in Culture Digest | 13 OCT 17

Weekend Reading List

What Kathryn Bigelow erases when she rewrites history, the future of Chinatown and remembering Kim Wall: what to read this weekend

in Culture Digest | 13 OCT 17

Kathryn Bigelow, Detroit, 2017, film still. Courtesy: Annapurna Pictures

  • ‘Her extreme curiosity led her to see beauty everywhere – in her routine, but most importantly in what was different from it’: remembering the extraordinary journalist Kim Wall.
     
  • Over at frieze, Jennifer Higgie writes about the dizzying range of sonic and visual references that flood Blade Runner 2049, from reminders of John Martin’s 19th-century apocalypses and Tarkovsky’s heartbroken dystopias, to snatches of Prokofiev and Nabokov – 'signification swirls through these radioactive streets like a cyclone’.
     
  • ‘A graveyard for nearly three thousand souls as well as a commercial real estate opportunity’ – on Lynne Sagalyn’s story of the cutthroat politics behind the redevelopment of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, after the 9/11 attacks.
     
  • In Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, urban rebellion has been transformed into ‘race riot’ – an episode in which irrational violence and racial enmity rule – writes Mark Jay in Jacobin. In her entire oeuvre, ‘issues of political economy become, at best, footnotes'.
     
  • Ronan Farrow’s reporting for the New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein’s victims is devastating.
     
  • Don’t miss Andrew Marantz’s story of the birth of a white supremacist – how Mike Enoch went from progressive upbringing to prominent anti-Semite.
     
  • Finally, are Chinatowns obsolete? Madeleine Thien writes on the history behind these deeply politicized spaces, in which visions of Chineseness and local concerns always contend – but what is their future in the face of increasing gentrification and displacement?
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