Last week, I watched my first Kurosawa movie: Kagemusha, or Shadow Warrior. One of Kurosawa’s final productions, Kagemusha takes place in sixteenth-century Japan and tells the story of a thief who looks uncannily like Shingen, the leader of the Takeda clan, and who is employed to impersonate him in the event of his death to keep the clan together and protect it from its enemies. Shingen dies: enter the shadow warrior. This three-hour insight into feudal Japan, its structures of power, and the paradigm shift enacted by the introduction of guns onto the battlefield in the Sengoku period is mesmerizingly beautiful. Almost every shot could be a painting—cavalry battle scenes; the many councils of leaders draped with patterned kimonos; the delicate, expressive face of Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays both Shingen and his shadow. My favorite scene was the dream sequence: the kagemusha dreams of Shingen emerging dressed for battle, like an armored bird hatching from a shell, from the urn in which his corpse was deposited. The shadow flees, terrified, against a hallucinogenically colorful sky. The river water that splashes around his bare feet is dark like paint. I am ready to watch Seven Samurai.

—Isabella Hammad, author of “Gertrude”

I am in a book club that has only two rules. The first rule: any novel we read must have at least one murder. Nada, by the French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, has, by my count, at least eight murders—and flashy ones at that. Originally published in 1973 and set in the hangover after the uprisings of 1968, the novel follows a group of leftist revolutionaries who kidnap the U.S. ambassador to France as a political statement. I’m not spoiling anything by saying that the revolutionaries and their scheme are doomed. The race to the bloody end fuses discussions on the legitimacy of using violence to further political aims with action scenes so gloriously paced that the book feels like a single exhale from start to finish. The characters include a jaded professional who hops from one leftist uprising to the next and a high school philosophy teacher who punches a colleague in the throat, shouting “fuck your face!” There’s also a mostly silent man who “wanted to shoot himself or just go to work—it was hard to say which,” and a rich girl who supplies the country house where the group stashes the ambassador. Her self-description is iconic: “My cool and chic exterior hides the wild flames of a burning hatred for a techno-bureaucratic capitalism whose cunt looks like a funeral urn and whose mug looks like a prick.”

It’s rare that a crime novel takes as an epigraph a quote from Hegel (“The heart that beats for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit …”), but Manchette is hardly an ordinary writer. His terse, propulsive sentences recall, a little, John le Carré, if le Carré had a passion for philosophy and a loathing of capitalism. Lucy Sante’s insightful introduction to Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation points out Nada’s “theoretical shortcomings,” which Manchette himself acknowledged: the book fails to connect the Nada group with larger social movements and to depict the state interference, COINTELPRO-style, that would almost certainly occur. The likely Manchette mouthpiece backs out of the kidnapping because “terrorism is only justified when revolutionaries have no other means of expressing themselves and when the masses support them.” Still, when an ex-comrade condemns him “to eat shit and say thank you and cast blank ballots” for the rest of his life, it’s hard to disagree that something’s lacking in his pacific leftism, too. If Nada proves anything, it’s that “political” novels can be as unsettled as the politics we live with.

Despite ongoing arrangements for its return, a stone relic looted from a Nepalese shrine in the 1980s is still on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The eleventh-century artifact featuring the Buddhist and Hindu god Vishnu was donated nearly thirty years ago from the personal collection of Steven Kossak, a former curator in the museum’s Asian art department whose dealings are now being scrutinized by academics, activists, and museum officials.

“This is the third thing that the Met is returning that was donated by the Kossaks,” Erin Thompson, an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told ARTnews, referring to the wooden strut and stone statue that were returned last year. 

Deity sculptures are considered living gods in Nepal. The Vishnu relic is a highly symbolic rendition of the god surrounded by a pearl-and-flame aureole with his consort Lakshmi on one side and the eagle Garuda on the other. Standing on a raised platform with lotus decorations, Vishnu is depicted in his four-armed form with raised hands holding weapons: a discus and a club.

Thompson, who has advised on earlier Nepalese repatriation efforts, had visited the Met two weeks ago to take a closer look.

“The museum not only has donations from the family, but it has at least eight loans from them,” she said, adding that the Vishnu relic currently sits in a gallery near an exhibition including other Asian artifacts donated by the Kossaks through their Kronos Collection. “Once you know that someone is acquiring artifacts without looking too closely as a source, the first thing you should do is look deeper.”

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

The Headlines

ANOTHER ART ATTACK. On Thursday, protesters at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth spray painted the logo for the oil and gas company Woodside atop a prized Frederick McCubbin painting, the Guardian reports. The piece was covered with clear perspex, apparently preventing it from serious damage. One person was arrested. In a statement, the activists alleged that Woodside is causing the “ongoing desecration of sacred Murujuga rock art” because of its activities on the Burrup peninsula, north of Perth. Woodside, for its part, said that there has not been any impact on the 50,000-year-old rock art in the area, and that it “has a proven, more than 35-year track record of safe, reliable and sustainable operations.” The protest follows a string of protests last year that saw climate activists throw paint (or other substances) on paintings, or glue themselves to them, in efforts to draw attention to their cause.

JOB POSTINGS. The next director of the Seattle gem that is the Frye Art Museum will be Jamilee Lacy. She is coming to the Evergreen State from the Providence College Galleries in Rhode Island, where she is director and chief curator, and spoke with the Seattle Times about her plans. Over in Vermont, the Shelburne Museum has established an associate curator position for Native American art, and named Victoria Sunnergren—a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Delaware—to the post, per ArtDaily. And in case you missed it: Ron Clark, the founding director of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, is stepping down after an incredible 54 years, and artist Gregg Bordowitz (an ISP alum and faculty member) is taking his place.

The Digest

Clearing, one of the New York galleries that helped trigger a groundswell of artistic activity in Bushwick in the early 2010s, is set to leave that neighborhood after more than a decade there.

This March, Clearing will relocate to the Bowery in Manhattan, where it will be sited about a block away from the New Museum and the gallery Sperone Westwater. Taking over three floors of 260 Bowery, Clearing will now occupy 6,600 square feet—a smaller amount of space than it had in Bushwick, but in a more central location that puts the gallery a short walk away from a host of Lower East Side art spaces.

“There’s nothing wrong with Brooklyn, but there’s more to New York than Brooklyn,” Olivier Babin, the gallery’s founder, said in a phone interview. “We’re not leaving for a bigger or better space. We’re leaving for a better location.”

The deal was brokered by Kelsey Coxe at Portman Realty, who a spokesperson for Clearing said was attempting to make forays into the art world, working recently with clients such as the artist-run space and bar Beverly’s.

Clearing started in Bushwick in 2011, and now also has venues in Brussels and Los Angeles. Babin has stated that he was initially lured to Bushwick by the relatively low cost of real estate there, which allowed him to open up shop in an airy former auto shop that was bigger than many other spaces in Chelsea or the Lower East Side.

Marcus, Luke and Andy see in the weekend! We check in with Charlie Kane, struggle to translate a very unrelaxed and dehydrated Pep Guardiola, and bring news from Cristiano Ronaldo’s debut! Is that… Kasabian’s guitarist on the left wing?

Plus, Luke finally completes his long-anticipated transformation into Richard Keys and Andy and Marcus face off in a Jack’s Encyclopaedia that will probably go immediately out of date. STOP SIGNING PLAYERS TODD FOR GOD’S SAKE!

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

In the summer of 2011, as Washington deadlocked over the once routine task of raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy, then the House GOP whip, decided to mix things up. At a closed-door caucus meeting, the California Republican cut the lights to screen a clip from the heist movie The Town, where Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner plot a violent act of revenge.

“I need your help,” Affleck’s character says. “I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.”

When the lights flicked on, Allen West, a first-term Florida congressman who had become a conservative hero after firing a gun past an Iraqi detainee’s head, rose to offer a version of Renner’s response.

“I’m ready to drive the car,” West said. 

For McCarthy, his political ambitions have always come with a catch: To get where he wanted to go, he first had to hand over the keys. His elevation to speaker of the House in January on the 15th ballot was the culmination of his life’s work and a demonstration of his powers. In nailing down a belligerent caucus, McCarthy leaned on relationships cultivated over a decade-and-half on the campaign trail, at the Capitol, and on the fundraising circuit. But it was also a reminder of the compromises he made to get there. McCarthy won the gavel, but not the authority it traditionally brings, by ceding control to the insurrectionists and austerity-obsessed hard-liners who blocked his nomination 14 times. His victory was in many ways the story not just of his own career, but of the trio of Republican “Young Guns” with whom he rose through the ranks. McCarthy is the last one of them standing, because he already surrendered long ago.

An out-of-this-world haven, accessible only by boat, the Fondation Carmignac on the picturesque Porquerolles island sits on a 37-acre estate where a farm once stood. Upon setting foot on this Mediterranean island between Marseille and Saint-Tropez, you’ll never want to leave. A village looms ahead, but the temptation to follow the sign reading “Fondation d’art contemporain 0,6 km” is too strong. The ascending road on the left takes you up to this contemporary art space, once the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 movie Pierrot le Fou.

Related Articles

In the 1980s, French architect Henri Vidal turned this quaint farm into a villa, which he had built on a small artificial hill, overlooking the sea. Shortly after, Édouard Carmignac, one of the world’s top art collectors, fell in love with the estate while attending his daughter’s wedding there and made Vidal an offer on the spot, thinking he’d turn the villa into a cultural venue. It took 30 years for Vidal’s daughter to get back to Carmignac.

Carmignac created his namesake family foundation in 2000 to steward his collection, and in 2009, he added the Carmignac Photojournalism Award to the “production of an investigative photo reportage on human rights violations, geostrategic issues in the world,” according to the foundation’s website. (The 2023 edition focuses on electronic waste in Ghana.)

Carmignac acquired the Domaine de la Courtade vineyard in 2013, and the retrofitting of the Villa, under the aegis of the studios Barani and GMAA, began the following year. Because the site is part of a nature reserve, called Natura 2000, erecting any new buildings on the site was out of the question. To create the 16,500 square feet of art galleries needed to transform the villa into a contemporary art space, they had to dig under the existing building.

“I had finished touring with my band, Moriarty, and was already bombing my father with ideas,” said Charles Carmignac, who joined the venture in 2016. “My first contribution was musical, I wrote with bass player Stephan Zimmerli a score for all the actors of the project, designers, architects, artists—in hopes that it would help them work in harmony.”

How Homicide: Life on the Street paved the way for The Wire

Former President Donald Trump has given many denials to writer E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that he cornered her and raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. He’s called Carroll’s story “all fiction,” “a con job,” and “a big fat hoax.”

“I know nothing about this woman,” Trump insisted in 2019, when Carroll first made her allegation public in a New York magazine article. “She’s a liar and a sick person,” he repeated recently. “She made it up probably to sell a book or for her own ego.”

Yet perhaps the most quoted of all Trump’s defenses is his insulting insistence that Carroll is “not my type,” as he told the Hill in an Oval Office interview shortly after Carroll’s story went public. The New York Times, USA Today, and many other outlets promptly ran his insult in their headlines. The Atlantic broke down the quote’s inherent misogyny: how it reduces an “unruly woman” to a sexual commodity, then dismisses her. Carroll, meanwhile, filed a defamation lawsuit over Trump’s denials, including the “not my type” quote, saying the president smeared her when he called her a liar. 

But a newly unsealed deposition from that lawsuit has thrown Trump’s “not my type” defense into question. According to the deposition transcript, when Trump was shown a picture of himself with his then-wife, Ivana Trump, talking to Carroll, Trump misidentified Carroll as his second wife, Marla Maples. 

“It’s Marla,” Trump responded when Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan presented the photo, as he pointed to Carroll.