It wouldn’t surprise me if, at the close of 2014, L’Image Manquante/The Missing Picture (Rithy Prahn, 2013) remained the best film I’ve seen all year. Premiering at Cannes, where it received the Prix Un Certain Regard, and having screened at most of the major film festivals, the Cambodian documentary is on the shortlist of potential nominees for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (More…)
The Wall Street Journal has published a promotional excerpt from Robert M. Gates’ memoirs, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War. It’s a much needed glimpse into the wartime thinking of the Obama Administration, particularly its similarities to its predecessor, the Bush Administration. (More…)
Britain used to be great, but an enemy within has sunk us. From Syria to Afghanistan, its growing list of foreign policy failures are the result of women, ethnic minorities, godlessness and gory films. Apparently. Scapegoating is the order of the day. (More…)
Never mind the quenelle. There’s a new hand sign in Egypt. The Rabia, as it is called, consists of holding up four fingers, with the thumb tucked in, as a protest against military rule. The gesture is Islamist, and refers to the massacre of supporters of deposed president Morsi, which took place in Cairo’s Rabia al-Adawiya Square on August 14th, 2013. (More…)
It has been four days since I was forced to leave Yemen. Last Thursday, the president of Yemen College of Middle Eastern Studies, gave me a choice: face interrogation, arrest and, potential imprisonment over my article Explosions of Sana’a (and presumably others,) or leave the country by Tuesday. (More…)
In the fall of 1992, I moved to New York to attend the New School for Social Research. Separated from my social scene in Portland, Oregon and with little money, I spent my first weeks in Manhattan feeling very much out of sorts. It was then that I reconnected with an old friend from my undergraduate days. Donny was going to Cornell Medical School uptown. He’d grown up in and around the city, and he made it his business to help me acclimate. (More…)
Seeing this photograph of graffiti in Stuttgart transported me back to my time as an exchange student in Germany. Not so much for the cleverness of the critique it implies — though I do appreciate it — but because I spent much of my stay asking myself the very same question, “What the fuck is Heimat?” (More…)
A moustachioed face emerged from a bundle of coats and scarves. Levon, talkative as ever, is warming his hands to the festive glow of a slowly rotating Döner kebab at Café Aleppo, Yerevan. Shwarma can take a while to prepare, especially with numb fingers. Business could be better. Customers don’t hang around in the cold weather. (More…)
One way of tackling the metal crisis is to reintroduce scarcity. To some extent this is already happening. The stubborn persistence of vinyl and cassettes in metal derives from a desire to maintain scarcity. The reduction al absurdo of this tendency is releasing music in near-obsolete formats such as floppy diskettes. However, on its own, this strategy is too limited though, as not only are many such releases simultaneously released digitally. (More…)
It’s hard not to discuss films that have already appeared on critics’ lists. However, most of what we read about in year end favourites like this still elude the majority of moviegoers. Most are unable to attend festivals, and don’t live in major cities, where end-of-year theatrical releases ensures eligibility for major film awards. For such persons, annual picks, however many of them we can read, are essential. Here are mine. (More…)
Anyone who travels to Pakistan, or Yemen, for long periods, is confronted with violence. Death is everywhere. One of the ways I have come to terms with it is through re-watching relevant films, in particular, A Serious Man. (More…)
I was spoiled. For fifteen years, there wasn’t a day when a new book or CD didn’t arrive in the mail. Sent for review, at the magazines I edited, it was a very different era. Publishers could far more easily dispense with physical copy, for PR purposes, than they can today. I owe half of my library to this largesse. (More…)