To begin with I ought to reassure the gentle reader that any resemblance between the title of this post and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is purely coincidental, though a literary charlatan in the audience may well argue that, like the pretentious novel, my post “deals with issues of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception.”
My impression is that 99.99% of all contemporary cinematic output falls into one of two categories. The first, by far the larger of the two, consists of brazenly exploitative commercial products, the medium’s equivalent of the Twinkie Cake or White Cheddar Cheetos, which are made by Hollywood’s lascivious Shylocks to fleece the common man. The second category is unlike the first in that a commercial return on the products of which it is comprised is somewhat less certain, and the reason for this is that they contain artistic pretension as a separate ingredient rather than the way a particular junk...
In some perverse way I’m hoping that our editor will put up today’s post without reading it, because few things are more irritating to a savant than a layman on the prowl in his field of expertise. Instinctively he reaches for the shotgun loaded with rock salt to teach the trespasser a lesson. I’ve only ever had a year of Latin in adolescence, but living as I do in a country whose language, in Byron’s phrase, is “that soft bastard Latin, / Which melts like kisses from a female mouth / And sounds as if it should be writ on...
I used to mistrust Boris Nemtsov, suspecting him of being a sanctioned opposition figurehead, until he was publicly executed on Putin’s orders. It’s quite amazing what martyrdom does for a man’s reputation. After the Nemtsov assassination I switched my mistrust to Alexei Navalny, who, gallingly, persisted in living as though to show that he cared nothing for my opinion of him. Yet a recent investigation published by Navalny’s foundation (FBK, or “Fight Against Corruption”) is so delightfully boisterous – so adventurous in delving into subjects no ordinary politician would touch with a bargepole – it has persuaded me that I...
A Russian painter friend of mine, who had followed our family into exile in the United States yet never went back on his contention that English articles are a petit bourgeois nuisance, used to joke that the American Dream is “finding Rembrandt in garbage can.” Although the major actors in the nightmare I record here are about as American as Confucius, and the dream object in question a Da Vinci rather than a Rembrandt, in the past few days my friend’s quip ran through my mind more than once. Let me begin from afar. It is a rule of life...
To my readers it would probably come as something of a disappointment to learn that I had actually watched the film entitled The Death of Stalin before I formed an opinion of it. Indeed, a trailer of 2 minutes and 27 seconds’ duration was more than sufficient to confirm me in that endangered species of prejudice which is born of experience. The film is advertised as a comedy, with the 1:1 proportion of swear words to cheap shots typical of the genre in its contemporary interpretation, namely, absurd slapstick made by people without a sense of humor for people without...
For the better part of the last ten years, in the California town of Perris – which is probably how you pronounce “Paris” if you’re a child molester, though this conjecture is, I admit, of little relevance to the larger argument here – a couple enslaved and abused thirteen persons of various ages, allegedly their own biological offspring, keeping them in chains and starving them in ways that would make Mr. Bumble take pity on poor Oliver Twist. This is all happening in America, in 2018, yet the only reaction to the madness, apart from the grinding of the wheels...
If one cares to understand something about the South of Italy, I suggest spending four minutes of one’s time viewing this masterpiece of daily life on YouTube. It has all the truthfulness, spontaneity, and absurdity of an early Chekhov story, and it explains something central about individual liberty – something missing in Burke on the right as well as in Mill on the left. In short, it’s a good illustration of why this is still the best place to live in Europe. Neither I nor my wife drives, so we’re well placed to observe disinterestedly, without the bitter rancor that...
I overdid it at Christmas, which for the Russians was this past Sunday, remaining incapacitated – catatonic is the usual term – and incapable of writing anything new this week. So here are some old jottings. Through the fog of champagne and grappa there dimly glimmers in them, I trust, a truth that bears repeating in the New Year. Reading all the various, though scarcely varied, opinions on the “crises” that Moscow throws the West’s way – after 100 years of Russian misrule one might think the word would be safely devalued, but no, they use it like St. James’s...
Like many great men, Signor Baldo, whose skills with the ancient San Marco espresso machine recall the illustrious surgeons or perhaps even the famous generals of history, is used to adulation. The morning bar crowd here is what in marketing is called a quality-conscious clientele, and these people are cognizant and appreciative of the fact that the machine is entirely manual, with nobody but its operator to be either blamed or applauded for the result. None of that press-the-button stuff for Signor Baldo’s customers. Once in a while a tourist wanders in, and though I can see that the coffee...
