I’ve been writing about Burt Lancaster for a freelance project recently, and this illustration by French artist Blutch turned out to be an unlikely starting point.
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Burt Lancaster By Blutch.
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It’s been a while..
So.
I’ve not posted for a while.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood opens in the UK this week. It’s a breathtaking and wholly affecting piece of work, and one that focuses on Hollywood’s ability to “fix” the worlds ills. Here, the dream factory conjures the ultimate happy ending.
A real sense of denouement runs riot throughout the picture. Much has been made of the director’s impending retirement, which is set to follow in the wake of the release of his next, thus far unmade feature, but one can not help but think this would have been the ideal ending for the filmmakers oeuvre. It’s a culmination of everything that he’s ever done, and everything that he’s about.
Here he takes the idea of Hollywood saving the day to its logical ending, allowing the movies to veer away from its own greatest personal tragedy. The director has been here before: There are echoes of his manipulation of world history in Inglourious Basterds, but in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood it’s all the more personal to Tarantino the cinephile.
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Keith Haring, at the Tate, Liverpool.
I visited the Tate Liverpool’s Keith Haring exhibition this week, and took the attached photographs.
This is the first staging of Haring’s work on this scale in the UK. Given that his work is EVERYWHERE, from socks and film posters, to Lacoste polo shirts, I half expected to be underwhelmed, due to the nature of desensitisation that often comes with over saturation. Alas, I needn’t have worried, with the show a genuine triumph, and as great an advert for Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as ever I’ve seen. It’s a powerful, moving experience, and one that I would wholeheartedly recommend one takes in prior to the show closing in November.
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What is it?
I don’t know what this blog is. I’ve written about art and film for over ten years and have always needed a platform. Recently though, I have begun to look away from screens in general, spending less time on social media, and less time interacting with content online. Where once the smartphone distracted, books are back, and I’m spending more time sat in front of films rather than discussing them on twitter.
Professionally I’ve shifted quite dramatically in the last 18 months too, and, as is no doubt eminently relatable, work dominates much of my time. So drastic was the shift in professions that I’ve found myself engrossed in learning again, and am immersing myself in design-related theory when not in the office. I’ve shifted politically too (well, slid), and am now a bona-member of the Green Party.
This is all to say that I *think* this blog should be about all of the things that interest and excite me. It should be about design, culture, art and cinema, and of literature, fashion, interesting music and the world at large. It *should* be about progressive politics on an intimate level, as per my personal mantra in the otherwise overwhelming age of Donald Trump and Brexit. I’m quite the optimist, but the world feels in a really bad place at the minute, between the state of the environment and our blusterous political leaders: I’m trying to focus on the world from my doorstep, and affect change that way. I want this outlet to be an extension of all of those things.
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From Violent Saturday to One, Two, Three.
It is with a note of sadness that I acknowledge the passing in to out-of-print status of Eureka Entertainment’s home video release of Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday, which was the first such release of any real note that I worked on.
I think it’s really important that films like this remain accessible to all, so it’s a shame to see it’s run finally sell out. I don’t think there are any plans to reissue it.
Conversely, my latest home video release, a lavish new edition of Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three, was released this past Monday. The initial run comes equipped with a special slipcover. It can be found here.
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Notre Dame.
My wife and I were staying in the shadow of the Notre Dame Cathedral not one month ago.
The Latin Quarter is my favourite place on earth, and the Notre Dame is it’s grande entrance. It breaks my heart to see the images coming out of the city of light tonight, but Paris is a resilient city, and I know it will overcome this tragedy.
Below stand a selection of Henri Matisse’s paintings of Notre Dame Cathedral.
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Salinger at 100.
The year of the pig marks the centenary of J. D. Salinger.
Salinger is my favourite American writer. The Catcher In The Rye is *the* great novel about grief, and his short stories and novellas concerned with the Glass family is somehow both at once a sprawling and unassuming opus.
To mark the occasion Penguin have reissued the four Salinger books that make up his readily-available oeuvre, The Catcher In The Rye, Nine Stories (aka For Esme – With Love And Squalor), Franny And Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in handsome new editions based upon their initial iconic covers.
Salinger was famously very particular about how his work was presented, with the author eventually settling on a minimalist, text only approach to cover images. The famously reclusive author was said to be against artist impressions of his characters being submitted, instead choosing place the emphasis of creation on the combination of his words and the imagination of the reader.
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Reverse Face
When the return of seminal culture mag The Face was made official last week I noted on social media that “few things meant as much to me” as that particular magazine did back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The Face was a gateway to another world, and an accessible one at that. Sometimes I would recognise the people on the cover, other times not, but by the end of each issue I surely would. I came of age in the time of Harmony Korine, and Chloe Sevigny, and of Larry Clark and the return of New York garage soft-punk. I’m not ordinarily one for nostalgia, but I often long for the days when I would wander the aisles of Borders and pick up magazines like The Face, Select and Juxtapoz (incidentally, the last of those is the only one still running, and Borders is long gone too).
The return is nothing if not thrilling, not least due to the publisher’s plans to do a full-on print edition. I’m passionate and highly obsessive about magazine culture, and genuinely think that there is a place for publication like The Face in the contemporary landscape.
Paul Gorman, who, quite literally, wrote the book on The Face is in discussion on the return here.
I had to change the time on my wristwatch this morning. The clocks went forward, you see.
The Glass Family 