The Green Room

Writer and author Bob Colacello was the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine during the 1970s, a role that placed him at the very epicenter of that era’s glitter, exuberance, and excess. Camera in hand, he accompanied the legendary pop artist through a dizzying social whirl around the world from the dark corners and disco lights of Studio 54 to the inner sanctums of the Reagan White House.  

 

Now, as Netflix celebrates the life of his close friend, fashion icon Halston in a new series starring Ewan McGregor, Colacello joins Arsalan Mohammad in the Green Room to talk about what the series got right - and where it went wrong. We also discuss the background to Bob’s epic biography of the Reagans based on his enduring friendship with Nancy, ponder the pair’s legendary marriage and legacy and Bob recalls his runs-ins with a gauche real estate developer from Queens, with a taste for bling, who married an elegant socialite named Ivana.

In this week’s edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator World edition Dominic Green meets human rights activist, campaigner for classical liberal values, research fellow, founder of the AHA foundation and prolific author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for a chat about her article in the new edition of The Spectator World edition. In it, she examines the perceived flaws in Western civilisation today, the toxic creep of those who push for a totalitarian ‘woke’ agenda and reflects on how tertiary education in the US is in danger of smothering students with critical race theory.  

 

‘You have to drill down on what it is the woke want. They want to dictate what you eat and don’t eat. They want to dictate who you fraternise with or what your children are learning at school. They’re very totalitarian in their approach and they’re punitive. I think it’s a self-defeating cause and very soon they’re going to be smashed up’

A former politician in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali has written several books including Infidel (2007); Nomad (2010); Heretic (2015); and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her newest book Prey is available now. 

Don’t forgot to subscribe to the The Green Room for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living. Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

In this week’s edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green and co-host Arsalan Mohammad take a look back half a century to 1971, a year currently being explored in a magnificent eight-part documentary series on Apple+ TV. Packed with archival music, contemporary news reports, voices from the mainstream and underground, the series is highly recommended.

However, Dom and Arsalan soon veer off into a debate on nostalgia, the whys and wherefores of the corporatisation of rock music, the astonishing impact of Black artists such as Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone and James Brown versus the pomp-rock of bloated West Coast hippies like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Should the supergroup concept ever have been taken seriously? And then, there’s the mind-boggling question - would you let David Crosby father YOUR child?

In this week’s edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green meets DJ Taylor, who writes in the latest edition of Spectator World, about Hawkwind, unlikely champions of the British rock underground. Less a band, more a way of life, the fascinating story of Hawkwind veers from the radicalism of the late 1960s, through the rise and fall of countercultural forces in decades to follow, to the present day. It’s a soap opera of Spinal Tap proportions, a very British tale of inspiration, madness, dreaminess and otherworldliness. 

 

Dominic and DJ Taylor have collaborated on a special Hawkwind playlist over here at Spotify, so don’t forget to check it out and let us know what you think! Meanwhile, do share the love in a suitably free love style, by sharing The Green Room with your social media channels for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living. 

Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

In this week’s edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green and journalist Arsalan Mohammad celebrate Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday by debating a good old-fashioned mixtape of tunes spanning the old master’s 60-year career (with some background sound effects by Arsalan’s dog). To listen to our selection, head over to our special Dylan Spotify playlist here and perhaps let us know what would make your top ten. 

 

Don’t forgot to subscribe to the The Green Room for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living. Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

In this week’s episode of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green meets the author Sohrab Ahmari for a chat about his new book, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering The Wisdom Of Tradition In An Age Of Chaos.

In it, Ahmari, a writer and New York Post op-ed editor, makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning, via 12 fundamental questions that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the life and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Andrea Dworkin, Ahmari invites us to examine the hidden assumptions that drive our behaviour and, in so doing, to live more humanely in a world that has lost its way.

Dominic Green talks to Simon Nye, who adapted the memoir-novels of Gerald Durrell into the television series ‘The Durrells of Corfu’. 

We all know we’re modern, but how many of us can say why? Dominic Green's guest on 'The Green Room' this week, Italian writer Roberto Calasso, is a peerless explorer of what he calls the modern 'revolution in the human brain’, and of the ghostly endurance of the old gods. His latest book, The Unnamable Present, is the ninth in a kaleidoscopic series.

Presented by Dominic Green.

Historian David Garrow on the de-classified FBI files on Martin Luther King. 

On this week’s Green Room podcast, Art Tavana and Dominic Green discuss the making and unmaking of Laura Loomer, a 25 year old video journalist who made unsavory comments about Islam, and what her modern morality tale says about media, politics and the way we live. Tavana feels that Loomer’s sanity and safety are in the balance, in part because she cannot escape her notoriety, but Loomer insists that she is going nowhere: 'I’m here forever. I’m here to stay.’

Presented by Dominic Green.