You are here: Home / Archives for 2017
posted on August 14, 2020 by

Empyrean by Alexandra Carr

“Hell, Heaven and Hope: A Journey through life and the afterlife with Dante is now open to the public in the Palace Green Galleries at Durham. The exhibition features a fabulous range of copies of Dante’s works, as well as contemporary artwork. Alexandra Carr’s Empyrean features as part of the section of Paradise. Completed as part of Alexandra’s Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence programme, the sculpture represents the spheres of the medieval universe, drawing on Grosseteste and Dante: sculpting with light on the grandest scale in the creation of the universe.”    —Ordered Universe, December 4, 2017

Filed Under: Visual Art & Architecture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
posted on January 1, 2020 by

“In the Ninth Circle, A Misunderstood Angel”

“Cheeseburger eggrolls to the right,
The center head devoured beef nachos.
And on the left, the restaurant’s sickly lights,

Glistened off chicken wonton tacos.
My quarry swilled a foul-smelling elixir
As to his booth we walked-o.”    –Matthew Dessem, Slate, November 25, 2017

Filed Under: Written Word Tagged With: , , ,
posted on December 28, 2019 by

“Brakhage: When Light Meets Life”

“His mission, which he pursued with a zealous intensity, was to liberate the eye from such ‘prescribed’ ways of seeing. The insect wings, twigs, and fragments of flowers and leaves that he applied directly to strips of 16mm film in Mothlight (1963) and 35mm in The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981); the streaks and globs of paint that seem to shine with an inner illumination in films like The Dante Quartet (1987); the arcs of light that bend around the underwater surfaces of Boulder Creek in Commingled Containers (1996): Brakhage’s films train you to look at the world as if it were—as he wrote in the first paragraph of his 1963 book Metaphors on Vision—’alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement.’

[. . .]

“In these cases, figurative footage occasionally still appeared in odd and unexpected settings—one section of The Dante Quartet was painted over what Brakhage identified as ‘a worn-out 70mm print of Irma la Douce.'”    –Max Nelson, The New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017

Still from Brakhage’s film The Dante Quartet, 1987

Filed Under: Image Mosaic, Performing Arts, Visual Art & Architecture Tagged With: , , ,
posted on December 21, 2019 by

Selva Oscura

“Selva Oscura is a music documentary that explores the creative process during the making of a music video for the song ‘Stolidi Pensieri.’ It also references the opening of Dante’s Inferno and translates to ‘The Dark Forest.’ It’s symbolic of a journey to unknown destinations, which is also our story, as we accidentally created a living project that never had a predetermined outcome and led us in a direction where we were all free to experiment within our disciplines.”    –John Welsh, Vimeo, September 8, 2017

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , , , ,
posted on December 15, 2019 by

“How long will I be on Submission? (they sob)”

“The Wait haunts all stages of writing for publication. There are different levels of waiting, a bit like Dante’s circles of hell. Waiting for critique, waiting to hear from agents, waiting to receive edits, waiting for feedback on edits, waiting waiting waiting W A I T I N G.”    –Lindsay Galvin, LindsayGalvin.com, October 5, 2017

Filed Under: Written Word Tagged With: , , , , ,
posted on November 17, 2019 by

Francesco Gabbani, “Tra le granite e le granate” (2017)

“Oggi il paradiso costa la metà
Lo dice il venditore di felicità
In fuga dall’inferno, finalmente in viaggio
La tua vacanza in un pacchetto omaggio.”

Check out Francesco Gabbani’s 2017 album Magellano on Spotify.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , , ,
posted on October 28, 2019 by

Dave Sim’s Cerebus in Hell? (2017)

“The first new Cerebus comic since 2004! Where has Cerebus been since he died twelve years ago? Is he in hell? Purgatory? Limbo?”    — Rich Johnston, Bleeding Cool, June 22, 2016

Check out Dave Sim’s Doré-inspired 2017 Cerebus in Hell? here.

To read about the controversy surrounding the title (“Cerebus” vs. “Cerberus”), see Rich Johnston’s blogposts here and here.

Filed Under: Visual Art & Architecture Tagged With: , , , , ,
posted on August 30, 2019 by

All That Man Is (2017) by David Szalay

David Szalay’s All That Man Is, published in 2017 by Vintage, tells the stories of nine different men at varying stages of life, and explores the issues and psych of the 21st century man. The book was a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, and the winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction. The fourth story of the novel cites the first three lines of the Inferno, as the story’s protagonist, a medieval scholar in crisis, drives into a pine forest.

“Pine forests on hillsides start to envelop them on the east side of the Main. And fog.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Ché la diritta via era smarrita

“Well, here it is. Dark pine forests, hemming the motorway. Shapes of fog throw themselves at the windscreen.” [. . .]    –David Szalay, All That Man Is (p. 146).

You can purchase Szalay’s book here.

Filed Under: Written Word Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
posted on August 1, 2019 by

The 9 Circles of Girls’ Clothing Hell

“Before your teenage daughter sighs, rolls her eyes and tells you she’ll only wear Hollister, you will be in charge of making clothing choices.

“Treasure this time of sartorial lack-of-autonomy, because it is fleeting.

“As the parent of a girl, one of the first decisions you’ll get to make is ‘Do I care whether people think my newborn infant is a boy or a girl or a genderless loaf of bread?’ Welcome to…The First Circle of Hell: Infant Implements of Discomfort.” […]    –Josette Plank, Scary Mommy, January 2017

Filed Under: Consumer Goods, Written Word Tagged With: , , , , , ,
posted on August 1, 2019 by

And the Tenth Circle of Dante’s Hell is …

“Hell, Dante tells us, has nine circles, each one reserved for souls guilty of particular sins. The greedy, for example, go to the Third Circle, while heretics are flung down into the Fourth. If you’ve lived a lustful life, full of debauchery and fornication, you will find yourself in the second circle, writhing and naked with millions of other lustful souls who — wait, how exactly is that a punishment?  According to Dante, the worst Circles of Hell are reserved for fraudsters and traitors, suggesting that he’d had an unfortunate disagreement with his publisher over royalties. But the great Italian fell short in his demonic visions, because there is another Circle of Hell: the Tenth. It is a place of infinite suffering and utter despair, echoing with the wailing of the damned. It is a movie theatre called Cinepolis Junior.” […]    –Tom Eaton, Rand Daily Mail, March 14, 2017

Filed Under: Consumer Goods, Dining & Leisure, Written Word Tagged With: , , , , , , ,