Trump
theartsdesk
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes in technology in the years since, "television", as Bordo points out, has become estranged from its material status. “In 2020, ‘television’ is what we watch, not the material object we watch it on.” Combining memoir with social and political history, her book is about our changing relationship with TV and the box's far-reaching consequences for our Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When the world was in lockdown and performers turned to TikTok to keep in touch with their fans, Sarah Cooper started using the online platform for short videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's speeches, and they quickly went global. Not many people can say they owe worldwide fame to Covid and America's worst-ever president.Now Cooper has a very good special on Netflix, and it shows that there is so much more to the actress and writer than her TikTok fame. But then those short videos showed what a great actor she is, with every twitch of the eye and curl of the lip neatly capturing Trump's Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Build the wall!” exhorted Trump, at rally after rally back in the days when we’d all acknowledged his moral repugnancy but still believed he could never attain the presidency. And Trump has indeed built a wall, one that divides Republicans from Democrats in ways unimaginable even during the psychodrama of the Nixon years; a wall that has divided America in ways that will take a generation or more to heal – as Boris Johnson and his Brexit project has done in Britain.Even though no one I knew personally ever wanted Brexit, I always felt that if ever there was a referendum we would be out, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Deep from the heart of Trumpland comes Cuck, a deeply unpleasant film about a totally repellent character. Directed and co-written by Rob Lambert, the film opened simultaneously last autumn in the States with Joker, with which it shares an overlapping interest in societal outsiders pushed to the brink and beyond by their pathologies. Weirdly, too, both movies feature ailing mums who demand to be bathed by their emasculated, increasingly unhinged sons – parts taken by Frances Conroy in Joker and a take-no-prisoners Sally Kirkland this time out. (Onetime Oscar nominee Kirkland also gets a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde sets out his stall in Brexit: Pursued by a Bear from the first line: “We meet in diabolical circumstances.” These aren't good times, he says, with two major leaders in the Western world whose relationship with the truth is merely that of passing acquaintance. Add in the UK's continuing divisions over Brexit, and diabolical seems apt.We know where Forde is coming from. He's a proud Remainer and Blairite, a former adviser to the Labour Party and a vehement critic of Jeremy Corbyn – who gets it in the neck just as much as Boris Johnson does. Forde sees little difference between Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy has been pondering how to react to oppression, and his own music’s obsolescence. What use is a rock band’s eleventh album at the best of times, he’s wondered, let alone in these worse ones under Trump?Wilco’s response is not to mirror their President in futile, raging protest. Instead, Ode to Joy is mostly gentle, built on acoustic strums of Tweedy’s toy guitar, and the relentless crunch of Glenn Kotchke’s percussion, which hammers against the protagonist’s self-deceit in “Everyone Hides”. Though static crackles at its margins, the music rises with purposeful optimism, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This album’s title began as a reaction to fractiousness under Trump, but gained more intimate meaning when drummer Janet Weiss quit Sleater-Kinney shortly before release. With production by St Vincent’s Annie Clark pushing these knotty indie-rock veterans towards gliding electro-pop, the musical differences Weiss cited after 22 years of shared service are obvious throughout. Sleater-Kinney’s abrasive, post-riot grrrl American feminism, forged in the idealistic Nineties hotbed of Olympia, Washington, is the core of their enduring importance. The Center Won’t Hold coherently develops their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finding snapshots to characterise Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign and its aftermath is a tall order. There are so many, and assembling them could result in a wearying cavalcade of the all-too familiar. Whether in book form – such as Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury – or film – say, the new Steve Bannon documentary The Brink – the net result is largely to validate existing viewpoints. Such well-trodden ground begs for new approaches.With the Trump-themed 45, Field Music’s David Brewis reassumes the School of Language persona he last adopted in 2014. Over 10 tracks and 33 minutes, he has Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Donald Trump’s former strategist, alt-right propagandist and all-round provocateur Steve Bannon comes under the spotlight of a smart, dynamic, behind-closed-doors documentary, as he attempts to turn his brand of far-right populism into a global movement. Adroitly mixing fly-on-the-wall material with news archive, director Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) follows Bannon as he campaigns behind the scenes of the 2018 US mid-terms and casts his beady eye on the EU elections. In so doing, she offers a chilling glimpse into the reactionary forces that are seeking to exploit Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the double-edged Chinese proverb has it, “may you live in interesting times.” Screenwriter Russell T Davies evidently thanks that’s exactly where we’re at, and his new six-part drama Years and Years (BBC One) is a bold, sprawling but – as far as episode one is concerned at least – amorphous attempt to assess the state of play.From Queer as Folk to Doctor Who and Cucumber, Davies’s favourite themes have included LGBT issues, science fiction, left-ish politics and a fondness for soaps. All of them reappear here (although sadly, the caustic humour and searing dramatic focus he brought to A Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chimerica is a stage-to-screen adaptation that has certainly kept up with the times. When it opened at the Almeida back in 2013 – a West End transfer followed, along with an Olivier award for Best New Play – Lucy Kirkwood’s drama was (very loosely) about the geopolitical symbiosis between the world’s two largest economies, China and America (hence, the title). It was seen through the prism of a story that began back in 1989 on Tiananmen Square and continued through to the present day.Channel 4’s new four-part drama, adroitly directed by Michael Keillor, retains the original’s sense of Read more ...