Arts Reviews

We all know we’re modern, but how many of us can say why? My guest on 'The Green Room' this week, Italian writer Roberto Calasso, is a peerless explorer of what he calls the modern 'revolution in the human brain’, and of the ghostly endurance of the old gods. His latest book, The Unnamable Present, is the ninth in a kaleidoscopic series which includes retellings of Greek and Indian myths (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka), studies of artists and writers (Tiepolo Pink, K, La Folie Baudelaire), the search for the origins of human society in sacrificial rites (Ardor, on the ancient Vedic civilization), and the tracing of the roots of the modern age in revolutionary politics and Romantic philosophy (The Ruin of Kasch, Literature and the Gods).

It was that philosopher of modern life Iggy Pop who first noticed that the screens were watching us. ‘See that cat, down on her back?’ Mr Pop reflected thoughtfully on the Stooges’ Funhouse album of 1970. ‘She got a TV Eye on me.’ These days the ‘TV Eye’ is on all of us. Black Mirror, back on Netflix for its fifth series, is what Stooges guitarist Ron Ashton would have recognized as an extended riff on the same theme. Except that while Mr Pop found the experience quite pleasant— ‘Yeah I love her so’ — it’s hard to enjoy Black Mirror. To be fair, that might not be the point of it. We aren’t here to enjoy ourselves. Iggy Pop’s signature move is to drop his pants at the end of the show.

A dizzying array of Democratic presidential candidates — 19 in total — took the stage this weekend at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame, offering a program of five-minute lightning talks that sounds to me like TEDxNinthCircleofHell. And each one had a different walk-off song, the implications of which the political media has been gleefully dissecting in response. But their choices were all wrong. I should assure you that in a world where a Twitter blue checkmark can lend a false sense of expertise to anyone who claims they know anything about a particular topic, I am an actual expert on walk-off songs.

Tolstoy tried to write a history of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but found that his story required the broader canvas of fiction. We like to think that fiction emerges from reality, and that a novel, which is as much as species of hallucination as it is a social document, might retain enough of its physicality to be, as we say of War and Peace,’realist’. But the traffic between fiction and reality goes in both directions. ‘What force moves the nations?’ Tolstoy asked in the philosophical coda that, returning fiction to history, he added to the end of War and Peace. The discipline of history, its reliance on facts, was at the heart of the Enlightenment.

If they asked me, I could write a book about Dr John, who died on Thursday aged 77. He was a sideman, a showman, a kind of performance artist with his Dr John Creaux the Night-Tripper alter ego and the music-hall voodoo of songs like ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, a songwriter but, above all, a piano player whose every phrase could only have come from his native New Orleans. In 1956, when he was 14 and still Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr. the son of an appliance vendor who fixed record players and sold records, Dr John met Professor Longhair, who was no longer Henry Royland Byrd and who had developed a piano style which combined a rolling, rhumba-influenced left hand with a flamboyant, bluesy right hand.

Rory Stewart, who is awfully polite about wanting to be Britain’s next prime minister, has apologized for smoking opium while walking in Afghanistan. It was politeness that got him into trouble in the first place. Stewart says he felt it would have been rude not to take a deep drag on the pipe when it was passed around at the wedding he had wandered into, as one does when one is walking in Afghanistan. What happens in Herat stays in Herat, except of course, if one of your qualifications for the top job is your stint as Prisons Minister. Not a good look, as the Pashtun say. Jeremy Hunt, another ministerial candidate to replace Theresa May, has confessed to drinking mind-altering yoghurt when traveling in Asia.

On Thursday, May 30, Morrissey was ‘canceled’. According to the Guardian, a British newspaper fond of such decrees, fans now feel ‘betrayed’ by the singer’s recent controversial and provocative statements, which have included support for Anne Marie Waters’s nationalist For Britain party. ‘Morissey [sic], what happened?’ the Guardian agonized on Twitter. But maybe they already know the answer. In just a decade, political correctness has obtained a stranglehold on Western culture. The provocateurs and counter-cultural icons of the late 20th century have been replaced by commercially compromised ‘influencers’, and artists who are carefully selected by social censors.

Although partisans of LGBT+ like to dismiss psychoanalysis as out of date, many of them fully participate in the ongoing repression of basic Freudian insights. If psychoanalysis taught us anything, it is that human sexuality is immanently perverted, traversed by sadomasochist spins and power games, that in it, pleasure is inextricably interlinked with pain. What we get from many LGBT+ ideologists is the opposite of this insight, the naive view that, if sexuality is not distorted by patriarchal or binary pressure, it becomes a happy space of authentic expression of our true selves. Suffice it to remember what happened with Girl (2018), a Belgian film about a 15-year-old girl, born in the body of a boy, who dreams of becoming a ballerina.

If Oscar Wilde were on Twitter, he might note that the only fate worse than being talked about is being canceled. Readers fortunate enough to still be dwelling on shrinking islands of civility amid the rising tide of contemporary barbarism may be forgiven for not knowing what ‘cancel culture’ is. To be canceled is to undergo the digital equivalent of people pretending that you no longer exist. Ostracism was the worst of ancient punishments, solitary confinement is the cruelest of legal modern punishments, and cancelation is the next worst thing in the lands of digitalia. Laura Loomer has been canceled. At this juncture, it may be necessary to explain who Laura Loomer is too.

About halfway through the Swedish space saga Aniara, I realized that there is no future. Or at least no alternative future for us in space. For a genre set in a distant future, space movies haven’t changed in decades. The limits of the form, and the techno-dystopian implications of the flight from reality, were mapped out in the Fifties and Sixties. The peak space movies were all made a long time ago: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995).

James Jeffrey served in the British Army for nine years, from his commissioning as a second lieutenant shortly after 9/11 to leaving as a captain in 2010. He served in Iraq in 2004 as a tank commander with the Queen’s Royal Lancers, providing armored support to the 1st Battalion The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, followed by another tour in 2006. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with the headquarters of the Welsh Guards Battle Group on Operation Herrick 10, during which the regiment’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, was killed by a Taliban IED, the first commanding officer killed in action since the 1980s Falklands War. Jeffrey now works as a writer.

The fans had been waiting months to hear the end of the story. It was the only story in town, the only story in every city, in every corner of the nation – the most important story in the world. They were desperate, needy and impatient to know how it ended: they were fans. Rumors said that a boat from England would bring the final installment of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop to America. Crowds of fans gathered at the docks in New York, or perhaps in Boston. It was true. There was a boat. A great hush spread among the crowd. At once the solitary figure of the packet’s captain appeared on deck. As the boat grew ever closer to the shore a dreadful noise began to stir amongst the fans. The captain, overcome with emotion, had tears streaming down his face.

To understand the differing status of the arts in Britain and France, compare the publishers in Bridget Jones’s Diary and Olivier Assayas’s new film, Non-Fiction. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) is an underwear-obsessed cad who gets his comeuppance when he is beaten up by Colin Firth. In Non-Fiction, Alain Danielson ruminates philosophically about what the ‘digital transition’ means for civilization, and indulges in plenty of Cleaver-style trifling with the staff, but gets away with both. We are reminded that ‘intellectual’ is a compliment in France but a dirty word in Britain, and that sex is dirty in Britain but intellectual in France.

A sprawling New York Times feature package this week showcases essays, photos, and snippets of nostalgia that all amount to the declaration ‘This Gen X Mess.’ One of the declarations in one of the essays is that ‘it’s easy to decide that Gen X is culturally irrelevant.’ Who actually thinks that? I was born in the mid-1980s and I’ve been sick of hearing Gen-X talk about itself and its place in history ever since I grew old enough to date men born in the Seventies without it being gross and creepy. To backtrack a bit, the events of my birth toss me squarely into the elder bracket of ‘millennials,’ you know, that overexposed generation of helicopter-parented, selfie-snapping, Adderall-addled ‘digital natives.

‘Was Shakespeare a Woman?’ Elizabeth Winkler asks in the new issue of The Atlantic. Of course he was. If you believe that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but Francis Bacon, or Walter Raleigh, or the Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, or even Emilia Bassano Lanier, then you have succumbed to a conspiracy theory. A pity that, given the public’s increasing willingness to believe anything, and some people’s increasing willingness to publish anything, that this conspiracy theory should be promulgated in The Atlantic, a magazine with a long, albeit lately abandoned, tradition of intelligent writing on literature.

One Saturday in 1975 a young man was walking through Macclesfield town center, without very much to do. He popped into Boots the Chemist and began flicking through their selection of records. After 10 minutes of random searching he found Patti Smith’s newly released LP Horses, and quickly returned home with it to Salford. As he recollects in his Autobiography, for Steven Patrick Morrissey finding Horses – in a pharmacy in Macclesfield of all places – was a defining experience: ‘Cross-legged by a dying fire later that night, and with only a side-light for company, I allowed Horses to enter my body like a spear… So surly and stark and betrayed, Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love… The past snaps.