Books and Arts

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first time ever I saw her face, she was smiling. I knew her face before I saw it, but I cannot remember when I first knew it, because I had always seen it. But when I first saw her in the flesh, I couldn’t really see her at all. She was behind thick glass and a waist-high wall, and a crowd of people 20-deep were pushing toward her, shouting and pointing and taking photographs. She was still smiling, but as I forced my way out of the crowd, I felt as though the smile no longer expressed the mysterious inner mood of a high-born Florentine sitting in a loggia, but the bemused contempt of a woman sitting in the stocks for the entertainment of the mob.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. For people who, like me, were born in the troubled times of the Seventies, Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were an educational crossroads. As we gazed into the cathode-ray tube for direction, each program led to a very different future. Sesame Street, now in its 50th season, remains unavoidable and familiar. Yet we’re captivated by the return of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the unpolished creation of Fred Rogers that aired from 1968 to 2001. Last year, the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? became a surprise hit. This week sees the opening of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a movie starring Tom Hanks as Rogers.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. To gauge a man’s character, note how he spends a month in Paris. Edward Hopper, according to the catalog of his 1933 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, lodged with a ‘respectable French family’, studying French and ‘avoiding bohemia’. Asked if he met any painters during his visits, he responded, ‘No, I did not know anyone. Gertrude Stein was on the throne when I was there.’ Hopper knew it wasn’t his scene. Isolation was a persistent theme in Hopper’s art and life. Was he dogged by isolation or did he pursue it? ‘Did anybody really know this silent, non-communicative man?

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. When Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in late September, he depicted Brazil as a victim of colonialism. ‘The United Nations has played a fundamental role in the suppression of colonialism,’ he said, ‘and we cannot allow this mentality to return to these rooms and corridors at any pretext. We cannot forget that the world needs to be fed.’ Foreign countries, Bolsonaro alleged, have ‘an interest in keeping indigenous people living like cave men’.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Wokeness, first conceived of by the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff (1872-1949) had barely reached the mainstream when Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister died in 2015. Still, Lemmy had given considerable thought to staying woke. As a champion abuser of amphetamines, he’d spent more time awake and thinking than anyone since 1945. Perhaps his surprising death –– surprising, because he seemed indestructible –– was necessary in some Gurdjieffian way, to make room for the terrors that now occupy our psyches.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Everyone loves a good murder. Tales of cold-blooded killing were bringing in audiences even before Truman Capote elevated the telling. Now, as if tales of real-life slaughter aren’t enough, podcasters color the horrors and hook the listeners with spooky music, awkward cliffhangers and a dubious sociological moral. The typical true-crime podcast has hosts who seem to be chugging wine from the box and narratives ruined by contrived social implications. A cynic or a detective would link this style to the appearance of listicles of the best true-crime podcasts in Good Housekeeping, Oprah Magazine, Town and Country and Women’s Health.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. A journalist friend was once ordered to interview Lou Reed in his hotel room. The meeting was not a success. Reed retreated to the closet bearing a copy of the poems of Delmore Schwartz and refused to come out until his guest had paid cash for it, saying, ‘Delmore needs the money.’ Reminded that the author of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities had died some years before, Reed observed, ‘Well, his family needs the money.’ $5.99 changed hands and the conversation continued.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. I couldn’t stand The Wire. Everyone mumbled unintelligibly, the pace — inexcusably in a series about drugs and violence — was often glacially slow, and I found some of its characterization too transparent, like, ‘Ooh, I know. We’ll make the wise old black guy have the unlikely hobby that he repairs dolls’ houses, so that viewers will appreciate the nuance and hinterland.’ Top Boy (new on Netflix), on the other hand, is pacy, plausible and deliciously ruthless. It’s like The Wire, relocated to London with a much cooler soundtrack and with all the boring bits removed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.