In Memory of Paul Newman

September 30, 2008 – 8:58 am

Paul Newman is dead.

He died of lung cancer at age 83, at his home in Connecticut. He is survived by his wife, five children, and two grandchildren.

He was one of the last of the great old stars, the ones who were larger than life. That’s a cliché now, but Paul Newman was the real thing.

He was a World War II veteran, a husband of 50 years to actress Joanne Woodward, a philanthropist, a political activist, an auto racer, and a businessman. But most of all, he was an actor.

Newman would’ve been too pretty if he hadn’t been so good at playing beautifully damaged men. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in Entertainment, movies, obituary | Comments (0)

The Islamabad Marriott

September 21, 2008 – 5:43 pm

I wanted to tell you why I thought the bombing in Islamabad just happened. That’s what I ought to talk about, in this world of terrorists and wars on terror and conspiracy theories about military intervention into civilian affairs and covert operations that create terrorists.

But can I tell you instead that the crenulations on the very top of the Islamabad Marriott are a sort of jaunty seventies mihrab shape? – a nod in the direction of both Islam and the modernist obsession with geometry.

Islamabad is full of that kind of architecture: tall buildings with porthole windows, triangular houses that fail to be A-frames. Pakistani architects strove in the sixties and seventies to create that perfect, progressive, modern form, that departure from tradition that would mark the beginning of an enlightened and prosperous age.

When I was a kid, my mother would go to what was then the Holiday Inn and enter it through a side door. I was often with her. She’s American and non-Muslim, so she had an alcohol permit with which she would buy bad vodka, worse gin, and some half decent beer to bring home for the party we would be having the next night. It was Murree Brewery beer with a horse involved somewhere in the logo. She would walk in, hand a man behind a high counter her permit, which he would inspect as he chatted her up, and she would come away with the loot and a sense of exasperation: at the fact of the permit and that all it bought her was lousy local booze.

Over the years, that building has acquired thicker and thicker skin. Coats of paint and concrete blockades have built up on it until you can only park far across the road or in the next city block in order to come in for their conferences, or weddings, or expensive Thai food, or bad local booze.

Rich people go to the Marriott; poor people guard them.

Not that it mattered in the flames of that inferno, anymore, except that the guards were already dead by the time the guests started running. Read More »

By Kyla Pasha | Posted in Current Affairs, Religion, islam, obituary, south asia, terrorism | Comments (4)

The Deaths That Bind Us: Solzhenitsyn, Pugovkin, Mordyukova

August 4, 2008 – 11:36 am

It feels instinctive to say that the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn marks an end of an era. Which era, though?

Solzhenitsyn’s life spanned many eras: WWII, the gulag, the Khrushchev years, stagnation, the last gasps of the Cold War, and, most recently, the strange and wondrous and bewildering reality of post-Soviet Russia. Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is crystal clear if one is looking at it from an outsider’s perspective. His legacy among his people and the people who love and study Russian literature and culture, however, is a much more complicated phenomenon.

In the West, Solzhenitsyn is most readily regarded as a symbol of All That Stalin Did Wrong. In today’s Russia and other post-Soviet countries he is a public figure whose function was and is debated, whose artistic achievements are criticized with gruffness rarely found elsewhere, and whose insistence on criticizing liberal democracy has earned him respect for the searing honesty with which he presented his views.

Living in the U.S., I have repeatedly run up against the sentiment that today Solzhenitsyn is intellectual Russia’s beloved grandmaster, a kindly, fatherly figure. The truth is, most people I know responded more emotionally when the likes of Nonna Mordyukova and Mikhail Pugovkin passed on earlier this summer - old school Soviet actors whose movies also serve as reminders of a time and a place gone forever.

The deaths of Mordyukova and Pugovkin did not, for the most part, make international headlines. But these figures were no less important in a cultural and historical context. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in Arts & Literature, europe, obituary, politics | Comments (3)

Heath Ledger Was the Cat’s Meow

January 23, 2008 – 3:41 am

Did I seriously just write the above headline? Heath Ledger was? He was?

People die young all the time. There’s nothing new under the sun, and tragic death in one’s prime is no exception. In many ways Heath Ledger was (here’s that dreadful word again) no more special than, say, the people dying in Palestine this week, many of them also young.

However, now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you: boy, did I adore Heath Ledger.

I adored him so much that I had arguments about him. People said, “he’s just another pretty boy,” and I said, “no he has range and depth, and the awesome factor like whoa.” People said, “awesome factor? Like whoa? What does that even mean?” And I said, “watch him, just watch him.”

Heath Ledger combined talent with a generally laid-back public persona. He was the guy who once moved to Brooklyn because he didn’t want to be photographed every time he stepped into a Starbucks or kissed his girlfriend. He wasn’t afraid to look like he hadn’t spent five hours with five different stylists. He was good even in the bad films (”The Brothers Grimm” come to mind).

He wasn’t afraid of taking on controversial roles and acting in scenes that would inspire most of our true-blue Hollywood heroes to run away screaming. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in Columnist, Current Affairs, Entertainment, movies, obituary | Comments (3)