John Wyver writes: I am lucky enough to be in New York for a couple of nights (look out for a ‘Postcard’ from the city here soon) and I spent yesterday afternoon in the peerless permanent collections galleries of the Museum of Modern Art. In the Collections 1980s-Present rooms, there is a space, presumably with a reinforced floor, devoted to the late Richard Serra’s monumental Equal, 2015, which absolutely captivated me. With the work almost to myself, I took a lot of photographs.
John Wyver writes: I had been looking forward to Peter Biskind‘s latest book, which in the States is titled Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV, and which over here carries the slightly desperate, and arguably reportable to the ASA, subtitle The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television. His Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex. Drugs and Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollwood is a classic, chronicling the mainstream American film industry of the 1970s. Amd of course, with my Sky and Netflix subs, I have been following the tale he explores in Pandora’s Box since The Sopranos and The Wire.
John Wyver writes: as usual, a selection of articles and audio that caught my attention this past week. The image above, which relates to my first choice, is a detail from Anatole Godet’s photograph of“Portrait de Emile Zola” par Manet, 1872-74, an albumen silver print courtesy of the wonderful Getty open content programme. Happy Easter.
• Is it even good?: like Brandon Taylor, who for the LRB writes – brilliantly – about Emile Zola’s twenty Les Rougon-Macquart novels [£, limited free access], I too have been working my way through this massive cycle of late nineteenth-century naturalism. And like him, I have been reading them in the excellent new editions, translated by Brian Nelson and others, and published by Oxford World’s Classics.
To date, it’s taken me longer than his two years, and working my way through them in publication order, I have four and a half to go. And I too am stuck part way through The Dream, published in 1888, of which Brandon writes, ‘The book insists so firmly and intensely on its own feelings that the reader is totally shut out.’ Yep.
But he also proposes that, ‘You will probably never read all twenty of Les Rougon-Macquart. I know that. You know that. Let us accept this truth between us.’ Well, no, Brandon. I’ll get there. Just give me time. I know the journey will have been worth it.
John Wyver writes: Here’s another brief, random note about a cultural object that I’ve encountered in the past few days, in this case Fritz Lang’s Western with Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney, which I saw at what I persist in calling the NFT on Monday evening. The film was screened as part of the Tierney season Out of the Shadows, that is just kicking off, with a host of treats, including a second showing of The Return of Frank James on Friday evening.
John Wyver writes: I’m pleased that I seem to be managing to keep the Sunday dozen going, and while I don’t feel ready – or have the time – to return to blogging more seriously, I want to try floating another series. There are lots of things – films, books, plays, much more, that I enjoy and appreciate, and that I want to comment on or recommend. I can do that on Facebook and Bluesky, but I’m interested to see if that very modest social media activity can benefit from something just a tiny bit more substantial and less transient.
So I am going to experiment with what, for the moment at least, I call ‘jottings’ – occasional, random bite-size posts about anything and everything that appeals to me, which I have also decided for no particular reason to number. This first is combines a walking map from Modernist Estates and a resplendent Henry Moore sculpture, above.
John Wyver writes: the weekend’s selection of articles, audio and video that especially engaged me over the past week.
• The dinner party that started the Harlem Renaissance: a wonderful slice of archival research about a 1924 New York dinner party that was arguably the origin moment of the profoundly significant cultural movement; presented online by The New York Times [gift link], with a stylish introduction (detail above), this is written by Veronica Chambers, the paper’s editor of Projects and Collaborations, and curator and writer Michelle May-Curry, lecturer of engaged and public humanities at Georgetown University.
John Wyver writes: a little late this week, and I’m completing the choice on a train to Stratford-upon-Avon for a final RSC “goodbye” to Greg Doran – as usual, here are a dozen articles and audio elements that I found especially engaging this past week. Plus, although I don’t have an article linked to it, above is a room in the Royal Academy’s terrific Entangled Pasts: 1768-Now exhibition, with Hew Locke’s glorious Armada (2017-19) installed amongst a selection of grand manner history paintings plus a dazzling Kehinde Wiley portrait. Go see the show.
• Arts & Ideas – Edward Bond: I failed last week to mark the death of one of the most significant post-war British playwrights, so I am delighted now to feature this excellent Radio 3 discussion about his significance, chaired by Matthew Sweet, with writer and director Mark Ravenhill, actor Kenneth Cranham, Professor of Contemporary Theatre Jen Harvie, playwright and archivist Tony Coult, and theatre director Claudette Bryanston.
John Wyver writes: the usual twelve recommendations from a busy week when we celebrated in style the life of my mother-in-law, Beryl Paterson, at her cremation.
• The Getty makes nearly 88,000 art images free to use however you like: an Open Culture report, with links, on the recent significant expansion on one of the great online resources, including Cézanne’s Still Life with Blue Pot, about 1900–1906 (above), which I feature only because I find it extraordinarily beautiful.
John Wyver writes: this week’s selection of writings and audio begins with links related to some especially sad news, before embracing a remarkable new open access publication, a great new podcast, a number of excellent essays and resources, and an archive treasure from Illuminations’ past.
• Remembering Professor Emeritus David Bordwell: like so many of my colleagues, I felt a personal sense of loss at the news on Friday that film scholar and mystery stories fan David Bordwell (above) had died at the age of 76. I knew him only from his writings and his videos, but both The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985), written with his wife Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, and Poetics of Cinema (2008), have been absolutely fundamental for my own thinking and watching, and I have highlighted his glorious blog, Observations on Film Art, created with Kristin Thompson, what seems like a hundred times here.
He wanted to die at home rather than spending his last days at a hospice facility, and he did. I was with him. It was brief, and I don’t think he suffered. It happened within a few months of the fiftieth anniversary of when we moved in together in the summer of 1974. He was as wonderful a spouse as he was a scholar and a friend.
John Wyver writes: eleven articles from the past week, and an archive from 1967, that especially caught my attention, plus the usual musical bonus. The image above by Ene-Liis Semper is from the 2012 Lyric, Hammersmith production of Three Kingdoms, revisited by Natasha Tripney via a link below.
