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Culture The Raw Concrete of America Brady Corbet’s Brutalist threatens to crush its audience. Credit: Andriy Baidak/Shutterstock The architectural term “Brutalism” is often subject to a false etymology. Most people think it refers to the force exerted by some of the more muscular Brutalist buildings, but in reality the term describes the materials employed. Brutalism draws its name from béton brut, French for “raw concrete.” But as far as most people are concerned, that’s beside the point: The false etymology may as well be the true one. And many Brutalist buildings are in fact massy structures that are intended to overawe—or oppress—with their monumental austerity. Brady Corbet’s Brutalist draws on the popular conception of the architectural movement at the expense of its factual reality. His film, which runs at nearly four hours with an intermission, is not too concerned with the genuinely fascinating story of how Walter Gropius and his disciples transformed the American architectural landscape after World War II. Instead, Corbet is more interested in using Brutalism as a rhetorical tool to teach his audience a lesson about the deadening, brutal force that, in his view, the American empire exerts on its subjects.   The story follows the fortunes of the Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) after he flees the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe to seek his freedom in the United States. Almost from the film’s opening shots, Corbet shows that this dream is a delusion. Tóth emerges from the bowels of a ship in the New York harbor in a noisy, disorienting, and exhilarating scene to behold the Statue of Liberty—upside down. Meanwhile, in a voice over, his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), stuck behind the Iron Curtain, reads to him that famous line of Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” My wife walked out of the film halfway through its run, but she may as well have left after that first scene. It’s not as if anything different happens in the ensuing three and a half hours. Once Corbet has established his theme, he never bothers to develop on it; he only restates his thesis again and again until the audience feels as if it has been crushed by one of Tóth’s creations.  Tóth settles with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture-maker in Philadelphia, who is enslaved by his desire to assimilate: He marries a shiksa, he becomes Catholic, he even changes his Hungarian surname to Miller. Tóth regards him with contempt. Soon, he encounters the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an ersatz Charles Foster Kane, who is of course enslaved to his own money, but also to a driving desire to be thought of as a serious, intellectual man. Van Buren, in turn, enslaves Tóth, all but forcing him to design and build a large, self-consciously modern community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And of course, Tóth enslaves himself, first to drugs to numb his despair, and then to despair itself, as he comes to see his American experience as little more than an extension of his detainment in the concentration camps.  In case anyone in the audience isn’t tracking with the brutality of it all, Corbet helpfully includes a scene where Van Buren rapes a drunken Tóth while making antisemitic observations about the causes of the Holocaust. (Yes, yes, we get it—America has raped the world….) And in case that brainy symbol isn’t clear enough, shortly after, he restates the film’s thesis in the mouth of Erzsébet, who declares to her dejected husband, “You were right, this place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat—this whole country is rotten.” And so it goes until the very end, when Corbet unveils his final exhibit: At the first Venice Biennale, Tóth’s niece reveals in a speech that his forced labor for Van Buren was really just an extension of his Holocaust experience, that what his patron has intended as a monument to a modern, forward-looking America was in fact a re-envisioning of the death houses at Buchenwald.  I recount all this not to criticize the anti-American animus of The Brutalist, as many other critics have already done. I am more concerned with its artlessness. Armond White, in a characteristically insightful essay at National Review, mockingly writes that Corbet has initiated himself into the warped pantheon of “Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier and their trite acolyte Yorgos Lanthimos.” There is some truth in this: Corbet certainly operates in the same heavy-handed nihilistic milieu as his Euro forebears. But he doesn’t rise to their level artistically. Say what you will about Haneke’s perverse Piano Teacher, but there is something coldly beguiling about Code Unknown. And criticize the excesses of Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac series all you like, but there is something weirdly tender about Breaking the Waves. No such favorable sentiment could be expressed about The Brutalist. Even using VistaVision as a crutch, visually, the film could at best be called technically accomplished, and even then only in the pejorative sense applied to the apple-polishing student. At the screening I attended, we were given brochures that were designed to look like gallery programs at a retrospective of Tóth’s work. The point, I think, was to emphasize the realism, the truthfulness of The Brutalist. But I left the theater disappointed and dejected by its falsehood—especially its lack of interest in its nominal subject. It was only the next day, as I entered my local Brutalist landmark, the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, and settled down under the fluorescent lights in one of its windowless cubicles to work, that I started to feel better, my mind a little more free. Maybe that was a delusion. Or maybe it was the raw concrete of America. The post The Raw Concrete of America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture The Human Hollywood The LA fires bring to mind the less rarefied side of the stars. (By Maks Ershov/Shutterstock) I have never set foot in California, but as I watched the awful, authentically apocalyptic images this week of Los Angeles overtaken by fire and smoke, I could not help but react with something like heartache. Scenes of such grave devastation would be shocking no matter where they occurred, but somehow they hit me harder for having befallen Los Angeles—a place, as unlikely as it may sound to my faithful conservative readership, that I have long felt an unlikely, long-distance, but genuine connection with. Although I live and work in Columbus, Ohio, I have spent much of my career writing about the movies, which means that I have spent a fair amount of time interviewing, talking with, or simply getting to know some of the people who make them. You may not have heard, but such people tend to live and work in Hollywood, or at least spend much of their time there. What follows are some of my adventures talking to Hollywood people over the phone. My encounters, however remote or impersonal, with actors, directors, and other moviemakers have generally been positive: In my experience, people who earn a fulsome living by entertaining the public tend to be agreeable and eager to please, especially those veterans who practiced their trade in an earlier, pre-woke version of Hollywood. One of the first memorable interviews I conducted was with the actor-producer Norman Lloyd, who will be familiar to Hitchcock fans as the malevolent-looking man who tumbles from the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur and might be known to more recent generations of moviegoers as the irascible headmaster in the Robin Williams movie Dead Poets Society. In 2004, when I called him for an interview about his mentor Orson Welles, Lloyd was 89 years old and in no mood for nonsense: He admonished me to speak more loudly and more clearly, and he took exception to an early question that, by his lights, had no bearing on our agreed-upon topic. Somehow, I managed to keep him from hanging up on me, and as we got accustomed to each other, he eventually expounded freely on Welles, Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, and Jean Renoir.  In fact, I have found that movie people enjoy rehashing their greatest hits. In 2017, I had the opportunity to interview Robert Redford, and although I fulfilled my assignment to ask him about his work with director Michael Ritchie—who directed Redford in the films Downhill Racer and The Candidate—Redford eventually got on the topic of the genesis and development of All the President’s Men. What was I going to do—ask him to stop? No less verbose were Bruce Dern and Al Pacino. When I interviewed them for various magazine or newspaper pieces, Patty Duke was all too happy to tell me about making The Patty Duke Show, which had gone off the air some four decades earlier, and the B-movie producer Roger Corman was positively delighted to tell me about his experience making movies for the drive-in circuit in the 1960s. Sometimes I even managed to ask stars about matters of local interest: The celebrity impressionist Rich Little agreed to an interview about his long-ago appearance with the Kenley Players, an Ohio summer theater troupe; the actress Anjelica Huston was great fun when discussing her unrealized dream of adapting for the screen novels by Dawn Powell, a great writer born in Mount Gilead, Ohio. My favorite show-business contacts, though, were those old-time pros who toiled behind-the-scenes. I got to know Dann Cahn, the gregarious chief editor of the sitcom I Love Lucy who left me voicemails that proudly, and invariably, identified where he was calling from: “This is Dann Cahn in Hollywood.” I was once “patched through” to talk to the famous Western producer A.C. Lyles while he was on the lot of Paramount Pictures. One good friend was the editor Bud Molin, who worked on many Carl Reiner comedies and who was living proof that Republicans did exist in that land out West. Knowing my own political perspective, Bud once emailed me a clip of an ancient movie starring Bob Hope in which Hope, having been given the definition of a zombie, says: “You mean like Democrats?”   Did my interactions with Hollywood from afar leave me star struck? Quite the opposite. Even the biggest stars, or the moviemakers I admired the most, seemed quite human in a phone conversation—their memories failed them, and they rambled like anybody else. In the middle of an interview, Carl Reiner asked me how to navigate the Internet Movie Database.  For churning out films of questionable quality and moral value, present-day Hollywood deserves its reputation as having an often toxic influence on the public, but let us not forget that the fortieth president emerged from that cauldron—and, on the basis of the log of films viewed by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as preserved on the Reagan Library’s website, he continued to take in the pictures even while running the country: What did he think of E.T., viewed at Camp David in June of 1982? What was going through his mind as he rewatched his own classic, Knute Rockne, All American, in August of 1982 at the White House and October of 1987 at Camp David? Why did he view the Harrison Ford movie Witness back-to-back in February of 1985? In any event, if Reagan found time away from conquering the Evil Empire to watch The Natural and Pale Rider, Hollywood couldn’t be all bad, could it? As for me, my Hollywood encounters have left me with an abiding affection for Hollywood people—and the opportunity, from time to time, to say to friends “I know that person!” when one of their movies turns up on television. The post The Human Hollywood appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs A New Monroe Doctrine, or a Federalized ‘Five Eyes’?  Competing grand-strategic visions of Donald Trump’s new American century are emerging.  (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) If one has to move beyond the relentless stupidity of social media in the past few weeks, it is easy to perceive that the singular line of thought that has most animated the right is one of annexation and conquest. One might cautiously divide the American political landscape into three competing archetypes: the revolutionary and often ideological puritans, the equilibrium-seeking landed gentries, and the fearless frontiersmen. The coordination between the three raised the greatest power in history; conflicts among them have led to catastrophes, and, in one particular instance, a civil war.  Every man, whether new or old, native-born or immigrant, somehow finds themselves in one of these archetypes, and his conduct reflects their intellectual proximity. Possibly America’s greatest era followed the Civil War, where a combination of ultra-republican nationalism, small-i imperialism, the prudence of the native-born oligarchy, and a restrained policy of balance of power abroad—including the last instance an official American “proclamation of neutrality” was issued—led to massive expansion of American power and prestige, not to mention American frontiers. Donald Trump is the closest to a Gilded Age patrician in our modern age. His calls to “retake” Panama, buy Greenland, and “unite” Canada would be understood viscerally by anyone in the late 19th and early 20th century. Not surprising, that it has received support and rationalization from even some unusual corners of the cognoscenti.  So what are the stakes? Trump’s Greenland-lust in particular has been called a return to a “new Monroe Doctrine” by various commentators. It is in line with “the scramble for the Arctic, one of the new ‘Great Games’ of the 21st century,” and “suggests the recalibrating of US priorities toward a more manageable ‘continental’ strategy—a new Monroe Doctrine—aimed at reasserting full hegemony over what it deems to be its natural sphere of influence, the Americas and the northern Atlantic.” A move away from the last quarter-century of crusading for democratic peace, the new “focus will be on shoring up the most important American interests at home and close to home, avoiding needless conflicts and adventurism in far-off places with marginal ties to American interests, and most importantly of all, restoring America’s confidence as a great country with a bright future.”  The geopolitical reasoning is undeniable if one looks at a North Atlantic map. Greenland is a massive landmass three times the size of Texas, a population that would be a sparse crowd in a mid-tier football stadium, an enormous untapped energy reserve, a cache of rare earth minerals needed to fuel the new industrial revolution, a whole new frontier to settle, and an unsinkable naval base to balance rival great power designs on the Arctic shipping route. It is also within the Western hemisphere; the capital of Greenland is closer to Washington, DC than to Copenhagen.  “The northernmost US base — only about 1,500km from the North Pole — is the most potent symbol of how vital Greenland is to American security,” Financial Times notes. “But its geostrategic importance is only likely to increase as climate change reshapes the Arctic, opening new trading routes close to North America and putting Greenland at the heart of the growing polar tussle between the US, China, and Russia.” Desire to own and explore Greenland isn’t something new, either. It was a New Hampshire man, Charles Francis Hall, who documented much of what was known of the landmass’s Inuit population during a Greenland expedition in the 1870s; he was followed by another American, Robert Perry. Secretary of State William Seward and U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Maurice Egan wanted to buy Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark in 1867 and again in 1910. The final attempt was immediately after the Second World War in 1946, when Denmark rebuffed Secretary of State James Byrnes but offered basing rights in return.  Buying territory from Denmark also has a precedent. In 1915, Denmark was coerced to give away the Danish West Indies, now known as the Virgin Islands, for a sum of around $25 million. Seward’s justification to acquire Greenland wasn’t just materialistic, but philosophical. His commissioned 1868 report states, In considering the future of Greenland, we cannot confine ourselves entirely to materialistic considerations. Nations have other resources besides those which figures can express to us by statistical tables. If a country has in it the means of developing man in any way, physically or mentally, it may be said to be rich to that extent… they possess, as it were, the key to many problems of science, and the answer to many questions which are at present discussed by geographers. Certainly, new truths are as precious acquisitions as new mines or new fishing grounds. Our new Gilded Age oligarchs have another idea, and that’s not just the occupation and absorption of Canada. Recently, the notion of a consolidated Anglosphere gained traction among certain circles, especially with the institution of AUKUS, the naval pact between the U.S., the UK, and Australia. When Dan Hannan, arch-Brexiteer and a peer in the House of Lords, tweeted that “we bring together the five great Anglosphere democracies in a diplomatic, military and economic union, including unhindered free trade, free movement of labour and an institutionalized military alliance,” Elon Musk replied that that was a good idea.  The idea is appealing—naturally short of a political union, which is practically impossible given different and incompatible governance structures and history. The Five Eyes, as the Anglophone powers are known in their intelligence-alliance capacity, possess about 20 percent of the globe by landmass, around 35 percent of global GDP, and 25 percent of total national wealth. They also possess the top universities and technological research, and are at least still somewhat loosely tied by a memory of Anglo-Protestant culture, ethics, frugality, language, and a sense of public propriety, self-sufficiency, and fair play.  The potential drawbacks, even in a federalized trade system, are nevertheless huge. Most of the Anglosphere outside the U.S. has socialized healthcare, a huge economic drag. Britain and Canada have huge Islamist and Sikh extremism issues, so free movement is out of question between the five. And, unless every country within the Anglosphere decides on spending three percent on defense, America should be unwilling to defend them in extremis.  The U.S. needs more frontiers to expand and settle, as well as more landmass for both rare earth mineral mining, energy, and military basing. This will enable further technological advancement by homegrown tech giants and, as a result, further global tech dominance; this, in turn, will enable more and more jobs, houses, and families. This growth will also need compatible talent, and, instead of a new mass of H1-Bs, it can reprise the 19th century by simply drawing top-tier talents from within the Anglosphere and Western Europe, who are already culturally and linguistically compatible and will not need further, possibly forcible, integration attempts.  The Greenland situation in particular can be solved by allowing Denmark to have special bilateral trade and employment privileges. What Scandinavian in his right mind would deny his kids jobs in America at American-led companies, a few hours’ flight from home?  A more moderate synthesis of the two instincts would go back to the drawing board of questioning what are the core American interests. The discipline of international relations doesn’t allow natural experiments, but some trends are visible, allowing some assumptions. The world is multipolar with rival predatory great powers, and the U.S. is both unable and unwilling to defend against the return of territorial conquest by either rivals such as Russia and Azerbaijan, or “allies” such as Turkey and Israel. The world is already in a new era of colonialism.  American security interests are also in expansion and hegemonic supremacy, at least in the Western Hemisphere. Even the founder of this magazine once argued for absorbing most of Canada. Donald Trump should unleash his inner 19th-century patrician and lean into this desire for grandeur. Let the age of neutered, impotent managerialism be well and truly over.  The post A New Monroe Doctrine, or a Federalized ‘Five Eyes’?  appeared first on The American Conservative.

UTL COMMENT:- Does this not suggest that the whole thing was planned? Who owns these companies - ummmm Blackrock / State Street ---- say no more.....

History changing... The post How did Oasis get discovered? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

It almost never happened. The post The shuddering story of Shirley Manson’s audition for Garbage first appeared on Far Out Magazine.