Culture

"This mob is not the people,” declared Henry J. Raymond in his paper, the New York Times, about the Draft Riots in July 1863. Blue-collar workers in New York, mostly Irish, had begun by protesting a new conscription law, but anti-war sentiment quickly became a pretext for widespread destruction, looting and racial violence. Blacks were hunted, their homes and businesses trashed, and scores of them lynched. Raymond wanted no quarter for the rioters: “Give them grape[shot] and plenty of it.” The new musical Paradise Square imagines a “little bit of Eden” in the Five Points slum of downtown Manhattan, July 1863, where, we are told, blacks and Irish did not just coexist peacefully for a time but flourished.

Ricky Gervais has caused a stir. This is not, perhaps, the least expected thing you could hear about the sixty-year-old British comedian, but his new Netflix show, SuperNature, has attracted an unusual amount of opprobrium for what people have perceived as anti-trans jokes. In the show, Gervais makes a distinction between “the old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs” and “the new women... with beards and cocks.” He calls upon the latter to “lose the cock,” and the audience laughs along with him hysterically.

The Cannes Film Festival remains the most glamorous and famous gathering of the movie industry in the world. High-profile, black-tie premieres attended by some of the best-known actors jostle alongside the more disreputable commercial market. Films on sale this year include My Neighbor Adolf, about the unlikely friendship that is struck up between a Holocaust survivor and a mysterious man who may or may not be Adolf Hitler. But back in the main festival, everything is going entirely to plan. Apparently. There has not been a “normal” Cannes Film Festival since 2019. The 2020 edition was canceled, and the 2021 event took place in reduced and rather glum circumstances in July. But now Cannes is back, back, back, bébé!

New York’s Upper East Side — 1018 Madison Avenue, to be exact — currently hosts another world at the Gray Gallery. It’s a universe with a near-scientific attention to detail. Plant stems are bisected and, in turn, bisect paintings like winding snakes; petals and branches are painted in such microscopic detail that they appear like the surface of some far-flung planet; and canvases are awash with such bright, clean lines they seem almost like subway maps of a particularly topsy-turvy city. The works — pastels, oil on canvas, and oil on linen — are those of Evelyn Statsinger (1927 – 2016), the deeply underappreciated artist who lived in New York, Chicago, and Michigan.

If there is such a thing as a formula for making a hit film, it has something to do with giving audiences a new and unusual villain. Over the years, screenwriters have thrown their protagonists up against enemies as thuggish as boss Johnny Friendly in 1954’s On the Waterfront and as smooth as Olivier’s Crassus as in 1960’s Spartacus. “The more successful the villain, the more successful the film,” as Hitchcock himself once put it. Which is why Hollywood’s constant search for new and unusual bad guys has explored almost every conceivable milieu: corporate America (The Big Short), street gangs (The Warriors), hospitals (Coma), prisons (Shawshank Redemption), law firms (The Firm), and even the movie studio itself (The Bad and the Beautiful).

When the Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis was recently asked by the BBC how she felt about the poor reviews she has received for her performance as Michelle Obama in the new Showtime series The First Lady, she was not coy in her response. "Critics absolutely serve no purpose," she replied. "And I’m not saying that to be nasty either. They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know. Somehow that you’re living a life that you’re surrounded by people who lie to you and 'I’m going to be the person that leans in and tells you the truth.' So it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you." The writer Brendan Behan once described a critic as being like "a eunuch in a harem.

Cockburn was crestfallen to learn that James Corden is set to end his tenure as host of The Late Late Show next year. In his eight-year stint Corden has cemented his status as the most welcome British export to America since class snobbery and weak, milky tea.

The fact that the master songwriter Bob Dylan is a fan of a literary allusion should come as no surprise. This is the man who, in his autobiography Chronicles Vol. 1, declared that reading the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud made “bells [go] off.” (Incidentally, it was Suze Rotolo, his first love whom he so cruelly lambasted in “Ballad of Plain D,” who introduced him to the poet. One feels that Dylan should have paid her a little more retrospective credit than the all-but-bitter love songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

One of the most enduring images from the Oscars came two decades ago, at the 2002 ceremony, when director David Lynch revealed himself as one of the most courteous and pleasant figures in contemporary cinema. Ron Howard had just won the Best Director award for his work on the dishonest and ephemeral mental health drama A Beautiful Mind. As the beaming Howard — one of the most popular figures in Hollywood — headed onto the stage to collect his prize, two of his defeated rivals, Robert Altman and Lynch, embraced one another.

What is there left to say about Picasso? This question, posed by a colleague apropos of Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, an exhibition on display at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, is inevitable. There are few cultural figures whose life and accomplishments have been as exhaustively accounted for as the man born — take a breath! — Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Innumerable exhibitions, books, scholarly tracts and films have been devoted to this relentlessly protean artist. Even after his death almost fifty years ago — Picasso died in 1973 at the age of ninety-one — he looms large in the public consciousness.

What Remains to Be Said: New and Selected Poems by Robert B. Shaw, Pinyon, 2022, 312 pages Robert B. Shaw is one of those quietly accomplished poets who publishes a slim volume of exacting and beautiful poems every eight years or so. One thinks of his teacher at Harvard, Robert Fitzgerald, as a model in this regard, or the late Amy Clampitt, or Shaw’s more prolific contemporary Frederick Turner. Shaw’s observational verse progresses by accumulation of detail or plot and aims to unify meaning and music. His most recent volume, What Remains to Be Said: New and Selected Poems, collects poems from all of his seven previous books and includes 28 new poems.

Father Stu opened in theaters this Holy Week. It’s a movie about a real-life man who led a depraved and reckless life, found God, became a priest, suffered greatly and died from an incurable disease. And did so — more importantly — with patience and good nature that inspired multitudes of those around him. The film’s message is essentially that suffering has value, and as we sit in the richest nation in history drowning in the highest levels of depression ever recorded, such a reminder could not come at a better time. It’s a curious thing that so many people are dissatisfied with life when the standard of living has never been higher.

Time is a Mother — Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection — should have been a scene-stealer, a much-awaited literary event of the type normally reserved for a J.K. Rowling. The collection has been talked about in the breathy, excited terms not normally associated with poetry — the least glitzy of the literary genres — and in a way not heard of since the blockbuster release of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998). Vuong, rightly, won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2017 with Night Sky With Exit Wounds. The collection had flashes of brilliance and was a mark of a young poet making his way in the world. It also won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and, in 2019, Vuong was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant.

Exactly when and where are our stunning and brave Hollywood stars prepared to take a stand for gay rights? Liberal actors and celebrities have a made a show of standing against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, signed earlier this month by Governor Ron DeSantis, a man progressives seems intent on making the next president. When activists and journalists realized they couldn’t stop the bill from becoming law, they deployed their new favorite tactic: demanding that corporations speak out against the bill (see also: how in response to Georgia’s new voting legislation, they insisted that Major League Baseball relocate the All-Star game).

Next week marks the release of the third J.K. Rowling-scripted Fantastic Beasts film, a series that has overstayed its welcome. This latest iteration is subtitled The Secrets of Dumbledore. As if to wrong-foot those who would smirkingly speculate that one of Dumbledore’s secrets is his sexuality, the film opens with the old wizard and his former lover-turned-nemesis Grindelwald (now played by Mads Mikkelsen, replacing a disgraced Johnny Depp) mourning the end of their love affair, which at least makes the homosexual subtext hinted at in previous films explicit. But that, alas, is about it for any kind of coherence, or interest, or originality.

It may come as a surprise to anyone who has read Mick Herron’s peerless Slough House novels, but Slow Horses, Apple TV’s high-profile adaptation of the first book in the series, is not funny. Instead, it takes Herron’s uproariously comic premise — that a group of misfit British spies, cast out of MI5 for misdemeanors exaggerated and accurate alike, have been reduced to grubbing about in a grim office on the periphery of the City of London — and plays it almost entirely straight. Gone are the laugh-out-loud one-liners and endearingly witty pieces of throwaway badinage. Instead, we have a big-budget spy thriller, polished and scripted to within an inch of its life. It’s a bit like seeing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reinvented as a gritty urban drama.

All the way across the Atlantic, the British literary world has been seized by John Donne fever. Katherine Rundell’s biography of the metaphysical priest-poet has led to excitable chattering about his life and work. The book, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, will be released in the US in September — a significant enough delay as to make the Declaration of Independence look like a mistake. Aside from radically different publication dates (again: would you rather have lower taxes and freedom from George III, or a brilliant Donne biography?), the specter of the far-off American continent has long since loomed large in Donne studies.

The news that Bruce Willis is to “step away” — rather than explicitly retire — from acting following a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia, is sad for both personal and artistic reasons. Even as a flood of stories emerge about Willis’s erratic and unpredictable behavior on film sets over the past few years, it is a bitter irony that, after a lengthy career as the tough guy hero — in Armageddon, he defeated no less an antagonist than a planet-threatening asteroid — the actor has finally been undone by his own brain. The news also makes the recent receipt of Willis’s Golden Razzie “award” for his performance in Cosmic Sin particularly cruel, not least because he was “honored” with a special category, “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie.

Writers have all sorts of hobbies. Tolstoy liked to play chess. Dostoevsky, as everyone knows, loved to gamble. Nabokov collected butterflies; Hemingway, wives. Eugene O’Neill’s favorite pastime was drinking. Flannery O’Connor, of course, loved birds. Emily Dickinson loved to bake. T.S. Eliot was an avid sailor. As a young man he regularly sailed along the shore of Cape Ann. One summer, Eliot and some friends sailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts to Mt. Desert Rock in a 19-foot knockabout in the fog and rough seas. It was a journey of well over 150 nautical miles and could have easily ended in disaster. The sea, of course, appears again and again in Eliot’s poetry.

Cancel culture has struck again, but this time its would-be victims aren’t apologizing. The Daily Mail — a publication notorious for being “free” with its own speech — is leading the anti-cancel culture charge this month with a series of stories that point to an encouraging trend. A handful of prominent creatives are standing up to woke bullies and noting the dangers (and impracticalities) of their demands, which essentially amount to writers and entertainers forsaking their imaginative talents by only addressing things they’ve personally experienced. Except they aren’t supposed to be candid about those things, either, as they might offend someone if they’re too honest.