Mussorgsky’s music represents a tsarist, imperial vision of what Hartmann, and no doubt other Russians, wanted to see constructed so that it could adorn the capital city of Ukraine for generations. When we listen to Mussorgsky’s music we can instead, for now, call to mind the Golden Gate of Kiev that still stands.
Ever since it was filed in 2022 this was a case shoved into the headlines by boring egos, sloppy legal work, and with the anemic celebrity appeal of America’s most blasé, greedy 1970s rock band lounging sleazily at the center of it all.
Ivan is a nationalist in the Putin mold and during our visit mistook me, at least, to have some American equivalent of his native love for authoritarianism.
Phonics was my nemesis, and later, I heard it as Phyllis Schlafly’s battle cry. Why, I wondered, was reading instruction political?
Despite some overlaps, military branches do in the end have their own histories, traditions, and, in particular, things, which set an emotional tone. Marines are “Leathernecks” for their stiff collars, originally meant to prevent cutlass wounds. Sailors were “swabbies” for their mops, or “tars” for the tar used on old ships. Navy cadre at the dive school called us “trees” for our camouflage-patterned army uniforms.
The story of Scott Walker is the story not of making it big, but making it big the right way across an entire career, including even the long breaks in between.
Philosophy needed some rebranding, if people were not to relegate it to grumpy old men. But Becky Moon was just a freshman, so she shrugged off the question and contented herself with doodling fresh, playful little pictures about the thought experiments.
“Calvin & Hobbes” ended in 1995, and Bill Watterson was not seen or heard from much since—until last year, when he and caricaturist John Kascht published “The Mysteries,” a (very) brief graphic novel.
It is in Motherwell’s complete and utter lack of direct representation that we might find room to discover the heart of his “Elegies.” He assumes, graciously, that we also have the heart and intelligence to triangulate history, painted images, and varying titles on the theme of Spain’s self-inflicted suffering.
The play does well portraying one of the novel’s main conflicts: that Ahab cannot live without knowing, within the framework of his own understanding of cause and effect, and this tautological pride makes other beings suffer. His lust for vengeance is blasphemous chiefly because he cannot live in The Mystery without acting on some little part of it and calling it the whole—just like us.