Arts Reviews

This adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play is handsomely mounted, as they say, and features a stellar cast (including Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss and Saoirse Ronan), but it won’t be setting the world alight. It is not a waste of 90 minutes, and Bening is superb, as if you even needed me to tell you that. But it doesn’t especially distinguish itself otherwise and I kept waiting for it to deliver emotionally. I waited and waited and waited, but no, nothing. The film is, of course, set on a country estate just outside Moscow, because if it weren’t set on a country estate just outside Moscow it plainly wouldn’t be Chekhov.

Jazz may be an egalitarian, collaborative music, but jazz musicians honor their best with the laurels of hierarchy. Everyone knows the royal monikers of ‘Duke’ Ellington and ‘Count’ Basie, and most people know that Billie Holiday was ‘Lady Day’. But there’s also a whole aristocracy of hip name-drops: ‘The Baron’ (Charles Mingus), ‘Pres’ (Lester Young), ‘The Court Jester’ (Ornette Coleman), ‘The High Priest’ (Thelonious Monk). The list goes on, and on. The mid-century saxophonist Hank Mobley (1930–86) was never ennobled in such fashion — unless you count Dexter Gordon’s hilarious handle for his friend, ‘The Hankenstein’. Nor has historical consensus enshrined Mobley as a leading musician of his era.

Reports of the death of bookstores are fiction. In 1931, there were about 4,000 bookstores in the United States. Almost all of them were gift stores, selling a limited stock of paperbacks. Only about 500 of them were specialist bookstores, and almost all of them were in major cities. True, between 1995 and 2000, the number of independent bookstores collapsed by 40 per cent. Amazon opened for business in 1994, but two other factors were big-city gentrification, and the expansion of mediocre chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, which went public in 1995. Now, the big chains are gone — and who, apart from a homeless person looking for a day bed, will miss them? — and independent bookstores are booming.

In a recent column, I vowed to return to a point made in passing. To refresh your memory, the American magazine the Nation printed a formal apology for running a harmless 14-line poem by a white writer about homelessness. The poet’s sins: using the word ‘cripple’ and adopting a voice lightly evoking what I gather we’re now to call ‘AAVE’: African-American Vernacular English. Facebookers were incensed, comments huffy. The poet apologised, too. I decried this ritual progressive self-abasement as cowardly and undignified. But it’s worth taking a second look at that story as a prime example of screaming emotional fraudulence in the public sphere.

‘The chief business of the American people,’ said Calvin Coolidge, ‘is business.’ Commerce to Coolidge was a kind of religion: ‘the man who builds a factory, builds a temple.… The man who works there worships there.’ In the forward momentum of American industrialisation from the turn of the 19th century through the Great Depression, skyscrapers, factories, docks and railroads, all became urban temples. If you had looked closely at one such building, a 20-story structure going up at 100 Church Street in Lower Manhattan in 1958, you would have seen two figures clambering up scaffolding trying to reach the highest point, pulling out first a camera, then a sketchpad.

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.

I got some bad news this week. I discovered that I’m a ‘privileged, white male’. It was my agent who broke it to me. We were talking about the trouble he’s having in finding a publisher for my book — a work of non-fiction — when the following exchange took place. Me: What’s wrong with my book? Agent: There’s nothing wrong with your book. It’s brilliant. It’s moving. It’s funny. Me: OK. So what’s the problem? Agent: You’re the problem. Me: Excuse me? Agent: You’re a middle-aged, privileged white man. You’re out of fashion — and so is your book. Publishers think you’re too male. Too white. Things are difficult for writers like you at the moment.

It all began with the orders. In the preface to his Gentleman and Cabinet-maker’s Director (1754), Thomas Chippendale started with ‘an explanation of the five Orders’ — those foundations of all architecture, the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. ‘Without an acquaintance with this science,’ he continued, ‘the cabinet-maker cannot make the designs of his work intelligible.’ Nearly two hundred years later, Evelyn Waugh said much the same thing. Writing in 1938 in Country Life, Waugh noted that by learning the orders of architecture, ‘you can produce Chippendale Chinese; by studying Chippendale Chinese, you will produce nothing but magazine covers.’.

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).

Life’s not all politics. Even for Cockburn. Well, kind of. Cockburn enjoys poetry, but the digital news churn leaves him no time to recline with a slim volume of verse and a glass of dry sherry, as he was wont to do in his youth. Imagine, then, Cockburn’s delight at finding a poem that combines the pleasures of lyric with deep research into global issues—immigration, Islam, the ‘administrative state’ (rhymes with ‘people we hate’), and the budding romance between Steve Bannon and Europe’s new nationalist parties: ‘Letter to England: For Tommy Robinson’, by the American versifier Joseph Charles MacKenzie.

When I went to see V.S. Naipaul in hospital last week he was feeling marginally better. His wife Nadira had arranged for a violinist to play some Mozart to him, helping him relax. She did not allow too many visitors. This was not the first time he had been in hospital. His health had been deteriorating for the past 12 months and the family had been receiving — as always — a flurry of invitations from literary festivals and heads of state. All had to be declined. In his hospital room we discussed his coming 86th birthday and I suggested that we celebrate with champagne at the Ritz. He smiled and proposed we go to ‘the other place’. He had a better time at the Lanesborough and preferred to head there instead.

For a certain slice of the online commentariat, nothing better captured the zeitgeist this year than the surprise romance between tech industrialist Elon Musk and Claire Boucher, the cyberpunk-ish music impresario known professionally as Grimes. This week, we discovered their coupling was just the beginning.The worlds of Musk and Grimes worlds merged bizarrely when the pop star Azealia Banks wound up blasting out status updates on Instagram from inside Musk’s LA manse. Banks painted an unflattering portrait of Musk as a billionaire whose impulsive business decisions made it impossible to get Banks and Grimes in the same room of the same house where, ostensibly, their musical collaboration was supposed to begin: https://twitter.

In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear. Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the writer’s 13- or 14- or 15-year-old was devastated by his death. XXXTentacion was, it is true, a nasty piece of work.

Ed Balls has become the left’s Michael Portillo, reviled as a politician, now a game, well-loved, almost cuddly TV personality. I met him once on This Week and I was instantly struck by how easy, funny and genuinely likeable he was: as engaging in person as he was totally bloody awful as chancellor. Happily it was the gentle man rather than the leftist bruiser who dominated Travels in Trumpland (BBC2, Sun). One fatuous previewer I read in the papers grumbled that he hadn’t challenged Trumpism enough. Tosh.