Arts Reviews

Mr President, as you settle down for an extended seasonal vacation at the little seaside cottage you and your retainers call the ‘Winter White House’, may I, as your sommelier of visual entertainments, recommend a few seasonally suitable amusements for the Mar-a-Lago screening room? You being you, the sort of movie you might find admirable may not exactly square with popular feeling regarding the season of good-will to all men — and, as you recently said, ‘women too, to be politically correct’. If goodwill isn’t to your taste, perhaps the presidential palate will enjoy some ill will, with a side order of bile? Submitted for your approval, Jon Landis’s classic comedy Trading Places (1983).

Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin wrote, was invented in 1963, ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’ Cunnilingus, according to Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots, was brought to Scotland in 1565 by a silver-tongued seducer named Robert, Lord Darnley, who seems to have acquired a taste for it at the court of Elizabeth I. The invention of intercourse, Larkin wrote, came ‘rather late for me’. But in Rourke’s telling, cunnilingus arrives north of the border just in time for Mary. She marries Darnley and, despite the obstacle of his alcoholism and homosexuality, bears him a son. In 1603, when Elizabeth I dies without issue, Mary’s son, a feeble and tyrannical slobberer obsessed with witches, becomes James I of England.

‘Songs of joy and tears of laughter are all we need, to lift our hearts – Godfrey Elfwick’ I penned the above quote for an article in my university’s weekly student magazine ‘Wotz Woke?’ while trying to combat the negative effects of Trump and Brexit. Since then however, things have changed, and my outlook on ‘tears of laughter’ has altered drastically. When it comes to comedy these days, ‘tears of laughter’ has become merely tears. This week, a ‘stand up comedian’ by the name of Konstantin Kisin was handed a very reasonable contract by the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, organized by university society Unicef on Campus.

Did Shakespeare win the war? He was certainly Churchill’s greatest literary ally in 1940 when he sent the English language into battle. In fact it comes as a surprise to realize — at a fascinating exhibition in Washington D.C.’s magnificent Folger library  — just how much Churchill saw England and its history through the eyes of Shakespeare. For a period in 1940 he became the lion-hearted Henry V — albeit Henry V with a cigar and dressed in a velvet onesie. Shakespeare and the theatre runs through Churchill’s life. He bought a Webb’s toy cut-out theatre as a little boy. He studied hard for (but twice just missed getting) the Shakespeare Prize at Harrow.

For those desperately awaiting the Trump presidency’s spectacular collapse, Robert Mueller has acquired an almost mythic status – forever looming in the background with astonishing ‘bombshells’ that could drop at any moment. Mueller himself never speaks, except through terse court filings, which lends his aura a mystical quality. His newfound fans have been known to light votive candles in his honor, wear apparel sporting his heroic visage, and spend day after day speculating on the internet about the time, date, and profundity of his next miraculous intervention. https://twitter.

It’s important to hate the right person, and not the left person. If the fate of the United States depends on hating an unscrupulous media manipulator and sexual predator, then it’s only right — or rather, only left — to hate Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News, over Harvey Weinstein, bundler of money for the Clintons. Like people still say, at least the socialists had good intentions when they killed all those people. Contemplate both Ailes and Weinstein simultaneously, and you feel your brain splitting into partisan halves. They seem to exist in separate worlds. It feels like only a Dante could have imagined them in the same space.

Anyone who has blinked in the last week may have missed the tenure of Kevin Hart as 2019 Academy Awards host. Mere hours after the diminutive comic was ruminating over the ‘opportunity of a lifetime’ on his Instagram, his waxen wings melted in the scorching heat of the Twittersphere and he crashed to earth. The source of the public’s ire? Some of Hart’s tweets from the earlier days of the website, surfaced by a BuzzFeed reporter. ‘Yo why does @DamienDW profile pic look like a gay bill board for AIDS..........Booom, I’m on fire tonight,’ one says.

There has never been a better time than this to be a dwarf in show business. For years, thespians of diminutive stature were obliged to eke out the 11 months between pantomime engagements with humiliating side gigs like working at ‘dwarf-throwing’ bars and performing at bachelor parties. Now, however, the public’s apparently infinite appetite for idiotic medieval fluff has made our low-wattage era a golden age for the height-impaired performer. Take a bow, Peter Dinklage for Game of Thrones, and Warwick Davis for the Harry Potter franchise. The nominations for the Golden Globes were announced today. There should have been more dwarves on screen this year, and perhaps as many as seven in one film. I speak, of course, of Bohemian Rhapsody, the Freddie Mercury biopic.

I’m at the airport in Salt Lake City, waiting for the snow to stop so we can get up to Vancouver. I’ve been on the road with the Disciples of Soul since a month before Thanksgiving. This tour, the Soulfire Teachers Solidarity Tour, has been going on and off for a year and a half now, and it ends on December 16. The road is a lifestyle I’ve gotten used to. I miss my wife, I miss my dog. But we don’t go out so long, three or four weeks at the most before going back home. It’s not like the old days, the we’d go out for a year, and stay out. It’s much more civilized now. The tour promotes my music-based school curriculum, TeachRock.org.

Queen Anne (1701-14) is remembered, if at all, for a school of doughty, dark furniture design which no one likes these days; for signing the paperwork that joined England and Scotland to form the United Kingdom, which fewer and fewer people like these days; and for enduring 17 pregnancies. Only five of these carried living children to term, and none of the infants survived past the age of two. She died depressed, obese and crippled with gout, and the House of Stuart ended its short and ignominious run on the throne when she did.Queen Anne probably did not go in for red-hot lesbian romping with her favorite, Sarah Churchill, wife of the Duke of Marlborough and distant ancestor of Winston Churchill.

Netflix have acquired the film rights to George Orwell’s totalitarian fable Animal Farm (1945). Napoleon, Snowball and all the other commies at Manor Farm are getting rebooted by British director and actor Andy Serkis. He has animal form, having played an ape in Planet of the Apes remake. The producers are promising to bring the novella to the screen with motion-capture technology, ‘in a thoroughly contemporary fashion.’ It’s too early to tell whether, given a plot-line involves a dictatorial pig’s insistence on building a giant wall, Serkis’s version will resist the obvious parallels with Trump’s America.

I can clear up the great ‘Who invented punk?’ debate, and the related question of whether it happened in London or New York City. America had the Stooges and the Velvets, the Seeds, ? and The Mysterions, the 13th Floor Elevators and all those Pebbles and Nuggets garage bands. But that was only after Britain had given the gift of the Kinks, the Troggs and the Who. So the punk sound was invented either deliberately by Shel Talmy, the American who produced the Kinks and Who, or accidentally by the Troggs, who looked and sounded like agriculturalists from the Stonehenge area. What about punk style? Well, there was the New York Dolls. But weren't they just the Stones with more lipstick?

Connoisseurs of anal sex are mourning the death of Bernardo Bertolucci, who died yesterday aged 76. He was a titan of Italian cinema in the Sixties and Seventies, so younger readers will need to be told who he was. Bertolucci should not be confused with another director whose name will also forever be associated with anal sex, John Stagliono, the pornographic actor-auteur who works under the nom de rectum ‘Buttman’ and entered European cinema through the backdoor in 1991 with Buttman’s European Vacation. Bertolucci was in no way vulgar and low-minded like Stagliono. He was vulgar and high-minded. He was the Buttman of the intellectuals. There was plenty of sex in Bertolucci’s films, but you had to stay awake for it.

The director Nicolas Roeg, who died on Friday aged 90, was a master of daring, dreamlike cinema — so daring and dreamlike, in fact, that the studios often didn’t know what to do with his films. Walkabout (1971) lost money on its release, but slowly became a cult classic. Bad Timing (1980) so alarmed the Rank Organization that they billed the film as ‘a sick film made by sick people for sick people’. But as Roeg showed with 1973’s Don’t Look Now or 1985’s Insignificance, he was more than a purveyor of shocks and chills, or split-screen, time-jumping Sixties’ tricks. Roeg had risen through the ranks of the British film industry, from one indispensable role to another: teaboy to director.

When I heard the breaking news that one of Electronic Dance Music’s most popular DJs has resolved to make dance music ‘more fun and more inclusive’, I groaned. Must politics invade dance music as well as every other aspect of modern life? I’ve been listening to EDM almost daily for years. The genre is maligned for its repetitive, mechanized sound, and its reliance on Auto-Tune, but it’s also surprisingly complex and various — diverse, one might even say. It’s true that EDM is often the soundtrack of drug-fueled club raves, but do charges of elitism and homogeneity really hold up in the sober light of dawn? EDM emerged in the 1980s.

On the one occasion when I visited Naples, the plane from Barcelona was packed with shouting Italians. They broke into exuberant cheers when we completed a routine landing, and clambered over the seats to pinch my cheek. My taxi driver got lost and it took hours to find my Airbnb, in an outlying block of flats with great chunks loose and crumbling from its garish orange façade. The airline, it goes without saying, had lost my bag, and the husband and wife who rented out the room wasted no time in selling me a toothbrush. I spoke no Italian save a few words of Dante, and they no English, but when my Italian-speaking friend arrived the next day he found he could understand them no better than I could. To blame, the notorious Neapolitan dialect.

Old age, Bette Davis said, ‘ain’t no place for sissies’. Neither was the Middle Ages. They were the Dark Ages, a world lit only by fire, in part because you had thrown the innards of your enemy onto the flames. The roads were terrible, and the primeval forest had recovered the farmland once worked by retired Roman legionaries. No wonder Dante’s traveler got lost in the woods in middle age. In Britain, civilization collapsed when the Romans went south. A long night of Scandinavian noir ensued, as raiders with names like Erik Bloodaxe set the social tone. For nearly a millennium, no one in England built a flushing lavatory, because there were no drains to hook it up to. Everyone stank. The peasants were especially revolting, and the nobles were notably ignoble.

The dumbest assertion ever issued in the history of American politics was purportedly uttered by Gary Hart to The New York Times magazine in 1987: ‘Follow me around, I don’t care.’ The Colorado senator, then the front runner for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, was responding to rumors that he was a womanizer. ‘I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored.’ What followed, at least in popular memory, became the paradigmatic cautionary tale for American politicians in the age of modern media. The press accepted Hart’s challenge, investigated his personal life, and quickly produced evidence of an extramarital affair: a photo of the senator sitting on a dock with Donna Rice, a much younger woman, straddling his lap.