Bulan: April 2025

27 April 2025

Why America Looks the Way It Does

Post By Minda Fashion, Lifestyle

To Europeans, the early United States was a curiosity: rich in resources yet poor in history. They were used to a storied landscape, where it was impossible to go for a stroll without tripping over the lithic remnants of some distant era. America, by contrast, seemed blank. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville scoffed at the “day-old ruins” of deserted log cabins—the closest thing to historical depth that this pathetically young country could manage.

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He should have spent more time in Ohio. Settlers there were finding thousands of ancient Native mounds and earthworks, some bafflingly large. Refusing to believe that the ancestors of Native Americans could have built such monumental structures, writers floated bizarre theories as to who had. Perhaps it was a lost tribe of Israel, or an extinct race of giants. (Why not both?)

If oversized Jews were indeed behind it, they must have been especially fond of Pickaway County. It boasted mounds aplenty and the earthen remains of two forts, one circular and another square, constructed with startling geometric precision. In 1810, surveyors latched on to the circle and founded a city, named Circleville, in concentric arcs around it. This was “probably the only city in North America developed in a radio-concentric plan,” the historian John W. Reps wrote in 1955. (There’ve been others since.) It was also, he observed, probably the only settler city built around an Indigenous form.

24 April 2025

How Paweł Pawlikowski Learned to Film Europe’s Fractures

Post By Minda Uncategorized

The first thing you notice about the film director Paweł Pawlikowski is that he looks like a movie star. This is an unusual state of affairs. As a rule, if you happen to be—as Pawlikowski is—demonstrably tall, dark, and handsome, with a flexible sense of humor, a yen for cinema, and industrial quantities of charisma, your rightful spot is smack dab in front of the camera. So why go and lurk behind it? Why didn’t Pawlikowski become an actor? “Oh, no, I’m a terrible actor,” he says. “I never know what to do with my eyebrows.”

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These days, having recently turned sixty-nine, Pawlikowski has a dusting of gray in his hair and his stubble—the annoying effect of which is to render him more, not less, like the very model of a leading man. It made complete sense, as we walked together down a street in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, when a young woman in a white dress ran ahead of us, turned around, explained that she was an actress at the National Theatre, and professed her adoration for Pawlikowski’s work. He smiled, thanked her graciously, and moved on. That kind of thing must happen all the time to Keanu Reeves, but few directors—especially middle-aged Polish directors—can be guaranteed the same treatment.

14 April 2025

Justine Kurland’s Photographs Keep Us on Edge

Post By Minda Art, Fashion

When Barbara Trapido was in her late twenties, a friend told her that she was lazy: she told such good stories, but she never wrote them down. Trapido did not think that she was lazy. Each morning, she took a bus from Durham, in northeast England, where she lived with her husband, Stanley, a lecturer at the university there, to Sunderland, an industrial town on the coast, where she taught drama and literature at a continuing-education college. Trapido loved her students. They were in their late teens, earnest and tasting freedom for the first time. She wrote her own abridged versions of difficult texts, to help them pass their exams. Trapido didn’t think she was lazy at all. Besides, the friend who’d said that she was—Margo Russell—was an overachiever. Like the Trapidos, Russell and her husband were political exiles from South Africa, where they had opposed the apartheid regime. The Russells were sociologists. They had young children and had blown up power lines belonging to the state.

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But it was true that Trapido didn’t have ambitions to speak of. She never had. As a child, she had been small and wheezy, held close by her mother, Anneliese, who was herself an exile. Trapido was hopeless at sports and other worldly pursuits. Her sister, Fran, who was a year older, was much better at all that. In school, Trapido loved fiction and poetry, but she noticed that, where all the bright boys in her classes had plans—for future careers or to study abroad—there was no plan for her. She just assumed, if she even did that, that she would meet a man and get married and learn to cook and sew and have children and live in a bungalow like the one her parents had in Durban.

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Russell was insistent. The Guardian was holding a short-story competition, and Trapido had to enter it. When she tried to come up with a story, she heard, very distinctly, the voices of a large family, talking loud, fast, and over one another. She closed her eyes and entered a soundscape. “I didn’t actually see them clearly,” Trapido told me recently. “What I saw was kind of shapes and the way people moved, the way people come to you in dreams.” More than anything, the experience reminded Trapido of her early childhood, when she would spend hours hiding in bamboo clumps in Durban, talking to people in her head. “I thought, Hey, this is playing. This is what I used to do—and I got really addicted to it.”

Her imaginary family—the Goldmans—became her constant companions. They accompanied her to the movies and to the seaside. She wrote down what they said: reams of argument and love. There were five—no, six—children. The mother, Jane, was beautiful and strong, but displaced from her own well-bred family. The two eldest sons, Roger and Jonathan, were captivating in different ways. Trapido wondered what would happen to the middle daughter, Rosie, who wasn’t as clever as her older brothers.