In the second edition of his great collection of artists’ biographies, Le vite dei piu eccelenti pitturi, scultori ed architettori (1568), the Tuscan painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) wrote the following about the significance of drawing: “Seeing that Design, the parent of our three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, having its origin in the…
Robert Venditti Interviewed Andrew Firestone talks to the author of The Surrogates
The inimitable ‘Li Se’, in whose “extended network” I find myself, has finally opened the floodgates and is committing to writing the kind of intellectual effluvium that people in said network have come to appreciate in conversation over the years. Written on the principle, appropriated from Charles Bukowski, of ‘not trying’, it is blogging as…
The picks of the week from around the web. The Guardian: “The Unwanted”. Joe Sacco on African refugees in Malta in the first installment of a 48-page reportage that originally ran in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Harvey Pekar. The death of the pioneering comics writer this week elicited some fine journalism around the web: Tom…
The passing of pioneer comics writer Harvey Pekar yesterday made me go back and reread some of his earliest collaborations with R. Crumb, published in his self-published American Splendor #1-4 in 1976-79. The beginnings of a remarkable body of work, they are emblematic of Pekar’s originality and importance as a writer, and as good a…
Meanwhile over at TCJ main, I have a review up of David Prudhomme’s critically acclaimed musical romance Rébétiko.
For this month’s column over at the Hooded Utilitarian, I’ve dug into the Rackham archive to re-present in English a piece I wrote on Quino’s comic strip masterpiece Mafalda back in 2005.
The picks of the week from around the web. The New Yorker: “The Mark of a Masterpiece”. David Grann talks to and examines the colourful career of Peter Paul Biro, the art forensics man who has participated in the authentication of the pretty, so-called Leonardo drawing that surfaced out of nowhere last year. Pretty amazing…
Ovre på det nye danske tegneseriesite nummer9.dk har vi netop postet en rundbordsdiskussion om de tre første bind i tegneserien Valhalla, i anledning af den nye samleudgivelse fra Carlsen. Udover undertegnede deltager chefredaktør Erik Barkman og Aben Malers Steffen P. Maarup. Check hele herligheden her.
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…
The picks of the week from around the web. Rolling Stone: “The Runaway General”. Without question this week’s most exposed piece of journalism, Michael Hasting’s article on the now deposed Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is well-worth spending time with if you only read the summaries. It does much more than convey the disparaging one-liners that lost…
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…
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…
My second DWYCK-column, on comics criticism and Hergé, is now up over on the Hooded Utilitarian. Check it out.
“Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings : yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption.…