Indian reality show Dadagiri, which combines hazing with Fear Factor, recently went Geraldo. Designated bitch Esha slapped contestant Ravi Bhatia, and the guy slapped her back. Is this real or just a publicity stunt? Then the poor fellow gets his ass kicked, because he’s of lower socioeconomic status, India’s litigation system doesn’t really work, and, […]
Have you ever seenGandhi shoot a gangster squarein forehead softly?
Moving picture istrain murder mystery film noirsex lies and jpegs.
Agatha Christie’sMurder on the OrientExpress, but in snow.
A matrushka dollmolded with brown heroinentraps Mortimer.
Low abandoned churchrafters falling, see-through sky.Seduce. Siberia!
Officially now, not presumptively: Barack Obama’s the first multiracial and the first African-American nominee from a major party. In the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
… we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force…. many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have […]
Alaska governor Sarah Palin will be the first female GOP VP nominee, 24 years after the Dems picked Geraldine Ferraro. Her profile has huge overlap with Bobby Jindal’s, and she has arguably less government experience.
Palin’s the polar opposite of Dick Cheney. Like Jindal, she ran on a clean government agenda. Like Jindal, she’s young, just […]
Just posted some new political tees. More after the jump.
Congrats to Amit Chatwani of Leveraged Sell-Out on the release of his very funny i-banking parody, Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Banker. The diss vid he put together above is frickin’ hilarious, Jazzy Jeff and Weird Al by way of Wall and Broad.
Bankers and consultants battling like Brooklyn - Long Beach? Rappers have […]
And the medal goes to Anthony Lane for his mammoth and brilliant diary of the Olympic fortnight in the New Yorker (week 1 and week 2). Over 10 pages (or 19, in case it reaches you as a Word document), Lane records how he watched everything from athletics to shot put, does some joyous China-bashing […]
Here’s a passage about a desi character in Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Adichie’s rightly celebrated novel about Biafra’s brief secession from Nigeria. Adichie’s language is utilitarian, but the war, affairs and arguments over postcolonial politics are molto bene:
There was Dr. Patel, the Indian man who drank Golden Guinea beer mixed with Coke… Whenever […]
Among the many things I’m thankful to Maike Kollenrott for, one is the Moleskine. She was the one who got me my first somewhat overpriced but entirely gorgeous Moleskine notebook and I’ve been a Moleskine junkie ever since. When I got the first one, I thought the best thing about a Moleskine was feeling a […]
Traitor is a facile, micron-thin movie which plays like one of the poorer episodes of 24. Its free association on loaded topics like terrorism, torture, religious discrimination and ethnic profiling are about as deep as a prom queen discussing Darfur. Issues are mentioned once and discarded as if mere incantation wards off boycotts. Under the […]
The lovely Elegy is a searing, honest chamber drama based on the May-December romance between a New York public intellectual (Ben Kingsley) and one of his students (Penélope Cruz). The rap is that the novella is better, Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal. I’ve got it on order — it must be a hell of […]
A cherubic auntie sketches actress Jodie Whittaker at the end of Hanif Kureishi’s film Venus. The composition later morphs into the eponymous painting, Venus by Velásquez.
The artist Francisco de Goya painted another famous nude which was referenced in Elegy, another meditation on aging starring Ben Kingsley. Elegy and Kureishi both seem to equate old age […]
[Quick impression of first 70 pages, not a full review.]
The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer tells the story of Tehran after the fall of the shah. The book’s central family is Jewish Iranian. The father is imprisoned for unspecified crimes against the mullahs, and an Armenian friend is unceremoniously executed.
The tone of the book […]
Keep ya guard up, prahji
Congrats to Vijender Kumar for winning India a boxing bronze, bringing its total to three, its highest ever in a single Olympics. Here’s video of Vijender’s semifinal match. He got completely owned by the Cuban, but ain’t no shame considering Cuba’s a boxing powerhouse.
Before the match, NBC ran a promo about […]