Arts Reviews

For the first time in what seems like decades, Saturday Night Live turned their sights on the Democrats – and delivered what Cockburn considers one of their best sketches of the season. ‘State Meeting’ takes place in the Virginia State Capitol, where an African American ethics committee chief (Kenan Thompson) addresses a room of mostly white colleagues to check whether they have ever worn blackface. Unsurprisingly, many of them have – and they ask whether their excuses for doing so are good enough. ‘I have a question,’ asks Beck Bennett’s state senator. ‘What if your blackface was just part of your costume as a black person?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrpQVSVa2QI ‘Does it count if you did it all the way back in the Eighties?

I’m so exhausted. I’ve spent the past three days stalking the streets of York with a bike lock, blinded by rage, looking for Liam Neeson. On Wednesday night however, a friend pointed out to me that Liam Neeson actually lives in NEW York which is apparently in America, and so my lust for revenge was thankfully brought into sharp focus. In a horrifying interview on Monday, Neeson spoke about a time in his past when for no reason at all he became so racist, he wanted to kill all black people. Going so far as to drive around Ireland in a big tank for several months, with the aim of ruthlessly mowing down every PoC he saw. Thankfully, we are going back many years when there were very few black people in Ireland and so his evil plan was scuppered.

Fresh off her formal campaign announcement last weekend, Tulsi Gabbard took to the hallowed grounds of Morning Joe’s studio for a friendly sit-down interview. Surely the expectation was that Joe, Mika, and the rest of the gang would herald Tulsi’s history-making potential as the first female, minority, and non-Christian president. A trailblazer! An inspiration! Instead, the discussion immediately took on a dark, interrogatory tone, focused (as usual) on Tulsi’s alleged fondness for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Kasie Hunt, the most overtly dimwitted of the Morning Joe crew, asked whether she thinks Assad ‘is a good person.

If Super Bowl LIII served no other purpose in this late Roman phase of the American republic, at least it reminded everyone of the Latin numerals. The first half ended III-0, and the halftime entertainment was low-scoring too. II out of X to Adam Levine, Maroon 5 — who at least could have named themselves Maroon V for the occasion — and a cast of several dozen. Maroon 5 sound like a wedding band playing Jamiroquai covers, though it is hard to imagine anyone wishing to soundtrack their special day with ‘This Love’. On this occasion, they were everybody’s fifth choice. Cardi B spoke on Friday of her anguish at turning down an invitation to perform at Atlanta.

This week the New York Times published an article which was long overdue, illustrating the obvious racism featured in the original Mary Poppins movie. (Something which, incidentally, Titania McGrath had already flagged up in a tweet last September: I remember watching that scene as a child one Christmas, and even at the tender age of four, a woman putting coal on her face instantly reminded me of the black and white minstrel show which I would read about 14 years later when studying for my Bachelor’s Degree in Human Rights and Social Justice (Hons). This, coupled with the cultural appropriation of Dick Van Dyke putting on a West Indian accent throughout the entire film utterly nauseated me.

How does Donald Trump make you feel? For the oft-maligned sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, incandescent rage might be the first emotion that springs to mind. Incredulity is a fairly common one too. Indeed, the 45th President causes a veritable rainbow of sentiments around the world. Perhaps one of the rarer ones, though, is the urge to create. But for some in the online artistic community, Donald Trump has served as muse to truly inspired works. Cockburn is delighted to welcome you back once more for a viewing of his private gallery, where this week we will be showcasing the boldest, finest, strangest Donald Trump fan art that the dark recesses of the internet has to offer. The images of President Trump span a number of different artistic styles.

No idea is too stupid to be entertained on the op-ed page of the New York Times. I was reminded of this truism last night when, changing the paper in the parrot’s cage, I read that the latest enjoyable vehicle for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s talents is not just a good 20 minutes too long, but also perniciously racist, if not sunk to its Victorian corsets in white nationalist propaganda. ‘Mary Poppins and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface’, wrote Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, professor of English and Contemporary Virtue at Linfield College, Oregon.

Socialists dismiss liberal democracy as false consciousness, but no one falsifies consciousness like a socialist. Socialist history is false history, the march of workers who want to work harder. Socialist economics is false economics, where the numbers never add up, but it’s always someone else’s fault. Socialist art is false art, because it is always propaganda. The socialist individual begins as an impossible fiction, and ends as an enemy of the state, because the aim of socialism is to subordinate individual desires to collective duties. This corruption of human relationships — denouncing your parents, spying on your wife, fearing your children — is not an accident, but an operating principle.

Cockburn can’t possibly imagine what attracted alleged pedophile Bryan Singer to Stephen King’s ‘Apt Pupil’, a story from King’s 1982 collection Summer of Corruption, which Singer first read aged 19 in 1984. Nor can Cockburn imagine why Singer was so obsessed by adapting King’s story that he commissioned a script on spec, and then, after the success of The Usual Suspects, turned down offers to direct The Truman Show and The Devil’s Own.  In Apt Pupil, set in the Eighties, Todd Bowden, a 16-year old a Californian high school student, realizes that Arthur Denker, the old man who lives down the street, is really Kurt Dussander, a fugitive Nazi war criminal.

The one program worth watching on PBS isn’t made by PBS. It’s Masterpiece on Sunday nights, and the masterpieces are British-made. PBS puts in a small amount funding before filming starts, then packages the variable results with a flourish of Baroque music and a spoken introduction. Since 2009, this address to the nation has been delivered by Laura Linney, affecting the gown and breathlessness of a Henry James ingénue about to attend a ball in old Vienna. Earlier speakers included Alastair Cooke, and Russell Baker, who died yesterday at 93. Baker and Cooke were writers, not actors.

One of the embarrassing truths our time is that wealthy and predominantly white people pay good money in order to experience conditions that poorer and predominately brown people have no choice but to undergo. When a college-educated millennial buys an overpriced ticket to a music festival, it’s a rite of passage. When a Bangladeshi village is washed into a tent encampment without running water, it’s a humanitarian catastrophe. Of course, choice is a factor. But once you’re hovering over a brimming chemical toilet and it hasn’t stopped raining for two days, the conditions are the same — a temporary reversion to Neolithic conditions, but with the population density of a modern city.

Any attempt to satirize millennial culture is doomed to fail. It’s already too absurd and too self-aware. A caricature would verge on the surreal. The best (perhaps only) way to squeeze some fun out of it is through deadpan objectivity, which is the secret to the success of FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. The sad and hilarious new Netflix documentary tells the story of an ill-fated music festival that was supposed to take place in the Bahamas. Its organizer, Billy McFarland – imagine Walter Mitty meets Bernie Madoff – used the influencer economy to bootstrap into existence the kind of party billionaire rappers fantasize about, with supermodels in barely there bikinis lounging on yachts levitating over a crystalline sea.

What I watched: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch What I turned off: re-runs of Arrested Development (it’s great but my son has been making me binge watch with him and you can have too much of a good thing) What I’m going to be tuning into: Trigger Warning with Killer Mike. He’s a rapper and activist but I get the impression that politically he’s like the anti-Kanye-West.

‘At least we’ll have good comedy,’ liberals and leftists sighed to themselves when Donald Trump was elected. If anything, the opposite has been the case. Topical comedy has spiraled into a drain of irrelevance: soggy, flimsy, colorless, disposable. Hannah Gadsby’s self-consciously serious Netflix special Nanette was embraced by progressives and denounced by conservatives for explicitly spurning jokes in favor of moralism. Frankly, I was grateful that Ms Gadsby was honest. Comedians have long been flattering their audiences into believing they are good, wise people with good, wise opinions and at least Gadsby did not pretend Nanette was funny. Others sprinkle jokes on a big pan of half-baked propaganda.