Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Archives for August 2014

‘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 […]

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