Star Catalogues

We finally got to see Wes Anderson's new movie 'Asteroid City ' on Monday night, as weird and wonderful a cinematic experience as might have been hoped for. It's just a shame we had to go all the way to Preston for the screening, because my local cinema in Blackpool closed down last month. That's just part of a worrying trend. Cineworld and Odeon are shutting cinemas nationwide and Empire Cinemas went into administration recently. 

However, watching 'Asteroid City ' did give me the inspiration for this week's blog about  catalogues  - because up till then I confess I was feeling somewhat stumped. And by the way, it was not for nothing that Wes Anderson and his fabulous cast received a ten-minute standing ovation after the film was screened at the Cannes Festival in May. (I'll take it over 'Barbie - the movie ' any hard day's night.)

director Wes Anderson on the set of Asteroid City

Without divulging too much of the plot, suffice to say that the action takes place in 1955 in the (fictional) American desert town of the film's title, a place famous for its meteorite crater. The itinerary of the annual Junior Stargazer/ Space Cadet convention (organised to bring together students and their parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition), is spectacularly disrupted when observation of a rare astral event  reveals something totally unexpected. (Enter the alien.)

In an attempt to pinpoint the origin of this world-changing phenomenon, there is much recourse to star maps (like the one on the observatory wall - see below) and star catalogues - which is the jumping-off point for today's blog.

Asteroid City observatory with star map on the wall

Obviously enough, star catalogues are tabulations of astronomical objects, usually grouped by type, morphology, origin et cetera. They have been compiled from mankind's earliest days and the first ones were literally inscribed on clay tablets by the Ancient Babylonians of Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BC, followed chronologically by the Ancient Greeks, Chinese, Persians and Arabs, sometimes but not invariably accompanied by illustrated star charts. Interestingly, there is no evidence that the Ancient Egyptians created star catalogues though they did produce star maps which often adorned the ceilings of their tombs.

Of course the majority of early star catalogues were limited by observational capability and, as with the accompanying star maps, could be somewhat subjective. Nonetheless, they were impressive compilations, accurate enough to assist in divination, husbandry, navigation and as a means of identifying shifts in the heavens.

The invention of the telescope rapidly advanced our ability to observe and catalogue astronomical objects and with the more recent advent of powerful observatories and the arrival of radio-telescopy, it has become customary to give stars numbers rather than names.

section of a star map

My all-too-brief research into star catalogues has identified a plethora of modern ones. There have, for instance, been a dozen "full sky" catalogues created in the last 200 years by different scientific institutes. The most comprehensive of all (and I use that term very loosely) are the three Gaia catalogues (DR1, DR2, DR3) being made by the Gaia space telescope listing billions of stars. How the minds of those Ancient Babylonian and Greek astronomers would blow if they could see how far we have come in terms of stellar knowledge!

Then in addition to the comprehensive catalogues, there is another raft of specialist star catalogues listing specifically double-stars or carbon stars or stars of a particular magnitude or even simply 'nearby stars'. Then there are trigonometric parallax catalogues and proper-motion catalogues, manifold niche tabulations enough to make this modern head spin! All digital nowadays of course, because of the sheer volume of data, and much of it in the ether. I like to think of it as the Cloud Of Knowing.

To conclude, here's the latest from the imaginarium, probably still evolving if I'm honest...

Holes In Heaven

Call it numinous

for how can dark matter

so long as there are

holes in heaven

too brilliantly numerous

for terror's insinuating 

fingers to obfuscate?

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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The World According To Wes

A movie-maker is a creator of worlds and my favourite contemporary movie-maker, by a celluloid mile, is the American director Wesley Wales Anderson.

Still from The Darjeeling Limited

I'm going to quote unashamedly from an essay about Anderson by Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon (whose novel Telegraph Avenue is a must-read, by the way), because I think Chabon captures the essence of Anderson's movie-making mission most eloquently:

"The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken...mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty and grief. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do; others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits even smaller and more jagged; and some people start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

"The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits - the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience - is to build a little world of our own...a scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half-remembered. We call these scale models 'works of art'.

"In their set design and camera-work, their use of stop-motion, maps and models, Wes Anderson's films readily, even eagerly, concede the 'miniature' quality of the worlds he builds - and yet these worlds span continents and decades.

"Anderson's films understand and demonstrate that the magic of art, which renders beauty out of brokenness, disappointment, failure, decay, even ugliness and violence is authentic and honest to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker's scale version  of the world. "For my next trick," says Wes Anderson, "I have put the world into a box."



Wes Anderson explaining a shot...

Anderson's methods are both intricate and painstaking, which is why he has only crafted eight movies in twenty years - but those movies are all of them brilliant stories and works of art in his distinctively quirky, engaging and very humane style. Take The Darjeeling Limited as an example. A significant part of the film (about three brothers seeking redemption and an absconded mother) is set on an Indian train (that gave the film its title) which, with the exception of the locomotive, was practically built from scratch for the production and everything was hand-made, right down to the hand-painted plates and hand-printed table-cloths in the restaurant car. Carriage walls had to hinge, to permit for distance shots to be set up, and girders were bolted into the ceilings to allow the cameras to track up and down corridors. As a final, self-referential touch, the outsides of the carriages were painted with stylised miniature scenes from the movie by local Indian artists - crazy and wonderful.

Wes often plays bit parts in his movies (in the grand tradition leading back to Alfred Hitchcock); a student, a passenger on a bus, a commentator at a tennis match; I like that in Fantastic Mr Fox he chose as his cameo role the Weasel. He was further inspired (for the cineasts among you) by Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Stanley Kubrick and Satjayit Ray - not a bad roll-call of influences. However, he has forged a directorial style all of his own.

Here's a resume of the world according to Wes - funny, clever, life-affirming depictions of the human condition. I you are urged to see them all (available on DVD, Netflicks etc):

Bottle Rockets (1996), Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). His latest venture is another stop-action animation about dogs, currently in pre-production. I can't wait.

And so to this week's poem, Camera Obscura, with a bit of a preamble: The poem was imagined in response to Anderson's suggestion that the break-up of his parents' marriage was a defining experience of his life; it is also allusive to a recent event in mine. The camera obscura (Latin for dark room) is a simple optical device that led to the development of the photographic camera and the whole evolution of still and moving pictures. It was originally a light-tight container with a pinhole in it that streamed the light and focussed a sharp (inverted) image, as shown in the diagram below - the world in a box.


Camera Obscura
Take one! Betrayal scene.
Pinpointed in the half-light
you lie stoned, naked
(martyr to your passion)
in this room,
this little world
in which you lost your head
in your fevered friend's bed.
The camera pans,
picks out your hand,
a tan-line minus wedding band.
Little details.
What does it betoken,
the missing ring folded in tissue,
carefully tucked at the bottom
of your carpet-bag,
with your conscience?
There are no more words to be spoken -
for this is now an awfully silent movie,
scripted, captured, canned -
and that's a wrap!

Thanks for reading. Have a popcorn-free, widescreen week, S ;-)

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