Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Every Once in a While …

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… the Sunday Review section of The New York Times publishes a striking opinion piece. It’s a rarity because the section is consistently, even insistently dull. The piece is short, and it is clear from the way it ends on a note of biting but truth-telling sarcasm that the author, Paul Theroux, clearly does not […]

‘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 […]

In Case Facebook Is Watching

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AP Photographer Nick Ut’s famous Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War photo illustrating the terror of war was censored for nudity by Mark Zukerberg’s minions. Facebook deigned to restore the image to its site, but did not apologize. It issued instead a boilerplate claim that the image could have been mistaken for kiddie porn in some countries, […]

Leonard Weinglass, Our ‘Modern Clarence Darrow’

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Other defense attorneys may have been more famous — William Kunstler, for example — but radical leftists of a certain age remember the late Leonard Weinglass with special feeling. On the back cover of Seth Tobocman’s graphic biography Len, A Lawyer in History, the publisher’s description says (and I believe every word of it): “In […]

Still Counting . . .

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And here’s what your tax dollars could have paid for instead. Meanwhile, anybody who follows the news is familiar with the flight of Edward Snowden, who is arguably the most important whistleblower in American history for his massive leak of secret NSA documents. Even so, the Danish-made film “Chasing Edward Snowden” about the details of […]

Nuttall Show Comes With a Warning

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The John Rylands Library at The University of Manchester is close to launching “Off Beat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground,” a comprehensive exhibition of artworks, writings, correspondence, books, and little magazines produced by or associated with an “all-round genius” whose stunning countercultural career half a century ago is little remembered today. Jeff Nuttall was […]

Total Obscenity of the American Dream

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Heathcote Williams’s verse polemic delivered by Alan Cox. “Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton — A Foaming Sleazeball from Hell versus An Iron Lady, Hands Dripping with Blood” And now for the video: EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Rugged Norwegian Art Show by War Vets

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While traveling recently in Norway, I came across “Camouflage,” a group exhibition by military veterans of wars and other armed conflicts that doubled as a form of therapy. It was presented in Bergen, Norway’s second largest city, and was curated by Per Ruttledal with the assistance of Suellen Meidell and Robert Rodrigues. Meidell told me […]

Dubuffet’s ‘Welcome Parade’ on Park Ave.

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I was drifting down Park Avenue last night on my way to hear a talk on Buckminster Fuller by Jonathon Keats, when I came across Jean Dubuffet’s huge “Welcome Parade” of “pathetic monsters.” Both the piece and the placement — the sheer incongruity on that stretch of Manhattan pavement — made me smile. But whatever […]

Guilty As Charged? I Hope So

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A review of my book, The Z Collection: Portraits & Sketches, in the June 17 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, accuses me of “restrained élan.” My wife may beg to differ, but I plead guilty to the charge — happily. The TLS reviewer, Douglas Field, whose biographical study of James Baldwin, All Those Strangers, […]

Remembered Depths

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Ian Kershaw writes in a review of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, a newly published book by Nikolaus Wachsmann: Is it possible to say anything new about Nazi Germany? This is, after all, probably the most thoroughly researched period in modern history. … [C]an a major work that alters our perceptions and […]

Speaking of Politics: ‘A Study in Depravity’

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Pamphleteering in England goes back nearly 300 years, represented most famously by such 18th-century polemicists as Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, and in America by the British-born Thomas Paine. Even the poet John Milton was a pamphleteer. The tradition continues. Ken Livingstone, the former socialist mayor of London, was on his way to the University […]

Who Are the World’s Most Famous People?

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You’d be surprised. Martin Luther King, Jr. is the world’s best-known American, followed by — are you ready? — Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, and Ben Franklin. Those are the top five. How do I know this? And on what basis? I checked Pantheon 1.0 at the MIT Media Lab, which did the elaborate […]

Three Centennial Parties for Harold Norse

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Harold Norse, the late poet and memoirist, desperately wanted his name in lights. Now he has it — thanks to Todd Swindell. Swindell’s assiduous effort to memorialize him goes beyond dedicated. He has not only created a posthumous website for him and edited a posthumous collection of selected poems, I Am Going to Fly Through […]

Looking Back at Cuba (continued) …

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Previously … Now you can fly to Havana direct from the U.S. without having to be part of a licensed group. You can even use credit cards in places equipped to handle them. Of course prices for tourists are higher than in 2002. But I’d bet that Cuban salaries aren’t. This was the first of […]

Looking Back at Cuba

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So much is being made of the U.S.-Cuba raprochement and the arrival in Havana of cruise ships filled with tourists that I took a look at an old series of mine, part reportage and part travelogue, from 2002. I haven’t been back to Cuba since then. Fidel has retired from actively running the show. He’s […]

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