Drawing a Blank: On D. David Marx’s Blank Space

Around the corner from where I’m writing this in southern Stockholm, clean center at the dark heart of suburbia’s placid, unquivering normalness, lives a young couple who wake up every day and pretend it’s still 1929. She dresses in Hooverettes and rayon slips, he in a top hat and double-breasted British Warm. She reads housewife magazines from the late ’20s, he polishes the vintage silver sconces. At night she executes 1930s recipes while he sits in the “smoking room” listening to Artie Shaw. Occasionally, when I go out for walks, I can see them strolling along the street. One needn’t squint or look twice. The piled fur lapels are hard to ignore.

Better to Be a Ghost: On Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros

Giorgio de Chirico has languidly stumbled upon the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence and wonders if it might make for a nice streetscape. But in the process of turning recollection into painted object, he finds himself transmuting the piazza’s distinguishing forms. A wide-open square, when painted, becomes a compressed court; a Gothic temple becomes Hellenic; an imposing white marble effigy of Dante Alighieri, circa 1865, becomes a relic from antiquity. Here, apparently, was the birth of pittura metafisica: the object rendered and transcended, turned into a signifier of a world beyond plain sight.

When You Ain’t Got Nothing: On Bob Dylan and A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan isn’t dead, but he may as well be. With a slate of books, think-pieces, and, now, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, we’ve condemned the man born Robert Zimmerman to a fate usually reserved for those already playing their great gig in the sky: becoming fodder for a few Golden Globes. It would be heartrending if it weren’t so absurd. The insanity of it all was not lost on a group of young cinephiles attending the Angelika in late October who, during the previews, caught their first big-screen glimpse of Timothée Chalamet’s mannered impersonation, and began laughing.