Category Archives: Blog

This photo is from one of my favorite rooms in Catherine Palace–every inch of this wall is covered in oil paintings…

Since the Olympics are currently underway in Russia, I’ll start posting some photos from when I lived there–to explore some of the country’s different faces…

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain…

― Khalil Gibran

I’ve been missing the fresh-baked bread I had every day while living in Sudan. It usually took me about 15 minutes on a donkey cart to get to this bakery in the desert–a half hour if I trekked through the sand on my own. My favorite breakfast in Sudan was this soft bread with fried eggs and falafel…

Since I see so much graffiti every day in Beirut, I find myself thinking a lot about the history of modern (and ancient) graffiti–a subject which is being covered in part by a new graffiti exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York…

If you’re in New York, take a walk through history today and enjoy some live performances at the Apollo…

This week in Beirut, my students and I have been reading and contemplating the writings of Plotinus (204/5-270 CE), as we trace the influence of Neoplatonism on writers and thinkers like Augustine, Maimonides, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), al-Ghazali, al-Kindi, and al-Farabi…

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful; he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine… Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

— Plotinus, The First Ennead

Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema

THE CONSTANT FACTOR at Lincoln Center
KRZYSZTOF ZANUSSI
POLAND | POLISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES | 91 MINUTES

Date: Tuesday, February 11
Time: 9:15 pm

A young man who dreams of climbing the Himalayas finds himself compromising his ideals when he takes a job at an international trade company in Zanussi’s award-winning Cannes hit…

 

Today in New York

Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema (Tonight through Feb. 16)

In December, Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project released a boxed set of six neglected international films through the Criterion Collection. None of those films were from Poland, but Mr. Scorsese has more than offset that with this feast of 21 films, which he handpicked from a collection of digitally restored titles from 1957 to 1987. Some — like Andrzej Wajda’s 1981 Cannes Film Festival prizewinner “Man of Iron” and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s accurately titled “A Short Film About Killing” (Thursday at 8:30 p.m.) — are known the world over. Others, like Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1972 animation-documentary hybrid “The Illumination” (Friday at 2:30 p.m. and Thursday at 6:30 p.m.), promise rare glimpses from one of the world’s leading film ecosystems. Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Lincoln Center, 144 West 65th Street, 212-875-5600, filmlinc.com; $13. (Grode)

Krzysztof Zanussi, a celebrated Polish filmmaker and public intellectual, will be speaking today at the Harriman Institute & East Central European Center at Columbia University. This evening, his film Camouflague will be shown at Lincoln Center at 7:30 pm.

The Revolution in Ukraine and Its Challenges to Europe
When: Friday, February 7, 2014, 12:00 PM
Where: 1512 International Affairs Building,
420 W 118th Street, Columbia University

On a long trek through the Sahara in Sudan, I stumbled upon these remains being buried by the gentle wind and forgiving sands…

I long to escape the prison of my ego and lose myself in the mountains and the desert.

— Rumi