Old Movies III: Highlander II

"Highlander II: The Quickening" is a campy romp through this absurd sci-fi tale. For that reason it isn't completely awful, but moderately entertaining. I mean it depends on where you head is at concerning fantasy and even the makers of this film clearly didn't take themselves all that seriously.

Many things are unanswered in this film, and perhaps wisely so. For example, why did General Katana want Connor McLeod killed?

After all he had already given up on immortality and become mortal so he could have just waited him out, right? Why did he send his two goofy assistants to slay him? If the sun shield that he engineered saved the world but left it humid and dark, what happened to agriculture? Wouldn't there have been mass starvation?

Why was McLeod Scottish and played by an actor who is actually French?  Why was Sean Connery named Rodriguez?     Was it the fact that most people from Scotland are from the planet Zeist? And why did General Katana when he comes to Earth, feel the need to hijack a subway train and put it through a speed trial? Does he hate public transport?  Maybe General Katana doesn't need a reason, which I guess adds to the entertainment value.

The Tate Britain Part 2

The older works of art found in the Tate Britain, it seems to me, 

 give one a bit more to go on than those in the Tate Modern.  This painting of some centuries ago, seems to give the subject a bit too little in the way of color, as if she is drained of blood.  I understand that being "fair" was a highly prized characteristics of women in those days, but this one seems to go too far. 


William Hogarth:  Heads of Six Servants (c. 1750-1755)



 William Hogarth (1697-1764) was a well known printer, painter, satirist, and social critic of his age.  He is probably best known for his moralizing art, such as his series "Harlot's Progress", and "Rake's Progress" but also painted portraits and commanded a good fee for doing so. 


William Hogarth:  The Painter and his Pug

I don't think he got much from his dog, however for this one. 



John Frederick Herring (1795-1865) shows a picture of the race horse "Birmingham" with his jockey and the owner of the racehorse, John Beardsworth,( 1830).  Herring made a career as a coachman and a painter of race horses and other sporting animals.  



James Barry:  (Detail)  King Lear Weeping over the Dead body of Cordelia (1786-88)

James Barry (1741-1806) was an Irish artist with a fiery temper.   This was his take on the Shakespeare tragedy "King Lear" about a king who divides his kingdom and turns against the one daughter who is true to him and rewards the others with portions of his kingdom.   He was a contemporary of Sir Joshua Reynolds but wasn't quite as successful. 



James Dickson Innes -Arenig,  North Wales 1913



 James Dickson Innes (1887-1914) died in the first days of the Great War.  He did not die in combat but from tuberculosis.  He was primary a painter of landscapes as shown here.  He was a member of the Camden Town Group, which was a group of British post-impressionist painters.



Vernon Lee by John Singer Sargent (1881)

 John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was a major painter of this era. An American born in Florence, his parents were wealthy.  His father was an eye surgeon, and after the death of a child he and his wife decided to travel to Europe to recover, and had stopped in Florence, when Sargent was born.  They stayed there for the rest of their lives.  Sargent spent much of his career in Europe, mainly in Paris and then London, when the disapproval of his painting "Madame X" caused his reputation there to decline, so he retreated to London.  Vernon Lee (nee Violet Paget) was a writer of supernatural fiction, which I guess means ghost stories.  She also was an essayist who wrote about aesthetics and art.  A lesbian and feminist, she   generally dressed "a la garcon" as can be seen above. 



Sir Neil O'Neil (1680) by John Michael Wright.


This painting shows with much realism, an Irish Chieftain.  Painted by John Michael Wright (1617-1694) who was either English or Scottish, he trained in Edinburgh and then in Europe.  During the Protectorate he collected art for the Archduke in Spanish Netherlands, and later was a court painter for Charles and James II, after the restoration.  A convert to Roman Catholicism he served as an ambassador to Rome in the final years of the Stuart monarchy. 

An iron forge (1772) by Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright (1734-1797) was a painter who is best known for his evocations of the birth of the industrial revolution and of his chiaroscoro lighting effects.  Others of his works include "An alchemist in search of the philosopher's stone" and "An experiment on a bird in the air pump". 



Cookmaid with Still life of Vegetables and Fruit (Detail) (1620-5) by Nathaniel Bacon



Nathaniel Bacon (1585-1627) was a wealthy landowner and amateur painter, and nephew of Francis Bacon.  I took the liberty of focusing on the cookmaid here.  This is his most famous painting.  Only 9 of them survive.  When looking on such a work it is amazing to reflect that it is almost 400 years old. 



Ships in Distress in a storm (Detail)  (1720-30)  by Peter Monamy



Peter Monamy (1681-1749) was a marine painter, that is to say, he focused on ships and water as his chosen subject matter. He came from a family of merchants who lived in Guernsey and the Channel Islands.   He was influenced by prints by the Dutch painter Van De Velde.  He was apprenticed to a sign painter as a young man and became one of the most celebrated marine painters of his age, although he was later disparaged by Horace Walpole, the art critic for being a mere sign-painter's apprentice. 



James McNeil Whistler's "Nocturne in Blue and Gold:  Old Battersea Bridge"



I have to admit that I was drawn to this painting because I remember it as the cover illustration of my copy of Norton's Anthology of English Literature Volume II.  James McNeil Whistler (1837-1903) was American born but spent most of his career in Britain.  His most famous painting is of course "Whistler's Mother" or as he termed it "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1".  He often gave his paintings names which seem more suited to formal musical compositions. 

  He was the painter who sued John Ruskin for saying that he had "flung a pot of paint in the public's face" regarding an exhibition that contained this very painting.  For some reason Whistler felt the need to reinvent himself in the public's eye, even insisting that he was born in St. Petersburg, Russia instead of Lowell, Massachusetts and testified as such even in a court of law.   In the end the libel case was "won" by Whistler but he was awarded only a farthing in damages. 

Thomas Brock's "Eve"

Sir Thomas Brock (1847-1922) was a British Sculptor, who also completed the sculpture of Prince Albert in the Albert memorial in London and the multi bronze sculptures of the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, perhaps his most important commission.   This sculpture was completed in 1899. 



LS Lowry's Hillside in Wales (1962)



LS Lowry (1887-1976)  was a painter who specialized in scenes from the industrial North of England mainly.  The flat perspective was considered akin to primitive or naive painting.  He was offered five National British honors including a knighthood, all of which were declined.  His day job was in a real estate office collecting rents. 

An eccentric man he owned a room full of windup clocks all set to different times, and here is shown painting in a suit and tie covered with paint.     



 William Strang- The Temptation  (Detail) (1899)

William Strang (1859-1921) was a Scottish artist who was known for his etching as well as paintings.  This is perhaps one of his best known paintings.  Shown here is Eve trying to get Adam to get more fiber in his diet, and to listen to her new friend the serpent. 

Portrait of Lady Kytson (c 1590)

The name of the artist who created this work is unknown, but because it has the name of the subject on the painting itself, we at least know that much.  Mary Kytson was Lady Darcy of Chiche and later Lady Rivers.  Mary Kytson (1567-1644) was married to Lord Darcy until he accused her of "unbecoming flirtations if not outright adultery" and separated from her in 1594.  She was the mother of his six children. 

Johann Zoffany "Colonel Blair with his family and an Indian Ayah (1786)



Johann Zoffany (1733-1810)  was a German painter who was active mainly in England, who painted in a neoclassical style.  He was a popular portraitist and court painter for George III and also was popular with the Austrian royals, and was created a baron by Maria Theresa.  He traveled to India and was  shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands and participated in cannibalism.   The Indian Ayah was a servant girl of the family.

Tristram Hillier (1905-1983) La Route des Alpes (1937)

 Tristram Hillier was born in China, and was a British surrealist painter.  He was married twice.  He was married to the daughter of a bookie the first time around, and the second time he married the daughter of the inventor of the Hardcastle torpedo. 


George Warner Allen's Picnic at Whittenham (1947-8)

 George Warner Allen (1916-1988) was a British artist whose work was collected by contemporaries such as Sir John Betjeman and TS Eliot.    He focused on religious and pastoral scenes.  This curious painting shows a man asleep in the foreground and watched over by Pan, the god of the wild, shepherds, and flocks, while two couples picnic in the background. 

Doing the Tourist thing in London

It is hard to get more than a superficial sense of a place from spending a few days there, and especially as a tourist.  When I went to London, for example, I saw the inevitable sights such as the palaces, the museums, the landmarks, the statues, etc.  I walked the streets, I took pictures.

  I ate, I slept, I looked around.  The museums were first rate. London seems well adapted to the demands of the modern city with its fast food, little shops, inevitable souvenirs and postcard stands, tee shirts.  Piccadilly circus seems to be an enormous tourist trap and I was there trapped along with all the other tourists with their cameras looking at stuff, with a multi-storey Ripley's Believe it or Not museum  right on the circus itself, and flanked by LED advertising of mainly Korean products (Hyundai, LG, Samsung), and a theatre in which Hitchcock's famous old film "The 39 Steps" had been converted into a play, and a "Cool Brittania" store, which was a very large gift emporium.  The place was kind of cool, but then I'm easily amused. 

And I suppose if Hell became a tourist attraction, there would be tee shirts for sale saying "My parents went to Hell and all I got was this crummy tee shirt". 

Dante:  Kinda Reminds me of my trip to Yellowstone

There would be Inferno refrigerator magnets, a Dante's Believe it or Not museum, a casino (if you lose you have to stay), and demon bobble heads.   And of course the money changers would overcharge you and everything would be absurdly expensive.   Indeed Dante was the first infernal tourist.  He was suffering a midlife crisis and had to take a vacation.  Unfortunately his pictures were lost at the processing lab (but no one really wanted to look at them anyway). 


That's Gary Sinese over there posing

  I stopped in and had a look at Cool Brittania.  It consists of two floors of tourist knick knacks like buttons and even wall clocks that say "Keep Calm and Carry On", and tee shirts with rude or humorous sentiments printed on them, toy double decker buses, union jack underwear

, flags, pennants, pictures of the Beatles, cardboard cutouts of the royal family,  mugs with big breasted women with the words "London", wall posters of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, postcards with the royal family and/or their dogs on them,  toy red British telecom phone booths and so on. 

I ended up buying a little blue backpack with the word "London" on it to carry my little collection of stuff back to America.   All this kitsch is rather predictable and God knows, I've seen the same thing in Chicago, except in Chicago it has "Chicago" printed on it and instead of Big Ben you have little plastic skyscrapers for sale with "Willis Tower" printed on them.    

Museums can take up a lot of your time, of course, but I wonder sometimes if I could have used my time more profitably avoiding the museums.  Sure it was a feast for the eyes, but after a while you are surfeited with looking and seeing.  The quiet and massive halls at length tempt me to sleep, if only there were a place to lie down and to think:  I need another brownie, and where is the toilet?  The British Museum for example, to do it justice, might accommodate a dozen visits for an hour or two each time, but then I can easily enough read and think about antiquities at home.  It was interesting to reflect that I had seen a replica of one of the better Elgin Marbles that was used to decorate the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Lapith and Centaur do battle on the South Side

  Maybe if I had brought with me a mind more steeped in the details of the ancient world, I would have enjoyed it more, but as it was I wasn't sure what the difference was between the Assyrians and the Babylonians, or between the Egypt of the Pharaohs,

Ozymandias and or the various Ptolemies.  After you have seen one mummy you've kind of seen them all, or so it seemed to me. 

I strolled down from the Green Park station to view Buckingham Palace and the massive monument to Queen Victoria complete with fountains and bronze sculptures on a heroic scale.   And elsewhere there are stone and bronze monarchs. 

William IV I found at Greenwich, Queen Victoria was also featured in front of Kensington Palace, and  George V  on the south side of Westminster Abbey.  As a stamp collector, I should know what these guys look like, since just about every British stamp features a picture of them.  And then there are all those Royal Consorts, and it was a shame I guess I never found time to have a look at the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall. 

There is even one of Oliver Cromwell over by the Houses of Parliament, which seems odd since during the restoration, almost the first act of the new regime was to dig up his body, behead him and throw the rest of him into the Thames.   I guess Cromwell was kind of a local, i.e. parliamentary hero and has since been "rehabilitated" in the eyes of the British people.   

Visiting London

Visiting London was perhaps the grandest adventure I have so far undertaken.   I parked my car early on the morning of the 18th near Chicago O'Hare, took a bus to terminal 3.  Got myself carefully examined for explosives at the security checkpoint and with my passport in hand and a checked bag, I was given permission to leave the country for 8 days.  I chose to take a morning flight since I can never sleep very well on a plane.

I thought we were going to fly the great circle route, which would have taken us across the Atlantic and across northern Quebec, but in the event it was not quite that direct.  Instead we flew along in Southern Canada, across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, across the northern half of Newfoundland and across the ocean there. 

Hours later, in the extended twilight caused by our eastward progress, night fell some time before we ended up crossing Ireland, Wales, and finally landed in heavily urbanized London Heathrow.  Ireland was dark and mysterious, but as soon as we were approaching London there was a lot of orange glow emanating from the ground, glowing like fluorescent bacterial colonies or a network of orange and white neurons on a giant black canvas known as the UK.  

  Finally we could get close enough to the ground to see vehicles driving along the roads and motorways, and sure enough, they were driving on the left.

All airports pretty much look the same in the dark, as this video can attest.   After we got off the plane we walked what seemed like a mile up escalators and moving walkways to the UK border, which was an enormous room with multiple checkpoints and a huge maze of partitions to allow the orderly queueing of people waiting to go through customs. 

At the border they asked me "business or pleasure" and I said "pleasure" and they asked me what I did for a living and I said "sales".  I did not elaborate.   With that my passport booklet got its first stamp, which warned that I was not allowed to seek gainful employment or overstay the usual limit for a tourist, though with all the Romanians and other assorted persons allowed in, I don't see the harm if they added an American or two, as frankly most of my ancestors came from this place (or at least in the vicinity of Belfast, Glasgow, and Liverpool, even if it was around 250 years ago that they left.)   And Britain is a remarkably cosmopolitan place, almost like the US. 

Many of the white people I encountered there spoke French, as though the Norman invasion had just happened,  and all the shopkeepers were from India but seemed as British as anyone.   I may have even seen a few Mexicans over there too. 

I figured I didn't want to take a long tube trip all the way down to central London in the middle of the night, but it would have been okay actually.  Maybe the subway trains don't run all night, but they run pretty late, later than the airport buses anyway.  As it was, I caught the very last airport bus to my hotel,

for which I paid 4 pounds.  If I had been just a little later, I would have had to take a taxi.   I guess arriving in the morning is a better idea, although flying overnight is terrible for sleep, especially if the flight is full.  I don't know if I suffered jet lag or just sleep deprivation on my only other transatlantic flight, to Scotland in 1991, but the first day was a trifle hallucinatory, it seemed to me.  And they trusted Beth and me to drive one of their cars on the wrong side of the road, which was an adventure in itself.  The left driving was easy enough to get used to, but what really gave me fits were the roundabouts and how everyone in Scotland seemed to like to park their cars halfway on the pavement.  In London I saw much less of this, but then some of the streets were pretty narrow there too.   And you need to be damned careful crossing the street.  I saw people bicycling through London traffic and dodging those enormous wall-like double decker buses and thought to myself:  these people must have a death wish. 

I seemed to adjust to local time just fine.  I went to bed at midnight local time, and woke up the next morning and had breakfast at their luxurious buffet at the Holiday Inn, then I took the Picadilly line down to central London and emerged into the deliriously busy Oxford Circle, my first taste of London above ground. 

The streets in central London are well marked and I had brought good map of the city, and a compass with me to determine true North.  Using these I had no trouble finding the AYH hostel I was staying in, dorm style.  I had signed up for a bunk room sleeping 4.  It wasn't bad at all, however.  I didn't come to London to sleep anyway.  I can do that in Chicago. 

So this was my base for the next 7 days.   I had a London Pass and a travel card, and I was good to go anywhere in the London area for 6 days.   It proved quite valuable and used the tube to go everywhere.  The tube was entertaining in itself, and was the most extensive network of underground trains I have ever seen. 

  The use of advertising was more extensive than what I had seen even in Chicago.  Giant ads covered the far walls across from the platform.    

The Tate Britain

The Tate Britain is the older art gallery, dedicated to British art, more or less.  It is somewhat to the south and away from the tourist ghetto around the Palaces, the Houses of Parliament and all that, on the other side of the home of MI-6, Thames House on Millbank Road.  I realized that I had left my dwindling remaining supply of AA batteries on the bus to Brixton, and so had to interrupt my proceedings to buy more batteries.  I had to walk all the way to Vauxhall Road and down that street to find a little grocery with an Indian proprietor to buy some batteries just to get me through the afternoon and evening. 

  .

  I noticed the side of the building was pock marked by what must have been a bomb blast.  This was traces of a WWII bomb which had fallen in the street just next to the gallery itself, but I didn't know that  at the time, although it seemed like a good guess at the time.  (Speaking of Art Galleries with bomb damage there is also Rodin's thinker in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art, which was blown up by some terrorist group, and for some strange reason has never been repaired.) 


Outside the museum there were lots of fanciful critters such as the flying lion women.  Anatomically remarkable with their milk glands located somewhere north of the clavicle and wings which could never hope to lift these flightless cat-women, at least on planet Earth.   But this is taken most likely from antiquity.  I saw something like it in the British Museum.    I have to wonder, being of a biological turn of mind, what experiments in animal breeding might have produced them. 

Brittania looms above it all, with her trident, symbolizing the close relationship of Britain with the sea, and with eyes the size of which are seldom seen this side of a Keane painting.

The Lion and the Unicorn are everywhere in the capitol, representing the Union of England and Scotland under James I in 1603, which also spawned the Union Jack. 



 . 

Perhaps most spectacular of all is a bronze sculpture showing a group of people having a very bad day with livestock.  Barely had the farmer had time to get dressed for a day's work at the farm when he and his farm hand has to contend with this:

But enough of exteriors.  Let's go inside.

I think this is truly a marvelous museum.  I like the chronological arrangement of the galleries and I spent a pleasant afternoon looking around there.

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An Allegory of Man (1596)

This man certainly has a tough row to hoe.  The dead hate him, his wife hates him, his boss is gunning for him, and so are his evil co-workers.  When he dies and goes to heaven, there's Jesus waiting to brain him with a large piece of wood.  The name of the painter is unknown but since the inscription is in English it is presumably a British painting.

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Atkinson Grimshaw: Liverpool Quay by Moonlight 1886.



I like this painting, a nice evocation of an evening.  Grimshaw was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and lived between 1836 and 1893.  He specialized in cityscapes (2).

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John Bettes- A man in a black cap 1545

John Bettes (active 1531-1570) was a contemporary of Hans Holbein, who is known for his portrait of Henry VIII.  It is thought that the portrait is of one Edmund Butts.  It is the best known painting by the artist (4).







Emily Osborne- Nameless and Friendless (1857)

 .  Emily Osborn lived from 1828-1925.  She specialized in pictures of women in distress, like this one which tells the story of a woman trying to make a living by selling her paintings.  This is one of her most famous paintings (1).

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Benjamin Haydon:  Punch or May Day (1829)

Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846)  was a painter specializing in grand historical themes mainly.  He gave lectures on art and was an influential artist in his day.  Never financially well off, he found himself in debt and committed suicide in 1846 (3).

This picture shows a Punch and Judy show on a busy thoroughfare.  A lot is happening in this picture as one can see.

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The Cholmondeley Ladies circa 1600-1610.



This odd painting seems to show twin sisters both who had children at about the same time.  It was in the private collection of Thomas Cholmondeley.  It bears the inscription  "Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, And brought to Bed the same day."(5).

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Annie Swynnerton-Count Zouboff (1931)

Annie Swynnerton (1844-1933) was a British Painter.  Of the Count I don't find much.  He may have been related to the Count Zouboff who was involved in the murder of the Emperor Paul I and the accession of Catherine the Great.  This portrait seems to be a picture of a Russian emigre descendant after the revolution.

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Cornelius Johnson: Portraits of an unknown Gentleman and Lady (1629)

 Cornelius Johnson (1593-1661) portraitist, came from Cologne and worked in Antwerp for a while before moving on to England where he made these portraits.  The paintings remain but not the names of the sitters, nor is much known about the life of Cornelius Johnson.  At length he went back to the Low Countries where he spent the rest of his life. 

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Edward Hodges Baily- The First Duke of Wellington (1838-40)


There are some remarkable sculptural pieces in the Tate Britain as well.  Edward Hodges Baily (1788-1867) was one of the leading sculptors of his time.   He sculpted the statue of Nelson at the top of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square as well as some of the decoration of the Marble Arch in a corner of Hyde Park (7).    Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington was a soldier who distinguished himself in the wars against Napoleon and elsewhere. Earning a dukedom he later served as leader of the Conservatives in Parliament and served twice as Prime Minister (6).   

Hylas surprised by the Naiades (1837)  by John Gibson

So who was Hylas, the Naiades, and John Gibson?  Hylas was the mythological son of Hercules or King Theiodamas (depending on which authority you consult), and the Naiades were water nymphs.  Half water nymph himself, he fell in love with the nymphs who abducted him. Hercules never found the boy (8).  I guess there are worse things that could happen to a lad than to be abducted by beautiful women who like to swim.   Maybe he didn't want to be found. 

 John Gibson (1790-1866) was a Welsh sculptor who started as an apprenticed furniture maker but then saw wood carving and persuaded his master to allow him to transfer to wood carving instead.  This lasted until he saw marble sculpture in progress, and he eventually got himself apprenticed in that trade.    He was a neoclassical sculptor and went to Italy, where he spent most of the remainder of his career (9). 

Snake Problems

About this time I grew tired of recording the captions to works of art and I neglected to discover the names and dates attached to this work, which I found striking.  But  as the Tate has a great web site have managed to identify it after the fact.  This is called "Athlete Wrestling a Python" by Frederic Lord Leighton, completed in 1877 (10).   He was also a famous painter of neoclassical themes and many of his works can be seen here (11).  By the time of his death he was of such stature that he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral and was given an elegy by Swinburne.   He was created 1st Baron of Leighton a day before he died.  As he left no heirs, it was the shortest Barony in the history of British aristocracy (12). 

Sculpture of Boy (Bronze)

Another anonymous sculpture, alas.  It is "A Boy at Play" (c1895) by William Goscombe John (1860-1952) (13).   John was a Welsh sculptor who did many public works in bronze,  such as war memorials, etc.    A sculpture of his wife, who died in 1923 was placed on her grave, but was stolen in 2001 and then again in 2007, and has not been recovered as of this writing (14).

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Mary_Osborn

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Atkinson_Grimshaw

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Haydon

(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bettes

(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cholmondeley_Ladies

(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Duke_of_Wellington

(7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hodges_Baily

(8)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylas

(9)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gibson_(sculptor)

(10) http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leighton-an-athlete-wrestling-with-a-python-n01754

(11)  http://www.artmagick.com/pictures/artist.aspx?artist=frederic-lord-leighton&page=1

(12) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Leighton,_1st_Baron_Leighton

(13)  http://www.flickr.com/groups/bronzesculptures/pool/65986072@N00/?view=lg

(14) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goscombe_John