Wrong face up, or Czech absurdity
We were sitting in one of many parks in Prague, sipping delicious Pilsners, chatting and waging a crazy war against an inexplicable army of flying insects (which I believe anticipated further events) when we realized that the evening is like an empty glass and we are very thirsty. Flicking through a dozen of free leaflets recommending plenty of venues to fill up the glass with, Cornelia noticed, to our delight, the ad informing about Petr Zelenka Quartet at Balbinova Poeticka Hospudka. There was no hesitation, and no time – we buried the hatchet with insects and left the park.
We reached our destination after a twenty-minute walk and realized that the farther from the centre of the city, the less people you could communicate with in English. The owner of the place was only able to sell the tickets and confirm that Petr Zelenka was playing that day. Excited and elated, the three of us sat by the table, as close to the scene as possible just to find out in a matter of seconds that the only Petr Zelenka we knew was a famous film director. Now, the Petr Zelenka in front of us was a talented jazz musician. Despite being a bit thrown off the balance, we realized that we were there for the music no matter which Petr Zelenka was to perform and our benevolence was rewarded with a great deal of tasty tunes that evening.
From ***@***, by Suzanne
This is more of a real folk song:
The soldier came knocking upon the queen’s door
He said, “I am not fighting for you any more”
The queen knew she’d seen his face someplace before
And slowly she let him inside.
He said, “I’ve watched your palace up here on the hill
And I’ve wondered who’s the woman for whom we all kill
But I am leaving tomorrow and you can do what you will
Only first I am asking you why.”
Down in the long narrow hall he was led
Into her rooms with her tapestries red
And she never once took the crown from her head
She asked him there to sit down.
He said, “I see you now, and you are so very young
But I’ve seen more battles lost than I have battles won
And I’ve got this intuition, says it’s all for your fun
And now will you tell me why?”
a commission on the Way of the Cross day
You like to walk your ways, those which you know, those you are accustomed to. You never want to try any new ways, out of fear. And the whole life is spent on the same way, to and fro. Like a horse that knows its way home and is able to come back even blindfolded. To work, and back from work, to school and back from school, to the grocery and back form the grocery, on vacation and back from vacation. The same way all the time.
He let Himself be led a different way, a way He hadn’t known before, a unique way.
How absolutely fantastic it is to enter the way which you have never tried before, the way you put your steps on for the first time, the way that was not planned before, or maybe even not wanted before. Only then you may feel you live for real.
And it does not matter, that some blood might be spilled on the way. After all, Life means more than life.
(michał_t)
Via Dolorosa
blah blah marketing
Leopard was putting the finishing touches to his toilet. He lay in the sun, admiring the beauty of his sleek, smooth coat, so elegantly marked. He rose lazily and strolled over to the pool, the better to gaze at himself in the clear water.
‘R-r-r-really,’ he purred, ‘I am indeed beautiful. Of all the animals in the forest, I am certainly the finest.’
‘I don’t know so much about that,’ said Reynard the Fox, who was passing at the time and happened to overhear him. Leopard pretended not to hear.
‘It’s those spots,’ went on Fox more loudly. ‘What a pity you can’t change them!’
Leopard looked down his nose at Fox in a lordly way.
‘And who are you to talk?’ he said at last, showing his sharp white teeth and curling his tail scornfully. ‘With that scrubby ginger coat of yours and that bedraggled brush, I wonder you dare show yourself in public.’
‘I think I heard you say you were the finest creature in the forest,’ said Reynard. ‘How do you make that out?’
‘You may not like my spots,’ answered Leopard, ‘but most creatures admire them greatly. Then I have such sleek, luxuriant fur, such a graceful shape, and such a noble way of moving. But I suppose you think yourself even finer.’
‘Indeed I do,’ answered Reynard. ‘I may not have your spots and your glossy finish. I may not be able to creep about like a snake. But I have brains, my dear chap. I’m the cleverest, craftiest, cunningest animal in the whole creation. Why, everyone envies me my intelligence! As for you, you’ve no more wit than a hen. That’s why I’m finer than you!’
And without waiting for an answer he sped off into the woods after a rabbit.
Hype and content never meet
Jewgitive
If only we knew more about them. More than a string of loose associations, or resentment, the Star of David evokes; more than the crumbling tombs overgrown by the grass nobody cares to cut; more than the swarthy looking faces of their grandchildren who visit this land to read the scarce plaques on buildings, engraved in the script recalling a half-forgotten nightmare. If only we heard more than the news from their own land, where the yesterday’s victims perpetuate similar atrocities they were once subjected to.
If only we knew what being a Jew meant then, when they lived next door. Today, they have become a fading spot in memory, a mark that links to few facts which only a still surviving handful of witnesses can make any sense of. So much of their world has been wiped out from the world we shared – a sense of belonging, a belief, a religion, a culture, a folklore, a common history, a destiny, a language, a sense of otherness, and a sense of community and neigbourhood.
Last night* the ghost themselves appeared on screen in black and white while their past neighbours and friends spoke of the loss. And the feeling of regret flickered dimly – if only we knew more about them, we would have more of this certainty about ourselves – where we came from and what we should really stick to today.
* a one-off screening of Po-lin. Slivers of memory, a documentary by Jolanta Dylewska, at Forum
variation on Idalah-Abal, mp3, 6.9 MB
Big and boozy
Haven’t we gone slightly mad? We’ve made a Christmas cake. We are now making it drunk. Regularly, twice a week, with brandy. It took us good two hours to get the ingredients ready, three more hours to bake, and now half an hour a session of methodical feeding it with booze. For this is the cake to have for Christmas rather than those dry and gritty popyseed rolls. The smells it gives off while it’s baking make us want it now and again.
We like to make our Christmas cake a couple of weeks in advance and then ply it with alcohol to keep it moist and boozy. Brandy is the spirit we use, because we think its flavour works well with the fruit, but whisky would work, too. To get the booze into the cake, we pierce the underside deeply with a knitting needle, or skewer, or thin screwdriver, then pour a little brandy into the holes. We wrap the cake tightly in greaseproof paper and then in foil or clingfilm and place it in a large container. Covered, it will be fine for several weeks. To get moist, flavoursome results we feed the cake every three or four days for two weeks.
Feathered mayhem in full flight
Planty on an early morning in November. On the ground whitened by the first frost, a flock of crows raking rustling leaves with their claws in search of food. Like menacing black blots on the ochre carpet. Far too many of them, scary they look. A sudden urge to watch Hitchcock in the evening.
What exactly is “The Birds”, one of the oddest of his films that makes a compulsive viewing now and again?
“The Birds” opens in San Francisco with a brief flirtation in a pet shop between Melanie, a beautiful but spoiled urbanite, and a handsome lawyer, Mitch Brenner. Intrigued by his patronising manner, she follows him up to the coast to Bodega Bay, where he lives with his widowed mother, Lydia, and younger sister, taking with her two caged lovebirds as an ironic gift.
But nature, implacable in its needs and demands, has no time for irony, as the film makes clear. Melanie is attacked by a savage seagull when she approaches Lydia’s house, the first blow in a vicious struggle. The conflict soon engulfs the whole town, as thousands of enraged birds attack every human in sight. In the end Lydia seems victorious, and the film closes with an almost catatonic Melanie being carried from Bodega Bay among the strangely silent birds.
Hitchcock never explains why the birds launched their assault. Are they part of his vision of the universe where an idyll can turn any moment into hell purely by accident? Or, do they represent the exploited nature, finally taking its own back on ruthless humans? Or, perhaps, the attacks are an external display of the mother’s repressed sexual frenzy, a hysterical outburst that jumps space, time and the species barrier in a way that all great mythologies would have understood?
Curiously, Hitchcock disliked birds, and kept away from them during the filming. However, the birds had their revenge. Released at the end of the filming, fifty crows refused to leave the studio and roosted in a tree near Hitchcock’s house, soiling his car with their droppings until the tree was at last cut down.
Sound into wave into show*
7.25 cold Friday evening mad rash around house spread evenly improvised dress improvised meal without dressing running from bright cold into dark cold cold war between my time and bus times speeding up short steps passing old lady barking dog breaking the cold of the evening slowing down steps getting longer getting on the bus stop bus stop step into the bus relief gallery refilled flyer on entry artists reveal themselves white walls minimal décor two tables tons of toys two minds mind the gap gathering go ahead …
The impression I got after the 30-minute noise concert was that I had attended a modern guerilla meeting, or listened to a new kind of punk music. The ideas behind the latter seem to be the same – rawness, unpredictability, rebelliousness. There is no compromise nor surety. It was the first minute of the set that was its essence for me. Pain Jerk started with a sound that broke into me in the most violent and abrupt way. A war-like (in its every measurable aspect) sound shook the walls, crushed the ears, rocked the body with every change he made. The experience of the sound was dualistic – it encapsulated both the beauty and monstrosity of human nature. The sonic waves flowed through the body like water or wind. Or they crushed like rock, pierced like bullets. The first sound like a bungee jump, or the first kiss. The first sound like murdering someone, or running naked into a church. I wanted to scream, driven both by primordial pleasure and terror.
(tomek_t)
*Zbigniew Karkowski/Pain Jerk in concert, Arsenal Gallery, 24th October, 8pm
Dancing days are over
We saw Wierszalin’s Bóg Niżyński on Sunday, a piece of passionate theatre that forcefully gripped the mind for the next 48 hours, perhaps much longer.
Dostoievsky’s words come to mind – “It is not by confining one’s neigbour that one is convinced of one’s sanity.”
What we saw on the stage was an asylum cell turned into the temple of a madman dissecting his own life. Watching him wildly dance his past and reach some near-shamanic trance, could have left few in the audience feeling complacent about their sanity. A few others, however, could have discovered to their horror that all reason they possess implies only a very questionable absence of madness in them.
Similarly, few of the spectators, occupying the darker part of the temple-stage, may have cringed at seeing Niżyński come to realize he was a Christ-like figure. For others, watching him lift his skinny fingers like antennas to Heaven could have meant recognizing a similar gesture of their own. The silence that followed the closing scene was for that gesture to sink into minds. Or, at least, for some in the audience to find out in wonder it is the point some of them reach after they have madly danced their life away. Just about the only thing they have ever done.
The question remains: how can we hammer out some sense out of our time and place? Is shaking the ass all life going to change a damn thing?
Francisco Goya
Fully recovered*
tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah tah …
*Last Saturday, on the eve of Warsaw Marathon, a pair of legs representing Global Village covered the half marathon distance from Białystok to Supraśl through the forest. The run clocked in 1 hour 32 minutes.
The runner’s happy to have sacrificed three toenails.
(Repetitive motion injuries are wear-and-tear injuries that occur because of repetitive activities that we perform at work and at home or during sport acivities. These injuries are due to repeated strain to muscles, tendons and joints in the hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders, back and neck.)
