by Thomas R. Wells

It is easy to become exasperated with liberal democracy. Various factions bicker and manoeuvre against each other in an endless grubby contest for power, hypocritically appealing to a shared public interest while continuously generating and sustaining social divisions. Things that are necessary – like addressing climate change – do not get done, lost amidst the endless dithering, quibbling, and bargaining for advantage. Things that should not be done – like deporting UK asylum applicants to Rwanda – become official policy against all common sense and multiple laws, seemingly mainly as a way of trolling the opposition and civil society.

So it is disappointing but perhaps not surprising that people around the world are increasingly likely to endorse the strongman theory of government, that “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and election is a good way to run the country”.

Strongman government has two major attractions compared to liberal democracy. First, it promises wise and benevolent rule: undistracted by factions motivated by political interests the strong leader will be freed to make wiser, better decisions in the national interest. Second, it promises decisiveness: without the endless bickering and second guessing, strong leaders can get on and do what needs to be done.

In what follows I want to challenge these apparent advantages and show that the very failings of liberal democracy are actually the solution to the problems that strongman governments run into. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled. Rwanda, January 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Joseph Shieber

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

One aspect of the book that makes it so great is the way that O’Brien makes the challenge of the ineffability of his – and his comrades’ – war experiences part of the book itself. For example, he writes:

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness. In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling.

Reading the book in this way reminded me of the brilliant poem by James Fenton, “A German Requiem” (from The Memory of War and Children in Exile, Penguin, 1983). Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rebecca Baumgartner

The cultural cachet of classical music and the countercultural tone of metal music would initially seem at odds with each other – one represents the Man, the other rails against him. Even many of the aficionados of both types of music would agree with that assessment. However, the listener unencumbered with such stereotypes can appreciate the similarities in both genres of music, similarities both of musical form and structure, as well as in the subjective experience of the listener. 

There are many technical similarities between classical music, especially music from the baroque period, and metal, which others more versed in music theory are better qualified than I am to discuss. At a fundamental level, both types of music are interested in exploring complexity. Sometimes this can appear like complexity for the sake of complexity, giving us the negative connotations of the word “baroque” (as in “the baroque language of government documents”). However, both the best baroque music and the best metal put their complexity to work in the service of building a musical architecture, an abstract structure that keeps the brain in motion, trying to work out how the pieces fit together.

Examples are numerous, so to narrow the field a bit, I want to focus on two concepts that are critical in creating that complexity, and how it makes both types of music more intellectually satisfying and fulfilling than your standard Top 40 hits. Those concepts are counterpoint and movement. Read more »

Top of a mountain at the border of Brixen and Vahrn in the South Tyrol.

by Michael Abraham

The shower is running. It has just begun to steam up the little bathroom in my little apartment, and I reach into it, turn the dial from all-the-way-hot to almost-all-the-way-hot. I step into the spray of the water, and I discover that, instead of almost-all-the-way-hot, I have turned the dial to nearly-tepid. I turn it back toward all-the-way-hot, and, almost immediately, I feel it scald my chest. I fuss with it. I fuss back and forth with the dial in my shower, and, as I do so, I think of you, whoever you are, whoever you are reading this essay or whoever you are who is not reading this essay and never will. I think of you, out there, in your bathroom, taking a shower in the early afternoon on a lazy day off, fussing with the dial or the handles or whatever contraption it is that controls the heat in your shower, finding yourself now scalded, now freezing. I think of you, of how we have this experience in common—this bare, quotidian experience that means nothing on its surface, that is easily forgotten in the moments after it happens, for it happens so frequently and with such little fanfare. I am thinking of you as I pick up the bar soap and soap my body. I wonder if you use bar soap, too, or if you are a shower gel kind of person. I feel fairly confident we share the experience of shampoo, but I reflect that not everyone conditions as I condition my hair. When I step out of the shower and am met with a bathroom that feels much more bracingly cold than it did when I stepped into it, I think of you as well, at how the hairs on your arms raise just like mine.

You see, I have been thinking of you a lot these days. I have been thinking of all the small, seemingly menial things that happen to me that also happen to you, of the way you swear under your breath when you burn the rice—how you cut your finger on the corner of the page of a book—how you are enchanted for a moment by a gust of wind and brought back to memories of playing in leaves as a child—how you make too much coffee and then drink too much coffee and then find yourself with a stomach ache and a buzzing mind. Read more »

by Derek Neal

If Joan Didion were alive today, she might write an essay about Prince Harry and include it in an updated version of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She might write a passage like the one she wrote about Howard Hughes:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Didion’s comment about finding a restaurant open for a sandwich comes from a remark she’d heard as an explanation for Hughes buying up real estate in Las Vegas. It may seem a bit much to procure a whole town as a way of ensuring you can get a bite to eat at 3 pm in the afternoon, or 3 am in the morning, but have you ever been to Europe? My first experience of Europe was a year abroad studying in Nice, France. One day, I planned to get together with an American friend for lunch. We figured we’d meet up in the old city center, walk around a bit, then pick a place that looked good. As it happened, we were both running a little late, then we strolled around a bit too long, and finally we walked into a restaurant at about, well, 3 pm. Ever the innocents abroad, we had yet to realize our fatal error. The restaurant was deserted, and we had difficulty finding someone who worked there. Eventually, we did. After we bumbled along in our best French, asking if we could eat there and feeling confused as to why we had to ask, the proprietor cast his cold gaze upon us and proclaimed that, in France, restaurants close between lunch and dinner time. The kitchen, he said, is closed. We were stunned. Were the social conventions truly so strong that they couldn’t be amended for us, two Americans, who just wanted something to eat and secretly felt that we deserved something to eat, as well? Were we really going to be turned away? We had money, after all. Read more »

Conversation

. . .—on a painting by Jack Braudis

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.

.

.

.

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Boat:
. . .Your slope is russet and graceful; seems soft.

Land:
. . .It is. I see it echoes the grace of your gunnels, stem to stern.

Boat:. . .
. . .We approach your still grace, having been upon water the day.

Land:. . .. . .
. . .Who is that with you, the who with articulating sticks?

Boat:
. . .He rows, he brings me to you to lie in your shade.
. . .He imagines the sky would be good to gaze into
. . .with you beneath his back; our painter has
. . .rendered us true and sure & his clouds
. . .follow the breath of wind as they must

Land:
. . .But I’m confused, what painter?
. . .I am real and true and so is sky.

Boat:
. . .Yes, and so is he and so am I.

Jim Culleny, 11/16/22
Painting by Jack Braudis

Ada Beams. Landscape Somewhere in France, 2022.

Digital photograph.

With permission from the artist.

by Rafaël Newman

It’s been 90 years since Hitler was appointed German Chancellor, on January 30, 1933, despite his party, the NSDAP, having failed to achieve a majority in the elections to the Reichstag held the previous year; so naturally I’ve been thinking about Max Liebermann.

Born decades before the establishment of the German Empire, or Second Reich, in 1871, the painter Max Liebermann (July 20, 1847—February 8, 1935) was to die just as the Third Reich was rising to its hideous feet. Liebermann was a pillar of the German art world—or rather, he had become one by 1933, when he resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts, the body he had served as president, but which had now fallen into line with the Nazis and had ceased exhibiting works by Jewish artists.

Max Liebermann was himself Jewish, but by the time of his death at the age of 87 he had long been accepted in the wider German bourgeois society into which he had been born, and which had persisted in its Prussian, Wilhelmine, and Weimar variations. After a rocky start to his career with scandalously “ugly” scenes of working-class life and “blasphemous” depictions of religious motifs, Liebermann would go on to play a leading role in the Berlin Secession, the fin-de-siècle movement opposed to the strictures of academic painting, which championed Impressionism and Realism and counted among its members such notable artists as Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, and Otto Modersohn. Liebermann resisted the Secession’s eventual support for Expressionism, however, which moved him towards the conservative camp and prepared his entry into the Academy, the establishment’s artistic watchdog, and the mainstream of German culture. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

I’m scared of birds. They’re dinosaurs, you know. They descend from the Jurassic when, just like in Jesus Loves Me, ‘they were big and we were small.’ Did you see those huge dinosaur tracks they found in Texas last summer? You were a scurrying little proto-mammal, foraging and minding your own business in the underbrush when that thing came along and blotted out the sun.

Birds are not cute little hopping around pixies, as likely shitting on your hand as sitting on it. Birds don’t have the presence of mind to fly off the hand that feeds it before despoiling it. Hummingbirds don’t even make sense in theory.

After the noise and furor that humans send up, birds are this world’s most insistent, annoying noisemakers, operating in the frequencies between bad manners and prison. The vocal rancor and pith of seagulls (find and bring to me a seagull that calms you) and the cage of two, three, four notes the rest of the bloody lot are doomed to stand inside and repeat all morning before it’s time to wake up, between those is where madness lies.

Privileged humans love birds. Birds’ appeal, they say, stacks right up alongside the majesty of the lion and the cheetah on safari. After you and your safari guide have rooted around for your fill of those mud trenches hippos make, say, and avoided the tse tse fly outbreak in day long pursuit of the famous muttering toad of this unique valley, somehow apparently, accidentally spying a dwarf cassowary in the sawgrass makes the day perfection. Read more »