I don’t know why it took the archeologists to tell us that the Roman emperor Caligula was a maniac. Anyone who’s seen John Hurt’s Caligula in the 1975 British television series “I, Claudius” would have guessed. It was on cable again last week. If you haven’t read the Robert Graves novel that series was based on, or the sequel […]
LET’S GET SERIOUS
A critic’s value is not determined by whether he/she’s right or wrong but whether he/she’s a good read. That’s one reason Martin Bernheimer is my favorite classical music connoisseur. (He’s right most of the time, too.) His review in the Financial Times of Fabio Biondi conducting an obscure Scarlati oratorio is the sort of classical-music […]
DRUM ROLL PLEASE . . .
!['The Juice' [msnbc.com]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/the-juice-msnbc.com-enh-365-200x200.jpg)
The last time I looked, oh, about a month ago, this column was called The Juice. I wrote it for over a year at MSNBC.com, where (my staff of thousands reminds me) it was that Website’s most popular daily Weblog. (In the age of cyberspace, where visibility counts more than ever and mediagiants aim to monopolize the Web, a bit of independence at […]
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. […]