Life Archives

Thursday

February 15, 2024

My friends keep dumping me

T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the cruelest month — January is. It’s cold and bleak and days end in premature darkness. And worst of all, it’s the month when friends start to dump you. OK, maybe not you, but definitely me. Here was my January dump tally: two ex-girlfriends, one lover, five friends (three I thought were close friends) and one person I never wanted to be friends with in the first place. And get this: I do what’s called “befriending” for a local charity. It involves calling people who feel lonely and isolated on the phone and talking with them. The woman I’d been befriending for over two years suddenly said to me, “Please don’t call me anymore. This relationship isn’t working for me,” and just hung up. There were no thanks. No goodbye.

Bill Kauffman

An introduction to presidential grave-hunting

Where better to talk about dead presidents than over beer and wings at Jim's Saloon in East Pembroke, New York, three days before Millard Fillmore’s birthday? Across the table from me is Pat Weissend, a convivial bank manager and former museum director who has visited the gravesites of all thirty-nine dead presidents and all but two of the forty-three dead vice presidents of the United States. (The hard-to-get veeps are Walter Mondale, whose ashes have yet to be interred under the cold hard Minnesota ground, and Nelson Rockefeller, whose private and inaccessible burial spot is the Holy Grail of the grave-hunting community.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The digital habit

In an era that claims to value the authentic, the direct and the natural, the word "processed" has negative connotations, as in “processed” food. Nevertheless, it describes exactly how perhaps nine-tenths of the human race — including, I imagine, the lost Indian tribes of the Amazonian wilderness — experience reality these days, which is to say processed through electronic media, social media and the oxymoronic smartphone.

Tuesday

January 23, 2024

Kevin Cook

Does boxing still matter?

Quick — can you name boxing’s heavy-weight champion? If you’re like most readers, you drew a blank. If you’re a sports fan you may at least have heard of Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk, who holds three of the world’s four heavyweight title belts. Usyk has a good story: an Olympic gold medalist in 2012, now unbeaten and untied in twenty-one pro bouts, he took time out from training to serve as a soldier in his country’s war with Russia. The fourth title belt, symbolizing the WBC’s heavyweight crown, belongs to England’s Tyson Fury (yes, he’s named after Mike Tyson). The 6’9”, 278-pound Fury is also undefeated, with a record of 24-0-1. His parents are Irish Travellers; Fury proudly calls himself the “Gypsy King.

Zoe Strimpel

Drinking during pregnancy just isn’t the same

There are many cruel ironies in life. One of them is getting pregnant (and intending to keep it) at just the age at which you begin to understand how and where to drink good booze and feel justified in spending money to do so. So, finding myself with a bun in the oven just after my forty-first birthday this summer, I had to bring to a screeching halt the habits of the last few years: drinking really good wine, sometimes quite a lot of it, fairly regularly. Indeed, I spent the first week of pregnancy in the Languedoc drinking a bottle a night, plus the odd gin and tonic, because of course I didn’t know. Just last year I made a special journey to an industrial park outside Brussels to collect six bottles of 2013 white Bordeaux — it was that good.

Cosmo Landesman

Why have parties suddenly gotten good?

Not long ago this month’s column would have been one long gripe about how the party — as a forum of fun — was finished. Partygoers, I would have moaned, had become more interested in big names and networking than in actually talking to strangers and having fun and blah... blah... blah. But something unexpected has recently been happening in London: people are throwing great parties again, and they are actually fun. I know, fun is one of those words that are so insipid and infantile I feel embarrassed using it. And yet the absence of fun from adult social life is a source of sadness. Even an old grump like me has been having a good time. I went to a party full of young, pretty, clever posh girls in Chelsea and they loved me — and I loved them!

Bill Kauffman

Remembering George Eastman

George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak and benefactor of Rochester, New York, told my late friend Henry Clune (1890-1995 — and no, that’s not a typo) that he had never laughed until he was forty — and the camera tycoon wasn’t exactly a chuckle-factory in his old age, either. Eastman put an end to the grimness with a bullet to his head in 1932. He left a suicide note that read, “My work is done — Why wait?” Clune, star reporter of the Gannett newspapers, habitué of poolhalls and burlesque palaces and country clubs, a man who read Macaulay for enjoyment and composed panegyrics to strippers and barkeeps, occasionally visited the “lonesome little old man” in his home or office. (Henry’s mother had coated photographic plates for Eastman’s fledgling company in 1881.

Wednesday

December 20, 2023

Josie Cox

New York is a people pleaser’s hell

Oh, New York, New York. So nice they named it twice. It never sleeps. It’s New York or nowhere, they say. And also — start spreading the news — it’s a people pleaser’s hell. I’ve written for this magazine before about the absurd hurdles I’ve encountered as a British-sounding expat trying to come to grips with the salespeople and baristas of the Five Boroughs. I’ve described the well-meaning individuals who can’t — for love nor money — figure out what I want when I order a “water.” “Oooh wah-der!” they’ll eventually exclaim in a voice laced with pity for the poor foreigner, presumably just off the boat. But over the last few months I’ve become painfully aware of an even more inhibiting feature of this city.

Cosmo Landesman

Why BDSM is innately conservative

My friend Evie complains that I never want to go out and have fun anymore. “You’ve become a boring old stick-in-the-mud.” And I’m left wondering: is she right? My Woke Woman invited me to go with her to her Free-Love-Eco-Marxist commune and I said no. “Come on,” she pleaded, “it will be fun!” And now Evie wants me to go with her to the Torture Garden, which is Europe’s biggest fetish and body-art event. “Come on, it will be fun,” she says. “There will be dancing and wild scary women!” It’s not the wild scary women that worry me — it’s the fat bald bearded guys in pink latex tutus with nipple clamps that wag their tongues at you that scare me. Friends always want me to have fun.

Bill Kauffman

Remembering John Gardner

"Art begins in a wound, an imperfection,” said the late novelist John Gardner, one of the last American writers to grow up on a farm, “and is an attempt to either learn to live with the wound or to heal it.” Gardner’s wound was more gaping than most: on April 4, 1945, the eleven-year-old was driving a tractor hauling a two-ton roller called a cultipacker. His six-year-old brother Gilbert fell from the tractor’s hitch. John turned around just in time to see his brother’s skull crushed under the huge implement. (Marge Cervone, a Gardner family friend, told me that “Gilbert was the kind of kid who would never hold on.”) “He was not to blame,” said John’s mother. “Nobody could have stopped that thing happening.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

A history of intellect

It has it been widely noted that, as Western culture generally has grown steadily more materialistic in its values and interests (as if it were ever anything else, ungenerous critics might suggest) over the past half-century, it has become simultaneously more abstracted in its mental habits and orientation? Chesterton described a paradox as truth standing on its head to draw attention to itself. In this instance, we have an obvious example. But it’s a good question how this particular one came to be. Ancient Greece was an intensely intellectual world of ideas that were firmly grounded in empirical reality and in observed and confirmable truth.

Ross Anderson

Visiting Glashütte, the small town in East Germany that has mastered time

The view from my top floor room at the Steigenberger Hotel de Saxe looked out at the great dome of the Frauenkirche. It’s a huge Baroque church in the center of Dresden; I first saw the building on foot, when failing to find a local restaurant on my first night there. I turned a corner to see it towering above me. It looks like it’s always been there, but the original was destroyed in 1945, under the infamous British firebombing, and reconstruction only finished in 2005. I was eventually directed to the restaurant, past the Oktoberfest stands that began sprouting up during my visit in late September. However beautiful the town, I was not here for “Florence on the Elbe” and its grand buildings, but for smaller, more delicate wonders from a nearby town. And so, at 8 a.m.

Tuesday

November 14, 2023

The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2023 Holiday Gift Guide

Matt McDonald, Managing Editor I am much better at buying gifts for others than I am at coming up with ideas for what I want: I’ve always valued experiences and memories more than material things... which isn’t very Christmassy or helpful. That said, I best unwind outside of work by going to the cinema and turning my phone off — replacing “bad screen” with “good screen,” if you will — and so getting me a MoviePass so I can watch Dune Part Two in IMAX next year at cut-price would be worthwhile. For others... the best thing I regularly get my Irish-ish cousins is items of clothing in one of our family tartans. Scarves for the ladies, ties for the gents.

Jack Holmes

Why America’s top TV networks are banking on English soccer

America’s soccer supernova is always just around the next corner, but Rebecca Lowe, who anchors NBC’s coverage of the Premier League in the United States, recalls a few corners already turned. “When I stood in LA in the rain at four in the morning and there were 5,000 people lining up to come in and join us,” she said, referencing one of NBC’s “FanFest” watch parties in 2021, “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this has not only made it, but this is not going anywhere. This is only getting bigger.’ And there are not many things in this country that can get bigger.” It sure seems like there are more red-blooded Americans patrolling our streets in Arsenal and Liverpool shirts these days.

Bill McMorris

The difference between children and tattoos

Mrs. McMorris and I have five daughters — and much like the WNBA nobody is watching them. Unattended children are best kept to the cozy culs-de-sac of the suburbs where the only threat to life and limb is inattentive Amazon delivery drivers, rather than the city where they could fall prey to inattentive pit-bull owners — or worse, watchful public-school teachers. Every father knows the first thing to do when moving to the suburbs is to find a cheap handyman who will respond within the hour to any text message. All the better if he is a licensed plumber, which is how Mrs. McMorris and I found Scott from All Total Service plumbing. Scott is indifferent to my career as a journalist, though he cares deeply about his Nextdoor rating.

Cosmo Landesman

The decline of the stylish man

The other day I saw something you don’t often see these days on the streets of London: a truly stylish man. He was a tall, skinny black dude, with a velvet top hat that tilted on his head in a jaunty way that defied gravity. He wore a brightly-embroidered paisley jacket, a waistcoat, tight black trousers and shiny, pointed black shoes — and he carried a pearl-handled walking stick. He looked like a cross between Beau Brummel and James Brown. So I was surprised when I saw this elegant man start to collect cigarette butts from the ground. Here was a dandy in the gutter — but one so cool, he stooped with style. I went up to him and said, “Hey man, I dig your look!” And I meant it.

Bill Kauffman

Revisiting Gettysburg

The Civil War, said Gore Vidal, is “the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our republic.” Gettysburg was its climacteric battle, and Ron Maxwell’s epic Gettysburg (1993), filmed on and around the battlefield, is the definitive cinematic treatment of the most consequential, written-about and argued-over military engagement in the history of the United States. (I would call it the most stirring as well but then I remember the words of the eminent historian J.G. Randall, best-known for his four-volume Lincoln the President: “That there was heroism in the war is not doubted, but to thousands the war was as romantic as prison rats and as gallant as typhoid or syphilis.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The rebuilding of the Tower of Babel

The going explanation for the critical international situation today is that the authoritarian, statist powers of the world are cooperating with one another against the Western, democratic, capitalist ones to smash the supposed “rules-based” order on which they imagine Western hegemony rests. This is certainly one cause of the present global crisis but I do not believe it is the proximate one, which is rather the entirely predictable — though inexplicably unpredicted — result of the network of nearly instant electronic communications in which international society is enmeshed as if in the web of a malignant cosmic spider, combined with a reinforcing system of cheap global transport operating at not much below supersonic speed.

Friday

October 20, 2023

Ross Anderson

The sorry state of Supreme

It would have happened on a Thursday, as it does every Thursday. Crowds of young men and teen boys would have lined up outside stores around the globe, in hopes of buying the latest drop from Supreme — the pugnacious streetwear brand which rose from New York skater shop to global multibillion-dollar fashion colossus and sold to fashion conglomerate VF Corporation for $2.1 billion in December 2020. Even if you don’t care about skating or streetwear, you would instantly recognize a white T-shirt slapped with their logo; a red box, with “Supreme” in Futura Heavy Oblique font inside. Celebrities love Supreme, the stylish (Hailey Bieber, A$AP Rocky, Kanye West) and the stylish-wannabes (Justin Bieber, Travis Scott, Jaden Smith).

Cosmo Landesman

Should I join a free-love Marxist commune?

Last week I got an interesting offer: would I like to leave London and go live in “Marxist free-love commune” in France? The offer came from the woke woman in mylife— I call her WW— the one I wrote about when I suggested we could end the culture war if we just poke the woke. Well, believe it or not, we’re still poking. And she wasn’t joking about the free-love Marxist commune. She’d recently been there for two weeks and had seen the future: our future. “It’s the most amazing place. You’ve got to come with me. We can pick olives, dance under the stars, write poetry do yoga — and have lots of sex!” “What? With other people?” “If you want,” she said. “They don’t believe sex should be exclusive or full of fear and repression.