La zorrita astuta

Here’s a video of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá – its youth section mostly – performing Janáček‘s Cunning Little Vixen in August 2021. The staging is as simple and low-budget as they go. I would call it home-made, but –…

Newton’s laws

The opening sentence of a recent piece by Laura Spinney in The Guardian: Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Newton’s second law of motion is F…

La Brea

According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Spanish, brea means tar or pitch. Confusingly, the Spanish definition provided alongside the English translation is “sustancia resinosa de ciertas coníferas.” Roughly, “the resinous substance of certain coniferous plants,” which sounds more like resin…

Defiance or escapism?

I was trying to write a sensible comment to a piece on Medium, It’s Time We Tell the Truth about the Rolling Stones, when I came across a stunning essay by Margo Jefferson. Ripping Off Black Music, published in 1973…

Once again, reinvent the book

Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic: …Ebook devices are extremely compatible with an idea of bookiness that values holding and carrying a potentially large number of books at once; that prefers direct flow from start to finish over random access;…

The Treaty of Kars: some background

A sequel to the post on the Treaty of Kars centenary (1921-2021). In much of the XIX century, Britain and France propped up the weak Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russian expansion. With the rise of the Entente Cordiale,…

The Treaty of Kars, 1921-2021

The first centenary of the Kars Treaty between three Soviet Republics and Turkey is coming up in October. Its predecessor, the Treaty of Moscow between Russia and Turkey, turned 100 in March 2021. It’s probably worth repeating that 2015 marked…

Rorty misquoted (again)

Writing in the New Republic, Chris Lehmann points out that a certain passage in Richard Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, appeared to prophesy the conditions of Donald Trump’s shocking ascension to the presidency. Lehmann then summarizes Rorty’s argument –…

Presentiment

Of nothing in particular. Ruins of Ivan Zholtovsky’s puzzling pavilion, grainy rain clouds above, a pop-artsy fence, and tired, lifeless grass in the foreground: Dusk in Gorky Park. By way of explanation, a quote by Alexandra Selivanova pasted from this…

Pines in wet climates

The pine forest on the left grows in the Pskov region of European Russia, not far from Pushkin’s ancestral estate. The climate there is moderately cold and rather wet, with more than 700 mm of precipitation per year.  Winters are…

The director’s part

“We liked how Actress X played her part – we just didn’t like Director Y’s production.” Every now and then, critics write this – without noticing the contradiction within. More often than not, it turns out that Actress X excelled…

East Europeans at Bayreuth

The Bayreuth Festival opened last Sunday with a performance of The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Holländer). The first thing that meets the eye is the roster of the artists who created this production. Most of the key names are Eastern…