What I’m reading #144

Get out your tissues: Robin McKie at the Guardian reports on Monty Python’s Terry Jones and his dementia. Quote unquote:

It is also obvious he gets strength from the presence of [Michael] Palin. Towards the end of our interview, Jones reaches out to grasp his hand, giving it a good squeeze. The pair hold hands for a couple of minutes, a gesture that perfectly reflects their 50 years of friendship – and its importance in sustaining Jones through his tribulations.

Harry Eyres at the New Statesman on my magazine-editor hero Alexander Chancellor. Well, not so much on him as on what happened to the Spectator after he left. Quote unquote:

Alexander was a brilliant and unconventional editor whose methods derived from Chinese Taoism: he achieved miracles while appearing to practise wu wei, or “do nothing”. In fact, Alexander operated instinctively, sniffing out writers whose style he liked and encouraging them, regardless of political viewpoint.
The effect was to rescue an ailing publication and set it on a course of unwavering success. Those who credited him with setting the tone of the modern Spectator, of making it readable, irreverent and witty, were partly right.
But the Spectator began to deviate from his liberal, civil open-mindedness only a few years after he stopped editing the magazine in 1984. This deviation took two, perhaps related routes. The first was a hardening of the paper’s political stance, first making it into a Tory organ (Alexander was never in his life a Tory) and then into a right-wing-of-the-Tory-party, brexiting rag. The second consisted of the introduction of a casual, jokey, faux-macho incivility – a malign mutation of Alexander’s irreverence – aimed at shocking the liberal bourgeoisie.

Two words: James Delingpole.

Dany McLauchlan at the Spinoff on Max Harris’s The New Zealand Project is the best book review I have read in years. It takes the book seriously, presents its arguments fairly (as far as I can tell, and anyway I trust him) and you’ll never guess what happens next. Devastating because Danyl knows the territory so well and is sympathetic to the views expressed – just not this book. The material on framing is brilliant: why, it’s as if he has spent years around political parties. Quote unquote:

If you pay more attention to politics, and read online commentary, or go to political conferences, or progressive hui, and listen to more brilliant left-wing intellectuals agree on What Must Be Done, it gradually becomes apparent that the progressive left has the answer to every problem in politics, except for the problem of how to actually persuade voters to listen to them, and thus affect meaningful political change. Which is a shame, because without that all the other grand ideas are pretty futile. All the talk about What Must Be Done starts to feel less like activism and more like a form of fantasy roleplaying, only instead of pretending to be dragon-slayers, or vampires, progressive intellectuals pretend to be people who are relevant to contemporary politics.

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian on Warren Beatty’s new vanity project Rules Don’t Apply: Quote unquote:

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that we cannot experience death because death is not an event in life. But then Wittgenstein never had to sit through this unbearable new film from Warren Beatty, his first in 15 years, co-written, produced and directed by its star, Warren Beatty, who may well be affecting a kind of kinship with his subject, the crazy but allegedly lovable billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. Beatty may also like the low lighting Hughes favoured.

Kate Mossman in the New Statesman on how Mayte Garcia found married life with Prince. Quote unquote:

I’m on the phone to Prince’s first wife and I’m trying to picture the wrestling. He had a very strong upper body, Mayte Garcia says brightly – but she had very powerful legs. “When he knocked me down, I would take my legs around his body and squeeze really hard. So he stopped tackling me down to the floor.” She doesn’t know why they wrestled – couples do weird things, don’t they? Like the hypnosis. In her new book, she says she loved the hypnosis because it was the only time he’d let her talk without interrupting her.

 Stuff reports that, sadly, Wellington diners may have to wait even longer for Jamie Oliver to open a restaurant there. They are possibly not missing much. He has, says Stuff, “42 Jamie’s Italian restaurants in the UK and more than 36 abroad run under his name.” Tanya Gold was not impressed when she reviewed for the Spectator Oliver’s latest London venture, Barbecoa at 194 Piccadilly, overlooking my favourite church, St James’s. Quote unquote:

I used to like Jamie Oliver, or the idea of him. I liked his willingness to be a spokes-chef; to damn parents who feed their children Turkey Twizzlers and roof insulation; I liked that he is fat. Then I ate at Jamie’s Italian in Soho and met a plank resting on two tins of tomato paste bearing greasy salami and cold cheese, and steak frites that thought they were Italian, and I stopped liking him.
 I began to think him cynical and money-grubbing. There is a peculiar depravity to the mid-market family restaurant in central London that offers bad value through a good name, and I cannot forgive Jamie for pretending he was different; for pretending, as he ripped up basil with his bare hands and told men, yeah, you can cook, that he was my mate. (That is the evil of television. Fake intimacy.) The dish may have been called Jamie’s Plank, but I do not remember. I hope it was. It should have been, even if the plank was me.

 The Economist on the hidden data on your airline boarding pass. Quote unquote:

All of this goes to show that yes, airlines should probably not make data available through a barcode scanner that they don’t want to make available on a printed boarding pass. And yes, you are probably better off using an electronic boarding pass on your phone, inconvenient though it may sometimes be. But the biggest takeaway is simply that your personal data are a lot easier to hack than you probably think. A wide range of seemingly harmless slips of paper, containing your name and an identifying detail or two, can open you up to a hacker’s attack. So the next time you check for your personal belongings as you exit a plane, you might want to make sure your boarding pass is among them.

 So here are Black Sabbath in 1970 with “Paranoid”: