Culture

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. There’s an old joke about Democrats and Republicans that might help us understand the anti-Trump rantings of pop-culture icons such as Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen. Two old guys are talking politics. One asks the other which party he supports. ‘The Democratic party,’ he responds. ‘Why so?’ ‘Because my daddy voted for the Democratic party, and my granddaddy voted for the Democratic party. So I vote for the Democratic party.’ ‘That’s ridiculous,’ rejoined the Republican voter. ‘So, if your daddy had been a hoss thief, and your granddaddy had been a hoss thief, does that mean you’d be a hoss thief, too?

As Douglas Murray says, Sir Roger Scruton was as scintillating in conversation as he was on the page. It was typical of Roger’s generosity that in September 2018, a month in which he had no less than three books coming out, he gave up an afternoon to recording a Spectator USA podcast at his home, Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire. We originally published it under the headline ‘Knight of the Living Philosophers’. His death at 75 impoverishes us all. Scruton was more than a philosopher. He wrote widely and well on subjects as various as wine and Wagner, fox-hunting and free trade. That month, Scruton the philosopher had published Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.New York City The singer and saxophonist Ray Gelato opens his set at Birdland with a cover of ‘That’s Amore’. But this isn’t the sleepy send-up of Neapolitan street waltzes that Dean Martin recorded in 1953. Gelato raises the tempo and swings it four to the bar. As he sprints his way through the verses, Philadelphia’s City Rhythm Orchestra drives the pace, piano, bass and drums holding down the shuffle while the four-piece horn section plays call-and-response to each other and his vocals. It’s the start of a fun, high- energy set, the two hours of which feel as if they pass in half the time. You don’t tap your feet to this music: you stomp.

I imagine you were all expecting me to write a scathing review of Ricky Gervais’s recent diatribe at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards. Well you would be wrong. Because you see, that is precisely what Ricky is counting on. When he stands there, obnoxiously pimping his own ego in front of the world’s most caring and compassionate people, he is doing it for the attention he so obviously craves. Yes, it was a truly disgusting display (not to mention a staggeringly apt symbol of toxic white male privilege) to see this abhorrently wealthy japesmith spewing his vile alt-right propaganda disguised as ‘jokes’ directly into the faces of the humble and benevolent Hollywood glitterati.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What have they done to Jack Ryan? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way: he’s been captured by a crack team of Ivy League majors in Race, Gender and Weaponized Resentment Studies — probably the same guys who wrote the Washington Post headline calling Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an ‘austere religious scholar’ — and they’ve reengineered him as a beta-cuck pantywaist woke dork for the Age of Snowflakes. To be fair, Jack did slightly show these tendencies in the first season of his Amazon adventures.

After T.S. Eliot died in 1965, his second wife Valerie became notorious for not releasing his letters or unpublished verse, and for not licensing his published work for vulgar adaptation. This is why ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was never made into a musical with an opening number in which the protagonist jumps off an operating table as a female chorus come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

Walking into the theater to see Bombshell — which recounts the high-profile sexual harassment cases that led to Roger Ailes’s ouster from Fox News — I felt a bit like a feline about to take in a showing of Cats. I was, after all, about to see a re-creation of the people and spaces that made up my work environment for the better part of two years. I started at Fox Business Network as a producer in October 2013 and stayed until March 2015, when I left to work for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign (please clap). During my time there, I only met Roger Ailes once, very briefly, and my main takeaway from that interaction was that I was taller than him in heels.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. As any Yule fool knows, there’s no Christmas album like an old Christmas album. But there’s not many of them. We’ve had plenty of classic Christmas singles but hardly any classic Christmas albums. In fact, since little Phil Spector went and ‘canceled’ himself and the life of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, there is only one. Nowadays, a double-sided helping of Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You from 1963 would have the most ardent Wall Of Sound fan hearing sirens, not sleigh bells.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first Star Wars trilogy enraptured by blending classic drama with science fiction. There was Luke Skywalker the fresh-faced hero, emerging from obscurity to save the day. There was Vader the villain, who had once been good but had embraced the dark side. There was the Emperor, the twisted puppeteer. There was the daredevil pilot Han Solo. There was Leia, the princess who had to be saved. There was even that essential companion on any voyage: a bumbling upper-class Englishman. All of it was familiar from classic cinema and adventure stories, but all of it had the strangeness of science fiction. The villain lurked behind a fearsome mask and choked people by mind control.

Few things enrage journalists more than when President Trump accuses the media of creating ‘fake news’ or calls them the ‘enemy of the people’.Reporters and pundits understandably take it as a threat — not only to themselves but also to the First Amendment and the bedrock notion that a free press is necessary for a free society. Some have interpreted Trump’s remarks as emerging fascism or even wondered if they could end up in jail for criticizing this administration (though the media curiously didn’t make as much of a stink when President Obama was trampling reporters’ constitutional rights).Yet to date, no journalists have been locked up. No fascist measures have been taken against the press.

No filmmaker knows quite how to push the collective buttons of the American media like Clint Eastwood. He does it purposefully, deliberately and even at almost-90 years of age, artfully. His choice to release a new biopic about Atlanta-bombing-hero-turned-suspect-turned-victim Richard Jewell at this particular moment is a blatant shot across the bow at a corporate media that sees itself as the flawless hero in a tale of them versus Donald Trump in a struggle for the American soul. The media has seemingly played right into the narrative trap Eastwood has set, by casting themselves as the real victim of a vicious smear machine in the story of Richard Jewell.

Boris Johnson recently cited the Clash as his ‘favorite band’ along with the Rolling Stones. London Calling, the Clash’s great third album, was released in the US in January 1980, 40 years ago next month. Time has judged it one of the great rock ‘n’ roll albums, but was it really made for Establishment figures like the British prime minister?For the affordable price of $7.98 the 19-tune, double LP hit the New Year market in a blaze of righteous Jamaican reggae and driving, dance-floor ska, 12-bar jazz, mento-calypso, disco, funk and much else besides. Having just returned from an American tour on which they were supported by the blues showmen Bo Diddley and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the Clash were fired up with the romance of America.

Every December, I make my way to the orgiastic display of wealth and ostentatious show-boating that is Art Basel in Miami. I go primarily to keep my finger on the racing pulse of our culture of conspicuous consumption and hedonism, and also because of an unhealthy fascination with human irrationality at scale, the kind of irrationality which drives bubbles. The high end of the global art market has always been a curious blend of vanity, self-absorption and what to every untrained eye is quite clearly commercial sophistry. Yet it persists and continues to grow, with worldwide sales for 2018 reaching $67.4 billion, up from $63.7 billion in 2017.

The Disney brand has long been known as the animated version of white colonialism. This was made predominantly clear when the first feature-length Disney movie was released, entitled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As if the main character’s name didn’t make it obvious enough, rumors that Walt Disney was a Nazi have been abound on the Internet ever since the rise of Starbucks and the invention of the MacBook Pro, and have plagued his legacy. Perhaps labeling him a National Socialist without physical proof at the whims of woke hipster sociology students is a bit of a stretch, but there were undeniably characteristics of Nazism in Disney’s politics, which are noticeably woven into his animated works.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first time ever I saw her face, she was smiling. I knew her face before I saw it, but I cannot remember when I first knew it, because I had always seen it. But when I first saw her in the flesh, I couldn’t really see her at all. She was behind thick glass and a waist-high wall, and a crowd of people 20-deep were pushing toward her, shouting and pointing and taking photographs. She was still smiling, but as I forced my way out of the crowd, I felt as though the smile no longer expressed the mysterious inner mood of a high-born Florentine sitting in a loggia, but the bemused contempt of a woman sitting in the stocks for the entertainment of the mob.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Four episodes in, I finally decided I really didn’t like The Politician (Netflix). Initially, I thought I might because there was lots of advertising assuring me how good and culturally important it was going to be. Also, it’s made by the same creative team responsible for Glee, that slick but likable and quite moreish series about an American high school glee club where an impeccably diverse class of gay and disabled people keeps bursting into implausibly accomplished cover versions of classic pop songs. But no. The Politician leaves you with the same unpleasant, dirty, life-just-wasted feeling I imagine you’d get from watching Japanese hentai porn.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. For people who, like me, were born in the troubled times of the Seventies, Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were an educational crossroads. As we gazed into the cathode-ray tube for direction, each program led to a very different future. Sesame Street, now in its 50th season, remains unavoidable and familiar. Yet we’re captivated by the return of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the unpolished creation of Fred Rogers that aired from 1968 to 2001. Last year, the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? became a surprise hit. This week sees the opening of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a movie starring Tom Hanks as Rogers.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. To gauge a man’s character, note how he spends a month in Paris. Edward Hopper, according to the catalog of his 1933 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, lodged with a ‘respectable French family’, studying French and ‘avoiding bohemia’. Asked if he met any painters during his visits, he responded, ‘No, I did not know anyone. Gertrude Stein was on the throne when I was there.’ Hopper knew it wasn’t his scene. Isolation was a persistent theme in Hopper’s art and life. Was he dogged by isolation or did he pursue it? ‘Did anybody really know this silent, non-communicative man?

During my study in the theater division at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Romanian emigree acting professor Andrei Serban was legend. Beloved by acting students, lauded by faculty, he was tenured, established, and had seemingly free reign over his department. Despite that, he recently resigned over the administration’s push for trans inclusivity and faculty identity diversity. In an interview with Romanian TV show Profesioniștii (The Professionals), Serban detailed the two major reasons for his departure. As head of a hiring committee, he was told by the Dean of the School of the Arts to hire a person based on their identity factors, and not the person who he thought was best for the job.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. When Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in late September, he depicted Brazil as a victim of colonialism. ‘The United Nations has played a fundamental role in the suppression of colonialism,’ he said, ‘and we cannot allow this mentality to return to these rooms and corridors at any pretext. We cannot forget that the world needs to be fed.’ Foreign countries, Bolsonaro alleged, have ‘an interest in keeping indigenous people living like cave men’.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Wokeness, first conceived of by the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff (1872-1949) had barely reached the mainstream when Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister died in 2015. Still, Lemmy had given considerable thought to staying woke. As a champion abuser of amphetamines, he’d spent more time awake and thinking than anyone since 1945. Perhaps his surprising death –– surprising, because he seemed indestructible –– was necessary in some Gurdjieffian way, to make room for the terrors that now occupy our psyches.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Everyone loves a good murder. Tales of cold-blooded killing were bringing in audiences even before Truman Capote elevated the telling. Now, as if tales of real-life slaughter aren’t enough, podcasters color the horrors and hook the listeners with spooky music, awkward cliffhangers and a dubious sociological moral. The typical true-crime podcast has hosts who seem to be chugging wine from the box and narratives ruined by contrived social implications. A cynic or a detective would link this style to the appearance of listicles of the best true-crime podcasts in Good Housekeeping, Oprah Magazine, Town and Country and Women’s Health.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. A journalist friend was once ordered to interview Lou Reed in his hotel room. The meeting was not a success. Reed retreated to the closet bearing a copy of the poems of Delmore Schwartz and refused to come out until his guest had paid cash for it, saying, ‘Delmore needs the money.’ Reminded that the author of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities had died some years before, Reed observed, ‘Well, his family needs the money.’ $5.99 changed hands and the conversation continued.

Critics weren’t sure how to categorize Joker: is it just a piece of entertainment (like other Batman films), an in-depth study of the genesis of pathological violence, or an exercise in cultural theory? From his radical leftist standpoint, Michael Moore called it 'a timely piece of social criticism and a perfect illustration of the consequences of America's current social ills', pointing out that it explores the protagonist’s origin story, examines the role of bankers, the collapse of healthcare and the divide between rich and poor. However, Joker does not only depict this America, it also raises a 'discomfiting question' in Moore’s mind: what if one day the dispossessed decide to fight back?