103. Jack White on a Rietveld chair

2 March 2025

I.

Jack White embraced Utrecht completely when he performed at TivoliVredenburg this week. I was lucky enough to be at the second evening of his show, which he dedicated — as he wrote on Instagram — to Gerrit Rietveld.

That was underlined during the performance. Before long, an actual Rietveld chair (in red and blue) was lifted onto the stage. A replica from the Centraal Museum’s depot. White sat down and played guitar solos. He performed back to back the songs Little Bird, Apple Blossom, You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl), Hello Operator and Jumble, Jumble. These are all tracks from The White Stripes album De Stijl from 2000.

White’s love for the art movement to which Rietveld belonged is unmistakeable. Earlier that day he had visited the Rietveld Schröder House (as he did in 2002, when he was there with Meg White). “What a special day in Utrecht,” White writes on his Instagram page. “I got to admire the work of my idol Gerrit Rietveld in the depot of the Centraal Museum and the Rietveld Schröder House.”

Because of this, the show did not feel like an American artist making yet another stop in Utrecht. “Hard, driven and sublime, an unforgettable one-two between artist and host city,” Menno Pot noted aptly in de Volkskrant.

II.

The Brutalist is a long sit, but I was never bored by this character study of the celebrated architect Lászlo Tóth, who leaves Hungary to escape the Second World War. When he arrives by boat in the United States, the Statue of Liberty appears upside down on screen. You sense it immediately: the American Dream is already over before it has begun.

Tóth toils away, but eventually he is recognised. The fabulously wealthy Harrison Van Buren hires him to design an enormous building, in honour of his deceased mother. Around that project, all manner of mutual tensions and traumas play out.

I think it’s a beautiful film, one that perhaps tries to do a little too much and thereby nearly buckles under its own ambitions. With lesser actors the film probably wouldn’t have worked at all, but Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody elevate the story. The most important acting happens between the lines.

There is an intense scene in The Brutalist that reminded me of Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with Trump and Vance last week. The abuse of power. The kicking a man when he’s down. The humiliation. The placing of blame on the victim. “Why do you make such an easy target of yourself?” Van Buren asks in the film, when Tóth is at his lowest. “If you behave like a scrounger, living on handouts, a social parasite, how can you expect a different outcome? You have so much potential, but you waste it.”

In other words: you need me, without me you are nothing. We tolerate you and that’s why you’re still here. Trump told Zelensky this week that he was not in the right position to tell them anything. “Don’t tell us what we are going to feel. Only with us on your side do you have the right cards. You are gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with a Third World War.”

“Have you thanked us enough?”

III.

The Museum of All Things is a virtual museum, a labyrinth where you can wander endlessly. Developer Maya Claire has turned Wikipedia into a three-dimensional space where you can read articles and view images as if you were in an art gallery. Like clicking from one Wikipedia page to another, only here you do it virtually through a building. You can download the programme for free via itch.io.

The museum is generated automatically as you walk through it. Large Wikipedia pages fill enormous rooms with plenty of imagery on the walls, while other pages translate into hauntingly bare corridors. My walk started with nuclear weapons and led through ancient Japanese shogunates to shitposting and microUSB. This is what it feels like to physically wander through a rabbit hole.

“The museum is inspired by educational videos I watched as a child and the small spaces created by early CGI,” says the developer. “I wanted to revive the promise of the internet by making it a place of endless learning and exploration.” In the future she may add multiplayer support, other languages and media types such as audio and 3D models.

PS.

The 87-year-old Jane Fonda received a lifetime achievement award at the SAG Awards. She delivered a passionate speech to the assembled actors in the room, urging them above all to keep focusing on empathy, now that division reigns in the world. “While you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing, right? Thinking, Sebastian Stan and The Apprentice. Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or ‘woke’. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”

This is excellent. John Oliver spending half an hour going off about Facebook’s direction. He had me from the roast of Mark Zuckerberg’s new look: “You look like Eddie Redmayne cast in the role of Ice Cube.”

A game in which you wander quietly through stunning environments and take photographs along the way? It looks like Lushfoil Photography Sim was made specifically for me.

An app that requires you to provably touch grass (your camera is the evidence) before you’re allowed to doomscroll on your phone again. Touch grass for iOS.

The biggest bookshelf ever: a visualisation of 100 million books. Dizzying (and brilliant).

Actor Gene Hackman (95) has died, along with his wife Betsy Arakawa (63) and their dog. I think The Conversation is his finest film, but I’ll remember him now with a cheerful clip from The Royal Tenenbaums, in which he plays Royal taking his grandchildren out for a day of fun and mischief.

Dio is back after ten years with a new album. It took a while, but he had some things to figure out about himself. De VluGtlaan is a beautiful introspective work about growing up in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, without a father, at a school for children with behavioural difficulties.

Comics giants Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Joe Sacco (Palestine) together made three new pages for The Guardian about the war in Gaza. “Never again!.. And again… and again…”

On TikTok and Instagram, AI videos in which you experience a day through the eyes of people in antiquity are being viewed millions of times. You walk through filthy, plague-ridden streets in the Middle Ages and wake up in the Stone Age. These images are wildly inaccurate (and less innocent than you might think), as archaeologists told me for an article on NU.nl.

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