I met an expat lady at GUM, Moscow's fanciest department store, the other day, and wound up horrifying her. She had asked me for directions in Russian, and I had noticed her accent, and spoke to her...
Rudely awakened from his Swedish love nest, cold-blooded American Jack executes three people. The striking landscape he inhabits is too exposed, too clear from the clutter of civilisation to...
The other day, I saw a pretty classic drunken fight. I was just at the beginning at what I assumed would be a delicious nap - having drunk a concoction that contained heated-up rum, coconut milk and...
Viv Richards, the peerless genius of West Indian batsmen, fixes the camera with his steely glare. The very same one he used when joining combat with the best bowlers in the world before hammering...
A few months ago, I insulted someone horribly. Darting about outside in a helpless panic, I had accosted a young man who was, by the looks of him, just trying to get home after a long day. "Do you...
Artist Rinus Van de Velde works and lives in Antwerp, and his last exhibition was in Seoul, at Korea's International Art Fair. At first glance, Van de Velde’s works looked to me like old photos,...
It was only a matter of time before ousted Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov became re-cast as the victim of "the dark forces that govern Russia" (as one person put it to me in an e-mail, preferring not to...
Every once in awhile a movie comes along that rekindles the passion we cine-maniacs had when we first fell in love with art films. This year, The 48th New York Film Festival (running from September...
Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin once wrote a brilliant story that is the very definition of "shot." In it, a nobleman riding alone sometime in autumn is nearly run down by a drunk peasant on his horse. The...
Liza Fomkina and her aunt - a woman suffering from a disability - went missing on September 13 after taking two dogs on a walk in Orekhovo-Zuevo, a town in the Moscow region. The aunt's body was...