Culture

Every civilization needs its barbarians. Lazy, filthy, dumb and dangerous, the barbarian, real or imagined, is the eternal grindstone on which the civilized sharpen their prejudices. They are, as the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy wrote, ‘a solution of a sort’ — but to what? In Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1898), an unnamed city is gripped by cultural torpor and political sloth. The gridlocked citizens, weakened by indolence and luxury, dream of a bloody release from their troubles. Disaster, a visit from the barbarians, becomes their last hope for rebirth. You don’t need to be a specialist to see the parallels between the poem and the illicit undercurrents of politics in the 2010s.

The fight for equality in America has been long and hard-fought. Sometimes a multi-generational upheaval has been required to undo old notions and myths. But there have been a few times when a new process enabled these changes to happen almost overnight. In the world of classical music, no change was more consequential than the instituting of blind auditions, whereby the musician auditioning for a position is behind a screen, and the only thing a panel can adjudicate is the sound of music.How do we know this was so successful? Because even self-proclaimed bigots found themselves choosing differently, in spite of themselves. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes how in 1980, Abbie Conant won a position as principal trombone with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.

Olivia de Havilland, who has passed aged 104, will forever be remembered for the role of Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind, a performance that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nod from the Academy. She would go on to star in acclaimed romantic dramas like To Each His Own and The Heiress, both of which brought her Oscars for Best Actress, but to fans of classic movies she will always be Scarlett O’Hara's sickly cousin, love rival but ultimate ally. She was cinema’s quintessential southern belle: genteel on the surface, steel underneath. Less well known is that de Havilland was a lively anti-communist and worked to expose and counter the influence of Soviet sympathizers in Hollywood.

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.

You’re familiar, no doubt, with the term ‘red pill’, the Matrix-inspired metaphor that’s become a catch-all for the type of right-wing thinking that thrives in the dark corners of the internet. Now the journalist Katie Herzog, in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek comment, might well have given us a new term: the purple pill. To take the purple pill, inferring from Herzog’s outlook, is to oppose the dangerous excesses of identity politics, but also the reactionary extremes of the red-pillers. This is, simply, a compromise — or the kind of terminally sensible position that shouldn’t need corny movie metaphors in the first place. But you see her point.

Statues do more than monumentalize individual achievement. They embody the self-image of those who raise, cherish and preserve them. It is this common self-conception that is being upended by the wave of iconoclasm that is sweeping through American cities. The race to raze structures that have stood untouched for decades or centuries disturbs because, instead of reassessing the past, it attacks it to reorder the present. Wherever you stand on this, the ‘debate’ is limited by Western visual traditions and stunted by patchy education. In Wisconsin, the abolitionist Hans Christian Heg was yanked down. In San Francisco, Ulysses S. Grant, a president who set the US Army on the Klan, was deposed. In Washington, DC, Gandhi, once praised by W.E.B.

Unpopular opinion: film noir is dull, self-indulgent and grossly overrated. I recognize it has given us some great performances — Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, say — as well as chiaroscuro lighting, laconic dialogue, cynical hard-bittenness and cancerously heroic quantities of smoking. But that’s exactly the problem. Film noir is so in love with its look and style, the plotting comes a very poor sixth. What, though, does any of this have to do with Perry Mason, the suave, brilliant, clean-cut lawyer played by Raymond Burr in the long-running Fifties and Sixties courtroom drama series? Well, bizarrely, HBO has decided to revive him for another of those dark and grimy origin stories that Joker made so fashionable.

It was June 2015. Bill Maher was holding court with assorted journalists to discuss the 2016 race. The Republican field back then was attracting all kinds of ridiculous monikers — it was apparently the most plausible, most qualified field in history. Maher asked Ann Coulter who had the best chance in the general election. She didn’t say John Kasich. She didn’t fancy Jeb’s chances. Three days earlier, Donald Trump had announced his candidacy in Manhattan, cutting the ribbon on a festival of media bafflement, disgust, and ridicule. Coulter made her prediction: 'Of the declared ones, right now, Donald Trump.' The studio audience hooted. The other panelists did a good impression of being horrified.

Quick bit of movie trivia: what do actors Felicity Huffman, Eddie Redmayne, Hillary Swank, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Glenn Close, Jeffrey Tambor and Jared Leto all have in common? All have won or have been nominated for major industry awards of their portrayal of transexual characters. Swank won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of real life murder victim Brandon Tina in Boys Don’t Cry. Leto was awarded the Academy Award for his role in Dallas Buyer’s Club. Felicity Huffman was nominated for the Oscar but settled for the Golden Globe for her performance in Trans-America (the best of these of roles). Redmayne was nominated for his historical role as Lilli Elbe. Close was nominated for the Oscar in 2011 for Albert Nobbs.

Although it finished production months before George Floyd was killed, the documentary Uncle Tom, produced by Larry Elder, has been released bang in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protest explosion. But in the face of this unrest, Uncle Tom — which bills itself as 'an oral history of the American black conservative' — shows a side of the African-American community that is often overlooked by the media. The title is part tongue-in-cheek. As an epithet, 'Uncle Tom' is often used to pejoratively describe black Americans who diverge from the political left, which has long been seen as the natural home for the African American vote.

Jimmy Kimmel knows what it’s all about. Now that old skits have resurfaced of him wearing blackface to impersonate NBA player Karl Malone and other black celebrities, the talk-show host has issued the inevitable learning-and-listening apology. But the line that sticks out is this: ‘It is frustrating that these thoughtless moments have become a weapon used by some to diminish my criticisms of social and other injustices’. This is why Kimmel will not lose his show or his sponsors, even with a recording of him rapping the N-word in 1996. He is reminding the mob that he is one of them, or at least can be of use. Don’t cancel me, bro.   Jimmy Fallon won’t be canceled either.

‘You are so lucky that I don’t know your thing. Do you understand how lucky you are?’ comic Louis C.K. tells his comeback show audience. ‘Everybody knows my fucking thing, now. Obama knows my thing. Do you understand how that feels? To know that Obama was like “Good Lord!”’ It’s a good point well made. Everyone who knows anything about the world of comedy does indeed know Louis C.K.’s thing. In 2017, when #MeToo exploded, C.K. was ranked by Rolling Stone number four among the 50 best stand-up comics of all time. His sexual proclivity was publicly exposed, he lost numerous television deals and movie contracts and he suddenly found himself cast into outer darkness. All in all, it cost him an estimated $35 million in lost income.

In her new book, the singer-songwriter Tori Amos advises aspiring artists to be wary of those who would lead them astray. ‘Most people cannot raise their hand and say, “Your expression, your piece, your song, your art, is not to my taste; in fact I have an aversion to it, but I think it’s brilliant.” And that means that... some people judge something to be good or not good by what they personally like. Beware of this, I say to all artists.’ The simple sentiment encapsulates why so much creative potential is stifled before it can flourish. An artist whose principal goal is to please an imagined audience, or to adapt his or her work to critical trends, is no kind of artist at all.

Today, politics is show business and show business is politics. Last week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new efforts to improve inclusion institutionally and for the Oscars themselves. A task force has been created to come up with new inclusion standards for Oscar eligibility by the end of July. The Academy’s president Dawn Hudson said: ‘The need to address this issue is urgent. To that end, we will amend — and continue to examine — our rules and procedures to ensure that all voices are heard and celebrated.’We have traveled a long way from 2003. Then, when Michael Moore made an overtly political acceptance speech about George W. Bush, he was forced off the stage as a result.

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week, filmmaker John Ridley urged HBO Max to remove Gone with the Wind from its platform. HBO Max capitulated right away, temporarily withdrawing the film until it can ‘return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions’. As HBO weighs how to address what Ridley and others have described as the film’s romanticizing of slavery, I would encourage them to use the message of the movie itself as their guide.Gone with the Wind is about the perils of romanticizing. The movie begins with young men romanticizing the impending Civil War. ‘War! Isn’t it exciting, Scarlett?’ exclaims one of the Tarleton twins.

I’m a Nineties kid. You know what that means: Tamagotchis, Super Mario, Sega, primitive cell phones, slap bracelets, skateboarding, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, David Koresh, scooters, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Nato bombing of Sarajevo, Pokémon!, Blink-182, Bill Clinton, Friends and the friends of Bill Clinton. What a decade! Only Nineties kids will understand it. And as even Nineties kids grow up, Nineties nostalgia is now big business. Everyone from the Spice Girls to Smashing Pumpkins has launched comeback tours on a rising tide of misty-eyed affection. McDonald’s brought back Tamagotchis and Furbys and other veteran Happy Meal toys. Friends is set to make a highly profitable return.

On the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University student who killed himself after being outed as gay by a roommate, children’s television network Nickelodeon dragged a cartoon sponge out of the closet in a tweet posted Saturday. In doing so, Nickelodeon set a dangerous precedent for LGBT youth everywhere. ‘Celebrating #Pride with the LGBTQ+ community and their allies this month and every month’, the network posted on Twitter above an image of SpongeBob Squarepants bathed in a rainbow glow. https://twitter.com/Nickelodeon/status/1271795092391682048?s=20 Fans have long speculated the beloved cartoon character might be homosexual.

First they came for the patriarchy, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a man. Then they came for the police force, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a cop. Then they came for PAW Patrol, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a three-year-old. Then they came for me, and there was no one to speak for me, because the men were away having their protective instincts surgically removed at re-education camp and the cops had been defunded. I didn’t even have a dog on my side, since PAW Patrol had been canceled and none of the canines out there wanted to be branded as class traitors.

I have to laugh when I read about my Baby Boom cohort’s memories of savoring rock ’n’ roll behind the backs of disapproving elders. I had no such problem. I wasn’t especially taken with the new sounds of the Fifties: I was six years old when Elvis Presley debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. I thought he was vaguely comical. In any case, my parents had resolutely high-minded middlebrow taste in such things, wavering somewhere between Dvorak, Lawrence Welk and Mozart. Rock ’n’ roll was simply out of the question. Everything else heard in the household — country and folk music, in particular, which my elder siblings’ favored — was tolerated to some degree, but my own secret musical vice was not.

The death of the artist Christo last week in New York at 84 has been the occasion for an outpouring of misty-eyed adulation. I thought I would temper that wave of sentimentality by reprising a column I wrote about him back in 2005 on the occasion of ‘The Gates’, his huge project in Central Park in Manhattan: Andy Warhol once remarked that ‘art is what you can get away with’. And how. Just ask Christo, the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur who wraps things in cloth, calls it Art and sits back while the money pours into his bank account. It is nice work if you can get it. In 2004, Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude (they work together, like Lady Bracknell and the Duchess of Bolton) took in about $15.1 million. And for what?

On January 23, Dr Stephen D. O’Leary, a retired professor of communications at the University of Southern California, posted a poem by George Eliot to his Facebook page. It begins: ‘O May I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again’. For 25 years Stephen was one of my closest friends in the world. I still can’t believe that I have to use the past tense when talking about him. He pressed ‘send’ on that Facebook post at 4:47 p.m. At one in the morning he joined the choir invisible. Although his heart attack was unexpected, we knew we were going to lose him. He called me the day after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. ‘I’m not afraid of dying. It’s going to be interesting,’ he said.

Donald Trump views The View as if it were a spouse over the age of 60: with disdain.‘Explain how the women on The View, which is a total disaster since the great Barbara Walters left, ever got their jobs. @abc is wasting time’, tweeted the President during the 2016 campaign.So boomers everywhere gushed with excitement as The Right View — the Trump campaign’s alternative to the ABC talk show — launched on Monday.Cockburn decided to tune in and give Donald Trump's entrance into the ladies' talk show market a chance. The Right View is essentially the offspring of a Trump merch infomercial and a Trump campaign ad.

Back in February when the inspiring documentary about the life of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, was playing in movie theaters around the country, I wrote a review encouraging you to go see it. Now, it is coming to your own home. On Monday night it premiered on your PBS station, and is repeating throughout the week. This is a great opportunity for you — and now made very easy too.In that earlier review, I wrote about meeting someone who had been completely brainwashed about Justice Thomas. The Thomas he knew was a fictitious personality created and maintained by what Rush Limbaugh refers to as 'the drive-by media.' Thomas has been described by the leading lights of the media as bitter, a loner, a brooding recluse.

A true adaptation of David Copperfield is neither possible nor even desirable. It would last as long as it takes to read the novel, say, two weeks. The principal cast would number in the dozens, and the extras — the clerks, lawyers, policemen, landlords, cooks, chimney sweeps, pickpockets, sailors, ministers, soldiers, beggars, porters, carters, fishermen, coachmen, pimps, gypsies and whores — in the hundreds of thousands. Replicating the cellars, garrets, galleries, museums, bridges, pubs, factories, shipyards, docks, scaffolds and debtors’ prisons of Victorian London would require construction on a Himalayan scale.

Jazz has traditionally been a male preserve — all 15 of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra are men — but jazz singing is the exception. Later this year, Netflix will release Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, based on the superb play by August Wilson and starring Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis. If the movie adheres to the spirit of the play and its subject (Rainey, the ‘Mother of the Blues’, sang frankly sexual songs in a moaning style), it is sure to ignite a fresh interest in her tempestuous life and career. The imperious Rainey wasn’t simply a gifted singer, but also an astute talent-spotter.