Sam Kriss | The Spectator columnists & writers

Why I admire Saudi Arabia’s monstrous new city

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia wants me to know that it is building a new city. Its adverts follow me around the internet. ‘Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint, designing to protect and enhance nature.’ I’m imagining. Their city ‘will be home to nine million residents, and will be built with a footprint of just 34 square kilometres. And we are designing it to provide a healthier, more sustainable quality of life’. According to its website, this new town ‘is a civilisational resource that puts humans first’. Which all sounds vaguely nice, if also nicely vague (although as I happen to be a human myself, I do appreciate the gesture). That is, until you see what they actually mean by this. The Line is not so much a city as a single cuboid structure, covered in blank glass walls.

Promethean grandeur: Maurice Broomfield – Industrial Sublime, at the V&A, reviewed

When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper pipes on a turret lathe. That was what you did in Derby in 1931: Rolls-Royce was the town’s biggest employer, and entire generations expected to pass the best part of their lives behind the walls of its 13-acre plant. But Broomfield didn’t stay. Not long into his new job, he saw a photo of an ageing employee being packed off into retirement with a handshake and a gold watch. This was a person who’d never had any real control over his own life; who’d worked when he was told to, and stopped when they told him it was time. Broomfield wanted something else. When he returned to the factories after the war, it was as a photographer.

In defence of country-pop

I am aware that the music I enjoy is widely considered to be the worst ever produced in human history. Worse than a roomful of children with recorders, cymbals and malice; worse than a poultry abattoir. Every so often, someone will ask me what I listen to, and I’m forced to tell them the truth. ‘These days,’ I’ll say, ‘it’s mostly country.’ Their nose will wrinkle, as if I’ve just let out a stealthy fart in their direction. ‘But old country, right?’ they’ll say, almost pleading. ‘Classic country?’ No, not classic country. I like Johnny Cash fine, I appreciate Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings and all the other respectable stalwarts you’re allowed to enjoy as a vaguely bookish Jew from north London.

The art of extinction

In one of Italo Calvino’s fables, a single dinosaur survives the extinction of his kind. After a few centuries in hiding, he comes out to discover that the world has changed. The ‘New Ones’ who have taken over the planet are still terrified of dinosaurs; they tell each other terrifying stories about the time when the reptiles ruled the world, or secretly fantasise about being brutalised by them, but they don’t recognise the survivor for what he really is. They no longer know what a dinosaur looks like. The newcomer is given a name – the Ugly One – and invited into their society. Eventually, they find a heap of dinosaur bones in a melting glacier, and take their new comrade to gawp at it. ‘If one of them had looked from the skeleton to me,’ the Ugly One reflects, ‘he would have realised at once that we were identical.

Schlock: Everything Everywhere All At Once reviewed

We’re doing multiverses now. Last weekend, a friend dragged me to see Marvel’s latest product, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For two hours I watched characters earnestly talk about their trauma, and then fly around firing jets of coloured magic at each other, and then more pompous trauma talk, like five-year-olds playing at adult emotional life, and then more joyless beams of coloured magic. I left the cinema muttering like a deranged war veteran. ‘Someone needs to be punished for this. We need show trials. We need to make them suffer for what they’ve done.’ My friend spoke, but I could barely hear him. I stared at an empty space roughly 50 metres behind his head. ‘You. You brought me here. You did this.

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