Culture

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.

Does the American public still have time for ‘Auld Lang Syne’?The traditional Scottish song long ago achieved ubiquity for its use on New Year’s Eve, when it is sung in observation of the year behind us and the year ahead. Yet its melancholy melody and backward-looking words seem profoundly out of step with contemporary tastes. In fact, apart from the crowds who congregate in Times Square on New Year’s Eve most years, or those wishing to affect a trad or twee persona, it is hard to imagine that too many of us still greet the arrival of the first of the year by launching into a communal rendition of the song.

In the darkest hour, there emerged a new light. It was 1940 when the double-barreled shotgun of the world first took aim at a little hole called home. At first, it seemed as if the hole’s inhabitant would be taken in by the old carrot trick. At least he would be careful enough not to stick his neck out. With an unblemished, white-gloved, four fingered hand, he feels around his immediate borders and takes the carrot. Of course, it’s a trap to draw him out. Did he know that all along? He would soon enough. The next time, it’s not a carrot but the hard steel of a gun aiming straight down his burrow. He flicks the barrels with his finger — plink, plink, plink — just to be sure. He tosses back the half-eaten carrot and pats the gun, but it is too late.

When a young singer and pianist named Charles Brown was hired in 1944 to play at Ivie’s Chicken Shack, the legendary jazz singer Ivie Anderson’s nightclub in Los Angeles, he was instructed to play ‘nothing degrading like the blues’. It wasn’t an admonition that he heeded very long. The blues didn’t degrade him. He elevated them. After Brown died in 1999, Bonnie Raitt, who toured with him starting in 1987, deemed him ‘the most extraordinary piano player I’ve ever heard’, noting that he ‘led the West Coast blues explosion’. Indeed he did.

I’m thrilled to tell you that my latest novel has been optioned by Netflix. Grand Prix Grandpa is the inspirational story of an ordinary journalist in his mid-fifties who reboots his life by becoming a world motor-racing champion. It’s tough at first driving round racetracks at 230 mph when your eyesight is going and your reflexes aren’t what they were. But with a little practice and a lot of determination, Grand Prix Grandpa — whose name is James, by the way — becomes F1 champion, then triumphs heroically over the resulting problems: semi-naked women hurling themselves at him; having so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it; the loneliness of tax exile in Monaco, etc. No, not really.

The Beatles never had a proper Christmas number one, only seasonal number ones with unseasonal bangers: ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘We Can Work It Out’/‘Day Tripper’ (1963-65) and ‘Hello Goodbye’ (1967). Though they never made a traditional Christmas record, the Fabs loved Yule — and you know you should be glad. Between 1963 and 1969, they recorded an album-worth of charming Christmas nonsense. Welcome to the semi-secret hinterland between the legal and bootleg worlds: the Beatles’ Fan Club Christmas flexi discs. The flexis have only had one official release since their private circulation to the ravenous Brit-Beatle fan club.

If there is one thing this cursed year of lockdown has been good for, it’s been video games. The right game — in a way that a box set cannot — will give you a sense of steady progress and achievement, a series of goals; and a world more forgiving and expansive than the four walls of your living room. My kids, for instance, have become very good indeed at Mario Kart Wii and have built vast empires in Minecraft; and I don’t dare look at my own total playing time on World of Warcraft.  With the prospect of the tier system continuing well into the new year, now is a good time to stock up on the best new goodies. The big news in gaming this autumn has been the release of the latest generation of consoles.

Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse than to have been a Roman legionnaire in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9 AD. It was the Romans’ Isandlwana — a devastating defeat inflicted by native forces on what was theoretically the world’s most sophisticated, best trained, and almost insuperable military power.Over the years since I first learned about arrogant, tricked, doomed Roman commander Varus and his three legions (about 20,000 men, almost none of whom got out alive), I’ve often mused pityingly on how it must have felt: trapped in the gloomy forest, hemmed in by a bog, waiting to be slaughtered by hammer, ax or javelin by the hairy, painted, blood-crazed Germanic barbarians.

In late spring, when every corporation and nonprofit in America was releasing statements about how racism is bad, the Poetry Foundation joined in the chorus of self-preservation. On June 3, it released a statement announcing that it stands ‘in solidarity with the Black community’ and denounces ‘injustice and systemic racism’.It continued: ‘We believe in the strength and power of poetry to uplift in times of despair, and to empower and amplify the voices of this time, this moment.’ Imagine some poor foundation employee posting that statement to their website and wiping his brow. Crisis averted. It took all of three days for social justice campaigners to respond in a fury.

Halloween wasn’t quite the same this year: no trick-or-treating or bobbing for apples, no packed parties, not even a socially distanced haunted house. As a lover of all things horror, I had to rely on television to put the spooky in the season. Netflix’s new series The Haunting of Bly Manor is the sister show to last year’s wildly popular The Haunting of Hill House, created by Doctor Sleep’s Mike Flanagan. (Flanagan is also behind Hush, one of the smartest horror movies I’ve seen in a few years and definitely worth watching.

In the summer of 1961, Clyfford Still packed his family into a car and began driving south from New York City in search of a new home. In the Forties, Still had shocked audiences with monumental canvases covered in stormy walls of thick, dark, pigment: some of the first totally abstract paintings shown in New York. Subsequently Still had risen with the Abstract Expressionists to unprecedented heights of institutional and commercial success. But despite wielding profound influence as a founding dean of this New York School, torch-bearing wasn’t really Still’s thing.

A deadly viral pandemic, viciously infectious, inflicting rapid death without fear or favor: gosh, where on earth did the makers of To the Lake get that idea? Not from the Chinese coronavirus, obviously. For one thing, this Russian series was made last year, when COVID-19 was still but an evil glint in Anthony Fauci’s eye. And for another, look around: do you see people dropping dead in the streets, as they should be, if this thing were living up to its inflated reputation as our Spanish flu? All that aside, the timing could scarcely be more perfect for this hugely exciting, gripping and involving series about a disparate group of family and friends struggling to survive in lawless, brutal, post-outbreak Russia.

Like Moses descending from the heights of Mount Sinai, former president and current prophet Barack Obama has today delivered his latest tome to the masses. A Promised Land, his fourth book, is a 'riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making — from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy'. Or so his publisher says. Cockburn, old-fashioned fellow that he is, has believed in the power of democracy for longer than 12 years. To mark the book's publication, Obama has summoned one of the spirits of his bygone era: he's tweeted out a playlist. 'Music has always played an important role in my life — and that was especially true during my presidency,' he writes.

Billie Eilish, who recently won five Grammys, is also singing the theme song for the new Bond film. ‘James Bond is the coolest film franchise ever to exist,’ she said. ‘I’m still in shock.’ My husband tells me that the symptoms of shock include pale, clammy skin and bluish fingernails. Since Miss Eilish’s fingernails were painted green at January’s Grammy ceremony, it was not easy to tell. But a life-threatening drop in blood pressure was clearly not present. The phrase in shock is now used where we used to say shocked, or even overjoyed. Perhaps people have been watching too many medical dramas on Netflix. Shock, from the French choque, began as the word for a collision of armies.

One of the more unusual works in the family art collection is a concept drawing of an automobile from 1937. The car, identified by the angular writing on its nose, is the LaSalle. To call this a drawing of just a car does a disservice to the concept behind it. With its shimmering grilles and Futurist forms, the vehicle might as well be an open-cockpit fighter plane about to strafe a runway. Automobile enthusiasts, as I recently learned, consider the drawing to present one of the first known examples of a ‘ripple-disk single-bar flipper hubcap’. Clearly, here is a machine meant to do more than just deliver you from point A to point B.

Paul Signac’s portrait of Félix Fénéon is a striking and historically important painting. But is it a good one? Its subject didn’t think so. Signac profiles Fénéon against a swirl of complementary colors and kaleidoscopic shapes, as if anticipating an acid-trip scene from a Roger Corman movie. This radioactively abstract background was bold stuff for Paris in 1890, when the picture was made, but contemporary critics disapproved, one finding the work ‘cold and dry’, another calling it ‘neither decorative nor comprehensible in terms of feeling’. Fénéon himself was similarly vexed by the final result, though he held onto the portrait throughout his life out of loyalty to his painter friend.

There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to appear in domestic-based thrillers. Last Sunday when HBO’s The Undoing began, Jonathan and Grace Fraser (Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman) seemed to have the happiest of middle-aged marriages. They still laughed at each other’s jokes. They still kept each other fully informed about the kind of day they’d had at work: he as a kindly child oncologist, she as an unfailingly wise therapist. Not only did they still have sex, but when they did, it wasn’t always in bed.True, they weren’t wholly without their problems. Their loving son Henry, for example, sometimes didn’t clean up after making smoothies.

October 31 brings Halloween 2020 but after a year like this, the idea of a single day dedicated to unrelenting horror seems almost quaint. Answering the door to masked strangers isn’t the novelty it used to be, distributing candy apples to more than six trick-or-treaters now carries a five-figure fine, and by participating in this cultural appropriation of the Celtic festival of Samhain you run the risk of getting yourself canceled. This season of the witch it is altogether safer to stay indoors, blow out the jack-o-lantern and confine yourself to strictly cinematic scares. To help you celebrate Hallowquarantine, we have compiled a list of the 10 best movies about or set on All Hallows’ Eve. Halloween (1931) https://www.youtube.com/watch?

There are many things to look forward to as 2020 draws to a close. Cockburn has had quite enough of lockdowns and pandemic politics. In fact, he would be quite open to everybody simply agreeing that 2020 never happened, rolling the clock back one year on New Year’s Day, and having a do-over.More than just about anything, Cockburn has been looking forward to seeing the last of the Lincoln Project, Rick Wilson’s scatology fan club posing as a grassroots anti-Trump organization.But God is distant and His judgment is cruel: the Lincoln Project plans to be with us forever.On Tuesday, Axios revealed that Wilson’s NeverTrump enterprise will not be closing up shop on November 4, even if Donald Trump is defeated. Instead, it aims to become a media empire.'The group...

It certainly raised eyebrows chez Cockburn, that’s for sure. A few weeks ago Peacock announced an original news program: The Mehdi Hasan Show. Peacock is NBC’s new streaming service. And who is Mehdi Hasan? Well that’s where things get really interesting. Like Cockburn, you may have noticed Mr Hasan’s cloudless upwards trajectory through the media firmament in recent years. He moved to DC in 2015, fronting news shows for Al Jazeera English, and from 2018 until earlier this year, a podcast for the Intercept. The precise moment Mehdi’s move to the big-ish leagues became inevitable almost two years ago. Watch: https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1062706401804455937 Whoa! Who is that guy?

‘I’m sitting here struggling for words and my friend nailed it: “She was our Princess Leia.”’ With those words, Dr Esther Choo, Yale Medical School graduate, holder of an Ivy League English diploma and possessor of 168,000 Twitter followers, memorialized the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A century ago, a citizen of Justice Ginsburg’s stature might have inspired references to the Bible, classical history or the great figures of America’s founding. But in the year 2020, a lifetime of achievement brings no greater honor than to be compared with a Disney-owned property whose action figure you can buy for $10.99.