A forgotten writer and a nearly lost book. Paul Kornfeld (11 December 1889 Czechia, – 25 April 1942, Lodz, Poland) was one of the many writers and artists who lost their life as a result of the Nazi regime. He worked […]
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One of my all-time favourite French movies, this 192-minute film by Jaques Rivette is a story about story-telling. It centers on the fanciful world of two women literally lost in the stories they tell each other. Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourer) go […]
David Foster Wallace ( February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008 ) was one of the most gifted writers of his generation. He wrote Infinite Jest (a huge 1,200-page magnum opus) in the early 1990’s — while in his early […]
Igor Zhukov (31 August 1936 – 26 January 2018) was a bit of a fixture in the 1980’ies during my studies in Munich. He played there regularly and was considered a “Geheimtipp”, as Zhukov never made it into the limelight […]
One of my all-time favourite authors has always been Georg Hermann, whose novels now are largely forgotten, after an attempt to issue a complete edition of his works had to be abandoned due to a lack of interest in the […]
What a discovery ! Thanks to medimops in Germany ( Tax dodgers Amazon do not deliver any longer to New Zealand, but all the better: I detest the bloodsucking US companies such as Starbucks, Apple, Amazon etc, who pay crappy […]
Giorgio Bassani’s Ferrara, like all true cities, is a myth, a state of being and of having been, and he haunts it with the nostalgic passion of the exile. ( His “The Garden of the Finzi‐Continis” was an ambiguous vision […]
‘Peter the Great’ was a cat that was the sole survivor of a volcano eruption at White Island off the North Island coast of New Zealand in 1914. ‘Peter the Great’, the White Island camp cat, only survivor of the […]
Isaac Albeniz recorded 3 Improvisations in 1903. A document of great significance, it is the only existing recording of a 19th century pianist improvising on record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6otO85ATRYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VQ1RB5YXp8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHl5Go-xQi8
This is one of my desert island vocal recordings: Kathleen Battle sings 3 spirituals as encores in her celebrated Salzburg Festival Recital in 1987. Irreplaceable, unique, stunning.
