Hello Smarty, It's Your Weekly Recs!JD Heyman on Roald Dahl, Adam Scott, Stephanie Lepp, Stevie Nicks, and More ...Dear Wags, Wag Emeritus Roald Dahl has been in the news this week. This is quite something, considering that he died in 1990. Dahl was a brilliant writer of children’s books and not the loveliest person. This makes for scintillating biography, but his fiction continues to enchant generations of readers. An ingenuity with language —Snozzberry, Oompa-Loompa, Lickswishy—is at the heart of Dahl’s appeal. Still, some of his sentences haven’t aged like fine wine. Stepping away from the page, many of his attitudes were mortifying by the 1960s. Despite these shortcomings, he got at the eternal truths of childhood: It is brutish, frightening, hilarious, and loaded with risk. Children of all types relate to this because it is their experience. People who read Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, among other books, grasp that they were written in the 20th century, not last Tuesday. The curious child may inquire about passages that don’t line up with contemporary reality, just as a reader of Little Women might have questions about the Civil War. Parents are well positioned to explain art that raises discomfiting ideas with their little ones. The notion that kids are never to be made uncomfortable is regressive, the oldest excuse for censorship in the book. Attempts to rewrite Dahl to match contemporary sensibilities are well-intentioned vandalism. Books will provoke, and responses to provocation will be varied. Sometimes, these little outrages inspire other books. Dahl may one day be retired from the canon of children’s literature because it is fluid (review what your grandparents read as kids and marvel at how much is no longer in circulation). Having a bureaucrat hack through Danny, Champion of the World, uprooting references to blood sports, will hardly keep it current. Because this fracas has been leaped upon by those who see the Cultural Revolution brewing under every mattress, let’s be clear: The impulse to shield the young from nasty and corrupting influence is where the extremes on both ends of the political spectrum have a hootenanny. Ideologues have no faith in people of any age and assume we are all as brittle as they are. But human beings are not fragile objects, and a foundational lesson in their education is that they are far stronger than words. Yours Ever, Proper Piss-UpParty Down (Starz). The funniest show about life in struggle in Hollywood gets a reboot that’s sharper than the original. Adam Scott, Jane Lynch, Megan Mullally, Ryan Hansen, and Ken Marino return to the margins of show business in a comedy about catering and failure. Lizzy Caplan was otherwise engaged, but Jen Garner, Bobby Moynihan, Quinta Brunson, and Jimmy I Can Do Anything Marsden all make appearances. Are we having fun yet? Golly, yes. —Casey Klein Workplace Horror ShowThe Consultant (Prime Video). Finally, a series that portrays business consultants as the spreadsheet-wielding sociopaths they are! Sir Christoph Waltz—not creepy at all—shows up at mobile games studio in L.A. to torment lumpy techies Brittany O'Grady, Nat Wolff, and Aimee Carrero. Herr Waltz has a novel take on workforce optimization— McKinsey, take note. — Lee Holloway Every so often, Wag asks a genius for creative inspiration. What better noggin to tap than the one belonging to Wag Stephanie Lepp? Previously the Executive Director of the Institute for Cultural Evolution, she’s now launching Infinite Lunchbox — a production studio devoted to moving American culture from “thesis vs. antithesis to synthesis.” A star of media, tech, and philosophy, her work as a producer, podcaster, and filmmaker includes Deep Reckonings, a series of explicitly deep fake videos that reimagines public figures as morally courageous people. Enjoy her gifts from the Muses, and make them your own:
How far you’ve traveled from Menlo-Atherton High School, Dame Stephanie Lynn Nicks! The Enchantress of Rock n Roll teams up with Wag Damon Albarn’s virtual band Gorillaz for Oil, a lush electronic escapade about fairy-like companions to the dark maths that catapult us to imagined worlds. Is that near Paramus? Anyhow, book us a ticket. —Suzy Bannion... Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to CultureWag to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
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