Culture

Are we in our own revolutionary moment? Many of our leading institutions clearly believe so. Yale University has been working overtime to prove it is on the right side of history. ‘Problematic' colleges have been renamed. ‘Offensive’ stained-glass windows have been knocked out. Only the leadership of an Ivy League school could spread such a poisonous rash. Heading the charge against the Dead White Male has been a progressive Yale bureaucracy that is, for the most part, pale and stale. Now the task of dismantling Yale’s famous art history survey course has fallen to a scholar I respect, Tim Barringer. British-born, Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and has been a leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If you want to get really depressed about the future of television, consider this: over Christmas, The Witcher was Netflix’s highest-rated original series on IMDb, beating everything from Black Mirror to Stranger Things and The Crown. The reason you should be depressed is that The Witcher’s popularity may send a dangerous signal to screen producers: don’t worry about the script or the acting, just chuck in lots of monsters, ultra closeups of swords cleaving heads, arrows going into people’s eyes and girls in body-hugging leather fantasy outfits, like a Dark Ages version of Hooters.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ was the headline of the New York Daily News. To which the City said to Ford, you first. When the Daily News ran that famous headline on October 29 1975, New York was teetering on bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had declared he would veto a federal bailout. It looked like the Big Apple was stewed. The world had written off New York. The feeling was mutual: the city had written off the world. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a million residents, over a tenth of its population. Still, New York attracted people who, against the reigning wisdom, would not or could not live anywhere else.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Jerry Bruckheimer is a quiet man who produces the loudest movies in the world. Early, arty Jerry was the fixer who put together 1980’s slight neo-noir American Gigolo. Thrusting mid-period Jerry, happily partnered with the 1980s zeitgeist and fellow producer Don Simpson, made the classics Flashdance, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop. Don died a truly maximal Hollywood death in 1996 — they found 21 different substances inside him — but Jerry, always the sober one, kept going bigger, faster, louder: The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon.

Last night I posted an incredibly innocuous tweet about Laurence Fox and the outrage it caused was predictably excessive. Now, for those of you not in the know, Laurence Fox is a privileged white British male actor who last week publicly said some of the most toxic and hateful things this country has heard in centuries. On the BBC’s political forum debate show, Question Time, Laurence was asked about his thoughts on the hateful racism Meghan Markle has been regularly subjected to from the British tabloids and his heartless response shocked the nation. I can hardly bear to type this, but he DENIED that any criticisms directed towards her were motivated by racism and called the UK...oh God...this is killing me...he called the UK a ‘lovely and tolerant country’. Jesus.

As per longstanding annual tradition, Hollywood yesterday woke up early to announce the 2020 Academy Awards nominees — and Twitter, as per slightly more recent annual tradition, woke up to be annoyed when the list of Oscar-worthy actors, writers, directors, and other filmmaking professionals was, as always, not particularly diverse. That this year's nominees could still be so overwhelmingly white and male was a particular slap in the face, especially since the Academy made a highly public move in 2019 to avoid exactly this outcome. July of last year saw the introduction of 842 new members, half of them women, into the Academy's voting ranks, with many spectators anticipating a wave of awards-season recognition for female and minority-led films as a result.

If you’re looking for answers as to why Joker, the Todd Phillips-helmed, gritty comic book Scorsese knock-off, garnered 11 Oscar nominations on top of being the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, then buddy, this isn’t the piece for you. I don’t have an explanation. Joker is not a ruckus Marvel CGI theme ride. It’s an excruciating anxiety-inducing and unforgiving character study, a very good one along the lines of older cult callings like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

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.