!['American Porn' by Heathcote Williams [Thin Man Press, 2017]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/American-Porn-by-Heathcote-Williams-Thin-Man-Press-2017400-200x200.jpg)
To mark the moment, a Straight Up tradition continues. From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands … thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . […]
Nuttall’s ‘Bomb Culture’ Is Back
When I first read Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, I saw the title two ways — descriptive and prescriptive — “bomb culture” (the kind that made nuclear annihilation possible) and “bomb the culture” (a call for revolution). A half-century later I still see it that way. Far from being bound by its time, Nuttall’s 1968 investigation […]
A Centenary of Mass Butchery . . .
. . . marking the end of the war to end all wars. From The Limping Messenger: Away with the glorification of the battlefield, the courage of soldiers, and how we are indebted to their futile sacrifice for whatever honoured the pride of nations . . . Speak rather about those who refused to be […]
Missing from the Warhol Retrospective
The historic Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum is “the biggest in almost 30 years.” And it is being swooned over with raves like Peter Schjeldahl’s in the current New Yorker, or as the headline puts it on an Artsy review by Darren Jones, You May Think You Know Warhol–but His Whitney Retrospective Holds Surprises. […]
‘Steps Toward the Invisible’
Take a look at Edward O’Donnelly’s stunningly beautiful short film made with and about the poet Malcolm Ritchie on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Click the image for a video of the film.
Dick Higgins’ Writings Are Back
A new book by Dick Higgins? Posthumous, of course. He died 20 years ago, unexpectedly, his life cut short by a heart attack at age 6o. It was a terrible shock to all of us who knew him. The book — Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins — is […]
An Evolution of ‘Other Means’
!['Immense Stone' [ca. mid-1960s]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Gary-Lee-Nova-IMMENSE-STONE-365-200x200.jpg)
Speaking of drawing by other means, Gary Lee-Nova messages that “after first encountering things like Fuzz Against Junk,” he discovered Max Ernst’s collage novels, and in that neo-Victorian mode created his own collages during the mid- to late-1960s. Among his “very first” was “Immense Stone” (below). Another was “Detecting the Forgery” (left), which was later […]
Drawing by Other Means
Ladies and Gentleman — On the left, we have a collage by Max Ernst from Une semaine de bonté, a surrealist graphic novel published in 1934. Ernst reportedly made the entire book of collages in three weeks. A few of his sources were identified as illustrations from an 1883 novel by Jules Mary, Les damnées […]
Tax Cheat Circus King
A poem received from an unnamed source with an illustration from the NY Times. America’s top shitholer goes whole hog at the public trough, and never mind the rest of us, because that is the hog’s nature. A silly grin when he licks his lips, a scowl like a lout’s mustache— the toadstool dick, the […]
‘A Whole New Order of Hidden’
A few excerpts from “Wooden Ships” by Malcolm Mc Neill that struck my indefatiguable staff of thousands, courtesy of IT: International Times, the Newspaper of Resistance: “The disclosure has begun of what was hidden from the first creation of the world,” wrote Peter Martyr when Columbus got back from his voyages. The creation of the […]
Long Before Cambridge Analytica, the Future Leaked Out
!['CUT UP OR SHUT UP' by Jan Herman, Carl Weissner, and Jürgen Ploog (with tickertape by William S. Burroughs), published by Agenztia [Paris, 1972].](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/1-CUT-UP-OR-SHUT-UP-Chapter-4-1-JH-cropped-750enh-200x200.jpg)
Specialists. There is no record of the long colloquies which took place between the founding fathers of CrossRoads Publishing, nor the long dreamy nights of investigation which must have preceded their collective action. We have only hearsay. But we suspect they first set up in London and it was not a particularly impressive address . […]
Weapons of Choice: Mustill’s MESSKIT
“Mess kit” is defined as “a portable set of usually metal cooking and eating utensils, used especially by soldiers and campers.” For Norman O. Mustill, America’s “messkit” consisted of silent weapons, play money, dancing the two-step, and industry in art. During the Vietnam War, when MESSKIT was published, that meant flamethrowers, napalm, Agent Orange, billions […]
#MeToo: ‘The No Holes Bard’
A bit of bawdy verse-and-drawing by Heathcote Williams. With thanks to Jay Jeff Jones, who sent it along. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Documentary Spotlight at NY Film Fest
A newly restored print of William Wyler’s World War II air-combat documentary The Memphis Belle and Erik Nelson’s new documentary The Cold Blue (created from recently discovered raw footage shot during the filming of Memphis Belle) are to be featured in screenings at the 56th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, accompanied by interviews […]
She Knows the Nuances of No
Hanne Lippard updates Molly Bloom. Audio kicks in at 1:23 on the video track. Wait for it. Some on the staff here call it a #MeToo moment before its time. Maybe. But whatever it is, prick up your ears. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Where Haughty Celia Sits
This poem was spurred by email exchanges among Liliane Lijn, Gerard Bellaart, and myself. It takes phrases from them and from the three sources noted below. The impulse to compose it arose from this blogpost. MUSE In the sawdust heart of a puppet world, where haughty Celia ingloriously sits, her failed prophecy is buried by […]
Valedictory in a Taxi Cruising Slowly
“Here are Sinclair’s ‘Last Words,’ written in Paris long before he would have been aware of any pressing need to devise a valedictory.” — HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS, from a tribute to Sinclair Beiles, in BONE HEBREW, a collection of Beiles’s writings published in 2013, in a limited edition, by Cold Turkey Press. Let me utter my […]