The Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: Posted late in the day, for which apologies, but here is the usuall miscellany of articles and audio that I have found engaing and enriching this week. The header image is John Constable’s ‘Cloud Study’, 1822, usually seen as part of the Courtauld collection but currently one of the many joys in Tate Britain’s glorious and deservedly popular Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals (until 12 April). I had the joy of a Member’s Hours viewing this weekend, which is really the way to see it, as otherwise it is rammed – and also sold out on many days.
• Stay classy: the most entertaining essay I read all week – Andrew O’Hagan for LRB [£; limited free access] about the Andrew formerly known as the Prince, and about Virginia Roberts Giuffre and the other victims of Epstein and his world.
• Balcon, Ealing and institutional identity: for his blog The Academic Bubble, Dion Georgiou writes about Ealing Studios, its head Michael Balcon, and post-war Britain.
• Outskirts with Boris Barnet dossier: the fine film journal Outskirts has made its first issue (there have been three so far) available as a free .pdf, with an exemplary group of articles about the Soviet director.
• The Savage Eye: showing for free until Friday at Le Cinema Club online is a recent restoration of this 1959 film by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick; I’ve long been curious about this work made at the margins of the LA industry, which the website describes, accurately, as ‘A recent divorcée wanders around LA in this lesser-known and biting modernist marvel.’ It doesn’t disappoint.
• The perverse, tender worlds of Paul Thomas Anderson: a very fine profile by David Denby for The New Yorker [£; limited free access].
• Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials: Sean Stranks – VFX Supervisor – DNEG: all of this is fairly strandard stuff these days, but I still love these discussions and reveals of digital effects in movies and television series; here, for Art of VFX, Sean Stranks talks about his work on the Netflix series, with illustrations in this short video:
• Dunghill theory: an exceptional blog post by John-Paul Stonard about Constable’s ‘The Leaping Horse’, currently on view at Tate Britain, and on the idea ‘that painting is a machine for transforming earth into light’.
• Archigram – how beautiful it was tomorrow: for Gagosian Quarterly, and on the occasion of the publication of the facsimile edition of Archigram magazine, published between 1961 and 1970, Dan Fox considers the ideas and legacy of the innovative and influential British architectural practice of the same name.
• No, misogyny isn’t a thing of the past: an important read by Leah Broad on the Songs of Sunrise blog:
There are many, many moves towards gender equity that should be celebrated. But it would be naive to ignore the bigger political picture when we’re considering longevity, especially in classical music, where the broad inclusion and acceptance of women has been so recent that it could be reversed with relative ease given an unfavourable political climate. It’s still unremarkable to run concerts with only men on the programme. Many musicians, let alone listeners, can’t name ten women composers. I regularly encounter surprise that women’s music is good.
• Jürgen Habermas dies at 96; one of postwar Germany’s most influential thinkers: Gal Beckerman marks the death of a profoundly influential thinker, for The New York Times [gift link]; see also Stuart Jeffries for the Guardian.
• Signifying absolutely nothing: just one Tr*mp essay this week, but an essential one, by Fintan O’Toole for The New York Review [£; limited free access]
• ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI: for the Guardian, Alice Speri speaks with some super-smart academics warning of the dangers of AI in higher education – and indeed everywhere else.
• And finally… how great is this? The ‘official lyric video’ of Bruce Springsteen singing Shane MacGowan’s ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’:
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