Esoteric Brezhnevism

  One of the film festival hits of 2017, described as an “intensely felt palimpsest of joy and despair” conveying the “infectious joy” of summer [1] and finding “magic in the mundane” [2], was Sean Baker’s The Florida Project . I watched it with the intention of posting a review, but found it so depressing and upsetting that I abandoned my plan for a write-up. As with Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), one of The Florida Project ’s selling points is its shocking depiction of unchaperoned children in inappropriate situations. Six-year-old actress Brooklynn Prince stars as Moonee, a foulmouthed, mischievous girl who stays at a sleazy Kissimmee motel with her semi-homeless stripper/hooker mother. Moonee’s imitation of the adults in her life finds her, for instance, calling another little girl a “stupid thot” or twerking for her mother’s amusement: “Oh, wow, you got some twerk skills, girl.” “Now watch me shake my booty,” Moonee sings, directing her posterior toward the camera. Writer-directo...

  Now forgotten, Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn was front-page news in the middle of November, 1963, after being released from a Soviet prison. A scholar in the field of political science whose specialty was Sovietology, he had been participating in a government-sponsored cultural exchange trip to the Soviet Union, where he was arrested and charged with espionage. “It was President Kennedy’s concern for Barghoorn that brought the Russians around to turning him loose,” the Daily News reported. “But they refused to back down from their charge – a charge denied by the President – that he spied on them during his visit to the Soviet Union on a tourist visa.“ Soviet authorities continued to insist that “they had enough evidence to bring him to trial.” [1] Barghoorn’s 1991 obituary in The New York Times gives this account of the incident: A well-known scholar on the Soviet Union, Mr. Barghoorn was seized in 1963 as he was completing a trip in that country made to conduct int...