Robert Rubsam

3 weeks ago | apollo-magazine.com | Robert Rubsam

Keita Morimoto is a nocturnal artist. He paints urban life between dusk and dawn, a lonely crepuscular cityscape of dark buildings and fluorescent lights. The brand-new works collected in ‘To Nowhere and Back’ (the majority date from 2025) at Almine Rech’s Tribeca gallery, construct a dreamlike picture of Tokyo after dark, where isolated figures gather at lonely intersections without ever meeting. Morimoto was born in Osaka and in 2006 he moved to Canada to study art in Toronto.

4 weeks ago | robertrubsam.substack.com | Robert Rubsam

Happy spring, all. Just because this country is falling apart at the hands of belligerent idiots and authoritarian nihilists doesn’t mean that I can just stop writing. First, the CRB published an excerpt of my novelTo the Madhouse as a story titled “The Garden Party.” It’s the first piece of fiction I’ve published in nearly five years, and if you like it, there’s quite a lot more like it in the book. I’ll include an excerpt below.

4 weeks ago | mubi.com | Robert Rubsam

Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour premieres in theaters on March 28 before coming to MUBI on April 18. Some years ago, I traveled nearly the length of Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. That winter was warm, as nearly all are now, but a Siberian winter is still winter by any definition, and for two weeks I shivered my way from Ulaanbaatar to Moscow.

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Robert Rubsam

In 1940, just before his death, the theorist Walter Benjamin conjured a famous metaphor for watching the past: the “Angel of History.” The angel was inspired by a print, Angelus Novus, by his friend Paul Klee, which features a great and beneficent being with his wings spread wide. Whereas we humans experience life as a chain of chronological events, the angel, Benjamin writes, faces the past and watches a tower of debris growing taller and taller, burying the victims of history.

1 month ago | clereviewofbooks.com | Robert Rubsam

Down in the courtyard beneath the blooming ginko, Nelly Blum handed us each an invitation. The card was heavy in my hand, and in old-style type it announced that on the afternoon of June 23rd, 1913, she would host a great Midsummer gathering at her estate on a lake to the west of Berlin. This party was the latest iteration of a long family tradition.