Culture

If Super Bowl LIII served no other purpose in this late Roman phase of the American republic, at least it reminded everyone of the Latin numerals. The first half ended III-0, and the halftime entertainment was low-scoring too. II out of X to Adam Levine, Maroon 5 — who at least could have named themselves Maroon V for the occasion — and a cast of several dozen. Maroon 5 sound like a wedding band playing Jamiroquai covers, though it is hard to imagine anyone wishing to soundtrack their special day with ‘This Love’. On this occasion, they were everybody’s fifth choice. Cardi B spoke on Friday of her anguish at turning down an invitation to perform at Atlanta.

This week the New York Times published an article which was long overdue, illustrating the obvious racism featured in the original Mary Poppins movie. (Something which, incidentally, Titania McGrath had already flagged up in a tweet last September: I remember watching that scene as a child one Christmas, and even at the tender age of four, a woman putting coal on her face instantly reminded me of the black and white minstrel show which I would read about 14 years later when studying for my Bachelor’s Degree in Human Rights and Social Justice (Hons). This, coupled with the cultural appropriation of Dick Van Dyke putting on a West Indian accent throughout the entire film utterly nauseated me.

How does Donald Trump make you feel? For the oft-maligned sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, incandescent rage might be the first emotion that springs to mind. Incredulity is a fairly common one too. Indeed, the 45th President causes a veritable rainbow of sentiments around the world. Perhaps one of the rarer ones, though, is the urge to create. But for some in the online artistic community, Donald Trump has served as muse to truly inspired works. Cockburn is delighted to welcome you back once more for a viewing of his private gallery, where this week we will be showcasing the boldest, finest, strangest Donald Trump fan art that the dark recesses of the internet has to offer. The images of President Trump span a number of different artistic styles.

No idea is too stupid to be entertained on the op-ed page of the New York Times. I was reminded of this truism last night when, changing the paper in the parrot’s cage, I read that the latest enjoyable vehicle for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s talents is not just a good 20 minutes too long, but also perniciously racist, if not sunk to its Victorian corsets in white nationalist propaganda. ‘Mary Poppins and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface’, wrote Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, professor of English and Contemporary Virtue at Linfield College, Oregon.

Socialists dismiss liberal democracy as false consciousness, but no one falsifies consciousness like a socialist. Socialist history is false history, the march of workers who want to work harder. Socialist economics is false economics, where the numbers never add up, but it’s always someone else’s fault. Socialist art is false art, because it is always propaganda. The socialist individual begins as an impossible fiction, and ends as an enemy of the state, because the aim of socialism is to subordinate individual desires to collective duties. This corruption of human relationships — denouncing your parents, spying on your wife, fearing your children — is not an accident, but an operating principle.

Cockburn can’t possibly imagine what attracted alleged pedophile Bryan Singer to Stephen King’s ‘Apt Pupil’, a story from King’s 1982 collection Summer of Corruption, which Singer first read aged 19 in 1984. Nor can Cockburn imagine why Singer was so obsessed by adapting King’s story that he commissioned a script on spec, and then, after the success of The Usual Suspects, turned down offers to direct The Truman Show and The Devil’s Own.  In Apt Pupil, set in the Eighties, Todd Bowden, a 16-year old a Californian high school student, realizes that Arthur Denker, the old man who lives down the street, is really Kurt Dussander, a fugitive Nazi war criminal.

The one program worth watching on PBS isn’t made by PBS. It’s Masterpiece on Sunday nights, and the masterpieces are British-made. PBS puts in a small amount funding before filming starts, then packages the variable results with a flourish of Baroque music and a spoken introduction. Since 2009, this address to the nation has been delivered by Laura Linney, affecting the gown and breathlessness of a Henry James ingénue about to attend a ball in old Vienna. Earlier speakers included Alastair Cooke, and Russell Baker, who died yesterday at 93. Baker and Cooke were writers, not actors.

One of the embarrassing truths our time is that wealthy and predominantly white people pay good money in order to experience conditions that poorer and predominately brown people have no choice but to undergo. When a college-educated millennial buys an overpriced ticket to a music festival, it’s a rite of passage. When a Bangladeshi village is washed into a tent encampment without running water, it’s a humanitarian catastrophe. Of course, choice is a factor. But once you’re hovering over a brimming chemical toilet and it hasn’t stopped raining for two days, the conditions are the same — a temporary reversion to Neolithic conditions, but with the population density of a modern city.

Any attempt to satirize millennial culture is doomed to fail. It’s already too absurd and too self-aware. A caricature would verge on the surreal. The best (perhaps only) way to squeeze some fun out of it is through deadpan objectivity, which is the secret to the success of FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. The sad and hilarious new Netflix documentary tells the story of an ill-fated music festival that was supposed to take place in the Bahamas. Its organizer, Billy McFarland – imagine Walter Mitty meets Bernie Madoff – used the influencer economy to bootstrap into existence the kind of party billionaire rappers fantasize about, with supermodels in barely there bikinis lounging on yachts levitating over a crystalline sea.

What I watched: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch What I turned off: re-runs of Arrested Development (it’s great but my son has been making me binge watch with him and you can have too much of a good thing) What I’m going to be tuning into: Trigger Warning with Killer Mike. He’s a rapper and activist but I get the impression that politically he’s like the anti-Kanye-West.

‘At least we’ll have good comedy,’ liberals and leftists sighed to themselves when Donald Trump was elected. If anything, the opposite has been the case. Topical comedy has spiraled into a drain of irrelevance: soggy, flimsy, colorless, disposable. Hannah Gadsby’s self-consciously serious Netflix special Nanette was embraced by progressives and denounced by conservatives for explicitly spurning jokes in favor of moralism. Frankly, I was grateful that Ms Gadsby was honest. Comedians have long been flattering their audiences into believing they are good, wise people with good, wise opinions and at least Gadsby did not pretend Nanette was funny. Others sprinkle jokes on a big pan of half-baked propaganda.

Nicole Kidman’s face is so familiar from the cover of People that we might forget that she can still play other people. In Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, Kidman plays people like us. Her character, Erin Bell, is haggard, unfit, and alcoholic, and a failure at work, marriage and parenting. Kidman is at her best when playing characters we dislike — the psychopathically ambitious weather girl in To Die For and the implausible spouse of Tom Cruise. Destroyer is Kidman at her intense and evocative best, as well as a proof of life that reinvents that venerable genre, the LA detective movie. It’s Chinatown all over again.

Fox News viewers go to some length to show their dedication to their favorite cable personalities. They might have Twitter alerts set up for whenever their preferred pundit says something, or they might go in to bat in the comments of a Facebook post. But then, some people really like heads they see on Fox. It gets their creative juices flowing, and inspires them to put pencil to paper. Cockburn is pleased to welcome you to his private gallery, where he’s been collecting the finest Fox News fan art the internet has to offer. Naturally, the higher profile personalities are depicted in a number of ways.

‘Talk to your crows!’ This precept should inspire us all as we begin the big, unknown adventure that is 2019. It’s going to change my life, that’s for sure. My wife’s too. That’s because we’ve both sat, increasingly enthused, through the first episode of Netflix’s eight-part series Tidying Up, presented by adorable Japanese tidying up sensei Marie Kondo, whose charming if rudimentary English I have just cruelly satirized. ‘Talk to your clothes,’ is what she was trying to say. Coming from a Western presenter this would sound like so much New Age airy fairy drivel. Coming from a beautiful Japanese woman with the serene aura of a Shinto temple nun, on the other hand, it comes across, somehow, as deep, wise and true.

No one plays Clint Eastwood better than Clint, but many people could direct a Clint film better than Clint himself. The strengths of Eastwood as actor — a steely isolation and an unremitting eye for the right profile — became the weaknesses of Eastwood the director. The actor’s ability to slow time and stop the action so that everyone waits for his next squint, a trick exploited so cleverly by Sergio Leone, became the director’s solipsism and self-regard. As Leone recognized, Eastwood’s gnomic emotions and grunted speech were an asset to the spare machismo of the Western. The Westerns in which Eastwood auto-directed as lead actor remain excellent exercises in genre: High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Pale Rider (1985), Unforgiven (1992).

I sat down on my futon the other night to enjoy a nourishing but humble bowl of organic vegan noodles with wakame seaweed and steamed honey-gilded pak choi. As I sat cross-legged at my chabudai and browsed the Wot’s Woke blogosphere on my iPad, the enjoyment of my simple peasant’s dish was severely marred as I came across a story about Louis C.K. The article contained the link to a clip of a ‘so-called’ ‘stand up’ ‘comedy’ ‘routine’ in which ‘Louis’ ‘C.K.’ stood in front of his ‘audience’ and ‘delivered’ what can only be described as a torrent of hatred, the like of which I have not experienced since Ricky Gervais refused to call Caitlyn Jenner stunning and brave.

Don’t believe the critics. Don’t believe the score on Rotten Tomatoes, which has risen to 7 percent as of today. And don’t believe the fake news about mass walk-outs either. Holmes & Watson is the funniest film I’ve seen in 2018, and if I saw it next week, it would probably be the funniest film of 2019. Will Ferrell is the best Sherlock Holmes since Jeremy Brett, whose high-camp Holmes was always halfway toward hilarity, and John C. Reilly, a rubber-faced release of repressed love and resentment, is the best Watson ever. 221b or not?

As a study in political power, Adam McKay’s Vice resembles a slow day in the Oval Office of Bill Clinton: close, but no cigar. The fault is in the stars. Not in Amy Adams and Christian Bale, both of whom are wonderful as the modern Macbeths, Dick and Lynne Cheney, but in the casting of Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, and in the intrusions of McKay’s technical and political vanity. Every time Bale’s Cheney tiptoes gruntingly towards power like one of the ballerina pink elephants in Dumbo, either Carell shows his teeth and snickers like a hyena, or McKay winks through the fourth wall via Kurt, Jesse Plemons’s supremely smug and irritating narrator.

Young people are revolting. The word now is that Frank Loesser’s ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’, an irritating Christmas flirt-fest from a bygone age, is a date-rape narrative. The same goes for The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale Of New York’, a recitative by two dipsomaniacs in the drunk tank. The young people have a point when they insist that when two alcoholics argue, they shouldn’t use offensive language. But that’s an impossible expectation. I suggest an easier solution.Erase the infamy, as that music critic Voltaire said. Ban all Christmas songs. Bury them under an avalanche of fake snow in a grotto of styrofoam igloos. And not because I’m particularly against Christmas songs or Christmas itself. While we’re at it, ban everything.

Mr President, as you settle down for an extended seasonal vacation at the little seaside cottage you and your retainers call the ‘Winter White House’, may I, as your sommelier of visual entertainments, recommend a few seasonally suitable amusements for the Mar-a-Lago screening room? You being you, the sort of movie you might find admirable may not exactly square with popular feeling regarding the season of good-will to all men — and, as you recently said, ‘women too, to be politically correct’. If goodwill isn’t to your taste, perhaps the presidential palate will enjoy some ill will, with a side order of bile? Submitted for your approval, Jon Landis’s classic comedy Trading Places (1983).

Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin wrote, was invented in 1963, ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’ Cunnilingus, according to Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots, was brought to Scotland in 1565 by a silver-tongued seducer named Robert, Lord Darnley, who seems to have acquired a taste for it at the court of Elizabeth I. The invention of intercourse, Larkin wrote, came ‘rather late for me’. But in Rourke’s telling, cunnilingus arrives north of the border just in time for Mary. She marries Darnley and, despite the obstacle of his alcoholism and homosexuality, bears him a son. In 1603, when Elizabeth I dies without issue, Mary’s son, a feeble and tyrannical slobberer obsessed with witches, becomes James I of England.

‘Songs of joy and tears of laughter are all we need, to lift our hearts – Godfrey Elfwick’ I penned the above quote for an article in my university’s weekly student magazine ‘Wotz Woke?’ while trying to combat the negative effects of Trump and Brexit. Since then however, things have changed, and my outlook on ‘tears of laughter’ has altered drastically. When it comes to comedy these days, ‘tears of laughter’ has become merely tears. This week, a ‘stand up comedian’ by the name of Konstantin Kisin was handed a very reasonable contract by the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, organized by university society Unicef on Campus.

Did Shakespeare win the war? He was certainly Churchill’s greatest literary ally in 1940 when he sent the English language into battle. In fact it comes as a surprise to realize — at a fascinating exhibition in Washington D.C.’s magnificent Folger library  — just how much Churchill saw England and its history through the eyes of Shakespeare. For a period in 1940 he became the lion-hearted Henry V — albeit Henry V with a cigar and dressed in a velvet onesie. Shakespeare and the theatre runs through Churchill’s life. He bought a Webb’s toy cut-out theatre as a little boy. He studied hard for (but twice just missed getting) the Shakespeare Prize at Harrow.