Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Boris Lurie’s ‘NO!art’ Mounted in Berlin

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NO COMPROMISES! | The Art of Boris Lurie at the Jewish Museum Berlin looks like a major, absolutely must-see show. But the title reminds me of a huge compromise at the heart of it. Lurie, a Holocaust survivor, lived in New York like a pauper. But when he died he left about $80 million. He’d […]

MoMA’s Hidden ‘Electro-Library’ Show

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It’s only a couple of vitrines, and they seem like overflow storage — as though they’ve been placed out of the way in the downstairs mezzanine of the Museum of Modern Art’s education building on 54th Street. But the slide show for THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY: European Avant-Garde Magazines from the 1920s is magnificent. In visual richness, […]

Legally, Is Trump a ‘Poxy-Arsed Whore’?

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And is it libellous to say so? I ask because a friend recalls this medieval definition of libel from his days as a law student at Oxford: Ye may say that a woman be a whore and that be not libellous. Ye may say that a woman be poxy-arsed and that be not libellous. But […]

Diderot Had the Right Idea

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“…neither the white silences / of Beckett, nor the black … / Grace & good nature / like a transparent forest / rooted in facts, / thoughts like crickets / in dry August grass. / Not to climb the ladder, / not to cling or sneer, but / to be invisible. / Though poor 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 […]

‘Donald Trump Is a Work of Fiction’

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The trouble is, “fiction has to make sense,” as Tom Clancy and others have said. Observe the celebrity known as Donald Trump saunter onto the stage at Boca Raton, twenty minutes after his helicopter swoops in. The slow and ponderous walk, the extended chin, the pursed mouth, the slowly swiveling head, the exaggerated look of […]

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 […]

Le Vent Macabre

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Note to Henri Lefebvre: A long-track F2 tornado on Sept. 16, 2015, destroyed the home of two of my friends. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]

Mc Neill & Burroughs: Art Meets Occult

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Hieronymous Bosch has nothing on Malcolm Mc Neill. And that’s not even counting the underlying theories Mc Neill has about time travel, biological mutation, and evolutionary transition that he and William Burroughs worked on together in Ah Pook Is Here, a failed word-and-image collaboration that led nearly 40 years later to Mc Neill’s memoir Observed […]

MoMA to Mount Tzara’s Magnum Opus

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Samy Rosenstock’s idea for a great big book is getting a great big show nearly 100 years later. Dadaglobe Reconstructed reunites over 100 works created for Dadaglobe, Tristan Tzara’s planned but unrealized magnum opus, originally slated for publication in 1921. An ambitious anthology that aimed to document Dada’s international activities, Dadaglobe was not merely a […]

Oy Feckin’ Vey! My Grub Street

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There I was, feigning interest. It was my job. Readers wanted to know all about their movie stars, or at least about my encounters with them. From A-listers and B-listers right down to Z-listers. The whole stupid Hollywood alphabet top to bottom. Names like this one to be forgotten as quickly as my own. They […]

‘The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft’

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I’ve discovered that my recent blogpost, An Experiment in Reading, doesn’t work on mobile devices. The gizmo that embeds the book (to let you turn the pages) gets hung up. So here’s a static presentation of George Gissing’s preface. There’s more, of course. But I’ll leave it there. You may have guessed that The Private […]

Where Have You Gone, Jackie Robinson?

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Pianist Kathleen Supové is to perform “Achilles Dreams Of Ebbets Field” by Dylan Mattingly in a world premiere at the Di Menna Center for Classical Music in New York. The Brooklyn Dodgers will be there in memory only. A massive, visionary piece in 24 parts, the solo piano work deals with heroism, passion, loss, grief, […]

Back to Reality: Torma on Michelangelo’s Art

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“Colossal as his works were, he saw them still too much as garlands and sought some immoderation wherewith to botch them. He was so successful that he left everything unfinished. Never push things.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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