A time there was when I would post a list of links on a Sunday morning, but over the past week I have been experimenting with a new approach by which I highlight just three things each day. Even collectively, these easier to compile than the old Sunday links, and maybe easier to consume. Regularity and consistency, however, are essential for anything like this, so let’s see if I can keep the idea going for longer than this first week. Today’s choices are:
• The Grantland Q&A – Errol Morris: Alex Pappademas interviews the documentary maker at length: ‘I’ve often said that my work is the perfect blend of the prurient and the pedantic.’
• Screening Surveillance: a substantial video essay by Steve Anderson focussing on surveillance in Hollywood movies, including 1984 (1984); this is published by the excellent online journal [in]Transition, and is discussed both its maker and by Kevin B. Lee here.
• Video Essay – Walerian Borowczyk: an introduction by Violet Lucca to the strange, sexual world of the Polish filmmaker, tied to Obscure Pleasures: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk which has just closed at Lincoln Center.
(Go here for a note about why I have started to post in this way.)
• Tom Cruise’s 10 greatest movie stunts: fascinating Vulture article in which stuntman Randy Butcher talks Bilge Ebiri through moments of the Mission Impossible series and more, including this sequence:
• Georges Perec’s lost novel: by the French’s author’s translator and biographer, David Bellos, for the New York Review of Books.
• The master writer of the city: Janet Malcolm for The New York Review of Books is simply wonderful on New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. Above, Mitchell outside Sloppy Louie’s restaurant with Louis Morino, the subject of the writer’s 1952 New Yorker profile ‘Up in the Old Hotel’; credit: Therese Mitchell/Estate of Joseph Mitchell.
• Hakanai de Adrien M / Claire B: this is a truly remarkable dance and digital imaging work; background, an interview and additional images from Jordan Backhus at The Creators Project here.
(Go here for a note about why I have started to post in this way.)
• 100 Voices That made the BBC – Elections: a glorious archive site about the televising of elections from the BBC and the University of Sussex (kudos to David Hendy) which makes extensive use of the Corporation’s oral history interviews. (The BBC image above is the studio at Alexandra Palace during the 1950 television coverage.)
A time there was when I used to post here regularly, including on each Sunday a host of links. In recent months I have fallen out of the habit. You’ve been so busy with other things, I tell myself. You’ve been writing in so many other contexts, I use as an excuse. But I know that @Illuminations has taken much of my focus, and my recommendations tend to go there rather than here. At the same time I like the relative (with much stress) permanence of a blog, when compared with the total transience of Twitter. So I am going to try a different tack, and to post frequently – and every day if I can – just a trio of things that have engaged me or interested or infuriated me. Sometimes they will be linked, oftentimes they won’t. Make of them what you will.
Unlikely as it may seem, read of the week may be Reeves Wiedeman’s article for Popular Mechanics about how 300,000+ copies of The New York Times reach the streets every day. Below is a selection of other pieces to engage me over the past week, with the usual thanks and apologies to those I follow on Twitter and others who alerted me to some of them.
• My own life: Oliver Sachs on learning that he has terminal cancer, from The New York Times (the leadline is courtesy of David Hume):
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. read more »
Interesting things from the past week and more, with sincere thanks as well as apologies to those who pointed me towards some of them, and who I have failed to acknowledge below.
Here’s a piece I wrote for the new issue of Picturehouse Recommends about the forthcoming cinema broadcasts of the RSC’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won on, respectively 11 February and 4 March. Picturehouse Recommends can be found at Picturehouse cinemas and is mailed to members. (And I freelance as Director, Screen Productions, for the RSC and produce the cinema broadcast.)
After the forthcoming Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema showings of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won in February and March, the Royal Shakespeare Company will be one-sixth of the way through their plan to screen all 36 of the Shakespeare plays included in the famous 1623 edition known as the First Folio.
Except that not one of the two hundred-plus surviving copies of that most precious of books features a play called Love’s Labour’s Won. Mentioned in a 1598 survey of English literature and listed by a bookseller in 1603, Love’s Labour’s Won is the most famous of the many ‘lost’ plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. No text with this title has ever been found, but RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran is among those tantalised by the idea of a play that might be the sequel to the sparkling youthful comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost. read more »
