The Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: The usual Sunday helping of stuff that I have found engaging and enriching over the past week. The header image is of two Hylaeosaurus dinosaurs on the Tidal Lakes Trail in Crystal Palace Park, which we visited last weekend. The recently restored Victorian monsters look wonderful.
• So you want to build an AI star?: a completely fascinating, and disturbing, report by Reggie Ugwu for The New York Times [gift link] about the creation of fake personas on screen…
• Are you a human?: .., and Jill Lepore’s dazzling New Yorker essay [£; limited free access] is the perfect complement.
• A tour of Alfred Hitchcock’s London — how the locations look today: an immensely enjoyable BFI feature from Adam Scovell about five Hitchcock films in which London plays itself.
• “He would leave me totally free”: Isabelle Huppert on Claude Chabrol: I’m looking forward to next month’s Chabrol season at BFI Southbank, and as a taster for that here’s an engrossing interview with the star on her extensive work with the director; courtesy of MUBI Notebook.
• Nike Air Max 180 ad, made by Jean Luc Godard in 1991; just because Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa posted this on Bluesky this week:
• Telstar: narrowing transatlantic divide to size of TV screen: great from Mark Mittelstadt: ‘A look at the day in 1962 when the world witnessed a huge advancement for international communications via satellite.’
• In a more devolved UK, should London still be in charge of broadcasting?: a thoughtful contribution to The Conversation from Jamie Medhurst.
• Why doesn’t the BBC understand the art world?: ‘Rakewell’ at Apollo [£; limited free access] previews the new BBC series The Big Deal with Steph McGovern (from 13 August); they are not impressed:
Far from opening up the art market to the art-curious, this programme feels more like a bigger-budget Bargain Hunt. Rifling through the art colleges to find something to sell, the producers seem to have forgotten that before people want to collect, they want to know about the art.
• Henry Moore – monumental nature: a richly detailed response for Gagosian Quarterly to the current exhibition at Kew Gardens (until 31 January) by Laura Bruni, curator of exhibitions at the Henry Moore Foundation; illustrated with some very fine photographs.
• Artist builds free-to-play videograme replica of Michael Heizer’s City: from the Newsdesk at Artforum:
Digital artist Lily Belmira has created a free video game that recreates the environment of Michael Heizer’s monumental land art sculpture City, 1970–2022, in the Nevada desert. Belmira, who is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote on her blog that she saw the act of creating the game as a “way to undermine its power.”
• Reality is all there is to love: despair and hope in John Berger: a very fine essay for Film Comment [£; limited free access] by documentary filmmaker Brett Story.
• Young people are different: for the LRB [£; limited free access] William Davies is really good, nuanced and empathetic, on Neets
• The five scandals within the “Air Force One” scandal: mostly I resist the temptation to post about Tr*mp’s atrocities, but this is a particularly fine article by national; security analyst Garrett Graff at his blog Doomsday Scenario.
• And finally… The Good Old Way: I’ve only just found this gem online, the fourth of a quartet of 20-minute BBC2 programmes about folk music in Britain from 1983 (so the visual quality, presumably of an off-air VHS recording, leaves a deal to be desired). Bernard Hedges was the film camerman at the Singer’s Club, London, and featured are the peerless Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. The producer for BBC Bristol was Andrew Johnston, and the exec was the great filmmaker Philip Donnellan.
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