Culture

I'm sorry to start this blog with a lament, but something sad has happened in Pittsburgh. Its maestro — whom some critics believe to be the finest orchestral conductor in the world — has recorded Beethoven's Ninth and unexpectedly messed it up. Since becoming music director in 2008, the 62-year-old Austrian Manfred Honeck has transformed the reputation of the Pittsburgh Symphony to the point where no one still refers to the 'Big Five' American orchestras, traditionally those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia. It's happened fast, too. In 2013, the New York Times reported that the Big Five were being swept away by 'the great western migration' of musical excellence to Los Angeles and San Francisco. No mention of Pittsburgh.

Sixteen years ago I interviewed a young American musician whose band had just signed to Rough Trade. We met in a café in west London, and he had with him a bag of records he’d just bought. In that bag were a handful of classic albums from the English folk revival, and in the intervening years Colin Meloy has steered the Decemberists to a frankly unlikely level of success, even topping the US album charts with The King Is Dead. Over three April weekends they have been performing shows to mark their 20th anniversary (which was actually last year, but pandemic and all that), which highlighted just what an idiosyncratic band they are. The English folk came through in the beautiful ‘January Hymn’, but also in one of Meloy’s other loves — the prog-metal side of folk.

As a Taylor Swift fan, I’ve greeted the past year’s cornucopia of fresh content with joy and gratitude. Every day, I wake up and wonder: will there be a new Taylor Swift album today? With astounding frequency, there is! The latest entry into the T. Swift COVID-era canon, following folklore and evermore, is the re-recording of her 2008 smash-hit album Fearless, now available as a 27-track pop-country marathon known as Taylor’s Version. Of course, the original Fearless was also, strictly speaking, ‘Taylor’s Version’. But the master recordings of that album, which can be monetized through lucrative avenues like sampling and commercials, belonged to the label she signed with as a teenager, who refused to sell them back to her.

‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ Maxwell Scott announces in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Something like this seems to have occurred with the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Other members of the West Coast jazz scene such as the great saxophonist Art Pepper were often in dire straits, but Baker has come to personify the romantic figure of the tragically doomed jazz artist. Once heralded as the ‘prince of cool’, Baker’s self-destruction was lucidly chronicled by Bruce Weber in the 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost. Even his album covers, where he gazes broodingly at the viewer, underscore his vulnerability. His meditative, halting solos formed the antithesis of the frenetic bebop movement emanating from jazz haunts on the East Coast.

If I had been told that Ken Burns’s next PBS extravaganza would be a documentary film about a 20th-century American novelist and, even more improbably, had been asked to guess his (or more likely her) identity, my last choice might well have been Ernest Hemingway. This is partly because there seem to be so many more eligible Burns subjects (Richard Wright, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison) but largely because Hemingway, man and novelist, seems especially uncongenial to the Burns sensibility: his fiction doesn’t tell us very much about America; he remains in bad odor in women’s studies departments; his Great White Hunter persona must surely spell a painful three episodes for ‘viewers like you’. First, the bad news.

Would you sign up for a screening streaming service that only had a dozen movies? A handful of series, and no classics? You might pause and ask if it’s worth it, compared to the range of options on other streaming providers. But if you’re like many of us, you might decide to pony up — after all, it’s only $5. Of course, I’m describing Apple TV+. It’s cheaper than Netflix or Hulu. But what you get, at least for now, is pretty limited. That’s not to say what they have isn’t good: they’ve pumped in a massive budget to lure creators like Oprah and Werner Herzog to this enterprise. Their movies have major stars. There just aren’t many of them. But they could have gone the other way.

‘I learnt there was Charlie and there was Chaplin,’ Jackie Coogan, the actor’s young foil in 1921’s groundbreaking The Kid once remarked. ‘The first was the biggest movie star on the planet, the second an insecure boy from the slums of London.’ Luckily for us, both sides of the Chaplin persona meshed perfectly in The Kid, with its generous helpings of the comic and the sentimental. It may be the Little Tramp’s most perfect and most personal film. Like almost everything that’s any good in art, The Kid emerged out of turmoil. In October 1918, the 29-year-old Chaplin had married the first of his child brides, 16-year-old Mildred Harris, after she told him she was pregnant.

It’s no secret that political correctness has stunted pop culture. Comedians walk on eggshells for fear of offending the wrong person. A day hardly goes by without a public apology for old comments. Hollywood is perhaps furthest down this road to insipidity. It means creative types who enjoy pushing boundaries, offending viewers, making even the most hardy of us as uncomfortable as humanly possible, can’t thrive. One such person is the director Tom Six. In 2009, Six made popculture history with his shock-horror flick The Human Centipede — a movie about a Nazi-like German doctor who kidnaps and stitches his victims together, anus to mouth — as a sadistic experiment.

In a world gripped by Nineties nostalgia, everything old is new again. Bootcut jeans and birkenstocks are back; old Nickelodeon classic cartoons are being rebooted for a new generation. But the strangest renaissance in this throwback moment is a moral panic: Marilyn Manson, the creepy goth-rocker with a startling appearance and a voice like synthesized nails on a chalkboard, is once again up for cancellation. The difference is in who's doing the canceling — and that this time, it seems it might actually stick.  Once upon a time, back in the late 1990s, Manson was the guy whose albums you hid in your underwear drawer lest your parents find them and freak out. It wasn't just the music itself but the man who made it, and what he seemed to represent.

Dear Stanley, Did I ever hear you laugh or see you smile? I like to think I amused you from time to time, but laughter was scarce among your responses. A pause was your applause. During the many months we worked together you were often friendly, always somber. You never hinted why. Private anguish was nobody else’s business; work its narcotic. Might it be that, throughout your life, success was as much revenge as pleasure? You seemed as much lonesome as autocrat; mark of the still photographer you first were; and the kid before that? As far as our script for Eyes Wide Shut was concerned, you apologized for not being able to specify what you wanted. You could promise only to recognize it when you saw it.

In The Dark Knight, one of the best superhero movies, the Joker presents Batman with a serious dilemma: he must choose between saving his romantic interest, Rachel, or Gotham’s ‘white knight’ DA, Harvey Dent. Batman makes the ‘wrong’ decision and runs off to save Rachel, only to discover the Joker has tricked him, and sent him to Harvey instead. The moral gray area isn’t that rare in modern superhero movies. Tony Stark (Iron Man) is otherwise a pompous, drunken lothario. Thor and Hawkeye react to a crushing defeat in battle by becoming a fat, lazy shut-in and a vigilante, respectively.

When it comes to who can play what in movies and on TV, producers have been quick to apply a double standard. It is deemed progressive and interesting for black and brown actors to play white characters but inappropriate and offensive the other way round. Colorblind casting only applies to people of color, which somewhat defies the point. After more than 30 years playing African American cartoon character Dr Julius Hibbert, actor Harry Shearer has become the latest victim of a campaign to un-whiten the entertainment industry.

In PBS’s Finding Your Roots, celebrity guests learn about their genealogies from the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates. The guest on February 9 was the Lebanese-American actor Tony Shalhoub. The episode made several false or misleading statements that downplayed what historians now call the ‘30-year genocide’ – the mass killings perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against Christians from the 1890s through the 1910s. In his academic specialty, African and African American studies, Gates is acutely aware of violence and discrimination. Episodes of Finding Your Roots often dwell on the legacy of slavery for black and white Americans alike. Yet Gates never once uttered the words ‘genocide’, ‘extermination’ or even ‘ethnic cleansing’ to describe Ottoman atrocities.

For 25 seasons, The Bachelor has marketed a fantasy: one man, 30 women, jetting around the globe on a ‘journey to find love’. The faces change, but the tropes remain: the picnics, the lingerie wrestling matches, the bungee-jumping that heavy-handedly symbolizes ‘falling’ in love. A girl who’s ‘not here to make friends’ steals the bachelor away one too many times and is designated the villain. A girl who’s ‘here for the right reasons’ tearfully tells the bachelor her traumatic past and is rewarded with a rose and fireworks. Finally, after eight weeks, the host Chris Harrison escorts one lucky lady down a long pathway to a dais of candles and flowers, where the bachelor gets down on one knee and proposes.

So here I am again. Pondering the hideous toxicity which exudes from Gina Carano. Only this time at least, it is to report to you that justice has been served. This wantonly wayward wrongthinker has thankfully been dropped by Disney for her scandalous opinions on social media. Apparently she posted on Instagram, or shared a post, or read a post, (I don’t know which, but I don’t think the actual details or her intent or the context matters one jot) which claimed that conservatives were being persecuted by the media, along with comparisons to the Holocaust (or something along those lines, as I say, I couldn’t be bothered to find the post in question). Imagine thinking that though (whatever it was she thought)?!

The Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art needed a new hat. The galleries are given pride of place in the expansive Fifth Avenue building, standing at the head of its enormous Beaux-Arts grand staircase. They contain many of the Met’s most popular treasures, but they weren’t showing pre-19th-century European paintings in the best of all possible lights. In 2018, Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the Department of European Paintings, embarked on the enormous project of renovating and modernizing the skylight system for the galleries. The museum is now about halfway through the four-year, $150 million endeavor. That’s a hefty price tag, but it’s a project that was long overdue.

One of my friends has a freakishly sharp ear for tiny nuances in the performance of classical music. God knows how he acquired it, because his personal tastes don’t extend much beyond early Madonna and late Beyoncé (‘far more vocally secure than Rihanna’). That’s sad for him but handy for me. If I catch him in a good mood I can make him sit through five interpretations of La Mer, and he’ll give me fresh thoughts on which conductor has the best grasp of Debussy’s tonal architecture. They’re fresh because he’s coming to it without preconceptions about how the piece ought to sound: he’s never heard it before and probably never will again.

‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel superhero characters who were last seen getting killed in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame,’ said… well, I was about to say: ‘said no one ever’. But clearly someone did, because this is what we’ve now got on Disney+: a bizarro series called WandaVision. I feel terribly out of the loop for not quite getting it. But possibly I’m not the target audience. For a start, I haven’t seen either of those Avengers movies; nor am I sufficiently familiar with the nuances of the Marvel comics universe to get all the frequent knowing references, such as the pastiche adverts for toasters produced by Stark Industries.

Bridgerton (Netflix) is just about the worst period drama I’ve seen on television, but I’ve yet to read a single review which tells it like it is. Why could that be, I wonder? Well, here’s my theory: I think it’s because this wooden, poorly scripted, horrifically set- and costume-designed, anachronistic, clunky, cringe-inducing farrago of sub-sub-sub-Jane Austen tosh has inoculated itself against criticism by deciding that about a third of the characters in the London of 1813 should be black. We’re not just talking servants and the occasional writer like Olaudah Equinao, which would have been historically accurate. We’re talking proper toffs: even the main love interest, the brooding, Mr Darcy-like Duke of Hastings is played by mixed-race Regé-Jean Page.

An inescapable insight emerges from the lockdown: today’s young are not what the young once were. Scanning western streetscapes, it is hard to miss that the ones wearing face masks are not overwhelmingly — as one might expect — the old and vulnerable, but include a disquieting number of youngsters, all but immune to SARS-CoV-2, who wear their acquiescence in the current plunge into tyranny like a pendant of courage along with their Nike Airs and Buck Mason Mavericks. It’s like rock ’n’ roll never happened. Or, rather, as if the rock ’n’ roll spirit had never proclaimed the rejection of slavery and subjugation.

In the dressing room at Birdland, the ‘jazz corner of the world’, a singer plants her baby on the counter, an actor strips off his shirt, and a cellist leans in to apply her lipstick before a light-bulbed mirror. I slip out to the bar for just a shot or two of whiskey and await my turn. Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf, a cellist and fellow Scot, asked me if I might sing one of my songs at her show. It’s part of the ‘Broadway at Birdland’ series, the brainchild of Jim Caruso, the club’s host, producer and performer extraordinaire who, he says, can either be ‘credited or blamed’ for having brought every flavor of pop, folk, country, theater and comedy into a club that’s legendary for jazz.

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move to Sark in the Channel Islands, he co-founded an artists’ colony and took to sketching fishermen and romantic, ripple-lapped coves. He put a gold hoop in his right ear, a red-lined cape over his shoulders, and grew his hair long, like Israel Hands or Long John Silver. The incredible thing was that he had yet to receive his commission to illustrate Treasure Island.

The antihero began as the ‘Byronic hero’ and was represented in the prestige television era by unlikable men in gritty dark dramas. Not completely unredeemable and usually handsome enough to catch the female viewer’s eye, this formula gave us Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), Dexter Morgan (Dexter), Walter White (Breaking Bad), Don Draper (Mad Men) and Gregory House (House). But their distaff counterparts were still villains or maidens. What we didn’t have was many antiheroines. Until quite recently, the closest thing TV had to an antiheroine was Carrie in Sex and the City. It was hard to sympathize with her: most of her problems were her own fault. She cheated on her boyfriends, then wrote narcissistic newspaper columns telling us all about it.