Heir, apparently | The Spectator

The Who’s farewell tour marks the end of an era

The Who are our last great rock ’n’ roll band. More than 60 years after four working-class boys from west London formed a humble R&B combo, the two surviving members look to be hanging up their spurs for good. The Who have named their latest string of engagements – a farewell tour which concluded early this month – “The Song Is Over.” When I caught them in Long Island, rumors of geriatric struggles were soundly put to rest: Pete Townshend, 80, and Roger Daltrey, 81, were in cracking good form. Most concertgoers that night were male, working-class and in their late fifties or early sixties.

Curtis Yarvin

One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made

One Battle After Another may be the worst movie ever made. Not in the petty and obvious way of a normal bad movie, though. It is a grand, multifaceted masterpiece of badness. It is dramatically bad, morally bad, historically bad and even erotically bad. And to cram in all this badness, it is an hour too long. But you won’t be bored – it is even entertainingly bad. This film is so bad that most people will think it is good, and it will probably make a lot of money. Proving only that America is the kingdom of Cain. But we knew that. But why not start with praise, eh? The film has a beautiful celluloid look.

Veronica Clarke

Taylor Swift’s new album balances glitter with grit

With The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift set out to do the opposite of her previous record, The Tortured Poets Department. Critics had called that sprawling 31-track project “unrestrained” and “imprecise,” and Swift herself admitted it was a “data dump.” This time, she wanted precision: a lean, 12-track pop record where every beat and lyric fit “like a perfect puzzle.” When Swift announced that music industry legends Max Martin and Shellback were producers on her 12th studio album, fans wondered whether this might herald a repeat of her 2014 smash-hit album 1989.

James Cahill

Adam McEwen’s small masterpieces of the uncanny

We meet at Adam McEwen’s apartment on the Upper East Side, a few hours before he makes a lightning trip back to London, where he was once a journalist working for the Daily Telegraph. After studying art, McEwen worked for a while writing obituaries, and his eureka moment came in 2000 with the decision to turn his day job into art. He began to write fake obituaries for living subjects, adopting the detached prose and visual design of a broadsheet newspaper. Each text was presented as a black-and-white C-print, and subjects included Jeff Koons, Marilyn Chambers, Macaulay Culkin and Nicole Kidman. McEwen’s fictitious obituaries are small masterpieces of the uncanny. In the instant of reading one, the hypothesized death seems real.

Paul Wood

Unpacking Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 documentary

What if the country responsible for almost 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001, was not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq, but Saudi Arabia? Did the US invade the wrong country? A lawsuit in Manhattan makes this case. The legal action, by 9/11 survivors and victims’ families, has unearthed new evidence that puts the blame for the attacks squarely on the -Saudis. The families believe the government of Saudi Arabia plotted the attack from the start – and afterwards, the US government let them get away with it. The CIA kept information from the FBI, Carlson says, because ‘the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources’ At the same time, a new Tucker Carlson documentary, The 9/11 Files, makes a different accusation against Saudi Arabia.

John Mac Ghlionn

Inside the Cartel is not your average true-crime memoir

Martin Suarez’s Inside the Cartel is part confession, part war chronicle, and part emotional autopsy of a man who spent years on the edge of death in order to bring the world’s most ruthless drug syndicates to their knees. It is not your average true-crime memoir. There are no cheap thrills, no voyeuristic obsession with gore, no Netflix shine or studio gloss. Instead, Suarez offers something far more dangerous: the truth. In the world of cartels, after all, the truth is synonymous with death. Inside the Cartel is not an easy book to read, nor is it meant to be. It opens with a gun pressed to the back of the author’s head and never really lets the reader exhale after that. Suarez’s prose is tight, muscular and cinematic without straying into melodrama.

Christopher Sandford

A compelling account of actor Robert Shaw’s life

A narrative biography by a member of its subject’s family is, if not unique, something of a novelty. Here, Christopher Shaw Myers writes the story, while his uncle Robert Shaw’s life (1927-78) provides the book’s framework. Shaw Myers has previously written the as-yet-unfilmed screenplay Jaws & Mrs. Shaw and revisits some of the same material here. In both cases, a pivotal moment comes when Robert Shaw’s mother visits the set where Jaws is being shot in 1974 off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, and thus happens to be present when her son polishes off the monologue about the shark attack on survivors of the USS Indianapolis that anticipates the gory finale of the film.

Madelaine Lucy Hanson

Addie E. Citchen’s debut novel is unsettling and ambitious

More than ever, arguments about tradition and gender roles are flaring up across the States and beyond. It is timely, then, that Addie E. Citchens’s debut novel, Dominion, arrives in this climate of revivalist misogyny and debates about rigid patriarchy. It is a story of power cloaked in piety, and of the damage done when pride usurps justice. Citchens is obviously an author of steely intelligence who possesses a crisp and sharp eye for tiny vignettes of ordinary cruelty, and has unwavering compassion and love for her subjects. Nothing is obvious in her work, and nothing is contrived. Citchens sets her story within a claustrophobically tight-knit black Missionary Baptist community in Mississippi.

Travis Aaroe

Kamala Harris is living in dreamland

Toward the end of 107 Days, Kamala Harris appears on something called The Checkup podcast. Though she was meant to be having a short interview about RFK Jr., the host suddenly asks if the then vice-president could talk on the hoof a bit about some of her star issues: healthcare costs, women’s health, and healthy meals for children. Alarmed, Harris fumbles for her “briefing sheet.” For any media appearance Harris requires one of these sheets, listing the questions to be asked and the answers to each of them. It isn’t there. After the interview she yells at her staff. The ancients used to warn that democracy would lead to the rule of silver-tongued demagogues who would promise the mob anything. In fact, it has been a good deal worse than that.

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