Category Archive: CRIME
The Case that Will Not Die
The Death of Jon Benét Ramsey We have spoken of the various imaginative, speculative and trashy treatments of this awful case before: See Perfect Murder, Perfect Town and Books About Jon Benét. Disclaimer: TVC has a keen interest in but no actual knowledge of, this matter. Apart from an individual who appears to have confessed to the crime in order to be extradited from a Thai jail, no one has admitted guilt nor been charged. Patsy Ramsey is now deceased and she always denied involvement in the killing, as have John and Burke Ramsey. We are discussing possible solutions on a…
Continue Reading →The Last Supper
"the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.'
Milan, 1999, 28 MAY Leonardo’s The Last Supper was restored this day to public view after 22 years of restoration, roughly 501 years after the great artist completed it. You can clamber over the crowds and see this acme of Renaissance fusion (christian myth and enlightenment art) at Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan, a scene recounted in the books Matthew and John, where Jesus, looking serene after a tasty lunch, gives all the apostles indigestion with his infamous accusation. Leonardo (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was not only a polymorphous genius, he was also reputedly quite crafty. All the…
Continue Reading →Nyugalom
"The Chasseur in the Forest", Caspar David Friedrich, 1814 (detail)
[A lunatic from the past, Bela Kiss, living in conditions of relative tranquility (in Hungarian, “Nyugalom“), made recordings of his ravings in the first-person mode obtaining from time immemorial. These have been transcribed and lovingly italicized by a team of scholars with rather too much affection for the source. The editor has taken the liberty of suggesting that the ensuing statements in the manuscript smack of self-serving apologia, akin to the homilies obtaining in the forwards of most modern three-volume biographies, to the effect that guessing, decontextualizing, moralizing and or fiction are necessary in order to render an antique subject…
Continue Reading →Perfect Murder Perfect Town
Jon Benét Ramsey's grave at Saint James Episcopal (by Taurusrus)
(2000) (Dir. Lawrence Schiller) Directed by Schiller as a tele-movie, originally a series, from his own book about the murder of 6 year old glamour-puss Jon Benét Ramsey on Christmas Day (or Boxing Day) 1996 in Boulder, Colorado, it violently divided critics and viewers alike as either partisan, too procedural or just plain icky. Young Jon Benét was found strangled in the family’s cellar after what was called “the ‘War and Peace’ of ransom notes” turned up. The parents became prime suspects; police and prosecutors clashed over the making of a prima facie case, and no one was ever charged….
Continue Reading →Reversal of Fortune
Insulin
(Dir. Barbet Schroeder) (1990) A contemplative, but playful account of a cause célèbre. Millionairess Sunny von Bülow’s vegetative state persisted from 1980 to 2008 (when she died, aged 76). The cause of this coma was alleged to be an injection of insulin by her second husband, Claus von Bülow, a classicist and former assistant to oil king J. Paul Getty. Bülow was convicted by a jury in 1982 and this film, based on the book by his appellate counsel, Alan Dershowitz,concentrates on the relationship between legal team and client during the appeal to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, seeking to…
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