Be Sure To Wear White Ribbons in Your Hair

March 3, 2012 | No Comments

Before hitting Russia about a month ago, I had planned on writing a series of blog posts about the country as we crossed it. I made copious notes to that effect as we did so: about the Russian reaction to Chinese pushiness at Far Eastern border crossings; the tendency of Russian bars to play to American songs that you wouldn't necessarily expect them to, like LMFAO's 'Party Rock Anthem' or, even more surprisingly, The Lonely Island's 'I Just Had Sex'; and about the pleasures of Soviet-era apartments that have been converted into cheap hotel rooms. I also wanted to write about the performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, like shell-shock in two movements, that we attended in Nizhny Novgorod's Kremlin Concert Hall. But other, more newsworthy pieces kept taking precedence. That has been especially true in the capital. Since hitting Moscow a little over a week ago, I have written more words per day than ever before, and thus far almost all of them have been published.

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The Student from Nanjing

January 31, 2012 | 2 Comments

"No one told me China was the worst country in Asia," the student from Nanjing tells us. "Vietnam shits on China. Thailand shits on China. Singapore shits on China. Japan positively shits on China." He is excited to hear that we're heading to Russia. "Russia shits on China," he says.

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Martha and Ernest

January 28, 2012 | No Comments

In Travels with Myself and Another, Martha Gellhorn writes of a trip to China with her then husband Ernest Hemingway. (Gellhorn hated Hemingway after their divorce and never refers to him in the book by name.) China was not the ideal location for two people who were not ideal travelling companions. Gellhorn was anally retentive about cleanliness and found the country's hygiene lacking. Hemingway, who was inspired by almost every country he ever visited, and who got at least one great story from each of them, never got one from China, and indeed didn't get any decent journalism from it, either. He liked the local liquor and the men who drank it, but not even the baijiu could stir him to write.

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Productivity and Intensity

January 14, 2012 | No Comments

My three months in Perth end this afternoon and I thought I should probably write a short post about my time here. It is very early in the morning right now and I have just finished a too-long essay on Schindler's List for Screen Education. (The picture is one of those that I actually quite like, but which disintegrates under the pressure of my fingernail the moment I start to scratch at it.)

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A Year of Television

December 31, 2011 | No Comments

There were a number of new and ongoing television series that took up a lot of my time this year. Homeland beat out Game of Thrones as the best new series of the year. (I've just started watching Boss, too, and am already very impressed with what I'm seeing.)

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A Year of Books

December 31, 2011 | No Comments

Where my university years were all about movies, and the four that followed them all about theatre, the last two have been taken up, in the main, by books and television.

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Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

December 16, 2011 | 1 Comment

"Remaining debonair," Irwin Shaw once wrote, "means that one must always be ready to go to the next bar or the next war, no matter how late the hour or how unattractive the war." Writing about his friend Robert Capa, Shaw could also have been describing Christopher Hitchens, who died today at the age of sixty-two after an eighteen-month battle with oesophageal cancer.

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