I’m just back from Helsinki, a delightful city, easy to warm to and welcoming in every degree. I liked the even line of the buildings (Helsinki has no skyscrapers, and almost every building in the city centre whether new or old is four or five stories high, giving a great sense of harmony about theRead More
Playing dead
Last weekend I sat through six hours and thirty-seven minutes of of Les Misérables (France 1925), the longest film I’ve ever experienced at a single sitting. It was shown at the Barbican in London, two comfort breaks and a supper break along the way. Neil Brand provided the live piano score, as he had withRead More
The hired hand
If I’m asked what my eight desert island discs would be – and to date I have to admit the question has yet to be asked – then six of the choices are always changing, but two remain fixed. One is Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Time is Tight’ (which I’m going to make theRead More
Journeymen
Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance … It is so organized that at all times it is compelled to reproduce the central action which characterizes all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own; two individuals are pitted against eachRead More
Worlds and stages
To the Arcola Theatre in Hackney to see Tamburlaine, a play I’d not seen staged before (two plays, to be precise, since Christopher Marlowe wrote a sequel after part one had been a success). Studio 2 at the Arcola is a brick-walled basement that in other circumstances might have served well enough as a doubleRead More
What will survive of us is Chuck
Somewhere in the stars beyond, quite a few milliennia from now, long after our civilisation will have pushed its self-destruct button, one or other of the Voyager spacecraft will be detected by some advanced species. That species won’t be so advanced as to have developed its own self-destruct button, but it will be smart enoughRead More
New ways of seeing
Here’s what tomorrow looks like. At last week’s Google Cloud Next Conference held in San Francisco, Google announced a new API (application programme interface) entitled Cloud Video Intelligence. With such an application, developers will be able to detect objects within videos and make them word-searchable, as well as detecting scene changes and tagging objects accordingly.Read More
Found online # 4 – web archives
Next in this occasional series of handy resources to be found online is web archives. Too many of us think of the web as being its own archive. Everything is there, and if it is not there then it is not worth bothering about because there will always be something else like it that willRead More
Theatregoing
I’ve just launched a new website. It’s called Theatregoing, and it’s a companion to my Picturegoing site. The subject of Picturegoing is eyewitness accounts of going to see pictures. The subject of Theatregoing is eyewitness accounts of going to see a show. The aim of Theatregoing is to document the experience of going to theRead More
R.U.R.
According to the BBC’s handy calculator, Will a robot take your job?, there is a 38% chance of my being replaced by a robot at some point in the future. Out of a list of 366 jobs, based on research by Oxford University, a curator (or archivist) comes in at number 206 of jobs atRead More