Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
A look at the peculiar obsession with “Santa Barbara” in the post-Soviet experience.
By Mikhail Iossel @ ForeignPolicy.com, July 24
Санта Барбара Форева! — Santa Barbara Forevah! — was stenciled boldly in tall purple-chalk lettering on the side of my parents’ apartment building in the southwestern part of St. Petersburg, Russia [....]
In Santa Barbara, people had manners. They had their self-respect about them. The men didn’t urinate in hallways or write obscene words on the walls of elevator cabins. They didn’t smash lightbulbs in entryways or drink cheap eau de Cologne first thing in the morning. They didn’t occupy the only toilet in the communal apartment for a good half-hour or keep their dirty combat boots and homemade barrels of pickled mushrooms in the communal bathroom. And they certainly did not, out of pure malice, slip slivers of tar soap in other people’s pans with soup boiling on communal kitchen stoves. Nor did they come home dead drunk past midnight and plop down on the couch face first with their shoes on and immediately start snoring. In Santa Barbara, men were men, real men, handsome and gallant, even if they were not necessarily very good people in all other respects. They didn’t go through their entire lives without saying “I love you” once to their women, especially to their wives — on whom, admittedly, they cheated mercilessly nonstop, but … well, men would be men, wouldn’t they? In Santa Barbara, men didn’t die of cirrhosis of the liver barely past their mid-50s, and there did not appear to be millions more women than men there, in Santa Barbara, or in America on the whole [....]
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You have to be registered and signed in to read the article, but you get 5 free articles per month as a registered non-subscriber. I just rechecked their access rules to make sure. From their FAQ page:
by artappraiser on Sat, 08/12/2017 - 1:42pm