While working in a library is not the job I want for the rest of my life, I do enjoy it when I have minor triumphs on the job.

Right now we’re doing a display on the clerks’ desk for books and other things the staff has enjoyed. It seems the stuff I put up checks out faster then anyone else’s.

So far I have put up and had checked out either the exact same day (sometimes within as little as five minutes of me putting it on the shelf) or the next day the following -

Books:

Why Faith Matters by Rabbi David Wolpe.

The Wish List by Eion Colfer

Jewtopia: The Chosen Book for the Chosen People by Bryan Fogel & Sam Wolfson

The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz

Movies:

Casablanca (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Out to Sea

Labyrinth (Anniversary Edition)

In fact, the only one that hasn’t checked out so far is Michael Crawford’s autobiography – Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String – but maybe that’s because so few people know who Michael Crawford is. I did however today before closing put out the DVD of the PBS special My Favorite Broadway – The Love Songs which Michael Crawford (as well as Barry Manilow and Brent Spiner) is in. So hopefully someone will check that one out and then see Michael’s autobiography there. If not my boss might end up checking it out anyway as I know she’s been meaning to read it herself.

And yes, those are all Amazon.com links. Heck, I really want to earn a gift certificate. So hopefully my minor triumph at the library means I’ll get some triumphs as an Amazon associate. Probably not but a girl’s got to try.

I’d still rather be singing for a living, however. I’d rather win a Grammy, but I’ll take what I can get.

I just finished reading Alex Ross’ excellent history of classical music in the 20th Century “The Rest Is Noise”.

It’s a book with many enjoyable anecdotes but I particularly like this one:

“Teacher and student would have long arguments about music’s role in society; once when Wolpe pointed out the window of his Greenwich Village studio and exclaimed that one must write for the man in the street, Feldman looked down and saw to his own ironic delight, Jackson Pollock walking by.”

Tonight I attended (thanks James Tracy at www.anatheist.net for getting me tickets!) a debate/discussion between Rabbi David Wolpe and Christopher Hitchens at the La Jolla Jewish Community Center. Wolpe is generally considered America’s most well known Rabbi, and Christopher Hitchens is, well, known as an inflammatory anti-theist and anti-religionist who usually has either a drink or a smoke in his hand. You can find videos of previous debates here and you can see Rabbi Wolpe debate Sam Harris here.

Even though Hitchens is a sharp and entertaining guy, I still think I prefer Sam Harris, Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins to Hitch, in general. That said, and even though I suspect that Hitchens was drunk, he absolutely mopped the floor with Wolpe. It was fun to see them go back and forth, but if you want my opinion, Hitchens was landing haymaker after haymaker, while Wolpe retreated to many tired old atheism myths and claims about the origin of morality. I mean, I think discussions like the one they had are fascinating to me almost not matter what, but Wolpe didn’t put up much of a fight. In fact, he nearly conceded that God and religion are man-made SEVERAL times, and Hitchens had to encourage him to take back his words on more than one occasion.

But what really interested me was that Hitchens posed an interesting challenge to Wolpe and the crowd. He even offered a reward if someone could give an answer. “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”

So I thought I’d pose that question to CCD. What do you think? Is there an answer to this question?

CCD,

Ben

On Friday I had dinner at the Elephant House Café, located near the Royal Museum of Scotland on George IV Bridge in Old Town. Famous for being “the birthplace of Harry Potter”, J.K. Rowling used to visit to nurse a cup of coffee and her child while writing the first Harry Potter novel on a meagre government arts grant. It’s right between the university campus and the Royal Mile and my dinner with salad and bread cost only seven pounds. It’s scruffy and lovely.

After dinner I went up the street to the Hub, the Edinburgh International Festival’s offices on the Royal Mile. Wolpe! was held in the main hall, upstairs above the ticketing centre. As the seating was unreserved, when I arrived at half past seven there was already a queue all the way to the front door of the building. The performance wasn’t due to start until eight. I decided not to join the masses and moved outside to enjoy the late sunlight, where a scalper offered to sell me a ticket. Twice.

All the buzz at the Hub raised my expectations somewhat for what was described in the program as a staged concert. It was produced by Muziektheater Transparant from Brussels – a “company that shifts the boundaries between opera and music-theatre, blending the old and the new.”

The concert was of Stefan Wolpe’s music, but it wasn’t quite a concert. It wasn’t quite theatre either. I got the impression it was more like a guy playing the piano, a guy singing and a woman talking about how much she admired the composer. And what she thought about life and Marxism too. As described in the program:

Wolpe! is not a pedantic lecture on Stefan Wolpe’s work but an attempt to find out his attitude towards the era in which he lived. An artist who creates is on a journey, following a path whose outcome he does not know.

While I enjoyed the music and found the experience interesting, I clearly wasn’t getting as much out of it as the gentleman sitting next to me who shook the whole row of plastic connecting seats with his barely repressed chuckles throughout the entire performance. Understanding German might have been of assistance here.

The majority of music in Wolpe! was agitprop songs written by Wolpe between 1929 and 1933.
For example, ‘Fantasy and the Day After Tomorrow”:

And when the war broke out again,
the women said no!
and locked up brother, husband and son
in their homes.

Then in every country they went
right up to the leader’s house
and held sticks in their hands
and dragged that high-ranking scum outside.

And thus they laid over their knees
all those who had ordered the war:
the bosses of banks and industry,
the minister and the general.

They broke many sticks in two.
And many big mouths fell silent.
Crying was heard in every part,
but nowhere was there war.

The women then returned back home,
to their brother, son and husband,
and said the war is over!
The men stared out through the window
and did not look at the women…

These songs were performed in German, but the anecdotes and philosophical posturing was all in English. Some of the later was quite irritating – like the final comments:
“If you spend time reflecting, you run the risk of having a new thought.”
There is nothing quite as annoying as performers giving audiences moral lectures through arty platitudes. You have to either be quite dull in the head or very desperate to agree with the author to enjoy that sort of thing. But the audience seemed to like it. And the story of Wolpe’s life does fit in very well with the overarching ‘artists without borders’ theme of the festival.

Wolpe’s music is apparently very difficult to perform, and he was continually frustrated during his life by poor attempts from his students to play his pieces (and during his life he lacked the recognition necessary to have much of his music performed professionally). His daughter – who herself became a very successful concert pianist – was interviewed recently and said that her father would be “bouncing in his grave with delight” and the thought of his work being performed at the Edinburgh Festival.

I am glad that it is possible to find a crowd of three hundred people in Scotland to watch a weird concert-play fusion of Wolpe’s music, anecdotes from his life, Marx quotes, bible quotes and sung agitprop. I’d be happy to hear more of Wolpe’s music in the future. I just hope I never have to go and see this again.

Wolpe!
Muziektheater Transparant

29/08/08
The Hub

Les 17 et 18 avril, l’Amphithéâtre Bastille rend hommage au compositeur Stefan Wolpe, grande figure de l’antifascisme qui dut s’exiler aux Etats-Unis pour fuir les nazis, auteur d’une oeuvre influencée par le Bauhaus, par le mouvement Dada et par Brecht. Dans le sillage de Wozzeck, le chef-d’oeuvre d’Alban Berg, deux soirées pour aller plus loin dans cette musique qui porte en elle toute une part de l’Histoire du XXème siècle.

Le compositeur Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), l’une des grandes figures de l’antifascisme et de la lutte sociale à la fin de la République de Weimar, dut s’exiler aux Etats-Unis, doublement menacé en tant qu’intellectuel et Juif. Sa musique et ses chansons destinées au cabaret, au théâtre de rue et au combat social devinrent très populaires. Dans l’oeuvre de Wolpe, le modernisme du Bauhaus et le mouvement Dada s’entremêlent. Son oeuvre se rapproche de Maïakovski, Brecht ou Schwitters, mais aussi du free-jazz et des musiques du monde.Caroline Petrick, mise en espace
Viviane De Muynck, voix
Johan Bossers, piano
Gunnar Brandt, ténor

Amphithéâtre Bastille
Représentation 17, 18 avr. 2008 20h
Prix des places Plein Tarif 16€, Tarif réduit 14€, Jeunes 10€