I watched Caught on a Train again the other night. It is a work that completed transfixed me when I first saw it, back in 1980, and which I have watched many times since. Made on location, it tells of the train journey across Europe (from Ostend to Linz) taken by Peter, a young, uptightRead More
2017 – highlights of the year
I’ve been producing a series of posts on my personal cultural highlights from 2017. They have covered things online, music, books and artworks. Last in the series is a list of highlights. These are some of the one-off events or publications that particularly stood out for me in 2017, and against which 2018 will haveRead More
2017 – the year in art
Next up in this short series of posts on my cultural highlights for 2017 is art works. So, a minimum of words, letting a few favourite pictures seen this year speak for themselves, but naming the gallery where I saw each work (which is not necessarily its permanent home) as well as art and artist.
2017 – the year in books
I read many books in 2017; I drank many cups of coffee. There’s an argument for my reviewing the various coffee drinks I’ve had over the year, intertwined with the locations in which I enjoyed them (ah, the latte I had at that ice cream parlour in Helsinki back in May…), but on balance IRead More
2017 – the year in music
Next in this series of posts of my 2017 cultural highlights is music. This was the year in which sanity eventually overcame parsimony – I gave up on the mind-numbing adverts obligatory with a free Spotify account, and started paying for the service. It has been a marvellous year of discovery. What Spotify does, atRead More
2017 – the year online
Once again, it is time for some reviews of the year. As with last year, and the year before that, I’m publishing a series of posts on what caught my eye, or ear, over 2017. To begin with, here’s a listing of some of the websites, databases and web services which I spotted during theRead More
What are filmographies for?
What are filmographies for? That might seems to be an easy question to answer – a filmography is a list of films defined by a particular subject, much as a bibliography is a similarly defined list of books. But that says what a filmography is; it doesn’t say what it is for. It’s a questionRead More
Escalator over the hill
The first jazz record I ever bought was a triple-LP avant garde jazz opera. I was seventeen years old, and pretentious, but there were good things to be found among the shelves of second-hand discs handed in by impecunious hippies to Rock Bottom, Whitstable’s peerless record shop, in the late 1970s. It was in thatRead More
Found online # 5 – cinema websites
The latest in this occasional series of themed lists of online resources is on a subject of particular interest to me. I’ve spent a good deal of my latter years as a researcher investigating cinemas, and was involved some while ago in producing a database of pre-1914 film venues and businesses in London, still availableRead More
On not liking David Attenborough
The latest natural history series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, Blue Planet II, is being broadcast in the UK. As with so much else of the work associated with him, it has been given a rapturous reception by viewers and reviewers alike. This, they say, is the best of television. This is why we don’tRead More