Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Steve Bannon, Trump’s strategist, comes across as sensible and well-informed, judging by this 2014 speech. Unfortunately, he is short on new solutions, to say nothing of a new worldview, but that would take a genius. At the moment, I’m more interested in the…
Those for whom the world ended with Hillary Clinton’s loss of the electoral college must have led lives basking in sunshine and boundless opportunity. But how does it feel – as years go by – to shed illusion upon illusion, wade through disappointment…
Owen Hatherley writes of British architects active in the first post-WWII decade: In the first ten years after 1945, the pure white style of Bruno Ahrends’s Berlin had been Anglicised, but not in the direction of the monumental dissonance of…
According to Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (here’s a report from the BBC): Russia’s economic development minister [Alexei Ulyukayev] has been charged with large-scale bribe taking and placed under house arrest following his detention overnight in a case that has sent…
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…
OPEC expects Russia to produce at the same average rate in 2017 as in 2016, which means a slight decrease from the current daily output. The IEA acknowledges that, if Russia can continue pumping at the same rate as in October,…
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…
I thought the Monster Vote was merely wishful thinking by escapist desperados – until it materialized. Well done, folks. Now I fear that certain people in the Kremlin, who do not believe in the possibility of government by the people…
Pavel Felgenhauer, the veteran Russian military observer (I recall reading him in 1992 or 93), sees the Admiral Kuznetsov‘s journey to the Levant as an argument for more funding, advanced by the Russian admirals to erode opposition from the finance ministry and the “tank…
They say there are three Vladimirs in Moscow now: one lying, one sitting, and one standing. That is, Vladimir Lenin’s body is in the mausoleum in Red Square in a horizontal position; Vladimir Putin “sits” in the Kremlin (as in…
The Kremlin should not mind at all a politically vulnerable, ailing person in the White House. Secretary Clinton fits the description perfectly, assuming that her digital trail and health are truly the sad affair her detractions claim they are. Besides, she is an intelligent, hence intelligible, machine with quite…
No matter who gets to occupy the New Shaab Palace and the White House, the Kremlin’s occupants will still have to admit that Russia, viewed as a country rather than merely a strutter on the global stage, is not getting anywhere.…