Charming coffee drinking young things talking about Wittgenstein

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

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

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!

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...

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

Tryin Not To Wallow In Typical Musical Misery Vol.1

Winter keeps us Warm

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).