American queen | The Spectator

Not in front of the servants

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Tina Turner believed that she and Ike were the reincarnation of god-kings from ancient Egypt. That, she reasoned, was why they’d been reincarnated in Memphis, Tenn.; their souls would feel at home in a city that, like Memphis in ancient Egypt, was sited on a big river and noted for its artisanry. In a perversion of Buddhism by celebrity culture, people select past lives that are more interesting than their present ones. Plenty of people believe they used to be Napoleon Bonaparte, but when was the last time you met someone who boasts of having been an illiterate Corsican goat-herder who married his cousin?

Louise Linton

Louise Linton: why I don’t like being ‘the wife of…’

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. It’s a muggy afternoon in Los Angeles as I sit down to write this — in my bathroom; the AC’s broken everywhere else. My vanity is dusty, cluttered with books, storyboards, shot lists and Post-It notes scrawled in ALL CAPS with a frenzied thick black Sharpie: ‘LOCK PICTURE!!’ ‘BEAR!’, ‘BORN FREE!’, ‘DOG’, ‘STATE DINNER’, ‘DOCUMENTARY!’, ‘GRATITUDE’. It’s a bizarre medley, as is my life in general. I’m married to a Republican politician but I’m extremely liberal. I cannot say that I’m a Democrat either. These terms are binary and weaponized.

Hannah Niemeier

Blondie ambition

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Once upon a time in the Seventies, rock ’n’ roll was a man’s game. Then Blondie happened –– or ‘Blondie’ herself, Debbie Harry, platinum bombshell and queen of punk. Actually, before Blondie there was the Runaways, an exploitation act from which the singer, Joan Jett, ran away. There was Patti Smith, who moved to New York City, fell in love with Robert Mapplethorpe and wrote poetry. There was Chrissie Hynde, who moved to London, passed through the rehearsals that generated the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and then, after Blondie had charted in Britain, formed the Pretenders.

Matt McDonald

Is Peaky Blinders past its peak?

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Peaky Blinders would have you believe it’s the best of British: sharp suits and vests, the workingman’s flat cap and the gangster’s slo-mo swagger, the chug of Anglo alternative rock, and a smörgåsbord of regional accents, Academy Award-nominated guest stars and oh-look-I-remember-him cameos from historical figures. These are the ingredients of Britain’s answer to the American sagas that set new standards for television: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad. Yet there’s always been the whiff of style over substance to Peaky Blinders, a sense of looking back without seeing anything new.

Dominic Green

Who killed the American arts?

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. The arts in America are dying. In the 20th century, Americans defined the world’s popular culture, but the 21st century world has no need of America’s arts. Through technology transfer, the world entertains itself with knock offs like Bollywood and K-Pop. In the 20th century, Americans created a new art form in jazz and its derivatives, and turned Hollywood into the world’s dream factory. In the 21st century, African American music has collapsed into monotone misogyny, and digital sex (see Julie Bindel) is America’s real movie business. Americans are in the gutter, looking up at porn stars.

Jacob Heilbrunn

A great time in the Faddisphere

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. It’s easy enough to write an elegy for the jazz world, a tale of decline and fall, from towering heights to epigones plying their trade in the shadows of the giants. But like most such stories, lachrymose in spirit if not intent, it obscures as much as it reveals. No doubt many of the great clubs that existed in the Fifties and Sixties have faded away, but since the Eighties there has been a distinct revival of more traditional forms of jazz.

J. Oliver Conroy

Race to the finish

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘I have observed,’ Joseph Addison wrote in 1711 in the first article in the first issue of the first version of The Spectator, ‘that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author.’ Thomas Chatterton Williams has earned a reputation as a tough, thoughtful and genuinely interesting commentator on race.

Emily Ferguson

Pod almighty

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Man the food-gatherer,’ wrote Marshall McLuhan, ‘reappears incongruously as information-gatherer.’ Once we foraged for information in the library. Now we graze among the podcasts. In the age of compulsive eating, podcasts are compulsive listening, an attempt to fill the silence. Nothing better to do? Click on a podcast, and let your attention drift. It takes no effort, it dissolves minutes into hours, and talking about the ‘great podcast’ you just listened to can sound just as smart as saying you’re reading War and Peace. After all, podcasts were originally made by nerds, for nerds.

Luke Haines

Grandpa, who were the Rolling Stones, and why?

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The Rolling Stones’ delayed tour is back on the road. Not the tour they delayed after Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree, but the one delayed because Mick Jagger had a heart attack. If you’re a boomer of advanced years and decayed taste, all this is no doubt a big deal, your last chance to see some of the last icons of the original and brief Rock Era, before you or they kick the bucket. Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones. Except they aren’t the Stones. They haven’t been the Stones for years.

James Panero

Secrets of the maestro

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At last, some justice for the ‘teacher of Leonardo da Vinci’. Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, reveals that this master was more than a mere footnote to his famous apprentice. Born around 1435 into the artistic boomtown that was Florence under the Medici, Andrea del Verrocchio may, in fact, have been the original Renaissance man. The greatest artists of the Florentine Renaissance took root in his studio and grew out of his mentorship: not just Leonardo, who stayed with him for over a decade, but also Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi and, most probably, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli too.

Ian Thomson

If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Georges Simenon, creator of the somber, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time he died in September 1989, Simenon had written nearly 200 novels, more than 150 novellas, several memoirs and countless short stories. He matched this demonic productivity with sexual athleticism. ‘The goal of my endless quest,’ Simenon explained,‘was not a woman, but the woman.’ He demanded sex at least once daily from his wives, secretary, and housemaid-mistresses. How he found the time to write so many books is a mystery that Maigret might struggle to crack. Simenon described himself, without irony, as ‘a psychopath’.

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