Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Mike Lesser, R.I.P.: ‘In Conversation With a Dying Friend’

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Heathcote Williams’s elegy is a meditation on death. Alan Cox reads it. The collage portrait of Mike Lesser as a young man is by Claire Palmer. The text of ‘In Conversation With a Dying Friend’ is posted for reading at IT: International Times. “ . . . my atoms will just disappear. “There’ll be a […]

Artist Bronzes Writer’s Life and Work in a Store Window

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The German artist Vera Bonsen has a window assemblage currently on display in a Heidelberg storefront that bronzes the life and writings of the American expatriate poet Cody Maher. The paper hangings consist of poems, diaries, photos and so on from 30 years’ worth of manuscripts. The artifacts include hats, a pair of boxing gloves, […]

Queers & Comics: Alison Bechdel

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Click in at 14’30”. That gets you right to the funny, smart, invariably entertaining cartoonist telling her story. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Beat Scene Magazine Eyeballs ‘American Porn’

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My staff of thousands tells me that “American Porn” was reviewed in Beat Scene, a British magazine edited by Kevin Ring. That was news to me. Here’s the review: The staff wanted to know what I thought of the review. I said I liked what the reviewer said about the poet: “Heathcote Williams is a […]

Carl Weissner Gets Stellar Notice in Book Podcast

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In his latest podcast at realitystudio.org Jed Birmingham zeroes in on the immensely talented Carl Weissner and his cut-up novel The Braille Film. Birmingham, who met Weissner in New York and Paris, talks about what made him so memorable and how he bought the book at auction some years ago for $75, believing it and […]

Of Poetry and Fakery, Cultural Theft, and Stolen Identity

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The title of Heathcote Williams’s memoir, Of Dylan Thomas and his Deaths, reflects the author’s belief that the great Welsh poet died not once but twice. He writes, “It can be said that he was to suffer no less than two deaths at American hands.” The first death, contrary to the accepted claim that he […]

Recapped: R. Crumb Epic Home Video (Un, Deux, Trois)

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This video was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, where the exhibition ran from March 23 to April 30. Curated by Monte Beauchamp, editor of The Life and Times of R. Crumb, the show was a retrospective that presented key pieces culled from the underground art collection […]

Poem for the Cleaning Women: ‘We Are All Holy’

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Courtesy of Bart de Paepe’s Sloow Tapes This is a historical recording by Judith Malina, who died two weeks ago. I’ve transcribed the text the way it struck my ear, but its true power can’t be fully appreciated until you’ve heard her read the poem for yourself. — JH every one of the cleaning women […]

Algren for Real: ‘The End Is Nothing. The Road Is All’

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Here he is on the big screen at last, an hour and a half of who Nelson Algren was and what he meant. It’s a documentary with the sources — authoritative sources (Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel, for example, who give their personal impressions of the man). Radical sources, too (Paul Buhle for one, who […]

realitystudio.org Launches Jed Birmingham’s Podcast

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I am STAGGERED! Of course I would be, for obvious reasons. Did I say I want this embedded in my headstone? Click to listen. It is utterly, inescapably humbling. The really wonderful thing about JB’s devotion to books as artifacts is the way he appreciates them as mysteries and teases out their hidden meanings. This […]

Sinclair Beiles: Poet of Many Parts and Places

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Dyehard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his association with the Beats. He collaborated on […]

From the East Village, ‘Ten Talk New York’

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Thanks to Clayton Patterson, “the great connector,” I met his friend Simon J. Heath the other day. Simon is an Australian-born filmmaker who’s in love with New York City. The latest evidence is “Ten Talk New York,” a fast-moving flick that features interviews with New Yorkers thinking out loud about sex, love, race, and death. […]

A Savoyard’s First Brush With Censorship

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Have a look at this Kickstarter campaign: Savoy Books is an independent publishing house based above a locksmith shop in the South Manchester district of Didsbury, founded and run by Michael Butterworth and David Britton. In 1989 they published Lord Horror, the last book to be banned in the UK under the 1959 Obscene Publications […]

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