Culture

I’m at the airport in Salt Lake City, waiting for the snow to stop so we can get up to Vancouver. I’ve been on the road with the Disciples of Soul since a month before Thanksgiving. This tour, the Soulfire Teachers Solidarity Tour, has been going on and off for a year and a half now, and it ends on December 16. The road is a lifestyle I’ve gotten used to. I miss my wife, I miss my dog. But we don’t go out so long, three or four weeks at the most before going back home. It’s not like the old days, the we’d go out for a year, and stay out. It’s much more civilized now. The tour promotes my music-based school curriculum, TeachRock.org.

Queen Anne (1701-14) is remembered, if at all, for a school of doughty, dark furniture design which no one likes these days; for signing the paperwork that joined England and Scotland to form the United Kingdom, which fewer and fewer people like these days; and for enduring 17 pregnancies. Only five of these carried living children to term, and none of the infants survived past the age of two. She died depressed, obese and crippled with gout, and the House of Stuart ended its short and ignominious run on the throne when she did.Queen Anne probably did not go in for red-hot lesbian romping with her favorite, Sarah Churchill, wife of the Duke of Marlborough and distant ancestor of Winston Churchill.

Netflix have acquired the film rights to George Orwell’s totalitarian fable Animal Farm (1945). Napoleon, Snowball and all the other commies at Manor Farm are getting rebooted by British director and actor Andy Serkis. He has animal form, having played an ape in Planet of the Apes remake. The producers are promising to bring the novella to the screen with motion-capture technology, ‘in a thoroughly contemporary fashion.’ It’s too early to tell whether, given a plot-line involves a dictatorial pig’s insistence on building a giant wall, Serkis’s version will resist the obvious parallels with Trump’s America.

I can clear up the great ‘Who invented punk?’ debate, and the related question of whether it happened in London or New York City. America had the Stooges and the Velvets, the Seeds, ? and The Mysterions, the 13th Floor Elevators and all those Pebbles and Nuggets garage bands. But that was only after Britain had given the gift of the Kinks, the Troggs and the Who. So the punk sound was invented either deliberately by Shel Talmy, the American who produced the Kinks and Who, or accidentally by the Troggs, who looked and sounded like agriculturalists from the Stonehenge area. What about punk style? Well, there was the New York Dolls. But weren't they just the Stones with more lipstick?

Connoisseurs of anal sex are mourning the death of Bernardo Bertolucci, who died yesterday aged 76. He was a titan of Italian cinema in the Sixties and Seventies, so younger readers will need to be told who he was. Bertolucci should not be confused with another director whose name will also forever be associated with anal sex, John Stagliono, the pornographic actor-auteur who works under the nom de rectum ‘Buttman’ and entered European cinema through the backdoor in 1991 with Buttman’s European Vacation. Bertolucci was in no way vulgar and low-minded like Stagliono. He was vulgar and high-minded. He was the Buttman of the intellectuals. There was plenty of sex in Bertolucci’s films, but you had to stay awake for it.

The director Nicolas Roeg, who died on Friday aged 90, was a master of daring, dreamlike cinema — so daring and dreamlike, in fact, that the studios often didn’t know what to do with his films. Walkabout (1971) lost money on its release, but slowly became a cult classic. Bad Timing (1980) so alarmed the Rank Organization that they billed the film as ‘a sick film made by sick people for sick people’. But as Roeg showed with 1973’s Don’t Look Now or 1985’s Insignificance, he was more than a purveyor of shocks and chills, or split-screen, time-jumping Sixties’ tricks. Roeg had risen through the ranks of the British film industry, from one indispensable role to another: teaboy to director.

When I heard the breaking news that one of Electronic Dance Music’s most popular DJs has resolved to make dance music ‘more fun and more inclusive’, I groaned. Must politics invade dance music as well as every other aspect of modern life? I’ve been listening to EDM almost daily for years. The genre is maligned for its repetitive, mechanized sound, and its reliance on Auto-Tune, but it’s also surprisingly complex and various — diverse, one might even say. It’s true that EDM is often the soundtrack of drug-fueled club raves, but do charges of elitism and homogeneity really hold up in the sober light of dawn? EDM emerged in the 1980s.

On the one occasion when I visited Naples, the plane from Barcelona was packed with shouting Italians. They broke into exuberant cheers when we completed a routine landing, and clambered over the seats to pinch my cheek. My taxi driver got lost and it took hours to find my Airbnb, in an outlying block of flats with great chunks loose and crumbling from its garish orange façade. The airline, it goes without saying, had lost my bag, and the husband and wife who rented out the room wasted no time in selling me a toothbrush. I spoke no Italian save a few words of Dante, and they no English, but when my Italian-speaking friend arrived the next day he found he could understand them no better than I could. To blame, the notorious Neapolitan dialect.

Old age, Bette Davis said, ‘ain’t no place for sissies’. Neither was the Middle Ages. They were the Dark Ages, a world lit only by fire, in part because you had thrown the innards of your enemy onto the flames. The roads were terrible, and the primeval forest had recovered the farmland once worked by retired Roman legionaries. No wonder Dante’s traveler got lost in the woods in middle age. In Britain, civilization collapsed when the Romans went south. A long night of Scandinavian noir ensued, as raiders with names like Erik Bloodaxe set the social tone. For nearly a millennium, no one in England built a flushing lavatory, because there were no drains to hook it up to. Everyone stank. The peasants were especially revolting, and the nobles were notably ignoble.

The dumbest assertion ever issued in the history of American politics was purportedly uttered by Gary Hart to The New York Times magazine in 1987: ‘Follow me around, I don’t care.’ The Colorado senator, then the front runner for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, was responding to rumors that he was a womanizer. ‘I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored.’ What followed, at least in popular memory, became the paradigmatic cautionary tale for American politicians in the age of modern media. The press accepted Hart’s challenge, investigated his personal life, and quickly produced evidence of an extramarital affair: a photo of the senator sitting on a dock with Donna Rice, a much younger woman, straddling his lap.

If there was one character who was omnipresent in the Marvel comic books universe, it was Stan Lee. Lee, who died on Monday, defined an exuberant, confident American era that seems to have vanished along with him. A member of the World War Two greatest generation, he played a decisive role in making comic books great again, starting in the 1960s, when he sought to reinvent the moribund genre with characters who bickered with each other when they weren’t worrying about their love lives. [caption id="attachment_10404225" align="alignleft" width="269"] The Amazing Spider-Man #18[/caption] Gone was the sterility of DC’s Superman, a paragon of perfection, to be replaced with ironic detachment and human foibles. Sometimes heroes were scared.

The truth hurts, and the standard of truth in war reporting requires eyewitness accounts of suffering and death. Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London, killed at Homs, Syria in 2012 in a targeted bombardment by Assad’s army reports, was the most accomplished war reporter of her time, and saw more war than most soldiers. Matthew Heineman’s A Private War, with Rosamund Pike as Colvin, is a cruel and haunting study in compulsion — the compulsion to tell the truth, the compulsion to live near death, and the compulsion to repeat the experience until death gets too near.

The White Album is one the greatest works of 20th century art, executed by the greatest exponents of the 20th century’s greatest popular and unpopular art: pop music. Which is why connoisseurs of this work of high magik know that there is nothing new to say about The Beatles, which, as everyone also knows, was The White Album’s official title. The minutiae of The Fabs’ mind-boggling State Of The Universe address from 1968 have been dissected and analyzed so completely that armies of middle-aged divorced male White Album necrophiliacs now roam the pub and bars of the West, clashing over the rallying cry, ‘But should it have been a single album?

We are so plagued by experts and inundated with know-it-alls that the popular reaction is to turn out the technocrats and embrace the know-nothings. A cynic might wonder if Axios, the political website that promises to cover issues with a series of bullet points totaling no more than 300 words, is a technocrat’s way of heading off the know-nothings, if only by ensuring that the people who still believe in expertise know a little. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but is it the meat of political analysis? Axios describes its info-gobbets as ‘smart brevity.’ Like smart foods and smart phones, this means pre-digested information, shot out in hard, pre-formed pellets. Axios offers smart conclusions, delivered with digital smartness.

It could just be, two years on from the election of President Donald Trump, liberal America is finally arriving at the fifth of the seven stages of grief, the one characterised by guilt. I realised this over the weekend as I watched Bill Maher, self appointed voice of the liberal conscience, delivering some hard to hear home truths to the faithful from the pulpit of his primetime chat show. Citing a recent survey, Maher told his audience: ‘Eighty percent of Americans find political correctness to be a problem, including 75 percent of African Americans, 74 percent of Americans under thirty, 82 percent of Asians, 87 percent of Hispanics and 88 percent of Native Americans.

When Barack Obama visits Atlanta on Friday, followed by Donald Trump in Macon on Sunday, the transformation of Peach State politics will be complete. Not too long ago, candidates here in Georgia stuck to local issues, particularly if they were Democrats burdened by the national, more radical version of their party. No longer. Georgia’s most competitive gubernatorial election in years has been thoroughly informed and powered by national politics. All public polls suggest a narrow margin when the votes are counted next Tuesday, and perhaps a runoff, with much depending on the showing by Libertarian candidate Ted Metz. Privately, the signals from both camps indicate momentum is swinging toward the Republican, Brian Kemp. Still, GOP loyalists seem more optimistic than confident.

Kanye West is perfect. Every time I think he can’t go up in my estimation, he does something more magical. Last night, having established himself as the most important political figure in the free world, he decided the time had come to find new worlds to conquer. ‘I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!’ he tweeted, out of the blue. https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1057382916760707072 And this not three weeks from the Oval Office audience he gave President Donald Trump, an occasion at which he, brilliantly, chose to communicate only through free association – oscillating at a frequency barely within the realms of human comprehension.

Il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Tiziano: The drawing of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian. With these words, supposedly written on his studio wall, Jacopo Tintoretto staked his claim on cinquecento painting. We are lucky he failed on both counts. Tintoretto was no Michelangelo or Titian, but he could push paint like no one else in La Serenissima. Renaissance means ‘rebirth’, of course. Yet the paintings of Tintoretto can come as deadly shock. His ‘Crucifixion’ of 1565 in Venice’s Scuola Grande di San Rocco strikes like a thunderbolt. The painting is also the single best work of religious art in the Italian Renaissance. With Christ fixed to the cross front and centre, the action of this composition swirls around him like a dark cyclone.

The Old Man and the Gun is a second farewell to film for Robert Redford. His first farewell, All is Lost (2013), made occasionally heavy weather of allegory on the high seas — the lone American yachtsman, asleep in his cabin despite the storm warning of 2008, springs a leak when his boat collides with a Chinese shipping container. This time, Redford is back on American soil, and on familiar ground, as the geriatric bank robber Forrest Tucker. After an allegory about the old man and the sea, the myth of The Old Man and the Gun. In Oklahoma in the early 1980s, Forrest meets the widowed Jewel (Sissy Spacek) when her car has broken down and his is being pursued by the police.

On Tuesday, after a six-month long poll in which four million Americans voted, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was voted the US’s best-loved novel. Mockingbird is so often at the summit of such polls or described as a book ‘every adult should read before they die’ that another win is no surprise. Lee, who stopped writing fiction and giving interviews almost as soon as the novel became a phenomenon, struggled for the rest of her life with the scale of its success. First published in 1960, as the civil rights movement hit its stride, Lee’s anti-racist novel has been handcuffed to liberalism for the last 50 years. An uncharitable reading of Mockingbird would see it as a childishly progressive fantasy.

In January 1882, a still little known 27-year-old called Oscar Wilde began his year-long, coast-to-coast, 15,000-mile grueling lecture tour throughout America. The ostensible purpose was to publicise the US tour of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, whose precious aesthete Bunthorne — ‘what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!’ — was partly based on Wilde. The real motive was to advertise himself and become a celebrity while searching for his true sexual identity. Victorian men had to hide their homosexuality, but Wilde found a way to flaunt his real feelings. Wearing a theatrical costume while behaving outrageously on stage, he used his ambiguous sexuality to provide entertainment.

Imagine Quentin Tarantino with a conscience, or even a historical consciousness. It’s easy if you try, as a rich junkie once sang, even if Tarantino never bothered to remove the quotation marks from every scene, as if life was all reference and no reality. Then imagine the film noir, that moral grisaille of the Thirties where everything comes in shades of gray, pulled into the technicolour Sixties, so that the fabrics are bright but the morals are polarised into good and evil, black and white, with darkness all around, and above us only sky.

We are here, to feast on the fabulous, lavish, ludicrous, deluxe and delightful 50th anniversary reissue of the Kinks undisputed 1968 masterpiece, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. In the United Kingdom, home to a royal family appointed by God who live in various castles; five-day cricket matches, football hooligans, innate conservatism, quiet revolution, natural surrealism, and cider that tastes of dead rats; drunkenness, habitual racism, suspicion of everything, Victorian politicians, a never ending empirical hangover, delusional grandeur, white sliced bread, drizzle, and endless doubles entendres – and this is just the good stuff ­– it is, to all intents and purposes, illegal to not like The Kinks.

TV networks will be waiting with baited breath to see how the Roseanne spin-off and sequel The Conners — why does the ‘e’ in the name irritate me? — performs this evening for ABC. No doubt there’ll be considerable rubber-necking interest, which will see a healthy audience for the first episode. But that will be because of the void left by the absence of Roseanne Barr. Like Banquo’s ghost to Macbeth, Barr’s non-corporeal presence will be difficult to ignore. The manner of her departure will be in many viewers’ minds, too. This isn’t the first time that the sudden loss of a lead actor in a hit series has resulted in broadcasters or platforms having to consider whether to carry on or call it a day.

‘Book-writing is hard on the brain and excruciating to the body,’ Anthony Burgess wrote in 1968. ‘It engenders tobacco addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence.’ Look at Willy, to use the nom-de-plume of the Parisian rake Henry Gauthier-Villars, in Wash Westmoreland’s Colette. Willy has his name on novels, short stories and reviews. He flatulates and eructates. He smokes cigars and, this being the 1890s and dexedrine having yet to be synthesised, drinks coffee and spirits round the clock. He is constantly stressed by an energetic routine of dodging his creditors, cheating on his wife, and contriving new stories to keep the money coming in. Eventually, he’s sexually impotent too.