or ‘Off With Their Heads’ . . . from ‘An Investigative Poem’ by Heathcote Williams” (for those disgusted by the nauseating glorification of the House of Windsor).
Heathcote Williams
Uncensored, ‘Advertisement’ for a Supermarket
![Heathcote Williams [Photo: JH, 2013]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/heathcote-williams-photo-copy-200x200.png)
‘The people who run Tesco must be Buddhists / You go in there and things are exactly as they should be / There is nothing that you could possibly want / Bits of telepathic animals neatly shrouded in heat-raised polystyrene / With Magic-Maker gravestones. / Dyed tomato mulch slobbering to itself in lead-lined tubular coffins, / Zilched by monosodium glutomate.’ — Heathcote Williams
Of Plumbers and Philosophers
Some old proto-Freudian
out of the German Yellow Pages
is looking up at me
from the kitchen floor
where he’s installing a new P-trap
under my kitchen sink,
telling me about how things are
and how they used to be . . .
Is a Poem Ever Finished?
It took Matthew Arnold 12 years to finish “Early Death and Fame,” which was first published in Fraser’s Magazine, in May 1855, and went through several changes until, in 1867, it found its final form. The changes were small. Were they fussy? I think not.
Tabloid Photographer + Rock Star + White Supremacy
“SHOOTER: A Fragment” is just out from Moloko Print in its new chapbook series. It begins: “Jerry Crane did not believe in perfection any more than he believed in his real name. If he had, he would never have worked as a shooter for the tabloids. Crane was born Jiri Kiranek, a truth-telling fabulist, tall and lean, a refugee from wealth and privilege. In his younger days he was often high speed, always riffing, full of imagination, his bitter humor tinged with sardonic taunts. Now not quite in middle age, he still had a facile street-smart intellect. He told ambling, long-limbed tales. It was a peculiar form of truth-telling.”
Independent Filmmaker, Principled Artist
Kenneth Anger held to his vision over a lifetime and, just as important, to his convictions.
Jörg Fauser: Outsider Among Outsiders
Lou Schneider liked his manuscript of ‘Stamboul Blues’ and got him started as a published writer. It was the cold junky eye, the alienation and disillusionment, the unemphatic humor—acid but deadpan—that appealed to Schneider, though perhaps I’m projecting what appeals to me.
A New Chapbook Series
Coming from Moloko Plus, This Is One of Them
‘Shall we / be lighthearted / to ward off / the shitstorm? / Tra-la la-la. / Or shall we / bite our elbows / to the bone? / Tra-la.
A Life as Yet Unfinished
“The leg is dead,” she says
and drags the left behind,
while the best of her —
impassioned lips and eyes —
gathers for the burial.
American Presidents
A Dirge for Their ‘Greatest’ Racist Hits
“One shocking, grotesque, and racist revelation after another reveals a history of the bigotry of American presidents and how complicit they were in legitimizing American racism.” — Randy Burman
Counter Culture Chronicles
Retro vinyl is a thing. But retro cassette? Does anyone still have or use a cassette player? Apparently some do. René van der Voort has produced more than 100 cassettes by a wide range of poets, writers, and artists. His label, Counter Culture Chronicles, lists audio performances by Aram Saroyan, Charles Plymell, Jürgen Ploog, Stuart Perkoff, Allen Ginsberg, Nanao Sakaki, Angus MacLise, Ed Dorn, Ken Kesey, Joel Oppenheimer, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Ted Berrigan, Peter Orlovsky, Gerd Stern, Ira Cohen, Michael McClure, Fielding Dawson, Steve Dalachinsky, Neeli Cherkovski, Ed Dorn, and ruth weiss. My own cassette has just been released. The recording runs for 30 minutes.
‘Burning Boris’ by David Erdos
Poem 6 from ‘The Bastards Charter’
Making an Impact on Elections
Listen to a podcast about Students for Justice. Its activist co-directors speak about what the nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization does and how it works. The program was founded in May 2020 to meet two urgent needs—the need to fight voter suppression and apathy, and the need to engage young people in the electoral process.
Essential Viewing
Jeffrey Sachs on Covid, Climate Change, Globalization, Oil, Ukraine, Russia, China, Taiwan, and South America
Speaking from deep experience and extensive scholarship, he excoriates American policies and leadership, and NATO’s.
Celebrating William Wyler
His Hometown in Alsace Puts on a Hollywood Show
Wyler was Laurence Olivier’s mentor, the love of Bette Davis’s life, John Huston’s best friend, Audrey Hepburn’s inspiring taskmaster, and Barbra Streisand’s father figure. His major motion pictures were touchstones for an entire generation. He guided more actors to Academy Awards than any other director. He also won three Oscars himself. “Olivier once told me he learned more about film acting from Wyler than from any other director; I can say the same,” Terence Stamp recalled in my Wyler biography “A Talent for Trouble.” Despite his reputation as a demanding director who sometimes drove actors to tears, he was a beguiling personality in private.
A Body of Work: ‘He could hear it breathing’
The pulse of Cold Turkey Press depends on a publisher* who maintains that well-made limited editions can be more influential than widely disseminated mainstream publications. But it also depends on the dissident poets and artists like Malcolm Ritchie, the late Heathcote Williams, Mark Terrill, the late Thomas Brasch, Jay Jeff Jones, David Erdos, William ‘Cody’ Maher, and others whose work he has chosen to publish.
On Ambition: From Nixon to Keats to Elvis, from Little Richard to Samuel Johnson, from Moses to Hannibal, Lenin to Alexander the Great, Spinoza to Ghandi to Albert Camus
I know of no writer who covers as much territory with as much lighthearted intelligence as A. Robert Lee. Here he is on the subject of ambition in his latest book, OUTSIDE IN: Hinges and Swivels, just out from Time is an Ocean Publications. — jh