Arts Reviews

‘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.

There’s a wonderful moment in the third television series of The Durrells in Corfu when Louisa, the mother of Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, has been reading a badly-spelled essay by Gerald, her youngest son. She turns to him with proud love in her eyes and says ‘Larry writes to dazzle. You write to entertain.’Screenwriter Simon Nye could not have better expressed the different literary skills of the two brothers. Lawrence, in his mid-twenties in the 1930s, was destined to become a leading poet of his generation and then, as he put it, to ‘stumble into prose’ with the ground-breaking Alexandria Quartet (1957-60).

Over 100 contributors to the New York Review of Books, including such intellectual heavyweights as Ian McEwan, Darryl Pinckney, Michael Walzer, and Joyce Carol Oates, have signed a letter (I did as well) that is being released today to protest the ouster of Ian Buruma as editor for publishing a controversial essay by the former CBC radio broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi. In triggering an international debate over editorial freedom and the #MeToo movement, Buruma has been more successful than he could ever have imagined. To some extent that success is, of course, inadvertent, a consequence of his being fired, or pressured to resign, from his post as editor. Initially, Buruma’s detractors, who celebrated his ouster, had the upper hand.

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s. We spoke about Ian Buruma’s departure as editor of New York Review of Books. Rick is a friend, I should say. I should also say that I believe he is a hero of free expression — and an increasingly lonely voice speaking up for authentic dissent in America. You can hear our podcast here. https://audioboom.com/posts/7016868-trial-by-twitter-is-ian-buruma-the-victim-of-a-new-mccarthyism Buruma, in case you haven’t heard, lost his job after he decided to publish an article by Jian Ghomeshi in the forthcoming edition of New York Review of Books.

We are told that we have lost the ability to hold two thoughts in our minds at the same time. The truth about the explosion of America’s favourite blended family, the Mia Farrow ménage, requires us to recognise several thoughts at once. They boil down to three thoughts. That’s still a lot to think about at the same time, but at least all three are, unlike Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, mutually compatible: Mia Farrow was not a fit parent. Woody Allen is a creep. Ronan Farrow is a hypocrite. Another truism which isn’t entirely true holds that people who believe everything end up believing in nothing. This is not the case here.

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.

Like Socrates and Cher, the name of Delacroix says it all. Here is the hot lunch of 19th century French art among so many dishes served cold — exoticism and eroticism, à la français. We can all form some image of the piratically handsome Romantic swashbuckler. We can also picture something of his harems, lions, and malfunctioning blouses rendered in his colours of blood and bone. Or, at the very least, we know someone who can. And just so, the major survey of Delacroix’s work, which opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is simply titled Delacroix — no subtitle, s’il vous plaît. The Met’s gift shop even sells a black shirt with his name typed out in white. The latest from the House of Delacroix.

It’s been fifty years since 2001. Not fifty years since the start of the second Bush presidency — though that was long ago too — but a half-century since the release of Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece 2001. A new ‘unrestored’ version of the film, made by Christopher Nolan from the original film negatives and sound recordings, has been in theaters this summer, including select IMAX theaters. I caught the final showing at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum cinema — the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, as it’s naturally called — this week. How does it hold up after five decades?Not well, is my first impression.