Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

‘The Last Dodo and Dreams of Flying’

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A reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford from a book of poetry published by New River Press. ‘I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.’ — Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Eugenia Hall ‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do […]

‘After the Revolution’: Heathcote Williams as Playwright

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Jay Jeff Jones writes in London’s Theatre Record: Like [Jeff] Nuttall, Williams was multi-talented and constant in his espousal of utopian anarchy. He was as uncompromising as he was compassionate; an intellectual force that alternated poetry and playwriting with direct action for causes that included the homeless, battered women and the environment. His first major […]

Lost: Whatever Happened to ‘Severe Joy’?

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When Heathcote Williams died recently, I heard from many people who recalled the lasting impact he’d had on them. Jay Jeff Jones, Michael Butterworth, and David Britton were three. They remembered a manuscript of Heathcote’s called “Severe Joy” that never saw the light of day. John Calder, a major London publisher, had failed to bring […]

Opera: America’s War Without End

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Anthony Haden Guest calls “The Plain of Jars” — a chamber opera by Keith Patchel about America’s secret war in Laos — “the lineal descendant of Stravinsky’s ‘Nightingale’ and Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’ and ‘Wozzeck.’” I haven’t seen it yet, but my staff of thousands tells me it “exposes the wounds caused by America’s use of […]

A Great One Died Today

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Updated with new information. ‘He was the Shelley of his age and more.’ — Gerard Bellaart A memorial service is to be held Friday (July 14), 3 p.m., at St. Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford. All welcome. July 17 — Malcolm Ritchie, whose friendship with Heathcote spanned decades, attended the service. This is his description: […]

Music Theater Where Truth Can Appear

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The last time we looked it was a work in progress. That was a year ago. William Osborne and Abbie Conant had been working on it for so long, Osborne said at the time, that it felt like “forever.” But now their music theater chamber piece is about to get its world premiere. The name […]

Burroughsian Credo: ‘Include Me Out’

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“Learning a hieroglyphic language is excellent practice in the lost art of inner silence.” — William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind “Cup of tea at dawn a room with rose wall paper wind stirs cigarette ash on a naked thigh calm miracle of apomorphine dawn . . . . .” Burroughs Lecture Series: Iain Sinclair […]

Norman Mailer on Almost Everything

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If there’s a richer radio archive of interviews with cultural figures and others from all walks of life than the one amassed by Studs Terkel, I’m unaware of it. Here, for example, is Norman Mailer talking with him on March 17, 1960, about writing, critics, self-censorship, and American life. It’s great stuff. Mailer offers his […]

When Trump Hog-Called His Cabinet: Sooie!

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Trump’s first cabinet meeting was the perfect reminder of one of William S. Burroughs’s most satirical “routines.” Burroughs wrote the piece in 1953 and had it published for the first time in a little mimeo magazine called Floating Bear. Since then it’s been reprinted many times, most famously as a mimeographed booklet by Fuck You […]

A Better Idea for the Guggenheim

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One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s fantasies for his design of the Guggenheim Museum was to color it pink. You can see how that might have looked in a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive. If you can’t get to MoMA, you can see what it […]

Please Insert

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My staff of thousands thinks this paragraph by Barrett Brown should be inserted like an unsheathed stallion’s penis into every last one of the obituaries plaguing us about the late Roger Ailes . . . just in case the corpse hasn’t been properly mounted: I don’t really mind Fox on ideological grounds, as a nation […]

On View: Mary Beach’s Witty ‘Illaminations’

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Mary Beach deserved to be an art star. Her collages are in a class with Richard Hamilton’s. But she was incapable of bullshitting her way to the top. She also submerged whatever ambitions she may have had to advance the work of her partner Claude Pélieu. She translated him, published him, promoted him and, when […]

Poetry of the Absurd

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This is a tape cut-up I made with Carl Weissner way back in 1971. We used a recording of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley speaking to members of the city council. We “cut” the tape electronically, not manually, on a big old reel-to-reel that I had at the time. You can hear the cuts. Technically […]

What Went Wrong

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Spineless Democrats and Republican thugs: A 30-minute rap on why we are where we are. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Female Power (from Medusa to Merkel)

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I love reading Mary Beard. She may be a professor, the highest of high-brow professors, but she writes — and speaks (albeit with a British accent) — like an actual human. Enjoy. Her talk begins: In 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy […]

Juggling Ideas About the Avant Garde

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So much art is called “avant garde” these days that my tireless staff of thousands wonders whether it’s just a label. Some think that the entire culture, no matter how far out, has gone mainstream and that there’s nothing legitimately avant garde anywhere — not since the good old days of Dada, surrealism, cubism, futurism, […]

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