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Tuesday

Conrad Black

Prince of Europe’s long peace

This is a giant Teutonic forest of a book, to be progressed through with determination as if by seasoned infantry; it is as far as biography can get from a Viennese waltz. But it has its rewards. It is an extensive and wellresearched chronicle of Klemens von Metternich’s monumental career — 39 years as foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, the last 27 of them also as state chancellor, and an extensive diplomatic career prior to all that. Wolfram Siemann presents and argues for a new and rather liberal interpretation of ‘the Metternich system’ instead of the normal view of Metternich’s influence as rigid and reactionary.

metternich

Monday

Spectator Editorial

The weak response to coronavirus is a symptom of the decay of the liberal state

If COVID-19 spreads in the United States as it has spread elsewhere, then quite soon the virus will be established within the general population. The federal response will have changed from containing isolated ‘hot spots’ to managing a national epidemic. ‘Social distancing’ and self-quarantining will be endemic, hospitals will be overloaded and the economy will have continued to contract. This could test not just the American people — their social bonds, their sense of collective fate — but also America’s government and institutions. That testing will be far more demanding than the ‘stress tests’ faced by the banks after the financial crisis of 2007-08. America’s resolve will be challenged again. This should not be a time for petty politicking.

coronavirus state liberalism
abortion
Godfrey Elfwick

I fell out with my friend Chrysanthia over abortion

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Portland, Oregon My pansexual cisgender nonbinary friend Chrysanthia (pronouns: she/her/they/thym) called to tell me she had some exciting news, and would I meet her for a coffee? Off I went, wondering what her announcement could be. As we cradled Espresso Loco’s hot and eco-friendly cups of locally sourced, organic Locolatte, Chrysanthia could contain her excitement no longer. She withdrew from her hemp satchel a used pregnancy test and thrust the urine-encrusted paddle into my face. Once my eyes had stopped stinging, I could see that it was positive. ‘OMG, are you serious?!’ I asked, my eyes filling with hot tears. ‘Yes!’ she cried ecstatically.

Friday

Eric Gibson

The human clay

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.The topics in The Necessity of Sculpture emerged randomly, thrown off by successive exhibition calendars and coming to range in time and place from ancient Mesopotamia to 21st-century Manhattan. As I made the selections, what began to take shape, beyond a conventional anthology, was a synoptic history of the art form. The title is a belated riposte to Ad Reinhardt’s famous dismissal, in around 1960, of sculpture as ‘something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’.

sculpture
argentina
Andrew Stuttaford

Do cry for her, Argentina

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The odds of becoming a cult figure improve with the speed of departure. Among musicians, Jimi, Jim, Janis, Kurt and Amy played their last notes at 27. By dying at 33 and later becoming the subject of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Eva Perón joined an even more exclusive club. ‘Half a million people kissed the coffin,’ says the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez in Santa Evita (1995). ‘A million-and-a-half yellow roses, stocks from the Andes, white carnations, orchids from the Amazon, sweet peas from Lake Nahuel Huapi, and chrysanthemums sent by the emperor of Japan… were thrown from balconies.

Wednesday

Bill Kauffman

The remarkable Martha Treichler

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Batavia, New York Shrouded in legend, Black Mountain College was an experimental school outside Asheville, North Carolina. For almost a quarter century (1933-57) it incubated, nurtured and disgorged the holy fools, ragged prophets and pretentious frauds of the American avant-garde and the (in some cases reactionary) counterculture: John Cage, Paul Goodman, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller, to name a few. Yet for my money, the most remarkable couple to pass through Black Mountain were Bill and Martha (Rittenhouse) Treichler, two farm kids, the former an Iowan, the latter a daughter of Maryland, who met and fell in love at Black Mountain during the 1948-49 school year.

treichler
stanford
Madeleine Kearns

Mass appeal: Stanford in Stamford

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The exterior of the basilica of St John the Evangelist in Stamford, Connecticut, looms large and gray. Built in 1875 by Irish immigrants who mined and hauled rocks from a nearby quarry, its interior bursts with greens, reds and golds. The saintly lives in its stained-glass windows are said to comprise one of the largest collections of its kind on the East Coast. I was one of 12 singers to perform here at the American premiere of the Mass in G Major by the Dublin-born composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). Stanford’s Mass was first performed at London’s Brompton Oratory in 1893, but, like The Spectator, it took its time coming to America.

Tuesday

James Hankins

Impeachment: the verdict of history

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Spring term, 2170. Professor Hankins assigns an English translation from the 22nd century’s most authoritative historical survey, The Beijing Universal History. This week’s course reading is from Volume VIII: The Far Western Hemisphere — North Central American Province. Chapter 33 The Era of Impeachment, 2020-52 At this time the North Central American province was still independent and under the system of governance known as ‘liberal democracy’, described in Chapter 29.

impeachment
goldwater rule
Roger Kimball

Time to scrap the Goldwater Rule

There are few ironclad rules in American politics. But here is one: if you are a Republican, no tactic is too disreputable to be deployed against you. I think for example, of the disgusting campaign waged to keep Judge Robert Bork from the Supreme Court in the 1980s. 'Lion of the Senate' Ted Kennedy led that charge ('in Robert Bork’s America...'), though he was aided by a young senator named Joe Biden. Journalists went through Bork’s trash and reviewed the movies he rented for incriminating evidence. Other campaigns of vilification against Republican Supreme Court nominees include the one conducted against Clarence Thomas and, most recently, the extraordinary full-court press against Brett Kavanaugh. But the calumny is directed not just against judicial nominees.

Monday

James Jeffrey

Addicted to Addis

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In the Entoto hills high above Addis Ababa, the lights of incoming Ethiopian Airlines planes are evenly spaced in the night sky. Behind me in an abandoned restaurant, the DJ cranks it up and the dance floor goes nuts. EDM (Electronic Dance Music), a style popularized at American festivals and raves, has landed in Ethiopia. I’ve been a dance music devotee since college. But when I first visited Ethiopia in 2000, I lost my heart to a different scene: mesinko-playing troubadours who mask political satire in witty innuendo, the hypnotic melodies of Ethio-jazz bands and the traditional shoulder-shaking of iskista dancers.

addis ababa ethiopia
cheese
Jane Stannus

Say cheese

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?’ Bertie Wooster was once heard to groan. Does cheese matter in a time of coronavirus, climate panic and tariff wars? These pressures can lead anyone to succumb temporarily to Sartresque nausea. Fortunately the gentleman’s gentleman was at hand with a steadying dose of sanity: ‘There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.’ And there is no time at which cheese does not matter.

Friday

David Bahr

Around the world in 49 days

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. No one remembers Wendell Willkie. If you don’t believe me, mention him as a man worth looking up at your next cocktail hour. Then watch as even well-informed acquaintances wonder when, exactly, you started taking an interest in adult-entertainment performers or bothered to locate the inspiration for Arrested Development’s hit ‘Mr Wendal’. Even the learned (and let’s throw in friends who subscribe to the New Yorker to even things out), will struggle to recall that Willkie was not only referred to as ‘Private Citizen Number One’ by FDR.

wendell willkie
red hook winery
Roger Kimball

Vintage Brooklyn: the wines of Red Hook

Close your eyes and think about the word ‘winery’. What image comes to mind? I’m guessing you will say, ‘A large stone pile from the 17th century or before surrounded by lovingly tended gardens and row after row of neatly staked vines.’ That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. There are plenty of wineries in France and elsewhere that feature modernist architecture. And there is one in Brooklyn, New York at 175 Van Dyke Street, towards the end of Pier 41 at the old Navy Yard. With a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty and the New Jersey waterfront, Red Hook Winery — a retail tasting room in front, barrels and vats in the back — occupies a fetching but improbable spot. Red Hook was started in 2008 by Mark Snyder.

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

Democracy in danger

The corruption of its democracy is one of America’s oldest yet most surprising habits. Edgar Allan Poe, it is believed, died after the ordeal of ‘cooping’: an informal exercise in getting out the vote, in which an often forcibly inebriated man was marched from booth to booth and made to vote for the same candidate each time. The voters of Massachusetts’s 4th District, compelled by a party machine to endorse Joseph P. Kennedy III, will know the feeling. Indeed, John F. Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 elections is said to have depended on the stuffing of ballots in the Chicago of Mayor Richard J. Daley — and possibly on the intervention in Cook County by the crime boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy went on to win Illinois by 8,000 votes and to take the White House.

democracy

Tuesday

Luke Haines

‘All rock ’n’ roll starts and ends with Lou Reed’

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.March 2013 I have written a song called ‘Lou Reed, Lou Reed’. It’s a hymn to the man in the title — a petition, as Jim Morrison would have it, to the gods of rock ’n’ roll. The song runs for just two minutes and consists of a three-note, sub-moronic riff and a two-word mantra repeated 71 times. The two words are ‘Lou Reed’. The song isn’t a hit, but it does cut a bit of a dash. The song’s subject even hears it. I hear from someone who hears that he heard it that he likes what he heard. Then, in October 2013, the subject of my song dies. My song, a throwaway, begins a strange afterlife.

luke haines peter buck
kraftwerk
Jay Elwes

Uniform beats

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Right from the beginning, everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no frontman, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic music owed nothing to blues, soul or any of the other forms of music that underpinned 20th-century pop. Instead, a Kraftwerk gig consisted of four gauche-looking fellows from Düsseldorf standing in a row, each poking at a synthesizer while strange, apparently unconnected images appeared on screens behind them. A Kraftwerk album could be just as confounding. The cover of 1977’s TransEurope Express featured the band in suits and ties, looking more like the partners at an accounting firm than a pioneering electronica band.

Monday

Benjamin Riley

An old master who still feels new

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Velázquez prized his work, but El Greco’s reputation fell quickly after his death in 1614. Another Spanish painter, Antonio Palomino (1655-1726), called The Greek ‘contemptible and ridiculous, as much for the disjointed drawing as for the insipid colors’. In the 1800s, ‘The Burial of the Count of Orgaz’, now regarded as one of his masterpieces, lay rolled up in the basement of a Toledo church.

el greco
bloomie
Taki

What makes Bloomie run?

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In that great movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles makes it big as a newspaper owner-publisher and then runs for governor of New York. He fails because of hanky-panky with a singer, and we all know the rest. In John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick, the protagonist has aspirations to be president but he, too, falls short. The characters I’ve just mentioned are, of course, fictitious. Mike Bloomberg is not. Nor are his fifty billion big ones. Bloomie recently wrote that unlike Trump he did not inherit a fortune. That he did not. But nor, really, did The Donald. The latter’s father was a comparatively small-time Brooklyn and Queens real-estate developer.

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

What the new nationalism means

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. For most of the past 200 years, the left, whether revolutionary or liberal, derived power and popularity from being on the side of freedom. If you resented the economic, social and political privileges enjoyed by hereditary aristocrats and landowners, you were on the left. If you chafed against the restraints imposed on what you could read, write, say, think or do by established churches or majoritarian cultural Christianity, you had reason to support one left-wing movement or another — philosophes and Jacobins in the 18th century, liberals in the 19th century, the American Civil Liberties Union in the 20th.

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Wednesday

Zack Christenson

In praise of the Midwestern steakhouse

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In the 20th century, you joined a city or country club for status and a good meal on the regular. But who wants to eat the same food from the same chef every meal for the rest of your life? Now we go to restaurants. There’s always a new spot, a new dish, a new someone you need to impress by swiping right across the menu. It’s been my lifestyle choice for over a decade now. My life revolves around food, and most of my monthly budget goes on gastronomy. But I’m tired. Most of these hotspots just aren’t that hot. My jaded palate needs something new — or rather, something old.

steakhouse