Albertina hurr

After girl's been weeping on my feet in despair, suddenly... "What the fuck is happening to your toes ?"
"What ?"
"Are they getting constricted ? Looks like burst capilaries maybe ?"
So I inspect what the fuck, and well... "It's... filth."
"Red filth ?!"
"How about... lipstick ?"

First class problems.

But be that as it may -- brace yourselves, dear reader, for this is going to be the largest visual deluge Trilema's yet blessed you with, immense (but still countable) as fascinating ; and generally wunderbar.ⁱ

Above & below : beautiful Autumnal Osterreicher skyies above Stephen's Cathedral. A building standing in that same place has served for a church since the mid 1100s, so we could almost suspect the sky's used to it yet.

Above & below : details of same. We're carefully avoiding the other side, where a criminal hand hung a large poster advertising some contemporary plastic inanity.

Above & below : horsy watering station. There's lots of carriages in the Innerstadt, pulled by well groomed, healthy horses.

Above : pit stop, Wienerschnitzel and local unfiltered beer on the tap.

Below : entrance to the Spanische Hofreitschule.

"Are these antique relics ?"

We're in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (right of the Maria Theresa statuary ensemble F. J. built to try and convince people to listen to him). Above, those are elephant teeth, hand carved. Below, various things I kept wanting to take home. Anybody got any ideas on how to steal all this shit ? Especially that blue pitcher below with the dragon head... but most everything, really. But especially that one.

This is a pretty good business idea even today, actually -- buy whole geodes, polish them into various objects, such as cups and whatnot. Amethyst inclusions for the win!

The world could certainly do with a lot more carefully handcrafted artwork, and correspondingly therefore a lot less wankish plastic, beton brut and the rest of the sad materials of the ADD generation, these inconsequential schmucks that are so very important (in their mind only) they can't possibly do anything well for all the rush to do something else (that they'll do just as poorly, of course). But at least nobody could accuse them of not doing things, or some such idiotically transparent bit of nonsense.

Young Polish commander (ie, Sobieski) in traditional fur hat.

Above : the results of healthy competition with the Ottoman craftsmen, testimony of the simple if "mysogynistic" fact that war is always better than peace.

Below : not even the most elaborate backgammon set in there. No idea how they could muster the patience, but there it is.

As the habit at the time was for most plebs to be kept outdoors working the fields in line with the other beasts of burden while the vehehehery occasional choice bit of cunt might've been permitted indoors but always on her knees futzing with the floors and never allowed to look up, it must be thus pointed out that these ceilings must've never been all that important, seeing how they never got that many views. No ?

A triptich. Spoiler : it doesn't work out for her.

Above : Alexander the Great by Andrea della Robbia, glazed terracotta, prolly Florence cca 1500. This item is an echo, of a treasure trove Lorenzo de' Medici sent in 1480 as a gift to Matthias Corvinus (it included also a profile of Darius to go with one of Alexander, and some fine armour).

Below : bust of Maximillian I attributed to Jorg hmmm... the piece doesn't actually appear among the KHM's otherwise excellent online list. O wait, yes, of course it does : Jorg Muskat. Also some other guy. What need to remember anything anymore once there's databases, amirite ?

The satyr's bottom's actually signed by Adriano Fiorentino (di Giovanni de Maestri). The [otherwise] idealized bust's by Simone Bianco.

Above : young couple by Tullio Lombardo, most likely made in the 2nd half of the very first decade of the 1500s. It's a major piece in that it started Venetian Renaissance sculpture ; in a break with what came before T.L. produced these non-functional pieces. Think of it if you will, carvings that aren't really knives or bedposts. Carvings that are really nothing, just there to be admired, to be thought about as such, like trading cards or pornographic stories. In which context, isn't it pretty shocking just how similar their tits came out ?

Below : Pietro Lombardo, not getting with the programme.

This is most likely Petrarca's Laura. Do you think she's pretty enough ?

You don't, do you.

There could actually be much prettier, just waiting to show up tomorrow. Maybe her letter's already in the mail. Maybe she's just about to turn the corner. There's so much more to come, hay so much more futuro, how could anyone possibly be that obsessed with merely this Laura ?

Evidently, Petrarca did not hold the same notions.

Above : Domenico da Venezia dish, gods having a party.

Below : Something rather in the same vein.

Above : Zoppo (probably), some scholar (from Padua ?). 2nd half of 1500s aka teh Cinquecento.

Below : dollhouse.

Above & below : no possible depiction outside of direct ownership can do these miniatures any sort of justice. I swear to god I can barely repress the impulse to ingurgitate a few even as I'm sitting here separated by miles and days from the damned things.

Glurgh!

Above is Neptune on a door knocker, an earlier version of Christ on a cracker. There's also two hippocampi, for good measure.

Below you find an actual android, of Italian (possibly Juanello Toriano) mid 1600s make. It plays the damned citern, moves about the table and keeps its fucking mouth shut. Well, mostly, anyway.

Delicious horse a bit. Poor him.

Give it up. Baby give it up. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Baby give it up...

And speaking of complaints, uneasements and displeasures, the principal problem with Vienna that I've so far discovered is that the Romanian language's tied with English for 2nd most spoken in public. What in the actual fuck! Go home, louts!

The practical utility of most of these miniature wood and stone sculptures is that they're to be carefully filleted in gold and then sold. Hence the attention to detail.

Chick's got tubes...

This tapestry only actually looks good in a picture. From up close it comes across rather... dingy.

"Blood!"

Doesn't he look just like a 1600s vampire, seriously now ?

If the doctors can do this retrospective diagnosis of imaginary diseases they came up with, why can't pulp fiction authors recognize "their" nonsense in the artefacts of the past ? After all, the Marius brothers were fighting for Clintonicity all along, neh ?!

You with me ?

I just... I seriously can't even.

Can you even ?

I 3, 5, 7, 11 can no further even.

And my feet hurt.

Gotta get the fuck out already, it is not humanly possible.

We did most of the left side of one floor out of three in one of three buildings in one of howeverthefuckmany zones, but IT IS NOT POSSIBLE!

O btw, doesn't he have quite the expression on him ? Like, "this chick's retarded, will swallow anything" or such. "Let me shove this shovel handle up her butt with my left while she's looking that way and then pretend a branch fell or something, she'll totally go for it."

"But are these antique relics ?!"

MP's guide to getting a rare strand of syphilis, not the common garden variety alive in used up crack whores today : rub the tit everyone's rubbed since 1400 or so, on the side of the Minorite church.

Time for a repast.

It's not that it says "Vienna's prettiest garden", but rather that it has two exclamation points.

French embassy. So far from what we've seen (Espana, Kasachsteen, Turkiyie Cum-Houryie-yet, some others) it'd be the better one.

Franz Brahms-Liszt von Wagner and slavegirl. He only has one.

Time for a little repast anyways. As it happens, the absolutely excellent Italian restaurant is up the street from both the Goulash Museum and the famous Porterhouse, which in turn turns out to be exactly around the corner from the equally famous 3 hackers eateria. As it turns outⁱⁱ, all the good restaurants in Vienna are on the same one block.

PS. The burrata was phenomenal.

You really expect the sign reads "Parking", don't you ?

Well, that's just not how zee Germanz do it, okay ?

I also got a new hat! It's most Vienese in its crepuscular.

"Yeah dude, it's totally a pleasure working with you."
"I am very impressed with your performance."
"We're so going to win this war..."
"That was a great joke. Know any others ?"
"Do you also sing ?"
"That's a great hairdo."

So he always wanted to wear a skirt. What of it!

Cultural exchange of ideas.

Yep, they were actually re-doing the floor panneling. It instantly made me think of mod6 for some reason.

Breast implant envy clearly a thing as early as the late 1700s!

I guess it's clear enough who won this face-off.

Both above and below, Michelangelo drawings. Could you tell ?

Klimt.

Above : Rubens' daughter (Clara Serena). Unremarkably, the least voluptuous of anyone he ever drew.

Below : Peter Bruguel's sorrow, eating smaller sorrows feeding on yet smaller sorrows in turn.

Yet another Klimt slut, whatevs.

We kept running into bridal parties, mostly toasty Eastern girls tryna pretend to Gypsy paradise on the cheap. I wonder though, how many actually had the gall to conceive in that very bed ?

Because that'd be something. I mean if you're going to all that trouble, might as fucking well, neh ?

This'd be the esteemed right honorable & respectable Generalissimus Archduke-ErzHerzog Carl. Moe was busy that day.

It's also not true he looks like a fish. He merely regards like one.

Yours truly admiring the complex votives of meanwhile disappeared empires. "Oh, so there is where you add the Providentia horse pair!"

It's like lego, all this statal aedification, you see. Godda make sure you've god enough spuriously overdressed middle aged women posing as abstracts with the appropriate labels and voila!

Above and below, Albrecht Durer.

And with that we say goodbye to humanity, leave it all behind and firmly progress towards the sad and broken fields of "what happens if you enfranchise the peons". Not that they didn't try and warn us, of course ; but if there were only one directly recognizable and absolutely cosubstantial attribute of idiocy, "knowing better" would necessarily have to be it. So we "knew better", and now here we are, look at all this shit.

Above : Modigliani, "Sorta portrait I had no patience for".

Below : Monet, "Almost drawing, I got bored midway of drawing it".

Above : Renoir, "Just some little thing I made, it doesn't represent me or anything. Do you like it ?"

Below : Signac, "Hey, doing it like this is way the fuck faster, it'll leave me more time for not doing anything useful or important in another ten dozen ways. Huzzah for tardocracy!"

Above : van Ryssselehwhatsthepointanyways, "Sorta-kinda... whatever."

Below : Moll, "I only noticed my easel was misoriented after I sat down, so fuck it, I ain't standing up again".

Above : Klimt, "You know, I totally could do good work, I just don't".

Below : Delaunay, "If we're lazy enough, maybe the bitches will start behaving out of sheer boredom. They'll be like, 'comfortable' and shit, for as long as nothing can possibly happen nobody can accuse anyone of anything!"

Above : Manguin, "Bleah".

Below : a whole fucking reservation of the intolerable products of these sad fucks not managing to be bothered.

This being the most galling part of post-humanity : the self-obviousness of the failure, the transparent capacity being wasted without whip. Evidently all these idle, coddled morons could have made excellent palaces and paintings and wharever else is useful for the glorification of the glory of the sovereign. They just "choose not to", because what the fuck already. Slowly and painfully drawing the last drop of lifeblood out of their offensive bodies is not really sufficient expiation for the utterly impermissible whatchamacall it, sinful evil, whatever, words can't also possibly do justice.

The nameless labourers dead among hungry children after a lifetime spent patiently going blind on repetitive detail so that each single fucking arch of the ten thousand arches of the palace has proper, adequate decoration weren't speshul enough, these unbearable fucks can't sit down for five minutes to do something right because "why be an architect when you could be a city planner", they gotta meta-paint and meta-game everything they're so fucking inconsequentially important in their own mind (and there only).

I perceive no value in "modern" art. Nor do you -- pompous self-delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Because there can't be, not value, not importance, not meaning, not anything, not anything whatsoever absent the sovereign root to anchor it all, in a value system and in a meaning system, and in realia generally.

I perceive no difference between this whole accretted pile of spurious bullshit and any other, because there can't be any. Elliotts they were and Elliotts they stay, there's nothing further there.

Female "art", just in case you thought I forgot about you dumb cunts. It's not good, not for this or that reason but specifically because it tries to enact the female gaze into human interest, something positively impossible and doomed from the onset, in principle. That's why the "mysterious, enigmatic" expression pasted impossibly atop an "anatomically correct" torso looks like a work of mongoloids with scissors : because it is. There's no objective substance to the female torso besides what males see in it ; nor is there any possibility of "enigmatic" besides that, it's not the fucking face that carries the enygmatic in women, it's the cunt.

This isn't "art", it's not even an intellectual production. It's rude and crude wishful thinking, the daydreaming byproducts of a stupid mind, Kelly Bundy collecting "K" letters cut off the Kellogg's cereal box to buy herself a sportscar.

Above : Modern democracy and the fruits of your stupid.

See ? Now it suddenly became art, now it means and values and is important and whatever. For as long as I hold it up in that symbolic relationship, and no longer. For as long as I say "this here is a metaphorical depiction of so and so political concept", that long and no longer is the metaphorical depcition anything at all.

Above and below : Chagall. Exactly like before : good ideas ruined through listlessness, sparkles of possible talent gone to waste for lack of cuffs and chains and small boxes with metal bars. Yes, Madonna belongs depicted butt first, but no, getting bored and moving on before the supposed butt looks more like a butt than like a tree trunk is not acceptable.

Now go fucking clean your room. Morons.

He fucking left the straightedge pencil marks in there, "at the edges", towards the bottom of the painting where "nobody cares", where the doorframes spring out of nothingness like the Summoner's Palace in Diablo 2. Because yes, all these modern morons are captive in a video game ; they don't live, they play, and after they're done... except they're never done. To be done they'd need souls, and there's no souls in video games. After I'm done there's exactly nothing left. Ian Murdock thinks he invented the Apple Marketplace ? Keks, get in line, blubbermouth. What about Renoir ?!

All you fuckwits keep "inventing" the same thing over and over and over and over again.

It's not so much that I don't have any time for modern art. It's that modern art doesn't exist.

———

1. For he interested in reproducing the results : first, place your selection of a few hundred raw images chosen from among the thousands upon thousands on your camera in a directory of their own. Then :

   let cnt=0; for f in *.JPG ; do ((cnt++)); convert "$f" -auto-orient -geometry 1024 albertina-"$cnt".jpg ; done

   and

   let cnt=0; for f in *.JPG ; do ((cnt++)); convert "$f" -auto-orient -geometry 560 albertina-"$cnt"-560px.jpg ; done

   The auto-orient is there so that portrait and landscape are correctly separated ; the -geometry produces images that wide (scaling them so they fit and adjusting the height so proportions are maintained). The rest should be self-explanatory : it creates the 1024 px fixwidth large versions and the 560 px fixwidth inline versions of images. The magic numbers are set for Trilema, feel free to fiddle with the values if your theme takes say 640 px wide images instead of 560 or whatever.

   Then

   tar -czvf albertina.tar.gz albertina-*

   to compress,

   scp albertina.tar.gz [your user]@[your ip]:[path to]/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/albertina.tar.gz

   to copy over and

   tar -xzvf albertina.tar.gz

   in the console of your server, to decompress (followed by a rm albertina.tar.gz, why not). Then finally

   hd="albertina"; for cnt in {1..270}; do echo '<a href="http://trilema.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/'$hd'-'$cnt'.jpg"><img src="http://trilema.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/'$hd'-'$cnt'-560px.jpg" alt="'$hd'-'$cnt'" title="'$hd'-'$cnt'" width="560" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-'$((cnt+88120))'" /></a>' >> article.txt ; done

   to produce the html scaffolding for inserting the proper references to all these into your article (again, this is taylored to the instant Trilema case, yours will perhaps take some self-obvious jiggling). [↩]

2. We've tried, and tried, and tried. Including this utterly inept Indian place, extremely intensively advertised all over (Demi Toss), that turned out to be a shitty six table joint with insufferably terrible service. Also including this supposedly excellent Georgian place (Alaverdi) that had the shittiest menu I've yet seen in any Georgian place. Including all sort and manner of thing, we try, that's what we do. [↩]