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Bollywood’s latest blockbuster release, Padmaavat, is based on the epic poem Padmavat, a fictionalized account of Alauddin Khalji’s conquest of Chittorgarh in 1303 written by a Sufi poet in the sixteenth century. (more…)
Fernando Esposito
Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015
The British political theorist Roger Griffin has argued that the defining characteristic of fascist movements is a central myth of national rebirth, or palingenetic ultranationalism. His study of fascism (The Nature of Fascism) sparked controversy upon its publication because it diverged from the consensus at the time that fascist movements were purely reactionary and conservative in character; (more…)
Fernando Pessoa was the greatest Portuguese poet of the modern era and arguably one of the most interesting and protean literary figures of the twentieth century. His vast body of work, some of which remains unpublished, includes hundreds of poems as well as essays on philosophy, religion, literature, and politics. His verse combines avant-garde modernism with pagan mysticism and a vision of national rebirth. (more…)
Benjamin Balint
Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right
New York: PublicAffairs, 2010
Running Commentary is a lively and well-researched work of intellectual history that is of interest both as an account of how a group of alienated dissidents came to revolutionize American politics and as a history of neoconservatism that details the movement’s Jewish origins. (more…)
Imre Makovecz was one of the great architects of the late twentieth century and the most notable proponent of organic architecture in Hungary. His works are characterized by an idiosyncratic style that melds modern influences with motifs inspired by Hungarian folklore. He designed nearly five hundred buildings over the course of his life, about half of which were built.
Czech version here
Johann Gottfried Herder
Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism
Translated and edited by Philip V. Bohlman
Oakland: University of California Press, 2017
Johann Gottfried Herder was an 18th-century German philosopher, theologian, translator, and critic. He wrote on many subjects: political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of history, metaphysics, linguistics, philology, art, religion, mythology, and music. (more…)
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The Lost City of Z is based on a recent book of the same name by David Grann about the British explorer Percy Fawcett’s quest for a legendary ancient lost city in the Amazon rainforest. Its premise brings to mind epic films like Lawrence of Arabia or Apocalypse Now (indeed several scenes are uncannily reminiscent of Coppola). However ultimately The Lost City of Z lacks the grandeur of the former and the hallucinatory intensity of the latter. It is also burdened by the clutter of several secondary themes (romance/family, war, colonialism/racism, classism, sexism) and the ham-fisted insertion of modern liberal talking points into the plot. (more…)
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Percy Grainger was a polymath: a pianist, composer, conductor, ethnomusicologist, inventor, artist, polyglot, and man of letters. He was one of the most celebrated pianist-composers of the early twentieth century. His work and writings reflect a worldview marked by both racial consciousness and an opposition to modernity that coexisted alongside radical artistic modernism. (more…)
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea remains imprinted upon the mind long after one has read it. It is one of Mishima’s shorter novels, but its tightly-woven narration heightens the intensity of the atmosphere, simulating a taut bowstring upon readying an arrow.
The novel takes place in Yokohama, Japan’s leading port city, during the American occupation, and unfolds mainly from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy by the name of Noboru Kuroda. (more…)
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Darkest Hour is the second film released this year on Churchill and the latest in an ever-growing list of Churchill-related films and television shows (around two dozen over the past decade). Like its predecessors, Darkest Hour rehashes treacly warmed-over clichés about its subject and glosses over the sordid truth about this murderous psychopath.
Jews in the film industry love Churchill because he serves as a real-life example of the “superhero who saves the world from Nazi villains” trope (more…)
In 1950, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji) in Kyoto was burned to the ground by a young monk. The temple had been built in the fourteenth century and was the finest example of the architecture of the Muromachi period. Covered in gold leaf and crowned with a copper-gold phoenix, it projected an image of majesty and serene beauty. It had been designated a National Treasure in 1897 and was considered a national symbol in Japan. (more…)
The discipline of gymnastics has its roots in ancient Greek physical exercises, but the father of modern gymnastics is widely acknowledged to be the nineteenth-century German gymnastics educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Jahn is credited with the invention of number of gymnastic apparatuses (the vaulting horse, parallel bars, balance beam, and rings), the founding of the first open-air gymnasium in Germany, and the popularization of gymnastics as a competitive sport. (more…)
Jonathan Bowden
Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics
Edited by Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2016
Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics is a highly original book that contains the transcripts of nine of Jonathan Bowden’s orations: one on vanguardism followed by profiles of Thomas Carlyle, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Charles Maurras, Martin Heidegger, Savitri Devi, Julius Evola, Yukio Mishima, and Maurice Cowling. (more…)