The Bluestocking, vol 323: Kanye and Moleskine
"I’m the man who single-handedly destroyed this architectural masterpiece"
Happy Friday!
This week, I wrote about the near-total absence of Brexit from the election campaign, and how that can’t last after July 4.
Helen
Will Lewis’s Thirst for Power (Daily Beast)
“Lewis showed his worth to Murdoch almost immediately. He joined News International in September 2010. (The company later became News UK.) At the time, Murdoch was bidding to take control of BSkyB, the British broadcaster. The deal was deeply significant to him. It was also in peril: the U.K. cabinet minister in charge of approving the bid privately opposed it. Murdoch’s camp suspected this but couldn’t prove it. Lewis, it seems, soon found something that did.
In December 2010, an unpublished recording of the cabinet minister, Vince Cable, was stolen from the Telegraph’s servers and leaked to the BBC. Cable could be heard describing himself as “at war with the Murdochs,” revealing quite how antagonistic he was. The revelation forced him to recuse himself from the bid. A more pliable minister took over, increasing Murdoch’s odds of approval.
Seven months later private investigators hired by the Telegraph reported that, based on telephone records, they had a “strong suspicion” Lewis was “involved in orchestrating the leak,” or theft, from the Telegraph’s servers. The recording had been leaked to the BBC’s Robert Peston, an ally of Lewis at the FT and friend to this day. Lewis later refused to address the allegation, claiming protection of sources. If the PIs were right, Lewis had acted as a corporate spy, blindsiding the very paper he had just stopped editing—through which he had made his name as an editor only a year earlier.”
*
The Washington Post newsroom is in revolt against the company’s new CEO, Will Lewis, who is charged with trying to spike unflattering stories about his role in the aftermath of the phone-hacking scandal.
Also, he turned up to an all-hands meeting and told the WashPo journalists that they were losing $1m a week and they needed to write more stories people wanted to read, which went down about as well as you’d expect.
Harry Lambert, who has just joined the Daily Beast from the New Statesman, has written a sharp, funny introduction to Lewis (no relation) and his ascent through British and American journalism. Like I always say, the soul of a longread is in the details, and I imagine that quite a few of my male readers (OK, principally my husband) will read this story and go: you can buy $1,100 trainers?????
*
Chaser: “As a trainee at the tabloid Daily Mirror, I dressed up in a giant yellow chicken outfit to chase Conservative politicians around London as an election stunt. I would often think of this with a wry smile when, years later, I was subjected to an Atlantic fact-checker asking whether I was sure the painting in Boris Johnson’s office was hanging over the fireplace rather than above his desk.” Tom McTague has written about the cultural differences between British and American journalism (The Atlantic)
His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (New Yorker)
Architectural fame doesn’t guarantee respect. Americans have demolished houses by Frank Lloyd Wright and Marcel Breuer. Last year, Chris Pratt, the actor, and his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, a self-help writer, bought a house in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles designed by Craig Ellwood, an admired mid-century architect. They knocked it down and began building something five times as large. In the nineties, a Pacific Palisades house designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen—working together, as part of the now celebrated mid-century Case Study experiment in residential architecture—was sold to a man who built a mansion inches from its face. The Case Study house lost its wide view of the ocean, becoming an annex joined to its blocky new neighbor by a corridor.
It’s hard, however, to think of another esteemed house that’s been left exposed to the elements, and to the public’s gaze, after being jackhammered halfway to ruins. Saxon told me, “It’s funny—and not funny, in a way—to say, ‘I’m the man who single-handedly destroyed this architectural masterpiece.’ But I pretty much did.”
*
Ian Parker tells the weirdly fascinating story of how Kanye West bought a Malibu house by a revered Japanese architect, and then hired some guy with a van from New Jersey to destroy it from the inside. Ye’s intransigence, constant madcap ideas and commitmentphobia will remind you of the worst boss you’ve ever had.
Ye is apparently now friends with James Turrell, the artist who creates “sky spaces,” and has given him $10m for his mega-project in Arizona. I’m a Turrell fan: here I am in the sky space at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, back in 2018. (There’s also one in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, but I’m guessing that the sky is rarely this blue.)
Quick links
“There’s one final form of America-brain, or should I say North America-brain, that I think pervades the current campaign and that’s the Canada analogy.” Ben Ansell thinks the British left and right have gone Stateside-crazy (Substack).
“My father reminded me recently of a phrase I heard a lot (from him) when I was young - good artists do what they can, great artists do what they must. It haunted me in my early twenties when I realized I didn't have the ambition to do what I must.” Laura Marling has a Substack! (Patterns on Repeat)
“It would be very good for our democracy for the Conservative Party to suffer a crushing defeat. The Conservatives have behaved terribly in government, and politicians, like children, need to know that their actions have consequences.” Remember that poll saying loads of people think the Conservatives deserve to lose every seat? Turns out Rob Hutton was one of them (The Critic).
“Positive cases for drug reform, affordable housing, self-ID, better pay for carers, and greater protection for British farming interests could form the basis of a credible ‘alternative vision for government’.” Regular readers will know that I preach against assuming the result of an election and working your coverage backwards from that, because unexpected things—Corbyn’s surge in 2017, the DUP confidence and supply agreement—regularly happen. So here’s Peter Taylor entertaining what sounds like a wacky question: What if the Lib Dems became the official opposition? (Substack)
I’m a strong proponent of keeping a physical notebook for longterm projects—I have a different coloured Leuchtturm for each book, script and radio series I do. Julian Simpson explains why it’s such a good way of organising your brain, as well as keeping a record of how you were thinking, as well as what you were thinking. (Development Hell, Substack)
See you next time! The Bluestocking goes out weekly to more than 21,000 readers. If you would like to subscribe, hit the button below:
The “Ye destroyed a house” story seems to me the meeting of people who have entirely too much money and self-regard on all sides. The architect who makes impossibly beyooootiful things that are also wildly impractical (imagine bringing up a child in that concrete staircase-trapped monstrosity) meets the person with mental health problems who wants to take it back to nothingness. Much money is spent on achieving nothing. 🤷♂️
Interesting read thanks.