To Bologna for a few days, mostly on film matters, but I also found time to visit the Joan Miró exhibition at the Palazzo Albergati. The seventeenth century building is one of those grand palaces dotted about the city whose pomp is now past, but whose pretensions and hauteur still linger on. It serves asRead More
Month: June 2017
Dylan’s jazz
I’d listen to a lot of jazz and bebop records, too. Records by George Russell or Johnny Cole, Red Garland, Don Byas, Roland Kirk, Gil Evans – Evans had recorded a rendition of “Ella Speed,” the Leadbelly song. I tried to discern melodies and structures. There were a lot of similarities between some kinds ofRead More
Endnotes
I have been reading Magic Moments by the literary critic John Sutherland. It is a memoir constructed around the books (and some films) that he experienced when young, viewed again from the perspective of its subject six decades later. It’s an ingenious way of constructing a biography, with each chapter devoted to the stories heRead More
Cinema contexts
Of all the ephemeral objects we build for ourselves in the digital world, among the most precious and at the greatest risk of disappearing are databases. Databases are organised and queryable collections of data. The larger ones, along with their cousin the content management system, govern our world and manage who we are, since theirRead More