A while ago I described myself as tending to spontaneously aggressively hostile.
A got a flurry of mail from my North End friends all describing themselves in the same way.
Improving ourselves is a struggle we all share.
Elena Ferrante, author of the Neapolitan Novels, a series of four of which ‘My Brilliant Friend’ is the first, in a terrifically entertaining way, illustrates the root of our issues.

This weekend I watched episodes 5 and 6 of the HBO 8-part film adaptation of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ and came away feeling that Scorsese and Coppola notwithstanding, this series of the old world Italians who shaped the Italo-Americans persona is by far the most accurate and compelling rendition of that family life ever presented on American television.
’The Bronx Tale’ and ‘Saturday Night Fever’ both rendered tantalizingly realistic touches of Italian home life.
’My Brilliant Friend’ presents a feast.

The film series is closely based on Elena Ferrante’s book.
Hardly a surprise since she is listed as the lead writer of the screenplay.

It premiered on HBO on November 18, 2018.
A second season was confirmed in December 2018.
A must see for its drama, sociology, entertainment, and cinematic achievement.

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Tagging Today
Friday, December 7, 2018
My 239th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
Time is 12.01am.
Boston’s temperature will reach 39* with a feels-like of  25 thanks to the wintry breeze. Sunny.

Dinner is to be determined.

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Question of the Day
What is the ‘Battle of the Centaurs?’

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Short Takes
A week after the bicycle slam and the unrelated waking with ‘morning sickness’ I took inventory of my losses.
Pain: gone, entirely.
Weight: return to normal-good.
Weight-lifting: back to normal-good.
Morning Coffee: a loss; had been drinking 14oz at rising. Now it appears that at 10oz my body’s guard is up and at 12oz I’ve hit a new maximum.
Not too bad.
Two ¾ cups.
Coudda been worse.

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Short Takes: City Life
Ode to the Dawn Redwood

Here are three photos of the rare Dawn Redwood in the Public Garden, Boston.
For variety, the fourth photo is of a cousin: a bonsai dawn redwood.

Left:
The identification.

Second from left:
Admiring the base of the tree. 

Second from right:
The dawn redwood in winter garb. 

Right:
Metasequoia glyptostroboides (dawn redwood) bonsai tree
Photograph by D Ramey Logan

Metasequoia glyptostroboides, the dawn redwood, is a fast-growing, endangered deciduous conifer, the sole living species of the genus Metasequoia, one of three species in the subfamily Sequoioideae.
It now survives only in wet lower slopes and montane river and stream valleys in the border region of Hubei and Hunan provinces and Chongqing municipality in south-central China, notably in Lichuan county in Hubei.
Although shortest of the redwoods, it can grow to at least 165 ft (50 m) in height.

In 1941, the genus Metasequoia was originally reported by palaeobotanist Shigeru Miki as a widely distributed extinct genus based on fossils, before attracting considerable attention a few years later when small populations were found alive in central China.
It is a particularly well-known example of a living fossil species.
The tree faces considerable risks of extinction in its wild range due to deforestation, and so has been planted extensively in arboreta worldwide, where it has proved a popular and fast-growing ornamental plant.

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Answer to Question of Day 
Battle of the Centaurs is a relief by Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo, created around 1492.
It was the last work Michelangelo created while under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, who died shortly after its completion.
Inspired by a classical relief created by Bertoldo di Giovanni, the marble sculpture depicts the mythic battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs.
A popular subject of art in ancient Greece, the story was suggested to Michelangelo by the classical scholar and poet Poliziano.

Battle of the Centaurs was a remarkable sculpture in several ways, presaging Michelangelo's future sculptural direction.
Michelangelo had departed from the then current practices of working on a discrete plane to work multidimensionally.
It was also the first sculpture Michelangelo created without the use of a bow drill and the first sculpture to reach such a state of completion with the marks of the subbia chisel left to stand as a final surface. Whether intentionally left unfinished or not, the work is significant in the tradition of "non finito" sculpting technique for that reason.
Michelangelo regarded it as the best of his early works, and a visual reminder of why he should have focused his efforts on sculpture.

The relief consists of a mass of nude figures, writhing in combat, placed underneath a roughed out strip in which the artist's chisel marks remain visible.
Architectural historian Howard Hibbard says that Michelangelo has obscured the centaurs, as most of the figures are represented from the waist up.
One of the few identifiable centaurs is visible in the bottom center, his leg extending between the legs of the twisting figure above him.
According to Hibbard, Michelangelo has also obscured a lone female figure in the piece, while Hippodamia can be seen among the figures in the center right.

Left:
View from a left angle
I, Sailko
The twisting figure holding the stone becomes "something of an artistic manifesto."
Particularly striking is the composition of the figure's upper limbs, which deviate from the carefully articulated norms.  

Second from left:
Twisting figure on the left, right view
I, Sailko

Second from right:
Whole piece from left
I, Sailko
 
Right:
Right side, detail
I, Sailko

Battle of the Centaurs was an early turning point and a harbinger of Michelangelo's future, sculptural technique.
Michelangelo biographers, Antonio Forcellino and Allan Cameron, say that Michelangelo's relief, while created in a classical tradition, departed significantly from the techniques established by masters such as Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello.
Rather than working on discrete, parallel planes as his predecessors had done, Michelangelo carved his figures dynamically, within "infinite" planes.

Forcellino and Cameron describe this break with modern practice as Michelangelo's "own personal revolution", and they point specifically to the left of the relief where a twisting figure becomes "something of an artistic manifesto."
Particularly striking is the composition of the figure's upper limbs, which deviate from the carefully articulated norms.

Also remarkable, according to them, is the manner in which Michelangelo sculpted independently of his preparatory drawings, freeing him from the constraints of two-dimensional vision and allowing him to merge the figures fluidly and multi-dimensionally.

Battle of the Centaurs was also the first sculpture for which Michelangelo eschewed the use of the bow drill.
Finer details of the relief were probably achieved with the use of a toothed chisel called a gradina.
The smooth figures of the foreground contrast strongly with the roughly-hewn background, created with a subbia chisel.
A traditional sculptor's tool, the subbia produced punched marks that had never before been left as a final surface in a work completed to this degree.
Georgia Illetschko insisted in 2004, these unfinished surfaces are "a conscious compositional element.", and not due to a lack of time.
According to Scigliano, it was an important development in the non finito sculpting technique.

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Good morning on this Friday, December 7, Christmas now 18 days away.
Today we talked about a breakout film series on HBO, My Brilliant Friend, wonderfully illustrating the struggle of two Neapolitan women from their childhood to old age to emerge whole from an impoverished, male-dominated society, so much like Italo-American enclaves in America. We talked about lingering losses from my bouts with the bicycle slam and my waking with a form of morning sickness. We discussed the Dawn Redwood and finally, Michelangelo’s Battle of the Centaurs.

Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?

See you soon.

Love

Dom