Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

‘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

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 […]

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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