Stanley Kubrick Season

More4, a UK digital TV channel owned by Channel 4, will show a season of Kubrick's films this month, as well as a new documentary about his archives on 15th July. (This is the third Kubrick season organised by Channel 4: the first was broadcast in June 1996, and the second in September 1999.)

The Art Of Time

Gaysorn, a shopping mall in downtown Bangkok, is hosting an exhibition titled The Art Of Time.

The exhibition is designed to promote Gaysorn's range of expensive watches, though of primary interest are works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, and other marquee-name artists.

The centrepiece is a bronze sculpture by Dali, a 3-D representation of his melting clock, a motif he first used in his 1931 painting The Persistence Of Memory. The sculpture was cast in 1980, in a limited edition of 500. (The massively over-rated Dali famously signed piles of reproductions, and even blank canvasses, each morning during breakfast, boasting that "I like to start the day by earning $20,000" and living up to the anagram, 'avida dollars', coined by Andre Breton.)

Most of the other works on display are also authorised limited editions. The 1963 Picasso linocut, La Dame A La Collerette, for example, was produced in an edition of fifty. The Dali clock sculpture is the only direct link to the exhibition's title, with the other works having no discernible connections.

The Art Of Time opened yesterday, and will close on 20th July.

youtube.com blocked by TOT

TOT, the Thai state-owned ISP, is currently blocking every youtube.com video. The website itself is unblocked, but any attempt to access a video results in a black screen and an apology: "We're sorry, this video is no longer available".

The videos are available, of course; the message is simply a smokescreen to hide the fact that they are being blocked. The message should be extended to: 'This video is no longer available to anyone unfortunate enough to have a TOT internet account'.

(The entire youtube.com site was blocked by all Thai ISPs in May last year, and finally unblocked last August.)

Metropolis: complete print discovered

A complete print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been discovered at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The full-length version, which premiered in 1927 at over three hours long, had previously been considered lost.

There have been various attempts to restore the film over the years, the most successful being the 2001 Murnau-Stiftung version, though even that superb edition represented only 75% of the original footage. Archivists had given up all hope of ever finding the missing 25%.

The complete print discovered in Buenos Aires is in 16mm, and, as the photographs indicate, its condition is not exactly pristine. However, the fact that a complete version exists, in any condition, is a revelation. A new Murnau-Stiftung restoration, incorporating the Buenos Aires footage, has already been initiated.

Wilders charged; Wilders acquitted

Today, Geert Wilders was charged with anti-Islamic blasphemy by a Jordanian court, following the online release of his inflammatory film Fitna earlier this year. Wilders faces three years in prison, and may be arrested by Interpol if he leaves his home country, the Netherlands. Yesterday, however, Dutch prosecutors acquitted Wilders of all domestic charges filed against him.

Xiao Yun photos: not on Thai sites

Thai webmasters have been warned by the police that they will face prosecution if they post pictures of Xiao Yun online. Xiao Yun is a young Chinese lady who has performed a sponsored online striptease to raise money for victims of the Chinese earthquake earlier this year. Many Thai websites (with the notable exceptions of telewizmall.com and madoo.com) have indeed refrained from posting the racier Xiao Yun images.

t-shirt leads to arrest

A teenager (whose name has not been revealed) has been arrested in Helensvale, Australia, for wearing an 'offensive' Cradle Of Filth t-shirt. Amazingly, in news reports about the case, Rev. Matthew Hunt of Helensvale Church is quoted in support of the arrest. I assure you that this Matthew Hunt is not me, because I actually own this t-shirt.

Subversion

Subversion, by Duncan Reekie is the first book to explore not only avant-garde art cinema and film-making collectives but the entire history of underground films, from the 1920s onwards. The book is a strange combination of dry theoretical discussion and personal polemic. Amos Vogel's Film As A Subversive Art, with its frame-enlargements from hundreds of obscure films, remains an essential study of underground cinema [and is probably my all-time favourite film book]; Subversion does not quite live up to its subtitle (The Definitive History Of Underground Cinema), but it does provide an opportunity to consider underground films within their historical contexts.

Deia Juan Carlos case resumes

Spain's National Court has resumed legal proceedings against the satirical magazine Deia, despite the case being dismissed in April. The magazine's controversial photomontage of King Juan Carlos was originally published in 2006. (In a parallel case, two El Jueves cartoonists are appealing against their convictions after they were fined 3,000 euros for their cartoon of Prince Filipe.)

appeal against Jyllands-Posten acquittal fails

An appeal by a group of Danish Muslims against Jyllands-Posten has been rejected. The appeal was launched following the dismissal of a lawsuit against the newspaper in 2006. Jyllands-Posten printed twelve Mohammed cartoons in 2005; the illustrations ignited an international controversy and were widely reproduced.

(A similar appeal, against the acquittal of French magazine Charlie Hebdo, also failed.)

textbook withdrawn for Mohammed cartoon

A new school textbook has been withdrawn from publication in Norway, as it reprints a Mohammed cartoon and makes an inaccurate claim about the Danish newspaper which originally printed it.

Henry Notaker's book, Eksistens, includes the infamous caricature of Mohammed drawn by Kurt Westergaard, which was originally printed in Jyllands-Posten alongside eleven other caricatures in 2005. Notaker writes that Jyllands-Posten also printed a cartoon of Mohammed with a pig's tail, though this is incorrect and no such illustration has been published.

Westergaard's cartoon came to symbolise the controversy surrounding the twelve original Jyllands-Posten drawings. It was removed from the online film Fitna in April, reprinted by European newspapers in February, and redrawn for the BBC last year.

Kaplan students

Here are some of my Kaplan students, whose course finished yesterday. [Thanks to Nuth for the photo.]

Decorative Arts

Decorative Arts: Style & Design From Classical To Contemporary is an illustrated guide to glassware, metalware, ceramics, furniture, and textiles. The author, Judith Miller, has written numerous antiques price-guides, though Decorative Arts is intended as an historical introduction.

Like Miller's other guides, Decorative Arts is published by Dorling Kindersley. I'm not particularly a fan of DK, as I explained last year. However, I can't argue with the 3,000 glossy illustrations in Decorative Arts, nor with its wide historical scope (from pre-history to the present day). There are more detailed decorative arts dictionaries and encyclopedias available, though Miller's book provides a fascinating overview of the subject.

Flat Earth News

Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, paints an unpleasant picture of contemporary journalism. It's subtitled An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood Distortion & Propaganda In The Global Media.

Davies criticises journalists for their reliance on wire stories and press-releases, and for never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. I'm pleased to say that the Daily Mail, a reactionary UK tabloid, is one of the main targets: Davies criticises the racist scaremongering and distortion in the Mail's immigration coverage.

Newspaper sensationalism and distortion is nothing new, of course. Press baron William Randolph Hearst (the model for Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane) once reputedly told a photographer: "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" (a line which was paraphrased in Kane). Famously, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a fictional newspaper editor explains: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".

Davies was initially inspired by the news media's unquestioning acceptance of government spin regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As a pretext for war, the UK and US governments both claimed that Saddam Hussain possessed WMDs and even nuclear weapons, warning that he could deploy them against the West at any time. The BBC reported that some of these claims were inserted at the request of UK spin doctors, and after the invasion of Iraq, the WMD threat was exposed as a gross exaggeration. (Alastair Campbell wrote about his involvement with this issue in his diary, published last year; Davies claims that Campbell's criticism of the errors in the BBC's coverage was a smokescreen to cover the errors in the government's dossiers.)

Flat Earth News is a necessary book, because media literacy is so crucial in a media-saturated culture. Life truly has few greater pleasures than a quality newspaper, though we should always read actively and, sometimes, skeptically.

if you don't stand up, you're mad!

Another person has been arrested for refusing to stand for the royal anthem at a Thai cinema. Rachapin Chancharoen has been accused of lese majeste by other members of the audience, in a case echoing that of Chotisak Oonsoong (who is facing the same charge following his refusal to stand at a cinema last year). Surely if someone chooses not to stand up, it should be nobody else's business?

Furthermore, the police have speculated that Rachapin may be mentally ill, as if a sane person would never refuse to stand. They should realise that standing up (or rather, sitting down) for your beliefs is not a sign of madness.