December 2009
I Destroyed Banksy's Rat →
A long time ago I lived in an old London warehouse with a guy called Steve, who was a questionable character and a cocktail of mental illnesses. Steve and I were both penniless; I worked full-time for a respectable fashion label but got awful pay for incredible PR, sales, and marketing skills, whereas Steve was a bum and deserved to be broke. On the outside of our building, near our front door,...
Director Jason Reitman Finds His Feet ‘Up In...
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November 2009
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The Kinks - This Time Tomorrow
Walter Benjamin : the story of a friendship →
The first thing that struck me about Benjamin - indeed it was characteristic of him all of his life - was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in...
Nagisa Oshima
Violence at Noon (Oshima, 1966): Aesthetics triumph. Oshima aggressively shoots black and white Cinemascope in almost exclusively close-ups or wide shots, most of them quite short, and combined with a dissonant orchestral score (not familiar with the composer, but it is in line with Takemitsu’s excellent film scores of the period), the film builds up momentum through craft alone. Which is...
Righteous Brothers - Unchained Melody
Some Indians Find It Tough To Go Home Again →
NEW DELHI — When 7-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai left Mumbai with his family nearly 40 years ago, he promised himself he would return to India someday to help his country.
In June, Mr. Ayyadurai, now 45, moved from Boston to New Delhi hoping to make good on that promise. An entrepreneur and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a fistful of American degrees, he was the first...
