Culture

It certainly raised eyebrows chez Cockburn, that’s for sure. A few weeks ago Peacock announced an original news program: The Mehdi Hasan Show. Peacock is NBC’s new streaming service. And who is Mehdi Hasan? Well that’s where things get really interesting. Like Cockburn, you may have noticed Mr Hasan’s cloudless upwards trajectory through the media firmament in recent years. He moved to DC in 2015, fronting news shows for Al Jazeera English, and from 2018 until earlier this year, a podcast for the Intercept. The precise moment Mehdi’s move to the big-ish leagues became inevitable almost two years ago. Watch: https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1062706401804455937 Whoa! Who is that guy?

‘I’m sitting here struggling for words and my friend nailed it: “She was our Princess Leia.”’ With those words, Dr Esther Choo, Yale Medical School graduate, holder of an Ivy League English diploma and possessor of 168,000 Twitter followers, memorialized the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A century ago, a citizen of Justice Ginsburg’s stature might have inspired references to the Bible, classical history or the great figures of America’s founding. But in the year 2020, a lifetime of achievement brings no greater honor than to be compared with a Disney-owned property whose action figure you can buy for $10.99.

In the early Thirties, when impoverished Americans were cramming into shanty towns called ‘Hoovervilles’, another Hoover created an industrial building of rare magnificence in west London. Driving into London from Heathrow airport, we see acres of nondescript suburbs. The Hoover Building at Perivale, about five miles from the West End, still astounds. Set back from the road in well-manicured gardens, this art deco masterpiece rises in brilliant white (due to the use of a cement called Snowcrete), its façade laced with angular green trim and sunburst decoration. The Hoover Building was the British factory of the Hoover Company, the Ohio-based vacuum-cleaner manufacturer.

Pop music is tribalist by nature and divisive by desire. It was always the Beatles or the Stones, mods or rockers, burn the Beatles’ records or ‘hang the DJ’ and, most important of all, Bob Marley or Big Youth? (The answer is Big Youth.) Only one man transcended this nonsense: Frederick Nathaniel ‘Toots’ Hibbert. Anyone who has heard Toots but doesn’t dig his mighty soul skank should be cast into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights of good, hard thinking. Toots died on September 11 in his native Jamaica. He was 77, allegedly the victim of complications from COVID-19. The man may have gone, but his vibrations will live on as long as mankind has ears to listen and feet to dance.

Two weeks from The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes and nearly four years into the Trump Era, you could be forgiven for thinking there was enough genuine outrage in the world. Why on earth would anyone need to confect a controversy? If the current Twitter imbroglio surrounding Hollywood star Chris Pratt is anything to go by, you should think again. It all kicked off on Saturday, when the TV writer Amy Berg floated a question into the Twittersphere. 'One has to go,' she wrote, accompanied by pictures of 'the four Chrises’: Hemsworth, Pratt, Pine and Evans. https://twitter.com/bergopolis/status/1317583965520240640 An innocuous topic of debate, you might assume. You would be wrong.

Almost the best thing about Cobra Kai is the response, somewhere between bemused and appalled, it has generated among woke millennials and Gen Z-ers. One reviewer noted with concern that neither of the two featured karate schools is run by someone of Japanese ethnicity. Another squirmed at two middle-aged men’s almost Trump-level inappropriateness, when while discussing the qualities of a mutual old flame they referred to their inamorata’s ‘tightness’. Yes. It’s one of the reasons we Eighties dinosaurs love it so. Cobra Kai is our safe space. It’s our Helm’s Deep of unreconstructed sexism in an otherwise Orcish horde-overrun Middle Earth of gender fluidity, #MeToo and micro-aggressions.

A kind of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before World War One. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever before. The mental power of the age could be measured in the sheer size of the things it produced. This might be ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s Dreadnought of 1906, which set off a European arms race in huge battleships, or a great construction — the Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is nothing to the one built in Kolkata.

On March 14, 1847, Eugène Delacroix made a trip to the studio of his colleague and countryman Camille Corot. Later that day, Delacroix recorded in his journal a feeling of newfound appreciation for the painter’s landscapes: ‘Corot is a true artist. One has to see a painter in his own place to get an idea of his worth.’ The Corot paintings that Delacroix had recently viewed at the Paris Salon seemed to hold new meaning after his seeing the site of their creation. As to exactly what had changed, or what he saw that changed it, Delacroix does not — perhaps could not — tell us. Few modern painters can claim as close a kinship to the spirit of Corot as Paul Resika.

The architectural historian Andrew Alpern has for decades done the dirty work when it comes to pre-war New York apartments. Others have presented glossy coffee-table books full of newly commissioned professional photographs. Alpern has focused on the practical details of apartment design, especially floor plans, which tell us so much about how people actually live in their apartments, or at least were originally meant to. His Apartments for the Affluent (1975), Historic Manhattan Apartment Houses (1996) and New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter (2002) are essential compendia; anyone with an interest in New York residential architecture, especially of the magnificent variety, must have them. The more industrious uptown real estate agents also find them useful.

When the Beatles’ first authorized biographer, Hunter Davies, clinched the deal in 1967, his publisher remarked that ‘we know everything we could possibly know about the Beatles and they’ll disappear soon’. In that same year, the philosopher Bryan Magee adopted an incredulous tone in the Listener: ‘Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be...part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?’But here in the recently released statistics for the Top 10 global recording artists of 2019, among the Taylor Swifts and the Ed Sheerans, 50 years after they broke up — let me introduce you to the band you’ve known for all these years.

The Obamas loved Hamilton. It was the biggest show to hit Broadway since Cats or Rent, with ticket prices reaching four digits. Michelle, who urgently needs to read Buddenbrooks or visit the Sistine Chapel, called Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical the ‘best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen in my life’. Hamilton was present at the dawn and eclipse of the Obama years. Miranda first publicly shared material from the musical at the White House’s inaugural Spoken Word evening in 2009. Seven years later, Lin-Manuel joined Barack for a cringe-inducing freestyle rap in the Rose Garden.

When I was a teenager whiling away the endless hours with VHS video rentals, Vietnam movies were pretty much the only game in town. I must have watched The Deerhunter a dozen times, and the scene in the rat-infested river cage well over a hundred times. Even now, I can’t watch it without being surprised at how De Niro manages to pull off that extraordinary escape stunt. My, how I covet those tiger-stripe Special Forces camouflage fatigues. The problem is, The Deerhunter has loads of boring non-war stuff either side of the good bits. That’s why I much prefer Platoon — controversial choice, Oliver Stone being a pinko — all of which takes place in-country.

Art historians do not generally become household names, as Kenneth Clark did later in life after embracing television, most famously with Civilisation (1969). They can, however, acquire legendary or semilegendary status within the profession and among amateurs. One such was Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), who taught for many years at the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania. Academic art historians are expected to ‘publish or perish’: college texts, monographic studies on individual artists, or down-the-rabbit-hole treatises on arcana that seem to require more pages of footnotes than text. Steinberg mainly wrote for professional journals. He also lectured widely, testing ideas that later might make their way into print.

MAGA country’s most famous resident wants his C-list career back. And some of the most despicable cretins on the left have stepped up to help him.Perhaps you didn’t catch the news last week; that alone is telling. Muslim activist Linda Sarsour co-signed, along with other left-wing agitators, an open letter accusing the Chicago Police Department of fabricating charges against Empire actor Jussie Smollett after Smollett staged a hate crime against himself in 2019.The letter was also signed by longtime Communist party member Angela Davis and actor Danny Glover (who apparently isn’t ‘too old for this shit’.

‘A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true,’ wrote G.K. Chesterton. Democrats seem to understand that point, though sometimes they are a little overeager to show they can laugh at themselves. Take the virtual Democratic fundraiser on Monday night. Vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris was joined by 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, along with — get this — Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler, who play them on Saturday Night Live! Readers were presumably as stunned as Cockburn to learn that wealthy thespians enjoy sharing a stage with Democratic leaders.

At the Maddox Gallery in Gstaad, that strange, swanky village on the roof of Switzerland, Jay Rutland is showing me the latest exhibition by photographer to the stars Terry O’Neill. It’s a lovely summer day, clear sunlight streaming in through the windows, and the high peaks on the horizon have never looked more inviting, but the Alpine view pales beside the photos on the walls. O’Neill photographed the world’s biggest rock stars and movie stars, the most famous people on the planet, yet these portraits are so fresh and intimate you almost feel you know them — not as aloof superstars but as fragile, familiar friends. Here’s Audrey Hepburn playing beach cricket with a piece of driftwood, grinning like a kid on holiday.

As the Kardashians announced the retirement of their TV show after 14 years and 20 seasons, there was the usual roster of commentators lining up to disparage them. Leading the parade was Piers Morgan who dismissed them as ‘vacuous, talentless, globally renowned imbeciles, the most shameless, grasping family in America.’ But their detractors shouldn’t be too hasty with their disdain. Shameless self-promoters they may well be but the Kardashians have influenced culture more than we realize. ‘We never set out to be celebrities,’ wrote Kim, Khloe and Kourtney with impressively straight faces in their joint autobiography Kardashian Konfidential.

It is an article of fashionable faith that genetic differences in sex are meaningless and malleable, but genetic differences in race are so profound and meaningful that they must not be tinkered with at all, even though race, we are told, is a ‘social construct’. Hence it is positively progressive to sneak a cheeky penis into a women’s changing room, providing the penis is attached to a ‘trans woman’. But it was despicably racist of the disgraced professor Jessica Krug, who was born white and Jewish, to have masqueraded as a woman of color.The gaps in this logic are so big that you could drive a bus through them, whether you’re sitting at the back or the front.

The everyday experience of 2020 includes televised demagogy and a national media making pure spectacle out of domestic terrorism and race riots. The less we believe what we see, the stranger the sights become. These experiences are also the story of Network, the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky/Sidney Lumet hit which won four Oscars out of its 10 nominations. We must ask ourselves why are we living out the 1970s again and, indeed, enacting its satire in deadly earnest. Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, but what did he know of Hollywood? A remake is the safest bet. We, however, have reversed Marx’s sequence.

Few artworks could be more responsive to the current upheaval than Jacob Lawrence’s 1954-56 series ‘Struggle...From the History of the American People’. Painted during the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, the cycle of 30 panels tells a history of the American Founding through punchy modernist vignettes, engaging with timely and timeless topics such as brutality, race, memory, justice and our shared national heritage. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 of the original panels have been reunited for the most complete exhibition of the series since its original showing more than six decades ago. The exhibition will travel to Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, DC from New York.

The MTV Video Music Awards took place last night all around New York City. The show was originally going to take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn but instead was held at locations throughout the city. NYC remains in a very tenuous position post-lockdown. Our restaurants are only allowed to offer outdoor seating and must close at 11 p.m. You cannot go out for drinks, unless you order food as well. Gyms are closed. Movie theaters are closed.  Our schools may not reopen. Funerals must be limited to close family only. Live concerts, even outside, are not allowed. If a bar or restaurant offers live music they are not allowed to charge a cover. The music must be incidental to the dining experience. The city is in crisis.

One of the many things I love about the horribly addictive French spy series The Bureau is that it never attempts to improve you with pious little homilies about how foreigners are just the same as us, with values just as worthy as our own, so they should be treated with the same amount of respect, for are we not all children of God? If The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA — had been made in the US, there would be a specially created nice, upstanding, Americanized Muslim character like the agent in The Looming Tower or the implausible black Muslim character in Jack Ryan.

Gloria Steinem is back in the news. Steinem, now 86, attacked the recent FX network miniseries Mrs America in a series of high-profile interviews. Yet Steinem’s criticisms reveal much more about her and how her extreme radicalism has harmed the women’s movement than they do about the miniseries. What are her complaints about the show? Steinem objects to its focus on anti-ERA campaigner Phyllis Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett, and she accuses Mrs America of distorting the history behind the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). According to Steinem, Schlafly ‘never changed one vote’ and the miniseries is ‘hopelessly wrong’ in suggesting that she did.

In Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, an early over-the-top indicator of future Earth’s stupidity is the number-one movie in the country: eight-time Oscar winner Ass, which is nothing but 90 minutes of its title proudly displayed.It turns out, though, that Judge’s vision of the future was not over-the-top at all. In fact, it was shockingly tame. Idiocracy took place in 2505, but Ass only took until 2020.The most popular song in America right now is Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’. The title is short for ‘wet ass pussy’, and the lyrics get even less Shakespearean from there. The song is accompanied by a big-budget, hyper-sexualized music video that has already been viewed on YouTube close to 100 million times in five days.

It’s quite rare for Republicans to get a starring role in the entertainment industry, let alone on an HBO production. The Swamp, a new documentary, is a fascinating exception.The documentary mainly focuses on the bipartisan effort to stop corruption in DC through reforms on issues like party leadership influence, campaign spending, lobbying and executive war power. HBO tells this story mainly through the lenses of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who have their own respective attempts at bipartisan legislative reforms during a partisan impeachment impeachment. But Cockburn wasn’t that taken with the public policy. There are too many humorous moments in the documentary to focus on such tedium. Here are the real highlights.

In September 2017, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker founder David Lowery sent me an email. Was I interested in turning Camper’s album New Roman Times, into a novel? The album’s central theme was what David saw as an ever-deepening divide in this country, fomented by the media. It was recorded in 2003, partly as a reaction to the Iraq war, but it largely predicted what happened between then and now.The album is set in an alternate version of America during a period of conflict. Instead of a country with 50 states, it’s a continent made up of several countries. The biggest are the left-leaning Republic of California and the right-leaning Christian Republic of Texas. As I began the novel, we were nine months after Trump’s election, and a year into Brexit.