HIGH HEELS ON A WINDOWSILL: THE DEFINITION OF REVOLUTIONARY SUCCESS: I haven’t got much to say about Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel’s lush biopic about Cuban gay/dissident writer (the adjectives are interchangeable) Reinaldo Arenas. If you know the basic outlines of the guy’s life, you know what to expect, really. I will say that the one major objection I had at the start of the movie–why are they talking in heavily-accented English, rather than either Spanish or accentless English?–ultimately struck... Read more

“WE LIKE LISTENING”: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or, in its American titles, A Girl in Love or Never Read the Comments! SPOILERS, obviously. Katharina Blum lives in West Germany, and it’s Carnival so everyone is loosened-up and in costume. She is generally considered quite prudish, but goes to a party and ends up taking a young man home. He’s a terrorist of some unspecified Red hue. The next morning the cops invade her home. The moment in which... Read more

CROATIA MUSEUM OF BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS WINS AWARD. Build your own poem. Via TKB. Read more

“THERE ARE BAD TIMES JUST AROUND THE CORNER.” The Twilight Struggle proved to be a bit of a just-before-dawn Struggle, but if you ignore everything explicitly about Communism (…I know) this is a really great bracer. Everybody dies eventually; you might as well die ornery. There’s no duty to retreat. Read more

Von Bayern sat down across the table from the two men. “I was an associate professor, working at the University at Alexandria. An Imperial official, a magistrate… well, she seduced me first. Or I allowed myself to be seduced. Or… There is not much blood involved, actually, not at one time, unless the person is driven to gorge. And infection is not inevitable. That is what a young man says to a young woman he desires, is it not? There... Read more

ON DECK: Uh, neither of those were the real post I promised, which will be about The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. You’ll get it tomorrow night. I’m sorry! Read more

ONLINE YA FICTION DYSTOPIA GENERATOR. To create your own one-trick-pony novel where an all-powerful government has the same idee fixe that you do! Read more

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS YOUR REASON, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A DOUBT. Read more

LIKE THOSE OTHER STICKY VALENTINES: A lot of people seem to view the killing of Osama Bin Laden as a symbolic victory. I think that’s right in many ways. But at the same time I think it’s something else; how do we know the difference between a symbolic act and a sentimental act? I know part of my distaste for the celebrations of his death (beyond the basic fact that celebrating even the death of Hitler is very different from... Read more

MOSFILM UPLOADS CELLULOID CLASSICS TO YOUTUBE. Via TKB. Russian film lovers can explore a treasure trove of Soviet films as legendary movie studio Mosfilm has posted dozens of its most famous films on YouTube for anyone to watch for free. The films, legendary for many Russians but often little known in the West, include the comedies of Georgian-Russian director Georgi Daneliya, “Gentlemen of Fortune” and “Mimino”; “The White Sun Of The Desert,” a much-loved adventure story set in Central Asia... Read more