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Raphael’s Portrait of Lorenzo de’Medici
The Metabunker summarizes the problems of attribution surrounding the Raphael portrait sold at Christie’s in 2007
Interview: El-P & Aesop Rock
Click here to read our 2003 in-depth interview with two of New York’s finest.
Continuous Creation — Titian’s Nuova Natura
On Titian’s aesthetic of the unfinished and Renaissance notions of the subjective.
Bleed Runner
On Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Also, read producer Charles de Lauzirika’s comments here.
Hergé and the Order of Things
Hooded Utilitarian column on Hergé’s vision and the necessity of comics criticism that engages deep form
Bruegel, Rembrandt, Crumb and Cartooning
Extended Hooded Utilitarian piece on R. Crumb’s Genesis and the cartoon tradition.
New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity
A deadening force at the heart of the art form, smothering the field in bourgeois mediocrity
Hogarth’s Chicken Fat
An analysis of Hogarth’s rich imagery as both support and counterpoint to his storytelling
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Wanderlust – Ulli Lust’s Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens
In 1984, when she was 17, Ulli Schneider went to Italy on a lark. She returned to Austria two months later, a changed woman. The following year she had a child and went on with life. She attended art school in Vienna, became an illustrator and produced several children’s books, eventually assuming her mother’s maiden name Lust. In 1995, she moved to Berlin to study graphic design. She fell in with the notable Berlin collective Monogatari and started drawing short comics, invariably in non-fiction: reportage, documentary, observational. She refrained from doing straight autobiography, however, regarding it as a somewhat hackneyed default shortcut for budding comics “auteurs.” But that defining journey through Italy evidently lurked somewhere, and in 2005 she decided to tell the story in comics form. She started serializing it on her online comics site, electrocomics, completing about half there before reworking it, adding a second color, and publishing to it great critical acclaim in Germany in 2009 as Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (‘Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life’).
Told with great confidence and uncomfortable frankness across a sprawling 450 pages, it is a coming-of-age narrative that inevitably places itself in the tradition of German travel literature, perhaps unwittingly joining the company of such august figures as Goethe and Hesse. Continue reading ‘Wanderlust – Ulli Lust’s Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens’