“Musea’s collaboration with Finnish Colossus Society has been fruitful in these last years, and the newest release is the most ambitious so far: a 4 cd set, with a comprehensive booklet, featuring 34 bands to address the 34 cantos of the “Inferno” part of the legendary 14th century epic poem ‘The Divine Comedy’ by Dante Alighieri (Purgatory and Paradise will be the concept of future releases, in order to complete the trilogy).
With such an amount of bands coming from different grounds within the progressive aesthetics, it is only natural that the conducting line is only maintained by the story and by the usage of vintage instruments (moog, mellotron, etc) which are common to all the guest bands. In part, and besides the fact that this approach secures a wide array of styles and different musical perspectives, it is also true that it makes the album not being as cohesive and focused as the Epic Poem that muses it would deserve. But hey! There are 4hours+ of pure “regressive” symphonic rock to fully enjoy!” –Nuno, Proggnosis
“The Classics as the Antidote to Modern Malaise”
“. . . Though brief, this is an ambitious book, offering insightful readings of authors including Homer, Dante, Descartes and Kant, as well as the novelists Herman Melville and David Foster Wallace. Mr. Dreyfus and Mr. Kelly believe that great books are the ‘gathering places’ where the major forces of a culture are focused, and so they are able to chart our descent from Homer’s gratitude before many gods to Wallace’s paralysis before a plethora of choices. . .
Great books are there to reconnect us. Mr. Dreyfus and Mr. Kelly admire Dante’s focus on the saving power of various forms of desire, but find that his ultimate emphasis on the overwhelming bliss of contemplating God ‘makes all other earthly joys irrelevant.’ Dante’s achievement turns out to be ‘not the answer to nihilism but another step in its direction.’ Similarly, the philosophical focus after Descartes and Kant is on the autonomous self as the basis for knowledge, but the authors explore how the idea of a human subject able to bestow meaning on inert objects winds up undermining our openness to the world.” [. . .] –Michael Roth, The New York Times, January 3, 2011
Dante Keyring
“2.75inch x 2 inch (7.5cm x 5cm) Keyring Gustave Doré Dante 002 Frontispiece.” –Danetre Gifts, Amazon
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Yi Zhou, The Ear (2009), The Greatness (2010)
“Imagine that van Gogh, after slicing off his ear, finds himself sucked down a passage into his own brain, which turns out to be the concentric onion of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Then capture that journey with three-dimensional digital imaging software and turn it, frame by computerized frame, into a five-minute animated movie. [. . .]
“She had her first breakthrough when she was taken on by the Jerome de Noirmont gallery in Paris in 2002. Since then, she has had a major sculpture and video projection work, ‘Paradise,’ installed in the Piazza della Signoria and the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, in 2006 [. . .].
“Ms. Zhou’s solo show of video art, ink brush drawings and sculpture at Shanghai Contrasts, running to Dec. 9, is built around her most recent film, The Greatness, a variation on the theme of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
“The film is a sequel to The Ear: both star Pharrell Williams, one in the flesh and the other as a sculpted vase, and both explore transience and death. In The Greatness, Mr. Williams’s look-alike vase, shattered by a bullet, disintegrates into a fractured universe while the bullet, like Dante guided by Virgil, travels through visions of hell and redemption accompanied by an other-worldly soundtrack composed by Mr. Morricone.” [. . .] –Claudia Barbieri, The New York Times, December 1, 2010
Read more about The Greatness, on Vice.
Hell on Earth
“In Grand Cayman, Dante’s Inferno comes to life in the form of jagged, black limestone formations that rise from dark, still waters. This creepy but artful landscape, which you cannot trek on but instead view from platforms, deserves its name: Many of the rocks, some resembling stalagmites, are sharp and menacing.” […]
“The more curmudgeonly among us might call the holidays, to (mis)quote David Foster Wallace, “a sneaky keyhole view of hell.” These days, hell is whatever we want it to be: other people (Sartre), ourselves (Oscar Wilde), a half-filled auditorium (Robert Frost). So much of our idea of hell comes from literature, rather than religion–Dante’s and Milton’s allegories, in particular–it’s hard to imagine a time when hell was more geological than metaphorical. Not so long ago, it was thought to be a real physical place beneath the earth’s crust with secret entrances in caves, volcanoes, underground rivers, and bubbling pools of boiling mud.” [. . .] –Megan Cytron, Salon, December 26, 2010
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