Cleanup, Clean up or clean-up may refer to:

• Cleaning
• Clean-up, a part of the workflow in the production of hand-drawn animation
• a cleanup hitter in baseball
• Clean Up Records, a record label
• Environmental remediation
• A euphemism of eliminating survivors of an attack.

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Nick Pope (born 19 September 1965) worked for 21 years at the British Government's Ministry of Defence from 1985 to 2006. He is best known for a job that he did from 1991 to 1994, where his duties included investigating reports of UFO sightings, to see if they had any defence significance.^[1] He now works as a freelance journalist and media commentator.^[2]

Ministry of Defence[link]

Pope joined the Ministry of Defence in 1985. After serving in a number of different posts, he was assigned in 1991 to a section of Secretariat (Air Staff) known as Sec (AS) 2a, where his duties included investigating reports of UFO sightings, to see if they had any defence significance.

At the time, while the Ministry of Defence stated that it "remains totally open-minded" about the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial lifeforms”, it also stated that there was no evidence to suggest that any UFO sightings posed any threat to the UK or that they were extraterrestrial in origin.^[3] It is clear from material that Pope wrote whilst still at the MoD that he did not share the MoD's view that conventional explanations could be found for all UFO sightings.^[4]

Pope's final posting in the MoD was to the Directorate of Defence Security. He resigned in 2006 and in 2009 MoD announced that UFO sightings would no longer be investigated.^[5][6][7]

Media work[link]

In November 2006, he resigned from his post at the MOD, saying the government's "X-Files have been closed down."^[8] He continues his research and investigation in a private capacity and now works as a freelance journalist and media commentator, covering subjects that include the unexplained, conspiracy theories, space, science fiction and fringe science.^[9]

He also does work for a number of film companies and PR agencies, promoting the release of science fiction films.^[10]

Books[link]

Open Skies, Closed Minds is Pope's autobiographical account of his interest in ufology. It provides an overview of the UFO phenomenon, with the emphasis on Pope's three-year tour of duty as the Ministry of Defence's UFO desk officer. Pope also discusses the politics surrounding the way in which those within government and the military view UFO-phenomena.

Pope has also written two science fiction novels, Operation Thunder Child and its sequel Operation Lightning Strike.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website

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Edward William Frank James (1907–1984) was a British poet known for his patronage of the surrealist art movement.

Early life and marriage[link]

West Dean House

Edward James was born on 16 August 1907, the only son of William James, an American railroad magnate who moved to England and married Evelyn Forbes, a Scots socialite, who was reputedly fathered by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII).^[1] He had four older sisters: Audrey, Millicent, Xandra, and Silvia. James was educated briefly at Eton, and then at Le Rosey in Switzerland, then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. In 1912 he inherited the 8,000-acre (32 km²) West Dean House in Sussex, on the death of his father.

James' first sponsorship of note was in publishing John Betjeman's first book of poems when at Oxford. He worked with Brian Howard on the Glass Omnibus. After Oxford, James had a brief career as a trainee diplomat at the embassy in Rome. He was asked to send a coded message to London that the Italians had laid the keels for three destroyers, but got the code wrong; the message said "300 destroyers". Shortly after this he was sent "on indefinite leave".

In the early 1930s, James married Tilly Losch, an Austrian dancer, choreographer, actress and painter. He had several productions created expressly for her, the most notable of which was Les Ballets 1933, which included Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya and George Balanchine. He and Boris Kochno commissioned that year Brecht and Weill's last collaboration, The Seven Deadly Sins, which Balanchine produced, directed and choreographed.

James divorced Losch in 1934, accusing her of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky, an American hotel executive; her countersuit, in which she made it clear that James was homosexual, failed.^[2] James was in fact bisexual.^[3] After the divorce, James joined a social set in England which included the Mitford sisters and the composer Lord Berners.

Surrealism[link]

James is best known as a passionate and early supporter of Surrealism, a movement that was born from the political uncertainty and upheaval between the wars. Rejecting the bourgeois' dominating rationality, surrealists escaped into a world of fantasy and irrationality. He sponsored Salvador Dalí for the whole of 1938 and his collection of paintings and art objects that subsequently came to be accepted as the finest collection of surrealist work in private hands. He also provided practical help, supporting Dalí for about two years, and allowed René Magritte to stay in his London house to paint.

James appeared in two famous surrealist paintings, both by Magritte:

• Not to be Reproduced^[4]
• The Pleasure Principle: Portrait of Edward James^[5]

Each suggests an alienated person. In the first, James looks into a mirror which shows the back of his head; in the second James's head is a fireball.

As well as Dalí and Magritte, his art collection included works by Hieronymus Bosch, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Leonora Carrington, Pavel Tchelitchew, Pablo Picasso, Giacometti, Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux, amongst others.^[6] Most were sold at a well-publicized sale at Christies two years after his death.

His intellectual interest in surrealism is demonstrated by his sponsorship of Minotaure, a lavish Surrealist magazine published in Paris. His refurbishment of Monkton House, in a part of the West Dean Estate, was a Surrealist dream. It was done in collaboration with the pioneering British decorator, Syrie Maugham, and has some of the most iconic Surrealist works on display, including the large [[Mae West Lips Sofa to which Dalí gave the form and colour of the actresseslips, and his Lobster Telephone in white. James donated these two items (among others) to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.^[7] James most fantastic surrealist creation was realised in the Mexican rain forest, a surrealist Sculpture garden, "Las Pozas" (see below).

New Mexico[link]

In 1940, James showed up in Taos, New Mexico, United States, as a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, where he was known for his amusing, clever eccentricity and effeminate manner. In Taos, he met the Hon. Dorothy Brett, an impoverished British aristocrat and painter, who in 1941 sold him nine paintings for $580. He later invited the 70 year-old Brett (as she was known) to return to England and reside at West Dean, but she declined.^[8]

Las Pozas[link]

The surrealist sculpture park Las Pozas, Xilitla.

Las Pozas, Xilitla.

Las Pozas ("the Pools") was created by James, more than 2,000 feet (610 m) above sea level, in a subtropical rainforest in the mountains of Mexico just outside the town of Xilitla. It includes more than 80 acres (320,000 m²) of natural waterfalls and pools interlaced with towering Surrealist sculptures in concrete.^[9]

Las Pozas is near the village of Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, a seven-hour drive north of Mexico City. In the early 1940s, James went to Los Angeles, and then decided that he "wanted a Garden of Eden set up . . . and I saw that Mexico was far more romantic” and had "far more room than there is in crowded Southern California”.^[10] In Hollywood in 1941, his lifetime friend and cousin, Magic Realist painter Bridget Bate Tichenor, encouraged him to search for a surreal location in Mexico to express his diverse esoteric interests.^[11] In Cuernavaca, he hired Plutarco Gastelum as a guide. They discovered Xilitla in November 1945.^[9] Eventually Plutarco married a local woman and had four children. James was "Uncle Edward", to the children called James,and frequently stayed with them in a house Plutarco had built, a mock-Gothic cement castle, now a hotel - La Posada El Castillo.^[12]

Between 1949 and 1984, James built scores of surreal concrete structures with names like the House on Three Floors Which Will in Fact Have Five or Four or Six, the House with a Roof like a Whale, and the Staircase to Heaven.^[12] There were also plantings and beds full of tropical plants, including orchids - there were, apparently, 29,000 at Las Pozas at one time ^[13]- and a variety of small casas (homes), niches, and pens that held exotic birds and wild animals from the world over—James owned many exotic animals and once took his pet boa constrictors to the Hotel Francis in Mexico City.^[12]

Massive sculptures up to four stories tall punctuate the site. The many trails throughout the garden site are composed of steps, ramps, bridges and narrow, winding walkways that traverse the valley walls.^[14] Construction of Las Pozas cost more than $5 million. To pay for it, James sold his collection of Surrealist art at auction.^[12]

In the summer of 2007, the Fundación Pedro y Elena Hernández, the company Cemex, and the government of San Luis Potosí paid about $2.2 million for Las Pozas and created Fondo Xilitla, a foundation that will oversee the preservation and restoration of the site.^[9]

West Dean[link]

In 1964, James gave his English estate which included West Dean House at West Dean to a charitable trust. The Edward James Foundation comprises West Dean College, a centre for the preservation of traditional arts and crafts, through short courses and full-time Diplomas and MAs. One of only two professional Tapestry Weaving studios in the UK, an Art Gallery are all housed on a 6,400-acre (26 km²) estate which is open to the public through the West Dean Gardens.

West Dean College is part of the Edward James Foundation set up in 1971 in response to James' vision of establishing “an educational foundation where creative talents can be discovered and developed, and where one can spread culture through the teaching of crafts and the preservation of knowledge that might otherwise be destroyed or forgotten”.

Edward James is buried in the St Roche's Arboretum at West Dean, with the simple inscription Edward James 1907 - 1984 Poet. The stone was carved by John Skelton.

Writings[link]

<poem> I have seen such beauty as one man has seldom seen;

therefore will I be grateful to die in this little room,

surrounded by the forests, the great green gloom

of trees my only gloom - and the sound, the sound of green.

Here amid the warmth of the rain, what might have been

is resolved into the tenderness of a tall doom

who says: 'You did your best, rest' - and after you the bloom

of what you loved and planted still will whisper what you mean.

And the ghosts of the birds I loved, will attend me each a friend;

like them shall I have flown beyond the realm of words.

You, through the trees, shall hear them, long after the end

calling me beyond the river. For the cries of birds

continue, as - defended by the cortege of their wings -

my soul among strange silences yet sings.

—Edward James, Poet 1907 - 1984^{[citation needed]}</poem>

• E. James, "The Bones of my Hand", privately printed, London 1930.
• E. James, The Glass Omnibus, privately printed, London 1934.
• E. James, The Gardener Who Saw God, 1937
• Edward James wrote four poems "Sécheresses" and Francis Poulenc put them in music for choir 4 mixt voices and piano ro orchestra in 1937
• George Melly (ed), Swans Reflecting Elephants, My Early Years, Autobiography of Edward James (Weidenfeld, London 1982).

Portrait sculpture[link]

An early marble portrait sculpture of Edward James exists, by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

References[link]

External links[link]

Ballet portal

• Edward James, Builder of Dreams, documentary film by Avery Danziger
• Surreal Eden: Edward James & Las Pozas, by Margaret Hooks
• West Dean, the Edward James Foundation