NB: much of his best work isn’t on streaming services but can be very affordably acquired. ‘Mannenberg...’ is included in full on ‘Voice Of Africa’, currently available on Discogs for £6 including shipping. Equally affordable is ‘Cape Town Songs’, which compiles the cream of the Enja recordings.

Lovely essay on the late Abdullah Ibrahim. ‘Mannenberg’ is a great place to start if you’re interested in what American jazz can sound like when grafted onto Cape & Jo’burg rhythms, but the gorgeous work he made for Enja from 1979–97 is sorely underrated – ‘Toi-Toi’, ‘Zimbabwe’, ‘Pule (Rain)’...

I have waited approximately 20 years for this screening 🥲

Throwback to when a TV station in Iceland accidentally aired an episode of Teletubbies with subtitles from the Sopranos 👌🏼

I'm a couple of days late for Miles Davis' centenary, but a note to remind you that his score for Lift to the Scaffold/Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Louis Malle, 1958) is one of the greatest film soundtracks ever www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXWs...

For anyone who, like me, was an avid reader of the Hardy Boys books as a child, this recent article – about the successive waves of sanitisation and politicisation that have buffeted the series over the last century – is thoroughly absorbing

Good to know stot is another term for pronk

Last year I visited Tallinn and Tartu to write about the Estonian modernist painter Konrad Mägi, now the subject of a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Worth noting that the Estonian National Museum and Kumu Art Museum are object lessons in museum-making

‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ is one of my favourite films of the last 10 years, and though the follow-up is more scattershot it has its rewards. Some thoughts below

One of the very best things I saw last year; devastating stuff. Great to see so many top-tier neo-noirs getting rereleases after decades of neglect. Despairing films for despairing times

‘What is described as abundant storage space is really a set of high-security vaults. We fill them with our memories and then we throw away the keys, or someone else does.’ A fascinating read for fans of Chris Marker

So much fun, I re-subscribed.

Gorgeous! Do read.

He coulda been one hell of a qawwali singer

This is not a painting. It is made entirely of wood, its surface flat. A detail from the 15th-century "Studiolo Gubbio", one of the finest examples of intarsia, the masterful art of fitting together pieces of wood to make images: publicdomainreview.org/essay/e...

Some months ago, ahead of ‘The Phoenician Scheme’, I had a long chat with Wes Anderson about billionaires, Buñuel, Benicio del Toro and the nature of patronage. That interview is now online

The hideous presentation is a given by now, but it’s sadder that among its many vast genre blindspots, Spotify doesn’t seem to know the difference between calypso and soca

The stage was his great love, but Tatsuya Nakadai gave some of the most vivid screen performances of the 20th century. His Kurosawa collabs are indelible but ‘The Human Condition’, in which he embodies an attrition of the human spirit over several years and 10 hours, might be his masterpiece

“A Long Winter” is the last and longest story in Colm Toibín’s excellent collection ‘Mothers and Sons’; where most of the stories are set in Ireland, this one memorably decamps to Catalonia and ups the psychological ante. Looking forward to seeing what Andrew Haigh does with it

Very much enjoyed speaking to Kelly Reichardt about her favourite museums, the first artwork to rock her world and the joys of filming an art heist

The prolific singer-songwriter Sonny Curtis died on Friday at age 88. Curtis had performed with Buddy Holly, opened for Elvis Presley and written hits like “I Fought the Law,” “Walk Right Back” and “Love Is All Around” — the theme song for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which he also sang.

That Supertramp was a great band is one of my most unfashionable opinions. Hodgson may have sung the best-known songs but Davies’s solo here – backed by an incredibly tight band, sans Hodgson – is a high point of live rock piano

Napoleon was born #onthisday in 1769. After the collapse of his empire in 1815, “le petit caporal” was imprisoned on St Helena, and while there started learning English. One resident of the island called his English “the oddest in the world” — publicdomainreview.org/collection/n... #otd

have sensed some confusion re: the origins of stomp clap that i'm all too happy to clear up maxread.substack.com/i/170106944/...

If you’re London-based and have no plans tomorrow, the endlessly beguiling mystery epic ‘Trenque Lauquen’ is screening at the ICA and I cannot recommend it enough. I wrote about it here

This was a daunting task, but I had a great time unpicking how Kubrick borrowed from 18th-century art to make one of the most beautiful films ever made.

Beautifully written piece.

Fun fact of the day: Mr. T's pastor is called Eric Clopton

Exactly the kind of precision I want from my weather forecasts

‘Scenes from a Repatriation’ at the Royal Court is invigorating stuff. I spoke to its writer, Joel Tan, about how statues embody power, how art can play in spaces where hard politics cannot, and how China’s attitudes to its own historic artefacts have changed www.apollo-magazine.com/joel-tan-sce...

Interviewed Wes Anderson for the magazine; chatted about billionaires, Buñuel and Benicio del Toro. Goodies aplenty in this issue www.mmslondon.co.uk/shop/p/sight...

new Pynchon novel!!!! about a 1930s private eye!!!! named Hicks McTaggart!!!!

Saw an accidentally perfect double-bill last night: ‘Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’ and ‘The End’. Both single-location movies; both about the lies we can so easily tell ourselves as individuals and communities; both sorely under-appreciated on release.

“Sister Midnight is an attempt, first and foremost, to channel its protagonist’s wild sensibilities’ @arjsaj.bsky.social reviews Karan Kandhari’s darkly funny debut feature about an unhappily married Mumbai woman whose life takes a surreal turn. In cinemas now. www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-so...

Was thrilled to contribute an article to the Blu-ray booklet of one of last year’s most beautiful films. Thoroughly worth seeing if you missed it on the big screen

I can count on one finger the bands who’ve made two scene-defining albums, disbanded, and reunited over 32 years later to deliver their greatest LP – which was also their first to entirely comprise originals. ‘Take a good look at my good looks’ indeed: how many frontmen are so witty about mortality?

Watched ‘Women in Love’ and ‘Nosferatu’ (2024) on consecutive nights and in several places the latter felt strangely like a remake/remodel of the former

Ugh, Piero della Francesca sliding into my DMs again with his unsolicited diptychs.

Tomasi di Lampedusa, menswear guy avant la lettre

Garth Hudson’s playing on this track transformed my teenage idea of what an organ could do; his solo here remains one of my all-time favourites on any instrument. Whenever I think of the Band it’s always his face I picture first. Guess he had to go sometime youtu.be/3ozaFzDrTwU

One of the most Indian things to have happened in recent years is a ‘personal emergency’ (a shortage of idlis) leading to a revolution in idli technology

Enjoying the meta-title gag (hat-tip to the BFI’s Patrick Fahy) almost as much as I enjoyed writing this review

Gutted that I’ll be away for the Michael Snow season at the ICA, which includes 16mm screenings of ‘Wavelength’, ‘La Région Centrale’ and ‘*Corpus Callosum’. A very heady weekend ica.art/films/in-foc...

‘As a genre, floral still lifes may seem decorative, harmless, even staid. But in the right hands, they can be rife with mischief, trickery and sleight of hand.’ Thoroughly enjoyed working on this piece about the phenomenal Rachel Ruysch; never going to see flower paintings the same way again

Incredible detail about the Russian hack of Clinton’s 2016 election campaign www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Nominative determinism at its finest

I can’t be the only one who briefly thought Bashar al-Assad had a copy of Orlando in his DVD collection

For the new issue, enjoyed reviewing ‘A Real Pain’ and writing a run-down of the films to look forward to in 2025: Kelly Reichardt, Lynne Ramsay, Andersons Paul Thomas & Wes, Safdies Josh & Benny, Richard Linklater (x2), Spike Lee, Albert Serra, Julia Ducournau, Park Chanwook, Bi Gan...

”Long before Rome was a fratricidal twinkle in Romulus’s eye, this holy year followed ‘seven sabbaths of years’.“ Very entertaining piece by Agnes Crawford on the upcoming Vatican Jubilee year