Hello. Welcome to Border Crossing issue #73.
I hope you’re well and if you’re here in the UK, keeping warm through the vicious cold snap. Mercifully, it’s almost done. It coincided with us getting one of those smart meters, so I’ve spent the past few days utterly horrified by how much it costs to heat my rickety old house. This week I’m travelling to rural Norfolk for a mixing session, and goddamnit, I’m taking my electric blanket.
This episode of Border Crossing is, by chance, a tale of two Lee Millers.
gems
1
Joel Morris just published a YouTube tour-de-force, in which he analyses the first two minutes of a classic episode of The Simpsons (including opening credits) to demonstrate what goes into writing that show. Joel’s book on comedy, Be Funny Or Die is out in March.
2
I’m deep into the debut novel by Hester Musson, The Beholders (4th Estate) which is an enthralling, unsettling nineteenth century thriller, with a beautifully painted upstairs/downstairs setting. A chunk of goth. I know Hester in real life, but I’m not biased: her writing is exceptional and I’m also relieved I didn’t have to pretend to enjoy it.
3
Late last year The London Review of Books podcast ran a four-part miniseries (within their regular pod) about how people have thought about Stonehenge over the years. It starts with Inigo Jones and John Wood.
4
Our early January hibernation has been built around one thing: binge-watching Elementary on Now TV. This was a long-running CBS Sherlock Holmes update, in which Jonny Lee Miller played a modern-day Holmes, Lucy Liu was Dr Joan Watson, and Aidan Quinn and Jon Michael Hill played their NYPD handlers Captain Tommy Gregson and Detective Marcus Bell. The show ran from 2012 to 2019, set mostly in New York City. It came recommended to us by Rifa’s mentee Deeksha, who puts it on in the background when she’s working on her MA. I was drawn to it when Jonny Lee Miller turned out to such fun, chewing scenery as Hot John Major in the otherwise shite later seasons of The Crown (which I sat through under duress).
Elementary is bloody ace. Wonderful stuff. With all the limitations and tropes you’d imagine from a mainstream network TV procedural — yes it leans CSI: Sherlock — still, somehow, it’s excellent, especially once it finds its feet. We got properly stuck in and we can’t stop. We’re near the end of season five, out of seven series. They’re old-school 24 episode runs as well, so by the end of season two, Miller has officially played Sherlock Holmes on television more than anyone else in history. And we’ve spent 80 hours on it since Christmas. Bloody hell.
They get just creative enough with the formulaic core. The ‘addiction recovery’ thread that runs throughout is handled beautifully, while the non-romantic partnership is perfect: Holmes and Watson meet because she’s hired as a ‘sober companion’ (she’d previously been a surgeon but quit) and she moves with Holmes when he gets out of rehab. There are loads of easter eggs, without it ever becoming fan service. We get Natalie Dormer’s very sexy take on Irene Adler and a sleazy Rhys Ifans as Mycroft, though really Sherlock’s super-rich corrupt business leader father Morland Holmes fulfils the Mycroft role more closely as the show goes on. Really, this is just a good old high quality police procedural, and that’s what Sherlock Holmes was. I’ve been a Sherlock nerd forever, and I vastly prefer this iteration to any other of recent years, including Steven Moffat’s work. For me, Jonny Lee Miller is my outright favourite TV Holmes, and though I loved comfy old Edward Hardwicke back in the day, Lucy Liu brings fire and measure, she’s a fine, fine take on Watson, only possibly bettered by Ian Hart in those two BBC Christmas films. It may get weird over the final two series, as long-running things often do, but we can’t exactly stop now.
5
American pop star Maggie Rogers runs a regular newsletter via her website, which she writes herself. Obviously it’s a promo tool, like all pop star newsletters. But Maggie turns out to be a casually wonderful writer. Her emails are idiosyncratic and engaging. I’m certain she’ll publish long-form in the future.
potato gem
It’s a while ago now but thank you Nat Burns for sending me this lovely little Insta reel by @appetite.life and for reminding me that Nora Ephron was an outstanding writer on potatoes.
In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you’re feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let’s face it: the reason you’re blue is that there isn’t anyone to make them for you.
— Nora Ephron, from Heartburn
Also in potato news (and in topics in this Border Crossing that involve the surname Miller) apparently a Tik Tok influencer called Brittany Miller has finally turned young Americans on to baked jacket potatoes. Huzzah! I can’t link to any of the news items about it though, because they’re in all the most evil newspapers.
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Lee Miller incoming
Lee Miller is such a fascinating figure. To me, she’s one of those icons who sort of sums up (or performs a kind of avatar role as) the multi-tasking flashmob edgelord exuberance of rich/beautiful westerners in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Globally mobile, even as they were surrounded by, occasionally enveloped in, the world’s worst horrors. I suspect she’ll probably cast a bit of a shadow over 2024 too.
Back in autumn 2022, Newlands House Gallery up in Petworth, mid Sussex, hosted an exhibition called Lee Miller & Picasso. Despite being posh, large (occupying most of a tall townhouse) and generally an expensive ticket, still Newlands House gives off the vibe of an outsider to the British art establishment: we tried to use our Art Passes but door staff ruefully told us that Newlands was unable to join the scheme. Sketchy. In the end, it was a good, expansive show that did solid work as a visual review of Miller’s life and career, built from her photos. The Picasso stuff was peripheral, not his art, mainly just a bit of “look, a famous bloke spent time here in Sussex”.
Back then, staff at Newlands also gave us heads-up of an upcoming movie about Miller’s life. I didn’t think much about it at the time but it turns out likely to be a reasonably high profile film. It’s called Lee, directed by Ellen Kuras, and it started showing up at film festivals later in 2023. Kate Winslet plays Lee Miller (the project was kicked off, many years ago, by the director spotting a resemblance between the two) and it’s also got names like Marion Cotillard, Andy Samberg and Alexander Skarsgård onboard, so that’s looking like a decent deal. The film is adapted from The Lives of Lee Miller, the excellent 1988 biography by her son, Antony Penrose. It’s been bought (at least in the UK) by Sky Movies, so let’s see if that includes a cinema release. Even if it doesn’t, hopefully we’ll get some kind of big screen presentation down here.
For Lee Miller, despite her American birth and decades of restless (sometimes incredibly traumatising) globetrotting, Sussex counts very much as home turf. She spent the latter chunk of her life with Roland Penrose at Farley House (now “and Gallery”) in Chiddingly, between Uckfield and Hailsham, where the estate likes to describe the property as a British base of the surrealists. They’ve done exceptional work as an estate, I think, led by Antony and his daughter Ami Bouhassane, in preserving the legacy of both Lee herself and her convivial surrealist second husband Roland.
Next, with impeccable timing, Brighton Museum opened its own solo show on Miller’s work, with an emphasis on her fashion. As I write, Lee Miller: Dressed is still up at Brighton Museum, and will be there until 18th February, so you’ve got just under a month to get your shit together, if you’re curious.
For this exhibition, the pretext is a big trunk of clothing, outfits, accessories that were rediscovered as recently as 2019 in an attic at Farley House. The show is built around ten full outfits and some fascinating other bits and bobs, each telling stories from Miller’s rollercoaster.
While Brighton Museum’s three rooms aren’t necessarily larger in size than the Newlands House show a year before, of course this new exhibition — in our city’s main museum — gives off buckets more confidence and authority in curation, labelling, storytelling and such. It mostly displays the outfits in the centre of each room and fills the walls around them with photography. On the whole, it’s a fuller exploration of Miller’s life, with the fashion couture angle not suppressing the war photography, nor her love for the Middle East.
It’s also a lot cheaper to get into than Newlands was, around half the price, and even less if you pay local resident rates.
Quick sidebar here to recommend Brighton friends actually bother to visit Brighton Museum, and buy a ticket, now they’ve changed the system: locals only pay £6.50 and your ticket lasts for a whole year, which now includes the temporary exhibitions like this one. These used to be charged separately and, given that they put on three or four decent temporary shows each year, it’s excellent value, even if you’re done with the museum’s eccentric, eclectic permanent rooms (which I’m not).
Several of the most iconic Lee Miller photographs did overlap both art shows and I found myself wondering if that means they’ll be crucial moments in the Winslet portrayal on film as well. Centrepieces. The infamous (actually slightly annoying) ‘Hitler’s bathtub’ image — Miller’s meticulously arranged self-portrait posing seated in the bathtub at Hitler’s abandoned home, taken just days after the fall of Berlin and his suicide, is present, as are some great informal portraits of famous surrealists from her later life. It’s all contextualised neatly alongside the fashion stuff.
But there’s at least one story missing here, which I had found fascinating in the Newlands House show. Here in Brighton Museum, there is no clear ‘ending’ given to Miller’s early modelling career. So the shift presented is gradual and organic — the kind of blur of a busy, adventurous life — away from the role of fashion model, and famous, glamorous young icon, having her body utilised commercially by others, via Miller’s own reclamation of that space, into the role of a fashion shoot professional, then on to her empowerment as someone able to turn her camera onto other things.
But at the Newlands show, we’d been told this story of how Miller’s teenage mainstream modelling career was in fact cut drastically, unexpectedly short, even as it was still mushrooming, when Kotex purchased images of Miller and used them, without her permission, to advertise menstrual pads. The negative public impact of this was immediate and catastrophic: it demolished her first career in one go, instantly she couldn’t get any more high fashion work. I wanted to know why it doesn’t feature in the Brighton Museum narrative, so I sent an Insta message to the show’s curator Martin Pel, but (of course) he didn’t reply.
Apart from that missing element (explaining a driving force from one career to the next) if I have a mild criticism of Lee Miller: Dressed, it’s only that it is good enough to be bigger. The scale and quality of the works warrants more. This highlights a consistent challenge for the temporary shows at Brighton Museum: the limit on physical space. In summer 2022, there was a great fun exhibition in this same gallery: Goal Power! which told a social history of women’s football in Brighton, curated to coincide with England hosting the European Championships. It focused on key individuals to convey the tale of women’s exclusion, perseverance and finally return to the heart of the game, through personal stories. Honestly, this was a fantastic show, except, again, it was too small. They had to squeeze it all in. It needed two more rooms.
It’s not often that I want art exhibitions to be larger. I’m usually done with them before they’re done with me. But the three precious rooms of Brighton Museum’s temporary show space are modest and, however much the nearby Fabrica Gallery, for example, might wish to argue differently, in recent years, that unassuming Brighton Museum space has been our city’s flagship host for major art shows. From Jeff Koons a decade ago, to Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba, to Yinka Shonibare, and so on.
Late last year on our podcast I had a moan about the lack of a proper large-scale gallery in Brighton, compared to other towns nearby. The context was visiting the Turner Prize exhibition at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne — and more generally the gorgeous size and state of that gallery. I got polite pushback from a couple of folks in our local art scene. But I’m not wrong: when you think about Brighton’s artsy national reputation and the kind of culture — and quality of work — that has been scaffolding for this city’s vibe in recent decades, it’s plain shocking that we don’t have anything to compete with The Towner, or Hastings Contemporary, or Pallant House in Chichester.
Really, Brighton doesn’t have a proper arts centre at all. The Dome doesn’t count, that’s more like an Academy-style commercial multi-venue space with a coffee shop newly slammed into the outer walls (and that’s after their major refurb already stumbled into a multi-year clusterfuck, which the public purse underwrote). Brighton doesn’t have a major art gallery. And Brighton doesn’t have a sizeable cutting-edge theatre space either. Yes it’s got the gorgeous crumbly old Theatre Royal (currently being renovated, in some fashion) but that’s a home for light comedy and tribute bands. Yes we have superb organisations like the People’s Theatre, trying to make things happen. We have ACCA up at Sussex University putting on some edgy shiz, but that’s such a trek from town, it’s not really here at all.
Sexy new commercial gallery Helm opened recently, on a site that was traditionally one or other of the big chain restaurants, with a bar up the front and a decent-sized show space downstairs. It’s made an optimistic start (we enjoyed the very fast-selling Margo in Margate show) — but that’s the sort of hipster art gallery Brighton ought to have thirty of, lying around every corner.
Chichester has Pallant House Gallery and a proper Festival Theatre set-up — and they’re a dullard Tory stronghold with one fifth of the population. You can’t get decent coffee there, but they’ve got a brilliant art house that stretches over three storeys. My hometown is so busy fighting to stake a claim as a citywide sandbox for the tech trade, we’ve forgotten that it was the arts and the night-time economy that made us attractive to those folks in the first place.
Oh look, another grassroots venue just shut down. So it goes.
Anyway, Lee Miller: Dressed is at Brighton Museum until 18th February.
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get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @thebordercrossing @cjthorpetracey @folkhampton
Twitter: @christt | @folkhampton | @lofiarts
always there
Try my music newsletter Double Chorus.
My Chris T-T complete annotated lyrics book Buried in the English Earth is still (just about) available via the Border Crossing shop. One last box to sell.
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.
Please look after yourself and your people.
All my love, as always.
Chris
x
If it was you who put me onto Joel Morris's Comfort Blanket podcast, then thank you: I love it (in a similar mood to how I love Refigure). x
If it makes you feel better our bills miraculously went down after we got a smart meter (vs self reporting) which makes me think something sketch had been going on before but nevermind.
I don't tell you enough but I really enjoy TBC as well as Double Chorus. So thank you!