The Renaissance Sensorium, The Hillbilly Heist, Malvolio's Demise
Collection: 1/21/26-1/28/26
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
by Francesco Colonna, 1499
A randy monk describes his dream in immense detail for 400+ pages. The dream itself is a giant immersive world full of ornamented sight, smell, and sound—replete with extremely in-depth descriptions of architecture and art. Wonderful engravings on many pages. A proto-graphic novel, in some ways, although its relationship between image and text is not as sophisticated as many contemporary comics. Favorite part so far: a human ballet chess-game.
Logan Lucky
directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2017
Was talking with a friend about how many racing movies there have been in the last 5-10 years or so. But they’ve all been about F-1, the friend replied. Not sure, I said, what about Logan Lucky? That’s about NASCAR.
I was wrong (it had been awhile since I first saw this one). This isn’t a racing movie. It’s not really about NASCAR. It’s a heist movie. It’s hilarious and fun, and I thought about how Soderbergh is extremely talented at portraying good people, not antiheros, although Logan and Soderbergh’s work as a whole do have their fair share of those.
Twelfth Night
performed by Atlanta Shakespeare Co., 1/22/26
I’ve only ever seen Shakespeare performed by high schoolers and people in parks from very far distances with bad audio equipment, so it was a nice change of pace to go to Atlanta’s Shakespeare Tavern and see a more experienced company perform this comedy.
Shakespeare’s comedies don’t receive as much attention, besides a select few, but as I’ve revisited Shakespeare over the years, I’m more fascinated by them—their mix of slapstick (sometimes involving a lot of literal slapping) and doppelgangers, fortune reversals, gender play, and mistaken identities. Great stuff.
