Culture

Remember when you were so nonchalant about the inevitability of Christmas privilege? Time off work for the holiday season, a few messy coke sessions with colleagues, maybe a boozy catch up with an old friend? Going out and about, buying your bourgeois real (dead) Christmas tree? Remember how you hated all that cornball Christmas muzak piped into the department stores: Slade, Wizard, Macca’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song”? Then along came Covid and Christmas was gone. You, my friend, were in lockdown. As each post-2020 festive season rolls into town, so will the new variants of Covid. The smart set decrees that it’s best we all hole up for the holidays and hide from disease and death.

A few years ago, the American artist Barbara Kruger covered the facade of Frankfurt’s Kaufhof department store with a pair of huge eyes. It was as if Big Brother had come out of retirement. Above that unsparing gaze was the slogan, in Kruger’s signature Futura bold italic font: ‘You want it. You buy it. You forget it.’ It was a typical work of art by Kruger. She made her career from what’s called culture jamming, subverting media messages by transforming them into their own anti-messages and by indicting the business of capitalism. In 1987, for instance, she took an advertising image of an all-American boy flexing his juvenile biceps before his admiring sister and subverted that message with the overlaid words ‘We don’t need another hero’ for a billboard.

Hark, groundlings: Shakespeare, after decades of being found to be Problematic, is now being reclaimed as the wokemeister-in-chief. New York’s Shakespeare in the Park company returned to Central Park this summer with a staging of The Merry Wives of Windsor, adapted by the Ghanaian-American playwright Jocelyn Bioh. The action, traditionally located in the white-supremacist purlieus of 17th-century Windsor, is now transposed to 116th Street in Harlem. The cast is mostly black, the script has been updated to contain references to Black Lives Matter and the Bronx, and Jacob Ming-Trent portrays the portly knight-about-town Falstaff as a wannabe gangsta. The critics love the production.

Paintings so nice you’ll see them twice. That’s the gambit of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the gargantuan ‘simultaneous retrospective’ that’s currently split between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. OK, so the concurrent presentations of painting and sculpture by the neo-Dada, quasi-proto-Pop artist aren’t exactly duplicates. The museums promise a sort of imperfect symmetry: ‘each half of the exhibition will act as a reflection of the other, inviting viewers to look closely to discover the themes, methods, and coded visual language that echo across the two venues’.

In 1576 Venice was gripped by plague. The island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio, on which the afflicted were crammed three to a bed, was compared to hell itself. In the midst of this horror Tiziano Vecellio, the greatest painter in Europe, died — apparently of something else. He was in his eighties and working, it seems, almost to the end. Titian: Women, Myth & Power, now on view at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, contains several of the greatest masterpieces of his old age — and also of European art. It comprised just six canvases (a seventh was unable to travel to Boston), all done for Philip II of Spain — a villain of English history, the man who launched the Armada but, as far as Titian was concerned, his most discerning patron.

Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle (1887-1933) never won an Oscar or saw his name emblazoned on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but he should be remembered as a movie pioneer. Despite his considerable physical size, he was a remarkably versatile and agile actor, and his best films are weirdly droll as much as slapstick funny. He predated both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a master of physical comedy played with a straight face. Arbuckle was also an accidental pioneer of cancel culture. Exactly a hundred years ago, he found himself sitting in a cell on ‘felony row’ at the downtown San Francisco jail, held without bail for the alleged rape and subsequent death of a 26-year-old actress named Virginia Rappe.

I was well into my thirties when my parents acquired a television set, for no good reason that I could discern after they’d gone so many years without one without obvious damage to their health or intellects. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my sister and I were permitted to watch two television shows while visiting with relatives. One was Topper. The other was Perry Mason, which they occasionally joined us for: a small family grouping that was the closest thing the Williamsons ever came to resembling a painting by Norman Rockwell. Over the past year and a half, I have been re-watching episodes of the original show starring Raymond Burr as Mason, Barbara Hale as Della Street, William Hopper as Paul Drake, Ray Collins as Lieutenant Tragg and William Talman as Hamilton Burger.

'Imperious’ comes to mind in describing the great American fashion designer Halston. ‘Perverse’ does too; ‘grand’, ‘haughty’, ‘intimidating’ also fit. But, once you got to know him, it was apparent that he was a sweet and clever boy from the corn fields of the Midwest putting on a show for the big city sophisticates he sought to impress — and impress them he did. I met Halston in the summer of 1971 when I was brought to a party at the fashion illustrator Joe Eula’s by Andy Warhol, who had made me editor of his new magazine Interview the previous fall at age 22. Halston terrified me.

February 15, 1981, the day after Valentine’s Day. At 11 on a Sunday morning, a man’s body was found slumped in the passenger seat of a beige 1971 Mercury on a residential street in the Forest Hills section of San Francisco. All four doors were locked. A Valium bottle was in the pocket of a coat on the back seat. There was no ID: the body went to the morgue as John Doe #15. The dead man was 37-year-old Michael Bloomfield, a pioneering guitarist who brought blues to the mainstream and set Bob Dylan’s music alight. The cause of death was registered as cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. Questions remain unanswered about how he died; why methamphetamine, which he avoided, was in his system; and why he was in a part of town where he knew no one.

The poster for I Care a Lot, now available on Netflix and Amazon Prime, has a pull quote from a Collider review: ‘DELICIOUSLY NASTY’. In a better world, perhaps this would be true. But here on Earth, we have J Blakeson’s film, starring Rosamund Pike as Marla Grayson, a predatory professional legal guardian convincing crooked courts to grant her the right to put old people in nursing homes against their will, regardless of their health or mental capacity. This allows her to cash in on their homes, jewelry, valuables and anything else that she can vacuum up. Near the beginning of the film, shortly before she picks up ‘a cherry’ in the form of Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), we see Marla before a wall of her wards, all taped up and looking miserable in their intake headshots.

Watching the rich and famous fail in slow motion is an American pastime. Movies like Heaven’s Gate, Eyes Wide Shut and They All Laughed weren’t reviewed — it was their circumstances, their producers, their directors that people wrote about. And that’s how most material on The Woman in the Window (not to be confused with the 1944 Fritz Lang film) begins and ends: ‘A.J. Finn’s beloved novel had a long, hard way to its release.’ Now that it’s here, dumped on Netflix in lieu of a major theatrical release by the already defunct Fox 2000 Pictures, fans of the book are largely disappointed, and fewer still are even aware of the film’s existence. Compared to the anemic ‘Netflix Originals’ it’s padding out, The Woman in the Window is a stunner.

It is a standard narrative in all showbiz reporting — and one that arts hacks seem to be duty bound to abide by. It is the fairy tale of ‘Making It’: the story of a star whose career took time to get off the ground but, thanks to perseverance and self-belief, went stratospheric. It goes like this: ‘I was a nobody, and I was turned down from everything. And I nearly didn’t go to that final audition, but whaddya know? I turned up and... Shazam! Oscars raining down and a mini-series on Netflix.’ There is an encyclopedia of stars who toughed it out before making it big.

We are familiar with Dorothea Lange’s gritty photographs of Okies during the Dust Bowl. New Woman Behind the Camera, which opens this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showcases Lange alongside over 120 other female photographers who refashioned modernist photography in the same years. Photography developed through an ambivalent relationship to high art: the camera was often seen as a medium for journalism or advertising. Yet the modernist works here showcase the flexibility of the form. Still, there are inherent tensions in an exhibit like this. Georgia O’Keeffe once declined an invitation to be included in an exhibit of ‘women artists’: she wanted to be seen as competing with the best, not as part of an inferior subgroup.

Imagine a John Le Carré thriller — one of the Cold War ones, not the tedious lefty morality tales — in which we meet Moisey Vainberg, a Polish Jewish composer who defected to Russia in 1943 while the rest of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust. He dresses like a mid-level bureaucrat and seems nervous about drawing attention to himself. That’s sensible, given that under Stalin he was thrown into jail for ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalism’. Then he’s rehabilitated, his music enjoys a brief vogue, he’s performed by Rostropovich, Shafran, Gilels, Kogan and the Borodins — but he never boasts or promotes himself. A few recordings reach the West, but the critics wrinkle their noses.

Without a space or a location, ‘the movies’ cease to exist. They become another niche interest with little to no cultural penetration. Awards-season movies, summer blockbusters, sleeper hits and all kinds of popular film phenomena cease to exist without theaters themselves. The last year has shown how much movie culture relies on the activity of going to the movies and the physical space itself. The Last Blockbuster is a documentary about the death of another space: video stores, albeit through the eyes of the last representatives of a corporation that destroyed vast swaths of mom & pop stores across America. Lloyd Kaufman, the co-founder of Troma Entertainment, an independent film distribution company, is an understandably hostile subject.