Catching up on my reading, I came across Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker of Kevin Costner’s new western Horizon: An American Saga, and was struck by the critic’s description of one of the characters as a “sex worker.” It made me wonder if the saloon had a mixologist.
Last night I watched Bill Maher’s conversation with Jerry Seinfeld, on the former’s podcast Club Random, and there were two moments that I could really relate to. The first was when Maher talked about writing the New Rule that ends his show every week – how he loves “tinkering” with it until it’s exactly where he wants it to be – and the second was when he gave Seinfeld a map of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, the layout of which I still have in my head, having attended five times as a kid. As Maher suggested, it was an age – and we were of an age – when corporations were still seen as forces for good.
Tuesday night I watched The Zone of Interest, the excellent film about the fictionalized home life of the commandant of Auschwitz, whose house abuts the wall of the concentration camp.
The next day, in The Spectator, I read in Charles Moore’s column that he too had recently watched the film. And he had wondered why, along with the warnings of “smoking" and "alcohol use,” the word “genocide” hadn’t been added.
I’m behind in my reading, which means I only recently read Yascha Mounk’s brilliant piece in the Easter issue of The Spectator: “Why the British think differently from Americans.” He notes that opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post are logical and unsurprising. “In American journalism, to be right – or, at any rate, to argue for the position that the right people consider to be reasonable at the time – is much more important than to be brilliant or entertaining.” Further on he states: “For American journalists, the cardinal sin is to be wrong. For British journalists, the cardinal sin is to be boring.”
I agree with him wholeheartedly (though I wonder how strongly writing in a litigious society contributes to an obsession with accuracy - and a tendency toward blandness). The two weeklies I read are The Spectator and The New Yorker, and I get more pleasure out of the former than I do out of the latter, which is earnest and informative but not especially enjoyable, even, lately, many of its cartoons. The one exception is Anthony Lane, but Lane is a Brit and, notably, was recently relieved of his movie reviewing chores.
I'm off to the nation's capital for a few days. Will be back here next week.
Last night we finished watching Midsummer Night, a charming, five-episode Norwegian series, and, because it came up, and because I knew it had been popular, we started watching Killing Eve. We gave it about 35 minutes, then turned it off. I have no patience for shows during which I envision a writers’ room full of hip young people – apparently many of them, these days, Ivy League grads – with no experience in the world they’re depicting. Their goal, it seems, is to churn out dialogue that is sharp and clever irrespective of whether it has any relation to reality. This is the problem I had with Succession; the writing was too good to be true. In The Sopranos, and the French series The Bureau, the writing was brilliant, but it also had the ring of verisimilitude.
This weekend Andy Golebiowski interviewed me about my new memoir on his delightful Polish American Radio Program. You can listen to the entire show, and hear some good music, or you can go to minute 42 and just listen to us: https://soundcloud.com/webrradio/sets/the-polish-american-program