Arts Reviews

The Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art needed a new hat. The galleries are given pride of place in the expansive Fifth Avenue building, standing at the head of its enormous Beaux-Arts grand staircase. They contain many of the Met’s most popular treasures, but they weren’t showing pre-19th-century European paintings in the best of all possible lights. In 2018, Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the Department of European Paintings, embarked on the enormous project of renovating and modernizing the skylight system for the galleries. The museum is now about halfway through the four-year, $150 million endeavor. That’s a hefty price tag, but it’s a project that was long overdue.

One of my friends has a freakishly sharp ear for tiny nuances in the performance of classical music. God knows how he acquired it, because his personal tastes don’t extend much beyond early Madonna and late Beyoncé (‘far more vocally secure than Rihanna’). That’s sad for him but handy for me. If I catch him in a good mood I can make him sit through five interpretations of La Mer, and he’ll give me fresh thoughts on which conductor has the best grasp of Debussy’s tonal architecture. They’re fresh because he’s coming to it without preconceptions about how the piece ought to sound: he’s never heard it before and probably never will again.

Bridgerton (Netflix) is just about the worst period drama I’ve seen on television, but I’ve yet to read a single review which tells it like it is. Why could that be, I wonder? Well, here’s my theory: I think it’s because this wooden, poorly scripted, horrifically set- and costume-designed, anachronistic, clunky, cringe-inducing farrago of sub-sub-sub-Jane Austen tosh has inoculated itself against criticism by deciding that about a third of the characters in the London of 1813 should be black. We’re not just talking servants and the occasional writer like Olaudah Equinao, which would have been historically accurate. We’re talking proper toffs: even the main love interest, the brooding, Mr Darcy-like Duke of Hastings is played by mixed-race Regé-Jean Page.

An inescapable insight emerges from the lockdown: today’s young are not what the young once were. Scanning western streetscapes, it is hard to miss that the ones wearing face masks are not overwhelmingly — as one might expect — the old and vulnerable, but include a disquieting number of youngsters, all but immune to SARS-CoV-2, who wear their acquiescence in the current plunge into tyranny like a pendant of courage along with their Nike Airs and Buck Mason Mavericks. It’s like rock ’n’ roll never happened. Or, rather, as if the rock ’n’ roll spirit had never proclaimed the rejection of slavery and subjugation.

In the dressing room at Birdland, the ‘jazz corner of the world’, a singer plants her baby on the counter, an actor strips off his shirt, and a cellist leans in to apply her lipstick before a light-bulbed mirror. I slip out to the bar for just a shot or two of whiskey and await my turn. Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf, a cellist and fellow Scot, asked me if I might sing one of my songs at her show. It’s part of the ‘Broadway at Birdland’ series, the brainchild of Jim Caruso, the club’s host, producer and performer extraordinaire who, he says, can either be ‘credited or blamed’ for having brought every flavor of pop, folk, country, theater and comedy into a club that’s legendary for jazz.

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move to Sark in the Channel Islands, he co-founded an artists’ colony and took to sketching fishermen and romantic, ripple-lapped coves. He put a gold hoop in his right ear, a red-lined cape over his shoulders, and grew his hair long, like Israel Hands or Long John Silver. The incredible thing was that he had yet to receive his commission to illustrate Treasure Island.

The antihero began as the ‘Byronic hero’ and was represented in the prestige television era by unlikable men in gritty dark dramas. Not completely unredeemable and usually handsome enough to catch the female viewer’s eye, this formula gave us Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), Dexter Morgan (Dexter), Walter White (Breaking Bad), Don Draper (Mad Men) and Gregory House (House). But their distaff counterparts were still villains or maidens. What we didn’t have was many antiheroines. Until quite recently, the closest thing TV had to an antiheroine was Carrie in Sex and the City. It was hard to sympathize with her: most of her problems were her own fault. She cheated on her boyfriends, then wrote narcissistic newspaper columns telling us all about it.

In the darkest hour, there emerged a new light. It was 1940 when the double-barreled shotgun of the world first took aim at a little hole called home. At first, it seemed as if the hole’s inhabitant would be taken in by the old carrot trick. At least he would be careful enough not to stick his neck out. With an unblemished, white-gloved, four fingered hand, he feels around his immediate borders and takes the carrot. Of course, it’s a trap to draw him out. Did he know that all along? He would soon enough. The next time, it’s not a carrot but the hard steel of a gun aiming straight down his burrow. He flicks the barrels with his finger — plink, plink, plink — just to be sure. He tosses back the half-eaten carrot and pats the gun, but it is too late.

When a young singer and pianist named Charles Brown was hired in 1944 to play at Ivie’s Chicken Shack, the legendary jazz singer Ivie Anderson’s nightclub in Los Angeles, he was instructed to play ‘nothing degrading like the blues’. It wasn’t an admonition that he heeded very long. The blues didn’t degrade him. He elevated them. After Brown died in 1999, Bonnie Raitt, who toured with him starting in 1987, deemed him ‘the most extraordinary piano player I’ve ever heard’, noting that he ‘led the West Coast blues explosion’. Indeed he did.

I’m thrilled to tell you that my latest novel has been optioned by Netflix. Grand Prix Grandpa is the inspirational story of an ordinary journalist in his mid-fifties who reboots his life by becoming a world motor-racing champion. It’s tough at first driving round racetracks at 230 mph when your eyesight is going and your reflexes aren’t what they were. But with a little practice and a lot of determination, Grand Prix Grandpa — whose name is James, by the way — becomes F1 champion, then triumphs heroically over the resulting problems: semi-naked women hurling themselves at him; having so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it; the loneliness of tax exile in Monaco, etc. No, not really.

The Beatles never had a proper Christmas number one, only seasonal number ones with unseasonal bangers: ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘We Can Work It Out’/‘Day Tripper’ (1963-65) and ‘Hello Goodbye’ (1967). Though they never made a traditional Christmas record, the Fabs loved Yule — and you know you should be glad. Between 1963 and 1969, they recorded an album-worth of charming Christmas nonsense. Welcome to the semi-secret hinterland between the legal and bootleg worlds: the Beatles’ Fan Club Christmas flexi discs. The flexis have only had one official release since their private circulation to the ravenous Brit-Beatle fan club.