Before its work in Gorky Park, Strelka anchored the remake of another space into a hipster and intellectual oasis in Moscow, around the former Red October chocolate factory on an island across the river from the Kremlin.
The grande dame in question is the venerable Algonquin Hotel, the neo-Renaissance literary landmark and sometime intellectual oasis that was haven to the witerati of the fabled Round Table.
NEW HAVEN — This city of 123,000 has long struggled to reconcile its two faces: The intellectual oasis of Yale University and the upscale area it has spawned, and a more turbulent side that includes the 1970 Black Panther trials, a recent Supreme Court ruling that white firefighters had been unfairly denied promotions because of their race and crime that still plagues parts of the city.
For the commentator Virginia Postrel, quoted in the local City Beat magazine, palm trees tell us that LA is an oasis, as much intellectual as physical.
In this golden age, Fregene, once a simple fishing village, became an oasis for Italian intellectuals and Rome's fashionable Via Veneto crowd.
The university, long an oasis for liberal ideas, was the intellectual epicenter of the huge pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 that ended violently when troops dispersed the protesters, killing hundreds.
And there we have the brilliant and quite original thesis of "The Oasis": the people of the ideological left — intellectuals and plebeians alike — imagine themselves moralists of the first order, when they are in fact possessed of only B-plus morality.
Opened in 1928 and named for Maxim Gorky, the writer who after moral torment returned from Italy to serve Stalin's regime, the park is the most recent Moscow oasis for middle-class hipsters and fashion-conscious intellectuals who fear that Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin's return to the presidency will bring a repeat of Soviet-era stagnation.
According to Justin Rudelson, an anthropologist and the author of a book on the Uighurs titled "Oasis Identities," Uighur culture is sharply divided along class lines — intellectuals, traders, peasants — and over the years these distinctions have become sharper, as each group has developed its own relationship with the Chinese.
The Oasis is a bustling, wood-grained establishment filled with skiers, hippies and intellectuals (the New Age Golden Braid Bookstore is next door).
As a detective inspector — with a high-strung intellectual, Hathaway (Laurence Fox), for a sergeant — Lewis has remained quiet and solid, if a bit cranky, an oasis of calm in a television landscape crowded with obsessive detective-geniuses derived from Sherlock Holmes.
