Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

‘Artaud’s Hammer’: A Dissident Portfolio Continues

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This is one of two new cards in the continuing series. Cold Turkey Press publications have a flavor all of their own; there’s a kind of wild, mad goodness about them — you know you’re going to be taken on a trip. Somewhere edgy and dangerous. You may not get back. You don’t care. You’re […]

‘Orwell’s Recipe for Tea’

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Narration and montage by Alan Cox. “Orwell exposed the state’s Ministry of Truth, / As controlling man’s desire to be free / With its lies and doublespeak and doublethink, / But he’d always break off for tea.” — Heathcote Williams

Only Man to Enter Parliament With Honest Intentions

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Guy Fawkes’ Lantern Guy Fawkes’ lantern Is a surreptitious Point of pilgrimage For anonymous Armies of anarchists who Visit the glass case Where it is preserved In the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. ‘What if?’ they wonder, ‘What if Guy Fawkes had done it? ‘Had done the business – ‘For what’s changed?’ they ask, ‘Kings and Parliaments […]

For Nonconforming Artists, the Envelope Please

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Update: Click for the 2015 Acker Awards. And read this captivating feature story by Nicole Disser: ‘Helen Keller Was an Asshole,’ and Other Things You’ll Learn at the Acker Awards Are awards the staff of life? Of course not. But they certainly seem like food for the hungry. The list of awards is nearly endless. […]

Gerard Bellaart Sends Greetings From France

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The resident genius of Cold Turkey Press has a thing for Artaud. Can you blame him?Not I. Neither can Hemingway. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our […]

A Difference Between the 16th Century and the 21st

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When I sent Heathcote Williams a photo of the Francis Bacon plaque in the Library Walk series … He replied with an ironic poem, like so … … which illustrates a difference between the 16th century and the 21st, doncha think?

From Laugharne Boathouse to Library Walk

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On my way to work I sometimes take a street in midtown Manhattan where an unsung marvel known as “Library Walk” celebrates the world’s great books and writers. For the length of two city blocks I’m distracted by bronze reliefs in granite plaques set into the sidewalk. They are beautiful to look at and inspiring […]

Unbuttoned: Samuel Beckett Meets William Osborne

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I knew my friend Bill Osborne and Samuel Beckett had met and spoken about Osborne’s musical settings of Beckett’s plays. But I had never heard the details. Now at last the full story! By William Osborne I spent seven years doing nothing else but setting the works of Beckett to music. At the end in […]

An Absurd Debate About the Last Word

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Following up on the previous blogpost, Gerard Bellaart sent a superimposition of several lines on Beckett’s short dramatic monologue “Not I.” Bellaart also sent an excerpt from Michael Maier’s paper, “GEISTERTRIO: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Ghost Trio.’” To which, Bellaart says: “The debate as to whether music has the last word is rather like […]

‘Sacred Elephant’ Is Coming to New York’s La MaMa

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I haven’t seen much theater lately, for reasons I may already have mentioned — so much is dull dull dull — but the dramatization of Heathcote Williams’s epic poem, “Sacred Elephant,” has got my attention as nothing has in years. The show, not yet officially announced, is coming in September to La MaMa‘s First Floor […]

‘Taking the Piss’ That May Pass for Shakespeare

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I spent more than a decade reviewing theater for a major metro daily and I’d never heard the term “nubbing (or taking the piss).” Hmmph. Heathcote Williams shows how it’s done in a sweet folio about to be published by Gerard Bellaart‘s Cold Turkey Press. As my good friend N.O. Mustill says via email, “me […]

‘Peter Bayliss and the Breatharians’

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The obituary in The Telegraph, in 2002, said: “He wanted no memorial, but his near-lunatic appetite for life will be impossible to forget.” The poet Heathcote Williams certainly remembers Peter Bayliss. He remembers, too, “the Bayliss Mischief” that “might still be working / From beyond the grave.” Here given their due are the vaunted philanthropic […]

MacFadyen Takes ‘Front Porch’ Look at Burroughs

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I knew when RealityStudio posted Ian MacFadyen’s review of “The Name Is Burroughs: expanded media at the ZKM, Karlsruhe” that it would be a major critique. I had already read his “Codename Burroughs,” the pamphlet that accompanied the retrospective, which was excerpted from a more complete text in MacFadyen’s book, William S. Burroughs. Cut. With […]

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