Influence

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April 25, 2014 + Free and open to the public at The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave. (at 34th Street) in Manhattan.+ 10:00 a.m. “Editing Burroughs” — John Bennett and Geoffrey Smith+ 11:00 a.m. “Burroughs and Literary Magazines” — Jed Birmingham, Charles Plymell, and Jan Herman +2:00 p.m. “Biography and Photography” — Barry Miles […]

Hear That Clicking Sound? Listen to the ‘Cobalt Blues’

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Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox.Click to listen.+In German folklore a kobold was a deadly sprite That inhabited mines and could live inside rock; Hunched and ugly it warned off human busybodies: It clicked, and it made an eerie, echoing knock. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Hans Walgenbach Has Art Yen for Cold Turkey

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Cold Turkey Press is een legendarische Rotterdamse underground uitgeverij die van 1970 tot 1976 actief was. Gerard Bellaart, beeldende kunstenaar en initiatiefnemer, hervatte het fonds in 2006 met publicaties van oa Ira Cohen, William S. Burroughs, Heathcote Williams, Samuel Beckett, Sinclair Beiles, Jean Arp, Antonin Artaud, Kurt Schwitters, Ed Sanders, Ezra Pound en Gerard Bellaart […]

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. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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