Culture

Culture

Thursday

William Newton

Why are there no paintings in Star Wars?

Why are there no paintings in Star Wars movies? The question occurred to me recently, rewatching The Rise of Skywalker. I’m old enough to recall seeing A New Hope in a drive-in in summer 1977, as well as the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special on television in 1978. Over time, my interest in Star Wars has shifted into something akin to nostalgia, so it may not be surprising that this question never struck me before. What is surprising, however, given their glaring omission from the films, is that the man who created the Star Wars universe happens to be a major collector of art — including paintings — and is due to open the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles by 2025.

Star Wars
del rey
Francesca Peacock

Lana Del Rey’s new record: samey, stale, sterile

The title song of Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, opens in a style now typical of the thirty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter. Amid the swelling string accompaniment and slow beat, the artist sings “fuck me to death, love me until I love myself.” So far, so in keeping with the musician who made her name with the dark, sensuous songs of 2012’s Born to Die (“my old man is a bad man, but I can’t deny the way he holds my hand”) and 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! (“Goddamn man-child, you fucked me so good I almost said ‘I love you’”).

movies theaters
Nicky Otis Smith

The importance of going to the movies

By the beginning of this decade, popular American cinema was once again in peril — just as it was in the 1950s and the Eighties. Then the threat was television and home video, respectively. Now it is streaming. There have been peaks and valleys in between, but before the pandemic, these were the major existential challenges to Hollywood and American movie theaters. The survival of theatrical exhibition after an unprecedented sixteen-month absence speaks to the power of the medium and the ineffable itch that going the movies scratches. Even Steven Spielberg looked desperate, if relieved, when he told Tom Cruise earlier this year, “You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution” with Top Gun: Maverick.

Tuesday

Robert S. Erickson

A stripped back Doll’s House on Broadway

The difference between a divorce and a funeral seems lost on the director Jamie Lloyd; ditto for bird cages and prisons and, in the end, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and a sanatorium. Lloyd’s new, minimalist production on Broadway is so stripped of ornament, so unremittingly rote, that this reviewer nearly handed his valuables to an usher and asked for a padded room. At the play’s close, the director has the embattled housewife, Jessica Chastain’s Nora Helmer, make her defiant exit through the back wall of the theater upstage; a garage door opens and she strides onto the rain-soaked pavement, probably to be harassed by tweakers or shoved into oncoming traffic. Peals of laughter erupted in the audience — here was our chance!

doll's house
Casey Chalk

Why I’m afraid of transphobia

J.K. Rowling’s Twitter feed “creates trans phobias,” writes Washington Post gender columnist Monica Hesse. Listening to Rowling, says Hesse, is exhausting. “It’s exhausting because it requires constant vigilance.” And the constant vigilance, says Hesse, is necessary in order to determine when Rowling’s words stray into “transphobia.” I confess my own “exhaustion” reading opinions like Hesse’s. I understand that “transphobia” has a very extensive Wikipedia page citing supposed medical experts who give the concept a veneer of legitimacy.

Saturday

Nicky Otis Smith

Why were 2000s movies so hypersexual?

Even though the endless debate about sex scenes in movies recurs every three or four months, it remains fixed. Nothing ever moves forward; nothing more is understood; no one’s perspective is shifted. Dug in on both sides of an argument that remains black and white, people refuse to move. Maybe one day they’ll be able to talk in Technicolor, but for now, some are distressed by erotic cinema and others are desperate for more of it. Stellar home-video labels like Severin, Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome continue to provide high-definition discs of genre films full of naked women and bloody bodies. But if Tom Cruise is the only real movie star left, the world won’t get more than a chaste kiss (maybe) from modern American cinema.

sex

Tuesday

William Newton

Drinking with Picasso

In February 1900, a critically acclaimed art exhibition went up at a Barcelona café called Els Quatre Gats. It was neither the first nor the last show mounted at the establishment, a popular drinking spot for avant-garde artists, writers and others. It was, however, the very first solo outing for one of the café’s regular patrons: a brash nineteen-year-old local art student named Pablo Ruiz Picasso. It has now been fifty years since Picasso died, on April 8, 1973, and even as that anniversary is being commemorated worldwide with new exhibitions and publications, he has never really faded from public consciousness. His art and even personal objects associated with him are avidly collected, and he continues to inspire filmmakers, musicians and other artists.

picasso

Monday

Dave Seminara

Should I have had a sensitivity reader review my book?

Reason magazine reported last summer on the rise of sensitivity readers, and publishers have made headlines for their plans to release sanitized versions of Roald Dahl's and Ian Fleming's works. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that publishers are hiring sensitivity readers to purify these books, or the fact that I probably should have had one review my books before they were published. In an ideal world, sensitivity readers would be in as much demand as Betamax repairpersons. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world full of hypersensitive Twitter users who relish finding offense in the unlikeliest of places. Hence the proliferation of sensitivity readers, or "authenticity readers" as they’re sometimes called.

sensitivity
latinx
Ben Kew

The growing bipartisan backlash against ‘Latinx’

Since its emergence, the term “Latinx” has been unpopular with Hispanics. Yet despite this opposition, progressive activists and organizations continue to use it as a means of identifying people of Latin American heritage in a supposedly more sensitive way. The term's origins remain a subject of debate, although its users argue that the word "Latino" reinforces the patriarchy while the "x" recognizes nonbinary people. According to the Wall Street Journal, it made its debut in academic literature a decade ago in Puerto Rican psychology periodicals as part of an effort to "escape the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language." Since then it has been adopted by many progressives as part of their ever-expanding twenty-first-century lexicon.

Friday

Peter Wood

San Francisco reparations and the Golden Age of Revision

We live in the Golden Age of Revision. Not everyone has noticed, so let me mention some of the highlights of the art of the Michelangelos and Monets of the revisionist moment. First, of course, we have found the path to revising birth certificates and chromosomes on the matter of an individual's sex, or as we have been taught to say, gender. This is revision par excellence, but only the beginning. Then we have the New York Times in the company of many thousands of American school teachers who have miraculously overthrown the burden of snow-capped mountains of historical evidence and wizened learning of generations of historians. Their revision reveals that the real history of America began in 1619 with the arrival of Angolan captives at Jamestown.

san francisco

Thursday

Teresa Mull

East Palestine and the roots of rural mistrust

The East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment has thrust rural America into the national spotlight. Town mayor Trent Conaway, a hefty, scruffy figure who resembles many a resident of flyover country, has been all over cable news expressing his “frustration” over how the federal government has handled the disaster. “Frustration” is exactly the word I’d use to describe the predominant feeling I encountered last week during my visit to East Palestine. It’s the same attitude I come across constantly in my rural Pennsylvania homeland. The way the East Palestine disaster has unfolded magnifies the rural perception of government, and both sides of the aisle would be wise to take a closer look and listen.

rural

Monday

Matt Purple

The magnetism of His Dark Materials

When I was in middle school back in the 1990s, there were two sets of books every boy seemed to have in his backpack. One was the Redwall series, Brian Jacques’s swashbuckling tales of heroic mice and tyrannical wildcats. The other was the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. It’s no coincidence, I think, that both Jacques and Pullman are British. What made these books intriguing, beyond their carefully wound plots, was that they were marketed to children yet addressed subject matter that was very much adult. In Redwall, it was the brutal violence. His Dark Materials had some of that too (in the first chapter of the first book, we witness an attempted killing; in the first chapter of the second book, we witness an accidental fatality).

his dark materials
William Newton

Greg Lansky: the artist with a scandalous past

St. Paul points out that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Despite that inclusive “all,” human nature inclines toward exclusion of the “other,” which is a very difficult thing for many of us to overcome — me included. Enter Greg Lansky, pornographic-film producer. Perhaps no one in recent memory has made a greater profit from the highly lucrative commerce paradoxically known as “adult entertainment” than Parisian-born entrepreneur Lansky. Within the span of about fifteen years, he went from dropping out of school and having few realistic prospects to making fortunes from adult media, partying with celebrities and receiving glowing profiles in magazines such as Forbes, GQ and Rolling Stone.

greg lansky
Mitchell Jackson

Mary Blair, doyenne of Disneyland

On a cold day at Disneyland, I walk through sugarplum-scented air, past a midcentury-modern poster for Alice in Wonderland, and beneath a plaque that reads, “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” Walt Disney — the controversial impresario of twentieth-century animation and escapism, not the corporation that bears his name — intended his magic kingdom as an escape, a real-life never-never land devoid of the politics and troubles of the everyday. But on this visit to the park, I encounter the here and now around every corner. Passersby notice that an empowered female pirate has replaced the bride-auction scene in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. (“Did anyone really believe pirates were role models?” one visitor asks.

mary blair
Robert S. Erickson

& Juliet and Titanique: two newly minted cult classics

Fears that the new pop-parody musical & Juliet would be a vehicle for steamrolling Shakespeare are understandable but unfounded. It’s true that, on Broadway as in the rest of the arts, holding dead white males up for flagellation is now almost a cherished ritual — a recent example being last season’s Six, a glitzy feminist paean danced on the grave of Henry VIII. There’s a healthy dose of girl power in & Juliet, too, and I don’t doubt that a few heedless theatergoers came with tomatoes in hand, hoping to find the Bard pilloried. Let me tell you a secret: the theater world still adores Shakespeare, even in 2023. To renounce him is to swear off your mother’s milk.

Juliet

Monday

Cockburn

Bianca Censori: Kanye West’s new handler

Cockburn would usually think twice about celebrating a man that’s under his wife’s thumb. But after seeing reports that Kanye West's new wife Bianca Censori “runs the show,” Cockburn can’t help but think that arrangement is probably for the best. The forty-five-year-old disgraced rapper shocked fans last month when he married the Yeezy architectural designer Censori, in a top-secret ceremony just two months after finalizing his divorce from Kim Kardashian. A source told the Sun, "Bianca runs the show. She has been around Ye for about three years, things got serious really fast in mid-November. "Bianca handles Ye's daily logistics from Yeezy clothing management to construction of the new Yeezy headquarters/ Donda Academy.

kanye west wife bianca censori handler

Wednesday

Jenna Stocker

The tragedy of corporate America’s anti-child messaging

My brothers and I grew up in a very active household. We were always busy with sports, schoolwork, and chores, and there was a constant revolving door of friends and teammates. Both of my parents worked full-time as business owners and as our informal chauffeurs. Along with thousands of meals to be prepared, loads of laundry to be done, fights to break up, and the occasional window to be replaced, ours was a house that was never quiet, especially when my brothers tapped their illegal fireworks stash. To an outsider, it might have looked like being in the middle of a domesticated Lord of the Flies. But there was a purpose to the madness and chaos. We learned conflict management, independence, fire safety, and the value of hard work and cooperation.

newborn

Thursday

Oliver Bateman

Dana White’s Power Slap is a gruesome freak show

UFC president Dana White’s new show Power Slap: Road to the Title debuted on January 18 to paltry ratings — a reported 295,000 viewers following a helpful lead-in from the pro wrestling show AEW Dynamite, which had nearly a million — and widespread critical outrage due to the seeming inhumanity of the sport. Those who did tune in watched in mute horror as Chris Kennedy was brutally knocked out, his hands curling up in what Chris Nowinski, a former football player and wrestler turned brain trauma researcher, referred to as “fencing posture,” indicative of serious brain injury — then later proved unable to recollect what had happened to him.

Dana White

Wednesday

Robert S. Erickson

The Some Like It Hot revival is cream-puff theater

The new Some Like It Hot on Broadway has bass player Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), disguised among Big Sue’s Society Syncopators as “Daphne” to hide from the Chicago mob, decide to embrace the drag lifestyle and elope with his elderly suitor Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila) by the show’s end. (The 1959 film closes with Jerry straining to extract himself from Osgood’s clutches.) Many theatergoers will not expect this update, setting up a bit of dramatic irony too delicious to be unintentional. What’s a drag show, after all, without a few surprises? To my knowledge, this irony has gone entirely uncapitalized by headline-writers across the nation. Some Like a Hot Dog! Speakeasy, Don’t Tell! Billy, but Wilder! Jack’s Lemon!

some like it hot
Sam Wasson

The death of the movie star

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were not, as the title of a recent documentary would have us believe, the last movie stars. Nor are movie stars — as Jennifer Aniston suggests in a November Variety profile — extinct. As long as there are big screens, stars will occur, perhaps only accidentally. The reality, though, is that the business may no longer need them. Before Hollywood figured out how to sell you a movie you didn’t want to see, way back in the old studio days when advertising a movie was as easy-breezy as sticking up a poster and few lobby cards at your local theater, you didn’t need to be sold a movie to take an interest. You just needed to be told it was coming. Because if it had a star you liked, you’d go. That’s what a star was: a means to sell you a ticket.

movie star
paramore
Mitchell Jackson

Playing God with Paramore

From the moment Hayley Williams founded Paramore with three Christian boys in Nashville, she was consumed by Biblical levels of conflict. Williams signed as a solo artist with Atlantic on the heels of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” Her male bandmates performed and recorded without a contract. To counteract the narrative that a major label had engineered Williams, Atlantic released Paramore’s 2005 debut album, All We Know Is Falling, through the “sub-label” Fueled by Ramen. Critics caught onto the ruse, with Gigwise writing, “The band are an A&R man’s fantasy.” But Williams connected with angsty teens partially because the critics seemed to be bullying her. The bullying continued when Paramore changed their lineup and released the 2007 sophomore album Riot!

immersive
James Panero

In Claude Monet’s postmodern garden

There are few topics that rankle the art critic more than “immersive exhibitions.” They must be second only to “nonfungible tokens,” whatever those are. I speak of the immersive spectacles where images of famous artwork are flashed on the walls and floors of a large white room in which you sit. Certainly, this should be outside the remit of my union card, I might think. Until now, if you were looking for some opinion on this-or-that out-of-copyright projection venue slash tourist trap, I would simply say not my job. Maybe go see the real thing. Then we can talk. And yet, with art on the walls, real or imagined, judgment always comes calling. Suddenly we seem to be immersed in immersion. It can be a challenge just to keep your head above the digital waters.

Adrian Brune

The shock and awe-inspiring art of Iraq

The road from Erbil consists of one large, tarmacked lane, no separation marks, no shoulder, despite seemingly never-ending ascents and descents and a barrage of trucks carrying huge oil tanks. As soon as the mountains of the Iranian border appear, the cars form a bottleneck into Sulaymaniyah, the “cultural capital of Kurdistan.” It leads to a maze of circular streets, where finding anything — let alone an old tobacco factory turned arts center — becomes a challenge, even for two journalists armed with Google Maps and a local fixer. Yet after some circling, a phone call, a bit of translating and the opening of two twelve-foot, light-beige metal gates, the artist Tara Abdulla appears, smoking a cigarette.

Monday

Teresa Mull

A pilot explains why air travel has become so stressful

Add your tropical dream vacation/work trip/family wedding to the list of lingering Covid consequences. If you’re like me, every time you head to the airport these days, you brace for your flight to be delayed or cancelled. It’s not just in our heads. If it seems that air travel has gotten less reliable since the the pandemic hit, that’s because it has. Reuters reported in August 2022 that “flight cancellations and delays by US airlines in the first seven months of the year have surpassed the comparable 2019 period.” Many of these disruptions were weather-related, but a pilot I spoke to emphasized ongoing airline staffing shortages as the biggest headache at the airport. He told me that heading into 2019, airlines were facing the biggest pilot shortage in history.

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

Prince Harry and Andrew Tate are two sides of the same coin

On the face of things, there is little in common between Prince Harry and Andrew Tate. Yet look closer and you see two sides of the same coin: a narcissistic version of modern masculinity that warps what's actually important about manhood for the demands of an addicted audience. Tate is a juvenile accused sex trafficker, who believes his right as an HGH-fueled muscle man entitles him to a Conan the Barbarian Romanian fantasy of Bugattis, baby oil and bitches. Harry is a pussy-whipped blue blood who wields his grief gestalt as a weapon against all comers — be they media or monarchy. Tate's narcissism is more aggressive.

andrew tate prince harry

Friday

Robert S. Erickson

Ebony and ivories

In the early going of The Piano Lesson (1987) there’s mention of a merchant buying up musical instruments in the black neighborhoods of 1930s Pittsburgh. When offers for the titular family piano are rejected by its current proprietor, Berniece, her brother Boy Willie, who has arrived from the south, hopes to sell it to him behind her back. It’s a coy reference to that great Broadway salesman of band equipment, Meredith Willson’s Music Man (1957), and the reversal gives you some idea of playwright August Wilson’s method. Where Meredith built a full musical around a musical zero (Harold Hill is tone-deaf), August composed a stage play from the music of the blues, which he called the “sacred book” of black literature.

piano

Thursday

Kara Kennedy

A staunch defense of ‘nepo babies’

Over the last few days, as far as I’m aware, I have been the sole defender of the successful children of the rich. So-called "nepo babies" have been unfairly attacked by the very jealous, mainly middling journalists, who have decided that the greatest crime of these talented few was simply being born. “We love them, we hate them, we disrespect them, we’re obsessed with them,” read Vulture’s front cover, along with a photo illustration of famous progeny. The spawn included Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny and Vanessa Paradis, and Dakota Johnson, whose parents are Melanie Griffiths and Don Johnson. The author of the piece seems to think that the only reason anybody knows the aforementioned names is because of their parents' status and connection.

nepo babies

Tuesday

Robert S. Erickson

An ingloriously dumb adaptation

There’s always been a market for nostalgia. Keats, the huckster of Greek glories, put it best: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” But the peculiar achievement of Lester Bangs, the cantankerous rock critic played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous (2000), is to sell us some self-confessedly unsweet music. True rock and roll, the Bangs character tells us, is “gloriously and righteously dumb” and could suffer no worse fate than to become an “industry of cool.” Of course, by his lights, the golden age has passed; all that remains is “the death rattle, the last gasp, the last grope.” If nostalgia is a drug, he has mainlined the stuff. What are you on, man, and where can I get some?

almost famous
hopper
William Newton

Edward Hopper’s America

With a new show at the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s New York; a new documentary film from director Phil Grabsky, Hopper: An American Love Story; and a recent exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the work of one of the most popular yet seemingly inscrutable American artists of the twentieth century is receiving a great deal of renewed attention. In his paintings, Hopper’s hard-edged realism, impressionistic plays of light and passages of intensely saturated color compete for attention. What has always captured the public imagination is the relative isolation of the figures that appear in his work. Search for articles about Edward Hopper online, and many will describe his art as an exploration of loneliness.