As I’ve written before, I’m leaving journalism. There’s a magazine profile of me coming out at some point, and it’s a good time to head to the beach.
I hate the media, but I’ve known the author of the article for many years so I hope it’ll be fair.
However, there’s one thing that a friend of mine who was interviewed mentioned, and I want to address it before going underground. Apparently the author of the profile was taken with the concept that I’m “a man out of time”—that I belong to a different era, perhaps the 1950s. (I also suspect the photograph they take will make me look like an asshole, but that’s a different story.)
If this is a theme, it’ll be wrong. I grew up in a liberal, artistic, JFK Irish-Catholic family in Maryland. We loved modernism. We read challenging books, listened to avant-garde music, and saw experimental plays. My father was a journalist for National Geographic and my brother was an award-winning actor.
And yet I’m a political and cultural conservative. The explanation for how this works is provided by Jed Perl in his book Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts. Perl argues that the “lifeblood of art” is the tension between authority and freedom. “Authority is the ordering impulse,” he says. “Freedom is the love of experimentation and play.”
It’s important for art to push boundaries, but without an established canon or standard of excellence to break away from it becomes frivolous. The struggle between authority and freedom, notes Perl, not only “animates the war of twentieth-century giants like Mondrian and Schoenberg,” but also stretches back through history. The struggle was going on “in all times and places”—through Mozart, Wordsworth, Picasso—back to Egypt. It was going on in the evolution of Radiohead. Perl once declared that “liberals are killing art.”
This balance has driven my life. It’s why the political left rejects me even as the right doesn’t quite understand me. Places like the Daily Wire and the Heritage Foundation have millions of dollars to invest in good journalism, promising young directors, restive visual artists. Instead they give us Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh. People need more than screeds. They need vision, hope and freedom and art. The Arts section of the Sunday New York Times is going to provide it much more than Alex Jones.
2026 marks the 45th anniversary of a work of musical art that’s part of my psyche. It’s “Tainted Love,” a smash 1981 single from the British band Soft Cell. “Tainted Love” was previously a 1964 Motown song by singer Gloria Jones. To Soft Cell (singer Marc Almond and instrumentalist Dave Ball) Motown wasn’t just the mecca of black pop music, but a pop musical authority with tradition, but also something to be transformed into something new. Inspired not only by the “Northern Soul” movement in their native England and the electronic music of the German band Kraftwerk, they reimagined “Tainted Love” as a mesmerizing, synthesized pop song.
Soft Cell released an extended version with the Supremes’ classic “Where Did Our Love Go?” on it. It’s a perfect intersection of Perl’s dual idea about authors and freedom, author and play. To hear it as a teenager on the dance floor in 1981 was to have your mind blown. It was new but not contrarian. As Perl notes, “great artists are not necessarily contrarians.”
It’s worth noting that the music scene of the 1980s was charged with modernism. In his book, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds argues that “those postpunk years from 1978 to 1984 saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature. The entire post punk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music.” Bands from Cabaret Voltaire, who borrowed their name from Dada, to Talking Heads, who “tried to deconstruct rock even as they rocked hard.” Lyricists absorbed the science fiction of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick. The record cover artwork of the period “matched the neo modernist aspirations of the words and music, with graphic designers like Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville and labels like Factory and Fast Product drawing from constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, John Heartfield and Die Neue Typographie.”
The call of the 1980s, like the call of the modernist, was to make it new. The critic Hilton Kramer once explored how modernism was accepted by mainstream Americans who were also cognizant of the very traditions it was attempting to break away from. Perl explores how a range of artists interact with authority, from T.S. Eliot, Picasso, Henry James, and Michelangelo, to philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Aside from politics, Perl writes, art has “an authority of its own.”
I was recently talking to a friend about my impending escape and he marveled at how, after the conservatives left me to die on the battlefield and the liberals don’t have the guts to face me, I’ve emerged stronger.