Culture

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.

Niall Ferguson’s decision to disengage with students and their politics is wrong. While such a statement may bring glee to those on the left and may displease Ferguson himself, Ferguson’s reaction to his admitted bad judgement involving Stanford students is deeply problematic. Specifically, after being caught suggesting some fairly unethical behaviour regarding his engagement with students, Ferguson penned a response in The Sunday Times where he stated that he learned a few lessons from his work with these Stanford students. Included in these lessons was the idea that “Student politics is best left to students” and as such, he is returning to his ivory tower – tweed jacket on – and “retreating to my beloved study. It is time to write another book.

Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing the science it was fictionalising. The story of a theme park populated by resurrected dinosaurs, it offered a portrayal of Mesozoic fauna that was as close to authentic as could then plausibly be achieved. For the first time, computer-generated imagery was used to portray dinosaurs as scientists had come to envisage them: agile, bird-like, smart. The impact was profound.

Leon Vitali is an actor who passed through the looking glass of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and became Kubrick’s right arm. When the documentary film maker Tony Zierra discovered Vitali’s story while investigating Kubrick’s final, flawed film, Eyes Wide Shut, he decided to first make a film about Vitali, who is sixty-nine and not in good health. This is only fair, as Kubrick took over Vitali’s life, admittedly with Vitali’s consent. Kubrick is an object of worship to film lovers and the people who merely work in film. The critics have tended to go along with the cult, though Pauline Kael and Roger Elbert both expressed strong reservations.

Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a (self-confessedly lousy) actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck in 1950s Hollywood and freelancing on Fleet Street in countercultural London (including reviewing films for The Spectator), Sigal was at the centre of every piece of action going. Should Black Sunset and The London Lover ever be gathered into a single volume (perhaps taking Sigal’s earlier memoir, Going Away, along for the ride), ‘Been there, done that’ would make a good catch-all title.

The film awards season is over and Cannes has been handed back to wealthy holiday-makers, yet the #MeToo movement shows no signs of slowing down. Morgan Freeman is the most recent addition to the ignominious list of film producers, directors and actors who have had accusations of sexual harassment made against them since #MeToo took off in October last year.Allegations against the 80 year-old Freeman, star of The Shawshank Redemption, emerged last week on the day before Harvey Weinstein handed himself into police in New York on charges of rape. The charges against Weinstein are serious; he should stand trial and, if found guilty, face a lengthy prison sentence.