This month marks the one-year anniversary of the conclusion of my career as a performing-arts critic. To be clear, I still hold numerous opinions about our country’s cultural landscape, and I still…

The polls haven’t even closed, and it has already begun: the finger-pointing, the accusations, the premature post-mortems. In mid-October, for example, Frank Luntz told CNN that Kamala Harris’s momentum…

Culture Saudis Go Beyond Oil Mohammed bin Salman invites the world’s elite to a beach party in the desert. Credit: image via Shutterstock Businessmen and social media influencers will converge upon an island paradise this weekend, but it won’t be in Ibiza. The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has invited the who’s who of finance and entertainment to join him in Neom, a 10,200 square-mile area in the northwest of the kingdom that is being rapidly transformed into a multi-city conurbation in an attempt to modernize and open the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) to westerners like never before. The beach party will take place at the Sindalah island resort, just one of the several regional projects that could cost the Kingdom up to $1.5 trillion to build. The Saudis are also constructing a luxury winter resort called Trojena, an industrial port-city named Oxagon, and a 105-mile long hypermodern city named “The Line,” a mirrored metropolis that will house up to 9 million people.  The immense scope of construction and the eye-watering costs are all part of Vision 2030, bin Salman’s big bet on diversifying the Kingdom’s economy away from its reliance on the production of fossil fuel and potentially unlocking KSA as a new cultural hub in a part of the world that isn’t often associated with leisure.  The beach party will take place days ahead of the Future Investment Initiative Institute conference scheduled in the country’s capital of Riyadh from October 29-31. Citadel’s Ken Griffin, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, the London Stock Exchange’s Julia Hogged, and Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon are all expected to attend the investment forum, where nearly $18 billion worth of deals were struck during the 2023 edition. This year, organizers expect more than $28 billion in deals to be announced.  As with other projects in the region, controversy over working conditions has dogged the builds. An estimated 21,000 migrant workers have died during construction of the resorts and an ex-intelligence officer told the BBC earlier this year that Saudi forces had been instructed “to kill” local villagers who protested the construction of The Line. More than 6,000 people have been removed from the area to make way for the futuristic eco-city without cars which is being built by dozens of Western companies. When completed, it will stand taller than the Eiffel Tower of Paris and cover the length of Wilmington, Delaware to New York City. If The Line is bin Salman’s vision for a cultural reimagining of the Kingdom, Oxagon is his vision for a new economic hub in the region. Located off the Suez Canal in the Arabian Peninsula, The octagon-shaped city will house 90,000 people and act as a floating trading hub connecting the Maritime Silk Road and the incoming India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor. The projects, located at the heart of where Europe, Africa and Asia cross, are estimated to consume 20% of the world’s steel market, much of it sourced from China.  The new projects are not the only attempt bin Salman is making to open his Kingdom’s door to the West. In recent years, KSA has invested heavily to attract some of the soccer world’s biggest stars, granting massive contracts to luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, and Karim Benzema. Ronaldo, who has become the celebrity du jour in the desert country, recently called the Saudi Pro League “one of the best in the world” and said he will likely retire at his club, Al Nassr. In a recent exchange with Al Arabiya’s Nadia Bilbassy, the former President Donald Trump called bin Salman “a visionary” and touted his leadership. Trump, too, has proposed gigantic new construction projects for the United States. In March of 2023, Trump floated the idea of building 10 new “freedom cities” and recently he has pitched selling off federal land in the Southwest as a solution to America’s housing crisis.  Despite the innovative plan to connect three continents, the Saudis have struggled to secure outside financing for the dream projects scheduled to be completed by the end of the decade. Bin Salman, taking a page from Field of Dreams, has poured the Kingdom’s wealth into construction—“If you build it, they will come.” Such is the mantra of the Saudi’s old desert made new.  The post Saudis Go Beyond Oil appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture A Critic’s Life The business of reviewing the arts online has changed the way in which we watch and review performances.  Credit: image via Shutterstock This month marks the one-year anniversary of the conclusion of my career as a performing-arts critic. To be clear, I still hold numerous opinions about our country’s cultural landscape, and I still get paid to issue those opinions in the form of what I hope are fleet, funny, and felicitously phrased reviews.  What has changed is the subject matter I am tasked with professionally consuming each week. I continue to review a boatload of books, a multitude of movies, and the stray streaming series, but I no longer cover music concerts, ballet performances, or live theater of various kinds.  That I ever did now strikes me as so unlikely—so representative of a now-bygone era both in the arts and in local journalism—as to be almost unbelievable. I find myself asking: Did I really see the senescent remnant of the Beach Boys perform with symphonic accompaniment? Did I actually see Riverdance in person and not just on public television? Well, I did, but it all seems like a bit of a dream . . .  In the summer of 2013, I received an invitation to write performing-arts reviews for my hometown daily newspaper. My initial assignment was to review the city’s local dance troupes, but my mandate eventually expanded to include classical music, opera, and the odd choral ensemble, pop act, or touring production. Now, my acquaintanceship with pirouettes and Puccini was limited compared to my deep knowledge of, say, the novels of John Updike or the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Even so, I knew I had the advantage of trusting my own eyes and ears: When I watched or listened to something, I was confident in expressing an opinion about its relative strengths and weaknesses. That I could do so in an hour or less undoubtedly secured my position for years to come. You see, my reviews were earmarked for the actual newspaper that was printed the morning following an opening-night performance. There was a space waiting for me in the Metro section, but if I wanted it to be filled with my great insights, the copy desk needed my review by 11:45 p.m. Early on, I missed this deadline by a seemingly trivial (but actually incredibly significant) 15 minutes, which led me to subsequently keep track of every second at my disposal.  If an average-length concert or show got underway at 8 p.m., I could reasonably expect that I would leave the theater at 10:15 p.m. (accounting for intermissions and other interminable delays). I learned to select aisle seats to avoid navigating a large and slow-moving crowd upon exiting; rudely, but practically, I never stayed for a standing ovation. If I arrived home by 11 p.m., I had about 30 minutes to sift through my notes, draw upon my reserves of inspiration, and mold a fair and just review. I might have 15 minutes to check the spellings of names and titles, but in truth, I was often giving one last look at the cast list just before I hit “send.”  This I found electrifying: I have seldom experienced a feeling of accomplishment greater than calling the copy desk to confirm receipt of my review, which, if all went according to plan, would greet me, complete with a witty and apropos headline, the next morning. Since the paper printed more than one letter-to-the-editor explaining how wrong I had been about this or that performance, apparently others were reading, too. I rolled with the punches. Even after my deadlines were shaved to 11:30 p.m., I learned to sift through my notes more quickly and organize my thoughts more clearly. My attitude only began to change when, a few years in, my reviews started running online only. The novelty was gone; so was the adrenaline rush. Paradoxically, writing without serious time constraints for the internet made me more anxious than writing with severe deadline pressure for print: typos, flubs, and hasty first impressions are less easily excused when not facing a ticking clock. Besides, there are only so many things to say, in 325 words or less, about The Nutcracker, the opening night of which I attended for seven consecutive years. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic spelled an end to live performances and the reviewers who wrote about them. Then, in October 2023, I asked to review the local ballet company’s season-opening triple bill, which included Twyla Tharp’s marvelous Nine Sinatra Songs. My mother had died a few weeks earlier. I needed to get out of the house. I was curious to see whether I still had the chops. I did, but the whole experience was rather grim and ghostly—like I was playing the role of a formerly important person, the performing-arts critic.  I was no longer writing for the solidness of print, and I wondered if my remaining readership, having lived without my brilliant insights for more than three years, still cared what I thought about this duet or that piece of music. Did I? It was my own final curtain. I have come to feel I lived through the autumn of the performing-arts critic. Along the way, I attended about a great many shows that have stayed in my mind: a recital by pianist Joyce Yang, a performance by the Dance Theatre of Harlem, memorable local productions of George Balanchine’s Who Cares?, Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free, and Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, and the voices of the touring St. Olaf Choir inside a beautiful Downtown cathedral.  That I got to memorialize my impressions of those performances was a privilege. Yet to assume that such a transient job would last forever is a bit like, as a famous Broadway lyricist once wrote, trying to hold a moonbeam in your hand. The post A Critic’s Life appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Blame Game Get Under Way The magnificos of the political and media establishments are wasting no time in pointing the finger. Credit: image via Getty Images The polls haven’t even closed, and it has already begun: the finger-pointing, the accusations, the premature post-mortems. In mid-October, for example, Frank Luntz told CNN that Kamala Harris’s momentum “froze” when she began to attack Donald Trump. Until then, her numbers had been terrific. Covering the famously roly-poly pollster’s comments, The Hill said some Democrats now “fear the 2024 contest is slipping away.” If it does, and Harris loses, the season of bitter recrimination will kick off in earnest. And if Trump loses, expect nothing less from Republicans. Because we probably won’t know who actually won the elections for days, weeks and maybe months—and because whoever loses might not concede (cue the lawsuits)—there will be no end of it. “They cheated!” “No, they cheated!” “It was stolen!” “They listened to the wrong people!” “Why didn’t she do that?” “Yeah, but if only….” For Americans glued to CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the rest, this after a while can get downright depressing. But for conservative Christian anarchists (thanks, Henry Adams), this might be the best part of any election season. That’s because it confirms some of our worst suspicions about government. For those of us whose expectations of our political system are minimal, it’s kind of fun. Our expectations are low, not because we think that the politicians, their handlers, and cheerleaders are all liars and crooks, but only that they are human. This is just how humans who seek power over other humans behave. And when frustrated in their desires, they lash out. We lash out. We have to blame somebody. David Hackett Fischer in Historians’ Fallacies said that in seeking to ascertain the causes of events, we confuse how something we don’t like happened with “Who is to blame?” This is, of course, more soothing to the ego and less taxing on the intellect. It’s important that historians know the difference (too often, Fischer finds, they don’t), but it is probably asking too much of mere mortals to do so.  In a political culture as fraught with bad feelings as ours, this assigning of blame—as all good citizens never tire of reminding us—only makes the atmosphere more spiteful and acrimonious. That is no doubt true. Back in 2018—the year before she died—Alice Rivlin in The Hill bemoaned the extent to which “party partisans” were “blaming and demonizing each other,” which resulted in that year’s government shutdown. The ex-director of the Congressional Budget Office, among other government positions, reminded us how “sensible parents” deal with “squabbling children.” Good mommies and daddies “start with a timeout to let tempers cool and then enlist the erstwhile warring parties in a cooperative project,” Rivlin wrote. “It often works.” Suppose, she droned on, “our elected policymakers were to call timeout and take a pledge to stop blaming each other for a month.” They could then “focus on defining the problem they want to solve, proposing solutions and explaining, with evidence, not slogans, how their preferred solutions are supposed to work… A simple timeout and a no-blaming pledge could be the first steps to restoring constructive national policymaking.” This was all well-meaning, but also preposterous. We regularly hear such condescending drivel from those who have devoted their professional lives to “public service,” and it is no less offensively demeaning than the practices Rivlin, et al., profess to deplore. We’re not in pre-K, after all, and the fact that career bureaucrats and other members of the political class view us in this way is troubling, if nothing worse. The only sane reaction might be one of mockery—specifically, that offered by Jerry Seinfeld on his TV show: “Who wants to be responsible? Whenever anything goes wrong, the first thing they ask is, ‘Who’s responsible?’” The post The Blame Game Get Under Way appeared first on The American Conservative.

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