Dominic Green

If I had to define rock’n’roll in one sentence, it would be: ‘The Blues from the Forties, played by Country musicians in the Fifties.’ Which is to say, black music played by white people. In the Sixties, and almost entirely at the prompting of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other white foreigners, white Americans allowed themselves to be persuaded of the merits of black American music. This created a small heritage industry, summarised in a 1991 album title by one of its beneficiaries, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as Black Music For White People. The black originators, ripped off once by R&B labels, and once again by the white impersonators, were granted the chance of being ripped off again by a new generation of promoters, selling their old hits to white audiences.

Is it good to contact your inner child — assuming, that is, you have one at all? And if you do, how far should you go—throwing tantrums, eating snot, wetting the bed? As an advocate of regression, Walt Disney was right up there with Arthur ‘Primal Scream’ Janov and R.D. ‘The Mad Aren’t Mad’ Laing. At least Yanov and Laing did their best to help troubled adults towards happiness. Disney did his wicked best to drive guilty parents into penury. Disney, the evil genius, realised that to really make money from children’s entertainment, you had to follow the money. Flatter the breadwinner, and he’ll spend bread on taking the kids to the movies, buying them stuffed toys, and even going to a Disney-themed resort.

The Spectator USA Life 'n' Arts podcast launches this week with fanfares, the popping of corks, and much coughing and wheezing into microphones. From now on, every week I’ll be casting a pod with artists, writers, thinkers, painters and even people who do something useful for a living too. First up is the novelist and essayist William Giraldi. Author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and The Hero’s Body, a memoir of misspent youth as a bodybuilder, Giraldi is one of the few contemporary American critics worth reading. This month, he publishes his first collection of essays, American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring (Norton).

In yesterday’s Spectator USA, I described the experience of watching Mission Impossible: Fallout as akin to being sprayed in the face with hot diarrhea. This was inexcusably coarse and vulgar. So was my observation that the Fallout of this baggy mess of a film resembled an anal prolapse. It was not my intention to personally insult Tom Cruise, or to imply that he is a ridiculous fake, or to suggest that Paramount Pictures are peddling misogynistic smut. But if I did, so much the better. For that is what I believe to be true. What does Ben Brantley believe to be true? Anything you like, providing you shout loud enough. Since 2003, Mr. Brantley has held one of the toughest jobs in journalism.

Spoilers for Mission Impossible: Fallout below. The jazz singer and Surrealist connoisseur George Melly once asked Mick Jagger how he had acquired those deep and sinister lines either side of his mouth. ‘Laughing’, Jagger replied. ‘No one laughs that much,’ said Melly. No one except Tom Cruise. It’s part of Cruise’s relentless and tedious professionalism, his insistence on being admired for his work rate. He is the Stakhanov of Hollywood. And he keeps going and going, his face uncannily smooth apart from his mouth, which seems to crumple inwards when he smiles, giving him the mien of an angry hedgehog. If Cruise made a deal with Satan or his agent, it would be of the Dorian Gray kind.

There are now more trees to hug in the Northeast than at any point since the eighteenth century. In the good old days, the trees were cut down for construction, firewood, and farming. Now, we build with concrete, burn old coffee grounds in decorative stoves, and convert old farmhouses into weekend rentals for skiers and hikers. This is good for the squirrels. Once, it was said that a squirrel could mount a tree on the coast of Maine or Massachusetts, and scuttle rattily through the canopy all the way to the Ohio River without putting one of his filthy little paws to the ground. But is it good for the humans? Samu Fuentes’ The Skin of the Wolf, newly released into the digital wild by Netflix, is about the dangers of re-wilding.

Michiko Kakutani used to be an important person in the world of people who cared about book reviews in the New York Times. This was not a world at all, so much as a small village whose borders could be seen from any tall building in Manhattan. Still, her opinion was considered important. Kakutani was notorious for actually reading the books she reviewed, and for not thinking of the reviewer’s desk as an outpost of the publisher’s press office. So, though book reviews are generally not worth reading, hers sometimes were. When Kakutani left the Times in 2017, it was rumored that she had jumped before being pushed by the downward-dumbing of the Times’ arts’ content.