Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Message From My Orwellian Phone Carrier

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The email arrived with this message: “At Verizon Wireless your privacy is our priority.” How nice. So I read on: “We’re enhancing our Relevant Mobile Advertising program in a way that can help marketers reach you with messages …” And here I thought privacy was defined as “the state or condition of being free from […]

Supervert’s ‘Vision of the Future’ Has Arrived

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It is possibly Supervert‘s most impressive book beauty to date, judging not only from the immaculate white-and-black antiseptic look of it and the heft of it — the text comes to 240 pages — but also, obviously, from the read of it. At one level POST-DEPRAVITY is a page turner (literally) and at another a […]

‘An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza’

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The brutality of the Israelis in its savage response to Hamas rocket attacks has been documented in photographs so horrendous I can’t bear to look at them. Listening to “An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza” — as read by Alan Cox in a recent radio broadcast on the KPFA program Cover to […]

‘Killing Kit’ to Be Staged in London Try Out

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Heathcote Williams’s first new play in many years is to open Sept. 21 at The Cockpit, where it received a reading last February. The company advertises itself as a radical fringe “theatre of disruptive panache, angry critique and useful, progressive ideas for the future.” “Killing Kit” traces “the volcanic life and mysterious death of Christopher […]

Cold Turkey Press Does a Nelson Algren Fight Card

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I was having such a great time re-reading one of Nelson Algren’s “lesser” books — Who Lost An American? — that I scanned a little excerpt from the second story, “Down With All Hands,” and sent it to Gerard Bellaart. It struck a nerve. He sent back one of his choice Cold Turkey cards. In […]

‘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.

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

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