Tampopo (Juzo itami, 1985), “the first ramen western”, is one of the all-time great genre-defying films.
It’s a profound, exuberant, nuanced meditation on food, sex, dedication, and life, with a succession of wonderful personalities led by truckdriver Gorō as he helps widowed Tampopo to perfect the noodles (“sincere, but lacking in character”) that she serves in her struggling little restaurant. Here’s a trailer:
Every single scene is beautifully crafted, but vignettes include
the French restaurant scene
an etiquette class for women on how to eat spaghetti properly.
the hobo scene (shades of Steinbeck’s Tortilla flat and Sweet Thursday, and indeed Hanshan), moving from veneration of the master to slapstick, and sequeing into
the most erotic scene ever. Breaking an egg will never be the same again (nor, for that matter, will the Mahler Adagietto—throughout, the choice of music is brilliant).
Call me irreverent (cf. The sermon, and We are miserable sinners), but Jesus jokes can be entertaining. There’s a plethora of websites, so here I’ll stick to some of my more niche favourites. Even last-supper jokes are a whole sub-genre—here’s an audio variant:
Apart from his brilliant anagram tales, my talented friend Nick, living in Lisbon, has a nice little number going with football reports featuring Jesus, coach of Sporting (as the team is ingenuously called). Among pithy headlines that Nick has spotted are
Jesus pays homage to his Father
and the brilliant
Jesus is very happy with his eleven
(Judas clearly relegated to the bench there—hinting he wants a transfer).
Despite his health travails, Nick has managed to update me. Receiving a head-butt à laZidane,
Such is the warm British welcome for foreigners [onlyjoking] that we can play this game too. Moving onto the Brazil forward, I enjoyed this Guardian headline** that appeared but briefly online—all the more apt since it was Holy Week:
Jesus restores some pride after thrashing
When he took a penalty for Man City against Burnley goalkeeper Nick Pope:
And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which—face it—was practically designed to make a man’s stomach and shoulders look good.
Not to be outdone, Beatrice Dalle is available for seminars on the history of religion:
I love Christ because he invented bondage.
No trawl through the archives would be complete without Family guy, where Jesus is a regular Special Guest Star, such as:
I must confess [sic] that there are already several related posts on this blog—Chumleys vinegar, more from Alan Bennett (WWJD, feet, and the Christmas card), the Matthew Passion incident, and so on. If you consult the latter post, we can all end with a resounding chorus of Always look on the bright side of life. For “blasphemy”, see also Patricia Lockwood.
In my defence, Daoist jokes are also a niche source of entertainment, like the train deity (also featuring Moses) or the “switch off the light” story. [Call that a defence?—Ed.]
We should celebrate the wonderful regional diversity of European folk cultures, notably their musics—Ireland, Romania, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and so on. But styles are just as varied within WAM (Biber, Nielsen, Janáček…).
Even among the great composers born in the 1680s, apart from Bach and Handel, let’s not forget Rameau—an early flowering of the distinctive voice of French music, leading on to Berlioz, Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen (not to mention Germaine Tailleferre and Lili Boulanger). If we’re conditioned by some notional one-size-fits-all baroque style, it’s most rewarding to immerse oneself in Rameau’s whole sound world—the rhythms, the harmonies, the melodic contours and ornaments, the instrumental timbres…
Perhaps we can hear “Tristes apprêts” from Castor et Pollux as a French companion to the Buxtehude Klaglied or When I am laid in earth—not to mention the hymns of mourning of the Li family Daoists. Among several fine renditions, here’s Sabine Devieilhe, backed by soulful bassoons:
Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux, Jour plus affreux que les ténèbres, Astres lugubres des tombeaux, Non, je ne verrai plus que vos clartés funèbres. Toi, qui vois mon cœur éperdu, Père du Jour! ô Soleil! ô mon Père! Je ne veux plus d’un bien que Castor a perdu, Et je renonce à ta lumière.
Rameau in Athens, 1981-ish.
In my early days as a barocker I did some Rameau opera for Lina Lalandi, but alas I began working with John Eliot Gardiner just too late to take part in his ground-breaking performances.
His 2007 Prom was enchanting (pre-echoes of Ravel?). The very first piece I had heard him conducting live (those funky bassoons again!) was the Entrée pour les Muses of Les Boréades (from 18.09)—further enriched here by magical (suspended!) staging, wonderfully at ease with modernity in HIP performance:
Rameau’s operas alone are a rich canon to explore.
The “search” of my title is partly inspired by a popular genre of Tang-dynasty poetry, wherein the poet embarks on an arduous climb in search of the abstruse wisdom of a mountain recluse—only he isn’t in. Typical Tang titles include “On seeking the hermit of West Mountain and not finding him” 尋西山隱者不遇 [English version here].
Now mountain recluses, with their archetypal long white beards, are definitely not the type of Daoist I am looking for here—”pacing the void” that is rural north China, my search is for ordinary peasants who perform rituals among the people; and the arduousness of the journey is more likely to entail getting stuck in endless traffic jams behind coal-lorries, and enduring banquets with cadres in unsightly modern county-towns apparently bereft of all tradition. So the concept still has a certain resonance; in the immortal words of Alan Bennett’s clergyman, “Some of us think life’s a little bit like that, don’t we?”
Talking of seeking Tang hermits, I think of Gary Snyder‘s translations of the Cold Mountain poems.
In a fine post on “the Facebook of the 7th century”, the splendidly named Randi Hacker sparks classroom engagement by introducing his students to Tang poems written by men who had come to visit other men who were not, alas, at home—status updates, indeed:
Some of the more convoluted and humorous titles of Tang occasional poems from the “Sorry to Have Missed You” category:
Going to Visit Censor Wang on My Day Off and Not Finding Him Home
Walking in the Hills and Looking for the Recluse, But Finding Him Not In
Spending the Night in Reverend Ye’s Mountain Chamber. I was expecting the senior Mr Ding, but he did not come
Answering the Poem Left by Mr Su, Nominally of the Bureau of Forestry, When He Stopped by My Villa at Lan-tian.
I love the “Nominally” in that last one. I might add my own yet-unpublished
On Visiting the Hunyuan Bureau of Culture, Only to Find a Bunch of Sozzled Apparatchiks who wouldn’t know what Culture was if it Bit them on the Bum.
This will also chime in with the intrepid explorations of Hannibal Taubes in search of decrepit village temples—often either locked, or their precious Ming-dynasty murals plundered or covered over in cement.
At least on our recent fruitless search for the Dragon King temple in Jinjiazhuang we were compensated by a chat with the splendid hereditary yinyang Zhang Nan.
We’re by no means short of tributes to the late lamented Victoria Wood, but Rebecca Front’s new two-part radio series is particularly insightful. Like Alan Bennett, her whole output is an exploration of English social mores and a celebration of the language.
She was no “mere” comedian, but here I’ll just offer a personal selection—embarras de richesse, you may say (for more, see here):
“Honestly, who has sex on Christmas morning?”
“The Dalai Lama!”
“Well he must peel his sprouts the night before.”
I’ve loved you since the first minute you gave me extra gravy.
“Does she like Spain?”
“Well, she likes the majesty and grandeur of the landscape, but she’s not too keen on the bacon.”
Welcome to Music For Posh People—the game that takes all the enjoyment out of listening to music.
I can’t seem to find
… but I can offer you a banquette in the lower circle.
Meanwhile for the sinologist… for me, with my constant agonizing over the differences between ritual culture in north and south China, this tiny clip, from her “stable”, epitomizes the dichotomy, and gets me every time.
Sinologists will know this one, but it’s rather fine, and can come in handy every so often.
Zhang the Third is worried someone will steal his hard-earned 300 taels of silver, so he puts it in a box and buries it in the earth near his house. But he’s still worried someone might dig it up—so just to be sure, he writes a note on the nearby wall:
此地无银三百两 Cidi wuyin sanbailiang
Here there is no silver, 300 taels
His neighbour Wang the Second comes along and sees the note. As he digs up the silver and takes it off, worried that Zhang might suspect him, he too writes a note:
隔壁王二不曾偷
It wasn’t Wang the Second next door that nicked it
I once attended a talk in London by someone who had returned from an audience with a young boy in Qinghai identified as a “living Buddha”.* Her eminently English dénouement was worthy of Roni Ancona:
“And do you know what was so wonderful about him? He was so well-behaved!”
* * *
I’m sure you know the famous stories about how the young Dalai Lama was identified—not least the false teeth, which I cite it here in his interview with Jeremy Paxman, if only to contrast his encounter with Burlesque-only:
I read somewhere a story about you finding a pair of false teeth that had been lost which had belonged to the previous Lama. Is that right? Do you remember that at all?
One day I insisted I want to go to the room of the previous Dalai Lama and then I insist to open one box. And finally they found one with the teeth. Then I said “This is mine”. This was what my mother told me! I can’t remember.
Only the Dalai Lama can compete with the infectious laugh of Keith Richards—and there’s another pairing you don’t hear a lot…
Why bother traipsing halfway around the world to hang out in poor dusty Chinese villages, I hear you ask, when my home “village” of Chiswick offers such rich potential for local history?! OK, it’s not noted for its Daoist ritual; its cosy church fêtes can’t quite compete with the bustle of Chinese temple fairs; and doubtless any séances held there were rather different from those of the Yanggao spirit mediums—but still. For flamenco in Chiswick, click here; and for my culture shock on returning from China, here.
In that latter post I cite Nigel Barley‘s classic The innocent anthropologist, and talking of armchair ethnography, in a chapter bearing the fine title “Honi soit qui Malinowski” he has some wise words qualifying the demonising of missionaries:
It was something of a betrayal of anthropological principles even to be talking to missionaries: anthropologists have been obsessed with keeping themselves free of this taint since Malinowski, self-styled inventor of fieldwork, first issued his impassioned cry to the ethnographer to get off the mission veranda and go out into the villages. Still, I would be on my guard against the devil’s wiles and might save myself much time by talking to people who had actually lived in Dowayoland.
To my great surprise, I was received with much warmth. Far from being rampant cultural imperialists, I found the missionaries—except for one or two of the old school—to be extremely diffident about imposing their own views.
Evoking some fine work by missionaries in China such as Grootaers, he notes:
It was surprising how much work was being done on the local cultures and languages, translation work, pure linguistic research and attempts to adapt liturgy to local symbolic idiom; my own research would have been quite impossible without the mission’s support.
“Ethnomusicology at home” has an impressive tradition too: from Ruth Finnegan’s The hidden musicians (on the exotic musical rituals of the tribes of Milton Keynes) to wise analyses of WAM by Nettl, Kingsbury, and Cottrell, as well as Blair Tindall’s Mozart in the jungle.
* * *
I’ve already noted the leaning pillarbox of Chiswick. The Chiswick timeline project provides fine material on the area’s changing topography with artwork and maps (albeit not by Artisan the Sixth or Li Manshan), also now adorning the archway by Turnham Green station. Would that such material were available for Li Manshan’s village of Upper Liangyuan! This is just the kind of community project that can be achieved in a bourgeois enclave, even as desperate families are being incinerated a mere stone’s throw away in North Kensington.
This advertisement from 1882 (“Annual death rate under 6 per thousand”) is particularly drôle, evoking flawed campaigns like that for Chumleys vinegar:
“Come and live in Chiswick, your statistical chance of survival is relatively high”.
Even without getting onto Chiswick House, or Bedford Park and its fine architecture in the Dutch style, I’m intrigued to learn about the history of my regular swimming pool (see also here), the New Chiswick Pool—like the “old” and “new” musics of the Tang dynasty, and the stile nuovo of 17th-century Italian music, it was new when they chose the name. [1]
With their innovative architecture—including the double-decker changing cabins—and risqué mixed bathing sessions, this watery west London meeting place was a prototype for the classic art deco lidos, promoting freedom, frolicking and fun [a Chiswick variant on fado, football, and Fátima].
You can watch charming clips here, from 1924 and 1927 (“California hasn’t a monopoly of bathing belles or the latest in beach costumes”)—and many more on that site.
No matter what doom and gloom was going on elsewhere in the country [Phew–Ed.], the flighty, sprightly, bright young bathers of Chiswick’s “inland seaside” could be found embracing a sense of gay abandon.
But by 1981, the council found the lido (as it had become known) too expensive to maintain, and it was closed, amidst considerable—if perhaps genteel—protest. Half of the site became home to the Moldovian Embassy (“Not a lot of people know that”), while by 1991 the New Chiswick Pool was opened on the other half.
So that’s the background of my regular swimming pool; it’s closed for repairs at the moment, so it’ll be even newer soon (with or without the gay abandon).
In case you haven’t spotted my fictional address at the foot of the home page, I rather like it:
Priory of the Azure Cloud Bottle* within the Belvedere of Tenuous Obscurity, Chiswick
京西微玄觀內碧雲罐庵
*Azure Cloud Bottle: Bombay Sapphire
[1] See Picken and Nickson, Music from the Tang court 7, ch.3; for stile nuovo, among much analysis, I’m dead keen on Susan McClary, Feminine endings, ch.2.
I’ve noted the unlikely connection between Li Manshan and David Sedaris. Both are fine humorists, but the latter takes language-learning to the cleaners with his essay “Easy, Tiger” in Let’s explore diabetes with owls. As with Daoist ritual or any text expressed through performance, Sedaris’s literary ouevre works best if you read it in his endearingly whiny voice (for more on public speaking, see here, here, and here).
On trips to Japan, rather than adopting the sinister Teach yourself Japanese (which would be right up his street) he makes progress with the aid of the Pimsleur language program [sic]. But
instead of being provided with building blocks that would allow you to construct a sentence of your own, you’re left with using the hundreds and thousands of sentences that you have memorized. That means waiting for a particular situation to arise in order to comment on it; either that, or becoming one of those weird non-sequitur people, the kind who, when asked a question about paint color, answer, “There is a bank in front of the train station,” or “Mrs Yamada Ito has been playing tennis for fifteen years.”
BTW, the ability to adapt by using building blocks is just what Indian musical training provides. In WAM we don’t even memorise hundreds and thousands of sentences, we depend on reading them out of the score. FFS…
One of the things I like about Tokyo is the constant reinforcement everyone gets for trying. “You are very skilled at Japanese,” everyone keeps telling me. I know people are just being polite, but it spurs me on, just as I hoped to be spurred on in Germany. To this end, I’ve added a second audio program, one by a man named Michael Thomas, who works with a couple of students, male and female. At the start, he explains that German and English are closely related and thus have a lot in common. In one language the verb is “to come”, and in the other it’s “kommen“. English “to give” is German “geben“. Boston’s “That is good” is Berlin’s “Das ist gut“. It’s an excellent way to start and leaves the listener thinking, Hey, ich kann do dis.
My own German vocabulary extends only as far as the Matthew Passion, blut, ellenbogen [Wozzeck], and plötzlich—none of which are very handy when you’re trying to buy toothpaste—but I know it will expand exponentially once I get to grips with Nina Hagen and Ute Lemper. Evoking my own inept flailings, Sedaris comments,
People taught me all sorts of words, but the only ones that stuck were “Kaiserschnitt” which means “cesarean section”, and “Lebenabschnittspartner“. This doesn’t translate to “lover” or “life partner” but rather, to “the person I am with today”, the implication being that things change, and you are keeping your options open.
[…]
There’s no discord in Pimsleur’s Japan, but its Germany is a moody and often savage place. […] It’s a program [still sic] full of odd sentence combinations. “We don’t live here. We want mineral water” implies that if the couple did live in this particular town they’d be getting drunk like everyone else. Another standout is “Der Wein ist zu teuer und Sie sprechen zu schnell” (“The wine is too expensive and you talk too fast”). The response to this would be “”Anything else, Herr Asshole?” But of course they don’t teach you that.
For a trip to China he reaches the “Romance” and “Getting closer” sections of the Lonely planet phrasebook:
A line that might have been written especially for me: “Don’t worry, I’ll do it myself.”
Oddly, the writers haven’t included “Leave the light on,” a must if you want to actually say any of these things.
Sedaris doesn’t see politeness in foreign languages as much of a problem, recalling the phrasebooks of his youth,
where the Ugly American was still alive and kicking people. “I didn’t order this!” he raged in Greek and Spanish. “Think you can cheat me, do you?” “Go away or I’ll call the police”.
In my own ancient German phrasebook I’m still very taken by the script suggested by the sequence
“The chambermaid never comes when I ring.”
“Are you the chambermaid?”
And while we’re about it, don’t miss the classic “Look!” story.
I also look forward to a phrasebook of Yanggao dialect—for me, better late than never. For impressionistically-translated Italian guidebooks, see Towers and wells.
Doubtless I will chortle further over David Sedaris on this blog, but meanwhile (still in Let’s explore diabetes with owls) I note an intriguing parallel with the choristers’ famous kangaroo story (in “Laugh Kookaburra”):
It was around this time that we finally entered the bush. Hugh pointed out the window at a still lump of dirty fur lying beside a fallen tree, and Pat caroled, “Roadkill!” Then she pulled over so we could take a closer look. […] We walked toward the body and saw that it was a… what, exactly? “A teenage kangaroo?”
“A wallaby,” Pat corrected me. […]
“Hugh,” I called, “come here and look at the wallaby.”
It’s his belief that in marveling at a dead animal on the roadside, you may as well have killed it yourself—not accidentally but on purpose, cackling, most likely, as you ran it down. Therefore he stayed in the car.
“It’s your loss,” I called.
*UPDATED! Watch the last clip below only if you’ve seen the whole of the final series!*
We can now bask in a fourth series of The bridge on BBC2, more noir than ever.* It’s one of the great dramas “like ever“.
I realized it’s obligatory for TV cops to be damaged, but it remains a mystery to me how Saga could get, and keep, a job that demands such skills of personal interaction, at least a feigning of empathy (contrast the equally magnificent Sofie Gråbøl in The killing—no less troubled, but not hampered by Asperger’s).
This interview with the divine Sofia Helin is one of the best bits of acting since Klaus Kinski playing himself, as she transforms her personality at the flick of a switch:
And we can relish many more interviews with her on youtube too.
This clip is a tad niche, but her diction is a revealing aspect of Saga’s personality:
And a drôle, not to say macabre, language lesson:
To imbibe the passion the series generates, try Twitter #THEBRIDGE4, and the BTL comments under the Guardian recaps.
But don’t take my word for it—here’s a critique of an earlier series from Philomena Cunk, where she explains the technicalities of foreign languages:
The theme tune complements the mood. Its lyrics have defeated most people—here are some fine mondegreens:
BTW, I note that the timbre of the singer is akin to that of Henrik’s voice!
*Watch the clip below only after you’ve seen the whole of the final series!*
Just as I was lamenting the lack of public acknowledgement of the crimes of Maoism—by comparison with countries where regime change has enabled such necessary commemoration (see e.g. my posts on Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Hildi, Gitta Sereny, the work of Philippe Sands, the GDR, and the Salazar regime)—the new Wang Bing 王兵 documentary Dead souls, just shown at Cannes, is a timely reminder of his brave work and that of other documentarists and journalists, not to mention their interviewees, survivors of the late-1950s’ labour-camp system and the kin of its victims (see also this interview). Comparisons with the Soviet Gulag are inevitable (e.g. Kolyma, Solovki, The whisperers).
Case-studies of the system can be found both in factual reports and in novels by authors such as Zhang Xianliang and Yan Lianke. Research on the notorious Jiabiangou camp in Gansu has an estimable history (note also Sparks). Wang Bing’s project goes back to meeting He Fengming in 1995 (herself a Gansu camp survivor), whose husband died at Jiabiangou—resulting in Wang’s 2007 film Fengming: a Chinese memoir (here, with Spanish and Italian subtitles; also interview), shown at Cannes that year. From 2003 Zhao Xu 赵旭 began publishing his research on Jiabiangou, Fengxue Jiabiangou 风雪夹边沟. From 1997 Yang Xianhui 杨显惠 was visiting former inmates, and in 2003 he published his collection Woman From Shanghai: tales of survival from a Chinese laborcamp (English translation 2009). As Wang Bing began dramatizing these stories in a narrative film, he met more survivors from Jiabiangou, and The ditch was premiered in 2010—a deeply distressing watch (here with French subtitles):
And then, even before Wang’s latest documentary was released, the great activist film-maker Ai Xiaoming 艾晓明 (b.1953, another Beishida alumna later based in Guangzhou: following Ian Johnson’s interview, note his important book Sparks; for another interview, click here) filmed her six-hour Jiabiangou elegy: life and death of the rightists (2017)—in five parts, starting here:
The interviewees note the general desperation of the inmates’ families and the local population, themselves struggling to find anything edible. Yang Jisheng, whose book Tombstone is an important source on the great famine of the time, points out the political background in Gansu (for the famine and Wu Wenguang’s Memory project, click here; for the works of Frank Dikötter, here).
Wang Bing’s Dead souls is even longer, at 496 minutes—here are three clips:
* * *
That latter excerpt leads me to a subsidiary point about ritual and ritual soundscape, about suffering, and people’s lives—and in this case the suffering that we can, and must, document is that of the Maoist years.
My film Notes from the yellow earth (DVD with Ritual and music of north China, vol.2: Shaanbei) contains a lengthy sequence (§B) from a similar funeral—filmed in a village which indeed has its own traumatic memories. One might hear the playing of such shawm bands as merely “mournful”—indeed, that’s why younger urban dwellers are reluctant to hear them, associating the sound with death. And of course the style and repertoire of these bands took shape long before Maoism, based on earlier historical suffering. But we can only hear “early music” with our own modern ears…
So in the context of Wang Bing’s film the bleakness of the soundscape really hits home, suggesting how very visceral is the way that the style evokes the trauma of ruined lives and painful memory—slow, with wailing timbre and the “blue” scale of jiadiao, the two shawms in stark unison occasionally splintering into octave heterophony. For similarly anguished shawm playing, cf. playlist, tracks 5 and 6 (commentary here). For anyone still struggling, despite my best efforts, to comprehend the relevance of shawm bands, Wang Bing’s scene should be compulsory viewing. Similarly, since I often note the importance of Daoist ritual in Gansu, the camps there might form one aspect of our accounts of ritual life there.
As I noted in my post on the famine, this is just the kind of memory that the rosy patriotic nostalgia and reifications of the Intangible Cultural Heritage project are designed to erase.
It’s not as if the prisoners had been caught red-handed in plotting the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party. Nearly all of the interviewees insist they are loyal, patriotic party members, with some saying they were indicted for a small critical comment against a supervisor or splashing tears on a portrait of Mao. One interviewee recalls hearing how leading cadres were sending people off to “re-education” by random, just to prove Mao’s view that 5 percent of society is composed of “bad elements.”
Amidst a shameful wall of official silence, both Ai Xiaoming and Wang Bing, along with their interviewees, were subjected to harrassment while filming. It may seem nugatory to observe that technically the editing and structuring of their films is highly accomplished.
And these are just a few of many hundred such camps, with their countless victims. No less harrowing is a film by Xie Yihui 谢贻卉 on juvenile labourers in a Sichuan camp:
The independent film-making of Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie plays a major role in Ian Johnson’s recent book Sparks.
* * *
The simultaneous national famine, subject of a growing body of research, deserves a separate post, but meanwhile, here’s an impressive documentary:
* * *
Like “the German soul”, suffering in China isn’t timeless: it is embodied in the lives and deaths of real people in real time. People dying since I began fieldwork in the 1980s all had traumatic histories; at the grave their memories, and those of their families, are covered over merely in dry earth, ritual specialists only performing a token exorcism that doesn’t obviate the need for a deeper accommodation with the past.
Arguments for maintaining the stability of the state, avoiding chaos, are paltry compared to the duty to commemorate, to learn from history—for Europe, UK, anywhere in the world. Just a couple of examples: the destruction of the Summer Palace by British troops, and the 1937 Nanjing massacre. We should all owe loyalty to truth, to people; in China it’s an ethical duty, not least in the tradition of filial piety.
And all this may remind us how important it is to seek beyond the sanitized representation of “Chinese folk music”, or indeed Daoist ritual, both in China and abroad. The people shown in these documentaries are just those who anyone doing research in China will encounter—whether working on social or cultural life (for a classic ethnography of commemorating Maoism through the fortunes of a Confucian temple in Gansu, see here). The stories of suffering, however distressing, need telling (cf. Memory, music, and society).
While visiting Sachsenhausen recently I was reading Philippe Sands’ brilliant book East West street. In my post on Sands’ splendid Private PassionsI mentioned his film What our fathers did: a Nazi legacy, based on his extraordinary journey with the sons of two Nazi criminals who took utterly different stances on their fathers—essential viewing:
East West street is a kind of detective story, as Sands breaks through the silence to unearth gripping personal accounts developing from the remarkable Lviv (Lemberg) connection of two architects of mass murder (Hans Frank and Otto von Wächter—both, ironically, lawyers); of two legal scholars who developed a means of prosecuting it (Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin); and of the author’s own decimated family. Sands’ grandfather Leon Buchholz was almost the sole survivor from his entire extended family, making his home in Paris—and since he never talked about it, Sands had to do a vast amount of research.
Leon Buchholz (1904–97).
This also makes a good way of describing the debate (formulated at the Nuremberg trials) over how to define genocide and crimes against humanity, group and individual responsibility, which Sands is exceptionally well qualified to explain.
“Social inequalities coursed through Lemberg’s streets, built on foundations of xenophobia, racism, group identity and conflict”. In Ukraine he also visits the brave display at a museum in Zólkiew, where over three thousand Jewish inhabitants were murdered; here, by contrast to the memorial sites in Germany, the complexities of history are still highly sensitive. The film broaches the 2014 Ukraine unrest, and its complex links to the Nazi background.
Sands notes Britain’s objection to US President Wilson’s 1919 proposal to protect minorities, “fearful that similar rights would then be granted to other groups, including American negroes, Southern Irish, Flemings and Catalans”.(72)
After Lauterpacht sought refuge in England, arriving in Grimsby in 1923 with his musician wife Rachel, Sands notes his conservative views on gender: “individual rights for some, but not for the mother or the wife”. (83)
The stories of other characters are moving too, like that of Elsie Tilney, who brought Sands’ mother from Vienna to Paris in summer 1939 (117–36). He visits Lauterpacht’s niece Inka Katz, who in 1942, aged 12, witnessed the arrival of Hans Frank in Lemberg, saw her parents snatched away, and survived only by going into hiding and entering a convent:
Seventy years on, she retained a sense of discomfort. One woman, coming to terms with a feeling that somehow she had abandoned her group to save herself.” (102–4)
The Matthew Passion, which Sands chose in his Private passions, was a touchstone shared, with bitter irony, by both Lauterpacht and Frank (106, 302). The words of Frank’s devoted wife are chilling:
“He is an artist, a great artist, with a pure and delicate soul. Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland.” (223)
Sands even finds lyrics to a song by Richard Strauss in honour of Frank—the score “disappeared”, no doubt for good reasons of reputation. (253)
Otto von Wächter’s son Horst takes a similarly disturbing tack:
“My father was a good man, a liberal who did his best. Others would have been worse.” (242–6)
Conversely, Niklas Frank is justly proud of his utter repudiation of his own father (“what a beautiful castle—full of criminals”). It’s this impasse that forms the core of Sands’ film.
As Sands pores over family photo albums with Horst,
I was transported back seventy years to the heart of an appalling regime. But Horst was looking at these images with a different eye from mine. I see a man who’s probably been responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Horst looks at the same photographs and he sees a beloved father playing with the children, and he’s thinking that was family life.
As Sands and Niklas confront Horst—“friendly, warm, talkative”—with more and more documents proving the involvement of his father in mass extermination, their conversation deepens. In one of the most excruciating scenes in the film—in the very room where Hans Frank proudly announced the Grosse Aktion to enthusiastic applause from Horst’s father—Horst keeps wriggling out of all the evidence with which Sands confronts him. He always manages to find a way to sanitize the material, only able to describe it as “unpleasant” or “tragic”. (248–51)
While they all get on remarkably well, Sands can’t help revealing his exasperation:
Horst fills me with despair. I cannot accept that approach. It’s not just the lawyer in me, concerned with how one treats evidence, it’s much more personal than that: when I hear him speak of his father’s good character and actions, I hear him to be justifying the killing of my grandfather’s entire family.
In the midst of the killing, and still worrying about his marriage, Frank managed to find the time to implement another bright idea: he invited the famous Baedeker publishing company to produce a travel guide for the General Government to encourage visitors. Baedeker hoped the book might “convey” an impression of the tremendous work of organization and construction accomplished by Frank. […] The visitor would benefit from great improvements the province and cities having “acquired a different appearance”, German culture and architecture once more accessible. Maps and city plans were modernized, names Germanized, all in accordance with Frank’s decrees. […] A million or more Jews had been erased. (246–7)
Sands moves onto the capture of Frank and the Nuremberg trials, with the harrowing testimony of witnesses like Samuel Rajman (303–5). Frank appears to show more regret than most of the defendants, declaring “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased” (308–11); but, as with Fritz Stangl, his position remained elusive to the end (357–8).
The final section of the book discusses the judgement—indeed judgement itself. A vignette from Rebecca West, who took time off from attending the trials to visit a nearby village, meeting a German woman who
launched into a litany of complaints about the Nazis. They had posted foreign workers near the village, “two thousand wretched cannibals, scum of the earth, Russians, Balks, Balts, Slavs”. This women was interested in the trial, didn’t object to it, but she did so wish they hadn’t appointed a Jew as chief prosecutor. Pressed to explain, the woman identified David Maxwell Fyfe as the offending individual. When Rebecca West protested the error, the woman responded curtly, “Who would call his son David, but a Jew?” (367)
Niklas Frank, then 7, remembers the day his father was taken to the gallows. He finds his repentant display at the trial insincere, noting that he later recanted his “confession”.
“I am opposed to the death penalty,” he said without emotion, “except for my father.” […] “He was a criminal.”
He takes out a faded photo of his father taken a few minutes after the hanging. “Every day I look at this. To remind me, to make sure that he is dead.”
As Sands notes, denial remains common today. In a telling scene near the end of the film, the three visit a neo-Nazi commemorative rally in Ukraine (accompanied by a folkloristic ensemble, I note), where Horst and Niklas—sons of mass murderers—are warmly welcomed. Worldwide, the need for truth remains constant, urgent.
* * *
Sands is no less compelling on radio. In his major recent ten-part series Intrigue: the ratline on BBC Radio 4, by contrast with Frank’s well-documented fate, he gives a disturbing update on the murky post-war story of Otto von Wächter. He provides ample recaps (as in the chilling title of episode 3, “A lot going on in Lemberg”), with the aid of the “parallel universe” of the memoirs of Wächter’s beloved wife Charlotte. With much further forensic sleuthing he goes on to investigate Wächter’s mysterious fate in Italy, as the role of the Catholic church in helping Nazi fugitives evade justice leads to a extraordinary story of espionage. And still Horst seeks to defend his father’s reputation. For the book, see here.
In this post I begin to educate myself on the Salazar regime—framed by moreon the changing history and image of fado.
José Malhoa, Fado, 1910.
Back in Lisbon last week after my visit this time last year, I reacquainted myself with the delectable Colete Salva-Vidas and her three daughters, notably the errant Aterragem (see my linguistic fantasy here)—and now, I find, yet another on the way, Proxima Paragem (“next stop”, between you and me). I’m tickled that the door sign for “Pull” is Puxe—putting foreigners off the scent, like changing the signposts in wartime Britain? I would like “pullover” to be puxesobre, “pushover”.
To console me that my visits never seem to coincide with a festival of traditional Alentejan choirs, my friend Nick took me to the wonderful Casa Alentejo. Cunningly disguised as a Western Union office, you’d never guess at the riches inside—a Moorish courtyard, frescos, tiles, and a little double stage: a true gem (if not aterragem).
* * *
While my first loyalty is to the complexity and intensity of flamenco cante jondo, it’s always good to explore fado—and it’s high time for me to understand a bit more about its social and political background. This may be old hat for world music groupies, but perhaps it’s of a certain relevance for my sinophile readers; and quite aside from the tourist angle, there seems a genuine enthusiasm among the current fadistas. [1]
The Museo do Fado (including sound archive here, and biographies here) makes a useful introduction. Evoking several other genres (flamenco, rebetika, tango, and so on), the early history of fado was one of delinquency and transgression (cf. Deviating from behavioural norms). Indeed, that’s still very much the ethos of shawm bands in rural China. As a useful 2007 article on fado comments:
When a Portuguese writer described the fado in 1926 as “a song of rogues, a hymn to crime, an ode to vice, an encouragement to moral depravity, an unhealthy emanation from the centres of corruption, from the infamous habitations of the scum of society”, he identified a set of associations that a new generation of fadistas wear like a badge of honour.
Musicians often wore bright tattoos, in red on the singer’s chest or between his thumb and fingers, with markings of “anchors, ships, guitars, flowers, animals, pierced or joined hearts, the cross, the five sores of Christ [YAY], other love, religious, fantasy signs or inscriptions”.
Pinheiro, Fadistas, 1873.
But later a political stigma replaced the old social one:
For some, it’s a sound forever tarnished by its association with fascism. After the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, many on the Portuguese left saw the fado as something shameful. It was seen, at best, as a conservative outlet for national misery, at worst as an authorised voice for Catholic fascism.
Salazar himself considered that fado “sapped all energy from the soul and led to inertia” (on which grounds he might have been a big Sex Pistols fan). In 1927 he passed a law regulating it, depriving it of much of its improvisation and spontaneity—which sounds like what the Party has long tried but failed to do in China. Under Salazar fado wasn’t used as propaganda, but it was neutered. Flamenco, while no less commodified, has retained a more earthy aspect.
Fado‘s links with Brazil and Africa are also worth pursuing.
* * *
Following my visits to Sachsenhausen and Stasi memorial sites in Berlin, it seemed suitable to give myself a basic education on the Salazar regime and its sinister PIDE security forces. By contrast with the grim surroundings of the Stasi museum in Berlin, the Aljube museum (Museum of resistance and liberation; also useful introduction here) occupies a picturesque site overlooking the sea, suitably opposite the Sé cathedral—as if to remind us of the role of the church in supporting the regime.
Portugal was one of the poorest countries in Europe. In 1920, 66% of the population was illiterate. Infant mortality rates only decreased belatedly:
1926: 45% 1974: 37% 2011: 3%.
The Estado Novo endured for forty years, from 1933 until 1974. It was in this period that Portugal became encapsulated by “the three Fs”: fado, football, and Fátima. Bread and circuses, perhaps: for the opposition, a formula for national alienation. One might add a fourth F: fear (see also The struggle against Mussolini).
Lisbon 1939.
The Aljube had a long history as a prison. On the eve of the Estado Novo it held “women of ill repute, and incorrigible women accused of serious crimes”. Indeed, under Salazar, the exhibition mentions the general exploitation of women:
Women like Maria Lamas, Maria Isabel Aboim Inglês, Virginia Moura and Maria Machado initiated a new specific approach to the female condition and especially of the until then “invisible” condition of the women.
In a country where feminism was a late starter, this positioning would fertilize the cultural soil, in which would grow what is considered the first Portuguese feminist manifesto, As Novas Cartas Portuguesas [The new Portuguese charters], the publication (and apprehension) of which would leads its three authors, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho da Costa, and Isabel Barreno, to be criminally persecuted in 1972.
Under the dictatorship the Aljube became a political prison. The museum outlines the use of torture, the role of informers (bufos, “squealers”), the resistance, and the exile of prisoners to penal colonies in the Azores, Madeira, East Timor. Many died of starvation and disease in Tarrafal camp in Cape Verde. The third floor covers the anticolonial struggle, as well as the 1974 Carnation revolution.
The exhibition documents the collaboration of the PIDE with the Italian secret police and the Gestapo—going on to note that the CIA helped train the PIDE from 1957.
One thorn in the flesh of the regime, harrassed by the PIDE, was the musician José “Zeca” Afonso (1929–87):
I’m sure a lot more tourists walk past than enter the Aljube museum, which is sad—but of course it takes a particular mentality to travel the globe in search of atrocity sites. Despite all the evidence of human suffering, not least during my own pampered youth, I’m not here (today, at least) to rant against tourism—the whole image of the Med (sun, sea, and in this case Sé) and idyllic island resorts—or indeed to carp at the human capacity for enjoying life.
Criminal states have operated all over the world, and continue to do so. In places like Germany and Portugal, where regimes have changed, lessons may be learned in the public domain; in China, still very little.
* * *
The new generation of fadistas are said to have shaken off the link with fascism, but it never fitted neatly into the discourses of either right or left. Moreover, it now seems largely rhetorical for fadistas to pride themselves on its history as an “ode to vice, an encouragement to moral depravity from the scum of society”. The clubs have been becoming gentrified for over a century, the atmosphere genteel (or what the Chinese would call “cultured”)—and even I can’t fault it for that.
So what better way of spending the night before Eurovision than to relish fado at a venue I hadn’t visited before: the Associação do Fado Casto in Rua São Mamede. Among all the fado joints in the Alfama, it’s rather off the beaten track, and suitably untrumpeted from the outside. The atmosphere is great, with groups of family and friends enjoying fine food amidst evocative memorabilia.
As to the fado, performed in sets of three songs, while the pluckers noodle away whimsically, the intimate intensity of saudade as the singer enters is immediately touching. I heard fine sets from Matilde Cid (YouTube topic), accompanied by Antonio Duarte and João Filipe:
I also just found out about the great Carminho, falling helplessly in love with this early clip of her singing Fado of the hours in Carlos Saura’s 2007 film (longer sequence here):
I used to cry for not seeing you, And now that I see you, I cry
Chorava por te não ver, por te ver eu choro agora, mas choro só por querer, querer ver-te a toda a hora.
Passa o tempo de corrida, quando falas eu te escuto, nas horas da nossa vida, cada hora é um minuto.
Deixa-te estar a meu lado, e não mais te vás embora, para meu coração coitado viver na vida uma hora.
This has leapt into my list of all-time Great World Songs. Incidentally, many fados make use of the plangent minor key, but this is a good instance of how saudade can be amply achieved without it.
I’m somewhat resistant to Big Stars (at least in “world music“), but I can hardly sign off without paying homage to the saudade of Amália Rodrigues:
For more links, see Tony Klein’s comment below. For flamenco under Franco, and more on gender, see here.
[1] While we await a translation of Rui Vieira Nery, Para uma história do fado, for one detailed study in English see Paul Vernon, A history of the Portuguese fado; see also James Patrick Félix, Folk or fake: the notion of authenticity in Portuguese fado, here. For a general introduction to fado in the wider context of Portuguese music, with discography, see The Rough guide to world music, pp.309–23; fado also features regularly in Songlines magazine.
Yet another fine addition to BBC Radio 3’s coverage of female composers: the great Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) (immortalized on the excellent T-shirt)—click here, part of a website well worth exploring.
Dying terribly young, Lili was eclipsed by her equally brilliant older sister Nadia (1887–1979), herself one of the great influences on WAM music-making in modern times (see here, and for a festival in 2021, here). And of course I’ve written many posts on French music in the form of Ravel and Messiaen.
“Not a lot of people know this”, but I recorded Lili’s pieces (or even morceaux) for violin and piano with Susan Tomes on one of those disc thingies around 1974, while we were at Cambridge. Here’s a 1930 recording of the Nocturne with Nadia accompanying Yvonne Astruc:
*Not suitable for those of a sensitive disposition!* [Red rag to a bull—Ed.]
This is one of the classic stories in our Fieldworkers’ joke manual, always coming to mind whenever some formal meeting prompts Chinese people to address me with the honorific nin 您 for “you” rather than the standard ni 你 (for a fine discussion, see here).
Dating from 1980s’ Beijing, the crucial pronouns of the story translate much less naturally into English than into other European languages, which still preserve the distinction between informal singular and honorific plural forms of the word for “you”:
So there’s this factory worker riding his rusty old bike home after his shift, trundling along in a daze. All of a sudden a big shiny Mercedes casually turns right just in front of him [as they do], and with no time to screech to a halt, the worker’s bike bumps into the gleaming car. As the chauffeur stops to inspect the damage, the furious worker leans over into the car and shouts,
“Your mother’s cunt!”
[Ni malegebi!]*
On behalf of the high-ranking Party apparatchik seated in the back, the chauffeur comes back with,
“Hey, comrade! How dare you speak so disrespectfully—don’t you realize there’s a VIP National Leader sitting in the back?”
Feigning an apology, the worker exclaims politely,
“Oh, I’m sooo sorry— I should have said, ‘Your esteemed… mother’s cunt!’
[Nin malegebi!]”
Getty Images.
In Italian the variants might go “La fica di tua madre” and “La fica di vostra madre” (cf. the vocabulary of Burlesque-only—Oh, and La vaca t’ha fat, also featuring posh car…).
On an Academy of Ancient Music tour of the States around 2002, a couple of my mates enjoyed the story, and wanted to hear me telling it in the original Chinese. Rodolfo, amazing fiddle player from Brazil, thought it would work well in Brazilian-Portuguese, so I talked him through it in English, and one evening after a gig in Nebraska, as the band was gathered in an unsalubrious pub, he did a near-simultaneous Brazilian-Portuguese translation while I told the Chinese version—which, beautifully, had ’em rolling in the aisles. It’s Not the Joke, it’s the Way you Tell it.
Among my Chinese mates this story is such a classic topos that now if I want to swear at one of them, all I have to do is mutter, “NIN…”
*For Miles, Keef, and Listen with motherfucker, see here. For some reason, Chinese bi is a tad less offensive than its English equivalent: see here. For the c-word in English, click here.
On my recent trip to China, I was having such a great time with Li Manshan in rural Yanggao [1] that I was somewhat reluctant to take the train back to Beijing—but thanks to encounters with some fine scholars (and home-made Italian cakes) I soon acclimatized. For me to observe
may not be quite as fatuous as it sounds—given the hangover from the old image of Red Guards and the new one of a cultural desert watered only by Xi Jinping Thought, both perpetuated by Western sinologists.
I’ll outline the work of these scholars in turn, beginning with my main host, the ethnographer Ju Xi 鞠熙 (b.1981), of the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology at Beishida—or Beijing Normal University, as it is quaintly known (now, to invite me to talk at an Abnormal university, that I might understand). With great imagination, she invited me to show my film as part of a series of talks in which I could reflect on fieldwork and rural ritual amidst social change, focusing on my two long-term projects: the Li family Daoists and the ritual association of South Gaoluo.
Ju Xi with ritual leaders, Daohui village, Zhejiang 2017.
Quite apart from making an articulate and supportive moderator to my talks, Ju Xi’s own research is distinguished. With Marianne Bujard, she has long been involved in a major collaborative project with the EFEO in Paris (four of eleven volumes published so far! And a fifth here, new in 2020):
Epigraphy and oral sources of Peking temples: a social history of an imperial capital.
In addition to a succession of fine works on old Beijing like that of Susan Naquin, all this makes an important complement to research on its ritual life, including the Zhihua temple.
Ju Xi’s wisdom was encapsulated at an unpromising one-day conference in March, which she transformed with a succinct and brilliant speech explaining the significance of local religion in current rural China—that should be compulsory reading for cultural pundits and cadres at all levels:
Criticizing the recent interpretations of “secularization” (compared with imperial China) and “revival” (compared with the Maoist era), both of which portray Chinese religion as somewhat isolated from society, Ju Xi observed that local religion is not merely a “spiritual creation” or “cultural heritage”—it’s a kind of cultural resource and social power which can play active roles in contemporary rural society.
She outlined the role of local religion in ecological conservation, building techniques, and handicraft taboos, and pointed out its tight social structure, close interpersonal and reciprocal relationships—a valuable resource for today’s poorly-organized rural society. She stressed the importance of temple fairs, pilgrimages, ancestor worship, ritual associations, and clan organizations, noting the “grassroots charisma” of ritual specialists. She explained local religion as practical strategy, and observes how peasants are now availing themselves of the mask of “intangible heritage” to express their own requirements and views, making local religion a new pivot of cultural identity.
Thus local religion should be seen as an important basis upon which the peasants can construct their social order, organize their social relationships, take part in social practices, and articulate their own life styles. It makes an essential pattern through which multiple actors in rural society can express their own requirements.
Ju Xi’s students are most fortunate.
* * *
Beishida has a noble tradition of folklorists, including Dong Xiaoping董晓萍 (b.1950), herself a pupil of the great Zhong Jingwen 钟敬文 (1903–2002). Among Dong Xiaoping’s books are
and a slim but useful tome with David Arkush (欧达伟),
Huabei minjian wenhua 华北民间文化 [Folk culture of north China] (Hebei jiaoyu cbs, 1995).
In English Dong Xiaoping’s acuity may be admired in a short review in Overmyer, Ethnography in China today, pp.343–67.
* * *
Chen Zi’ai.
At Beishida I was also delighted to meet Chen Zi’ai 陈子艾 (b.1933), part of an illustrious generation of scholars whose academic careers might have been more fruitful but for the vagaries of Maoism. A native of Hunan, her experience of local Daoism there and in Jiangxi has left her with a deep impression. She is a contributor to the lengthy series of publications on Hunan Daoism edited by Alain Arrault.
In a lengthy and mesmerizing impromptu speech after my second presentation, Chen Zi’ai touched candidly on crucial aspects of research on religious behaviour in the PRC, observing the riches of the topic as a window on folk culture, by contrast with the incongruity of her generation’s ideological indoctrination; and the more recent benefits of Chinese–foreign collaboration on such projects.
* * *
Such research on folk religion and temple fairs builds on an influential volume edited by
Guo Yuhua 郭于华, Yishi yu shehui bianqian 仪式与社会变迁 [Ritual and social change] (2000),
and the work of Zhao Shiyu 赵世瑜, notably his 2002 book
Yet another brilliant fieldworker and ethnographer at Beishida is Yue Yongyi 岳永逸 (b.1972), who has a prolific list of publications based on his fieldwork in rural Hebei.
Other Hebei temple fairs on which Yue Yongyi has published include two in Zhaoxian county—on the Dragon Placard Association (longpaihui) of Fanzhuang village: [3]
“Xiangcun miaohuide duochong xushi: dui Huabei Fanzhuang longpaihuide minsuxuezhuyi yanjiu” 乡村庙会的多重叙事: 对华北范庄龙牌会的民俗学主义研究 [Multivocal discourses in a rural temple fair: a folkloristic study of the Dragon Placard Association in Fanzhuang, north China], Minsu quyi 147 (2005), pp.101–60;
(with Cai Jiaqi 蔡加琪) “Miaohuide feiyihua, xuejie shuxie ji zhongguo minsuxue: longpaihui yanjiu sanshinian” 庙会的非遗化、学界书写及中国民俗学: 龙牌会研究三十年 [The heritage-ization of temple fairs, academic writing and Chinese ethnography: thirty years of research on the Dragon Placard Association], Minzu wenxue yanjiu 35 (2017.6), pp.36–52;
and on the temple fair to the Water temple goddess in Changxin village:
“Dui shenghuo kongjiande guishu yu chongzheng: Changxin Shuici niangniang miaohui” 对生活空间的规束与重整: 常新水祠娘娘庙会 [Restriction and regeneration of living space: the festival of the Water temple goddess in Changxin village], Minsu quyi 143 (2004).
Most notable is his detailed work on the temple fair of Cangyanshan in Jingxing county—which we may add to our bibliography on south Hebei:
Like Yue’s book on Miaofengshan, it contains detailed subheadings on temples, gods, ritual associations and other performers, activities, and artefacts, with rich material on spirit mediums (xiangtou, cf. north Shanxi) as well as on the sectarian creator goddess Wusheng laomu (widely found in Hebei, e.g. in Xushui and Yixian counties) and (in the case of Cangyanshan) Third Princess (sanhuang gu 三黄姑).
Wusheng laomu statue, Cangyanshan.
In English, note his
“The nation-state, the contract responsibility system, and the economy of temple incense: the politics and economics of a temple festival on a landscaped holy mountain”, Rural China 13 (2016), pp.240–87,
which also includes a useful bibliography. More general, but no less thoughtful, are his books
With his rich experience, Yue Yongyi made a fine discussant in our unlikely one-day panel at Beishida.
* * *
All these fieldsites provide rich material for ethnographers, even if they share a paucity of complex liturgical sequences such as those I generally find. My encounters with these scholars make a welcome change from the insidious infiltration of romanticized “living fossil” ICH flummery into music studies. Given the understandable dominance of research on religious activity in south China, they also form a community of scholars working on changing ritual life in north China (see also Goossaert article cited here).
While I entirely recognize the ongoing erosion of rights under the current regime, the current Chinese academic scene is far from emasculated. Fine scholars like these, undaunted, continue to seek the truth about modern history, at a great remove from the supposed brainwashing from Xi Jinping Thought trumpeted in the Chinese and foreign media. This theme continues in my following posts on the Beijing scene (here and here).
[1] See my series of posts starting on 14th March 2018, summarized here.
[2] Another recent book on the incense associations of Beijing is Zhang Qingren 张青仁, Xingxiang zouhui: Beijing xianghuide puxi yu shengtai 行香走会: 北京香会的谱系与生态 (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue cbs, 2016).
[3] For earlier refs., see my In search of the folk Daoists of north China, p.8 n.14.
How wonderful to see the Women’s FA Cup Final on BBC1, showing that progress continues despite misogynistic reactions around the globe. The schoolgirls who, this time last year, wrote those brilliant letters to the FA (“We aren’t brainless Barbie dolls”) will be delighted—not a pink fluffy football in sight.
Following the Daoist ritual to bless a football team, another intriguing debate has just arisen on the place of Daoist ritual in society under a notionally secular and atheist regime. [1]
In Minqin county in the north of Wuwei municipality in Gansu province, an exorcistic Daoist ritual was performed recently at the inauguration of the construction site of an experimental thorium reactor of the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Though the ritual was commissioned by the local construction team, two employees from the institute were promptly sacked and placed under CCP investigation for having failed to stop the contractors, thus “deviating from the scientific spirit”.
Rituals for “moving the earth” are commonly performed all over China. This one was conducted by a single local priest depicting talismans and burning yellow paper memorials, as a sheep was slaughtered (lingsheng 领牲). In the brief video, at some distance one can see an altar table, around which a shawm band stands to play.
Some may be content to seize on the story to demonize the CCP (which is fair enough, as far as it goes). But again, just as with the Daoist ritual for the football match, what is more notable is the intelligent rebuttals of the po-faced official stance that are already appearing online and in the media—if not yet on a par with the protests that greeted the Pingyi funeral clampdown. Most authoritative essays come from the brilliant Tao Jin, and on WeChat here; doubtless there will be more. A critique from a leading Daoist priest, marred by introducing a confused angle of indigenous and foreign religions, has evaporated from the void.
So it’s another storm in a teacup. Local rituals are performed all over China (including, magnificently, Shanghai). The problem here was merely that the CCP shouldn’t be seen to be promoting “superstition”—so it’s a healthy sign that the online community rallies round to observe that by the CCP’s own terms it’s no longer considered as such, and to stress the depth of “Daoist culture” that the Party itself now propounds. The authorities’ kneejerk reaction can only entrench people’s “belief” in the laws on religious freedom. The popular message is clearly: don’t mess with the Traditional Culture of the Chinese Peoples!
It’s also a reminder that Gansu must be one of the most fertile sites for research on household Daoist ritual!
[1] See this from Sixth tone, with a brief video clip (why on earth (sic) did someone deem the video footage acceptable but not the original audio?!); and a follow-up expounding the issues clearly:
I also fear that Taoist conservatives—the kind who head up the country’s religious associations—will grow tired of reacting to public suspicion with openness and warmth, and will instead try to defend Taoism from a purely nationalist standpoint. As China’s sole homegrown religion, Taoism is fertile ground to be claimed by hyper-patriotic revivalists of traditional Chinese culture. It is essential that Taoists remain level-headed and oppose radical and exclusionary political attitudes.
For other comments, see e.g. here, here, and here.
In Berlin a couple of weeks ago, apart from my visit to Sachsenhausen I was keen to explore the city’s GDR history, moving on into the 1950s and beyond—the Stasi memorial sites (as the Rough guide notes) making a potent antidote to the trendy Ostalgie of Trabi kitsch. Here my experience of China, learning to empathize with “sufferers” there (Guo Yuhua, after Bourdieu), feels all the more relevant.
To limber up I took the U-Bahn to Alex, which I can’t presume to call by such a familiar name.
Alexanderplatz: the Weltzeituhr and Fernsehturm (1969), with the 13th-century Marienkirche—not leaning towers, more an innocent trompe-l’oeil of my camera…
My splendid host Ian Johnson (whose own writings are a must-read on both China and Germany) made a fine guide for a trip along the remnants of the wall, Checkpoint Charlie and so on.
We passed the Staatsoper, where I performed Elektra in 1980. How shamefully little I knew then, and how limited was my curiosity. Throughout my recent visit to Berlin it finally hits me how very pampered our lives have been compared to the painful decisions that our German contemporaries constantly had to make.
Do click on these links, from a fine series of short films tracing the timeline of the Wall:
Meanwhile Timothy Garton Ash was beginning his long acquaintance with the regime.
Stasi memorial sites I visited both the Stasi prison and the Stasi museum. Though they’re not so far apart in the Lichtenburg district, I wouldn’t advise trying to do both in one day—the prison tour is excellent, and even by spending the rest of the day there I still only saw a small part of its exhibits. While the museum is less taxing than the prison, its location has retained a more suitably grim, bleak, forbidding air. As in Sachsenshausen, it’s wonderful that these sites are so busy, with many school parties—though I didn’t see any Chinese tour groups among them…
Just a few months before I was born, the major popular uprising of 17th June 1953 throughout the GDR (wiki, and a wealth of online sites, notably here), documented in both exhibitions, is far less known abroad than Budapest 1956 and Prague 1968. Needless to say, the popular uprisings of June 1989 in China are not so called there.
Studying the exhibits of perpetrators and victims, one continues to deplore the appalling ethical morass caused by Nazism—what a terrible price to pay throughout the following decades. Again, what would we have done?
Some of the eyewitnesses guiding visitors around the site.
At the Stasi prison (Gedenkstätte memorial)of Hohenschönhausen (formerly a Soviet special camp) the team of wonderful tour guides includes many former inmates; though our guide that day wasn’t among them, he gave us passionate articulate reminders of how crucially important it is to learn lessons amidst the current erosion of crucial rights worldwide.
Freya Klier and Stephan Krawczyk.
There were many strands to the counter-culture in literature and music. Icons of the resistance in the arts became figureheads, like singer-songwriters Wolf Biermann (b.1936, exiled in 1976) and Bettina Wegner (b.1947); Bärbel Bohley (1945–2010), whose 1978 painting Nude makes a striking image in the prison; performers Freya Klier (b.1950) and Stephan Krawczyk (b.1955); and Jürgen Fuchs (1950–99). For subversive film in the GDR, see here.
But just as moving in the prison is the series of mugshots of ordinary people making a stand, trying to escape, or just caught up in the maelstrom.
However much I admire our own posturing counter-cultural heroes, all this can only make them seem bland and smug. Sure, the punk movement in London, New York, and so on was important—more so than my life in early music, anyway, though that was also new (“original”!). But apart from getting abused in the Daily Mail, the punk life in the UK hardly involved such serious risks. For the GDR punks, [1] the “fascist regime” casually snarled by the Sex pistols would have had a far deeper resonance (cf. punk in Madrid, and jazz in Poland).
The Stasi museum alsohas exhibits on the vast network of IM informants—including punks. The Stasi even managed to recruit two of them in the band Die Firma—“it is not known whether they both knew each other’s secret”. Of course, the “decision” to inform, framed by self-preservation or desperation, and with whatever degree of apathy, was itself no simple matter.
Die Firma, with Tatjana Besson, 1988.
Here they are live in 1988:
Wedding at Jena, 1983: the couple’s friend was informing on them,
But the most basic routine parts of growing up were fraught with anxiety.
Alternative kindergarten, Prenzlauer Berg 1980–83.
“Learning differently”, evening school 1988.
The Christian resistance was another crucial focus right through to the 1989 Montag demos that brought the whole system down. The pastor Oskar Brüsewitz burned himself to death in protest in August 1976—just as I was spending an idyllic summer after graduating (cf. Alan Bennett’s wry comment).
Also explored at the museum is the psychology of the Stasi employees.
The whole second floor of the museum preserves the offices of Erich Mielke, head of this whole hideous edifice. It’s a riot of beige and formica (cf. Deutschland 89, scenes of which were filmed there). Mielke’s diagram of the layout for his breakfast is a masterpiece of pedantry—of which, I have to say, my father would have approved.
The diagram has now been cannily immortalized in a mouse-pad, one of the few concessions to modernity in the museum’s suitably antiquated little bookshop—Is Nothing Sacred?
As throughout the socialist bloc (including China), for bitter relief, jokes always made a subversive outlet.
The museum also tellingly depicts the scramble of people all over the east to limit the destruction of Stasi files after November 1989.
* * *
It’s little consolation to reflect that the GDR was surely exceptional in its degree of surveillance, even in East Europe. And in such a vast and predominantly agrarian country as China, for all the horrors of Maoism, and the current intrusive mission, “the mountains are high, the emperor is distant”.
Precisely because German lawmakers and judges know what it was like to live in a Stasi state, and before that in a Nazi one, they have guarded these things more jealously than we, the British, who have taken them for granted. You value health more when you have been sick.
I say again: of course Britain is not a Stasi state. We have democratically elected representatives, independent judges and a free press, through whom and with whom these excesses can be rolled back. But if the Stasi now serves as a warning ghost, scaring us into action, it will have done some good after all.
And again, I both recoil at this horror that was perpetuated right through my naïve youth, and admire the German determination to document it for future generations.
After some time immersed in the rich harmonies of Mahler 10, it made a nice contrast for me to bask in the purity of monophonic Hindustani music in the Indian gallery of the British Museum. With the arhat at the other (Chinese) end of the gallery gazing on serenely from afar, Kaushiki Chakraborty sang with the lucidity and intensity characteristic of the style, accompanied by tabla and harmonium (the latter, alas, only intermittently suggestive of the bandoneon—call me old-fashioned, but you still can’t beat the sarangi).
She began with a khayal in the late-evening rāgMaru Bihag—whose relation with rāg Yaman (and Yaman Kalyan) is a subtlety to be explored by the aficionado. But even for the less attuned ear it’s worth homing in on the basic vocabulary of raga: the pitch relationships, always expounded most clearly in the opening alap.
To simplify absurdly the ascending and descending scales, and the choices of phrases within them, Ms Chakraborty’s version of the rāg featured Ni and Ma prominently, using an ascending scale of
Ni Re Ga Ma Dha Ni
—feeding on the tension with the tonic drone of Sa, as in many ragas. The natural-fourth degree ma is introduced as a subsidiary theme (Ni Ga ma, or Sa ma, and Ga ma Ga), and later a sustained Pa also features. Here’s a version she sang in 2017:
Here’s a rendition by the great Nikhil Banerjee on sitar:
As to Arsenal’s young star, I’m keen to get this headline in early:
“I am opposed to the death penalty,” he said without emotion, “except for my father.” […] “He was a criminal.”
Stephen Jones: a blog 