I think the BBC’s role in bringing to people’s attention the great things being done by arts organisations across the country and artists is phenomenally important… Do I think the BBC should take the arts seriously? Of course. But I am not there yet and I am not commenting on that stuff. The arts and culture matter to me hugely. I am not at the BBC yet, but, you know, they matter to me enormously.
I have just finished reading Stephen Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In fact I have been viewing on my iPad downloads of the five-part six-hour BBC Two film. I have watched parts of it on tube and trains. I saw some in bed and some one morning with my breakfast toast. I even took the serial to the loo. And I realised I was consuming it in just the way that I would read a novel. At times I could devote ten minutes to it, or even just two minutes. On one occasion, I followed more than ninety minutes in a single session, jumping across the episode ends of of parts two and three. This has felt like a quite new experience – and a pleasing one too. My sporadic but concentrated attention seems to have suited Poliakoff’s visually sumptuous, achingly elegant, too often clunky, slow-paced but undeniably involving drama. On the tube this morning as I closed the iPad, I found myself wondering which of the author’s books I should read next. read more »
Even if I neglect the blog on other days (and apologies for that, it’s just a very busy time right now), the list of links needs to be offered each Sunday. I rarely embed audio clips here (mostly because I find doing so trickier than video) but this is a lovely long piece from Radio New Zealand with the editor of the London Review of Books, Mary Kay-Wilmers, speaking about the magazine and especially about the late Peter Campbell who was a wonderful illustrator and a great graphic designer and the loveliest of men. Peter was originally from New Zealand and his work is currently on show in an exhibition at the City Gallery in Wellington, a detail from which is reproduced above.
The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald is the most recent addition to our catalogue of Art Lives films that we distribute on DVD. Completed in 1987, this is a richly interesting documentary about the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux who died in 1994 at the age of 97. Delvaux is best-known for dreamlike tableaux featuring naked women in settings that are both fantastical and grounded in archaic Belgian townscapes. Adrian Maben’s film is a conventional biographical profile and its primary interest comes from the presence of Delvaux himself who relates his own life story. Plus there is a wealth of archive photographs together with images of Belgium at the time was shot, together with shots of many of Delvaux’s most famous images. There are some infelicities, such as incongruous music at times, and the film is very much of its moment, but it remains a valuable record of an intriguing artist. You can purchase the film here. read more »
It’s got to be Girls for the lead. The most recent episode of Lena Dunham’s HBO series, titled ‘One man’s trash’, lit up my Twitter like nothing else last week (except maybe that meteor, on which you need to read Elif Batuman in The New Yorker), and while it will be some time before we see it here, at least we can read about it. In That sex scene on last night’s Girls, Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker followed up her recent article about the series. Part – but only part – of why she liked the show so much was its tender display of sex:
… the Hannah/Josh scene was so intimate that it felt invasive: raw and odd and tender. That’s a nearly unheard-of quality in sex on cable television …
I know I’m coming late to this, but Girl Walk // All Day (above) is a feature-length dance film that since late 2011 has been freely available to view online in twelve chapters. And its tale of a girl, played by Anne Marsen, dancing her day through New York City is a really great watch. The director is Jacob Krupnick (there is a New York Times Q&A here) and the crowd-funded finance came from Kickstarter. There are occasional one-off showings in the real world too, such as one this past week in Glasgow. Chapter 1 is embedded here, and see also articles about the project from The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and recently by David Jenkins on the BFI blog. Across the jump, as usual on a Saturday, are nine further recommendations for online viewing.
My blog schedule for the week has been disrupted by a slow recovery from a modest bout of ‘flu, so apologies for the absence of new posts in the past few days. Spending more time in bed than usual did allow me to catch up with some reading, including the recently published The Persephone Book of Short Stories. This is the 100th volume from Persephone, which over the past decade or more has specialised in publishing neglected twentieth-century writing, much of it by women. The Persephone story is told well in the Observer feature One shade of grey by Rachel Cooke and this is the link to their richly interesting online catalogue. I want simply to hymn this particular 450 page volume, in part for its contents but mostly – and this is particularly important in this age of the tablet – for its materiality. read more »
So let’s talk about Beyoncé. Everyone else is. Especially about her half-time Super Bowl show last Sunday (above, the video is embedded in several of the pieces linked to), which through the week prompted a slew of interesting pieces. These include The roots of Beyoncé’s Super Bowl spectacular by Ann Helen for NPR’s The Record, who writes thoughtfully of a ‘display of imperial charisma [that] comes off as a historical inevitability, and as something that benefits us all’. Also worth reading are Tom Shales’ How many Beyonci does it take to blow out a Super Bowl? for the Chicago Sun-Times, Why the Super Bowl needed Beyoncé by Mark Blankenship at NewNowNext and On Beyoncé’s face from Avidly. But make sure you don’t miss Anne Helen Petersen’s Beyoncé, feminism, ambivalence and the fascinating string of comments that this ‘sermon’ (her word) has sparked. There are more good links across the jump, with h/t thanks this week to @charleskriel, @Chi_Humanities, @erik_kwakkel and @alanclarkeGD. Meanwhile, just because I can…
The first of this week’s videos – which, by the way, is totally delightful and should be watched now – is discussed by the academic Jason Mittell in his post The Scared is Spread at his essential blog Just TV:
My perspective on this video is unique, as it was made by my student Bianca Giaever as her final project at Middlebury before graduating last week, and I was the project’s adviser… The bulk of [Bianca’s] creative background was in audio production for radio, and oral storytelling… In the fall semester, she made Holy Cow Lisa, an excellent project in her Video Production course that took an audio interview and ‘visualized’ it through creative & playful video footage. She wanted to see if she could make another project in that vein as a kind-of ‘proof of concept’ that illustrated audio stories could work as a format – the result was…
At the time of writing, The Scared is scared has attracted more than 230,000 views on Vimeo and, as Mittell details, extensive discussion and highlighting on other blogs. He continues:
I also watch it spread from the meta-perspective of a scholar of digital media, which raises numerous questions. What does it mean to traditional educational hierarchies to have a student’s work seen & enjoyed by thousands of people? Does spreadability matter when assessing and grading students’ work? Should we encourage students to seek spreadability as a goal, or just facilitate it as a potential byproduct of creative success? How do such accomplishments impact the reputation of the department and potentially benefit other students’ opportunities? And most immediately, how will this success help Bianca make a living after Middlebury?
Network’s new double DVD set from the 1960s ABC TV arts series Tempo is, as I posted last week, a wonderful collection of archival jewels. After last week’s introduction, I intend to post over the next few Fridays responses to individual films and tele-recordings, starting with the half-hour film A Tale of Two Talents, first broadcast on 6 February 1966. The talents on view are those of pop singer Tom Jones, a star for just a year or so when the film was shot and still playing Mecca Dancing Locarno Stevenage, and Royal Ballet principal Lynn Seymour, a dazzling young dancer who had been a favourite with critics and audiences for seven years or so. James Goddard’s film sets up an intriguing contrast of low art and high, of mass audiences and niche appeal, but initially it is far from apparent what the two figures might have in common. But as we see Tom performing and Lynn rehearsing the answer emerges comes across very clearly: sex. read more »
