Thanks to my friend Mark, who has a eye for amazing podcasts, for this documentary. Sammy “The Bull” Garavano was one of the most feared mob bosses in history, and this talk he has with Patrick Bet-David of Valutainment is two hours of thoughts on criminality, sociology, modern politics and what he has in store for the future. It’s a tour-de-force of brutal common sense.
Politics
[Literature/Social Commentary] We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s
“Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans” is a compelling essay by Henry Farrell published today in The Boston Review. From the essay: This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. […]
via We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s — Biblioklept
Our friends at Biblioklept never cease to surprise. The political junkies followed the wrong person into a future oblivion. It was the cyberpunk Philip K. Dick who may have had the right vision all along.
[Art] Banned Russian art squirrelled away in Uzbekistan
I’m a bit late with this article, but it discusses a treasure trove of art which was forbidden in the Soviet Union. It turns out that these pieces were socked away in the Karakalpakstan province of Uzbekistan.
[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.
[Video] Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Borges: South America’s Titan”
This video sums up precisely the raison d’etre of this website and blog. William F. Buckley, Jr., intellectual giant of the Conservative movement, interviewing perhaps the most important write of the 20th Century (at least in my estimation), Jorge Luis Borges. One couldn’t ask for a better pairing.
A Miscellany Of Tasteful Music 