Before the president of the United States publicly imagined the Gaza Strip as a hip Middle Eastern Riviera, I only ever told this story to mock myself at parties. It was one of my bits. It turns out I am a prophet, I would declare.
Finally, I confess...and realize what I have been missing.
Roy Ayers coasted on his unique sentiment and vibe. It was sublime, positive, and unfailingly warm and luminescent. What else would you expect a writer, any writer, to say about the musical talent who gave us the song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”?
It is anyone’s guess as to whether Ukrainian President Volodoymyr Zelensky has read ‘The History of the the Peloponnesian War,’ even if his words spill into realms that Thucydides, with his imperatives for the preservation of law and solidarity against violence and calamity, would recognize at once.
The goal is to make you feel slightly more virtuous, briefly. But why stop there? People are crazy, and times are strange.
Facebook’s algorithms, which drive what any of us see individually, are a mystery to most of us. At best they make us passive consumers; at worst, easy pupils to brain-train for nefarious ends.
By drawing a line between its disturbed central figure and the serenity of the two bystanders at the vanishing point of the painting’s perspective, The Scream asks us to question the “sanity” we pretend to hold on to.
The guys in Gaza must be nearing 60 like my bandmates and I. I wonder if they stayed in our country after they were free to return to theirs without booking a steady gig in a gulag. I wonder what they make of Vladimir Putin having an ally in the White House or a short-timer like Pete Hegseth having oversight of the mightiest military on Earth.
Oksana Maksymchuk explained that she started writing ‘Still City’ in Ukraine, “maybe half a year before the actual invasion in the summer of 2021…and the Russian troops were amassing on the border, and we were assured that there would be nothing happening, but it seemed very threatening. I thought, ‘I’m going to write it as a kind of narrative about a non-event,’ something that I was sure would not take place.”
The world knew Nemerov's poetry. No one guessed his heart.