nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour

Building the Revolution

2012-01-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

[first appeared in Icon 103, 1/2012]

Seeing yet another replica of Tatlin's Tower on the courtyard of the Burlington House in London, done by Jeremy Dixon and partners, I thought the 'Russian avant garde', as we like to call it, couldn't be more disfigured and less properly interpreted than its original creators conceived it. Originally projected by committed Bolshevik Vladimir Tatlin, this 400 meter-high, steel and glass Monument to the 3rd Internationale, built to the glory of Komintern's growing success in the world popularisation of communism, has since the 1970s endured some kind of obsession with tiny, usually 1:40 or 1:50 replicas, built invariably as various exhibition's decoration.

Tatlin's idea was indeed to surpass the benchmarks of western engineering, on one hand the ultimate example of Eiffel's Tower in Paris, on the other, New York and Chicago's skyscrapers. But with its projected neon, glimmering lights and its progressing movement in a whirlpool, twisting around its axis, depicting the infinite progress of socialism, sheltering at the same time a building inside, it was an ultimate tower, tower of towers, a Gesamtkunswerk of communism the way it never was. Designed in 1919,as a result of systematic replacing of the old Tsarist monuments with the new revolutionary ones, it was never to be actually built, an impossible projection of Communism's or anyone's technical possibilities really, becoming a prevailing tribute to the “Soviet Utopia”.

In the underdeveloped Soviet Union of the 1920s, the possibilities evoked by Constructivists remained largely a dream. Shows such as Building the Revolution. Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 in Royal Academy remind us how our ambitions of building the new world are paltry in comparison to those now cherished as 'Russian avantgardists'. This internationalist group of agitators-engineers-radicals-propagandists were deeply devoted to serving the new Communist system from 1917.

Lenin wasn't their fan, believing in the conservatism of the working classes, at the same time no one was stopping them from leaving the mark on the regime's visual shape – most obviously in the built environment. This was wide ranging. There were office blocks (like the outstanding Gosprom in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine capital, by Samuil Kravets, 1929), houses for communal life, cooperatives, schools, youth centres, factories and workers clubs, but also state communications, heralding the regime via radio (such as the beautiful Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow by Vladimir Shukhov, 1922), newspapers like Izviestia or Pravda and various Palaces for the press, or even the news stands designed by Gustav Klutsis, not even mentioning theatre and the arts. They were creating new ways of life from start to finish, and in the way the interiors were distributed, also new forms of work and social, family or sexual life.

The show's focus on architecture’s importance shows how this art actually succeeded among other avant-garde activities under the communist regime. Even if the Constructivists themselves were not always architects, their approach to composition exposes a totally architectural approach to the world, which in their eyes becomes a fully mechanised, rectilinear, precise landscape on which industry put the final mark. Yet many of the featured architects were classicists both before and after the 1920s. They changed their course under Constructivist influence, and then, after the avant-garde's suppression by Stalin, they changed course again. The exhibition gives hints at this not necessarily strictly fanatically avant-gardist approach all the time, be it expressionist (like Soviet Doctor's Housing Cooperative by P.Aleshin in Kiev) or even semi-classicist, Palladian impulses (like Ivan Zholtovski's MoGES, a modernist power station with Renaissance arches). Also, the internationality of the style is visible in the Western import, most notably engaging giants like Le Corbusier (Tsentrosoyuz in Moscow) or Erich Mendelsohn (Red Banner Textile Factory in Petersburg). There was room for variety of styles within Constructivism, but perhaps this openness contributed to its subsequent demise, replaced by an architecture “Soviet in content, nationalist in form”.

Whether killed during the purges, opportunists who gladly joined the new regime, or degraded to the insignificant roles like Melnikov, who ended up designing radiators, the Constructivists were in the end defeated by something perhaps inherent to the Russian character - a predilection to tsarist flamboyance and kitsch. They leave behind a group of buildings unmatched in their disciplined beauty, now largely decaying, as is shown throughout the show on the grandiose photographs by Richard Pare, who has been documenting their history for some years, also in support to Moscow's preservationist society to save what has left after Stalinist and post-soviet era. Namely, from Moscow's now ex-meyer Luzhkov and his business-minded likes, who has been vandalising the city for too long. For well known reasons, this period of Soviet history hasn't been incredibly popular among the post-Soviet satrapes and city councils.

Unsurprisingly, constructivists always had and still have now quite a lot of admirers in the West, who, inspired by them, launched a plethora of styles, from abstraction to pop-art and postmodernism. But when today we read the architectural manifestos of ManTownHuman or Patrik Schumacher, calling for a “new ambition architecture once had”, let's remember that Russian architects were responding to a revolutionary social demand, rather than realising their Ayn Randesque fantasies.

Building the Revolution. Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 Royal Academy, London until 22.01.12

Polish Socially Engaged Arts

2011-10-27T05:20:00.000-07:00

Full version of an article originally published in the Guardian CiF April 17th, 2011.

Polish artists are interesting because of their relation to history
AGATA PYZIK

After more than 20 years of introducing a brutal, neoliberal economy into a decaying late communist reality, and creating a capitalist market, Poland now also has a much-desired “art market". A few years ago, when there was something of a boom in Polish art, an attempt was made to label it Young Polish Art, after the British equivalent. This trend has now begun to fade, especially since numerous events during the long Polska! year promoting Polish culture in the UK failed to attract much publicity. It’s true that Miroslaw Balka got a prestigious Turbine Hall commission in 2009/10, which is as close as you can get to canonization in the modern art world, but I don’t think recognition of Polish art worldwide changed much.

What has shifted is the political impact of Polish critical art at home. Polish art, rather than being simply an entertainment for the rich, is engaging with politics on the levels many of the Western artists can only dream of. It’s been seriously clashing with politics, many times finishing in court. it was not sheer epather le bourgeois - the visual arts taken the task of challenging the society on a much harsher, deeper level than film or literature.

This is the legacy of the 1990s, when makers of so-called “critical art" were reacting to the years of censorship, superficiality and lack of democracy, revealing that not much has changed in the new democratic reality. We enjoyed on a smaller scale a version of the Viennese Actionist movement. Artists such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Artur Zmijewski, Zbigniew Libera, Robert Rumas and Grzegorz Klaman were excavating Polish traumas, touching upon themes such as Polish religiosity, too-soon forgotten memories of the Holocaust, intolerance and exclusions (of homosexuals, women, disabled), various taboos, like non-normative sexuality, the body and its visceral aspects or ageing, and the way individuals are controlled in a free, but actually extremely oppressive, society. Much more rarely the inequalities wrought by the transformation from communism to capitalism.

They were playing upon the central theme of the individual versus the system, exposing the fact that the choice between one oppressive system and another is not really a choice, at a moment when the majority of society regarded liberalism as the only option and the brutal transformation from communism a necessary evil. By self-exposure (such as Kozyra, who posed as Manet’s Olimpia while suffering from cancer) or assuming the role of a perpetrator (Żmijewski asking a former concentration camp prisoner to “renew" the tattooed number on his arm), critical artists were working through and acting out numerous traumas, frequently becoming the object of harsh, politically motivated censorship and hostile social ostracism by right-wing politicians. Gallery closures were common, as was the removal or even destruction of work. The most famous case of censorship was the 8 years-long trial of Dorota Nieznalska, concerning her 2001 work Passion, where she put male genitals photo onto a cross. She was finally cleared of the charges, but this process remains a reminder of the free speech abuse in Poland.

A couple of years into the new decade of the noughties, however, some of the most successful critical artists, such as Żmijewski, started to criticize this kind of art for being self-indulgent and for its lack of visible political success. Critical art had not disrupted the system, it was claimed. Worse, it had become a playful, attractive gallery object, all the more pathetic given its initial ambitions. In 2005, Żmijewski became an art editor of Krytyka Polityczna, a newly emerged but increasingly popular political club and magazine where he published his manifesto, Applied Social Arts, which prompted fervent debate about the political impact of Polish critical art.

Interestingly enough, at the same time Żmijewski was accusing his peers of political indifference and lack of taking serious risks, he, Althamer and Kozyra were becoming renowned names, appearing frequently in international art magazines. And exactly when a new generation of artists born in 70s and 80s entered the scene and were cutting off from the “critical” generation, they, to whom Bałka also belongs by age, had started to get the official nod: there were huge retrospectives for Libera and Kozyra as well as big group shows in the key Polish art institutions. Apparently, they no longer threatened the establishment, they wouldn’t shake Poland. Oh really? In this one sense Żmijewski was wrong: critical art was capable of political agency, because it provoked national debates that redefined the status quo.

The real question with which Polish artists are now struggling is mapping the realm in which art can still mean and effect something. Attracting gallery visitors was never their aim. It was later said that critical art was only really interested in the big existential questions, ignoring the social reality of the poor and excluded. Żmijewski responded to this by making a number of socially engaged works: he filmed dozens of demos, rallies and protests for his ongoing series Democracies; in his Work series he filmed people doing particularly unattractive, numbing jobs: a cashier in a hypermarket or a street cleaner. Recently he made a film about the mourning of the Smolensk air disaster, Catastrophy, which studied the behaviour of the crowd that stood in front of the Presidential Palace brandishing a giant cross, raising all kinds of social tensions. Żmijewski himself chosen to provocatively side with the religious crowd, presenting them in a positive light. That’s what makes his work ambivalent because the same square saw also the only moment when a counter crowd manifested itself, yearning for a secular country and calling for releasing the city space from the church’s domination, but they are not his favorites.

Żmijewski’s aim is always to provoke the viewer to his own political choices, he’s not saying that anti-church is necessarily enlightened and pro-church backwards and oppressive. Maybe he wants to actually redefine the senses in which we become a community, what constitutes us as such and what did it actually mean to be a Pole during those difficult days of the mourning, that now will come back, as we have the 1st anniversary. But I sympathize more with actions of a very important public space artist Joanna Rajkowska, whose actions prompted debates about public spaces in Poland again. Some of them formerly belonged to one ideology, and later were obliterated, such as the square in the former Warsaw ghetto, where the contemporary Israeli trips come to the Synagogue, and a church vis-à-vis was selling anti-semitic brochures. In this toxic area Rajkowska built an artificial pond, so called Oxygenator, that was mainly used by the formerly neglected pensioners living nearby, who were suddenly enjoying this space, and what a different view for the Israeli teenagers on their compulsory Holocaust trips, that are told they are coming to the land of death. Despite the pond’s popularity, city authorities objected to prolong its few months existence, but it has changed this space forever.

Polish artists are looking for new models of engagement, since the sense of community we had earlier was destroyed, and the only new community we’re offered is manipulated by the Catholic church or by a sense of victimhood. In neoliberal Poland, caught between the cynicism of the right wing populists and the cynicism of the liberals, between lack of self confidence and an inferiority complex, this sense of community is what we must restore.

more links

project of a group of post-critical artists after the Kaczynski brothers (Law & Justice, PiS, right wing & nationalistic, though combining it with more social policies)

Katarzyna Kozyra in Art in America

Sound in the Early Soviet Cinema

2011-09-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

[unedited version of an article appeared in The Wire in #329 July 2011 issue]

KINO: Russian Film Pioneers 1909–57
BFI, London, UK

For everyone not acquainted with the early works of Soviet cinema seeing the early, experimental pieces of the 1920s must be a striking experience. It is a succession of groundbreaking masterpieces that transformed the 10th muse. How was that possible in the basically state controlled cinematography, nearly uniquely devoted to propaganda of new Soviet order, with no nods towards mass culture, to maintain its initial innovation and experiment, while remaining also entertaining, joyous watch? The Russian Film Pioneers section of the British Film Institute's KINO season, running until 30 June tries to capture this phenomenon, with all its tensions, eruptions of brilliance and ideas. One of them was the introduction of the sound at the end of 1920s and the transition from the silent – where so much had to be suggested by editing, acting and expression of the visual material to the explosive opportunities of sound. Introduction of the sound techniques left many of the most forerunning artists, including Eisenstein, initially skeptical. The first, who adopted the sound among the avant-garde luminaries, was the one who most vivaciously was denying himself an artist: the pioneer of camerawork, documentary and heartbreakingly beautiful propaganda, Dziga Vertov or the authors of Eccentric Theatre manifesto (1922), Kozintsev/Trauberg’s directorial tandem in their various Shostakovich collaborations. Shostakovich, still in early 20s, after completing his great Gogol-inspired operettas, becomes filmscore author, only to cause a massive scandal: in The New Babylon (1929), bold, astonishing rendering of Paris Commune days by the duo of directors, he masterfully captures the psychological and political nuances of any scene, juxtaposing Offenbach and Tchaikovsky’s grandiose operatic sound with more mundane sound of cancan, and above all things, importing the new, wildly modern sounds of jazz - in a truly postmodern, yet invigoratingly original manner.

No wonder that his satirical approach met instant opposition from the censorship. One can compare watching (and listening!) experience of Vertov’s Enthusiasm to eg. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, but only on the base of oppositions. Whereas Riefenstahl insists on her artistry and sublimity and what she gains is kitsch and rather dull apotheosis of Nazism, Vertov’s apotheosis of shock-workers in Donbass during the realisation of 5 Year Plan (and Symphony of Donbass was the film’s alternative title) remains as striking a masterpiece as it was on the day it was made, pushing the art of sound galaxies ahead. Vertov amassed the scenes of dismantling the old order (iconoclastic looting of the monasteries) with the New: striking images of 'Udarniki' in Ukraine, undergoing mechanization of labour. The New is also expressed by power of the Radio – here scenes of a radio transmission are interwoven with the images of glory of Soviet achievements. The soundtrack, recorded by Vertov himself in situ and then synchronized, was a depiction of mechanization itself, being an aural attack consisting of industrial sounds of steelworks and furnaces working at full temperature and speed, put together with compositions by Shostakovich and Timofeev – here epitomizing the New Economic Policy, that rhythmic sledge hammering of steelworks were to obliterate. The use of sound by Vertov was contrapunctual, or, risking a cliché – dialectical in its construction. The emphasis was on work, how things are made, how the film itself is being made. Sound was supposed to be as tough and heavy as the work itself. The workers liked the final result, because it was showing the work as it really was: shockingly hard, the authorities not so much – the attention to human labour to build communism was not in the political climate of the late 20s.

Another fascinating use of sound happened during the festival screening of Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia (1928), a tremendous first attempt on an alternative western, or rather an “Eastern”, with the congenial soundtrack of Yat-Kha, a contemporary traditional Tuvan band. The musicians sadly couldn’t play it live, stopped by the lack of visas, so soundtrack was played from a dvd. Film is striking in combining the breathtaking visuals from the Republic of Mongolia, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist message and a revolutionary agitation. Tuvan musicians approached it with a similar playful eclectism, combining traditional drones and throat singing with nods to Western pop-culture, guitars and traditional rock, ironically quoting even The House of the Rising Sun, to a successful comic effect.

Cinema was a crucial, highly theorized art for the Constructivist avant-garde. Their writings remind us how popular metaphor of abstraction musical composition was. “There’s nothing else in musical composition, than relation of pitches to one another” wrote literature theorist Victor Shklovsky. The play of a disciplined form and arbitrariness happens in the early Soviet films in its fascination with the rhythm, which equated the modernity, the reality of speed, of mechanized life. Rhythmization was also preventing an easy fulfillment of the mimetic powers of cinema, a strange Verfremdungeffekt. Soviet filmmaker wanted to melt various features of an artwork as a Gesamtkunstwerk. In their films Vertov dreamed of becoming a seeing machine, while Pudovkin presented human brain as a machine.

In the end, sound contributed to all that, but, just as its appearing intersected with the consolidation of a Stalinist power, it couldn’t fulfill its revolutionary promises. Still, even in Stalinist era musicals, such as Alexandrov’s Happy Folks, Circus, Volga, Volga were not just simply russified Chaplinesque or Hollywodian forms. Watched after the years they seem strangely Brechtian vaudevilles. Soviet avantgardists were seeing a filmwork as a dense multilevel whole, equally a montage of attractions or the disruption of an artificial visual spectacle, and the sound acted like a final storm, sending the filmwork the final revolutionary shivers.

Kino: Russian Film Pioneers 1909-1957, BFI Southbank, London, 1st pt until June 30

We Want to Be Modern - Polish design exhibition

2011-09-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

[unedited version of an article that appeared in ICON 094 April 2011here]

more photos

“We are aiming at a beautiful future, but we cannot see its shape yet, we cannot imagine the form and the scope of the life we are aspiring to. Which is why we want and we demand that visual arts show us this good, just and happy future life” – so said Jerzy Hryniewiecki, designer and theorist in the 1st issue of the “Projekt” magazine from 1956, heralding the new commandments of life after the 'Thaw' in People’s Poland. Modernity became a fetish for the society. The exhibition We Want To be Modern. Polish Design 1955-1968 from the Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw shows a flamboyant, glamorous and complicated face to the oft cited, but frequently misunderstood socialist-era Polish design. This period proved to be the most interesting in the vast collection of the Museum, which still has no permanent exhibiting space and seeks for a new one to store over 24,000 objects, now hidden in magazines. This show seeks to change it.

In post-war Poland there was a general necessity of restoration. It was not only a dream, but rather a dramatic necessity in a country left in total destruction after the war. The break was Warsaw's World Festival of Youth in 1955, a mass event typical of the People's Republics. Carnivalesque street decorations were designed by the students from the city’s Fine Arts Academy. Before the 'Thaw' Polish designers couldn’t refer to the 20s and 30s avant-garde, because Socialist Realism did not permit any steps outside its canon. The liberation from sotsrealism brought enormous hunger for everything new. That included also not purely decorative arts: literature, theatre, music. This time saw the formation of the Polish schools of poster design (Tomaszewski, Cieślewicz, Młodożeniec) and cinema (Wajda, Polański, Munk). In other words, it was the most original culture Poland had in the 20th century. Lots of formerly forbidden experimental art from the West was available, the new generation of artists, who started their education after the war left the academies, and there was a chance that the promises of the failed avant-garde projects of the interwar period could be introduced into life.

Many Polish artists of the period were devoted socialists, believing they were building the new Poland, but designers were apparently less subjugated to the power apparatus and much less controlled. It seems that decorative arts were freer than so-called pure art. Their call was to make the life under socialism finally beautiful, and polymaths, like architect Oskar Hansen, author of the famous “open form” theory with wife Zofia, film-maker Jan Lenica, Jerzy Sołtan, Wojciech Fangor, Wojciech Zamecznik, were designing everything from film posters or book covers, to cars, a pioneer shawl or a lipstick advertisement, at the same time being painters and sculptors. There were no barriers between artistic/commercial.

Among the most popular features of the new aesthetics were soft lines, vivid colors, natural, light materials, asymmetrical, slanted forms taken from biology or science, made possible by the use of plywood, fiberglass, or textile printing techniques. Art was supposed to parallel the exploration of the world on a micro as well as a macro scale. Hence Polish designers were taking from such giants as Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen or abstract high art as well: there’s an influence from Henry Moore, Picasso, Matisse, but also Klee, Arp, Brancusi, Pollock or Informel painting. The Warsaw’s Institute of Industrial Design was the queen bee’s cell of the Polish design of that era - there the artists were preparing the prototypes, which were then presented on exhibitions and sold to factories. This way an average Polish family could afford a fragment of the futuristic dream of luxury in their houses. The then very popular and now rare and sought after Ćmielów ceramic figures are a perfect example of the more mass produced but stylistically unique design of the time.

The question lurking in the exhibition space is whether it was possible to develop a specter of a luxurious consumption when there was no real possibility of consumption. Many of the projects were never actually introduced into life, unacceptable to government officials. But the main elements of the style remained in every Polish house and they were truly showing the nation the importance of material culture again after the war.

We Want To be Modern. Polish Design 1955-1968 from the Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw February 4th – April 17th 2011

Wielkanoc, "Girlscarbines"

2011-09-15T14:52:00.000-07:00

[first published in The Wire #330 August 2011]

Wielkanoc
Dziewczyny Karabiny
CD
Manufaktura Legenda

Virgin Mary does the splits – the world falls in!/The communion of holy white wafers of snow covers her eyes and face/ The world of white altars – cemeteries of paradise. This is not, surprisingly, from any Norwegian Black Metal band, but a song called Snow Queen by the Polish new wave group Wielkanoc (Easter, or Great Night, to render its double meaning) from a small Polish industrial town of Lubin, in Lower Silesia, who lasted less than 3 years and were killed, alongside with so much of what was interesting in the Polish alternative scene, just after the collapse of communism around 1990.

Dziewczyny Karabiny (Girlscarbines) was never actually released, and compiles live recordings from the festivals where the group wowed the public and critics, such as Jarocin in 1988, or from the Rozgłośnia Harcerska radio (known for its support of progressive groups in People's Poland) the same year. No wonder they did – live Wielkanoc was a knockdown combination of the moody and the unpolished. Even today it is amazing, how such sophisticated groups were possible in the suicidally grey Poland of the 1980s. As young people from a small industrial town, they knew they had to invent a world around them to have anything on their own. Pretty much, you could say, as did the post punk bands of British industrial areas, but they certainly didn’t have the Citizen Militia running at them with truncheons after the gigs.

What is greatest in Wielkanoc is probably the originality and real provocation in the lyrics. Kasia Jarosz was a truly charismatic vocalist and lyricist, introducing to the nearly all-male Polish scene a rare, assured yet raw female presence, and giving the censors lots of work. Regular meals/Warm checked blankets/Speedy sidewalks/Slit-eyed spiders/Rainy alleys/Train station open/public toilets/female male copulate/The promised protein/no-mans protein. Nobody at that point dared to sing about grim sexuality in communist Poland like this, and there’s definitely no sadder elegy for a spared sperm on the toilet door in any music.

The album’s publication after so many years comes as a part of a wider retrieving of the lost legacy of the Polish punk scene by the same people who were engaged in the volume Generacja (The Wire Feb ‘11). Along with the booklet (sadly, only in Polish) which gathers unique pictures of the band and festivals and (translated) lyrics, Dziewczyny Karabiny tells a fascinating story of the functioning of the new music under the decaying socialist regime. Mainstream and alternative meant something completely different in this economy, where every small dom kultury had a certain budget they had to spend, and frequently supported young rock bands, running alongside the first attempts to capitalize on the music by the more commercial bands of the era. And the fact 1990 destroyed such a rich musical culture only adds another fascinatingly ambivalent layer

Generation - book on Polish punk

2011-09-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

[first appeared in: The Wire #324 Feb '11]

Generacja
Michał Wasążnik/Robert Jarosz
Ha!art (paperback/336 PP)

In the 1983 BBC adaptation of Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, when a Shakespearian actress on a guest appearance in Moscow asks the spy Alan Bates, “What else is there?” (ie apart from ugly clothes and dull people), he responds with a smile, “the system”. That all-pervasive system, too, was a constant presence in the Polish experience, most explicitly after 1945. It dictated the shape of Poland’s art and determined the way Poles felt about the state and themselves: always infiltrated by the system. The common Western view of Poland under communism must have been like the one represented in The Style Council’s “Walls Come Tumbling Down” video from 1985 Warsaw: grey, devastated streets, grim Soviet monuments and the shadow of the Palace of Culture and Science, a gift from Stalin, towering above it all; but nevertheless some enthusiastic small crowd gettng carried away in a nightclub.

But that was the 1980s. Generacja, a photo album now printed in both Polish and English by the renowned Cracow niche publisher Ha!art, is trying to break with precisely this stereotype. Apart from the usual assemblage of associations – drabness, poverty, grim architecture, the shops’ empty shelves, the sense of claustrophobia stifling the breath of the citizens, preventing them from any form of more liberated expression – there was also a place for fun, joy, being young, irresponsible and crazy. During the late 1970s, particularly the few years between approximately 1976 and General Wojciech Jaruzelski proclaiming martial law on TV on 13 December 1981, there was a colourful, unique punk attitude across Poland, expressed in legendary cult clubs like Warsaw Riviera-Remont or later, in the 80s, on youth music festivals such as Jarocin.

The large A4 format book can properly expose the both colour and black & white Michał Wasążnik’s marvellous pictures, perfectly documenting the era’s nervous, angular glamour. This fantastically talented photographer was never properly appreciated in Poland, and has lived in Norway for more than 20 years. Robert Jarosz’s narrative is constructed in rock journalism’s most popular format: an oral history. The text is based on a large number of interviews with the scene’s vital participants, such as Robert Brylewski, Maciej ‘Magura’ Goralski, or Tomek Świtalski (all of whom played in probably the scene’s most influential group, Kryzys), with some strangely perverse nods towards such ambivalent creatures as Jerzy Urban, the communist government’s PR man – an especially nasty but fascinating figure.

Typical group names – Kryzys, Tilt, Brygada Kryzys, TZN Xenna, Deuter, Dezerter, Izrael – tell their own story about Polish punk attitude. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. The most interesting thing about Generacja is the way it unveils the genuine originality and vitality of the Polish counterculture of these times, its carnivalesque ability to have fun. There were soft drugs everywhere, distributed without many problems; there were also secret police infiltrating the musicians and concerts. Parties were organised for epileptics, schizophrenics and erotic experimentation. Yes, even in the darkest times under the communist regime, there was the possibility of genuine fun, and plenty of Polish young folks were willing to have it.

It’s just a pity it was such a boys’ game. Although the first ever punk gig in Poland was by The Raincoats, sadly women never got into Polish punk, or haven’t played a significant role in it – although this is frequently lamented by the male former participants of the scene. (There was the charismatic Pola Mazur of The White Volcanos, or Pyza, drummer with several groups, or Kora from Maanam, but she’s a part of a different story.) There’s a note of regret, shame even, over why the scene failed to realise its potential. One could argue that because of the extreme patriarchy of the Catholic and masculine culture in Poland, which has barely changed its face even today, even punk, which was supposed to be as basic, sharp and one-dimensional as possible – didn’t manage to pierce it. Pola disappeared, as did so many others, after 1981, and became a comedian in California. That was basically it: unlike the youth in the Latin America at the same time, the Poles never grasped guns,; they didn’t take to the streets, but chose internal or geographical emigration instead.

There’s a sense of unrealised potential, disaffection with the present, and general frustration here, but with a hint of satisfaction that there was a real energy, a real culture going on, against all the odds. Although some now claim that the festivals were only a safety valve for the youth so that they wouldn’t try to destroy the system, we can see how they started to take on their own life. Polish punk and post-punk was never purely ‘journalistic’, and the will to live a relatively ‘normal’ youth – or to live Western youth’s youth (minus the consumption, which remained a fantasy) – vindicates the power of the music.

Cabaret Cixous

2011-09-15T05:01:00.000-07:00

[full version of my review of Maria Minerva's Cabaret Cixous, from The Wire magazine #332, Oct 2011. From now on, I'm going to put here my otherwise not available articles published in British press]

Maria Minerva
Cabaret Cixous
Not Not Fun
CD LP

Although Maria Juur aka Maria Minerva's debut album Cabaret Cixous starts with a song entitled These Days, it's not a new version of Nico's melancholic confession. But the tormented life of Christa Paffgen seems only at first a completely incongruous element to Minerva's private mythology, as presented on her previous EP releases, especially Tallinn at Dawn, full of complicated allusions to feminine desire, schizophrenic sexuality and various difficult (un)pleasures. Like Nico, Minerva struggles for feminine expression and presence in the music. And Juur's dreamy, oceanic, but uncompromising femininity is not miles away from Nico's astonishing gothic folk solo records. Too easily called “woozy” or “romantic”, she's rather testing out the expectations of a young, sexy girl. She's connected to “chillwave” only via a method of sound as if found after 2 or 3 decades lying full fathom five in a rusty swimming pool somewhere in a villa in Los Angeles. Noble Savage and especially Tallinn at Dawn showcased her production skills, an ability to put rich layers of sound one onto another with incredible charm and beauty.

In her escape or at least problematization of the usual associations of femininity, she was using ironically romantic titles and retro pop and disco hooks, then elegantly disrupting them in her charming sound-cum-psychoanalysis machine. Yet an ambitious title belies how Cabaret Cixous shows the signs of overproduction (her third release in six months!). She goes further than before, risking pretension in citing Helene Cixous, philosopher and guru of ecriture feminine, who gained fame after her 1975 essay The Laugh of Medusa. This text attempts to define woman's writing and her dependence on logocentric language. Freud said that woman always looks at herself in a schizophrenic way, assuming the role of a man. Medusa was supposed to take this view back. “Men haven't changed a thing, they've theorized their desire for reality.” says Cixous. Thing is, here we look at Medusa and discover that she's not only alive, but she's beautiful and she's laughing.

In another self-conscious move, Juur claims here only a Cixous cabaret-making, nothing more than that, neither serious, nor academic. Hence the karaoke pop tunes, cheap new age synth ballads, purposely “bad sound” and, as someone said, “cellphone fidelity”. Yet as we know, cabarets turned out to be the most serious catalyst of any worthwhile art of the 20th century. Here, the cabaret is a young woman in her room, an Estonian on a willing London exile, trying various masks in front of her mirror, looking sometimes grotesque, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes seductive, putting beauty into question. Cabaret is equally about the masquerade in this infinitely narcissistic theatre, as it is about inscribing these private things into some bigger scheme. But then again, it realises it is after all “only pop music” released by the most fashionable label of the season, so it stops somehow in the middle. What makes this record special nevertheless, is its longing for undefined freedom, for means of self-expression, an Easterner questioning the latest Western devices. Who in female pop is still even asking such questions today?

Love is Lovely

2011-05-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

Carl in one of his manic, passionate posts about love and its discontents:

Equally of course I know lots of couples who have been together for years and are happy, and whose love for each other I don’t doubt. But you need love, without love your relationship is just one more thing you have to manage, one more negotiation between your fear and need, one more drain on your spirit, one more cost/benefit analysis. It will weigh on you, you'll begin to steel yourself for your partner’s return home from work, find you're hyper-alert to every nuance and tic of their mood, feel your heart sink when the phone goes and it’s them.

yes, love is lovely, when you love, things like concern, focus, attention, involvement just go naturally out of your noble inside and you just never feel any selfish, self deprecatory or unglamorous feelings, or think ignoble thoughts, they are just naturally blocked and swept away from your brain by the miraculous activity of loving.. well, only it's just not true, at least not all the time. we know it's not so easy. you know it yrself Carl, and you were, as I recall, writing once about waiting all day for 'her' to say she loves you, and when she finally did, it wasnt so meaningful. because people are moody, neurotic creatures, sometimes erratic, sometimes generous, but still bit unpredictable. especially in those times and especially in certain circles. and the most genuine, authentic love can be sometimes put into hard times by our neuroticism. we want good, it turns ut bad..but we love each other, so it doesnt matter, does it? precisely, the fact we had previous dissappointments, we are wary, we are weary, we dont want to get hurt, and with two neurotic individuals it gets even more difficult..

im just saying that love isnt ever just lovely, or that you may love someone to pieces, want only the good of this person and still get hurt. I wish all the lovers, that only the purest, unmediated products were issuing from their deep, beautiful selves, and the bad demand just never actually happened to their hearts, but actually, why not to demand, I ask you. when you feel dissatisfied, a right to demand should be a sacred one and lets demand, and first of all, from ourselves. amen.

Last Train to Berlin

2011-02-13T10:41:00.001-08:00

The latest manifestation of my Ostalgie. Films by a directors duo, Dieter Koster & Hannelore Conradsen, depict everyday life of West Berliners living next to the wall, some small time crooks, youth taking illegal substances way before even the Christane F. age, but first of all a great chance to see some of the raw footage.

This is here purely for the visual reasons, I have no time/energy to expand it right now, there are at least 5 posts pending in my "editing" page, but what if the proper moment for posting them somehow passed before I had a chance to got back to them and now the mind is completely blank. For those who got interested in my story of a solitary girl in front of the computer, entrapped by the crap technology while crying her days away when her boyfriend stays on the other side of the channel, this is happily gone, I'm in my "second" hahaha "homeland" England again, experiencing a somewhat premature spring, but a combination of pseudo-autumn with piercing wind and glimpses of sun more like. Meanwhile, the Egyptian revolution took place, Poland yet again was immersing itself in craziness over Smolensk victims and our Formula 1 driver Robert Kubica's car crash, I debuted in the British press (look out for my pieces in the February and March issues of the Wire & hopefully the next ones as well), was reading a lot of a wonderful poet Thom Gunn, whom I'm translating, came with about 10 equally fantastical plans of how to stay-in-the-Uk-and-not-starve, but basically the things has been terrifically exciting if only a little bit precarious and unstable.

But next, when only my brain will start to function normally again and some ideas will start to come up, with my Eastern Europe musings, I'm planning to get far more serious. The most annoying and serious use of pop in the countries on the East of the Bug river, or Oder, more accurately, seems to be the way music is used to support various regimes. I hope to write for instance about the terrifying use of music by Lukashenko in the election in Belarus lately, and report a bit more about the Ukrainian scene, because I'm going to Kiev soon. In the meantime, there will be some "naked German women" (actually not necesserily of German extraction), because I discovered that my blog is very frequently googled by some action-seeking pornographs, dialling "sex pyzik", "naked little girls masturbating" or aforementioned naked Teutonic daughters. Not to let my readers down, soon I shall fulfill those expectations.

Agata's Boy is a Computer

2011-01-23T14:47:00.000-08:00

It's late evening on Sunday 23rd of January and I just realised I haven't met anyone within the past week, since my boyfriend left for his country. I mean, I was leaving the house, of course, I was seeing lots of people on the streets (living in a big city man is never fully alone, so to speak), I had many phone conversations (two of them of a longer & deeper nature), I attended one meeting about a late artist I greatly admire, where I've meet lots of friends and had a few chats with them, but mostly I've been staying at home, and my conversations or thoughts exchanges, although some of them very engaging, occured via internet. I was reading, doing research, translated 2 long texts into English, written 1 longer and couple of shorter articles, worked on my book. Seen three films. Listened to lots of music (also to write about it). Some of it was truly compelling esthetic experiences. But honestly, I can't say I had any form of deeper in-real-world interaction with other human beings (dismissed two invitations to go out in the evening because of the workload, which now I regret).

Something literally shrinked within when I thought about it, although there's nothing there that should be at any rate shocking for anyone. Lots of us live like this nowadays, especially if we're freelancers working at home (and don't have flat mates, as I do). Lots of us live online, lots of us move the working hours into the night and sleep until noon or later. Still, I'm utterly terrified that I managed to do that at all. Wasn't something in me craving for such contact? How did I manage to spend so many hours in this flat not even noticing it? Even if it's winter, it's cold, night falls at 4pm and there's not much to do in the January evenings. I suddenly dropped my work altogether, pondering when exactly did I accept, just like that, this kind of apalling solitude.

On the much praised album from the last year, "North" by Darkstar, one of the Hyperdub flag ensembles, there's a song, which was also a much youtube-played 2009single, Aidy's Girl's a Computer. Heard it many times, but must say that until today, when I played it sitting alone in my flat, it didn't struck me with equal power. (Am an ignorant as far as the technique aspects of the music are concerned, but) It starts with some torn, as if cut out pieces of a computer generated/manipulated voice. As if from the deepest, darkest of digital voids, this voice formulates first the word "I" and then "feeling", then recurring throughout the rest of the song, fragmented & layered. It at first sounds like some kind voice test, but of course in connection to the songs title emerges with a quite distrurbing meaning. There's no story or narrative in this song, and the better, because it would render it banal. as Sam Davies written in the November review in the Wire, North is an essentially synth pop album, but the song stands out, belonging to the former dubstep phase. The simple two step rhythm, plus xylophone, this song seems to me an incredibly touching rendering of the tired, solitary nights I spend in front of my computer, trying to connect with the person I love, waiting for the machine to be "on" and the heartbreaking silence that is opening whenever the connecting devices decide not to work. And towards the end of the song, the machine voice says "I'm on". Yet I cant quite describe what is so moving in this song, its autumnal atmosphere and soundscape looking so basic & flat.

Recently we stopped using skype, because my headphones were broken and my stolen internet was just not doing it, and when it was faintly working, he was saying he can hear me as a woman robot, which allegedly was sounding sexy. Now we have to be tight at phone calls because they cost fortune, but funny how one is always disappointed by a phonecall, no matter how long it lasts. In his review Sam is calling "Aidy" a "modern lament" and as effective as it sounds, it is a lament, and to avoid any pretentious metaphor at the end, it's sort of a hymn of the crap technology, of the heartbreaking unfulfilled relationship we have with it, of its broken, unhappy promises, as well.

Bless the Soviet Hipsters!/Perils of Europop

2011-01-20T04:56:00.000-08:00

[picture above: Savage Progress, a pop group in the 1980s formed in Kenton, England which had hits in Germany, Austria and Switzerland]

Just been reading a review of a 1986 Neu! release by Mark K-Punk in the Wire few issues ago, where he's complaining about its untimeliness in general, comparing some of it to the "Europop British tourists will bring from their Mediterranean vacation". I was thinking about this phenomenon of Europop in relation to my previous musings, it is after all a product of certain kind of Eurovision culture, European Union, post-war thing, from ABBA to Dana International (I love them both), but also elading to lots of very, very bad music, and funny it evolved into this semi-universal code of extremely trashy & kitschy soft-porn show.

Meanwhile, I have fans of my new music approach, got a letter from the author of this lovely Europop blog. my atemopt on the analysis of the Eurovision culture grows in my mind nevertheless and hopefully will take its shape here soon.

Also, got more into the Altered Zones website, which is very succesfully hiding the fact it is by kids of the Pitchfork era & owned by Pitchfork.
here Simon Reynolds muses on the Altered Zones generation, whose flag music is chillwave, all sort of generated by Ariel Pink and lo-fi, witches-in-the-forest esthetics, wonder what is the link between this & dubstep and hauntology.

but Im absolutely captivated by this clip to the Rangers, from their album Suburban Tours (sic!) showing that love for "undead social projets of Modernism" have, unnoticed, become some kind of underground mainstream & the question is whether there really is something to it more than a passing fashion, and what does it signify culturally. It's telling, that girls and boys on both sides of the Atlantic somehow think wandering around empty, derelict tower blocks is the most hip thing to do and we can only speculate who's responsible for that! Crisis had its role in it, no doubt.

RANGERS - "DEERFIELD VILLAGE" from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

Also, investigated a bit Puro Instinct and the word "Stilyagi", which she used in a song I posted, and it turned out Miss Kaplan & other chillwavers really thought this all thoroughly out. Stilyagi were Russian, or rather Soviet youth fascinated by the West, culturally, visually, what expressed in their style of clothing, musci etc...the very precursors of the hipsters, one may say.

And there's also this relatively fresh feature film on Stilyagi, called, in translation, simply - Hipsters! frocks, songs, atmosphere. There's a direct link between the Soviet youth from the 1920, 30s, 1950s & 1980s...

Also, this is so much exactly what one needs in the grim season, when the day ends at 4pm, account is empty, internet works sporadically and the general feeling of the End-of-the-World is crawling on us.

As far as the Stilyagi-cum-punk goes, there was a whole wave of those bands, the most colorful being Bravo.

Leningradskiy Rokenroll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bravo was created on the wave of teh Stilyaga culture revival, some kind of Easternized beats combined with Mods & hipsters (dwelling on real 50s hipsetrs and anticipating the later revival in the 00s as well), but to me they look more like post-punky rockabilly'ists. either way, isnt that gorgeous? they were fascinated by the Western culture, but it was coming to them already in its distorted, a bit caricaturized form. there the John Peel thesis ("strange things happen to pop in isolation") would be actually true - trying to mime the West Russians or demo-peoples in general were creating something rich and strange (hoep to show some more Polish examples soon). It also shows the beginnings of the Retro Culture in full spread - all those big beat & early rock'n'roll revivals, (followed by the neverending festival of the 80s that lasts alreday longer than the decade itself), signs of a derivative, self-eating, nostalgic culture we have now up to its caricatiral form. There it has started, in the 80s, or, more possibly, when "the history ended" in 1989, as Fukuyama put it, after the collapse of communism/The Wall, so greatly described in Joshua Clover's fantastic 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sign About. It also brings to mind so many 80s UK bands built on a similar spur: Madness, The Specials, taking Mod or 50s culture, its climat & iconography, into a new space.

At the beginning Bravo had an amazing Zhanna Aguzarova (she has a massively detailed Russian Wikipedia entry, must be a cult figure there) on the vocals, who was later expelled by the official authorities (!!!) and replaced by a geezer, to the rest of the band's fearful acceptance. Then they stopped being in "underground" anymore & turned into a very conventional pop/rock band. In their early days they remind me of Polish Maanam, which should be the next on my focus here. Which will in general become: the growth of new wave, 80's synth-pop and some disco 70's mainly Eastern bands as a social movement? we shall see.

In Bed With Doda

2011-01-18T04:11:00.000-08:00

фотокино - FOTOMOTO "CHAT" from Anna Bekerskaya on Vimeo.

In addition to the yesterdays post: Owen drag my attention to this article, about a completely contemporary Ukrainian music scene, that emerged around Orange Revolution (here), focusing on a band called Fotomoto, singing in French, that were the darlings of the late John Peel. Peel wasn't exactly right saying that they were completely isolated from the Western sound ("strange things happen to pop in isolation"). What allured him was the singing in French and dream-poppy atmosphere. The idea the East lives in isolation is another stereotype that is attractive for the West I guess. The musicians themselves say they feel a part of the global world, im sure that around 2004-5 all of them were highly networked! But a strange situation: you cant get their cds anywhere, for people who were capitvated by them via Peel, they remained an air-only ethereal phenomenon. But isn't it sound great, actually?

But another thing Peel says there seems fairly typical:
'Most music I get from eastern Europe tends to be rather grim metal stuff, not awfully good, and when you see the bands live - of course this is a gross generalisation - there's always a kind of cabaret approach. There's always someone in the band dressed as a clown or a monk, and the vocals are always terribly theatrical.' But what is bad about Theatrical exactly? Of course, I'm perfectly aware how bad in general metal bands may be, but that also complicated my thesis from yesterday, the singing in English/in your native speech thing. Because precisely, just think about all those very bad metal bands, or just the absolutely horrible/fascinating form of commercial pop everywhere (be it mutation of Europop - remember Eurodance? etc). they mostly sing in their respective languages.

here more spectacular examples.

She (they?) are singing in Russian (I envy you seeing it for the first time):

and she is singing in Polish (although I'd give a lot not to understand what about)

Doda, performing with her "band" elegantly called Virgin, is a proud Katie Price of Poland. Funnily enough she's a couple with a leader of the internationally known metal superband, Behemoth, maybe one of those John Peel was talking about. Also, you'd be curious to know, there's a massive form-content discrepancy, usually. I mean, what she sings about has nothing to do with the entourage. you'd think it's all porn & all, but what's probably even worse, these are attempts at lyrical poetry. yes.

and she is singing in French

eugh....

Also, one of the strangest phenomena of the beginning of 21st century: TaTu

All of them just wanted to be Madonna (rather re In Bed With Madonna than to focus her fine pop moments), or later, Lady Gaga, or emulate old times divas (P. Kass committs an unforgivable profanation of any idea of Edith Piaf, or Francoise Hardy, whenever she opens her mouth), but who actually knows what people responsible for Nikita had in mind.

It's not exactly how do you imagine national bards, is it? Nikita & Doda sing in Russian/ Polish, because there's a massive audience for that, which emerged in the strange post-capitalism times in UKR/PL, in a culture where even baring your tits in a Reality Tv seems simply not enough & being a criminalist is a cool & accepted way of life.

Some people like to watch celebrity shows or reality TV, others - read biographies of famous people or aristocratic families, others think that reading Kolakowski or the late pope JP2 will save them from all the atrocities of the world. In a way, there're no big differences between them.

They Play From Behind the Curtain

2011-01-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

Reading this interview with Piper Kaplan, from Puro Instinct (via Pop Jukebox) (the only reason I know about her is because she is from the Ariel Pink constellation), I found out about the story of this amazing compilation, containing four Leningrad bands, that was the first ever presentation of the Russian punk in the West. Released in 1986, well into the Glasnost era, it still had to be smuggled. However some of her statements sound a bit naive ("I also think that Russia is really cool, because Russia is on the outside what America is on the inside. It's really seedy, and fucked up, and corrupt. It's like the innards are exposed. I like that. They’re proud of it, and wear it on their sleeve. I think that’s pretty cool. My idea of Russia is kind’ve this weird apocalypse, Troma version of America."), I think there's a lot to it, much more than Miss Kaplan can imagine.

When in the post on Pulp few days ago I was writing about the inability of Polish bands to fully emancipate from the influence of the West (at the same time being trapped within history, that made them either be journalistic, or completely nihilistic, and no wonder why - later will elaborate on this subject), the silent premise of those statements was that of course, there were nations that had it worse as far as social and political history goes and most definitely I feel that despite being exposed to this music & culture for years, my research on this matters barely started. There's a lot to be found out. But to better imagine this entrapment of the rock/punk bands under the Warsaw Pact, it is worth to imagine how it is to sing to a music invented by English-speaking lads. I guess that the fact now everybody sings in English, what wasn't the case 30 years ago, is a sign not only of the culture's globalisation and homogenisation, but speaks about the cultural limitations of the genre itself. I know it may sound funny after so many has happened to "rock" music we can't recognise it as a genre anymore, but the mediocrity of teh current "indie", this sort of stagnation in a form set decades ago & its selling well speaks volumes about the conservatism of the current era and proves either there's still a public space generated by music to take over or that we are in a state of a total, total bankrupcy. You decide. Or that, coming back to the linguistical thing, there are always two parallel 'scenes' in the countries: one of the English singing more or less West-copyists, and another, that still struggles with the real singing-songwriting, that occurs, I think, in your Muttersprache. (Writing in English, which scene's part should I feel?)

Some of the Punk on the other side of the Curtain story I mention in the review in the current Wire magazine where I reviewed much anticipated by me alternative history of Polish punk, Generacja by Michal Wasaznik & Robert Jarosz, telling how things were especially before the introduction of the Martial Law in 1981, which I heartily recommend to you. And if I ever said that there was no more than the system vs. the youth thing, that would be an unforgiven simplification. The quasi capitalist consumption at the end of the 1970s was in a full blow and the society obviously knew numerous ways how to obtain the desired goods or lifestyles, be it smuggled clothes, food or Western records. And definitely, from the late 1970s on, the communist system was so rotten, old, flaking off, being a parody of itself more than ever before, and if the economy is a joke and the reality you live in is a joke, what do you have to lose?

The story of how the West mingled/mirrored/copied the East and vice versa has a funny reflection in a story of a "rebelled" American female punk, who was so attracted by the Russian roughness & brutality, she went there, got together with the bands and released the 1st LP of their music on this side of the curtain, and had relationships with the members of the scene, which is a funny episode of the erotic relationship between USA & USSR. So as the new generations of American girls are seduced by the Communist Chic, we can only look forward to the fruits of this love.

Pulped life

2011-01-10T13:15:00.001-08:00

[a slightly changed version of an article I've written a year ago and published in a Polish magazine called Lampa (issue 1/2/2010), inspired by this piece, of course. So now, when Owen publishes his book, no one will tell I nicked my ideas from him]

Polish pop & punk bands were journalistic, Polish bands were not excelling in great lyrics. This text seeks to overcome this general opinion, and maybe come up with some new views. In the history of popular music of single countries there’s their history written, social, political, intellectual, it conserves the cultural momentum, the language, style, views, customs, morals and consciousness. I initially started writing this text in a reaction to Owen’s two part essay on Pulp - where he was overtly stating this was the best UK band of the 90s and why it was so special – but it was probably the article’s cheekiness and general flamboyancy that made me to rethink whether and why my country, Poland, never had its version of Jarvis Cocker. Because it was probably this band who captured, better than anything from that period, the zeitgeist, drowned in the Brit-pop’s crassness and cockiness, and left victorious this embarrassment that Brit pop was, without fraternization with Blair or participating in the Blur vs. Oasis thing, still topping the UK charts with Common People in 1995.

Through they style-jangling, eclectic, nonchalant (I thought at that time!), but very accessible music they were the most exciting and moving band at the time, touching upon the themes of the class war, patriarchy, inequalities, and managed to do so through very private and idiosyncratic obsessions of its frontman and lyricist, the one and only Mr Cocker. Because really, the lyrics were the most important in this band, although all of us were dancing to the ‘hits’ from Different Class.

Because there they were – and I remember very well when I bought my first of their albums, it was Common People of course, and it was a cassette, and I was thirteen, 1996, initially prompted to buy it allured by the cover and the artwork of it, pictures of the family events, weddings, communal life and this whole ridiculous slogan ‘We just want to be different’ – wondered, why exactly did they mean? I remember the initial awkwardness of my acquaintance with Pulp very well. For a girl who at that time just started reading music press – and it was a good time for the press in the still freshly free Poland, just a year before a first real popcultural magazine started, called “Machina”, a mixture of Face, I-D and Melody Maker, where I first read about William S. Burroughs, Afrika Bambataa and pop art probably – it was quite something. Don’t remember whether I even read a review of Pulp, just there they were, and I remember just being seduced by the title – Different Class. At that time I already knew and was listening to, among others, Portishead, Bjork, Blur, had few important soundtracks, like (forgive me) Trainspotting, after which I started listening to Joy Division and New Order, and at that time, in Poland, believe me, listening to (Whats the Story?) Morning Glory didn’t condemn you to the social inexistence. Au contraire, no one were interested in this music in my school or among my friends. There were just me and tons of cassettes in my room.

After that there was dozens of British bands in my life, discovered and rediscovered. The moment when I realised how much a context of a place from where the band was was decisive. If you’re from Sheffield you don’t play like guys from Glasgow, and definitely not like blokes from Liverpool or Manchester. Pulp were from Sheffield, famous for its industry and brutalist architecture, with the great social experiment that was the Park Hill complex at its front. It was to be the city of the future, there the dreams about the final industrialization were supposed to fulfill, it was a fine transposition of futurist ideas into the every day life. Cabaret Voltaire, Human League (who first performed as the Future!) or Comsat Angels were from there, among others. But Pulp does not wear significant traces of an influence of the local scene. Cocker founded Pulp aged 15, and his natural references were Roxy Music and (I guess) some influences of Bowie, with a vision of a sexy, feminized but not gay, vocalist, inclination to frocks and luxury, and refined pop.

Who is usually founding bands? Funnily enough, unlike Britain, in Poland it was rather kids from intelligentsia, with an access to family libraries and at least small financial security. Not in UK, as we know. But Cocker was hardly a working class hero. He had it written on his face he was a good student, a well read teacher’s favorite, who attended music lessons and were active in the school theatre. But he clearly wanted a success. And where the hell is a success and the access to the ladies if not in the realm of rock music. If you watch the very early videos of Pulp with Jarvis, included on the post-split Hits dvd, what you see is an incredibly tall, eccentric, quirky, nonchalant, black-humoured but perfectly aware of his uniqueness pretty boy in oversized glasses, whose every gesture, every whim on his face, seem to be perfectly directed, so perfectly it suggest his fragile and embittered ego. He desperately wants to be different, fucking Andy Warhol, combined with Bowie, and more Scott Walker than Bryan Ferry, and what not, and he will be restless and ruthlessly focused where he only wants to. He is like Cary Grant in Bringing Up a Baby – but whereas there only we, the audience knew he may be clumsy, but he’s pretty fucking hot, he’s a bloody Cary Grant after all! – this boy already is perfectly aware how bloody charismatic and special he is and how he will use it to his advantage in the music world. And what a spectacle of a man he is - and he knows it, even when he’s doing his grocery shopping. But look at him again, and then look at him a few years later. Jarvis wasn't a typical frontman, with his carefully staged video and gig persona, with his ridiculous height, thinness, overly long arms and legs...it may have appeared as even grotesque. (then we learned there was some heroine involved to this thinnes later). He looks like a Daddy Long Legs, isnt he, so fragile he would be thrown with a slight blow of a wind. If you look like that, you feel uneasy, uncomfortable, you stand out. There's no easy option for sexiness for you, you have to invent yourself. Hence the queer-but-straight, peculiar stage motion of Jarvis, his cabaret, theatrical characteristic "pointing" hands gestures, his studied as-if drunken/stoned manner of dancing, that seem like a parody of conventional male sexiness, but delivered together with this deep, baritone voice becomes Ueber-sexy...
On the Sheffield Band video, sitting together with his band mates, he seems very uncomfortable. They all, the band, love Sheffield, they really do – isn’t Sheffield a beautiful place? he asks rhetorically, equally rhetorically admitting he will never move to London. Ha bloody ha. His mind is already nowhere else.

I’m unfortunately not patient enough with describing frocks and style, if you want this, go to Jon Savage and England’s Dreaming – let me then release my inclination for sublimation and focus on the message. The message was truly ambivalent. It is hard just to put Jarvis strivings into the box of a prole resentment, because it was so much more. Pulp is a band of oppositions. Yes, of course, he was perfectly interested in making a career and fucking other bands’ chicks, but show me a 90s frontman actually more interested in the destinies of women? And with an equivalent of the quiet, but assured presence of Candida Doyle on the keyboards (somewhat a balance to the Jarvis’s flamboyancy). Another paradox is of course the nostalgia. Cheap nylon outfits, general atmosphere of tawdriness, that later was changed for the more expensive, but still far from luxurious 1930s-meet-1970s colorful shirts, velvet suits and pencil skirts. Nostalgic salubrious sound vs the epic rock, mechanical motorik referring to the Sheffield bands tradition and the sentimental balladry; cockiness and shyness. The sentimentalism, self obsessed and sexy, reeking with boredom, disappointment, resentment, inequalities, decadence, ennui, deviations, alienation, hedonism, despair. And compassion. All those girls and women dwelling those songs, from the early Little Girl, repeating the theme of a young woman, pushed into a marriage & children, and then deteriorating in a house in the suburbs. My favorite song from the early underrated 1987 Freaks album is I want you, with a metaphor of an old lover, who wants to “keep her and throw himself away” (is there a more beautiful metaphor of love?). “You could look like anyone else, If that’s what you want to do”, but she cant, he can’t look at her in any other way. Guilt, frustration, sick love, fear of love, are leitmotivs of the early Pulp. In Life must be so wonderful Jarvis continues over the sad destiny of his ex, who left the town and didn’t quite gain the success elsewhere, who he is mocking, bored to the degree he need not to even pretend anymore.

I have a quite unexplainable liking for Freaks, which are relentlessly bleak, one-note, monotonous album on boredom, unsatisfying sex and title’s “death of emotions”. Unlike other Pulp albums, there’s no playfulness, nearly no skips (apart from I Want You and What You See maybe) toward any other form or other kind of human interaction. There’re certainly pieces of art that doesn’t bring any hope, but the songs on Freaks are also badly written and produced and there’s perhaps no forgiving for that. Still, I can’t fully recover after subsequent listenings of Life must so wonderful, where there’s clear there’s something genuinely wrong with the world and our relationships. There must be a difference between sheer wallowing in our unhappiness and real unhappiness, which is total and absolute shiteness. There’s certainly a difference between acknowledging that your relationship or lack thereof is shit and eg., that people are cruel, and eg. rape and kill each other. Because one can just leave said relationship, paying probably with a few months of feeling shit or having a depression, but surely, things like politics fucking over generations after generations or mass murder are worse.

But the catastrophe of relationships in Cocker’s lyrics are not only a fault of the imperfect nature of an individual, not only of the male desire, which in the end must say “goodbye” even to a nicest and most sympathetic girl and look for another conquest, to avoid the suffocating emptiness. Or rather this emptiness takes place in a specific space: in cage-like, stuffy flats, without perspectives, among stupid and insignificant dreams, among passive women and frustrated men. The characters are usually from the lower social classes, who had a chance to have/taste some of a “better life”, which often ends in a total failure. All this is filtered through an openly misogynistic, self-ironic, monologueing hero, who is mocking his own pretension to grandeur and megalomania, which is also a side effect of a class-induced resentment. There’s no, apart from the Freaks, real misogyny in Jarvis’ lyrics, who was raised by and surrounded by women, the father left the house, and Jarvis frequently admitted he’s actually more interested in a woman’s psychic life. The misery, lack of chances and helplessness of women is a frequent theme there.

Jarvis also were fascinated by Scott Walker, who produced finally the We Love Life, album “nobody bought”, as Jarvis later said, and the whim, mysteriousness, grandiosity of his music is definitely present there, if not the most in the fragmented, whining, painful baritone of the frontman, nonchalant and full of authentic despair. These are lyrics about sex in a smaller city, like all that joyful forgetfulness of Razzmatazz or Babies. But no irony – irony was a clichéd du rigeur of the past few decades and enough of that. Jarvis’ hero may be truly a bastard, when he’s blagueing that “I wanna give you children and you might be my girlfriend”, but aren’t the alternative destinies of those girls actually much, much worse? All those stupid things, they don’t work anymore, leave hope you who cross the line of growing up & entering the society. The thing is all that is raconted from a proper perspective of time (“well it happened years ago”), and is actually told by a slightly lecherous thirty year old man, who really probably doesn’t give a fuck since a long time. Sweetness is still there though, and real sympathy.

My favorite album or rather group of songs come from This Is Hardcore recorded after the astonishing success of the Different Class. This is one of the saddest albums ever, also an album of the lost chances – made more commercial than intended, it has become a spectacular band’s suicide. Its really like in this Frederic Beigbeder book, 99 Francs, the peak of the celebrity culture, this is a nightmare of a fulfilled dream of money and fame, drowned in drugs and alcohol, with incredible 30 minutes opera (masterpiece!) of the title song and written as if from the other side, hilariously funny Help the Aged, with Jarvis flying on a wheelchair to another galactic, like in Tarkovsky's Solaris mixed with Monty Python Flying Circus. Fetishism, crime, suicide, hardcore pornography, drugs (there was heroine around, so did Jarvis get a near-death overdose or a nasty trip?), jokes about death (but you're dead already, aren't you?). Yikes indeed. This is hardcore is a post coital, post sexual, post libido, post mortem pure dreadness, that gives me shivers & a serious twist in my stomach.

Moreover, it's everything Freaks wanted to be but could never become. This is an album of an unmatched power, a hangover & existential haze encapsulated, it’s freak Hollywood drama, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, Hitchcockian thriller with his women fixation (the projection of desire specifically Hitchcockian here!), cinema noir, showered with modern decadence, vanity, emptiness that can only come with a career in show business. This is a depiction of Jarvis Cocker’s state of mind after a year or two of taking advantage of finally getting on the top, of constant shagging anything that moves and partying hard. It nearly killed him, psychically, but there’s something great in the way he’s subliming it. Interesting, how eg. Bowie was embracing it (although it nearly killed him too, as we know at the end of the Station to Station there's nothing short of a goodbye-to-life declaration) and found himself much more inclined to hedonist pleasures, and actually never produced anything as dread-invoking as This is Hardcore - there's never such a menace, such desire-turned-something-terrible thing. It’s truly spectacular, pushed to the utmost degree, Twin Peaks/Mulholland Drive luxurious atmosphere of dread, like you were on a Eyes Wide Shut party, going straight to hell.

Truth is that is has to come to that, and it requires shitloads of hard work just as much as partying and immense self confidence, which comes after years of giving way too much fuck. And then you realize it doesn’t matter.

Pulp - Help The Aged
Załadowane przez: Pulp. - Odkryj inne klipy wideo.

Then Cocker got married, left for Paris, had a child, recorded a weak solo album, got divorced, produced among other things, Charlotte Gainsbourg album, recorded another solo album, whose highlight song is called I Never Said I Was Deep. Slightly disappointed by the first one, I actually begun to find the joyful embitterment of the second one fun. Well, he didn’t lose the classiness or sense of humor, naturlich, but the erotic neuroticism of Pulp is long passé.

So if I mourn something lacking within Polish (music) culture, is its not enough of literacy. The lack of striving to express their frustrations in an enough of a literate way. We limited ourselves to one-dimensional punk screaming/whining how special-but-nobody-knows-about-it songs that mostly sounded like cheap plagiarism over the Western bands. We seemed condemned to the music secondariness, so what about some lyrics experimentation? Sure there were frustrations, tons of them, but no one cared to put them into an artistic, poetic way. Yes, Im more than furious with how things went in Poland, because we have such a wonderful poetic tradition, such original literature, especially after 1945. What has happened with it, why it didint infiltrate the popular music?

Do we need and why, a Polish Jarvis? why do I miss such a figure in Polish cultural landscape? Why don’t we have equally nonchalant, whimsical, eclectic music, non-stripped of emotions? I’ll pass the general esthetical dependency of Polish popular music from the foreign, which condemns us to be eternal epigones. Lets focus on the layer of expression, ideology even. All music has its own esthetical ideology, Jarvis’ ideology was some projects from the past, filtered through his personal obsessions. Well, it is better not to mention our ideology. Polish bands, in result of those, and not the other, historical conditioning, had to, first of all, fight with the mythological SYSTEM, ‘komuna’, and didn’t have time or possibility to develop the esthetical or lyrical issues.

There’s also too big difference between our perception of socialism, obviously. Big assemblies, tradition of militancy, “classlessness” of the 30 years of the after-war period in UK, and then Thatcherism, strikes, when the industry was being destroyed are quite a different thing than the assemblies in Poland, under a quite different flag, or a general atmosphere of hopelessness, bleakness and greyness, especially of the last two decades of Peoples Republic. Maybe comparing the histories of our countries is idiotic in general. But hey, when I listen to Pulp, I still regret not having this chance. That the most popular songs in Poland have to necessary be bloody protest songs; and that we always, as a nation, preferred Clash to Sex Pistols. [well, a book called Generacja by Robert Jarosz, dismantles this image, but it came out a year after I’ve written this]. Class war, well, was something completely different here, was incorporated within the rotten ideology of late communism. Polish artist just couldn’t look at the socialist equality with hope. We also do not have a strong working class artist tradition, very few of the artists, maybe more among writers, belonged to the working class, art always being a domain of intelligentsia, who had privileged access to knowledge, books, education.

Funnily enough, when another self-proclaimed dandy, Paul Weller of the Style Council, wanted to show the bleakness of Thatcherism, he came nowhere else than to the grey Warsaw and shot Walls came tumbling down there in 1985. Now we watch this clip on youtube and proudly show it to our foreign friends, because Warsaw has become this really hip place. To me Warsaw is real, true punk. Ian Curtis knew what he was doing (although he probably meant Bowie’s Warszawa more). But funny that there’s no a Bowie song called “Berlin”, but there’s Warszawa. Still, people treat us as a living museum of communism (but people, go to neighbouring Ukraine for this purpose), whereas an ideal of contemporary Poland is a fucking small entrepreneur. Because maybe one of the problems of the culture in Poland under communism is that obviously it wasn’t socialist enough, and was basically as divided as anywhere else. Also dandyism as a way of life never actually found its way or tradition in Poland and died with the romantic poets.

Another thing is our level of consciousness. Young people coming to the festivals like Jarocin dreamed mostly of getting pissed and having sex in the bushes, they thought of the freedom and emancipation as well, but not knowing how it actually should’ve looked like. Punk in Poland was still v much about filth and vomiting, there were Solidarity, but all that was immersed in the omnipresent Polish Catholicism, and the progressive or anarchic circles already were seeing it all going toward right winged nationalism and capitalism. If we had lyrics about love, sex, unfulfillment, maybe paradoxically it only happened in the texts of one band, simple Teenage Love Alternative, then T.Love, whose frontman, Muniek, born in the same year as Jarvis (1963), is one of little working class born musicians in PL, who wasn’t ashamed to write about love. Muniek emancipated himself and gained a success comparable to Jarvis. Some also say that the more contemporary, 00s band, Cool Kids of Death (named after St Etienne song, of course!) was a late heir of Pulp. Their songs are fulfilled with similar resentment, unfulfilment, aspirationism. But whenever Pulp wanted to get there (and was getting there), CKOD were singing somngs of self-hating slackers. T. Love and CKOD sung a wish ablout collectivity, that never really happened, failed youth collectivities, refusal, hopelessness – CKOD coming from Lodz, a fallen working class city, no wonder etc etc.

WE never loved life, or ourselves, for that matter. Pity. Because this comparison between cultures and histories shouldn’t go towards revengeful or regretful jealousy really. But there was and are cultural complexes in us Poles that we unsuccesfully are trying to heal through similarly inept methods, like shock capitalism, privatisation, self denial or denying that the previous system had anything worthwhile in itself.

This is a far more complicated story and I'm not going to finish it right now, the story continues…

"I take your dark head in my hands"

2010-12-26T09:52:00.000-08:00

This is a book that was certainly the most important for me in 2010, read extensively and excessively, many times, in long bath lies, in bed, on my way to various places, as if I didn’t want to separate from it for too long. It was supposed to be unpublished until the 2023, but the heirs decided differently, and it was published in German in 2008 and then Polish and English in 2010. I have bought copies in three languages.

This is a testimony of great love between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, two poets I rate among the most important for me, if not the most important, really; a two orientation points as long as the post war poetry or writing as such is concerned (Bachmann important for me rather as a prose author), examining the limits of the language, testing the very possibilities of what can be said. This all sounds very Wittgensteinian, and no wonder that in a film adaptation from 1990 by Werner Schroeter of the final, astonishing novel by Bachmann, Malina, published in 1971, in which she’s paying a homage to her lover, dead of 1 year ( Celan chosen “the loneliest of deaths” in 1970 by throwing himself to the Seine after years of struggle with mental illnesses and personal crisis), the heroine, played by the very Isabelle Huppert, is attending a course on Wittgenstein’s philosophy in Vienna. How very proto Haneke's The Piano Teacher (Elfriede Jelinek's Klavierspielerin appeared in 1983), probably my favorite film ever – where again, Huppert played a desperate and lonely to the bone woman with artistic aspirations, which were brutally diminished, displaying her usual indefinable charm and aura of sexual complexity.

In both those cases, adaptations of books written by Austrian female authors, we have a woman, who eventually finds it impossible to live after a one way or another unrequited or failed love for a man. In Bachmann’s novel, at the end the heroine says: “I loved him more than my life. He was my life.” – whereas her lover, the title’s Malina, is believed to have died in mysterious circumstances, just as did Celan. In this unfinished novel, stopped by her tragic death after the fire appeared in her flat in Rome only at the age of 47, she finally closes their lifetime long, incessant relationship, love, friendship, correspondence, that sometimes muted for years, included few attempts of getting back together, always paid for by even greater pain and bitterness. But first, why should we care about it at all?

Because what it gives you an inquiry into is to what kind of depths of despair and intensity can love lead and especially if you were lucky enough to experience it in your own life, it is a proof that all this really is possible to put on paper, within a letter. Being in a relationship that lead me to frequent separations with the person I love, I also frequently have to rely on letters, and sometimes have nothing but letters, although we can't escape the fact we live in the era of internet. But even in the times of a quick internet connection one can still experience all kinds of doubt, longing, waiting, anticipation, desperation and loneliness. And this collection of letters is dearer to me than anything published in years, and it leaves me speechless and even more in love, because it helps me to name what love actually is about, although I couldn’t possibly explain it to you.

Celan has become everyone’s darling now, Libeskind channeling his Radix, Matrix poem to his drawings, songs cycles being composed to his Todesfuge (Death Fugue), him being a model tormented 20th century poet. He inspired a Polish poet Andrzej Sosnowski in his seminal long poem After the Rainbow and many uncountable others. I cant possibly write about Celan’s poetry in a piece of a blogpost space. It overwhelms me, although I strongly believe, that Celan, a poet of notorious obscurity, was rather a poet of an absolute lucidity, clearness and quite impossible distillation. He was a poet, he could only be a poet, and this is what he was doing for all his life.

Born as Paul Antschel (1920), a survivor of Holocaust, of course – but you know all this story already, do I really have to tell this again – a native of Czernowitz, Bukovina in Romania, born only few years after the dismantling of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, of which it was a part, he was invariably a product of its culture and politics. Member of Jewish diaspora there, he spoke Romanian at school, and a high literary German at home, mainly because his mother, Fritzi, was in love of German literature and was keen of passing her son the same passion. She is frequently referred to in his poems, tragically killed, in a Nazi camp, shot in her head, as he later found out, but the father, a more orthodox Jew, remains a dark and obscure figure. He insisted on the Talmudic education of his son, and therefore Celan spoke Hebraic also at a quite early age, so the inheritance of Jewish culture was quite strong in him. This whole constellation of languages, plus Yiddish, which he got as well, created the rich polyglot ambiance, in which the poetic mind of Celan matured and flourished – although probably it wouldn’t mature but for the inevitable, tremendous Jewish fate. He was a poet of this fate, of the civilization after 1945, who, as much as Bachmann, was trying to remap the world anew, to see the possibilities of saying something. And one will see, that his poems, after a brief initial period of quasi-surrealist stylization, strive to describe actually real situations, although it happens in the most condensed, reduced, dense way. There was not and there wont be any poet like him, ever, because the situation, in which he wrote and that made him write, is unique and uniquely tragic.

I can really only recommend jumping into his poems now, immediately, as you read this post. I remember studying his poetry in the University Library in Warsaw, transcribing his poems, as I couldn’t afford to pay for the Xerox, also, because I wanted to memorize its lines. I wrote in German and in Polish (had a bilingual translation) and although I didn’t know the German, I could read them, deciphering his cryptic, words overloaded with layers and layers of meaning. They are incredibly personal, in fact, and much has been written (Szondi, Gadamer) about the meaning of the Celanesque “Du”, that is “You”. “Du” appears there hundreds of times, testifying about the despaired attempt to link or to find this other being, and this “Du” was very frequently Ingeborg Bachmann herself.

Because the reason those letters are so tremendous is mostly due to Bachmann. Who was always investing more in this affair, and then difficult friendship, who was endlessly patient, careful, delicate, human, ready to give. This book show her as someone, who maybe recognized the weight of this love way too late, and then for the rest of her life was trying to recover from it.

Bachmann is now renowned mostly as a novelist, but she was an astonishing poet as well, her poetry being an examination of damages of war on the culture and possibility of speaking, of expressing human emotions. After becoming a successful writer in the 50s, she disrupted this image, publishing various experimental novels & short stories, and radio plays, that included strong inspiration by Celan. They’ve met when she was nearly 22 and him 28, in a post-war, divided Vienna in 1948, and almost immediately, well, just fell in love with each other (but my hand hesitated whether I can use such a bland expression to describe it). Her a daughter of a Nazi officer, born in 1926 in a very "brown" Klagenfurt, was studying philosophy there, preparing a very critical, as it was to occur, doctoral thesis on Heidegger. He was a man without a land, feeling increasingly alienated and haunted in a former Nazi country.

He leaves quickly for Paris, she stays. They try to meet again, but for some reasons, it doesn’t work out. Their attempt of mutual life end up “a la Strindberg”, in her words. As it occurs quite often, two very individualistic creative personalities are better in tragic loving that in the everyday routine. But there’s something more: he cant forgive her belonging to the culture, who killed his parents, she desperately tries to fulfill his expectations all her life, and finally fails. What is striking sometimes is Celan being demanding to the extremes to see the impossibility of his situation, and at the same time his lack of sensitivity, frequent blindness to anyone else’s traumas or problems than his own, whereas it is Bachmann, who is careful with every word she writes to him. Poverty stricken, she has to devote her time to non-intellectual jobs, starts to write excessively, he, married to a rich family, can mostly devote to the writing. Both of them suffer from numerous breakdowns, with, mostly Bachmann’s, constant trials to sort out their relation. Also, even when he appreciates her poetry, it is always connected with her person, his love to her, her charm etc., as if he was incapable of seeing her as a poet, a writer.

Their relationship was becoming more and more difficult with the years. Celan was suffering increasingly from his illness (it is difficult to say was it a mounting schizophrenia or recurring depression) and one’s own demons can be very possessive sometimes, to the degree they overwhelm and makes us blind to the suffering of the others. After another outburst of feelings and unsuccessful attempt to be together again around 1957, they embarked on a rather dry relation, as far as the letters go. Bachmann was changing, she was experimenting with writing, she published various novels, a cycle called Todesarte, The Arts of Dying, where she was among other things, settling accounts with Holocaust’s legacy in Austria. Also, her attempt to settle after Celan, was always doom-stricken. It seems that she just couldn’t be happy after him. Her white relationship with a gay composer Carl Werner Henze, although the lack of sexual tensions made her very happy, obviously wasn’t a solution, then she started to be with a renowned Swiss writer Max Frisch, an ex-architect, some may be interested to know (the exchange between him and Celan, also included in the tome, gives an incredibly funny tragicomic image of impossible dialogue between harmed, obsessed Jewish poet, seeking consolation after attacks, and a bit humourless, still crazily jealous, overly indulgent with his ego Frisch), who only left her four years later, after what she had to be hospitalized. Relation with Celan was even more harmful, as he was only capable of demanding from her and accepting only total agreement. He never was a help for her. He was too much obsessed with his demons, as Bachmann said, he was always a victim and died as one.

The peak of his deterioration was of course the so called Goll-Affair, when Celan, an increasingly renowned translator, after translating some of Ivan Goll poetry, is accused by his wife of plagiarizing her husband in his own poems. Then there were hostile reviews of his poetry in Germany, where, especially in the infamous Blocker review, he finds strong anti-Semitic undertones. He seeks consolation, mainly from Bachmann’s, she does whatever she can, but the distrust is there and after that Celan does not recover anymore. After several attempts to kill his wife and son put into an institution (what the letters are not saying), then released, he finally commits suicide. “Every day is a burden, what can be called my “health” will never come back, it seems, the damage reaches the very core of my existence…I can be cured only in pieces.” he written briefly before his death to his Israeli friend, an old, late rediscovered youth friend from Czernowitz, Ileana Shmueli (their moving correspondence was published several years ago in French).

This is an excrutiatingly beautiful testimony of few people loving each other. Because there was also Gisele, Celan’s French wife, who did almost everything for him one can do. Her letters to Bachmann, in which she confirms that “she understands” her relation with her husband, are heart breaking. This leads to the most touching letter Bachmann ever wrote to Celan, which remained unsent (like many others), where she concludes: “You are everything to her with your suffering, but she with her suffering would never be enough for you. What injustice.” Read this one and then the real letter that she’d sent to him instead. This captures her infinite delicacy, her turmoil and her consciousness of the delicate balance between them, that, at some point, just didn’t resist. “Je n’ai pas su l’aider come je l’aurais voulu”, “I couldn’t help him the way I wanted”, concluded Gisele informing Bachmann about Celan’s death. This is also a testimony of women whose love is terribly betrayed by the men's egos. And everything fades in a horrible, deadly silence.

Charming coffee drinking young things talking about Wittgenstein

2010-08-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

I quite often read readers' reviews on imdb.com. Unlike reviews on Amazon or pretty much everywhere else, they are not exclusively dull, there happens little hilarious eruptions of insight and they present much greater variety of approaches. Having a Sunday of procrastination, as it is, between cooking and reading Dostoyevsky's Devils, not being able to decide, what way of losing the time for working is better, whether to watch Haynes "Safe" (too depressing) or Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg on Youtube (Youtube quality), I suddenly realised that what I should do is to find some japanese-website quality example of no matter which example of my truly favorite genre of cinema, in the guilty pleasure sense: French comedy of manners where they do a fuckin lot of pseudointellectual babble (in French) and occasionally screw. My choice were cast on Arnaud Desplechin's My Sexual Life (Or how I got into an Argument) with wonderfully ugly-handsome and utterly pissing off Mathieu Amalric.

There was (and still exists to some measure) this wonderful genre in French cinema, started probably by New Wave directors - contemporary comedy about over-(usually pseudo, but that's tautology)-intellectualized young people, mainly and not surprisingly - young men, celebrating their immaturity, which is, in wider sense, we are told, supposedly a sign of something more general, the cultural climate, the society, in which they live etc.

This genre exists everywhere, and produced films as different as Francois Truffaut's saga about Antoine Doinel, Jerzy Skolimowski's Trilogy on Andrzej Leszczyc or Keith Waterstone's Billy Liar; Mike Leigh's Naked's eloquent Johnny is their younger brother, of course. Young-ish males engaging into endless disputations and imaginary lives, by the way screwing up lives, theirs and the people around them, whose pursuing the truth may be at the same time pure blague and pure sincerity & authenticism, but it's hard to tell, if at their most authentic they are the most hypocrytical and mendacious, or vice versa. Phd students, bluebirds, pseudeintellectuals, posing, babbling & escaping every form of responsibility - or to the contrary, those, who by their posing uncover the true rottenness of the society around them, maintaining in fact a real, moral and other, purity and innocence?

The cinema and literature is full of them, and they are always young males. If i think about the American cinema, there were few attempts to give them a woman repersentation, but I guess everybody will agree that Winona Ryder weren't very convincing in this role. Hamlet is a man - always a man, and Ophelia must just die. Full stop. There can't be a reversal of those eternal rules. Women are not convincingly depicted as intllectualls or even slackers, in the movies. The best you can get is fucking Juno, but she's a 16 year old in the "smuggest film of all time", as Mark K-Punk once put it. Now Juno's Ellen Page plays parts like utterly flat Ariadne, a labyrinth designer (sic!) in a Christopher Nolan's superproduction Inception, where she helps Leo DiCaprio to get to his blond haired children and a ghost of crazy French wife. apart from her, she's the only female character in this quite populated movie.

But my argument weren't supposed to be in this vein. Sure, there's also no, or very little, great depictions of, say, women's depression in cinema (vide Baumbach's ultra-boring Greenberg), but let's be honest: it's because there's very little, main woman characters in movies as such. Coming back again to so praised in blogger's circles Inception, and incredibly silly business class hi-tech pseudo-Freudian babble, women in this movie can be either desexualised part of the gang or they are crazy, irrational French, cliched beauties.

But this is something every child knows and yawns at. My argument here really weren't supposed to be as dull as pointing out the sexism in world cinema, but the aforementioned French comedy of manners.

In Desplechin's movie, the lovely Paul Dedalus (yes, really), a phd candidate in a subirban university in Paris, engages in one big succession of talking, drinking, flirting, breaking up with girls, messing up with his life, messing up with the lives of others, with his career, talking & talking. For three hours. literally. 173 minutes. Im a conaisseur of reading then the mentioned mixed reviews in imdb.com my favorite fragment is: "Like Stephen, his problems with writing are linked to his problems with sex. This is a key film of the Young French Cinema, which favours the flat filming of dozens of bright charmless young things drinking coffee and talking about Wittgenstein. Great."

In this case it is exactly how the reviews are saying - all my critique above doesn't change the fact that IT IS very truthful about the young people and IT IS extremely annoying and in places, boring. and probably most of the contemporary, politically aware, intelligent readers of these words, if they have seen the film or even at the sheer description of it, would argue they dont find themselves in a portrait of the 25/35 generation and find it endlessly shallow, vacuous and boring. and who they are, privileged, quite well off, secured, compared to many people, to us even, having the luxury of talking bullshit in Parisian Cafes, while we have crisis, cuts and unemployment, allowing themselves to make problems out of some stupid, vacuous romances and dull dependency between the sexes.

fine. fair enough. but what will you tell me after seeing scenes like this:

or this

dont you find yourself in them, at least in a tiny bit? very tiny? our ridiculousness, the ridiculousness and pointlessnes of our relationships, full of poses, hipocrisy and insincerity? but always, always with a true need to reject all those masks, with a possibility of it lurking somewhere. no, as you can see, the whole thing above was not supposed to put them into derision and through the psychoanalysis or class critique machine.

my favorite commentary is the one under the breaking up fragment: "Wow, French people sure are emotional!!!!!! Wore me out just watching it, can't imagine living like that everyday! Neurotic nonsense!" well, exactly, so what??

because the grandness of those young smug pathetic people is that they are also capable of greatness and that we are great in our weaknesses etc. or something. at least I want to believe it this evening, when I'm watching them.

That was as far as I could go

2010-07-31T14:32:00.001-07:00

Past may be a foreign country, but what if it is a foreign country within a foreign country? Imagine you happen to change your life thoroughly, and you decide to take a huge risk; and then the risk happens to be worth it. I guess then everyone live happily ever after? Not necessarily. When I came to London already as a “girlfriend”, with a plan set that we will visit each other month by month, it felt doubly like having a new start in life. No dry knowledge on England, no studies or reading, made me prepared enough to feel familiar. Suddenly the language I thought I know very well seemed utterly foreign; the conversations blurred, the small details were running away. Used to master and control the reality around me I felt suddenly lost.

I’m not sure how it had started; I was irritatingly impatient, asking questions about everything and losing my temper 50 times a day. O’s stories all seemed rather elusive. Sometimes I wasn’t even asking and the stories were coming out, sometimes I wanted to ask, very, very much, but was too shy to do it or was afraid of his reaction. And when I was listening I had a feeling that a lot stays in between, somehow lost, dressed in lighthearted statements that may cover something of much more heaviness. I realized that even with all the details the stories wouldn’t seem any more real or true to me because this is how memory works. He insisted he was not nostalgic about his past. So can one become nostalgic about the places someone else seems nostalgic about?

Yes, very much so. The fact that we knew each other before from writing paradoxically didn’t help much, because it was a bit one way – I was reading his blog, thinking that in this way I will know things better, but the more I knew, the more lost I felt. Words were alienating me from the experiences I couldn’t share, as if, despite this is how we’ve met each other, internet wasn’t this mystic space of meta-community, or of real sharing. Going from ethereal space of the internet into the real places before I was only reading about was suddenly a bit shocking. Language creates its own reality, that doesn’t have to relate to the flesh and blood reality. Places about which we read don’t necessarily have to really exist. And the detailed descriptions of the places O likes only made me realize more that I’m a stranger to all this.

The knowledge came to me through walking: views, smells, tastes, proven to be much more telling than stories. Already highly mediated through what I’ve read and what I was told, I was trying to forget all that knowledge and subjugate to the sheer specificity of the place. Which, given the aesthetics of the places O was taking me has already become a part of certain cultural industry, could easily transform in its parody. Luckily it didn’t. it seems that the aura, or some kind of black energy may emerge even when we resist it.

London is a mystery to me, a mystery that I know won’t reveal itself any time soon, it will only get worse. I was warned: there’s no chance to fully get to know this city, even after many years. This is probably a part of the charm I should accept and drown myself into rather than feel anxious about. But mixed emotions is my specialty, so I couldn’t resist that.

The irregular rhythm of my visits didn’t help much in getting any stable opinion of a city, which I’m getting to know from a very characteristic perspective, the South East. We live in Greenwich – well, not exactly Greenwich, O would say he lives in Westcombe Park, but the sheer sounding of “Greenwich Peninsula”, a half insular, half land-ish dimension of this piece of ground appeals more to my imagination. In my mind we live in a strange, joli-laid, beautiful-ugly place, which transcends the real official borders of Greenwich, where the park is a wilderness, river is a sea and the fortress of Canary Wharf, the financial centre built on the Isle of Dogs (sic!) is a somber citadel. It is simply a place, where you can be pretty sure you will stumble upon something uncanny. I can imagine that every day I could find there something that would be suitable for this new site, collecting haunted curiosities.

Greenwich, apt to its name is a space with lots of greenery, that is being suddenly interrupted by industrial trash and pollution. Where classic beauty of Wren’s Royal Naval Hospital clashes with the futurism of Millenium Dome area, and where the splendours of the royal park is a neighbour to the ordinariness of Blackheath. No wonder, we are in London, after all. Finally and metaphysically enough, it’s a “zero point of time”, as it were, a Greenwich Meridian space, with the elegant silhouette of the observatory, interestingly used by Conrad in his Secret Agent as a symbolic place of modern terrorism, where an anarchist revolution is to be started and a perfect place to embody “perverse unreason”, as Conrad described it, which “has its own logical processes”. His story was based on a real event of a French anarchist, who was carrying explosives, that accidentally detonated around Observatory:

“But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory it did not show as much as the faintest crack. I pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and then remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner: "Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards."

Funnily enough, that was – the park, the hill, the observatory – my very first acquaintance with Greenwich, when I went for a walk there, last Summer. That was as far as I could go not knowing any inhabitant who could take my by the hand and take somewhere more interesting.

Greenwich is not a proper suburbia, it used to be a town, a port, wit a rich history. Not until the end of 19th century it has become a proper part of London. One can feel the independence of this place, that still didn’t assimilate. Being there, I tend not to assimilate too and stick to the place. As a person who spent all her life in a Eastern Bloc concrete city, I crave water: and here I am, gazing at the Thames, that starts to look like a sea. Sitting at the Cutty Sark pub and drinking my pint, I stare at the water, imagining the whole microcosm of the lives lead here. I listen to people. Different on the weekdays, different on the weekends. On the weekdays, in the work hours especially, I like to imagine, that people like me come there: temporarily out of place, in suspension, as if on vacation. If only for an hour or two. I imagine the conversations, not just trying overhear them. I plot the criminal stories. I gaze at the incredible, fantastical figures of gas holders, I scan silos that are to be demolished, one by one. I look at the ancient Woolwich ferry, planning a trip. I imagine one day everything here will be drowning, naturally (won't be calling JG Ballard here, oh no), but Greenwich already looks like it has regressed to some ancient geologic period, after reemerging from the deluge of some sorts in a degraded form, whose the shiny, cold, metallic and ruthless opposite shore of Canary Wharf is also a part of.

Not domesticated

2010-07-31T09:45:00.000-07:00

For a short while I thought I want to have an “esthetic” blog, in which I could write/put pictures of my current interests/fascinations, but that proved to be a bummer. I didn’t really feel this, I wasn’t engaging, and first of all I felt that my English wasn’t good enough, and I was too chimerical. And too lazy. First of all I was too lazy.

I’m still a lazy and very melancholic person, but between January, when I last put any “content” to this blog and the present moment, an important thing had happened. This, among other things, makes me to commute a lot to London, where my boyfriend lives. This experience, of staying for weeks in a place that is so different from Warsaw, where I live, turned out to be very intense and highly transformative. For the first time I was somewhere else than home that wasn’t just a place of my vacation; yes, it was a space of temporary existence, but also with certain traces of “stability”; but it wasn’t a place of actually “living” either, because it remains undecided whether we’ll be living together and I still didn’t make a decision of moving from Poland. But exactly because of that, of London being this space infinitely “in between”, a place of non-decision about what it exactly means to me, a non-place of staying and non-staying, of living that is not entirely a “living”, made this experience so powerful. I don’t know for how long I will (or rather we will) continue this mode of being, but the longer it happens, the more it occurs to transform both spaces: my sense of Warsaw and my sense of London – as two intersecting, hybrid spaces of domesticating.

While staying in London, I also discovered, to what extent the space I’m in determines my way of being and thinking. This space being South East London, precisely – Greenwich and few other places, that constitute it. Gradually over the last few months we’ve been exploring this space together. Owen’s impressions can be found on his fantastic blog here. As I was reading his impressions of places I thought I knew so well, they suddenly seemed strangely foreign to me. Little by little it was clarifying for me, that the curious impressions I was collecting over my visits in London also start to constitute certain whole, that is revealing itself for me. What will hopefully follow on this blog will be a very modest try on telling the bits of this ongoing, hybrid, sometimes alienating, sometimes fascinating experience of the attempts to domesticate/get to know/intellectually colonize a space that still remains quite obscure and foreign, but already with traces of familiarity to it.

Oh.my.god!

2010-05-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Somebody show me a sexier performance or a sexier performer, I swear, I'm gonna eat my underwear!

...ich bin so suchtig, ich fuhle mich so Wunderbar...

2010-04-03T13:21:00.000-07:00

For now - only clips, accompanying text should follow shortly...

Tryin Not To Wallow In Typical Musical Misery Vol.1

2010-04-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

Winter keeps us Warm

2010-01-11T04:55:00.000-08:00

Since winter is on everybody's mind now, I'm posting this wonderful short film from 1963 by Geoffrey Jones, on the especially hard work that British Railway workmen had during the severe winter that year. Here the full description from the BFI archives:

Snow was Geoffrey Jones' first film for British Transport Films (BTF) but it owes its existence to a happy twist of fate. In September 1962 Jones began his research for a film about design for the British Railways Board. Armed with a 16mm camera, he travelled throughout the country, shooting film 'notes' of anything he found particularly interesting.

Viewing the footage, Jones was struck by several images of black steam trains churning down the tracks against a glaring white backdrop, and hit upon the idea of making a new, separate film contrasting the comfort of the passengers with the often Herculean efforts of the workmen to keep the trains going in hazardous conditions. On January 31st, 1963 Jones met with BTF head Edgar Anstey. Realising that the film would have to be made quickly or delayed until the following winter, Anstey agreed straightaway and shooting commenced the very next day. Jones and his barebones crew proceeded to chase winter conditions across the country.

Unable to afford his first choice of music, 'Teen Beat' by American Jazz musician Sandy Nelson, Jones had British musician Johnny Hawksworth re-record the tune, expanding it to twice its original length by reducing it to half its original speed at the start and steadily accelerating the tempo over a period of eight minutes to a speed approximately twice as fast as the original. Daphne Oram of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop added various filters.

Viewing Snow can be a hypnotic experience. Jones begins the film with a slow military throb, with the railway station and tracks all but buried beneath a mountain of snow and ice. The pace increases with the workmen's clearing of the tracks, and while the trains barrel through the snow-covered countryside, the music accelerates. The percussive editing between trains and environment reaches a joyous crescendo with a rapid succession of pounding snow, churning pistons, fields of livestock and the ever-present tracks, ending in a wild flourish of percussion.

Snow received at least 14 major awards upon its release, as well an Oscar nomination in 1965. It has been screened around the world and remains a favourite of fans of Geoffrey Jones' work and British Transport Films. Most importantly, this film marked the first full realisation of Jones' signature style, which he would expand upon and refine in subsequent films like Rail (1966), Trinidad and Tobago (1964) and Locomotion (1975).

Historia de Musica Eletroacustica

2010-01-10T09:52:00.001-08:00

a bit overwhelming portion of electroacoustic music, that will probably finally kill my computer:
here and here

Many thanks to the person, who bothered to put this together!

plus a new video of Hildur Gudnadottir via Touch label

Hildur Guðnadóttir "Opaque" from Touch on Vimeo.

Das ist Liebe oder das ist Sex

2010-01-04T15:25:00.000-08:00

I should probably start a series: "best dressed band", "with a best hairstyle", "the most respected way of wearing leather trousers by a performer" etc. In this case I have no doubt: DAF is definitely the best dressed and stands for one of the most sexually confident yet ambivalent ones, what's combined with their muscles-cum-leather style, resembling Nazi esthetics & gay fethishism subculture at the same time (which are not so distant from each other, as we know.)

I was planning a post on them for a long time, and I will do it, but since I can't stop listening to Gold und Liebe since last 2 weeks, this is just to shake off my obsessiveness for a bit. They were pioneers of techno and one of the best Neue Deutsche Welle groups. Their album Gold und Liebe, despite coming out in 1981, sounds zillion times more starkly modern and thrilling than most of the contemporary bullshit. Their leather-clad, sex-obsessed image, stark photography and relentlessly minimal electronic music, augmented with thudding, old fashioned drums and disturbingly sexy esthetics delights me. More on that later, I promise.

Neoliberalism for Children

2010-01-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

Neoliberalism as Water Balloon from Tim McCaskell on Vimeo.

Happy New Ears

2010-01-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

this and this
The Cultural Decay myspace
and why I love internet

Wrapped up in Books

2009-12-29T15:07:00.000-08:00

Few books that have been important for me in 2009. Now only 5, there's a lot more of them, but the rest I'm going to list separately.

1. Return to T.S. Eliot

"In the last ten years – gradually, but deliberately – I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately – in order to endure, in order not to feel – but it has killed V."

First, he made me sympathize with a prematurely aged 20-, than 30- and 40-something at the age of 15, when, via the Metaphysical poets, he’s became my most cult author – because his influence on me didn’t include only poetry, but mainly – essays. Tradition and Individual Talent, Music of Poetry, What is a Classic and various essays on the aforementioned poets I could quote by heart. The dissociation of sensibility and detachment between senses and intellect haunted my youth. Then he’s became an object of my dissertation at my early English literature studies. Then I’ve became more prone to the “experimental” poetry and started reading Pound, Lewis and Laura Riding more ferociously.

There is something about good old TSE you just can’t resist. Even though he, at some point, professed fascism, expressed anti-Semitism, misogyny and god knows what else. It probably has to do with that he was able to permeate my desperate teens to such a deep, overtaking extent, along maybe only with Rimbaud and Thomas Mann (sic!). The publication of the Letters 1923-25 reveals the especially difficult period in TSE life: he published The Waste Land, a shocker of a poem, which shook the ground of English literature and determined the development of poetry at least for the next decade, his marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood has proven to be a disaster for both, Eliot still worked at Lloyd’s bank and descended slightly into an especially severe condition, a combination of depression, guilt and self denial. As he wrote in February 1923, to Middleton Murry: ‘it will take me a year or two to throw off The Waste Land and settle down and get at something better which is tormenting me by its elusiveness in my brain.’ It actually finally took place, cf. The Hollow Men, but in a rather exhaustive manner to say the least. Certain vein, set of possibilities, certain momentum, had been already exhausted and faded to an infinite gray.

2. Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Call me reactionary; I like this book. I like Julian Barnes. He’s frequently genuinely funny, self-ironic and never falls into self indulgence or hatred, as for example Martin Amis does. Flaubert’s Parrot is a brilliant book and one of the best accounts on Flaubert there are, remaining an enjoyable, hilarious read. The same goes with A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Before She Met Me. Even Talking it Over is not without charms. I can forgive him his French pretentiousness and his living in Provence. And I enjoyed his last novel, Arthur and George, quite much. Surely, no wonder, he’s no new Dostoyevsky, but we just can’t afford any new Dostoyevsky or Dickens nowadays. Let’s face it: Barnes at least represents cultured, cultivated times, when writers at least could write proper sentences, and he’s reasonable, modest, and definitely knows how to operate with the pen.
I said ‘reactionary’, cos Nothing considers this usually controversial topic, that is (non)religion. Before you start yawning, I ensure you, that Barnes deals with his own maturing to atheism in an interesting way. He struggles with his brother – analytic philosopher, ultra conservative mother, agnostic father, and grandparents: communist granny especially neat. But he’s not mocking any possibility, and the review of his family beliefs is a nice family portrait and I’m always interested in family portraits. Then there goes his review of books and his significant other authors, like aforementioned Flaubert or Jules Renard, and their views on religion. The conclusion is not revolutionary, we are all afraid of death etc., but what the hell. As Flaubert says, “We have to learn everything, from how to talk to how to die.” Philosopher, c’est apprendre de mourir, wrote Montaigne. Ah well.

ps. Barnes on Orwell here

3. Miron Białoszewski Chamowo & Juliusz Strachota Cień pod blokiem Mirona Bialoszewskiego

Some strictly Polish stuff, haha. Białoszewski (1922-1983) was our one of the best poets of the 20th century, pushing the boundaries of what was possible in linguistic poetry, soaking it with an extremely ‘local’ climate. He was a local poet to the bone, and Warsaw, with its topography, architecture, shape, district division, and the local languages, was his city: his territory, his destiny. I will write a ‘hauntological’ post on Białoszewski once, feel warned!

He survived Warsaw Uprising as a young man, which experience he delineated after years (1970) in the one of the most stirring and poetically excellent war account ever written, that is The Diary from The Warsaw Rising. He invented a new type of literary language: colloquial, mundane, trying to be as sincere to the way things are spoken as it’s possible, simultaneously inventing a new way of recording it: experimented with punctuation marks, small letters etc. But what is the most important is the wholly new way of writing about oneself, which is at the same time very close to life and distanced, as if the writer’s ego, its ontological status, translocated and transformed and become the speech itself. Chamowo, which title is derived from a common name of a part of Saska Kepa, a district in Warsaw, is an exercise in combining a diary, autobiography with a “chronicle of events", but a very strange one indeed, because those events are of a kind, that someone went for a trip near Warsaw or bought a new pair of trousers. It’s a metaphysics of the everyday, of the ordinary.

[this is actually literally "the shadow over the Miron Białoszewski tower block" in Saska Kepa in Warsaw]

Juliusz Strachota is a late heir of Białoszewski, that has a cult status among Polish writers. He was a creator of a whole tradition in Polish literature and Juliusz (1979), whom I happen to know, is its new continuator and a great fan of his. His short stories are really short – like 2,3, 4 pages maximum and his style you could describe as a combination of Etgar Keret, Raymond Carver and Bialoszewski himself. Strachota is the best portrayer of the current 20somethings generation: his typical hero is as anti-heroic as it’s possible, usually a 30 years old computer programmer, neurotic, haunted by memories (clearly soaked with Peoples Republic reality of PL) and the fantastic, grotesque visions of reality. Clearly he’s also unable to express or to feel emotions. But it's not a typical ‘loneliness in a big city’ type of desolation – we are too provincial for it and Strachota is too ironic and self deprecatory. The language is laconic, hilarious, restrained. His hero struggles with his demons, but is looking for a way out.

And Strachota is also one of the most local authors I know, in whose prose details, like the number or a route of a tram or the design of a special street, are of crucial importance. He was obsessed with Saska Kepa in Warsaw, where Bialoszewski lived, living himself in Grochow. And now he lives in Krakow’s Nowa Huta, a famous social realist district designed for workers, a city within a city indeed. The spectral tower blocks and nonsentimentalism of this areas in his prose delight me. Now Nowa Huta has become also a theme for the discussed collection and for his next novel, which I’m currently reading in a manuscript. Hell, it is good. And we need another account of Nowa Huta in literature.

But it doesn’t change the fact I was absolutely thrilled, when I discovered this some time ago from my favourite blogger. Scroll a bit to the top and you will read, how Owen is juxtaposing Nowa Huta with Shirley in his familial Southampton. As far as I’m concerned, we could carry on a twinning of Nowa Huta and Thornhill any time.

4. Rereading of L-F Celine

I don’t really want to dwell on Celine, that is, Louis Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961), famous for his anti-semitism and favouring Nazism too much. To me he was one of the rare true literary geniuses of the 20th century and its one of the most problematic if not controversial personalities at the same time.

Celine is an ideal writer when you’re young, angry and prone to any shallow radicalism, then he becomes a writer of non-comparable despair. Show me more excruciating, heartrending passages, than those of Bardamu, the hero and the narrator of Mort a credit (Death on credit, 1936). Show me a more contradictory genius of 20th century prose, who was, no doubt about it, such a scum and sociopath. The keys to Celine are his miserable childhood and youth, as presented in Death; then his nightmarish experiences at the WWI front, described in the Journey to the End of the Night, that left him a handicap. Celine had a tin plate in his head and had a high ringing sound in his ears for the rest of his life, as a result of an explosion he endured. then there comes his lifelong experience as a doctor for the poor - his contemptous passages on the proletariat he treated from Death are stirring, but on the other hand, he cured them for free without any spare questions; But nothing can explain or justify what he wrote in Trifles for the Massacre (1937) or then in an even more terryfying pamphlet, L'École des cadavres [The School of Corpses] published a bit later (1938), where Celine postulated a total subjugation and fraternite with the Nazi Germany.

This is something “one would expect from an anti-Semite of Céline's tireless and impenitent ardor, a writer who, from 1937 to 1944, spent all his flagrant literary energy and aptitude calling—shouting—for the death of every Jew in France (for a start).” (to quote this helpful piece). “Once one extends the reach of Godard's claim to include the anti-Semitic trilogy, the congruence of Céline's wink-wink misanthropy with his unblinking sociopathy becomes apparent. It is not that we shouldn't read Céline because he was, at a profound level, contemptible. It is rather that, to understand Céline, we must be ready to, and permitted to, read all that he wrote. Only in this way can we begin to understand what we are saying when we might think to class him as—of all things—a humorist.”

Kino uber Alles

2009-12-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

Films remembered without renewed research, not in the order of importance and not only from 2009:

Inglorious Basterds (2009) dir. Quentin Tarantino

Just two observations over this film, on which you can read practically everywhere else. First, the use of language: Tarantino always has been playing with language, from strange poetry of the trivial, from the gangsta slang in Reservoir Dogs to the woman’s chat in Deathproof. His films are “talked” films par excellence. In Basterds, by various uses of speech, i.e. actually four languages (among which English is one of the least used!), numerous discourses, and the virtuosity of speaking, that sometimes become monstrous (in which obviously the terrifying SS colonel Landa excels), demonstrates that in certain circumstances language can be a lethal weapon, or a measure that is capable of saving life (e.g. the fantastic scene of playing cards in the tavern); nevertheless, chatting may occur a matter of life and death.

Secondly, Tarantino was always a master of depicting the cathartic powers of violence. Here, in this at first glance unacceptable mash-up of a Holocaust movie with a spaghetti western and adventure movie, Tarantino surpasses the efforts of Spielberg in Indiana Jones and more sophisticated fantasies of contemporary art dealing with the Holocaust.

Beeswax (2008) dir. Andrew Bujalski

Latest from this still underappreciated independent filmmaker, which, like his previous films, Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), deals with the ambivalence & inexperience of young adults who find themselves in situations that might well determine the rest of their lives.

Beeswax tells a story of twin sisters, Lauren and Jeannie, both in their late 20s, I suppose, focusing on the latter. It documents few months of their lives, when Lauren seeks work and love in the most unlikely places and Jeannie struggles with managing a quite unattractive, but agreeable second hand store and a former co-partner, who is about to sue her.

As usual we have amateur actors, who are so beautifully directed by Bujalski we don’t even notice it. Jeannie is paralyzed, and the film is utterly straightforward about it without making it an issue. We see her getting in & out of the car, soliciting help from strangers, going to bed with a guy etc.

Dialogue is the best part but already much has been said of Bujalski’s use of language. He’s got a quite rare ability to capture the demurral, hesitation and non-commitment in dialogues that usually concerns the most banal issues.

When Jeannie drives with her on-off boyfriend Merril to a meeting with a friend from whom they want to borrow money for the troublesome business, in a 20 sec exchange Bujalski gives a vision of the couple’s past life together, why they broke up and an idea how they might make their relationship work the next time. Will it be worth it?
The film ends with a sex scene, which ends at the beginning of a foreplay – we can’t really say, whether Merrill and Jeannie will succeed, but they have a slight chance.

Hunger ( 2008) dir. Steve McQueen

I dreamed about seeing this movie long before I was able to actually see it last summer on the festival I worked at. I’m just going to mention few things, since the film remains a truly mind-blowing experience, at some moments approximating to a masterpiece.

First, many months before, I watched all the scenes I could find on the Youtube numerous times. For the one scene only, that is, the 10-minute completely static dialogue scene of Bobby Sands and the priest in the Maze prison, this film would be a masterpiece. But it remains so much more: it combines what is the best in contemporary visual arts with the naturalist tradition of the movies of Irish terrorism, such as In the Name of the Father.

Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands reaches the edges of what is possible in acting, in a good and in a bad sense, but the effect is stirring. The cinematography, monochromatic and static, is brilliant. The way of depicting violence is breathtaking.

As far as the political inclinations go, Hunger remains a positive example of the long discredited engaged cinema. I asked my English friends, did the film cause any new discussion over the Thatcher “legacy” in England; I was told, to my great surprise, that what's been discussed, are mostly only artistic values of the film. Pity.

The Beaches of Agnes (2009) dir. Agnes Varda

I was already writing about Varda on the occasion of presenting her husband's, Jacques Demy, gem of a musical, that is Les Mademoiselles de Rochefort. In this case, forget the “meditation from the legend of Nouvelle Vague over life and death” – it is more another masterful exercise over blurring the boundaries of cinema genres from this great cineaste, that is Agnes Varda. It is a beautiful film, shot by a woman over 80, who clearly is preparing herself for passing away. What she wants to capture is her beloved ones, first of all her husband, that passed away of AIDS years ago, and their mutual life and love within the movies. Most of all, she impresses with self-distance and irony, never aiming at a serious resume, always witty and humble. I love the sequence about her childhood and existence between the fishermen, that made her to do her first movie about her village. And her last film is able to touch really deep and dense matters without ever getting into self indulgence.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) dir. Paul Greengrass

The greatest secret of contemporary cinema is that the real value you can no longer spot in the art house movies. The best moments, of true CINEMATIC value, in many senses, you can get in the most commercial cinema made for the biggest money.

My adventure with the discovery of the astonishing cinematic richnesses of mainstream, high budget cinema, is quite fresh: one can shake off the suffocation of the so called high “kulchur” only when one have been soaking up for enough time with it. I always liked the genre cinema; then there goes the re-evaluation of the pure cinematic values, like editing, sound, cinematography.

In Bourne-Greengrass (director of both Bloody Sunday and Flight 93) edition cinema is again the feast for the senses. It is like in this old story of a bourgeois, who comes to the theatre/cinema/what have you unwilling to make any intellectual effort. Here everything is done for us before we can even think about it. but I’m not saying this in an estimating manner. The editing here is a masterpiece and it’s crucial – the subliminal effects are here in the order of the day. I don’t remember the exact number of cuts, it’s probably few millions or something; and it’s not for nothing. It creates an overwhelming spectacle, a massage for the brain, levitation of the senses.

I’m not even going to mention the plot and to sketch the strangely fascinating-repulsive figure of Bourne himself. Matt Damon proves to be made for this part, being barely watchable apart form this movie. Here he’s a perfect embodiment of a plain men, whom you wouldn’t notice on the street; a perfect embodiment of the forces ruling in the Cold World.

to be continued...

My resume for 2009

2009-12-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

2009 was to me more a year of discovering and rediscovering things, than a ferocious if not desperate attempt to be au courant with all the novelties (and it will probably be continued, hopefully as long as possible), as it is usually the case nowadays. This year I spend probably more hours on, most of the time completely futile, groping in the darkness of the internet, marked as so called “research”, than ever before. Like millions of my addicted compatriots, I was digging the tenth references of my current, usually most trivial excitements, spending sleepless nights in search of a holy Grail, measuring out my life with coffee spoons and cigarette butt-ends, not even knowing, when I’ve become some sort of a human-vacuum machine, in all the endeavors, doomed at the bottom obviously, to know or at least to be aware of what is there, to excite a life of a culture zombie or at least to kill the omnipresent boredom, that defines the present moment.

The boredom combined with nostalgia, defines our moment of culture, and can be discovered even in some under-aged kids making this. if some kids born ten years after me are already expressing this kind of ennui and nostalgia, what does it say about the whole culture?

So being already 26, I should probably start to think of myself what my coeval T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) thought back 96 years ago, when being nearly exactly my age he wrote one of the best poems there are, The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock: I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.

The main plan for the upcoming 2010 will be to balance (not merge) the omnipotent “online” with the more and more dubious “offline”, when it is still possible. That is: replacing “software” with the “hard copies”, reading more books & magazines, than digesting blogs, more listening to the music than READING about music. Traveling & going outdoors in general as often as it’s possible, when it’s not interrupting the actual work etc. Wishful thinking, but at least let’s try to stick to those few simple principles.

Anyway, what will follow, will be a bunch of things that I probably devoted the most of my doubtful cogitations and considerations, things that excited me, taught me things or simply gave me pleasure, hopefully, unmediated with the self-censorship, internet hype, and silent culture requirements.

Oh, and btw, below it's me, on my especially powerful 2009 moment, accidentally. I discovered I don't have any photos of myself. From 2010 I'll try to document my exterior slightly better. And the Chicks on Speed image on the top is there simply because i liked it.

Pretending I'm updating

2009-12-07T11:39:00.000-08:00

So I'm working a lot, but outside the blog, that's for sure.

below some of the effects of my work:

two interviews from the 6 Week Notebook, on with the expert, scholar and journalist Edwin Bendyk and the second with a group of very interesting Lebanese artists, who told me some about the difficulties of being an artist in a bombed and distroyed city

go here fo the pdf

and here the interview with Mr Owen Hatherley, which I've published nearly 3 months ago, but since Owen is coming to Warsaw for a short visit to have a lecture in MoMA, I can't not re-post it:

go here

I know the future of this blog, if there's any, lies in writing it i POlish and I finally will start doing it...

Awesome tapes from Africa!

2009-11-28T16:16:00.000-08:00

A real treasure hunt:

go here

lately only music "outside western idiom" brings me any joy or rest.

listen to the Middle East Divas as well: Fairuz, Googoosh, Ofra Haza. though all of them represent different worlds, from LIban to Israel, from more traditional-influenced arabic music to euro-pop, they are still something different. i wonder if im not committing the classical sin of orientalisation, famously postulated by Edward Said, a Palestinian himself; nevertheless, this trip into the world of different rhythms and pitches was and still is fascinating.

6-weeks-Notebook #56 & some explanations

2009-11-07T15:33:00.001-08:00

hello again, after a while...

first, a link to 6-weeks-notebook that just appeared:
go here

contains my interview w/ David Crowley, London's V&A curator.

"Winter kept us warm", TS Eliot famously wrote in the Waste Land, but it's not enough an explanation, when winter is paving her actual way through our houses and hearts. the toughest time of the year has just begun and I have no solution to this amount of a sudden lowkey mood and depression. many things has just collapsed in my life.

it appears, that maintaininig a blog is really a job that one has to devote to to some level...
and it seems my latest work totally eclipsed my blog activity.
so my freelancing job pushed me to conduct a number of interviews of more than 10, including established London curator (effect above in the link, though in Pl as usual), Renata Salecl, a famous psychoanalitic theoretician, , Ewa Kuryluk, my cherished artist and writer, some artistic collective called Critical Practice, a guy from Chto Delat, Swedish writer who authored a book on Ulrike Meinhof and Milena Jesenska, a journalist, who wrote a book on Marlene Dietrich, Hungarian author of a 800-pages long novel on Adam Mickevitch...
last few days I spend with Jakob Jakobsen, founder of Copenhagen Free University and our improvised Flying, Nomadic University of Warsaw, which was based on meeting in private flats and parting while exchanging knowledge...

and now I have to write all of it down. make a story. write articles people would read. make it interesting and useful. make it a source of knowledge.

is blogging really for me? I started to ask myself this question after I haven't desired to write anything for the last 3 weeks.
maybe I will return to regular writing, but I just feel better outside the omnipresent NET at the moment. if anyone started to read this blog and were ever interested, forgive me for this impertinence and inconsistence.

i just know i have to focus more on something else now. some form of life, people, taking care of someone/something. that sounds extremely cheesy, but this is just the way it is. since I didn't have any agreement w/ anybody about this blog and it's a mine and mine only space, I just decided to suspend it for a while.
maybe im just not a material for a blogger, maybe this form of responsibility and discipline have to wait for a better moment.

so see you soon!
A.

Let's dance

2009-10-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

I'll now try to explain to you, why this is probably my favourite scene in the whole history of cinema (ok, one of favourites).

In Godard's Vivre sa vie (To live one's life) Anna Karina plays a girl, who out of some circumstances (breaking up with a dull man, boredom, then lack of financial means or sheer indifference) becomes a prostitute. This shot in a pre-experimental, pre-Marxist, pre-Dziga Viertov Group, more "traditional" style, that has more to do with early Nouvelle Vague style - more or less open form, freedom and improvisation on the plan, lots of plain air, streetlife from Paris. This scene has always seemed to me as autotelic, sort of self evident, without any greater need for explanation - one of the few moments, when Nana can "escape" her existence and devote herself to a "sheer being", without any reasoning (as opposite to the last scene and her conversation with the old man about language and possibilities of self expression), just simply being and dancing as a purposeless act. But of course this is also the last stage, when Nana is concerned with the society, she's not ashamed of putting herself on display, she no longer cares about her position. from this peak moment her existence will become more and more problematic, until her accidental death from the hands of mafia.

The other scene from "Bande a part" is another example of a quite independent, taken out of time, scene in Godard's films. With the reflection on time ("one minute" scene and a commentary on the individual sense of time in cinema), then - an interruption from an autotelic dancing, and then the opening of a narrative with "parentheses", it proves also a sheer cinematic bliss.

All the flowers for Herta...

2009-10-08T04:14:00.000-07:00

Nobel prize for literature for my cherished author Herta Muller

Depression...

2009-10-07T14:07:00.000-07:00

[contemporary Chernobyl]

Oh no, not mine: it's just due to the publication of Dominic Fox's book Cold World, which I had the, excusez le mot, *pleasure* of reading earlier in pdf. It's a great book, where the author examines the *positive* potential of so called dysphoria, as opposed to euphoria, calling it "militant" in every case when the dysphoria and displeasure (or dejection) is an *active* state practised by the subject. or, as Alex Williams claims, "[T]he Left is trapped in a sort of depression, in a dysphoric state itself. Here “militant dysphoria” means the dysphoria of the militant. The hope arises that it is through a radicalisation of this very negative state that a future emancipatory politics might be born. A radicalisation in what sense though?" Good question and follow the rest on Splintering Bone Ashes blog on the right from this post.

I'm not going to outline the book now, the right time will come when I will have more time, but here just to sum up an event that took place just few days ago in London at Goldsmith's, where a panel discussion with few persentations by very interesting thinkers grouped around Zer0 Books took place.

I'm quoting a piece by Nina Power she posted on her blog Infinite Thought, where she refers to, among other things, von Trier's "Antichrist" (which I personally, had to admit that, rejected as pretentious soft-slasher kitsch), Herzog and Shulamith Firestone, famous feminist and her reflection on woman's body. lots of links to other speeches at her blog.
here it goes:

[Herzog on 'Fitzcarraldo'] Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back, that’s all. And that’s what’s grandiose about it and we have to accept that it’s much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much as erotic, I see it more full of obscenity … And nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain …. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony. There is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder …. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. (see this post on Conjunctural a while back, with useful comments from Ben)

A dysphoric relation to nature may see itself fascinated and reflected in a world of killing and eating but our age is characterised by a dyphoric relation to forms of nature in general much closer to home: human nature, particularly bodily nature. Think of eating disorders, self-harm, particularly prevalent in young women, where any concern for health gets subsumed into a desire for thinness, beauty or desirability. In this sense, then, there exists a common, generalised form of dysphoria in the west, a turning away from 'health', either mental or physical, towards a lessening (if not a worsening) of the world, to exist in a smaller way, to take up less space. To be dysphoric in the shape of body dysmorphia is, particularly though certainly not only for women, to be on board with the idea that our inner nature is to be punished. Just to give you a strange example of these priorities, yesterday I was walking past a pharmacy and saw a sign advertising a cervical cancer vaccine for £379 and beneath it, Botox for just £50: the vaccine that one might hope would be distributed for free by the state is more than seven times more expensive than having a barely-legal poison injected into your face.

the paradoxes and seeming dualisms of health/disease, positive/negative penetrate us at least since Romanticism and were probably most famously put by one of the most "entrenched" and powerful Modernists, Thomas Mann, who was a late heir of a long philosophical tradition, culminating in his last great novel , Dr. Faustus. I hope to muse on that more later.

Desire

2009-10-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

In his Critique of Judgement Kant describes desire as "a faculty which by means of its representations is the cause of the actuality of the objects of those representations". it is quoted in the first chapter of Deleuze/Guattari's "Anti-OEdipe" as a symptom of the revolution in philozophizing about desire. An inteersting remark can be made about this Kant quotation, as not only from the literature of the subject, but from my own experience I can tell desire is mostly caused even by simply thinking about desire. The "triangular" system described by Rene Girard (ie, in shortest, that we always desire what is already desired by someone else, who is the real cause of our desire) always appealed to me. This idea is actually taken from Lacan, but via French Hegelianism of the 1940s, as it is Jean Hyppolyte, in whom we can find a thoght that 'human desire is always a desire for the desire of an other'. But I could agree more with Deleuze/Guattari actually, who claim, that desire is a more or less universal force, prior to the subject-object distinction, prior to representation and in fact even RESISTANT to representation.

We are bodies subjugated to many various, mostly chaotic modern sensations and experiences - I find it sometimes hard to withdraw enough to feel again the wonderful empowerment of desire. which is good, it brings me back to life, on a more basic and at the same time, profound level. My desire makes me think and long this one specific person, what makes me more focused and realizing what do I want to do in life. My desire makes the world all the more real. Desire is often described in negative terms, as a realization of lacking, but to me this whole concept of lack was rather appealing.
I don't want to be full all the time, my longing makes me more perceptive and more alive.

Traume fur Herbst

2009-10-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

October...

2009-10-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

What a lousy, wet freshly october day. You can only think about the inevitable passing of time and surrender to melancholy. As I have to finish my MA now, the only thing I can do before going on short hiatus is to quote the very sweet object of my queries, Mr James Schuyler.

Schuyler (1923-1991) was a great American poet, who belonged to so called "New York School of Poetry", including such greats as John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, but like the "school" never actually existed and was an easy label for the critics, trying to capture the phenomenon of, from the one side, Abstract Expressionist school of painting and accompanying phenomena of the great revival in American arts: literature and especially poetry, Schuyler was not also a typical "member" of this societe des artistes. Being a secretary to mighty W. H. Auden, whose early poetry was the major influence on NYSP, for couple of years, he decided, what kind of poetry he wants to write, or, more importantly, does not want to write.

Schuyler was first of all a great lyricist, an author of numerous lyrical and personal poetry, but more in the style of Whitmanesque-WC Williams-Stevens, than Confessional poetry.

He often wrote about himself, his friends, his sometimes dull and "nothing-has-happened" days, he was autobiographical, with an everlasting desire "to see things as they are, too fierce and yet not too much". he was a weak brave man, struggling with some kind of schizophrenia and nervous breakdowns and then also healt problems, for most of his life. Hosted by his friends, the family of the painter Fairfield Porter, lived in hotels and small rented flats, sometimes supported also financially.

He remained a wise and perspicacious commentator of his and his friends events and accidents, stating once in the "Hymn to Life": Life is hard. Some are strong, some weak, most/Untested. I can hardly believe that there is any line in any poetry that I could more agree with.

Polanski...

2009-09-30T05:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting side commentary over Polanski's furore. i recommend reading the whole of it, but here a quotation:

go here

Yet just as Polanski was a victim of alleged Sixties excesses, so he was a rapacious product of those excesses, too. Any sympathy for Polanski quickly dried up following his conviction for unlawful intercourse in 1977. This, too, conservatives argued, was part of the degeneracy of the open-minded, open-trousered culture of the American West Coast in the mid- to late-twentieth century; it sprung from Polanski’s and others’ determination to ‘push back the boundaries of sexual liberation’, as one report said this week (4). Some American law enforcers and right-wing commentators seem to imagine that having Polanski returned to the US will finally bring to an end the odious influence of the 1960s on contemporary society and morality. Under the headline ‘Why we dislike the French’, one conservative American columnist asks how ‘liberal’ Europe can ‘support a child rapist’ (5).

Yet if this attempt to write off 1960s sexual liberation and experimentation (some of which was progressive, some of which was solipsistic) on the back of Polanski’s past is bad, then the defence of Polanski by European government officials and commentators is even worse. They are motivated not by anything remotely related to legal norms or questions of justice, but by a snobbish and opportunistic anti-Americanism in which Polanski (who is probably a bit of a creep) becomes recast as a paragon of European decency against hung-up America. So determined are some liberal observers to use L’Affaire Polanski to get one over on America that they have even forgotten about their normal role of stoking up hysterical panics about paedophiles and have re-depicted Polanski’s encounter with Gailey as just a somewhat over-exuberant heavy-petting session.(...)

For many American and British commentators this is all about Samantha Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal and eternally symbolic victim of the alleged great evil of our time, Child Abuse. ‘Remember: Polanski raped a child’, says a headline in Salon, in an article that provides sordid, misery-memoir-style details of what Polanski did with his penis to Gailey’s vagina and anus (9). For European observers, by contrast, Polanski’s actions can be explained by his own victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his ‘life tragedies’ and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker (10). Anne Applebaum, the American commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled America in 1978 because of his ‘understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.’ (11) (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who is actively campaigning against Polanski’s extradition.)

You're not my Wonderwall

2009-09-29T13:09:00.000-07:00

Another treasure found (and lost) somewhere between the 60s psychedelia and and fashion/drug culture. Starring the starlette of the day, Jane Birkin. film is about music, colours and atmosphere, not about the plot. Just enjoy your eyes.
from Dangerous Minds website

Wonderwall is probably the ultimate “swinging London” film and what a pedigree it has. The film stars the lovely Jane Birkin and featured Anita Pallenberg and Dutch design collective The Fool (who art directed the film and were well-know for their work with the Beatles) in cameo roles. The soundtrack was by George Harrison and featured Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, some top classical Indian players in Bombay and an uncredited banjo performance by Monkee Peter Tork. There is one song called Ski-Ing that features one of the single most ferocious guitar riffs that Eric Clapton ever laid down and most of his biggest fans have never even heard it. Made in 1968 by first time director Joe Massot (who would later direct the Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same and work on the psychedelic western Zachariah with the Firesign Theatre), Wonderwall was released on DVD in an elaborate package by Rhino in 2004 that now goes for top dollar to collectors.

George Harrison's music in it is great. I resist embedding too much of clips - you can easily found it on the net. And imagine those f***in' tarts Gallagher bros, while releasing their mediocre hit Wonderwall, ekhm, tried to channel the Beatles. I'm no a die hard fan of the Fab Four now, as I know tons of the equally (at least) great bands from the 60s, but this should really be prohibited. And George did say "um..no" to Gallaghers.

And I'm looking for some other spectacular films of this era, like, Who are you, Polly Magoo? check this one out.

Un peu des rhythmes diverses

2009-09-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

Just a bunch of links, since I have to do some serious work now. While looking for some, excusez le mot, non-european idiom and thank to my friend, DJ and a versatile person at all accounts, Jacek Staniszewski, I come across some rap from RPA from a collective called Die Antwoord. Not only the arfikaner language makes it completely unusual and sorta alien to our own Western idiom. of course, you can syill recognize some common, mutual rhthms and articulations. but as a combination totale it is a new sonic and cultural experience to me. ie it's actually great:

"Die Antwoord is a zef rap-rave crew from Cape Town, South Africa.

Die Antwoord is a lovable, mongrel-like entity made in South Africa, the love-child of many diverse cultures, black, white, coloured and alien, all pumped into one wild and crazy journey down the crooked path to enlightenment.

All DIE ANTWOORD's next-level rap-rave tjoons are downloable FOR FREE off: www.DieAntwoord.com"

http://www.dieantwoord.com/

and here some other treasure from Africa, Duda dj Txiga, actually I don't know anything about them apart from what can be heard & seen on the clips I found on YT. here some more familiar african rhythms, but having in mind of how tremendous significance african rhythms were to the development of western popular music, we may say that they are now familiar, we internalized it, but did we also appropriate it?

and here an example of the appropriation totale, but at least done by one of the most legendary french rappers MC Solaar, appropriating also some Eastern influences. Even though I can't imagine anything more commercialized than this, at the same time Solaar inscribes into a very long tradition of mixing. So Inch'allah, indeed.

Free Roman

2009-09-28T06:16:00.000-07:00

and the Genesis P-Orridge text goes:

Are You Free? Are You Really Free?
Is It You? Is It Me? Or Is it Simply History?
Is It You Or Is It Me Or Is It Simply Jealousy?
Sharon lies on a Hollywood beach
Sharon sees all her hopes are in reach...
Sharon knows all the Hollywood names
Sharon plays all the Hollywood games
Sharon walks alone as your wife
Sharon gives her life for a knife
Sharon floating high up above
Sighing, crying, dying for "LOVE"

Oh Oh Roman, Oh Roman, Roman P

Are You Free? Are You Really Free?
As You Hide Away In Gay Paris?
Life of money, life of sex
Life of honey, life of hex... Więcej...
Little girls drinking and eating cupcake
Little girls cause you
your grestest mistake
Flesh of the flesh of insidious flesh
Little girls wearing their Hollywood dress
Corrupter you are, corrupter you be
Corrupter you are, the corrupter you see

Oh Oh Roman, Oh Roman, Roman P

Roman you are, Roman you be, Roman
you are in your history
Roman in your victory
Roman in your destiny

Are You Free? Are You Really Free?
Is It You? Is It Me? Or Is it Simply History?
As You Try To Keep Your Liberty?
Are You Really Free?
Or Are You Simply Roman P......

rage

and sentimentality

Les Valseuses

2009-09-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

Memoirs des films continued. I simply love Les Valseuses by Bertrand Blier and this is probably the funniest scene in this film and also maybe in the history of cinema

and this one too

couple of fragments

and for the good beginning of teh week, the defloration of Isabelle Huppert ;-))

I have to finish here, because I can't stop laughing right now.

ENJOY![more on the film later, as I post already TOO much]

Edufactory

2009-09-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

Partisan Songspiel. Belgrade Story from dmitry vilensky on Vimeo.

[taken from Chto Delac, Partisan Songspiel, love it!]

Just attended a very inspiring and productive seminar w/ Gerald Raunig, whose book Art &Revolution. Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, published at semiotext(e) was quite a revelation for me, when I read it when it was published 2 years ago.

Organised as a part of Free University of Warsaw, curated by Kuba Szreder, seminar was conducted by Ewa Majewska, who gave a compelling introduction on some key Deleuzian terms and notions, such as war machines and various meanings of the "body" in Deleuze/Guattari diptych, Anti-OEdipus and Mille Plateaux, then with lots of ideas coined by Raunig himself and then an interesting exchange between the attendants, including Jaroslaw Lubiak and Daniel Muzyczuk. It was an intense afternoon indeed. for now I can send you to the text of Gerald we were discussing, like this one

the themes of productivity/nonproductivity, free time/labour, exploitation and going on strike, resonate in me since some time ago; especially since I can call myself a part of so called "prekariat", as I am a rather low paid freelancer occupied with writing on art, attending meetings, doing a lot of research all the time; and now starting this blog, which is projected as a training ground for variety of ideas I have, which I'm ferociously update'ing. Of course I'm doing it, because I need it, want it, but it's also a pleasant, and as I discovered lately, quite exhaustive, and of course absolutely non paid extra "job".

I had the pleasure of attending Martin Kaltwasser's, very interesting Berlin-based artist dealing with the notions of public space etc., Picnic of Creative Leisure in June in Warsaw, where Martin gave a very interesting open air lecture, which I translated then; and the interview with Kuba Szreder i also translated.

Martin made me even more conscious about the notions I'm unwillingly dealing with every day: the division between work and non work, leisure and labour, that has been completely erased in my life. The recurring question will be, which model I will choose and whether I have any choice at all.

The interview w/ Martin can be found at the 6-Weeks-notebook and Bec Zmiana Foundation website on the right from this post.

and here some e flux Liam Gillick's articles I'm reading at the moment:

here

and here

and a wonderful piece by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano on Badiou and May '68

Toscano and Power - The Philosophy of Restoration - Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May

"Charbovari"

2009-09-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

Three films on which I'm going to write short notes these days:

Roman Polanski, who will probably never get rid of this sale histoire until his death, has been arrested today in Switzerland, which collaborates veri nicely with American justice administration. the new category of wtf, indeed.

The Tenant, a film which I saw 1st time in my childhood in TV and was fascinated ever since, found in a whole at some Japanese website

go here

Chabrol's apparently classic adaptation of Madame Bovary, in 15 parts on youtube, with this delightful "Charbovari" scene:

Marat/Sade by Peter Brook, famous adaptation of Peter Weiss play

and Wajda's Danton, one of my fave by this too often humourless director, shoot during the Martial Law in Poland, great cast, music and interesting interpretation:

And I'm still thinking about Eustache. A strange, cameral, even performative movie by Eustache, Une sale histoire, is the one that sort of encapsulates all the anxieties and despair of this director. With a wonderful performance by Michael Lonsdale, who tells the title "dirty story", interpreting a man addicted to pornography and a voyeur, who actually finds himself detesting women. In a arresting monologue he pushes the boundaries of the story over and over

go here

here some lucid quotation from Senses of cinema:

In both these early shorts, relations between the sexes is a matter of resignation and empty distraction rather than connection or genuine feeling-there's no love or tenderness, only groping and conquest. For all Jean Nöel-Picq's storytelling skill and wit and Eustache's exhilarating experimentation, Une Sale Histoire expresses the same conviction. Nöel-Picq clearly gets a kick out of pushing his story to the limits of what is socially acceptable, testing his audience, daring them to be offended. But that's not to say that he doesn't mean what he says. After spending hours and hours at his post before the spy-hole, he observes that "all the hierarchies about the body had been overturned" so that he had come to believe that "the mirror of the soul is the pussy," and this seems to me to be as blunt an expression as possible of the state to which the relations between the sexes, in Eustache's view, have been reduced. The frankness in Une Sale Histoire or The Mother and the Whore is not a sign that Eustache condones this new freedom-he's not enthusiastically pushing the envelope even further but rather wallowing in the human wreckage he sees it as having produced. It's not that sex has been elevated to a spiritual level but that religion, morality, and love have been reduced to the physical plane. Later in Une Sale Histoire, Nöel-Picq complains that he's sick of taking women to movies, talking to them, learning about them-"That's the part I hate most." It's not that "the mirror of the soul is the pussy," but that the pussy is the soul now, as close to it as most men care to get anyway. Eustache seems to believe that sexual liberation has drained male-female relations of any mystery and emotion they might once have had, that sex has become so central that a great emptiness has washed over society.

6-weeks-Notebook

2009-09-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

I cordially invite you to read the current issue of 6-Weeks-Notebook, a publication of Bec Zmiana Foundation , with which I cooperate. There you can find my interview with Nasty Brutalist aka Owen Hatherley, "Nothing is Too Good For Ordinary People". Owen is a young & very talented critic of architecture, and the author of one of my favourite blogs, Sit Down Man, You're Bloody Tragedy and others, that may be found on the right from this post, where he writes also on music, politics & culture.

And Foundation's website offers the whole pdf of this issue, unfortunately for the PL language people only, but you may always try the Google translator, at least for some kind of amusement.

go here

Narcissism

2009-09-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

Women's (and men's) narcissism is probably the greatest inspiration for creative work of all sorts. I'm not saying it is necessarily an inspiration for any kind of creation - I mean rather the kind of self-consciousness or over-coensciousness, that can come with writing, especially self reflective writing. In couple of next posts I will try to dwell on the notion of narcissism in women's eroticism and creativity; then - on men's. For a good beginning, probably the most openly narcissist photo that was taken of me, from a project of a friend artist Alexandra Hirszfeld, a Repetition of Warhol's Marylin at the icon's 82nd birthday last year (and the book I'm holding is Fragments of Lover's Discourse by Barthes, no less. I have a strange feeling that it is at the same time a nice excercise in submitting oneself to derision ;-)

Strange Attractor

2009-09-25T02:48:00.000-07:00

I'm kinda fascinated by this Bettina Rheims photo. I'm not going to refer to her other work, just would like to focus on this particular one.

This is from a series of women (but Rheims only photographs women) (un)dressed like some mythology/historical heroines, often referring to religion, obviously in a campy blasphemous way.
This one reminds me of the Bible woman "dark characters" - Lilith, Dalilah, Mary Magdalene or the harlot, who, though pardoned and praised by the Christ, has always remained in my head as a somewhat not entirely happy with her salvation. And the Rheims' model IS Lilith, as she takes away and reverses the power of the Snake by writing it, permanently, on her breast.

Why did the woman do the tatoo? did someone convinced her or made her to do it? did she do it for esthetical/religious reasons? Was it painful? People do far more harsh stuff to their bodies, but it fascinates me, why women decide on the mutilation of breasts, probably the most delicate part of our body. And tremendously powerful in symbolic sense: motherhood, feeding the baby, preserving life. In the Bible there is this passus about a woman, who blackens her breast to repel the baby from it and let it learn to eat other things, i.e. grow up. And this is obviously one of our greatest attractors, isn't it? which woman would deliberately get rid of one of her most indisputable powers? of course, lesbians, transgender women etc. Women that have no choice and try to survive cancer. Amazons, militant mythology women.

We sometimes find attraction in disgust and it is even to well documented.
And the round form of it, around the round nipple, at the same time embellishes and outrages from it.
I'm not even going to touch the snippet of the breast symbolism here, I just found this image strangely attractive and couldn't understand it. And when I can't understand, I have to find out.

Cria Cuervos!

2009-09-24T15:24:00.000-07:00

Distraction w/ Miranda July & Blonde Redhead

2009-09-24T05:42:00.001-07:00

Une sale histoire

2009-09-24T01:57:00.001-07:00

La Maman et la Putain (1973) by Jean Eustache (1938-1981) is one of those rare, incredible coincidences in the social, cultural and art history, that aside from having strictly artistic features, manage to capture the most tremendous aspects of the moment, the Zeitgeist in every sense - and in this case, though it's a very Parisien film indeed, it is a post-'68 sexual revolution impass and existential void of its heirs.

Eustache, who commited suicide after being disabled from a car accident at only 43, never revealed details from his youth or life, and was always saying that "The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be.” which make us think they are autobiographical. But even if Eustache really was in a threesome portrayed in the film, as Alexandre, played by Jean Pierre Leaud in a compelling post-Doinel maniere, living between The Mother figure and The Whore figure, trapped, mean, cynical, faible, ridiculously self-centered, stupid, naive, charming bluebird between two women in a sado-masochist relation, this only partly explains the phenomenon of this film.

I happened to see it on my first really independent vacation, somewhere between 17 and 18, in a small cinema in Quartier Latin in Paris, Studio des Ursulines. I remember lots of details of this event, because the film was so unusual and left an everlasting impact on me, even though my French was not so good at the time and it's 3 hrs 40 minutes long. I remember getting back home, walking a dark street, Boulvard de Montparnasse and passing the Balzac statue, questioning and reasoning in my head, what had actually happened.

Until today I don't know any more authentic and moving rendering of male/female toxic relations (apart from maybe Japanese cinema and Bergman is to me a piece of cake compared to this), with such investment of humanity at the same time. The visceral aspects of sexuality; graphique sex; vomiting; quasi-rapes; love; passion; humiliation; humanity - everything merging on the plan of two small dirty flats, 2 cafes in Paris and some few hours from the viewers lives.

and some quotation on Eustache from a critic:

In the thread of the desolate 70s, his films succeeded one another, always unforeseen, without a system, without a gap: film-rivers, short films, TV programs, hyperreal fiction. Each film went to the end of its material, from real to fictional sorrow. It was impossible for him to go against it, to calculate, to take cultural success into account, impossible for this theoretician of seduction to seduce an audience.

Films in (re)watching

2009-09-24T01:25:00.000-07:00

Une demoiselle de Varsovie

2009-09-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

I'm absolutely delighted by Les Demoiselles de Rochefort by Jacques Demy I've just seen today and will definitely post something around it in couple of days. What a Joy! What sheer, pure bliss of cinema!

Demy did some wonderful stuff with the musical genre, introducing his very own cinematic esthetics and being faithful to it ever since. A husband of equally arresting director, Agnes Varda, one of my favorite directors actually, together they created a one of its kind cineaste duo. She - more inclined to documentary and inventing a unique way of articulation - very literary and personal mode of filmmaking, him - seemingly with his head in the clouds, a fairy tale storyteller, of lighter-than-creme, completely disrupted from 'real life' sugary sweet colorful n'importe quois. Of course not entirely true and his inventiveness was probably never rightly understood. Just give you this fragment at the moment, a wonderfully amusing caricature of some vile "contemporary artist" juxtaposed with some "naive" daubster of "L'ideal feminines"; later will write sth at length about the incredible world of Demy. Enjooy!! as it is a keyword here.

Lust for truth

2009-09-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, if you thought it's a "civilised", "cultural" blog, now it's the time you find out you're wrong! I knew that blogosphere includes all kind of stuff, and this is a wonderfully terryfying feature of the net: all kinds of abnormalities, which actually can teach us more about life, ethics and humanity that anything else. actually at the moment I can't imagine myself without this experience of a unbelievable variety of humanities if it wasn't invented. I'm fully aware how bluntly and naive it may sound, so to make more clear what I mean, let me introduce to you....Suzannah and her world of a rare quality

http://suzannahlust.com/

This is Suzannah (a pseudonyme naturally) who writes about her experience as a sex worker and a girl who simply likes sex. of course, you may say, that we had actually a lot of this kind of stuff, some tenth washings after singlegirl.com or pitiful careerists of the worst sort, with their kitschy nymphomania and whatever comes after it. but Suzannah is different. she's first of all, a good writer. At least since Sei Shonagon and her treatise The Pillow Book and tons of books of all sorts, from Bataille to Pauline Reage and Catherine Millet, we know that the pleasures of literature and the pleasures of sex can go together and that the letter is not the opposite of ectasy.

Actually sometimes I think "The Pillow Book" is Peter Greenaway's best film; of a rare beauty and great sense of aesthetics, even though rather shallowing the infinite possibilities of clashing writing with sex, when we think of it beyond its lush, sensual atmosphere and exquisite visual beauty.

But Suzannah. let's take the first accidental section:

It’s funny how people are labeled in society. People who work for charity are good, drug dealers are bad. People who cheat on their spouses are bad, single mothers raise eyebrows.
I was brought up to believe such righteous judgments and am still working to rid some of them from the far reaches of my subconscious.A few weeks ago I entered the subway, passing a homeless man who was trying to move his worldly possessions from the bottom of the stairs to the top. He was struggling and it crossed my mind that he needed help. I watched the struggle as I waited for my train, and I watched as another commuter came by and moved the bags for him.

There aren’t a lot of people who would have moved those bags. I’m trying to be one more often. I became friends with a bag-mover recently, someone quite selfless and truly empathetic, whose gift for appreciating the hidden good in others is unique. In theory, she should be bad, like me. We inhabit a questionable place on the fringes of society. I should add here that I am also good, when I work at a reputable and elitist corporation and have sex within the confines of a relationship. Sometimes I’m between good and bad–let’s say questionable–such as when my dog, who isn’t neutered, raises the ire of a fellow canine on the street. I was definitely bad last week when asked by a couple of missionaries whether I believe in Jesus.

What follows is usually a very lucid and true analyzis of - no, not sexual behaviours, but the society and the individual self in it. not to mention that this is a woman's experience. i admire the way Suzannah is dealing with her feelings, how she's totally open to the experience and the generosity of sharing it. it's a lesson of some type of humanity i'm equally fascinated with. so, do not ask, what is it, but read, read, read.

http://suzannahlust.com/

News from the Netland

2009-09-21T03:19:00.000-07:00

A quick morning mindwipe in the net and here we are, a bunch of treasures, that only this culture enabled to come up, such as:

Bigozine 2 is a somewhat self-appointed watcher of some priceless lost&found bootlegs and radio registrations that there are.

here's the access to a Brian Eno's soundtrack for derek Jarman's Glitterbug, a combination that brings me some pleasant cramps in the heart

http://www.bigozine2.com/archive/ARrarities/ARbeglitter.html

sir George Martin in studio, tens or perhaps hundreds of hours to listen, a studio orgasmatorium for recordphiles

http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=297

and The Who concert in 1969 Minneapolis

http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=293

if it's not enough, here's some collection of Polish classic book cover design, from a great blog on books from a real bibliophile I've been following for some time

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2009/09/thirty-book-covers-from-poland.html

it's a quite great example of Polish design of posters also, proving that the esthetics of Cieslewicz and Tomaszewski was not an alone phenomenon and how splendidly design was developing during the communist years.

And on Quietus a very nice article on David Bowie's acting career, something I quite never decided about, since even Dame's failures tend to be quite splendid and interesting.

http://thequietus.com/articles/01850-cracked-actor-get-hooked-to-the-silver-screen-for-david-bowie-the-actor

on this last topic I may express myself at length in the future, as I just got access to some earlier unknown stuff and stare at Mr. Bowie ever since.

The all too human world of Kazuo Hara

2009-09-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

Only about two years ago I've read for the first time about Hara Kazuo, one of the most important Japanese New Wave directors, together with the likes of Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura. His films include the most extraordinary documentaries you would ever see, like The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On(1987) about the atrocities of the IIWW in Japan and the most outstanding rendering of cinema-verite docu-autobiography, and somewhat the strangest travelogue there is, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), centering on his ex-girlfriend Miyuki Takeda, not long after their breakup.

She leaves him and goes to Okinawa island with their child. He follows her as a somewhat the strangest and humiliating way to preserve their relationship. Miyuki is a militant feminist, a pioneer of women's liberation in patriarchal Japan: she lives exactly as she wants and nothing will stop her before realizing her decisions. the sado-masochistic drive is obvious; but behind that stands a non-deniable, authentic love, as he documents her relationships with other women, black American GI's and her work as a go-go dancer. not only his voyeristic masochism is totally moving; his extreme naturalism as well. we observe two births in nearly real time.

I couldn't find any fragment of his proper work as a video on the net, but here's a fragment of Barbara Hammer's documentary on artistic-productive collective of directors, called Ogawa

Devotion, A Film about Ogawa Productions by barbarahammer.com from barbara hammer on Vimeo.

here some biographical stuff:

Kazuo Hara born in 1945, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. Studied photography at the Tokyo Academy of Photography. Together with Kobayashi Sachiko, Hara founded Shisso Productions in 1972 for making documentaries. After debuting with Good-bye CP, Hara made Extremely Private Eros, Love Song 1974, a film featureing Takeda Miyuki. Takeda who had a child with Hara, took the baby and left him to live with a black American soldier in Okinawa. Later in Okinawa she gave birth to a racially mixed child. Hara and Kobayashi Sachiko ( Hara's present wife) documented this very private episode in a 110 minute, 16mm independently produced film. Besides receiving tremendous audience response, the film won an award at the International Independent Film Festival in Thonon les Bains, France. In 1975, hara directed a teledoc on women's liberation: Women Now…History Begins Here. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on (1986) is hara's most sensational work till now. The film is about a Japanese Imperial Army soldier Okuzaki Kenzo, who appeased the death of his fellow soldiers at the end of the Pacific War. Inspite of the recognition the film received in Japan and abroad, major film distributors in Japan refused to show it because of its inherent criticism of the Japanese imperial system and cannibalism among Japanese troops.

and some useful links:

http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/090522/article.asp?parentID=108401

http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-01-23/film/kazuo-hara-crosses-the-line/

more on this later...

2009-09-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

Collapse with China and Michel

2009-09-18T03:16:00.001-07:00

Collapse Magaazine was so kind to share its out of print issue for free. and you get China Mieville with Michel Houellebecq in it. as the blurb of the publisher says:

'The fourth issue of Urbanomic's "journal of philosophical research and development," Collapse, focuses on the relationship between modern philosophy and horror fiction and features essays by and about authors such as Thomas Ligotti, China Miéville and Michael Houellebecq and of course H.P. Lovecraft. Having sold out its print edition, Urbanomic has made the issue available for download as a 200 + page PDF. Some disturbing images (and ideas) within the download.'

http://freeourbooks.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/collapse-iv-philosophy-and-science-sold-out-now-open-access/

[btw, I have a problem with giving clickable links on blogspot, any advice for a freshman like me is more than welcome!)

Happy Moscow?

2009-09-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

Since two days I'm haunted by those photos. They were made by a Czech photographer around 1896 and some of them somehow managed to survive. I'm no expert on photography techniques, but apparently they are not really colorised, but they were in fact IN COLOR at the moment they were made, as my more learned friend-photographer is saying. this would be all very interesting to investigate anyway.

But looking at them I'm more excited about the image of, let's say, Dostoyevski's heroines, who still (the autor of Karamazov Brothers died in 1881) could've walked on the streets like this (though seldom, as their creator preferred his familial St Petersburg than Moscow). Nor could Moskva, the heroine of Andriey Platonov novel Happy Moscow, walk exactly the same streets, since she was a child of revolution, that took place 21 years later.

So still imperial Russia, a bleak place to live indeed, comes back to life on this by all means exquisite photographs, waiting for a great change to come..

http://englishrussia.com/?p=5167

and here some article on more contemporary Russia, a review of The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World by David Priestland, an analyzis of ever-recurring Russian despotism, that seems unshakeable there. as it's also a 70th anniversary of Russian agression on Poland, that destroyed completely our hopes for winning with Germans after 17 days of war, and the absolutely loathsome behaviour of most of russian politicians towards Poland even nowadays, I guess it's somewhat worthwhile to give it some thoughts

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/08/communism-communist-soviet

Recent buys/readings

2009-09-17T04:13:00.001-07:00

2009-09-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

just not to forget about this site: lots of material to be studied. ads that got banned, usually for explicit sexuality or seeming abuse of morality, but sometimes for strictly political reasons. not to mention that quite often suffering just from utter stupidity. nevertheless, worth watching.

http://www.illegaladvertising.com

I'm so lost, Leonard

2009-09-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

One of my planned posts was a comment on Two Lovers by James Gray, with a lovely clumsy and unattractive Joaquin Phoenix just before he went mad and dropped acting - but I found something I'm kinda stupefied how it matches with my opinions

http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/4/11/in-which-youre-the-only-woman-ive-been-dreaming-of.html

I'm by no means and will never be a Jewish boy, but always wanted to marry one.
The film is a bit modernized version of Portnoy, that even now quite powerful and universal Philip Roth's story of a Jewish bachelor's infinite problems with his desires for shiksas. And if the shiksa is played by that mistress of acting and versatility, Gwyneth Paltrow, wearing her usual Calvin Klein/Ralph Lauren/what have you outfit, we are more likely to shrug our shoulders (or is it just me?).

But we shouldn't this time. I enjoyed how this film, using so many cliches ("I loved you ever since I saw you asking your mother to dance.") remains somewhat moving. Maybe exactly because of the cliches. We have Leonard, an ageing Jewish son, living with his parents (mother played by still stunning Isabella Rosselini) after he cut his veins when some improbable girlfriend from non-Jewish milieu left him. So he sits in his hovel full of old comic books & VHSes, and only because of a strange whim of the screenwriter, cherishes a completely ridiculous dream of black and white photography making.

Gwyneth is the troubled beauty he meets in curious cirsumstances, Sandra is the good Jewish girl nearly pimped to the hero by both his'n'hers families.

From the beginning we know of course that nothing will come out of this odd couple: women like Paltrow's character never quite fall for troubled boys without careers, and Sandra is a pharmaceutic company employeer, who bores Leo to death.

I was wondering, how come I care about this film? It's no match with so many masters of man/woman flirt/romance: Rohmer, Cassavetes. the shameful truth is probably the incidentally (and accidentally) sharp image of our own images of love and the seeming choices we have in life.

I also recommend you this blog's fantastic exchange between Wes Anderson, a cherished "niche" director and a journalist, who discovered, how Anderson pushed the Parkinson ill Pauline Kael, a legend of film criticism, to praise his movie:

http://thisrecording.com/film/2008/8/18/in-which-wes-anderson-tries-to-game-pauline-kael.html

and have a look at the collection of mp3 he always give under the post. I have to think about sth like this here, when i will cross this pain-in-the arse infantile initiatory period.

Irresistible instinct of playing Jews against Nazis Pt.1

2009-09-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

2009-09-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

I promised a German series, but something interrupted me – I got this
http://thisrecording.com/today/2009/8/3/in-which-these-are-the-100-greatest-writers-of-all-time.html

We would like to stress that there is a crucial difference between "an important writer" and "a great writer"; the latter is at this time our sole interest.

An apparently anglo-saxon-favourite-list –of –the one-hundred-best-fuckin-writers-of –all-time. So Faulkner before Shakespeare? With Ashbery at Fifteenth and Homer two stances below? Euripides together with Stendhal and Orwell? And where the fuck is Celan? Have they heard about sth like postmodern literature? Oulipo? Nah. There is something genuine American in this whole lists business and this one is no different: to have all epochs together, in order, measure Blake and Kafka by the same, objective categories… But cut off the irony and look in the list the second time: are there any serious absences? Do we miss anybody severely? Can we in fact construct the canon as we do the shopping list? I come from a notoriously neglected country, speaking a notoriously difficult and marginalized language…so: no Bruno Schulz, no Mickiewicz, no Slowacki…but hello, there he is, Czeslaw Milosz, florid as ever, hand in hand with no other, than….JP2, the Pope. We can obviously see a certain method in the list: even though its authors do not claim it’s decisive, but look: no fucking surprises.

My personal favorite (though repressed one), T. S. Eliot, would be proud of an attempt to hold a certain tradition and individual talent tendency in this list: a bunch of originals, usually struggling with private crises, nervous breakdowns and societal acceptance. Ok, so they are repressed gays & lesbos, religious renegades, blind lunatics, drug addicts, alcoholics, eccentrics, dissidents. Dead in loneliness, despair, misery or forgetfulness. But they are our tradition! Little or nearly no compromise for so called other traditions: Western canon all the way, our own carnival without limits! But am I outraged by the presence of Walter Benjamin – hardly a writer per se

No! I rather cherish the barenaked chest of Ezra Pound in the flourishing of his own madness and the sinister look of the great adherent of disdain, Mr. Jonathan Swift.

There is nothing bad to say about anyone we list here, except in some cases that they were anti-Semitic or racist, hated women or hated men. Literary crimes are usually relative, the caveats of which we shall enumerate.

True indeed. This list says what every list always say: there is no canon, there is no and will never be anything as closed list of the writers of our “culture”. The reason the lists always bring so much joy is that they prove something else: we are hostages of icons, names, codified phenomena. We are reassured. But let me go to bed with my favourite lecture of these days, a little book by Gaito Gazdanov, An evening at Claire, who lived in Paris in the 20s and 30s. some people say he was even more respected than Nabokov at the time. But Nabokov, how did he rank, let’s check…

Berlin meine Liebe

2009-09-11T13:19:00.001-07:00

Planning another short trip to Berlin right now, I endured a whole series of flashbacks, connected with my stays in this city. Fascination, that begun with the reading of Christiane F way too early (around 12 years old) and culminated, when I came there first time around 17 with my high school friends, already residing in Kreuzberg, that has become my usual shelter there (and two times - Friedrischein, around Warschauer Strasse, a place and flat I will never forget for some reasons), since then I tend to visit the city upon Spree at least once a year.

I always nearly unconsciously tended to keep a certain degree of distance to the whole myth of Berlin, perhaps because the very exquisite looks of the city, its scales, distances, architecture – one may say a richer, more spectacular and happier version of my city, Warsaw. I hated the resentimental element in that, but I couldn’t restrain a little cramp within the heart (or sometimes not so little), when I observed the fantastic, unchallenged pace of Berlin’s investments, constructions and apparent flourishing, having in mind, how Warsaw could have looked like, if it wasn’t completely devastated by Germans after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. But that cramp lasted only a little while, being quickly repressed by the overwhelming fascination and great admiration for the cityscapes & legends Berlin offers.

Since I started to come there, I sucked in completely – music, people, places, with the special space reserved for music, as Berlin was the nearest city, where I could go to a concert of the bands I cherished: Pixies, Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth, to name few. Along went the explorations of the city’s psychogeography. Watching Berlin Alexanderplatz, a Doblin Weimar era masterpiece adapted by Fassbinder and Ulrike Ottinger’s films, like Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of no Return) and Freak Orlando especially, I developed a special relation with the city. During a long walk to Treptower Park, with its Soviet Soldiers Memorial monumental park complex last very freezy winter, and then learning about an analogical, though smaller in scale, mausoleum in Warsaw, I felt a real connection with the place for the first time.

This is just to begin something like a series on German music here I’m planning at the moment. Only because I started to correspond with Anja Huwe, an ex-Xmal Deutschland singer lately, I just dig through a considerable amount of her clips at YT and will definitely scribble something around it in the near future. The dreamy atmosphere I announced in my statement will surely mark it.

absolute beginner

2009-09-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

It is me, an absolute beginner in the matter of blogs, despite reading them for quite a long while. I'm starting a blog after being encouraged by friends, who probably had enough of my fbook and non-fbook activity and adviced me to create a space, where I could pour out my never-ending mind-mill-stream-of-conscioussness.

The title of this blog is taken from a little book by Michel Leiris, Nights without night and couple of days without day, a collection of short stories - dream descriptions he had been writing down for nearly 40 years, since early youth till the publication of the book in 1961. Writing down your dreams in a 40 years span always seemed kind of strange activity to me and can you imagine something more banal indeed? Yet, after spending numerous night sleepless, resulting from insomnia I suffer from time to time, I realised this strange non-reality between dream and non-dream took away enough a bit of my life to take a closer look at it.
I like the idea Nerval expressed, that "Dream is our alternative life" and in this life we live equally intensely and this is also the way we perceive reality.

At the beginning of the Pervert's Guide to Cinema Slavoj Zizek repeats the famous scene form Matrix and seated in front of Morpheus instead of Neo, demands the "third pill", that is: neither the blue one, by which he goes back to the reality; nor the red one, which will take him "as far as the rabbits burrow leads", that is the Matrix. He doesn't want to take away the fiction from the reality, because we need fiction to put an order on the reality, so he's asking for the third pill.

The third pill enables to see not the reality behind the behind the illusion, but the reality of the illusion itself. if my inquiries, capriccios or musings have any "goal", let it be experiencing the intense reality of wonderful illusions of daydreaming.