Merry Christmas!
Gregório Lopes, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1544, oil on panel, Museu de Évora.
Gregory Isaacs RIP
Love is overdue.
Eyedea RIP
Eyedea, champion.
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web. BBC’s “A History of the World in a Hundred Objects”. For those residing outside Britain, you might be unaware of this brilliant radio programme, in which British Museum director Neil McGregor pieces together a history of human civilisation from individual pieces in the museum’s collection, presented…
Happy 5 Aben Maler!
Open publication – Free publishing – More aben maler Congrats to Steffen Rayburn Maarup for five great years of quality comics publishing in Denmark at Aben Maler, culminating with the finest foreign edition of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan this year. Here’s to many more!
Was the Copenhagen explosion terror-related?
The news on Friday of an explosion at Hotel Jørgensen in the centre of Copenhagen and the initial report that the arrested suspect possessed effects suggesting he might have been targeting the Viby headquarters of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the 2005 Mohammad cartoons, is disturbing to say the least. The last bit of info,…
Images from Comics and Beats 4
This Sunday saw the fourth Comics and Beats event in Copenhagen. Organised by the Danish Comics Council, it is a live drawing event where cartoonists improvise to music provided by a DJ and prompts given by the audience and the MC. This time, it took place as part of a charity event in Copenhagen’s Fælledpark,…
On the Child Pornography Debate in Denmark
The highly publicized child pornography conviction last month of a Swedish translator, for possessing manga which allegedly depicted sexualised minors or minors engaging in sexual acts, is but the latest manifestation of a debate concerning what constitutes child pornography that has been going for a number of years. The chairman of the Swedish Comics Society,…
On the Ongoing Cartoon Shellshock
I was just reminded today of how depressingly treacherous it has become to navigate the Mohammed cartoon affair and its religious-cultural discontents. The day before yesterday it was reported worldwide that the upcoming memoirs of ‘Bomb in Turban’ cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Manden bag stregen (‘The Man Behind the Line’), would be published with the cartoon…
Rammellzee RIP
Last week, another of the pioneers of early hip hop culture, Rammellzee, passed away. A versatile multimedia artist and cultural theorist, he remained at the margins of hip hop culture as it evolved into a worldwide, commercially successful phenomenon, marching to the beat of his own drum. From hitting the A train in 1974 and…
In Memory of José Saramago
Jesus is dying slowly, life ebbing from him, ebbing, when suddenly the heavens overhead open wide and God appears in the same attire he wore in the boat, and His words resound throughout the earth, This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Jesus realized then that he had been tricked, as…
Colour in Line
I haven’t talked much about my Ph. D. dissertation, “Colour in Line — Titian and Printmaking”, here at the Bunker, despite it having occupied my life more than any other intellectual project for the last five years or so. I guess because it is still very much a work in progress, but I figure it…
Gary Shider RIP
Gary Shider of Plainfield, NJ and long-time funkateer of Parliament-Funkadelic fame, has passed away. He was the one in the diaper, rocking the guitar. Plus he was one of the architects of the P-Funk sound, overshadowed in the earlier years by fellow guitarist Eddie “Maggot Brain” Hazel but was just as important a constituent of…