Arts Reviews

Is it good to contact your inner child — assuming, that is, you have one at all? And if you do, how far should you go—throwing tantrums, eating snot, wetting the bed? As an advocate of regression, Walt Disney was right up there with Arthur ‘Primal Scream’ Janov and R.D. ‘The Mad Aren’t Mad’ Laing. At least Yanov and Laing did their best to help troubled adults towards happiness. Disney did his wicked best to drive guilty parents into penury. Disney, the evil genius, realised that to really make money from children’s entertainment, you had to follow the money. Flatter the breadwinner, and he’ll spend bread on taking the kids to the movies, buying them stuffed toys, and even going to a Disney-themed resort.

I got some bad news this week. I discovered that I’m a ‘privileged, white male’. It was my agent who broke it to me. We were talking about the trouble he’s having in finding a publisher for my book — a work of non-fiction — when the following exchange took place. Me: What’s wrong with my book? Agent: There’s nothing wrong with your book. It’s brilliant. It’s moving. It’s funny. Me: OK. So what’s the problem? Agent: You’re the problem. Me: Excuse me? Agent: You’re a middle-aged, privileged white man. You’re out of fashion — and so is your book. Publishers think you’re too male. Too white. Things are difficult for writers like you at the moment.

It all began with the orders. In the preface to his Gentleman and Cabinet-maker’s Director (1754), Thomas Chippendale started with ‘an explanation of the five Orders’ — those foundations of all architecture, the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. ‘Without an acquaintance with this science,’ he continued, ‘the cabinet-maker cannot make the designs of his work intelligible.’ Nearly two hundred years later, Evelyn Waugh said much the same thing. Writing in 1938 in Country Life, Waugh noted that by learning the orders of architecture, ‘you can produce Chippendale Chinese; by studying Chippendale Chinese, you will produce nothing but magazine covers.’.

The Spectator USA Life 'n' Arts podcast launches this week with fanfares, the popping of corks, and much coughing and wheezing into microphones. From now on, every week I’ll be casting a pod with artists, writers, thinkers, painters and even people who do something useful for a living too. First up is the novelist and essayist William Giraldi. Author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and The Hero’s Body, a memoir of misspent youth as a bodybuilder, Giraldi is one of the few contemporary American critics worth reading. This month, he publishes his first collection of essays, American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring (Norton).

Life’s not all politics. Even for Cockburn. Well, kind of. Cockburn enjoys poetry, but the digital news churn leaves him no time to recline with a slim volume of verse and a glass of dry sherry, as he was wont to do in his youth. Imagine, then, Cockburn’s delight at finding a poem that combines the pleasures of lyric with deep research into global issues—immigration, Islam, the ‘administrative state’ (rhymes with ‘people we hate’), and the budding romance between Steve Bannon and Europe’s new nationalist parties: ‘Letter to England: For Tommy Robinson’, by the American versifier Joseph Charles MacKenzie.

When I went to see V.S. Naipaul in hospital last week he was feeling marginally better. His wife Nadira had arranged for a violinist to play some Mozart to him, helping him relax. She did not allow too many visitors. This was not the first time he had been in hospital. His health had been deteriorating for the past 12 months and the family had been receiving — as always — a flurry of invitations from literary festivals and heads of state. All had to be declined. In his hospital room we discussed his coming 86th birthday and I suggested that we celebrate with champagne at the Ritz. He smiled and proposed we go to ‘the other place’. He had a better time at the Lanesborough and preferred to head there instead.

For a certain slice of the online commentariat, nothing better captured the zeitgeist this year than the surprise romance between tech industrialist Elon Musk and Claire Boucher, the cyberpunk-ish music impresario known professionally as Grimes. This week, we discovered their coupling was just the beginning.The worlds of Musk and Grimes worlds merged bizarrely when the pop star Azealia Banks wound up blasting out status updates on Instagram from inside Musk’s LA manse. Banks painted an unflattering portrait of Musk as a billionaire whose impulsive business decisions made it impossible to get Banks and Grimes in the same room of the same house where, ostensibly, their musical collaboration was supposed to begin: https://twitter.

In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear. Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the writer’s 13- or 14- or 15-year-old was devastated by his death. XXXTentacion was, it is true, a nasty piece of work.

Ed Balls has become the left’s Michael Portillo, reviled as a politician, now a game, well-loved, almost cuddly TV personality. I met him once on This Week and I was instantly struck by how easy, funny and genuinely likeable he was: as engaging in person as he was totally bloody awful as chancellor. Happily it was the gentle man rather than the leftist bruiser who dominated Travels in Trumpland (BBC2, Sun). One fatuous previewer I read in the papers grumbled that he hadn’t challenged Trumpism enough. Tosh.

Literary mandarin Zadie Smith has waded in deep this time. We’ll see if she’s allowed back to shore. Smith has been making troubling noises lately, letting off faint signals that her inner life might be insufficiently pasteurised and homogenised for the tongue-clicking clipboard huggers of the modern moral regime. In a Guardian interview conducted earlier this year, Smith said: “I can’t stand dogma, lazy ideas, catchphrases, group-think, illogic, pathos disguised as logos, shoutiness, ad hominem attacks, bombast, liberal piety, conservative pomposity, ideologues, essentialists, technocrats, preachers, fanatics, cheerleaders or bullies.

In yesterday’s Spectator USA, I described the experience of watching Mission Impossible: Fallout as akin to being sprayed in the face with hot diarrhea. This was inexcusably coarse and vulgar. So was my observation that the Fallout of this baggy mess of a film resembled an anal prolapse. It was not my intention to personally insult Tom Cruise, or to imply that he is a ridiculous fake, or to suggest that Paramount Pictures are peddling misogynistic smut. But if I did, so much the better. For that is what I believe to be true. What does Ben Brantley believe to be true? Anything you like, providing you shout loud enough. Since 2003, Mr. Brantley has held one of the toughest jobs in journalism.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric green, giant-thong-like swim wear worn by Borat; the classic late-Nineties catchphrase ‘Is it because I is black?’ And sure it must have taken some nerve — even in character — to explain to a clearly impatient and unimpressed Donald Trump his business plan for some anti-drip ice-cream gloves. But how often, even at his best, does Baron Cohen ever make you laugh?