51: Three hours in the British Museum

Hello, I hope you’re doing well.

Here’s Border Crossing issue #51. Thank you for reading this email, I appreciate you. If you’ve newly signed up, a warm welcome, thanks for hanging out.

This time, I wander around the British Museum (my first visit in years) and realise that how I comprehend museums has fundamentally shifted. This one includes a few photos, so you may need to ‘enable remote images’ or whatever.

I’m self-isolating (for the first time this whole pandemic). No symptoms but it brought to an early halt what had been a fun month of live radio interviews. Also, it’s far more anxiety inducing than I’d ever expected. Rules is rules — but fucking hell, let me go for a walk already.

In happier news, a sexy new Roland keyboard showed up this week, ahead of Jim Bob tour rehearsals. It’s a gorgeous stage piano set-up, with lots of gizmos.

Also, Folkhampton has a great new time-slot for the weekly broadcast on Radio Reverb 97.2FM. It now goes out Thursdays, from 5pm. Farewell to late night.

log roll

1

Last week, Neil ‘Mr Spoons’ Witherow published his first book, Don’t Mention The ‘Spor. I helped a bit with editing. It’s a funny, touching football memoir about travelling to see Crystal Palace play overseas. It’s available via Amazon print-on-demand.

2

Jim Bob’s new single, ‘Song For The Unsung’ is a beauty. I played piano and sang. For the video, Jim’s fans contribute tributes to people who helped them during the difficult year. It’s very moving.

gems

1

This Vice oral history of All Tomorrows Parties indie festival is a fast, dirty read. It perfectly captures the heady ride of ATP, though it’s a bit too kind to Barry Hogan (he slags off artists more aggressively than anyone slags him off). The money issues (and the infamous Stool Pigeon article that exposed them) are given due space but I think we probably over-romanticise how unique ATP would be today, if it were revamped. Non-mainstream festivals have got a lot more imaginative. At the top end, even Primavera feels equal to ATP but bigger and better run. Incredible times, though.

2

The new episode of Francesca Steele’s Write-Off podcast series (Apple link) has Douglas Stuart discussing the many rejections for his novel Shuggie Bain, before it went on to win the Booker. He’s lovely in conversation.

3

Emily VanDerWerff writes in Vox on how the intense online reaction to an acclaimed sci-fi short story has upended its vulnerable author’s life.

4

Elis James’ beautiful obituary in The Guardian of exceptional, influential Welsh musician David R. Edwards, of the band Dayblygu.

5

Sinead O’Connor reading her own memoir Rememberings as an audiobook is plain incredible.

potato gem

Health Magazine asks the million dollar question. Are potatoes healthy?

•   

Three hours in the British Museum

“If you put your name on it, it is not charity. It’s philanthropy: you get something from it. It’s a business deal.”
— Michael Sonnenreich

(Sonnenreich was a lawyer and co-creator of the ‘Controlled Substances Act’ in the USA. He prosecuted cases against Arthur M. Sackler over people getting addicted to valium and other drugs, but then later joined Sackler’s corporation and close circle, becoming his attorney and lifelong confident)

This is a bronze head of Emperor Augustus. It was made in Egypt in 30BC and would’ve included his whole body, stood tall in a military uniform, quite a bit larger than life-size. The disturbing, oddly modern eyes are made from bright coloured glass. This thing contrasts markedly to how we instinctively think of classical Greek and Roman sculpture, in milky marble. He leans into the uncanny valley, a bit Zuckerberg-ish. As well as having his face on all the coins, there would’ve been statues of Emperor Augustus like this, right across the Roman Empire, as propaganda, emphasising the stable, controlling power.

This head was nicked by the Kushites, raiding from Sudan. They loathed voracious Rome and tore down its images. When they got home with the stolen head, they ritually buried it, beneath the main doorway to a temple. Forever, Augustus would be desecrated, his face walked over by people going to and from prayer. A deposed god. Familiar symbolism, two thousand years ago.

A small gallery tells a potted history of money. The first ever debit card (item 1) is a 1950s department store ‘charge plate’ that customers could use to pay on account. Next to it are early iterations of the modern credit card, what would become VISA and MasterCard. Fascinating how the format and style has remained so stable, ever since.

I also enjoyed this little Edwardian coin, vandalised by suffragettes.

Of course, there’s no real context here about how power and money actually work. That would be divisive and risk over-interpretation. But it’s there if you dig.

So then here’s another emperor, etched high over a nearby entrance. The Sackler family dedication is prominent above the same room where I spotted that head of Augustus. I’m reading the book Empire Of Pain by American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, so the Sackler name leapt out. It’s the story of the family who made fortunes via the incredible misery of millions of people, by triggering and enabling tidal waves of prescription-based addiction, from valium to the opioid crisis, with their innovative, world-shifting new drugs, corporate subterfuge and aggressive pharmaceutical marketing and sales practice.

The patriarch (and oldest of three brothers) was Arthur M. Sackler, who’d died before the launch of Oxycontin, yet whose fierce drive and appalling, contradictory attitudes set in motion — and continued to shape — the family’s global empire, long into the opioid crisis era. The Raymond named here is Arthur’s younger brother and Beverley is Raymond’s wife. Once Arthur got into art philanthropy (via an obsessive collection of Chinese antiques) family members’ names began to appear on museum wings and galleries around the world. It was often unclear who’d really given the cash. Museums bent over backwards to court the Sacklers, even when they weren’t spending, in hopes of future endowments. To appreciate how recently the major museums were still fully proud of associating with the Sacklers, no hint of toxicity, check out this 2015 web page advertising a snazzy opening at the Smithsonian. The centrepiece, introduced by Gillian Anderson, is a ‘remix’ of a famous 19th century dining room, The Peacock Room, by James Whistler.

I once did a concert in The Sackler Suite at Camden Roundhouse, as part of Lost Evenings festival. I loved the show, it was a great room full of kind people. I’m not sure if the Roundhouse has now formally renamed it, or quietly removed the branding, or done nothing. The name leaves a stain.

Back to the British Museum. After watching The Dig I sought out the loot from the Saxon burial hoard at Sutton Hoo. Obviously the warrior mask is the popular piece, yet here’s a fabulous weirdo detail that I’d never heard of before: the burial boat had several large, decorative hanging bowls on it. Fun. The biggest one included a rotating carved three-dimensional fish. Yeah, a fish. Apparently, it’s especially rare that this fish is fully shaped, when most Saxon decorative fish in hanging bowls (wtf!) only had two-dimensions (wtaf!). Now I can’t imagine the same sepulchral burial boat at all. It’s gone delightfully fruitloop.

Hey Ælfric, mind your head mate,
that hanging basket has a rotating fish in it…

Given the fame and status of Sutton Hoo, I’d wrongly hoped there’d be a decent display of other late Saxon bits and bobs. I was scoping for some King Alfred. There’s nothing. A bit of focus on the Vikings and two shelves of modest artefacts to link Romans to Norman invasion. I guess it’s harder to find Saxon things, since the Normans trashed the country.

The earliest surviving handwritten documents from the British Isles are here: Roman post-it notes (written in ink on wafer thin tablets) discovered at Vindolanda fort on Hadrian’s Wall. There are hundreds of them and they’re casual, informal notes. This one is a party invite:

Claudia is inviting her sister Lepidina to her birthday bash. She’s keen for Lepidina to come, says it’ll make the evening much nicer if she shows up. Claudia also sends greetings to her nephew and sends love from her own kids, who are doing well. It’s addressed on the back, like a postcard. Most of the note is written by a professional scribe (who wrote other notes for different people) but Claudia adds her own bit at the bottom, reiterating in her own handwriting: I shall expect you. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.

Claudia’s handwritten sign-off is the world’s earliest surviving writing in Latin, by a woman.

When the Romans left — once the power was gone — for centuries almost nothing like this casual handwritten postcard survives. Like, some of the Vindolanda homes had double-glazing and underfloor heating, yet 600 years later, local farmers’ dwellings, built from recovered materials from the garrison, still just had holes for windows. As usual, we don’t appreciate the sheer scale and longevity of societal collapse.

My favourite factoid about King Alfred The Great is that he invented the notebook, at least in northern Europe. At the time, the only bound books were Bibles and precious collections of religious scripture, made by monks. But after he retook his throne and quelled the Vikings, King Alfred was powerful, educated and inspiring enough, that he was able to persuade the monks to make him a bound book and leave it blank; an ‘enchiridion’, in which to write his own notes. This was unheard of. Such a book would’ve been sacrilege, if placed into any but the purest, most pious and literate of hands. Alfred’s notebook is long lost — even a single page would be priceless to modern historians — but it was celebrated and remembered during his lifetime and beyond, into the Norman era. In 1125, William of Malmsbury mentions it in his own writing.

It is shocking how much we still live with resonances of Norman genocide, a thousand years ago. The north-south divide is written there and then, in the blood and pain of anyone living above the Watford Gap. Suddenly we get two words for things. For example ‘pig’ (livestock / labourer / old English) and ‘pork’ (table meat / landlord / Norman French). It prefigured and shaped English class history; corrupt land ownership and social structures that thrive today. The true roots of, say, the Daily Mail being relentless bigot arseholes in service of fat aristocracy, are tendrils from that same brutal occupation. Truly, honestly, it’s not very long ago.

A million museum exhibits all eloquently platform power and achievement and change, with only tenuous connection to struggle.

In April, I finished making the People. Change. Museums. podcast series with Dr Sophie Frost at Leicester University, which soaked me in first-hand conversations of colonialism, racist and classist employment practices and pilfered objects throughout the heritage world. Since then, I’ve been transfixed by Moya Lothian-McLean’s expansive audio series Human Resources, which concisely connects vast chunks of our familiar heritage to the transatlantic slave trade. So it’s been an enlightening year in that regard, though I already thought I was awake.

On earlier museum visits through the decades, even when I debated the narrowband colonial viewpoints, or criticised the dodgy benefactors whitewashing their brands, still — really — I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. It took this first post-corona visit to the British Museum in 2021 to fully realise: those constant, overwhelming inadequacies in how we display and experience heritage have become the absolute core of how I see the museum realm, as a whole, as soon as I walk in. The history beneath the history. Where it used to be about individual objects and specific failings, now the entire space needs re-building from foundation up, if that makes any sense. It’s an unfathomably big challenge.

At last, my rotating fish has become three-dimensional.

It’s been a year since the good people of Bristol righteously pulled down Colston’s statue and tossed it in the canal. Personally, I would’ve left it in there, underwater, with a small plaque to explain its presence. It might’ve got stolen though, I suppose.

The Colston statue is now displayed in the M-Shed museum, lying prone, with graffiti in place and an explanatory panel nearby. Museum restorers even worked on the graffiti to protect it, making it a part of the exhibit. That’s a lovely touch. The statue being laid horizontally perfectly captures the essence of what happened to it. However the museum leadership say this is not a political gesture — but that even if they wanted to display it upright, they couldn’t. The Colston was so badly damaged, it’s too fragile to risk standing up vertically. Sounds about right.

A couple of weeks ago, on Twitter I suggested that people ignore the recently launched right-wing nationalist TV news channel. The tweet scored me an amusingly fierce pile-on of abuse from gammons and bots. During the chaos, a couple of times I replied to people with that photo of the Colston statue. It elicited this gem:

Inevitably, one group tried to sabotage the M-Shed’s new display. The ‘Save Our Statues’ activists ran a Twitter campaign, to get people to use M-Shed’s free pre-booking system to book out all the slots (without actually going) to prevent visitors seeing the statue. Thanks Ben Murray of the Art Fund, who told me this story. Luckily, the saboteurs only managed it for one day, before running out of steam. Specifically, they were trying to block the one year anniversary. But M-Shed simply pivoted to a walk-in policy, tweeted it out and loads of people showed up anyway. Since then, the museum has tweaked its booking system.

Though surely the story of Colston’s statue is not yet done.

It seems obvious enough that anyone ought to be able to understand. Agree with the various ideologies at play, or not, a simple fact remains: the public toppling of a statue is history, not an attack on history.

It will be fascinating to watch these front-line skirmishes play out over coming months. They’re everywhere. In Oxford, more than 100 academics are working to rule, in protest at Oriel College’s failure to remove the beastly Cecil Rhodes. They’re boycotting discretionary and voluntary work, only doing their non-discretionary jobs. There are many stories like this.

Then there’s the dilemma unfolding in the restaurant at Tate Britain. The restaurant has always been in a room with a gigantic mural. It’s an original work by Rex Whistler (no relation to James Whistler, mentioned earlier) of near priceless ‘artistic value’ that envelopes the sprawling space on several sides. This Whistler painted it specifically for the restaurant, back in 1927. But recently, as it was being restored, it became clear that the mural includes hateful enslavement and racism painted into it. More than just “of its time” this is a vile piece of work.

At first, because the yucky bits are small, when the restoration was complete (and pre-Covid) they re-opened and hoped to go unnoticed. They only put up explanatory text in response to complaints. But it couldn’t fly, especially not as a backdrop to people munching a posh lunch.

It’s very serious and quite hilarious. As I write, the restaurant hasn’t reopened post-lockdown and may not reopen at all. Tate can’t easily move it without infrastructural change (the kitchen is right there). Already both Tate Britain and Modern’s restaurants are shut til autumn. Nor can they remove the offending Whistler piece; it’s part of the Grade 1 Listed interior. I read about this last November in The Art Newspaper, however last month it reached the heady pages of The New York Times. Even the Spectator’s inevitable clickbait defence of the mural and shrilling of “cancel culture!” felt half-hearted.

The chickens (so comfortable, so all-encompassing, for so long, in the dark heart of colonial hatred) come home to roost. For me, I won’t ever walk through a museum the same way again: these (not actually that complicated) issues of power, ownership and viewpoint are now my first and dominant focus, whenever I engage with a heritage space, not even by choice, whether I want it or not. And fair play to that.

get in touch

email: chris@christt.com
insta: @thebordercrossing | @cjthorpetracey | @folkhampton
twitter: @christt | @folkhampton

always there

LinkTree

The Border Crossing shop at Big Cartel

Folkhampton weekly music radio show —
• Wed 4pm (UK time) / 11am (ET) / 8am (Pacific) on Slack City
• Thur 5pm (UK time) on Brighton’s Radio Reverb 97.2FM/DAB+
• and all shows archived at TotallyRadio.com

New Folk Friday — weekly Spotify playlist for new releases in folk, psych, songwriting and americana, updated every Friday.

The Hudson Records Mixtape — I’m hosting this narrated Spotify playlist for the great Sheffield record label, updated every couple of weeks.

My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag too. Thank you!

Loads of love, as always. Look after yourself and your people.

Chris
xx