Culture

Ronan Farrow is currently the most wonderful wunderkind in the United States, at least on the Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Former news chat show host for the MSNBC network, Rhodes Scholar and former foreign service officer, recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize for exposés on nasty sexual misconduct which brought down both Harvey Weinstein and the attorney general of New York, author of a new book of foreign policy deep thoughts and gossip. And all at age thirty and half! Not only does Farrow embody the anti-Trump zeitgeist right now, he has a freehold on the future, whether inside the next Democratic administration or in broadcast media. His ma is Mia Farrow; his paternity, complicated.

During a dozen years in Belfast I collected a number of political coffee mugs, hailing from both sides of the divide. Unionist designs including the heartbreakingly punctuated ‘Ulster Say’s No’ (not merely to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; no to everything) and the impressively witty ‘Reservoir Prods’: four toughs in shades identified as ‘Mr Orange’ and ‘Mr Boyne’, etc. The republican mugs exhibit no such sense of humour, which won’t surprise you. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams stare sternly from their porcelain. Worse, the mugs from the Sinn Fein bookshop are cheaply decorated with decals, which are less robust than the inked unionist ones, and tend to melt in the dishwasher.

Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other people, the sequence of postures is different. Strange, then, that so many skilled workers have left France. Stranger, still, that so few skilled foreign workers have moved there. You’d think they’d be banging at the door. Isabelle, the heroine of Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In, is so committed to the ‘cinq à sept’ that she does it round the clock.

It’s quite commonplace now to say that people’s lives and careers have been ruined by #MeToo ‘witch-hunts.’ But witches weren’t ever real; sexual assaulters are.Like many women, I love the idea of Me Too as a relay of shame; that every victim who stands up and names what happened passes on the blame to an assaulter who will have to remember that he was so undesirable he felt it necessary to force himself on someone who didn’t want him – feel the fear and pass it on!In most cases that hasn’t happened. The big ugly New York ones – Weinstein, who conveniently looks like the archetype sweaty sex-pest and Eric Schneiderman, the ghoulish attorney general – are thrown overboard. The younger, prettier ones have basically got away with it.

The HBO program Silicon Valley has a recurring joke. Every time some eager young Zuck pitches a business idea, he caps it by promising to “make the world a better place” through whatever inscrutable software enhancement he’s trying to sell – “through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”, “through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints . . .” and on and on. It’s pretty funny. Faux-philanthropy is not just for incel code-ninjas.

Tom Wolfe has died at the age of 87. In 1998, William Cash interviewed the great author for The Spectator: Yes, Tom Wolfe does own one of those 12-room Upper East Side apartments, as he wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities, 'the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York, and for that matter, the world'. Contrary to reports in the British press, however, the 68-year-old dandy New Journalist, self-styled Zola of Our Times, does not resemble Bela Lugosi with 'cracked lips' and the blood sucked from a 'ghastly livid-white' face. Although he does wear a cape at night and has rarely been seen out in public in the last year, he looked extremely well in his whipped ice-cream suit.

Racer and the Jailbird is a terrible name for a film. It sounds like an unsolicited tribute to that sorrily misbegotten Seventies’ genre, the action-comedy buddy movie—like Freebie and the Bean (1974) or Smokey and the Bandit (1977). But it is not. Nor, though the trailers for Racer and the Jailbird misrepresent it as such, is it a sexed-up, souped-up heist movie for knuckleheads and chuckleheads, like Gone in Sixty Seconds or Baby Driver, but with sexy Europeans instead of Nicholas Cage looking like he’s been shot with an elephant tranquilizer, and then put in someone else’s dentures because he’s still a bit woozy. Racer and the Jailbird is none of these things, probably because it isn’t really Racer and the Jailbird at all.

Draggle-tailed guttersnipe. Squashed cabbage leaf. Bilious pigeon. These are some of the insults hurled at Eliza Doolittle by Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. The musical is undergoing a Broadway revival this season, the first in 25 years, with Lincoln Center Theatre’s production directed by Bartlett Sher. Sexual politics may be under the spotlight, in keeping with Lerner and Loewe’s original, yet it's the British class system takes centre stage. Set in London, at the turn of the 20th century, My Fair Lady is the story of a flower-selling street urchin, Eliza Doolittle, as she becomes the willing subject of a social experiment conducted by ‘speech scientist’ Henry Higgins. It’s the tale of a self-made woman.

Cynically timed to minimise news coverage, Katy Perry’s decision to bury the hatchet with Taylor Swift just as things are kicking off big style in the Middle East is nevertheless huge news. The parallels between the Swift/Perry crisis and the historic tensions in the Middle East have long been impossible to ignore. Both have come to define a generation, and both have at times seemed utterly unresolvable.

Some actors reach greatness via pure commitment – shedding pounds, adding them, living in character for months on end, all but transforming into the role they’ve decided to play. Marlon Brando, Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, and if I may hazard an addition (a somewhat non-traditional nominee), the United States of America.Can we nominate a whole country for an Oscar? A Tony? Can we do that? Can someone check on that? That’d be beautiful. You know what I mean? Beautiful. The best. Beautiful people, beautiful acting. Wow. For approximately the past two years, my country, or the better part of it, at least, has stared into the mirror, and feigned astonishment, as if candidate-cum-President Donald J.

If you were to revisit the house you grew up in, would you take a look at your old bedroom? The answer is yes, of course you would—unless, that is, you are Ronit, Rachel Weisz’s character in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience. If you are Ronit, you will instead ponder your late father the rabbi’s rich collection of Talmudic literature, then kiss Esti, the lost love of your teenage years, with tongues. There should a joke here about pastrami and tongue sandwiches, but Disobedience has no jokes. Adapted from Naomi Alderman’s novel, Disobedience is set in an Orthodox Jewish community in London. Jews are supposed to be smart and funny, but this lot are slow-witted and mirth-impaired, like black-clad, black-hatted Stepford Wives.

It is now fifty years since the événements of May 1968, when young Parisians lobbed onobble stones at the police, occupied the Sorbonne, and launched the Boomers’ long march through the institutions. That makes it fifty years since Jean-Luc Godard lost the plot—never a good idea if you are a film-maker. Godard has made plenty of films since 1968, but no one cares. You can see some of Godard’s post-1968 films on YouTube. They’re all terrible—didactic and boring. Perhaps Godard admitted as much when he called his split-screen analysis of middle-class family life Number Two. The split in the screen, like the one in Godard’s mind, was dialectical. Many people lost their minds in 1968 through psychedelic drugs.

A doozy of a correction from the New York Times. On Sunday the Gray Lady published a profile of Campbell Brown, the CNN anchor turned head of news partnerships at Facebook, by Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles. All was going well until Bowles got onto the social media site’s new video series platform: 'Ms. Brown wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product — a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like "Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families" — to be a breaking news destination.' Wait, what?

Is Jon Hamm’s name really Jon Hamm? Or is it a stage name, meant to telegraph his acting style? When an actor is called Slim Pickens, you know he’ll never play the Dane. Hamm is the name at the top of the bill in Beirut, and preserved pork is what he delivers, thinly sliced in the style of a television actor stretching his talents to the full two-hours, and with a rancid aftertaste. Too bad, really, as Beirut has the elements and characters of a good thriller. That is because the elements and the characters are familiar from other thrillers. The scriptwriter, Tony Gilroy, has written four Bourne movies.

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.