Summer of rage | The Spectator

Affluent white female killer

The poster for I Care a Lot, now available on Netflix and Amazon Prime, has a pull quote from a Collider review: ‘DELICIOUSLY NASTY’. In a better world, perhaps this would be true. But here on Earth, we have J Blakeson’s film, starring Rosamund Pike as Marla Grayson, a predatory professional legal guardian convincing crooked courts to grant her the right to put old people in nursing homes against their will, regardless of their health or mental capacity. This allows her to cash in on their homes, jewelry, valuables and anything else that she can vacuum up. Near the beginning of the film, shortly before she picks up ‘a cherry’ in the form of Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), we see Marla before a wall of her wards, all taped up and looking miserable in their intake headshots.

Ben Lazarus

The lost king of the blues

February 15, 1981, the day after Valentine’s Day. At 11 on a Sunday morning, a man’s body was found slumped in the passenger seat of a beige 1971 Mercury on a residential street in the Forest Hills section of San Francisco. All four doors were locked. A Valium bottle was in the pocket of a coat on the back seat. There was no ID: the body went to the morgue as John Doe #15. The dead man was 37-year-old Michael Bloomfield, a pioneering guitarist who brought blues to the mainstream and set Bob Dylan’s music alight. The cause of death was registered as cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. Questions remain unanswered about how he died; why methamphetamine, which he avoided, was in his system; and why he was in a part of town where he knew no one.

Michael Collins

Yet more death in Venice

The inspiration for the object of Aschenbach’s infatuation in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was acknowledged by the author some years after publication, and the subject of a biography a century later (The Real Tadzio by Gilbert Adair). He was a Polish boy the writer ogled from a distance in 1911 while holidaying with his wife at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice. Less is known of the teenager who played the role in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film of Mann’s novel. For years the director trawled the Continent in pursuit of the right actor for the part. It was a search that had eluded the other major directors who had attempted to bring the book to the screen: John Huston, Joseph Losey, Franco Zeffirelli. Visconti finally found 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in Stockholm.

Sumantra Maitra

In search of Nirad Chaudhuri

The false sense of complacency in Washington DC, now restored as the imperial capital of the world, is only matched by a tone of utter bafflement. History has apparently renewed its march toward a progressive utopia, and the American cabinet seems as epidermally diverse as it is ideologically totalitarian. But there remains a sense of unease. The imperium suffered a systemic shock in 2016, one that needed and still lacks explanation. The shock was not limited to America. The Guardian struggles to comprehend that British Indians tended to support Brexit, and that members of their community such as Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel have risen to influence in the Conservative party and high office in the government.

Bob Colacello

I remember Halston

'Imperious’ comes to mind in describing the great American fashion designer Halston. ‘Perverse’ does too; ‘grand’, ‘haughty’, ‘intimidating’ also fit. But, once you got to know him, it was apparent that he was a sweet and clever boy from the corn fields of the Midwest putting on a show for the big city sophisticates he sought to impress — and impress them he did. I met Halston in the summer of 1971 when I was brought to a party at the fashion illustrator Joe Eula’s by Andy Warhol, who had made me editor of his new magazine Interview the previous fall at age 22. Halston terrified me.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The Browning version

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’. Yet few of Browning’s contemporaries are as hard to see plain as his own wife: the poet who was known to her family as ‘Ba’, signed herself ‘EBB’ and published a number of popular works under her married name, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During her lifetime she was one of the most admired poets of the age: a framed portrait of her hung in the bedroom of Emily Dickinson, and when Wordsworth died in 1850 there was serious talk of her becoming the first female poet laureate. Since her death in 1861, however, her reputation has sunk like a bad soufflé.

Jessa Crispin

Into the Darknet Diaries

Do you ever get the sense that no one in legacy media knows any weirdos? And, given how deeply strange our world has gotten lately, how that might be a problem? From the New York Times’s inability to find any Trump voters to talk to until they were literally storming the Capitol to the widespread media panic about incels, to the total ignorance of QAnon until the conspiracy theory movement had gobbled up thousands of people’s brains, it just feels like if our reporters were in touch with the malcontents and drifters and losers, they would understand the world a bit better. Nowhere does the gap between coverage and reality seem bigger than in the field of technology and the internet.

Books & Arts