March 2012
9 posts
“Sister Wendy, the nun-turned-television-presenter, has warned that modern-day ignorance about Christianity and the Classics has left people unable to appreciate much of Western art.”
—
Britons are ignorant of Christianity and the Classics, says Sister Wendy - Telegraph
Sister Wendy is right. If you’re going to appreciate Western art and culture at anything more than a superficial, unsatisfying level, you need at least a passing understanding of Greece, Rome, and Christianity, not to mention a comfortable appreciation of the Renaissance.
Some art can stand apart from context, but context makes it so much better.
The same goes for literature, by the way. And film.
The Boys of Tianjin: The True Story of Not Getting the Story →
diaspora.chinasmack.com
Qing Qing Chen’s entertaining story of what happens when a young Chinese woman raised in America comes back to China and encounters the local boys.
“Peter Biskind’s book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” split the ’70s Movie Brat generation into warring camps: Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, the protectors of Art, versus Lucas and Spielberg, the guys who turned movies into video games. (It seemed like a worse insult 10 years ago.) Among the many problems with this theory is that Lucas’s work on technical advances, like digital filmmaking and computer-generated imagery, has begun to help the very directors whose careers he supposedly vaporized. The year in which Martin Scorsese releases “Hugo” — a movie with 15 times the number of C.G.I. shots as “Jurassic Park” — is the year in which it’s no longer O.K. to call Lucas a villain.”
—George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits - NYTimes.com
Russia's New Time of Troubles
MARTIN SIXSMITH
on Russia, then and now.
The line dividing memory from history is a thin one. The latter hinges on reportage, reconstruction, and, inevitably, speculation; the former is personal, immediate and in some cases dramatic. It is twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but my memories of it are sharp. Waking up in Moscow to the news of the August 1991 military coup against the reforming Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev; driving down Gorky Street as columns of tanks descended on the Kremlin, sent by the disgruntled hardline communists who claimed to have seized power; talking to the tank crews and hearing from nervous conscripts that they had live ammunition in their weapons and were prepared to use it. For three anxious days the fate of Europe and the world was fought over on the streets of Moscow.
After nearly a decade of reporting from the Soviet Union, I had known for some time that Gorbachev’s perestroika was in trouble. His liberalizing reforms hadn’t delivered the goods, either politically or in the nation’s food stores. Earlier in the year Kremlin hardliners had surreptitiously fomented unrest in the Baltic republics; now they were going for broke.
