It’s not often that an experienced critic finds himself confronting the work of an “unknown” painter—unknown, that is, to the critic—only to discover that he’s looking at the paintings of a master talent. But this was my experience upon visiting the exhibition of paintings by the Cuban artist Tomás Sánchez (b. 1948) at the Marlborough Read More
A ponderous medieval thriller may not exactly be what everyone’s been hoping for as a welcome antidote to overhyped crucifixion fables by Mel Gibson and the sudden new avalanche of brain-atrophying time-wasters about teenagers trying to get laid, but at least it’s different. The Reckoning , directed by Paul McGuigan and set in the English Read More
Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution , by Alma Guillermoprieto. Pantheon, 250 pages, $25.
Few dancers write memoirs, and so the world of dance remains an elegant mystery to many of us, despite lovelorn films like Red Shoes or reverential ones like the Margot Fonteyn series. A recent review of Robert Altman’s The Read More
Long declared to be mere footnotes to history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are riding high in the American media. The Cuban Revolution, it seems, is everywhere once again, and cold, hard historical judgment is harder and harder to find. HBO may have pulled Oliver Stone’s fawning documentary Comandante after Mr. Castro, in April, sentenced Read More
“World music,” a term for music made by everybody who doesn’t happen to look or sound like us, is a convenient but patronizing expression that comes in for a fair amount of high-minded abuse. But the release this month of a superb new album, Specialist in All Styles (World Circuit/Nonesuch) by the Senegalese group Orchestra Read More
My wife is a lawyer. Every year, a steady stream of wide-eyed summer interns flood the New York firms. Associates, like my wife, like it because they get carte blanche to take the interns to lunch at the city’s swankiest restaurants. Interns like it, of course, because they get well fed. Law firms like it Read More
Despite his blustering and joking during his recent trip across Europe and Russia, George W. Bush surely wonders sometimes why nations otherwise friendly to America are so suspicious of him and his government. It must be frustrating that millions of people abroad (and more than a few at home, despite “patriotic” strictures against dissent) question Read More
All over Havana, touts want you to buy black-market cigars at a fraction of the government price, and they make lewd pantomimes of puffing as you walk by shadowy alleyways, but it wasn’t ’til we’d been in Cuba a few days that my wife and I followed an earnest young man into the back of Read More
The title of Peruvian singer Susana Baca’s excellent new album, Eco de Sombras ( Echo of Shadows ), suggests that she’s singing about something that somehow doesn’t really exist. That would be the music and culture of black Peru. African slaves followed hard upon the heels of Peru’s Spanish conquerors in the 1500′s, but, contrary Read More
Some winter days are so bleak I feel as if I am the groundhog’s shadow willing itself to be visible. The afternoons grow dark early, not mysteriously dark as if it were December (no miracles waiting) but dull gray, cotton-mouthed dark, thick-tongued dark, blurred in fog and cloud. I think about what it must be Read More
