Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

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 […]

The Dark Side of Boris Johnson

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Back in April, before the Brexit vote, Heathcote Williams wrote a merciless pamphlet, subtitled “A Study in Depravity,” about the most notorious cheerleader for the British exit from the European Union. Completely factual, replete with scores of footnotes, it was circulated to friends and then taken up by the London Review of Books, which republished […]

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 […]

Not Franzen’s Kind of Birding

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As told to me by Kurt Wold: One day Kurt came to dinner at the artist Norman O. Mustill’s house and noticed a birdcage. “Norm,” he said, “you have a bird!” He walked over to it and said, “Hi budgie, budgie.” To which a somewhat pathetic-looking, pale blue budgerigar grasped the bars of the cage, […]

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

Trump Wrestles for President

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A friend tipped me to this video. It’s no secret. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have seen it, but I hadn’t. My friend also sent along his comment: How could the man in this video be a presidential candidate? Our media has debased people with trash for half a century and has shaped what we […]

East-West Mash-Up, Hokusai Meets Wright

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Not many people know that Richard Wright, renowned for his 1940 novel Native Son, and his 1946 autobiography Black Boy, wrote thousands of haikus — about four thousand actually — all of them in France, in self-imposed exile from the United States, during the last 18 months of his life. Wright prepared 817 of them […]

A Piece of Zen Music Called ‘Pond’

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When I heard it for the first time, I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought of it as a demonstration of the trombonist’s virtuosity. Then I read the composers’ general description of the piece, explaining its origin, in 1976, and how it was composed. “Pond” was first performed in 1977 at the […]

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 […]

‘Dadaglobe’: Art for Dada’s Sake

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Although “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” at MoMA is a magnificent project of deep-dive reclamation, the catalogue that recreates Tristan Tzara’s never-realized Dadaglobe anthology also recreates the limitations of Tzara’s original concept. The catalogue is printed as he would have done it — in black and white. I prefer seeing the works submitted to him in their original […]

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 […]

A Music Theater Work in Progress

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Truth, or at least the effort to capture it, can be problematic. William Osborne and Abbie Conant have been working for several years on “Aletheia,” a music theater chamber piece for performance artist and digital piano. It feels like “forever,” he says. “The deeper we go the slower it reveals itself.” The ambition of the […]

A Lesson About ‘Fake Opposition’

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“The cult of Hitler’s personality set up a fake opposition between leader and party.” So says Neal Acherson in his review of Hitler: A Biography (Volume 1, Ascent 1889-1939) by Volker Ullrich. That idea as applied to Trump and the GOP leadership is worth taking seriously — it’s not nearly as alarmist as it sounds […]

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