Ubik poem

For Tony Boucher

ich sih die liehte heide
in gruner varwe stan
dar suln wir alle gehen,
die sumerzeit enphahen

I see the sunstruck forest
In green it stands complete.
There soon we all are going,
The summertime to meet.

Spindler's list

Sorry, more DWM - but I just found out more about the career of William Spindler, the German industrialist who figures large in the Isle of Wight Undercliff's 19th century social circuit. Ventnor was the final destination of a far darker story of the dangerous political climate of Bismarck's Germany.

Faust (2011)

Johannes Zeiler (left) as Faust; Anton Adasinsky (right) as Mauricius

Another film recommendation: we just borrowed the video of Faust, Alexander Sokurov's 2011 film adaptation of the Faust legend. Russian-made, with dialogue in German, it's a "free fantasy" adaptation of the legendary Faust -  a man who sells his soul to the Devil - as portrayed by Goethe and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus.

In the Sokurov film, Heinrich Faust is a disillusioned middle-aged academic working in a seedy hospital in a seedy little German town, struggling to understand the nature of life through dissections and dabbling in alchemy. Penniless, he fails to pawn a ring, and buys hemlock to commit suicide. However, at this point he's visited by the sinister moneylender, Mauricius, who drinks the hemlock instead. It doesn't do anything but give him stomach pains, which amazes and intrigues Faust, who takes up the moneylender's offer to show him a side of the town he has never seen.

As the two wander the town, which is populated with grotesques and eccentrics, discussing life and theology, it becomes clear that Mauricius, though not overtly identified as the Devil, is something very strange. He shows Faust some corrupt highly-placed people who are his clients, and gets kicked by a carter who evidently knows his nature. Undressing in a laundry, he is revealed to have a monstrously deformed body with (as a woman comments) "nothing in front" and all his tackle at the back. While at the same laundry, Faust becomes attracted to a young woman, Margarete (played by Isolda Dychauk - a casting straight out of Vermeer). Things turn considerably for the worse when Mauricius starts a quarrel in a tavern by calling the wine "donkey-piss", then in the further mayhem caused by his miraculously making quality wine spout from the wall, engineers it that Faust fatally stabs a soldier with a meat fork. The two go to the soldier's funeral, when we find that the soldier is Margarete's brother; Mauricius uses the situation to broker a meeting between Faust and Margarete. However, despite her attraction to him, the (correct) rumour is spreading that Faust was the murderer, and he further blows his chances by admitting his guilt to her. He goes to Mauricius, who finally springs the deal: Faust's soul for one night with Margarete. Faust signs.

Mauricius conducts Faust through a tunnel to Margarete, who is standing on the edge of a lake, evidently contemplating suicide. Faust embraces her and they both fall into the water. What happens next is a little enigmatic: is the fall a metaphorical one of falling into passion, or literal?  I took it as the latter: that the pact has granted Faust's wish in letter rather than in spirit: that Faust and Margarete are both dead, and Faust has spent the night with her only in the sense of being in the same place.

The next morning, Faust appears to wake, with grotesque figures creeping toward the window of the room where he's lying with Margarete. Mauricius aids him in fleeing town, and they ascend a rocky landscape, meeting characters we know to be dead, as Faust (we assume) is too. But Faust finds the wilderness interesting, and is fascinated by the workings of a volcanic geyser. His curiosity about the world revived, he finally tires of Mauricius's nihilistic gripings, buries him under rocks, and confidently departs into the vast glacial landscape.

The film has had mixed reviews. It was a hit at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, where it premiered, but has also been described as "ponderous". It may be; its plot is a tapestry of detail, character, and strange encounter, all relevant to the theme, but not all directly relevant to the central story. I did, however, find it gripping, and its atmosphere intense; it's filmed in Iceland and in various Czech castles, all in visually beautiful subdued pastel (Faust's blood as he signs the pact is about the only saturated colour in the whole film). The film is carried by Anton Adasinsky's charismatic performance as Mauricius, combining the appearance of decrepitude with flexibility and sudden vigour; I didn't know until Googling that Adasinsky is a mime, clown, and veteran of physical theatre. And he does bring a certain dark Boschian humour to a rather solemn movie, in the sheer bizarreness of the characterisation, as when Mauricius reveals his Cronenberg-style body in the laundry (the New Statesman review described it as "as if a Doctor Who villain had strayed into Ingres") or the exchange when Mauricius prepares to defecate outside a church (the horrified Faust tells him he can't do that - he agrees, and instead, with much off-camera groaning, does it inside). If you like weird and moody films, check it out.

- Ray


moviemaniacsDE trailer



the more action-focused atlanticfilmtrailers trailer

Klaus Nomi sings Purcell

Stream of consciousness takes you in odd directions. What with the recent weather, I just bought a new body warmer, which due to the padding is somewhat higher and wider in the shoulders than I like - so much so that it reminds me of Alex's description of his gang clothing in A Clockwork Orange ...

We wore waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders ('pletchoes' we called them) which were a kind of mockery of having real shoulders like that.

...and also of the stage costume of the late Klaus Nomi, a German countertenor with a weird Expressionist / punk / camp stage presentation - one reviewer called him "a Weimar version of Mickey Mouse" - and a remarkable vocal range that he used to tackle material from classical opera to covers of 1930s songs and pop across various decades (he had scarcely crossed my mind since I saw him in the early 1980s on BBC2's The Old Grey Whistle Test).

The above video was the one that immediately struck me: The Cold Song (aka What Power Art Thou?) - a countertenor staple now (though originally written for bass) from Purcell and Dryden's semi-opera King Arthur. A creepy, strongly chromatic and melancholy aria, it's sung by a supernatural character, the Cold Genius, when Cupid attempts to rouse him:

What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow?
See'st thou not how stiff and wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath?
Let me, let me freeze again to death.

I'd never heard of this work, but as described in the Wikipedia article King Arthur (opera), it seems a bit strange. In part, this is down to the 17th century format of "semi-opera", a kind of musical where not all the characters sing (in the case of King Arthur, only supernatural ones and secondary characters do). It's also an 'everything but the kitchen sink' affair, not based on conventional Arthurian legend but about "Arthur's endeavours to recover his fiancée, the blind Cornish Princess Emmeline, who has been abducted by his arch-enemy, the Saxon King Oswald of Kent" with various supernatural characters from mixed mythoi: Germanic gods and goddesses, Cupid and Venus, and invented ones. There's also a deal of musical and literary borrowing. Dryden's libretto - see King Arthur - or The British Worthy at OperaGlass, has been considered by a number of musical scholars to be a political allegory, in its original form a commentary on the Exclusion Crisis during the reign of Charles II.

Here's a nice video of its Passacaille section from the film England, My England - The Story of Henry Purcell, giving an idea of what its sumptuous production as a 'Restoration spectacular' costing £3000 and "excellently adorned with scenes and machines", might have looked like.



- Ray

Lebensbaum

This is one of the images that dates the previously-mentioned Wonders of the World: the Lebensbaum (Tree of Life) wooden sculptural facade to Bernhard Hoetger's 1931 Haus Atlantis in Böttcherstraße, Bremen.

As Wonders of the World puts it,

The outstretched figure here shown does not represent Christ, but embodies the idea common to all religions of self-sacrifice for an ideal. The surrounding Sun Disc connects this with the myth of Odin, whose annual death was said to give birth to the New Year.

This is more than a little of an underexplanation. As can be seen in the detailed images at the House Atlantis page on the Böttcherstraße website, the figure is a kind of Odin-Jesus symbol, surrounded by a wheel with runes and a quotation of the episode in the Poetic Edda where Odin suffers self-sacrifice to gain the power of the runes ...

Ich weiß, daß ich hing am windigen Baum neun Nächte lang, vom Ger verwundet, dem Odin geweiht, ich selber mir selbst.

I know that I hung on a windy tree, nine nights long, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself.

... while the three-pronged structure at the base is recognisably an Odinist "Toten" rune (aka death rune). There are more images at Jeff Diehl's Haus Atlantis Odin page, and this particularly clear one in Lionel Gossman's 2009 biography of Marie Adelheid, Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the "Nazi Conscience" (page 10):



The symbolism of the piece draws on a manufactured tradition of Nordic-Atlantean myth favoured by top-ranking members of the Nazi party. Furthermore, the whole Böttcherstraße architectural project, bankrolled by the decaffeinated coffee magnate Ludwig Roselius and designed by Hoetger, was dedicated to the prime mover of these myths at the time, the lay historian-scholar Herman Wirth (see Nationalist Uses of the Atlantis Myth in a Nordic Framework, Vanessa Ward, 2008). Hoetger, however, fell out of favour when his expressionist sculpture was denounced as "degenerate art"; he settled in Switzerland, where he died in 1949.

The Lebensbaum sculpture was largely destroyed by fire following Allied bombing in 1944. Unlike the rest of the street, it wasn't restored (unsurprising, perhaps, given its history and symbolism) but the frontage of Haus Atlantis was eventually given a redesigned restoration in 1965 with a circular brick-pattern mosaic by Ewald Mataré, another German artist whose work had been considered degenerate.

Böttcherstraße now remains a major artistic and cultural tourist attraction in Bremen.

- Ray

Guernica - Kaigenrei

While finishing my tax, I've been listening to the 80's Japanese band Guernica. They did strange but often compelling stuff: avant-garde and often atonal cabaret/electronica with Jun Togawa as vocalist, all with retro 1920s-1930s styling reflecting the Westernised element of the pre-WW2 Japanese imperial era.

At the moment my favourite piece is the one embedded above and below in two versions: 戒厳令 (Kaigenrei in Romaji), whose title appears on the web variously as Martial Law in English or Belagerungszustand in German. The chorus section from 0:55 to 1:38 recalls early 20th century totalitarian or patriotic anthems - I think it's a brilliant tune. But although it seems very familiar, I can't find it on Musipedia. The version below is a powerful slower-tempo arrangement for conventional orchestra, sung in German with a lot of Sturm and Drang.



This seemed a strange conceit until I realised that Guernica's lyricist Keiichi Ohta wrote the lyrics in German originally. The song is about the repression and fear of living under totalitarian rule, with strong allusions to Nazism, judging by these lyrics I found (the German is a little fractured in places):

Die Autobahn in der Nacht
Durchfaehrt im heftigen Regen
Der Asphalt wird das schwarze Plastik
Den Tropfen der Frontscheibe
Warnt das Autoradio vor Kreis
Die Belagerungszustand reisst die Nacht.
Ach, Ach, Belagerungszustand
Ploezlich erscheint das schwarze Beiwagenmaschine.
Der schwere Ton des Offizerscheibes
Hilfeschrei eines reinen Maedchens
hoert man hinter "Gesperrt" hevor.
Die Belagerungszustand reisst die Nacht,
Ach, Ach, Belagerungszustand

Die Sirene heult jetzt in der ganzen Stadt.
Wie Mantel Totenengels
Der Regen Faelt auf den roten Backstein,
Wie die traurige Traene deren,
die nach Hoelle gewhen. Wie traurige Traene.
Die Voegel singen die Fried und die Freiheit, aber
klingt es leider hoffnunglos.
Das Gebeht der Frauen zum heiligen Kreuze
weckselt ja mit dem Fluch ueber schwarze den Teufel.

- lyrics from this Guernica fan page

There's another video here - Martial law - Belagerungszustand / Guernica - which brings out a powerful irony to the song by juxtaposing the pageantry of Nazism to these downbeat lyrics that portray its dark side. I don't know if the anthem section is a genuine Nazi tune - if not, it's a superb pastiche of one. But if it is, its upbeat and disturbingly inspirational flavour is completely subverted by Belagerungszustand's lyrics. Loose partial translation:

The siren now wails over the whole city
Like the mantle of the Angel of Death
...
The birds sing of peace and freedom, but
the sound is sadly hopeless.
The homage of women to the holy cross
becomes the curse of the black devil.

If you read Japanese, the official Guernica site is here. If you do, I'd be delighted if you could feed back any information on the background to Kaigenrei if you see any. What was its inspiration? Why did a Japanese songwriter choose to write a song in German? Is that compelling catchy anthem a real Nazi tune or a pastiche?

Addendum I like this one too: Denrisou karano Manazashi (which means something like "Gaze from the Ionosphere") I haven't the least idea what the lyrics are about, but it has a Weill-like urgency and atonality to it.



- Ray

Songs from the past

Further to the previous post Hardy's poetry: downbeat but great, I just had an e-mail from Ken Trickett Voll of Buena Vista, Wisconsin. His own story is unusual in itself; Ken has part-German, part-Devonian roots, arising from his father Gert being interned at POW Camp No. 42 (Exhibition Field Camp), Holsworthy, during World War II. Ken's mother, Carla Trickett, was a maid in service at Soldon Manor; the two met briefly during one of Gert's several escape attempts and married after the war, emigrating to the USA to avoid prejudice.

Anyhow, to the point of the post: Ken sent me some sound files of partially-restored cylinder recordings and notes belonging to his late mother. According to her diaries, they comprise a trio of songs recorded by Cecil Sharp during a tour of Dorset and Devon in the early 20th century. In his notes Sharp writes of Percy Grainger being present at some of the recording sessions, which places the likely date as 1908, when Grainger is known to have been collecting tunes while on a concert tour of the Westcountry. 2


The first, unnamed, song is performed by Cedric "Brassy" Nupson, a Hampshire-born thatcher and keen fisherman living in Starcross. Unfortunately all but the first two and the last verse were too damaged to recover. "Mr Nupson regaled us with accounts of catches of unlikely size," Sharp wrote, "after which he sang a version of The Unfortunate Rake." This broadsheet song spawned many variants including The Streets of Laredo, and the highly interesting thing in this one is its Exeter setting (it mentions the St James district, near Exe Bridges) which makes it a 'missing link' between the English versions and the American St. James Infirmary Blues.


The second, also by Mr Nupson, is a bawdy song called My Angledog (possibly NSFW); I won't ruin the point of the song by explaining (see footnote 3 for spoiler if you must). It is rather fun because it's a glimpse at the kind of material Sharp obtained as raw recordings; as is well known, he typically bowdlerised his transcripts).


The third, which was the reason Ken got in touch, is a recording of Lydia Garger of Wareham, Dorset, singing a song called Great Things. They recorded in The Angel, Wareham Forest (the pub renamed The Silent Woman after featuring in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native). Sharp noted "Liddy" to be a tiny but formidable lady, almost a dwarf, who before singing needed to warm up on a prodigious amount of chewing tobacco, along with pale ale "which she downed with great gusto despite her diminutive stature. As she drank she told us of the folly of her youth, when she had 'left her head and heart on the dance floor'. We soon had no money left, but Percy organised a whip-round and all was well". The lyrics of Great Things are the Thomas Hardy poem of the same name I recently mentioned, showing that Hardy wrote it nearly a decade before its publication in his 1917 Moments of Vision. (Of interest, the Mellstock Band have also set the words to music).

Ken tells me he has severe doubts about the pieces being autochthonous folksong, and I don't disagree. The literary origin of the Great Things lyrics pretty obviously suggest it to be a parlour performance piece; conversely there's something of the flavour of music hall about My Angledog - its title word is the only regional dialect word in the song. Not that this necessarily matters: highbrow songs such as Thomas Moore's Oft in the Stilly Night and faux-rustic ones such as the charmingly naive Buttercup Joe have become well-established on the folk circuit.

A quick search through the British Library 19th Century Newspaper online archives rather confirms my suspicions of non-amateur origins, in that The Era for 8th January 1881 finds a Miss Lydia Garger getting star billing in pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Exeter. It's a sufficiently unusual name and the dates look about right. Then as now, I suppose, pantomime was a valuable, if stereotypical, work opportunity for persons of restricted growth. I've had no luck finding any more about Cedric Nupson or why he was called "Brassy".

However, I'm not too bothered; Ken's find is absolutely fascinating, and I'm sure more background will come to light. Enjoy!

1. Files copyright Ken and Hannah Trickett Voll, 2010.
2. See p.125, Percy Grainger, John Bird, 1999.
3. But if you need a spoiler, see Passing down old Devon dialect, Laura Joint, BBC Devon, for "angledog".

- Ray

Unusual string quartets

A couple of recommendations. On October 6th Lily (my employer) and I went to a performance by Methera, and it was outstanding. From the official website:

Methera unites the rich texture of the string quartet with the depth and integrity of traditional music from England and beyond. Four fine young musicians with individual traditional styles weave old and contemporary tunes into the tapestry of the string quartet, exploring the power and diversity of sound it has to offer

The crossover between folk and chamber music isn't new. The description reminded me of a detail I heard a long time back about Turlough O'Carolan, the great Irish blind harper, being influenced by Corelli; see these Albuquerque Baroque Players programme notes for interesting discussion of such fusion going on historically. But Methera brings a very fresh and very English spin on the concept.

Methera's lineup is standard - two violins, viola and cello - but, unusually, Methera play facing inward to tightly coordinate their playing. You can hear some of their pieces at www.myspace.com/methera, which give an example of the flavour of their music - even if the online samples don't do justice to the dynamic range and the marvellous atmosphere, intensity and intimacy of the live performance. If you get the chance to go to one - it'll have to be their 2010 tour now - both Lily and I highly recommend them.



And then there's the Finnish rock band Apocalyptica (see Wikipedia and their official site) whose core lineup is four classically trained cellists. They produce a remarkable fusion of metal and string quartet styles, much of their work comprising covers of songs by heavy metal bands such as Metallica (for instance, "One", embedded above, is Metallica's "...And Justice for All"; and another of my current favourites by them, "Fade to Black", comes from the Metallica song of the same name). Their collaborations are excellent too: check out "Helden", a German cover of David Bowie's "Heroes" with vocals by Rammstein's Till Lindemann, and their performance of Rammstein's "Seemann" with the scary Nina Hagen.

Addendum: November 9th 2009. "Helden", the German cover of "Heroes", is especially pertinent today, which marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The lyrics, Bowie said, were inspired by seeing a couple defying the system by making love on top of the Wall. Rammstein themselves, by the way, have East German / Berlin roots, as does Nina Hagen (I'm wondering if the strongly trilled R is a regionalism).

- Ray