Prospero

AFTER a brief glass of wine at the bar, some eager young reporters and jaded older hands piled into the auditorium at Millbank Tower, smartphones in hand, ready to tweet away. To celebrate the launch of the Huffington Post in Britain, Arianna Huffington organised a debate with Kelly Osbourne, one of the magazine's many unpaid celebrity bloggers; Jon Gaunt, a former journalist for the Sun; Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former press secretary; Celia Walden, a columnist for the Daily Telegraph; and Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties). All were invited to discuss blogging, or rather the "Self-Expression Revolution", as the Huffington team called it.

Despite the glamorous panel, Twitter stole the show. The audience was invited to "Join the debate"; the best tweets from the #HuffPostUK stream were then re-published on a screen behind the stage. (Not one but two free Wi-Fi networks had been set up for the event.) But this meant everyone ended up staring at the screen instead of listening to the debate, waiting expectantly for their own tweets to come up. Some guests appeared happy to broadcast their inner comedians, leaving the debate punctuated by otherwise random explosions of laughter. (One particular crowd-pleaser came from @alsy77: "Just spied two guests in the audience with pen, paper and no smartphone. Can someone please call security ASAP?") Arianna Huffington grew visibly exasperated by the distracted crowd. “Multitasking is bad for journalism,” she sighed. The tweet-screen duly filled up with people asking what the point of the screen was then.

Continue reading "Huffing and tweeting"»

BRITAIN'S phone-hacking scandal has left Rupert Murdoch's business in crisis and cast doubts over the future of his son James. Time to revisit a rare interview he gave in 2009 to Sophie Barker, who set out to find the person behind the rather faceless public figure, for Intelligent Life.

"While other media-owning families, like the Sulzbergers and the Bancrofts, either wobble or walk away, the Murdochs march on. James is Citizen Kane in waiting."

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"CY TWOMBLY excites art critics in ways that perhaps no other American abstract artist does," observed this paper in 2004. In part this was because he was one of the few Abstract Expressionists left who was not only alive but also still grappling with canvas. But his work (dubbed "post-Abstract Expressionist") can also be difficult, full of scratches and phalluses, filth and the occasional lofty classical allusion. His mix of subversive vulgarity and grand ideas earned him zealous followers and not a few detractors. Indeed it is this divisiveness—this singular ability to excite—that has helped to secure his place as one of America's most important postwar painters. But little of this attention seemed to affect the man, who was always something of a loner. He had long traded America for Rome, where he could paint in peace and read his Rilke, far away from the noise of the art world. This was where he died on Tuesday, aged 83.

On the eve of the painter's 80th birthday and just before his 2008 retrospective at the Tate, Philip Hensher, a British novelist and art critic, traced the arc of Twombly's career for Intelligent Life magazine. We have republished the tribute in full below. Twombly's work can also be seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in a show that juxtaposes his paintings with those of Nicolas Poussin.

Continue reading "Hypnotic scribbles and abstract allusions"»

TO DESCRIBE the woes of bricks-and-mortar bookstores is to join the dirge-singing chorus. Everyone knows the tune: sales at bookstores have fallen because buyers are ordering books online or downloading them to e-readers. Bookstores may be great places to browse and linger, but online is where the deals are. In the latest chapter in the Borders saga, the bookstore chain has agreed to sell its assets for $215m to Direct Brands, a media-distribution company owned by Najafi, a private-equity firm, which would also assume an additional $220m in liabilities. This will serve as the opening bid for the company’s bankruptcy-court auction, scheduled for July 19th.

Whatever happens at the auction will dictate the fate of the bookseller, which has already closed more than a third of its stores. Because Direct Brands is an online- and catalogue-based distributor of music, DVDs and books (such as the mail-order Book of the Month club), some speculate that a deal with Najafi will do little to keep the remaining bookstores open. Rather, the company will probably see value in the Borders distribution network and liquidate most everything else. Regardless, the story doesn’t look good for store employees and their dwindling patrons. (The company, which employs more than 11,000 people, has racked up more than $191m in losses since seeking bankruptcy protection in February, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

Like Barnes & Noble, Borders has a reputation for being a brutish corporate behemoth that has been edging out more humane book-selling competition for decades. Isn’t this just a story of comeuppance? But as we noted in March, these colossal book empires have also played an important role as often lone bookstores in small American towns and suburbs, where readers may otherwise be limited to what can be found at Wal-Mart. A friend and former colleague who grew up in Texas often bristled when New Yorkers kvetched about stores like Borders. When one of these multi-storey bookstores moved into his home-town, he couldn’t believe his luck. Urban centres can be counted on to provide affable places to buy tomes, flirt with bookworms and listen to visiting authors. Elsewhere it is stores like Borders that have provided a rare, atmospheric and pressure-free space for bibliophiles, often in strip malls next to a Home Depot.

But alas, this precious “pressure-free” element may be the problem. Now that these bookstores are closing, local papers are lamenting the loss even as they profile customers who never quite managed to open their wallets. A recent article in the Elk Grove Patch, for example, considered the precarious fate of its local Borders bookstore—the only non-religious bookstore in the Californian city, just south of Sacramento. Yet the locals quoted are perfect examples of the problem:

Continue reading "Goodbye to bricks and mortar"»

HANIF KUREISHI has always seemed to court controversy. From his first screenplay, the Oscar-winning "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985), which featured gay sex, drug-dealers posing as Mullahs and dodgy Pakistani businessmen, Mr Kureishi began offering a rather different immigrant's narrative. Like a post-colonial Philip Roth, his semi-autobiographical novels and screenplays revealed something harsher and raunchier about growing up in London in the 1970s and '80s. The son of a Pakistani father and an English mother, his early works were as angry as they were incisive, quick to explode cultural stereotypes. His first novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1990), about a mixed-race teenager who is desperate to escape his suburban life in South London, is credited with bringing the stories of British Asians and non-whites into the mainstream (with plenty of sex and filthy language). Now taught in some schools, the book has also generated some public friction with his father. With his novel “The Black Album” in 1995, Mr Kureishi presciently explored the growing discontent and radicalism of some young British Muslims. In 2008 the queen named him a Commander of the British Empire.
 
Mr Kureishi's favoured themes of race, class, sexuality and religion all inform the pieces compiled in “Collected Essays”, released by Faber & Faber in Britain earlier this year. Dating from 1980, these essays (most of them previously published and unrevised, unfortunately) tackle politics, cultural changes and the role of the writer and reveal Mr Kureishi's knack for argument. They show his ability to be both provocative and convincing.
 
Mr Kureishi spoke to More Intelligent Life about these essays, his thoughts on David Cameron and why it’s racist to not attack a religion. 

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JOHN CHILDERS would look out of place on any conventional sports team. Aged 57, he has a protruding belly, a long, thick, white beard and an even thicker southern accent. He calls women ma’am and his speech is scattered with words like poh-leese, Illinoize and North ‘Arolina. Childers (pictured top) tells jokes that are dirty—“What's a Yankee? The string at the end of a tampon"—and others that are too racist to repeat. His political views would repel a member of the tea party. President Obama is a particularly sensitive subject. "I wouldn't assassinate him,” Childers joked. “But I'd dig the hole.”
 
These comments may be offensive, but Childers manages to blunt them with friendliness and a deadpan wit. He both embodies and teases at every stereotype of the American South, but somehow hasn’t become a caricature himself. He fits right in to the irreverent, smoky, boozy circuit of one of the country’s fastest-growing sports: competitive barbecue.
 
For the past 15 years Childers has entered his team, Pigs in Heat, in at least a dozen barbecue competitions across the country each season, which usually runs from May to October. On a recent weekend in June he hitched his custom-designed wood smoker (with the Pigs in Heat insignia carved onto its door) to an elaborate trailer hand-painted by two of his “girlfriends”, and drove from Taccoa, Georgia, to Tryon, North Carolina, to compete in the Blue Ridge Barbecue Festival for the sixth year in a row. 
 
“If I miss one, it won’t be this one,” Childers said about two hours before contestants submitted the first of four meats to the judges. “I've made friends here that I cook all over the union with. You see 'em here and six months later you cook with the same guys in Texas. I’ve never met but one enemy. He was from Texas. But I won’t mention no name. I’ve had 15 years cookin' and only one man made me mad."

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I'D HAD no more than a quarter of an hour there, five years before, but it had left me with strong and peculiar memories. The works themselves, the hundreds of sculptures in plaster and marble, had been impressive, but the building that housed them was what stayed in my mind. I’d seen nothing else like it: a massive free-standing Egyptian temple, painted a bright ochre; figures moving in frescoed procession around its outer walls, cream and ochre and plum against black backgrounds; a glazed inner cloister, in which statuary gleamed or hid in stripes of sunlight and shadow; and running round it, red, green or purple rooms in enfilade, like cells or stalls, each holding a white marble hero or goddess. The inspired colour scheme of these rooms, faded and subtilised by time, was unusually striking. It continued in the long central courtyard, frescoed with soaring palm trees, where the great Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen himself was buried, as if in a northern dream of the south.

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AS EUROPE’S leaders watch the crumbling of a political edifice half a century in the making, many are surely wistful for the bold promises of just a few years ago. It was only in 2004 that ex-communist countries were clamouring to enter the European Union. The American misadventure in Iraq helped to make the European model look especially attractive. Remember when books were published with names like "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century"?

Europe’s strengths were reflected in its currency. Ten years ago a euro was worth less than 85 American cents. By 2008 it bought $1.59. Niall Ferguson, a British historian, even suggested—no sniggering—that the euro could displace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

In retrospect perhaps the single currency’s apogee came in 2007, when Jay-Z, an American rapper, featured a stash of €500 notes in the video for his track "Blue Magic". Cash-worship had been central to American hip-hop almost since its inception; consider the Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 hit "C.R.E.A.M." ("Cash Rules Everything Around Me"), with its "dollar, dollar bill" refrain. Jay-Z’s decision to ditch the greenback in place of conspicuous shots of pink euro notes seemed a watershed moment. If the hip-hop world had lost faith in the dollar, how long until OPEC followed?

But soon after Jay-Z’s flirtation with the euro, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world’s credit crunched. This accelerated a shift in economic power away from America and Europe towards fast-growing countries in Asia and elsewhere. Then came Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis. Now, thanks in part to the unwillingness of European leaders to accept that Greece is insolvent, the euro could even break apart.

Rappers have kept with the beat. Wiley, one of the biggest names in grime (roughly a British version of hip hop that takes its cues from reggae and garage rather than funk and soul), has been taking to Twitter to kick the euro when it’s down. Describing it as "Monopoly money" and "deadout", he now wants to be paid only in dollars or pounds.

These insults were Wiley’s response to angry Norwegian fans after he failed to turn up for a gig in Oslo. When he was reminded that Norway was not part of the single currency, he was unrepentant, insisting: "Krona what ever money you use i dont like it and i dont wanna earn it you keep it". Later he pinned his colours to sterling’s mast, asserting that: "As long as that £ stays strong so will i god save the queen".

Still, there’s no need to overdo the gloom. As a piece in this week’s edition of The Economist reminds us, the euro has remained surprisingly resilient throughout the crisis, and is actually 8% higher against the dollar than it was at the beginning of the year. But as Europe anxiously awaits a vote from Greece’s parliament on a drastic austerity, wise rappers are busily figuring out a good rhyme for “Papandreou”.

IT IS quite an experience to walk into the Museum of Modern Art on a carefree summer’s day and be confronted with Boris Mikhailov's photographs. Nineteen larger-than-life pictures surround the viewer. A man lies sleeping, possibly passed out, a striking figure in a black coat against the white snow. Another man faces away from the lens, his bare back revealing blood gathering in the sores. A thin young girl with sallow, translucent skin, shorn hair and a pink shirt, is captured in an odd, distant gaze.

Born in Ukraine, Mr Mikhailov shot these photographs in Kharkov in 1997 and 1998. He visited this industrial Ukrainian city after the fall of the Soviet Union and found that many people, including those who were previously middle class, had been displaced and were now homeless. Mr Mikhailov was disturbed that despite the “shiny wrapper” of Western modernity, people were starving, suffering from disease and resorting to prostitution. He spent a year taking the pictures that would eventually become “Case History", a 400-photograph series and book. The MoMA show is the first time these pictures have been exhibited in the America. Some of the series, shown at a much smaller size, are also on view at the Tate Modern in the show  “Photography: New Documentary Forms” until March 2012.

Mr Mikhailov envisioned himself as a type of modern Dorthea Lange, documenting a class of people that would be otherwise invisible. He makes it impossible for viewers to look away. The figures plead with their eyes, every sore, every wrinkle depicted in Technicolor. “Harsh conditions. He had to make harsh and disturbing pictures,” said Eva Respini, the show's curator. 

Continue reading "Harsh pictures of harsh conditions"»

DAVID MAMET had a problem. After several dozen plays, he was famous enough to feel bad about binning the stacks of notebooks and marginalia that most writers should send straight to recycling. “Why,” he recalls wondering, “had I collected this mass of junk, most of which I never wanted to see again?” So when dealers from the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center came calling, it was a lucky break. Surely there was someone with “a surfeit of time and an interest in the arcane”, who might find such things useful, or at least diverting, he said at the time.

The Mamet papers—300 boxes of drafts, journals and files—were acquired in 2007. It was a coup in a decade of coups for the Ransom Center, which has, since 2000, also acquired the archives of Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and more than 50 other writers. That makes it one of the most successful acquisitions efforts of any research library in recent memory—and one of the most controversial. Many of the complaints have come from Britain, which has never been happy to see British papers go to American universities with deep pockets and hefty endowments.

And the dons have a particular challenge with Tom Staley (pictured), a Joyce scholar and the Texas centre’s director since 1988. Mr Staley is charged with recruiting authors as aggressively as other Texans recruit football stars. He is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the villain in A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel “Possession”—an academic named Mortimer Cropper from an obscure university in New Mexico, who smoothes over his rough manners with stacks of money and even robs a poet’s grave. In 2007 the controversy had been percolating for so long that it earned Mr Staley a long profile in the New Yorker. 

Continue reading "Collecting with a vengeance"»

YOU build yourself one of these.

DAVID MAMET'S latest book, “The Secret Knowledge”—a tale of his bitter disenchantment with liberalism—has so far met with the predictable responses. The conservative Wall Street Journal ran a review that mostly liked it, and the liberal New York Times published one that mostly disliked it. The most accurate appraisal, it seems to me, came from the other side of the pond. The Economist’s reviewer called Mamet’s baroque lucubrations a “tedious and simplistic rant”, yet added that his “vehemence commands a certain admiration”, and praised the playwright for penning sections of the book that were “wonderfully entertaining.” There is nothing liberal or conservative about a literary gift, or about the authenticity of a passion.
           
Here in America, the basic issue of Mamet’s conversion tale seems to have gotten lost. As the doctor father of a friend of mine habitually asked about life: “How did it happen?” How did a remarkably successful playwright and screenwriter become obsessed with the free-market theology of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman? To begin to arrive at an answer, a historical contrast is useful.
           
On the surface, Mamet’s book falls into a long tradition of similar turns to the right. Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer—they were all Jewish intellectuals who began as radical idealists critical of capitalism and ended as anti-government firebrands and apostles of the free-market. Mamet would seem most of all to resemble the conservative curmudgeon Saul Bellow, like Mamet an artist rather than an intellectual, and just as famously associated with Chicago.

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