It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One – Page 33

“The Arts of War: Assyrian Narrative Art” Nigel Tallis (Talk at the British Museum Members’ Open Evening, 11/11/2013)

A couple of weeks ago we had a day out in London visiting the British Museum. During the day we mainly went to see their El Dorado exhibition (which I’ll write up later) and in the evening we went to two gallery talks at the Members’ Open Evening (one of which is what I’m talking about here, the other one will be tomorrow). My photos related to both these talks are up on flickr here.

The first of the two talks was about the Assyrian reliefs that the museum has on the ground floor. The curator, Nigel Tallis, took us round 3 of the rooms, talking about both the art and what it tells us about the Assyrian Kings (and about their methods of warfare, hence the title of the talk).

Assyrian Relief from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud

The first room has reliefs from the Northwest Palace in Nimrud (in modern Iraq) and is the earliest known example of these types of reliefs from Assyria – previously they had painted reliefs with much the same subject matter. Tallis told us this was an example of how the Assyrian Kings liked to demonstrate their greatness by emphasising their embrace of new technology & arts, they’d seen reliefs in other lands and now they wanted them themselves.

The last two of those photos also illustrate the army, and thus by extension the King embracing new technology. There’s a scene of the army crossing a river, and you can see the soldiers using inflated bladders as float aids. And you can see in the siege scene that the defenders have tried to set the Assyrian army on fire, but the Assyrians are pumping water to put out the flames.

The next room has the reliefs from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib, which are later in date and more complex in style. In contrast to the Nimrud reliefs the text on these one includes captions explaining what the scenes are showing. The text on the Nimrud ones is several repetitions of a standard text explaining how glorious the king is.

The scenes here tell the story of the siege of Lachish, a city in Judah. Tallis told us this is an unusual situation from the ancient world where we have both sides of the story – these reliefs tell the Assyrian side, and the Bible tells the Jewish side. The reliefs tell the whole story of the siege, and the capture of the citizens of the city (and what happened to those that were punished). In the photo above the King is sitting on a hill overlooking the action. Tallis pointed out several features that suggest that the artists who created the scenes were actually present at the battle, sketching bits for later use. And he said that archaeologists have figured out where the battle took place, by using the relief and matching the landscape up. So it’s partly a realistic representation, but it’s important remember it’s also symbolic. And again it displays the King endorsing & using new technology (and you can see where the artists are stretching their repertoire too).

The last room he took us through was the one with the royal lion hunt reliefs. These are not war per se, but involve a lot of the same sorts of representation and mix of realism and symbolism. The lions as they are shot and die are very realistically depicted, again it looks like the artist has seen this rather than just been told about it. But the King is shown as larger than life – a relatively new development, earlier reliefs had him the same size as other people.

Also crossing the boundaries between reality & symbolism is the whole event itself – the lion hunt was a real thing that happened, but it was very much staged. The lions were captured and the whole hunt took place within an enclosed area. One of the photos above shows the lions being released into the arena. There’s also a scene of the King killing a lion with a knife – there’s a series of these scenes, like a cartoon strip, showing a lion feigning death then rearing up to attack a servant before the King bravely steps in and finishes it off. Now this may’ve been a thing that actually happened, but it’s also a propaganda piece for the King – if you look at the pose of the actual kill it’s set up to look exactly like one of the royal symbols, which will not’ve been a coincidence!

This was a fascinating talk, I’ve looked at these reliefs several times but there was a lot I’d not noticed or not realised the significance of.

Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor

Whee! 50th anniversary special Doctor Who, and I think they managed to pull off a suitably epic story. Lots of back references to Old Who, and a mainline plot about one of the big things from New Who. As I generally do with Doctor Who episodes this rest of this post is a not-quite-cohesive collection of things I liked 🙂

(Terminology note: I’m keeping the Doctor numbers the same, and calling Hurt’s Doctor “the War Doctor” instead of 8.5.)

SPOILERS AHEAD! Hover mouse over text to read, or read on entry page:

I liked that the Time War was the focus of the main plot line – it’s been one of the defining characteristics of the Doctor in New Who, he is the man who killed his own people because it was the lesser of two evils. Even 11 isn’t over it, he hasn’t forgotten how many children died on Gallifrey because it “slipped his mind” he’s deliberately chosen not to dwell on it – but that choice still defines him, he’s the Doctor who has decided it’s time to move on from what he did. That’s what the War Doctor and 10 can’t imagine, they’re too close to it. But 11 has had another 400 years on from 10 and he has started to come out of the other side of that grief. Although he’s not all the way there, even if 10 & the War Doctor think he is.

Given it’s such a big difference between the classic episodes & the new ones I think it needed to be in the anniversary story. And it’s also nice to have it tied up, and the Doctor (and the plot lines) can truly move on now. By making this the focus of the special I also think it compartmentalises it in a way – this is not “New Who Is Not Old Who” this is an episode in the whole story of the Doctor’s life. Yes, it’s a third of his life so far, and it’s going to forever colour his life going forward. But it’s just a part of the whole sweep of continuity. (I’m not sure I’ve managed to get that thought out of my head intact, hopefully you can follow what I mean!)

I liked that the Doctor figures out a way to avoid actually having to burn Gallifrey. I didn’t like the actual plan he came up with coz I don’t think it makes sense but I’m willing to not think about it in detail because I like the higher level story. The 4th Doctor couldn’t bring himself to wipe out the Daleks before they began, the War Doctor feels forced into the genocide of both the Daleks and the Gallifreyans, and the 11th Doctor finds a way to be true to his self and avoid it. Just a shame the “and the Daleks will shoot all of each other” bit doesn’t really hold water :/ The time locking the planet thing also fixes that bit at the end of 10’s run where the Gallifreyans break out. Which 11 remembers, incidentally, but 10 hasn’t got there yet.

For all my quibbles I liked the way everything for the climax was set up earlier on. Same software different casing – and we get the immediate pay off with the screwdrivers & the door, but then the real pay off is in the climax. Paintings that are slices of time locked away – and we get the immediate pay off in the Zygon subplot (twice), but again the real pay off is in the climax. I liked the running themes as well, of memory loss (again pays off finally because the War Doctor has to forget he didn’t kill them all), of “which one is the real one” (and in particular the running gag where 10 keeps telling the real Elizabeth she isn’t).

I loved The Moment, both the concept & the execution! The idea of a weapon so complex it became sentient and developed a conscience is really neat. And so of course it was left over at the end of the war – the Time Lords in general were afraid of being judged and found wanting, behind their rhetoric about the war being necessary. But the Doctor will use it because he already judges himself more harshly than even The Moment will. And continues to judge himself for the next 400 years – the last scene of the previous episode where 11 turns away from the War Doctor saying that he didn’t do it “in my name” shows that. So it makes sense to me that there is this spare weapon of mass destruction, and that the Doctor would be the first to use it.

The interface picked from “your past, or is it your future” made sense too – we’ve seen the TARDIS do that to interact with people before, so it’s a Gallifreyan-tech thing. And nice call back to the TARDIS being confused about past/future/causality when she was put in a human body. I thought Billie Piper did a fantastic job of playing the avatar as alien. And in an out-universe sort of way I liked that they had her back to represent the 9 era, given Eccleston didn’t return.

I also liked the way that this weapon with a conscience engineered the situation so that she would not be used. She nudges the War Doctor into seeing his future if he survives this (as punishment – which I also liked, she chose that as the punishment to fit the crime). And she chooses which future selves he meets and when – setting them up to solve the problem, and nudging things along the way to make sure they do figure out a solution.

There was loads of other stuff I liked too, but I think I’ve wittered on for long enough here 🙂 Looking forward to the next one now!

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Tattered

TV This Week Including Cave Paintings, Ceramics and Music

David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy

We watched episodes two and three of David Starkey’s series about music and the English/British monarchy this week. In the second episode he covered the 17th Century and an important theme of this era was the battles between the Puritans and the Royalists – in this context a major one was over the place of music in the church. Church organs, for instance, were a great source of discord between the two camps – with the Puritans firmly on the side of keeping them out of worship. The third episode was mostly about Handel (and I was surprised how much of the music in that one I instantly recognised) – he came to England to write operas, originally, and stayed after the Hanoverians took the throne to write a lot of the ceremonial and public music of the period. Georges I, II and III were fans and he got commissions like the writing of the coronation anthems for George II for this reason. As the role of the monarchy shifted to be more ceremonial & less powerful the music they commissioned stopped being just religious or ceremonial in nature and became entertainment. This episode also covered the development of the national anthem – apparently Britain has the oldest national anthem of any country. Interestingly not imposed from outside, but instead it started as a gesture of support for the monarchy during a troubled time and grew in popularity.

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Ceramics: How it Works

The third episode of Mark Miodownik’s materials science series was all about ceramics, how they’re made, what their properties are and how they’re used. I hadn’t realised before watching the programme that glass can be grouped in with pottery. One juxtaposition between this programme and the one about plastics is that ceramics is all “old tech” that we may’ve refined but have known about for millennia. The Romans had enough command of glass making technology to make windows (not just bottles and drinking glasses) – but we’ve developed ways of producing purer and more consistent glass (making things like cheap pint glasses a possibility). And we’ve made closer to perfect glass sheets, which are much stronger than glass made using older technology. For pottery it’s porcelain that’s the developed form – the Chinese got there first, but in the West it took centuries after porcelain was known of to figure out how to make it. And the third material Miodownik discussed was concrete – again the Romans used it extensively, our modern wrinkle was to figure out how to reinforce it to let it carry heavier loads.

This series was really good – Miodownik’s enthusiasm for his subject was infectious, and there was plenty of stuff both historical & modern that I didn’t know in advance 🙂

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Cave of Forgotten Dreams

We recorded this film about the Chauvet cave paintings off Film 4, and weren’t quite sure what to expect. It was made by Werner Herzog, and was partly showing us the cave paintings and partly about the cave paintings and the study of them. You could tell it wasn’t a British made programme – not just the accents of all the participants, but also it had a different sensibility to it. I don’t think I could articulate what was different, just that it was. And it had quite an odd epilogue about albino crocodiles which was trying to make some point about how one sees the world, I don’t think I followed what Herzog was doing with that at all. The best bits of the film were the bits where it just showed us the paintings (with suitably atmospheric music), because it’s not somewhere we’ll ever get to go & see – access is controlled and even the people studying it aren’t allowed to stay in the cave for long. The science etc was also interesting, but it’s also an exercise in displaying how little we’ll ever know – we can date them and so on, but we can only speculate about what they meant or why they were made.

In Our Time: The Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer was written during the English Reformation as the new reference for the services & ceremonies for the new Church of England, and it’s still in use in many churches today. Discussing it on In Our Time were Diarmaid MacCulloch (University of Oxford), Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge) and Martin Palmer (Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture).

Prior to the break with the Roman Catholic Church all church services were in Latin, and the forms of the services came from several different books depending on what sort of service it was and so on. Even though the English Church’s break with Rome was driven by Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce from his first wife there were genuine supporters of the European flavour of Reformation involved in the process. A key figure amongst these was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who not only orchestrated the original split from Rome but was also (in Edward VI’s reign) responsible for the original versions of the Book of Common Prayer. This was designed to be the single book that contained all the necessary prayers and ceremonies for the Church of England – each parish church had a copy, and used it for its services. The first version was to some degree a compromise between those who wanted a fully Reformed Church and those who wanted a more traditional Catholic theology (with or without the Pope as the head of the Church). As such a contemporary of Cranmer’s (who wasn’t as keen on Reformation as Cranmer) demonstrated that it could quite easily be interpreted in line with traditional Catholic theology. The second edition, again written by Cranmer, was published in the closing months of Edward VI’s reign and it was more hardline Protestant. Edward’s death & his sister Mary’s ascension to the throne returned the country to the Catholic Church and so the Book of Common Prayer was sidelined for a while. When Elizabeth I came to the throne she had the Book of Common Prayer republished, in much the same form as the second edition, and it was again the official prescribed version of the services.

By the time Elizabeth died the book which had once been regarded as “too Protestant” was regarded as “too Catholic” for hardline reformers. There was hope that Elizabeth’s successor would bring about a proper Reformation of the English church – after all James VI & I had been brought up in the Scottish Kirk. Sadly for the reformers James rather liked the ceremony of the English Church, and wasn’t fond of the dour Scottish Kirk – and in particular he liked the hierarchical nature of the English Church which reinforced his sense of his divinely anointed authority. So the Book of Common Prayer (and the concept of bishops) lived on. After the Civil Wars, while Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector the Book of Common Prayer was again abolished – this time replaced with a much more Puritan form of worship. The Restoration of the Monarchy was also the restoration of the Book of Common Prayer – revised another few times subsequently, but the definitive version is the 1662 revision. This was used throughout the British Empire as it grew, and is still used in some churches today.

As well as the history of the Book of Common Prayer they also talked about the language of it in the programme. Obviously it’s in English – and this was one of the important features of the new service book. An important part of the Reformation was the idea that everyone should understand what was going on – both in having access to a bible in their own language and in having services in their own language. The actual phrasing of the book is also important – it has had a significant impact on the sort of language we use today. They were keen to stress on the programme that it was written with its use in mind – in that the same words are to be used time and time again, so the prayers were constructed to be repeatable. Not florid prose that might sound foolish after a while nor witty or full of punchlines that might sound lame the umpteenth time you heard them. For much of the century or so of the reformation process in England there was a requirement to attended Church of England services that used the Book of Common Prayer. This ensured that the words and their underlying theology sunk in, over time, and that all children were properly indoctrinated.

One thing that they mentioned several times in the programme is something that always strikes me when learning about the Reformation in England – how very odd it was compared to the rest of Europe. The English Church tried (and mostly succeeded) in navigating a third way between catholicism and protestantism. A lot of the theology was reformed as compared to the Catholic church (like transubstantiation), and obviously the Pope is no longer head of the C of E. But the C of E still has bishops and a hierarchy, and even though it’s been austere at various times and places it has also still had ceremony and pomp at various times and places. So it didn’t really make either of the extremes happy – and the way the Book of Common Prayer was discarded once for being too Protestant and once for being too Catholic within the space of a century sort of sums that conflict up.

Marillion (Aylesbury Waterside Theatre, 9/11/2013)

Marillion have played a couple of UK dates recently and we went to see them play in Aylesbury. This was, apparently, the first time in 29 years that the band have played at that venue, and as Aylesbury is where they’re based it was a sort of homecoming gig. The Waterside Theatre is relatively newly rebuilt, and Aylesbury seem very pleased with it – we drove into Aylesbury twice* from different directions & you’re sign-posted to the theatre right from the outskirts of town both times. It’s quite nice, and the staff were all astonishingly friendly and cheerful.

*On purpose – we were staying with my parents in Oxford and so drove round the edge of Aylesbury on the way there before returning for the evening.

The support “band” was Jacob Moon – who does guitar+singing. His most recent album is a collection of covers, and so as well as original stuff we were treated to his version of Kayleigh and also of a Rush song (I don’t know Rush well enough to remember what it was). He was good, and built up some quite complex songs by layering guitar loops. Obviously he got the best response to Kayleigh, as you’d expect.

Then it was Marillion. Overall they played two hours – a main set plus 3 encores. Apart from the very last encore it was a very recent setlist, heavily biased towards things off Sounds That Can’t Be Made (as you might expect). But the setlist had been shaken up a bit from when we’ve previously seen them while they were touring this album – in particular they started with Invisible Man (from Marbles) rather than with Gaza. There were also no A Few Words for the Dead this time. I put the camera away for the last encore once they started playing – this one was two Fish-era songs, Garden Party and Market Square Heroes (appropriately as we were right near the Market Square in question). And it was very bouncy 😀

A good evening! I’ve got some more pictures up on flickr, here.

“Enchanted Glass” Diana Wynne Jones

History lecturer Andrew Brandon Hope has just inherited his grandfather’s house and field of care – but at the beginning of this book neither he nor we have any idea what the latter really entails. About a year later, as he’s beginning to settle into the house 12 year old Aidan Cain turns up on his doorstep. Aidan’s grandmother has just died & she’d told him if he was ever in trouble he should go to Andrew’s grandfather – so here he is. The rest of the story revolves around Andrew’s field of care, Aidan’s parentage, and the magic they both have (but that Andrew had forgotten due to being concerned with being a grown-up).

This book was published in 2010, the year before Diana Wynne Jones’s death, and I don’t think I’d realised before that she was still writing as recently as that. She was one of my favourite authors when I was a kid but I never ended up buying many of her books because they were all in the school library. In fact I think I only own Archer’s Goon, but my favourites were the Chrestomanci books and Homeward Bounders. I was actually looking in the children’s section of the library to see if Homeward Bounders was on the shelf, but this was the only one of hers that was there – so I picked it up coz I’d not read it before.

If I’d been the right age for the book, I’d’ve loved it – as an adult it felt a little too pat at times and everything wrapped up rather easily. Which is not a criticism as such, just an acknowledgement it’s a children’s book I’m reading without the rosy glow of nostalgia 🙂 The tone of the book is fairly light-hearted – most of the secondary characters are broadly drawn & comic. And the antagonist is just sinister enough that you can tell, without being truly scary.

Which all sounds like it wasn’t a good book, but it was – it was a lot of fun to read. I liked the dopplegangers with one from the fairy world & the human world. I liked the servants Andrew inherits along with the house – a housekeeper and a gardener, a comic pair who’re quite determined to make sure that Andrew behaves as they think he should, but also both have their roles to play in the events of the plot. Amusingly both surnamed Stock, as are many in the village, it’s almost as if it’s full of stock types … 😉 The one thing I didn’t entirely like was the final reveal about Aidan’s father – it felt like it grew out of the story, in that the clues were all there, but the relationship it implied it didn’t sit well with me.

So overall, fun, but probably better if you’re 10 or 11 years old.

Past Glory

TV This Week Including Congo, Evolution and Egyptian Mummies

Dan Snow’s History of Congo

This programme falls into the category of incredibly depressing stories about the state of the world. Dan Snow visits Congo and tells us about the history of this region of Africa – and how it’s been screwed over first by European colonial powers and subsequently by homegrown dictators & rebels (propped up by the West). Congo has vast reserves of natural resources, yet the people who’ve been in power over the last hundred and fifty years have all been very good at making the profits disappear into private hands, leaving the country one of the poorest in the world. Also depressing is how little I knew about the country before I watched this programme. Worth watching.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

This programme was part a biography of Darwin, part a trip down memory lane for David Attenborough and part a discussion of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Rather surreally it was presented by current David Attenborough and co-presented by David Attenborough from 30 or so years ago. I mean that they re-used footage from earlier serieses of his, including Life on Earth (which I don’t actually remember watching as a child, but I remember getting the book out of the library multiple times). It ended up feeling like a programme which had a strict budget – not just the re-used old footage, but also an animation of the tree of life which had been made by someone else. There wasn’t really anything new to me in the programme, but it was a pretty good round up of the subject.

Tutankhamun: The Mystery of the Burnt Mummy

This programme was a cut down version of the two hour film that Chris Naunton made about Tutankhamun’s death, which we watched a couple of months ago while visiting J’s parents. I think this one hour version was actually a bit more coherent than the longer film – and it definitely had less of Naunton pretending not to know things so he could ask people leading questions. (Yes, I know that’s part of how you write the script for one of these, but it doesn’t mean I like it much when it’s obvious.) The programme looks at the mummy of Tutankhamun and presents a theory about his death and mummification to explain the physical evidence. As I said the last time I wrote about this programme “determining” the cause of death of Tutankhamun is always an exercise in deciding which wounds you think are real and which you think are artifacts of the mummification process and subsequent treatment of the mummy. Naunton & co’s theory was based around the significant damage in a straight line from Tutankhamun’s left shoulder to left hip, and the missing heart and sternum. They used modern crash simulation technology to show that a chariot crashing into a kneeling Tutankhamun would produce injuries consistent with those on the mummy – and suggest it’s possible this happened during a battle. But I’m pretty sure other egyptologists think those wounds are a red herring – there are also candidate wounds in one of his legs, for instance.

The more convincing theory they propose is the one that explains why the mummy is charred (hence the title of this incarnation of the programme). The basic idea is that the mummification of Tutankhamun was rushed and the oils used as part of the ritual weren’t allowed to dry out enough before he was wrapped up and put in his coffin. They suggest this would be down to the political situation at the time – Tutankhamun’s named successor was Horemheb, but his actual successor was Ay so there’s a suggestion that Ay seized power and buried Tutankhamun as quickly as possible (and they also suggest he was interred in Ay’s tomb, with Ay later being buried in a bigger tomb originally intended for Tutankhamun). But anyway, he was buried a bit too quickly, still damp from the oils – and some oils as they dry heat up. In particular linseed oil which Naunton did a test with and showed that oily rags bundled up as if they were in a mummy will very quickly reach over 300°C – sadly he didn’t say if linseed oil was one of the oils used in mummification, but I assume something similar is. So it is very likely that Tutankhamun smouldered away in his coffin after burial, and that this explains the charred appearance of the mummy.

Steven Wilson (Royal Albert Hall, 20/10/13)

Nearly a month ago J and I went to see Steven Wilson play at the Royal Albert Hall. As this was shortly after we’d got home from Turin we didn’t spend the day in London beforehand, just headed in in time for the concert. After meeting up with Paul and Ady we had dinner at Wagamamas and headed off to find our seats. Paul had bought the tickets some time before* and we’d all forgotten what we’d done about seats – just remembered we’d gone for fairly cheap tickets so assumed we were up in the nosebleed seats somewhere. But it turned out we’d got seats on the main floor seating area, only about 20 or 30 rows back from the front, which was pretty awesome.

*We’d learnt from last time’s organisational fail!

I find talking about solo gigs for Steven Wilson a bit difficult – I don’t often (if at all) listen to the albums at home. So I don’t know the music particularly well, and often can’t name the tracks even when I do know them. There’s something about the atmosphere of him & his band live, in combination with the visuals, that makes the music work for me in a way it doesn’t really do on record. And I do like the videos that go with the songs. The concert even opened with a short video set to music about a busker who no-one notices (which is also the subject of one of Wilson’s songs – “Luminol”), which segued seamlessly into the start of the concert proper. I can’t remember the setlist now (and as I said at the beginning of this paragraph I likely couldn’t’ve told you it immediately after the gig either) – I do remember we got Postcard (which I like quite a lot, but J’s not that fond of), and Watchmaker, and The Raven that Refused to Sing, because I remember all the visuals for those ones 🙂 And they finished up with Radioactive Toy as the encore, just like in March 🙂

They were fairly strict about no photography during the show, so I don’t have any photos (and the one I tried to take on my phone to show where we were in the venue didn’t come out at all). I’ll finish up the post with a video from youtube instead, of Postcard as played in Mexico City last year: