Culture

The Von Erichs were, at one time, the toast of Texas: a family of chiseled, clean-cut American lads who took on bullies, thugs and liars in the wrestling ring. Girls wanted them. Boys wanted to be them. Advertisers wanted to throw money at them. Under the watchful eye of the family patriarch, Fritz, young David, Kevin and Kerry Von Erich seemed destined for greatness. Then David died, on a tour of Japan. There were rumors of a drug overdose but the autopsy ruled that he had had a heart attack after suffering from enteritis.

‘Was Shakespeare a Woman?’ Elizabeth Winkler asks in the new issue of The Atlantic. Of course he was. If you believe that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but Francis Bacon, or Walter Raleigh, or the Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, or even Emilia Bassano Lanier, then you have succumbed to a conspiracy theory. A pity that, given the public’s increasing willingness to believe anything, and some people’s increasing willingness to publish anything, that this conspiracy theory should be promulgated in The Atlantic, a magazine with a long, albeit lately abandoned, tradition of intelligent writing on literature.

One Saturday in 1975 a young man was walking through Macclesfield town center, without very much to do. He popped into Boots the Chemist and began flicking through their selection of records. After 10 minutes of random searching he found Patti Smith’s newly released LP Horses, and quickly returned home with it to Salford. As he recollects in his Autobiography, for Steven Patrick Morrissey finding Horses – in a pharmacy in Macclesfield of all places – was a defining experience: ‘Cross-legged by a dying fire later that night, and with only a side-light for company, I allowed Horses to enter my body like a spear… So surly and stark and betrayed, Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love… The past snaps.

Donald Trump is Satan. The Satan in question is perhaps the greatest literary character in the finest epic poem in the English language, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. That makes Washington Republicans the other fallen angels. In 2016, Republicans made a deal with the devil. Like Dr Faustus, they sold their souls for power. Now they stifle their consciences, never speak ill of President Trump, hug him closely, fearing the wrath of his base. The same Lindsey Graham who in 2016 wrote, ‘If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it,’ recently said, ‘To every Republican, if you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand behind you.

Remember hygge, the Danish art of warding off existential horror by suffocating your fear and trembling beneath a soft blanket? The cult of coziness is a Scandinavian speciality. You too would insist on marshmallows in your hot chocolate if there was a howling blizzard outside your window — in May. You too would feel like making the best of living alone with a cat and a set of matching sofa pillows if you had no choice but to live alone like Agnetha from ABBA in ‘The Winner Takes It All’. It was a Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote Fear and Trembling. This is not a novel set in a Danish dinner party, but a reflection on patriarchal authority and the uses of religious despair.

Hindi cinema has a deep and abiding love affair with Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers has been adapted in at least six Bollywood films in the last seven years, from 2012’s Love Rebels (Ishaqzaade) to 2018’s Heartbeat (Dhadak).  And audiences like them: A Play of Bullets: Ram-Leela (Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram-Leela) was India’s fifth highest-grossing film of 2013, and Wild in Love (Sairat) is still the highest-grossing film ever produced in the Marathi language. What has the Bard to do with Bollywood? And why the much ado about Romeo and Juliet?

The trouble with Trumpworld is it’s so often beyond parody. How could a comedian ratchet up the president ordering Big Macs for a visiting championship football team to make the moment funnier than it already is? It’s a problem which has plunged late-night comedy writing into an identity crisis, one that has blighted America’s flagship sketch show Saturday Night Live. The Trump era has seen SNL bag Emmys and reach record audiences. But it’s achieved this through polarization: hitting the same tired Trump tropes each week and playing to their coastal-elite base. Its viewers have noticed: 39 percent of them surveyed by The Hollywood Reporter said the show had become too political.

Ever since that agonizing day on November 8 in 2016, Donald Trump’s Twitter feed has been dark, and full of errors. His Lannister-blonde hair glinting in his avi as his tiny fingers mercilessly excrete torrents of egomaniacal tweets, like an illiterate Cersei drunk with power. Well, no more. This will not continue. Last November, Trump made the fatal mistake of revealing himself to be a Game of Thrones fan by posting a meme, a commitment he reaffirmed in January and April. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1058388700617498625 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1081735898679701505 https://twitter.

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping? Such thoughts do not bother the critics. They are convinced of their rectitude, secure in their sense of being the most powerful tastemakers in the land. As the New Yorker’s queen of TV Emily Nussbaum put it in 2015: ‘Those of us who love TV have won the war. The best scripted shows are regarded as significant art - debated, revered, denounced.

Watching Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone was like a narcotic experience. The poetical monologue took you into a dimly-lit room, on the crackling leather of a worn couch, into thick plumes of cigarette smoke. Smartly suited, Serling introduced a flaw in the human condition in a rhythmic, jazzy voice, as if he were about to whip out a horn and blow the smoke away to reveal a moral, a twist, or riddle. Through 156 episodes, The Twilight Zone was as much a literary as a celluloid achievement. Remember ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’ from 1960? A parable of McCarthyism, and a mowing of the lawns of suburban paranoia. ‘The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout,’ Serling intoned.

American conservatives don’t usually like Marxist guerrillas, but they make an exception for the Kurds. So do American socialists. The further left you go, the more you feel the burn of contempt for the Kurds, until eventually you go far enough left to find yourself in the company of those who support the Kurds’ enemies. Our friends on the left have principles, you know. It isn’t sufficient to survive genocidal attacks and build a gender-neutral people’s militia. You have to hate America and Israel too. A bit of Islamist zealotry doesn’t go amiss either, for the decadent Western nostril is happy to mistake the stink of Islamism for the red rose of socialism.

Forty-seven years ago, in 1972, David Morrell wrote the novel First Blood which was later adapted into a hugely successful film and launched the iconic Rambo franchise. This September, Rambo will pick up his gun for the last time (again) in Rambo V: Last Blood. Sylvester Stallone, now 72, will play Rambo as he races to rescue a friend’s daughter from a vicious Mexican drug cartel. Stallone had almost walked away from the Rambo series in 2016 before agreeing to do the cartel storyline. Prior to its evolution into a kidnapping/rescue story, Morrell and Stallone had worked out a different Rambo outline. Their concept was very ‘character driven’ but was ultimately scrapped by the studio for unknown reasons in order to pursue the Mexican cartel plotline.

Aretha Franklin recorded her best album, the live Gospel performance Amazing Grace, over two nights in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles. The Queen of Soul had crossed over, and perhaps too far, with the Live at the Fillmore West album, a play for the white rock audience that included covers of ersatz Soul and Gospel hits like ‘Love The One You’re With’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Amazing Grace was Franklin’s musical and spiritual homecoming to the Baptist church. One of her mentors, the Reverend James Cleveland, presided over a full gospel choir, and the rhythm section with which Franklin had recorded the Young, Gifted and Black album in 1971. Her father, the Reverend C.L.

The art world has seen many iconic depictions of America’s first families. One can see a marvelous gallery on the website of the White House Historical Association, showing portraits of every president’s wife: Jackie Kennedy gets the most glamorous portrayal to date. At present, though, the collection is incomplete: the Association does not yet feature Melania Trump, wife of the Donald. As an established connoisseur of art, Cockburn thought he might do them a favor by compiling the finest images of Trump family members the internet had to offer. Any of them would look delightful hanging in the corridors of the West Wing. The First Lady During her husband’s first term, Melania has donned a number of iconic outfits, some of which inspired our artists.

The vision of Jude Law filming The New Pope at the beach has been acclaimed as a miracle — the washboard abs, the white trunks sticking closer than the Swiss Guard. As followers of the heretical TV series will know, the first series of The Young Pope featured another sporting vision, nuns playing soccer in slow motion. The soccer theme, if not the sporting nuns and the sex scene, is believed to derive from the real Pope Francis’s enthusiasm for the ‘beautiful game’. Any soccer fan wishing to understand the nature of faith will understand what Francis, a juvenile goalkeeper and fan of Argentinian league side San Lorenzo, sacrificed when, in 1990, he forswore watching soccer on television.

We’ve all got a bit of Deplorable in us, even me. To paraphrase the philosopher who left the White House in 2016, I cling to my religion because it’s the tree of life. Being rather Old World as well as old school, I’m appalled by the proliferation of advanced weaponry in the US, but I favor the right to cling to some kind of gun. And having spent more time in the academy than is healthy or useful, I can confirm the ongoing accuracy of William F. Buckley’s observation about the repository of wisdom that is the first 300 names in the Cambridge, Mass. phone book. But I don’t like Steve Bannon. I’m only fascinated by him. Bannon is the West’s foremost proponent of classic left-wing revolutionary strategies.

This week, Prince Harry called for the popular game Fortnite to be banned, saying: ‘That game shouldn't be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household? It’s created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.’ I could not agree with him more. These days children spend far too much time indoors, playing on their video games consoles and other electronic what-have-yous. Very often, I hear the argument ‘But many kids come from backgrounds where the internet and video games are the most easily-accessible way for them to socially engage with other like-minded young people.’ What utter rot!

Every circus needs a midget. This particular law of show business was established by the Victorians. It was P.T. Barnum who popularized the word ‘midget’. Harriet Beecher Stowe had used it in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to describe both children and a small adult, but it was Barnum, as great and merciless as master of the levers of sentiment as Dickens, who popularized the m-word when advertising the outsized talents of Colonel Tom Thumb, Commodore George Washington Nutt, and Lavinia Warren. Commodore Nutt, who was not a naval officer, wore a naval uniform. He loved Lavinia Warren, whose real name was Mercy Lavinia Bump. But she married the bill-topping Tom Thumb, who was originally Charles Stratton.

The case of Jussie Smollett is, among other things, an accidental tribute to the life and work of Tom Wolfe. Wolfe, who died last year, annoyed progressives with his portrayal of white guilt and black radicalism in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and the contempt he expressed for identity politics and fashionable attitudes in other works. Wolfe, who coined the term the ‘Me Decade’, delighted in mocking cultural narcissism. He argued that America was full of ‘status spheres’ in which politicians, artists, activists and others jockeyed for cultural capital. One of his favorite targets was fashionable victimhood.

Nietzsche trained as a cavalryman, but injured himself attempting an unorthodox dismount. His last public act was to throw himself sobbing around the neck of a flogged horse in Turin. In the decades after the philosopher was carried to the asylum, we put horses out to pasture. Our constant companions, first domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some four- to six thousand years ago, were displaced by a new symbol of mobility and freedom, the internal combustion engine. In Farewell to the Horse (2017), the German historian Ulrich Raulff identifies the moment we abandoned our real four-legged friend as the moment we became modern — which is to say, lost amid freedom. If Americans are more lost than most, it is because they have more freedom than most.

Justice is blind. But, as it turns out, she’s not unwilling to negotiate. If it buys her some silence, she’ll play ball.Yesterday, Jussie Smollett was exonerated by the District Attorney for the state of Chicago. Like Trump, the celebrity victim has been cleared of all charges, though not cleared of wrongdoing. Whatever that means. Dead or alive? It’s Schrödinger’s cat.No one knows what to say exactly because the truth may be too damaging. After all, who knows what happens when you jail a young black gay celebrity? How much abuse would he endure? And if they do kill him, what will happen to our prison system? How much will all of this cost? Oh Jesus, make it go away!Or that’s what I figure happened. Closed doors won’t answer.

The new season of Veep will show Selina Meyer as a former president. It’s an awkward role at the best of times; George Washington’s model, Cincinnatus, has long since become Davos Man. For a woman, it’s likely to offer particular challenges — and a key element of the show’s genius has always been its consideration of the realities of female leadership. Veep was created by Armando Iannucci as a spin-off from his successful UK comedy, The Thick of It. Veep quickly came into its own, offering a view of the idiosyncrasies of American politics through a thick fog of obscenity and insults. Veep’s Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is not like the hapless, hopeless MPs satirized in The Thick of It.

‘I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him,’ said Barbra Streisand to the Times of London about Michael Jackson, who was by his own admission ‘really bad’ and, according to Wade Robson and James Safechuck, much, much worse in private. Streisand’s interview was a wide-ranging reflection on her legend and upcoming tour. The kind of men who agree with her defense of Jackson won’t buy tickets. Most of them are already locked up. ‘His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has,’ said Babs, referring to the Jackson Five’s Greatest Hits and Freud’s theory of early childhood sexual development.

You never knew where Andy Kauffman the character ended and Andy Kauffman the human being began. Whether he was wrestling women or reading The Great Gatsby aloud, onstage, until he had emptied a theatre of his own fans, the great performance artist always asked the question of whether it was merely an act or whether the antics reflected real instability. When Kauffman died of lung cancer at the age of 35, some people even wondered if he had faked his own death. Many comedians have aped Kauffman’s deranged realism but his true heirs are not comics. They are right-wing performance artists like Alex Jones, Jacob Wohl, and Laura Loomer. Are they Trump-loving, left-hating, conspiracy-theorists? Or smart businesspeople exploiting their audience? Are they mad?

Captain Marvel is a triumph. Finally, we have a female superhero! This is progress. This is new. This is fresh. This is terrifying men all over the planet. Not since Ghostbusters 2016 has a movie featured such a strong female lead. I literally cannot think of ONE other comic book-based movie which has a woman in the title role. I wonder why this is? Oh, I know, it’s because Hollywood hates women. The star of the movie, Brie Larson is also a superhero in real life. She bravely spoke out about the negative reviews A Wrinkly Time received, stating that too many white men had seen it. Now, as a black woman, I watched that film with tears in my eyes.

Young Amber Heard met elderly Johnny Depp on the set of The Rum Diary (2011), a Hunter S. Thompson adaptation about a man trying to save his soul. Like the Depp-Heard marriage, the movie had a weak narrative, too much drinking, and generally poorly reviews. It lasted a lot longer than it should have done, too. Heard filed for divorce in May 2016, but you wouldn’t know it. Three years on, the marriage remains click-worthy. Days after filing, Heard accused Depp of being verbally and physically abusive throughout their relationship. Depp denied the allegations, and has now asked for $50 million in damages.