The issues in this opera are not about anti-Jewish Nazism at all. None of the main characters are Jewish at all and this is an uncomfortable truth for modern audiences to ruminate. Non-Jewish reviewers have found it hard to pigeon-hole this as some Jewish-owned-holocaust Jew-written opera. Jewish reviewers seem lost also as they too have been caught off guard. Unlike a lot of the current publicity and present-day Holocaust perception this is not about regular forgiveness although for some of the characters they may wish it was. There is no resolution for these characters. The gulf that divides perpetrator and victim is too great.

All along you are sort of lead to believe that it is indeed Martha, Liese’s victim, on the ship. Yet, it is never actually revealed that it is. Liese never approaches the woman she thinks is Martha. She’ll send the porter to find out details (which never confirm unequivocally it to be Martha) and Liese’s husband also stops himself from confronting the mystery woman (preventing himself from confronting truths were it indeed Martha). Despite all of her melodrama and anguish over the mystery woman, the perpetrator Liese clearly just wants personal deliverance without confronting her past. We, as post-Holocaust observers, expect a warm fuzzy resolution like Schindler’s List so hope and imagine it is indeed Martha. But Medvedev has set a comfort zone trap for us.

You can see, though most won’t want to, that Martha actually never interacts with Liese on the upper ship set (the real-time now). Is Liese’s desire for forgiveness and resolution genuine? No, she really only seeks it from Marta. All the others were just “enemies of the state” so she cares not about them. She never sees people who remind her of those. But Martha “the Madonna of the barracks” – only she will surely provide Liese with that self-indulgent latter-day warm fuzzy religious paradox and allegorical closure Liese so craves and prays for. And she’ll save her husband’s reputation and job also. Her concerns are entirely selfish. The perpetrator, Liese, expects forgiveness – and chattering-class audiences expect it to be given too. And this is how you are led through the first half and most of the second act.

The victims however …well, the victims are all dead as I read it. And that’s the twist. Except it isn’t a twist – it’s reality. Almost all of the holocaust’s victims are simply dead unable to tell their tale. The first people who knew the story of the first dead and were told to pass it on, they too were murdered and so on. Occassional notes-in-a-bottle have turned up at concentration camps and there is the Anne Frank Diary but the reality is that these are just a half-dozen five minute glimpses into ten million tragedies. Of the millions that were murdered there deliberately was left no onward story to tell so complete was the destruction of the victims on every level. Every aspect of their humanity was reduced to the atomic infinitesimal. Thus the dead cannot scream “never forgive never forget”. This is why there is time spent on minor  characters in the first act. Some reviewers didn’t see why time is spent on these characters when they don’t go anywhere, they begrudge the time spent on them. But this is to miss the point. The opera for them is not one where some latter-day post-Holocaust warm cozy inter-faith 21st-century group hug resolution discovers their deaths not to have been in vain. No, it is a black abyss of a gap. Their tune here is not where their notes are but rather where they aren’t. These characters don’t go anywhere because they can’t – they get murdered. This is so uncomfortably against convention for triumph-over-adversity deliverance-type narratives that critics feel the wheels leave the track in being led across this territory by Medvedev and Weinberg though without perhaps realizing why there was suddenly nothing beneath the wheels.

The very final scene is also designed to trick the modern viewer back to their comforting assumptions of deliverance. Indeed, you too can, if you willfully disregard all the clues, imagine like Liese that somehow, things did work out for Martha, that somehow she escaped and found peace or that the two talked things through after the final scene ends. But, this a trap for the audience.

There is no ambiguity offering the prospect of any comforting closure – for Medvedev just wants you to explore how bourgouis and liberal chattering-class you are.  Simply either you engage in wishful thinking for a happy end or you won’t. If you hope all worked out well you morally become the same as the perpetrator expecting forgivness for the unforgivable at a small cost of ignoring the inconvenient truths that really you know Martha is actually dead.

If you confront the cold reality of the final scene – Liese doesn’t interact directly to Martha – it is plain Martha indeed is dead all along, there is no twist. Worse, Liese knew at the back of her mind Martha could “never forgive never forget” right from the outset as she was dead. Liese, having the luxury of being alive, just indulgently engages in mental gymnastics vainly re-imagining herself as a victim and engaging in bankrupt moral equivalency. This itself shows that Liese, hitherto a vain stupid lost and naïve woman, is actually just as horrific a monster as all the rest of the Nazis she’s tried to imagine herself away from. She sits silently in her finery uncomprehending the true depths of her moral depravity as the scene plays out. The scene and music ends gently fading away into blackness.

If you, as an audience member, hope these characters found peace themselves one way or another Medvedev shows you how you’ve just dragged yourself down to Liese’s moral level trying to excuse past wrongs by self-indulgently trying to create meanings.

The message is that crimes which go against basic humanity are inexcusable on even the lowest levels. No religion-inspired paradox or allegory or revisionist view can excuse or explain murder apart from black-and-white seeing it for what it is. Neither does it matter who the victims are, Jewish or otherwise. The issues are black and white – as indeed is the set essentially. The upper ocean liner set being white is where Liese wants to be yet her past drags her back down to the black.

The clue as to what the opera is really about is in its very first opening lines and also the very closing ones. But I will let you listen closely and discover those for yourself!

Musically this stands alone. Is it Shostakovich pastiche? No. It’s Weinberg. Reviewers have simply not heard enough Weinberg hence compare it with his contemporaries. In the program they compare it with Britten – despite the very first line of their comparison admitting Britten never met Weinberg nor is there evidence either of them knew eachothers music.

The score is incredibly subtle throughout. There are no cheap thrills whatever some reviewers say. Having seen this I seriously doubt some of them genuinely sat though a live performance at ENO but likely half watched the 2010 premiere DVD whilst typing something else. There’s unusual things in the score too and I counted 8 percussionists playing at one point though percussion just points up parts here and there and doesn’t go full tilt throughout. The orchestration is beautiful and the strings writing is awesome. Listen out for the raspingly loud low sustained tuba notes. Some of this slightly echoes 1960s works like Fellini’s “Otto e Mezzo” with flashback and musically, although far far further out than Nino Rota, there are deliciously angular ’60s jazzy moments for some ship-bound action.

As a new work the staging is apt and works very well. You need to think about it a few days after seeing it to better understand it. Being a new work there are many layers of complexity to the libretto which the stage settings presently expose quite well but possibly subsequent re-workings of the staging may more readily observe deeper and different meaning from the same work.

Overall : go see this now - likely to become one of the standard repertoire pieces for the future.

Adam Ramet

Me, I’ve got a better idea for you all : just pull a funny ugly face for the camera and use that. People will see an honest face and remember someone capable of having a good laugh rather than someone who is trying to maintain appearances against the tide of time.

At the very worst it’ll scare off people you didn’t really like from a few decades back from contacting you. Everyone has seen your ugly funny face – surely you’ve done it for a few laughs on a great night out before. It’s the one thing that never changes about you. You might be a little grayer, a little more wrinkled but those funny faces you pull will always look the same and, dare I say, no doubt improve with age.

You can tell old friends all about your great life you have these days and how you’ve got on in life and even if half of it’s true they’ll probably not believe you. But, show ‘em an ugly funny face and they’ll know you’re still a barrel of laughs and good company deep down inside.

Go on then! Start a new trend! Change your Facebook profile picture for the daftest face you can muster!

Depth, originally uploaded by Adam Ramet.

Living in the UK is sometimes quite bizarre. The rest of the world rages on around us but we, as a nation, continue to ignore the elephant in the room. Our underlying sense of superiority over other nations is, I think, the root cause of this blindness. Our warm fuzzy comfort zone is but a fatal weakness. At present the world economy is in a state of re-alignment. It’s not turmoil nor a “credit crunch” : to believe these concepts apply to the present state of affairs is merely another denial scenario. At present we have a plain simple re-drawing of the boundaries. In the 21st century the flow of money and trade will be different to how things were in the 20th century. The east is on the ascendant as is the thirst for energy.

We really have nothing to offer but advice and expertise. As we usually make such a demonstrable mess of our own and other nations affairs why anyone should seek to avail themselves of British advice and expertise is not clear. Perhaps to do so represents money well spent taking an abject lesson in how not to do things.

How the sub-prime banking disaster will affect the UK is not really grasped here. In America a homeowner may hand back the keys to their property and in so doing divest themselves of all liabilities for any shortfall in equity. In the UK this is not so, one may hand back the keys to bank but the bank may still come after the borrower for any shortfall deficit. It would appear then that as the present banking situation deepens banks in the US will find themselves in a much worse position than the equivalent UK institutions. In the US central government is now stepping into the lending void left by financial institutions who are tightening their belts. The government has worked out that it is cheaper to become a regular mortgage lender on more favourable terms to borrower than private instutions than it is to bail out failing banks when there is a lack of money in the system. Unfortunately “when America sneezes Britain catches a cold” and a predictable and almost certainly manageable crisis for the US will easily lead to an predictably mis-managed crisis in the UK.

What the future holds for the UK is uncertain. What is certain however is that there is an elephant in the room. And the room is indeed small.

Tree and Sky, originally uploaded by Adam Ramet.

Well, that’s nearly the end of my creative renewal fortnight. One new camera, two lens filters, a trip to the shore at Jamestown VA, an evening with the USAF band under the sunset at Williamsburg, a drop in to the National Marine Corps archive and exhibition at Quantico and good ol’ Southern Hospitaliteh!

Having reeled off in excess of 2000 pictures in under 2 weeks, penned who knows how much new material and ideas I am nearly ready to get back on that plane to stale old England. A check of the Met Office shows I’ve missed no summer at home at all. It’s been every bit as wretched as usual.

Still, I’m probably supposed to say something like it’s good to be going back to the country whose greatest export is “democracy”. People in England often smugly chant this mantra. What is overlooked is that so much of it was exported at some time in the distant past that they ran out of the stuff and exported everything in stock ultimately leaving the UK with less democracy at home than place where they exported the stuff to.

Any return to the UK then is to face everything as stale in the world as is the stench of those greasy savoury pastries that assails ones nostrils upon arrival at London Heathrow. These make certainly the most unpleasant welcome of any international airport around the globe. The British, knowing little else apart from possessing a firm belief in the fact that they are right, persist with medieval pastries. In England any greasy flaky pastry is regarded as a part of the national culinary “heritage”. If the love of a greasy sausage roll is a mark of English patriotism (and I suspect that in many ways it is!) then give me a bucket of American southern fried chicken any day. Throw in 2 sides of corn and a large Coke while you’re about it too!

It must have been a year later and again it was real late one Sunday evening and I’d just caught the last train at London Victoria to Brighton. I dashed down the platform and hopped into an almost deserted carriage. The train pulled out the station about 30 seconds later. I’d done the journey hundreds of times before. As I sat down a guy, about my age, sat opposite asked if I’d like his newspaper. He said he’d bought two while he was waiting and had read one. Fair enough – they sell the following day’s papers on the concourse late at night each day depending how quick they roll off the press. In town you can regularly buy, say, Monday’s newspaper at 11pm Sunday night and so on. I offered him the cover price but he wouldn’t take a cent. I insisted, out of common courtesy, but he’d have none of it – fair enough, so I thanked him. Hey, I had a really weird deja vu moment.

I started reading the paper. Again the weird deja vu. I put it down to deja vu. I glanced at the guy again, he looked familiar. Weird thing deja vu ya know. I started to read the paper again. No. Something was nagging my mind. This was the weirdest deja vu of my life – surely something so utterly obscure and innocuous couldn’t have happened before – could it? Another couple minutes passed. I looked at the guy again. He really did look faintly familiar. I figured I’d have only spoke to the guy randomly for about 20 seconds possibly one or even two years before so how could I accurately remember a passing random face but, yes, it did seem the same guy. He started to look nervous. Now I knew something was up. “Excuse me,” I said to him “this might sound really nuts, but haven’t you done this before – offered me a newspaper.” And then it got really weird. He said “Yes.”

The train rattled on into the night, I read my paper, he read his. Then it struck me that something was not quite right here. I couldn’t put my finger on it. The easiest way I figured to resolve the weirdness would be to pay him for the paper. This would bring clarity to any unknown motives one way or the other. I spoke to him again. I offered him the payment, as he’d been generous twice and it would be rude of me to twice accept the generosity of a stranger. He’d have none of it, so I persisted. “Fine,” I said “then you must have the paper back – I cannot accept it” and I reckoned that the best way to handle this game was not play it. “I can’t take the paper back – it’s yours and you must keep it” he said. So I was right, this guy was playing some kind of game – with newspapers. “OK,” says I “you need to explain yourself – either take the money or the paper or come up with a pretty good explanation sharpish – this train’s going real fast and I’m not amused at this moment.” At this he knew I meant business. Most people know when I mean business – there’s really no getting confused over that! “Give me a minute” he said “I’ll explain.” And then I sat there while he wrote down on a small piece of card something. He passed me the card and said “here’s the explanation.” On the card it said “the newspaper is yours, you must keep it, deprive me of it and refuse to pay.” This was all entirely novel to me. Sensing I’d been drawn into someone else’s control fantasy I figured I had two options. Either go along with it and humor the guy as harmless or not play the game. I chose the latter one. I insisted he either took payment or the paper – neither an option in his fantasy.  Again he declined. But I insisted. Twice. He said this had never happened to him like this – turned out in this dysfunctional way. Too bad for him and he now had a classic Adam “my way or not your way” set of two options to choose from. He accepted payment in the end. The train rattled on into the night he got at some station along the line, I got off at the last stop and went home to bed.

But, it doesn’t end there. Several years later I was round at a friend’s house. He was showing me some crazy fetish website / publishing idea of his and harping on about all the weird things people are into. He had some chat forum up on screen and we were laughing our heads off as he chatted to various screen-names making out like he shared their fantasy. After going through about two dozen of the most bizarre and obscure recess of human sexuality we both roared with laughter as he clicked on someone whose moniker was “newspaper”-something or other. As the friend chatted online with this screen-name suddenly out the blue this old fuzzy memory of the weirdest 10 minutes of my life from several years came back. “Stop!” I cried out – “hey, do you remember that story I told you years ago about the guy on the train and the newspaper?” and then I went back over it. “Maybe it’s the same guy!” and how we did laugh. The chatroom conversation drifted on and I said to the friend to get around to the subject of how he gets off on realizing his fantasy at which point pass the keyboard over to me and I’d seamlessly continue the conversation. At a convenient point I took over the keyboard. After drawing out of him how he regularly goes on the last late night train back home and dishes out papers I dropped into conversation that it was a darn weird thing but that that had happened to me on the same line! I gave him a few details and he likewise and he was horrified to discover that I was the guy in that carriage several years before who’d rumbled his game. I was the only person ever who’d ever rumbled him and no one had ever done so since either. We ended the chat amicably. He offered to come down one evening so he could watch me read, specifically, a broadsheet newspaper – Financial Times, Telegraph, Times. He doesn’t get off on watching people read tabloids. It’d be better if I could wear a suit and tie and flick fag ash over him. I’d have to take the paper and not pay him and tell him it was now mine also though.

I declined politely.

We turned the computer off. Sometimes that’s just the best thing you can do.

I am a member of just one such society and we are fast approaching our fiftieth year. Fifty years ago it was formed by people looking back to some perceived golden age approximately thirty years before then even. Eighty years. By my reckoning to really enjoy the society as originally conceived I’d have to be at least a centenarian. For the last fifty years the society has fallen into the rut of formalizing nostalgia. We still at meetings regularly play hours of music from the 1910s, 20s and 30s. It started off as nostalgia then evolved unchallenged into some kind of societal etiquette. Modern-day regulars have grown a genuine love of the music and it’s become a curious end in itself but is it really what we were all about at the start? Through failing to identify our purpose and maintain a forward direction have we pre-booked our ride to decline by making the enthusiasm merely “of it’s time”.  

Take a look at the vintage record market. Consider 78rpm discs – the 10 inch old heavy brittle black things. There’s very little market for these now. It’s nearly a half-century since they ceased production as technically obsolete. The remaining money in them is from now from rather elderly rock n roll enthusiasts. There used to be a healthy market for 40s swing music a few decades ago but you can’t give the stuff away now. In the 60s there was a jazz and danceband nostalgia revival for material from the 20s and 30s but again that’s really now all dead. The very earliest gramophone record collectors used to fetishize the earliest acoustic recordings of Caruso and pay great sums for the same. Some of this material still does fetch good money but in the main these markets collapsed decades ago. A record dealer friend of mine recently chucked in the towel stating that the bottom had now fallen out of the rock music vinyl market. CDs have been here for a quarter century and new technologies are already rendering those fast obsolete too.

I don’t have a museum personality and abhor them. As nice as I find it to collect all forms of old music I strongly believe music should be heard not seen. Contrary to popular conception there is no old or new music really. If we play an old tune to a new generation it is new to them. Old records should be played and shared, old sheet music should be put on the piano desk and played and shared. I don’t dream than a modern generation should rediscover and make mainstream again, say, 1905-style instrumental ragtime but there is plenty enjoyment to be derived from music previously unheard for any new generation to discover. I’ve spent the last quarter-century on my own personal voyage exploring music from at least a century earlier in addition to the stuff of today. The two are not mutually exclusive – I see as a two-for-one deal. There’s so much to explore and enjoy – easily enough for several consecutive lifetimes. You cna extend the same sentiments to whatever you like – old cars (drive them!), old books (read them!) etcetera.

People form preservation societies as humans can’t cope with change and like to live in the comfortable past. For all societies the original point of preservation for preservation’s sake will always be lost once the founding generation are dead however with a little lateral thinking future generations may continue to derive the same pleasure and that surely is what it is all about.

Challenge all those dead-head museum mentality enthusiasts out there in the world! Don’t let them do it! To the secretive lonely old weirdo anoraks who hoard stuff just say boo! Don’t deal with them. They are their own worst enemy and their behavior ultimately destroys everything they seek to preserve.

By enthusing a new generation to interact with preservation subject material whether it be old music, vintage vehicle, musical instruments etc, a healthy forward moving enthusiasm may be created and maintained. It’s a great way of super-sizing your life : you get more for less. Share your enthusiasms with the rest of the world.  Share! Loudly!

July ended with me reading up on the American Civil War sat here in Stafford VA. What is the most disturbing thing about the war was not it’s causes and denoument – but the involvment of the country I come from in exacerbating matters. Back home in Britain people are so smug simpering and self-righteous about how we, the English, abolished slavery years before those beastly Americans. Of course this is really a sly lie. There were never slaves in servitude in the UK in the same way as there were in US plantations. In the mid 19th century Britain was the top consumer of raw cotton to produce cloth. After the UK abolition of slavery we purchased ever larger quantities of the stuff, quite clearly most of it must have been produced with slave labor. British industy turned a blind eye, drove a hard bargain in order to keep raw material costs down and exacerbated the problems. Of course, there were other issues being fought over but the UK didn’t help one jot. What I find really twisted is that Britain still does exactly the same to other countries and their underpaid workers in the 21st century. We talk about creating ethical policies and “monitoring” all the while cheap goods flow in. Reality is this : we could never afford to pay the real cost for all this stuff as we’ve screwed up our economy long ago. But we delude ourself that we are somehow a cut above the rest. Just like a new report out in the past few days shows UK emissions of CO2 have risen 18% during the period we’ve been snootily lying to the rest of world we’ve reduced emissions 5%. Clearly this was some kind of trade lie in an attempt to sell “British expertise” overseas. We have to sell “expertise” and talk ourselves up now as we don’t manufacture anything at all. Why should we manufacture when we can employ people by proxy in foreign countries on virtual slave-labor terms. Ah, “free” trade!

It’s heartening then to start August far away from mean ol’ Britannia. America may have it’s shortcomings, where on earth doesn’t, but at least it knows what it’s core values are and where it’s heading. Only the most curmudgeonly of cynics could ever think otherwise. Wait ’til I see that rotten lot outside Starbucks when I get back home!

Middle Street Synagogue – Brighton

Originally uploaded by Middle Street

This is really an ongoing pet-project of mine. I first walked thru the doors of this place about 10 years ago and thought “Wow!”. Mind you, everyone who walks thru the door has the same reaction the first time they see the place.

It’s a large interior crammed full of things to see. Most people just see it on that single level and don’t really stop to appreciate the fine detail. For me what is exceptional though is the fine detail and the fact that the whole is so overwhelming one tends to just visualize the interior as a whole rather than see the smaller pictures.

Each corner and facet is really its own little universe within a universe. To reveal the true depth of this buidling’s beauty we need to explore all these macro universes. Each stained glass window is a harmonious whole in its own right however each panel has it’s own ambience up close.

Starting to capture the interior in different ways is complex. Light shines through the windows fleetingly, at steep angles and varying intensities depending on time of the year and external weather. The opportunity to capture certain moods may only occur for a few days each year before the sun’s angle rises or falls and different parts are illuminated. Sunlight only falls on certain spot at certain times of the year – it’s a little unpredictable.

Here’s my most recent arty music pic video. I’m sat here working on another – jeez, selecting pics is harder than choosing the music even!

I’m bored of my matchbox-sized digicam. Folk ooh-and-aah over the photos but it’s time for a DSLR. One camera-purchasing trip and 700 test photos over 2 days later I’m getting the feel of it. Taught my father-in-law about ISO numbers, f-stops, shutter speeds. He’s started taking some pretty neat pics also now.

Maybe I’ll try and catch some fireflies tomorrow on camera.