Essential media about the arts

Keen to start off the new year with a vision of the future of television? You could do a lot worse than read John Seabrook’s Streaming dreams for The New Yorker. Seabrook casts a somewhat sceptical eye over the plans for YouTube Original Channels and along the way raises a host of interesting questions about what how our media experiences may change over the coming months and years. I was particularly taken by his sense of the disconnect in the planning between ‘information people’ and ‘entertainment people’. This is encapsulated by the riposte of one executive to a question about definitions: “‘What do you mean, “What do I mean by ‘a show’?” ‘ ” (The New Yorker, of course, is immaculate about the placing of quotation marks, and I hope I’ve carried that concern across here.) Below, more links to more interesting stuff, with quite a bit of essential ‘digital’ reading this week.
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Below you’ll find all sorts of good things that I’ve been reading and watching (or at least meaning to) over the past fortnight or so… In contrast to previous weekend collections, I’ve mixed up articles and videos – a practice that I think I’ll continue on coming weekends – but I have tried to assemble everything into some kind of narrative. That said, do feel free simply to dive in anywhere.

PS. After my slightly self-pitying post yesterday, my aim is to return to a daily post – with another The Year in TV contribution tomorrow, this time about 1962, and then on Tuesday a kind of back-to-work piece about Illuminations’ plans for the coming months. (If I announce these posts here, that will act as a kind of prompt for me to complete them.)
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This weekend’s The New York Times Magazine has an essay by Heather Havrilesky, ‘Clues that lead to more clues that add up to nothing’, lamenting the narrative plotting of post-Lost television drama. ‘The empty thrills, the ticking clock that never runs down, the pointless twists and turns that are neither motivated nor resolved’ are in danger, runs the rather shrill argument, of killing American television’s new ‘golden age’ (The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men et al). For a more nuanced discussion, take a look at Lost in a great story: evaluation in narrative television (and television studies), scholar Jason Mittell’s October 2007 blog post at Just TV from with his appreciation of, among other qualities, the show’s ‘twists and turns’: ‘For me and many other viewers, the ability to be pleasantly surprised by a television series violating conventions and expectations keeps us tuning in and anticipating future twists, offering a wealth of pleasures within both the show’s story content and storytelling form.’ Mittell has just posted the text of a keynote that’s also directly relevant, The qualities of complexity: aesthetic evaluation in contemporary television. It’s an essential read – and see also posts at InMediaRes about Popular seriality (one of them Mittell’s). Across the break, further links to good stuff.

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This is not the first time we have led a selection of links with one of Adam Curtis’ essential posts at The Medium and the Message – and I trust it won’t be the last. His latest The Bitch, the Stud and the Prawn is subtitled The rise of geezer capitalism in Britain, and it continues his analysis of the narrowing of political possibilities in post-war Britain. It is also a wonderfully colourful and profoundly depressing tale of tycoon George Walker, Guy Hands, bankers and boxers, film finance, tax dodges and a mutant prawn boxing movie. The post also features some fabulous extracts from BBC programmes – here, if nowhere else, is the BBC archive being productively plundered in the most imaginative and intelligent way. Below, a handful of other links to stuff that I’ve found interesting over the past week (and which remains a work in progress until I add some more later on).
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Highlight of the weekend was definitely Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet at the Barbican. Today’s matinee performance was the last (Wednesday’s show was cancelled because of strike action), so any recommendations of reviews will only give you a sense of what you missed. Staged across nearly three hours with no interval, acted by a cast of six (one actor plays both Gertrude and Ophelia), and set on a large square of dark, damp earth, it is certainly one-of-a-kind: bonkers, brilliant at times, silly, self-indulgent, extraordinarily physical, intense and thrilling, vibrantly theatrical and anti-theatrical, but also at moments all-too-obvious. For more, read the Guardian‘s Lyn Gardner, Kate Kellaway for the Observer, Daisy Bowie-Sell for the Telegraph. Then, go below for other links to interesting stuff from the past week.
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