I wear several hats. Some hats I have worn and now discarded; some hats I have tried to discard but they just won’t slip away. I have found this in my online life, where I have produced blogs on silent films, Shakespeare, poetry, film and media, and the moving image work I do at theRead More
89. I remember the Young Generation. 90. I remember Betty Stöve, who played in the women’s singles, doubles and mixed doubles finals at Wimbledon in 1977, and lost them all. 91. I remember Casey Jones a-steamin’ and a-rollin’ / Casey Jones you never have to guess / When you hear the tootin’ of the whistleRead More
I was wandering past some of the unlovely new homes being built on the Rochester riverfront with their regimented, office-like brick walls, and the idea of a post on bricks came to mind. I thought of the many kinds of beautiful bricks walls, from Jacobean to modern times, that can be found in this town.Read More
Time to return to the modest indulgence of reviving musical obscurities from the punk and new wave era which can can be found on YouTube and not really anywhere else. Previous posts, Where’s the New Wave now? and It was easy, it was cheap – go and do it, have revived happy personal memories ofRead More
60. I remember Persia. 61. I remember David Bedford lapping other long-distance runners, a mustachioed superman. 62. I remember deciding that when older I would fly in a plane, reach out to grab a piece of a cloud, and then report back to a grateful world what it was made of. 63. I remember florins.Read More
My walking is of two kinds: one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I think I must be theRead More
I was in Stratford, London, the other day and went for a nostalgic look at the Olympic Park. You’re not allowed into the Park, of course, and a perimeter fence ensures that you keep your distance, but if you got to the top of the John Lewis store at the Westfield shopping centre, they haveRead More
I have been engrossed by Turner Prize-winning Jeremy Deller‘s video installation English Magic. Produced as part of, and as a synthesis of, his Venice Biennale exhibition of the same name, the British artist’s work is a playful and visually profound statement on the state of the nation (particularly the English nation). The video is aRead More
I was in the town of Lund in southern Sweden last week, attending a seminar on newsreels, which I’ll write about in due course. Lund is a pleasant, quiet town of around 100,000, almost half of which are students. I had half a day in which to mooch around the town, and so it wasRead More
I started out my career in moving images back in 1986, as a cataloguer. I worked at the National Film Archive (as it then was), describing the films and television programmes that we acquired by country, title, date, creators and performers. The films were indexed according to subject – we used the Universal Decimal ClassificationRead More