Vengeance:The English.

"I believe in justice. I believe in vengeance. I believe in getting the bastard" - Vengeance, New Model Army

The English (BBC2/iPlayer, written and directed by Hugo Blick) is beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, and tells a tale of vengeance that should resonate throughout the ages. Yet, and maybe it's just me, I found it less than compelling. At times I was even a bit bored. I played Words With Friends on my phone far more than I should have done.

I'm not totally sure why that is. In a world of endless star filled skies, fields of gold, noble horses, rattlesnakes, prairie oysters, stagecoaches, paintings of buffalo slaughter, and manifest destiny we're treated to all manner of horror. Men are hanged, women are punched out cold, faces are blown clean off, and there's more than one suicide. Rabbits, pigs, cows, snakes, and horses all meet predictably grisly ends and humans often fare even worse.

All manner of inventive torture is devised for them. Among all the holsters, leather chaps, and bows and arrows (if you're a fan of toxophily, The English is for you), there is some good history stuff about Native Americans and how their lands, their rights, and their lives were taken from them by European settlers. But, despite this, The English always felt a little bit staged, a tad theatrical.

The actors perform as in the shade of some grand narrative that is never fully revealed and each of the six episodes makes for very slow going. As if mood prevails over motion. Some of the subplots and secondary characters are poorly sketched, the supposedly profound voice overs grate and add nothing, and the whole show rests on an air of smug superiority that is never really earned.

The main story concerns Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Pawnee scout who is looking to claim his birthright and his meeting with Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), an upper class English woman who wants to kill a man for the murder of her child. Set across Oklahoma, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas in 1890, the land seeps with the blood of the Indians it was stolen from.

Eli and Cornelia meet in unusual circumstances (some of the confected scenarios reminded me of BBC1's The Tourist from earlier this year - though they weren't as much fun) and head north together on a kind of road trip, horse trip, that will involve them coming into perilous contact with all manner of dubious characters. 

Black Eyed Mog (Nichola McAuliffe) is a particularly interesting case study. She kills Indians and hangs their scalps from her wall in her own quest for revenge but, staying true to The English's key theme, she is also the focus of someone else's revenge fantasty. Indian chief Kills On Water (William Belleau) is after her scalp and believes Eli Whipp may be the man to get it.

He's pretty handy with a knife - and a gun too. With no great pride, he informs Cornelia that's he's both "seen Hell" and "made Hell". Cornelia's a good archer, and she carries with her a bag overflowing with dollar bills, but she does have the stomach for the ultraviolence of the American frontier? Will her belief in magic, luck, and destiny be enough to save her?

She's pursued, vaguely, be Thomas Trafford (Tom Hughes), an unhappy land owner who refers to homesteaders as pigfuckers (elsewhere Native Americans are routinely dismissed as shitsniffers), and hangdog Sheriff Robert Marshall (Stephen Rea) who struggles to keep the peace in the small Wyoming settlement he's nominally in charge of.

As they journey on, Eli and Cornelia run into shoot outs, abandoned children, and a fairly decent list of quality character actors that don't hang around for very long. Toby Jones, as Sebold Cusk, is barely on screen for ten minutes, Ciaran Hinds (as racist rapist David M.Watts) lasts just one episode, and even Rafe Spall (who is brilliant as the deranged David Melmont, even if he did remind me of Tom Hardy's Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders) only appears in two of the six episodes.

His role was, at least, pivotal. Too many weren't. Sadder than that, though, was that, by the end, I didn't really care what happened to Eli or Cornelia. I didn't care if they got killed and I didn't care if they got their revenge. I just wanted it to finish so I could switch over and watch Question Time. A disappointment - but at least a visually impressive one.

Atlantic Star:Winslow Homer @ the National Gallery.

Water! Water! Everywhere! At the National Gallery's Winslow Homer:Force of Nature exhibition, you'll come into contact with so much water that you'll wish you'd taken an umbrella. Or at the very least worn a mackintosh. The salty brine froths away, often beneath ominously cloudy skies, so often you can almost taste it.

People sail in it, fish in it, row in it, bathe in it, and, in some cases, seem to almost live in it. Water stands as both a background, a foreground, and even a character in its own right in Homer's paintings but part of the appeal of the National's exhibition is that it doesn't just show Homer as a maritime painter. The curators are bold enough to show some of his terra firma paintings and, in combination with his seascapes, these make a good case for Homer being one of the finest, one of the most under-rated, artists of his era.

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) (1873-76)

 

Born in 1836, in Boston, Massachusetts, and growing up in nearby Cambridge, Homer was initially taught by his mother, a gifted amateur water colourist, Homer first came of age as an artist during the American Civil War (1861-65). A conflict that would imbue in his art a lifelong obsession with mortality and with human struggle.

 

Sometimes with other humans. More often with the elemental forces of nature. During the Civil War, Homer moved to the front lines of the Union Army in Virginia and there he captured moments that he hoped would stand as ciphers for the enormity of the vast conflict. He saw in the war something that remains as relevant as ever. Perhaps more now than even before. He saw that the American dream was just that:- a dream, and one which we could all wake up from at any moment. It took a collective will of all American people to stay in the dream state and not all Americans wanted to.

Sharpshooter (1863)

Sharpshooter shows a lone Union sniper perched in a tree using modern military technology to pick off unsuspecting victims from up to a mile away. Winslow Homer could barely have been able to imagine just how many lone gunmen would make use of such hardware to gun down innocent peacetime victims in the 159 years since the painting was made.

Prisoners From The Front, painted one year after the war had ended during the so called Reconstruction period, shows the smartly dressed Union Army capture of a group of dishevelled Confederate soldiers. The fact they are painted in a horizontal framing, it is believed, is Homer's way of suggesting there is no longer any need for hierarchy. All men must be considered equal.

Prisoners From The Front (1866)

The Cotton Pickers (1876)

 

A Visit From The Old Mistress (1876)

Even women. Even women of colour. At least up to a point. Following the war, Homer's paintings would move on to more everyday settings and 1876's A Visit From The Old Mistress shows former slaves who have now been freed. Though they are, of course, still servants to their white mistress.

 

A Basket Of Clams shows what may have been an everyday scene in Gloucester, Massachusetts at the time. Two young men with the aforesaid basket between them walk barefoot on the beach, one of them completely unaware that a dead shark is lying in their path. It's a strangely wistful image painted in muted tones as if to emphasise both the mundanity of the situation and its extraordinary potential.

 

A Basket Of Clams (1873)

Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide) (1870)

With Homer, ordinary scenes are often rendered extraordinary with a more considered viewing. The woman wringing her wet clothes out in Eagle Head was considered almost pornographic at the time (!) and Dressing For The Carnival shows two women sewing a young man into his Junkanoo costume of the Lord of Misrule. All ready to celebrate black liberation. Something Homer returns to time and again in his paintings. By modern standards, he may not stand out as a particularly 'woke' artist but some of his ideas and themes were well ahead of the times he operated in.

 

Dressing For The Carnival (1877)

The Veteran In A New Field (1865)

Snap The Whip (1872)

He painted grief, he painted hope, he painted endurance, and he painted hard work (The Veteran In A New Field) but he also painted fun and games in more innocent works like 1872's Snap The Whip. Even though, if you look to the far left of the painting, one of the children has broken off from the chain. Homer, it seems, always remembered to show those left behind.

Or at least that's the interpretation the curators are giving to Homer's work. Homer himself did not like to explain his pictures. The two smart ladies in Promenade On The Beach are looking at something but Homer wouldn't say what. They also appear to be based on real people but yet again Homer refused to confirm or deny this. A Homer image can be whatever you want it to be. It's up to you.

Promenade On The Beach (1880)

Hound And Hunter (1892)

He was keen though to make clear that in 1892's Hound and Hunter, the deer in the image is already dead and that the hunter is not drowning it. Homer seemed to appreciate animal life as much as he did human and with Charles Darwin's Origins of Species coming out when Homer was in his twenties he took a great deal of care in presenting his animal specimens correctly.

They could be metaphorical, or allegorical, or they could, in some cases - like the Channel Bass, just be what they are. The curators suggest Homer as an early environmentalist but that seems, to me, a rather ambitious attempt at retrofitting his images to tie them in with today's most pressing concerns. The fish, for me, is just a fish. Strictly speaking a painting of a fish.

Channel Bass (1904)

Right And Left (1909)

The ducks are just ducks and probably not, as an information board at the National has it, representative of man's inhumanity to man. In 1881, Homer journeyed to England and settled in the North Sea fishing community of Cullercoats. There he painted everyday working lives of fishermen and fisherwomen and when he returned to America nineteen months later he continued with these themes.

Using them to highlight human vulnerability in the face of nature's mighty power and also to make points about class and gender divisions in maritime society and society in general. Though, as ever, the paintings aren't easy to 'read'. They open themselves up to multiple interpretations. Often they're best enjoyed quite simply as images of coastal life.

To The Rescue (1886)

The Life Line (1884)

The Fog Warning (1885)

The Gale (1883-93)

In all its simplicity, all its terror, all its peril, and all its beauty. Fisherman look for rescue from distant schooners, women in danger of drowning are winched to safety, and mothers with children on their backs brave tempestuous gales. Homer's female portraits of this era border on the Amazonian. It's noteworthy how often the women seem to be far stronger than the men.

At least when the women are painted alone or with children. When men enter the picture the women seem to begin to struggle, to go under the water. They have to be saved and as luck would have it there always seems to be a few athletic, often topless, men around to do that saving.

Inside The Bar (1883)

Undertow (1886)

The Life Brigade (1882-83)

Back in America, Homer settled in Prouts Neck, Maine. In winter it was cold and inhopsitable so he would travel to warmer climes:- Florida, Cuba, Bermuda, and the Bahamas which he described as "the best place I've found". Of course, while he was in these tropical hotspots he continued to paint and it's not surprising that these works are not so cloudy as those he made in Maine or on Tyneside.

The dark blue waters and verdant foliage of the Caribbean is a joy to look at but here, too, the power of nature remains a threat in the form of destructive hurricanes and circling predatory sharks. Man, also, remains an existential danger to fellow man as the various nations of this part of the world remain states which allow slavery or have moved on from it - but not much.

Sponge Fishermen, Bahamas (1885)

A Garden In Nassau (1885)

Searchlight On Harbor Entrance, Santiago De Cuba (1902)

Hurricane, Bahamas (1898)

The Bather (1899)

Nassau (1899)

The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906)

Sharks; Also The Derelict (1885)

I loved Homer's painting of sharks, of proud and muscular bathers, and of the Nassau Sponge Exchange (!) though closer inspection shows black islanders excluded from the large homes of white traders and US searchlights parked up on Cuban shorelines trying to stymie any hope of independence or self-governance. Hurricanes, it is suggested, signify the destruction on Caribbean people and their islands by imperial powers. The sharks, it was believed at the time, could swallow a man whole. Homer leaves it to the viewer to decide if the sharks are the most deadly threat.

A clue may be found in Homer's later work. In the 1890s, with Homer now in his mid-fifties, humans became less central to the paintings he made. In some cases they were removed altogether. The raw beauty of nature, particularly the sea, became the theme in its own right. He became something of a recluse and refused invitations to parties and Thanksgiving events so that he could use what time he had left, another twenty years - he died in 1910, over to the solitary pursuit of painting the seas around Maine and even north into Canada.

Northeaster (1895)

Driftwood (1909)

Kissing The Moon (1904)

Winter Coast (1890)

The spray of the water was intensified, the rocks looming over the sea became more fearful and awesome, and the few people who do appear seem to be cowed, beaten, by nature. Be it snow or waves. Winslow Homer, it seems, had always been obsessed with the natural world. As he grew elder he became so consumed by it and its indifference to mankind that he gave himself into it. It sounds like a lonely and tough life. But the art it produced remains as powerful today as it must have been at the time. A splendid show.

Cape Trinity, Saguenay River, Moonlight (1904)

Bautain studio - Winslow Homer in Paris (1867)

Interstellar Overdrive:A Journey Aboard The Webb Telescope.

Space is so vast, so enormous, so hard to 'grok' that when I attended, lemonade in hand, Skeptics in the Pub - Online's JWST:From launch to first science with Dr Emma Curtis-Lake (a STFC Webb Fellow now based at the University of Hertfordshire) I felt certain I was in for something of a science lesson. I also felt fairly certain there would be large parts of the talk I wouldn't understand.

I was correct on both counts. I had no idea what the doc was talking about when she touched on blue shifts, red shifts, spectroscopy, and the spectrum of exoplanet atmospheres and was even more baffled when it came to WASP-96b and HIP65426B.

But, fortunately for me, much of the evening was presented in layman's terms so that even a non-scientist, and a man that will never be astronaut, like me was able to understand. Or at least get a basic grip on. The JWST (the James Webb Space Telescope has been changed to the Webb telescope after it came to light that James E. Webb, a former NASA administrator, had been involved in trying to purge homosexuals from government work forces in something that became known as the 'lavender scare') launched on Christmas Day last year and is the largest telescope ever sent into space.

At a cost of ten billion US dollars. That, of course, is quite a lot of money at a time when belts are being tightened but Dr Curtis-Lake, though she never opined on the cost, presumably thinks it was worth it. She certainly seemed brimful of enthusiasm for the project and very eager to talk about just what knowledge it may bring to us.

The sun shield on the telescope is about the size of a tennis court and there's also a huge mirror which is bigger than the rocket that sends the whole thing into space. These parts are folded up on launch and unfolded once they reach space. Which it now, most certainly, has done. It is now roughly a million miles away and is being held at an extremely low temperature. I can't remember quite how low but it was below -220 degrees Celsius.

It needs to be that cold to capture the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that it needs to which, unlike the much smaller Hubble, are the infrared parts. It has to be extremely cold because heat equals light and any heat would confuse the images the telescope is sending back to Earth. Powerful Earth based telescopes are unable to achieve the same quality of image because views become blocked, or obscured, by Earth's dusty atmosphere.

So why the infrared? Multiple reasons. It allows the telescope to peer through dust and see the stars previously hidden behind it. Some of which are newly formed stars. By looking at new stars, we can get an idea of how they were formed and, from that, an idea of how our star, the sun, was formed.

The Webb telescope also allows us a good look at stars at the other end of that spectrum. Dying, or dead, stars. It's the best tool we've ever had for investigating planets outside of our solar system, exoplanets. Some of which are far far older than our own 4,500,000 year old home. In the end it helps us ask, and maybe even answer, the perennial question - is anybody out there?

The Webb telescope isn't just probing the geography of the universe, it's probing the history of the universe. We know that when we see the moon we see it as it was roughly 1.225 seconds ago and that when we see the sun we see it as it was roughly seven minutes ago. But the moon and the sun, in cosmic terms, are near door neighbours. Some stars are almost unimaginably further away.

The images we see of some distant stars may actually date from before the time of the dinosaurs. Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer, proved how the further away one things is from another in space the faster they are moving away from each other (as the universe rapidly expands) and this creates a Doppler effect in light (and in sound).

These factors have to be taken account when the Webb telescope is looking much further back in time than the Hubble did. The Webb telescope can 'see' as far back as the time of the formation of the Milky Way, our galaxy, roughly 13.6 billion years ago. Our space hardware is getting close to seeing right back to the Big Bang - though it's uncertain we'll ever manage to get all the way there. The way we're destroying the planet it's certainly a race against time.

It seems obvious to me that if we can understand how planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies, and ultimately, the entire universe was formed this will bring new and incredible levels of knowledge to human. What's not certain to me, judging by what humans have done with information and technology so far, is that any of this will be put to good use.

As rich cunts like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson fly off into space to escape the damage they, and others, have done on Earth it seems to me unlikely. But that doesn't mean the Webb telescope is a wasted exercise and it doesn't mean that Dr Curtis-Lake's faith in, and passion for, it is wrong either.

Like I said, I didn't understand everything from last night's talk but it was still fascinating (not least the images of 'the pillars of creation', 'Stephan's quintet', and the 'cartwheel galaxy' which I've used in this blog) and for that I thank compere James Bremner, Dr Emma Curtis-Lake, and, once again, Skeptics in the Pub - Online. To infinity and beyond.