Opera: accessibility vs snobbery

Posted on 15 April, 2004 by adrian

I hate it when someone dismisses a whole cultural genre or style out of hand, but I have to be honest here. I just do not like opera. I’ve tried my best, listening to examples of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, but the result is always the same… “Hey, that’s really great music. Mmmm, yeah… I like that. Oh wait… er, do you think maybe… oh, please. Nooooooo! PLEASE DON’T SING!”

However, I’m prepared to believe that part of the problem (only part, mind) is that I’ve never heard/seen an opera performed live. This can often be the key to better understanding of any musical style. Unfortunately, opera doesn’t traditionally lend itself to the “try before you buy” approach (which is where the Proms really excel). Until recent moves by both Covent Garden and the English National Opera to add cheaper ranges of tickets, prices were generally very high. Even now, you’ll need to pay at least £40 unless you want to be stuck right at the back or way over on one side.

So… it’s nice to hear that the Savoy Opera is about to start its first season at the Savoy Theatre on the Strand. You’re looking at £35-50 for the highest ticket price, with a sensible range of options below that. They probably won’t have the same clout as the two rivals in attracting the really big names, but I don’t have a problem with that. A £20 ticket for the live opera equivalent of Naxos CDs? Sounds like the sort of thing that might tempt me along.

On the Today programme this morning, impresario Raymond Gubbay came across well, making a good case for the existence of the Savoy as an alternative to the Big Two. As he pointed out, both the Royal Opera and the ENO have received masses of public and Lottery funding and can therefore operate at a totally different economic level. The accusation of bland populism will never be far away, and I hope the Savoy can avoid falling into endless re-runs of the Magic Flute. Mind you, after hearing what Michael White (formerly of The Independent) had to say about the Savoy, I hope it succeeds in any way possible…

“…Raymond is appealing to first-time opera-goers who, in a way, are innocent opera-goers. They’re not in the best position to judge whether they’re being given something that’s good or bad.”

Social responsibility or just snobbery? I suspect the latter. Thank you, Mr White, but when I want help in my cultural life from some newspaper critic, I’ll be in touch. Until then, I’m perfectly capable of making my own judgements about art, thanks.

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The Easter break, in pictures

Posted on 14 April, 2004 by adrian

Forcing my reluctant brain back into work after the Easter break. Can’t think of much to write about, so here’s a few pictures of what we managed to do over the four-day holiday…

FRIDAY

Thanks to the 2-for-1 offer currently running in collaboration with National Rail, we headed up to Whitehall to explore the Cabinet War Rooms. War history isn’t something I spend a lot of time exploring, but so much of British life during the 20th century was formed by the influence of the two world wars, so I’m always intrigued to learn more. The CWR is one of those ideal museums… sufficiently small and specialised for a two-hour visit, and with a good mixture of easily digested overviews and precise detail.

Living in London, it’s easy to become complacent about all the tourist attractions. In part, this is a perfectly reasonable defence mechanism; there’s just so much to do here, at every cultural level, so you have to focus on the special things you can’t do every day. A new play, a gig by a favourite band, an interesting restaurant or whatever.

But even after living in this metropolis for ten years, I love doing the tourist thing from time to time. Everyday life takes us through the city on such rigid, predictables routes, where a ten-minute delay on the tube or train can leave us seething for an entire evening. When you’re a tourist, every street is worth exploring, and if you miss a transport connection, you just go somewhere else.

(On SATURDAY, I dutifully accompanied Nicola to Swindon for the crucial top-of-Division-Two derby against Bristol City. If his spectacular late equaliser is anything to go by, Rory Fallon is going to be a player to watch over the next few years.)

SUNDAY

One thing I haven’t become complacent about during the last ten years is the Surrey countryside. Surrey tends to get a bad press, the name suggesting miles and miles of suburban avenues and ostentatious greenbelt houses occupied by stockbrokers. That’s not without truth; a large part of Surrey has seen the same fate as Middlesex, being swallowed up by Greater London. However, most of the county has survived this fate, and you can easily spend a day walking through ancient woodland, rolling chalk downs and quaint villages, barely seeing a soul. We walked south-west from Dorking, working our way up the complex series of wooded hills topped by Leith Hill, Surrey’s highest point (don’t get too excited – it’s only 300m high).

 

MONDAY

Back into London again for a walk along the Thames, Putney to Barnes…

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Freedom of speech again

Posted on 8 April, 2004 by adrian

The British National Party leafleted my street yesterday evening. I take this to mean that one of their candidates intends to stand in this ward in the forthcoming local council election. They’ve stood in other (more deprived) wards in previous local elections, but I think this is the first time one of their leaflets has fallen onto my doormat. I only hope my neighbours are aware of who the BNP are, and what they really stand for.

Standing with leaflet in hand, I was unsure of what to do. Despair at this filth landing on my doormat? Accept their right to freedom of speech, given that the leaflet contained nothing illegal? Run down the street after them, shouting abuse?

What I actually did was to screw the leaflet into a ball and hurl it out of an upstairs window, watching it flutter to the ground, unnoticed (to my annoyance) by the five or six party activists working their way down the street. Hardly a display of gritty resistance; I think I’ve probably done the same with a Conservative Party leaflet in the past. I thought hard about whether or not to provide a link to their website, but I’m not going to. If you don’t know what the BNP is, I suggest you use Google to find a broad range of independent information.

I can also react with my allegiance, displaying a poster in my window from the party I support. However, although I’m most likely to vote Liberal Democrat in a general election (being a disenfranchised lifelong Labour supporter who would never vote Conservative for reasons of fundamental ideology) I don’t think their local council is particularly great… they seem to have the same smug inevitability as the Labour Party do nationally. I don’t feel a strong desire to demonstrate my support.

Maybe it’s time to stop displaying “Vote for XXX” posters in our windows. The feelings of apathy and electoral powerlessness have created a climate where “Don’t Vote for XXX” would be more appropriate, so maybe I should do that for the BNP.

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In praise of BoingBoing

Posted on 8 April, 2004 by adrian

With all those links to so many Wonderful Things appearing every day on Boing Boing, I find myself becoming more and more selective about what I actually click on. It’s a shame, but real life has a habit of getting in the way, and there’s only so much surfing time in a day. That said, though, I’ve been in danger of following every link just lately. A couple of back-to-back gems from yesterday, repeated here for the (modest) extra propagation potential I can provide…

This Goatse tribute page made me laugh out loud several times. It’s not quite as crushingly non-worksafe the original Goatse (if you don’t know what that is, read this worksafe Wikipedia entry) but you may want to leave it until the boss is out of the room.

And then there’s the story of the bilingual wash instructions on a US-made laptop bag. The French section, along with the usual clothing label details, contains the text “We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.”

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In the land of the careless, the man with a spellchekker is king

Posted on 1 April, 2004 by adrian

So it took me three days to notice the typo in that last entry. Whatever… ;-)

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Paul Ford’s Passivator

Posted on 29 March, 2004 by adrian

Ouch. I like to think that I have a competent grasp of my native language, even though I don’t claim to be a virtuoso performer. I’m not a writer, as such. Well, I’m a writer in that part of my work involves writing for a guitar magazine, but I’m not a Writer. Nonetheless, I like to poke fun at bad spelling and grammar in commercial and civic publications and I can do the smug, ironic little chuckle at the famous split infinitive at the start of Star Trek. What’s more, I harbour a secret yearning for the day when I’ll pluck up the courage to walk up to an ice cream van and, with the full benefit of the classical education I never had, ask for “Two Magna, please”.

So, anyway… the point. Paul Ford’s Passivator is a very amusing little tool (compatible with Safari, Opera and Mozilla browsers; if you’re using IE, you need a new browser anyway) which highlights adverbs and passive verbs in a piece of text. Drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar and click it whenever an overly adverb-laded or suspiciously insufficiently active piece of text is loaded into your browser…

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Soon, you’ll all be using this word

Posted on 23 March, 2004 by adrian

Blog. Blogging. Blogger. See Jack blog.

For a hobby/fad/lifestyle choice which is (or isn’t, depending on who you believe) taking the materialistic portion of the world by storm, it’s a pretty stupid name. Childishly lopping off an unwanted syllable isn’t generally a sure-fire way of creating a great buzzword (yes, you people who refer to this box as your “puter”, I’m talking to you… stop it now).

Also, whatever the etymology, it’s a pretty ugly word, occupying the same phonetic ballpark as blag, bludge, bilge and burglary. Well… yeah, okay… that’s not entirely inappropriate, given some of the available product, but imagine my delight when I noticed that my ever fragrant friend Rick Booth had come up with a much better word: Fuwking. Frequently Updated Website Keeping. See? Much better, and more importantly, it’s a cool acronym. Say it now. Say it over and over again, and before long everyone will be fuwking.

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You have no mail

Posted on 22 March, 2004 by adrian

The postman didn’t call today.

My work involves a number of pieces of printed music being delivered to me each month, I subscribe to a couple of magazines and I’ve recently been selling lots of CDs on Ebay, and have been receiving several cheques. So the non-appearance of the postman is unusual, but not unheard of.

Far more alarming, though, is the total lack of email. As usual, I turned the computer on around 9:00, opened up my mail client and checked for new mail. Nothing. It’s now 11:20 and I just checked again, in case there had been a server problem the first time. Nothing. I even logged into my mail server via the web interface, just in case something was preventing the messages from being downloaded. Nothing.

Why am I even mentioning this? I’m not expecting anything important, and it’s a pleasant surprise not to see the usual 10-15 items of nightly Viagra/Penis/Mortgage spam coming down the wire. I guess it just shows how any routine, no matter how dreary or mundane, can act as a comfort of sorts; a “normality index”. I’m glad to have the kind of psychological stability which allows me to realise that not all types of abnormality are bad. I shall celebrate by using my untainted bandwidth to download some more Frank Zappa bootlegs…

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Brussels II

Posted on 17 March, 2004 by adrian

So, anyway… after spending a pleasant, if cash-strapped, day in Payottenland, we got the bus into central Brussels (after a brief worry that our last Euros wouldn’t be enough for the fare. Yay for Belgium’s cheap public transport… only 80 cents each).

My last experience of Brussels (1996, I think) was of a jaw-droppingly beautiful main square, an incontinent little boy and a huuuuuuge building site. It was a rainy day, too, and we got lost, walking miles out of our way, so maybe my memories were somewhat jaundiced. However, they were building a whole load of new EU buildings, so all the good bits were somewhat overshadowed by the mess and disruption.

Now, though, there’s a lot more shape and form to the city, although it’s pretty obvious that Brussels is (despite its administrative status) no different from London in the way that new buildings are slapped onto older buildings with no concern for context or continuity of form. The good bits are still very good; any tour of the city must start with the Grand Place…

And then of course there’s plenty of cafe/bars to explore, punctuated by old churches, art galleries and more bars. And yes, the Manneken Pis. But there was still that problem of money. Even in the heart of Brussels, we found a surprising number of bars where credit cards were just not accepted. No problem, we thought, we’ll just get Euros from cash machines; after all, if we get too much, we’ll have plenty of other opportunities to use them. That is, of course, if you can find a cash machine that takes anything other than Belgian cash cards. No kidding… there are very few cashpoints in central Brussels, and of those, we only found one (the Citibank near the Gare Centrale) which would accept Visa cards. I mean… Brussels, Europe… HUH?!

But never mind. It might be an odd place in some respects, but Brussels has a lot of charm. It’s difficult to say just how much of the city would exist without tourism and the EU (a lot of the highly recommended cafes seemed to have a passing clientele which would briefly appear en masse as the guided tours stopped and started; we were unusual in wanting to stay for two or three drinks) and it’s a shame to see just how much of it has been unsympathetically rebuilt over the years. For a country so small (anywhere is day-trippable) Belgium has an impressive array of stuff to see and do… Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, WW1 battlefields, the Ardennes, Brussels. Okay, most of that would be a downright turn-off to the sort of person who just wants a relaxing week in the sun with plenty of cheap lager on tap, but they can find that elsewhere.

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Brussels I

Posted on 16 March, 2004 by adrian

I’m always up for a trip to Belgium, as documented here before (this time last year and in pre-archive days). Last Friday, I and my usual three travelling companions set off, cheap Eurostar tickets clutched in hand, for a long weekend of Belgian fun.

Arriving in Brussels, our first stop was Beersel, in the heart of Payottenland. Our mission here was to find some genuine Lambic beers as well as having a look at a part of Belgium away from the usual lace’n'chocolate tourist trails.

After a night in Beersel (witnessing the bizarre sight of respectable middle-aged Belgians getting tipsy and dancing their butts off to a mixture of Tyrolean oompah music and cheesy Latin pop) we spent a large chunk of the next day exploring part of Payottenland. Let’s put things into geographical perspective… this is an area only 10km from the centre of a European capital city (the equivalent in London would be somewhere like Wood Green, Acton or Tooting). There are plenty of railway lines, motorways and industrial canals, just as you’d expect, but you can also see surprisingly rural scenes…

Yep, it’s a real contradiction. It’s suburbia (lots of hideous Essex-style dream homes in evidence) but it’s also countryside, and you can easily see the high-rise centre of Brussels in the distance. Typifying the rural aspect was the fact that we just couldn’t get hold of any cash. Anywhere. Presuming that, like everywhere else in Europe, we’d be able to use Visa cards in most cash machines, we hardly took any Euros with us. Big mistake. All of the cash machines we found were only suitable for Belgian bank cards. You’d never guess that there was a big European Union administrative base nearby and you’d equally never guess how little our cash opportunities improved in the heart of Brussels. More later…

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