Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

‘American Porn’ for Inauguration Day

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On the day Twitter Fingers is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of “investigative poems about American history, culture and politics” by Heathcote Williams. The […]

Meryl Streep’s Truth to Power

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Her remarks ran for four minutes, 55 seconds. At two minutes in, she said this: There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended […]

Now a Country Named for Him

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When Twitter Fingers takes the oath of office, we will have official confirmation that we are now living in the United States of Trumpistan. So add it to the list. Whoever coined the term “Trumpistan” deserves attribution in the O.E.D. The earliest reference I can find is from eight years ago — Jan. 10, 2009, […]

The Right Idea: An Illuminating Essay

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The editors of The New York Times Book Review asked “some notably avid readers — who also happen to be poets, musicians, diplomats, filmmakers, novelists, actors, and artists –” to name the books they read this year. About 50 answered the call, listing what must be several hundred titles. I noticed that not one of […]

Trump’s America

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Here’s to the end of a lousy year, with no apologies for our tinkered layout: EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Horse’s Mouth Changes His Tune

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Or maybe I was hearing the wrong tune when I went to listen to what the horse’s mouth had to say at the Council on Foreign Depredations. At the time, last January, I wrote “to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane.” At one point, speaking of Putin, he said that unlike Bush, who claimed […]

Love That Irish Brogue

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Are there any video promos for a play as inviting as this one for “The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal”? An exchange of comments: To my ears, Irish is the most beautiful English, an impression reaffirmed by three long bicycle trips through the West of Ireland. How did a country with half the population of […]

2016: Giving Thanks on Thanksgiving Day

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From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands … thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the […]

Why I’m Waiting for Asher’s Algren

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Having said in The Revenge of the Mediocre that both Bettina Drew and Mary Wisniewski fail to capture Nelson Algren’s personality in their biographies of him, I realize I didn’t mention something equally and, some would say, more important. Sure, they get his so-called skid-row lyricism, which Blake Bailey recently harped on, but that shortchanges […]

Going Cold Turkey (in Cyberspace)

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The computer screen has become a substitute for reality, dominating us not just by way of social media but — old news — by making artifacts like books on paper seem obsolete. I plead seriously guilty, witness this blogpost with its images and descriptions. A package that came in the mail with several new items […]

Trump Centaur

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An insult to pigs . . . “The Republican Party has become the most dangerous organization in world history.” — Noam Chomasky

The Revenge of the Mediocre . . .

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. . . upon the great is a risk that every biographer takes. Mary Wisniewski has taken it, and it defeats her. Old friends of Nelson Algren whom he later spurned, to say nothing of his enemies, get their chance to lay into him now, 35 years after his death, in her mistitled and pedestrian […]

Racism and the ‘Bigger Force’

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When I asked South African playwright Athol Fugard his opinion of race relations in the United States, he replied: Man! It’s not as easy to identify the enemy here, as it is back home, which makes the struggle vastly more complicated. At home the enemy is immediately identifiable — simply because of the institutionalization of […]

Where Black Lives Did Not Matter

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Headline: ‘A Tender Bond Confronts Racism. Racism Wins.’ One can only hope that headline does not apply to the outcome of today’s U.S. elections. In the many years I spent on Grub Street writing about the theater, Athol Fugard and the plays I saw of his stand out in memory for their eloquence and humanity. […]

He Spread Peace, Love, and Booze

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The “first scholarly comic art biography of the legendary John Chapman,” otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed, has arrived. A quick inspection reveals 112 ravishing pages that tell the true story of the man who became famous two centuries ago for “spreading the seeds of apple trees from Pennsylvania to Indiana.” To quote the publisher, Johnny […]

Tom Hayden: Gone But Not Forgotten

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Looking back: Mad Magazine + Tom Hayden = SDS. And before I forget. Meanwhile, the obits are pouring in for Hayden, who died yesterday. Here are three (with great photos) from The Washington Post; from The Huffington Post; from The New York Times. And here is a video of him speaking about the need to […]

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