Guise? Guise!

 Using this blog simply to regurgitate videos from the BBC Archive does feel a little lazy, but it keeps putting out such treasure, and I wanted something properly unsettling to post for Hallowe'en weekend. Unfortunately this package delivers so fully that I now want the whole heathen atrocity of a "holiday" banished from the memory of the Earth. What are these poor innocents doing? What have they been taught? What is this programme?

 

 

 Full marks to whoever decided to overlay the subtle howling of wind over footage of children limping through a wood singing about their own ugliness. Until now I had entirely bought into the idea that trick or treating was something we picked up from the States – I blame Fry and Laurie – but I was ten in 1984 and yet I don't remember "guising". Or sticking my head under water to make contact with another world. Or eating apples to learn the future. I knew a little about carving faces into turnips, but only because we had to wear one at the London Dungeon as "Stingy Jack". That was a scary costume. It had nothing on this kid's Licorice Allsorts mascot Bertie Bassett though. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.

 

Heads Held at Arm's Length

 

 

 

 I'd not noticed the Medusa outside Tate Britain before. Henry C. Fehr's The Rescue of Andromeda isn't the only depiction I've seen in which Perseus and the woman's head he brandishes look identical – I don't know the reason for that (and I haven't bought Natalie Haynes' new book yet, so it might get explained there) – but it's the only depiction I've seen in which Medusa's hair is bound. I suppose that's a sensible precaution, although it's possible Fehr just couldn't be bothered with all the snakes. It's odd that Perseus is also holding a sword though: he's about to turn a sea monster into stone, what was the plan?

 Similarly bound and held at arm's length, I realised, is the head in the centre of Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Not "the Crucifixion" I now note. According to Bacon they're Furies: raging demons from Greek Tragedy broken into the Christian Iconography of a triptych. The artist decided in 1944 that pity was no longer enough I guess. Every time I walk into that room of the Tate I'm fifteen again, seeing those girning horrors in that orange boom for the very first time, and recognising the one in the middle from Swamp Thing's first trip to Hell. "Flutch" Alan Moore called him in that. Pencils by Stephen R. Bisette. Inks by John Totleben. Outside of comics I suppose it's odd for a drawing to have two artists, but I looked at those drawings a lot.

 

 Another triptych was playing in the dark round the corner: John Akomfrah's gorgeous The Unfinished Conversation, a study of the immigrant intellectual life of the Stuart Hall who didn't present It's A Knockout. And thread through the whole building, Hew Locke's mighty Procession. Two new highlights. I can't remember when I last spent as long there – I went Monday; it might be where I picked up the bug – I really recommend going.

Uncle Francis Postscript: Fatespotting

"Shelter Drawing: Three Fates" by Henry Moore (source)

 

 Following on from what I hope was a tribute to my late uncle Francis yesterday: looking for pictures of him to accompany the post, I was surprised to find the video below, from 2014. I never expected to see Francis in a video. Possibly because the first extraordinary fact I ever learnt about him was that Uncle Francis didn't own a television! He composed epic dramas in blank verse, and themes for organ. He didn't pop up on youtube. But here he suddenly is, less spry than I remember, I hope it's okay to say, which is why I suspect the last time I saw him was before this. But maybe we're just witnessing the toll upon Francis of talking about the Blitz. These aren't happy memories, which is one of the reasons I think they're so worth sharing. I remember, in the class he gave in 1999, Francis talking about growing up in "Bomb Alley",watching "men murder each other in the sky above us." I forgot – if I ever knew – that he was also friends with Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.

"It's not spooky. It's just a city waiting to be crucified."

 

 You can see Francis talk at far greater length about this moonlit childhood beneath the bombing in his other youtube appearance here: "Armageddon and faith - a survivor's meditation on the Blitz".

 And his funeral service will be held on the 20th. Here.

Top Search Results for an Image of God

 Considering monotheism on the back of that post about Akenhaten, I was looking for something to illustrate the concept, when it occured to me – for the very first time – to see what would happen if I just typed the word "god" into an image search.

 

 

 This painting of Krishna was the first to come up, from a blog called Get Much Information (Hindu Gods - 7). Capitalising the G made no difference; monotheistic or pantheistic, "God" and "god" both turned up exactly the same results. I think you can click on these to get a closer look. That's Krishna, top left...

 I thought this find surprising enough to share, and was about to write "Look what I happens when I google God", when I realised I hadn't actually googled God, because I don't use Google, I use Ecosia. 

 So I typed "God" into Google...

 ... and got markedly different results. Again, it didn't matter whether the "g" was upper case or lower, in contrast to Ecosia's mainly Hindu pantheon, Google gave me wall-to-wall Abrahamic Lord and Father (click to enlarge)...

 

 Which is when I realised I should probably try every other search engine too. 

 Next up then was Yahoo...

 

 

 

 Krishna again! From Hindu Gods 7, together with almost identical results to Ecosia's. I'd expected Yahoo to be more Googly, but no...

 

 What other search engines were there? 

 Ask.com didn't have an image search facility, as far as I could find, but if you're interested, its top result for "God" was the site Reading Christadelphians - a Bible-based community. 

 Microsoft Bing, however...

 

 

 

 Krishna yet again. A whole line-up incredibly similar to Ecosia's and Yahoo's. But with one notable addition. See if you can spot it...

 

That's right. "God's Face", dead centre...

 

 According to The Daily Mail's website, this "youthful and feminine" face was an e-fit conjured up by the Univeristy of Northern Carolina "with the help of 511 American Christians", which raises a number of questions I probably don't want answered, and anyway that's not real investigative journalism, this is. Finding out what religion various search engines are (bearing in mind, of course, that Islam's non-figurative tradition means we'll never know how Muslim a search engine is).

 What about AOL? America On Line...

 

 

 Oh, hi Krisha! And hi, guys...

 

 Why were Google's results were so different?

 By now I was having to run a search for search engines, because I couldn't think of any more, and found this list of fifteen.  

 Baidu was one I hadn't heard of so I typed "God" into that, and finally...

 

A different perspective...

 

 Baidu is a Chinese engine. 

 This meant I found it quite difficult to find the image button, and when I did press it, the following text popped up at the top of my screen...

 

... which I think says "God lie". 

 Yandex was another engine I hadn't heard of...

 

 

 Ah! A heavily accessorised, but definitely identifiable, Abrahamic if not exclusively Christian deity again: glowing wafer, pyramid hat, staff with two fingers raised, bird holding another origami bird, it's all there. I think Yandex is Russian...

And the last search engine on the list was called DuckDuckGo...

 

 Shiva!

 

 Finally I decided, as a change of tack, to try an online "Artificial Intelligence" text-to-image machine – or API. But all this gave me was a series of hairy, missshapen pigs... 

 

Do let me know if you have any better luck.

"The Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him..."

  Ten minutes walk from Kentish Town, there are roads entirely unchaperoned by lamplight, and where there is light, there are hills, and green, and gates. I don't think of horror passing these overgrowths, I think of a kinder magic, less prevalent onscreen - something I'd hoped to see when Peter Jackson had filmed Lord of the Rings in fact, but those elves turned out more monochromatic, less folksy than I had hoped.

 

  These days, the supernatural born of the natural in British art is nearly always either twee or terrifying. In the real world however – even in NW3 – it seems easy to still encounter uncomplicated awe, a connection to something pagan but unthreatening. Suddenly on my walk, I thought of the chapter in The Wind In The Willows that could never be included in adaptation, in which Mole and Ratty encounter a vision of Pan.

 

 Here imagined by E. H. Shepard (source).

 

 I'd read that this god had a particular significance to closeted Edwardians, and wondered if the inclusion of "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", as the chapter's called, was Kenneth Grahame subtly shipping his two protagonists. I resolved to see if I could find the Cosgrove Hall version when I got home: the company's original adaptation had omitted the chapter, but I remembered it getting a whole episode when they came to make the series. And I found it, and it's perfect, still one of the most startling episodes of children's television you can imagine, the answer to a prayer. All hail Pan.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Often Unenviable Fairy Seat

"A Dance around the Moon" by Charles Altamont Doyle

 I knew that the author of Sherlock Holmes believed in fairies, and was happy to identify, for example, Frances and Elsie's cardboard cut-outs (below) as evidence of psychic phenomena, despite such a verdict seeming to go against every tenet of his creation's practice of deductive reasoning.

 

  But what I didn't know – and what might go some way towards explaining this discrepancy – is how large a part fairies had played in the life of his father, the illustrator Charles Altamont Doyle...

 

 "Meditation, Self Portait" by Charles Altamont Doyle  

 

 According to Alistair Kneal's Transceltic blog, "his paintings were often of fantasy scenes, many featuring fairies..." but "after growing family worries about his moods and desperate attempts to obtain alcohol, he was admitted to the nursing home of Blairerno House at Drumlithie in the Mearns... Following an aggressive attempt to leave Blairerno House he was sent to Sunnyside, Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum on 26 May 1885...

"The seat of fairies is not always enviable"

 

"It is described that he would tell staff that he was receiving messages from the unseen world and accused them of being devils... He maintained to his family that he was sane and had been wrongfully confined. In doing so he complied sketchbooks with caricatures, drawings of fairies and notes...

 

 Painting from "The Doyle Diary" 1889

 

"He inscribed the frontispiece of his sketchbook diary: ‘Keep steadily in view that this Book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? or depraved taste? If in the whole book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me.’"

 

 "The Spirits of the Prisoners" 1885

 

 And there's more of his work on Monster Brains.

Sometimes this blog will just be "The Black Dog".

 Here's a good dream. There's the confidence of a lifetime's work behind it, and when it turned up on television sometime around the late nineties, it immediately became one of my favourite things a person had made. I knew nothing about the person though – Alison de Vere – and that changed little in the intervening decades. She had no channel of her own, no website, and it seemed impossible to find any pictures of her online, unless we count this. Even this was hard to find, and I don't know how long it will stay up, which is why I want to share it while I can, so – quick! – let The Black Dog's nineteen minutes leave their mark on you before they disappear. Alison de Vere died in 2001 it turns out, at the age of 73. I found her obituary this week. Everything I'd guessed about her was wrong.

 

And here is the City this afternoon - a Monday afternoon - at 3pm

 First I should say, following yesterday's post, I received a nice update this morning about my aunt. According to her brother, Unce Martin, she's had a good sleep and is now eating and "(as the school reports used to say) ‘showing improvement’", which is fantastic. My mother's side of the family are juggernauts.

 

 I didn't head out this afternoon expecting surprises, although there are still streets in NW1 I haven't yet walked down and courtyards to chance upon. I just wondered how empty they'd be. Most people I passed were wearing masks, which had become rare outdoors, but they do keep your face warm. I thought of a new translation to the first line of The Odyssey: "Let's have a story about a windy man!" But how would the reader know which pronunciation of "windy" was meant? That's the only problem.

 

 Things were a lot quieter than in Defoe's day I think. I was coughing quite a bit, but I've now come to recognise this epiglottal build-up of fizzy pizza-flavoured throat-pop: it took me five Christmases to realise it doesn't mean I have food poisoning, I'm just wearing my belt too tight. And I don't have to have eaten pizza to taste it. I forgot that only one of the spires of Saint Paul's has a clock in it, like the eyes of a broken robot pirate. Here's a statue I like. Look at them shimmy.

 

 I missed the hose on the other side. Another reason I like this, I suppose, is because it's a statue of a team. A lot of people get heroism arse backward. Odysseus might be to blame for this, but its root isn't the journey of the indivual. Human beings evolved as a team. That's why we have language. We hunted as a team, gathered and ate as a team, and sitting round the fire is how we managed to stay warm enough to spread across a planet. Only once we'd got the hang of this, I think, could we find ways to be alone. Solitude isn't getting back to nature, it's a benefit of civilization, and I hope, now that another lockdown's been announced, you can still find it if you want it, or still enjoy it if you've now no choice.

Who's Better Though, Greeks or Persians? There's Only One Way To Find Out... WATCH VIDEOS!

 I spotted this board game in the window of a charity shop in Clapham back in - let me check... September. Wait, September? That is... That's only two months ago! But it feels like... - 2020 has seemed so long, yet the days have seemed so short. Anyway... I had often wondered where the concept of "Western Civilization" came from, given it seemed to refer to influences from Egypt, Greece, Rome, and what I'll call the Bible Lands, all of which as shown in the map above lie to the North, South and East of the Mediterranean. My confusion however was lifted by the following short, computer-game-sponsored video from "Extra Credits" (and its sequel). I've a lot of time for "Extra Credits". Apparently it's the Greek historian Herodotus who first spun the idea of a pan-Greek identity in his account of the battle of Thermopylae against Persia, the battle depicted in the film 300, the battle the Greeks actually lost. In fact, as the video goes on to explain, the Hellenic alliance would be incredibly short-lived, and Sparta would turn on a rebuilt Athens before the century was over...

 

 In this short window between invasions however, the city-state of Athens would produce the Parthenon, the plays of Aeschylus (the Oresteia), Euripides (Medea) and Sophocles (Oedipus!), the philosophy of Socrates, the sculpture of Phidias, and a culture war between the rule of law and contrarian personality cults whose models bring us pretty much bang up to date.

 

Thanks again, Larry Gonick. 

 

 The influence of the team on the left hand side of the map, in other words, has not been overstated. But it's worth remembering that this fight against "Oriental despotism" (as the Persian Empire is described below in a Sunday Times publication from 1960 enigmatically titled Mainly For Children) fought for at Thermopylae and more successfully a few months later at Salamis, masterminded by Greeks who would later seek comfortable retirement themselves in that same Persian Empire, was a fight for freedom only inasmuch as it was a fight for self-determination, the freedom to, among other things, keep slaves, a model that again brings us pretty much bang up to date.

 On other pages: "Why Bother About Space?" by Colin Ronan, "The Chronicle Of The Great Carp" by Clifford Parker, and "Australian Animals I Have Met" by Axel Poignant.

Tight Lipped of Troy

 Helen, whose abduction famously precipitated the Trojan War, was one of two daughters born to the mortal Leda after Zeus came onto her in the form of a swan, a heritage subtly alluded to by the feathers round Helen's neck in the above still from Troy: Fall of a City, and less subtly alluded to in this illustration from Larry Gonick's far less trashy Cartoon History of the Universe:

 

 

 One thing I didn't know about Helen though, until I read the Odyssey, was that she had known all along about the Greeks' plans to conquer her adopted city with an army hidden in a huge wooden horse. According to her account to Odysseus' son Telemachus a decade later, she had bumped into Odysseus when he sneaked into Troy disguised as a beggar, immediately recognised him, gave him a bath and then, somehow, managed to get him to tell her the whole plan. But then she let him go and didn't tell anyone because she was sick of this now ten-year-long siege and just wanted to be taken back to Greece. Wait, I thought, why had I not heard his before? Was this the normal story? If this was the case, why didn't Helen just sneak out of Troy with Odysseus and end the war there? Happily I was able to ask Natalie Haynes all this, and here is Natalie's reply:

 "Ten points for reading the Odyssey, but you lose a point for thinking there is any such thing as the normal story. So, net gain: nine points... The version of Helen in the Odyssey does say/do that (there is a much madder bit, at least to my eyes, in some versions where, when the Trojan Horse is found and the Greek soldiers are suspected of being inside, Helen does a sort of Mike Yarwood thing and impersonates the voices of the wives of the Greeks. She's so convincing she reduces several horse occupants to tears... HOW MAD IS THAT?) I think the important thing to bear in mind with Helen is that you can't necessarily believe what she says – I think she probably did want to go back to Greece, but the insult of her kidnap/abduction/adultery wouldn't be removed if she just snuck off with Odysseus – the Greeks would still want revenge on Paris and they'd still want to loot Troy, which is the only reason a lot of them are there... So she might as well wait it out in the city than in the Greek camp. But that's just my reading... Also, Homer's Helen is a real plaything of the gods, esp Aphrodite, so she may not have had the option of bailing with Odysseus – Aphrodite threatens her quite pointedly in Iliad 3, when she says she's not that into Paris anymore..."

 So there you go! I now need to find out exactly what Helen did that made Odysseus talk. Might it have been her Mike Yarwood bit? If you have any mythology-based questions of your own, you can ask Natalie here.

 

 

 How many things can YOU name that have nothing to do with either horses or Troy?

Perhaps you'll see them in this video.