love
I.
Titian, "Venus Blindfolding Cupid" (c. 1565)
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II.
“She’s Love, she loves and yet she is not loved.”
[Wm. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis]
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III.
Ten years ago, the Magnetic Fields (a project by Stephin Merritt; the band is apparently named for Les Champs Magnetiqués, a Surrealist novel published in 1920) released 69 Love Songs, a three-part genre- (and gender-) bending collection of songs that are by turns ruminative, bitter and hysterical. Merritt is a latter-day Cole Porter, crafting lyrics that are well-structured and impossibly witty. Here are videos (not at all official) for the ballads “Love is Like a Bottle of Gin” and “Busby Berkeley Dreams.”
(There will be at least one or two more Magnetic Fields posts this year.)