what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Casanova and all that

One of the many pleasures to follow from the absence of television from my living places is the selection of videos to buy and watch – and the serendipity of buying videos in Cyrillic script! The writing on the covers is so small and indistinct that I generally don’t know what I am buying here in Sofia – relying generally on the photos of the actors. A good source is the bookshop in the University underpass. On Sunday I emerged with 8 films costing an average of 2 euros. One I bought only because of it starring Helen Mirren and it turned out to be a touching film about the last days of Tolstoy - The Last Station.
Another hero of mine is Casanova who is generally totally misunderstood. He did not “have” as many women as is generally assumed – more importantly he respected and loved most of them. He is such an interesting figure that I collect books about him – and another video I took home and watched last night figured Peter O’Toole as the old Casanova  in the castle in northern Bohemia I would often drive past 20 years ago on my trip from Prague to Berlin; and David Tennant as his younger version. It’s the best of the 3 films I’ve seen so far on the subject

An art blog I discovered recently has just completed an excellent set of vignettes on the Scottish colourists - Peploe; Cadell; Fergusson; and Hunter.
I’m not really into abstract art – but liked this review of a couple of New York exhibitions of key figures a century ago who spearheaded that art form

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