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Oct 29, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
Among the instruments Manoucher Yektai used to accomplish his paintings are brushes, spatulas, blocks of wood, trowels, scalpels, and whips. When an image came to him and demanded its fullest expression, any old tool would do. The landscapes now on display at Karma burst with the energy of a man at the mercy of his evanescent inspiration.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
Recent stories of note:“On Chaïm Soutine”Michael Hofmann, London Review of BooksWhen Amedeo Modigliani painted his fellow artist Chaïm Soutine in 1916 and again the following year, the resulting works were more or less orderly, the young man’s features carefully hemmed in by dark outlines. Not so for the subjects of Soutine’s paintings, however.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
Fiction:Russell Kirk. Photo courtesy of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. “Conservatism and the Masters of Gothic Horror” with Luke Sheahan, James Panero & Adam Simon (October 29): “Mine was not an Enlightened mind,” Russell Kirk famously said of himself. “It was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
The Mahler Third is the longest symphony, at least in the standard repertoire. But we should not make too much of length: it is one of the greatest works of music we have. Is it your favorite Mahler symphony? Your favorite of the nine? (There is also a movement of a tenth, complete, true.)It is often said that we have different favorite Shakespeare plays depending on our time of life. Young people, for example, love Julius Caesar. Older people understand King Lear.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
Recent stories of note:“The ghostly worlds of Goya and Paula Rego”Tim Smith-Laing, ApolloGoya’s late-life print series the Disparates is full of figures with vague eyes swallowed by shadows, as well as animals and anthropomorphic creatures, distorted and malign. Differing from his Caprichos and Desastres series, with their cartoonlike and witty captions, the Disparates are his least legible prints and are all the more unsettling for it.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen has plagued the musical intellect for over a century and a half. Interest in the tetralogy’s first complete performance in 1876 drew an audience to rural Bayreuth that included Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil. By 1897, the French music theorist Albert Lavignac was able to claim that all that had been written about the Ring’s composer could not be read in a single lifetime.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
After the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump in just over two months, the media’s reactions were once again more shocking than shocked. What was only gracelessness back in July has now been compounded by an affected cynicism implying that, if the attempts were not actually staged by the candidate himself, they were at least dismissible as part of his histrionic style of campaigning.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
The king holds up a stave of hickory. The hanged man dangles from a knot of jute. Whatever else the fortune tellers see,the cards still trace their trouble to the root. There are no thunderheads portending rain;above the fool, the sun makes its decree. That ground is barren where the king lies slain. The cards still trace their trouble to the sea. And aren’t there details that the cards won’t tellas you wait, bound on the eternal wheel?
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
We wrote before Hurricane Helene devastated bits of North Carolina and Musk stepped in to offer free internet service to those without power through his Starlink network. His entrepreneurial initiative infuriated his critics, not least the bureaucrats clustered around the flaccid Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema).
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |Victor Davis Hanson |Ronald S. Lauder |Glenn Ellmers
Evenings were loud with crickets. I could hearlovers in the gazebo, and flustered leavesof the magnolia like a tambourineshaken and shaken. The pond rippled clear. In the garden, a scarecrow’s ragged sleevescast their shadow over a patch of green.
