“There is no place on earth where we haven’t pitched our tent of exile.” Mahmoud Darwish
“Heaven is closer than Sinai.” A reported saying in Gaza.
(In light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine, please consider donating to MAP and other regional medical charities. For those in the United States, Great Britain, Germany and other nations allied with Israel, I also urge to you contact your elected representatives and call for a ceasefire and suspension of collective punishment against Palestinian civilians, including those in the occupied West Bank.)
Resentment flows upward. Caste without duties. Aristocracy without grace. Trump, Biden, Musk, Netanyahu—the leaders of the current dispensation detest having to win our support. Your duty as a citizen—this is stated explicitly—is to advance their careers, to advance their legacies, and to balm their conscience regarding whatever is done in pursuit of that legacy. Their adult children joylessly debauch themselves in public, libertines that demand our compassion, their public therapy courtesy of the public coffer. There is no dolce vita, only a bitterness at not being acclaimed enough, at not being loved enough. We are so unfair to them. An era of sore winners.
With rightwing nationalism ascendent in India, Israel, the United States, and elsewhere, you would expect an artistic and intellectual movement rise with it, like the Futurists did with Mussolini. But no such movement has taken place. This is mostly because the right has been captured by liberalism, both in a cultural and an economic sense. Art and entertainment must be explicitly moralistic, without subtext, a photo negative of the “woke” culture they condemn. Conservative aesthetes, these anonymous fascisti—and they are, almost to a man, male—spend their time hectoring the public online, culture warriors that they are. Their legacy disappears once the terms of service change. Their would-be investors, like investors everywhere these days, are risk averse. The returns of culture are marginal and slow to accumulate. The money goes to lobbyists and spokespersons instead. It goes directly to the politicians. Efficiency and disintermediation.
I’m learning “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” on the piano, by the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died of cancer earlier this year. The song comes from a film by the same name, which stars Sakamoto as a WWII-era prison commandant, alongside fellow polymath David Bowie, who plays his rebellious charge. A strange and brutal piece of erotic cinema, whose soundtrack, not surprisingly, seems to have outpaced the original film in popularity. It was first time Sakamoto acted and the first time he composed a soundtrack. Remarkable. The film also came out the year I as born. My nostalgia for that era was inevitable, I suppose, but I feel it intensely right now, not just because of age but because a concept that animated the careers of Bowie and Sakamoto, a genuinely popular avant-garde, seems to be receding further and further away, replaced in turn by philistine populism on the one hand and endlessly fracturing niches on the other.