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Lou Reed, RIP: the luckiest man in rock
To judge from the heartfelt eulogies published today, Lou Reed meant a great deal to a great many. Consider, for example, this dramatic claim by Carl Wilson in Slate: For diverse tribes of misfits,...
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Dead, but right, in Beirut
In Beirut last week, Mohamad Chatah — the Lebanese Sunni leader, Hezbollah critic, former ambassador to the US and (possibly) future prime minister — was assassinated, presumably by Hezbollah and/or...
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My favorite museum in Cairo damaged by a car bomb
My favorite museum in the Middle East, the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, was not the target of yesterday’s car bomb — the police headquarters are across the street — but early reports are that it...
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How I got to Libya one month after the embargo was lifted
Though the anniversary is little noticed, it was precisely ten years ago that the US embargo on Libya was lifted and the country was brought in from the cold. I remember this principally because at...
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On the Mario Testino exhibit in Buenos Aires
A year or two ago, when I heard the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was showing an exhibit called “In Your Face” by the Peruvian fashion photographer Mario Testino it inspired a certain weary cynicism...
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Why Narendra Modi is a bad choice for India
It had been evident for more than a year that Narendra Modi and the BJP were going to win the recent elections in India, facing a lackluster campaign by the once-dominant Congress party now led by the...
View ArticleAn unworldly article on the world’s game
As the countdown begins to the World Cup opener in Brazil on 12 June, the New York Times has an astonishingly unworldly article about what it calls the ‘uniquely Brazilian sport’ of futevolei, which...
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The Jeff Koons show at the Whitney is a failure
The Jeff Koons exhibit that opened at the Whitney on Friday is a failure. The show comes larded with superlatives — the most comprehensive retrospective ever of his work, the last Whitney exhibit to...
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When I stumbled into John Galliano’s greatest show
John Galliano show, Paris, 2005, photo by Sean Rocha John Galliano — perhaps the most celebrated fashion designer of his generation — made his return to the runway today, showing in London for Maison...
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The cultural destruction of war in the Middle East
Lamps at the Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo The cultural loss in the the last four years of political conflict in the Middle East has been staggering. One of the world’s great ancient cities, Aleppo,...
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The future of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia
Like many people, I first went to Barcelona in large part to see the architecture of Antoni Gaudi. His work can seem pure fantasy at first with its wild rooftops and lack of intersecting lines but —...
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On the attacks in Paris
Some years ago I wrote about how street photography in Paris was illegal owing to exceptionally restrictive privacy laws and used the photo above of Le Ca Rillon to illustrate my point. I took that...
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Lijiang, China as it used to be
I am early, and late, to this video about Lijiang in the southwest corner of China along the Tibetan plateau. It was produced by the BBC nearly a quarter century ago and somehow I have only heard...
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Bali ruined, again
Monkey Forest Road in Ubud 1989-2016, photo by Sean Rocha The first time I went to Bali was in 1989, when I was twenty, and I thought it was magical. When I returned two years later, in 1991, I thought...
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Car bombs and gangsters in Malta
When Malta’s most prominent political journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was killed in a car bomb on October 16th a fair amount of the reporting talked about how this attack was at odds with the...
View ArticleBanning the Indian rupee notes really was dumb
On a flight from Singapore at the end of 2016 I saw a Tamil film called “Pichaikkaran” (“Beggar”) playing in the row ahead of me so watched it myself. It stars Vijay Anthony as a rich businessman...
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