A catch-up dozen (or so)
John Wyver writes: I have been away, on an excellent trip to Warsaw, Tallinn and Helsinki, and so have neglected the links for the past two Sundays. Here is a catch-up selection of stuff that has recently caught my eye, with the intention that I will return to a proper Sunday column next weekend; I may also add a handful of extra links here. The image above is from the fascinating Neon Museum in Warsaw, which I will discuss more in a future post.
• The 100 best TV shows of the 21st century: The New York Times [gift link] begins another of its mega-listing stunts, which will doubtless prove infuriating and invaluable in about equal measures.
• Not a civilisation, an organ: there’s so much to engage with and reflect on about AI at present, and this blog post about agentic swarms by the ever-excellent Bill Thompson should be near the top of your reading list.
• The winner of Elon Musk’s AI Odyssey contest will make you laugh out loud: Frank Landymore at Futurism with a short report on the first results of Grok’s attempts to go up against Christopher Nolan.
• Lena Dunham’s Famesick is a cautionary tales of filmmakers doing TV: Richard Brody for The New Yorker [£; limited free access) is very good on the travails of the maker of Girls.
• There is no history of cinema without Patricio Guzmán: for POV Fran Romero pays tribute to the great Chilean director who we lost last week…
• Desert of the disappeared – Patricio Guzmán on Nostalgia for the Light: … and the BFI reprinted Chris Darke’s exemp[lary interview from 2012.
• The final Temenos: a wonderful essay for MUBI Notebook by Emma Fuchs about the cult of Gregory Markopoulos’ epic film:
The restoration of Eniaios (1948–1990),the magnum opus of Greek-American experimental filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, has been a gradually revealed 25-year process. The experimental film comprises 168 reels organized into 22 cycles—each composed of meticulously spliced black film leader, clear leader, and brief bursting footage from Markopoulos’s early films—and is 80 hours long. Segments of Eniaios’s restoration have been screened in the same field in the Greek village of Lyssarea at Olympic intervals since 2004. This June, over the course of four nights, the final four cycles (XIX–XXII) were screened, marking the completion of the Temenos. This name, originally meaning “a place set apart or a sacred precinct,” has come to signify both Eniaios and the open-air cinema dedicated to it—it has become an event inseparable from its home.
• ‘Scrap the drama department!’: Michael Seely with a great BBC story from March 1965, with parts for Sydney Newman, Ted Willis, Kenneth Adam and other luminaries.
• Kiss The Ring – Richard Wagner’s opera festival in the age of AI: I’ve read a number of responses to Bayreuth this year, but this by Krithika Varagur for The Paris Review is the one that I have enjoyed the most.
• The Bayeux Tapestry photographed: thanks to The Burlington Magazine for making open access Ella Ravilious’ fascinating May 2023 about Edward Dossetter photographing the complete embroidery in 1872.
• A slowed-down kind of loving: for the LA Review of Books, Rowland Bagnall writes about Carol Armstrong’s new study of still life painting, The Matter of Still Life: Between Chardin and Morandi :
With The Matter of Still Life, Armstrong proves that art is not a subject separate from our lives, neither wholly decorative nor something to be chewed over in isolation. Instead, these essays quietly affirm (like all the best art writing) that art is an extension of experience, closer to a branch of thinking than a by-product.
• Can a uniform escape its history?: terrific from my University of Westminster colleague Andrew Groves about what might, or might not, be a proposal from Tr*mp for a new United States Space Force uniform.
• A fly’s footfall: David Trotter is as good as ever in this LRB review [£; limited free access] of Microphone by Ralph Jones.
• And finally… 2026: Time for the Midterms: love this from the Hamilton crew:
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