Battleship Potemkin (1925) M (1931) The Baker’s Wife (1938) The Killers (1946) Kind Hearts and Coronets (1948) Begone Dull Care (1949) Neighbours (1952) Tokyo Story (1953) Seven Samurai (1954) The Ladykillers (1955) The Fabulous World of Jules Verne aka Invention for Destruction (1958) Directed by Karel Zeman The Actor’s Revenge (1963) 21-87 (1964) 23 Skidoo … [Read more…]
esculent adjective: fit to be eaten; edible. noun: a thing, especially a vegetable, which is fit to be eaten. from Latin esculentus, from esca ‘food’, from esse ‘eat’. ——————- vitiate : spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of; destroy or impair the legal validity of Seen in the New York Times, in a column … [Read more…]
His score of books and hundreds of essays documented Stalinist executions, Communist repressions and censorship, and the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Obituary in The New York Times.
Finished rereading Vineland today. First read it when it came out in 1990 and I don’t recall reading it again until recently, 35 years later. I’ve recently reread Inherent Vice, and of course, Shadow Ticket, his most recent and often, when idle, between books, I’ll pull one of his books down, open it randomly and … [Read more…]
In The Guardian is a fine piece on how Jessica Williams found and used prepared piano as an extension of her musical world. I can’t find her album “Blue Abstraction” yet, but wanted to leave this marker for future use. Williams died in 2022. Dave Brubeck called her a great and Mary Lou Williams gave … [Read more…]
Crack-up Capitalism – Market Radicals and the Dream of A World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian 2023 The New York Review of Books ran a recent review of Slobodian’s new book Hayek’s Bastards – Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right which was intriguing. When I checked at the library for it, … [Read more…]
John Burton, influential California Democrat, dies at 92. The quip “Never pass by a urinal, never trust a fart, and never ignore an erection” is attributed to him. His office wall held a framed jock strap embroidered with the words “I am a Burton supporter.” In 1998, after he was elected Senate president pro tempore, … [Read more…]
While reading about Lotte Lanya in Wikipedia, they used the term Diseuse: “French for “teller”, also called talkers, storytellers, dramatic-singers or dramatic-talkers is a term, at least as used on the English-speaking stage, that appears to date to the last decade of the 19th century. ” Lotte Lanya as Rosa Klebb in From Russia With … [Read more…]
en·sor·cell [enˈsôrsəl] verb archaic enchant; fascinate: “he was a child when the power of a mythic image first ensorcelled him” Similar: captivate charm delight dazzle enrapture entrance The above link shows an etymology from Old French: ensorceler (“to cast a spell, enchant; to captivate”) Found in this phrase in a review by Namwali Serpell of … [Read more…]
Irredentism – (Italian: irredentismo)[1] is one state’s desire to annex the territory of another state. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this term used in the context of the Ukraine war by Russia. I found in at the end of chapter 14 of V. by Pynchon: “Rumor had it that a week or so later the … [Read more…]