Arts Reviews

Kanye West is perfect. Every time I think he can’t go up in my estimation, he does something more magical. Last night, having established himself as the most important political figure in the free world, he decided the time had come to find new worlds to conquer. ‘I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!’ he tweeted, out of the blue. https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1057382916760707072 And this not three weeks from the Oval Office audience he gave President Donald Trump, an occasion at which he, brilliantly, chose to communicate only through free association – oscillating at a frequency barely within the realms of human comprehension.

Il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Tiziano: The drawing of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian. With these words, supposedly written on his studio wall, Jacopo Tintoretto staked his claim on cinquecento painting. We are lucky he failed on both counts. Tintoretto was no Michelangelo or Titian, but he could push paint like no one else in La Serenissima. Renaissance means ‘rebirth’, of course. Yet the paintings of Tintoretto can come as deadly shock. His ‘Crucifixion’ of 1565 in Venice’s Scuola Grande di San Rocco strikes like a thunderbolt. The painting is also the single best work of religious art in the Italian Renaissance. With Christ fixed to the cross front and centre, the action of this composition swirls around him like a dark cyclone.

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.

On Tuesday, after a six-month long poll in which four million Americans voted, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was voted the US’s best-loved novel. Mockingbird is so often at the summit of such polls or described as a book ‘every adult should read before they die’ that another win is no surprise. Lee, who stopped writing fiction and giving interviews almost as soon as the novel became a phenomenon, struggled for the rest of her life with the scale of its success. First published in 1960, as the civil rights movement hit its stride, Lee’s anti-racist novel has been handcuffed to liberalism for the last 50 years. An uncharitable reading of Mockingbird would see it as a childishly progressive fantasy.

In January 1882, a still little known 27-year-old called Oscar Wilde began his year-long, coast-to-coast, 15,000-mile grueling lecture tour throughout America. The ostensible purpose was to publicise the US tour of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, whose precious aesthete Bunthorne — ‘what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!’ — was partly based on Wilde. The real motive was to advertise himself and become a celebrity while searching for his true sexual identity. Victorian men had to hide their homosexuality, but Wilde found a way to flaunt his real feelings. Wearing a theatrical costume while behaving outrageously on stage, he used his ambiguous sexuality to provide entertainment.

Imagine Quentin Tarantino with a conscience, or even a historical consciousness. It’s easy if you try, as a rich junkie once sang, even if Tarantino never bothered to remove the quotation marks from every scene, as if life was all reference and no reality. Then imagine the film noir, that moral grisaille of the Thirties where everything comes in shades of gray, pulled into the technicolour Sixties, so that the fabrics are bright but the morals are polarised into good and evil, black and white, with darkness all around, and above us only sky.

We are here, to feast on the fabulous, lavish, ludicrous, deluxe and delightful 50th anniversary reissue of the Kinks undisputed 1968 masterpiece, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. In the United Kingdom, home to a royal family appointed by God who live in various castles; five-day cricket matches, football hooligans, innate conservatism, quiet revolution, natural surrealism, and cider that tastes of dead rats; drunkenness, habitual racism, suspicion of everything, Victorian politicians, a never ending empirical hangover, delusional grandeur, white sliced bread, drizzle, and endless doubles entendres – and this is just the good stuff ­– it is, to all intents and purposes, illegal to not like The Kinks.

TV networks will be waiting with baited breath to see how the Roseanne spin-off and sequel The Conners — why does the ‘e’ in the name irritate me? — performs this evening for ABC. No doubt there’ll be considerable rubber-necking interest, which will see a healthy audience for the first episode. But that will be because of the void left by the absence of Roseanne Barr. Like Banquo’s ghost to Macbeth, Barr’s non-corporeal presence will be difficult to ignore. The manner of her departure will be in many viewers’ minds, too. This isn’t the first time that the sudden loss of a lead actor in a hit series has resulted in broadcasters or platforms having to consider whether to carry on or call it a day.

‘Book-writing is hard on the brain and excruciating to the body,’ Anthony Burgess wrote in 1968. ‘It engenders tobacco addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence.’ Look at Willy, to use the nom-de-plume of the Parisian rake Henry Gauthier-Villars, in Wash Westmoreland’s Colette. Willy has his name on novels, short stories and reviews. He flatulates and eructates. He smokes cigars and, this being the 1890s and dexedrine having yet to be synthesised, drinks coffee and spirits round the clock. He is constantly stressed by an energetic routine of dodging his creditors, cheating on his wife, and contriving new stories to keep the money coming in. Eventually, he’s sexually impotent too.

When the West’s Days of Reckoning came in 2016, we naturally turned to George Orwell, master of modern dystopia, to make sense of Trump, Brexit and the return of the far-right in Europe. We took to the streets — or rather Twitter — crying, ‘It’s just like 1984!’ Dystopia had made a comeback. We lapped up The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror and Blade Runner 2049 with gleeful horror. Our concern shot Orwell’s novel to the top of Amazon’s chart. These are cautionary tales for dangerous times. Stories of science-fictional wastelands, malevolent totalitarian governments and vengeful AI that warn us of what we might become. Yet we often ignore Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This is curious.

You won’t be aware of this because the BBC has been keeping it very quiet. But the new Doctor Who is — wait for it — a woman! Let me say straight away that Jodie Whittaker is a delight. Opening as the new Doctor is never easy — all that tiresome establishing rigmarole you have to go through along the lines of ‘I’m feeling all funny. Almost like I’m a completely different actor but in the same body. What can it be? Who am I? Has anyone watching at home worked it out yet?’ But already we like her. Yes, at the moment she’s still a bit of a mishmash of previous Doctors but this will change as she grows into the role.

There was something inexplicable about Leonard Cohen, some combination of sexiness and silliness, brains and bohemianism. It  never should have worked, but it did, and that put him in a category of his own. Cohen died in November 2016, just after the release of his final studio album, You Want It Darker. Before he died, he compiled his first posthumous work, The Flame, from the uncollected poems, sketches, and lyrics in his hundreds of notebooks. A complicated man, Cohen somehow assembled uneven poetic gifts, limited musicality and a questionable vocal range into a consummate artistry. Cohen’s star burned more brightly with age, but he was a writer first and, in the end, last. In 1959, he published his first collection of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies.

I understand how America’s Republican teens will be feeling this morning, which is to say very hurt indeed. Taylor Swift has revealed herself to be a Democrat and the news will take some getting over. For years the singer had been the slam dunk winner in any argument about the impossibility of being both culturally relevant and right-leaning in modern America. Yes, the Dems have pretty much every star of stage and screen behind their cause, but the right had Swift, the biggest star on the planet, the ace in the pack, on theirs. Take that, libs! Why did the right think Swift was on their side? Well, because back in the mists of time (2008), on a website called MySpace, 18-year old Swift wrote ‘Republicans do it better’.

Of the making of babies, there is no end, except for the parents who cannot get started at all. Like the servants of yesteryear, infertile couples are the watchers at the feast of middle-class family life, attending the festivities without getting a seat at the table or a place in posterity. Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, Private Life, a Netflix film with a limited cinema release, is a sad and subtle comedy of the modern manners of conception. Which is to say, Private Life is about an expensive medico-ethical tragedy in the making, and a film very much worth seeking out on any size of screen, because its implications go to the core of us, as people and as a society.

In 1983, ten European heads of state, signing the Solemn Declaration on European Union, declared a goal of ‘ever closer union’ — something Belgium, in its role as home-nation to the EU, has been abetting ever since, but which the democratic publics of the EU’s constituent nations keep blocking at the ballot box. Since 1954, visitors to the Frick Collection have been attempting an ever closer union with the Flemish master Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor (c. 1441–43), but have been blocked by a forbidding console table, which guards and obscures van Eyck’s work in the Boucher ante-room. Europe’s ‘ever closer union’ has been a disaster for democracy.

The legal limit for abortion in Pennsylvania is 23 weeks and six days. Theoretically, a termination one minute beyond that could become the basis of a homicide rap. Yet, there is no visible or measurable difference between a foetus of 23 weeks and one of 24 weeks. The self-evident arbitrariness of such a law announces itself as quite devoid of reason and morality, and thus offers a provocation to the consciences of those whose reasoning mechanisms derive their logic from a perhaps unfocussed belief that man might become his own God. Such a man was Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphian abortionist who in 2013 was put away for the rest of his natural for the unnatural crimes that to him seemed to represent naturalistically good deeds.

Kanye West is getting perilously close to the most disruptive idea in politics. ‘Disruption’ has been a buzz word among tech companies for many years now, but the political world got a taste of what it means for the first time in 2016, when Donald Trump shot straight to the White House without ever having run for lower office. He cut through all the indispensible consultants and ideologues and party apparatchiks who were supposed to run the GOP, then beat Hillary Clinton by winning states no Republican had won since Reagan. That was disruption. But the forces of un-disruption are hard at work, and they're confident that the Trump demographic is dying. Trump actually did better among non-whites than Mitt Romney, the last conventional Republican, did.

Kanye West is an egomaniac. Who isn’t these days? He’s also very brave. It takes courage to wear a Trump hat to sing on Saturday Night Live. Kanye — or ‘Ye’, as he wants to be called — said he was ‘bullied’ backstage by people telling him he should take it off, and you can imagine that is true enough. The Saturday Night Live audience booed Kanye on stage, but he remained undaunted. ‘We need a dialogue not a diatribe,’ he said, not unreasonably. The SNL brigades clearly did not agree. Their idea of dialogue is just anti-Trump diatribe. Good for West; he makes the world more interesting. And for him to stand by what he thinks as the rich, elite world he belong to harangues him takes guts.

As an immigrant to this blessed land — 13 years before the mast — I was spared first-hand experience of the Clarence Thomas nomination and the Starr Report. These events were mediated for me by the BBC. That might not sound appetising to anyone but the most coastal of liberals, but I could at least switch it off. Now, I experience American news like Americans do, and like Malcolm McDowell does in A Clockwork Orange, when they pin his eyelids open for re-education. I watched and listened to the entirety of Thursday’s hearing, sustained only by horrified fascination and a giant bag of Trader Joe’s Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips, the kind of wholesome sustenance that you can only get in this country, God bless it. And what a re-education it was.

The events of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the relish President Donald J. Trump displayed in his consequent pushback at the #MeToo movement elicit a Proustian response among those who’ve seen Jack Lemmon’s 1965 comedy How to Murder Your Wife.If Mr Trump was in any way a cinephile, it might indeed figure as one of his all-time favourite films. If not, the movie still possesses a particular relevance in today’s highly charged political environment.How so? Without recounting the plot in detail, the hook centres around Lemmon’s wealthy New York bachelor, cartoonist Stanley Ford.