6th March 2014
I am reading a book that drips sex. Émile Zola’s The Kill, in Brian Nelson’s thrillingly good Oxford World’s Classics translation, is one of the most sensuous, sexy books that I think I’ve ever read. This may, I recognise, say more about my sheltered upbringing than the qualities of Zola’s 1872 novel, but I like to think not.
The Kill is the second of the French novelist’s great Rougon-Macquart cycle, but it’s not nearly as well-known as others in twenty-volume series, such as Nana (1880) or Germinal (1885). Given its compelling voluptuousness, this comparative obscurity is perhaps a surprise, although it is connected, I suspect, to the fact that Nelson’s recent translation into English is the first since 1895.
The scene is laid in the Paris of the Second Empire, mostly in the early 1860s, and the story relates the incestuous passion of the thirty-year-old society beauty Renée for her stepson Maxime. The third central character is the avaricious and unseeing Saccard, Renée’s husband and Maxime’s father, and the fourth is the urban environment undergoing the upheavals of Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding. It’s a book about capital and modernity, about the city and sex. And having started reading it via a Kindle app on my iPad, and finding that deeply unsatisfying, I am now devouring the handsome paperback that you see above. Which is tactile, elegant, hard-wearing, responsive, versatile and, in its own quiet way, sort of sexy.
I read a lot of things on my iPad. I read my subscription to The New Yorker. I read scripts and I read the Guardian website. I read academic books about film history and adapting Shakespeare for the screen. But I have definitively decided that the particular pleasure of reading a great classic novel is not to be had from an unyielding glass screen. I need the thoughts of Henry James and George Eliot and indeed Émile Zola to be laid out in distinctive type on particular paper. I want the dialogue and especially the descriptions at which Zola excels to be in the same place on a page when I return to them. And I have to be able to touch the words. I want them to be real.
It is important to me as I consume a novel that I can bend back – but not break – the spine. I delight at the way in which my reading just lightly soils the pages, so that I constantly have the sense of my progress through a volume. And I anticipate with pleasure that I will keep this volume on my shelves, where it will continue to carry the traces and the marks and the memories of my encounter with it. The reading of a great book is, and I think (or trust) always will be, supremely physical.
3rd March 2014
Until yesterday’s Guardian article by Gareth Rubin I regret to say that I had not heard of the artist Miriam Elia and her totally delightful website Learning with Miriam. I had, however, seen several of her smart art parodies of Ladybird Books popping up in my Twitter feed. My favourite was the one in which the cover illustration above is accompanied by a facing page of text that reads
There is nothing in the room.
Peter is confused.
Jane is confused.
Mummy is happy.
‘There is nothing in the room because God is dead,’ says Mummy.
‘Oh dear,’ says Peter.
Miriam produced 1,000 copies of her We go to the gallery book and was selling them for £20 each when the m’learned friends from Penguin Books descended and told her she was infringing their copyright. Now she is allowed only to sell enough copies to cover her initial costs and must then cease and desist from making us laugh and making us think and making the world just a little better with her art. What is even weirder, what she is doing may not infringe copyright in a month’s time – and it almost certainly would not be an infringement in the United States, Canada, France and elsewhere. read more »
1st March 2014
We have just completed a short film for Christie’s which has gone online this morning. The film showcases Turn Me On: European and Latin American Kinetic Art, 1948-1979, a private selling exhibition at Christie’s Mayfair until 7 April. More details are here along with an online version of the catalogue. It’s a really delightful and stimulating show – and entry is free at 103 New Bond Street, London W1S 1ST.
The film was produced and directed for Illuminations over the past five days by Linda Zuck, with Nicole Mandell as production assistant, Ian Serfontein as director of photography and Tor Kristoffersen as editor.
Image: Marina Apollonio, Dinamica Circolare 9B, 1969, on display at Turn Me On.
27th February 2014
The remarkable True Detective started on Sky Atlantic last Saturday, while in the States HBO has already aired the first six episodes of the opening series of eight. As a consequence, there has been plenty of time for the series to prompt a slew of critical writing – and it’s a selection of this that I highlight here. Anything that can stimulate this kind thoughtful engagement from such a variety of perspectives – including Jason Jacobs’ remarkable philosophical musings – has to be special. New viewers and readers might do well to begin with a trailer, of which this is the fourth that HBO released:
read more »
26th February 2014
On his blog Modern Art Notes the smart, provocative and always readable critic Tyler Green publishes The Monday Checklist, an invaluable weekly round-up of the visual arts. He notes new reviews, highlights Twitter and Tumblr feeds and draws attention to interesting print and digital publications. In this week’s post he links to the new online site 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated – and here I want simply to underscore Tyler Green’s recommendation and muse a bit on why I think the 1959 presentation is so interesting. First, here’s some background in the form of a film that accompanies 1959, but if you’ve never heard of Clyfford Still it might be worth reading the Wikipedia entry before watching:
read more »
25th February 2014
On Friday the Royal Shakespeare Company launched the trailer for their new productions of Henry IV Parts I and II:
Following November’s successful showing of Richard II, these new stagings will be broadcast in cinemas for Live from Stratford-upon-Avon on 14 May and 18 June in Britain, and then over the following months abroad. The broadcasts are produced by the RSC, as is the trailer, and not by Illuminations, but I am involved as the producer – and I thought it might be insteresting to share some notes about how the Henry IV trailer came together. read more »
23rd February 2014
3pm, and Screen 1 at Cineworld Wandsworth is perhaps one-sixth full. I am waiting for neither The Lego Movie nor Mr Peabody and Sherman – those cinemas have rather more people in them – but rather the ENO’s stand-out Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton (above) live from the Coliseum. ‘Twas but twenty months ago that ENO artistic director John Berry told The Stage that screening productions in cinemas ‘is of no interest to me. It is not a priority. It doesn’t create new audiences either… this obsession about putting work out into the cinema can distract from making amazing quality work.’ Yet here is the company in a new partnership to screen productions in cinemas with the rather anonymous altivemedia group. Now clearly, given my close association with RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon (which is in a similar space for theatre) I’m the last person to judge this first outing objectively. Even so, here are my brief thoughts on how they got on. read more »
21st February 2014
To the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the first public performance of Francis Beaumont’s 1607 The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Which, let it be said, is very funny, very finely played (including by Pauline McLynn and Phil Daniels, above) – and very long. Last night’s show came down after 3 hours and 20 minutes at 10.50pm. Some relief – for which, much thanks – was provided by short interludes at the end of Acts I, II and IV, with an additional 15-minute ‘privy break’ as a more conventional interval.
The 4-minute or so interludes, which feature music and a little comic dancing, allow one to stand and stretch, which really is a necessity, at least if you are sat in certain of the Playhouse’s seats. I was in Pit Row D (again – but I’ll learn), jammed between two strangers who during the opening hour and more engaged with me in a subtle and slightly distasteful turf tussle for leg-room. Cushions have been added since my first visit but there is still the sense that one is paying a significant chunk of change (£45 on a normal night) for a refined form of torture. Try to remember, you keep saying to yourself, the play’s the thing – and not cramp, bum-ache and the painful torsion necessary to turn one’s side-facing body towards the stage. read more »
20th February 2014
Short of living in the London of the early seventeenth century, this must be the best of times for those of us interested in early modern theatre beyond the Bard. Tonight I’m off to the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for their new production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle with Pauline McLynn and Phil Daniels. The Duchess of Malfi (above, with David Dawson and Gemma Arterton) has just closed there and The Malcontent is to come.
In Stratford-upon-Avon Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director Gregory Doran has committed The Swan to a comparable focus on the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. This year will see stagings of The Roaring Girl, Arden of Faversham, The White Devil and The Witch of Edmonton, together with The Shoemaker’s Holiday as a Christmas treat.
We now have major editions of the plays of Thomas Middleton and of Ben Jonson, each representing scholarly endeavour at the highest level. The Arden Early Modern Drama series is bringing us new editions of other significant works. And the new Collaborative Plays by ‘William Shakespeare & Others’, a gorgeous and glorious volume that – given that as a hardback it is currently available for just £21.25 – ought already to be gracing your bookshelves.
I have been disgracefully absent from the blog in recent days – journal articles, a keynote lecture, broadcast proposals and the making of the RSC trailer for Henry IV, Parts I and II (coming very soon) have taken up almost all of my time. By way of easing my way back in to regular posts, today’s contribution and a subsequent aim to bring together thoughts about and links for all of this exciting early modern drama activity. read more »
5th February 2014
For the past several years I have been delighted to contribute some classes to the MA course in Critical Writing in Art and Design at the Royal College of Art. With the course leader Professor David Crowley, the students and I explore examples of screen-based media about the visual arts, many of which are drawn from British television. So we look at recognised classics like Civilisation, Ways of Seeing and Pop Goes the Easel (see yesterday’s post) as well as perhaps less obvious programmes like State of the Art and A Bigger Splash. For the fourth of my classes I ask the students to present an example of web-based video that they find interesting, and today one of them contributed this trailer for REM, a documentary about the architect Rem Koolhaas, which is being made by his son Tomas (there’s an Arch Daily interview with him here, with further details about the project). It’s a terrific short film, surprising and beautiful and imaginative, and a very original way of engaging with the spaces of a building (which is the Casa da Musica, Porto, above in an image from OMA).
OFFICIAL TRAILER FOR ‘REM’ DOCUMENTARY from tomas koolhaas on Vimeo.
