Post-hols stripped-back Sunday links

26th July 2014

Welcome home – to sunshine, a much-neglected blog and more than 1,700 spam comments that need (rapid) reviewing. Here is a developing list of some of the things I’ve found interesting in the past few days since I have been back from a wonderful time in Italy.  With apologies for not giving credit where it’s due for the pieces I didn’t discover myself.

• NOW THEN: a new batch of brilliance from Adam Curtis.

• The down and dirty history of TMZ: a completely compelling profile of the above by Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed.

• The pervasive power of Rupert Murdoch: an extract from Hack Attack by Nick Davies, courtesy of the Guardian.

• ‘Hollywood Exiles in Europe’ – feeling alienated and anxious: Kenneth Turan for the Los Angeles Times on a UCLA season of movies made by those who driven away by the Red-baiting of the 1950s.

• Excerpt from Crying at the Movies: a section of Marion Sprengbether’s ‘film memoir’, published in 2002.

• Insomnia – unbearable lightness: Jonathan Romney for Criterion on the 1997 Norwegian thriller.

• Moonrise Kingdom – Wes in Wonderland: David Bordwell on current notions of auteurism as highlighted by Anderson’s film.

• Hollywood transformed: Tom Shone for the Financial Times on China and the contemporary cinema.

• Edinburgh 2014 – brain benders of the Black Box: Harriet Warman for Sight & Sound at the EFF showcase of experimental moving images.

• Andrew Dickson on Shakespeare in the Wild West: great podcast.

• The Nether “trailer”: a smart interactive experience for the show currently at the Royal Court.

• Mastersinger: Alex Ross profiles Joyce DiDonato for The New Yorker.

• The all-American expo that invaded Cold War Russia: Matt Novak at Paleo-future on the American National Exhibition in Moscow, July 1959.

• Prefab, post fab and just fab: John Grindrod visits Catford’s Excalibur Estate of post-war pre-fabs.

• No moral, no uplift, just a restless ‘click’: Holland Cotter at The New York Times on MoMA’s Garry Winogrand retrospective…

• In transit: … and a very fine Geoff Dyer piece on Winogrand from the London Review of Books archives.

• Musical gold: a fine Rebecca Mead New Yorker piece on investing in Stradivari.

• Brief lives: Luke McKernan on writing for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (which I’ve also been doing recently)

• At the crime scene: a remarkable London Review of Books essay by Adam Shatz on the sado-masochism (and more) of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

• What is the great American novel?: for TLS Sarah Graham reviews Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel.

• Big air: The New Yorker‘s Ben McGrath at the X Games.

• BBC R&D at the Commonwealth Games 2014: the future of broadcasting is here – or, at least, it’s in Glasgow.

• Beyond digitisation – new possibilities in digital art history: James Cuno for Iris at The Getty.

• Citizen Bezos: Steve Coll on Amazon for The New York Review of Books.

• Understanding the participatory culture of the web – an interview with Henry Jenkins: … by Trevor Owens at a Library of Congress blog.