Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Black Eye Porn

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“Normally The Guardian publishes all of Rowson’s cartoons, but I don’t think this one. He mailed it to Heathcote who forwarded it to me. Heathcote wrote the lines when I asked him.” — Gerard Bellaart, editor/publisher Cold Turkey Press I think of H.W.’s stanza in the mode of G.G. Belli’s 19th-century Roman sonnets, which were […]

From a Secret Location

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Once upon a time hundreds of editors, mainly poets, and all manner of bohemian riffraff took to their mimeo machines. They produced an avalanche of little magazines, lovingly collected by Granary Books as a wonder of the age. This literary avalanche was documented in “A Secret Location on the Lower East Side,” a 1996 exhibition […]

A Man With Moxie Plus

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When Asger Jorn heard that he’d been awarded a Guggie, he told them to fuck off. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Wonders Never Cease

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EPITAPH FOR MY TYPEWRITER I’ve learned to keep cheerful by committing all my suicides on the typewriter. A shot into the keyboard’s brain equals one p o + e m THE UNIVERSAL BUBBLE* The Universe — more like a great thought than a great machine — a soap bubble with corrugations — not the interior […]

They Had Their Own Fun

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Back in the mid-1960s, when Carl Weissner discovered the British mimeo zine My Own Mag, he struck up a correspondence with its presiding genius, Jeff Nuttall, and soon took My Own Mag as a model for his own mimeo, Klactoveedsedsteen. The two of them became pen pals and freewheeling collaborators — Nuttall in Norwich, Weissner […]

Filth Is Good for Something

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This blog has been called a breeding ground for filth. If it were true, I would have no objection. A bit of filth is good for the health of any writer and for any of his readers. Where’s the proof? Frank Harris, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Iceberg Slim, and the Marquis de Sade. […]

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, […]

This Dog Has the Right Idea

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My tireless staff of thousands sent a one-minute video. Banksy doesn’t do it better. The little flourish at the end is priceless. And for your further diversion, catch this: The Statue of Liberty’s Burka. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

The Gilded Toad & Social Corrosion

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Poem by Heathcote Williams Video Montage and Narration by Alan Cox • From IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance • EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Picturing the President

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Insect brain, cold-blooded eye, bared teeth of a human predator. The total obscenity of the American Dream Comes to fruition in Donald John Trump … — Heathcote Williams, from a poem in American Porn The collage was published in 2016 by Verlag Peter Engstler in Paulus Böhmer das es Euch gibt: Collagen, a collection of […]

‘American Porn’ for Inauguration Day

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On the day Twitter Fingers is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of “investigative poems about American history, culture and politics” by Heathcote Williams. The […]

Meryl Streep’s Truth to Power

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Her remarks ran for four minutes, 55 seconds. At two minutes in, she said this: There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended […]

Bookstores in Their Anecdotage

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Garrison Keillor, who owns a bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, called Common Good Books, writes in a foreword to FOOTNOTES* from the WORLD’S GREAT BOOKSTORES: *True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers that “the little independent bookstore is dying out, they say. Too bad. Someday mine will, too.” The author […]

Going Cold Turkey (in Cyberspace)

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The computer screen has become a substitute for reality, dominating us not just by way of social media but — old news — by making artifacts like books on paper seem obsolete. I plead seriously guilty, witness this blogpost with its images and descriptions. A package that came in the mail with several new items […]

Trump Centaur

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An insult to pigs . . . “The Republican Party has become the most dangerous organization in world history.” — Noam Chomasky

He Spread Peace, Love, and Booze

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The “first scholarly comic art biography of the legendary John Chapman,” otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed, has arrived. A quick inspection reveals 112 ravishing pages that tell the true story of the man who became famous two centuries ago for “spreading the seeds of apple trees from Pennsylvania to Indiana.” To quote the publisher, Johnny […]

‘Street Gangs of the Lower East Side’

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It’s rare that the tireless staff of thousands agrees to post a guest review. But there are exceptions. Review by Jerome Sala The Street Gangs of the Lower East Side offers a provocative eyewitness history of gang culture in the context of the whole diverse, eccentric and sometimes revolutionary LES scene of the ’70s through […]

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