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At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘One Night in Miami’, 18 February 2021

... song he thinks appropriate to the venue. The song is called ‘Tammy’. The audience, exclusively white, old and rich, is not charmed. A woman leans towards her partner and says: ‘I preferred it when Debbie Reynolds sang it.’The cruelty here has nothing to do with the quality of Cooke’s singing. It lies in Cooke’s failure to understand that an ...

Bitov’s Secrets

Michael Glenny, 18 October 1984

... Department. The reviews, reports and other articles are in two categories – ‘yellow’ and ‘white’. ‘Yellow’ is the in-house description of the line taken on all cultural news from capitalist countries (kapstran in Russian Newspeak: Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’ captures with the precision – and prevision – of genius the Soviet propensity to make ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Detroit’, 21 September 2017

Detroit 
directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
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... has one other important element. The residents at the motel have a discussion about race and how white people routinely subjugate black people. This seems sound enough until one black person pulls out a gun and shoots another to prove his point. There is shock and horror all around, even after the gun turns out to be a starter pistol and the target alive and ...

Sucking up

Michael Rogin, 12 May 1994

Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War 
by John MacArthur.
California, 274 pp., £10, January 1994, 0 520 08398 9
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Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad – 35 Years in the World’s War Zones 
by Peter Arnett.
Bloomsbury, 463 pp., £17.99, March 1994, 0 7475 1680 4
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... John MacArthur documents in sickening detail the love affair between the media and the Pentagon/White House during the Gulf War and the months of foreplay that made it possible. (One of the features of what Dan Rather called ‘suck-up coverage’ was that media personnel who participated in it engaged in widespread mea culpas after it was over.) The media ...

Vagueness

Hans Keller, 1 May 1980

Michael Tippett: An Introductory Study 
by David Matthews.
Faber, 112 pp., £5.95, December 1979, 0 571 10954 3
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Tippett and his Operas 
by Eric Walter White.
Barrie and Jenkins, 142 pp., £7.97, January 1980, 0 214 20573 8
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... confusion invariably inspires confusion. C.G. Jung, a mind of confused genius, was a hell-send for Michael Tippett, a veritable genius of confusion – who now, celebrating the 75th year of his consistently lively life, inspires sundry confusions in his commentators, and even in those who comment on his commentators: ‘...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Prometheus’, 5 July 2012

Prometheus 
directed by Ridley Scott.
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... our creators, they are our older cousins. The film looks great. The landscapes, mostly grey and white, are full of sombre beauty, and you have no idea how well-endowed the executive suite on an up-to-date spaceship can be – I mean will be. There is an android who makes cups of tea, learns ancient languages and models his diction and appearance on Peter ...

Living in the Aftermath

Michael Gorra, 19 June 1997

The God of Small Things 
by Arundhati Roy.
Flamingo, 340 pp., £15.99, June 1997, 0 00 225586 3
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... this for me,’ the Orange-drink Lemondrink Man said, handing Estha his penis through his soft white two-by-two dhoti. ‘If you could just hold this, I’ll get you your drink. Orange? Lemon?’    Estha held it because he had to. And eventually the little boy’s hand is stickily full of what looks to him like ‘egg ...

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century 
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9
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The Time of Our Time 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0
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... feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the introduction. He identifies white supremacy as another constitutive feature of the United States, one that became ever more pervasive after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one which, according to Evans, white Americans have had more difficulty coming ...

Life on the Town

Michael Wood, 22 May 1997

The Farewell Symphony 
by Edmund White.
Chatto, 504 pp., £16.99, May 1997, 0 7011 3621 9
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... Past is quietly deliberate, but of course the characters in Proust died of time, not of Aids. White wants to register the disaster, but refuses to memorialise the dead only as victims. The title of the novel, as we learn on one of the last pages, comes from Haydn: ‘I kept thinking of Haydn’s The Farewell Symphony. In the last movement more and more of ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Celine Song’s ‘Past Lives’, 19 October 2023

... see a woman and two men sitting at a bar, while the unseen speakers make guesses: ‘I think the white guy and the Asian girl are a couple and the Asian guy is her brother’; ‘Or the Asian girl and the Asian guy are a couple, and the white guy is their American friend.’ But their leading refrain is ‘I don’t ...

Power and Prejudice

Michael Dummett, 7 October 1982

Now you do know 
by John Downing.
War on Want Campaigns, 80 pp., £1, December 1980, 0 905990 10 2
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... hopefully entitled it Now you do know, he expresses in his Preface pessimism about whether many white people in Britain will read it, or will believe it if they do. I do not intend in this review to summarise its contents: it is already very compressed, and quickly read. Instead, I will try to remove the principal obstacle to people’s reading it or taking ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Da Vinci Code’, 8 June 2006

The Da Vinci Code 
directed by Ron Howard.
May 2006
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... directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of ...

Ronbo

Michael Rogin, 13 October 1988

Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North 
by Ben Bradlee.
Grafton, 572 pp., £14.95, September 1988, 0 246 13364 3
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For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington 
by Donald Regan.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 09 173622 6
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... as social body, as spectacle. It would be hard to credit the resulting confusion in the Reagan White House between the personal and the political, the historical and the imaginary, were not the evidence offered by the President and his circle so compelling. Guts and Glory portrays Oliver North, who enacted the anti-Communist part of Reagan. For the ...

Watching a black man in the shower

Michael Wood, 12 September 1991

Young Soul Rebels 
directed by Isaac Julien.
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Diary of a Young Soul Rebel 
by Isaac Julien and Colin MacCabe.
BFI, 218 pp., £10.95, September 1991, 0 85170 310 0
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... on the disco deck; punk and soul styles are jumbled on the dance floor. Men and women, black and white, gays and straights, mix easily if loudly, having a good time. Two men are seen kissing, but only a newcomer, and our camera, linger over the event. The general effect is raucous and chaotic, but not strident or violent. The punks don’t really dance, they ...

The Shinka

Michael Rose, 21 June 1984

... not from L but from Newsweek. So L’s mom will not be with us this day as I am wed in the little white Episcopalian church to the President’s daughter. Nor will her Bostonian kin, who took against him when he went South and registered Republican, not knowing this was the only decent thing to do in a county where the Democrats stood to Goldwater’s ...

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