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More than half a decade before Chaplin was to ridicule Hitler’s spectacle of charismatic greatness in the Great Dictator, Walter Benjamin already emphasized the strange affinity between the comedian and the politician. Accordingly, Hitler and Chaplin appear as products of the same zeitgeist, yet they chart the tremors of the present on opposite seismographical scales [...]
When one writes about Chaplin, discussion of a ”best” work inevitably results in his most ardent supporters agreeing to disagree in choosing his best feature length work or short film. Less contentious is the selection of a favorite example to represent him. ”The Gold Rush” is a fine work in itself, and is also emblematic [...]
“I never knew of but one artist, and this is Tom Eakins, who could resist the temptation to see what they think ought to be rather than what is.” – Walt Whitman. If the self-portrait below does not appear especially jubilant, the reason could be that during a long period of neglect, Thomas Eakins had discovered [...]
For centuries the principal ingredients in the popular Western image of the Middle East have been spirituality and sex. As early as the sixteenth century, European writers were using the second half of this irresistible combination to describe and define a venerable eastern art form, the belly dance. The ignorance and laziness of innumerable popular [...]
Interpreting the mythology of a work of art may fall under the domain of the art sleuth, and an intrepid one at that.Take for example Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece, ”Primavera”. Those who are willing to settle for a poetical tableau and a virtuoso’s exercise in arabesques will be amply satisfied. For those who want to read [...]
” give me a thousand acres of tractable land & all the gang members that exist & you’ll see the authentic alternative lifestyle, the agrarian one”. ( Bob Dylan, liner notes, World Gone Wrong ) Food for thought. Second helpings, Please! Perhaps you should reconsider that rumbling in your stomach. The expression ”speaking truth to [...]
”The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was [...]
” If you’re going to San Francisco be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”. The same could be said for Florence,which, in the fifteenth century was a permissive, liberal society. The pendulum of the permissive revolution swung the other way and the radicalized flower children of that epoch, imbued with messianic mass hysteria, [...]
A language police and literary garbage removal squad.Painful protocol for a poet to swallow.The Academie Francaise was created by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 as the official agency of linguistic formalism. It began as a reaction against female domination of the salons and against the ”precieuses”, a group of intellectual ladies who favored a style of [...]
The outbreak of the French Revolution, and the Reign of Terror, made reforming ideas suspect among the English governing class. Jeremy Bentham allowed his time and energy to be dispersed among a number of different projects. Among them was one that absorbed the personal fortune he had inherited from his father and gave him the [...]
