Oh my, November’s almost halfway through and I’ve just gotten October wound up. So, how was it?
This month I was enchanted by a horological tale told by Nicholas Parsons, leading to a documentary Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams - the silver swan created by a roller-skating, cross-dressing Belgian émigré has to be seen to be believed.
Speaking of which, how sight and colour has evolved was explored by the Natural History Museum - although they didn't explain why Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes are so enduringly mesmerising.
We peered into the grimness of the BBC's Victorian slum and thanked our lucky stars so much has changed. And, I saw The Entertainer, a 1957 play, which proved some things never change that much at all…
“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”
Nicholas Parsons, a Poem in Clockwork + a Priceless Creative Lesson…
The Just a Minute host followed his passion to Paris, to see the legendary ‘Breguet No. 160 grand complication - a watch commissioned for Marie-Antoinette. The brief was deadline-less so both queen and watchmaker were dead by the time this ‘poem in clockwork’ was completed. The lesson? Set boundaries.
Colour + Vision at the Natural History Museum
“[Colour ] can be used as a warning, a disguise or even an irresistible invitation”. From the opalescent hummingbird to the striated zebra no creature sees colour quite the same. A dragonfly’s kaleidoscopic experience far outweighs our human vision, for example, but our developed brain constructs meaning from what we see. Brilliant.
The Entertainer - A Britain lost + divided (in 1957)
Kenneth Branagh played Archie Rice a washed up comic tap dancing and pattering his way through music hall’s last days. The British empire is crumbling, the Americans are coming with their rock 'n' roll. From ‘the Poles’ to the Middle East (Suez) the relevance of John Osborne’s play was a bit … eerie.
Neon Demon - a meditation on narcissism by Nicolas Winding Refn
NWR wanted to see the world through the eye of a 16 year old beauty: “Nobody likes the way they look.” “I do,” says Elle Fanning’s model, Jessie, with the kind of disarming self acceptance which incites social media trolls or, here, ravenous models - unwittingly becoming the eye of an occult cannibalistic storm. Oops! [See Henri de Corinth for an in-depth critique]
Slum Life - down + out in the BBC’s Victorian London
Dirt, disease, debt, the doss house. Communal toilets shared by hundreds - oh and smoking kippers. Hard labour for men - if you could get it. Women staving off prostitution with home-based piece-work. Perpetually hungry kids. The prospect of eviction. The tuppenny hangover. The coffin bed. The good old days.
I Spy Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra Topshop Top on eBay
Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra marked the end of the old Hollywood studio system and ushered in the 60s-take on ancient Egyptian style. Taylor’s legendary violet eyes lined in calligraphic kohl and tanzanite blue shadow and the 65 costume changes are, to me, the stars of film - never mind Liz ’n’ Dick.