Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
In his latest LRB review, Owen Hatherley writes about Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture by Nicolas Grospierre: Grospierre puts next to each other the Vilnius House of Ritual Services (a Soviet type sometimes known as a ‘Sorrow Palace’, where funerals were…
Some brutalist architecture is great – but when it’s bad, it can be very, very ugly, depressing and miserable. Sometimes it ages disgustingly, especially if the concrete is of poor quality. And if there’s a fire… Look at what happened to…
One of the two protagonists in Atomized by Michel Houellebecq reminisces: Oh, maybe I felt a little sad—but in a very general sort of way. “God Himself cannot undo that which has been done,” as some Catholic writer said somewhere.…
Alexei K. Tolstoy wrote A Mutiny in Vatican in 1864: The Castrati have rebelled.They walk into the Pope’s chambers:“Why aren’t we married?What’s our fault?” The Pope suggests “patching” his singers with cotton tissue, to which they object that the missing…
Alexander Petrun’ko was one of the “conservative activists” who attacked the Josh Sturges exhibition at the Brothers Lumère Center in Moscow last Sunday. Reportedly, he spilled a foul-smelling yellow liquid over the exhibits and the walls. (Some reporters got sprinkled, too.)…
The Moscow Times is running this headline today: Social Conservatives Make American Photographer an Overnight Celebrity in Moscow. The photographer is Jock Sturges. Radio Liberty reports: A controversial Moscow photography exhibition that critics say amounts to “child pornography” has been…
H. L. Mencken wrote in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1913) regarding the philosopher’s radical vegetarianism and belief in “natural methods of healing”: Nietzsche had read Emerson in his youth, and those Emersonian seeds which have come to full flower…
For whatever reasons – ideological or scholarly or both – Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar was not accepted into the mainstream of Soviet linguistics. On the other hand, the professor’s criticisms of US policies were a welcome addition to the…
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephanie DeGooyer writes about Ada Ushpiz’s new documentary, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt. Before focusing on the 2016 film, the reviewer makes a critical mention of an earlier one, Hannah Arendt…
While we’re at it, the cakewalk – ragtime’s close relative – makes an appearance in a relatively well-known poem by Nikolai Zabolotsky, The Signs of the Zodiac Are Fading, first published in 1929: Fat-bottomed mermaidsAre flying away straight into the sky,Arms sturdy like sticks,Breasts round like…
Electrical sound recording, which relies on microphones and amplifiers, became the industry standard around 1925. From Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 to the mid-1920s, sound was only recorded acoustically, the sonic vibrations transmitting themselves directly from the horn…
The media is anxious to find evidence of Trump’s deals with Russian oligarchs to prove Putin’s influence over the candidate. Since Russian oligarchs are but Putin’s puppets – so the logic goes – the man in the Kremlin can either…