Sunday links
An idiosyncratic selection of articles and more that have engaged me over the past few days, with the usual apologies for not including appropriate thanks to those who alerted me to some of them.
• Le Giornate del Cinema Muto – Pordenone post no 8: mille grazie to Pamela Hutchinson at Silent London for a delightful series of posts from the silent film festival over the past week; this final one has links to the other seven.
• The Barnsley disaster and the Engine-driver poet: a fascinating fragment of early film history from Luke McKernan.
• The Goddess – the revival of the classic from Chinese cinema’s golden age: a video from BFI about a major film screening this week in the London Film Festival.
• Shedding her skin: while we wait for Series 6 of The Good Wife with Juliana Margulies (above) – which is simply the best small-screen show of the past five years – here’s a particularly good New Yorker piece on the series and its context from Emily Nussbaum (but with spoilers).
• Find your beach: Zadie Smith is very good on New York, from the New York Review of Books.
• It’s official – AIs are now re-writing history: a weird auto-combination photo story, together with reflections on its implications, from Rob Smith.
• Grindr, dick pics and contemporary art’s new invasions of privacy: interesting article by Sian Cain for Guardian.
• Killing it – lessons in after-hours creativity from pop culture writer turned Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn: pretty much what it says in the headline, from Joe Berkowitz at Fast Create.
• The Woman in the Moon (The Dolphin’s Back) @ The Rose Playhouse, Bankside: Peter Kirwan for The Bardathon on James Wallace’s strong revival of John Lyly’s play.
• Grit & grace: a very fine piece of online branded content about the demands of ballet delivered by The New York Times on behalf of Cole Haan.
• Great beauty – Eugène Green on La Sapienza: Nick James for Sight & Sound talks with the maker of a film I’m longing to see.
• A farewell to Epcot’s Norway ride – how fake experiences shaped my life: Matt Novak at Paleofuture marks the closing of Maelstrom.
• Tetris the movie: can falling bricks really make it big where other video games failed?: Jenna Ng from the University of York at The Conversation.
• How Bill Gates thinks: the Microsoft man talks with author Steven Johnson, from The Atlantic.
• J. xx Drancy 13/8/42: Michael Wood in 2000 from the archives of the London Review of Books on Nobel literature prize-winner Patrick Modiano.
• Karl Miller’s grand style – John Sutherland remembers the late, great editor and academic: from New Statesman.
• The greatest ancient picture gallery: William Dalrymple writes rather wonderfully for the New York Review of Books about the Ajanta caves.
• The top ten fairytales: Marina Warner’s choice, via Guardian – what more do you want?
[…] “In the Public Hall, at Barnsley./The children went to view/The animated pictures,/As children love to do.” Luke McKernan recalls the horror of the 1908 Barnsley disaster, where 16 children attending a bargain-priced screening were crushed to death when the balcony was closed due to overcrowding. He also has some kind thoughts for George Gresswell, whose reproduced verses commemorating the tragedy might be doggerel, but recreate the events with memorable simplicity, “a quality that connects them with calypso or some reggae lyrics, passing on the stories of the hour in a memorable and shareable form.” Via John Wyver. […]