Straight Up | Jan Herman

By Jan Herman Awful news has arrived: The remarkable originator of Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project, someone whose good works were beyond admiration, is dead. His close friend, Jenifer Howard, writes, “It is with the heaviest heart that I let you know that a terrible accident claimed the life of our friend, David Jiranek, on Saturday […]

New Yorkers got a taste of what William Sydney Porter meant when he called their town Baghdad-on-the-Hudson. “There’s more poetry in a block of New York,” said Porter, otherwise known as O. Henry, “than in 20 daisied lanes.” Last night during the great Northeastern blackout of ’03, he could have said “than in all the […]

It had to happen. Somebody feels put out that this column has dared to invade the sacrosanct precinct of the arts with an alien subject: political opinion. I quote from a message sent yesterday to ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan:  “Can you explain what exactly Jan Herman [is] writing about? Are you no longer running an […]

Putting it to Arnold, Slate reminds us of his inflated, risk-averse business reputation. Writer Daniel Gross recalls the bankrupt wreckage of Planet Hollywood and what a “glory hog” our celebrity of the people was as that ’90s restaurant chain went belly up. Arnold never had to put up a dime. (That was lucky, not smart.) All he […]

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 […]

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 […]