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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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