Ornithologists say white-feathered pigeons are masters of survival
While I was giving a reading in Chicago, Jan 28th at 5 pm, the roof
of the pigeon exhibit in Chorzów, Poland collapsed under the weight
of snow. 63 people died. Słowo nie zagruchotało. To tylko dach
gruchnął. An iridescent audience on air. Archangels Barbs Homers
Frillbacks Laughers Modenas Nuns Orliks. Read the rest of this entry »
“The moment I heard that the biography of the late Polish ‘journalist of the century’ was being written, I knew there’d be some debate. I was right. Because if in Poland someone is ‘great’, he is also an untouchable saint…
To read more, click on the image to the right and visit Cafe Babel
marek kazmierski & aga kucharko
So, after months of micro-hype, OFF_ served its first meal to the public on Thursday. Considering literary diners in London today are spoilt for choice when it comes to spoken word events, how did it all taste?
The ingredients (books, films, projector, screen, posters, etcrrrrra) which should have been ready weeks ago only arrived at the Bedroom Bar with hours to spare. The first guests were already sitting down when head chef Bartek Dziadosz got busy with his Mac pots’n'pans. Maitre d’ Marek Kazmierski, as is typical of catering staff, had had one too many by the time serving time came up. But at least the main dishes of the evening, Lilian Tietjen and Sam Taradash, were fresh and in plentiful supply.
Owner of the Deconstruction Project chain of art eateries, Aga Kucharko, flew in late to have all the furniture shoved around, posters put up and guests charmed.
OFF_ still feels the way Silny looks in this photo, but the New Statesman
obviously believed the press pack hype…
“For several years now, the Polish Cultural Institute has been making efforts to educate Britons about their (not so) distant European neighbour. In recent months, we’ve seen exhibitions from the artist Miroslaw Balka, reviewed here by Sue Hubbard, and a festival to celebrate Chopin’s bicentenary.”
Read on by clicking on the photo…
A limited edition series of the first 50 copies, hand stamped, numbered and signed, has just arrived and will be available on Thursday, just for the launch…
get them while they are literally hot off the press
this Thursday in London town, 8 pm, Bedroom Bar
The names of Danish towns now names of carpets, rugs,
and what’s worse the joint (Swedish) ØRESUND strait
is now a toilet seat. Your blackmail cost me three Swedish
bowls at Sunday discount, two sleepless nights on the
four-post OSLO. Did they name their floor coverings
ZERO, the début film by Pawel Borowski, is another example of the ongoing crisis in Polish screenwriting. What good is excellent direction, cinematography, acting or sound production – even if it is the best of its kind – if the most important organ in the body of the film – the script – is poorly thought through?
It’s not possible, thanks to its unusual narrative construction, to compress the plot of “Zero” down to a few lines. It seems the hub of this multi-layered story is the figure of the director of an unnamed company, who hires two rather wacky, down-at-heel detectives to follow his wife who, as we later learn, has rented a small apartment to host meetings with her lover. To spice up this narrative thread, Borowski dissects it with other plot lines: lingering shots direct our attention towards other characters – a taxi driver, newspaper seller, a nurse, a go-go dancer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Initially, we follow these with interest, expecting something we haven’t yet seen before. The scope of this strategy brings to mind Anderson’s “Magnolia”, in the distance accentuated with echoes of Iñárritu and Arriaga. We are curious as to how this wildly varied group of individuals will be brought together by the all-powerful screenwriter’s pen.
What will you tell me oh Highgate cemetery
through vine-wrapped stones
and you tall Englishwoman riding the Tube
(I would so like to come all over your chest)
what do you really want to know
Chinese chap and you two German girls
when asking for directions to Marx’s tomb
is it not you who should be leading me there
through decaying leaves
Three years ago, Peter Greenaway shot a feature film in Poland about a Dutch painter… it gets it’s limited UK release on Friday – read all about it on TG;
“Greenaway is an incurable self-promoter, forever ready with a barrage of stats about how many people he VJ’d in front of in Gdansk, or have seen The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. There will always be, he says, “people who travel thousands of miles to see a Greenaway film. And I’m still painting – I’ve got a big exhibit coming up in Milan soon. And that’s even more private.”
In today’s Guardian – read more by clicking on the image…
(a cheeky chant for zombies)
Nobody uses the stropha Sapphica any more,
not even Jacek Dehnel or Różycki,
why do they choose sonnets, when the Sapphic
stanza is sexy?
Top hat, bowler, have more grace?
A pointless hard-on, needless fart and cock in hand
belonging to a dull classicist in the 20th century
and the first, if you like.
Sooner the avant-garde will retrieve the crushed
remains of Sappho from her resting rocks,
dear artistes! Dress the bells,
perhaps you’ll get it up!
In partnership with the Deconstruction Project, the event includes;
All are welcome. Entry is free.
The readings and discussion will take place in English.
Kinoteka Film Festival, 2010, triple film review
Let’s start this piece of vicious writing on a positive note. Nothing screened this year could be anywhere near as dire as Andrzej Wajda’s 2007 “Katyn”. I saw it in London last year, rooted to my cinema seat by the sheer awfulness of what I was witnessing – the dead-icon imagery, the sub-soap opera dialogue, the giant waste of the best acting talent Poland has to offer, the paper thin characters, the plot schisms, the editing mess… a few said it was good for Polish school kids to go see some of the history which communists had hidden for several generations, but school kids want their history strong and vital, not dumbed down and deathly dull.
It’s interesting to note none of the delighted reviews in the Guardian or Times or other high-brow publications actually talked about the film – they all focused on Wajda’s losing his own father in Katyn and about the moving theme of the story. Think I’m being insensitive and wickedly arrogant? Be honest, which is more important to you: what’s on at your local cinema today or what battles are being fought in the name of freedom, even as we speak? I sympathise with Wajda’s loss (both of my grandfathers had spent time in Nazi camps, though both survived), but films must be judged on merit and not personal feelings – if you are going to tackle big themes in your work, especially if it is reaching millions of impressionable hearts and minds, serve them well.
I dream of the city and of friends considering
suicide. And my grandmother, in good
shape, centuries younger, saying
she’s moving in with me. (Do I have somewhere
to move out to?). And I’m haunted by the dead,
who I would never dream of doing such things.
They have no answers, but they do know
that soon I will be asking for trouble. For if tenses,
past and future, don’t exist, then I keep sinning
in the same body and spirit. Read the rest of this entry »
…
a short, sweet introduction to the life and work of Edward Stachura, a French/Polish writer and singer/songwriter.
“EDWARD STACHURA (1937-1979) was one of the most interesting writers of the Polish postwar generation. Like many artists, he had a heightened sensitivity to experience, and lived a life that was short and at times unbearably intense. Stachura lived his art as much as he wrote it. He spent his life searching for that which lies beyond facts, beyond acts of sensual experience, beyond the signs of printed words. He wrote his life as long as he lived it, but was never satisfied with the way words conveyed reality. His last major work, Fabula rasa, is an attempt to bridge the gap he saw between literature and life.”
click on the image to the right to read on…
for Marek Sz.
with that sorry shorter leg of his
so proud of himself,
when he made the jump
he shouted: look, a magic trick!
and then it was necessary to
move into the copper cauldron,
hey, let’s pretend it’s washday!
hide! a magic trick
PIOTR SIWECKI: OFF_PRESS origins…
MAREK KAŹMIERSKI: Like so many memorable things in the world, OFF_ was born of bad blood. Marcin Piniak and myself (Marcin writing in Polish, I in English) met writing for Nowy Czas, a newspaper printed in London which had ambitions of being the highbrow choice for the emigre Polish community in the UK. Too bad it didn’t happen. We both quit the paper and kept on drinking, moaning, dreaming. But that gets tiresome after a while, so this time last year Marcin, Kinga Pilich (a young publishing student) and myself set up OFF_Magazine, an on-line bilingual literary journal. It was meant to tell as many stories in as many languages (literal, visual, multi-sensory) as we could find, but such big nets are hard to handle. We got submissions from all over the world, some great stuff, some worse than woeful. Then we decided to run an international writing competition, then publish an anthology of the short-listed writers, then make a film to go with it, then run some literary events to publicise the whole shebang… Read the rest of this entry »
Your eyes, in which I journey away
Paul Éluard
Nusch,
who, if not you,
not sight of you,
will let me understand
that the greatest happiness is happiness in the midst of misery?
Who do you think I think of along the streets, in offices, schools
among the pompous, the plain, the unavailable?
Of who in hospital,
among the broken, the sick, the humbled,
where time flowed like tears of piss
into the catheter?
…
