Current Preoccupations
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On the Hungarian elections
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« Last night didn’t just feel like an election victory, there was something of 1989 about it, the way people were dancing on the roofs of bus stops, forming a…
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The vanished world
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Monsieur and Madame Louis Cahen d’Anvers never liked Renoir’s portrait of their eight-year-old daughter; it was Madame Cahen d’Anvers’s lover who chose Renoir over a more fashionable society portraitist; they…
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Epic Failure
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Growing up on, and still happily consuming, American popular culture, my brain’s first association when it sees the letters e, p, i and c, is to read epic failure. And I hear the bass rumble…
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Underground rave, literary
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We are all explorers. Last week was Easter weekend. I’m not much of a Christian, but where I’m from (Latviaaaa!) it means family gatherings, eggs dyed with the first spring…
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« Exile is a form of action »
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The Bibliothèque Tourguenieff, the oldest Russian-language lending-library outside Russia, is on the second floor of an anonymous apartment building in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. The library was originally founded…
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The Emperor’s New Clothes Part II: Crowds and Phones
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Last week, I found myself waiting in a long line of twenty-something-year-olds in fancy dress, Goths in black leather and chains, trans waifs in white pancake makeup and platform wedgies.…
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« The Emperor’s Clothes »
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Any fool can see that the head of state is naked, that he is a complete phony — except for himself. Such appears to be the premise of The Emperor’s…
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« Mother Has Arrived »
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Last Saturday I saw a play called « Mother Has Arrived ». It was written and directed by Than Hussein Clark, an American artist based in Glasgow and Genoa. His…
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D’win Erbyn, Genocide
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The elderly gentleman seemed at first sight to be having some kind of seizure. He was lying on the ground, his body shaking convulsively. Young men and women in yellow…