Books
Douglas Wolk
Tuesday, August 24th 2004
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illustration: Gary Panter
Panter covers Dante, Dryden, more
Details:
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No Witness Protection for Mobster Turned Snitch Joe Campy. PS: He's Hiding in Plain Sight. PPS: He has a web site.
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Mickey Rourke is The Wrestler The onetime Hollywood A-lister climbs back in the ring with Darren Aronofsky's latest
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Midway Through the Toronto Film Fest, and Things are Looking Bleak Oh, Canada
As brief as it seems, the book is impossible to take in without prolonged effort; you have to unpack, cross-reference, and stare at each panel's hermetic geometries to even begin to make sense of it. As intense as the formal schema gets, though, it's OK to kick back and drink in the pictures. Every page is a heroic act of design, illuminated borders and all, and Panter's dazed chicken-scratch resolves into virtuosic eccentricity. Even so, Panter's purgatory is a closed system—its visual content is a nightmarish compacting of 20th-century popular culture's trash heap, but nothing escapes from it—and the implication is that the lines from Ovid and Dryden and Chaucer that make up the language of Jimbo's limbo are likewise condemned to be neither here nor there, meaningful only as currency within academia.
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Bastard Out of Carolina
Drunken banjo player frog-marches obscurities from minstrel repertoire into country tradition
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Never Ending Math Equation
After the court decision, file shares and mixtapes float on
How Much Is Music Worth?
Music subscription services may result in bargain binging
The Big Chill
EZT shuts down, courts lag behind, WMG gets desperate
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