Culture

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Was there ever a more audacious album title than Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire? The name of the Kinks’ 1969 masterpiece could almost be described, in Sixties vernacular, as ‘far out’. But just two years after the lysergic hurricane of 1967, the content of Arthur was ‘far in’, even by the Kinks’ distinctly un-psychedelic standards. Not for them the late Sixties’ return to Americana of the Stones (Beggars Banquet), the Band (Music from Big Pink) and Dylan (John Wesley Harding).

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If you want to get really depressed about the future of television, consider this: over Christmas, The Witcher was Netflix’s highest-rated original series on IMDb, beating everything from Black Mirror to Stranger Things and The Crown. The reason you should be depressed is that The Witcher’s popularity may send a dangerous signal to screen producers: don’t worry about the script or the acting, just chuck in lots of monsters, ultra closeups of swords cleaving heads, arrows going into people’s eyes and girls in body-hugging leather fantasy outfits, like a Dark Ages version of Hooters.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’ was the headline of the New York Daily News. To which the City said to Ford, you first. When the Daily News ran that famous headline on October 29 1975, New York was teetering on bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford had declared he would veto a federal bailout. It looked like the Big Apple was stewed. The world had written off New York. The feeling was mutual: the city had written off the world. Between 1970 and 1980, the city lost nearly a million residents, over a tenth of its population. Still, New York attracted people who, against the reigning wisdom, would not or could not live anywhere else.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Jerry Bruckheimer is a quiet man who produces the loudest movies in the world. Early, arty Jerry was the fixer who put together 1980’s slight neo-noir American Gigolo. Thrusting mid-period Jerry, happily partnered with the 1980s zeitgeist and fellow producer Don Simpson, made the classics Flashdance, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop. Don died a truly maximal Hollywood death in 1996 — they found 21 different substances inside him — but Jerry, always the sober one, kept going bigger, faster, louder: The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Laramie, Wyoming ‘It’s pretty, but is it art?’ Rudyard Kipling asked in 1890. In those days the modernist movement across the Beaux Arts was gaining a grip on the western world that it maintains in the 21st century and is likely to hold into the 22nd, if there is one. One hundred and thirty years later, Kipling’s question calls for a plain response: ‘If it’s ugly, it has to be art.’ Aquinas defined art as ‘right reason in action’; reason in making. Right reason depends upon a man’s knowing what he ought to believe, desire and do. The modern artist is ignorant of all of these things.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.New York City The singer and saxophonist Ray Gelato opens his set at Birdland with a cover of ‘That’s Amore’. But this isn’t the sleepy send-up of Neapolitan street waltzes that Dean Martin recorded in 1953. Gelato raises the tempo and swings it four to the bar. As he sprints his way through the verses, Philadelphia’s City Rhythm Orchestra drives the pace, piano, bass and drums holding down the shuffle while the four-piece horn section plays call-and-response to each other and his vocals. It’s the start of a fun, high- energy set, the two hours of which feel as if they pass in half the time. You don’t tap your feet to this music: you stomp.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What have they done to Jack Ryan? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way: he’s been captured by a crack team of Ivy League majors in Race, Gender and Weaponized Resentment Studies — probably the same guys who wrote the Washington Post headline calling Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an ‘austere religious scholar’ — and they’ve reengineered him as a beta-cuck pantywaist woke dork for the Age of Snowflakes. To be fair, Jack did slightly show these tendencies in the first season of his Amazon adventures.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. As any Yule fool knows, there’s no Christmas album like an old Christmas album. But there’s not many of them. We’ve had plenty of classic Christmas singles but hardly any classic Christmas albums. In fact, since little Phil Spector went and ‘canceled’ himself and the life of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, there is only one. Nowadays, a double-sided helping of Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You from 1963 would have the most ardent Wall Of Sound fan hearing sirens, not sleigh bells.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first Star Wars trilogy enraptured by blending classic drama with science fiction. There was Luke Skywalker the fresh-faced hero, emerging from obscurity to save the day. There was Vader the villain, who had once been good but had embraced the dark side. There was the Emperor, the twisted puppeteer. There was the daredevil pilot Han Solo. There was Leia, the princess who had to be saved. There was even that essential companion on any voyage: a bumbling upper-class Englishman. All of it was familiar from classic cinema and adventure stories, but all of it had the strangeness of science fiction. The villain lurked behind a fearsome mask and choked people by mind control.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first time ever I saw her face, she was smiling. I knew her face before I saw it, but I cannot remember when I first knew it, because I had always seen it. But when I first saw her in the flesh, I couldn’t really see her at all. She was behind thick glass and a waist-high wall, and a crowd of people 20-deep were pushing toward her, shouting and pointing and taking photographs. She was still smiling, but as I forced my way out of the crowd, I felt as though the smile no longer expressed the mysterious inner mood of a high-born Florentine sitting in a loggia, but the bemused contempt of a woman sitting in the stocks for the entertainment of the mob.