Just like Yale University Press’ disgraceful censorship of Jytte Klausen’s book on the Muhammed cartoons, it seems the august Metropolitan Museum in New York is set to muddy the waters of history by pulling from their display ancient images of the prophet, made by Muslims and considering not putting them back on display once the renovation of the gallery is completed in 2011. Apparently they are also changing the designation of the Islamic Art galleries from the accurately descriptive ‘Islamic’ to a prolix geographical designation.

As I’ve written before, occluding the fact that Muslims have in the past, actually, depicted their prophet is highly problematic in that it feeds attempts by certain parties to write it out of history, in order to bolster an often destructive agenda. As for the change in designation, it strikes me as silly, but also quite disturbing — is ‘Islamic’ now an inflammatory term? Emblematic, perhaps, of how seriously unsettled from our common history we have become by the sad events of the last decade.

Of course, this is all based on a story in the anything but unbiased New York Post, so let’s take it all with a grain of salt for the time being.

Forlaget Fahrenheit udgiver i morgen den første manga for voksne på dansk, Jiro Taniguchis Min fjerne barndomsby. Det fejres med en reception i Thimers Magasin, Tullinsgade 24, København, kl. 16.30-18.00. Oversætter Mette Holm vil sige et par ord om arbejdet med oversættelsen og forlægger Paw Mathiasen om selve udgivelsen af en japansk tegneserie. Mød op og læs endelig tegneserien — den er fremragende!
 
 
 
 
 
 
Læs mere om udgivelsen på Fahrenheits hjemmeside, og check undertegnedes anmeldelse af en række værker af Taniguchi, inkl. Min fjerne barndomsby, fra 2003 ovre på Rackham.

For this year’s wrap-up season, Paul Gravett repeats last year’s great idea of asking comics connoisseurs and professionals all over the world to write a few words on the year’s most notable comics from their respective country. He graciously asked me to talk about the best in Danish comics, so my selections appear in part one, now online, along with ones from Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, & Sweden. Stay tuned for the followup.

Here’s my selection, by the way: Continue reading ‘Danish Comics of the Year/Planet Comics 2009′

All right, now my Continental Drift column on Moebius’ Hermetic Garage is back up over at the new TCJ.com. Above is an image which I talk about in the essay, but which for some reason did not make it into the printed version in The Comics Journal #300. I’ll do my best to actually post it over there, but in the meantime, here it is.

As per tradition over at rapspot.dk, us contributors have curated our annual awards show for our favorite hip hop music of the past year, plus miscellaneous foolishness. Although I can’t say many of my personal favourites made it to the final list, it’s still a pretty great compilation of quality hip hop music released in 2009, so skip over there and check it out. Meanwhile I’ll try to get my act together a write about my year of listening. Or just listen to the track of the year, from the Mighty Mos Def. Continue reading ‘Rapspot’s 2009 Rap-Up’

I just briefly wanted to pay homage to the recently passed master cartoonist. Possibly the most recognisable caricaturist of the past 40 years, Levine has come almost to incarnate the discipline, especially with his withering cartoons of the main players in the Nixon administration and of other unsavoury world leaders of that era.

Contrary to assertions I’ve heard made, he was far from single-mindedly, or even reductively, acerbic (his most vicious caricatures are indeed pretty fierce, but are also animated by the kind of outrage necessary to political cartooning); he was rather a finely rounded cartoonist. His portraits are more often than not reverent, humanising their subjects with humor and verve. With thousands of such cartoons under his belt (most of them for the New York Review of Books) he ranks, rather, amongst the most significant portraitists of the last forty years.

Read Michael Kimmelman’s appreciation here.

I didn’t take long for the New Year’s first piece of crap news to arrive here. Some idiot broke into the home of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard wielding an axe, evidently in “retaliation” for the latter’s cartoon of the prophet Muhammed. The cartoonist saved himself by fleeing to the house’s panic room. His grandchild was also there. The police thereafter arrived and disabled the attacker with shots to the leg and hand, and he has now been charged with attempted murder and is recovering in the medical wing of the prison Vestre fængsel, Århus. Congratulations asshole, you’ve just made the world a little less tolerable a place to live.

For what little it’s worth, our sympathies and best wishes and hopes for a peaceful rest of the new year go out to Westergaard and his family.

Above: one of the infamous cartoons (not by Westergaard); prescient at the time, painfully topical now.

From all of us to all of you. Holding it down for Copenhagen.

A short note on the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. It seems to me that this incisive fable about one man’s search for answers is the equivalent of the filmmakers handing us the keys to their art. Only now, after 25 years of making movies, have they created an overtly Jewish film. Characters such as John Turturro’s shifty bookie, Bernie Bernbaum, in Miller’s Crossing (1990) and John Goodman’s unforgettable, devout convert Walter Sopchak in The Big Lebowski (1998) now appear as discrete signposts in the oeuvre, wild cards tipping the winning hand the Coens have been playing all along. Continue reading ‘He came here the same way the coin did’

Things remain busy here — still working on that diss. Have just finished the introduction, so I’m getting there. But now it’s Christmas, with all that entails, so the blogging here will remain rather perfunctory, but I wanted to at least get something up here and since I was just in Paris for a day and a half, here are some thoughts on the big Venetian show currently at the Louvre.

It’s basically a much expanded reconfiguration of the Titian Tintoretto Veronese exhibition displayed at the MFA in Boston over the summer. That show was a focused if somewhat academic effort with an impressively high-quality selection of paintings. The Paris version includes most of those works, with a few notable exceptions, adds loads more and expands the scope to cover Jacopo Bassano and other artists of the late 16th century. So, lots of great paintings and well worth a visit, but is it a better show? Not really. Continue reading ‘Merry Christmas!’

Ovre på Dansk Tegneserieråds hjemmeside ligger der nu en tekst forfattet af Thorhauge og jeg selv, hvor vi lægger nogle af tankerne bag rådets dannelse og ambitionerne med samme for dagen i letlæselig, agitatorisk form. Check det ud.

A couple of months ago I wrote here of the Women in Comics conference in Cambridge and mentioned that sound files of the papers would at some point be put online. Well, it has now happened, apparently with more to come. I recommend jumping straight to Dominique Goblet’s talk, which was both intense and compelling.

As expected, the politicians have failed us.

Photo: Reuters.

While I remember, there’s this little curiosity. At the Christie’s preview I went to the week before last, there was this astonishing intarsiaed Louis XIV tortoise shell/pietra dura cabinet, which went on to sell for a good £4.5 million.

Anyway, what leaped out at me immediately, being mired fatally in Titian’s prints at the moment, was a little dog design inlaid on one of the drawers. This dog actually has a pretty distinguished pedigree, probably originating in a very damaged, early 1530s drawing by Titian in the Louvre, which was reproduced in several engravings in the later 16th Century, and it also migrated into the master’s very large and famous — and famously perplexing — mythology, also in the Louvre, called the ‘Pardo Venus’.

This painting is usually thought to have been initiated in the 1510s and finished in the 1550s and sent to King Philip II of Spain, but for complicated reasons I won’t go into here, the documentation advanced in support of this is highly unlikely to refer to the Louvre canvas, which rather looks like a painting of the early 1530s. The dog, then, seems initially to have been devised to accompany the shepherd in the drawing, before it was transferred wholesale into the collage-like painting.

The Italian craftsmen behind the cabinet, who cannot have seen the painting, must have known the dog from one of the prints after the Louvre design. Another example of the enduring popularity and wide dissemination of Titian’s printed designs. Wonder whether some of the other animal designs have similar sources…

Er, OK, this is really obscure, but I’m off to Paris and the Louvre now, so maybe that’s why I thought of it.