Arts Reviews

It is an article of fashionable faith that genetic differences in sex are meaningless and malleable, but genetic differences in race are so profound and meaningful that they must not be tinkered with at all, even though race, we are told, is a ‘social construct’. Hence it is positively progressive to sneak a cheeky penis into a women’s changing room, providing the penis is attached to a ‘trans woman’. But it was despicably racist of the disgraced professor Jessica Krug, who was born white and Jewish, to have masqueraded as a woman of color.The gaps in this logic are so big that you could drive a bus through them, whether you’re sitting at the back or the front.

The MTV Video Music Awards took place last night all around New York City. The show was originally going to take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn but instead was held at locations throughout the city. NYC remains in a very tenuous position post-lockdown. Our restaurants are only allowed to offer outdoor seating and must close at 11 p.m. You cannot go out for drinks, unless you order food as well. Gyms are closed. Movie theaters are closed.  Our schools may not reopen. Funerals must be limited to close family only. Live concerts, even outside, are not allowed. If a bar or restaurant offers live music they are not allowed to charge a cover. The music must be incidental to the dining experience. The city is in crisis.

Gloria Steinem is back in the news. Steinem, now 86, attacked the recent FX network miniseries Mrs America in a series of high-profile interviews. Yet Steinem’s criticisms reveal much more about her and how her extreme radicalism has harmed the women’s movement than they do about the miniseries. What are her complaints about the show? Steinem objects to its focus on anti-ERA campaigner Phyllis Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett, and she accuses Mrs America of distorting the history behind the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). According to Steinem, Schlafly ‘never changed one vote’ and the miniseries is ‘hopelessly wrong’ in suggesting that she did.

In Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, an early over-the-top indicator of future Earth’s stupidity is the number-one movie in the country: eight-time Oscar winner Ass, which is nothing but 90 minutes of its title proudly displayed.It turns out, though, that Judge’s vision of the future was not over-the-top at all. In fact, it was shockingly tame. Idiocracy took place in 2505, but Ass only took until 2020.The most popular song in America right now is Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’. The title is short for ‘wet ass pussy’, and the lyrics get even less Shakespearean from there. The song is accompanied by a big-budget, hyper-sexualized music video that has already been viewed on YouTube close to 100 million times in five days.

It’s quite rare for Republicans to get a starring role in the entertainment industry, let alone on an HBO production. The Swamp, a new documentary, is a fascinating exception.The documentary mainly focuses on the bipartisan effort to stop corruption in DC through reforms on issues like party leadership influence, campaign spending, lobbying and executive war power. HBO tells this story mainly through the lenses of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who have their own respective attempts at bipartisan legislative reforms during a partisan impeachment impeachment. But Cockburn wasn’t that taken with the public policy. There are too many humorous moments in the documentary to focus on such tedium. Here are the real highlights.

In September 2017, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker founder David Lowery sent me an email. Was I interested in turning Camper’s album New Roman Times, into a novel? The album’s central theme was what David saw as an ever-deepening divide in this country, fomented by the media. It was recorded in 2003, partly as a reaction to the Iraq war, but it largely predicted what happened between then and now.The album is set in an alternate version of America during a period of conflict. Instead of a country with 50 states, it’s a continent made up of several countries. The biggest are the left-leaning Republic of California and the right-leaning Christian Republic of Texas. As I began the novel, we were nine months after Trump’s election, and a year into Brexit.

The fight for equality in America has been long and hard-fought. Sometimes a multi-generational upheaval has been required to undo old notions and myths. But there have been a few times when a new process enabled these changes to happen almost overnight. In the world of classical music, no change was more consequential than the instituting of blind auditions, whereby the musician auditioning for a position is behind a screen, and the only thing a panel can adjudicate is the sound of music.How do we know this was so successful? Because even self-proclaimed bigots found themselves choosing differently, in spite of themselves. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes how in 1980, Abbie Conant won a position as principal trombone with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.

Olivia de Havilland, who has passed aged 104, will forever be remembered for the role of Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind, a performance that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nod from the Academy. She would go on to star in acclaimed romantic dramas like To Each His Own and The Heiress, both of which brought her Oscars for Best Actress, but to fans of classic movies she will always be Scarlett O’Hara's sickly cousin, love rival but ultimate ally. She was cinema’s quintessential southern belle: genteel on the surface, steel underneath. Less well known is that de Havilland was a lively anti-communist and worked to expose and counter the influence of Soviet sympathizers in Hollywood.

It was June 2015. Bill Maher was holding court with assorted journalists to discuss the 2016 race. The Republican field back then was attracting all kinds of ridiculous monikers — it was apparently the most plausible, most qualified field in history. Maher asked Ann Coulter who had the best chance in the general election. She didn’t say John Kasich. She didn’t fancy Jeb’s chances. Three days earlier, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy in Manhattan, cutting the ribbon on a festival of media bafflement, disgust, and ridicule. Coulter made her prediction: 'Of the declared ones, right now, Donald Trump.' The studio audience hooted. The other panelists did a good impression of being horrified.

Quick bit of movie trivia: what do actors Felicity Huffman, Eddie Redmayne, Hillary Swank, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Glenn Close, Jeffrey Tambor and Jared Leto all have in common? All have won or have been nominated for major industry awards of their portrayal of transexual characters. Swank won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of real life murder victim Brandon Tina in Boys Don’t Cry. Leto was awarded the Academy Award for his role in Dallas Buyer’s Club. Felicity Huffman was nominated for the Oscar but settled for the Golden Globe for her performance in Trans-America (the best of these of roles). Redmayne was nominated for his historical role as Lilli Elbe. Close was nominated for the Oscar in 2011 for Albert Nobbs.

Although it finished production months before George Floyd was killed, the documentary Uncle Tom, produced by Larry Elder, has been released bang in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protest explosion. But in the face of this unrest, Uncle Tom — which bills itself as 'an oral history of the American black conservative' — shows a side of the African-American community that is often overlooked by the media. The title is part tongue-in-cheek. As an epithet, 'Uncle Tom' is often used to pejoratively describe black Americans who diverge from the political left, which has long been seen as the natural home for the African American vote.