Really Minnelli

Content Warning: Violence, Anti Semitism and Adult Themes Art Speigleman’s Maus is an artfully crafted story where he recreates his father’s Holocaust (or the Shoah in Hebrew) experience. Having won a Pulitzer Prize, this comic portrays the brutality of Nazi regime with the use of mice, cats, pigs and dogs, a visual manifestation of Speigleman’s quote “Maybe vulgar, semiliterate, unsubtle comic books are an appropriate form for speaking of the unspeakable.” The Complete Maus is comprised of two books; Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began . The first book follows Vladek Spiegleman, Art Spiegleman’s father, through his life from the mid 1930s to winter 1944. Spiegleman weaves the interactions he has with his father into the story using a dual timeline, allowing readers to interact with Vladek’s younger self and the person he is at the time of conveying the story to Spiegleman. This alternation between current events, where Spiegleman is interacting ...

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion seems to feature ideas ranging from the distant past like classicism, to more recent ones, such as Industrial Neoclassicism. Classicism is the style of the ancients, or the ancient Greeks and Romans, of which the Greek temple or the temple in general is considered the paradigm. Industrial Neoclassicism is a term coined by Peter Behrens to describe reduced and abstracted architecture, that became increasingly popular during the 19th and 20th centuries. Mies seems to have shared a passion for exploring how Industrial Neoclassicism could manifest itself better in modern buildings, a venture that Behrens, whom he worked with, had taken interest in himself. The combination of glass, steel and stone create dramatic contrasts and comparisons between the materials and the structures they create. The glass creates a sense of seamlessness while the stone seems to assert dominance. While glass and steel have been used extensively to ornament th...

The Code Of Honor—A Duel in the Bois De Boulogne, Near Paris , wood-engraving after  Godefroy Durand ,  Harper's Weekly  (January 1875). Image from Wikipedia. The gentleman’s duel is an arrangement between two people where they engage in combat with matched weapons. This practice was particularly common during the 17th and 18th centuries, where the opponents faced each other in the event where one of the two parties had offended the other. The two parties would duel although it was most likely that both would survive in the end, as it was mostly considered a symbol of risking one’s life to restore honour to both parties. In The Twelfth Night, Viola, who is disguised as a man who goes by the name Cesario, has to face Sir Andrew in a duel, and before the duel Sir Toby Belch gives Sir Andrew advice by saying “so soon as ever thou seest him, draw; and, as thou drawest swear horrible; for it comes to pass oft that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent sharply twanged off, ...