Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

‘Dying’s Annoying,’ a poem by Heathcote Williams

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Ever since the death of two close friends, my staff of thousands has had trouble sleeping. Recently a suffocating moment of enlightenment troubled it further. The staff was contemplating an obvious but astonishing fact: When a body expires the person attached to it vanishes. The person has dematerialized. It’s hard to wrap your head around […]

Sanders: ‘Book of Glyphs’ = ‘Smile-Book of Grace-Joy’

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Granary Books has just published a facsimile edition of Ed Sanders’ first book-length work of glyphs, which he created in Florence, Italy, in 2008, using colored pencils and a small sketchbook. The publisher notes: Though each piece stands on its own, collectively the 72 glyphs convey, with characteristic humility and humor, many of the themes […]

Did Frank O’Hara Write ‘Captain Bada’? I Thought So

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I see there’s a 50th anniversary edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems out in hardcover from City Lights Books. It reminds me of a question I’ve had for years about a poem of O’Hara’s that I’ve never had answered. Back in 1967, the year after O’Hara died, the New York poet Jim Brodey came knocking […]

Cold Turkey Press Publishes Portrait of Nelson Algren

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This is a byte of self promotion. A byte? Haw. From the jacket blurb: Who could resist a study of a writer that begins, “if his writing had taken a flying fuck into a deep canyon, it was always balls-to-the-wall”? Jan Herman has borrowed the ghost of Algren’s golden arm with which to write this […]

Touring ‘Poetry Army’ Charts History of Radical Verse

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A posting by the Stop the War Coalition: From The Peasants’ Revolt to recent events at Tahrir Square, this incendiary performance celebrates radical verse in all its glory down through the centuries. The longstanding collaboration between poet Heathcote Williams and performer Roy Hutchins, encompassing such hits as Whale Nation and Autogeddon, continues as Hutchins combines […]

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 […]

Hard Bop: Sacha Perry in the Dwayne Clemons Quintet

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“Pianist Sacha Perry is widely known among musicians in New York as one of the brightest pianists on the scene. He studied with Barry Harris and quickly excelled in ability at the most difficult and subtle harmonies. He has been playing at Smalls for eight years, appearing with Across 7th Street, the Chris Byars Octet, […]

‘Unstoppable’: On Dismantling the Corporate State

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I’m a huge fan of Brian Lamb’s ‘Q & A’ on C-Span. Listening to Ralph Nader speak to Lamb last night about Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Nader’s new book, was typical of the broadcast’s educational brilliance. The discussion, or rather the story as Nader told it, of Nader’s “upbringing […]

‘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

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