Globe to Globe Hamlet.

Shakespeare's Globe is taking a production of Hamlet, a version of this production perhaps, to every country in the world:

"Shakespeare’s Globe said it aims to perform in some 205 countries and territories, some of which have never seen a Shakespeare production before, and will get around by automobile, boat, train and plane. The Twitter feed @WorldHamlet will track the show’s whereabouts."

It doesn't leave until next April, but the official website is already up here. How exciting. The Guardian has quotes from director Dominic Dromgoole:

"I think having a lunatic idea is a very good thing, it's a great way to keep everybody focused and dazzled and delighted by the ambition and energy of the company," said the artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. "If we're going to do every country in the world it has to be every country, we're not going to leave anyone out. All the 'Stans, South and North Korea – we're very keen to get into North Korea. Antarctica? Fuck yes."

The Twitter feed offers some background on the nature of the production:

Just 8 actors play over two dozen roles on a stripped-down booth stage, directed by @the_Globe's artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. #G2G
— GlobetoGlobe Hamlet (@WorldHamlet) July 16, 2013

All very In The Bleak Midwinter. Or Shakespeare Wallah. No news if it's the same eighth actors, because that would be remarkable. Can I come?

Why do most exhibitions in Liverpool seem to be of contemporary art?

Art Attending the Burne-Jones exhibition at the Lady Lever reminded me something which has been becoming increasingly frustrating over the past year or so and can only be said bluntly in the form of a question:

Why do most exhibitions in Liverpool seem to be of contemporary art?

Let’s just define that for a moment because “contemporary art” is an ever changing term because it has to be. Edward Burne-Jones was a contemporary artist at a certain point. I suppose what I mean, though I’m ashamed to say it, is living artists. A major proportion of the work is by living artists. Dead artists don’t often get a look in.

Every now and then I’ll glance wistfully south and that see that somewhere like the National Gallery is showing a selection of Vermeers or the Royal Academy is showing Manet and sigh knowing that such things will never appear in Liverpool or even (to some extent) Manchester.

Or I'll watch videos like this and cry:



Yes, I know it's the Met in New York, but damn, why can't that be us too?

Partly it’s because we don’t have an equipped venue.

Tate Liverpool has notably been veering closer to the turn of the last century or even earlier in its selections for major exhibitions, Chagall at the moment and Monet mixed in with Turner and Twombly previously. Mondrian coming soon. But it is still a “contemporary” art venue. It’s not within its remit to present a selection of Constables for example, unless it’s in the context of some wider contemporary art exhibition, as happened with some London Pre-Raphaelites turned up in the Alice in Wonderland show.

The Bluecoat, FACT, the Open Eye are all contemporary art venues. The Victoria Gallery has the odd thing from their collection, but generally they choose to support living artists.

The Walker has a massive, much acclaimed permanent display which rivals some of the national venues for quality.  But it's relatively static just as permanent displays are supposed to be.  Much as I love it, I'd also like to see something new.  

In 2008, the Walker offered the amazing Art in the Age of Steam, but since then exhibitions have generally preferring instead to foster new work and present acquisitions and more contemporary items from the collection. Plus there's the John Moores exhibition too. Again this is all fine. The venue has a vast collection of its own much of which can’t be displayed plus blockbusters like Art in the Age of Steam are hugely expensive.

Which is, I understand, part of the problem. The reason the real treats are in London is because those huge galleries have the infrastructure and sponsorship to be able to afford them.

But for an art lover, especially an art lover who is interested as much in Bosch and Bruegel and the Impressionists, London feels as close as Paris in terms of accessibility and it’s in the same country. A minimum of £65 to see something like this on a regular basis is a real shame. We’re being penalised by geography. Again.

Except doesn't need to be a "blockbuster" exhibition.  I'd love to see the work of lesser known artists.  When was the last Arthur Hughes retrospective?  Or John Collier?

What can be done?

As it stands, not much. 

The pipe dream idea would be for the national galleries to have outreach programmes in which touring samples of their collections, and not just the odd painting as has occurred in the past, travel slowly across the country spending a quarter in a venue before moving on, Tate Britain vacating a space to make way for the V&A before the National Gallery moves in and perhaps the British Museum or whoever and even running concurrently.

One problem is the space. In Liverpool, at present, we don’t have one. Which means an older building would have to refurbished and pressed back into service for these galleries of national museums stuff turning up on Merseyside to move into. The old Post Office building would have been perfect but that’s being turned into lecture theatre and the like at the moment by JMU.

The other problem is paying for all. There’s no money. At all. At this point it seems unlikely Tate Liverpool would open up under present conditions. Thank goodness it’s already here.

But again that’s also wrong, because we’re paying for these national galleries even though most of us never get to see them more than once or twice in our lives other than on The Culture Show or BBC Four. Usually information packed, but not the same and also just slightly depressing.

Yes, I know, it’s all sound and fury and I should be grateful for what we do get and that we have something like the Biennial which happens every couple of years and brings great art to the city by living artists. 

 It would just be nice if we could commemorate more of the dead ones too.

The Drawings of Edward Burne-Jones: A Pre-Raphaelite Master at The Lady Lever Art Gallery.

Art If there’s at least one reason to visit The Drawings of Edward Burne-Jones: A Pre-Raphaelite Master, it’s for the rare opportunity to stand toe to frame with arguably one of the artist’s greatest works, Sponsa de Libano (the Bride of Lebanon) (1891) which in these small exhibition spaces stands floor to ceiling, and if you’re close enough your entire field of vision. Although such paintings are rarely inaccessible in other locations both in the gallery and elsewhere, usually these taller canvases are displayed off the ground, further up the wall as they are in the main picture room at the Lady Lever.

Only here can see the heft of his technique, the banding of colour, of gouache and temper, to create other pigments and how their integration when looked at from further away creates the stunning detail which is the hallmark of pre-Raphs in general. Even having seen at the work many times before, only now do I notice the design of the Bride’s sandals and the way she almost hovers above the ground and just how much of an inspiration Botticelli was to Burne-Jones. The painting is almost a chaster, vertical re-imagining of the Birth of Venus, especially noticeable in the positioning of the virgin’s face.

The rest of the exhibition is fine in that way that exhibitions of drawings on paper both complete in and of themselves and preparatory tend to be, with the vague suspicion that artists and art students will gain more from seeing the technique revealed more than this general visitor. As with most other members of the school, his style is exceedingly recognisable partly because he kept returning to the same models time and again so that there’s almost a “Burne-Jones” face. That means that when he comes to create a figure of Christ at The Last Judgment for the east window of St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean, Sussex, we’re not quite sure just how androgynous he’s supposed to be, the facial expression almost exactly like Sponsa de Libano.

The Drawings of Edward Burne-Jones: A Pre-Raphaelite Master continues until 12 January 2014. Free entry.

Ogden Avenue.

Radio In 1958 ...



Then again in 2013 ...

Time Can Be Rewritten.

TV As per Philip Sandifer's piece today about Doctor Who's Army of Ghosts slash Doomsday, and because I do see this a lot in relation to various episodes, here's the thing about why UNIT don't mention Torchwood in the 70s episodes.

The most obvious reason is because Torchwood hadn't been invented yet but that's not good enough for fans who want this to a be a complete universe that doesn't contradict itself and wonder also why Pertwee era spin-offs sometimes do but also sometimes don't try and cover over the cracks.

Here's the fictional fantasy reason.

Torchwood hadn't been invented yet.

You might argue on this if you like, but time in the Doctor Who universe has always been in flux even within the fictional world of the series. So when the Doctor delays the Daleks for a thousand years in Genesis of the Daleks it does have a real effect in ensuing episodes and effectively overrides what may or may not have happened before in previous pepperpot related stories. Retconned if you will.

Similarly in nuWho, when Van Statten doesn't know what a Dalek is despite Journey's End, it's because that episode happened in the timeline before Journey's End changed everything. In the new timeline, there may or may not be a version of Dalek which reflects those events and Van Statten identifies the Dalek immediately.  Assuming his collection hasn't already been impounded by Torchwood.

So now, post Tooth & Claw, there will be a version of the Pertwee era in which Torchwood is a going concern. If there are any classic Who spin-0ffs which mention Torchwood, they're happening in the new version of the timeline rather than the old one. Not that there needs to be much of a difference, probably, though there is some potential in producing a series of nuTrek style remakes which recreate old stories like The Claws of Axos or Invasion of the Dinosaurs in a nuWho tainted version of the timeline in which Torchwood does exist.  The Delgado Master becomes a Scientific Advisor to the evil version of Torchwood.

In other words, time can be rewritten and many of the stories we've enjoyed across the years are just snapshots of a fictional universe at a certain moment.

Some notes:

(1)  The Doctor can only change time if he wasn't previously aware of the outcome.  In other words, he can't kill Hitler, even if he wanted to.  The whole fixed point in time business.  Notice that whenever he's tried, the aforementioned Genesis, Waters of Mars, something has always happened to keep the web of time in check, even if that includes, as per Father's Day, the destruction of a planet or timeline.

(2)  All of which also in effect nullifies canonicity questions because it means that everything can happen, even Death Comes To Time.  They're just different versions of the fictional truth.  At some point, there's nothing to say that there isn't a version of the timeline in which the Doctor isn't a eccentric human in 60s London, the TARDIS his personal hobby.  Chameleon arch or whatever.

Block Google.

Film It was Ingmar Bergman's birthday yesterday, and to celebrate, only in Sweden, Google offered this doodle:



"This is my hand. I can turn it. The blood is still running in it. The sun is still in the sky and the wind is blowing. And I... I, Antonius Block, play chess with Death."

BBC Genome completed.

TV Ariel brings news that the BBC Genome project is complete and from Monday, BBC staff will be able to browse the contents. The public will be some time after that. In case you don't know, the project scanned in every issue of Radio Times and transformed it into a searchable database so that users will be able to see when programmes were originally broadcast without having to visit a library and work through the pages. Quite an endeavour, Morse:

"We seriously underestimated the scale and complexity of the endeavour,' says the member of the archive content team in west London. 'Other organisations have digitised and published their magazine back catalogue, so digitising 4,500 magazines doesn't seem that daunting until you realise that it's about 420,000 pages, containing 4.9 million programmes and information about over 8 million contributors.'

"McEnery puts this into context for those still grappling with the numbers - the dataset is about the size of Wikipedia."

Don't suppose anyone's handing out guest accounts?

British Columbia Children's Hospital.

Film PiXAR now has its own Lance Parkin and Lars Pearson. In a hilariously well thought out, imaginative blog post, Jon Negroni attempts to explain how all of PiXAR's films can exist in the same universe filled with wild moments of extreme brilliance:

"Meanwhile on Earth, machines are left behind to populate the world and run things, explaining human landmarks and traditions still being prominent in Cars. There are no animals or humans in this version of Earth because they’re all gone, but we do know that the planet still has many human influences left. In Cars 2, the cars go to Europe and Japan, making it plain that this is all taking place on Earth as we know it. So what happened to the cars? We’ve learned by now that humans are the source of energy for the machines. That’s why they never got rid of them. In Wall-E, they point out that BNL intended to bring the humans back once the planet was clean again, but they failed. The machines on Earth eventually died out, though we don’t know how."

After I've finished watching my way through Disney mainstream in release order, I think I'll be rerunning PIXAR in this order. Oh my.

Plaza of Nations.

Travel The New York Times publishes an article about Japanese culture in Paris. It's the perfect storm for this blog's city tags:

"Japan continues to fascinate the French, and after a while, you begin to see Japan almost everywhere you go in Paris. The spa Cinq Mondes near the Opera features “kobido,” a natural skin-lifting ritual once reserved for geishas. The Henri Le Roux chocolate shop makes a pea-green Yuzu Macha bar. Galerie Sentou, a design and furniture store, sells Noguchi lamps. Every Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris now seems to have a Japanese touch; some bistros, like L’Office, have even imported Japanese chefs. The Paris runways have come under the same spell. Just one example: Kim Jones, Louis Vuitton’s men’s-wear style director, has combined classic tailoring with kimono silks. Meanwhile, the high-fashion concept store Colette just unveiled “Bento,” a jewelry collection inspired by rice, jasmine flowers and wasabi beans."

See also: Paris syndrome.

Hadden Park.

Film Last Friday, Ben Wheatley's new work, A Field in England was released simultaneously in most formats (about the only one not included was rental streaming). I caught it on blu-ray through my Lovefilm subscription and liked it very much in a post-Tarkovskian sort of way even if I also think it's a film which has to be watched multiple times to full unlock its secrets.

The big question was always going to be, did it work, did this form of mixed distribution hurt one format or another. Well, let's watch Mark Kermode interviewing executive producer about the results...



The Guardian has the numbers too.

In general its considered a success. It was released on the weekend that Murray stormed Wimbledon which was unlucky, and only appeared in cinemas in a very selective way, it wasn't a wide opening across multiple chains, but as the producer says, across the various platforms, the film probably saw more eyeballs than it might have done otherwise considering the kind of film it is and the audience it might otherwise have attracted. As she and Mark say, it's not a model which is going to work for every film, but I could imagine it being the future of independent distribution.

WHO 50: 1996: Doctor Who.

TV One of the less well-known elements of the original broadcast of the TV movie is that outside of the UK, for the so-called “international release”, the opening sequence featured a caption that read “Based on the series originally broadcast on the BBC”.

As the TARDIS Datacore, where I gleaned this spectacular information from explains, this was as a way of observing the typical American production tradition, legal or otherwise, of crediting the original creator of a property, except they didn’t chose Sydney Newman. They could have. He’s often the answer given on game shows and in board games unless they’re being wrong and decide it's Terry Nation. Trivial Pursuit, first edition.

Why did they choose not to? Gene Roddenberry is still credited as Star Trek’s creator even after all these years even as the franchise strayed quite far from his original concept (the later years of DS9). For all the changes which have happened to the classical Marvel Comics characters over the years, they’re still credited as being created by Stan Lee and whichever artist he was working with. Bob Kane created Batman.

But Doctor Who feels unique. As the producers of the TV movie observed even in 1996. anyone who’s written it on an official basis, across media, is a co-creator. It’s a collective creative act.

That’s why when The Guardian offers up Mark Gatiss as co-creator it doesn’t seem that strange (until they corrected themselves about six weeks later judging by the article history). When Matthew Sweet explained on the Today Programme in a discussion about whether the new incarnation could be a woman how the Doctor et al were loomed, a piece of mythology from the Virgin New Adventure novel Lungbarrow, it felt right.

You only have to look at the TV movie’s much derided opening monologue for evidence. Skaro was created by Terry Nation. The Master was created by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts, his original appearance in Terror of the Autons written by Robert Holmes. Derrick Sherwin, Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks arguably created the Time Lords but Dennis Spooner introduced us to The Meddling Monk the first example of someone else from the Doctor’s race. Gallifrey was first mentioned on screen in The Time Warrior.

On that score you could more legitimately suggest Dicks, Letts, Hulke and Holmes created the mythology of Doctor Who and which underpins most of what we know about the show and particularly the TV movie. Except they didn’t decide the Doctor’s time machine would look like a Police Box. His sonic screwdriver first crops up in Fury from the Deep by Victor Pemberton.

Notice how, when the show returned, Russell T Davies didn’t even attempt to apply some kind of propriety claim to his version of the show. The opening credits are all about the stars, the title of the show, the title of the episode and the given writer for that week as per the classic series. He saw himself as just its latest producer, one of many. Even in the closing credits, it's only usual for the word creator to be utilised when one of the old monsters has been brought back. Kit Pedler’s always there when the Cybermen trundle through.

As with so many things in Doctor Who, there really is no right answer other than “Based on the series originally broadcast on the BBC” because that’s where it all started and started again.

Managra.

Says Discogs:

"Managra was an offspring created from a gang-bang of a bunch of Waukesha based 90's punk, thrash, grunge, power pop, glam rock, and garage bands. The band always tried to take their music to new levels of eclecticism. But, with an over abundance of band members, and not enough steam to keep the engines hot, Managra eventually fell apart. All the members are still playing music in bands and/or projects, and live in and around the Milwaukee metropolitan area."

Unconnected, there's also a Managra Music record company:

"Managra Music, Inc. is committed to recording and presenting quality musical content within and without of the traditional industry umbrella. Acknowledging the vast talent pool and believing that global audiences have much more varied appetites than the diet they are being fed, Managra Music, Inc. provides the experience and guidance for nurturing, creating and distributing music through direct marketing and viral InterNet proliferation."

One of their releases is available at archive.org.

The Making of Flatline.

Music Some notes:

(1) It's always a bit strange when people record things in the wrong aspect ration on their phone, but the bit with Keisha getting the song wrong is funny because the aspect ratio is incorrect so what can you do?
(2) It's excellent proof that the vocals on the track haven't been tampered with.
(3) Sugablokes.
(4) Leona Lewis for a second.

Updated later. My goodness. The Sugababes's email mailing list, the current line-up such as it is, has just sent out an email about  ...

"Mutya Keisha Siobhan, aka the original line-up of the Sugababes, have announced their first headline show in 12 years at the Scala in London on August 1st. "

With all the relevant links about where to hear and buy Flatline (currently only iTunes).  I wonder what significance we can put to this, especially since its labeled Universal which is their current record company and not any of the record companies the Sugababes have signed to. Island still have the copyright on the name. Hmm...

The only bit of interest is that it was sent to an older email address I don't use much now, so it's possible this could be an old, old list that I registered with earlier in that last decade and it's being pressed back into service.  Still interesting though given the disparity in the record companies.

Terence Stamp on The Limey.

Film Every AV Club Random Roles column always seems to have a Steven Soderbergh story and here's Stamps, about how the director managed to secure the footage of Poor Cow for The Limey

"I was on holiday in Hawaii, and I got this number to call him and he’s telling me about the movie. And he said he’d seen this older movie I’d done called Poor Cow, and he was thinking of using footage from this old movie as a kind of backstory, and how did I feel about that.

"I was speechless, really, because when I got the call from him, I just assumed it was for some kind of supporting part. But as he explained the movie, I realized that he was actually thinking of me as the limey. He said, “What’s the matter, what’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” And I said, “I really like it! Did you think I wouldn’t?” He said, “I don’t know a lot of other male stars who’d like to be up there with themselves 30 years ago.” And I said, “Not me, mate.” However, during the shooting of the movie, we didn’t have permission [to use the Poor Cow footage]. Every week, every time he got a day off, he’d go to Warner Bros. and work his way up from the people who sell you, like, frame by frame. He worked his way up, and finally on the last weekend, he’d worked his way up to the head of Warner Bros. And what he told me was this. He said that the guy said to him, “Why are you dealing with me? Why can’t you deal with the people who sell the movies by footage?” And Soderbergh said, “Because I want permission to put anything I need from the movie, into my movie.” And the guy—I can’t remember the guy’s name—said, “I can’t do that.” Steven said, “Why not?” and he said, “Because it’ll create precedent.” Steven said, “Yes.” And he said, “I can’t do it.” Then Steven said this thing which I thought was amazing; he said, “If you won’t give me permission to do it, I will never make another movie for you.” This is a guy who’s like 35 or 40. And the guy said, “Oh, take it, take it.” What was wonderful for me when I saw [The Limey] was his pace and his restraint in how little [of Poor Cow] he used when he could have used anything from it. That, to me, is why I put him up there with Fellini and Wyler. "

No mention of Full Frontal during which Stamp has a metatextual cameo, but you have to admire the confidence. But you can understand why Steven's decided he doesn't want to have to deal with the bullshit of getting films made any more, though I do wonder if he might have been able to carry on if he'd done a Woody Allen and decided to move to Europe for a while.

Casanova.

Opera Malkovich. Malkovich. Malkovich. Malkovich:

"Actor John Malkovich sets out to introduce some nuance to the character of Italian adventurer and womanizer Giacomo Casanova in the new opera-theatre presentation The Giacomo Variations.

"Malkovich says he wants to bring out the sensitive soul who gets lost behind the libertine image as he plays Casanova on stage.

“He was very gifted in expressing his feelings and of course, a lot of his feelings had to do with the conquest or the loss of women or even just how a relationship started, proceeded and ended,” he says in this interview with CBC’s Jelena Adzic."

Malkovich.

Cardinal Richelieu.

Radio In 2009, Radio 4's The Long View compared ... well ...

Cardinal Richelieu and Lord Mandelson

Jonathan Freedland presents the series that looks for the past behind the present.

Jonathan and his guests discuss the art of politics through an examination of the careers and political worlds of two great survivors, Lord Mandelson today and Cardinal Richelieu in 17th-century France.

... and then a year later he was largely gone again. Oh well.

Professor Alice Roberts on Human Anatomy and Evolution.

Nature What's often forgotten about a lot of television experts is that most of them are academics, even when they have various titles and letters before and after their name. Professor Alice Roberts is an excellent example.

 One of the newer wave of television "faces", she's also been holding down a job at Bristol University and now Birmingham University.

 This video, which sums up one of her television series, and was apparently recorded just after she'd signed her contract this time last year, is about new, cutting edge research on the evolution of human anatomy.

Mary Shelley.

Medicine The Atlantic discusses the news that the technology is now apparently available to do a full human head transplant:

"Jump forward to 2013, when last month Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero said that we have at last figured out that issue of connecting the spinal cord. The head transplant is now feasible, said Canavero, and he has a project called HEAVEN that's going to do it.

"HEAVEN stands for Head Anastomosis Venture, which is a poor choice of acronyms in an industry constantly sidestepping God-complex accusations. Maybe it's like, ironic in a super self-aware way. That would be unique among the pages of the journal Surgical Neurology International, though, where Canavero dives deep into the specifics of how HEAVEN will work. So deep that we arrive at the existential."

... with Jennifer Lawrence as Young Zoe.

Completed in 2007 when Lawrence was still a teenager, but pulled out of the archive now for some reason which will be entirely unrelated to her Oscar win. She's not in the trailer, but is in this clip:



Looks like a rubbish version of an Adrian Lyne thriller. Should be amazing.

Torquemada.

Academia In January 2011, the University of Lodz's department of British literature and culture (in Poland) held a conference celebrating, seriously, the legacy of Monty Python:

"Upon seeing Internet postings for "Monty Python in Its British and International Cultural Contexts, or, How to recognize the Spanish Inquisition from quite a long way away," all of the attendees at first thought it was a joke—an impression that was not dispelled when the conference Web site announced the attendance of the special guest Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-Schplenden-Schlitter-Crass-Cren-Bon-Fried-Digger-Dingle-Dangle-Dongle-Dungle von Knacker-Thrasher-Apple-Banger-Horowitz-Ticolensic-Grander Knotty-Spelltinkle-Grandlich-Grum­blemeyer-Spelter-Wasser-Kurstlich-Himble-Eisenbahnwagen-Gutenabend-Bitte-einen-Nürnburger-Bratwürstel-Gespurten-mit-Weimache-Luber-Hundsfut-Gumeraber-Schönendank­er-Kalbsfleisch-Mittleraucher von Haut­kopft of Ulm.

At the opening, though, Dobrogoszcz conceded that Gambolputty would in fact not be coming, "as he plainly does not exist."