Popular Culture

Daumier painting

Armond White is the movie critic for National Review. In 2010, as then-chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, he addressed the group’s annual award banquet. Moviedom VIPs attended: Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, others. None liked what they heard. An essay based on that talk appeared afterward in First Things under the title “Do Movie Critics Matter?”
Most editors and publishers today cut out or limit criticism’s traditional media function. Journalistic standards have changed so drastically that, when I took the podium at the film circle’s dinner and quoted Pauline Kael’s 1974 alarm, “Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising,” the gala’s audience responded with an audible hush—not applause.
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Readings: A Ramble

Holidays are for reading. Everything slows on a three-day weekend. It gives us time to read those titles that call to us as we rush past them on an ordinary day. That’s the old reading technology, the kind I love to surround myself with. Then come the blog posts waiting at the bottom of a string of bookmarks in one browser or another. In some respects, the greatest urgency attaches to these. They exist in the ether and might not be there when I want them. Continue Reading
Brinton strikes a pose

The Brinton phenomenon is essential to grasping the degree of malice toward normality—or heterosexualism as queer theory puts it—that has seeped, like hydrogen flouride, into our culture at the highest levels. My schadenfreude index skyrocketed when Sam Brinton was arrested for twice stealing women’s luggage. Mainstream staff writers, though, had to do an egg walk. Careful ones reported along the lines of: “Brinton is non-binary. His pronouns are they and them. They is married to Kevin Rieck. I’m cool with that. Continue Reading
Two Flags; Two Wars; Two poets

My town hall boasts two flag poles. One flies the requisite Stars and Stripes. But it is the companion pole standing next to it that stirs the local blood. This one flaunts the colors dearest to a well-appointed community that congratulates itself on its civilized progressivism. Ukraine’s bicolor tops the second pole. It is paired with the rainbow colors of the LBGTQ Nation. The duet proclaims the town fathers’ common purpose: celebration of those chic causes that thrill The Better Sort. Continue Reading
Huey Newton

The violent bear it away. That title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel still resonates. Some relentless atavism is at work in our culture, a monstrous irrationality that awakens what O’Connor called “the stuff of which madmen and fanatics are made.” Violence, no longer shunned, is now an accepted political tool. The attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh—preceded by U.S Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to enforce federal law against protesters at justices’ homes—exposed the fragile divide between constituted order and willed anarchy. Continue Reading