Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Benzene Anyone?



I know I shouldn't let myself be amazed by technology but trying to remember the adage that exceptional people are amazed by the mundane, I have found a sweet beauty in the fact that I have just created a SQL Server DTS package which documents SQL Server DTS Packages into text files, including itself. My first experience of this sort of self-reference was rather negative in that it involved my predecessor at my work-experience year placing password-stealing code in a login script which then deleted itself so as to leave no trace. At least my DTS stuff is constructive.


Anyway to more beauty in the form of a wonderful three-parter on BBC 4 about the Pre-Rapahaelites. When I mentioned that there was something about the Pre-Raphs on TV I was berated by my daughter for using slang ... which hurt ... and is now in at number 37 on the list of hazards for middle-class parents. This programme is a short half-hour thing with what the reviewer calls Points-of-View style announcements by the early critics of what they considered to be blasphemous abominations, which broke rules of composition as well as those of religious deference. It seems there is not much difference between this and the storm which greets things like The Last Temptation of Christ these days. The PRB were trying to show religious figures as real people, worthy of the messages they were giving out to the people, making the suggestion that Christ understood people by virtue of having grown up with them and knowing what they wanted. To show Christ as living in some remote palace-like environment or worse, by not showing him at all, he becomes a remote dictator of the worst do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do kind.


The programme concentrated on the three primary figures of the PRB - William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and of course Dante Gabriel Rosetti who, as you can see, looked like Rob Newman although of course I suspect that the resemblance is probably due to effort on the part of Mr Newman. Byronesque I suppose. Anyway, jump cut and with fast string music, this is a definite show to keep up with. Talking of more art, I was caught unawares by the BBC2 programme about Manet at the weekend. I suppose it might have been a repeat but I don't remember having seen in before. Not sure about the need to recreate the two pictures of his which happen to contain nudity but it did shed light on the meaning of both.

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