I’ve watched this film I don’t know how many times. I was probably nine or ten years old when I saw it first, most likely nine. My father took me; and 2001 gave me a life-long love of classical music. Among other things. I’m prompted to write this piece by…

I’ve never been a huge fan of podcasts, but there are exceptions. For me, one big surprise was this podcast: The interview of Michael Cohen by Emily Jane Fox. Okay, this was a surprise. It starts out a little weak, but spot on: noting that Donald Trump’s mind is “a…

I just mailed back my disc of Stalker (dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). It wasn’t easy to do. Something inside me told me that I needed to watch the film at least three or four more times, in spite of the subtle but profound feeling of disturbance this film evoked in…

Peter Gay. W.W. Norton: 1968. I have loved Weimar since my early teens. My first exposure was my parent’s LP of the 1962 off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (translated and adapted by Marc Blitzstein). I played it over and over. I could not get enough of the sinuous music, gangster anti-hero, overt radicalism, and…

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata If you’re looking for something to read as the second wave of Covid-19 devastates our fragile country of great strength, you could do worse than this brilliant and deceptively simple story of an oddball woman, Keiko Furukura, for whom life never made sense, no…