New york

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

I’ve never thought much of John Lennon’s music – until now

It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it must be good but it’s never made much of an impact on me no matter how hard I’ve tried to appreciate it. If I like a Beatles song, I usually discover it’s by George. But the discovery from a radio trailer (reluctantly, I’ll have to admit they do sometimes work) that Lennon would have been 75 this week was shocking enough (how could he ever be that old?) to make me tune in on Thursday night to John Lennon’s Last Day.

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Cruising

By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled by the motion and murmurings of the rocking sea, I slept like a baby. I was never bored. Queen Mary 2, the Cunard Line’s flagship, has everything from a ballroom, planetarium and library to an art-deco Titanic-style dining hall. Passengers do not want for anything: there’s even a mortuary. The last time I shipped out to New York from Southampton was in 1961, when I was a baby. We stayed in New York for more than a year while my father worked for a Wall Street investment bank.

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

If only they were a bit less cool: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons at the Guggenheim Bilbao

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time Guggenheim Bilbao, until 1 November Jeff Koons: Retrospective Guggenheim Bilbao, until 27 September Manhattan in the late 1970s early 1980s was, by all accounts, a pretty scary place. It was caked in graffiti, lawless, and in certain areas, almost emptied by the so-called ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. It was, in other words, a perfect stomping ground for artists and musicians. This is the romantic notion, anyway. It’s what someone will tell you when trying to justify Jean-Michel Basquiat’s posthumous superstar status and its accompanying price tag.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Could a row with Uber be taxi for a London mayoral candidate?

One of the striking things about the contest in Labour for the mayoral candidacy is how many of the candidates are keen to admonish private taxi firm Uber. Sadiq Khan has described it as a ‘problem’ and said he is ‘on the side of the back cab driver’, Tessa Jowell is ‘enormously concerned’ and doesn’t have an Uber account, while David Lammy wants to ‘protect the institution that is the black cab’ and wishes there had been a confrontation between the Mayor and Uber as there had been in Paris. But perhaps these candidates should take heed of what has happened to another mayor who confronted Uber. Bill De Blasio picked a fight with Uber in New York earlier this year, and lost.

Thursday

Stephen Smith

I reshot Andy Warhol

It’s one thing to make the most boring film in cinema history — at least you can kid yourself at the outset that it might turn out differently. It’s quite another to lovingly recreate the same film half a century later, shot by eye-bleeding shot, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’m proud to say. I say shot by shot, but since Andy Warhol’s Empire consists of a single locked-off shot of the Empire State Building running to 8 hours 5 minutes in black-and-white yawn-o-vision, that’s not much to write home about. Nor is the rest of the movie, from almost any popcorn-munching perspective you can think of.

Emily Rhodes

Idolising Ida

Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old days’ of the publishing industry is palpable: a time when books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell … their contents, the magic words, their poetry and prose, were liquor, perfume, sex, and glory to their devotees. The halcyon days of print publishing were not, in fact, so very long ago, with the first e-reader going on sale only in 2004 and Amazon’s Kindle in 2007; it is astonishing that the digital revolution has taken only a decade to change the publishing landscape dramatically enough to inspire a novel so thick with nostalgia.

Kate Webb

The lonely struggle of Jude the obscure

Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara has announced a new shift in consciousness. Jude, the lead character in A Little Life, is known to his friends as the Postman, ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past’. The obscurity of his origins (left at birth in a rubbish bin) and a childhood of horrific abuse mean he is determined to draw a veil over his past, making him the most mysterious of the four male New York friends at the heart of Yanagihara’s story. However, his condition is only an extreme — and negative — version of the ambiguity that characterises all the people around him, among whom identity is continually in flux.

Sunday

Ella Whelan

The internet is eroding the presumption of innocence

Last week, New York magazine ran a front-cover photo of 35 of the 46 women who have accused actor Bill Cosby of sexual assault. The feature inside includes individual interviews with each woman, but argues that ‘the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience’. The collation of these women’s accusations follows intense public interest in Cosby's alleged misconduct, triggered last year when the comedian Hannibal Buress declared ‘you raped women, Bill Cosby’ during a routine. The New York feature is not an attempt to bring Cosby to justice, or even to challenge the statute of limitations that impedes any potential legal process against him.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Dedicated follower of fashion

Iris is a documentary portrait of Iris Apfel, the nonagenarian New York fashion icon. Nope, me neither, but that’s irrelevant, as all you truly need know is she is a joy, a wonder, and terrific, as is this film. It’s the final work of documentary film-maker Albert Maysles, who died last year, at 88, and although Iris obviously loves the camera, and plays to the camera, and it is often Iris doing Iris, as Iris does Iris so brilliantly, who cares? Also, you just can’t take your eyes off her. You can’t. The opening shots show Iris, who is 93, in her Park Avenue apartment, in all her glory. Accessories make an outfit, is a fashion tip often proffered, but why make an outfit, when you can blast it out of the water?

Thursday

Philip Clark

The London ear

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames. Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be forgiven for assuming that RVW has taken a genteel amble around the countryside.

Vicky Ward

The rich are a different species

The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway through his brother’s eulogy and brazenly strolls down to the front pew, ignoring the scandalised glances. He’s late, a whisper spreads, because he had a meeting with director James Toback. Wait. James Toback? Lame! The hearse leaves, and the congregants assemble on the street. An attractive brunette in her late forties weeps desolately. Did she know the deceased well? Not at all: she has discovered that someone at the service walked off with her Christian Dior trench and left her with a shabbier coat from a chainstore.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Thinking inside the box

Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question to put to a man who numbered Piet Mondrian, as well as other masters of modernism, among his acquaintance. But, characteristically, Cornell veered off at a tangent. ‘What’, he replied, ‘do you mean “my time”?’ In its way it’s a good response, as the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, makes clear. The subtitle of the show refers to travel in mental space. In mundane reality, Cornell (1903– 72) seldom left New York City, and never ventured further afield than Maine. But in his imagination, he journeyed across the world and dwelt, mentally, in an era earlier than his own.

John R. MacArthur

The man who wrecked New York

It is something of a mystery why the Bodley Head has decided to publish Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in Britain more than 40 years after the initial appearance in the US of this classic work — but better late than never. Caro’s remarkable portrait of New York City’s master planner Robert Moses merits publication in any language, at any moment in time. For its scope extends beyond Moses, fascinating though he was as a person, builder, wrecker, and manipulator of men and money. Caro’s ambition — in a journalistic sense equal to Moses’s ambition in architecture, park creation, and road and bridge construction — is greater than conventional biography.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 4 June 2015

The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein.It had me clapping with one hand due to the operation, and standing with the packed theatre for the ovation. Shows how much the critics who panned it know. The audience loved it, as did I. It’s an uplifting, wonderful play about J.M. Barrie and the children. Then there was the blind black guy in Brooklyn who told me, ‘You’re too pale for this neighbourhood.’ Go figure, as they say in that part of town. I’m always sad to leave the city, especially with the end of spring. I miss its mixture of glitz and grit, of races and colours, of violence and pleasures, of misfits and millionaires.

Melanie McDonagh

Degrees of bureaucracy

It took Oxford 40 years to catch up with Cambridge in appointing a woman vice-chancellor, but Louise Richardson — ex-St Andrews, Irish, Catholic, terrorism expert — is to take over from the chemist Andrew Hamilton. He is leaving early to head New York University for an eye-watering £950,000 a year. His successor will inherit a more modest but still whopping £442,000 a year. That’s what happens when a university is run like a biggish corporation — the head is paid like a chief executive. (A professor gets around £65,000 a year: once, Louise Richardson would have been on something similar.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 21 May 2015

This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking north on a silent Park Avenue hoping to get into trouble. Fourteen thousand yellow taxis have turned Manhattan into a Bengali hellhole, blasting their horns non-stop, picking up or disgorging passengers in the middle of traffic-clogged streets, speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians as Big Bagel law requires. But on the Upper East Side, on a balmy evening, the yellow devils are causing havoc downtown, so I almost find myself singing in the rain as I head north far from the madding crowd.(Puns unintended.) Nicola’s is an Italian restaurant that used to be very much in fashion back in the Seventies and Eighties.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 7 May 2015

If any of you sees Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his hand, it’s because he took me to dinner recently. I sort of went a bit nuts with the wine and the VF chief ended up with the bill. We went to a new Bagel restaurant, Chevalier, a futuristic marvel with great food and wine and even grander prices. New York is no longer elegant, and there are no longer society types dressed to the nines sitting on the banquettes and downing Manhattans. The Jewish ascendancy that downed the Wasps was as elegant as the one it replaced. William Paley, John Loeb and others like them dressed at Anderson & Sheppard, were shod by John Lobb, and had their shirts made by Sulka. They had exquisite manners and aped their predecessors.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 30 April 2015

I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was in 2002, when I was 62 years old, and rather a pretty girl whom I had been quietly admiring through the crush on the Piccadilly Line suddenly rose to her feet and beckoned me to take her place. I was so shocked that I responded most ungraciously. I just shook my head in irritation and signalled to her to sit down again. For, notwithstanding the fact that my hair had long ago turned white, it was the first time I had realised that I actually looked old. From then on, offers of seats on crowded Tube trains started to come my way occasionally, and they came with gradually increasing frequency, until now, 13 years later, I have almost come to expect them.

Nigel Lawson

Diary – 30 April 2015

I have escaped this rather depressing election campaign by retreating to my home in la France profonde — to be precise, in Armagnac, in the heart of Gascony. My only outing, from which I have just returned, was a brief visit to New York, travelling there and back in the giant Airbus 380. The purpose of the trip was to drum up US support for the thinktank I founded in 2009, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and its campaigning arm, the Global Warming Policy Forum, in the company of our outstanding director, Benny Peiser. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the GWPF has a global reach, and its international influence is growing.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 23 April 2015

A recent column in the FT made me mad as hell. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, which is a bit like calling the Queen a busted flush because of her age. Sure, he writes how great Vienna was back when the Habsburgs ruled the roost, attracting people from all over, ‘some of them nuts’. He includes Freud, Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky. Not the nicest bunch I can think of, but then the paper is a pink one. He fears London might go the way of Vienna, and price itself out of the reach of everyone but a few Chinese, Russian and Indian billionaires. He’s right about London but dead wrong where Vienna is concerned. (Vienna, incidentally, is dirt cheap.