Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Six of the Best 266

Who will Mitt Romney choose as his running mate? To find the answer, National Public Radio advises us to keep a close eye on Wikipedia.

Normblog dissects a reaction by Jacqueline Rose in the Guardian - "of quite spectacular inanity" - to the murder of Shafilea Ahmed.

Clive James discusses his fellow Australian Robert Hughes, who died yesterday, in a 2007 piece from the New York Review of Books: "Among my generation of aesthetes, bohemians, proto-dropouts, and incipient eternal students at Sydney University in the late 1950s, Robert Hughes was the golden boy. Still drawing and painting in those days, he wrote mainly as a sideline, but his sideline ran rings around his contemporaries, and his good looks and coruscating enthusiasm seemed heaven-sent."

The Indian blogger Jabberwock contributes a thoughtful essay on one of my favourite films: "A Canterbury Tale may seem to be a film that believes strongly in divine blessings and redemption ... but even the irreligious mind should have no trouble appreciating what Canterbury comes to represent for each of these characters. It can be seen as a place where one comes to make peace with oneself, finding solace by recalling the struggles of other people who lived centuries ago – and thus momentarily becoming part of something larger (something that doesn’t have to be supernatural). Seen this way, the towering cathedral isn't so much a symbol of divinity but a venue for introspection and for the surfacing of finer feelings."

Open Culture has a video of Peter Greenaway's 1993 film Darwin: "Darwin is structured around 18 separate tableaux, each focusing on another chapter in the naturalist’s life, and each consisting of just one long uninterrupted shot. Other than the narrator’s voiceover, there is no dialogue."

Should you see your favourite 1960s band in 2012? ask Juli Weiner and Bruce Handy on Vanity Fair. Their answer, in the case of the Zombies, is yes.

No comments: