Sailing against the tide
The other day I was looking for a Christmas card with a Nativity scene to send to a more religious friend and I couldn’t find a single one. It was all trees, presents, Santa Claus, reindeers and even penguins. But no Nativity scene. Now, it is true that Christmas since the beginning adopted many pre-Christian…
The algorithm works in mysterious ways. I spent almost a full year working in a documentary film about Finland, taking the trouble to create complicated stop-motion scenes to represent dreams, and hardly anyone watched it. I think not even the people who appear in the film watched it. Maybe it was too long and too…
The world you were born in no longer exists. When I was a child, thousands of years ago, the world was still mostly analog. I listened to vinyl records and tapes. I had a walkman. That was considered a great innovation back then. Sometimes the tape got stuck and you needed to rewind it with…
There’s a lot of doom in the Internet, especially among the alternative news crowd. People can’t get enough of the “end of the world/end of the West” type of thing. While I do understand that we are living in highly worrying times, with war expanding everywhere, economic downturn, birth rate collapse, mass migration, and radical…
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande, che per mare e per terra batti l’ali, e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande! (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVI) The Americans After Spain, I came to Florence, for a brief course. I’m staying in a monastery of benedictine nuns that rents rooms, located right at the edge…
For several weeks, protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza have been ongoing at several American universities and a few European ones. It’s basically the same crowd of leftist students that protested for Black Lives Matters, for abortion or for other popular causes (but not against Covid lockdowns). But while those protests were accepted and even…
As the world moves closer to WWIII for reasons no sane man can understand, I prefer for the moment to write about travel. I am still reading Vigée Le Brun’s memories about her travels in Italy, and finding them pretty interesting. But then again, I usually like to read diaries or travel journals, even by…
We live in an age that, for the most part, doesn’t believe in miracles or in any form of transcendence from the material world. Some believe in the miracles of “science” — although I suppose that has also taken a hit in the recent “Covid” years — but, other than that, I think most people…
Perfect Days “Perfect Days”, Wim Wenders’ latest movie set in Tokyo, is a very poetic, minimalistic film about finding joy in the simple things of life. (I am usually not a great fan of Wenders, but this is a good one). In the film, the main character works as a public toilet cleaner, although his…
So let’s conclude with our end-of-the-year report. The posts with most viewers here were the ones about politics, AI and immigration. The least viewed ones were the ones about travel or obscure movies. I am not sure what it means. I normally prefer to write about travel or obscure movies, but most people obviously prefer…