Links for the weekend
So even if you’ve already seen this, it is worth another watch – it’s a brilliant marketing coup for Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum which re-opens this week after a decade of closure. A detail of the painting which it recreates – Rembrandt’s celebrated The Night Watch – is above. The image is courtesy of the museum’s new website with its wonderful Rijks Studio facility which has a generous framework for downloading and re-use.
I’m not sure I can top that with any of the week’s other links, which you will find below, and for which I am grateful to @brianveronica1, @twitsplosion, @annehelen, @DanBiddle, @markkrotov and @ColectivoPiloto, among others.
• The best writing on Roger Ebert and his legacy: the influential movie critic Roger Ebert died this week, and Alison Herman at Flavorwire has drawn together extracts and links from some of the many, many online tributes.
• A last gasp of stale air: for Moving Image Source, Noah Isenberg contributes a fascinating essay on Edgar G. Ulmer and his late noir film Murder is My Beat (1954).
• The dream life: Michael Chaiken at Film Comment is great on Spring Breakers.
• A brief history of Chinese independent films with Tony Rayns: a terrific interview by Jia Xu with the man who knows more about the subject than most (all?).
• Remembering history, reconstructing memory: Jon Gartenberg – like the Ulmer essay above, at Moving Image Source – on the found-footage films of Jean-Gabriel Périot.
• Extracting audio from pictures: a remarkable post from last summer by the Media Preservation Initiative at Indiana University Bloomington about recovering audio from a printed image of a gramophone record published in 1890.
• Reclaiming a Knicks title: more scrupulous media restoration, this time of the only videotapes recording Game 5 of the 1973 NBA finals, as reported by Richard Sandomir for The New York Times.
• Who are the people making TV shows available for illegal download and why do they do it?: Dustin Rowles at Uproxx tries to answer an intriguing question.
• TV will tear us apart – the future of political polarization in American media: Matt Novak at the Smithsonian’s great blog Paleofuture uncovers a remarkable 1969 Paul Baran prediction about politics and media.
• As the world stopped turning – Lynn Liccardo talks about soap operas (part one): Henry Jenkins’ Confessions of an Aca-Fan blog hosts a conversation between Sam Ford and Ms Liccardo, who is truly interesting on As the World Turns (which debuted in 1956) and other serialised television narratives; part two of the exchange is here.
• Channel 4’s Dogging Tales drives Twitter conversation: analysis of second-screen activity around Thursday’s doc from Kirsten Williams at SecondSync.
• When New York City tamed the feared gunslinger Bat Masterson: also from the Smithsonian, another tremendous slice of urban history from Gilbert King at Past Imperfect.
• Moby celebrates L.A. architecture: the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time project in Los Angeles is cranking up a new series of exhibitions and events, this time about modern architecture in and around the city from 1940 to 1990 – this is the engaging trailer with musician and DJ Moby…
• Southern California architecture – the missing early years from PSTP: … and this is an initial considered response from the L. A. Times‘ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne.
• Scientology – the story: Diane Johnson for The New York Review of Books reviews Lawrence Wright’s ‘evenhanded, chilling, and distinctly circumspect investigation’.
• The bad-boy brand: Lizzie Widdicombe in The New Yorker on Vice (the entertainment conglomerate, that is).
• If books then… what now? Books face the future: a stimulating post from Frank Rose at Deep Media on books as data, tech, links and, well, not books.
• The national digital public library is launched: an important piece about a fundamentally important project by Robert Darnton for NYR blog.
• Incident on 57th Street – Bruce Springsteen – Hanging Rock 2 – 31-03-2013 : on Twitter this week @rwilliams1947 described this as ‘the best Springsteen audience film I’ve seen in ages’ – what better recommendation could there be?
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