Sailing against the tide
Pablo is dead. Who is Pablo, you may ask? I had no idea either, but the main street downtown suddenly appeared full of flowers and written notes and candles and teddy bears. “R.I.P. Pablo”, said a graffiti in the shape of a heart. I started to think he was a victim of terrorism. Turns out,…
While most people were understandably driven to fear, rage or despair over the most recent massacres in that eternal conflict in the Middle East, while thousands were protesting in the streets for their preferred side and a few were even driven to violence over it, I, after an initial panic, spent my time trying to…
I knew something was afoot when they said that it was “Israel’s 911”. I mean, I guess it depends if you believe the official narrative or not. But for those of us who don’t necessarily believe the official story, this is a red flag. Now, I’m not saying people didn’t die. People also died in…
In February 2022, no one expected that Covid would suddenly disappear from the headlines from one day to the next due to some war in the Ukraine. In October 2023, I guess few people were expecting that the Ukraine war would suddenly disappear from the news because of another war between Israelis and Arabs, although…
Language as a home “The Russian language is my homeland”, wrote the great poet Anna Akhmatova. She was born in Odessa but lived mostly in Saint Petersburg. She descended from Ukrainian cossacks on her father’s side and from Russian nobility on her mother’s side. She could have escaped during the 1917 Revolution, as friends of…
The Criterion channel has been doing a Hal Hartley retrospective, so I decided to watch or re-watch some of his films. As you may know, Hartley was one of the indie cinema darlings of the early 1990s, together with the likes of Jim Jarmusch and others. Jarmusch is still around, but Hal Hartley, which had…
One of the strangest aspects of contemporary pop culture is how dark a lot of it is, and how drenched it has become in all kinds of occult symbolism. I am way too old to personally follow pop music, and I don’t really watch most Hollywood movies anymore either, but sites such as Vigilant Citizen,…
In 1927, Herbert Asbury published The Gangs of New York, a non-fictional book detailing the history of several gangs active in the New York area from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. Martin Scorsese made a film out of that, but the film is mostly a fictional interpretation (and probably not one of…
Spain won the Women’s soccer World Cup, but there was hardly any celebration. All the news have been concentrated on an infamous kiss given by Luis Rubiales, the president of Spain’s Football Association on one of the female players, Jennifer Hermoso. (Hermoso, by the way, means beautiful in Spanish, but opinions vary.) It didn’t seem…
Last year, I visited New York and Seattle and was surprised to see so many homeless and drug addicts roaming around the streets. Public transportation seemed more chaotic than usual and the cities still were reeling with disorder and a highest cost of living. I haven’t visited other cities there recently, but many visitors tell…