renaissance man
Some years back I bought Teresa a set of early Hitchcock movies, and The Skin Game is, I think, my personal favourite of the x films in the set.
In many ways it’s very dated, from the stagey feel and some of the rather old school acting styles, to the class war plot of upstart industrialist vs. old country gentry. But it’s also very universal, in its themes of conflict, shame and revenge.
With numbers down on the drum teaching front, mainly due to our move making travelling to some former schools/pupils less viable – in particular the two hours plus odyssey to Bishops Stortford* – we thought we’d try letting our spare or ‘guest’ room.
Our initial attempt, listing it on Gumtree with a view to finding a lodger, got plenty of views, but no enquiries. So I thought why not try AirB&B? We ourselves have stayed in a few AirB&B properties, the best and most memorable being our Waterloo bicentennial trip to Belgium, in 2015. That place was absolutely terrific.
Anyway, letting our spare room with AirB&B has, so far, proved to be a good move, with guests booking in pretty much straight away. Our very first guest came during one of Tigger’s occasional bouts of flea infestation, which wasn’t exactly the best start! But we waged merciless war on the little bleeders, and eventually saw them off.
After this shaky start, things have settled down. One of the several good things is that having people coming to stay forces us to keep a better, tidier, cleaner house. Another is that the AirB&B short-stay type deal suits us – and perhaps me especially? – far better than a ‘proper’ old-school lodger, who’s around all the time.
We’ve had people recommend us to friends and colleagues, and we have one regular guest, who comes to visit his young son. His son’s name? Sebastian! The best thing is that everyone who’s stayed so far has been very easy going. We haven’t had any issues at all. Long may that continue!
* The difference this makes to my car fuel bills is massively noticeable. Plus all the time no longer wasted travelling. It was a good school, and the kids were great. But I’m really glad I finally quit! I’m not someone who finds quitting easy or natural.
Today I went a-roamin’, and collected a free soprano ukulele (from a lady with the fabulous name Lucinda Fudge!). It’s broken, hence her giving it away. I’ll probably try and fix it. But I also got it with a view to building my own ukulele. It’ll be useful as a reference.
I figure I should build a ukulele or two before attempting guitars. And I might start the latter with an electric project, and work my way up to acoustics! I love the video below, in which… well, you can see from the title what he’s up to.
I also bought some green Silverline polishing compound, a 120/240 grit sharpening stone, and some 600 and 1200 grit wet and dry sandpaper. Along with my recently constructed strop, all this stuff means I’m set up for proper serious sharpening.
So I’ll be getting all my planes and chisels in shape ASAP.
I,also need to get a lot more organised generally, and make some proper plans. I have nebulous half-arsed ideas about zillions of things, and want to start getting more stuff done. Amongst my priority projects are the following:
Get my Kity planer/thicknesser working; make some Izzy Swan style clamps; build a decent solid/heavy workbench; finish the two cold-frames; make my 1st ukulele; fix the garden fencing; replaced the old guttering. I also want to start making serious inroads on painting my 6mm and 10mm Napoleonic armies.
Sooo much to be done!
I still have issues with various tools, such as chisels and planes, not being sharp enough. I’ve been using Paul Seller’s sandpaper on glass technique for sharpening. And it has gotten blades much sharper.
But I’ve never yet been able to achieve the razor-sharp shave your arm hair degree of keenness on any blades that I want and need.
Having mentioned this when commenting on Youtube videos and forum posts about sharpening I’ve been told a leather strop is essential. So over yesterday and today day I made one.
I got two perfectly sized and shaped rectangular scraps of leather from a local craft shop, for £2, and made a wooden paddle out of some suitable looking medium density timber I found lying around the workshop.
I cut the wood to size on my quick’n’dirty tablesaw, shaping the handle on my bandsaw, and finished it off with some sanding and shaping, especially of the handle. I also drilled and shaped a hole for hanging it on my tool wall.
I glued the smooth-side-up piece on, rough side down, using wood glue. Left overnight that worked fine. However, the rough-side-up face, also glued with wood glue, didn’t work so well.
Firstly it had slipped out of position, and secondly, it was easy to peel off. So I removed it, cleaned up that face of the wooden paddle, and re-applied it, using a two-part epoxy glue. Stopping the smooth side of the leather from sliding out of place was tricky, but I eventually succeeded in weighting it down with sundry stuff and, a few hour later, it seems fine.
I had to trim off some excess glue, and even a few edges of leather that overhung. But shaping the handle, partly with a mini electric hand sander I recently got via Amazon Vine, and sandpaper and files, was – even if the results are rather rustic – lots of fun.
I really wanted to get some polishing compound today. But by the time I’d found someone local who actually stocks/sells it, it was too late. I’ll have to get it tomorrow, or early thursday. I also need to set up some new sandpaper and glass, and do a load more basic sharpening.
I might even bite the bullet and get some sharpening stones. I’d like the diamond plates. But good ones are very dear! Still, I’m pleased, another home-made tool for the workshop. Might stain the wood a bit darker… hmm?
Wow! This is a terrifically beautiful book.
This edition – I wonder if others will be published, e.g. when the show gets to the Palace of Fontainebleau? – bears the imprimature of the Canadian Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
I had them set aside a copy for me at Topping Books, intending to go in and buy it yesterday. But worries about the cost – I’ve paid the full £40 RRP – resulted in my not going till today.
I got up earlier than I normally would, to be first at the bank, paying in some drum lesson fees (and thereby mitigating, somewhat, my feelings of guilt re the expense!), and was in Ely nice and early. A quick browse of the book at the counter, and I bought it.
Now I’m poring over it at Welney WWT, with a pot of tea and a bacon bap. Must keep any bacon grease of this sumptuous and expensive thing of beauty! I’m sharing a few pictures of spreads from the book for educational purposes, in the hope that folks visiting and reading this might be inspired to buy this book, and/or visit the exhibition.
Sadly for us Brits the show won’t be coming to England as far as I know. It travels via several venues across t’other side of the pond, in Canada and the U.S, before heading to France, later in 2019. I intend to visit the show when it reaches Fontainebleau!
It’s funny, in years past my interest in all things Napoleonic was chiefly confined to the military history aspect. Mostly it’s been centred around reading, including much perusal of art and maps, etc, and all of this as a kind of adjunct to the toy soldier collection.
Now, however, I’m interested in far more: the person of Napoleon himself, and his allies and enemy’s; the art, culture, and even the general tenor of the times, and how they’ve fed into subsequent history, and so on.
Indeed, I’ve had flights of fancy wherein I fantasised about returning to higher education and studying the era in greater depth. I even had one particular dream which involved a PhD on the visual culture of the 1er Empire, the end product of which was to have been something very like this book, drawing together such diverse elements as art, architecture, design, and all that jazz.
But here it is, already done, by a whole team of experts, and now in my eager and excited hands. An absolute treasure trove of beautifully photographed artefacts, ranging from designs for buildings, porcelain, tapestries, uniforms, and suchlike, to the things themselves. And ranging from small metal baubles to chairs, furniture, carriages, all the way up to palaces.
Subtitled The Imperial Household, the chapters are broken down thus:
I. The Imperial Household: Portraits
II. The Household & Its Palaces
III. Art & Majesty
IV. Serving The Imperial Family
V. Epilogue
Appendices.
Within these there are numerous sub-sections, sometimes on a particular theme, individual, or area of production. So for example we have entries on Denon, Sevres, Gobelins, the Empress and her Household, the Imperial Hunt, and so on.
The richness and splendour that is a central theme throughout really is quite overpowering. No doubt just as was intended. There’s also a very interesting juxtaposition on one page of four portraits, in which the contrast between Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon is really very striking.
Having recently been reading Inside The Third Reich, by Albert Speer, it’s interesting to compare the longevity of both these fairly recent irruptions of Imperial ambition. Napoleon certainly was, like Hitler, a despot. But it would seem he was a far more enlightened one, for all that. And in light of that, perhaps it’s not surprising that his Imperial legacy has fared far better, vast amounts of his bequest to history surviving in numerous areas, from bricks and mortar to the Code Napoleon.
As I mentioned in the post on my recent birthday, one of several books I recently acquired is Inside The Third Reich, which I’m currently reading.
Written during his incarceration in Spandau, it’s interesting to a military history buff like me how little Albert Speer has to say about the military campaigns in Poland, the Low Countries and France, compared with the great detail he goes into about his architectural projects.
Indeed, although he’s a favoured member of Hitler’s innermost coterie, it’s clear that in the lead up to and the early stages of WWII Speer is very definitely on the outside of Hitler’s military circles. This would change, when he became armaments minister. But at the point I’m at, Speer is at pains to stress that whilst he himself felt such monumental projects as Hitler’s plans for central Berlin should be put on hold, in order to focus exclusively on the war effort, The Führer himself insisted that this non-essential work be carried on regardless.
For such immoderately grandiose plans to have ended up having such fleeting and ephemeral existences is in itself a fascinating and tantalising thing. Many of the buildings Speer worked on remain realised only as drawings or, at best, models. The latter only surviving the war (as far as I know) in photographs.
A bit of googling turned up a few things, such as a recent book on Speer’s architectural work, a short article about a ‘lost’ interview with Speer by Robert Hughes, and a number of instances of people selling a photo-book on Speer’s Neue Reichskanzlei (New Reich Chancellory), pictures from which help illustrate this post.
Speer also has a decidedly rueful note in his hindsight view, suggesting more than once that the aphrodisiac of power caused his style to develop in ways he suggests we’re not ‘true’ to his real nature. Perhaps the image above hints at the lighter more modernist approach he might’ve pursued more, had he not become court architect to a megalomaniac powermonger?
Speer also says he developed a ‘theory of ruins’, and that he discussed this with Hitler, and the two of them were in agreement on it. The idea was, in essence, that buildings of the Third Reich should be built in such a way that, like the ruins of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, they would still be awe-inspiring a thousand or more years hence.
The irony was to be that destruction would be visited upon the architectural works of Speer and Hitler’s other architects far sooner. And so it was that Speer’s new Reich Chancellory looked as you see it above, not in 2943, but just two years after completion, in 1945.
NOTES:
[1] Breker clearly captures Speer’s likeness very well, but his Mekon like bulbous bonce, probably intended to flatter Speer by reflecting/emphasising his intellectual aspect, does look a bit comic now.
[2] The horse – possibly Breker again? – has a very stiff, heavy, unnatural look, typical of Nazi approved sculpture. The two figures pictured above also have this rather leaden feel.
[3] Revisiting the ruins of one of his mammoth projects with Robert Hughes, years after the war and his release from prison, Speer confessed that it could now be seen that the outward show of pomp and gravitas was only skin deep, and that even the quality of much of the stone cladding, which covered the concrete bulk of the buildings, would’ve disappointed his beloved Führer.
One of Hitler’s primary aims in the new Reich Chancellory was to overawe visiting bigwigs, and make them feel both small and tired. The first could be accomplished by architecture on a huge scale, the second by making them walk miles of hard shiny corridors before they met him, cowed and exhausted. Speer himself notes, in retrospect, that all of this, and even his own design style, as it evolved, becomes – indeed is intended to be – inherently oppressive. Well, that’s fascism for you in a nutshell!
On a recent visit to Topping bookshop in Ely, I had a very brief browse of a splendid large hardback on 1st Empire glory, which was, I think, the Yale University Press publication Napoleon.
This sumptuous book is partner to a touring exhibition, currently showing in the U.S. and heading for the Museum at the Chateau of Fontainebleau, later in 2019. Sadly this affaire is not destined to come to the shores of perfidious Albion.
I’m seriously tempted to get this book. And I’d love to visit France to see the show, later in the year. The video above is a very short thing by Yale, giving a brief glimpse at the book. The video below is Napoleonic enthusiast Nicholas Hoare enthusing about it and thumbing through it, at slightly greater length.
My mum recently brought the excellent Upstart Crow TV series to my attention. Thanks mum!
Given my recent diatribes on how there’s practically nothing on current TV remotely worth watching, save the occasional re-run of something from the archives, it’s refreshing indeed to find some recently produced TV that’s not only bearable, but actually compelling, enjoyable viewing.
Ben Elton has done a superb job, helped in no small part by an excellent ensemble cast. And Elton and co. get to have their cake and eat it to, simultaneously mocking and celebrating ‘The Bard on Avon’, as Count Arthur once memorably called old Billy The Shake.
Great sport is had with the English language, using both that of the Elizabethan era – sirrah, etc. – and a delirious mash-up of contemporary and made-up stuff, resulting in such gems as ‘puffling pants’, so-and-so ‘doth hate my gutlings’, ‘cod-dangle’ and ‘tufted lady-grotto’.
And whilst the whole thing is delightfully clever, nay, witty even, it’s also piss-pot full to brimming over with knob gags and potty humour, in the best of British traditions, partaking of a noble lineage running all the way from Chaucer and Shakespeare’s lewd comic characters through to Carry On, Benny Hill, and now this.
David Mitchell is pitch perfect as William Shakespeare, both certain of his own genius and yet riddled with insecurities. And the action revolves, for the most part, around his two main haunts, the Shakespeare family home in Avon, and his ‘London lodgings’.
The cast are uniformly terrific. His country bumpkin family, with coarse father, fallen snob mother, homely milkmaid wife and petulant daughter, are a delightful lot. And in London we have his servant, Ned Bottom, Kate, his landlord’s daughter – aspiring actress and frustrated feminist – Kit Marlowe, Anthony Green, and Burbage and his ‘poor players’, etc.
Mark Heap’s Green, constantly scheming against the ‘Upstart Crow’, is a rare and wonderful thing, being that almost oxymoronic impossibility, a nuanced pantomime villain. His dastardly delivery of delightfully enunciated pre-cis-ee-on, and his m.o. of exiting rooms backwards, a-bowing and scraping with overdone mock politesse, all add up to a man one loveth to hate.
The trio of Burbage (Steve Speirs), Condell (Dominic Coleman) and Kempe (Spencer Jones) are also terrific: Burbage the big, bluff, bear-like luvvy, all strutty and shouty, Condell the Grand-Dame and chief whoopsy, and Kempe an obvious parody of Ricky Gervais.
Not only are all the chief players exceeding good, so to are the many cameos, from the less familiar young ‘uns (for example, in episode one Kieran Hodgson as the young ‘love lorn loon’, about to go up to Cambridge, is terrific), through Ben Miller’s Wolf Hall (an obvious reference to Mark Rylance), to Blackadder’s ‘Bob’ (Gabrielle Glaister), right up to such mega-luvvies as Ken Branagh and Emma Thompson. [1]
Teresa, my wife, stolidly refuses to be charmed by this utterly brilliant series, remaining a staunch Bl’adderite. I do love Blackadder, no mistake, but I might actually prefer Upstart Crow. It’s more consistently funny [2], more tightly jam-packed with laughs, and there’s a tighter focus. But I guess time will tell.
I definitely want this on DVD. It comes out in a few days, on Jan 14th.
NOTES:
[1] I have to confess I’ve never really warmed to Branagh or Thompson, but I do enjoy their contributions here.
[2] By this I mean it arrived on our screens fully formed, whereas Blackadder took a while to evolve, changing dramatically from series one to two, and maturing thereafter.
Some years ago mine uncle didst take Teresa and I out to dinner and a concert, in Olde London Towne. I confess I forget what the restaurant or cuisine were, but I vividly recall the venue and music: the concert was at The Idler Academy café and bookshop (sadly no more!), in Notting Hill, and the group was the Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments.
Their programme of musick that night was called The Ministry of Angels, and they had a CD of the same name, which was funded ‘by subscription’, i.e. ye olde fashioned form of crowd-funding. Terry very kindly bought us the CD.
This year he gifted us the group’s most recent recording, The Longest Night. The live concert, all those years ago, was enchanting. One thing I particularly liked was that they celebrated fallen angels as well as the goody-goody ones.
Both albums are excellent. But of the two I definitely prefer the most recent, which, despite an earthier more pagan programme is, musically, quite completely and utterly sublime. The music ranges from ethereal, starting with what sound like harmonics on a violin or similar stringed instrument, to earthily folksy.
Where the first album had an angelic theme, this one has a winter solstice Scandewegian core, several of the songs being sung in (sorry, should know, but don’t!) either Norwegian or Swedish, and the Hardanger fiddle and Nyckelharpa being strange and ancient instruments of those two respective countries.
Whenever I hear a harp playing music of this style/vintage (and that isn’t often enough, alas), I go looking for more similar stuff. I’m always surprised and disappointed how little there appears to be. On Amazon, for example, I could only find three or four such albums, and several of those were out of print vinyl or cassette releases!