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.
John Wyver writes: I’m sorry, but personal stuff and a professional deadline mean I just have not had the time to compile this Sunday’s recommendations. Apologies. I hope normal service will be resumed next week. In the meantime, here’s a 2016 video of Zubin Kanga performing ‘Hitchcock Études’ for piano, electronics and video by Nicole Lizée. I heard the composer talking on a recent edition of BBC Radio 3’s The New Music Show, and I was entranced both by her ideas and her music. I think this 16-minute piece is sensational. (Image of Nicole Lizée by RPMTelevision – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)
John Wyver writes: another dozen articles and elements of audio, mostly about digital stuff and cinema, that I have found intriguing, informative and challenging over the past week.
• Time Canvases – Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism: composer Samuel Andreyev presents an edition of The Radio 3 Documentary that I found fascinating, about Feldman’s relationships with, especially, painters Philip Guston and Mark Rothko; it’s very timely too, since the glorious Philip Guston retrospective at Tate Modern has just a fortnight to run and tomorrow night at King’s Place Lucy Railton and Joseph Houston perform Feldman’s 80-minute composition for cello and piano, ‘Patterns in a Chromatic Field’.
John Wyver writes: welcome to the usual mix of articles and audio that captured my attention this past week.
• Bite-sized Godard – read along with the French New Wave auteur: for MUBI Notebook, Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews a new volume of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard; above, of course, is Anna Karina in Alphaville (1965):
As someone who often regarded both his talk and his filmmaking as playful experiments—a means of testing ideas and the meanings of words rather than making any simple or final declarations with them—Godard typically confounds efforts to tie him to any single game plan. The most that many entries in this book can accomplish is to show how much fun these forays can be. Like one of Godard’s spidery, web-spinning blankets of wordplay suggesting other routes that imagination, coherence, or even ideology might take, Reading’s entries are brief interludes, fleeting fancies designed to illuminate and then, very politely, evaporate.
John Wyver writes: as usual, I’m pleased to share twelve of the articles and audio contributions that engaged and challenged and intrigued me during the past seven days.
• How the government captured the BBC: this is excellent from Alan Rusbridger, late of the Guardian and LMH and now editor of Prospect [£, but limited free access] – here’s the set-up, with the handy cutout-and-keep diagram above also coming from the article:
This is a story of wheels within wheels. It takes us into the clouded intersection between UK politics and media. We meet a cast of characters who have long wished to control, abolish or diminish the BBC and its public service broadcasting cousins. We peep into the shadowy world of how public appointments are fixed. We learn how fragile some of our great institutions are. And we discover that Sir Robbie Gibb, until 2017 a -middle-ranking TV executive, may well now be the most important journalist at the BBC, and therefore in the country.
