Showing posts with label Washington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington. Show all posts

Sunday, May 21, 2023

A few last thoughts re the amazingly talented Martin Amis, very much a legend in his own lifetime, and my own very tangential relationship to Oxbridge and espionage skullduggery

A few last thoughts re the amazingly talented Martin Amis, very much a legend in his own lifetime, and my own very tangential relationship to Oxbridge and espionage skullduggery



Remembering Martin Amis: obituary
Celebrating the life of the iconic British author, 1949-2023

https://t.co/NIaPGuA37v


Martin Amis was born in Oxford, so per Oxbridge, the second place that I lived at in Washington, D.C., after arriving in 1988, was a neoclassical tan brick house in Tenleytown, at 4100 Nebraska Ave., N.W. that had been the last home of 1950's 'Cambridge Five' spy Kim Philby and his wife -and fellow KGB spy Guy Burgess- while he was MI6 chief of station. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby


According to the version of the story I was told by my landlord, a Georgetown University Philosophy professor, the house was raided by the FBI -quite unsuccessfully- shortly after Philby and company made their escape, but not before he left a fully-loaded and operational rifle in the top window, pointed at the street below, to scare off any and all FBI agents and interested parties, plus assorted angry and exasperated British officials.
Apparently, my English basement apt. is where they had constructed and maintained a fake wall behind a normal-looking bookcase that hid top secret documents that would later be communicated or spirited away somehow to Moscow. 

The house is next to the immaculately-kept Japanese Ambassador's residence, a few blocks down from the-then Swedish Ambassador's residence, the Washington studios of NBC News, the campus of American University, and the huge Naval complex, which includes Naval Intelligence, where the Nazi sub codes were broken in the 1940's.

My last place in the DC area was a comfy north Arlington, Virginia townhouse on a cul-de-sac I lived in for 7 years, which had been President Ford's daughter, Susan's place.
I had her old bedroom, the largest, with a southern exposure, and we still had the 1970's-era Secret Service-installed wall intercom system, along with her trash compactor, both of which never worked. 
Across the street from me lived a guy who worked at the Naval bldg. on Nebraska Ave. doing NCIS type work if I recall correctly.  
He even had the Mark Harmon mustache thing going on!


This excellent Sky News video from yesterday features Sky commentator Adam Boulton, who is also an Oxford grad, and is well worth watching, 


 #MartinAmis wrote SO many of the best things I EVER read, yet was also the ever-compelling subject that so many others wrote abt, too, like this gem by @Alex_Bilmes in 2010, which I still have.

telegraph.co.uk/comment/713495
"There's a passage near the beginning of The Pregnant Widow, Amis's substantial new novel of the sexual revolution and its aftershocks, in which the narrator remarks on the protagonist's prescience:
"Unusually for a 20-year-old... Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life." In the final analysis, acclamation, money and success – even such blazing artistic achievement as Bellow's, or Amis's – count for little, if one's personal history is a cause for regret."

This is genuinely amazing and definitely worth reading while you can!

The Paris Review
Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151
Interviewed by Francesca Riviere
ISSUE 146, SPRING 1998
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1156/the-art-of-fiction-no-151-martin-amis





Martin Amis Remembered: Legend who was willing to examine the sordid side of his era
Sky News YouTube Channel
Uploaded May 21, 2023 #martinamis #author #skynews

Martin Amis was very much a legend in his own lifetime. He summed up the period in which he lived so very well, of getting over the baby boom, of Britain rediscovering itself as perhaps not as important as it had been, but certainly as a country very proud of its literary heritage.

Read the full story here:

Sunday, September 5, 2010

"Sub-sub-sub-culture" exposes Japanese men to ridicule as they take 'virtual girlfriends' on holiday - augmented reality for lovelorn otaku nerds

japan flag Pictures, Images and Photos


Russia Today
is a 24/7 English-language news channel based in Moscow and other international cities that I first watched the Saturday morning in April when Polish President Lech Kaczynski's plane crashed outside the airport in Smolensk, on his way to represent Poland at a ceremony commemorating the 1940 Katyn massacre, killing all 97 people on board..

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/11/world/la-fg-polish-president-crash11-2010apr11
RT
was the only TV news network reporting the story LIVE from near the scene, plus had well-informed analysts on the phone from various European capitals, including Warsaw, who could speak knowledgeably about Kaczynski's personal life and Polish political history and how these events all connected in one horrible day for modern-day Poland.

As I wrote at the time here, since I was awake when it happened, the Fox News Channel was first U.S. cablenet to report the crash, and as usual, MSNBC slept, showing one of their many old crime documentaries they lard their overnight and weekend schedule with, rather than break into it.  

That was not the first time that I saw MSNBC be the last TV cable net to air some breaking news, so now I never even bother flipping to them to see their take on anything.
Homepage: http://rt.com/


Their YouTube Channel has some interesting videos.
https://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday

Alyona Minkovski in particular interviews all sorts of characters on her show:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlyonaShow
Here's a video from her show about the topic du jour: lovelorn otaku nerds in Japan taking their virtual girlfriends on holiday with them to a hotel in Atami on the Pacific Coast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebrvafpjIlg




Some of you longtime readers may recall me writing in the past here on the blog that my first year living in Washington, D.C., I lived next door to (in front of) the Japanese Ambassador's official residence on Nebraska Avenue, N.W., thus putting yours truly in one of the safest neighborhoods in the city, due to all the security details in the area, which I greatly appreciated. 
This was when the crime and murder rate in D.C. was out-of-control and made D.C. America's murder capital.

I was living just down the street from the campus of American University, as well as the Swedish Ambassador's home, NBC-TV's Washington news bureau and their DC affiliate, WRC-TV, as well as the real-life HQ for NCIS.  (Years later, when I was living in Arlington County, I had an NCIS agent for a neighbor.)

Wall Street Journal's Japan Real Time blog:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2010/09/03/this-weeks-hits-virtual-girlfriends-walkman-beats-ipod-calling-the-boj-shots/


'Love Plus' resort: A solo romantic getaway
Why are men with virtual video-game girlfriends flocking to a Japanese beach resort town?
http://theweek.com/article/index/206736/love-plus-resort-a-solo-romantic-getaway

Konami Digital Entertainment
http://www.konami.com/


http://news.discovery.com/tech/love-plus-dating-game.html