Worst artists in the world?

Wood

McGonagall

Was William Mcgonagall the 19th century Ed Wood?
 Whilst it would be great to get Johnny Depp to play the official worst poet in the world (Vogon poetry doesn't count), are there any parallels between these two curious cultural icons?
 Both are regarded as the 'worst' in their fields. Not merely bad, anyone can simply be bad at something, but comically bad. Their work contains what the industry and the public regard as elementary errors that are so apparent that they are comical.
 However, the key is unintentional errors. If the errors appeared to be intentional, then they would lose their comedic appeal. The comedy arises from the delusion of greatness.
 William McGonagall was poet, and didn't he know it. His poems inadequately use poetic metaphor, and don't scan properly. Here's a sample of his most famous, the Tay Bridge disaster:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

 Edward Wood was an American filmmaker from the 1950s, who produced, directed, edited, authored, and starred in his own films. His productions were B-movies, with little commercial success, and were also created by his enthusiasm and lack of recognition of his limits. It was only decades later that his movies acquired a cult status, and as a result he is one of the most famous movie makers of Hollywood.
 William McGonagall also had no care for recognition from his peers, and made his money from performing his work in front of a crowd. Audiences would jeer and pelt him with fruit, for which he would recieve up to 15 shillings a night. He seemed to believe that the queen had enjoyed his work, due to a polite letter from the palace thanking him for his poem, and tried to perform for the queen after walking from Dundee to Balmoral. He was stopped by security. Whilst it has been suggested he was playing up to the crowd for money, I don't think this is the case. He went out of his way to perform, going over to America or walking 60 miles to see the queen, the sort of poetry most people write in primary school. I think he genuinely did believe in his talents. Like Ed Wood, who continued in his career long after common sense should have told him to stop.
 Both died penniless and were cruelly mocked by their peers and the public. Both had to be rediscovered by later generations. And both took mediocrity and produced strangely timeless work that's quite enjoyable.

TARDIS!

 
 As any visitor to Glasgow knows, we've still got police boxes.
 As a huge dr who fan, this is of course a source of great civic pride. Whenever I walk down Buchanan street, that blue box sticks out a mile away no matter how crowded (and it is always crowded) the street is. Even on May 4th, when we had Darth Vader and stormtroopers on Buchanan street, that didn't even come close.
 Of course, it wasn't always there. It was reintroduced in the late 90s (I think 1996). Before that, of course, they had been decommissioned by the early 70s due to the widepsread use of personal radios (and, no doubt, doctor who jokes). In 1994 Strathclyde Police decided to get rid of the remaining boxes. However, owing to the intervention of the Civil Defence & Emergency Service Preservation Trust and the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, a few were kept around the city.
 But here's the shocking thing...they were red!

See how wrong it looks?

 Glasgow police boxes were all painted red until the late 60s. Aside from it just looking wrong, why red? Surely red is the colour of the fire brigade? If I saw a red police box, I'd assume it was for calling the fire brigade (to compund the confusion, they actually had fire extinguishers in them). Dr Who can't even be blamed here, because they'd been like that with introduction of the Mark I's (the Gilbert Mackenzie Trench design) in the 30s (police boxes went through several evolutions since their introduction in Albany, New York, in 1877).
 One thing that really annoys me -really really annoys me - is that they never leave the things alone. They're used as coffee shops, or repainted. In my opinion, this is wrong. They look great, tourists love them, and when you're drunk and coming round the corner past TGI Fridays in the early hours it just looks awesome.

I don't hate the 60s! Honest.

 

 Has anyone noticed the backlash against the 1960s recently?
 I once read a book, about ten years ago, that was about the 60s, and it began 'the 1960s are perhaps the most mythologised decade of all time'. Which I agreed with. However, in the last ten years or so, there's been something in the Zeitgeist that wants to re-evaluate the 60s, to explore it's dark side.
 I have to confess an interest. I love the 60s. When I somehow get hold of a time machine, that's where I'm going for a holiday. Youth culture and pop culture in general had an energy to it that's been lacking ever since, which is probably why it's been so romanticised. Woodstock, man landing on the moon, hippies - there was an innocent exuberance, which to our older culture can be charming. The 60s had an energy for change, but in a positive way.
 However, that would be to ignore the flip side of the coin, which is where this backlash is coming from in the first place. As a society, we can only ignore the dreadfulness of the 1960s for so long before it becomes decade-worship. The civil rights and feminist movements were a cornerstone of the 1960s, rightfully so, but they were the forced result of a culture that essentially punished you for not being male and white. The 60s could easily be a very dangerous time if you weren't part of that subset of the population. The 'establishment' that young people railed against was an oppressive regime that had had a long experience of silencing dissent. During the 1960s, most people were still aware of their place in society and knew to keep their heads down.

Kent state shooting

 Protests against the Vietnam war highlight the awful reality of actually having been around back then. Protests and demonstrations turned violent, and of course there was the Kent State shootings. The cold war had produced enough nuclear weapons for the repeated annihilation of all life on Earth, either by madness or by accident, and although protest was widepsread it was ignored.

JFK

 In Britain, to deal with the housing crisis, tower blocks had been enthusiastically built. However, the premise was flawed - tower blocks don't allow you to simply pile up indefinitely, there needs to be quite a lot of surrounding to space to let in light to the bottom and in case the things collapse like dominoes, so you might as well build normal 2-up 2-downs - the huge subsidises hidden, and whole commnuities were seperated. The pound lowered in value, and it became common for young men to go abroad for work. Britain in the 60s could be very, very, depressing.
 So why, then, has it been so mythologised? Why does our culture shy away from the bad side? Well, it could be that youth culture of the time is so appealing. Their fashions were ridiculous (but perfect for fancy dress), some of their beliefs were well-meaning but stupidly flawed (e.g free love, or no politics in the communes), it could be that they did amazing stuff in that decade (man on the moon, sexual and civil equal rights, forcing society out of its rigid old mentality), or maybe it's just that we would all like to outrage an older generation that we're outraging with our outragessness.
 None of these feel right. In my opinion, the 1960s are glamourised just because there was the mood of change. They had come out of the bland conformist 50s and the feeling was that they were making a much better, more interesting, society. Wages had been rising, young people had a lot more disposable income, and some more time before society expected them to settle down. We miss the feeling that things are getting better. We live in a world where politicians advertise themselves as managers of the economy, not changers of society. I lived through the birth of the internet, which was perhaps the biggest change to our society since the 1960s, but nobody really got excited about it. It just happened a bit at a time. Maybe this explains our new-found antipathy to the 60s - we know, deep down, that the opening years of the 21st century just won't be eulogised anything like the 60s.

All the world's a stage..but which one?

Swan theatre, London

Shakespeare in London. Shakespeare at the Globe.
 Right now, a replica of the Globe sits near the Tate Modern in London, the original lost to history. No photographs remain (what with the technology having not been invented yet), so how do we know what the Globe looked like?
 In 1596, whilst visiting the Swan theatre in London Johannes De Witt (a Dutchman) made a crude sketch of the Swans interior from the point of view of the upper galleries - a large stage,and an area behind the stage where the actors changed (the 'tiring', short for 'attiring'. It was multileveled so it was also used for balcony scenes), and a partial roof. The original of this has been lost, but a friend made a copy, and this is what's been passed down to us. This is the only known record of an Elizabethan London theatre interior, and in its defence it's probably similar to how the Globe looked.
 Then, a Bohemian called Wenceslas Hollar (in either the 1630s or 1640s) drew an illustration of London that showed London, but the perspective is from one that he couldn't have ever seen - diagonally above the tower of Southwark Cathedral. The only way he could have been there is if:

a) A building had existed there at the time. It didn't.

b) He'd been suspended by a crane.

c) He'd been levitating.

c would have violated the witchcraft laws of the time (when the law came down hard on you for it), and b is just silly, so he probably drew it from imagination. It suffers, though, from showing the second Globe, not the first, and Shakespeare had died in 1616, so it couldn't have been the one that premiered Hamlet. There was another illustration, an engraving by a Dutchman Claes Jan Visscher that clearly shows the original Globe theatre - the one that we all think of when we think of the Globe, a crude 'O' shape made of wood - and it's been the basis for what we've thought the Globe looked like to this day.
 Except that he'd never visited London. He'd done his engraving based on an earlier engraving from 1572, before the Globe had been built. So, probably what it was that the 'O' shape was a common design. Or there had been an earlier theatre that got burned down, rebuilt, and renamed by its owners. It's hard to say, like everything else about Shakespeare it's maddeningly elusive. All we have, apart from a few signatures, are speculations and reasonable predictions. Oh, and conspiracy theories.

Shakespeare day

 Today was St Georges day, the national day of England. It was also supposedly the birthday and deathday of William Shakespeare.
 I must admit, I am sceptical of this idea. It just sounds too neat. Englands national poet born and died on its national day. As with much of Shakespeares life, there is sufficient uncertainty as to allow speculation. Whilst we know when he died, when he was born is uncertain. All we know for definite is that he was baptized on April 26th, which his local church documented. At the time, convention dictated that a child was baptized on the first Sunday or holy day following birth as it was believed that if not and if the infant died then they were going straight to hell. So, the error bars for his birth-date could be as high as a week before. If he had been born April 23rd 1564, a Sunday, then this presents a problem. St Marks day was April 25th. However, some people thought this to be unlucky, so maybe they delayed until April 26th.
 Believe it or not, to have this amount of data is quite lucky. Stratford had only started to keep records from 1558, even though they had been ordered to in 1538 (it was viewed with suspicion as a way to increase tax collection). Unfortunately, this wasn't in time for Anne Hathaway, who was older by eight years, so no record of her birth exists.
 Shakespeares life is 5% fact and 95% speculation, and surprisingly many speculative ideas have been worked into the publics knowledge of the man. I am going to write a series of articles about this and about Elizabethan England, because it's quite instructive on the limits of how much we can know history.