Lampoon Magazine International Issue 12

A DICEMBRE , a tre mesi dall’apertura, 250 mila biglietti d’ingresso erano già stati staccati per la mostra di Caravaggio, al Palazzo Reale di Milano. Non era più possibile prenotare la visita – tutti i posti esauriti fino al 28 gennaio, giorno di chiusura. L’unica possibilità per entrare era mettersi in coda. DALLE OMBRE del Merisi nascono gli scintilli di Sølve Sundsbø, da un baratro di rocce scure sorge la Torre d’Avorio di un’Infanta Imperatrice de La Storia infinita – per interpretarla, abbiamo voluto Lina Hoss. La moda di questa primavera è composta di luccichii e bagliori che nascono dai chiaroscuri, dal buio di un inverno concluso. Nel corso del 2018, Fendi sostiene il progetto di catalogo digitale di tutte le opere del Caravaggio, lavorando con la direzione della Galleria…

VOLCANO EXTRAVAGANZA – I Polpi, a travelling festival, opened on July 13 last year with a sui generis football–based performance by the British artist Eddie Peake: entitled Animals, a reworking of Touch, a piece conceived by Peake in 2012. The protagonists of this Neapolitan reinvention, amateur footballers from the Naples area, all in good shape, performed completely naked except for their socks and boots, and dripping with sweat, given the unbearable heat, in a game of metaphysical suffering, a match split into two halves, fifteen minutes each. “Naples is a terribly sexy city”, one well-known contemporary art curator was heard to whisper on that occasion. A KIND OF AUTO-DA-FÉ . A symbolic reflection by Peake, whose poetry, expressed in different media, often focuses on issues related to the sexual sphere.…

CHARLES DE BEISTEGUI , a.k.a. don Carlos de Beistegui e Yturbe, a Mexican millionaire with a Spanish passport imposed by King Alfonso XIII of Spain. Owing his wealth to his family’s silver mines, he was a fascinating and cosmopolitan figure who was a literary host, collector and patron between 1895 and 1970. Preyed upon by a creative psychic obsession, by a super-aesthetic and narcissistic deviance, he had a taste for luxury, was as changeable as a serial and he stubbornly remained single until the very end. Orson Welles defined him as “demanding with women too, at the very least he needs them to be duchesses.” ALTHOUGH BEISTEGUI belonged to the twentieth century, he was probably the last exegete of the ancien régime together with Alexis de Redé, the minister of…

AN ILLUSTRATOR, WRITER and man-eater. Too many lives within a single head to be taken seriously by the literary society of the time. However, in her novels she always seems to be about to die of boredom, wearied of her compulsive sexual appetites that she never managed to transform into love. We picture her as an ultra-sexy Cinderella, on the afternoon before an opening party in Pasadena. Her friends had warned her that her ex, for whom she still had feelings, would be attending. We can almost read her mind. What should she do? Stay at home and gorge on vol-au-vents like a little servant who has just finished scrubbing the steps? Or go anyway? In the end, she must have convinced herself that the latter was the right option.…

SOME PEOPLE say that the twentieth century really began in 1920 and, given the child it produced, its gestation could only be tragic. Between 1915 and 1918 the trenches of the Great War swallowed up something like sixteen million dead and returned a desperate army of cripples to the so-called world of the living. Twenty million were seriously wounded, disfigured or mutilated. The lid of hell had been lifted, Europe was in pieces and humanity was on the precipice. Everyone has their own way of reacting when they see the devil. In the USA, people met him at the crossroads at night, and sold him their soul in exchange for a blues song. In the United States that came out of the war as wealthy victors, the vision of the…

THE FORTIES . Irene Brin was the pseudonym given to her by Leo Longanesi. She was born in Genoa in 1911 as Maria Vittoria Rossi, to a General father and Jewish mother, from Vienna. She began writing at a young age, after spending her teenage years reading and studying, and learning Proust off by heart. SHE NEVER wore stockings, even in winter. She refused to wear glasses, even though contact lenses did not exist at the time and her short-sightedness prevented her from seeing more than ten centimetres away. She wore only mid-heel mules that left the back of her foot uncovered. She loved fur. She constantly changed the colour and cut of her hair. “She was a born quick-change artist”, said Lietta Tornabuoni. She would put on and lose…