Culture

Peter Schjeldahl’s essay 'Renoir’s Problem Nudes' in The New Yorker has already attracted some portion of the contempt and ridicule it deserves. Here is my modest contribution to that task. According to Schjeldahl, Renoir 'sparks a sense of crisis.' 'Who doesn’t have a problem with Pierre-Auguste Renoir?' he asks in his opening gambit. Can we have a show of hands on that? Pace Schjeldahl, Renoir is such an immensely popular because his painting is essentially celebratory; he looked upon the world with an oeil bienveillant, glorying in its sumptuousness. There is great intensity in some of Renoir’s portraits, but very little melancholy. The dominant mood is festive: a happy, sociable sensuousness.

The woke have spoken: fat is fab. This is great news for Lizzo, an American singer and rapper whose rise to fame and celebrity has been rapid and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Lizzo, or Melissa Jefferson as she was once known, is unquestionably rotund. In the days of yore, Lizzo’s excessive layers would have been considered optimal, a marker of wealth and status coveted by women and adored by men. In theory, we’ve grown and evolved since those days, and now enjoy unprecedented levels of knowledge and education about medicine, diet, and exercise. This wealth of information should produce an especially healthy populace; instead, Americans continue to stuff ourselves with everything we know we shouldn’t eat: too much red meat, too much fried food, too many carbs.

The Boys (Amazon Prime) is a superhero series for people who hate superheroes. That's me all over, which is probably why I've loved every moment of four episodes I've seen so far. It's based on a comic book by Garth Ennis (Preacher; Punisher) who also hates superheroes. 'Personally, not having grown up with superheroes, I find them completely moronic,' he said in a recent interview I could only access by having to use a VPN hider to pretend I wasn't in the EU (seriously we can't leave that overregulated dump soon enough). And: 'The notion that the medium I work in is dominated (and, sadly, defined) by such a stupid genre is not one that feeds my sense of idealism.' Ennis claims to object to superheroes on moral grounds: they are glibly escapist and ignore the world's real problems.

Cancel culture claimed another victim this week. This time it was The Hunt, a Universal Studios thriller in which a group of — presumably liberal — elites go around hunting and killing ‘deplorables' for sport. The premise is awful, and it does nothing to encourage the kind of spiritual healing Marianne Williamson correctly believes our nation so badly needs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8IifEu67yU But consider some other cinematographic successes. ABC’s Designated Survivor tells the story of a terror attack that wiped out the entire American government, leaving a lowly Secretary of Housing with the job of Commander in Chief.

There are over 2,000 shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but only one that is really worth seeing. Titania McGrath’s Mxnifesto is a tour de force of political oratory that is unlikely to be surpassed in my lifetime. I have seen every single performance, except for the nights I’ve had off (usually when my self-diagnosed PTSD has flared up), and its cultural significance is indisputable. I’d go so far as to suggest that the Edinburgh Fringe should cease after this current year, given that its purpose has now surely been fulfilled. I was warned against writing this piece. Apparently, it is frowned upon to write a review for your own show. I consider this yet another attempt to silence women’s voices by the forces of heteronormative patriarchy.

Unsurprisingly, David Berman hated his dad. When he broke up his band, the Silver Jews, in 2009 he released a statement which announced: 'My father is a despicable man. My father is a sort of human molestor [sic].  'An exploiter. A scoundrel. A world historical motherfucking son of a bitch. (sorry grandma)' Obviously, Berman felt as if the sins of the father had tainted the son. 'This winter,' he wrote, 'I decided that the [Silver Jews] were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused.' He swore to seek justice by other means. Apparently, this involved writing a book but it never materialized and Berman all but disappeared for about a decade. Berman reappeared in 2019, with a gorgeous album, Purple Mountains, and plans to tour.

The man of distinction who longs to be acclaimed for something else is a recurring and quite endearing figure. A few years ago, I wrote a small book about the fraught relationship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. The escapologist was driven by shame about his lack of formal education. He had dropped out of school at the age of 12 to support himself as a shoeshine boy before embarking on a career as an acrobat and magician. For Conan Doyle, the attainment of influence and wealth as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories apparently never dispelled the vulnerability that dwelled inside the alcoholic’s son from a slum household in Edinburgh.

I hear the sound of chanting in the distance, grim and ominous. ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom ba boom, boom, boom...' Suddenly, voices cry out: ‘Je-sus walks!’ A white-robed Kanye West is surveying the geodesic dome structures that he has built across his lands. A MAGA hat is pulled over his brow and the sun glints off his oversized sneakers. Kim Kardashian stands beside him in a bodysuit that strains against her preternaturally tumid curves. Kanye announced that he was building the housing complex for the homeless in 2019.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s most pleasurable film since the first installment of Kill Bill. It’s delightful pop esoterica, blending the sensational disposability of a pulp novel with an antique edition of Playboy filled with crackling cigarette ads you can practically inhale off the page. The film is a visual banquet with a daft machismo that puts Tarantino out of step with the marketing plans of today's priggish e-cigarette smoking snoots. Ultimately, Once Upon a Time... is a stylish fairytale where the two anti-heroes are a neurotic leather-clad TV cowboy named Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio in his funniest performance) and Cliff Booth, a sadistic and square-jawed drunk who feeds his dog canned slop, played by Brad Pitt.

Let it never be said that Hollywood is cowardly. When there is a cause to go to the wall for, when there are monstrous dragons to be slain, when the ethical balance of our times tiptoes along the edge of calamity, is it not Hollywood – that steadfast, sensible battery of dream-makers – that rises to the challenge, earning the sighing respect and tearful admiration of us all? Weren’t we all thrilled, shocked and relieved in January when Robert De Niro – riskily breaking with precedent and the hidebound convention that A-listers should never opine about current events – said: ‘Trump is a real racist.’ Finally someone had the courage to say it!

The nation waits with bated breath for news of one of its favorite and most delicate sons, the ‘rap artist’ A$AP Rocky. Mr Rocky is held hostage by the military of the barbaric regime of an anti-Western failed state called Sweden. The Scandinavian rogue nation is widely suspected of having colluded with the military of another barbaric regime of another anti-Western failed state, Iran, which last week kidnapped an entire oil tanker under similar circumstances. Mr Rocky claims to have been minding his own business with two of his minders when they felt it necessary to kick an Afghan asylum seeker in the body and head while taking an early evening stroll in the rubble of Sweden’s Mogadishu-like capital, Stockholm.

In the middle of the 20th century, the Central Intelligence Agency executed a commendable troll against the American left. Long rumored to be a joke, documents released in the 1990s revealed that during the Cold War the CIA secretly funded and promoted some of America’s biggest contemporary artists without the knowledge of the artists themselves. It was art as weapon. The US aimed to showcase the intellectual freedom and creative superiority of Western, capitalist societies against the drab, inhibited propagandist art of the Soviet Union by broadcasting this wildly inventive style in vogue at the time. The CIA propped up artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

In these erratic times, political comedy is hard, OK? It's tough to dream up jokes more ridiculous than the reality of the reign of Trump: no wonder many of the writers are struggling. But is that cause enough to be cruel? Comedienne Samantha Bee directly addresses author and presidential candidate Marianne Williamson in a promo for her TBS show Full Frontal, and invites her to be a guest...if Williamson will drop out. https://twitter.com/FullFrontalSamB/status/1153328212509962241 'Hi Marianne Williamson, it's me, Sam Bee! I am so loving your vibe, so I wanted to invite you over to my show for a very chill, very serious campaign dropout party,' the host says. 'We can have tea, throat lozenges, agave, and whatever else you use to make your voice sound so angelic.

Despite his slender frame and greater affinity with high-end fashion brands than street gangsterism, 30-year-old American rapper A$AP Rocky has never been one to avoid confrontation. Videos on YouTube show him threatening to ‘snuff’ a giant English man, who promptly tells him to ‘do one, bruv’. Thank God some people have kept the spirit of the duel alive.Last month, however, words ended and fists flew. Rocky was arrested during a tour of Sweden, and video emerged of him swinging a young man through the air and into the pavement. Frankly, it was an impressive, if acutely dangerous, display of physicality. This, and he and his colleagues’ subsequent kicking and stomping of the young man and his friend, made this look like an open and shut case.

Truly I think there is no hope for youth. Watching a couple of episodes of the new Stranger Things with my son confirmed this. Though I raved about the first season — an inspired mash-up of classic early-1980s TV and movie tropes with a great soundtrack, charming characters and lots of spine-tingling creepiness and horror — this latest one (we’re now on season three) appears to have settled for self-indulgence and tweeness. Where season one had the creeping menace of Alien, the mood here is closer to Scooby-Doo, only instead of solving mysteries the pesky kids spend half their time padding out the drama by having cute, winsome relationships with girls (one of whom is Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown but now with added hair).

Only 16 percent of Americans reported knowing or working with someone who is transgender, according to a 2015 GLAAD survey. I’m not sure that the issue has ever been studied, but I’m comfortable conjecturing that more than 16 percent of Americans have either heard of Scarlett Johansson, or enjoy going to the occasional movie. These numbers are important to remember when considering a particularly vacuous 'controversy' from last summer and its recent re-emergence this weekend. Johansson found herself at the center of a curious conversation last July. Like every actor in the film industry, she is frequently paid to portray individuals aside from herself. English language speakers used to refer to this behavior as 'acting.' The job in question was to act in a film called Rub and Tug.

Aziz Ansari premiered his hour-long Netflix apology special in a barely audible voice from a crouching position in the corner of a dark stage in Brooklyn. His mostly white audience was rapt and reverential through each moment of silent reflection and public embrace. For past crimes, he forgives himself, he forgives his audience for not forgiving him earlier, and he forgives all those who know not what they did — crying ‘Nazi!' in crowded theaters, promoting fake news, finding good people on both sides.We are chastened. We are redeemed. Our prodigal son has returned to us a prophet and yea, unto us his message is clear: 'Children, we are all assholes in different cultural contexts. Love each other. Now is all we have.

Where I go, The Green Room goes. Last week, I was on the Greek island of Corfu. With a heavy heart, I had accepted an invitation to deliver a short talk about the novelist Lawrence Durrell, of whose work I’m wholly ignorant, to an audience of experts in Lawrence Durrell. I’ll spare you the details of how the talk went. It rapidly emerged that most of what I know about the Durrell family comes from the television series The Durrells of Corfu, which was adapted for television by Simon Nye from the memoir-novels of Gerald Durrell. Being serious-minded literary and academic types, we passed many long and arduous hours conferring hard in the Dionysios Solomos Museum, the home of the poet who wrote ‘Hymn to Liberty’, the lyrics of modern Greece’s national anthem.

Trump: The Presidency began airing in January 2017 on CNN, MSNBC, FOX and every other television channel in the free and unfree world. Immediately drawing favorable comparisons with blockbuster sagas like Game of Thrones and The Sopranos, T:TP soon overtook them in prominence and popularity. But as the hit show’s ratings tumble in its third year, and with key contracts up for review in 2020, it’s time to ask a question that was unimaginable even two years ago. Are viewers falling out of love with the media’s favorite show? Whether you loved or hated Trump: The Presidency, whether you came to it for comedy or tragedy, one thing above all could not be denied about the show: it was unmissable television. It wasn’t simply that everyone talked about it.

Rock music is always so close to parody that the best and best known fictional film about a rock tour is This Is Spinal Tap. Rolling Thunder Revue, new on Netflix, is a rock documentary — a rockumentary, if you will — about Bob Dylan’s ‘Rolling Thunder’ tour of December 1975. Its producer is Martin Scorsese, who made The Last Waltz in 1976, when rockumentaries had yet to become mockumentaries by default. Really, it was the musicians who made The Last Waltz, and Scorsese who turned that material into not just one of the best concert films, but also a sharp-eyed study of musicians and the music business.

We all know we’re modern, but how many of us can say why? My guest on 'The Green Room' this week, Italian writer Roberto Calasso, is a peerless explorer of what he calls the modern 'revolution in the human brain’, and of the ghostly endurance of the old gods. His latest book, The Unnamable Present, is the ninth in a kaleidoscopic series which includes retellings of Greek and Indian myths (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka), studies of artists and writers (Tiepolo Pink, K, La Folie Baudelaire), the search for the origins of human society in sacrificial rites (Ardor, on the ancient Vedic civilization), and the tracing of the roots of the modern age in revolutionary politics and Romantic philosophy (The Ruin of Kasch, Literature and the Gods).

It was that philosopher of modern life Iggy Pop who first noticed that the screens were watching us. ‘See that cat, down on her back?’ Mr Pop reflected thoughtfully on the Stooges’ Funhouse album of 1970. ‘She got a TV Eye on me.’ These days the ‘TV Eye’ is on all of us. Black Mirror, back on Netflix for its fifth series, is what Stooges guitarist Ron Ashton would have recognized as an extended riff on the same theme. Except that while Mr Pop found the experience quite pleasant— ‘Yeah I love her so’ — it’s hard to enjoy Black Mirror. To be fair, that might not be the point of it. We aren’t here to enjoy ourselves. Iggy Pop’s signature move is to drop his pants at the end of the show.

A dizzying array of Democratic presidential candidates — 19 in total — took the stage this weekend at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame, offering a program of five-minute lightning talks that sounds to me like TEDxNinthCircleofHell. And each one had a different walk-off song, the implications of which the political media has been gleefully dissecting in response. But their choices were all wrong. I should assure you that in a world where a Twitter blue checkmark can lend a false sense of expertise to anyone who claims they know anything about a particular topic, I am an actual expert on walk-off songs.