Happy new year and welcome back to the main story! I don’t have too much to say plot-wise here, so instead let’s talk some Picasso and look at a picture!
This is the 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – originally a relatively typical piece which Picasso radically reworked after catching the tribal art bug from the Fauves and the collectors they hung out with. It’s Picasso at his shamanistic best, I think – art that bites and frightens and has something to say beyond its own formal innovations.
That’s not always the case with Picasso. There’s a lot of this in there too, where he’s opening up possibilities of material and form without quiiiiiiite knowing what to do with them:
Compare this to a piece by Georges Braque from a year earlier – similar but Braque seems to me to have a clearer sense of why he’s painting this particular thing:
But to be fair, every time Picasso meandered he came back, generally by walking over the wreckage of somebody whose life he ruined, but back he came:
– Count Dolby von Luckner
The original ETA Hoffmann story on which The Nutcracker is based is a strange, strange thing – like pretty much everything that Hoffmann wrote – and was radically pared down for the ballet. You have to drop SOMETHING to make way for prancing, and the multiple frame storytelling of the original, with its nested system of curses and duty shirking cats, was the victim.
We are fast approaching the New Year, and as the whole New Year’s Eve To New Year’s Day nexus is more or less the most unavoidably depressing thing ever, steps have been taken to be-rad-ify it, Empire style. I was sucked into the world of Star Wars miniatures a while ago, and as it combines universe/narrative creation with world sculpting with tactics with collectible things that come with cards, it sunk its teeth in deep, so I try and drag Geoff and a small cohort of others over once every three months or so to run through a new scenario. So far we’ve been from Raxus Prime to Corellia to Yavin IV, but January 1 we’ll be doing it up Hothwise, and it will be glorious. Because if rebels aren’t heroically dying in the snow, it’s hardly New Year’s.
– Count Dolby von Luckner