Magical Europe is a captivating timelapse video created by Stan Chang . He spent two years traveling around Europe with his wife and small son capturing a stunning array of sites. The compilation of timelapse videos that he created on his family’s sojourns on the continent is breathtaking. I was amazed by the number of places that I’ve visited over the last five decades, but equally motivated to see all of the sites that I missed.
I was captivated by the charming video Nine Letters, which was written and directed by the Brazilian-Swiss filmmaker Cristina Müller. The poignant short film is built around a series of letters and cards ranging from the 1930s to the present day, each of them written by someone who, like Müller, is somewhere other than home. The letters are narrated in the writers’ original language, while the accompanying visuals offer meditative views of New York City passing through the seasons.
“Somebody said that we were less than human and not fit for freedom. Somebody said we were like children and could not be trusted to think for ourselves. Somebody owned our flesh, and decided if and when and with whom and how our bodies were to be used… Somebody’s saying that we must have babies whether we choose to or not. Doesn’t matter what we say, doesn’t matter how we feel. Meanwhile, those somebodies who claim they’re ‘pro-life’ aren’t moved to help the living… Oh, yes, we have known how painful it is to be without choice.” -1989, We Remember: African American Women Are for Reproductive Freedom brochure.
To Be Without Choice, 2019 by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
I’ve been an admirer of the writing of Richard Brautigan since I first read his books In Watermelon Sugar and Trout Fishing in America when I was a teenager. I was recently reminded of the existence in Vancouver, Washington, of a library for “unwanted” manuscripts — manuscripts that no publisher wanted to publish called the Brautigan Library. Housed in a local library, it was inspired by Richard Brautigan’s 1971 novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, which describes a library for “the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing.” Authors could place their manuscripts anywhere they liked on the library’s shelves, happy to have them preserved there though no readers could find them.
Inspired by this, in 1990 Todd Lockwood, of Burlington, Vermont, started The Brautigan Library, inviting submissions of unpublished manuscripts and encouraging visitors to read them. Lockwood’s library closed in 2005, but in 2010 its contents were taken from storage and moved to Vancouver, where John Barber, a faculty member at Washington State University, now curates it. It currently contains more than 300 manuscripts, and Barber now accepts electronic submissions. You can browse the catalog here.
The French writer David Foenkinos wrote a novel in which a librarian reads Brautigan’s book and decides to create Brautigan’s library as part of the municipal library that he manages in a little town in Brittany. It’s called Le mystère Henri Pick. In 2019, a French film based on the book was released. You can stream it here.
To a cat
Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences
nor the arriving dawn more secretive;
you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure
which we can only spy at from a distance.
By the mysterious functioning of some
divine decree, we seek you out in vain;
remoter than the Ganges or the sunset,
yours is the solitude, yours is the secret.
Your back allows the tentative caress
my hand extends. And you have condescended
since that forever, now oblivion,
to take love from a flattering human hand.
You live in other time, lord of your realm —
a world as closed and separate as dream.
Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alastair Reid, 1977)
I recently stumbled upon a link to Mesopotamia Online which is an immersive exploration of Mesopotamian art objects. The exhibition Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins was on view in 2021 at the Getty Villa. It was organized by the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The digital exhibition is an intriguing look at some of the most amazing ancient art produced along the Middle East’s famous Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, centered in modern-day Iraq. The show goes back to the origins of urban civilization when Mesopotamia began to emerge in force around 3400 BC.
Italy has opened a new museum to showcase art it has rescued. The museum, which opened in Rome last week, will present rotating exhibitions of looted and stolen pieces that the nation has recovered.
The Museum of Rescued Art, which is housed within the National Roman Museum in the Baths of Diocletian, launched with an exhibition of 100 artifacts, including a number of important ceramics that had been reclaimed by the country’s “art squad.”All the items were seized in the U.S. and returned last year.
According to Dario Franceschini, Italy’s minister of culture, “Stolen artworks and archaeological artifacts dispersed, sold, or illegally exported constitute a significant loss to a country’s cultural heritage and the expression of its historical memory and collective values, not to mention the identity of its people. Despite its intrinsic intangible value, rather than being worth safeguarding, protecting and preserving, cultural heritage has often been targeted for illicit trafficking and material destruction. It is no coincidence that during international conflicts, aggressors frequently, intentionally, and deliberately damage cultural heritage, striking at the very roots of the enemy country’s identity.”
About 100 of the 260 Etruscan, Greek, and Roman artifacts that have been returned to the country over a period of time are now on display at the Museum of Rescued Art’s first exhibition, located right in the heart of the ancient Baths of Diocletian. Visitors will get to view figurines, statues, urns, and coins, many of which are believed to have been looted by tomb-raiders in the 1980s, before they were smuggled out of Europe.
This psychdelic marbled binding is on Le Terrecotte Figurate del Museo Nazionale di Napoli, or, “The Figured Terracottas of the National Museum of Naples.” The book is by archaeologist and historian Alda Levi (1890-1950) and was published by Vallecchi Firenze Publishing House in 1926. Levi’s work included excavations on the Via dell’Abbondanza, the longest road in Pompeii. She was an influential figure in Italian archaeology during the first half of the 20th century despite being a woman and being Jewish. Levi was persecuted by the Fascist government and survived the Holocaust by hiding in Rome.
This marbling appears to be a pattern called Gloster (also known as Gloucester, Partidge’s Eye, Oeil de Perdrix, and Stein Marmor mit Grießtropfen). This pattern is created by starting with a Turkish base, then a comb with one set of teeth is drawn across the bath twice vertically (or horizontally), once in either direction with the second pass halving the first. Then one or more colors of ink mixed with a dispersant are sprinkled onto the bath, causing those last spots to have open, very fine spots inside them.
Travel Between The Pages 