Books and Arts

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.

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?