Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

VDRSVP #3 for Old Times’ Sake

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Someone told me he knew what RSVP stands for. But what did VDRSVP mean? “Black humor,” I said. No point giving away the joke. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Damning Account of ‘Rough Justice’ at Guantanamo

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Jess Bravin has a new book out, The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, just published by Yale University Press. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a damning, brave book by an author who is legitimately outraged by what he uncovered.” Here’s an excerpt from the Prologue: November 24, 2001. Around Noon. Checkpoints were common as […]

In Bone Hebrew, the White Kaffir Speaks

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A long-awaited copy of Bone Hebrew from Cold Turkey Press showed up in my mailbox. The title is taken from Paul Celan. The cover is by Antonin Artaud. The poems are by Sinclair Beiles. Here are two of them: Asphyxiation They tried every kind of gas on him. none of them would work. nothing would […]

‘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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

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 […]

Petition to Stop Warhol Exhibit at the Nat’l Arts Club

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Boris Lurie, who died in 2008, was a Holocaust surivor and one of the founders of a radical art protest movement known as NO!art. I’ve blogged about him before. His close friends Clayton Patterson and Dietmar Kirves are sending around a petition to halt an exhibition of Warhol works that opened last week at the […]

In Iowa, ‘The Subversive Culture of Collage and Zines’

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The running head on these two pages of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up text “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin” reads: “if you are gay I am right seconds with Karate you are wrong you are he kicks him into 1914 movie.” The spread appeared in an exhibition, “Liberated Images,” at the University of Iowa […]

Teaming Burroughs & Mustill for Thanksgiving

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A Straight Up tradition continues. But this year William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day are posted with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. That completes the package. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through […]

‘The Lord of the Drones and the White House Fly’

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My staff of thousands reminds me there’s an election coming up in the U.S. of A. For all the voters going to the polls, here’s a poem to cheer them on by the British poet Heathcote Williams. Part two … enter the realm of litrichur, narrated and montaged by Alan Cox. And here’s part three, […]

The Not-So-Perfect Storm

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Ecuador contends that the British Foreign Office has yet to renounce a threat to storm its embassy in London, where Julian Assange has taken refuge from British authorities. So says The Guardian. A British court has ordered the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition to Sweden to face questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct, although no formal charges […]

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