Culture

Has the British artist Steven Patrick Morrissey, often known simply by his last name Morrissey, embraced the alt-right? Or is he just living proof that not every celebrity Brit is a moral coward? This week, the former frontman for The Smiths has attracted media attention after he condemned Halal meat as "evil," called out attempts to sabotage Britain's exit from the European Union, and denounced British Prime Minister Theresa May, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbot. This isn’t the first time Morrissey has ignored his public relations team.  In 2017, following the Manchester terrorist attack, Morrissey criticised politicians for refusing to acknowledge the attacker's extreme Islamic ideology.

They called Ted Kennedy the Lion of the Senate. He spent most of his time stuffed, satiated and asleep, and the rest of it on the prowl for young flesh. He also had a hand in numerous pieces of legislation. But the only thing he will be remembered for is leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die at Chappaquiddick in 1969. Judging from Jason Curran’s carefully constructed and brilliantly played Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy deserved nothing less—and a lot more than a two-month suspended sentence. The Kennedys were a mafia. Ted was their Fredo Corleone. The family bailed Ted out when he was caught cheating at Harvard, then slid him into JFK’s empty Senate seat when JFK moved to the White House. The killings of JFK and Bobby left Ted as the head of the family, and in the crosshairs.

The recent news of a Spice Girls reunion will, I suspect, be greeted by some former fans with nostalgic longing and others with an embarrassed cringe. But whether you’re a fan or foe, I think it’s worth remembering that golden decade of Girl Power — the 1990s — when it was bliss to be young and female. With our present preoccupation with the abuses of male power, we’ve forgotten about Girl Power. It was a fun-fuelled feminism for the mainstream; a materialistic and hedonistic celebration of female assertiveness, ambition and self-reliance. Girl Power was Thatcherism in sexy underwear. OK, so maybe Girl Power didn’t produce much in the way of great pop music or feminist polemics.

Seeking the behind-the-scenes story about Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony? Don’t bother. Congressional testimony is mostly about what is right in front of your eyes: what are people willing to say in public, and how much public support does that attract? As they say, it’s like “raising a flag to see who salutes.” In this case, the flag says: social media is losing its luster. Congress was willing to grill Zuckerberg for fifteen hours, he was willing to act mostly contrite and submissive, and mass media mostly supported the critical tone.

Martin Luther King is easily misrepresented in our era of heightened identity politics, and of scepticism towards grand unifying ideals. For him, the campaign for black civil rights was firmly rooted in a very grand moral and political vision. Today’s progressives have largely lost sight of this wider vision; indeed the thought of it embarrasses them. It seems naïve, unrealistic. Its grandeur is more likely to be mocked than honoured. To black activist writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates (whom I recently discussed here) it seems a mask for complacent racism. The remarkable thing about King is that he expressed the core ideals of America, and the West, with new intensity and fullness.

It seems the phenomenon of Milo Yiannopoulos – the brief, bright arc of his invention – is over. I do not want him to fall without being understood so I will tell you the strange tale of our encounters last year. Monsters should be understood, and pitied, for our own sakes. It is midsummer and he is staying at the W Hotel on Times Square, close to where a $35,000 billboard of his face will soon appear to publicise his book Dangerous. Milo’s real face can, therefore, check on his paper face simply by looking up at the sky. The W is a slick pseudo-celebrity hotel for tourists. Milo has checked in under the name Emmanuel Goldstein, after the character in 1984. Few British journalists recover from George Orwell.

Wonderstruck is a film by Todd Haynes and you will certainly be struck by wonder, often. You will wonder at its painful slowness. You will wonder at the way it strains credulity until it snaps. You will wonder if the violins will ever give it a rest. You will wonder if it will ever end. And you will wonder at the ending, when it does finally come, as it is so stupid. So it does not short-change on the wonder front. Whatever the price of your cinema ticket, you will be getting limitless wonder in return. Haynes is usually such an immaculate, thoughtful, winning filmmaker (Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, that Karen Carpenter short told with Barbie dolls — Superstar) that you will also wonder: how could he have helmed such an unholy mess? ‘Is it for children?

After an essay in this month’s Prospect about literature and freedom of speech, it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’. Now, I rather fancy being a ‘provocateur’. But as for the adjective. Someone can call you ‘stupid’, and that’s just one person’s opinion. It doesn’t seem true because a single childish naysayer has impugned your intellectual prowess. Yet hitherto, the tag ‘racist’ has tended to stick. And it’s self-verifying. Why ever would anyone call you a racist if you weren’t one? In our current climate of sensitivity about race (and everything else), finger-pointers wield enormous power.

At dinner the other night a friend wondered what came first, social climbing or name-dropping? It’s obviously a very silly question, and we all had a laugh about it. ‘As Achilles told me in his tent the other evening, Helen always fancied him and Menelaus didn’t like it a bit.’ Or, ‘I’m rather tired of listening to Claudius complaining that Agrippina doesn’t hold a candle to Messalina in the sack.’ We played that game for a while and then I dropped the name of Highgrove, and the first time the Queen was seen in public with Camilla. I began to describe the outdoor lunch and my guests started to drift off. No, it’s true, I was there, I told them.

Americans breathed a sigh of disappointment last week when the promised super-heavyweight bout between Joe Biden and Donald Trump stalled after the weigh-in trash talk. “They asked me, would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no,” Biden said as he stripped to his trunks. “I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’” “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” Trump replied as he strapped his thumb. “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.” This pugilistic persiflage reflects everything that is wrong with American politics. There should be more of it.

My friend’s ten-year-old daughter has a new hobby. Like many of her school pals, she hopes to become a video blogger — a ‘vlogger’. She has started to record clips of herself for others to watch, share and ‘like’. She showed me a few, then gave me a list of famous vloggers to watch: JoJo Siwa, iJustine, Noodlerella, Zoella. Their names sounded so bizarre. But they are totally familiar to tweenage girls. Like an earnest marketing executive, my friend’s daughter then explained to me that it was all a matter of numbers. If her videos are viewed 40,000 times on YouTube, she can have adverts placed on them; 100,000, and companies would start sending her products to promote. One million and she’d be a bona fide YouTube star.

Grade: B+Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record company money and thus now able to draw on his time as a gangsta, while telling us all it was a very naughty thing to have done.The difference between Staples and much of the similarly uprooted West Coast hip-hop crew is twofold. First, off-stage the man is thoughtful, articulate and refuses to hunker down beneath the comfort blanket of black victimhood. Further, he eschews all drugs and alcohol and loathes the glorification of gang culture — something he calls coonery — and is a Christian. (Although it is hard to imagine Jesus Christ cheerfully singing along with this little number.) And second, he has words.

It was only Seven Days in Entebbe, but it felt like an eternity. The rescue in July 1976 by Israeli commandos of 102 Jewish and Israeli hostages from Palestinian and German terrorists at Entebbe airport in Uganda was a scriptwriter’s dream: a three-act drama of crisis, complication and resolution, in which the good guys won—good guys that is, unless you were rooting for the hijackers to murder 106 men, women and children for no other reason than they were Jewish. Three films were in production almost immediately. None were made by Arabs or Germans.

If I needed a safe space, I would nominate California. Against most odds this seedbed of censorious liberalism has thrown up the antibodies to the lurgy it created. Here within a short space of each other are a group of leftists and conservatives, religious and non-religious, all of whom are united in deploring the ‘You can’t say that’ culture which has torn across America and the West in recent years. The state may still have the shoutiest students. But it now also has the best first-responders. On Monday morning in Los Angeles I go to be interviewed by Dennis Prager, a devout, Republican talk-show host. From there I go to the studios of Joe Rogan, a libertarian comedian and martial arts expert.

It seems Stormy Daniels has finally asked herself the question the rest of us have been asking since January, when the Wall Street Journal revealed that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer had paid the porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair: Why did she settle for just $130,000? The agreement between Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen regarding an affair alleged to have begun and ended a decade ago was made in October 2016. With the presidential election mere weeks away, couldn’t Daniels have demanded a much higher sum not to send the campaign careening completely off the rails?

We were so close to getting rid of Jann Wenner. When his 51 per cent stake in Rolling Stone was put up for sale last year, it felt safe to assume that the new owners would gently ease out the man whose disastrous recent leadership brought the publication to the point where it needed to be sold. No one on the editorial staff ever did lose their job over the debacle of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s false UVA story in 2014. It seemed only fair that Wenner should lose his.But reporting from Vanity Fair has confirmed that the Penske Media Corporation, the magazine’s new owners, are keeping Wenner on. Not with some kind of emeritus sinecure, either, but with the title of editorial director.We should have known it would be this way with a Baby Boomer.

You would have to be quite odd not to approve of the sudden surge of solidarity amongst Hollywood stars of the female persuasion. (Though I did wonder, when Frances McDormand called so movingly during her Oscar-winner speech ‘Meryl, if you do it everyone else will!’ whether she meant ‘Suck up to Weinstein for years’ or ‘Give Polanski a standing ovation’ - because Streep certainly led the liberal sheep in those fields.) But still - Ancient Mariner on the oceans of objectionability that I am - I do miss the days when ‘actress’ was shorthand not for ‘whore’ but for ‘bitch.’ These days, female actors want to be seen to be building each other up rather than tearing each other down.

You Were Never Really Here is a fourth feature from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) and the first thing to say is that it is exceptionally violent. I don’t say this disapprovingly but if your threshold for violence is as low as mine — I incurred a paper cut the other day and passed clean out — it will prove an 89-minute ordeal. Still, it has been described as ‘the Taxi Driver for the 21st century’, if that is of help while you’re bracing yourself for the next hammer blow. Personally, I found it of no help at all. Also, it’s untrue.The film stars a bulked-up Joaquin Phoenix as Joe, a tortured hit man, and it opens as it means to go on. That is, not prettily.

Reading the lip-smacking reports of the latest troubled celebrity relationships  (Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux definitely high and dry, Cheryl Cole and Liam Payne allegedly on the rocks) I couldn’t help musing that stars – and more specifically, the place they occupy in our mass psychological landscape – have very much changed since the first mass-market celebrities emerged. The film stars of the fledgling Hollywood truly were worshipped as higher beings; a tribe of Pathan Indians opened fire on a cinema when they were denied entry to a Greta Garbo film while women committed suicide when Valentino died. Their marriages were regarded as heavenly unions; their romantic sunderings as tragedies.

Ah, this will be about empire. So I thought when I saw that the small city of Arcata, California, has voted to remove the statue on their town plaza of President William McKinley. The United States had never possessed overseas colonies before McKinley. Every territory we acquired, we eventually brought into the republic with full statehood. That all changed in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, at the end of which America found herself in possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines—islands about which McKinley admitted “I could not locate within 2,000 miles.” He also annexed Hawaii and established a protectorate over Cuba.

The wedding of Meghan Markle to Prince Harry has no precedent in the history of the Royal family. How will a relatively ordinary person, albeit a celebrity, cope with the rigid etiquette and stifling sense of entitlement of the culture into which they are marrying? I’m referring, of course, to Harry. From the moment he becomes Ms Markle’s husband, he will be expected to observe a code of behaviour designed to trip up the newcomer. I’m not kidding, alas. Since she was a small girl, Meghan has breathed the purified air of the liberal American ‘filter bubble’ – so called because it ruthlessly filters out people, ideas and even casual turns of phrase that are deemed ‘inappropriate’.

Tomorrow night, TV viewers will take to their couches for a night of Hollywood glamour, razzmatazz and gross hypocrisy. A bunch of vain halfwits who make millions waving guns around or taking off their clothes will preach to us about gun control and sexual morality. Yes, it’s the 493rd annual Oscar Awards. I have the envelope in my hand, ladies and gentlemen, and there’s enough coke in it to see us through the after-party after the after-party. And the Oscar goes to… Best Picture: ‘Harvey’s Fall’. Harvey is a piggish producer who hangs out with the Clintons and assaults women in hotel rooms. Suddenly, he vanishes. Ben Affleck plays his son, an alcoholic gambler, who tours the rehab facilities of Arizona looking for clues.