Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web.
Above: Youth Magazine (May 24, 1970), cover drawing by Chiba Tetsuya, design by Yokoo Tadanori. From Holmberg’s article, linked above.
Nate Dogg 1969-2011
The melodic voice of the G-Funk era, Nate Dogg, alias Nathaniel D. Hale, died on Tuesday. He had been suffering from strokes, apparently, but I haven’t seen any report on the cause of death.
Nate Dogg, best known for his classic duet with Warren G “Regulate” (1994), on which the two of them put words on what was becoming known as G-Funk: “It’s the G-Funk eeera, funked up with a gangsta twist!” He had, however, already been given his big break by Warren’s stepbrother and gangsta rap mastermind Dr. Dre. Featured on the groundbreaking and legacy-making Chronic album (1992), he sang the hook to the street banger “Deeez Nuuuts”, which had his Long Beach homie Snoop Dogg and his cousin Daz Dillinger on the mic with Dre: “IIIII can’t be faded, I’m a nigga from the muthafuckin’ streets!”
Hype: Bamsernes Befrielsesfront!
Den 21. marts udkommer Bamsernes Befrielsesfront – hele historien på Politisk Revy. Danmarks største nulevende bladtegner Peter Lautrops legendariske føljeton fra Information sidst i 70erne i samlet udgave! Mød op til receptionen mandag den 21. marts kl. 16-18 på Information (hvor præcis, ved jeg ikke, men det må være til at finde).
Open hands : Cézanne at the Met
Throughout his life, Paul Cézanne nurtured an ambition to paint figure compositions in the renaissance tradition. At various points in his career he thus attempted to populate his otherwise open landscapes with anonymous, lumpy nudes, often bathing. There is something uncomfortable, something unresolved, about these paintings — they seem an intellectual aspiration toward a pastoral that was beyond him, not to mention his time.
His shyness only complicated matters — not since his years as a student had he spent any sustained time drawing from the nude, and he was unwilling to hire models to pose for him. Late in life however, in the early 1890s, he began paying the gardeners and hired hands at his estate in Aix-en-Provence to sit for his pictures. The result was a number of monumental portraits and group compositions of card-playing peasants that arguably more than any other group of works in his oeuvre succeeded in capturing the grandeur of his great historical paragons.
A small, exquisite exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, organised in collaboration with the Courtauld Gallery in London where I saw it in the fall, focuses on these pictures.
Kom hjem: Interview med Thomas Thorhauge
Kom hjem: Interview med Thomas Thorhauge
Stort interview med Thomas Thorhauge, om hans graphic novel, Kom hjem
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web.
Entering the Second Decade
As you may have noticed, the Metabunker now looks slightly different from how it did until last week. The simple reason is that we’ve finally shed the coils of our 2007 WordPress installation (see image for a reminder) in favour of something a little more 2011. A huge thank you to Derik Badman for mastering the transition. Without him it probably wouldn’t have happened for another four years, if at all.
So, it is now easier to sign up for our RSS feed — just tap the switches on the upper right of the sidebar. Other than that, we’ve decided finally to activate our dormant Twitter account as an experiment, in order to see whether that particular piece of hyped online ephemera is going to cause any revolutions in our neck of the woods. We ain’t asking for much — a little fun will do — so we might just be pleasantly surprised. Please note, however, that we haven’t yet managed to set up a mechanism to hype updates made here directly in that succinct format, but it may happen sometime soon!
In any case, we hope that you’ll keep reading and find something to enjoy. There’s always stuff in the pipeline. Let us know what you think!
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web.
Respect the Architect
Respect the Architect
On David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp.
Greatest Comics Show Ever?
Might the Egyptian Book of the Dead show at the British Museum be the best comics exhibition ever? It certainly contains some of the greatest comics I’ve ever read. It’s good sometimes just to forget about the historically determined understanding of comics as a modern art form and remember that humans have told stories in sequentially-arranged images and text for millennia. Irritating as Scott McCloud’s formalistic muddying of the waters in Understanding Comics might be, there is also something problematic about the dominant urge to isolate the modern mass-culture iteration of this practice from the larger history of word/image art.
Expertly presented, the exhibition itself merges sequence and repetition to evoke for the visitor the deceased’s journey through the afterlife as described in the official Egyptian guidebook, the collection of spells today known as the book of the dead. Drawing largely upon the Museum’s own astonishing collection of such ‘books’, it presents the narrative of what happens after death stage-by-stage, from mummification and burial to the perilous voyage through the netherworlds to the eternal fields of green beyond. Following us are sections of one extensive version that belonged to a scribe named Ani, which become our own guide through the show’s different rooms, in which examples from other Books of the Dead as well as objects related to death and burial in the Egyptian New Kingdom deepen the experience. Because the set of spells laid down in the Book are essentially the same, one is familiarised with their narrative, internalising it as one moves along.