Sunday links
Let’s do without any Brexit-linked links this week, shall we? Pretend that nothing’s happened, and then perhaps this catastrophe will go away. And in the meantime take a look at these bits and pieces that I have found interesting the past seven days. Thanks as always 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.
• Picturing performance – Theatre to Cinema comes to the web: David Bordwell on a significant (and hugely welcome) online edition of Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’ 1997 book about performance and early cinema.
• TCM diary – old men, new westerns: for Film Comment Steven Mears is very good on little-known westerns from the early ’70s directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Blake Edwards and John Huston.
• Persistence of vision – the cinema of Theodoros Angelopoulos: for Mubi.com Jeremy Carr offers an overview of the great Greek director’s work, including Landscape in the Mist, 1988 (from which the image above is taken).
• Looking for Mushrooms, 1959-67/1996: here until 14 July, courtesy of MoMA, watch Bruce Conner’s trippy Mexican travelogue in its full 14-minute glory.
• Shakespeare and awkward teenagers: a rich post by Luke McKernan on web series that for the past few years have been redefining Shakespeare adaptations for young, modern-day audiences; as Luke says,
This is a new form of Shakespearean production, and it needs to be championed. It is fresh, illuminating and relevant. It fits the temper of the times through its use of online media and through its special connection with a young audience. It makes a TV production such as The Hollow Crown look safely conventional, and the social media ambitions of the RSC’s Midsummer Night’s Dreaming feel ham-fisted.
And here’s the trailer for one of the series Luke highlights, Nothing Much to Do from The Candle Wasters:
• Stories in abstraction – an interview with Mary Heilmann: Hazel Rowland for Apollo speaks with the American painter whose vibrant work is currently on show at the Whitechapel Gallery.
• Surf Art – a brief history of surfing design and culture: Alex Bigman for 99 Designs on a little-recognised genre of visual art.
• The Artist Project – Nan Goldin on Julia Margaret Cameron: last week I highlighted Eric Fischl’s contribution to this series from The Met, and here’s a contemporary photographer on a (perhaps unlikely) Victorian inspiration.
• Exit interview – Sreenivasan on his time at the Met, crowdsourcing his future: Carlett Spike for Columbia Journalism Review talks with the Met’s former Chief Digital Officer, who pioneered The Artist Project and was ‘let go’ by the institution at the end of last month.
• Terrace Wires – Ron Arad RA: behind-the-scenes video about the installation of the new public art work at St Pancras station.
• Between the Guelfs and Ghibellines: escape to the early 14th century with this engaging London Review of Books review by Tim Parks of Marco Santagata’s Dante: The Story of His Life.
• How guns became an object of desire: at TLS Stephen Wertheim reviews Pamela Haag’s The Gunning of America.
• Arnold Wesker’s bid to build a new Jerusalem: David Herman on the playwright for Standpoint.
• A very singular girl: Lorrie Moore for New York Review of Books on Helen Gurley Brown and the ‘modern single woman’.
• Erasing the pop-culture scholar, one click at a time: interesting article about journalism and the humanities by Amanda Ann Klein and Kristen Warner for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
• The cello: terrific short film with projection mapping created by 59 Productions – if only the BBC’s embedding opportunity wasn’t quite so ugly…
• Data mining reveals the six basic emotional arcs of storytelling: a fascinating article about the analysis of narrative from MIT Technology Review.
• Twitter showcases live streaming capabilities with Wimbledon coverage: a little-noticed experiment this year may be a herald of momentous things to come, by Jordan Valinsky for Digiday.
• Sensploration: a surprising and beautifully made video with Charles Spence
Professor of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, about the the interplay of various sensorial inputs.
Charles Spence – Sensploration (FoST 2016) from Future Of StoryTelling on Vimeo.
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