Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

‘The Green Man Is a Green Terrorist’

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My blog staff of thousands didn’t have to do much to persuade me that Heathcote Williams’s newest dissident poem, a rhymed marvel of CAT-scan clarity, will be seen one day as a YouTube classic. Here are the opening lines transcribed from the video in four-line stanzas: Tangled vegetation sprouts from each orifice From his mouth, […]

Selling the Earth … ‘No Return, No Exchange’

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A poem by Heathcote Williams, narration and montage by Alan Cox. The print edition of Selling the Earth is coming soon from Cold Turkey Press. The poem begins: After someone had sold their virginity on the Internet And made a hundred thousand pounds, Another entrepreneur would decide that he’d try To put Planet Earth itself […]

Way Ahead of My Time in 1969

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Where would the blogworld be without blogger self-promotion? So indulge me. Anneke Auer, webmaster for Rotterdam-based Sea Urchin Editions, has designed a classy presentation of General Municipal Election, a “collectible” action-art book of mine. I published it in San Francisco way back in ’69 under the Nova Broadcast imprint. Ben Schot, the artist who founded […]

Carl Weissner, Cherished by Friends & Colleagues

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It was a year ago today that I began posting tributes to Carl Weissner (1940-2012), whose unexpected death last January came as a shock. My own words went up with a photo and funeral announcement by the filmmaker Signe Mähler, another of his friends. The poet and performance artist William Cody Maher, the journalist and […]

Algren on Learning to Write by Way of Academia

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I noticed an ad in the current issue of The New Yorker for the Yale Writers’ Conference to be held this coming June. Since a bunch of us have been talking about Nelson Algren, the ad couldn’t help reminding me of his essay “Hand in Hand Through the Greenery,” published in The Last Carousel back […]

The Algren I Knew Was No Loser

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Taking nothing away from the brilliance of Colin Asher’s biographical essay on Nelson Algren, or my admiration for it, I have a mild but serious objection. I intended to post this earlier but didnt have the time. Now I do. The subhead on the essay calls Algren “the type of loser this country just can’t […]

Algren Gets What He Deserves from Colin Asher

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I’m happy to report that Colin Asher’s smart biographical essay on Nelson Algren in The Believer is the best I’ve ever read. I’m also glad I made an unacknowledged contribution, one nearly verbatim. Though small, it reminds me that words have a life of their own, regardless of who wrote them. Postscript: I finally found […]

VDRSVP #2 for Old Times’ Sake

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Now that my venereal staff of thousands has managed to get its shabby act together for VDRSVP #1, I’ll be posting info about the contents of this issue as soon as possible. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Harry Patch: Anti War Hero’

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If journalism is the first draft of history, Heathcote Williams’s poetry is the CAT scan. Text by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

VDRSVP #1 for Old Times’ Sake

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I’ll be posting info about the contents as soon as my venereal staff of thousands manages to get its shabby act together. But first things first: What a great title. Second things first: VDRSVP #2 and #3 are coming too. Postscript: Jan. 9 — The staff finally woke up. Here are the contents of VDRSVP […]

La Môme et de Rouge

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Date: April 26, 2012 11:43:35 AM GMT+02:00 Had a message from Marianne Faithfull . . .. . . ‘Isn’t it time you wrote me another song?’ I said ‘What do you want it to be about?’she said she’d been reading a book about Edith Piaf and was gripped by it.I said I’d have a look. […]

Fresh From My Hot Little Paws

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A review posted at RealityStudio of Malcolm Mc Neill’s spellbinding memoir, Observed While Falling, recently published by Fantagraphics Books, about his relationship with William S. Burroughs and their artistic collaboration. Mc Neill is an artist who can write. Really write. He brings a fresh analytical eye to the familiar Burroughsian fixations — synchronicity and doppelgangers, […]

‘Shelley at Oxford,’ a Timely Polemic for Christmas

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Written by Heathcote Williams, montaged and narrated by Alan Cox, it has just arrived on YouTube and begins like this … In Oxford High Street, in 1810, Slatter & Munday’s Bookshop Had a large, bow-fronted window For displaying their latest wares. Aged 19, Shelley flooded it with a pamphlet On ‘The Necessity Of Atheism’. Which […]

Who Is Heathcote Williams? Not for Sale, That’s Who

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“He is one of a few of genius who did not sell out and who peaks in (relative) old age. That’s quite something nowadays.” — Gerard Bellaart +++ “Fame is the first disgrace because God knows who you are.” — Heathcote Williams, “The Local Stigmatic” +++ The videos comprise Parts 1 and 2 of a […]

More Dissident Literature from Cold Turkey Press

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The title of Heathcote Williams’s poem puts it country simple. You can’t get more direct than “The United States of Porn.” The poem, which runs to 208 lines, nearly all based on facts, is part of a portfolio called American Porn. It was published in 2011 in a beautifully produced first edition of 36 copies […]

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