Brat

Wednesday

Graeme Thomson

Is Music, Fashion, Film really the best Charli xcx can do?

Of the three creative pursuits that give Charli xcx’s eighth album its title, the English pop star seems least interested in the first. She admits as much on “Camera,” the best song on Music, Fashion, Film, which makes clear her obsession with acting and a desire to pursue it more fully. “Do I want to make music?” she asks herself. “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen and I’m turning 34?” Even without this clue – which, like much of the album, is presented via the singer throwing out rhetorical spiel more or less unexpurgated – it is no great stretch to surmise that the pursuit of making music is struggling to fully hold her attention.

brat

Thursday

The Spectator

This month in culture: January 2025

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl January 3, Netflix The panic that gripped the McMorris household in November 2023 was rivaled by that of the great toilet paper shortage of 2020. Greater even, for this crisis could not be solved with a credit card and the willingness to fight hand-to-hand against fellow Costco members. Aardman Animations, the last bearable producer of children’s entertainment, was running out of clay. The sole remaining British factory that produced the stuff behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep had shuttered. Only a pitchfork would suffice. The advent of CGI has fried parental eyeballs with neon ever since Toy Story and only Aardman has resisted the trend, delivering us stop-motion Stan and Ollie routines.

culture

Thursday

Becket Adams

The recriminations that follow a Kamala defeat will be delicious

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is in trouble, which means we may be in for one hell of a post-election fireworks show.   If she loses the presidential election, there will be intra-Democratic Party in-fighting unlike anything we’ve seen before. The recriminations will be extraordinary. There will be finger-pointing, backstabbing, excuse-making and an air of panic that will make even the sleazy, widespread gossip-peddling that followed the late Senator John McCain’s defeat in 2008 look tame.   How do we know this will happen? Because it has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale.

recriminations

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

The meme election

Each subsequent election seems to get more and more online. The Kamala Harris campaign, armed with a strategy devised by a few twenty-five-year-old women in a Bushwick coffee shop, thinks the election will be won by hiding the candidate away and replacing her with a string of memes and cringe slogans. Unfortunately, they may be right. When you have a candidate that has a problem stringing three unscripted sentences together into something coherent, you must find some other way to shove her across the finish line. That means spiriting her away from the press as much as possible, limiting speeches to only those with a teleprompter and changing your policy positions so many times that no one has any idea what you’re actually running on. Hey, it worked for Joe Biden.

election