“Watchmen,” the movie, caused a stir at the box office when its opening weekend nabbed $55 million, the highest opening gross of the year and third-highest March opening ever. It’s a shame that none of the money will trickle down to the artist Malcolm Mc Neill, whose image of the Mayan Death God (right) in […]
Studs Terkel, R.I.P.
![Studs Terkel [from 'The End Is Nothing. The Road Is All.']](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/studs-370-e1429549595620.jpg)
Oh shit. Studs Terkel has died. He was 96. He was the blackest white man I ever met. Blacker even than his lifelong friend the novelist Nelson Algren, another black man who happened to be born white. Anyway, here’s what several former Chicago Sun-Times colleagues of mine had to say. Roger Ebert: “Was he the […]
HANGING IN WITH GEORGE
By Jan Herman When 1984 came around smack in the middle of the rose-tinted Reagan era, many in the commentariat had a field day noting that George Orwell, for all his genius, had overstated his case. The future he’d warned of in “1984” simply hadn’t come to pass. Yeah, right. Thinking of Bill Moyers this morning, it occurred […]
STONE GETS TOUGH ON FIDEL
by JAN HERMAN Oliver Stone’s “Looking for Fidel,” to premiere Wednesday on HBO, is called the follow-up in tough mode to “Commandante,” his previous softball portrait of the Cuban leader. This time, instead of tossing bouqets at Castro in a loving (some said fawning) approach to El Commandante, Stone reportedly confronts him about his vicious […]
My Checkered Career
I’ve been a staff writer covering arts and culture at the Los Angeles Times, a reporter and movie reviewer at The Daily News in New York, a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, a senior editor/producer and the theater critic for MSNBC.com, and a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. […]