Email business.

Life Back when this blog was but a fledgling, it was being written while I was still using dial-up at home via a BT Surftime account with an included email address - which I quickly stopped using after beginning this mess and adopting its title and so for years my email address was feelinglistless@btopenworld.com.  You might have used it yourself.

When I migrated over to a 3 dongle for my broadband, 15gb limit a month and such, and asked to cancel the Surftime account, so I could keep the BT email open I continued paying £1.60 per month to maintain it, partly out of laziness but also because it seemed as though there were enough services which would not allow me to transfer over without some fiddly business.

Imagine my surprise when I received my credit card statement and found the charge had increased to eight pounds and some pence.  With the service depreciating, BT have increased the cost of what's not called a "BT Premium email" service to £5 per month, something which they entirely failed to inform me about and I only discovered after some frenetic Googling.

A lengthy phone call later, in which it took an advisor ten minutes to realise what my query was and find my details, it was explained to be the extra three pounds and change was essentially the difference for the previous month I'd already paid for, they having decided to put the price up retrospectively.  I know.  I don't understand.

Which left me with choices.  Pay the £5 a month which over time is a bit steep really.  Connect the email account to our current broadband package which also happens to be with BT which I wouldn't want to do because I liked keeping them separate and wouldn't want to mess things up further.  Or cancel the account altogether.

With a perfectly good gmail account set up, I've since spent the past two days working through six months worth of emails sent to the BT account (and forwarded on to my gmail anyway) trying to find everything which is connected to that old email and deleting it.  As expected this has been fiddly, especially in relation to fruit based devices and methods of payment.

Dozens of mailing lists cancelled and resubscribed to.  A PR database which has been quite useful which I ended up having to make telephone call to.  Music services, film streaming services, my whole virtual life.  Slowly, slowly realising just how connected we become to email accounts and how used to them we become.

But I think I'm there or at least very close.  The folder I set up via a filter is empty and I'll simply watch it for a few weeks now to see what else appears in it.  I'm sure I've forgotten something and it's going to be interesting when I get there to discover how it's possible to recover the account if the primary email address no longer exists.

So if you're trying to contact me from now onwards, my email address is stuartianburns@gmail.com having swooped in early when they were still in beta (would you believe) and grabbed my full name.  Now I'm just going to have to remember to use it when signing into the innumerable places which previously used the other one.

Liverpool Biennial 2016: Master Chef Restaurant.

"A silent wall! We must make mouths in it with our weapons, then it will speak more light."

-- Hetra, The Web Planet

Art I wander through the front door into the empty restaurant and glance around nervously. A man steps out of the kitchen.
"Hello."
"Hello."
"I'm looking for the Biennial painting?"
He points to the wall on the left.
"This."
He points to the wall on the right.
"And this."
"Ah" I say, "Thanks very much."

Just a short trip, this time. The Master Chef Restaurant on Renshaw Street is one of life's fixtures, a place which I've passed many times on foot and by bus but never actually entered. Not for any particular reason. Perhaps I'll return at some point to try the soup.

As part of the Chinatown episode, we have two paintings by Portugese artist Anna Jotta.  From the biographies I've read, she's most interested in the idea of not having, or erasing her own personal style, her inspiration based on mood and whatever works.

In the early eighties she was a film set designer and here's her IMDb page.  A glance through images of her other work and this interview indicate a strong interest in film, often painting or drawing on a fold away projection screen.

The Biennial booklet says that these two works, No No Sir!, were painted with the restaurant in mind, the colours influenced by some antique green pottery she saw in a magazine whilst on a train to Liverpool

But by coincidence the olive green colour utilised on one of them matches the paintwork on a number of the walls in the restaurant and the cream colour is similar to the white when bathed in artificial light.  The paintings reflect the surrounding walls back on themselves.

The most obvious similarity is to abstract expressionism, De Kooning and Rothko in particular although there isn't the same rich gradation of colours.  Plus they were working within a very rigid space, whereas these are unsupported pieces of canvas with raggedy edges.

Do I like them?  I don't dislike them.  The notion seems to be that they should blend in, that perhaps a restaurant patron should gradually come to realise that they looking at a commissioned piece of work connected to the art festival rather than some off the shelf B&Q sourced wall filling.

One of the notions connected to abstract expressionism was that they're almost drawing a distinction between casuals and the hard core.  De Kooning says that in order to appreciate his work you have to put in the time, to appreciate the play of light, the time he's put in.

Do Jotta's paintings pass this test?  Not sure.  I didn't spend a lot of time with them, it's a very odd space to be standing amid the tables.  My guess is that yes, if you were eating in the restaurant concentrating on them between courses more detail could become obvious.

Vworp.  Vworp.

Next Destination:
FACT

Liverpool Biennial 2016: Tate Liverpool.

"I think I ought to warn you that I've given second thoughts to the whole of this scheme, and I think it better we turn round and go back before it's too late. Hmm, hmm."

-- The Doctor, "The Myth Makers"

Art If the TARDIS looks like it's dropping in and out of phase, it's because the weather was utterly horrendous on the way to the TATE this morning, rain shifting horizontally across the waterfront, making it pretty difficult to control the time ship long enough to take the photograph.  Perhaps the shock of returning to the gallery so close to having been to the Biennial's opening press conference also discombobulated the controls.  After deciding to use a randomiser, I hadn't expected to be at TATE quite so soon and rather makes me wish I'd stuck around for the curatorial introduction last Thursday before toddling off to Caines.

Not that the exhibition itself isn't fairly self explanatory.  The key expression of the "Ancient Greece" episode of the Biennial, it presents a selection of busts and reliefs bought by art collector, Henry Blundell in the 1800s and now in the vaults and so on loan from National Museums Liverpool.  Having spent a portion of the late 90s cataloguing sections of this collection when I worked for the then National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, I was well aware that there was more in the donation than what's on display in the sculpture gallery at the Walker, so it's fascinating to see some objects which haven't always been on display.  The press kits gives a figure of 553.

The first floor gallery at the TATE displays about a dozen specifically chosen because of how they represent inaccurate restoration.  As the Biennial booklet explains, female heads could find themselves attached to male bodies, parts of the anatomy incorrectly fused, fragments married with later creations to form new sculptures by eighteenth century restorers.  Within the show, there are disembodied heads married to bases to become busts, mismatched breasts fused to females for which they were missing and even an example of hair extensions on a scalp for which they were never meant and look entirely incongruous.

Presented on a wooden boards atop pink-painted metal frames this is not the usual museum display, apart from the accompanying labels which are every bit the sort of text you might expect in an antiquities gallery, explaining how the object was restored and who or what it's supposed to represent.  The pottery selections are not presented in the usual manner behind glass cases and it's possible to walk almost right around them, again not something usually possible within a more traditional museum setting.  Perhaps I was expecting something a bit closer to a recreation of the Ince Blundell Hall interior as featured in the booklet photograph, but again the Walker's sculpture gallery exists for that.

Amid these ancient relics are new commissions and other business by contemporary artists reflecting on ancient Greece.  Andreas Angelidakis's digital video explains how Ancient Greek vases were on of the ways in which news and myths were communicated, relating them to social media which arguably works in a similar way albeit on a much quicker timescale.  That's accompanied by various shapes, some of which appear in the video, created through 3D printing displayed in a similar fashion to the ancient greek objects.  But it's fair to say my interest was always directed back the magnificent museum piece cobbled together by various makers across history.  Now, where next?

Next Destination:
Master Chef Restaurant.

My Favourite Film of 1938.

Film As we've discussed previously, the news archive on YouTube are an endless, seemingly bottomless supply of footage of our collective past, hundreds and thousands of moments in time captured in a way which wasn't possible before the invention of photography existing so that nothing much can be forgotten about anything. For that reason and because every other film you can think of from that year's been invalidated by the various rules I decided upon at the beginning of this project, my favourite film(s) of 1938 is the Pathe News archive. Yes, cop out has two words. Anyway, having hit the wall and made a hole in it, let's choose some examples which cover the usual interests of this blog.



Their Majesties In Liverpool (1938)

My Grandfather was in the Liverpool Scottish, though he died before I was born. I didn't know either of my Granddads. This from the "Royal Tour of Lancashire" spoken with the same exoticism as any other part of what was then the British Empire. I like to think I displayed similar athleticism when our school cross country was on Wavertree Playground but in truth I came second to last and only because the other person turned up late and ran the wrong way.




The National Theatre At South Kensington (1938)

George Bernard Shaw receiving the deeds, a sod and a twig at the launch of the National Theatre. Shaw of course wastes no time in comparing himself to Shakespeare. At this early stage it was designating itself as the home of the Bard in London, years before the Barbican and the Globe.




Henry VIII Model Aka Model Film Stars Issue Title Ride 'em Cowboy (1938)

A quick scoot about online to find out more about Harald Melville. He was an author with many books about set design published later in the 40s and 50s. 1948, ten years later, was a busy year for him. His one screen credit according to the IMDb was as an actor and art director on a film called Castle Sinister, a spy thriller. That same year he was the set and costume designer at a Glyndebourne production of Die Entfuhrung in the Bath Festival 1948 (Theatre Royal, Bath). He also appeared at the Gateway Theatre in two shows.




Billy Mayer And His Claviers (1938)

And now some music. Since even the legacy of the Sugababes doesn't stretch back this far not counting the release of Angels With Dirty Face starring James Cagney, here's some other musical dexterity.




Window Cleaners on The Empire State Building.

Welcome to New York, it's there waiting for you.  The Pathe archive is filled with these sorts of films of events and happenings which in later years are the stuff of askew montage sequences in the likes of Amelie, Stephen Poliakoff dramas and Adam Curtis documentaries.  It's not just that this happened, it's that it happened regularly. Here's another bonus example:




Musical Dawson Birds (1938)

Marvellous.

Liverpool Biennial 2016: Cains Brewery.

"We are not of this race. We are not of this earth. Susan and I are wanderers in the fourth dimension of space and time, cut off from our own people by distances beyond the reach of your most advanced science." -- The Doctor, An Unearthly Child.

Art This journey through space and probably time, since we're all travelling into the future even if it's the slow way, by seconds, minutes, hours and days, begins at Caines Brewery.  Caines was one of the key Liverpool businesses, founded by Irishman Robert Cain in 1858 and at its height owned a chain of over two hundred pubs but over the years through mergers and takeovers its licensed premises and brewing have been watered down to the point that there are just five establishments left and the Cains name is being lent to a collection of craft beers.  This factory was closed in 2013 with a view to redeveloping the entire site as a leisure and and housing complex [wikipedia].  Caines's website is still up and running as though none of this has occurred with all its bells and whistles and no mention that the Biennial has temporarily made it's home here.

Despite not being much of a drinker, I had always planned to book a visit for a tour of the factory fascinated as I am with manufacturing process as well as how they're communicated to the public.  But meant doesn't always translate into do, and so this was the first time I'd really set foot on the site, apart from the occasion when I got lost on the way to The Gallery art space a few years ago.  Like the Old Blind School and the Copperas Hill post building back in the day, it's an opportunity to see inside old working buildings otherwise shut off from the public with their fixtures and fittings still largely intact.  The space, the old canning hall, has a similar atmosphere to The Furnace, the hall utilised at AFoundation during the 2006 edition of the Biennial and which now houses the main eating area with the caravans at Camp and Furnace.  High roof, concrete floors and an adequate toilet.

Three of the Biennial's "episodes" feature, Chinatown, Flashback and the Children's Episode.  These are are separated by Andreas Angelidakis's Collider, a large structure of concentric circular walls apparently inspired by the Large Hadron Collider (for which the University's Victoria Gallery and Museum currently has a fascinating exhibition).  Immediately it's apparent that although the concept of the episode implies separation between sites just as they would be in a televisions series, these themes will in fact be somewhat intermingled - there's also an exhibit from the Software theme here too.  The effect seems more analogous to someone changing channels on a television and skipping between different series or the crosscutting of storylines in an ensemble film, especially if those storylines don't interact directly like Griffiths's Intolerance.

As you might expect my favourite piece in the show, Yin-Ju Chen's Extrastellar Evaluations riffs on the theme of alien presences interacting on earth.  The idea is to gather together evidence of a race of beings from the lost continent Lemuria, living on Earth in another dimension but visiting us periodically and most notably as a group of conceptual artists in the 1960s.  Most recently on display at the Kadist Gallery in San Francisco, it's spread across Caines and FACT and in Caines inhabits the Chinatown and Flashback "episodes".  Rather like a story told across multiple episodes, we can only really appreciate the whole effect once we've experienced all of the sections creating an incentive for visitors to travel to the various venues  Knowing my luck with the randomiser, I'll be seeing the rest of the piece in a couple of months.

The first section, in Chinatown, is in an office on the edge of the main space, a long darkened room with a video projection at one end, metal tiles arranged in two patterns and easy to kick if you're not watching what you're doing arrangements of crystals.  You're initially greeted by a letter (in very nice joined up handwriting) from someone called Lucia, who claims to have been channeling the message of the Lemuria indicating, rather poignantly given how 2016's gone so far, that if "Earth beings become one" they'll be happy to bring their higher civilisation back to this "blue marble".  So we're in Eric Von Daniken territory territory, or Arthur C Clarke's monolith, the notion of higher beings nurturing humanity.  In Doctor Who this tends to mean Scaroth or the Silents and there's very much an ulterior motive.

The screen features a figure bestride the landscape, long blonde hair, look of intent.  Now we're presented with the notion of alien visitor, Jeff Bridges in Starman, Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth or indeed a Time Lord.  He wanders about, investigating, walking.  He, we must assume is Adama, the person communicating with Lucia.  Words are superimposed across the screen, greeting us, explaining his intent, advising us when his message is sent.  We must then conclude that the metal plates are part of his communication device and the crystals indicate in their shape his constellation of origin and some other things.  Are we supposed to be visiting a recreation of the site where he's been or the devices he uses to communicate with us?  Given everything happening elsewhere in the canning room, the suspension of disbelief is impressive.

The exhibit continues in Flashback with photograph of the cosmos projected on the wall, a television set on the floor and a chart filled with geometric shapes and photographs from Earth's past nearby.  I sat on the floor and watched the screen as it filled with images similar to those in the other space, of green landscapes and snow filled vistas but instead of the starman, it's what must be his ship, a giant mirrored cube floating through like a Zardoz head or the Pandorica in flight-mode and with all the elegance of Skagra's sphere in the BBC Video restoration of Shada.  I whooped with delight.  The photographs in the chart indicate divisive or tragic moments of the 60s, the Vietnam War and the death of the Apollo 1 astronauts, mixed with examples of abstract public art, obelisks and other weirdly shaped structures, which we must infer are the  Lemurian's handywork.


An Interview with Yin-Ju Chen, Kadist Artist in Residence 2016. Extrastellar Evaluations is on view 5/11-6/25 from Kadist on Vimeo.

Find above an interview with the artist from its appearance at Kadist (with excerpts from the videos) in which she talks about this mythology in much the same way as any writer does about science fiction.  Her ideas are rich and based on existing stories, Lemuria was part of a theory from the 19th century designed to explain incongruities in platechtonics which have since been discredited.  This fictional land has nevertheless spawned a range of genre fiction, notably as an antagonist for Namor The Sub-Mariner's Atlantis.  The word "Lemuria" has appeared in Doctor Who, in the Alan Barnes's Seventh Doctor audio, Daleks Among Us, but it seems to be attributed to something else entirely although the notion of extra-dimensional beings having and effect on human history is almost a cliche in the Whoniverse.  Almost?

In some ways, I wish that video was available in the gallery space by way of explanation although perhaps the fiction as it stands is supposed to be opaque, hoping to fire our imagination.  It succeeds, especially if you're a fan of this kind of fiction.  My favourite element is how it co-opts other artworks in a similar way to newsworthy events in alternative history fictions, the metal tiles and rocks implying that the Lemurians have been communicating through other artists.  I wonder how I might have approached these sections if I'd seen the FACT material first, something I won't know until I make it there.  Let's have a look and see if the randomiser on my time ship will land me on Wood Street next.  Set the controls and .... no, not yet ... fast return switch it is then ...

Next Destination:
Tate Liverpool

Liverpool Biennial 2016: Introduction.

Art  Here we go again ...  Up until about half ten this morning I didn't own a collapsible umbrella. Having recently bought a new coat because my old faithful had become tent-like due to losing all this weight, I'd been wearing it pretty much on and off since last December due to the inclement weather. But now we've reached July, it's still raining but it's also too warm to wear the new faithful. So lacking an umbrella I headed out to the Liverpool Biennial press day in just by jumper and within seconds of leaving the house resembled a very sinister sponge having not noticed that it was raining. This was not good and so after walking some, I ended up at Sports Direct in Liverpool One buying a Dunlop-branded TARDIS blue collapsible umbrella which was relatively flimsy stopped me from getting wetter as I trudged across the Dock Road and to Tate Liverpool.

Even after all these years, I'm still very excited about the Liverpool Biennial and especially the Liverpool Biennial press launches.  Even though I'm pretty well on record, well on this blog, in not exactly loving everything about every Biennial, because human taste dictates that when faced with challenging artwork we're unlikely to like everything, there's always that same sense of anticipation.  What will there be?  What will I see?  Even the press days are different each time.  In 2014, we met in the shell of what was called The Blind School for a relatively low-key affair but this was a full on bash with accreditation tables in the foyer, lecturned introduction in a meeting room and around eighty to a hundred members of the real press.  And me.  The new innovation are the pictured wristbands, much easier to navigate than the old cardboard signs on lanyards.  Yes, I know I have hairy arms.

Speeches.  From Sally Tarrant, director of the Liverpool Biennial.  From Francesco Manacorda, artistic director of Tate Liverpool.  From Culture Liverpool Director, Claire McColgan.  From Wirral South MP Alison McGovern.  Although not expressed specifically, Brexit underscored much of what was said, about how since the Capital of Culture, Liverpool has transformed itself out of all recognition into a truly European city and how even as we face this needlessly uncertain future, we'd be reckless of toss that effort away (and since we're on of the few cities which has voted to remain, I hope that won't be the case).  Alison McGovern's speech very powerfully described what it's been like seeing the Biennial's introduction and development and how it's helped shape the city's perception of itself and how we all embrace it.  I tweeted her afterwards to thank her for her words and compliment her on being her and she replied.  Like me, she's a Biennial fan.

The overall tone felt much more confident than in 2014, more robust, much closer to earlier editions and that's reflected in there being a much clearer theme which is, to quote the booklet, to explore "fictions, stories and histories, taking viewers on a series of voyages through time and space."  Der-der-der-dum.  "These journeys take the form of six 'episodes': Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children's Episode, Software, Monuments from the Future and Flashback."  Der-der-der-dum.  Effectively while Doctor Who is on hiatus (or whatever you want to call this gap year) the Liverpool Biennial is picking up the slack, the arts festival equivalent of the Colin Baker starring art-themed Radio 4 drama Slipback.  Cue the sound of drums.  After the theme of the Biennial being the absence of a theme last time, now there are effectively six.  I'll see over the coming months just how closely the work reflects those themes and how they mesh together.

As is customary for the press days, there's a very carefully worked out itinerary, in which visitors are shuttled by bus between venues with curatorial explanations in each but since I don't have a deadline and because I didn't want to rush through everything in a couple of days, once the press launch had completed, rather than sticking around at the Tate, I wandered instead down to the second stop at Caine's Brewery and once the rest of the press pack had arrived, we were served a pizza lunch at The Brewery Tap nearby.  This was very nice pizza and I may have eaten more than my fair share of it.  After that as everyone else headed off to the announcement of the John Moores Painting Prize, I stuck around at Caine's for the rest of the afternoon and although this wasn't quite as involved a process as The Blind School had been in logistical terms, there was more than enough to keep me occupied and I'll write about that soon.

Some route talk.  In recent years, my process for visiting the venues has been in numerical order based on the map in the official booklet, but since the theme this year is episodes and there's much talk of time travel, I've decided instead to engage a randomiser and visit them all in whatever order this website dictates.  Although I'll be taking my TARDIS (you'll see) through space rather than actual time, my hope is that there'll still be a sense of visiting other conceptual periods as I work my way through the exhibitions.  According to the booklet there are twenty-seven official venues and commissions as well as the Centre for Chinese Culture in Manchester which is twenty-eight.  There's also the usual fringe or independent section so I'll be slipping a time track now and then to see what's happening there.  The pamphlet produced by The Double Negative implies great things.  Overall, with any luck, it's going to turn out to be "quite a great spirit of adventure."  Here we go again ...

Next Destination:
Cains Brewery.

Cathy Come Home: The Stage Show.

Theatre Last night The Barbican offered a stage version of Ken Loach's seminal film Cathy Come Home and have presented a recording of the live stream on YouTube:

"Catch up on this incredible performance of Cathy Come Home by watching the video above (starts from 19 minutes 25 seconds - an edit will be uploaded shortly). The shows runs for approximately one hour and is directly followed by a panel debate asking the question: "Homelessness 50 years on: what's changed?" featuring legendary filmmaker Ken Loach, BBC journalist Samira Ahmed, Shelter's CEO Campbell Robb, our Artistic Director and Founder Adrian Jackson, Mercury Prize nominated musician Eska and Deputy Mayor for Housing James Murray. Have your say and join the conversation."

The Superlambanana is in a Fucking Mess (Updated!)

Art Excellent news. This blog post was picked up by Radio Merseyside who reported on it this afternoon. They've spoken to the council and ...

It's looking a little mutton but now @lpoolcouncil has agreed to repaint the city's #Superlambanana pic.twitter.com/Y00Kt6WZ8U

— BBC Radio Merseyside (@bbcmerseyside) July 7, 2016

We are told its replacement will find a permanent home on the Strand by 2018 #superlambanana https://t.co/BI3VqF0lPh

— Claire Hamilton (@chamiltonbbc) July 7, 2016

Here's the original post ...

Art Some friends visited Liverpool today and I gave them a tour of the city taking in the major sites one of which being the Superlambanana which is currently outside one of John Moores University's libraries on Tithebarn Street. As I discovered back in the late nineties when researching public art for various reasons, although towns and cities are very grateful to have them installed, their upkeep is a whole other thing and so it's proving with what's become a modern icon of the city.

As you can see from the above photo and the close-ups below, the paintwork is pretty much knackered, less cared for than the average bus shelter. At a certain point it has had a second layer but rather than doing what's needed which is to sand the whole thing down and start again with a more weather resistant paint, it was simply touched up between the gaps and now in large sections the paintwork has dropped away leave bare concrete. It looks sad. Unloved. Forgotten.







This shot is of a major portion of the side. As you can see the paint has almost completely fallen away.



You may have noticed in the midst of that the addition of the litter bin which has been put next to the underbelly of the beast. Here it is in-situ. I've blanked out the face of the members of the public nearby. Apologies for the language by the way but I was trying to get the getting one people who this on social media. Some intemperate bad language seems to work.  For some reason.



Who administers the upkeep of the sculpture I wonder?  Is there a special budget somewhere?  Does original artist Taro Chiezo need to be involved?  It's just extremely weird that a piece of public art which is merchandised this extensively, which has spawned all of those children, notably those produced in 2010 which are now outside the Museum of Liverpool and clearly loved by some many people should now be in such a shabby state.

My Favourite Film of 1939.

Film The first time I heard the soundtrack album to Good Morning Vietnam was during a sponsored walk at a scout hut in Garston in the late 80s. I remember vividly sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car having completed my wander around the grounds, pressing play on the cassette in the stereo and hearing Robin Williams pipe up with his opening monologue with little knowledge of what the film was about or even having seen it, despite having seen the posters covering the walls of the local Video City when the film was released on rental dvd. As we've discussed I was too busy with Star Trek and Police Academy.

Within days I was provided with a bootleg copy which I then spent the following weeks and months listening to incessantly until I had memorised his monologues and knew the songs off by heart. This was also the first time I'd even heard anything from the original film of The Wizard of Oz, my choice for 1939, even in this parody, which is strange considering one of the earliest books I owned was The Marvelous Land of Oz and my parents had taken me to see Walter Murch's Return to Oz at the Woolton Picture House one birthday.  My first viewing of Oz wasn't until many years later in the library at Leeds Met one idle afternoon.

So despite having an incessant difficulty learning anything off by heart which has curtailed my acting career, hum, and means I'm still plugging away at "To Be Or Not To Be..." I still have scraps of this speech in my head from years ago.  Perhaps it's because I remember laugh at the time, perhaps it was that the same relative had also memorised the speeches and I didn't want to be outdone, I'm not sure why it's lodged up here, but even after all these years, everything which has happened, I think I'm still able to recall at least that opening section.  Let's see.  Apologies for any mess syntax and grammar.  Translating speech to text is hard.

"Gooood Morning Vietnam, hey this is not test, this is rock and roll. Time to rock it from the delta to the DMA. Is it a little too early for being that loud, hey too late. This is oh-six-hundred. What does the oh stand for? "Oh my god it's early." Speaking of early, nunee-nunee-noo-noo, nunee-nunee-noo-noo, picture a man going on a journey beyond sight and sound, he has left Crete, he has entered the demilitarized zone. What is the demilitarized zone? Sounds like something out of the Wizard of Oz. "Oh look you landed in Saigon, you're among the little people now." "We represent the other, other army." "Oh no, don't go in there ..." "Ooeeoo, Ho-chi-min." "Oh no, it's the Wicked Witch of the North, it's Hanow-Hanoy!" "Aaah little GI, you and you're little tu-to, too. Aaah I'm melting... don't you my pretty ah...!"

A quick listen again to the soundtrack on Spotify reveals I've forgotten "Is that me, or does that sound like an Elvis Presley movie? Viva Da Nang. Oh, viva, Da Nang. Da Nang me, Da Nang me. Why don't they get a rope and hang me?" and some business about calling "Hanow" a slut. It's not the most PC business but probably completely in period.  Certainly at the age of eleven or twelve people saying naughty words was inherently funny, however un-PC they are now.  When our primary school gave out free dictionaries, our first instinct was to look up all the rude words and even in secondary school we all knew which page number of the Biology textbook had line drawings of genitalia.  254. 

Here's a supercut all Adrian's business, which reveals that the material on the album was heavily edited from the material in the film:

Hamlet: A Critical Reader. Edited by Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson.

Books  Yesterday whilst writing about Thompson and Taylor's introduction to the revised edition of their 2006 Arden Third Series publication of Hamlet, I noted how for the most part they ignored general literary criticism and focused instead on textual matters.  Here it is instead in Hamlet: A Critical Reader, an extension to that original work expanding on some of its themes and introducing others.

Part of a series which will notionally cover all of the plays, numerous authors tackle various, now standard elements of literary criticism, through chapters with largely self explanatory titles: The Critical Backstory, Performance History, The State of the Art (survey Hamlet lit crit in the past decade), New Directions: Hamlet and Gender, New Directions: Hamlet, Cinema, the World and New Directions: Being Hamlet Not Being Hamlet (a piece of original lit crit by Frank McGuinness).

Mostly allergic to literary criticism for recreational purposes, especially when it's simply restating other people's work on a particular topic for student research purposes rather than injecting something original, I nonetheless found the Lois Potter's performance history particularly valuable.  I'd not known previously that when Garrick toured his portrayal, he'd play the role against a backdrop of popular local players, which on one occasion led to him sharing billing with the star playing Osric.

Catherine Belsey's brief survey of feminism in Hamlet studies is also useful in recording the extent to which female actors have played the Danish prince both in English, abroad and on film, emphasising to varying degrees the potency of his femininity and the extent to which the text is rewritten to explain the change in gender.  We're yet to really see her played simply as a woman, Rosalind-style disguises or simply playing it as a "man" the general rule.

The book closes with a section listing resources, texts, websites, films and essays.  The Hamlet Weblog is not mentioned, which is probably for the best.  The film list is selective, mostly covering the more high profile entries, ignoring those starring Kevin Kline, Campbell Scott, Richard Burton and Christopher Plummer.  But I imagine if I was studying Hamlet at school or college this would act as a very good jumping off point.

Hamlet: A Critical Reader. Edited by Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson is published by Bloomsbury. 2016. ISBN: 978-1472571373. Review copy supplied.

Hamlet: Revised Edition. (The Arden Shakespeare). Edited by Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson.

Books In an effort to acknowledge the passage of time and how even some of their Third Series publications might require some reconsideration, as scholarship begins on the Fourth Series, Arden presents this revised edition of Hamlet, first published in 2006 with some thirty extra pages inserted to present additional scholarship and further productions and publications.  For some reason, having gratefully received review copies of the plays for some years now, in my memory I'd already reviewed the earlier version and was all ready to simply link back to my opinion with some necessary amendations of that opinion.  But it appears not.  Right, then.

The Arden Hamlet was and is groundbreaking for presenting all three extant Hamlet texts, first Quarto, second Quarto and first Folio (ignoring later reprints) across two publications and treating them as separate entities worthy of study in and of themselves.  All three texts contain lines and scenes which don't appear in the others or in the case of the first Quarto whole sections which are simply different, some would argue incoherent and there's been much discussion as illustrated by the authors in their introduction as to exactly where they came from before they were published in this editions.

Previously, with the exception of facsimiles, editors have taken it upon themselves to try and create a "right" or "ideal" version of the play, attempting to reproduce "what Shakespeare intended".  This led them to either choose the second Quarto or Folio as their base text (and including variations at the end) or as was customary for years, and often still is, a conflation, drawing together all three texts, compiling a version which mixes together the three texts.  Before I became a fan, I assumed there was only ever one text of Hamlet, the conflated version, surely studied much in schools for many years and was amazed to find that simply wasn't what Shakespeare wrote.

Taylor and Thompson take the view that because can't really know the origin of the texts before they appeared in the relevant publications and that it's their job as scholarly publishers to present the texts in as readable editions as possible that they should, with the exception of modernising the text and "fixing" error in the original printing,  present them pretty much as is.  For more on the implications that has on the Q1 and F1 texts, see my original review of the accompanying volume containing those texts.  For all its textual "faults", Q1's scene structure has become pervasive as a signpost for directors seeking to the cut the text.

The evidence based approach pervades the publication, as the authors seeking to present the arguments of previous scholars whilst enunciating just how much assumption and hearsay has seeped into scholarship, the need to back-up shaky arguments transforming maybes into certainties.  We can't know exactly the relationship between the various texts whether they're successive rewrites, alternative versions for different venues and even if Shakespeare himself had a hand in their preparation or another hand.  But scholars across history have become lost up numerous blind alleys.

The structure of the book is standard Arden with the "eclectic" approach of the Third Series allowing the authors to choose the topic which mostly interests them.  Here that means that although some lip service is given to the psychoanalytic approach to Hamlet's character, the discussion focuses primarily, across the introduction and appendices, on the textual matters and discrepancies which then feeds into a production and publication history hinting towards a suggestion that the interpretation methodologies of editors, actors, authors and directors converge.

The decadal update extends these themes with the inevitable mismatch between four hundred and then ten years being concentrated on in similar number of pages.  The authors also bravely include criticism of their original publication, from the decision to treat Q1 with the same respect as the other versions to individual choices within the actual text.  Inevitably there's still an obvious cut off point, as the text doesn't noticed that Maxine Peake's performance was filmed for release and there's no mention of the Radio 4 Afternoon Drama production starring Jamie Parker.

Nevertheless, of all the Hamlet editions available this is the publication I'd recommend to anyone seeking a scholarly edition of the play and have on numerous occasions.  Reading appendix 2, which carefully unpicks the differences between the texts and the misapprehensions wrought on them across numerous publications was the first time I really became suspicious of scholarly motive and realised that there isn't one Hamlet.  There's what's in the original text and then the hundred of different versions since, on the page and on the stage.

Hamlet: Revised Edition. (The Arden Shakespeare). Edited by Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson is published by Bloomsbury. £8.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781472518385.  Review copy supplied.

A Viewing Order For Star Trek.

TV Well, I tried. With all of television Star Trek materialising on Netflix UK yesterday, I thought it might be an idea to put together a viewing order. Two hours later amid episodes without stardates, faulty memory after having not seen most of these episodes for twenty years and trying to get my head around the business of meshing the three 80s/90s series together I closed my Access databases and Excel spreadsheets and googled Star Trek viewing order in much the same way as people seem to be finding my Doctor Who list.

Happily someone else has done the spade work and utilising much the same methodology I was and would have done, placing Enterprise's These Are The Voyages… with TNG's The Pegasus and smoothing over continuity errors and broadcast dates generally messed up because someone in the Trek office wasn't paying attention to stardates when sending the scripts down to the sound stage or audio recording booth.  You can see the writer pulling their hair out trying to fit Insurrection somewhere in much the same way I did when faced with Doctor Who's Planet of the Dead.

About the only omission is the animated series, which Paramount recently decided is canon after all and I was planning to drop in between TOS and TMP.  It's here that the T in James T Kirk was originally revealed to be Tiberius and it has the brilliant The Lorelei Signal episode in which Uhura, Chapel and the female members of the crew have to take over the running of the Enterprise.  The Wikipedia page reveals a ton of other connections including the news that Manny Cotto was planning to include the Kzinti in a fifth season of Enterprise.  Sigh.

That watchlist also reveals, including the animated show, if you did want to binge your way through all of Star Trek, you're looking at a mountain about 728 odd episodes and movies high which would take two years to work through assuming you're just watching one episode a day.  It took me a year to do Doctor Who, but only because of the month in the middle when I was prepping and then recuperating from my hernia operation so did nothing but watch Doctor Who for two months.  Plus in this instance you're at the mercy of Netflix and just how long they have the rights.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted.  Before Doctor Who, Trek was my franchise of choice (see here) and I still haven't seen the last two seasons of Voyager.  But I'm still ploughing through the tail end of Gilmore Girls as well as a pile of other stuff waiting to go and there aren't enough hours in the day.  But I rewatched TNG's Parallels last night and was engulfed by waves of nostalgia as I remember just how much the teenaged version of me loved the show (and Marina Sirtis) even if some of the acting is just the right side of creaky.  Oh sod it.  Broken Bow, here I come.

Shakespeare at the BBC: Talawa Theatre Company's King Lear.

Shakespeare Big news. Talawa Theatre Company's King Lear, recently at the Royal Exchange in Manchester with Don "Rassilon" Warrington in the title role is to appear on the BBC iPlayer for three months. BBC News has the news:

"The critically-acclaimed production also featured Philip Whitchurch, who appeared in The Bill and My Hero, and former Emmerdale actor Wil Johnson.

"The film has been funded by digital commissioning body The Space and will be made available across a range of platforms including cinema over the next year.

"The Space's chief executive Fiona Morris said the move would "ensure that the audience for this powerful production continues to grow".

"King Lear: the Film is being included on the BBC iPlayer as part of the corporation's Shakespeare Lives digital festival."

I'd add the usual grumble about why this isn't on BBC Two on a Sunday night, but since I barely watch linear television at all now it hardly matters.

Vogue 100 at Manchester Art Gallery.

Fashion In an attempt to take a break from hearing about the total destruction of our way of life (or whatever this is) for a few hours, yesterday I travelled to remain-stronghold Manchester for the Vogue 100 exhibition which has toured from the V&A up to Manchester Art Gallery. This didn't quite work. Included in the exhibition is a shot of BoJo sat on a girder in front of the Anish Kapoor piece during the 2012 Olympics. Little did any of us know back then he would help bring about the destruction of Western democracy just a few years later, the fuck.  Another visitor took a photo of the mop headed uruk-hai's image.  Why on earth would you want to do that?

Despite being a normcore, man at Asda type, I've always had a deep fascination for haute couture and fashion design.  Note this does not stretch to me understanding the mechanics of how these dresses are made exactly, but it's always felt like a shorthand way of being able to appreciate history and who we are as a people.  Recently fashion feels like it's stagnated, clothing worn on the street a mish-mash of recent decades, but that in and of itself says much about our own times.  My #ootd was a red t-shirt sporting the 70s Wonder Woman logo, which is pretty much what I wear all the time, a design classic, I'm sure you'll agree.

Not that this has stretched to buying fashion magazines but I've recently kept an eye on Vogue, led in no small part by watching The September Issue, the expose/advertumentary about the production of the most important issue of the year for the US publication, highlighting the personality of its editor Anna Wintour (who must have been one of the influences for the Cat Grant character in TV's Supergirl).  The notion of a magazine which sits slap bang in the middle of promoting artistic expression for the purposes of selling clothes or at least the idea of a lifestyle to people who aspire to at some point being able to buy versions of the clothes in the high street depending on their credit rating.

VOGUE 100 is a celebration of the history of the UK magazine, concentrating on the photographers commissioned across the years and the models who sat for them.  Although the fashions are inevitably mentioned, this is not a chronology of clothing, at least not in a definitive sense.  It's more about how the magazine sensed trends and portrayed them, and built the careers of photographers and models, highlighting the more seismic shifts and the occasions when the magazine even led those trends, which is more often than not.  There are a couple of moments when the only response is "Oh, so that where that came from..."

Boldly the exhibition begins with the 2010s and works backwards across the decades.  At first this seems counter intuitive, as you know my usual taste is for a good hard chronology, but it makes sense in this context, to begin with the way we live now and work backwards, demonstrating the key influences and how the structure of fashion photography has or hasn't changed across the decades.  Plus it allows for an impressive introduction to the show filled with dynamic images of royalty, surreal dreams of models in bed with crocodiles or dreams of their fighter pilot boyfriends manifesting in their front lounge.

The key revelation for me is that in Vogue and other fashion magazines we're seeing the modern replacement for the paintings of the Renaissance, baroque and Victorian eras, of women in allegorical and narrative poses.  Even designed as they are for consumption in magazine form, none of these photographs, even the more genetic portraits, feel out of place or over elevated within a gallery space.  They're often as startling, exciting or surprising as those masterworks and although the production time is far shorter, the inspiration and creative process mirrors them in a number of crucial ways.  There's little ephemeral about this supposed ephemera.

There's Kate Moss in her first shoot for Corine Day back in 1993, entirely unpretentious launching a career in some high street clothing shot against a cheap carpet, like a Sundance movie taking on the Hollywood might of the supermodels, Kristy, Naomi, Cindy.  The original print of their collective cover is displayed nearby and they're ravishing, commanding, a collective sisterhood of dragon mothers ready to rule the galaxy.  The exhibition is strong on marking how our connection to these figures has changes across the years.  It wasn't until the 1940s that the "average" model was anywhere close to being a household name.

Vogue has also had a strong editorial undercurrent.  When the magazine began, fashion drawings were accompanied by a rich seam of articles about culture, music and art and literature, initiated by editor Dorothy Todd who published a couple of hundred articles by the Bloomsbury group amongst other things.  Her interests were unpopular and there was a drop in circulation, but nevertheless later editors recognised how useful this balance could be, with Lee Miller's reporting from WWII and more recently articles about the plight of the homeless and other social problems.  Perhaps one of the frustrations of the exhibition is that the example articles aren't presented in their entirety.

The other frustration is me not really being the audience for this.  Although I've heard of some of the designers, my knowledge of who they are or what they do is minimal.  I envied the visitors who pointed amongst their friends, perhaps picking out the kinds of clothes they've worn or would like to wear.  Eventually I realised it was ok just to enjoy looking at the photos and it is one of those exhibitions where there is no filler.  You might disagree with the subjects on display, although I understand why Thatcher's here, but it's never boring.  I gasped numerously.  There are plenty of images which wouldn't look out of place at the Liverpool Biennial.

But however many shots of by Bruce Weber of Matt Dillon there are, men's fashions remain incredibly boring and rarely beautiful in the same way as an Alexander McQueen or Coco Chanel dress.  Hell, even the average Marks and Spencers top is more interesting than what men have to wear no matter how metrosexual the cut is supposed to be.  Even as a teenager I was moaning about how women have so much more choice and that stands, we have no equivalent to the halter top or little black dress.  Sarongs do not work.  There was a lot of envy being thrown about yesterday afternoon, and no a velvet jacket is not the same.

A couple of things to note in case you decide to visit.  At the entrance to the show is a video demonstrating the shift to online presentation of the fashions through moving image which has an incessant, repetitious piece of what I think is trance music underneath which can be heard throughout the exhibition so you'd be well to bring some music if you haven't company.  I worked through both Taylor Swift's 1989 album and the new All Saints both of which seemed apt for this material.  Taylor does not appear in the exhibition itself which relies more heavily on actresses, Gwyneth, Salma and Uma before she was famous.  Each is provided with a context explaining film had just been released.

The show also has an audio guide, something which I didn't realise until half way round when it was pointed out to me by an invigilator after I asked why one of the labels featured a wifi logo.  "Did you not read the text before coming in?" he asked before dragging me outside to show me the URL to this page which necessitated me going through the 70s-2010s all over again adding half an hour to the visit.  Narrated by Dervla Kirwan, it's more like an audio commentary featuring the curators of the show explaining their curatorial processes, which can be a bit dry.  There's a solitary piece of interview with Lily Cole about the photography process and I would have liked much more of that.

After having had to double back, I think I was in the exhibition for about four hours not including the break in the middle for lunch, and it still didn't feel like enough.  I savoured a lot in here, awash and absorbed by all of the beauty.  The curators say they designed the exhibition to partly mimic the experience of reading a magazine, but despite everything Vogue on paper fulfils the utilitarian requirement of advising readers on fashion trends however artistically, whereas in a gallery context, the role is reverse and they become art objects in and of themselves and on that basis I'd recommend it to anyone.

Sugababes announce new album.

Music  Siobhan's announced that she Mutya and Keisha are releasing a new album next year.  Even as the world fall down around our feet, it's good to know that some things are as reliable as they always where, not the actual album, of course, but the announcement that there's going to be a new album.

Speaking to Wandsworth Radio (which is a brilliant detail) during the local LGBT+ Pride, a date has been set, preparations have been made. Here's the main quote. See if you can spot the most interesting part of the story:

"Sugababes have got a record coming out next year. I can’t tell you the exact date. I know, but I can’t tell you. It’s next year."

Not MKS, Mutya Keisha and Siobhan, but Sugababes. Does this mean they're re-obtained the name somehow?  Am I going to have to through and change all the labels on these blog posts?

Anyway, seventeen years later, we dare to dream again.



[via]

Soup Safari #66: Broccoli and Stilton at Manchester Art Gallery Cafe.

Lunch. £3.95. Manchester Art Gallery Cafe, Mosley Street, Manchester M2 3JL. Tel: 0161 235 8888. Website.

My Favourite Film of 1940.

Film For quite some time, I was in two minds about the notion of an in-vision announcer presenting films, either as part of a strand or the house style of a television network. Being something of a spoiler phobe to the point of trying not to discover too much about a film beyond who's in it and what's on the poster, the idea of someone providing an introduction should be anathema.

Done badly, and I've seen this done very badly, the critic offers too much of an analysis, almost assuming we've already seen the film and in the worst case giving away the ending. At their best, they give some information as to how the production was initiated, how it fits in the time period, themes and ideas to look at for and generally a sense of celebration and excitement about what we're going to witness.

Sometimes they're included on dvds, Leonard Maltin popping up to present a "Night at the Movies" on the Warners dvds which also include an animation, short documentary or drama, a bit of newsreel and an introduction to the main presentation, providing a flavour of the context in which the film would have been originally shown, albeit in a much smaller auditorium.

But thanks to YouTube many of these old and some new introductions are available so should you not want to go into a film without some back-up, you can always watch someone against a white background or sitting on a study set offering some guidance. Here's a short guide and some examples of the kinds of introductions available.

TCM

For decades, since its launch in 1994 TCM has utilised researched in-vision introductions to their films during prime-time as way of setting themselves apart from other film channels who almost seem annoyed that they have to interrupt the commercials with content. Here are a couple of examples featuring stalwart Robert Osborne introducing His Girl Friday, my favourite film of 1940:





Moviedrome

Doesn't need much of an introduction and indeed there's a website with a wealth of information about this 80s and 90s BBC Two cult film strand usually broadcast on a Sunday night. YouTube is filled with the introductions by Alex Cox and his successor Mark Cousins. Here's Cox's intro to what would be my first viewing of The Terminator in 1990 at the age of sixteen:



Here's Mark Cousins's first introductory gig for Scarface, again the first (and last time) I saw that film:



Booklets were published listing the films in Moviedrome with some of the text from Cox's introductions and you can download these from his website.

Film Four

Film Four's channel is awash with film introductions. Some were recorded for broadcast before films, others to fill the gaps between as publicity for some new release. Some are with directors and actors and some of them are with critics, notable Mark Kermode who himself used to present horror films on Channel 4 as a rival to Moviedrome.



Mark Kermode's Movie Club

A short lived attempt by Kermode to resurrect a version of Moviedrome, introducing his favourite films via the Kermode & Mayo YouTube channel. Here he is on Breathless:



BFI Player

Now a hyperbolic Kermode has a regular gig introducing weekly selections from the BFI Player's catalogue. On Brief Encounter:



Epilogue

The easiest way is probably to the search for the name of the film and whatever the strand is and see if anything crops up. The other seam is the Q&A often recorded at film festivals in which director and/or cast were present for a screening of the film and although the results can be interminable, with the correct moderator they can be fascinating. Here's a bootleg recording for the TIFF Q&A for St Vincent:



An official BFI Q&A about the Shaun The Sheep film:

Shakespeare's Globe at the BBC: The Complete Walk.

Theatre The Complete Walk was a "festival" of short films which appeared on giant screens in and around the Thames and throughout Liverpool on the weekend of the 23rd & 24th April to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death, each providing reworkings or excerpts of each of the plays from his canon.

Working that weekend so unable to do the local tour, I'm pleased to see that they're slowly being uploaded as clips to the BBC's Shakespeare website.

They're available here, as full versions available and then just clips.

Soup Safari #65: Pea, Lettuce and Mint at the Hayloft Restaurant in Erddig.

Lunch. £4.50. Hayloft restaurant, Erddig Hall, Erddig, Wrexham LL13 0YT. Telephone: 01978 355314. Website.

Erddig.

Erddig’s story is all about relationships – those of the family, the servants and the wider community. It is unpretentious, unconventional and unexpected, always offering a friendly welcome.

It was home to a family that took an almost curatorial attitude to their possessions. Many are recorded in verse, as are generations of servants whose portraits were commissioned by the family. With their working areas almost unchanged, Erddig is a place where servants and their lives are not forgotten.

Heritage On the day before the EU referendum or "let's not be Werner Herzog's penguin" I decided to visit a nearby country and so hello Wales, hello Wrexham and hello Erddig, the next National Trust property on my trail.

Some necessary route talk first.  Train to Chester from Lime Street, train to Wrexham General from Chester, the Cardiff train in fact.  Short walk across town to the bus station, to Stand One where the number 2 bus leaves from as directed by the National Trust website.  Twenty minutes early, I wander around town and buy a chicken salad sandwich from the Co-op.  Eventually the bus leaves with the driver promising to shout when we reach the road to the house.  On reaching here, I ask him for times of the bus back assuming it would be the 2 again which runs hourly.  "Every ten minutes" he tells me, "All the buses come this way."  Ok.

A brown sign points towards Erddig.  One mile it says, and I follow.  A little way in I reach a cross roads with another couple of signs.  One points towards the house and garden, the other towards "Felin Puleston" whatever that is.  So I quite logically follow the house and garden sign.  I walk, I walk, and I walk some more. I walk past this view:



I walk past this sassy sign:



But there's no real indication I'm going in the right direction other than the cars I'm persistently dodging. At one point I panic and try to phone the house but there's just answering machines at the end of the line. Eventually I reach another Erddig sign. I follow this. Which leads to more walking.

About half an hour later I reached Erddig. My first reaction is to explain my troubles to the volunteers in reception. They know, oh, they know. Also it turns out that I'd gone the long way around. I should have walked the other way towards "Felin Puleston" which would have halved the journey and they drew over a site map to point me in the correct direction out.

I didn't need it in the end. After my visit, just as I was starting to follow the directions (after first walking the wrong way due to having the map upside down), one of the volunteers from inside the house pulled up in her car and offered me a lift and took my all the way back to the outskirts of Chester where she lived. Which meant I got to do some bonus charity shopping in Chester at the end of the day (the BBC series How We Build Britain with David Dimbleby on dvd and a t-shirt for a Malaysian Four Seasons Resort are now mine) and I was home much earlier than I would have been.

Erddig then.  The quick version.  The house was originally built in the 1680s for Joshua Edisbury the High Sheriff of Denbighshire.  It was so expensive it bankrupted him, but as a volunteer explained during a tour of the gardens which began my visit, not before he asked his brother who was in government to pull money from the general exchequer to help clear his debts.  They both ended up in jail.

Erddig was then bought in 1716 by the London lawyer John Mellor for reasons which have never been explained since he'd never even been to Wales.  In any case with the help of his nephew Simon Yorke, he extended the house on either side, filled it with all mod cons including a chapel and then unfortunately died in 1733 before he'd really had a chance to make use of it.

Simon picked it up in the will and so began just under two hundred and fifty years of ownership by the Yorke family which eventually ended in 1973 when it became too much of responsibility for the final owner Philip Yorke III thanks to general decrepitude and the local colliery having mined underneath the house creating subsidence.  He gave the house to the National Trust who thanks to a public appeal and compensation from the coal industry were able to renovate the place and buttress the foundations and opened it to the public in 1977.

As they indicate in the leaflet, what it lacks for in architectural distinctiveness, it makes up for in possessions and social history.  The current cataloguing and recording project indicates that when Philip III passed the house on (with the understanding that nothing be added or removed) there were over 30,000 objects in the collection.

But the key point of interest is how across the centuries, the various owners of the house kept records of all the servants they employed with paintings and photographed portraits, each commemorated by lengthy rhyming verse biographies, endless stanzas extolling the virtues of cooks, stable lads, gardeners and footmen.  They all still on display in rooms and corridors just as they were when the house was passed on in the 70s and they really are a curiosity, notably a painting of the coach boy who stands out by being a person of colour.

It's for this reason that visitors enter the house through the servants areas in reverse to as usually occurs in stately homes.  In renovating the house, the chosen period was early in the 20th century when Philip II became a father and Erddig became a family home.

None of the family were really art collectors.  Although the house is filled with paintings, they're mainly portraits by minor artists and reproductions of other works lots of "after" designations and "British School".  To bury the headline, their two star items are this portrait of Philip Yorke I MP (1743–1804) by Gainsborough and of John Mellor the second owner of the house in which Gainsborough overpainted everything but the face in an attempt to improve on original artist Charles Jervas's work.  Both are a cut above anything else on display.  The collection is available to view on the ArtUK website.  Plenty of them are attempts by members of the family including this rather nice image of a kingfisher in the frost.

My favourite room in the house is undoubtedly "the state bedroom" which was latterly joked as being  so named because of the state it was in due to rain water damage, messing up the bed and walls.  A photo in the guide book shows it to have indeed been in a horrendous state, certainly worse than most of the rest of the house.

The key item is the bed, which was purchased by John Mellor in the 1720s from a London furniture maker and then travelled up country to the house.  After the damage it incurred in the 60s, the V&A, who judged it to be one of the most important examples of that type of furniture in the county agreed to restore it on the understanding that when it turned the room would be protected by a glass walk through rather like a quarantine room in a research facility.

This gorgeous room, decorated with 18th century hand painted wallpaper, containing a coromandel lacquer screen is only viewable through this protective glass which just adds to the feeling of standing in some kind of time capsule viewing a moment in the past.  You could image Dave Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey shuffling in wandering of the monolith has changed the breakfast order.

The house is in a constant state of renovation.  Some rooms are barely accessible, the Tapesty and Chinese Rooms require a volunteer to unlock a rope for entry and they stand watching as you look around although there's more than enough time to gawp at the orientalist fixtures, tapestries illustrating aspects of the empire actually produced in the Soho Factories for Mellor in the 1920s.  The Music Room is mostly under wraps and other locations, such as the library, are being used for storage, all of which is necessary but breaks the illusion a bit for visitors.



But for all that it's probably at least worth a visit for the gardens, which after being left to overgrow for years have recently been redesigned by the Trust's head gardener to resemble an earlier period and now resemble something you might find in a French chateau.  To look out of the window is to imagine yourself in Versaille or Marienbad.  How do you grow topiary like that?