John Wyver writes: welcome to the weekly round-up of bits and pieces that have engaged and informed me over the past week. One little change: I’ve experimented by making (most of) the links open a new tab, which is not how I’ve organised the page before – good idea?
Unusually, the header image is not linked to any of the specific links but is simply something that I saw Tweeted by @OSaumarezSmith and which I think is all kinds of wonderful: a 1937 map by MacDonald Gill showing the location of the GPO’s radio masts. I know little about Gill, Mac (brother of Eric, apparently) but I’m now keen to know more, and ‘MacDonald Gill (1884-1947)’ from The British Postal Museum & Archive blog in 2012 is one place to start.
• The British Library simulator: let’s begin with something silly but in its way, sublime — a simulator of the building in Euston Road that so many of us are missing, built by the BL’s Curator of Digital Publications Giulia Carla Rossi using the Bitsy game engine; background and intro here.
• Initial lockdown meeting: of course, I had to include this, even though you (and 170K others to date) have already watched it:
• What kind of country do we want?: Marilynne Robinson writes for New York Review of Books about the USA, but there’s much wisdom and many lessons for those of us on this side of the Atlantic.
• Class of 19/20 perform “When I Grow Up” | Matilda The Musical: to cheer us up after all that (and there’s something extraordinarily resonant about this just now):
John Wyver writes: you have until Thursday evening to witness online, thanks to today’s Berliner Ensemble, a truly astonishing as-live recording made in 1957 of Bertolt Brecht’s landmark production of Mother Courage and Her Children. Directed by Brecht in 1949 in Berlin, by then of course in the GDR, this was the founding presentation of the Berliner Ensemble, the company established that year by the playwright and his second wife Helene Weigel, who plays Mother Courage.
And this is the main production brought by the Berliner Ensemble to London’s Palace Theatre in the summer of 1956, a visit that profoundly influenced numerous strands of British drama across the following decades. Shot with multiple electronic cameras from the stage of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the Ensemble’s home from 1954, this screen version is vivid, vital and immediate (and even without subtitles strikingly accessible to non-German speakers), and it offers a unique opportunity to get as close as is possible to being there, whether in Berlin or London, in the mid-1950s.
I am in no sense a Brecht scholar, and there are many writers who are better qualified to write about this revelatory recording, including Holger Syme, who as @literasyme Tweeted an informative thread about it over the weekend (and who I hope is going to discuss it online in more detail).
John Wyver writes: another selection of articles and videos, plus a Twitter feed, that have engaged me over the past week. Many of these come from my Twitter timeline, and I remain immensely grateful to all those who I follow for their recommendations.
• Four coronavirus futures: I found this very useful for trying to think about The After – Ravi Gurumurthy and Charles Leadbetter for Nesta lay out four possible scenarios.
• Igor Levit is like no other pianist: do you need any other recommendation for this excellent essay than knowing that it is an Alex Ross profile for The New Yorker? And if you do, try this, which is Levit in lockdown playing Brahms’s arrangement of the Bach Chaconne in D Minor…
John Wyver writes: another group of articles, along with three videos and even a Twitter thread, that have engaged me, and just occasionally enraged me too, over the past week.
• We are witnessing a national catastrophe: Alastair Campbell writing for Tortoise Media; he offers a strong historical framework for what’s happening, and I have found – especially in the last week because of the VE Day anniversary – but also more generally, that I have been reading some excellent writing by historians, including…
• Must we mention the war?: … Chris Grey’s The Brexit Blog (he’s based at Royal Holloway University of London) is essential reading every Friday, and this week’s post offered a new intro to a newly topical contribution from September 2018, and…
• Reflections on VE Day 75: … related thoughts from conservation and environment campaigner Miles King, and…
• The story of the Golden Fleece – a study in political economy: … a rather technical but really interesting post by Nick Pearce, University of Bath, about ‘the industrial technique of “melt-blowing” thermoplastics to form microfibres’, the Cold War and Covid-19.
John Wyver writes: Welcome to my weekly list of links to articles and videos that have engaged me over the past week. Covid-19 is key, of course, but further down you’ll find pieces that have little or nothing to do with the virus. I’m aware that, as so often, there’s something of a bias towards writing from the States (and this week especially, The New York Times). In part, this reflects my belief that pieces from British publications will already be more familiar, but it is also a recognition that magazine culture in the USA is simply richer, deeper and more innovative than here…
• April 15: A Corona Virus chronicle: … a case in point being this remarkable dossier of text and images that took up almost all of the 4 May issue of The New Yorker: a historic account of ‘Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic’.
Economics is a system for optimizing resources, and, if it were trying to calculate ways to optimize a sustainable civilization in balance with the biosphere, it could be a helpful tool. When it’s used to optimize profit, however, it encourages us to live within a system of destructive falsehoods. We need a new political economy by which to make our calculations. Now, acutely, we feel that need.
• Pointing the finger: Jacqueline Rose is fearsomely good on Albert Camus’s The Plague for LRB, ending like this:
On the last page, the narrator tells his readers that he wrote the story so as to leave behind a memory of the injustice and violence undergone, and in order to state ‘quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise’. There is still everything to play for. A thought for the aftermath, when there will be so much to be done.
• Bolero Julliard: on Twitter my friend Kirk McElhearn dubbed this online performance ‘genre-defining’, and that’s about right – it’s also utterly joyful and more than occasionally jaw-dropping:
• ‘Bolero Juilliard’ – Inside the making of a lockdown musical miracle: … and here’s the ‘making of’ story, by Tim Teeman at The Daily Beast: imagined by Juilliard President Damian Woetzel, choreographed and directed by Larry Keigwin, with 100 performers and more than 500 video clips.
John Wyver writes: On a Sunday evening in early August 1960 the esteemed art critic and cultural mandarin Kenneth Clark (knighted at the time, but not yet elevated to the peerage) hailed television viewers from a bench in the empty exhibition galleries of what was then the Tate Gallery. His position of privilege was within the great Picasso show of that summer, and over the next half-hour he walked through the spaces, guided the eye of monochrome electronic cameras linked to an outside broadcast (OB) unit, and offered his far from unequivocally positive thoughts about the art of the great Spaniard.
On a Friday just over a month ago the writer and broadcaster Alastair Sooke greeted us at the end of the Millennium Bridge. He was about to take us inside the empty exhibition galleries of Tate Britain (which back in 1960 as Bankside B electricity generating station was still under construction) for an ‘exclusive’ tour of the Andy Warhol show that had opened only days before. Sixty years on from Clark’s endeavour, Alastair Sooke followed pretty much the blueprint established by that pioneering ATV broadcast, demonstrating in the process aspects of a virtual museum visit of the kind that we are becoming ever more familiar with.
As a follow-up to Monday’s post and in anticipation of tomorrow’s Museum from Home day from the BBC (part of Culture in Quarantine), this column reflects on Sooke and Simon Schama (who took us around the Ashmolean Museum’s ‘Young Rembrandt’ show) and then selects a number of innovative online presentations of exhibitions created by museums and galleries across Britain and abroad. Both the Sooke and the Schama films are on BBC iPlayer for the next six months, here and here.
John Wyver writes: Frustrating as being isolated at home is in many ways, it is also fascinating for the opportunity to observe how cultural organisations are conjuring up all sorts of smart, innovative ways to respond to the crisis. As well as finding this a rewarding experience in and of itself I am also deeply intrigued by what we might learn from the new forms and aesthetics that are emerging, as well as from the models for producing and funding this work, and what we can perhaps take in to The After.
Tonight, BBC Four begins Museums in Quarantine, a series of half-hour films made in galleries under lockdown; the first has Alastair Sooke wandering around ‘Andy Warhol’ at Tate Modern. This seems a good prompt to look in a series of posts this week at how museums and other institutions are, sometimes with broadcasters but often not, making their works and shows available.
To kick off, today I want to consider three approaches to presenting locked-down exhibitions on screen. One is the BBC Arts film Titian: Behind Closed Doors (above, on BBC iPlayer for another week or so); this was made by the independent Matchlight with the National Gallery in the run-up to its major exhibition ‘Titian: Love Desire Death’ that closed just three days after it opened.
John Wyver writes: welcome to this week’s listing of links to articles and a handful of videos that have engaged my attention over the past week. Stay safe and well.
• What do we need in a crisis? Broadcast TV!: John Ellis at CST Online is very good on media in this moment: ‘Connection and reassurance, long the business of ordinary TV, have found their cultural role in this time of crisis. There is a new reality that we all share…’
• How the coronavirus is changing television production: meanwhile, across the Atlantic, for Buzzfeed, Krystie Lee Yandoli explored ways of continuing to work pioneered by producers at Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Tonight with Jimmy Fallon, American Idol, The Walking Dead and more.
John Wyver writes: the current embrace of streaming performance by cultural organisations, broadcasters and audiences means that, amongst a cornucopia of online delights, you can find a rich range of Illuminations’ productions and collaborations involving dance. Highlights of the available productions in which we have been involved include the following…
Tomorrow night, at 7.30pm on Friday 24 April, Sadler’s Wells premieres An Evening with Natalia Osipova, which will be available for a week on the Sadler’s Wells Facebook page. Included in the programme of works with the astonishing dancer is Qutb, a complex and intimate work choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, which premiered in 2016. Natalia Osipova performs alongside dancers Jason Kittelberger and James O’Hara in a showcase of the technique, energy and precision which feature throughout the great dancer’s work. We filmed the dance as part of a trilogy of performances for Sky Arts, with Ross MacGibbon as screen director and Lucie Conrad as producer.
The programme from Sadler’s Wells also includes the ‘ravishing six-minute ballet’ (as The New York Times described it) Valse Triste specially created for Osipovaand American Ballet Theatre principal David Hallberg by Alexei Ratmansky, as well as the beautifully emotive Ave Maria by Japanese choreographer Yuka Oishi set to the music of Schubert.
