One wonders if Blaxploitation soundtracks were big in the Former Yugoslavia. Here’s Serbian bandleader Angelo Vlatković funking out.
Communism
[Literature] ‘Havel: A Life,’ by Michael Zantovsky
Václav Havel was, perhaps, the first hip (as opposed to ‘hipster’) president. A playwright, poet, and political dissident, he ended up as the first president of a free Czechoslovakia, and helped steer the ‘Velvet Divorce‘ which saw the country’s peaceful dissolution into the current states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
He was an ardent anti-Communist, humanitarian, and friend and fan of men as disparate as Frank Zappa and Ronald Reagan. Perhaps now is a great time for an American audience to see what a friend we had in Václav.
Marci Shore reviews the biography here, courtesy of the New York Times.
[Lit] ‘Dr. Zhivago’: The Classic Book That Was Almost Never Published
Russia bans books and movies from time to time. It takes a lot of cheek to compare banning a literary classic like Boris Pasternak’s ‘Dr. Zhivago‘ to trash like Pussy Riot, but this is what one learns to expect from the Huffington Post.
Still, the literary world would have been a poorer place had ‘Dr. Zhivago’ had never seen the light of day.
Read Petra Couvée’s article for HuffPo here.
A Miscellany Of Tasteful Music 