No articles by me to promote here, wanted to highlight some stuff to read if you’re at home doing the right thing with a surfeit of time and don’t mind looking at a screen, emphasis on free entertainment not on super traditional channels. May we all be relaxed enough when the time comes to do what is called for…
Vogue Italia archive:
Vogue Italy put its whole archive online through mid-June (promo code VARCHIVE4YOU). Some ah beautiful ah stuff in ah there ah, entire magazines’ worth of ads and editorials, searches by designer, photographer, brand, model etc. The archive is in English and Italian. The nice thing about an entire archive being available is it doesn’t suffer from individual selection bias. There are a lot of really good Instagram fashion archive pages, but they’re severely and necessarily incomplete. Everything that goes up there is whatever the person in charge of that account liked enough, or thought was important enough, to post. Much of the time the people running these things have good taste but Instagram is built to be selective and not exhaustive. At best it’s a cherry-picking mechanism, which is not good enough if you like details and surprises. It’s great, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not good enough. If you want the true measure of what was happening in this field in 2001 or 1997 or 1979, Il Vogue Archive will give you the most complete look; whatever biases exist in this archive are of the steamroller variety and were baked into the time of publishing. Which is a nice corrective to an extra distortion appended years later on a third platform(1) and one that’s worth inhaling.
British Film Institute’s greatest films list:
The BFI put up its 2012 poll of the best films ever, voted on by critics, archivists, programmers, directors. There’s been a poll every decade for the past half-century, usually Citizen Kane won. This poll contains discrete info for every film, director and writer: who voted for each of the top 100 and what films everyone voted for. The bold-faced names—Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, Gregg Araki, Joanna Hogg, Monte Hellman, Abel Ferrara—weigh in and Ebert has Tree of Life on his list. Mann’s movies are all like, from the 1920s and Avatar, Hogg was the only director to vote for Taipei Story, etc. It’s almost an overload: hey, who put Yi Yi in their top 10? Some lists are full of deep cuts and some aren’t. Michael Mann writes about his favorite films … what a gift. Clicking around on this thing leads to dead links, so if you land on a film without votes on it, append /sightandsoundpoll2012 to the URL to get what you need.
Various Bill Cunningham archives:
This blog put up a number of 1980s Bill Cunningham magazine pieces, from the old Details mostly, up, years ago, and they’re still up. Many of the photo spreads are very beautiful, all are informative, lots have direct relevance. Severely incomplete uploading but so good it doesn’t matter. Worth digging around the whole site, not just the Cunningham stuff. Cunningham’s work on here feels like something; so much of what we’ve read in the past decade was about him and not what he did. Rightly so, but why not more of both. His biweekly spreads are found on Times Machine but not without mucho work and sometimes the photos are too generated to make anything out. So this is nice.
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/bill-cunningham-details-march-1988.html
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/bill-cunningham-details-november-1982.html
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/bill-cunningham-details-october-1987.html
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/bill-cunningham-details-issue-1-june.html
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/bill-cunningham-details-march-1989.html
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/bill-cunningham-details-march-1990.html
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/details-october-1988.html
http://november-books.blogspot.com/2014/02/bill-cunningham-details-march-1988.html
Scaruffi.com:
The New York Times called this website the greatest of all time (in 2006) and I don’t think it is (probably ebay.com) but it’s closer to the top than the bottom. Scaruffi (Piero) is Italian, lives in the Bay Area and doesn’t make money off his site, which trades in knowledge but mostly in record reviews, covering chamber music to plain rock to some types of death metal and electronic music, but neither goregrind nor Armando. Some reviews are in Italian. (He says the site takes up all his time and he does software consulting on the side.) I like to scroll by genre and pick names from genre histories to listen to or fisk his top 100s (I seem to like about half of what I jam). It’s also good to use his website parameters to search for a band or composer. Scaruffi’s taste has its limits but the sample size is so big you can find what you like in his lists and adjust accordingly(2). His site is really the only consistent and broad archive of music writing out there besides gramophone.co.uk’s opera recording ratings. A fine starting place.
Newsletters I like:
Why not support other newsletters? Here are some of my favorites.
https://nograssintheclouds.substack.com/ - great way to keep up with European soccer, thanks to its analytical bent. Sentences within abuse and elevate English, sometimes both. Free and paid, a few times a week.
https://streaktalkjayhawk.substack.com/ - all Kansas basketball, wildly informative, brisk and light. I wish every college program was covered in this way. A nice antidote to weird churched-up college coverage. Is Texas a basketball school? Free and paid, a few times a week.
https://miguelrivera.substack.com/ - weekly intellectual coverage of topics high and low every Monday: sneakers, short-sleeve down shirts, manga, television, bad movies, rap music, minor and major works by Lacan. The result is a dynamic in which the cultural peloton is discussed at eye level. There aren’t many incentives to think and write like this, so there aren’t many newsletters like this. For me it’s a must-read. Free and paid.
Non fiction I like:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/atomic-john
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/06/marathon-man
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1948/01/death-pig/309203/
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/kubrick-199908
https://www.t-nation.com/training/13064-pull-ups-in-5-months
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/05/06/an-unsimple-heart
http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/05/31/reviews/980531.31jamest.html
https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=116879421&page=1
Thanks for reading, be safe.
Snake
(1) many of these archival IGs are really good
(2) he likes Kyuss more than Impetigo…