Books and Arts

Yesterday

Alexander Larman

Why Arthur Miller is back in the limelight

Arthur Miller may have died two decades ago, but America’s answer to Euripides and Sophocles is having a moment. The great tragedian’s plays have been revived, and revived again, ever since he first broke through in 1947 with All My Sons, but even by his standards, the new productions just keep on coming. His most famous play, Death of a Salesman, has opened on Broadway to rave reviews and Tony nominations galore, with a cast-against-type Nathan Lane as the doomed Willy Loman and Laurie Metcalf as his loyal wife Linda. Across the pond, Bryan Cranston has recently finished an equally acclaimed run as Joe Keller in All My Sons.

arthur miller

Friday

Nicky Haslam

How to dress a queen

The problem with exhibiting costumes is well known. Should the mannequins be lifelike with human features, or faceless? What about trying a more surreal approach with Perspex or metals? This show of her late Majesty’s wardrobe opts for something more ghostly: hundreds of shoulderless, neckless, wristless, legless figures, floating magically in space, presented in cases at eye level, with others, higher, in serried ranks, like some gorgeously arrayed terracotta army. The unifying factor is that instantly recognizable royal silhouette – from the youthful wasp waist to the later fuller frame.

queen
Anne Margaret Daniel

Meeting Jay McInerney, Manhattan’s sassiest social novelist

Since his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City appeared in 1984, Jay McInerney has been one of the best-known writers whose work is mostly grounded on the long, skinny, granite-bedrocked river isle the Lenape called Manahatta, “island of hills.” He has lived in town for most of the past four decades too, and currently divides his time between a Village penthouse apartment and Water Mill in the Hamptons. McInerney walks into the lobby of the Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street, just paces from Washington Square, and heads turn. Young lovelies on their laptops with Mission Control Center-sized cans over their ears and chic hairstyles look up and blink, appealingly. Waiters slide swiftly to his side.

lady chatterley
Frances Wilson

All the gossip about Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written in a villa outside Florence during the winter of 1927-28, two years after D.H. Lawrence was diagnosed with TB. Described by him as “a phallic novel, but good and sun-wards, truly sun-wards,” the tale is set in his native Nottinghamshire, which he left in 1912 when he eloped with his aristocratic wife Frieda von Richthofen, who was then married to his tutor. Frieda, who valued her freedom, was enjoying an affair with the Italian officer Angelo Ravagli, who became her third husband after Lawrence’s death in 1930. It is believed that Lawrence was impotent for the last years of his life. In the evenings he would read aloud his finished pages, in which the Lawrentian philosophy is expressed by Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper to Sir Clifford Chatterley.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Riveting: Kokuho reviewed

A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell, I’ll grant you, but I’ll give it my best. Kokuho is multi-award winning. It is the highest grossing live-action film in Japan ever. It is sumptuously filmed. It is masterfully sweeping. The kabuki itself is stunning, so much so that you may one day wish to visit the kabuki theater in Tokyo, although be warned: the shortest production is four hours. Some last all day. Looked at this way, you are getting off lightly here. Directed by Lee Sang-il, and adapted from Shuichi Yoshida’s two-part novel, the film is a drama spanning 50 years. It opens in 1964, in Nagasaki, with the shocking killing of a crime boss while his 14-year-old son Kikuo (Soya Kurokawa) looks on.

Richard Bratby

A spring mood lifter: Tales of Love and Loss at the Linbury Theater reviewed

This year’s Jette Parker Artists showcase is a triple bill of modern-ish operas; a cleverly assembled trittico of one-acters, linked by a theme of bereavement. That sounds bleak until you consider that Puccini’s Trittico was originally inspired by The Divine Comedy, and who bothers about that today? Anyway, the three operas that make up Tales of Love and Loss are far from dispiriting in their overall effect. Like Puccini, Talia Stern – who directs all three – has gone for two tragedies plus a raucous, palate-cleansing comedy. And like Gianni Schicchi, the final laugh-fest (Elena Langer’s Four Sisters) plays out around a barely cold corpse and sends you into the night feeling uneasy, but undeniably entertained.

flowers
Melanie McDonagh

The art of flowers

Multisensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, it feels just right to sit in a space given over to flowers with the sound of gurgling water in the background, mingled with the cries and chirrups of birds. At intervals there are scent stations where you can smell damask rose or green and black tea from flower-shaped chalices. From the ceiling hang swaths of green muslin. I could have stayed here all afternoon. Right in front of me were also two delicious studies of tulips to illustrate the Dutch craze of the 1630s. Frankly, if it came to a choice of two-tone tulips or bitcoin as a way of squandering money, I know which I’d prefer. There is a print of a sultan’s seraglio in this tulip section.

boyhood
Alex Peake-Tomkinson

They shoot horses: Boyhood, by David Keenan, reviewed

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favorite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

elizabeth
Roger Lewis

The exquisitely dull life of Elizabeth II, expert on cap badges

The dogs, horses, diamonds, furs, full-length evening gowns of lace and pearls; private jets and limousines; the ever-present jostling retinue; the push and shove of photographers and the clamor of crowds – Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth II had a lot in common, each taking herself very seriously and needing to be seen to be believed. Whereas the Hollywood actress was majestic mainly in her vulgarity and brashness, however, the late Queen, as is evident in this pair of biographies, did her level best to be reticent, even nonexistent. The best known of her few recorded utterances are “Oh really?” and “Are you sure?” She had a tendency to stare at a person with “absolutely no expression,” or at best “an expression of controlled irritation.

Thursday

James Panero

The message behind the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale

“All art is propaganda,” wrote George Orwell, “but not all propaganda is art.” Upon this subtle distinction rests the success or failure of whatever art we see at the Venice Biennale.  The Most Serene Republic’s exercise in art-world Olympics is propaganda by design. A garden of national pavilions – small buildings in various styles as you might find in a zoological park – presents exhibitions that compete with one another for a “Golden Lion for Best National Participation.” Here, in the murky parkland of the Giardini in the city’s eastern Castello district, nationalist and anti-nationalist passions mix with art-market imbroglio into a sordid spectacle. Just how bad will it be this year? To discover the answer is why we keep coming back.

Tuesday

Roger Lewis

Life is a Cabaret: inside Liza Minnelli’s memoir

Though she may well have been “one of the world’s most celebrated, beloved and iconic performers,” who’d have wanted Judy Garland as a mother? When not remaining in bed “for days at a time, heavily drugged and in a deep state of depression,” she was, according to her daughter Liza Minnelli, slashing her neck with a razor blade because “she loved playing the victim… Hospitals are a way of life for her.” Judy died of a (possibly accidental) drugs overdose in 1969, aged 47. At the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side, her corpse was prepared for public view by the very same make-up expert who’d worked years previously on The Wizard of Oz. Twenty thousand people filed past the open coffin – more than had come to gawp at Valentino.

liza minnelli

Saturday

Clare McHugh

Lena Dunham is still her own worst enemy

In her seminal 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes of her former self, a 20-year-old naif arriving in New York City for the first time: “Was anyone ever so young?” Lena Dunham – an avowed Didion stan – should have used that line as the title of her new book, an account of the messy process of making Girls, the HBO show she created, scripted, directed and starred in. Despite her inexperience and juvenile blunders Dunham, at age 25, produced a hit. Why, then, call her memoir Famesick? Because, she contends, the most important story she has to tell is how her body turned on her “right in sync with the public.” It’s true that Dunham has been the object of sustained fascination since Girls launched in 2012.

lena dunham

Friday

Michael Moorcock

J.G. Ballard’s surreal fiction continues to resonate through the century

In 1951, when J.G. Ballard was 20, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman premiered in London. Directed by Albert Lewin and starring James Mason, Ava Gardner and a solid cast of English actors, it was filmed on the Catalan coast by Jack Cardiff in lush MGM color. Man Ray contributed designs based on the work of de Chirico. Set in an Anglo-Spanish colony, it featured a surrealist painter. a racing car driver and a toreador. All love the mysterious Pandora, who is unable to love anyone until the Dutchman drops anchor. To prove his passion for Pandora one suitor takes poison while another pushes his beloved car over a cliff.

j.g. ballard
Graeme Thomson

How good are the Rolling Stones’ alter egos, the Cockroaches?

Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising lineup becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the years. Pop stars spend the first part of their careers trampling over their grandmothers in the unseemly rush to demand the world take notice of who they are, and the second part whining about being pigeonholed. The only thing harder to escape in the music industry than your name is your original haircut. Hence, the pseudonymous offshoot, offering a degree of separation with very little sense of jeopardy.

James Delingpole

AI could never replace me

There are two main schools of thought on AI in the Delingpole household. I, as the resident batshit-crazy reactionary tinfoil-hat loon, think that it is evil, indeed quite possibly satanic, and that everything would be much better if only we went back to horse transport, herbal salves and abacuses. And Boy Delingpole, representing technologically literate youth, thinks I’m an idiot, that AI is the future and quite mind blowing in its potential to change everything. Probably we’re both right. Personally, I don’t feel quite as threatened by AI as perhaps I should. More by accident than design, I seem to have ended up in one of the very few jobs that AI isn’t going to steal.

zurbaran
Jaspreet Singh Boparai and Jonathan Ruffer

The genius of Zurbarán – and why he vanished

A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue that Caravaggio had any direct influence on his work. After all, he died when Zurbarán was 11 years old. Since Zurbarán never left Spain, he could not have seen any of Caravaggio’s paintings with his own eyes. Indeed, he might never even have heard the artist’s name. Still, there are unavoidable similarities between the two men’s work. Zurbarán shared Caravaggio’s sense of drama and his love of shadows broken up by patches of strong light.

Helen Barrett

The nightmare of filming A Hard Day’s Night

It would be easy to dismiss A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles film made in 1964, as a throwaway period piece. The plot hurls the Fab Four into a meta narrative: they’re playing themselves while a director – a seething Victor Spinetti – panics as the boys are delayed on their way to a televised variety performance by mishaps, distractions and stampeding fans. The film was thrown together to fit the group’s breakneck schedule – scripted over a few weeks in January by Alun Owen, shot by Richard Lester by May and out in cinemas in July. In her absorbing, concise book, Samira Ahmed sees the film not as a cursory promo but as a watershed moment in British culture – “a kind of cinematic big bang.

Stephen Smith

Antony Gormley’s lonely figures transfer to paper

If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI bots filling the world with humanoids, it’s the look on their glassy faces when they realize that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby Beach in Liverpool to Gateshead, from Texas to the Netherlands and western Australia. He and his simulacra might not detain our new overlords for very long, of course (but in the meantime “The Gormleys versus the Bots” is the Doctor Who series I’m here for).

Tuesday

Anne Margaret Daniel

The photographer who connects Bob Dylan and the Beatles

MAX JONES: “What do you think of the Beatles as artists and people?” BOB DYLAN: “Oh, I think they’re the best. They’re artists and they’re people.” —Melody Maker, March 1965 For more than 60 years, people have been fascinated by the connections between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All were born during World War Two. All loved the music of Little Richard and Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochran; all were blues fans swept off their feet by rock and roll. Dylan was a Minnesota boy who early in his life became the avatar of the American folk scene, and then a protean man containing multitudes, both musically and otherwise.

bob dylan

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Don’t blame Kanye for his abject idiocy

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as “Heil Hitler” and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault.

kanye west