Recent Reading: Alexandria

by Lindsey Davis

I've been picking up Lindsey Davis's Falco novels - when the paperbacks appear - since forever, but really just as light reading. Even by those standards, though, this one is a lightweight. Falco and immediate family make their way to Alexandria-in-Egypt, stay with some more distant family, meet some people from the library, and run into a murder mystery, which eventually gets sorted out in a rather discursive fashion. Then they go home again.

The book seems to exist for two reasons; to let Davis unload some research she's done about Roman Alexandria in a moderately entertaining fashion, and to allow her a small joke about detective story forms. The Falco stories started out as time-displaced hard-boiled noir exercises with a reasonable amount of grit, but as the hero has settled down as a family man, and Davis has come ever more fond of her supporting cast, the requisite darkness has rather faded. Here, in fact, we get (a) a body in a library, and (b) a locked room murder mystery. But Davis can't do Christie-esque cosy puzzles particularly well, I'm afraid. The best scenes are actually a couple of set-pieces involving sudden death and night-time chases through the streets, which may not achieve serious levels of tension, but at least manage to be interesting.

I gather that the next in the series involves a return to Rome - and with any luck, we'll get Falco's honest-cop pal Petro back, and maybe a few brutal gangsters and some cynical court politics on the mean streets around the Aventine. Then, I'll feel less like my time-filler is a time-waster.

Recent Reading: Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

I picked this up a few months back, but I took a while to finish it, with various interruptions - which may be a sign about how much enthusiasm it didn't inspire in me, but could of course just be a sign of the men-over-45-don't-read-many-novels syndrome.

I was interested in it because I've quite liked some Vinge I've read in the past, and I was curious as to what he would do, as a fairly seriously hard SF writer with an interest in genuine futurology, with a near-future setting. The problem, perhaps, is that what he does is a bit too much like some of his far-future stories. He wants to tell a sprawling multi-stranded tale of wonders, but he tries to cram it into the more constraining bounds of an international espionage tale and a school story.

Yes, both. The plots are also crammed together with a story about an aged Alzheimer's victim who turns out to respond exceptionally well to new medical treatments, and who therefore finds himself more or less restored to youth. The strands are interlocked moderately competently - the restored geriatric is obliged to attend the school in order to learn his way around the brave new world of 2020-ish, allowing for a certain amount of low key touring of the balloon factory, while his family become the key to a multi-layered espionage plot - but there's a sense of excessive coincidence, and some moderately odd behaviour from one or two characters that mostly happens to drive the plot. Vinge plays with some interesting ideas about near-future developments in computer interfaces and large-scale networked decision support, but this leads to some odd, unexamined problems; for example, if a character is engaging in a deeply secret, incredibly illegal and morally dubious long-term project, could he really maintain a large network of online consultant-advisers without worrying whether one or two of them might, you know, work out what they're involved in and blow the whistle in a fit of conscience?

In fact, the human elements are some of the least convincing parts of this story. The central character, the rejuvenated geriatric, comes across as an annoyed hard-science academic's parody of an annoying, self-indulgent artist-intellectual, and is only patchily convincing, either in himself or in his response to his situation. We also get the bizarre situation of a school full of teenagers, plus some elderly people in newly youthful bodies, one of them that self-indulgent, emotionally manipulative poet-intellectual, where nobody even seems to think about sex for almost all of the book. I wasn't look for soft porn or bad comedy, but I was looking for either plausible human behaviour or some explanation why human norms might have changed so radically by this point in the near future. But answer came there none. Libido suppressants in the water supply, maybe.

Vinge's view of the information-saturated future isn't that deep, either. After most of the book has talked about such matters, the climactic scene is largely driven by someone's attempts to extract a physical object from a sealed location - a physical maguffin whose information content is all that matters, really. Also, about half-way through the book, some of the characters discuss whether one of the others might be, well, something which William Gibson established as a bit of a cyberpunk cliche decades ago. The characters dismiss the idea out of hand. It's not giving away much to say that it seemingly turns out to be correct. How this could have come about in the time between now and the novel's present isn't very clear to me, mind, but that's another of Vinge's problems; he wants all these wonderful things to have come into existence in the near future, but his plot needs them to have been around for a fairly long time, so that they can have had consequences. (It also needs a few moderately substantial political shifts, such as India becoming a global power player.)

The novel does have some decent ideas, and one or two characters it's possible to care about, for good or ill, even if a lot of them are a bunch of smug, shallow technocrats. But then, in the end, it shambles to a slightly confused and incomplete conclusion, leaving the fate of some of those characters unclear and with enough semi-loose ends that I wonder if we're supposed to be looking for a sequel. I'm not, though, really; I suspect that Vinge is at his best when he looks into the far rather than the near future. It's a shame; I was hoping that he could write short, snappy books that I could enjoy, as well as his interesting but physical-strain-inducing doorstops, and I hoped that he could do some good near-term futurology. But he's really not as sharp or convincing as, say, Greg Egan, or the better cyberpunks; for all his forward-looking pose, he's an older-generation skiffy writer, and it shows.

Theatre: Twelfth Night

Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, 28/8/2010

(Note to self; you enjoy Cambridge Shakespeare Festival productions, Philip, so you really should get to them earlier in the year. The last night of the last performance looks like brinkmanship. Fortunately, the weather held, this time.)

And it's back to Robinson College gardens for another comedy - more unambiguously comic than last year's, mind. It's still a nice venue for theatre on a nice evening, although this production doesn't seem quite to have got the hang of working with the space - lines were getting lost in the shrubbery, cast members were trying to interact from too far apart. Still, mostly, they were pretty good. Mind you, I've seen some not-very-similar Violas and Sebastians in my time, but these two really were exceptional - about a foot apart in height, and with no other similarities. Hey ho, accept the theatrical convention.

The director's line here seemed to be that Illyria is almost entirely inhabited by foppish loons - not just Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, Duke Orsino is pretty much as bad. This explains why Olivia isn't very interested in him - she's trying to be a sensible person and is still genuinely in mourning, but none of the aristocratic layabouts around her will be sensible - and why she falls so promptly for Viola/Cesario, who acts moderately seriously as well as being quite charismatic. (This Olivia then flips over into a state of girlish lust, abandoning black like a shot now she's got someone she can be cheerful rather than silly with, but then throwing herself very energetically at the object of her affections, which must be nice for Sebastian when she grabs him but doesn't look very consistent.) However, this then leaves a problem of explaining why the smart Viola should fall for the goofy Orsino... I know, she just does, okay? It's a Shakespeare comedy.

And, to be fair, quite funny in this production - notoriously not always the way with Shakespeare comedies, and not just because of Malvolio's character story (marginalised at the end in a faintly embarrassed way here). The Shakespeare Festival continues to make Shakespeare productions that are worth going to see. Must try to get to it more efficiently next year.

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Well, one of the big-ish Transhuman Space projects has now progressed to the rough layout stage. Looks highly promising.

Edit: As Kromm has now revealed the title in his blog, I can happily confirm that this book is Cities on the Edge, by Anders Sandberg and Waldemar Ingdahl.

And I have a fully signed contract for the big project which I can't really talk about yet, but which may make these sorts of posts relatively infrequent for a while (while making me quite happy).

Toy Story 3

First, the easy bit. This film is brilliant. Funny, fast-paced, ironical - people have talked about Wall-E or Up being among the major films of their years, but to my mind, this is the big-time computer animation that really has a claim for that sort of standing; notably, when it tries to be moving, it usually does so without being too blatantly manipulative.

However, it also left me glad that I don't have children, because that means that I didn't have to try and explain this film to them. Aside from the fact that the whole thing is about maturity and loss and the prospect of death, there are the three-eyed green blobs with their religious obsessions and eventual apotheosis, or Buzz's Spanish alternate persona and its curious appeal for Jessie. One also imagines generations of children growing up into their first encounters with the prison movie and PoW film genres, and suddenly realising what much of this thing was all about - and that's not just the minor cliches, it's also big-ish things about the corruptions of petty power. The film's direction also repeatedly employs the semantics of the horror genre, with the blank-eyed zombie Big Baby and the culminating plunge towards a hellish pit. And, of course, there's Ken, concerning whom one might choose to explain subtle concepts like metrosexuality and '70s disco fashion to the sprogs, if one wanted to get more complicated than just saying that he's evidently gay. All this is much of the point of the movie, mind, and I think that it's in more danger of befuddling kids than of seriously traumatising them, but it really does feel like a film about a box full of toys, written for a non-child audience - something that may confuse some parents as well as their offspring.

I saw it in 3-D, incidentally, and that proved unintrusive without being at all necessary in this case. Which I guess could be taken as the sign of maturity in the technology, or just money wasted.

Sherlock

Sherlock definitely accomplished what it set out to do - to update Sherlock Holmes and his surrounding myth to the 21st century. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were good enough as Holmes and Watson that I wondered vaguely how they'd do in a period-costume version, although Holmes's nigh-sociopathic callousness was maybe over-emphasised - the original would at least observe the social niceties when interviewing a distressed client, and would sternly declare his opponents to be abominable before diving into the clues. Maybe someone thought that this was just a mask, and a modern Holmes wouldn't bother. Meanwhile, the scriptwriters had enormous fun working stuff from the original stories into the modern-day version, doubtless seeing how much they could include that would make the people who just think they know Holmes accuse them of gross distortion before the people who've actually read the stories jumped in to point out the truth.

But oh dear, it was rushed. I got the feeling that the writers wanted a full multi-week series and pitched a story arc on that assumption - and the BBC said "great, you can give us that in three 90-minute episodes". So in the first episode, we got the Big Meeting and the basic relationships framework, and Holmes heard the name "Moriarty"; in the second, Holmes cracked a case (with the aid of one stonking big coincidence, if you were paying attention) and unbeknown to him, the leader of the villains was collaborating with someone who signed himself "M" and who employed a sniper (doubtless name of Moran), and in the third, Moriarty decided that Holmes was both threat enough and entertaining enough that he gave him an episode's worth of arbitrary puzzles at huge cost to himself and his credibility, then emerged from the shadows to reveal himself to be a bit of a loony, eventually setting up an arbitrary To Be Continued.

Okay, now BBC; it works, okay? That much should have been obvious from the first, but anyway, if you're prepared to believe it now, give Moffat and Gatiss at least a dozen or so episodes to expand into, let them wrap up the Moriarty nonsense with one mighty bound in the first (Moriarty was always a dull and cumbersome element to the original Holmes mythos, after all - making him a big feature of the modern version was a bit lazy), and let's see Cumberbatch and Freeman weave their intellectually sinuous way across modern London the way that Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke made Victorian-Edwardian London look so damn good.

Otherwise, don't bother.

Notes from a Holiday

Angela having a couple of weeks booked off, it was time for a break.

Starting, on the last day of July, with a day at the Cambridge Folk Festival. This was less laden with names I knew in advance than previous years, I must admit, which didn't make it any less fun - and at least the weather was decent, the day we happened to be there. I quite enjoyed Pink Martini - I know that some people wouldn't consider them to be folk, to an even greater extent than a lot of performers who show up at the Festival, but hey, I'm happy to regard 1930s lounge lizards who like doing covers of Ravel's Bolero as my kind of folk - while Kathy Mattea, doing what seemed to my untrained ear like a traditional sort of American folk-country, with a lot of songs about coal mining, was very good at what she did. Anyway, a good day.

The next day (our wedding anniversary) was lunch with friends, and the day after that was packing, because on the Tuesday, we flew out to Stockholm. I'm mostly going to record this in the form of a photo log on Flickr, which is still a work in progress right now, and may take a while to finish (I have a lot of digital images to sort through and tweak), but anyway, for the record, we stayed in the Hotel Rival (strongly recommended, even at the cost of directing yet more cash into the great Abba money maw - and by the way, if the Swedes are so proud of their internationally successful exports, how come I kept seeing references to Abba but none to the Cardigans?), which was located in Sodermalm, Stockholm's Bohemian quarter. By the way, "Bohemian" in Swedish turns out to mean "was poor working-class a few hundred years ago, and now has rather a good selection of nice little restaurants".

Stockholm actually turned out to be a great city for a holiday, if not the cheapest place to eat (and an even more expensive place to drink, thanks to the Swedish government's tax-based attempts to stope the Swedish people from drinking to dull the pain of living in an orderly, prosperous society). The generous supplies of good-quality coffee, sometimes actually free, compensated somewhat for that. The preferred building style often suggested a peculiar fixation on Renaissance Italy - a better model than most, in truth, although the local light wasn't exactly Mediterranean in intensity, which maybe reduced the effect rather - but the city's real advantage is that it's wrapped round and threaded through a lake and bay and archipelago; there was a feeling that the first thing one should do each morning was check which cruise liners were dominating the skyline that day.

Highest points of the holiday included the extraordinarily well-preserved centuries-old ship Vasa in its own museum, ascending the tower of the fortress at Vaxholmen for a beautiful view over the inner archipelago on a summer day, and strolling round the extraordinary outdoor museum and zoo at Skansen. Anyway, a good ten days.

And then it was back home.

Doctor Who 2010

So I've finally got around to watching the last episode of this year's season of Dr Who (definitely no question mark as it seems these days), by which time all the serious fans have already blogged about it, sometimes at extreme length and occasionally with useful insights. So anything I'm going to say is going to feel deeply superfluous.

But since when did that stop a blogger?

One thing that those fans spotted was that this season seems to have been largely about Steven Moffat doing the sort of things that Russell T Davies previously did with the show, but doing them well. Now, while this is vastly preferable to many other things (such as, doing them the way that Russell T Davies was doing them), it wasn't what some of us were at heart hoping for (which was, at minimum, him doing Steven Moffat things well). Still, this approach produced some episodes that I enjoyed well enough... Until the last two.

Though the two episodes in the story in question were annoying in different ways. The first was just padded - okay, so bits of it involved classic Who thrills, but all the stuff with the Romans felt rather desperate, and when you're playing for these stakes, some running around and screaming with one (1) damaged Cyberman feels a bit feeble. It also involved some amazing incidental mental thickness; okay, the Doctor might somehow might be expected not to notice the obvious about his little speech about what was in the Pandorica, but you'd have expected one of the two smart-arse companions present to react with "sounds like you".

The plot felt cobbled-together and implausible, too. Okay, hoping for plausibility in a Who plot is a bit forlorn, but there has to be some kind of break point, some chance that stuff might be explained in such a way to make one go "ah!". The Alliance of Enemies had some credibility problems, too; there's infinite comic potential in trying to imagine their planning meetings ("THIS MEETING IS CALLED TO ORDER!" Later. "We have a cunning plan. He's going to cause the end of the universe because of these crack thingies, so we're going to raid his assistant's brain through one of these cracks, construct a hideously complicated plot to attract his attention, and then capture him." "And then we exterminate him?" "No, we lock him in a box that any idiot with a sonic screwdriver can open." "Can't we exterminate him a little bit?" Later. "What are the Silurians doing here? We thought that he liked you lot." "You mean, apart from giving us a scientific name that puts us in the same genus as those monkeys?" "Yes." "Well, he put us into hibernation, and set the timer so that we woke up in the 31st century - just when he knew damn well that solar flares would be sterilising the solar system...").

The second part, on the other hand, showed the severe difficulties with fairytale-style wild science fantasy, by just not doing it very well. If anything is possible - anything that fairytale magic might bring about, anything that wide-screen baroque space opera might conceive - then the most that you can get on screen is pretty pictures and over-acting. This was all-too-Daviesian NuWho, the Doctor as a demigod who can save the entire universe with a bit of dubious technobabble and some pained claims about self-sacrifice, and the assistant du jour as the mostest important magic girl in all the universe who can restore things which have been wiped from history by wishing hard enough. It just wasn't satisfactory.

This series has also given too damn many hostages to fortune. Another thing that some proper fans noted about the whole series was that Steven Moffat seems to like time travel stories - that is, stories in which stuff happens in the wrong order, cause and effect are chopped up for dramatic or comic effect, and so on. Actually, I think that the time travel is just an excuse, a convenience; Moffat simply has a lot of fun tinkering with causality within narrative structures. My favourite script of his, ever, anywhere, remains episode 1 of season 4 of Coupling, "Nine and a Half Minutes", which is essentially Rashomon as an urban sex comedy. However, Who has usually been a little bit careful about time travel stories, in this strict sense; to this show, time travel is just a way to get our heroes into an infinite variety of places and times, and any suggestions about going back in time to stop bad things have been clubbed down with pronouncements about the Laws of Time or Causal Loops. And there are several good reasons for this caution, given Who's nature as a mass-market TV show; time travel stories tend either to confuse casual viewers by being difficult to follow, or to bug the bejasus out of attentive geek types by being sloppy and illogical. Furthermore; they present huge problems for the long-term design of the show, in the way that excessively powerful technology does; if the Doctor can use time travel to solve one problem, to determine which flat to rent to find the monster of the week, why doesn't he use it every time a problem is serious enough to, say, involve the deaths of a few dozen people? The rule has been broken on occasion, of course - Davies broke it once or twice - but Moffat seems happy to plain ignore it. It'll come back and bite him, I tell you.

Anyway, Steven Moffat is definitely engaged in reinvigorating a classic British popular culture hero for television in the 21st century, and doing a fine job of it from what I've seen so far. Unfortunately for this blog post, the hero is Sherlock Holmes. This jury of one is still out on his work on Who; let's hope that, now that he's worked through the unhappily established conventions of 21st-century Who in his first season, the second will do something really worthwhile. The presence of, for example, an actual married couple on the Tardis (a first, I think) does at least suggest that we might get some proper Moffat foibles instead of the tired old Davies foibles.

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Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100 (or whatever exactly it ends up being called, but me I like that title) is now off to SJGames, my final draft editing being done - so I take a deep breath and look at the as-yet-secret possible project that now seems to be coming together. Oh, and I deal with a little Pyramid article I said I'd write. Just a short one.

Inception

"His subconscious has been militarised!"

Indeed.

The genius of this film is its solution to a deep-seated Hollywood problem; how to reconcile the Therapy Model of Plot (the idea that the only real point of the stuff that happens to a protagonist in a movie must be to solve some deep-seated emotional problem) with the demands of the action genre (which doesn't leave time for that nonsense if it's being done right). Past solutions have involved carefully paced talky intermissions between the explosions, kids needing rescuing, villains who represent (or just plain are) The Father, and so on. Inception skips all that in favour of something much more literal; it sets out to explore the subconscious - somebody's subconscious, anyone's subconscious - and promptly discovers that it's made up entirely of gunfights, explosions, car chases, and at the deepest level, a rather nifty, slightly grimy post-Bondian alpine villain base, complete with skiing guards.

And it does it gorgeously. Christopher Nolan lives up to the old Welles line about a movie set being the best train set any boy could have, and adds on the best computer game level designer kit that boy might want today. One tip; go see this movie on a reasonably large screen with a proper sound system - I doubt that it'll be anything like the same without wall-to-wall visuals and a seismic bass undertone. Admittedly, nothing later in the movie quite lives up to the early, fabulous poster-moment when Paris folds back on itself like so much well-designed cardboard packaging, although a late, bleakly exquisite landscape of abandoned mega-skyscrapers tries hard. But as his Batman movies showed, Nolan loves his cityscapes with an infectious passion, and can shoot a decent action sequence too; given the chance to combine the two, he's in his element.

Here, he shifts the scene to Mombasa for a while for no real reason other than that it lets him do a street chase scene with a new aesthetic edge (okay, maybe owing something to Casino Royale).That's during the early part, when the movie is still running through a highly traditional "assembling the team" phase, which reminds me; the movie also shows Nolan's knack for casting. The leads all do their best with often slightly thin characters, even Ellen Page, who spends the first third of her screen time being on the receiving end of some mandatory exposition, and the rest being the empathetic girl genius, manages to make something of her part. However, the plot is all about Leonardo DiCaprio's character, who's a damaged soul... This isn't a character movie.

What it is, is the action movie re-imagined as a Chinese philosophical parable, Freud with big guns in a cyberpunk world. The soul of the thing may be a little flimsy to justify the scale of the structure built to support it, but that's Hollywood movie dreams for you - and it is a big-budget SF movie with the sort of serious ambitions we've mostly come to associate with smaller-budget SF movies in recent years. The two-and-a-bit hours certainly went by for me in a glow of admiration.

High and Low

Hmm, no, I don't seem to have been saying much here lately. I've been a bit busy. There's a couple of things I will just make a note of, though.

For one, on the 28th of June, we got to the British Museum for the "Fra Angelico to Leonardo" Italian Renaissance Drawings exhibition. (Well, there was a lot of stuff you'd otherwise have to get to the Uffizi in Florence to see.) This turned out to be a very technical sort of exhibition - there were explanations of the various techniques used, samples of paper and parchment one could actually touch, and comparisons of some of the drawings that were actually preparatory works for paintings with images of the finished paintings themselves. And for the first stretch, it maybe felt a bit too technical; the drawings from the early years of the Renaissance weren't bad, but they weren't exciting either, and were often formalistic copies of standard designs. And I'm still no fan of late medieval art, with all its stiff religiosity, even though looking at drawings rather than paintings saves one from the usual surfeit of gold halos.

But then, well, the exhibition kind of proved that art evolved for the better in the Renaissance, and after the path through had hit the Leonardos around the mid-point, well, I was sucked in. Stunning stuff, some of this, and all of it certainly never less than technically interesting.

And on 11th of July, we got to see Shrek Forever After at the Cambridge Arts. We previously saw the first couple of Shrek films, but we missed the third, so this was a fairly casual interest, but we enjoyed the movie; it had the usual density of reference to both fairy-tales and other sources (amazingly for an American series, the Shrek movies hadn't thrown in anything from the Wizard of Oz until this final episode, so far as I recall), the usual grossly over-qualified cast (I missed noticing the presence of the wonderful Jane Lynch until the final credits), and the usual torrent of good jokes. The 3-D, while effective enough, was pretty much an irrelevance here - a few hurtling broomstick-mounted witches are nothing compared to, say, Monsters vs. Aliens' games with scale - and the movie as a whole was nothing like as sophisticated as, say, The Incredibles. Whereas in that movie, the hero is aware from the first of the ambiguities in his discontent with family life, and the solution to the problem is a complex process which requires adaption by all the parties involved, Shrek is just an understandably put-upon-feeling husband, father, and citizen, who gets a chance to see what the bachelor life would be like, enjoys it for a short while, and then gets hit over the head with the Hollywood presumption in favour of domesticity. It's an unearned moral, mere moralising.

One shouldn't think too hard about the alternate history plot structuring, either. Technically, it creates a whole universe full of people with their own lives and troubles and hard-won triumphs, and then obliterates them with a kiss, in a casual act of cosmic genocide. Although it was the even more casual death of the Gingerbread Man that might actually worry more viewers. Also, I was probably too taken with Rumpelstiltskin's palace - a gilded Versailles-for-dark-lords - and his wigs - all wiped out by the plot's tide of narrative Tipex. Still, yeah, don't think too hard and it's certainly huge amounts of fun.

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And yeah! The finished edit of Transhuman Mysteries is off to e23. I don't know when exactly it'll appear, but it's off my hands now. Good book, by the way.

So it's back to a couple of my own writing projects now...

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Oh yeah - Transhuman Mysteries is now in editing.

Other stuff (that I may have mentioned in the past) is waiting on various necessary administrative things. Further updates will probably be posted when those bottlenecks are cleared (and not before). There are also some possible major projects coming into view; if they come together, they'll take much of my time for months, and I won't be able to say anything about them for a while. So don't worry if these posts turn infrequent.

Concert: Blondie

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 11th June 2010.


I was at university from 1978 to '81, so Blondie are naturally an important part of my past. However, I never did get to see them back then, so the discovery that they were going to be playing Cambridge (I think for the first time ever, although I may have missed something in the last few years) was an opportunity to fill that gap in my life.


The evening began in appropriate '70s style; first, everyone had to queue up outside until the doors opened at the concert's advertised start time, and then the support band (Little Fish) turned out to be a three-piece (guitar/vocals, drummer, keyboards) with a female singer-guitarist playing jagged, slightly punky little songs; they weren't bad, but I found I was old-fashioned enough to wonder if they'd be better with a bass player to round out the sound.


Anyway, one interval later, Blondie hit the stage, starting with the inevitable assorted thin, slightly anonymous male musicians and then - Debbie Harry, wearing a platinum wig, shades, a black dress with a conical layered knee-length skirt, and Doc Martens. In other words, she looked a bit like some kind of crazy cat lady, if your neighbourhood crazy cat lady was a living goddess of power pop - complete with the voice we all remember, that coolly amused New York drawl. Actually, the voice may not be quite the subtle power tool it once was; during "Atomic", the crucial repetition of the title was first spoken, then handed over to the audience, then replaced with an apocalyptic guitar solo. Still, there was no doubt who this was.

The set actually turned out to contain a fair amount of new material - the band have a new album coming soon (and the new material sounded very Blondie) - which is great; this isn't just a self-tribute act, although many of the classics were in there too, to varying effect; this was a rock band with decent keyboards, not a synthesizer band, so "Maria" and "Call Me" were fine, while "Heart of Glass" was, well, rockier than the studio version. I never did catch who the line-ups lead guitarist was (Chris Stein, the long-time mainstay of the band, seemed to be leaving a lot of the lead work to this other guy), but he was a little bit prone to axeman exhibitionism. But that wasn't the point, was it? The audience of forty- and fifty-somethings (and some of their kids) were there to see the cool, streetwise blonde who was there before any of your Madonnas or Gagas. And we got what we came for.

Recent Reading: Recklessly Yours

by John Allison

Well, I suppose that this isn't technically very recent reading, given that I first read these strips at the time that they appeared in Scary Go Round. And a lot of what it requires isn't reading so much as looking, Scary Go Round being a comic strip and all. But anyway, the book collection appeared recently, enabling one to re-read the contents more briskly than one page per day - which does, all else aside, sometimes enable one to follow the details of what passes for a "plot" a little more effectively. For example, I now understand why Desmond Fish-Man attempted to recite an obscene limerick at the climax of the Jeremy Kyle Show. You can't put a price on that sort of understanding.

Furthermore, these collected strips are accompanied by brief notes from the author, John Allison, which together help explain why they turned out to represent the final year of the strip. Allison comments that he started the period in a positive frame of mind, but the narratives show that his mood - always crucial to his quirky brilliance - was changing from very early on, and it shifted radically even towards the very end.

There are five "stories" (often a rather loose concept in John Allison world) in this book, and the first two, "Carrot vs. Stick" and "Extra Income", show Allison's tastes in subject-matter moving towards the low-key tales and younger characters that have turned out to characterise Scary Go Round's successor strip, Bad Machinery. The first, a school story about the stress of growing up and the difficulties of maturity, substantially expands the role given to such previously minor characters as Carrot Scruggs and Sarah Grote. The second starts out with The Boy, for some time an interesting viewpoint character, seeking a part-time job and becoming entangled with sleazy businessman Hamilton Percy, but Allison evidently got bored with that idea, and shifts the focus to an unexpected romance between Sarah and Ryan Beckwith, which in turn leads to a brief outburst of drunken idiocy from Carrot - and the story ends.

"The Estate", on the other hand, sees Allison developing an almost social-realist interest in the actual community of the characters' home town of Tackleford, and making some vaguely thoughtful comments on its underclass - albeit with a plot centered on the moronic and obnoxious Desmond. While this is all a long way from the sort of story that made Scary Go Round popular, it's often very very funny indeed. The story also introduces Charlotte Grote and Shauna Wickle, two child characters for whom Allison evidently developed an affection, as they would become central to Bad Machinery.

Then, Allison made one last attempt at the kind of wide-screen-rococo, junk-movie-tribute tale that web comic fans like his so often love, and which he'd often started well and then ended rather abruptly as he ran out of the necessary bubbling energy. Actually, "Looking for Atlantis" is pretty good of its kind. Starting with a completely futile attempt to discover Desmond's origins, it brings in a dubious ex-Nazi researcher who takes Desmond, plus central characters Shelley and Amy to, yes, lost Atlantis. There, Shelley's idealistic optimism (plus some general human stupidity) causes chaos and destruction, despite Amy's desperate attempts to balance it with cynical realism. Allison claims that this story showed him that the plan he'd been developing, to replace Scary Go Round with a strip about Shelley's adventures as a time traveller, wasn't going to fly because he just couldn't face writing about Shelley's sunny sociopathy - although it appears that he kept the idea going until quite near the big break point.

Which comes, not surprisingly, at the end of "Goodbye". This brings back The Child, previously a quasi-supernatural agent of chaos, but here redrawn as a more mundanely manipulative brat, whose previously shadowy and Rasputin-like father-figure turns out to be a Michael Jackson doppelganger. Allison's notes say that this story was massively revised in the wake of Jackson's death and the ensuing public hagiographising, but it's hard not to see this as more of an excuse, because the original plot outline which he discusses here (with rough sketches) looks out of kilter with his shifting mood - and also uncharacteristically bitter as well as dark. Personally, I'm glad that he didn't use that plot, although this may be sentimental of me. Admittedly, he was planning to end things with a story involving a high school prom (not very traditional-British, that, though) and both Shelley and Esther going into action in Tim Jones/Matsushita Corporation battlesuits ("It's the Matsushita Gothnaut 1 - it can only be driven by someone Very Dark") - but he was also going to kill off a number of major characters, for one or two of whom I felt considerable affection. Instead, we get a lower-key precursor of the gentler wit of Bad Machinery, entangled with some life changes for other characters, with shifts and closures that almost verge on the moving. Mind you, the hopeless Carrot gets to suffer to the very end.

After this, Bad Machinery started slowly, and while I've stuck with it, I wasn't too surprised to hear that it had some trouble keeping the old strip's audience. It's a new angle on Allison's odd, sweet, dangerous, skewed world (which I haven't even attempted to describe in this review, because, well, you have to get to know it for yourself), suggesting a maturity which Allison shows largely through the eyes of child characters - although Amy and Ryan, once among Allison's least responsible adult characters, have survived and attained their own peculiar form of maturation. Hopefully, there'll be printed collections of that strip, too, documenting that rebirth into adulthood as this one documents the end of one era for one eccentrically brilliant writer.

Going West (Temporarily) - Sun, Sand, Fossils, Food...

Note: some photos relevant to the following are up on my Flickr stream.

It must be about forty years since I last visited Lyme Regis, and Angela had never been there - and in those forty years, the place has gained a twist of enhanced fame thanks to John Fowles (assisted by Meryl Streep) and Jane Austen (assisted by the BBC drama department). So when we wanted to take a long weekend away, we decided that we ought to head down there and see how many flashbacks I might suffer.

But first we had to get there, and the drive down involved a stop for lunch. Fortuitously, Angela looked at the map and realised that a service area on the way, at Popham, happened to be the location we'd seen on TV when Heston Blumenthal attempted to kick-start the Little Chef chain towards higher quality in front of the cameras. It's not often we structure our itinerary around a Little Chef... Fortunately, Blumenthal's efforts at this place turned out still to be working. I don't think that I'd ever tried ox cheeks before, but the dish I ordered had the texture (literally) of a fine piece of slow cooking. Everything else there was competent at the very least, and often very good. I don't know if the chain have tried or are trying to extend this approach to other branches, but if they managed it, they could in theory accomplish a mind-boggling improvement in image.

Anyway, yes, we did eventually reach Lyme, checked into the hotel, and went out for a walk. And yes, bits of it trawled memories up from the depths of my brain - not often too bizarrely, although I'm pretty sure that a shop called "The Toby Jug" was there in the '60s, with the same sign, and the aquarium out on the Cobb definitely was. Mostly, though, and I suppose predictably, it was the smell of the seaweed cast up by the tide that felt so familiar, along with the beaches full of soft grey tide-smoothed pebbles.

Lyme itself is attractive enough, and the paeleontogical importance and the Jane Austen connection give it ways to draw in tourists. It doesn't half cash in on those options sometimes, though, especially the fossils - there's ammonite imagery everywhere, and multiple shops selling the things, (with stock drawn from all over the world if you look closely - the beaches near the town have been picked clean, absent any recent landslips). The town museum holds maybe more historical stuff - a dense clutter of local history, in fact - and that was where I discovered that Charmouth, the village along the coast where my family used to stay, was where Harriette Wilson stayed while working on her memoirs. That's rarely mentioned. Personally, I think that the tourist trade ought to make more of it.

Oh, and the seafood is good. By Sunday, though, we were ready to head further afield. We paused briefly at Charmouth, but my memories notwithstanding, I didn't see enough there to justify spending time and parking charges. In fact, we'd decided to take a look at the Royal Signals Museum, over at Blandford - which is a pretty good museum, especially if you can enjoy a fair-sized collection of vintage motorcycles and other vehicles, though there's plenty on military signals generally if you're enough of a tech-geek. Heading back from there, we took in quick looks at the Cerne Abbas Giant and Dorchester, and then stopped off at Maiden Castle nearby - another location I remembered from childhood holidays; a great wind-swept sheep-field surrounded by earthworks, the biggest Iron Age fortification in the UK. It's impossible to capture the scale of the place in a ground-level photo, but it was worth a stroll.

Anyway, we got back to Lyme in good time for the booking we'd made to treat ourselves at the Hix Oyster and Fish House. This is, well, a very good restaurant, and a part of what makes it is actually the location, overlooking the bay and the coast through floor-to-ceiling windows; eating while the marine horizon fades to darkness is definitely an experience. The cooking was good, too, if quite militantly rustic-local; my nettle soup was, I think, rendered pleasingly oleaginous by the snails, while Angela vouched for her deep-friend sand eels... My main course of hake seemed a bit salty, and the service seemed relaxed to the point of being off-hand at first, but overall, the treat was a treat. One local ingredient that was definitely used well was Somerset cider brandy, incidentally, especially in the "shipwreck tart" that I hit for dessert - a Hix creation of pastry and nuts where the warming glow of the brandy provided a definite twist on the standard walnut/pecan pie formula.

We headed home the next day - but by the scenic routine, taking in a few more sights, starting with Abbotsbury Swannery (a tourist attraction that knows what will attract tourists; the roads for miles around were dotted with signs saying "Baby Swans"), and then going onto Bennets Water Gardens (very pleasant to stroll around in the hot weather), and lastly reaching Portland Bill. This last was one more location I remembered from childhood; I think that it was the first lighthouse I ever visited. What I didn't remember was how windswept, almost bleak, it was; it's the last low slope of a lump of rock projecting south into the Channel, and was probably always pretty austere, but by the looks of things, the Victorians turned into into a quarry for Portland stone, and it's never quite recovered. Still, on a hot day, it has a sort of blasted charm - and the lighthouse looked much as I remembered.

Anyhow, we made it home. And I didn't suffer any catastrophic flashbacks.

Concert: Ray Davies

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 13th May 2010.

If I'd wanted to give this post a smart-arse title, I'd have been spoiled for choice, wouldn't I? "Well-Respected Man", "You Really Got Me", "Not Like Everybody Else", "Loud, But Never Square"...

Or, to put it another way - well, it's not too hard to see some of the surviving legends of Ray Davies's form and era - from the far side of a stadium, at considerable expense. But in a venue the size of the Corn Exchange, for local-venue prices? That wouldn't really have been sensible to miss.

Of course, Ray Davies was one of the lesser Big Names of his era, being the most quintessentially British of the British Invaders. But I'll put him up there with any of them, for influence as well as talent. I don't really like "If no A, then no B, C, D, or F" comparisons - influence and history don't work like that - but subtract the Davies/Kinks influence and where are you with Bowie, or the Jam, or the Pretenders, or Blur? And the blighter was productive, too; every now and again at this gig I was thinking "Hey, he's used most of his big hits already, where's he going from here" - and then out would come yet another classic pop song.

Which said, being limited to the resources of a small-ish touring band did restrict the range of effects that Davies could apply, to the point where (whisper it) some of the songs were in some danger of sounding the same as each other. He started with just himself and another guitarist, playing mostly acoustic but seriously amplified, and then brought on the keyboards, drums, and bass; the classic rock/pop configuration, playing in fairly conventional style - and at one point performing a string of heavier numbers (yes, including "You Really Got Me") that would remind one that the Kinks also got some credit or blame for Heavy Metal. (Although to be fair, they probably gave it a useful sense of melody and some wit.) The other notable feature of the performance, though, the one off-beat stylistic touch, was the way that Davies used the audience in his arrangements.

I believe that he's long had some tendencies this way - live albums with the audience sounds mixed high, and so on - and I don't think that it's exactly egotism; rather, Davies treats his more exuberant fans (and the front row at this event were definitely exuberant) as part of the show and therefore part of the music, letting them provide vocal fills when they want to. The trouble is, a bunch of dedicated rock fans aren't the most precise of instruments... Still, it was often fun, and many of the songs could stand it, including some that perhaps shouldn't have had to. I've said before that "Waterloo Sunset" can withstand pretty well anything, and that turns out to include this sort of live performance with the audience providing occasional backing vocals.

Anyway - repeatedly, throughout the show, Davies and the band would hurtle yet again into some neat little pop song that was also a small masterpiece of slice-of-life poetry. And this guy wrote all this stuff, and has been performing since about 1962. The place was full of people of a range of ages, all doubtless being reminded of important parts of the soundtrack to their lives. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Recent Reading: The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

The Age of Wonder has a subtitle: "How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science". Which is accurate enough, although the terror only really shows in the chapter on Frankenstein, and maybe occasionally in the stuff about the discovery of the true scale of the universe.

Richard Holmes is a biographer by trade, and this is scientific history as biography. The spine of the narrative is formed by the life stories of two figures; Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and his successor as the president of the Royal Society, Humphry Davy (1778-1829), around whom other stories twine in different chapters - with the Herschel family featuring in several of them. I'll admit that I learned an awful lot from this book; just for a start, I'd previously been aware of Banks mostly in connection to his contributions to the nomenclature of gardening, rather than for his status as the grand (ageing) man of British science over generations (or even for his activities as Coleridge's drug dealer), and of Davy as the inventor of the miners' safety lamp, which was certainly important but which rather neglects the stunning volume of work he did on the foundations of modern chemistry (the work which got the safety lamp project pushed his way, in fact). Blame the simplistic shorthand stories of British education in my schooldays, I guess.

Whether Holmes quite proves his stated thesis is another matter. His idea is that there was in Georgian Britain such a thing as "Romantic science", or perhaps more correctly a Romantic idea of science - science as the product of solitary geniuses, thirsting for knowledge at any cost, progressing by huge leaps at crucial "Eureka moments" and seducing that knowledge from the infinite mysteries of nature, but also objective and disinterested, willing to transmit their new knowledge to a wider public thanks to a new system of public lectures. The last part, though, seems to me to be the only place where "Romantic science" differs very clearly from the Enlightenment science of Newton and Descartes, although Holmes does trace the 18th century evolution of the myth of Newton's Eureka moment with the apple, and his story does culminate in the meeting where the word "scientist" was actually invented to replace the older "natural philosopher", retroactively fitting the likes of Newton with a new label. He might also have traced the relationship between British science and that of other European nations in more detail, but to be fair, the book has quite enough to talk about as it is.

But whatever. Holmes tells a good story, and reading more around the subject might well reinforce his case. Meanwhile, he draws an interesting picture of the "second scientific revolution" (as identified by Coleridge in 1819 - Coleridge is an important figure throughout this story). The primary sciences in this revolution were astronomy and chemistry, with the first largely driven by the methodical brilliance of William Herschel, an expatriate German musician discovered by chance making solitary observations on the back streets of Bath (I said that Holmes has a great story to tell). Herschel, aided by his sister Caroline (who became Britain's first professional woman scientist, as Herschel became personal astronomer to the king), redefined the universe; his discovery of Uranus (the thing about him that I learned in my schooldays) seems almost incidental, although helpful to his fame.

But before we meet Herschel, we get to know Banks, a fabulously wealthy naturalist who landed the job of botanist on Captain Cook's voyage to Tahiti. Banks comes across as one of those casually amiable aristocratic types who treats everyone with equal amounts of casual charm, whatever their social position or cultural background, and seems to have helped the slightly more stiff-necked Cook deal with the Pacific islanders he met; one ends up wondering if Cook would have survived his last voyage if Banks had been along to moderate his attitudes, instead of being kept off the ship by political chicanery in the Admiralty. (This is a handy book for devotees of the conspiratorial model of history, although it makes no deliberate efforts to support such silliness; fellow roleplaying gamers of my vintage will understand if I re-title it "When Void Seekers Ruled the Earth".) Instead, Banks became the patron of the new scientific movement, although his aristocratically conservative instincts maybe hardened into something less helpful as he aged. Indeed, the story of British science in the period emerges as one of older organisations growing sclerotic and being replaced by dynamic new groupings, as the Royal Society is followed by the Royal Institution, and that then leaves a gap to be filled by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. All very British.

Where the book maybe seems a little weak is in the actual science; Holmes comes across as having done the research and taken good advice, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that he's more interested in the people than in their work, occasionally digressing onto the lives of the Romantic poets with variable amounts of relevance, and he fails to really tackle more complex subjects in any detail; his explanation of Fraunhofer lines, for example, is limited to a footnote, where he calls them "similar to a supermarket barcode". Nor does he seem to understand why scientists get so irritated by Coleridge's bizarrely muddle-headed comments about mind being passive in Newton's "system", and one Shakespeare or Milton thus being equal to 500 Newtons. He also wanders off into specific subjects that barely qualify as "science" at all, although they were of some interest to scientists and to the Romantic poets; fortunately, these make for interesting chapters. One involves Mungo Park, an early explorer in central Africa who was to some extent backed by the old globe-trotter Banks, and who did appeal to Romantic poets; another, which I confess to finding sometimes hilarious, is the ballooning craze of the late 18th century. Lighter-than-air flight was actually invented by the French, but the British caught on fairly quickly (and told themselves that some of the chemistry involved was invented by Britons, so it was fairly British anyway, even if one of the pioneers in this country had the poor taste to be Italian); this being the Georgian era, early developments naturally included attempts to invent the Mile High Club, while more serious pioneers struggled to convince themselves that there were in fact reliable winds in any direction one might want at different altitudes, so given a bit more research, this technology could actually be made useful... Holmes actually misses an analogy which hit me while I was reading this chapter, between ballooning then and the manned space program today; ballooning involved new gadgets, public showing-off, and worries about national prestige and military applications, was basically about applied technologies but involved various scientists attempting to argue that it was all about serious scientific research, was a little bit too dangerous for comfort, and faded out rather after a few years as early promise came to little.

But the book begins and ends with sea voyages that facilitated vastly important biological research; at the start is Banks, vastly expanding the knowledge of European biology and returning a hero and a major public figure; at the end, as John Herschel dismantles his father's great forty-foot telescope (ending the age when Slough was a global centre of astronomical research) and young scientific radicals like Charles Babbage chafe against the Romantic establishment, a relatively obscure young enthusiast lands a job on HMS Beagle - and returns with ideas so dangerous that he doesn't dare publish them for decades. But Darwin's long-drawn-out Eureka Moment is a story that's been told well before, and largely lies outside the scope of Holmes's book. What is does show, and fascinatingly, is how the Georgians invented modernity, in this as in other ways - and then weren't quite sure what to do with it. It was left to their heirs to sort out that little matter.

Iron Man 2

If anyone hadn't heard, Marvel Films are currently engaged in a speculative project; they make a set of movies featuring most of the original members of the Avengers, and assuming that these work well enough, at some point in the future, they make an actual Avengers movie. Well, Jon Favreau has evidently bought into this idea; Iron Man 2 is set in something much more like the "Marvel universe" than previous Marvel superhero movies, and not just because of the teaser scene after the end titles. Early on, someone tells Tony Stark that he can't continue operating as a lone gunslinger, that he should accept the help that his friends offer him; by the end, we're in Marvel Team-Up territory, with Iron Man and War Machine facing off against a horde of robots while Black Widow infiltrates the enemy HQ.

Yes, Favreau clearly loves him his superheroes, and he's been given the resources to express that love. The fights in this film could come straight out a comic - not just the noisy, dazzling high-tech power armour dogfights, but also Black Widow's deft and hyperkinetic demolition of a whole team of security guards. (Not that Scarlet Johansson's character is ever referenced by that name, and frankly she's pretty superfluous to the plot, except that she defines its parameters while giving us lots of high-speed judo in a catsuit, which is good enough for me.) He also seeds the film with stuff for the geeks; not only does it assume that viewers will have seen the first in the series (fair enough), it assumes that they'll have sat through to the end of the credits on that one, so that when Samuel L. Jackson wanders on set half-way through, he's not given anything as superfluous as an introduction. For that matter, I'm pretty sure that Tony Stark's father was carefully cast and made up to resemble Tony Stark in '60s-era comics.

But lots of directors can do decent super-fights. Where Favreau jumps ahead of the pack is, as in the first film, in the engineering. (Both films seem practically designed to make engineers into very happy bunnies. The heavy product placement of Audi cars fits very, very well indeed; Audi are a marque with huge engineer appeal.) Admittedly, the script tips ever further into comic-book goofiness here, as Stark synthesises a brand new element (gurggh) by improvising a particle accelerator in his lab, aligning it with a spirit level and what appears to be Captain America's shield (yes, really), and then hand-aiming it - but Favreau evidently reckons that, if you're going to do comics, you gotta do goofiness. And the actual physical action of those scenes, as Stark throws himself around his workshop, alternately playing with holographic models and tearing up the floor with a pneumatic drill, reinvents the cinematic mad scientist lab for the 21st century. Anyone planning a movie about a super-genius inventor will need to watch this one first from now on; I just hope that the makers of Doctor Who[?] are paying attention.

But all this narrative density (plus the obligatory tedious Hollywood father-issues sub-plot, damnit) has to have a cost, and what this film has lost that made the first so interesting is a sense of a relationship with real-world politics. At times, Iron Man threatened to say something almost significant about American foreign policy and the "War on Terror"; Iron Man 2 assumes that Stark is doing something worthwhile about these issues at the start, and then looks at what might follow for him personally - which is moderately interesting, but not something that binds so well to the newspaper headlines of our own world. That jump into a full-on "superhero universe" maybe leaves too much behind. Though one might see Stark as symbolising America this time round - ingenious, charismatic, solipsistic, obsessed with independence and free enterprise, terribly opened to attack from all sides when weaker opponents show that he's not actually invulnerable, subject to the demands of a military-industrial complex that cares only for profit...

And because it's still about just Iron Man, the film has problems finding interesting opponents for him; most of his fights are with other people or robots in suits of armour much like his own, which could get quite boring quite fast. (Mickey Rourke's "Ivan Vanko" - briefly referred to as "Whiplash" in the credits, but comics geeks will see him as owing rather more to the Crimson Dynamo - shows his face in his first appearance, but never quite explains how he can be so robust with that much bare flesh showing, and eventually dons proper armour.) The comics solve this by throwing much more colourful, less armoured gadget-users at Iron Man and then ducking the question of how they survive in a stand-up fight against him; this isn't likely to work on film. Meanwhile, Justin Hammer is the story's weak link, an incompetent twit who's somehow become CEO of a major weapons manufacturer - nothing like the suave Cushing-esque Hammer of the comics, and just a pale shadow of the first film's Obadiah Stane.

So, overall - not as good as the first film, no, and probably too specifically aimed at the geek market in the virtues it does retain. But it's still a film about a guy in super-powered armour, with good FX and fight scenes and a few good jokes, that also asks a few questions in passing about responsibility and power.It's probably as good as we deserve.

Expand, Contract (22)

Oh yeah, it's been a while... But anyway, Steve Jackson Games have recently cleared a bottleneck in the contractual process. So I'm just signing a contract, which I think means that things are advanced enough for me to mention; said contract is for Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100.

And talking of the Transhuman Space line, I can probably also safely mention the Bill Stoddard's Transhuman Mysteries has now completed playtest and is into final draft work - I'll be editing this in due course.

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010: Art in Standardised Forms, I Guess

Afternoon: Mmm - it's been a while since we got to the Fitzwilliam Museum, and they've got some temporary exhibitions on, some of them set to end in the near future. Plus, they've finished the last round of refurbishment.

And yes, the Greek and Roman galleries are nice these days - we just wandered through soaking up (mostly) a collection of partial and damaged sculpture that reminds one that this stuff is one of the foundations of Western art. Then, it was off through the rather less grabbing (but doubtless very, umm, comprehensive) porcelain collection to the south wing, which is where they tend to put the temporary shows. There was a room full of netsuke, which is an extraordinary form of craft, and maybe of true art - I mean, those things are just decorative toggles for bits of costume, they seem to use fairly standard subjects, there's no apparent attempt to evoke deep emotions - but it's all bogglingly fine and elegant and skilled, at a level of effect which makes much conscious art look cack-handed. There was a room full of monotype prints by Lino Mannocci, which might appeal to me, in a minimalist, allusive sort of way, when I'm in the right mood. There were a couple of rooms now holding the museum's collection of modern art, of varying levels of appeal, but hey - Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, oh my. And there was an exhibition of works by Sargent, Sickert & Spencer, unified by slightly more than the fact that they were three English-speaking artists of the late 19th/early 20th century whose names began with "S". Just to state what I'm qualified to state - i.e. the bleedin' obvious and personal - I guess that Sargent is the most instantly accessible, even if this exhibition (being based on the museum's own collection) didn't feature some of his most lushly gorgeous portraits; Sickert came across as the most interesting, if only for his London urban images; and Spencer is the most "spiritual", if mutant personal religious imagery and unflattering self-portraiture is what floats your boat.

There was also this year's sculpture promenade outside. This didn't grab me quite as much as last year's, but there's some reasonably cool things there.

Evening: Oh yeah, the new Dr Who[?] season opener. (I note that the standard logo for the series now uses the letters "DW", with no question mark. Am I alone in finding this somehow deeply naff?) It wasn't bad - not great, but not enough to make me hide behind the sofa and weep for lost childhood things. While Matt Smith is definitely playing a younger, mutated David Tennant, he's trying to make the part his own, and at least he seems to be emphasising "weird" over "cute". The plot was essentially routine Who - much more noohoo than klassikhoo, but relatively good noohoo...

But on the other hand, Steven Moffat frankly seemed to be coasting a bit at this point, making it "good noohoo" by repeating stuff from previous good noohoo rather than by being original (and it's his capacity for originality that makes me hope that his Who will be worth watching). Notably, we had the bright, sparky kid who meets the Doctor and then encounters this half-disbelieved childhood imaginary friend again in adulthood - which was great in "The Girl in the Fireplace", but not needed a second time. We also got a reiteration of some of noohoo's worst features, notably including gratuitous cameos by ludicrously over-qualified thespians who were then completely thrown away - Nina Wadia being the worst example here, although as a Green Wing addict, I was also unhappy to see Olivia Colman reduced to playing Monster's Temporary Shape (even if said shape could be interpreted as Harriet Schulenburg). Then there was "the Doctor faces down dangerous aliens and scares the cr*p out of them just by identifying himself", which seems painfully self-aware at best, implausible at worst - and which was in any case done much better and more convincingly by Neil Gaiman writing John Constantine twenty years ago. Plus, we got the all-too-classic ur-Who clunkiness of monsters who really, really can't run for toffee, a new Tardis control room that tips over from the steampunk style of the last series into junk-shop silliness, with old typewriter keyboards and all, and a Portentous Comment by the monster which makes it clear that this series will have an overarching plot theme. Sorry, I know that this is supposed to be a way to keep us watching, but when you've already had seasons where the overarching theme was The End Of The Universe Is Coming or The Doctor Is Going To Die, doing it again is just superfluous and suggests a lack of confidence.

And - oh yeah - there's the new assistant. Quite sparky, quite charming, but still stuck with being the sparky, charming eye candy who's along to keep the Doctor company. Having grown up with assistants who were trained scientists or strong-willed girl reporters or fully certified geniuses in their own right, I'm afraid I do have to regard a kissogram girl as a bit of an anti-feminist retreat. (And can one even find kissograms these days? Not that I've gone looking, but ... I have a nasty feeling that we might have to think of Ms Pond as a pre-watershed euphemism for a strippogram.)

But no, it wasn't a disaster. It was adequate science fantasy, which may be what we should be asking from Who these days, because getting anything more would be pure bonus. Let's hang in there and see - for now.

A Moment in Time

Like, I guess, a lot of people with a basically touristic relationship with London, I have a bad habit of thinking of the city in terms of a few square miles at the very centre. I'm aware that this huge conurbation spreads out far beyond the Circle Line, of course, and I often watch those part go past from the train, but I don't get off there much. Then something comes along and prompts me to get somewhere like the Estorick Collection, out in Islington, as I did last Saturday, and I'm reminded that I should try harder.

I'd never even heard of the Estorick before this year, but it's a small gem, perched on the edge of Canonbury Square (which itself well earns its paragraph in the guidebooks, and which features a fragment of an Elizabethan manor house, lurking like a reality shard among the nineteenth century terraces); specifically, it's a collection of 20th century Italian art, primarily but not solely Futurism. What I read about was a temporary exhibition, curated by Jonathan Miller, called "On the Move: Visualising Action", which fitted in this gallery because its theme - the attempts by artists to depict movement more convincingly in the age of photography - was something that preoccupied the speed-and-modernity-obsessed Futurists. The exhibition sits on the borderlines between art and science, drawing heavily at the beginning on the work of Victorian photographic pioneers like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, who developed the technology to show movement as it happened, thereby showing most painters that they'd been getting stuff like animal movement wrong for centuries. Some of these pioneers saw themselves purely as scientific researchers, but some of them clearly wanted to see themselves as traditionally artistic - Muybridge tended to photograph classically-draped nudes - and yet it was artists who wanted to break with tradition, such as the Futurists, who naturally jumped on the new ideas most enthusiastically, creating paintings and sculptures which imitated the photographic imagery.

The exhibition maybe loses focus a little as it moves on from those early days, finding a lot of quite interesting technical photographic work but less in art, as painters and sculptors in the twentieth century lost interest in representing movement (or anything else very literal) too much. Still, it's full of cool stuff, and for a bonus, you get to see the Estorick's fixed collection, which includes some slightly skewed Italian variations on styles like Impressionism.

The gallery has a good cafe, too, by the way, if it's not too crass to mention that.

Anyway, once we were done there, we walked and took a bus into the centre of the city, and ended up taking a stroll around the Native American and Asian sections of the British Museum. It struck me there that some gods seem far less discomfited by being captured and hauled off to Bloomsbury than others; Ganesha handles it all with elephantine dignity, whereas the Dance of Shiva becomes just a formal abstraction.

Dinner in Wahaca; Mexican food and tequila... And no inclination to relate that to the sinister Mesoamerican stuff I'd been looking at only a few hours before. Some gods are definitely best cast down and reduced to archaeological curiosities.

I have photos of the day up on Flickr, by the way.

Gabriel's Orchestra

A covers album from Peter Gabriel has to be an interesting idea, but this is, well, Peter Gabriel; he's not one to take the entirely obvious route. Scratch My Back features a dozen interesting songs (some of which I was familiar with, some not) - all accompanied by modernist orchestral arrangements by John Metcalfe, and generally slowed right down to the point where Gabriel's singing occasionally approaches simple speech.

So it ain't exactly rock and roll. But it's good, in a self-consciously searing sort of way, and well worth a listen. It did occasionally remind me of Peter Sellers reciting the Beatles' "Hard Day's Night" in the manner of Laurence Olivier's Richard III, though.

There's apparently also going to be a CD made by the various people whose songs Gabriel covered, covering some of his songs in return. That may be interesting - it should feature David Bowie, Paul Simon, the Magnetic Fields, Randy Newman, and Neil Young, among others.

The "Special Edition" version is well worth the extra money, incidentally, less for the second CD (which has remixes of three of the tracks, plus definitive proof that "Waterloo Sunset" is an absolute poetic and musical masterpiece which can withstand absolutely any sort of assault) than for its inclusion of a code that gives a free three-month subscription to the Society of Sound - which means free downloads of high-quality versions of a clutch of varied but often very interesting albums.

Alice in Wonderland

First off, a digression. When one is introducing a new technology, it is wise to (a) think through the small practical details of the system so as to minimise inconvenience for your customers, and (b) make sure that the people you employ are completely familiar with the details of the new system and can perform basic maintenance and make simple adjustments with no fuss.

So, for example, with regard to (a) - if you're installing modern 3D technology at your cinema, and you decide that your customers should buy the required polarised glasses at your refreshments stand, you need to tell them so, with large, clear notices in the foyer and on your Web site and so on. You do not let them climb up two floors to the screen area, and only then have a harassed usherette tell them that they've got to go back down and queue up for the bloody things as the clock ticks. (Especially not when you're pushing a new electronic ticketing system that means they won't necessarily have spoken to any of your staff before that point.) And with regard to (b) - if there's a momentary power cut in the projector room, sure, the showing will dip out. There's no help for that sort of thing, we understand. But then you should pause the film showing, get the sound and the picture working again properly, and then rewind to the point where things stopped and start again at that point, not a minute later. You should not carry on showing the film without sound for several minutes, so that the audience misses five or ten minutes of plot (including cameos by half the British acting profession, in this case).

Stupid, stupid Cambridge Arts Cinema. Amiable amateurishness is not the name of the game.

Anyway, the movie...

I'm not, I confess, particularly a Tim Burton fan. I've got nothing against his brand of gothic whimsy, you understand, and I've greatly enjoyed several of his films; I just don't worship at the shrine. Likewise, I don't regard Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books as sacred texts. I recognise that they've become foundational myths for the modern age, mind you - distillations of surreal mathematician's logic for the age of relativity and quantum mechanics, amiable flights from reason for a world that finds reason a source of stress, anthologies of superb imagery with no excessive baggage of meaning. However, it's all too clear to even a casual observer that this film compromises both Burton's artistry and Carroll's vision in pursuit of the safe financial return that made it possible in the first place. The multiple star appearances and vocal contributions could well class as good casting (rather than stunt casting) and a sign of Burton's prestige in the business, and the decision to make this actually a "return to Wonderland" story with a 19-year-old Alice could be considered to represent Burton doing exploratory things with the myth, even if it does give us a heroine in a gauzy blue dress who can appeal equally well to small girls with a Disney-princess fixation and to their fathers. (Though it must be said that the way that Alice's dress refuses to change size when she and her underwear do could be interpreted as sleazy,  assuming it's not just a symbol of her rejection of the role into which society is forcing blah blah blah.) But the Avril Lavigne song over the end credits is just too crashingly misplaced.

And honestly, the plot is just too bloody Hollywood wrong. Carroll's small girl is on a holiday from the confusingly rational adult world through a landscape of puns and surreal symbolism; this film determinedly transforms her into a teenage victim of social expectations, achieving anachronistic levels of self-actualisation (or something) by discovering her role as the Prophesied Hero of a cut-price knock-off War of the Ring (which ends very quickly when the literal and metaphorical Dragon from yet another Carroll source dies and the arch-villain's troops all promptly switch sides - gods, was Burton seeing how many TV Tropes entries and general iffy fantasy cliches which the Alice stories don't evoke or use he could drag in?); said War, by the way, is a struggle between playing cards and chess pieces with the chess pieces as the good guys, (which I guess is appropriately Victorian), and has evidently been on hold until Alice shows up; still, it seems to have transformed several of Carroll's innocent characters into expert sword-fighters. Then, in the end, Alice escapes marriage (this is technically a spoiler, but I doubt anyone will be surprised) into the world of commerce - and proposes to set to work opening China up to British trade.

Yes, problems of dating aside, this film suggests that Alice grew up to become an architect of the Opium Wars. Thanks, Tim, but are you sure that you've thought this through?

The ludicrously over-qualified cast do their best with this farrago, although Anne Hathaway for one is clearly struggling with the silliness of her part, and Johnny Depp, given the job of second lead (because this is a Tim Burton film), adopts a Scottish accent at random intervals. Oh, and yes, this is the latest big production to explore the possibilities of 3D technology. Unfortunately, the realistic sections end up suffering from a dolls-house artificiality, and the luridly coloured dreamscape-landscapes of Wonderland (renamed Underland when the script remembers) jumped into my face a bit too assertively.

Ho hum. I actually came out of this movie quite amused by the carnival flamboyance of it, almost willing to forgive the cinema their technical cock-ups, even. But it's too easy to see the problems even while you're watching it, let alone in retrospect. If some films suffer from logic holes - refrigerator logic - this one suffers from refrigerator surrealism. I'm prepared to give Burton the benefit of the doubt and assume that the problems arise from him taking the Disney shilling, but I really hope that he doesn't repeat the mistake.

Grey Becomes Black and White (is it true what they say?)

Kettle's Yard, in Cambridge, currently have an exhibition, "Modern Times: responding to chaos", described as being of "drawing and film" from the 20th and 21st centuries. Actually, there's a fair amount of paint and other two-dimensional media involved, albeit almost entirely monochromatic, while the film too is largely black and white - short looping "art pieces", mostly I think from the inter-war era. It might have been more accurate to have described this as an exhibition of black and white art from the last hundred years. Still, and even for an art ignoramus like me, it's an interesting show.

The assorted movements encompassed by this collection of stuff - Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism - doubtless have their crucial differences, but judging them purely by what's on show, they would all seem to tend to minimalism and abstraction; the occasional almost-figurative piece is downright jarring in the context. Some of the pictures seem to verge on architectural representation, and judging by the labels, one or two of them were actually meant that way, but mostly this may just mean that a modern human mind reads "angular structure" as "building". And gosh, I do find myself going round these things trying to interpret that way... Sometimes with great pleasure, in fact. Early in the exhibition there's a big painting whose title and creator's name I forget, but it's a wonderful swirl of black and white paint that could have devoured my attention for hours. Is it a bird? Is it driftwood? Is it a wolf?

The film pieces, incidentally, look like the last survivors of a lost and stillborn art form, especially today. When a cheap computer and some software can allow anyone to cobble together mind-wrenching full-colour animations and manipulated images in a spare morning, the idea of some obsessive oddball in 1920s Berlin or wherever spending hours hunched over a collection of hand-crafted drawings, photographing them frame by frame in order to create - gosh - moving abstract pictures taking a full seven minutes or so to play out, just seems tragically quaint. But obsessive artistic oddballs having their vision eaten by the system is a theme for another post - probably my next one.

You Bought It, You Couldn't Wait, Could You?

As some of my older friends can probably attest through gritted teeth, I've always had a very large soft spot for Magazine. This is partly aesthetic (they were, after all, one of the most important and talented bands of the post-punk era), and partly sentimental (I saw them twice in my student days in Cambridge, and the second time was one of my early dates with Angela). But Magazine were a band who quit while they were ahead, when presiding genius Howard Devoto evidently decided that life as a rock star didn't suit him and ran away to join a photo library. (His subsequent musical projects, in Luxuria and ShelleyDevoto, never seem to have been more than hobbyist exercises.) Anyway, I presumably don't count as a proper Magazine fan; I didn't get to the reunion concerts last year...

Still, I did eventually get around to picking up the DVD of one of those shows (from Wire-Sound), so I guess that I get some latent fan points. I also get a pretty good down-the-line concert DVD, simply but slickly enough shot and presented given the slightly marginal nature of the exercise. It turns out that the members of the band have lasted pretty well, absent the sadly deceased John McGeoch, as has the band's music (but we knew that). In particular. when the event kicks off with "The Light Pours Out Of Me", we are forcibly reminded that Barry Adamson provided much of the heart and soul of the band, generating bass lines that are at once thunderous and melodious. (I'm not sure about his current apparent taste for top hats, but with that talent, he could get away with wearing a tutu.) Across the stage from him, McGeoch's replacement, Noko (who previously worked with Devoto in Luxuria) provided a remarkably effective emulation of one of the great rock guitarists of the last thirty years, only occasionally slipping into conventional axe hero antics that McGeoch would surely have avoided.

But it's the man between them who counts, and who's ... not changed, indeed who looks amazing unchanged (but he always looked a bit like an ageless alien reptile), but illuminated by time - and the main thing we can now admit is what a (deliberately) funny man Howard Devoto really is. Actually, Magazine in general and Devoto's lyrics and stage presence in particular were always loaded with irony and flippant surrealism, but jokes weren't what smart post-punk rock was supposed to be about back in 1980, and Devoto's threatening songs, laden with alienated lyrics, chilly electronic soundscapes, and razor-sharp Adamson and McGeoch riffs, could seem terribly serious if you let them. Now, though, when Devoto shows up in a pink jacket and plus fours, and announces that he's reformed the band to impress a woman, the joke becomes a bit more explicit. We've all had thirty years to relax (well, I have - I hope and would imagine that Magazine have fans these days whose parents hadn't even met when I saw them at the Cambridge Corn Exchange), and we can allow ourselves a more open awareness of the ridiculous.

Which reminds me - one fannish note. "Model Worker", a love song in the jargon of Chinese Communism (yes, some of us got that joke even back then) includes the line "I know the cadre will look after me". This was widely misheard when it was first played as "that Carter", and in 1981, Devoto played along by singing "I know that Reagan will look after me" instead. In 2009, he sang "I know Obama will look after me"... The only other odd lyrical tweak I noticed was in "Permafrost"; in the first chorus, "I will" became "you want me to", and there were even mumbles about political correctness from the sofa. But in subsequent iterations, that still-chilling-thank-you chorus reverted to its original form.

Oh, and I wonder - were these the first Magazine concerts with a backing chorus line (of two)? One of these ladies - Rosalie Cunningham, I believe - took duet parts on one or two songs, and had the Magazine cool down just right, with a perfect combination of a detached gaze, a razor-sharp black bob, and an LBD - plus a tendency to sit down on stage to read a magazine when her voice wasn't needed. She deserves credit.

The extras on the disc are pretty minimal - one song from a rehearsal room, one from a different concert - and there was very little new; just a re-enactment of greatness. But no matter. Sentiment assuaged.

When I ordered this DVD, I also picked up the CD which was apparently indirectly responsible for the reunion concerts happening - keyboard player Dave Formula's new Satellite Sweetheart, featuring every surviving member of the band (and indeed featuring a McGeoch credit on one track - presumably a sample from an old recording or something), which assembly inspired someone to think that they could also do some stage shows - along with Live and Intermittent, a collection of live tracks from Magazine's heyday which Formula has recently assembled. The latter may be moderately interesting as a historical document, but it's a very rough recording; completists-only stuff, really. The former is, well, despite all those appearances (on different tracks), not really how one imagines Magazine would have evolved, even over thirty years; Formula is evidently one of those (extremely talented) rock band members who'd really, really like to be showing what he can do by playing something slightly different - in this case, something like lounge jazz, a lot of the time. Adamson has gone the same way at times over the years, to be sure, but he at least has a taste for the sinister in his atmospherics. There were times on Satellite Sweetheart when I was irresistibly reminded of Derek Smalls's excursions into free jazz, but without the thundering bass (or the stunned audience). Still, it does feature Devoto singing on "Via Sacra"...