Culture

Literary mandarin Zadie Smith has waded in deep this time. We’ll see if she’s allowed back to shore. Smith has been making troubling noises lately, letting off faint signals that her inner life might be insufficiently pasteurised and homogenised for the tongue-clicking clipboard huggers of the modern moral regime. In a Guardian interview conducted earlier this year, Smith said: “I can’t stand dogma, lazy ideas, catchphrases, group-think, illogic, pathos disguised as logos, shoutiness, ad hominem attacks, bombast, liberal piety, conservative pomposity, ideologues, essentialists, technocrats, preachers, fanatics, cheerleaders or bullies.

In yesterday’s Spectator USA, I described the experience of watching Mission Impossible: Fallout as akin to being sprayed in the face with hot diarrhea. This was inexcusably coarse and vulgar. So was my observation that the Fallout of this baggy mess of a film resembled an anal prolapse. It was not my intention to personally insult Tom Cruise, or to imply that he is a ridiculous fake, or to suggest that Paramount Pictures are peddling misogynistic smut. But if I did, so much the better. For that is what I believe to be true. What does Ben Brantley believe to be true? Anything you like, providing you shout loud enough. Since 2003, Mr. Brantley has held one of the toughest jobs in journalism.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric green, giant-thong-like swim wear worn by Borat; the classic late-Nineties catchphrase ‘Is it because I is black?’ And sure it must have taken some nerve — even in character — to explain to a clearly impatient and unimpressed Donald Trump his business plan for some anti-drip ice-cream gloves. But how often, even at his best, does Baron Cohen ever make you laugh?

There are now more trees to hug in the Northeast than at any point since the eighteenth century. In the good old days, the trees were cut down for construction, firewood, and farming. Now, we build with concrete, burn old coffee grounds in decorative stoves, and convert old farmhouses into weekend rentals for skiers and hikers. This is good for the squirrels. Once, it was said that a squirrel could mount a tree on the coast of Maine or Massachusetts, and scuttle rattily through the canopy all the way to the Ohio River without putting one of his filthy little paws to the ground. But is it good for the humans? Samu Fuentes’ The Skin of the Wolf, newly released into the digital wild by Netflix, is about the dangers of re-wilding.

When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech. But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which the media landscape has changed in the past few years. Gone are the days — if they ever existed — when political interviewers were dispassionate seekers-after-truth on a mission to get the best out of their subjects. Now, it’s mostly activism-driven, the aim being to advance your preferred narrative while showing up your ideological opponents in as unflattering a light as possible.

So much rap is outsourced id – music we play to put us in touch with deep animal parts of our inner lives, where we fight and fuck and flaunt our victories like civilisation never happened. The vast sums of money and creature comfort afforded to the play-actors are darkly poetic. Here’s the deal: you tell us about the grinding poverty, violence, drugs you came through and how you’re now rich as fuck, and we’ll make you so. Just pop out of your mansion every few months and remind us how the good life tastes when you’ve grown up hungry. We all want heedless, hedonistic triumph, but we’ll take it vicariously – we have jobs to hold down and mothers to please.

There is so much euphemistic reporting about Scarlett Johansson’s decision to drop out of a film in which she would have portrayed a trans man. Ms Johansson ‘quits role’, headlines tell us. She has ‘stepped away’ from ‘trans role’, we are informed. It all makes it sound like she had a simple change of heart, or maybe found herself drawn to a different movie project. The truth is rather different. The truth is Ms Johansson was hounded out of the trans role by an intolerant online mob hurling invective at her. She didn’t merely ‘quit role’ — she ‘quit role’ under pressure from an unforgiving gang of identitarians who think they have the right to tell actresses who they may and may not portray on screen.

Michiko Kakutani used to be an important person in the world of people who cared about book reviews in the New York Times. This was not a world at all, so much as a small village whose borders could be seen from any tall building in Manhattan. Still, her opinion was considered important. Kakutani was notorious for actually reading the books she reviewed, and for not thinking of the reviewer’s desk as an outpost of the publisher’s press office. So, though book reviews are generally not worth reading, hers sometimes were. When Kakutani left the Times in 2017, it was rumored that she had jumped before being pushed by the downward-dumbing of the Times’ arts’ content.

He used to ring me via his assistants and make me wait on hold. It was normal; he was, after all, the biggest Hollywood tycoon of them all. This time he called me directly, there was no ‘Harvey Weinstein wishes to speak to you, please wait on the line’ stuff. The old growly voice was the same and he went straight to the point: “I’ve got a world exclusive for you, are you interested?” We agreed that I go to him, as I live in a very stuffy building on the Upper East Side of New York and Harvey’s reputation has taken a beating of late. The last time we met I had gone to his downtown office where many of the alleged sexual assaults had taken place.

It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a biography, nor a work of musicology. As an extended historical essay it is patchy and selective. It is partly about pianos and pianism, but would disappoint serious students of that genre. It is not quite a detective story — though there are, towards the end, elements of a hunter on the track of his prey. It is probably best to begin the book with no expectations of where it will lead. It starts in the Palma workshop of one Juan Bauza in the 1830s as he fashioned an upright piano — crude, even by the standards of the day — from local softwood, felt, pig iron and copper.

The day after Independence Day, 2018, the President of the United States shambled into a packed auditorium in Great Falls, Montana, and delivered these remarks, apropos the size of the assembled audience: “I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record . . .” Well, that’s as good an epitaph as any. Whoever’s in charge of the giant, gold-plated sarcophagus can sharpen the chisel and get carving.

Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against a backdrop of the usual overproduced r&b pop schlock. What used to be called ‘indie’ singer-songwriters are always moaning about how utterly useless they are, taking Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ as a kind of self-flagellating worldview. Chart singer-songwriters, meanwhile, can’t stop telling everyone how absolutely bloody marvellous they are, despite being traduced, which fits right in with the extraordinary narcissism of our current youth culture, its bovine #MeToo grandstanding and exquisite sensitivities. I don’t mind Allen, despite her irritating sub-adolescent Corbynista politics.

In a sardonic email written last year to the New Yorker magazine, the late, great Philip Roth describes Donald Trump as a man “incapable of expressing or recognising subtlety or nuance...wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.” I enjoy the crankiness, coming from Roth, and I wish I could say it was wholly uncalled for. Our president, it can’t be denied, is a man little given to nuance, and almost charmingly innocent of any refinements of diction or syntax. This is a loss for us, if a survivable one. The world is complicated, and all things being equal, leaders who speak precisely and beautifully render better service to the citizens they represent.

You know the feeling. One minute, you’re an oversexed adman, strolling the streets of Paris and propositioning every woman you pass. The next, you’ve walked into a lamp post, and knocked yourself unconscious. You wake up in the same Paris, but now the sex roles are reversed, and the hierarchies of power and values too. Every day is now Freaky Friday in the sex wars. Is it a dream, or a nightmare? A nightmare for forty year-old Damien, whose headlong encounter with a piece of Belle Époque street furniture begins Eléonore Pourriat’s I Am Not an Easy Man (Je ne suis pas un homme facile), a new Netflix film. Not much better for the other men, either, who are wolf-whistled even when they’re holding the baby. But for Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane), everything becomes easier.

You’ve probably heard that we’re in a boom time for the art business, breaking sales records as fast as we can make them. This might seem strange, in a time of such political uncertainty, but look closer: the art world is a fascinating canary in our cultural/social/economic coal mine, an odd liminal zone where profound reflection on the human condition is strung up on a white wall, and traded for increasingly wild sums of money.This ostensibly deep, meditative stuff, most often forged on dirty floors by spiritually hungry oddballs, is being gobbled up by real-estate tycoons, hedge funders and tech giants from every part of the globe, especially, lately, China and the Middle East.

What is it that Kanye West and David Lynch know that escapes the intelligence of Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the restaurant that refused to serve White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders? It’s the same thing that escapes the intelligence of the people camping out in front the apartment of Trump aide Stephen Miller, passing out “Wanted” posters and screaming “fascist.” Even as The Resistance™ enters the aphasic, “Maxine Waters” phase of senile dementia—probably abetted, it turns out, by Russian mischief makers—little shoots of sanity are sprouting up in some unlikely places.

This is a golden age for documentaries, if you have time to view them. Digital film and editing have reduced the cost of making a documentary, and online streaming has resolved the problem of distribution. The result is a glut of documentaries, generally well-made, and generally too long. Lorna Tucker’s Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist comes in at eighty minutes. This is the same as a movie like Run, Lola, Run, and only slightly less than Paths of Glory (88 mins), The Producers (88 mins) and Stand By Me (89 mins). Westwood is a self-made character, the Edith Sitwell of British fashion, and her biography has the plot twists and characters of fiction.

Dear 2016 WriteNow mentees, Thanks so much for your open letter to me. It seems only good manners for me to write back. You’re rightly proud of having been admitted to a challenging programme at Penguin Random House that mentors gifted young minority authors and helps to cultivate their talents. My own publisher, HarperCollins, runs a similar programme, which enjoys my full support. Such proactive outreach is exactly the approach I endorse for helping to vary the voices on our bookshelves. That is why my column of a fortnight ago said not one discouraging word about WriteNow. Indeed, I made no reference to your programme whatsoever.

‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the table outside a café in Highgate. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’ It turns out the girlfriend is no longer the girlfriend. ‘You broke up? You know, that happens. It’ll be OK. You’ll meet somebody else.’ He pauses and then says something that runs through my head for days after our interview. ‘She’ll meet somebody else.’ It’s true, of course; she will. And it’s a human thing to say: both parties to the relationship will move on. But it’s also delivered with a hint of claws. Who wants to be told, fresh from a break-up, that their ex will soon be hooking up with another partner?

For pure, unadulterated comedy nothing has emerged from the carnival of broadcast entertainment, print-media and online badinage of the past two years to beat the quotidian exhilarations of the saga of Donald J. Trump. Each day accelerated demands for stimulation are amply satisfied by the President’s actions and reactions as they trigger his detractors (‘losers and haters’) into ever more preposterous and self-righteous rage. In the short time since the proofs of Conrad Black’s lively new chronicle landed on my doormat, Trump has attended a ‘very, very successful’ G7 summit in Quebec at which he declared a ‘10 out of 10’ relationship with other leaders including Justin Trudeau who ‘did a really good job’.

Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack clichés, and an ensemble strong enough to ensure that there are at least two good female leads on the screen at any one moment, and never a man in sight. Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) is the sister of the late Danny, George Clooney’s character in Ocean’s Eleven and Thirteen.