Dominic Green

This week on the Green Room, I’m talking the blues with Grammy-winning blues artist Chris Thomas King. Earlier this week, King wrote for Spectator USA a scathing criticismof the policies of the Grammys’ Blues category. King is an African American from Louisiana. He is the son of a blues musician, and grew up in his father’s juke joint. He was one of the last blues musicians to be ‘discovered’ by anthropologists from the North. He has won two Grammy awards, in 2001 for the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which he starred as a blues singer who has sold his soul to the devil, and in 2002 in the category of Best Historical Album, for his tribute to Charley Patton, Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues.

Queen Anne (1701-14) is remembered, if at all, for a school of doughty, dark furniture design which no one likes these days; for signing the paperwork that joined England and Scotland to form the United Kingdom, which fewer and fewer people like these days; and for enduring 17 pregnancies. Only five of these carried living children to term, and none of the infants survived past the age of two. She died depressed, obese and crippled with gout, and the House of Stuart ended its short and ignominious run on the throne when she did.Queen Anne probably did not go in for red-hot lesbian romping with her favorite, Sarah Churchill, wife of the Duke of Marlborough and distant ancestor of Winston Churchill.

Connoisseurs of anal sex are mourning the death of Bernardo Bertolucci, who died yesterday aged 76. He was a titan of Italian cinema in the Sixties and Seventies, so younger readers will need to be told who he was. Bertolucci should not be confused with another director whose name will also forever be associated with anal sex, John Stagliono, the pornographic actor-auteur who works under the nom de rectum ‘Buttman’ and entered European cinema through the backdoor in 1991 with Buttman’s European Vacation. Bertolucci was in no way vulgar and low-minded like Stagliono. He was vulgar and high-minded. He was the Buttman of the intellectuals. There was plenty of sex in Bertolucci’s films, but you had to stay awake for it.

Old age, Bette Davis said, ‘ain’t no place for sissies’. Neither was the Middle Ages. They were the Dark Ages, a world lit only by fire, in part because you had thrown the innards of your enemy onto the flames. The roads were terrible, and the primeval forest had recovered the farmland once worked by retired Roman legionaries. No wonder Dante’s traveler got lost in the woods in middle age. In Britain, civilization collapsed when the Romans went south. A long night of Scandinavian noir ensued, as raiders with names like Erik Bloodaxe set the social tone. For nearly a millennium, no one in England built a flushing lavatory, because there were no drains to hook it up to. Everyone stank. The peasants were especially revolting, and the nobles were notably ignoble.

The truth hurts, and the standard of truth in war reporting requires eyewitness accounts of suffering and death. Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London, killed at Homs, Syria in 2012 in a targeted bombardment by Assad’s army reports, was the most accomplished war reporter of her time, and saw more war than most soldiers. Matthew Heineman’s A Private War, with Rosamund Pike as Colvin, is a cruel and haunting study in compulsion — the compulsion to tell the truth, the compulsion to live near death, and the compulsion to repeat the experience until death gets too near.

We are so plagued by experts and inundated with know-it-alls that the popular reaction is to turn out the technocrats and embrace the know-nothings. A cynic might wonder if Axios, the political website that promises to cover issues with a series of bullet points totaling no more than 300 words, is a technocrat’s way of heading off the know-nothings, if only by ensuring that the people who still believe in expertise know a little. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but is it the meat of political analysis? Axios describes its info-gobbets as ‘smart brevity.’ Like smart foods and smart phones, this means pre-digested information, shot out in hard, pre-formed pellets. Axios offers smart conclusions, delivered with digital smartness.

The Old Man and the Gun is a second farewell to film for Robert Redford. His first farewell, All is Lost (2013), made occasionally heavy weather of allegory on the high seas — the lone American yachtsman, asleep in his cabin despite the storm warning of 2008, springs a leak when his boat collides with a Chinese shipping container. This time, Redford is back on American soil, and on familiar ground, as the geriatric bank robber Forrest Tucker. After an allegory about the old man and the sea, the myth of The Old Man and the Gun. In Oklahoma in the early 1980s, Forrest meets the widowed Jewel (Sissy Spacek) when her car has broken down and his is being pursued by the police.