Yet more death in Venice
Books and ArtsBjörn Andrésen is now tall and painfully thin with long silver hair and a matching beard that belong on Merlin
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The techniques of totalitarianism are still fully in play today
Instead of examining the dictators individually, How to Become a Tyrant explores their careers thematically
July 21, 2021
The lost king of the blues
Books and ArtsNo one played the blues like Mike Bloomfield
July 20, 2021
Affluent white female killer
Books and ArtsI Care a Lot reviewed
July 17, 2021
Abolishing museums serves nobody
Activist demands will destroy museums — and make us all poorer
July 1, 2021
Winston Marshall is more than a martyr
I hope the banjoist is now free to reveal publicly how the industry operates these days
June 28, 2021
Dungeons and Dragons goes woke
Do today’s players care if orcs are racist?
June 24, 2021
Watching The Woman in the Window
Books and ArtsThe Woman in the Window reviewed
June 23, 2021
No success like failure
Books and ArtsWhy does no one talk about how most artistic careers end in failure?
June 22, 2021
Girls on film
Books and ArtsNew Woman Behind the Camera brings together the whimsical and the confrontational to show how modernism shaped photography
June 20, 2021
The legend of forgotten musical genius Mieczyslaw Weinberg
Books and ArtsDismissed as a dime-store Shostakovich, then praised as a major modern composer
Vacation time
Books and ArtsThe enduring popularity of the Vacation series reflects not just the American appetite for travel, but also that old American virtue of gung-ho optimism
June 15, 2021
Steve Austin and the age of the antihero
Stone Cold was foul-mouthed, sadistic and mean — and people loved him
The rising cost of remembering the Fab Four
A forthcoming George Harrison box set will sell for $1,000. Do we still love the Beatles enough to care?
June 1, 2021
Bo Burnham flirts with post-comedy
A lot of Inside is not even attempting to be funny
May 31, 2021
Friends: The Reunion turned out to be a pointless nostalgia-fest
The much-hyped comeback was a waste of time
May 26, 2021
Fifty years of ‘Imagine’
Perhaps the real secret to the song’s eternal popularity is that it taps into our modern obsession with feeling good about ourselves
May 19, 2021
The last American video store
Books and ArtsVideo killed the video store
Along came Bill Evans
Books and ArtsNo matter his personal woes, Evans almost always vouchsafed his listeners something not merely to dig but to cherish
May 17, 2021
Meet the Medici at the Met
Books and ArtsBad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness
Van Morrison is a sane man in a mad world
The Morrison cancel mob are dancing to the tune of the oligarchy that is trashing American democracy
May 16, 2021
Take a trip with Hawkwind
Books and ArtsHawkwind played notes from underground, but they had a global influence
May 11, 2021
The end of the awards ceremony
Diversity drama at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association could prove fatal
May 9, 2021
Even Elon Musk couldn’t make SNL funny
Everything seemed so dated
May 4, 2021
Elon Musk is too funny for Saturday Night Live
Still, I hope he kills it
April 30, 2021
A film festival fiasco in Narrowsburg, New York
Books and ArtsCastellano and Castaldo descended upon Narrowsburg with a gust of wind, declaring that they would open an acting school, start a film festival and make it ‘the Sundance of the East’
Korean film has mastered the supernatural horror genre
Books and ArtsFor those of us who have followed Korean film for many years, the triumph of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden or the living-dead series Kingdom on Netflix came as no surprise
Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans
Books and ArtsFor Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life
April 27, 2021
I’m turning Japanese
Books and ArtsIn the Eighties, Japan had prosperity, optimism, loads of bizarre porn and the solace of technological gadgetry
