Talismans from the past are rare but are still around, especially at the old Post Hotel: Faded bleached photographs of horse-drawn sleds on Main Street, long-bearded peasants chopping wood on the Eggli, even skiers walking up mountains in knee-deep snow before ski lifts were invented. Is there anything more precious than old photographs? Killjoy contemporary conversation subjects like the size of indoor chalet swimming pools, ...
It’s nice to be back in good old Helvetia again, but as the holiest of holy days approaches, I cannot help but think of my friend Jeremy Clarke and his struggles. Philosophers have dealt with life’s problems starting with the Greeks, yet not one of them was able to pin down man’s ultimate defeat: death, that is. The one who did manage it was no philosopher, just a simple carpenter, and his take on it has given more ...
If I had one wish to be fulfilled this Christmas it would not even be Lily James and Keira Knightley abducting me for a 24-hour love session, but for every U.S. Marine guarding our nation’s embassies to put down their guns and declare a 48-hour strike against the rotten regime in D.C. that chose a black lesbian drug smuggler over an American ex-Marine rotting in a Russian jail since 2018. The black lesbian basketball player ...
NEW YORK—It’s party time in the Bagel, and also the last week I’ll be spending in this unrefined place. The Bagel has lost its je ne sais quoi for me. It is now as subtle as a knocked-out Russian T-72 stuck in the mud. There’s as much wit around here as there used to be virgins in Hollywood, when the great Oscar Levant referred to Elizabeth Taylor’s numerous marriages as “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” Or as ...
Why bother with something true to life, dignified, and classy when you can create something untrue, cheap, and vulgar? While surfing through some channels looking for a black-and-white oldie, I watched something that I think is called Rogue Heroes. I’m not sure of the title because the TV film annoyed me so, I turned it off after watching it for less than ten minutes. And it took as long as that because the trash was based on ...
In these willfully ignorant times, the powers that be seem, in their haste to be politically correct, to forget that America fought its bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million men died, yet the Civil War is being refought with fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of great American soldiers, while one group of citizens is robbed of their heritage in order to please another. About ...
NEW YORK—Christmas partying, like Yule shopping displays, begins much earlier of late. After the lockdown, however, the urge to party and party hard is justified. Like others, I am trying to make up for the missing two years, but the hangover toll is prohibitive. It now takes a whole two days to feel normal again, and at this point in my life, days count as much as months used to. Last week I hit a hot new club here on the ...
The LNG king, Peter Livanos, an old good friend, has sent me a very informative write-up about China. Peter knows as much as anyone what’s cooking behind what used to be known as the Bamboo Curtain, and he’s clued me in about China when I’ve been wrong in the past. But for any of you unfamiliar with shipping terms, LNG stands for liquid natural gas, something that costs a hell of a lot to carry over water. As a result, ...
NEW YORK—An American hack who used to write okay stuff until his left-wing employer signaled to him that activism is more important than journalism recently revealed that Americans are unhappier now than they’ve ever been before. Especially in places that voted for the Donald. According to the hack, Trump got the most votes in places where people felt the unhappiest. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t people vote ...
There are famous heroes and then there are unsung ones, and I basically prefer the latter as I have known a few of them in my lifetime. The funny thing is, I grew up learning only about famous heroes, the ancient Greek type, starting with the semi-god Achilles. Homer didn’t deal with unsung ones; everyone was larger than life, and there were only winners and losers. The person I will tell you about this week would not have ...
NEW YORK—Ms. Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is 40 years old with modern Bagelite manners, and by that I mean they are not exactly those of, say, C.Z. Guest or Babe Paley, two ladies who are no longer with us but whose presence in drawing rooms we could do with rather desperately. Ms. Draper is angry as hell and has declared she will not take it anymore. She was recently charged with grand ...
Rodney Dangerfield was the American Benny Hill, lewd, funny, and not exactly politically correct where the weaker sex was concerned. In America today there is no room for Rodney’s or Benny’s shenanigans, and leering at women is now commensurate to having one’s rocket polished in broad daylight, perhaps even more so. I find it amazing to be bombarded daily by the shameless gimmickry, stupidity, and smuttiness of ...
That Kim Kardashian dame being fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for a “pump and dump” scheme should help add victimhood to her other assets. Everyone in this country revels in being a victim, or so it seems when watching the news or reading the papers. My Spectator colleague Jeremy Clark is as ill as it is possible to be, and what we get is his brave and wonderful column every week, never complaining about ...
NEW YORK—I am seriously thinking of visiting a shrink (just kidding) as I now have definite proof that I am crazy: Instead of remaining in England and going to Badminton for the duke of Beaufort’s 70th birthday bash, and catching a glimpse of the love of my life, Iona McLaren, I find myself in a rotten place where a small headline in the New York Post announces “16 shot in one bloody night.” All I can say is the ...
Harvard man Russell Seitz has sent me an extraordinary present as an object lesson in “what a magazine should be, in case you start another one.” The paper has yellowed and is dog-eared, pages are falling out and the print is faint, but The Transatlantic Review, Vol. 1, dated January 1924, is a joy to behold. Mind you, we were already one hundred years old when Ford Madox Ford first edited TTR in Paris. And that’s what I ...
Privilege at birth displeases wannabe types, and the subject came up rather a lot last week, especially in the Land of the Depraved, where the Bagel Times regards monarchy as antidemocratic and the cause of most human ills, including the common cold, cancer, pimples, varicose veins, and even athlete’s foot. At my own alma mater, the University of Virginia, founded by the greatest of all Americans, Thomas Jefferson, some ...
