Sailing against the tide
The other day I was looking for a Christmas card with a Nativity scene to send to a more religious friend and I couldn’t find a single one. It was all trees, presents, Santa Claus, reindeers and even penguins. But no Nativity scene. Now, it is true that Christmas since the beginning adopted many pre-Christian…
The algorithm works in mysterious ways. I spent almost a full year working in a documentary film about Finland, taking the trouble to create complicated stop-motion scenes to represent dreams, and hardly anyone watched it. I think not even the people who appear in the film watched it. Maybe it was too long and too…
The world you were born in no longer exists. When I was a child, thousands of years ago, the world was still mostly analog. I listened to vinyl records and tapes. I had a walkman. That was considered a great innovation back then. Sometimes the tape got stuck and you needed to rewind it with…
You know what, I miss the 1990s. All the way up to the early 2000s. And not just because I was young in that period. It’s not just nostalgia. Those years were objectively better. There were great movies (too many to list), great music (many great bands from the 1980s still active and many good…
There’s a lot of doom in the Internet, especially among the alternative news crowd. People can’t get enough of the “end of the world/end of the West” type of thing. While I do understand that we are living in highly worrying times, with war expanding everywhere, economic downturn, birth rate collapse, mass migration, and radical…
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sì grande, che per mare e per terra batti l’ali, e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande! (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVI) The Americans After Spain, I came to Florence, for a brief course. I’m staying in a monastery of benedictine nuns that rents rooms, located right at the edge…
I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I haven’t written much here. I spent the past couple of weeks visiting family in Spain, reading Brothers Karamazov1 on the beach and trying to forget about the state of the world. I was staying on a smaller location, about 20 minutes by train from downtown Barcelona, in a coastal…
For several weeks, protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza have been ongoing at several American universities and a few European ones. It’s basically the same crowd of leftist students that protested for Black Lives Matters, for abortion or for other popular causes (but not against Covid lockdowns). But while those protests were accepted and even…
As the world moves closer to WWIII for reasons no sane man can understand, I prefer for the moment to write about travel. I am still reading Vigée Le Brun’s memories about her travels in Italy, and finding them pretty interesting. But then again, I usually like to read diaries or travel journals, even by…
Some people say I am too harsh on the modern world. That we have wonderful technology and people live in comfort and we have so many ways of amusing ourselves and we can find any ethnic restaurant we want in any town on Earth. Fair enough, I guess. But why is so difficult to make…