Life In case you hadn't noticed with all the writing I've been on holiday this past couple of days. Today I went on yet another of those gallery trips, the location for which will be revealed at some later date, just to keep you in suspense (it's related to a milk commercial, that's all I'm saying) When I decided to visit all of these galleries, I just thought it would be a leisurely chance to visit some places I haven't been before and see some good paintings in the process. After Monday and today I'm beginning to see that actually this is turning into something akin to one of Dave Gorman or Danny Wallace's eccentric bets except that (a) there was no bet and (b) I'm not trying to prove anything to anyone. I'll tell you about my thrilling adventures in Lancashire when I'm a bit more awake.

“Ideas of time and space were changed forever.” -- Wall label

Art Art In The Age of Steam is one of the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool’s tentpole major exhibitions as part of the Capital of Culture celebrations. As such then it should be rather special and you know what – it really is – one of the best exhibitions the galleries has staged this decade. It’s an interesting and relevant topic and the exhibition takes time to look at the very specific era between 1830 and the early half of the 1900s in great detail, showing how different artists working various genres and media reacted to it.

As the opening explanation in the wall notes, “Ideas of time and space were changed forever.” Stream engines meant that people could travel faster than ever before between destinations which utterly changed perceptions of the local world. It’s difficult for us now to imagine a world in which it would take days or weeks to travel throughout even our small island, London seeming a very long way away rather than two and half hours (give or take delays). Also, it’s not emphasised enough in the show but the Liverpool to Manchester steam railway was one of the technical marvels of its age with Stevenson’s Rocket the famous vehicle that ran first on the tracks.

Fittingly, it’s the flexibility of travel in the times we live that allow this exhibition to be quite as comprehensive and surprising. There’s no denying that it’s quite thrilling to enter a section, for example ‘Impressionism and Post-Impressionism’ and find five Monet and a Manet lined up on a wall opposite some Pisarros and a Van Gogh in a space, a ten minute bus ride away from. That might be commonplace in London and Paris obviously, but certainly not in Liverpool and many of these are from private collections and this will be the only time they can be seen for many a year. It might sound trite to talk about names over the quality of the work on display, but this is the first time I’ve actually stood close enough to an Edward Hopper to see the brush strokes and that’s not something you’d really want to forget.

As a side note, having worked for the registrars of a gallery I can understand the undertaking this exhibition will have represented, especially considering the number of institutions which are listed as sources, many of them in the US. Plus there’s the funding. Monet’s Railway Bridge, Argenteuil actually has an addition to its label that the ‘transportation was supported by Merseytravel’ which means that the cost of moving that one painting was so expensive an outside organisation had to step in!

Some of these provenance labels are interesting in and of themselves. Norbet Guenuette's View of Saint-Lazare Railway, Paris is owned by The Baltimore Museum of Art but many hands chipped in to buy it for their collection; 'The George A Lucas Collection purchased with funds from the State of Maryland, Laurence and Stella Bendann Fund, and contributions from individuals, foundations and corporations throughout the Baltimore community.' That's what I call civic pride.

If the Impressionists stands out for its A-List power, the emotional backbone is the section about 'the human drama of the railway'. Spend enough time between trains, idly waiting for the next train and you’ll find yourself people watching, speculating on who your fellow passengers are and how they spend the rest of their lives. Sometimes, if you’ve been commuting together you might ask and sometimes their story might even be more fantastic than you first thought. But often you’re happy with the fantasy, and these pictures of travellers on station platforms and in train carriages capture that impulse perfectly, period scenes teaming with life, small groups of people demanding us to imagine their story.

The area is dominated by WP Frith’s The Railway Station which like all of them contrasts the different classes of passenger showing how segregation was still in effect even as they joined the train. It’s Parting Words, Fenchurch Street Station by Frederick Brown Barwell that creates the biggest mystery because it seems to be based on some lost novel. As the label asks, just “Why is the man on the left standing in amazement at one of the two identically dressed ladies?” That seems to be a theme, since across the room Augustus Egg’s The Travelling Companions also features two similarly costumed girls, twins in fact, sitting opposite one another in a carriage producing a near symmetrical image but for the scenery.

The American vistas in 'Crossing continents - America and beyond' are of the order which must have influenced John Ford and his cinematographers as they attempted to capture the old west on film. Often, as in George Inness’s The Lackawanna Valley there’s a stark contrast between the idyllic countryside and this symbol of industrialisation rolling through. But its difficult not be moved by the massive canvas of Donner Lake from the Summit by Albert Biersladt in which the train is dwarfed by the landscape, suggesting that no matter what happens, nature will out.

The final two areas 'States of Mind' and 'The Machine Age' bespeak of the transitional period when Steam was inevitably superseded by even more impressive, but perhaps more damaging technology. Whilst its interesting to watch the avant-guard attempt to deal with old technology in a new era, the most effective image here are the still green and red hues of Hopper’s Railroad Sunset which shows a solitary signaling box and now trains, perhaps underscoring what’s been lost. A plasma screen in the gallery has footage from a range of films showing these beasts in action and it’s certainly a more thrilling experience than watching an anonymous two carriage electric box trundle out of Lime Street.

Film A couple of years ago there was a screening in Manchester of Mitchell & Kenyon’s football films. M&K were two Blackburn entrepreneurs who for a period in the early part of the last century set about filming people and work and play and then charging them to see their life projected that evening at various locations including fair grounds and libraries and it turned out St George’s Hall. I’ve thought since then how wonderful it would be to organise such a showing at that venue again and last night I got to see what that looked like as hundreds of people piled into the main hall to see a selection of their films of Liverpool, in a screening organised by the BFI and Liverpool University.

My version of the event was a plasma tv running from a Matsui dvd player with about thirty chairs. Instead, the main stage was filled with a giant screen, showing images from a state of the art projector sat on the organ balcony and an audience covering the whole floor. The programme selected highlights from over two hours of footage shot in the city, generally places with large gatherings of people such ass football matches, parades, the return of soldiers from the Boer War, the leaving of Cunard ships from the Pier Head and oddly a reconstruction of the arrest of a criminal.

As you can see from these edited highlights, that’s a very broad description of the marvels we saw, blurry scenes of the past put into context by the guest speakers, Julia Hallam from Liverpool University and Vanessa Toulmin from Sheffield’s National Fairground Archive, who’d also commentated on the football in Manchester and has apparently presented over a hundred and thirty similar shows throughout the country. Vanessa seems tireless and has the same enthusiasm for the subject that I saw two years ago.

I went with my Dad and he was particularly impressed with the musical accompaniment provided by Stephen Horne, who at one point played the flute and piano simultaneously creating a spooky atmosphere to accompany the recreated Arrest of Goudie (a film which demonstrates exactly how difficult it was to spin a narrative when you’ve only very long static shots to work with, establishing shots lasting many minutes). Now and then Horne imported familiar melodies including You’ll Never Walk Alone and The Leaving of Liverpool, which created some wonderfully post-modern moments, different eras of the past combining.

Seeing images such as the giving of medals to soldiers even I can’t but feel that we’ve lost something in our stupid cynical world. True, some of the audience in the footage of the May Day Demonstrations look bored stiff (with the exception of one particularly enthusiastic gentleman waving his hat in the air) but it was at least a regular gathering in which the entire community could become involved and which by the looks of things hadn’t been hijacked by commercial concerns (with the exception of the ice cream man perhaps).

The Capital of Culture year, with collective experiences such as this screening are proving that actually such things are still possible. Usually in screenings I’m quite obsessed about talkers making noise during the main feature. Here it seemed positively encouraged, a collective brains trust attempting to work out exactly were in Liverpool particular films had been shot, or exclamations of surprise as the older demographic of the audience saw shops and streets that have long disappeared.

TV Heather writes about being interviewed by Kathie Lee Gifford on NBC's Today Show, which sounds even worse than BBC Breakfast in dealing with left of field (ie, not mainstream) topics:

"this is obviously a case of an interviewer not being adequately familiar with the topic at hand (also, probably not a good idea to have someone afraid of computers interviewing someone about their job using computers). And I'm not about to jump into the crowd and start calling Kathie Lee names, she does not deserve that from me. I'm not so much angry at her as I am disappointed that this topic was not given the service it deserves."

I've not seen anything but the opening of video because of my chuggy connection, but really? That's how you're introducing a section about something computer related? 'I hate computers!' That sounds like it's going to be an in-depth interview ...

"Journalism" Just because they need to be told over and over and often. No Daily Mail, it isn't cool to steal photos from flickr without attribution and for commercial gain if the photographer says it isn't.

Law So after October 1 when judges are hearing civil and family cases in England and Wales, they'll be dressed like The Ood from Doctor Who with fashion pretensions?

Updated three minutes later: I just want it on record that I read what Hadley Freeman said in The Guardian three minutes after I posted the above. She said: "If humanising the judicial profession was the aim of this makeover, it is interesting that Betty Jackson decided that the outfit best suited for this would be one that looks like something an alien android with menacing religious undertones would wear when waging war with Doctor Who." I let you decide which is funnier. It's hers right?

Education Annette writes inspiringly about being a teacher: "But then, just when you want to give up, something amazing happens. You're reading a student's essay, and it's so much better than the first draft. He read my comments! You read on--wow, this kid's got good ideas! He cited his sources correctly. Some of the comma errors are still there, but they're not too bad. This kid, the kid who sits in the back texting while you're lecturing, the kid who you thought never paid attention, this kid can write a college paper! *Choirs of angels sing hallelujah* It worked! I "taught" them something! As a teacher you live for those moments. As satisfying moments go, those rank right up there."

"You don't know much, do you?" -- Another visitor who thought I was a staff member and harranged me with a barrage of questions.

Art I was told off by one of the attendants when I described Dunham Massey Hall as a stately home. “Not so stately” she whispered to me mischievously. I’m still not sure how else to describe it, given that it’s a rather large house in the middle of an estate. The National Trust website calls it mansion so we'll go with that. Of all the venues I've visited from Edward Morris’s Public Art Collections In North-West England book, it’s the first so-far that I’ve actually wanted to live in, with room after room filled with gorgeous furniture and a genuine sense of lost time. Except I’m not sure where I’d put the telly and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to plug in a computer.

The mansion was built in 1616 by Sir George Booth, one of James I’s baronettes and across the years has been occupied by various Lords and Earls of Stamford and Warrington before falling into the hands of the National Trust on the death of the 10th Earl Roger Grey in 1976. Since then the house has hardly been changed which means that as you stroll past wood paneling and wallpaper, across wooden floors and worn carpets you can see the modification and developments added by many of owners, all attempting to make it their home.

In many cases the original furniture was kept in state and later generations have simply filled other rooms with their life with areas such as The Great Hall, the Library and the Billiard Room all seeming like separate time zones, the visitor stepping through portals between. At first it’s quite disorientating and there’s certainly too much for the eye to take in, every detail suggesting the tastes and decency of the people who lived here. It’s probably best to concentrate on a particular aspect and focus, which is why it’s helpful that I particular wanted to see the fine art collection.

To an extent it’s a building-shaped family album, with every wall featuring at least one portrait of somebody or other. With the exception of the Romney and the Reynolds, most of these are head and shoulders 'shots' and actually a bit samey and of the kind which would be dashed off quickly by a painter living off the commissions. Since we are seeing generations of the same family though, you can see how painting methods have developed over the centuries, techniques becoming more sophisticated with the passage of time, from rather sombre ladies in black from the Jacobian era to the bright face of the turn of the last century.

You’ll need a good pair of binoculars though, since the best of these portraits tend to be at the opposite ends of large rooms, a frustration of stately homes were security is paramount. There’s an amazing picture of Dorothy Wrighte, the wife of the 3rd Earl of Stamford attributed to Jon Richardson in the Dining Room, with vivid reds in her dress but you can only see it from a small mezzanine leading in from the Stone Parlour. Similarly you need some determination to have decent look at the canvas that dominates the summer parlour, a full length by J. Ernest Breum of Penelope Theobald, Countess of Stamford and her children.

In general though, I think the finest pictures are fairly unheralded and you’d miss most of them if you weren’t looking. On ducking into the entrance hall, the staff are determined to herald you on, but I managed to stop in the doorway of the adjoining courtyard and noticed on either side two paintings by J Boultbee, Denham Oak. These appear to be mirror images of each other, broken trees moodily gathered in dark wood. Look more closely and you’ll notice that actually the artist has painted the same scene from two different directions and if you were to lean the two canvases back to back, you’d have a three hundred and sixty degree view within a two dimensional plain. A.L.R. Ducros’s Temple of Minerva Medici, Rome uses much the same trick showing a ruined dome within a landscape from opposite angles as nature in the form of vines and trees claims this ancient architecture for its own.

Roped off nearby in the parlour you can just about glimpse J Nelson Drummond’s Where Heroes Rest, a poignantly misty view of St. Paul’s Cathedral created in coloured crayon, greens and blues blended to underscore the sense of doom in the title. Along the corridors, don’t miss Le Champ Du Drop D’or, a 1774 engraving at the bottom of a stairwell showing the procession of Henry VIII to meet the French King Francis I, which as well as featuring some wonderfully Hogarthian characterisation amongst hundreds of faces has a dragon, yes, a dragon flying through the sky, something Shakespeare omitted when he got around to writing the King’s stage biography. Further into the house, the weirdest picture by far is the one Edward highlights in his book by Jan Wyck of A Dutch Mastiff with Dunham Massey in the Background. He calls it ‘sensitive and touching’ but it's also scary, a kind of forced perspective suggesting that the dog’s grown to Digby proportions and is preparing to stamp all over the town which also lies in the background, giant paw prints in its wake.

Most of these curiosities aren’t even mentioned in their guide book, which prefers to spend much of its time detailing the silver, jewelery and furniture, the history of the house and its gardens. It does take time though to include John Harris’s birds-eye views of the hall painted in 1751. Predating the game show Treasure Hunt and Google Earth by around two hundred and fifty years these are fascinating descriptions of the grounds of the house and how the 2nd Earl of Warrington very much saw them as an extension of the property, avenues fanning out into his plantations. I presume they’re extrapolations of the plans, that century’s equivalent of the artist impression as seen whenever a new building project is being proposed (see the soon to be opened Liverpool One).

This one of the most idyll places I’ve ever visited. In the gardens alone, despite having spent most of life near Sefton Park I still wasn’t prepared for the freshness of the air and fragrances, the colours and the silences. Or the wildlife; deer walk freely around the estate and I couldn’t help pointing and exclaiming ‘It’s a deer!’ to the staff member I’d luckily got off the bus with and was showing me the way to the house. Ironically, even if much of the collection is slightly obscured from view, it’s relatively expensive to get in and it wasn’t the easiest venue to reach (it took three and a half hours to get home) I think this might well come close to being my favourite of these visits, if only because it far exceeded my expectations.

TV That's hilarious. It's ages since I've had a text message that exciting. From the comments: "Apparently, he's been pacing the corridor saying "It's not what it looks like"

(yes, I know that's not much to go on but you'll just have to click and have look -- the last thing we need is for Google's algorithm to latch onto the names -- it'd be in the tabloids by the end of the week which wouldn't be fair)

TV If anyone still needs to be convinced that Doctor Who is real television, Steven Moffat has won Best Writer at the Bafta Craft Awards for arguably the best episode of last year's series Blink. Which sounds quite impressive, and then you find out that he beat Jimmy McGovern (for "The Street"), Tony Marchant (for "The Mark of Cain") and Heidi Thomas (for "Cranford"). Extraordinary.

Commerce EBay is broken: "So I returned to the list of items, and found that - sure enough - the 6th page which I had expected to find my item on was actually only the sixth page of featured items. It was not for another several pages that the list of featured items was finally exhausted, and the 'Time Left' column reset from '5 days' to '< 1 minute'. Once again I had to click through several pages of items which were ending before mine, until finally, around page 20, I saw my item in the queue. Great, I thought, what good is an auction if nobody sees it?" Later.

Music Why I don't go to gigs -- and in fact why I don't go to gigs: "People who take pictures throughout gigs. Several flavours of these, now; the professional photographer who elbows his way to the front on the grounds that he has a job to do, clicks away with little regard for the people behind or destruction of atmosphere. The mobile phone fan who you would assume had done this enough times to realise you will never, ever get a decent photograph of a band from the back of a hall, particularly by waving your shitty handset in the air, but still tries periodically."

Music When does it stop being Kraftwerk? "I happily accept that when they play 'The Robots' as an encore, with nothing on stage except 4 laptops and 4 mechanical robots, that I am watching Kraftwerk."

Elsewhere In case you're wondering, I actually did have a shower.

Music Two Scottish lads pretended to be American rappers for two years in order to get a record deal, signed with Sony, and then realised that if they ever released a single they'd be found out:: "If you can convince one person, and then another person, eventually you have all these people believing in you, wanting something from you." As their social circle in London expanded, they would appropriate plot lines from TV shows and films, or stories they'd heard Americans tell, to flesh out their new identities. "We'd play around with different accents - we'd go, 'Fark off' and do loads of English accents, fooling around - and people were like, 'You should have your own TV show!' We did Billy Connolly and people were clean blown away by Americans doing such good Scottish accents."

Music Useful column from Charles Arthur describing how the internet blindsided record companies:

"As they explain, the average CD is 650 megabytes of high-quality sound. Every single second takes up 1.4 megabits of data. But everywhere you look, your potential consumers - home internet users, the same people who buy CDs now - are on dialup internet, chugging along at 36 kilobits per second. At that speed, it would take 45 hours to download a CD. In that time, you could walk to the nearest store and buy the record."

Except, as we know, someone was already thinking ahead.

Comics I'll write about my new DC Comics obsession some other time (isn't Identity Crisis great? Isn't it though?) but for now here's a useful article about retconing and the headaches thereof, inspired by the increasingly bizarre Spiderman incident but take in the sights throughout the con-iverse including The Legion of Superheroes:

I've been pulling from Legion history for a lot of this, because... well, because they're kind of the perfect example. Moving from the Levitz version of the classic Legion to the Giffen/Bierbaum version of the retconned Legion and then the Post-Zero Hour Rebooted Legion gave us a chance to see almost all of these retcons in practice, and in the long run they were almost all disastrous.

I thought the Whoniverse was inconsistent until I saw what had been going on with DC for decades. How can fans keep up with their favourite characters when their origin stories and status quo keep changing every three or four years?

"Journalism" Typical bloody Daily sodding Mail. I mean it's not like there aren't enough of the real thing, as The Observer found out when they posted a typically well researched story on the subject over a week before the mid-market tossers. That is all.

Poetry Alicia Goranson (one of the Beckys from the sitcom Rosanne) hasn't posted to her blog since 2006 but has just these past few weeks begun posting some poetry. Taking into account that like most people, everything I know about verse (that isn't by one man and written four hundred years ago) I learned at school before failing A-level English, it's actually very good. So good in fact it's put me in the mood to inflict some of my own on you, from back in the day -- 13th March 1996 -- to be exact.

"Something New

He reached out
to touch her,
nervously.

Away, she
pulled, from him,
shielding.

He spoke to
her calmly.

Screaming, her
voice cracked.

He smiled.

She shouted.

He ...

She ...

She reaches out
to touch him,
nervously.

He holds out
his hand and
grips hers.

She speaks to
him calmly.

Laughing, his
voice cracks.

She smiles.

He weeps.

She ...

He ....

See. What do I know about poetry? I really need a muse. You do know what the promised BIG REVELATION was during the tail end of Mystery Music don't you?

"I haven't ever really found a place to call home ..." -- Dido, 'Life For Rent'

About In the comments to the Dido post, Matthew wondered where the lyrics "The implication I mistook, told on whose side you took; and now with paper in my hand, I'm beginning to understand..." are from. I can say with some confidence (admittedly after a hunt round Google), they're from The Housemartins's track Freedom and should read:

"But the implications I mistook
Until I found out whose side you took
And now with paper in my hand I'm beginning to understand "

I'm listening to the song as I type from their compilation, Now That's What I Call Quite Good. They're right. I can't quite believe how good The Housemartins were and unlike some bands I can mention, they knew when to call it a day (after just five years) before their talent turned to mush in the face of success. There is not a single poor song on this album and despite the vintage, the mid-80s, doesn't sound at all dated largely because they didn't give in to voguish temptation to include any of the electric noises which were in vogue at the time even on ostensibly acoustic albums.

Lead singer Paul Heaton's later band was of course The Beautiful South and one of their lost classics is a cover version of Dream A Little Dream which appears on the soundtrack to French Kiss (the Meg Ryan/Kevin Kline rom-com). It's on there twice in English and French and I can't help but prefer the latter simply it's so unusual to hear the style of the group with a vocal in a different language.

Incidentally, Amazon are listing a new Dido release for September called TBA. It looks like a single judging by the price -- unless they're so worried about sales that they're discounting an album even before it's released. Which is unlikely.

"You were so cruel and I hated being your fool..." -- Patty Griffin, 'Time Will Do The Talking'

Communication Finally had a chance to use Facebook's new chat service last night. It was only a quick try-out -- I wanted to ask Chris something about someone, he happened to be online and the question was answered very quickly. And that's the point -- it was fast -- simply look at the list of friends who might by using the site at that moment, click the icon and initiate. No messing about with Trillian or any of the chat software, no needing to know someone's user id or ICQ number. The name is simply there, a button press away.

I'm impressed.

I haven't used chat software in years, largely because I tend to like to write in sentences which isn't very conducive to chat. All too often someone would butt in mid sentence to ask if I was still there. But on this basis of this I'm thinking of trying again.

Of course, tonight, when I'm in the mood, "No one is available to chat."

Typical.

Architecture I09 offers some 1970s Soviet architecture which doesn't look like a product of this earth and could pass quite comfortably in the sci-fi franchise universe of your choice: "French photojournalist Frederic Chaubin likes to take photographs of science-fictiony Soviet architecture from the 1970s and 80s. During that era, the Soviets erected several formidable buildings that look like cities you'd see on an alien world. Pictured here is a strangely organic-looking wedding palace which is located in Georgia. More U.S.S.R. spaceportecture below."

Plug! A rep who I think works for one of my haunts, Tate Liverpool, has asked me to plug this excellent new scheme, and the best way to do that is probably to offer the entire press release. So if you'll indulge me and in a break from tradition:

7 May 2008

YOU’RE HIRED: LIVERPOOL’S APPRENTICE PROGRAMME HELPS YOUNG PEOPLE GET INTO THE CREATIVE AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

A consortium of Liverpool’s leading cultural organisations – led by Tate Liverpool - is set to launch a unique national training scheme this May. Creative Apprenticeships Liverpool has been devised for young people aged 16-24. It’s part of the national Creative Apprenticeships scheme devised by Creative & Cultural Skills and will pave the way for thousands of young people to access previously out-of-reach careers within the creative and cultural industries.

Competition for jobs within the cultural sector is fierce. Often, entry-level jobs are awarded to graduates who already have significant work experience under their belts. This means that young people who may have the right talent and aptitude, but don’t have the qualifications or work experience, are unable to compete. The end result is a workforce that isn’t diverse and that doesn’t reflect the local communities it serves.

To tackle this, eight major arts organisations, known collectively as Liverpool Arts & Regeneration Consortium (LARC), together with Liverpool Community College, have been involved in the development of Creative Apprenticeships Liverpool and will be piloting the programme in the city during 2008.

In September, ten young people from Merseyside will become the first Creative Apprentices in the region. They’ll receive paid, on-the-job training while working inside some of Liverpool’s most successful arts organisations, from Tate Liverpool to the newly reopened Bluecoat. As well as walking away with a formal qualification at the end of the 12-month programme (a Level 2 NVQ in Community Arts Management), participants will gain invaluable work experience, career counselling and transferable skills.

Importantly, Creative Apprenticeships Liverpool will ensure that local young people get the skills they need to take advantage of the boom in cultural jobs in their home city.

The development of this ambitious programme was initiated by Tate and independent grant-making body, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Taking a long-term view, the Foundation invested £155,000 in the Liverpool pilot, funding not only initial research and development but also ‘capacity building’ within the Liverpool-based arts organisations taking part.

The programme’s early research identified that Liverpool’s cultural organisations were more used to managing experienced graduates than young people fresh from school, leaving them ill equipped to support young employees. A major part of the programme has therefore focused on changing the employment culture within participating organisations, with staff receiving formal and informal training to give them the skills necessary to support younger colleagues. National Museums Liverpool has delivered this part of the programme, which represents a major step towards creating a more diverse workforce within Liverpool’s growing creative and cultural sector.

‘The Paul Hamlyn Foundation welcomes the launch of Creative Apprenticeships Liverpool,’ says Robert Dufton, Director of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. ‘We see this as a national pilot for cultural organisations across the UK, enabling them to use their resources so that young people in their communities develop skills which will equip them for working both in the creative industries and other sectors. In particular, this scheme has the potential to contribute to the development of the workforce for the 2012 Olympics. The Foundation initiated this scheme with Tate Liverpool and has contributed towards its development and implementation. The Foundation is committed to maximising opportunities for individuals and communities to realise their potential and experience and enjoy a better quality of life.’

‘This scheme shows both the strengths of Liverpool’s cultural sector and investors’ confidence in it,’ said Andrea Nixon, Executive Director of Tate Liverpool. ‘We were extremely fortunate to have had a partner such as the Paul Hamlyn Foundation involved from the start. The Foundation understood our vision for the Apprenticeships, believed that we could change the culture of employment within the sector and had complete confidence in the ability of the city’s cultural organisations to work together to make Creative Apprenticeships Liverpool a reality.’

Creative Apprenticeships Liverpool launches at Tate Liverpool on 13 May – with the consortium behind it looking to sign up its first intake of ten apprentices by 13 June. The Apprenticeships themselves will kick off in September 2008 and will run for 12 months.

Open events will be held at: Tate Liverpool (13 May, 6pm-8pm), FACT (18 May, 1pm-4pm) and National Museums Liverpool (29 May, 2pm-4pm). Applicants can also find out more at www.creativeapprenticeshipsliverpool.org.uk.

"Warrington is where it all began. I was at the grand opening of Allied Carpets in the late 80s and Leslie Crowther shook my hand." - Justin Moorhouse

Art A couple of weeks ago on a wet Tuesday, I visited Warrington Museum and Art Gallery. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been through the doors. It’s one of the few places in Edward Morris’s Public Art Collections in North-West England guide I’ve been reluctant to travel to because I’ve been through its doors before and I’ve been trying to enjoy the shock of the new as much as possible. I dropped in many times during the late nineties when I was working for Edward researching local public art (for the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) in the adjoining library. It was a good place to get some cheap machine coffee if I needed to take a break from looking through the records.

The coffee hasn’t changed much and neither has the museum. Founded in 1848 and opened five years later by the local Town Council, it’s as much a piece of history as the objects in its care. Wood paneling and old style cabinets dominate, with hand written information cards next to the artifacts. In an age when museums are being refit left and centre attempting to get away from the culture of simply showing a myriad ethnographic examples, it’s quite surprising to find a place standing still, maintaining its traditional style, a perfect way for curatorial students to see what the museums of yesteryear were like. Please don’t see that as a criticism; one of the best rooms at the British Museum is the antiquated Enlightenment which offers the chance for the visitor to discover the marvelous without them being highlighted to readily. Warrington offers that journey across an entire collection.

The art gallery extension was built in 1875 to ’77 essentially, according to Edward, to house a single sculpture – John Warrington Wood’s milk white marble St Michael Overcoming Satan, which can be seen just inside the front door. Wood was a Warrington boy, and though he spent his formative working years in Rome it's just right that his labour should be represented. There’s no entrance hall as such or at all in fact. A stairwell essentially, with a lift at the centre. But the thing you really notice is how acoustically distracting the building is. I could hear the staff chatting loudly two floors up and a visiting school group trudging about, which isn’t exactly conducive to looking at art. Deep breath. Sigh.

There are three particular display sections. This section of the building has been refit slight since I last visited, the temporary exhibition space slightly more ‘modern’ than before and the mezzanine floor above more prominent to the eye. Warrington’s School of Art was one of the best in the country and its most successful period was in the 1860s under brilliantly named headmaster J. Christmas Thompson. It’s this work which is collected up there and you can see why the students achieved more scholarships than most other art schools of the time.

Henry Woods's First Communion Vale is a Technicolor feast capturing a Mediterranean view of two girls chatting whilst one sews the titular garment. It’s a pleasingly odd composition – the faces aren’t entire realistic and the background is positively impressionistic. Also worth spending time with is a sculpture, Guinevere’s Redeeming by William Reynolds Stephens lustrously developed in bronze, ivory and enamel. It wonders if Arthur’s queen did indeed bring down Camelot and she’s seen trying to make amends for her deeds by returning Excalibur to its rightful owner.

The most interesting pictures on the floor are from Thomas Birtles, some photographs of old Warrington. There’s the Manchester Ship Canal under construction and more atmospherically Eagle and Child Yard, Formerly Patten’s Lane, Looking East to Bridge Street. This isn't mere reportage. It’s a view from a dusty yard into the world beyond, teasing the viewer with a slight image of women in the fashions of the time and the world of the past beyond. If anything it reminds me of Nicholas Middleton’s John Moores entry from 2006, Scene From a Contemporary Novel which showed a similarly ugly part of the city invigorated by the some striking lighting.

There’s no delicate way of saying the following so I’ll just blurt it out. The rest of the fine art collection is maddeningly displayed in the stairwell and particularly the one you’re greeted by at the entrance. A recent re-hang also meant that none of them were labeled and so my ability to offer a commentary is pretty foggy. There’s a nicely turned out painting of a girl popping some peas in a pink top but I couldn’t tell you who it’s by. I also liked the Daughter of the Lagoons by Luke Filder enough to write the title down, but I think by this stage in the visit, the background noise from everywhere had become so intense there wasn’t much I could do. Once everything's sorted out in a couple of weeks I'm sure this will be fine.

Luckily though, and to end on a positive note, I think I’d already seen the best paintings before stepping onto the mezzanine. Walter Langley’s Between the Tides shows a woman leaning over a rail to talk to a rather stereotypical looking fisherman at some docks which is ironic because you also have to lean over a rail to see it. Above the stairs is Fair Quiet and Sweet Rest by Sir Luke Fildes, an idyllic scene of what looks like two couples rowing slowly across a river, singing and taking in the swans and lilly pads – that I can describe the speed they travelling in shows how perfectly the artist captures their movement. It’s Jean Renoir’s short film Partie de Campagne rendered in oil. Remarkable.

Mystery Music: Post Mortem

Every morning I make a point of watching the local weather report on the BBC just before seven o’clock. It’s provided by the national weather centre and whichever presenter has been put on the rota for the morning records one for each of the regions (which on my Freeview box means that its possible to click between three different channels and see said presenter pretending that the North-West, London or Wales are special). The other morning, Laura Tobin, the Christina Ricci of the bureau was describing how it would cold but sunny (and it was) and as usual I let the mass of numbers and statistics wash over me, just about grasping what’s what as I dozed. Some presenter’s voices are more useful than others and Tobin’s is a particularly soothing way to start the day.

It occurred to me that morning, that the weather report is the most technically complex piece of exposition on television. Even more than the business news, the audience is supposed to have a grasp of all kinds of jargon and be able to follow a scientific narrative or projection over a three or four minute period. It’s a daily lecture with a very specific subject area – the weather for the day or sometimes weekend – in an information burst that expects a lot in terms of retention from the audience. And I suspect that most people, like me, don’t remember it all – they can’t possibly. In the end, they focus on the essentials they need – whether it will rain and the temperature – so that they can decide if they should take an umbrella and/or wear a coat. Everything else is extraneous data which is mentally discarded even as it leaves the lips of the forecaster.

Which offers the best explanation as to why writing about music for the best part of the past two months has been so difficult. As I arduously tapped away on my keyboard some mornings and evenings, the reason I simply couldn’t as predicted put my real ideas into words was because I hadn’t absorbed as many of the fundamentals of the process as I’d thought. Despite scanning The Guardian’s music columns, the aforementioned websites and flirting with Q Magazine and Rolling Stone in the past, I simply didn’t have the background knowledge, the instinct ability to give an opinion that I really needed, because what I’d done was looked to see if a cd or artist was worth searching for and setting everything else adie. Especially the art of writing a review, of expressing in words something that can only be experienced authentically through sound.

It hasn't been easy. In the desperation to grind the material out I attempted to give myself a few rules; try and write about as many genres as possible, don’t write about too many film soundtracks or female singer/songwriters and affect a journalistic rather than ‘bloggy’ tone. Sure enough the first post was about the American Graffiti soundtrack and by the third post I was already writing about Carla Bruni with the Beethoven sandwiched in between very much autobiographical. The plan was that having gotten those out of the way I could move forward into other territories, but slowly it became all to clear that if I was going to fill all of the slots, even with the month’s gap in the middle, I would have to keep returning to the genres I really enjoyed and knew something about.

But I did enjoy the challenge even if I think there were more failures than successes. Most of the time I couldn’t decide what tone to write in and even though this was supposed to be a list of my favourite music you haven't heard of, often I’d find myself writing about something I didn’t necessarily love too much or everyone had heard of because I simply wanted to get the words out. The most fun was the post in which I picked my five least favourite tracks and then realised that most of my criticisms were rather petty and attempted to be even pettier. Lord knows what you all made of it, but my readers through site meter have certainly dipped and a few more Bloglines subscribes have deserted the rss feed – which also happened last year for Forgotten Films by the way.

If I’ve understood anything it’s that like any other art form, there simply isn’t one way to write about music and that your approach really does change depending upon what’s being presented to you. That pop music demands that you be funny and skittish and that classical by its nature hope you’ll have some deference. I’ve certainly discovered that my musical taste is surprisingly wide ranging and that in fact I quite like some country and dance music, that you simply can’t make those kinds of distinctions any more. I’ve also discovered how important music is to me, far more than I’d been aware of, and how my ears are always open. As I write I’m listening to Pete Seeger’s live cover of The Byrds (or Ecclesiastes) Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) and it’s about the most perfect track you’re likely to hear.

Elsewhere ... got up Monday morning and wrote what can loosely be described as a review of Saturday's clever Doctor Who. I've pretty much stopped trying to be accessible at this point.

"Nothing last forever." - Deacon Blue, 'I Was Right And You Were Wrong'

Life Hello all. Hope you're having a good bank holiday Monday. They do go very quickly these days, these days. Just in case you're wondering, Thursday was the council elections again, and the usual fifteen hours working as a poll clerk in a large room with a random stranger went off without a hitch, despite but probably because of the low turnout. Boris Johnson. The floppy haired fool. Even though he's the new mayor of London it still seems like a human failure of logical that will effect the whole country. It can only add to the momentum which'll lead to the Tories returning to power. People are inherently silly and have very short memories. Don't you remember what they were like last time? You'd rather have that than this? I spent Friday dealing with the lack of sleep from Thursday. Saturday night spent at pub for Chris's birthday. Sunday evening spent at wrong pub because a quiz at the right one didn't happen due to a wedding reception having been booked there. That's me caught up. What have you being doing?

Mystery Music March which was in April and is now briefly in May

Thank You -- Dido

Finally then, as promised, Dido. I thought most of the criticism which greeted Dido's first album No Angel was a bit unwarranted. It wasn’t too far away from the jibes James Blunt received a few years later, but whereas in his case he deserved it (not least for spoiling the memory of watching Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk by borrowing the theme tune), Dido’s doubters seemed to simply dislike the woman because her music sudden popularity was surely going to herald the return of the light ballad, the soulful music for the soulless once epitomized by Sade and Beverley Craven. And so it was as Dido was followed by the Norah Joneses and Madeleine Peyrouxes to the supermarket shelves – a slightly bluesier sound clearly but still hitting the same aural comfort zone.

If Dido’s second album, Life For Rent descended into maudlin territory, to these ears, No Angel is a treat from top to bottom with Thank You the highlight. This isn’t challenging music, but it doesn’t want to be; it’s an attempt to capture honest feelings without anger, a musical Bridget Jones’ Diary without some American stealing the part played in my head whilst reading the book by Sally Philips. The singer describes a typically shitty day in Dido-land – having to go to work on a rainy day with a hangover, missing the bus, late for work but throughout she encounters her lover, in photographs and in person and to quote another lyricist it's all ok. In her subsequently much copied naturalistic singing voice she tells him or her that they’re the best thing about her day, no matter what’s happening.

Of course, never having been in a relationship, these are emotions I can’t really tap into, and so I’ll admit there’s a certain wish fulfillment involved in my attachment to the song. Blokes and other spouses should love this song though because it suggests that just by being there they can turn their girlfriends and partner’s life around. Lyrically it isn’t exactly economic, or as impressive as Regina Spector or Kate Nash, but it’s still a lucid daydream, the listener romantically projecting themselves inside. It’s clever too, somehow managing to use the word ‘imply’, something I’ve not heard in a song before or since. The production is deceptively simple – the bongo drums, echoing choral bits double banking some of the lyrics (shades of Nelly Furtado when she was good) and rather looser to these ears the first time it appeared in public with other Music From The Motion Picture Sliding Doors.

I can absolutely understand why some of you hate its breeziness, and I’ll never convince you. There are just some people who hate music which fails to challenge the ear, which is passable background fare sometimes, but emotionally useful otherwise. Predictably, I loved Dido as I love all this music, from Diana Krall through Natalie Imbruglia to Stacey Kent, drawing the line only at Katie Melua who at no point has or does sound authentic or as though she has much at all to do with the music. I bought The Closest Thing To Crazy the day it came out, and regretted it ever since, sounding as it does like a mechanized attempt at recreating Norah Jones in much the same way as Avril Lavigne stole Alanis’s thunder. Oh and Natasha Beddingfield, who is just scary. I suppose it takes a fan to see the difference between all of this stuff.

We know that only a fraction of the music that made the playlist of Michael Parkinson's Radio Two show was any good.

Mystery Music March in April

God Be With You Till We Meet Again – Ralph Vaughn Williams

At the Liverpool Blue Coat, the then all-boys, mostly a grammar school, officially a comprehensive school, that over seven years shaped some of who I am, assemblies were very important. Every morning the school would unite either in the main hall of the school chapel for the same routine – organ voluntary, reading, hymn, prayer and school messages – what club and society activities there would be that day and whether anyone in particular was doing something worthy of a telling off. Every Tuesday, a charity speaker would attend and tell us exactly why we should give our pennies to Amnesty International, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth or the PDSA. Randomly what can best be described as an evangelist would turn up and give us a sermon, which these days would be considered very curious indeed considering it wasn’t what modern jargon might be labeled a faith school.

Being a contrary person, even though I’d dabbled with Christianity in my first year but rejected it soon afterwards, I really appreciated these assemblies – the voluntaries were often spectacular, the collective experience of singing hymns and being able to hear the appalling notes drawing from nearby teachers and the readings, which through some bizarre twist of fate (and volunteering) I managed to give a hell of a lot of in the sixth form (once an exhibitionist etc). I even helped to pick the charity speakers as one of the class representatives who bothered to show up for the termly meeting to look through the box of leaflets which had been sent pleading for money. We’d always seem to end up choosing the same ones and often on the basis of who would be speaking. Friends of the Earth always did well because their visitor had a funny name.

At the end of each year there would be a final assembly at the close of the last day. The format was roughly the same as in the morning, but the aspects were rather more fixed – the same reading, the same voluntary (I think) and the same hymn, no 740 in Hymns Ancient and Modern, God Be With You Till We Meet Again. It was a school tradition which fled across the decades and happened each and every year. The words, by Jeremiah E. Rankin, cumulatively inspired one sentiment. Take care, and I’ll see you soon. Even though I was bullied horrendously for years at the place, habitually had a horrible time all told, and leaving the discussion of what I thought 'God' meant in this context, I often choked up during this part of the assembly because I was still intensely proud of the fact that I went to that school and that once you were a Blue Coat boy, you were always a Blue Coat boy.

Inevitably after seven years I was sitting in the final ever assembly in the school. I remember it oddly just being my year group and for some it being quite a chore (they wanted to get to the pub, which was predictably called the Coffee House). By then, girls had joined the school, there we no longer borders living there, and some of the other traditions had fallen away but we were still singing this hymn, and yes I did get as emotional as I’d hoped. This had been my final proper day at a school I’d worked so hard to get into at the beginning of my teens letting me loose towards the end. Just exams to go and then hopefully university. We were finally becoming adults (!) and there certainly would be people here we wouldn’t see again (until the invention of FriendsReunited and Facebook) and yet we still sang those lyrics – and loudly – it sounded like a soccer chant. But it still seemed right to say take care, one more time.

Food The case for Quorn. I'm still not convinced, partly because I love meat and also since it sounds exactly like the stuff Professor Jones and his colleagues at the Nut Hutch were growing in Doctor Who's The Green Death.

Web Friends Reunited redesigns. Now looks like every other boring website online. Owners ITV miss point (as usual) and now want to turn it into Facebook for oldies. At least it's free now. And easier to use. Hmm.

Books A cautionary tale for researchers and writers everywhere. What I don't understand is how the writer,Veronica Buckley, could have used a purposefully fictual work as a primary source without reading the back cover or introduction which presumably fess up to the intrigue. And even if they don't, what about the fact that the book is credited to an author rather than an editor (as a real diary which had been prepared for publication would).

Mystery Music March in April

The 'Internet'

In September 1995, BBC Music Magazine published this article which helpfully introduces the internet to a readership who may still be getting used to hearing their music on cd:



It’s the kind of writing which still needs to put the words like browser and phrases like World Wide Web into apostrophes and which spends a lot of time explaining what the Usenet is. This is pre-Google and the search engine of choice, Lycos didn’t even have its own domain name yet.

Over a decade later the various news groups are still there (rec.music.classical, rec.music.early, rec.music.makers.piano) and can be seen though Google Groups, but the WWW Vitual Library’s been lost and I’m pleased to see Lycos is still in the topic five web portals along with their doggy logo. Most impressively though, the Viola Jokes domain still works and takes you to a page which notes that the magazine made a typographical error in the URL before usefully pointing you in the right direction!

With the exception of this organ, I haven’t been in sight of a high street magazine about music in years. Most of anything I read about music is in the papers or online which probably explains why I still haven’t understood exactly how writing process works despite spending the best part of two months in the attempt. As a homage to John Warburton’s fantastic piece of journalism, here are the five music related ‘websites’ ‘online’ which I’m using right now. Don't expect any great revelations ...

No Rock And Roll Fun
I’m not subscribed to too many music-related gossip websites largely because Simon seems to read them all for me (and us). Covering everything from the business to what the tabloids are saying I might not always have a clue who he’s talking about but his posting rate is impressive and the writing between the links is often funny and acerbic.

Wired: Listening Post
As you’d expect this offers a slightly more corporate, technology orientated version of the above but with more a more proactive approach. More often than not, I’ll read a story here which isn’t picked up by the rest of the media until days later and with less detail.

Winamp
My music player of choice. Having tried iTunes and found it cloggy and slow on my dial-up connection, Winamp continues to be a lean, useful alternative. A recent overhaul added a little box which appears and tells you unobtrusively which track is just beginning, although I still can’t get the ID3 editor to work as well as before.

Soundamus
A tool which analyses your scrobbling habits through Last.fm and then sends news via an RSS feed of new releases by the artists whose music you’re listening too. It works too – Jewel’s new lillbitcountry album is released in June.

Wikipedia
Well, yes, clearly. Does anyone actually remember what the web was like before the Wikipedia came along and could tell you very quickly why Lou Reed recorded Metal Machine Music? Pointlessly criticised for the few minor errors which are corrected almost as quickly as they’re noticed it’s been the main source for many of these articles. If the coverage isn’t always as detailed as you like, at least you can go in yourself and make it as detailed as you like. Even if you’re wrong.

Obituary Bye Humph. I can't imagine how I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue will work without you. Oddly though, George Melly managed to write your obituary for The Guardian before he died himself, which shows forward planning.

Film Rather lovely if slightly tragic Vanity Fair article about Doris Day. I didn't know she'd married a wrongen: "In the course of their 17-year marriage, Melcher took over Day’s career completely. Long before prenuptial agreements became standard among Hollywood celebrities, the Melchers entered into something even rarer: a post-nuptial arrangement. Dated December 28, 1955, the document underscores that, after four and a half years, the Melcher union had become more professional than conjugal. In it, Day is referred to as “the Artist” and Melcher as “the Manager.”