Views from a Busy Day

The 19th of October this year was, I see in retrospect, a busy day for us.

As previously noted, we started at my brother's place, and after a run up Lawrence Hargrave Drive and onwards, we arrived in Sydney, dropped off the hire car, and found our way to our hotel - which was located on the harbour, in fact in a converted warehouse on the quayside below the south end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (Good location!) Then we set out for a walk, under the Bridge (which is as impressive a piece of engineering as you may have heard), round Circular Quay (which is, if you look at the map, kind of square - I'm thinking Aussie humour here), and up to the Opera House (which is as impressive a public building as you may have heard, from a distance or close up).

That put us at the north end of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, so we walked down through those in the late afternoon, taking in flora, fauna, and statuary. A kind of high point was seeing fruit bats roosting in one set of trees, even if the gardens seem to regard them as a borderline pest... Then we headed back up through the city, past assorted historic buildings, and back to the hotel, before heading out for dinner in an open-air oyster restaurant on Circular Quay.

Okay, it was basically a day sightseeing. But you'll notice we ended up with a lot of pictures.

Views South of Sydney

I've now put up a batch more photos from our October holiday up on Flickr, this time covering the 15th-19th of October. On the 15th of the month, we arrived by train in Sydney, picked up a hire car, and went to visit my brother David and his wife Shirley south of the city, in the area which turned out to be describable as the Illawarra/Wollongong region. The next day, Dave and Shirley showed us around some of the local sights, and we caught up with their family.

The serious sightseeing started on the 17th, when Dave and Shirley contrived to show us some serious views in the Southern Highlands. We took in the Illawarra Fly, an amazing treetop walkway with views across the forest and the coastal plains to the coast, the stunning scenery at Fitzroy Falls, where a river has carved a canyon out of the edge of the highland plateau, and yet more views at Cambewarra Lookout, where what looks like a pleasant rural tearoom garden (okay, with palm trees) suddenly plunges over the side of a mountain, with a view across to the Pacific. To wrap up, we went down to that ocean, specifically for a short visit to Seven Mile Beach.




Then, on the 18th, we got back down to the coast again, pausing in Shellharbour (and photographing some pelicans) and then looking round Bass Point, which is basically an attractive sea-shore park (with protected nurse sharks off shore, apparently), and a war grave/memorial. Then, after a pause to take in the Kingsford Smith Monument and the view down the coast at Gerroa, we had an excellent lunch at Coolangatta Winery. On the way back, we saw Blowhole Point at Kiama, and especially the blowhole itself - a striking natural formation where the sea drives in through a covered channel eroded in the rocks, then erupts upwards (though the day was calm enough that we didn't get soaked by it). We got pictures of that and of the helicopter that came past overhead, but unfortunately the whale that was swimming past that day was visible only at a considerable distance.

Finally, on the 19th, we were scheduled to head back to Sydney, so we drove up the coast a ways in convoy with Dave and Shirley. This took us over the striking Sea Cliff Bridge, up onto Bald Hill (scene of Australia's earliest aviation experiments, courtesy of Lawrence Hargrave), further up for a stop at Governor Game Lookout, and then into the Royal National Park, where we said our goodbyes at the Hacking River.

And then we drove onto Sydney. It had been a great few days with a lot more striking sights than we'd perhaps expected; the scenery in that part of the world turns out to be stunning. But there was more to come.

I Talk

If anyone is actually digging round here out of interest in me - Victorian Adventure Enthusiast have just run an interview with me.

Concert (+ CD): Magazine

The Junction, Cambridge, 2nd November 2011.

Posting this a month or so late, but what the heck.

To start with, a boast. I first saw Magazine in (I think) 1978 at a gig in a university hall, and then again in 1979 at the Corn Exchange. So, having made it to their gig at The Junction, I think I must have seen them every time they've played Cambridge.

Actually, the '79 gig was one of Angela's and my first dates, so we weren't going to miss this one. But first, we got hold of No Thyself, their first new recording as a band for thirty years. I'm not sure if anything on this is quite up to their best work c.1980, but it's definitely real Magazine, recalling, say, the menacing pulse of "The Light Pours Out of Me" in "The Burden of a Song", and the deliberate four-letter shock effects of "Permafrost" (only more so) in "Other Thematic Material". The pushing-for-accusations-of-bad-taste lyric of "Hello Mister Curtis (with apologies)" might almost count as something new, except in that it fits with Howard Devoto's general, habitual post of punky irony. (Though that his disdain clearly extends to punk: "No decadence, no cheap thrills of hate from me...") Some of the songs could probably grow on me quite a lot, in fact; they may look like conscious recreations of the band's old style, but in the worst case, that's a fine model to emulate.

(I was amused when some critics detected a new maturity in "Of Course Howard", incidentally, given that I recognised some of the lyrics from the introduction to a collection of other Magazine lyrics published thirty years ago. Actually, the song seems to represent a dialogue between Devoto today and his younger self, which is interesting in itself.)

But anyway... For those who don't know them, Magazine were a group who evolved out of the punk scene when lead singer Howard Devoto decided to do something a bit unashamedly smarter, then vanished when Devoto apparently just got bored of the whole business, leaving a legacy that took the rock world decades to acknowledge. Unfortunately, since 1981, John McGeoch, the band's authentic post-punk guitar hero, has died. Also, when they reformed in 2009, Barry Adamson, their bass player and other most strikingly capable musician, rejoined, but he's since evidently decided that his career in film music and so forth means more to him, and walked away. The replacements, Devoto's occasional collaborator Noko on guitar and "Stan" on bass, are entirely capable of emulating the originals' playing well enough, but whether they can emulate the original synergistic, innovative brilliance is another matter.

Not that the audience at this gig were too worried (and I speak as one of them, believe me). We may not have had associations with the two guys on his left and right, but that was Howard Devoto in the middle. Okay, a lot of us were clearly there to be reminded of our youth. I haven't seen this many grey hairs and this much male-pattern baldness since ... um ...the last folk gig I was at. And I guess that Devoto, who's gone from "high forehead" to "bald" in thirty years, could feel entirely at home in this company. But enough tacky irony. That's Howard's job.

The set consisted of a mixture of old and new songs, in pretty conventional rock gig style, really, not that I'm complaining. It even used staging tricks I remember from thirty years ago, notably hitting the audience full in the face with white spotlights behind the band for "The Light Pours Out of Me". Among the new songs, "Hello Mister Curtis" was dedicated, a little strangely, to Terry Pratchett; I assume that the point there is that the song is about facing up to mortality, though whether its pose is one of acceptance or defiance - whether the lyrics are addressed to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain in tones of wry admiration or contemptuous sarcasm - seems unclear. Clarity has never been the point with Magazine, mind; during the first song, Devoto was at one point wandering around the stage with a placard say "You Do The Meaning".

And we will, Howard, we will. Whether we were here for abrasive surrealism, or wry and twisted humour, or to be reminded of our student days, or just because we know the band will rip into that guitar riff in the encore of the monumental classic "Shot By Both Sides", we all likely went away satisfied.

The support, incidentally, were In Fear of Olive, whose country-tinged rock was competent enough, but seemed on this brief exposure to lack sufficiently memorable tunes, aside from the fact that they really didn't look to have much in common with Magazine. But the support act in '79 was Simple Minds, and I didn't think very much of them, so what do I know?

More Views: Ocean to Ocean

I've now finished posting the set of photos covering our trip on the Indian-Pacific railway, which involved leaving Perth on the 12th of October, with a brief and under-lit visit to Kalgoorlie that evening. Kalgoorlie being a mining town where the main sights on a coach tour are a giant hole in the ground (sadly under-lit while we were there - apparently they'd had a minor landslip, so the usual round-the-clock work was cut back) and the red light district.

On the 13th, we passed a full-scale airport with a staffing level in single figures, crossed the Nullarbor Plain, and stopped in the ghost town of Cook. Then, on the 14th, we reached Adelaide - early in the day, but still a bit late, so we took only a flying coach tour of the city with limited opportunities for photography through rain-streaked coach windows. It looks like a pleasant sort of city, going purely by the central area, even if the statue of the founder has its back to visitors, and the local habit of laying claim to Don Bradman seems to lead to heckling if one mentions it anywhere else in Australia.

Later in the day, still running late, we had only a few minutes in the remote mining town of Broken Hill - just time to get a few photos from the station platform. Finally, on the 15th, we descended from the Blue Mountains (nice views) through small town like Medlow Bath, into Sydney, from where we were set to drive down to visit family.

Yes, it was quite a trip

Views of Perth

Next up in the photo uploading to Flickr; our couple of days in Perth, from our arrival by air to our departure by train.

It's an attractive city, in ways that I hope that the pictures hint at. And we knew we'd reached Australia when, on our first morning there, we were woken by a weird raucous noise that, when I was conscious, I identified as a kookaburra.

Missed seeing: the art gallery (closed in the time we were there), much of the outskirts. Saw: the Mint (founded as an outpost of the Royal Mint, to provide the Empire with coinage courtesy of Western Australian gold, and the big thing about a visit there is the demonstration of molten gold pouring - essentially a fireworks display, but with really expensive fireworks), the museum with a fine collection of meteorites, the botanical gardens, the bell tower...

Views of Singapore

My, we came back from that holiday with a lot of photos. It's going to take ages to put the good ones up onto Flickr (with appropriate editing). In fact, I've only just finished those from our day in Singapore. Well, that was a fairly full day.

I ended up with a lot of flowers. (Hotel exterior, Botanical Gardens, Fort Canning Park), and a lot of skyscrapers (Singapore). It's an interesting city, in a very tidy sort of way. Warm, too, being within a degree of the equator and all that. But the photos probably sum up our experience of the day.

And... We're Back

I've not been very good about posting here this year, for all sorts of reasons, largely involving distractions, but my silence of the last three weeks has had more solid justifications, which kind of run Singapore-Perth (mk.2)-Indian Pacific Railway-Visiting Family-Sydney-Ayer's Rock-Sydney-Hong Kong.

It was fun. We're home now. Right now, we've been awake for c. 21 hours, most of them on an airliner, so don't expect much coherence or many words immediately, but at least your e-mails or whatever now have a solid fighting chance of being answered. Or at least read.

Hopefully, there will be retrospective blogging eventually. Or at least, about 6 gigs of image posting to the Flickr photostream.

(First thoughts on Asian cities: Somebody said to me during the trip that Singapore is a beehive, Hong Kong is an ants' nest. Yeah. Alternatively: Singapore seems to be about making money, while Hong Kong seems to be about spending money.. Or, perhaps: If you show Singaporeans the city scenes from Blade Runner, I think they'd say "Yes, that is a horrible warning of how things might go if we don't regulate matters very carefully." If you show those scenes to someone from Hong Kong, the response would surely be "Hey, really good ideas with the flying advertising there!")

(Oh, and the Jenolan Caves are freaking well amazing. While Uluru has a simple job, which is to just sit there on a geological scale, and performs it brilliantly.)

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Oh yes, I neglected to mention last week when it happened; my Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100 is now out from e23.

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Oh yeah, I hadn't mentioned... If anyone who's interested hadn't heard, revised drafts of the new edition of the Discworld Roleplaying Game (by me) and Transhuman Space: Wings of the Rising Sun (by David Chart) are both in and currently being subjected to various sorts of playtesting and review.

Which is the kind of thing that's been keeping me busy these last few months, and so providing me with an excuse for not keeping this blog at all up to date.

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Well, the Discworld RPG manuscript is back from Sean Punch - with 100+ pages of initial commentary to act on. And other stuff of mine seems to be moving along in other people's hands.

Also - the Ennie Award Nominations are now out. These never seem to include much GURPS material, which means that little of my work ever rates a chance of a mention. However, this year, my modest but non-trivial contributions to Gatecrashing, from Posthuman Studios, mean that I can at least claim a part-share in three nominations.

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I'm not getting a huge amount of writing or editing done myself at the moment, largely because I've got a whole bunch of stuff to do towards Consternation next month. However, Sean Punch has now made entirely public something that I thought wasn't a very secure secret; that my big project of the last few months (and next year or so) is a new edition of the Discworld RPG.

(About which, I am happy to talk a bit. However, I'd prefer to avoid games of Twenty Questions with obsessive fans who are trying to extract the entire content of the planned 400-page book from me a paragraph at a time.)

Also, I have been fielding a few questions from the author of a new Transhuman Space supplement which hasn't been announced yet. Ah, the fine art of fitting GURPS rules to a high-tech setting and getting character creation to look right...

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Just one thing this time; Bill Stoddard's Transhuman Mysteries, which I edited (and which is in a line of which I am the line editor) has just been published on e23.

Klonk!

I'm on Amazon UK's mailing list (surprise), and for some reason, their algorithms apparently not only have me down as a Discworld reader, but a serious fanboy. Why else, after all, would they tell me when they've got German editions of the books available?

But this does mean that I get to find out when I could be purchasing Klonk!: Ein Scheibenwelt-Roman.


It sounds so much cooler than Thud! somehow.

Doctor Who 2011-1

First off, to damn with faint praise, Doctor Who has been better this year than for a while. For much of this first half of this year's series, I have been able to watch it with actual interest, rather than feeling that I've been suckered by a title borrowed from a series that was significant to me in my teen years, and that I'm being insulted by self-indulgent junk. It's become light science fantasy with a bit of style, some functional plots, and decent characteristation.

Well, the first half of the first half, anyway.

The core problem with NuWho resurfaced in episode 5. It wasn't just the skimpy, predictable, but painfully implausible plot, the ropey science and the frenetic hand-waving; it was the sense that all of these things were familiar. They weren't just repeating Who-at-its-worst; they looked like an almost-conscious homage to Who-at-its-worst. In other words, this was Who written by someone who'd seen far too much Who, and who thought that repeating stylistic stuff from over the last fifty years with nary a thought to how stupid it might look today was the way to go. Given that, the decision to stretch the story out over two episodes, when  many better plots have been jammed into one, was just adding insult to injury.

(I notice that some more serious fans are complaining about moral inconsistencies in the Doctor's behaviour at the end of this story. This seems to me to be missing a large point. Before you can worry about moral logic, you need simple consistent logic - without any and all inconsistencies being hand-waved away.)

Then, strangely enough, along came episode 7. Oh dear.

You could say that this made a similar mistake, seeming at times to be paying homage to the worst bits of Davies-era NuWho. But I'd be simpler than that. This episode resembled nothing but the worst sort of fanfic.

It was overloaded with guest appearances that made less and less sense the closer you looked at them, and introduced a whole bunch of new characters who the writer thought would be cool (a sword-wielding Silurian detective in Victorian London!) or funny (a Sontaran nurse). Unfortunately, none of it was half as clever as it thought it was, and surely even the youngest of fans will noticed that they were being pandered to - ineptly - by the end?

Okay, I'll watch the second half of the 2011 series when it shows in a few months. I'm hoping that the nature of this war against the Doctor will be explained in more detail, and that his enemies' need for a baroque and implausible plan in order to create a bizarre weapon to use against him will turn out to have an interesting explanation, instead of just being another stupidly complicated attempt to destroy him (when they could have shot him or blown him up at various points during this episode). I'm hoping that the Headless Monks will have an interesting explanation and history, instead of just being another bunch of nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters. (Actually, it's a terrible thing how nursery-scary, stylish, faintly surreal Moffat monsters have gone from being wonderful to being a cliché in a few short years). We'll probably get some half-decent episodes. But frankly, I think that I'm going to be stuck damning with very faint praise again.

Photos on Flickr

Just for the interest - I've just finished putting up a couple of new small batches of pictures on Flicker:

• Stuff from our visit to the Shuttleworth Collection and Old Warden the other week.
• A few snaps taken at UK Games Expo last weekend.

Old Stuff in Museums

When we - the general public - go to museums, we tend to think of them in terms of the stuff that we see on display. Which is fair enough, but - to a degree doubtless varying with the museum - also wrong. There's a whole load of curating and preservation and additional material and scholarship going on behind the scenes, which we glimpse in dribs and drabs if we pay attention.

The Fitzwilliam's current big exhibition of Italian Drawings, which we went to see on Saturday, reminded me of this, with something of a kick. It draws largely from the museum's own back rooms - items which aren't normally on display. But one motive for going to see it is, frankly, something akin to name-dropping. It's not often that one gets a chance to see art by (among others) Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Vasari, and Modigliani, all in the same room, within a dozen miles of one's front door, after all. Okay, so what one sees is actually a bunch of, well, drawings, ranging from quite stylish but dashed-off pen-and-ink pieces to tiny preparatory sketches and doodles. But the raw density of art history in that one room is quite impressive.

That's one fairly dimly-lit room, mind. One reason that some of these highly significant pieces can't regularly appear on display is clearly that, even more than a lot of art, they're fragile. I won't quite say that they're disintegrating before one's eyes, but some of them certainly look lucky to have lasted this long, and despite all the technical brilliance of modern museums, I'd guess that they have a finite lifespan, even if it can still be measured in centuries. There's a definite sense of the memento mori when one looks at a tiny, fading sketch that was in fact dashed off by Leonardo when he was thinking about how to depict horses and riders, five hundred years ago.

Then, on Monday, we went to a completely different museum which has an equally important backroom function - the Shuttleworth Collection in Old Warden. For those who don't know it - this is a fairly substantial aircraft collection, but most impressively, it's got some old aircraft. That is to say, they have a couple of planes, in actual flying condition, which are over a hundred years old. This puts them in the business of restoration and preservation as much as any museum, which is something they happily talk about; for example, they have a Spitfire (pretty much inevitably, I guess), and one can see it in one hangar - in bits. It needs sprucing up, it seems.

Mind you, aircraft restoration evidently involves a lot of refitting and replacement work. The displays talk about the art of fitting new fabric surfaces (so with some of these aircraft, most of what meets one's gaze is actually new) and the necessity of replacing, say, thousands of magnesium rivets with something newer and less lethally corrosive. But aircraft are machines, built to do something; a restoration process that kept more of the original but left it incapable of flight, would perhaps be too much like taxidermy.

(I grabbed a fair few pictures on Monday, incidentally, of aircraft and also of the adjacent Swiss Garden and Bird of Prey Centre. I'll try and get them up on my Flickr photostream reasonably soon.)

Conspiracy Theories

Blogger suffers its second problem in a fortnight, leaving me unable to sign in to my account. Then, after a couple of days, I have a bright idea and try using Chrome instead of Firefox - and lo and behold, I get in.

Thus are conspiracy theories born. Google must surely be trying to force people away from the competition and onto their software. Fortunately, (a) I hear that Internet Explorer works too, and (b) I've even been able to get in using Firefox from another computer.

Still, two service collapses in consecutive weeks? Aren't Google supposed to be better than that?

Thor

The superhero movie fashion continues...

Cranking through the list of their major characters as a preparation for the Avengers movie (with lesser Avengers popping up to fan service effect - here, "Agent Barton" spends a couple of minutes on-screen with a bow, just to confuse the non-geeks) and just because, the Marvel films people run head-first into the difficult one. Most superhero movies can be presented as slightly over-exuberant technothrillers, but, well, what the heck can you do with Thor?

Throw a posh British Shakespearean director at it, maybe? Just for Odin's sake don't try to make the original '60s costume work on screen. Which is presumably how Walt and Louise Simonson earn themselves credit mentions alongside the '60s Marvel names, having given the (Marvel) God of Thunder his vaguely plausible suit of armour and his beard. Still, it's all about dropping a clunky modern-fantasy reading of Norse myth into the modern world, and there's only so much anyone can do with that - the script tries a bit of waffle about magic being sufficiently advanced science, but that really doesn't survive a moment's scrutiny - this is sufficiently advanced science that can generate immovable objects, execute conditional operations based on moral judgements made from beyond line of sight, and operate at the mutter of a patriarchal guy in an eye-patch several light-years away. Oh well, at least they didn't try any mumbles about nanotech.

And let's be fair, from a geeky point of view - the visual realisation of a lot of stuff from the comics is really pretty good. The movie also moves fast enough to stop anyone worrying about the obvious glaring logical holes so long as it lasts. (What language do the Asgardians speak? Does Bifrost have a Tardis translation circuit? How old are Thor and Loki? How did they get into human myth if they were born after regular contact between the Nine Worlds ended?) The Casket of Ancient Winters is reduced to a canister of pure distilled Maguffin, though, doing nothing except sit there glowing blue and being important for as long as it's needed; one wonders if early script drafts did more with it, but I wouldn't even bet on that. The visual design for much of Asgard is certainly fun, especially in 3-D - a garish high-fantasy cityscape, rendered with a bit of budget. Bifrost, though, looks like a bad '80s home computer visual effect given unwarranted solidity

The cast is over-qualified, of course, even given that it has some relative newcomers - Chris Hemsworth has fully adequate charm and charisma as well as the body for the lead role, and Tom Hiddleston brings ice-blue eyes and icy elegance to Loki, aided by good direction and costume design which recalls his horned helmet from the comics without getting goofy. (The film has a relatively complex treatment of that character, actually, even if the psychology is a bit Hollywood-routine.) Anthony Hopkins does dignified, Natalie Portman does her best with the career-upgraded Jane Foster, and Idris Elba gives Heimdall plenty of deific dignity. They're fun to watch, but they can never quite suppress the impression that this film exists because the comic exists, and not because it has any great claims to interest in its own right. Still, we get that fight scene between Thor and Loki...

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

(Another old post finally being finished...)

To begin with a confession, I suppose - I haven't seen The Mummy, or some of the Indiana Jones movies, or any of the Tomb Raider films, and nor have I read the French bandes dessinées on which this film is based - so I'm probably even less entitled to comment on it than usual. But this blog is only supposed to be about personal reactions anyway, so here we are.

Actually, I think it's the last omission which probably ought to count against me most. I can see why reviewers have been invoking those English-language reference points, but really, this isn't much of a Hollywood-style action movie. Luc Besson may have had some influence in Hollywood over the years, but he's always been a bit too Frenchly odd, and with its lack of a proper villain and focus on a style-soaked female lead, this is very much a Besson movie. More to the point, with its peculiar sense of partial detachment from any sort of reality, its weird dialogue and disregard for much in the way of psychological reality, it's extremely reminiscent of any number of BDs that I have seen, so I suspect it's pretty faithful to its source.

In case you were wondering, Adèle Blanc-Sec, played by the inevitably winsome Louise Bourgoin, is an Edwardian-period adventuress who is, as it turns out, looking for the mummy of an ancient Egyptian doctor so that she can get it resurrected by a loopy academic psychic, because she knows that the ancient Egyptians had the medical knowledge she needs to cure her sister, who is in a coma with a hat-pin through her skull. Unfortunately, though, the psychic has already resurrected an ancient pterodactyl egg, and the pterodactyl is terrorising Paris. Not that Adèle cares about Paris or anyone else much, it seems - family comes first, and Adèle sets out to deal with her own concerns before anything else, leaving a trail of chaos and one or two accidental deaths in her wake...

It's all rather self-consciously French, too, what with the politicians having affairs with cancan dancers and the gendarmes who insist that they are wine connoisseurs and the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, I guess it could even be called charming. Or at least, charmant. Not without its interest, even. More a curiosity than a masterpiece, though.