Culture

The everyday experience of 2020 includes televised demagogy and a national media making pure spectacle out of domestic terrorism and race riots. The less we believe what we see, the stranger the sights become. These experiences are also the story of Network, the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky/Sidney Lumet hit which won four Oscars out of its 10 nominations. We must ask ourselves why are we living out the 1970s again and, indeed, enacting its satire in deadly earnest. Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, but what did he know of Hollywood? A remake is the safest bet. We, however, have reversed Marx’s sequence.

Few artworks could be more responsive to the current upheaval than Jacob Lawrence’s 1954-56 series ‘Struggle...From the History of the American People’. Painted during the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, the cycle of 30 panels tells a history of the American Founding through punchy modernist vignettes, engaging with timely and timeless topics such as brutality, race, memory, justice and our shared national heritage. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 of the original panels have been reunited for the most complete exhibition of the series since its original showing more than six decades ago. The exhibition will travel to Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, DC from New York.

The MTV Video Music Awards took place last night all around New York City. The show was originally going to take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn but instead was held at locations throughout the city. NYC remains in a very tenuous position post-lockdown. Our restaurants are only allowed to offer outdoor seating and must close at 11 p.m. You cannot go out for drinks, unless you order food as well. Gyms are closed. Movie theaters are closed.  Our schools may not reopen. Funerals must be limited to close family only. Live concerts, even outside, are not allowed. If a bar or restaurant offers live music they are not allowed to charge a cover. The music must be incidental to the dining experience. The city is in crisis.

One of the many things I love about the horribly addictive French spy series The Bureau is that it never attempts to improve you with pious little homilies about how foreigners are just the same as us, with values just as worthy as our own, so they should be treated with the same amount of respect, for are we not all children of God? If The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA — had been made in the US, there would be a specially created nice, upstanding, Americanized Muslim character like the agent in The Looming Tower or the implausible black Muslim character in Jack Ryan.

Gloria Steinem is back in the news. Steinem, now 86, attacked the recent FX network miniseries Mrs America in a series of high-profile interviews. Yet Steinem’s criticisms reveal much more about her and how her extreme radicalism has harmed the women’s movement than they do about the miniseries. What are her complaints about the show? Steinem objects to its focus on anti-ERA campaigner Phyllis Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett, and she accuses Mrs America of distorting the history behind the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). According to Steinem, Schlafly ‘never changed one vote’ and the miniseries is ‘hopelessly wrong’ in suggesting that she did.

In Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, an early over-the-top indicator of future Earth’s stupidity is the number-one movie in the country: eight-time Oscar winner Ass, which is nothing but 90 minutes of its title proudly displayed.It turns out, though, that Judge’s vision of the future was not over-the-top at all. In fact, it was shockingly tame. Idiocracy took place in 2505, but Ass only took until 2020.The most popular song in America right now is Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’. The title is short for ‘wet ass pussy’, and the lyrics get even less Shakespearean from there. The song is accompanied by a big-budget, hyper-sexualized music video that has already been viewed on YouTube close to 100 million times in five days.

It’s quite rare for Republicans to get a starring role in the entertainment industry, let alone on an HBO production. The Swamp, a new documentary, is a fascinating exception.The documentary mainly focuses on the bipartisan effort to stop corruption in DC through reforms on issues like party leadership influence, campaign spending, lobbying and executive war power. HBO tells this story mainly through the lenses of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who have their own respective attempts at bipartisan legislative reforms during a partisan impeachment impeachment. But Cockburn wasn’t that taken with the public policy. There are too many humorous moments in the documentary to focus on such tedium. Here are the real highlights.

In September 2017, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker founder David Lowery sent me an email. Was I interested in turning Camper’s album New Roman Times, into a novel? The album’s central theme was what David saw as an ever-deepening divide in this country, fomented by the media. It was recorded in 2003, partly as a reaction to the Iraq war, but it largely predicted what happened between then and now.The album is set in an alternate version of America during a period of conflict. Instead of a country with 50 states, it’s a continent made up of several countries. The biggest are the left-leaning Republic of California and the right-leaning Christian Republic of Texas. As I began the novel, we were nine months after Trump’s election, and a year into Brexit.

Every civilization needs its barbarians. Lazy, filthy, dumb and dangerous, the barbarian, real or imagined, is the eternal grindstone on which the civilized sharpen their prejudices. They are, as the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy wrote, ‘a solution of a sort’ — but to what? In Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1898), an unnamed city is gripped by cultural torpor and political sloth. The gridlocked citizens, weakened by indolence and luxury, dream of a bloody release from their troubles. Disaster, a visit from the barbarians, becomes their last hope for rebirth. You don’t need to be a specialist to see the parallels between the poem and the illicit undercurrents of politics in the 2010s.

The fight for equality in America has been long and hard-fought. Sometimes a multi-generational upheaval has been required to undo old notions and myths. But there have been a few times when a new process enabled these changes to happen almost overnight. In the world of classical music, no change was more consequential than the instituting of blind auditions, whereby the musician auditioning for a position is behind a screen, and the only thing a panel can adjudicate is the sound of music.How do we know this was so successful? Because even self-proclaimed bigots found themselves choosing differently, in spite of themselves. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes how in 1980, Abbie Conant won a position as principal trombone with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.

Olivia de Havilland, who has passed aged 104, will forever be remembered for the role of Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind, a performance that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nod from the Academy. She would go on to star in acclaimed romantic dramas like To Each His Own and The Heiress, both of which brought her Oscars for Best Actress, but to fans of classic movies she will always be Scarlett O’Hara's sickly cousin, love rival but ultimate ally. She was cinema’s quintessential southern belle: genteel on the surface, steel underneath. Less well known is that de Havilland was a lively anti-communist and worked to expose and counter the influence of Soviet sympathizers in Hollywood.

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.

You’re familiar, no doubt, with the term ‘red pill’, the Matrix-inspired metaphor that’s become a catch-all for the type of right-wing thinking that thrives in the dark corners of the internet. Now the journalist Katie Herzog, in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek comment, might well have given us a new term: the purple pill. To take the purple pill, inferring from Herzog’s outlook, is to oppose the dangerous excesses of identity politics, but also the reactionary extremes of the red-pillers. This is, simply, a compromise — or the kind of terminally sensible position that shouldn’t need corny movie metaphors in the first place. But you see her point.

Statues do more than monumentalize individual achievement. They embody the self-image of those who raise, cherish and preserve them. It is this common self-conception that is being upended by the wave of iconoclasm that is sweeping through American cities. The race to raze structures that have stood untouched for decades or centuries disturbs because, instead of reassessing the past, it attacks it to reorder the present. Wherever you stand on this, the ‘debate’ is limited by Western visual traditions and stunted by patchy education. In Wisconsin, the abolitionist Hans Christian Heg was yanked down. In San Francisco, Ulysses S. Grant, a president who set the US Army on the Klan, was deposed. In Washington, DC, Gandhi, once praised by W.E.B.

Unpopular opinion: film noir is dull, self-indulgent and grossly overrated. I recognize it has given us some great performances — Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, say — as well as chiaroscuro lighting, laconic dialogue, cynical hard-bittenness and cancerously heroic quantities of smoking. But that’s exactly the problem. Film noir is so in love with its look and style, the plotting comes a very poor sixth. What, though, does any of this have to do with Perry Mason, the suave, brilliant, clean-cut lawyer played by Raymond Burr in the long-running Fifties and Sixties courtroom drama series? Well, bizarrely, HBO has decided to revive him for another of those dark and grimy origin stories that Joker made so fashionable.

It was June 2015. Bill Maher was holding court with assorted journalists to discuss the 2016 race. The Republican field back then was attracting all kinds of ridiculous monikers — it was apparently the most plausible, most qualified field in history. Maher asked Ann Coulter who had the best chance in the general election. She didn’t say John Kasich. She didn’t fancy Jeb’s chances. Three days earlier, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy in Manhattan, cutting the ribbon on a festival of media bafflement, disgust, and ridicule. Coulter made her prediction: 'Of the declared ones, right now, Donald Trump.' The studio audience hooted. The other panelists did a good impression of being horrified.

Quick bit of movie trivia: what do actors Felicity Huffman, Eddie Redmayne, Hillary Swank, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Glenn Close, Jeffrey Tambor and Jared Leto all have in common? All have won or have been nominated for major industry awards of their portrayal of transexual characters. Swank won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of real life murder victim Brandon Tina in Boys Don’t Cry. Leto was awarded the Academy Award for his role in Dallas Buyer’s Club. Felicity Huffman was nominated for the Oscar but settled for the Golden Globe for her performance in Trans-America (the best of these of roles). Redmayne was nominated for his historical role as Lilli Elbe. Close was nominated for the Oscar in 2011 for Albert Nobbs.

Although it finished production months before George Floyd was killed, the documentary Uncle Tom, produced by Larry Elder, has been released bang in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protest explosion. But in the face of this unrest, Uncle Tom — which bills itself as 'an oral history of the American black conservative' — shows a side of the African-American community that is often overlooked by the media. The title is part tongue-in-cheek. As an epithet, 'Uncle Tom' is often used to pejoratively describe black Americans who diverge from the political left, which has long been seen as the natural home for the African American vote.

Jimmy Kimmel knows what it’s all about. Now that old skits have resurfaced of him wearing blackface to impersonate NBA player Karl Malone and other black celebrities, the talk-show host has issued the inevitable learning-and-listening apology. But the line that sticks out is this: ‘It is frustrating that these thoughtless moments have become a weapon used by some to diminish my criticisms of social and other injustices’. This is why Kimmel will not lose his show or his sponsors, even with a recording of him rapping the N-word in 1996. He is reminding the mob that he is one of them, or at least can be of use. Don’t cancel me, bro.   Jimmy Fallon won’t be canceled either.

‘You are so lucky that I don’t know your thing. Do you understand how lucky you are?’ comic Louis C.K. tells his comeback show audience. ‘Everybody knows my fucking thing, now. Obama knows my thing. Do you understand how that feels? To know that Obama was like “Good Lord!”’ It’s a good point well made. Everyone who knows anything about the world of comedy does indeed know Louis C.K.’s thing. In 2017, when #MeToo exploded, C.K. was ranked by Rolling Stone number four among the 50 best stand-up comics of all time. His sexual proclivity was publicly exposed, he lost numerous television deals and movie contracts and he suddenly found himself cast into outer darkness. All in all, it cost him an estimated $35 million in lost income.

In her new book, the singer-songwriter Tori Amos advises aspiring artists to be wary of those who would lead them astray. ‘Most people cannot raise their hand and say, “Your expression, your piece, your song, your art, is not to my taste; in fact I have an aversion to it, but I think it’s brilliant.” And that means that... some people judge something to be good or not good by what they personally like. Beware of this, I say to all artists.’ The simple sentiment encapsulates why so much creative potential is stifled before it can flourish. An artist whose principal goal is to please an imagined audience, or to adapt his or her work to critical trends, is no kind of artist at all.

Today, politics is show business and show business is politics. Last week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new efforts to improve inclusion institutionally and for the Oscars themselves. A task force has been created to come up with new inclusion standards for Oscar eligibility by the end of July. The Academy’s president Dawn Hudson said: ‘The need to address this issue is urgent. To that end, we will amend — and continue to examine — our rules and procedures to ensure that all voices are heard and celebrated.’We have traveled a long way from 2003. Then, when Michael Moore made an overtly political acceptance speech about George W. Bush, he was forced off the stage as a result.

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week, filmmaker John Ridley urged HBO Max to remove Gone with the Wind from its platform. HBO Max capitulated right away, temporarily withdrawing the film until it can ‘return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions’. As HBO weighs how to address what Ridley and others have described as the film’s romanticizing of slavery, I would encourage them to use the message of the movie itself as their guide.Gone with the Wind is about the perils of romanticizing. The movie begins with young men romanticizing the impending Civil War. ‘War! Isn’t it exciting, Scarlett?’ exclaims one of the Tarleton twins.

I’m a Nineties kid. You know what that means: Tamagotchis, Super Mario, Sega, primitive cell phones, slap bracelets, skateboarding, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, David Koresh, scooters, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Nato bombing of Sarajevo, Pokémon!, Blink-182, Bill Clinton, Friends and the friends of Bill Clinton. What a decade! Only Nineties kids will understand it. And as even Nineties kids grow up, Nineties nostalgia is now big business. Everyone from the Spice Girls to Smashing Pumpkins has launched comeback tours on a rising tide of misty-eyed affection. McDonald’s brought back Tamagotchis and Furbys and other veteran Happy Meal toys. Friends is set to make a highly profitable return.

On the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University student who killed himself after being outed as gay by a roommate, children’s television network Nickelodeon dragged a cartoon sponge out of the closet in a tweet posted Saturday. In doing so, Nickelodeon set a dangerous precedent for LGBT youth everywhere. ‘Celebrating #Pride with the LGBTQ+ community and their allies this month and every month’, the network posted on Twitter above an image of SpongeBob Squarepants bathed in a rainbow glow. https://twitter.com/Nickelodeon/status/1271795092391682048?s=20 Fans have long speculated the beloved cartoon character might be homosexual.

First they came for the patriarchy, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a man. Then they came for the police force, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a cop. Then they came for PAW Patrol, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a three-year-old. Then they came for me, and there was no one to speak for me, because the men were away having their protective instincts surgically removed at re-education camp and the cops had been defunded. I didn’t even have a dog on my side, since PAW Patrol had been canceled and none of the canines out there wanted to be branded as class traitors.