Americans: Please help us all out
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web.
We’re still unable to talk about much else than the US elections here at the Bunker, but not to worry — it’ll all be over in a couple of days.
Love Multiplied
Currently on display at the art dealer Pietro Scarpa in Venice, there’s a reclining nude by the Venetian painter Giacomo ‘Palma’ Vecchio (c. 1480-1528), which is worth a second look for anyone interested in the practice of replication in the Italian Renaissance workshop. It repeats with slight variations the figure of Venus in a canvas in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Both pictures are datable to the 1520s, with the latter falling late, left as it was unfinished in the master’s studio at his death.
Heavy on the Castanets
Michael Chabon frustrates me. He’s obviously talented, smart and knows how to tell a good story in the old school way. Even if he suffers from the classic problem of providing his stories with endings as memorable as what went before. (I remember a lot of cool things about Kavalier and Clay, but how did it end, again?). What I have a problem with, however, are certain mannerisms in his fluid, elegant language that have always been there, but which one hoped would dissipate, rather than consolidate themselves, with experience.
Defending the Herd
As so many before me, I recently took umbrage at some of Domingos Isabelinho’s rather categorical views on comics, as expressed on his new blog The Crib Sheet. This time it was a curt dismissal of the majority of Hugo Pratt’s work as being superficial and hollow that got me out of my chair. For the record, here’s my short, rather extemporal take on what makes the best Corto Maltese stories great, formulated in response to his assertion that Corto is an unknowable, romantic stereotype, a ‘sailor who doesn’t sail’:
Corto is not meant to be a realistic character — he’s an engine for our imagination. Pratt’s genius in those stories, and I mean right up to the very end — or at least until the penultimate Corto book, Elvetiche (the last, MU, is coasting a bit) — is to engage our taste for adventure in unexpected, almost dreamlike ways.
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web.
Just returned from Venice; pardon the lateness…
No Architects
In which I go to the Venice Architecture Biennial, so you don’t have to.
Hype: Majors — Suckers Never Play Me!
Danish rap supergroup Majors have just dropped a new single, reprising “Suckers Never Play Me,” arguably the best track on their fine, eponymously titled album, released earlier this year. It’s available for free download from their website, and is well worth it if you’re into traditional hardcore hip hop.
Klodsen Kommer
De fleste københavnere, og sikkert også de fleste danskere, har nok allerede hørt om ‘Store Roberts’ kommende entré i Københavns havn, så jeg vil undlade at komme ind på de triste detaljer her og blot eklære mig enig med de efterhånden mange stemmer, der synes at det er en meget dårlig idé, og i øvrigt udtryk for eklatant mangel på dømmekraft fra Overborgmesteren og borgerrepræsentationens side, at dette længe syltede projektet igen er blevet taget op.
Man kan selvfølgelig sige, at det ville være et ganske repræsentativt monument over den talentløshed med hvilken størstedelen af Københavns havn er blevet udviklet over de sidste 10-15 år, men det er næppe et argument i klodsens favør. Ikke alene vil den være fatalt ude af skala i forhold til sine omgivelser på det sted — den lader også til at være det med sig selv.
Walls — Bassano
I was in Bassano del Grappa today. A beautiful small Medieval/Renaissance town scenically situated in the foothills of the Dolemites, it’s well worth a visit. Palladio’s famous pontoon bridge is elegant, almost timeless in its grace, and the collection at the city museum of pictures by the town’s greatest artist son Jacopo del Ponte, aka. Jacopo Bassano, is both grand and moving. His best work is earthy and rustic, yet possessed of a luminous spirituality that transcends the profane.