Nature Mort
Frame grabs from Preston Sturges’s comedy Sullivan’s Travels (1941). In it, privileged fluff film director John Lloyd Sullivan ‘Caliph Of Comedy’ (played by Joel McCrea) hits the road decked out in bespoke tramp garb to discover the true face of poverty. At first his studio bosses try to prevent him from putting his ‘assets’ at risk. After realising the PR gold potential of such a stunt they relent, but only with the proviso that he’s tailed by a special ‘Land Yacht’ containing scriptwriters, journalists, photographers and other Hollywood lackeys to document every single moment of Sullivan’s journey of discovery. This is a brief and simple sequence in the film, but I think it perfectly captures the relentless nature of Hollywood realism and the almost inevitable seeming failure of trying to escape from its conventions. Though this might be presented in ponderous, heavy handed and pessimistic terms, the sequence caricatures it well, making Sullivan’s escape attempts seem quite fun.
Largest water reservoir discovered in black hole.
The reservoir holds as much as 140 trillion oceans, or more than 4,000 times more than exists in the entire Milky Way. It exists as vapour spread across hundreds of light years.
While water has been found across much of the universe previously, this is interesting because of the fact this reservoir is 12 billion light years away, meaning that this water existed when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.
The Persuaders Documentation of installation at James Taylor Gallery.
