2/2 First picture is Medici heir imagined as young prince (Medici palace chapel). The family soon became Princes/Dukes, destroying the Florence Republic. Second and third pictures are ferocious decorations on the Strozzi Palace. If you’re a non-elite in 1460 Florence, what do these say to you?

Kory Teneycke has been given credit for largely avoiding the culture war stuff that Pierre Poilievre has strired but this is culture war assaults too, all to appease a small vindictive base + people who see the city as a place to drive thru, & Ford himself, damn the residents. It will cost lives.

It’s a noxious internet- and media-fueled process, where extremely violent ideology moves quickly from marginal discourse to mainstream, as members of the American power-media complex continue to work on aligning themselves with the US regime’s extremism. WPost, LA Times, NY TImes, the Atlantic…

These two frescoes were painted only about 15 years apart (Fra Angelico: ca. 1440; Masaccio: 1425). And the former was well aware of the latter’s work. Did FA paint to absorb and refute Masaccio? FA’s three-dimensionality comes directly from his study of the Brancacci chapel).

Carney seems to be exploiting that and substantially undermining/repudiating it while pretending not to. Under the cover of an incredibly welcome, spirited *rhetorical* defence of Canada against American economic aggression.

I’m here for the Fra Angelico exhibition at the Strozzi Palace & San Marco. Is his provocative insistence/hypothesis/faith that a perfected or perfectable world is conceivable, visible, maybe even assimilateable to our little world still useful? Does it speak to our degraded, despairing era? 3/3

Our own civilization’s Brunelleschi domes are… visiting the moon? vaccines? eradicating polio & smallpox? And we’re in process of repudiating/trashing both the concrete accomplishments and entire the sense that we can make better worlds, that it’s worth it. What’s the opposite of “Renaissance”? 2/

Perhaps that’s why Hui’s adaptation works best; she manages to articulate, rather closer to the surface, Chang’s implied (though utterly unorthodox) feminism. Which is to say, or rather ask: is Eileen Chang “untranslatable” on screen? If so, then it’s totally still worth trying. 6/6

pretending it’s not just a setup for an archly critical, ironically humorous, utterly civilized (and arguably feminist) investigation of national and sexual power. 5/