Found while browsing the British Museum archive of 2D art, a walrus head drawn by Albrecht Dürer:
It looks even better viewed large. I think that deserves to be as famous as his equally marvellous rhinoceros.
Category: Culture
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In The Mood For Love
I watched In The Mood For Love on DVD yesterday. It’s an absolutely gorgeous movie, set in Hong Kong in the 60s. One of the cover blurbs says it’s ‘like Brief Encounter remade by Kubrick and Scorsese’; I’m not sure about the Kubrick/Scorsese thing, but the comparison to Brief Encounter is very apt. It’s a film about two people not quite having an illicit relationship, or at least not quite having a sexual relationship.
Apart from anything else, it just looks great. it has a real period feel—not than I’m in a position to judge the accuracy of the details. It’s full of colour, but mainly a subdued palette, all greens and oranges and browns, off-whites, soft blues. And nearly all the action takes place in confined spaces, in apartment blocks, offices, alleys, noodle shops, and in artificial light. And it looks cramped: looking through it to find some screen grabs, it was striking how often objects intrude in the foreground.
Maggie Cheung drifts through the film looking exquisite and fragile in a sequence of beautiful cheongsams, and Tony Leung is is also extremely watchable, if not quite so fabulously attired. It’s moody and atmospheric and generally a pleasure to watch.
More from the ephemera collection at the British Library. You might also want to look at the Wonder of the Sea and American Jack, the Frog Man. Not to mention A.H. Minting, the Marvellous Spiral Ascensionist.
More fascinating stuff from the British Library collection; this poster is from 1892.
I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum yesterday, which is always worth a look.
Apart from the fact that there are loads of great photos, there’s the fun of deciding whether the judges have made the right decisions. I’m always a bit disappointed when they choose a portrait of a large charismatic mammal as the overall winner—a yawning hippo or a leopard or something—because much as I like those animals, I think it would be cool to see it won by a photograph of a shrimp or a toadstool or something. This year it’s an elephant (boo!) but it’s an abstracty kind of picture which I guess makes it a less obvious choice. And it is a good photo.
I paid slightly closer attention to what kit everyone was using this year; I was interested to see that the victory of digital is almost total. The only bastion of film was the ‘In Praise of Plants’ category; I guess if your subjects are stationary, it’s less important to be able to take thousands of shots and discard most of them without having to get them developed.
You can see all the pictures on the NHM website, so if you’re not going to pass through London before April, you might as well check them out. If you are considering going to the show, I’d suggest you don’t look at the website first, because the pictures look so much better seen large on lightboxes than as piddly little jpegs.
» the picture is of a Corn Bunting singing, with its breath forming rings in the dawn air. Which is cool. As you can see, it’s © Gastone Pivatelli.
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American Pastoral by Philip Roth
According to the blurb, this is Roth’s masterpiece. To which all I can say is… meh.
I don’t know. It’s a good book, a broad-sweep fat novel of the old school, but I wasn’t blown away by it. I don’t think Roth is much of a prose stylist, for a start. Perfectly competent, and sporadically rather better than that, but not one of the magicians.
And it’s just a bit… shouty. Perhaps that’s what the Guardian had in mind when they described it as ‘raging and elegiac’. He’s like the Bellman in the Hunting of the Snark: ‘what I tell you three times is true’. And he does say everything three times, hammering away at each point. Bang. Bang. Bang.
There may be a bit of trans-Atlantic disconnect going on here, but for whatever reason, this didn’t push my buttons.