Culture

For better or worse, the rapper, producer and sneaker salesman Kanye West is almost certainly not running for president, as he has claimed. He is instead sidling into the mainstream consciousness just before he drops his latest album. Kanye has had an odd few years. He's come out in support of Donald Trump, made an impassioned religious album, and failed to build a complex of Star Wars-inspired domes for the homeless. A presidential run, then, feels like a natural next move. Ultimately, though, he does not seem to have even filed the necessary paperwork. This has not prevented progressives from being outraged by what they believe is an attempt to split the liberal vote and hand Trump another victory.

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.

I have to laugh when I read about my Baby Boom cohort’s memories of savoring rock ’n’ roll behind the backs of disapproving elders. I had no such problem. I wasn’t especially taken with the new sounds of the Fifties: I was six years old when Elvis Presley debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. I thought he was vaguely comical. In any case, my parents had resolutely high-minded middlebrow taste in such things, wavering somewhere between Dvorak, Lawrence Welk and Mozart. Rock ’n’ roll was simply out of the question. Everything else heard in the household — country and folk music, in particular, which my elder siblings’ favored — was tolerated to some degree, but my own secret musical vice was not.

The death of the artist Christo last week in New York at 84 has been the occasion for an outpouring of misty-eyed adulation. I thought I would temper that wave of sentimentality by reprising a column I wrote about him back in 2005 on the occasion of ‘The Gates’, his huge project in Central Park in Manhattan: Andy Warhol once remarked that ‘art is what you can get away with’. And how. Just ask Christo, the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur who wraps things in cloth, calls it Art and sits back while the money pours into his bank account. It is nice work if you can get it. In 2004, Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude (they work together, like Lady Bracknell and the Duchess of Bolton) took in about $15.1 million. And for what?

On January 23, Dr Stephen D. O’Leary, a retired professor of communications at the University of Southern California, posted a poem by George Eliot to his Facebook page. It begins: ‘O May I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again’. For 25 years Stephen was one of my closest friends in the world. I still can’t believe that I have to use the past tense when talking about him. He pressed ‘send’ on that Facebook post at 4:47 p.m. At one in the morning he joined the choir invisible. Although his heart attack was unexpected, we knew we were going to lose him. He called me the day after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. ‘I’m not afraid of dying. It’s going to be interesting,’ he said.

Donald Trump views The View as if it were a spouse over the age of 60: with disdain.‘Explain how the women on The View, which is a total disaster since the great Barbara Walters left, ever got their jobs. @abc is wasting time’, tweeted the President during the 2016 campaign.So boomers everywhere gushed with excitement as The Right View — the Trump campaign’s alternative to the ABC talk show — launched on Monday.Cockburn decided to tune in and give Donald Trump's entrance into the ladies' talk show market a chance. The Right View is essentially the offspring of a Trump merch infomercial and a Trump campaign ad.

Back in February when the inspiring documentary about the life of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, was playing in movie theaters around the country, I wrote a review encouraging you to go see it. Now, it is coming to your own home. On Monday night it premiered on your PBS station, and is repeating throughout the week. This is a great opportunity for you — and now made very easy too.In that earlier review, I wrote about meeting someone who had been completely brainwashed about Justice Thomas. The Thomas he knew was a fictitious personality created and maintained by what Rush Limbaugh refers to as 'the drive-by media.' Thomas has been described by the leading lights of the media as bitter, a loner, a brooding recluse.

A true adaptation of David Copperfield is neither possible nor even desirable. It would last as long as it takes to read the novel, say, two weeks. The principal cast would number in the dozens, and the extras — the clerks, lawyers, policemen, landlords, cooks, chimney sweeps, pickpockets, sailors, ministers, soldiers, beggars, porters, carters, fishermen, coachmen, pimps, gypsies and whores — in the hundreds of thousands. Replicating the cellars, garrets, galleries, museums, bridges, pubs, factories, shipyards, docks, scaffolds and debtors’ prisons of Victorian London would require construction on a Himalayan scale.

Jazz has traditionally been a male preserve — all 15 of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra are men — but jazz singing is the exception. Later this year, Netflix will release Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, based on the superb play by August Wilson and starring Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis. If the movie adheres to the spirit of the play and its subject (Rainey, the ‘Mother of the Blues’, sang frankly sexual songs in a moaning style), it is sure to ignite a fresh interest in her tempestuous life and career. The imperious Rainey wasn’t simply a gifted singer, but also an astute talent-spotter.

Batavia, New York With the first blizzard of every winter I take John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound off the bookshelf, and though I never quite make it through to the end, when the snow is ‘melted in the genial glow’, I feel as if I have hunkered down for the week with the ‘Barefoot Boy’ poet’s besieged shut-ins. So when the Kung Flu — excuse me; I forgot for a moment that mild humor is now as verboten as sweaty raves and square dances — kicked its way into our lives, but before the local library shut down, I, like everyone else — well, like a tiny sliver of the populace — reached for Camus’s...Camus’s...oh, the hell with it: The Plague by Albert Camus.

Netflix’s Tiger King has been touted as ‘the only show that’s crazier than the world outside right now’. Besides being weird beyond measure — a seven-part freak show combining meth-heads, involuntary amputees, firearms, sex cults, gay polygamy, cocaine, rednecks, attempted murder and, yes, more tigers than you could shake a flaming torch at — it offers fascinating parallels with the most important debate of our time: the eternal conflict between liberty and authority. As you may have noticed, this coronavirus pandemic has brought out the best and the worst in people and produced two highly polarized visions of the world.

Late on the afternoon of November 29, 1984, Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were loading boxes into a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan and a U-Haul trailer parked at a self-storage facility in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia. The boxes were heavy, so despite the autumn chill and the wind, Rosenberg and Blunk were working up a sweat. Both wore glasses as part of their disguises. Blunk had an ill-fitting wig that he barely managed to keep on his head. An FBI wanted poster called Rosenberg armed and extremely dangerous, and the Bureau wasn’t wrong. On the front seat of the Olds, purses held semiautomatic pistols — an Interarms Walther PPK .38 caliber and a Browning Hi-Power 9mm. They were both fully loaded.

If you haven’t heard of the Netflix docu-series Tiger King, then you probably haven’t spent much time on the internet during the national quarantine. The series centers around Joe Exotic, a now-incarcerated, gay, meth-addled, big cat breeder and former candidate for both president and governor of Oklahoma, whose bleach-blond mullet, handlebar mustache, sequined leopard-print blouses and eccentric underworld of private zoo-keeping has been the unlikely catalyst to bring a nation together that is stuck at home with severe cabin fever. Tiger King is another indication that we should prepare to say goodbye to classic documentary filmmaking and get used to the docu-series, usually timing in at about six hours long spread across several episodes.

There is a classic Simpsons episode in which young Bart falls down a well. Local celebrities, with the aid of guest star Sting, decide to band together to do something about it. Their magnificently useless contribution is to band together to perform a song in which they ‘send their love down the well’. ‘We can’t get him out, so we’ll do the next best thing, go on TV and sing, sing, sing.’I am surely not the only person who thought of this scene when Gal Gadot, Will Ferrell, Sarah Silverman and others performed a rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.

What’s ancient, slow-moving and leaves a trail of crap in its wake? No, not Britain’s royal family; the African elephant. The two are easily confused. The royals never forget and are an endangered species that mates in captivity. Elephants are leathery, photogenic and likely to inspire misplaced sentiment. No wonder Meghan Markle’s first venture as Hollywood royalty should be as voiceover artiste for Elephant, a Disney documentary about elephants in Botswana. But this, like Meghan’s in-laws, is as rich, white and privileged as it gets.The plot of Elephant is the usual cheap anthropomorphism. Gaia the indomitable matriarch must lead her herd hundreds of miles across the Kalahari Desert to a lush green paradise.

Across the most bourgeois quarters of the known world, youngish men with expensive educations and an unhealthy interest in the works of Italo Svevo have been driven by plague from their favorite coffee shops. For the first time in their lives they cannot go to Friday night loft parties and snicker about more successful contemporaries. What is to be done with all these days that stretch out languidly into infinity? Should they volunteer to dig graves? Help 3D-print a new ventilator design? Call their housebound mothers? No. Don’t be naive. When the going gets tough, the tough dust off their copies of The 101 Habits of Successful Screenwriters and get down to work. I mean, didn’t Shakespeare write King Lear during a quarantine or something? That could be you!

Most of the podcasts that sell relationship advice imply that romance is synonymous with sex. The theory of that equivalency has been a theme in the arts for centuries: Shakespeare, Flaubert, Thackeray and Tolstoy all exposed its follies and truths. Unsurprisingly, the podcast hosts have a less poetic, nuanced note than the classic writers, such as giving the advice: ‘If you’re having a dry spell, listen to us or break up.’ Tony and Alisa DiLorenzo are a Christian couple who have married for 23 years. Perhaps surprisingly, their podcast, ONE Extraordinary Marriage, depicts sex and romance as interchangeable. Tony and Alisa, who couple on the page in their co-authored book 7 Days of Sex Challenge, start each episode with a ‘hug’.