To start Sunday links, this…
• My vote: Roger Angell for The New Yorker.
… and this…
• The road ahead: Kirk Douglas for The Huffington Post.
… and this, from Joss Whedon and friends (which you’ll have seen but which is just as good on repeat viewings).
The usual weekly offering of links to articles and videos that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as usual to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks. First, watch this:
• 176 reasons why Donald Trump should not be President: Keith Olbermann for GQ.
• ‘We’re the only plane in the sky’: a really remarkable oral history, compiled by Garrett M. Graff for Politico, of events aboard Air Force One in the hours after the 9/11 attacks…
• How Politico recreated 9/11 aboard Air Force One: … while Columbia Journalism Review‘s David Uberti has the background on what he describes as ‘a historical document of some of America’s darkest hours’.
Today the great archivist and social historian Rick Prelinger has released on Vimeo (and I’ve embedded below) his 2013 feature-length film No More Road Trips? under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license. This means that we can watch for free and share this astonishing collection of home movies about travel in 20th-century America. But we can also remix, transform and build upon the film as long as we provide appropriate credit, that this is done for non-commercial purposes and that the results are shared under the same license.
Here’s Rick’s description:
A journey from the Atlantic Coast to California made from a collection of 9,000 home movies, No More Road Trips? reveals hidden histories embedded in the landscape and seeks to blend the pleasures of travel with premonitions of its end. The soundtrack for this fully participatory film will be made fresh daily by the audience, who will be encouraged to recall our shared past and predict the future. This is a silent movie meant to be shown to audiences that ask questions, make comments, disagree with one another, and generally act like vocal sports spectators or the rowdies in the pit in front of the Elizabethan stage.
And there’s more about the film and its making here.
No More Road Trips? A dream ride through 20th-century America made from home movies from Rick Prelinger on Vimeo.
With my colleague Dr Irene Morra from Cardiff University, I am working on a major international, interdisciplinary academic conference to be held at Senate House next June. ‘Britain, Canada, and the Arts: Cultural Exchange as Post-war Renewal’ will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, and we have begun to send out the Call for Papers, which I am happy to reproduce here. Do please consider submitting an abstract if you feel you have a contribution to make to the event – or do be in touch with other thoughts about what we think is a completely fascinating, and largely unexplored, topic. read more »
Last weekend our friend Dr Billy Smart circulated by e-mail to a handful of colleagues a touching tale of a second-hand book. Billy was Research Officer for the excellent and just-completed research project The History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK at Royal Holloway University of London. I liked the story so much that I asked if I could feature it on the blog, and Billy kindly agreed.
Dr Billy Smart writes: An unremarkable envelope comes through my door this morning, but one that sets off a chain of reflections about publishing, posterity and the value of a play as a commodity. read more »
As I fly back to the UK through multiple Sunday timezones, here are links to articles and videos that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as usual to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Wide Screen – Videogame Adaptation: pride of place needs to go to an open access special journal issue guest edited by my friend Kevin Flanagan; this is a collection of articles (delivered as .pdfs) concerned to apply some of the concerns and methodologies of adaptation studies a wide array of videogames. There’s a stimulating introduction and then (individually linked) pieces on self-reflexivity and The Stanley Parable, 2013; 8-Bit Cinema‘s versions of Hollywood blockbusters; Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation as applied to Playstation 2 games; theme parks in videogames; Los Angeles and LA Noire, 2011; and Gotham City and the Batman: Arkham series (above). And, although you’re probably among the half million viewers of this on Youtube, to pique your interest here’s 8-Bit Cinema‘s adaptation of Titanic:
Or, a post in three chapters. I have been in Brisbane for just about a week now, and I think it’s fair to say that, despite the weather having been so-so, I’m a little bit in love with the city. Built on either side of the Brisbane river, it feels human and humane. I’m a big fan of the sweeping riverside paths that divide bikeways from pedestrians. And I’m enormously enthusiastic about the vaporetto-like council-operated CityCat water buses that speed from landing stage to landing stage. Plus, there’s free wi-fi right across downtown. I was invited here by the University of Queensland, and that’s the focus of chapter 2 below, followed by a strange – and I hope entertaining – tale of my day off yesterday in chapter 3. But first, a mention of the city’s two exceptional art galleries. read more »
Among many other excellent activities, my friend and colleague Luke McKernan, who is Lead Curator, News and Moving Image at the British Library, curates the invaluable Picturegoing website. As the site succinctly explains, ‘Picturegoing is an ongoing survey reproducing eyewitness testimony of viewing pictures, from the seventeenth century to the present day.’
Many of the entries, which are drawn from diaries, letters, memoirs and more, feature people bearing witness to watching films. But from time to time Luke unearths a fragment written by someone who has just watched television. As he has with his most recent post, ‘”Gerald Cock Presents” – Review of Television Programmes’, written by Kenneth Baily and published in The Era on 14 October 1936. Reading it, I felt much as I imagine a historian of the early modern world might feel when generously offered an unknown incunabulum. Suddenly and excitingly, a fragment of the past was illuminated for the first time. read more »
Posted from down under in Brisbane (and with little sense of what timezone I’m in – hence the change of title), today’s list of links points to articles that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as usual to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• Suspended at a junction in time: Australia, Silent Running, The Drowned World and the University of Queensland: I arrived in Brisbane yesterday to give a class and a memorial lecture on Tuesday and another class the following day (further details here); which is all the excuse I need to link to this wonderfully allusive 2007 post by architect and urbanist Dan Hill that reflects on the environment of the campus and celebrates especially the architecture of James Birrell.
• Short cuts: also, on the architecture and the future (at least as it was in 1969), this is Jonathan Meades in the latest LRB…
• Estuarial towns are an architectural utopia, says Jonathan Meades: … and in the current Spectator, Meades on Medway modernism and more; the image above is one of the Maunsell Forts at Red Sands near Whitstable; the Forts were built during World War Two as mountings for anti-aircraft guns.
If you’re even a semi-regular reader of this blog you will know that I am fascinated by early television, and especially by television before World War Two. What a delight then to discover online an open access issue of the Journal of e-Media Studies from Dartmouth College dedicated to ‘Early Television Methodologies’. As editor Doron Galili explains,
Rather than defining “early television” strictly chronologically, the issue takes a page from the book of early cinema studies and considers “early” as the period in television history that preceded the establishment, codification, and standardization of what became the dominant media practices of broadcast television.
Each of the six contributions to the issue is predominantly concerned with the history of television in the USA – and it’s fair to say that in general the literature on the subject is more extensive in the States than it is here. But there’s lots for anyone interested in the topic to consider, even if the undoubted highlight is ‘Television in the Cinema Before 1939: An International Annotated Database, with an Introduction by Richard Koszarski’. read more »