1. UbuWeb, the least housebroken film school online
UbuWeb Film & Video remains one of the better arguments against cultural centralisation by committee. Avant-garde cinema, artists’ film, structural oddities, dead formats, old provocations — all arranged with the charming indifference of a site that never hired a brand consultant and therefore still has a pulse. If your visual diet has lately been reduced to prestige television and tasteful algorithmic mush, this is a useful corrective.
2. Cabinet, for people who prefer magazines with a nervous system
Cabinet’s back issues are still there, quietly demonstrating how a journal can move between hair, failure, objects, logistics, superstition, and obscure scholarship without becoming lifestyle paste. Browse by theme rather than by urgency. One of the few archives online where wandering remains more rewarding than searching, which already puts it several floors above most contemporary publishing.
3. David Rumsey, when maps recover their appetite
The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection now holds more than 147,000 maps and related images online, but the useful point is not the number. It is the method. Try the Random Browse, then the themed sets for Pictorial Maps or Space. Modern interfaces train us to go directly to the answer; old maps are better company when they are allowed to mislead us a little first.
Amsterdam: two reasons to leave the house
At Frascati, Urland’s Open Studio: Before The Story Starts runs on 22 and 23 May. It is positioned as a research presentation rather than a polished premiere: an immersive one-man theatre piece circling the liminal moment before a story begins, with help from Douglas Adams, Alan Watts, and the pleasant terror of unfinished meaning. Good. Too much theatre arrives lacquered and dead. Process still has blood in it.
On Sunday at BIMHUIS, Vadim Neselovskyi — Perseverantia brings piano and string trio into the same room, drawing on Eastern European folk lyricism, minimalism, and heavier modern textures. The suite was produced by John Zorn and recorded in Amsterdam with the Ysaÿe Trio. In other words: not background jazz for men who call their sofa an investment.
Enough. Watch one unruly film, read one magazine that still trusts digression, get lost in one improper atlas, and then go out before the weekend is handed over entirely to brunch upholstery and guided self-regard.