"Rock was the greatest single social changing force of the 20th century..."

"And here we are 25 years into the 21st century, and rock couldn't be less of an influence on the social political order. Does anybody think that that's kind of strange?"

Asks Billy Corgan.

👀 Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan Finds It ‘Strange’ That Rock Music Has Fizzled Out

“There are forces in the world that go out of their way to marginalize particular voices … because they refuse to accept the given narrative … Rock was the greatest single social changing… pic.twitter.com/OPD0pxIEQ4

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) January 10, 2026

"'One Battle After Another' is a movie that connects with the moment we’re in like nothing you’ve seen...."

"As the United States gets pushed, day by day, closer and closer to autocracy, that’s a situation that ought to be setting everyone in the country on edge. Yet it’s part of the nature of autocracy to narcotize people into numbness, delusion, fear, and a kind of self-perpetuating apathy.... 'One Battle After Another,' on the other hand, is a wildly entertaining, awesomely unpredictable screwball political thriller that on some level forces you to confront… the fate of our fucking country.... [I]t’s also the kind of galvanic and enveloping movie that imprints its themes onto your headspace.... The red-state demo has tended to shun films... which it views as liberal-left agit-prop, but I suspect that there’s something about the big vision of 'One Battle After Another' that could prove uniquely inviting.... The film depicts an underground band of revolutionary guerrillas, but instead of holding them up as shining heroes, it portrays them in shades of gray, spotlighting their naïveté and selfishness...."

Writes Owen Gleiberman, in "'One Battle After Another,' With Its Thriller Vision of Authoritarianism, Is the Rare Movie That Could Rule the Cultural Conversation/Paul Thomas Anderson's wild swing of a movie connects with the moment we’re in like nothing you’ve seen"
 (Variety).

And here's Ben Shapiro's view of the movie, from the right:

Austin's heinous new logo.

Reminds me of when NYC spent millions on bringing arts and culture back to the city after Covid. It was hard to believe it wasn’t an SNL skit pic.twitter.com/0dYhP2bWna

— King Francis the Turd (@YourTurdliness) September 5, 2025

"Doesn’t Shakespeare begin 'Twelfth Night'... with the infatuated Duke Orsino uttering the famous line, 'If music be the food of love, play on'?"

"Saheem Ali’s production hasn’t cut it, but merely decided that Orsino can wait. By flipping the first two scenes, and giving Viola the play’s final line, Ali has recentered a character who has been known to get lost in the overstuffedness of this comedy. And by having her speak initially in Swahili — 'Je, hii ni nchi gani, bwana?,' or 'What country is this, sir?,' she asks the captain — Ali establishes her firmly as a person arriving, in unaccustomedly desperate straits, on the shore of a foreign land, Illyria. Sounds political, doesn’t it...."

From "'Twelfth Night' Review: Lupita Nyong’o in Illyria/The actress is luminous, alongside her look-alike brother Junior Nyong’o, Sandra Oh and Peter Dinklage, in Shakespeare’s comedy at the newly revived Delacorte Theater" (NYT).

"Yeah. I mean, man, each book, you get more right wing. I have to say, you get, like, the last one. I remember you were on my show, and it was, like..."

"... one line in it that was — and I said to you on the air — like, are you implying that that, Trump, that election was stolen by Biden... you were kinda like hedging it. And now you're like, you, you...."

Bill Maher lapses into near-babbling in the presence of David Mamet, who remained calm and quietly eloquent. The quoted part begins around 5 minutes in. 

It gets quite awkward, and Mamet finally — close to the 16-minute mark — frames a question: "How would you like this part of the conversation to end so that we can move on to something else? What would end it to your satisfaction?"

It's such a writerly — multi-level — phrasing. An ordinary person would continue the decline, carping in the usual lefty-against-righty fashion. Someone with a little more distance and self-possession might say, Can't we talk about something else? But Mamet creates the scene in which he's the character who's doing something cagey with the Maher character. He's insulting him in a devious way with this sarcastic notion that he might be there to please him: What would Maher like, what would give him satisfaction? And the key word is end: "How would you like this part of the conversation to end... What would end it...?" Is he threatening to walk out? The dramatic tension is sublime. Maher, you idiot! You have the great dramatist beside you. He's giving you so many points of entry into a beautiful dialogue. Take one! 

So frustrating! Worth listening to though, for Mamet. Here's his new book: "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" (commission earned).

"Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel..."

"... not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity."

Writes Merve Emre, in "An Unsentimental Education/Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals" (NYRB).

I know you're unlikely to have the needed subscription, but that essay will appear in a new edition of the novel, coming out next month (so wait for that edition if you're thinking of buying the book).

And I would encourage you to click that link if only to see the top of the article, which is illustrated with an Elliott Erwitt photograph, "Women with a sculpture personifying the alma mater at Columbia University, New York City, 1955."

That's one of the best photos I've ever seen! And it is evocative today, with Columbia so much in the news.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" got a lot of attention when it came out in 2004, and it will be interesting to see reactions to it 20 years later. 2004 was the first year of this blog. I read the book.

"Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience."

"When we interrogate systems of power and challenge historical narratives that center whiteness and colonial dominance, we do not divide, we restore balance."

Said Nicholas Galanin, a sculptor of "Indigenous heritage" who produced a work called "The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole)" ("a wooden totem disappearing into floral wallpaper" (image here)).

From "Taking Aim at Smithsonian, Trump Wades Into Race and Biology/His executive order faulted an exhibit which 'promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct,' a widely held position in the scientific community'" (NYT).

What are you holding with care and not suppressing? What are you interrogating and centering?

Was sculpture disappearing into the floral wallpaper of academic jargon?

"I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble."

Said Richard Serra, quoted in "For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. He was known as the Man of Steel. But the sculptor was also an eternal poet, reshaping our perception of space, says our critic" (NYT).

The Times critic Michael Kimmelman begins:

... Richard Serra died yesterday....

 It continues:

At the bobdylan subreddit this morning, somebody asks "Why doesn't Dylan speak out more about politics?"

Here.

And somebody quotes something that I track down to this 1984 Rolling Stone interview:

Do you follow the political scene or have any sort of fix on what the politicians are talking about this election year?

I think politics is an instrument of the Devil. Just that clear. I think politics is what kills; it doesn’t bring anything alive. Politics is corrupt; I mean, anybody knows that.

The Art of the Mug Shot.

From "The Trump Mug Shot’s Art-Historical Lineage/Assessing the forty-fifth President’s Georgia photo op in the context of Da Vinci, Warhol, and a rogues’ gallery of accused criminals" (The New Yorker):

I must say that I appreciate things like this — more distanced, aesthetic takes on Trump. More please. Less heat. More coolness. 

"The short time line around [Oliver] Anthony’s virality and the seemingly synchronized way in which right-wing pundits, such as Matt Walsh and Jack Posobiec, have tweeted enthusiastically..."

"... and almost apocalyptically about 'Rich Men North of Richmond' have turned the singer into a messianic or conspiratorial figure. Depending on your politics, he is either a voice sent from Heaven to express the anger of the white working class, or he is a wholly constructed viral creation who has arrived to serve up resentment with a thick, folksy lacquering of Americana.... Whether this gambit will work or if Anthony is in on the trick is anyone’s guess. He has said that his political views are 'pretty dead center,' and he does seem to rail against both Republicans and Democrats, but, until his big break last week, his songs were mostly apolitical small-town anthems that sounded like they were written with a fountain pen dipped in Merle Haggard’s ashes.... I should say here that I am not immune to these charms. When I first heard Townes Van Zandt, I felt that some truth had been revealed about how life can break and drag, but in a glamorous way.... The markers of authenticity—the wood-panelled kitchen, the woman who alternates between cleaning dishes and smoking a cigarette, the grizzled Black man who, himself, also stands in for authenticity—could be pulled apart and declared problematic by any freshman in a critical-studies class. But they also work...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang in "A Close Listen to 'Rich Men North of Richmond' The viral country song by Oliver Anthony has been embraced by right-wing pundits" (The New Yorker).

Read the lyrics here (at Genius). Here's the song:

"Whereas politics attend to concrete social matters, every great work of art is itself the manifest solution to a totally invented problem."

"Only in the artist’s psyche was the problem ever real. No artwork ever had to exist, nor be made to exist as it was.... [T]he arts suffer because they have been overtaken by a perversion of the democratic spirit. Political art has been prominent; derivative, pedantic, unambitious, historically ignorant, shallow, designed-by-committee art has been more prominent still. Great artworks may or may not be difficult but are always ruthlessly singular expressions, their nature aristocratic. A culture valuing inclusion above all else will never know its masterpieces."

Writes Alice Gribbin, in "Why Good Politics Makes for Bad Art/Affirmation is available everywhere. Why ruin aesthetics?" (Tablet).

Gribbin discusses the platitude "All art is political." In that context, she quotes Toni Morrison:

Art and politics.

Just another weirdass piece of art, which they are addicted to. pic.twitter.com/c58hZzO6wn

— Shekhinah • PJ ✝️ 🇦🇺🕊🙏🏻 (@petahjaneishere) May 14, 2023

I feel like averting my eyes, but maybe you choose to worship all that is Dolly.

Sample lyric: "Don't get me started on politics/Now how are we to live in a world like this?/Greedy politicians, present and past/They wouldn't know the truth if it bit 'em in the ass...."

"Each time Ed had another encounter with his 'pal, the surgeon'—whom he did not begrudge for having 'to maintain his skills'..."

"... he’d promise to quickly 'be back with fervor at the drawing board, conjuring up malevolent, wicked delights and pleasures for your eyes.' And sure enough, his shaggy Vermonters and Manhattanites, his farmers’-market devotees and NPR donors—by way of ​​Snuffleupagus by way of Daumier—whose pretensions and obsessions he affectionately lampooned, would soon be parading into my in-box. In his final months, he didn’t have the energy to draw as large, or with such obsessive, scratchy detail, as before, but he still couldn’t resist reworking one final cartoon—featuring the Grim Reaper, as a poet—before sending it off to me last week.... On a recent call with Ed, when I expressed awe at the fact that he was still sending in cartoons for me to review, he quoted Mark Twain: 'The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.' Neither of us mentioned the second half of that line—'there is no humor in heaven.'"

Writes Emma Allen in The New Yorker's "Postscript" — "Edward Koren, the Cheery Philosopher of Cartoons/The artist, who was first published in The New Yorker in 1962, never stopped marvelling at the miracle of a cartoon’s creation."

Here's the NYT obit: "Edward Koren, 87, Whose Cartoon Creatures Poked Fun at People, Dies/For six decades in The New Yorker and elsewhere, his hairy, toothy, long-nosed characters offered witty commentary on the foibles of the American middle class."

"The presentation of great historic works such as The Nutcracker... should send a powerful statement that Tchaikovsky – himself of Ukrainian heritage – and his works speak to all humanity..."

"... in direct and powerful opposition to the narrow and nationalistic view of culture peddled by the Kremlin."

Said a spokesperson for London’s Royal Ballet. 

Quoted in "Ukraine calls on western allies to boycott Russian culture Minister defends step in ‘civilisational battle’ but says it would not amount to ‘cancelling Tchaikovsky’" (The Guardian).

David Butcher, the chief executive of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra — which will soon perform Stravinsky and Shostakovich — said: "I don’t think it’s appropriate as a pioneering creative organisation to cancel, pause or self-censor, in our case, great music which deserves to be performed and heard."

The spokesperson for the BBC did not take the clear pro-art position: "We continue to carefully look at programming linked to Russia, considering everything on a case by case basis." What weaselhood!

I wonder: During World War II — and World War I — did orchestras stop playing Beethoven?

"AI bias is a notoriously difficult problem. Left unchecked, algorithms can perpetuate racist and sexist biases..."

"... and that bias extends to AI art as well.... If DALL-E manages to depict a world free of racist and sexist stereotypes, it would still do so in the image of the West. 'You can’t fine-tune a model to be less Western if your dataset is mostly Western,' Yilun Du, a PhD student and AI researcher at MIT, told Recode. AI models are trained by scraping the internet for images, and Du thinks models made by groups based in the United States or Europe are likely predisposed to Western media.... Because AI is backward-looking, it’s only able to make variations of images it has seen before. That, Du says, is why an AI model is unable to create an image of a plate sitting on top of a fork, even though it should conceivably understand each aspect of the request. The model has simply never seen an image of a plate on top of a fork, so it spits out images of forks on top of plates instead."

From "AI art looks way too European/DALL-E and other models keep making art that ignores traditions from the rest of the world" by Neel Dhaneshaneel (Vox).

"Wait. The guy who tried to kill his own VP will be hanging in National Portrait Gallery? No. Absolutely not."

That's the second-highest-rated comment on "Smithsonian’s Trump portraits to be funded with $650K from Trump’s PAC" (WaPo).

First-highest-rated is: "They've already got the Trump as Rambo riding a dinosaur and holding a machine gun. Do they really need a new painting for any reason?"

"This Biennale, which runs through Sept. 18, is serious. Very serious. It verges on humorless...."

"[The curator's] statement notes that today’s 'profusion of sprawling, monumental exhibitions' mirrors 'the material excesses' of global capitalism, and asks: 'So why add yet another exhibition to this?' The answer he reaches is that art — perhaps uniquely — can reclaim our attention from algorithmically enforced social control.... Mai Nguyen-Long’s 'Vomit Girl' and 'Specimen' sculpture series... grapple with the aftermath of Agent Orange bombings in Vietnam.... Even blunter are Mayuri Chari’s vulvas sculpted from cow dung... address the shaming of women’s bodies in India amid conservative Hinduism’s obsession with purity.... This Biennale is... all over the place — one must study the scatter in an attempt to understand the collision that produced it. Its contradictions, I suspect, reflect those of the 'decolonial'.... Whereas decolonization in the classic sense was a political, territorial project with no inherent grievance against modernity, today’s 'decolonial practice' is about changing systems of knowledge — a woolier, potentially endless project. This Biennale is presented as a gathering of 'decolonial strategies.' The task... is tending 'all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity.'... This Berlin Biennale feels... overloaded by its own conceptual apparatus...."

From "Berlin Biennale Wrestles With Big Issues (and Itself)/A powerful and relentlessly political exhibition takes on all the world’s crises — at the risk of conceptual overload" by Siddhartha Mitter (NYT).

"You think we imprison people on a whim? No, if you think our humanistic system capable of such a thing, that alone would justify your arrest."

Says a Stasi interrogator in the 2006 film "The Lives of Others." The "humanistic system" was East Germany.

I just watched for the first time, on the urging of my son John, who warned me that it was about to leave the Criterion Channel. John chose that movie as the best movie of 2006, noted on his blog about the best movies from 1920 to 2020.

William F. Buckley Jr. said it was "the best movie I ever saw."

The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, got the idea for the movie from Maxim Gorky's description of a conversation he had with Lenin about music:

And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, he added without mirth: But I can't listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn't pat anyone on the head or we'll get our hand bitten off; we've got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it's a hellishly difficult office!

In the movie, a character quotes Lenin — about Beethoven's "Appassionata" —"If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution."