EWAN CAMERON picks out two fascinating music shows, fusing the Korean, and the Celtic, with the modern
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Wasters
SETH SANDRONSKY appreciates a fresh take on a 100-year-old novel that helps to contextualise the current moment of conspicuous wealth, waste and climate chaos
BLING: Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, with gold-infused glass
[Roy Luck/CC]
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
John Marsh, Monthly Review Press, £16.99
AS month two of the Trump 2.0 era careens forward, reading author and English professor John Marsh’s book is a wake-up call to systemic themes and trends as he unpacks culture and the economy over a century through the lens of Fitzgerald’s novel.
He revisits an influential work of fiction to examine an enduring “popular fascination with the rich – their houses, their clothes, their manners.” At the base of these cultural features is an economic system of, by and for the accumulation of capital held together by competition and class.
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RON JACOBS welcomes the political lessons for today, about organisation and withdrawal from conflict, made by an erudite and conversational biography
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
SETH SANDRONSKY recommends a production that looks back at the political Tinseltown in the mid-1970s when US cinema ‘didn’t pander to trends’