Now Antonioni snuffs it.
Archive for July, 2007
30
Jul
Director Ingmar Bergman has died. A fairly harsh obituary, with digressions on a load of directors who are better and more worthy than him here.
18
Jul
Was in Drogheda yesterday for the opening of an exhibition celebrating 10 years of Upstate Theatre Project. My uncle Declan’s been involved since the beginning with the company, and has lots of interesting tales to tell about bringing experimental theatre on the road in the Northeast. I did an interview with him last week, so I may transcribe it and put it on the site in the next few days.
10
Jul
Last week I read Robert Sullivan‘s quite excellent The Meadowlands, a leisurely travel book which documents the author’s journeys around the badlands and swamplands and dumping grounds of New Jersey. The land is, essentially, poisoned, having functioned as a dump for the nearby city of New York for so long. There are some memorable boat journeys across acrid swamps, quests for the remnants of New York’s old Pennsylvania Station, which were dumped somewhere in the Meadowlands in the 1960s.
Last November, I took a train journey across New Jersey, crossing the Meadowlands as I went, and was struck by the beautiful – and scarred – landscape. It was reminiscent of East Anglia, but had been more obviously affected by the intensity of 20th Century industrialisation: dumping grounds everywhere, road and rail bridges jaggedly skirting the horizon. Sullivan’s book is a helpful and engaging explanation of how the place got that way. He’s also written a book about New York’s rat population, and a more recent book about travelling across the USA.
An NPR radio show about Sullivan here.
