June 26, 2025 : Issue #93

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

This week, following a two-week sabbatical, visits with two (make that, three) old friends: first, Film magus Walter Murch, on the verge of the American release of his magnum opus, a preview chapter on the uncannily familiar workings of the spliceosome (you’ll see); and then, our Russian four-hand pianist pals, Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kolesnikov, return with an homage to David Hockney (by way of Stravinsky and Wagner) on the occasion of the British master’s big Paris retrospective.

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Catching my bearings

So: did anything happen while I was away (mainly lecturing, I mean “fishing,” in Guadalajara, Mexico, a truly swell big little town incidentally, enormous thanks to my hosts there). Wait, what!? What the….? Good god. No: seriously? Oy. On the other hand, hmmm. Well, no doubt more on all of that in the weeks ahead, but in the meantime, there’s this….

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The Main Event

ANOTHER VISIT WITH WALTER MURCH

Veterans of this Cabinet have already encountered the eminent film and sound editor Walter Murch (THX-1138, American Graffiti, the Godfather movies, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, Julia, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Cold Mountain, The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley, Particle Fever, Coup ’53, and on and on) by way of several of his myriad polymathic side-passions (including golden ratios of the face and screen and for that matter in human breastfeeding; some of the uncanny mathematics undergirding the Egyptian pyramids; the surprising midpoint between the biggest and tiniest dimensions in the universe; and more recently, John Stuart Mill on stupidity). Well, all of that’s not even the half of it, as readers will have occasion to marvel for themselves with the release in two weeks of the American edition of the eighty-two-year-old magus’s long-awaited, long-gestating, memoir-cum-manual-cum-manifesto magnum opus, Suddenly Something Clicked (due out from Faber and Faber on July 15th)

Nice bunch of blurbs there, and the British edition has already been racking up a brace of rave reviews of its own. But I’d suggest the jacket overplays the book’s merely cineaphilic interest, for with Murch, cinema and editing in particular (as rich and fascinating as he is on those themes) are only the launching-off points for far wider concerns, sometimes pretty much as wide as you can possibly imagine.

Case in point, the attached preview chapter, which Walter has graciously allowed us to sample here at the Cabinet, which begins

13: THE SPLICEOSOME
Our Lives Depend on Editing

We think of film editing as a quintessentially modern development, and in a narrow sense this is true. As Béla Balázs observed, ‘Cinema is the only art whose birthday is known to us.’ But as we have so often discovered, biology has an uncanny way of anticipating our inventions. Or rather, we have a way of eventually coming to the late realisation of something that biology developed long ago. In the case of the subject of this chapter, long, long ago.

It turns out that ‘film editing’ is going on inside every cell in your body – in fact, in every cell of every complex life form on Earth – and has been for perhaps two billion years.

And goes on from there. For the rest, see HERE. (Note that at the bottom of each spread, Murch has provided a fortune-cookie type aphorism to the left, and the name of its utterer to the right, part of a sequence of such entries that spans the entirety of the book, sometimes rhyming with the text above, sometimes subtly undercutting it, always in playful counterpoint; he also regularly provides QR Codes in the margins which afford smartphone access to film passages being discussed).

Incidentally, Cabineteers who happen to be in Los Angeles: on Tuesday evening, August 12th, I myself will be engaging Walter for a free and free-ranging public conversation about his new book at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. Tell your friends!

Furthermore, those among you curious as to the sort of woman who could enchant a man like Murch across sixty years of marriage—and more to the point, be able to put up with a character like him—might well delight in Harvesting History, the delicious memoir of the truly grand dame in question, Muriel (“Aggie”) Murch (nurse-midwife, community radio maven, organic farmer, matriarch), itself only just released earlier this year, see HERE.

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A-V ROOM

TSOY & KALESNIKOV CHANNEL DAVID HOCKNEY
IN PARIS

As part of his expert curation of a gorgeous late-life-summing retrospective of the British/Californian master David Hockney at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris (currently up, through the end of August), Sir Norman Rosenthal invited his friends (and ours, here at the Cabinet) the young London-based Russian four-hand piano (and life) partners Samson Tsoy and Pavel Kalesnikov to fashion a two-day concert, featuring the sort of visual/musical thematic braiding for which they are becoming increasingly renowned. The results were videorecorded (exceptionally well) and here is the first of those concerts, featuring music by Johann Strauss, Igor Stravinsky (the pair’s shatteringly propulsive rendition of The Rite of Spring),

John Adams and Richard Wagner, intercut, during the intermission, with a vividly engaging video of one Hockney’s own Wagner drives through the San Gabriel mountains.

To view/listen click HERE. Do give it a look but do so soon: the link may not be operative after the conclusion of the show.

Incidentally, Samson and Pavel will be in Residence at the Marfa Ballroom in Texas in September. If you are in any way able to, don’t miss that either.

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ANIMAL MITCHELL

Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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