#and it only exists because of a very interesting time in contemporary polish history

[hanzajesthanza]

also i realize i'm saying all these noble and beautiful things about the channel from the purest depths of my heart. but actually i'm also just doing this because i fucking love the witcher books and it pisses me off that people don't know about them that much in english and i can only go for so long (seven years) with people not knowing that there are books. or that the witcher is from the 90s. or polish.

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Star Trek: Facets of Film

In an unsurprising turn of events, as it happens, there is a rather large difference between the production design of a full-length feature film, and a television show.

There are plenty of reasons for this.  Costumes are different, and cheaper.  Special effects are different, and cheaper.  Sets are different, and cheaper.

You get the point.

The fact is, the chief differences between the trimmings of film and television lie in the budget.  Movies just have more money to spend than television does, and television has to churn out a series of episodes every season.  A movie has the ability to produce sets, costumes, props, special effects because they have more time and more money to do it with.  It’s only natural that most films tend to be more creative and interesting looking than most television shows: there just isn’t the freedom, time and money to do so.

As a result, television has to rely on the trimmings that come to them most easily: writing, performances, and characters.

For the most part.

As it turns out, Star Trek is a little bit of an exception.

Thanks to its unique settings and alien designs, Star Trek’s production was a little more involved than most television shows on, even today.

See, there’s more to a good television series than just a good setup and great characters.  As a matter of fact, there’s actually quite a lot that goes into making a television show, especially one like Star Trek.

In a show set on other planets, full of aliens, space battles and otherworldly clothing, the production design had to be a little more involved than the traditional contemporary television program.  It required more unique costumes, sets, props and special effects, on top of the camerawork, music, and performances that are all used to convey information to an audience.  A lot of different elements have to come together in order to tell these stories in a visual medium in an entertaining way.

Any work in a visual medium that’s worth its salt has to know how to use these elements to work together in order to enhance the existing story and characters.  A good use of these factors combined with a great script and good characters can propel any movie or show from good, to great.

So yeah, they’re kind of important.

But not too important.  It’s a balance.  

These elements, these ‘facets of filmmaking’, exist to enhance, not overshadow.  They are to be good enough to be believable, but not so overblown that they are the focus.  It’s a difficult balance, but it can be done.

Today, we’re going to be trying to figure out if Star Trek hit that balance.

Let’s take a look, starting with the cinematography.

The camerawork in any visual form can sometimes make or break the viewing experience.  Typically, when it’s done adequately, it’s barely noticeable, just simply there.  When it’s done badly, it’s extremely noticeable, and when it’s done well, it’s often done well enough that even a casual viewer will notice the visual look of a film or television show.  At first, it seems almost impossible to shoot a scene ‘badly’, but as it turns out, there’s a bit more to camerawork than just pointing it at the action.  There’s a lot to consider.  After all, the cinematography is supposed to help generate audience reactions almost as much as the script and characters are.

So, how does Star Trek’s cinematography hold up?

Well, it’s a bit complicated.

The camerawork is decent, at the very least.  It follows the action, cuts to extreme dramatic close-ups when the music indicates, and pulls back for more comedic ones.  The overall look of the show was big, bold colors that showed up well on camera, everything from the uniforms to the planets, and it was incredibly striking.  Thanks to this, the intense backlighting, bright lighting, and sharp focusing effects, Star Trek had an incredibly distinct visual style and language.  No show looks quite like it, even at the time.

While it’s easy to make fun of the goofy close-ups with dramatic lighting, the fact is, it helped Star Trek create a very distinctive visual language that defined the show.  For a television show, Star Trek was shot in a very expressive way, that holds up as incredibly individualistic even today.

But a camera means nothing without the visuals to shoot in the first place.

Like I said, Star Trek is nothing if not colorful.  Between the bright uniforms of the Enterprise crew to the dazzlingly loud outfits of the natives of the planets they visit, and even the planets themselves, the worlds of Star Trek show up rather brilliantly on screen.  But there’s more to the visual look of a show than its costume design.

The space visuals (and stock footage) of the show can come across as rather dated to modern eyes, even after the remastering, but in the 1960s, they were the best available on a television budget.  The model of the Enterprise and the occasional other enemy ship or life form would appear on screen to establish the scope, or maybe the other ship would appear on the ship’s view screen, only for a moment before the scene would change, focusing on the bridge of the Enterprise or the surface of the planet.  But still, though these moments were short, they left an impact.

The model of the Enterprise is legendary, a striking visual even to this day, to the point where it was displayed in the Smithsonian.  The look of these ships, while not yet polished to the point that they would be in the films and later series, was iconic, solidified forever in the public consciousness.

As were some of the sets.

Very few sets are as instantly recognizable and iconic as the bridge of the Enterprise.  Everything from the blinking lights to the famous captain’s chair is ingrained in the cultural memory.  Even the helm and communication’s panel are distinctly Star Trek. Of all the ‘home base’ sets in the history of television, it’s unlikely that you’d find one that looks as iconic as the bridge of the Enterprise.  As such, it was shot as both a comforting location, and a genuinely heroic place of adventure, bringing together both familiarity and the feeling of excitement.

The rest of the sets on the Enterprise are, while not quite as iconic, also memorable.  The transporter room, the sickbay, the conference room, the mess hall, and a few of the crew quarters are regular re-occurrences on the show.  Each location manages to be its own unique, distinctive room, while keeping with the overall aesthetic and feel of the ship at large.  With a striking memorable visual ‘home base’, Star Trek was already well on its way to being extremely visibly unforgettable.  But the work on the visuals didn’t stop there.

Of course, one of the most striking images in all of Star Trek are the looks of the aliens themselves.

Blue skinned Andorians, the lizard-like Gorn, the rock-like (lasagna-like) Horta, the tough, warlike Klingons, and, most famously, the pointy-eared, pointy-eyebrowed Vulcans and their distant cousins, the Romulans.

The impact of the Vulcans is most keenly felt in the main character of Mr. Spock.  The pointy ears and eyebrows are forever imprinted into geek culture.  The reasoning for this is more speculative than anything else, but the treatment of each alien culture as being just that, a culture, rather than a force to be reckoned with, may have had something to do with it.  Spock’s presentation as a character first, and an alien second (or third, even) may have had a distinct impact on how the aliens on Star Trek were represented: not just as having interesting designs, but by being interesting characters in and of themselves, leaving a far more distinct impression.

Speaking of impressions, let’s talk about the music, shall we?

The music in Star Trek, most notably the opening music, has been often parodied, copied, or referenced in the years since it’s release, to the point where it can come across as incredibly corny.  However, I am rather loath to use the word ‘corny’ in a negative context.

The theme for Star Trek is overwhelmingly hopeful, uplifting, adventurous.  Like much of the rest of the show, it’s memorable and instantly iconic, reminiscent of exploration and the ongoing vastness of space.  Accompanied by the opening narration and the sound of the Enterprise whooshing past the camera, the sound of the Star Trek theme is big and bold, instantly getting across the feel of the show.  And that’s not restricted to just the opening theme.

The incidental music of Star Trek, (The ‘comedy’ bits, the dramatic music, ‘Spock’s Theme’ that originated in Amok Time, among others) is almost as interesting and memorable as the opening theme is.  It’s not particularly ‘epic’, at least, not all the time, but it does capture the spirit of the show, which is more important.  These elements, these ‘facets of film’, are best when they are consistent with the tone of the project, rather than trying to go above and beyond it.  As such, the music fits the show and characters perfectly, filling in the background with intense or lighthearted instrumental in order to help the mood along.  It’s noticeable, very much so, and really adds to the emotional impact of any given scene.  It really works, and even though it comes across as a bit campy now, (again, not necessarily a bad thing) it truly does bring home the ‘feeling’ of Star Trek.

But it’s all in vain if the performances can’t pull it off.

Thankfully, the actors are more than up to the task.

Hold on, you might say.  Isn’t this the show that made World Class Large Ham William Shatner famous?  And here you say about good performances?

Yes.  Absolutely.  And Shatner isn’t excluded in that statement.

Star Trek includes interesting sets, special effects as simple, yet memorable as the transporter and the phaser, fascinating alien designs, and good stories, but it’s all worthless without the people.  In the end, Star Trek is not about these designs, or externals.  It is a drama, concerned about people and their relationships to one another, and it is utterly vital that the actors be able to make the audience believe in them, and in their connection to the other characters.

And every last one of them succeed.  Even Shatner.

Sure, the acting style of the ‘60s looks a bit different now, and times have changed.  Although some scenes can come across as a wonderful blend of Ham and Cheese, the actors bring it together in truly emotional performances.  You believe that these people know and care about each other.  From Leonard Nimoy’s subtle layers as Spock to DeForest Kelley’s dry exasperation as McCoy, even to William Shatner’s charismatic intelligence and courage as Kirk.  Every character, even the supporting cast, holds their own, with genuine, distinctive performances, and again, it all fits perfectly.  Nobody is too peppy or too dramatic.  Everyone fits together perfectly, and, even better, they all fit the show.  Each character is clear and distinct, and the audience establishes connections with all of them.

Again, maybe they’re not realistic, exactly, but they are real.

There isn’t a single aspect of Star Trek that feels unbalanced, or misplaced.  While the look and feel of the show can seem campy and goofy to modern audiences, upon closer inspection, it turns out that every facet of this show fits exactly where it should, with nothing overshadowing the story and characters.  It’s alternatively big and bold, or small and contemplative, but almost always, it’s just right.  Everything blends together to become a television masterpiece, that has been long remembered with great affection for a reason.

And it didn’t happen by accident.

Join us next time while we take a look at the facets of filmmaking: the behind the scenes of Star Trek.  Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to see you there!

[trinuviel]

Exhibition: The Splendour of Power (Koldinghus, Denmark 2018) [Part 1]

I had the good fortune to visit the exhibition The Spendour of Power - 750 years of royal and magnificent jewellery from the halls of power at the castle of Koldinghus in Denmark. 

It is an impressive and gorgeous exhibition that chronicles the intersection between jewellery and power over the course of 750 years, from the early medieval age to the present. The central premise of the exhibition is formulated thusly:

Whether discrete or flashy, the jewellery of power have a function and bear values which can be decoded, thus contributing to a better understanding of the shifting power structures and societal norms through history, as well as out contemporary conscious or unconscious codices. (Catalogue text)

The exhibition includes 184 pieces from the 13th century to the present, all pieces that outright symbolize power or subtly signal wealth and social status to pieces that express either loyalty or resistance to various political entities and regimes. Thus, the exhibition presents the visitor with a plethora of very different jewels and ornamental objects that have been used to convey political, social and monetary power throughout history. These include signet rings, ecclesiastical items such as an abbot’s staff as well as a large number of items that function as symbols of royal power such as a magnificent jewelled and enameled accolade rapier from the renaissance that belonged to King Christian IV. It also include a number of royal orders, which traditionally is given to people who have served the monarch or the state loyally. Some of these orders are still in use, such as the Order of the Elephant and the Order of the Dannebrog.

(Various insignia of The Order of the Dannebrog)

One of the big draws of the exhibition is the large number of royal jewellery on loan from the collections of the Danish, Swedish and British royal families. There are some truly splendid pieces of great monetary and historic value on show, pieces that we otherwise only see on royal heads in the media. 

However, the exhibition also includes some more humble pieces of jewellery that has either been expressly made or appropriated to signal resistance to an oppressive regime as well as at least one piece that its owner uses to signal a specific political stance, i.e. Madeleine Albright’s brooch “Breaking the glass ceiling”, which used to express her support for Hilary Clinton’s bid for the American presidency in 2016 (x). Albright is indeed known for using her jewelled accessories politically.

(”Breaking the glass ceiling”. Brooch of melted glass with gold. 1992. Vivian Shimoyama. Sec. Madeline Albright, US Diplomacy Centre)

As said, the exhibition includes some truly magnificent pieces of jewellery and in the following I’m going to present my favorite pieces. Since this is going to be a very long post, I’ll put the rest of it under a cut.

Enjoy.

SPLENDID RENAISSANCE JEWELS

The exhibition includes a number of renaissance jewels of which a necklace from the late 16th century is the most splendid piece in terms of aesthetic value. This piece is a rarity since necklaces from this period rarely have survived, especially in such a good state of preservation. 

(Necklace in gold, silver, diamonds, enamel and pearls. 1590-1620. Designmuseum Denmark)

While this 16th century collier features small table cut diamonds and freshwater pearls, it is the ornate setting that really draws the eye. The necklace is composed of nine lozenge-shaped links, executed in gold open-work with volutes and stylized floral ornamentation that interlace elegantly. The delicate gold ornamentation of volutes, arabesques, rosettes and flower heads is decorated with blue, white and red enamel in a classic cloisonné technique. The effect is one of ornate trellis work, topped with diamonds and pearls. The mounting of the diamonds is rather tall, which gives the whole piece a lot of three-dimensional volume. 

Though the collier includes precious gemstones, it is the enameled gold-work that dominates visually, which is typical of renaissance jewellery:

One point which stands out clearly in the pieces which have come down to us, is that precious stones played an accessory role in relation to the use of enameled gold. Besides this the stones show but little variety in the cutting; coloured stones are frequently cut en table, flat, en cabochon, rounded, without facets and polished. Diamonds were usually cut as pyramids en pointe, flat cut, or rounded dos d'ane (donkey's back). Cut in this manner they could hardly show the fire for which they are famous. (x)

The craftsmanship is absolutely exquisite and the whole piece is a veritable feast for the eyes. The maker is unknown, as are the provenance - but jewellery of this caliber usually belonged to people at the very top of the social hierarchy. This quality of this piece would have been expensive and it would have been worn both as a beautiful adornment but also to signal the wealth and taste of the owner. Though the piece is non-figurative it also had a symbolic meaning since both pearls and diamonds were given symbolic attributes in a Christian context. Pearls were seen as symbols of salvation whereas diamonds were seen as symbols of Christ’s strength as well as the wonder in God’s creation.

For the wearer of this collier, it was not thus not merely a case of the splendour emanating wealth and prestige, but also a visual confirmation that the owner was a good Christian. If the collier belonged to a woman, an extra secular symbol can be added given that the pearl, in classical mythology, was seen as a symbol of Venus, and thereby a symbol of love. (Catalog text)

It is, as previously said, an absolutely stunning piece of jewellery - and the visitor got the opportunity to really appreciate the craftsmanship through a magnifying glass mounted on one side of the display case wherein the necklace was exhibited.

Queen Dorothea’s Bridal Ornament

The exhibition included another large piece of renaissance jewellery - and though it isn’t nearly as exquisite in terms of craftsmanship and aesthetics, both its symbolism and history are very interesting. I am speaking of the ornament known as Queen Dorothea’s Bridal Ornament.

(Ornament of fire-guilt silver, enamel, pearls and cabochon cut precious stones. 1557. Museum of Copenhagen)

The bridal jewel is quite large and was designed to be pinned or possibly sewn onto the front of the bride’s dress. It looks impressive but it isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as the necklace mentioned above - probably because it was most likely cobbled together by previously used ornaments and stones. However, the really interesting thing about this piece is the symbolism that is expressed through the pelican ornament in the center as well as the various gemstones. The gemstones symbolize important Christian virtues:

Pearls = innocence and purity

Amethyst = love

Yellow-green sapphire = fruitfulness and hope

Bluish rock crystals = faith(fullness)

Thus the various gemstones symbolizes the cardinal Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity.

The pelican ornament at the center of the jewel also has a very specific symbolic meaning. 

In a Christian context, the pelican symbolizes the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ due to the adaption of an ancient legend:

The legend was that in time of famine, the mother pelican wounded herself, striking her breast with the beak to feed her young with her blood to prevent starvation. Another version of the legend was that the mother fed her dying young with her blood to revive them from death, but in turn lost her own life. (x)

However, the pelican also came to symbolize maternal charity - and it was a symbolism that lent itself well to the ideals of motherhood and femininity. Queen Elizabeth I of England successfully politicized the maternal symbolism of the pelican to bolster her image as the Mother of the Nation and to express her commitment to her subjects (x). The pelican became one of Elizabeth I’s favoured symbols and she owned several pieces of jewellery shaped like a pelican. She was even portrayed wearing a jeweled pelican pendant in the famous Pelican Portrait by Nicolas Hillier (1573-1575). 

As a symbol of maternal charity, the pelican was thus an apt symbol for a bride to wear, which is probably why this symbol is placed prominently on the bridal jewel.

The bridal jewel was gifted to the Copenhagen City Hall bye Queen Dorothea, consort to King Christian III in 1557. The bridal jewel was most likely made for this event since if features the queen’s coat of arms with the year 1557 engraved on it. The jewel was meant to be used by the daughters of the city’s officials and mayors on their wedding day.

By presenting such a sumptuous gift, Queen Dorothea ensured that the city’s “brides of unblemished reputation” should be suitable adorned for their big day, and she also manifested the link between the city’s leading administration and the royal family. (Catalog text)

The sumptuous bridal jewel did not only signal the elevated status of the wearer but also that the wearer was under royal patronage by association.

By donating the ornament, Dorothea could send a signal about the royal couple’s affiliation to Copenhagen; the ornament would also add to the outfits of the most distinguished brides, while attempting to limit the wedding celebration excesses that were getting out of hand during this period. (Catalog text)

The gift of the bridal jewel also a had a political purpose other than emphasizing the relationship between the royal rulers and the city officials. It was also part of an attempt to curb a rising trend of people dressing above their social station. There were several official regulations regarding how people should dress and how much jewellery they could wear. This was not a local phenomenon. Sumpturary laws existed in several European countries and their purpose was to limit the use of luxurious attire (jewels, fabric, etc) to a specific social class. Servants should not dress like merchants and merchants should not dress like nobles not matter how wealthy they were. It was an issue of social control and there were cases where people were fined for wearing jewels deemed above their social station.

The exhibition covers 750 years of jewellery, so I’ve chosen to split up my review in several sections. The next section will take a closer look at royal jewels from the 19th century.

To be continued...

[languagemadness]

38 Classic Polish Books You Should Know (About)

requested by anon

That’s a hell of a Buzzfeed title, wow! I focused solely on books, but you need to remember that poems play a HUGE part in Polish literature in general. Instead of doing a list of "classic Polish texts", which would include full-on books, poems, dramas, everything, and would be probably 18637 positions long, I did only some of the most important books, dramas, and comic books. If you’d like me to tell you more about anything on this list, cover something more in detail, or make another list — shoot me an ask!

I ordered the list NOT by how much I like these books or how strongly I’d recommend them. The list is ordered from the easiest ones to the toughest ones -- literarily, not linguistically.

Also, I know that the ask was about classical books, which I too included in this list.

Let’s start with something approachable — comic books and "normal" books that are so easy and pleasant to read. Except for the two books about war — they’re approachable but the topic doesn’t really make them pleasant.

Pan Samochodzik by Zbigniew Nienacki

A series of books about Pan Samochodzik, who’s an art historian and a detective, and his job is to solve theft, smuggling, and forgery cases. He’s basically a mix of Indiana Jones and Hercules Poirot. The background for the books is life in Polish People’s Republic, but it’s actually shown not as rough as it was in real life. Apart from that, they’re basically children’s books — very light, easy, and funny.

I’d definitely recommend them, I mean, who doesn’t like stories like that? Plus, you don’t need to be God knows how good with Polish to read them.

adaptations: There are 4 movies and a TV show based on the books, each based on a different book from the series.

Podróże z Herodotem by Ryszard Kapuściński

You can read it even when you’re like 10 because it’s a very nice, easy, pleasant story. An autobiography where the author describes his travels to Asia and Africa and compares them to the travels of Herodotus. Very interesting, often funny, it gives you a full view of different people and cultures and how rich the world is. It teaches you a little bit of history, it teaches you a little bit about the modern world (I think the story starts in the 1950s), and the comparison between these two — it’s really fascinating to see that, generally, the world hadn’t changed that much.

I would wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

W pustyni i w puszczy by Henryk Sienkiewicz

The only book I cried on and not because it was so beautiful, but because it was so painful to read. Okay, I was like 11 when I read it, but technically it’s a book for kids, so…

It’s a story about two kids who get lost in Africa and they hike through like 5 countries to find their fathers (who worked in Africa and just happened to forget to take their children one day I guess?). Really, it’s about friendship, dedication, love, all the important values in life. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s painfully boring to read.

It’s a wonderful story, don’t get me wrong, and I loved it as a child — but the movie. The book I hated. So I do recommend it, but the movie.

adaptations: 2 TV shows and 2 movies (the one from 2001 being the most popular).

Tytus, Romek i A’Tomek by Henryk Jerzy Chmielewski

Comic books. Two friends try to humanize a monkey while traveling and exploring different areas of science and history. It’s funny, absurd, educational, and understandable for non-advanced learners of Polish.

Do I recommend? Absolutely.

adaptations: 2 episodes of a short TV show, a video game, and a movie from 2002 titled "Tytus, Romek i A’Tomek wśród złodziei marzeń" — but it’s not based on the comics, only on the characters.

Kajko i Kokosz by Janusz Christa

A series of comic books which is basically a Polish version of “Asterix”. It’s about two Slavic warriors who have all kinds of adventures and fights with Zbójcerze. It’s all fictional and to be honest, I don’t really remember much from the comics, but I know that I loved them as a child. There are also renewals of the old volumes as well as new stories based on the original story and they’re coming out even in 2018.

I wouldn’t say it’s something you absolutely have to read, but if you want to, then it’s worth your time.

adaptations: A TV show that’s still being made and a video game.

Zemsta by Aleksander Fredro

Language-wise, it is pure genius. Not too easy, though. The jokes, the phrases, the sayings — it is the base of common Polish language. Story-wise, it’s basically Polish Romeo and Juliet. Two families live in a castle and hate each other, a girl from one family is in love with a guy from the other family. We also get some more important side characters, they’re very nicely written, iconic even. The whole drama is hilarious, so yes I would calmly recommend it to people who are somewhat fluent in Polish.

adaptations: 2 movies (the one from 2002 being more popular).

Wiedźmin by Andrzej Sapkowski

I think it’s the definition of contemporary classic. It’s a series of short stories, later an actual book, later comics, and finally a movie and a video game. The book is about this witcher and a child of destiny who’s a witcher-in-training. The main character needs to protect her. The stories and comics, however — they’re obviously about the witcher, but I don’t know the details.

If I’m 100% frank, I have not read the stories, the book, the comics, nothing. So I can’t fully recommend it to you, but I can tell you this: everyone who’s into fantasy is crazy about it. I suppose if you like fantasy, Wiedźmin’s a must.

adaptations: A movie from 2001, a TV show from 2002, and a video game.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

This one’s, on the other hand, is a must if you’re into sci-fi. It’s about contact: with aliens, other civilizations, the unknown — but it’s not specified, which actually makes the book so interesting.

It’s been translated into multiple languages, so I’d say it’s easy to get, and if you’re either into sci-fi or into modern Polish literature — do read it.

adaptations: 3 movies (in 2002 Soderbergh made it a movie, so I suppose it’s worth checking out, but I personally haven’t watched it).

Kamienie na szaniec by Aleksander Kamiński

A story of 3 boys who just graduated from high school when WW2 broke out. It’s an actual story of actual people and it is heartbreaking. If you want to read anything about the WW2 that isn’t very technical or boring, this book is definitely for you. It’s about normal lives in abnormal circumstances and you get very attached to the characters and their stories, and the book actually makes you feel things.

Would recommend.

adaptations: A movie from 1977 titled "Akcja pod Arsenałem", which is based on the book, and a movie from 2014 under the same title as the book, also only based on it.

Medaliony by Zofia Nałkowska

An omnibus of short stories about WW2. Very short, very shocking, sometimes even disgusting. The stories are about people who survived the war and they are actual things that actually happened. I don’t think I get appalled easily, but those are horrifying, really.

A good recommendation for someone who wants to learn about the more (or less) humane side of the war. I would actually say it’s a must if you want to at least begin to understand the tragedy that WW2 was.

And now we’re moving onto some more… mature books. Those are usually compulsory readings in middle school and high school, and to get what they’re about, you need to have some common knowledge. Nothing too specific, though. And there’s a lot to them that you can enjoy even if you don’t know much about general Polish culture and history, so I would say giving them a shot is definitely worth it. Plus, you can learn a lot if you’re a careful reader.

Lalka by Bolesław Prus

Hands down my favorite Polish book of all times. The best thing they made me read in school and I swear this book made the 12 years of tears and pain that I spent in school worth it. Long story short, it’s about a dude from quite a poor family and he becomes rich for an aristocrat he loves very, very deeply. But she’s a total bitch and uses him like an old rag. Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t like romance but Lalka… I mean, the lengths he went for her, the things he did for her… I don’t want to spoil the book but it’s full of dramatic events, interesting characters, surprises, and most importantly — it’s absolutely exciting for the reader! It truly sucks you in. Not to mention the book in a phenomenal way shows how Polish society of the 1870s functioned and thought. And don’t even get me started on the psychology of single characters. I’ve read only a few books in my life that made me feel so passionate about their characters. Character-building-wise, Lalka is the peak of art.

If you want to read only one book from this list, this is the one.

adaptations: Tons of plays, a movie (1968) and a TV show (1978). Pretty accurate, but I personally didn’t like them.

Potop by Henryk Sienkiewicz

There’s a trilogy: Ogniem i mieczem, Potop, Pan Wołodyjowski — and they tell the history of Poland in the 17th century. For some reason, only Potop is considered an absolute must, but if I’m honest I didn’t read it, so I personally can’t recommend it to you. Potop itself is about a guy who wants to marry this girl but she thinks he betrayed the country, so he needs to clear his name by fighting by the king’s side. It sounds very fairy-tale-like, but the background is actual history and the author himself operates incredibly well with the real and the imaginary.

The thing with Sienkiewicz’s historical books is that they are pretty damn good, so even if you’re not too much into that kinda stuff but there’s a tiny part of curiosity in you, I don’t think it’s a mistake to check it out.

adaptations: A movie from 1974.

Krzyżacy by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Basically when Poland was all… under occupation and non-existent, Sienkiewicz wrote this book to bitch about Germanization, as well as to remind the Polish people about their country. The book is about the great times of Poland, from 1399 all the way to the greatest battle of 1410 when Poland kicked Prussia’s ass. But we also get some romance, some schemes, some awful deaths… The full set if you will. 

A lot of people say it’s a super ass boring book, but in my opinion, it’s absolutely fantastic. The details, the numerosity of threads (that somehow doesn’t confuse you at all), again the imaginary intwining with the real… I do recommend it not only to people who are into history, but to anyone looking for a good read that would explain a bit of Polish nature.

adaptations: A movie from 1960.

Quo vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Honey is this one fantastic… It’s a story about a Christian girl in Nero’s Rome and a non-Christian guy who’s in love with her. Of course, at first it looks like a love story, which it is, but there’s so much to it. The book is a knockout of a description of what life was like in ancient Rome. Everything from history, through society, to things like the time of bathing of each social class — there’s everything. And, what’s even better, it’s not boring at all! Actually, the book is unbelievably well-balanced between eventful, not overwhelming, and detailed.

I would definitely, definitely recommend. It’s not exactly a must and if you want to read a Sienkiewicz historical book, then Krzyżacy or Potop would be a better idea since they’re about Poland, but Quo vadis would most definitely not be a waste of time.

adaptations: 6 movies (the one from 2001 is the most popular one), a TV show, and a ton of plays.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

A book you either love or hate. I personally love it, I’m kin with this book, whatever. While reading it, I agreed with every single sentence, with every single opinion, I felt like it was me who wrote it in my past life or something. Just. An. Extraordinary. Book. Remember when I said that Lalka was the reason why I didn’t hate school? It was, but Ferdydurke is the reason I’m alive, kids.

It’s about a 30-year-old man who’s a writer (kinda), but he can’t write. Suddenly, he turns into a kid and is forced to go to school again. That’s just the plot of the book, however, because the story is simple, absurd, inconsistent, weird, and you don’t really read the book for the story. It’s what the story stands for. It’s about how pointless society is. How society creates idiotic rules to standardize people and to take away any creativity or any will to live. How people need to protect themselves and their originality but they can’t because originality doesn’t exist. And our main character explores all those philosophies. It’s a fantastic criticism of society, school, systems, classes, life.

Language-wise, it’s also a very interesting book. Definitely not an easy one. Gombrowicz was the master of language, the words and phrases he came up with, the ideas he hid within them. The language of his books creates, not only describes, the world from the books. His language is a whole different, self-sufficient being. Rare, striking, awe-inspiring.

As I said, somewhat philosophical and very metaphorical. You need to feel from your very heart what Gombrowicz means to understand this book.

adaptations: A theater performance from 1985 that you can watch on Youtube and a movie from 1991. I wouldn’t recommend watching them, though.

Sklepy cynamonowe by Bruno Schulz

Weird, metaphorical, a bit… insane? I love it. It’s an omnibus of short stories that are a description of the adult world through a child’s eyes. It’s like a dream, it’s impossible, it’s very soft and delicate and magical, really. It’s unlike anything. You feel like you’re reading a description of some very sensual dream. The stories make you wonder about the way people think, the way childhood affects your future life, the way the world works, and they make you realize that you don’t understand anything ever. But if you’re not looking for a deeper meaning, you can read the stories just for pleasure because they are honestly so sensual, sexy (but not porny, more like seductive), fascinating, and just strange, you actually read the stories with all of your senses. Makes you enter a whole different world and I will not exaggerate when I say that it changes your perception of everything.

As I said, it’s unlike anything you’ll ever encounter in life. A million out of ten would recommend.

adaptations: There is a short film from 1986 based on one of the stories from the book. It’s called "Ulica krokodyli".

Cudzoziemka by Maria Kuncewiczowa

One of my top 10. It is a story of the last day of a woman’s life. She knows she’s dying and she knows that all of her life she was in pain. So she recalls her entire life, all the big decisions she ever made, to find the source of her misery and to escape reality. It is a very sad book, but rather that depress the reader, it makes you think. It’s a story about alienation — the main character lived in a foreign country, never got to do what she actually wanted to do, never got to be with whoever she wanted to be with, and so everything she did, everywhere she went, everyone she spent time with, she felt out of place. The book was revolutionary in terms of composition and it explored the main character’s psychology very deeply. A fascinating, thought-provoking, original book.

Definitely would recommend.

adaptations: A movie from 1986.

And finally, books for the strong, books for the advanced, books for the masters. To get these, you actually need some strong background knowledge on Polish history and culture, especially society- and politics-wise. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not bad, they’re just… demanding.

Granica by Zofia Nałkowska

It is about… uhh… society, morality and the lengths a person can go to achieve what they want. Sounds complicated and serious, and it sort of is, but it’s also totally worth your time because it doesn’t really tire you as much as you could think it would. And it’s thought-provoking as well. It’s about this dude who has a wife, a career, and a lover, and he basically ruins his life and the lives of everyone around him — which is quite exciting and somewhat frightening to read. So if you’re into ambitious, psychological stuff, then I say yes! Go for it.

adaptations: A movie from 1938.

Chłopi by Władysław Reymont

It’s basically a longass description of one year in Polish countryside in the late 19th/early 20th century. Personally, I think it shows and defines the society of that time extremely well and it surely is admirable that someone wrote almost a thousand pages describing in detail things such as preparing cabbage for dinner or collecting crops. Reymont actually won the Nobel prize for this book.

Would recommend if you’re not looking for anything too thrilling. Even though the book has some iconic moments like taking away Jagna on a wheelbarrow cause she was a slut…

adaptations: A movie from 1922 and a TV show, which was later turned into a movie, from 1972.

Przedwiośnie by Stefan Żeromski

A Polish family in Russia (actually in Azerbaijan but before WW1 it was Russia, so). They live awesome lives until WW1 breaks out and the father has to leave the family. Then, the son goes a little nuts and joins communists and then there’s a revolution, the son gets traumatized and he runs away to Poland (where he’d never been before) where he’s looking for a prosperous life that his father had promised him. And Poland had just regained independence, so everyone hopes that it will be the oasis of prosperity and well-being once it’s renovated. The book is about how hope and gullibility (but mostly hope) are heartlessly crushed by reality. It is also a story about growing up because we follow the main character all the way from his careless youth through his war-and-revolution trauma to a point where he has to decide about his future. But most importantly, I think, it’s a historically important story. It was written when Poland was a new country and it was supposed to remind people that communism is bad and politics, in general, is crap, as well as propose some political solutions for the new country. That’s the general message but there are lighter moments like descriptions of Polish countryside, a lot of flirting with pretty girls, and even a murder.

It’s a good story, it’s a deep story — but not too complicated. And it’s actually very interesting, and I can promise you it’s not as heavy as I made it sound.

10/10 would recommend.

adaptations: Two movies — one from 1928 and one from 2001.

Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz

It’s an epic that describes life in the countryside in the 19th century. It was mainly written to remind Poles who had emigrated to France what a wonderful country Poland originally was, even though it was entirely under occupation, completely wiped off of any map. Naturally, everything there is presented through rose-colored glasses but still, if you’re looking for the classic of the classics, I suppose Pan Tadeusz is the book for you. If anyone wants to understand Polish literature, this book is a must.

Would I recommend? Sure if you’re here to sink in Polish culture or if you like quite full of adventure and yet easy reading. Easy as in the story’s nice and pleasant, the language is rather tedious.

adaptations: A surprisingly good and accurate movie from 1999. And the script is actually the text of the epic.

Dziady by Adam Mickiewicz

I think every Polish student hates Dziady. I didn’t, though. It’s a drama, actually, there are 4 parts of the drama, the last one not quite finished. I think the problem with Dziady is that no one really knows what it’s about. It was written in the mid 19th century, so again — Poland’s out of every map. The tzar is a bitch and Adam Mickiewicz disses him in the wildest of ways, but it doesn’t make sense until someone explains it to you. If you asked me what Dziady were about, in my opinion, all 4 parts are about love. Love for your country, love for your lover, love for yourself, love for other people, love for your family — all possible kinds of love. Sounds nice, right? That’s because it is nice. The problem with Dziady is that if you don’t delve deep into it, you won’t get it at all. The words as you read seem just like random words in a random order, no point whatsoever, skipping from topic to topic, all four parts at first seem completely unrelated. But the deeper you dig, the more you see. It is a very rich drama, there’s something in it for literally everyone, but it requires a ton of commitment and probably someone to guide you well through it.

Add it to my recommendations only if you are desperate to read it and if you have all the things above, aka time, commitment, and help. And language skills. The 2nd part, however, is short and it’s the easiest one, so do check it out.

adaptations: "Lawa" from 1989 is based on the second (which, in order, is the first) part of Dziady.

Wesele by Stanisław Wyspiański

It is such a deep drama that you just don’t get it. Kind of like with Dziady, except this one is waaay shorter and basically just disses everyone. In Dziady, the main character’s idea to show people love was to take control of them. Wesele, however, was about motivating people to do stuff by offending them.

Personally, Wesele is one of my favorites because it is just so problematic. Wyspiański attended a wedding in 1900 and then described it. Each guest in the drama (and at the actual wedding) represented an attitude that the general of Polish society had towards the country’s situation (occupation). And after 105 years of occupation, it seemed that the society didn’t really care anymore and just accepted their fate. Wyspiański was very much against that attitude. So basically what he did was he publicly washed the society’s dirty linen by pinning it onto his real-life friends. When Wesele premiered, people were actually chasing Wyspiański down the streets because they hated him so much. Not to mention that in the drama the whole offending thing is actually pretty profound and harsh. So much so that actual real-life guests weren’t enough for him — Wyspiański needed to introduce ghosts from the past, people who played an important role in Poland’s history. Of course, that was the author’s idea of motivating people to fight for their freedom.

The drama is full of references to Polish literature, Polish culture, and Polish history, so unless you’re fluent in these three, I wouldn’t tell you to read it.

I love Wesele with all my heart. If you want to give it a shot, instead of reading the actual drama, I’d suggest reading the story behind it and the summary and interpretations. This way you can enjoy it, which I think anyone should, without knowing much of the background. If I’m honest, you can’t really get much out of the drama itself. But I definitely recommend spending some time on this book, it’s definitely worth it.

adaptations: From 1973, it’s pretty good and quite accurate, but just a bit tiring.

Szewcy by Witkacy

Oh boy. A grotesque, modernist drama about the future of society, where the author basically talks about how people are doomed and headed for inevitable self-destruction. There’s a lot about how mechanic and inhumane people have become and of course tons of criticism towards society, revolution, capitalism, communism, and fascism.

I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t recommend because I didn’t really understand the language. It was a pain in the ass reading this book and if I had read it earlier in life, I assure you that W pustyni i w puszczy wouldn’t be the only book that made me cry from pain.

adaptations: Tons of theater performances that you can watch on Youtube.

Tango by Stanisław Mrożek

It’s a drama about generation gap and some ideas to live by (like conformism or anarchy). Sounds complex, but it actually keeps it very simple and short, a kid would get it, really, and yet the story actually stays with you. It also makes you wonder about a place and meaning of an intellectualist in society. Not to mention the hilarious and absurd situations like convincing your grandma to just die already.

Personally, I enjoyed it. Even though it’s about quite serious stuff, it’s hilarious, so you do read it with pleasure.

adaptations: There are multiple theater performances available to watch on Youtube.

Balladyna by Juliusz Słowacki

The main idea behind the drama is how good and evil both function simultaneously in this world and the fight between the two. A nymph sends a prince to the main character’s house. The main character wants to marry the prince, so she does a lot of awful things. Basically. It’s a nice story, though strange. A story that you would read to a child, except the language of the drama is… complicated. Let’s be honest — it’s Romanticism after all.

I would recommend it, but I wouldn’t die to make someone read it.

adaptations: There is this absolutely awful movie from 2009 (English title: The Bait). It’s loosely based on Balladyna.

Kordian by Juliusz Słowacki

It’s about this guy who plans to kill the tzar. There was a deeper meaning too but don’t ask me about it, I just don’t remember. To be honest, it was surprisingly pleasant to read and sometimes quite funny (I don’t think it was supposed to be, though). But I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know a whole lot about Polish history and culture — or unless you’re dangerously interested in it. And I mean like, you’d kill and die for it.

Nie-Boska komedia by Zygmunt Krasiński

To be honest, it’s a weirdly good story and what surprises me most about it is that it’s actually understandable, even though it’s quite a typical romantic drama. Interesting, huh… 

It’s about a man who is looking for his artistic self, leaves his family to pursue his art, and then there’s him trying to protect his country. It was actually written to criticize this romantic way of thinking and living, so there are a few moments where the author just dissed other authors of the time, but most importantly, the story is a comment on the current (current for them) political and sociological events, as well as religion, and a way for Krasiński to express his opinions.

Recommend? Meh. It’s a good read but it’s not a must and you gotta be in a mood for it. Also, a solid historical and literary background would make the reading way easier.

My advice if you’re planning on reading any of these? Check the time period of the action. I swear if you do that and you pretty much can tell what the background for Poland was at the time, even just like one basic piece of information, it will make reading the book possible.

I think that’s about it. There are hundreds of other great Polish books that I can go on and on about (I can also talk about these for at least a few hours), so again -- if you have any questions, opinions, requests, anything, ask away.

[art-now-poland]

"Swedish town at night" ( painting nr 296 ), Krzysztof Pajak

130x146cm Chalk ground. Of numerous cracks. KRZYSZTOF PAJĄK PAINTING I must admit that I am starting to write this text filled with anxiety, which comes from an ever-topical observation made in the 19th century by Eugene Delacroix1 :"Critical assessments of fine arts have been printed from time immemorial,and always,almost inevitably they have had their bad sides: firstly, they bore men of the world, for whom thi kind of writing is always ambigous, tiresome, and full of unclear terms, leaving their mind with a sense of something incomprehensible. Secondly, hate them, because such assessmets not only contribuate to progress in art, but they obscure the simplest problems, and whatever they explain, the explanations they offer are false". It is indeed very hard to translate truly, sincerly and authentically the much richer and deeper response to visual impressions into the language of lmperfect verbal notion. Can one, without a risk of beeing megalomaniac, comment on or evaluate a mere final result, not even trying to understand its context ?. Therefore, the anxiety mentioned en the beginning does not stem from a willingness to give the reader cheap thrills, just the opposite-it comes from the fear of the complexity of the problem I am going to deal with. I have had a chance to see several dozens canvases by Krzysztof Pająk: canvases varying in their final shape, different in guality and form, but at the same time cnnected by the common imperative of a genuine wish to create totally new aesthetic values. And yet, my assessement is of a very subjective, one could say- superficial character. I thus think that what I should aim at is not some penetrating, but illusory evaluative criticism of separate paintings: I should rather seek an answer to the guestion of the place, role,and function of Krzysztof Pająk's painting in Polish art of the erly 1990s. The artist seems to stand alone, far from the most influential centres of modern art. He does not follow any short-lived trends, as noticed by Georg Simmel2 ,"make one free from the burden of responsibility.The give an individual certainty that he is not alone in what he is doing". On the other hand, they restrain, inhibit, and paralyse a true artist. Thus, Krzysztof Pająk has chosen a more difficult road, wich would not be possible without a strong sense of self - confidence.It is not easy to determine the " future course of action".I guess that the artist himself would find it diffucult to foresee it. For the time being, he is fascinated - this seems to be just the right expression, by no means a pejorative one - with landscape painting. Both the artist's creative temperament and his present interests incline him to achieve the final form of his works by stratifying successive sequences of impressions and considerations as well as of mutual interactions between impulses. The townscapes thus created are reminscent of a poem inspired by experiencing and releasing some fervent emotions leads to the state of perfect satisfaction, and it is the laborious and solitary process of stiving for this "state of fulfilment that constitutes the power of both the artist himself and his artistic narration. Among the sources of Krzysztof Pająk's painting we find parallel motifs of 19th century townscapes, idealism of architecture of Renaissance Italian towns as well as an echo of Warhol's serigraphy, or painting of the Cobra group. Those less familiar with the history of may think that such a way of constructing canvases has ben derivved from pointillism.This, however, seems to be true only to a certain extent.Obviously,it is difficult for a contemporary artist to take no account of the experience accumulated by past generations of artists who followed solitary paths leading to sheer perfection.What he should do, however, is contribute s0me new personal experience to the quest for the universe called "beauty". Edmond Duranty3 in his recommendations to painters demanded: "You should not paint what you see. what would the use of painting be then ? It should serve only to show us things that not exist.( ...) What happens around us is uninteresting, just because we can see it every day". Krzysztof Pająk seems to comly with this clear and timeless message of the great thinker.It is confirmed definitely and unequivocally by this exhibition. Thanks to his high standatd of professionalism and honesty in the implementation of his projects, the artist makes one consistent whole of the visible and the unnamed, the past and the enigmatic. Krzysztof Pająk continues his quest for new solutions, he is still on his way.With all the greater hope, attention and friendliness we should follow his future actions. 1.Delacroix Eugene, "On Art Critics", in: "Oeuvres litteraires", Paris, 1923, pp.1-7 2.Simmel Geog, "Philosophie der Mode", Berlin, 1905, p.181 3.Duranty Edmond, "Notes sur 1' art", in : "Realisme", 10 july 1856, pp.1-2 Jacek Werbanowski art historian Editor-in Chief of " Exit" ( New Art in Poland) tekst do katalogu wystawy w galerii "Test" 1990

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Swedish-town-at-night-painting-nr-296/90942/3668146/view

[ray-dog-67]

The Replacements - Bastards of Young (SNL 1986)

The Replacements were a band, who, early in their career played a ferocious style of punk, then segued into a straight-up pub rock n roll band. Led by rhythm guitarist Paul Westerberg, the tone of the songs became more in line with the singer-songwriters he admired. Early adherents of the group would yell “sell-out” but the band, whose first record, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, was released in 1981, soldiered on, their recorded output’s sound getting more polished and refined with each release. Finally, in 1991 the group called it quits. Up to that point, with varying degrees of quality, The Replacements released 8 LP’s; 4 of them on the major label Sire. Critics generally loved them, and indie rock fans gravitated to the group’s wild, even bizarre stage antics, and heavy drinking—of course, they all loved the tunes, but the craziness, especially exhibited by lead guitarist Bob Stinson, quickly thrust the band into legendary status. All of the members, drummer Chris Mars, bassist Tommy Stinson (Bob’s much younger half-brother), and Westerberg, were from the Minneapolis area which, at the time the band began, was not necessarily known for its punk/indie rock scene. For fans and rock connoisseurs on the coasts, Minnesota was a backwater, the rise of Prince was still a little way off, and Bob Dylan was more identified with New York than his home state. Part of the band’s repertoire consisted of songs like “Gary’s Got A Boner,” “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out,” “I Hate Music,” crazed, punk-fueled, juvenile rippers that could get a basement party quickly moshing, pogoing, and throwing beer. As time progressed Westerberg’s songwriting would become more mature with tunes like the tender ballad “Skyway” from 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me, the sad, desolate “Unsatisfied” from the band’s 1984 album Let It Be; a song that pre-dated the grunge of the early ’90s. The Replacements were losing some older fans but gaining new ones. Contemporaries of R.E.M. The Replacements were part of the pack of indie rock bands who leaped to the major labels, but, unlike the quartet from Athens Georgia, The Replacements would never be able to score the huge hit or extended record deal, owing to their abhorrent behavior, and inner demons. When most people associated “college rock” with bands whose member’s image was nerdy, scholarly even while playing a style of pop that was jangly/folksy The Replacements were blue-collar, disheveled, even a bit clueless, no wonder I loved them so much. The span of their career proved to be that the band was a little ahead of their time, I think had they started in the mid to late 80’s they could have rode the wave the Seattle scene, scoring bigger hits, filling larger venues, while the record companies showered them with cash and incentives…or maybe not, The Replacements could never get out of their own way, but they would have an effect on indie rock for years, they were revolutionary in a manner that is hard to define. Author Bob Mehr’s well-researched Trouble Boys the True Story of The Replacements does an exemplary job of telling The Replacements’ rough, hardscrabble, emotional, tale.

Mehr begins the book with guitarist Bob Stinson’s funeral, in 1995, 4 years after the band called it quits. Stinson had been dismissed from the band at the end of 1986’s Tim tour was replaced by Bob “Slim” Dunlap, an acquaintance of the band. From there Mehr’s narrative begins with chapters dealing with each band member’s history—Chris Mars being the exception, he gets a few introductory paragraphs at the beginning of chapter 6. Through extensive interviews with family members, friends, and former band members Mehr is able to shed some light on the causes of The Replacements legendary dysfunction. This is not a fan’s glorification of the “rock n roll” lifestyle but rather a written expose’ of the childhood traumas suffered by the Stinson brothers. Paul Westerberg, a nerdy yet irascible teen, father is an alcoholic with a rather cynical, grim outlook on life. Chris Mars seems to have the least troubled upbringing, has musical and artistic yearnings, traits that get one labeled an outsider in most Midwestern communities. Trouble Boys tells the story of 4 boys, really, Tommy was only 12 when he started playing bass in Dogbreath, the first incarnation of The Replacements, who have somewhat similar backgrounds, who came together to form a rock group, even though they each had different tastes in music, temperament, and notions of how the band needed to conduct its business. The hard life caught up with Bob, his booze and drug addiction, did him in, his body couldn’t take it anymore, in a way he exemplified The Replacements, even though he was not a constant member. His style of guitar playing was fast, wild, usually performing on stage in a dress, diapers, or completely nude, a lover of prog rock a counterpoint to Westerberg’s more contemplative, singer-songwriter approach. The funeral is the perfect place to start, Bob Stinson remains a focal point of sorts, throughout the book.

By the mid-’80s The Replacements became indie rock celebrities, garnering some critical acclaim, major label interest, and a glorious—although completely fucked-up, performance on SNL, early 1986. Usually, this is when the story begins to grow stale, but Mehr does an excellent job chronicling the group’s interactions with major players in the record industry, while Westerberg is tasked with writing the always elusive big hit. Bob Stinson, a smart affable character when sober, was a major source of tension for his brother Tommy, Paul, and Chris, but his dismissal didn’t seem to put the band on the proper footing for success, the heavy drinking, and abhorrent behavior continued. Dunlap, whose family were successful lawyers and journalists, had a wife, 2 young children, and a 16-year-old daughter, was something of an anomaly within the group, his role, and contribution somewhat less than the elder Stinson. Still, he could keep up with the drinking and maintained a caustic attitude toward producers, managers, and Sire’s staff. Hotels, buses, venues were destroyed, while insults were lobbed at fellow rockers, chemicals never far from the band’s grip, that was the major label existence of The Replacements, by 1991 everyone had grown tired of it. Recently, there have been some reunion shows, but they were half-baked, with no intention of returning to the old days. Chris Mars was fired from the band before 1991’s All Shook Down tour, Dunlap suffered a stroke in 2012, hitting his head while falling to the floor.

After the breakup, Mehr follows the former bandmates solo projects, marriages, without losing any of the story’s traction. Sometimes a book, toward the end, can feel hurried, in need of an editor’s red-inked pen, this is not the case with Trouble Boys. The reader gets a glimpse of life after a band has broken up, and the realities of receiving unemployment checks, telemarketing jobs, or just simply hanging out with the family is a nice bookend to the chaos, anarchy of a signed, performing rock band.

Trouble Boys chronicles a time of popular music that was very different from our current environment, even though it really wasn’t that long ago. This book describes a band who redefined the term “underdog” who never had great success, but had a huge effect on rock’s direction, especially the mid 90’s Americana movement. Trouble Boys is full of insight, information, with concise prose, a pleasure to read, one of the best rock books I have ever read, and not because I was a huge fan of the band.

[johngallianotheking]

John Galliano

FALLEN ANGEL Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John Galliano coat

 Maison Margiela designed by John Galliano jacket

Photographed by Paolo Roversi

John Galliano Is Taking Things Step by Step at Maison Margiela - The Wall Street Journal

OPPOSITE AN orthopedics store and a scruffy bar in Paris’s 11th arrondissement sits an old convent building, its facade saturated with decades of grime. Across a cobbled courtyard lined with old latrines, a few flights up a stone staircase, is a rambling room decorated with antique eccentricities—from a vintage model ship to an articulated mannequin—like an attic of curiosities pilfered from Miss Havisham’s house. Into this room bounds a Brussels griffon, followed by a man wearing an odd assemblage of long trouser shorts, sneakers, a yellow T-shirt and a wool sweater slightly unraveling at the collar. “That’s Gypsy,” he announces. “She’s a recovery dog. I never had a dog before—it was just very good for me to be responsible and to not always think about myself.” He chuckles happily.

This is John Galliano, and he could not have chosen a more fitting place to hole up, if that is what he had intended to do. For the past three years, Galliano, 57, has been creative director at Maison Margiela, the fashion house founded in 1988 by avant-garde designer Martin Margiela, who elevated privacy to performance art: Only a few photographs of Margiela are known to exist, and he often veiled the faces of models in his runway presentations, or forwent humans altogether to show his clothes on stark clothes hangers. “Anonymity: A reaction against the ubiquitous star system, the desire to let the ideas do the talking,” reads an official Margiela “glossary” from 2009. In 2004, Maison Margiela took over this 18th-century building, whitewashing the crumbling interiors in keeping with the designer’s affinity for white, both for its cleansing properties and because it highlights imperfections. The space is just four miles but a world away from the primly perfect dove-gray hallways at the Avenue Montaigne headquarters of Dior, which Galliano helped build into a pulsing $1.1 billion empire—until he was fired days before the fall/winter 2012 show when a video of him drunkenly making anti-Semitic remarks at a Parisian bar became international news.

It would be easy to conceal oneself within Margiela’s cloistered heritage, but Galliano has nothing to hide. He says he has been sober for nearly seven years—he attended rehab after losing his post—and in that time has tried to face his demons head-on.

“I said what I said. I didn’t mean it,” he says now. “And I continue to atone. Some people have forgiven me, and some people will never forgive me. But that’s something that I have to take on board.” He says he is also still grappling with legal issues stemming from the incident.

Before Galliano became a symbol of how the mighty can fall, he was a symbol of how the mighty had risen. Fashion, an industry that can sometimes seem as though it’s busy proving that nothing exceeds like excess, portrayed him as the apotheosis of romantic genius. He was appointed att Dior in the late ’90s, in an era when bold deal-makers like Dior’s owner  Bernard Arnault,  the architect of luxury conglomerate  LVMH had discovered there was a fortune to be made by applying the go-go strategy of M&A to the antiquated luxury world.

Galliano was the perfect creative partner, his Vesuvian imagination and virtuosic technical abilities unleashed by burgeoning budgets. He became the ultimate celebrity designer, paparazzi’d during nights out with supermodels like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, his long hair braided into plaits, his body buff and tanned. He delighted fashion editors with the imaginary tales behind his collections, told in a dizzying array of accents—jumping from the diction of a Shakespearean actor to “mockney” slang to his native Spanish to upper-crust French. He even supplanted his fabled predecessor, calling the line Christian Dior by John Galliano and taking runway bows as theatrical as his catwalk shows: dressed as a matador with pink stockings or a pompadoured astronaut or Napoleon. The French emperor, though, found Versailles too extravagant; not so Galliano, who staged Dior’s fall/winter 2007 haute couture show there in celebration of Dior’s 60th anniversary. Four years later, it was all gone: Galliano’s gilded fantasia vanished in a cloud of ignominy.

“I’m not God. But I realize that now,” says Galliano, who these days wears his dark hair pulled back by a simple black head wrap instead of the crown he once rakishly cocked for a photo shoot. “Whereas before I would self-will and self-will and self-will. When you are driven by perfection, you miss out on something beautiful that happens in between that is unfinished—that does have emotion that is relevant in this house,” he says, referring to Margiela’s appreciation for experimentation.

When owner Renzo Rosso first approached Galliano in 2013 to take over Maison Margiela—the founder had officially retired in 2009—Galliano’s response, he says, was “ ‘What?’ I didn’t get it at all.” (The Italian fashion impresario knew the designer from having manufactured the children’s line of Galliano’s eponymous brand.) He turned down the offer several times, but the persistent Rosso slowly seduced Galliano by taking him cruising through the Greek islands and the French Riviera on his motorized yacht, the Lady May. “I just loved the idea of working with this guy, the most important designer in the world,” says Rosso, who was unfazed by Galliano’s controversial history.

In 2013, he convinced Galliano to visit the Margiela headquarters when it was empty one Saturday night in August, and the building on rue Saint Maur finally won Galliano over. Upon entering, “I felt good—the beautiful decay, the peeling paint,” he says. “I had become so f—ing polished and so finished. Suddenly that rawness and emotion appealed to me, because I was feeling raw and emotional.”

Galliano immediately set about reorganizing the fashion house into the strict pyramidic structure he had mastered at Dior: a high-flying couture collection that garners attention and sets the tone for the ready-to-wear collections, in turn informing the commercial collections, the bags, the shoes and even the beauty lines. “It’s the only way I can work,” he says. “I was really honest [with Rosso]. I need to express myself—the parfum that can then be diluted into the eau de parfum, the eau de toilette.”

“John said to me, ‘I am a couturier,’ ” says Rosso. “I am very happy with that. A designer can just do a collection, but a couturier can dream and invent something that doesn’t exist.”

COUTURIER, God, that sounds grand,” says Galliano, laughing at himself. “I’m a dressmaker. There aren’t many of us who can cut, make patterns, drape.”

Galliano’s extraordinary skills have been his solace and his redemption: Just three months after he left Dior, he was slated to make Kate Moss’s wedding dress for her 2011 marriage to musician Jamie Hince. Without access to an atelier, he was left on his own to create the creamy confection, which featured a skirt of delicately embroidered feathers that appeared to have been dipped in gold sequins: “He sewed every sequin onto that dress himself,” says Condé Nast artistic director  Anna Wintour. “People don’t make dresses the way that John does anymore.”

While Maison Margiela has shown haute couture since 2012—an offshoot of Margiela’s Artisanal project, through which recycled and vintage materials became one-off follies, such as leather sandals transformed into a lacy vest—it had become known primarily as an upscale contemporary line, serving reworked staples from the house repertoire. Galliano seized on the Artisanal idea, bringing gifted couture seamstresses to flesh out the Margiela atelier and installing longtime loyalists as his top deputies in the design studios. But how to apply Galliano’s taste for fantastical fairy-tale gowns to Margiela’s conceptualized versions of streetwise boots, sweaters and trench coats?

While Margiela was known for purposefully awkward elements such as the jutting, padded shoulders on his jackets and dresses, or massively oversize coats, Galliano had made his name with a liquid-like bias-cut gown, in which a single piece of fabric is sliced against the grain so that it wraps languidly around the body like a second skin. It’s dressmaking’s triple axel, enough to confound its cutter—and ruin yards of fabric—if not done with precision. But an early meeting with Martin Margiela, during which the designer said, “Take what you will from the DNA of the house, protect yourself and make it your own,” helped ease Galliano’s anxieties about melding their sensibilities.

“It’s exhilarating for me to be inspired by outerwear or a ski jacket. It’s not always a fabulous ’50s couture gown shot by Mr. [Irving] Penn,” adds Galliano, who was surprised to discover he and the reclusive Margiela shared an interest in 17th-century French literature and 18th-century costume. They also employed similar techniques, particularly early in their careers: “Bricolage, recycling, inside out, upside down—that’s kind of what you do when you are a young designer,” he says. “You destroy, you construct, you reveal.”

One of the ongoing motifs that emerged from this impulse is something Galliano calls décortiqué—the reduction of a garment to its inner skeleton, both a witty reference to Margiela heritage and a display of Galliano’s technical wizardry. Along with other themes (which he has given such names as “unconscious glamour” and “dressing in haste”), it appears throughout his couture and ready-to-wear collections as well as Avant-Premiere, which entails broader offerings. (Prices range from $184 for a T-shirt to $8,585 for a coat.) He has even turned out the bias cut in stiff tweed.

Deconstruction has been a preoccupation for Galliano from the beginning: His first Dior dress, famously made for Princess Diana’s attendance at the Met Ball after her divorce from Prince Charles in 1996, was a navy silk bias-cut slip, which Galliano constructed with an interior bustier to protect her royal modesty. But when Diana arrived at the gala to greet him and co-chair Liz Tilberis, “We were like, Oh, my God—she’s torn out the corset,” he remembers, leaving her décolletage scandalously exposed under the negligee-like lace straps, though the other guests—and, until now, Diana fashion historians—remained none the wiser about her last-minute alteration. “It was a reflection of how she was already feeling: liberated.”

Although Galliano himself seems to feel freed by his new home away from the spotlight, he is determined to remain respectful of Margiela’s legacy. He knows firsthand how sensitive it is to take on a living designer’s house, having lost his own eponymous line, which he had founded in 1988 (91 percent–owned by LVMH, it is currently designed by Galliano’s former right-hand, Bill Gaytten). “It was like losing one of your children,” he says. “A lot of work had to be done to stop me from doing anything silly.”

He pauses and looks away. “I was killing myself anyway—it was a slow death,” he continues. “I didn’t realize I was killing myself. I was completely in denial. You think you can deal with it and cope with it, and [you tell yourself] it’s just the creative pressures, and every excuse. The insidious disease that creeps up and takes you over, and I was too weak.”

“We all knew he was going through troubled times. And we tried to look after him,” says milliner Stephen Jones, a longtime collaborator and friend, who points out that for years Galliano was designing 15 collections annually, a rare feat in the industry. “He dealt with it extremely well for a very long time, and it became a huge success. But he was very much in the eye of the storm of fashion.”

The workload was notable to many. “He is such a perfectionist,” says Wintour. “He had the inability to delegate or let go. The job was almost too mammoth—it was the volume of work, and he was so particular about everything.”

“I was just afraid to say no to Mr. Arnault,” Galliano now admits. “I thought it was a sign of weakness and that I would lose my contract. How dumb. You know, when work becomes more important than your health—the work came first at the risk of everything. Health, relationships, family—ruthless. That’s how sick I was. And your world becomes the bottle, the drugs, the ups and the downs.”

He has been able to forgive himself by re-examining his life: the move to England from Gibraltar at age 6, growing up as a closeted homosexual in a strict Catholic family in South London, bullied at school until he found his way to St. Martin’s School of Art. “You see the little Juan Carlos Galliano-Guillen—what happened to him? That poor thing. And that’s where you start to be able to handle it. Because you become this—whatever I became.”

These days, he attends regular AA meetings and retreats four times a year to a wellness center in southern Spain following each fashion show. He’s home every night, he says, at his Marais apartment with longtime partner Alexis Roche, and spends weekends at their country house in Auvergne with their two dogs, pacing his workload according to a concept he calls “step by step.”

“Seriously, I just didn’t get that before,” he says. “Or living in the present—I didn’t understand. It took a long time to get that life is this, now, what we are doing, not my head stuck up my own ass thinking about 2020.” He also maintains a mostly macrobiotic diet, though his taste for cigarettes and coffee are unabated—as is his joyfully wicked laugh.

“Recovery is an amazing journey to go through—to be given a second chance at life, and to regenerate creatively,” he says. “I’m happy to talk about it, because I think it’s nice to hear that you don’t lose it all—that you can’t paint and you can’t write and you can’t sing, because it’s not true. You can. It’s actually more intense, the levels of creative highs. I guess it’s because you are more aware of them as well. Because you are just so electric—all the good things that I love about this industry, the process—oh! It makes me jump out of bed in the morning.”

His name is also being reintroduced to the annals of Dior, though since that fateful day the news broke he has never again spoken to Arnault or the then-president of the brand, Sidney Toledano (“My calls were not accepted,” he says). Pieces from his 15-year tenure at Dior were included in the brand’s sweeping exhibition staged at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs last year, a moment that was more emotional for Galliano than he anticipated. “It’s quite wonderful that they are letting [my designs] be viewed, because for a while they were locked away,” he says. “It’s really nice to see the old girls getting an airing.”

His slow-and-steady approach at Margiela is also taking hold: For this spring, the house launched a new bag, the Glam Slam, a pillowlike creation that was introduced alongside a travel-themed collection with the sly implication that it could be used in lieu of a neck cushion on long-haul flights. January marked his first men’s show, and eventually he will tweak the look of the Margiela stores, of which there are 60 worldwide (the brand is also sold at retailers like Barneys, Saks, Nieman Marcus and Net-A-Porter/ Yoox).

Rosso’s strategy is not to pump the brand for profits. “It’s a niche brand,” he says, explaining he has already seen double-digit growth. “I want it to have product with real passion, not become the biggest brand in the world.” He doesn’t anticipate that it will more than double in size from its current position (about $160 million in revenue, versus the $5 billion in revenue for a mega-brand like Chanel). “It takes time for the old pyramid to filter through and for people to appreciate it,” Galliano says. “The buyers want to know that you are serious—when they come to the showroom, they don’t want to just hear ‘Fab show’; they want to see what effect you’ve had.”

In the meantime, he’ll be in his drafty studio with “the kids,” as he calls his design assistants, where they are doing fittings for the fall/winter 2018 couture show. He’s been seeking inspiration from all sides, including from “Insta-glam” muses that he finds on social media, or his own experiences, such as throwing on a trench coat tied with a leather belt over a tracksuit to walk the dogs at midnight. “Is it music, is it a film, is it a painting? It’s life—being a little bit more connected,” he says. “It’s the idea of proposing a new glamour, though I never want to be so arrogant to think I could arrive at it—that doesn’t interest me. But the process does interest me and my team.”

He watches his fit model stride across the room wearing the beginnings of a chinoiserie coat redone in a reflective material that creates a holographic, X-ray effect (inspired by a recent viewing of the Blade Runner remake—“Major!” he gasps in operatic tones). As she walks, the material gently floats, and he clucks approvingly. He nods and says quietly to himself, in time with her sashaying feet: “Step by step.”

[osmosismnl]

The rise of a worldwide phenomenon.

By cis carlo (@mistressofthesky)

Hallyu is a Chinese term which, when translated, literally means “Korean Wave”.

Long gone are the days when being a kpop fan is just for the “jologs”. South Korean pop culture is taking over the world through the form of music, dramas, Skincare, cosmetics, and evem to the famous samgyeupsal that we all know and love. At the heart of all this is the ever evolving and emerging popularity of Korean pop music or in short, K-pop.

K-pop has captivated the hearts and interests of many through it’s catchy melodies, synchronised choreography, captivating visuals, and sickening fashion.

Hallyu has been building for two decades, but K-pop in particular has become increasingly visible to global audiences in the past five to 10 years. South Korean artists have hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart at least eight times since the Wonder Girls first cracked it in 2009 with their crossover hit “Nobody” — released in four different languages, including English — and the export of K-pop has ballooned South Korea’s music industry to an impressive $5 billion industry.

Psy’s ground breaking Song “Gangnam Style” have helped rocketed the popularity of K-pop by becoming the very first video to ever hit 1 billion views on youtube.

BTS became an uncontested US phenomenon in 2017, with two songs hitting the Billboard Hot 100, a huge performance at the American Music Awards, a New Year’s Eve performance in Times Square, and a remix of their single, “Mic Drop,” done by Steve Aoki. If it’s possible to ascribe a tipping point to a “wave” that seems to be endless, BTS might be it; it certainly seems that the all-boy group has gone as far as a South Korean band can go in terms of making inroads into American culture — they recently graced the cover of American Billboard magazine.

The first wave.

K-pop today wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for democracy and television specifically, South Korea’s reformation of its democratic government in 1987, with its accompanying modernization and lightening of censorship, and the effect this change had on television.

Before the liberalization of South Korean media in the late ‘80s, the music industry in South Korea was mostly dominated by “trot” music.

After 1987, though, the country’s radio broadcasting expanded rapidly, and South Koreans became more regularly exposed to more varieties of music from outside the country, including contemporary American music.

As Moonrok editor Hannah Waitt points out in her excellent series on the history of K-pop, K-pop is unusual as a genre because it has a definitive start date, thanks to a band called Seo Taiji and Boys. Seo Taiji had previously been a member of the South Korean heavy metal band Sinawe, which was itself a brief but hugely influential part of the development of Korean rock music in the late ‘80s. After the band broke up, he turned to hip-hop and recruited two stellar South Korean dancers, Yang Hyun-suk and Lee Juno, to join him as backups in a group dubbed Seo Taiji and Boys. On April 11, 1992, they performed their single “Nan Arayo (I Know)” on a talent show: Not only did the Boys not win the talent show, but the judges gave the band the lowest score of the evening. But immediately after the song debuted, “I Know” went on to top South Korea’s singles charts for a record-smashing 17 weeks, which would stand for more than 15 years as the longest No. 1 streak in the country’s history

“I Know” represented the first time modern American-style pop music had been fused with South Korean culture. Seo Taiji and Boys were innovators who challenged norms around musical styles, song topics, fashion, and censorship. They sang about teen angst and the social pressure to succeed within a grueling education system, and insisted on creating their own music and writing their own songs outside of the manufactured network environment.

Between 1995 and 1998, three powerhouse music studios appeared: SM Entertainment (often referred to as SM Town) in 1995; JYP Entertainment in 1997; and YG Entertainment in 1998, created by one of the members of Seo Taiji and Boys, Yang Hyun-suk. Together, these studios began deliberately cultivating what would become known as idol groups.

The first idol group in South Korea appeared on the scene in 1996, when SM founder Lee Soo-man created a group called H.O.T. by assembling five singers and dancers who represented what he believed teens wanted to see from a modern pop group.

H.O.T. shared traits with today’s idol groups: a combination of singing, dancing, and rapping, and disparate personalities united through music. In 1999, the band was chosen to perform in a major benefit concert with Michael Jackson, in part because of their potential to become international pop stars — an indication that even in the ’90s, the industry was attuned to K-pop’s potential for global success.

That potential can be seen in the studios’ eager promotion of multilingual artists like BoA, who made her public debut at the age of 13 in 2000 and in the ensuing years has become one of South Korea’s best-known exports thanks to a brand built on raw talent and multicultural positivity.

All the while, K-pop as a whole was building its own brand, one based on flash, style, and a whole lot of quality.

The Second wave.

There are three things that make K-pop such a visible and unique contributor to the realm of pop music: exceptionally high-quality performance (especially dancing), an extremely polished aesthetic, and an “in-house” method of studio production that churns out musical hits the way assembly lines churn out cars.

No song more perfectly embodies these characteristics than Girls’ Generation’s 2009 hit “Gee,” a breakout success that came at a moment when K-pop was starting to turn heads internationally due to a number of recent milestone hits — notably Big Bang’s “Haru, Haru,” Wonder Girls’ “Nobody,” and Brown Eyed Girls’ “Abracadabra.” “Gee” was a viral internet earworm, breaking out of typical K-pop fan spaces and putting Girls’ Generation within striking distance of US fame.

Ever evolving

This gradual evolution suggests that part of the reason K-pop has been able to make international inroads in recent years is that it’s been able to push against its own rigid norms, through the use of modern themes and sophisticated subtexts, without sacrificing the incredibly polished packaging that makes it so innately compelling. That would seem to be a formula for continued global success — especially now that South Korea and its culture has the world’s attention. Hallyu may swell or subside, but the K-pop production machine goes ever on. And from here, the future looks fantastic, baby.

Sources

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/16/16915672/what-is-kpop-history-explained

[joshuajacksonlyblog]

Op Ed: Belarus and the Case for National Bitcoin Strategies

On September 28, 2019, a video in which Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko talks about mining bitcoin with the country’s nuclear power began to make the rounds on Twitter. Though the speech presented is not new (it dates back to April 2019) and was covered by Bitcoin Magazine at the time, the effect of this sudden reemergence has given birth to a new round of debates about nation states getting involved in bitcoin mining.

First of all, it’s essential to ask the question, “Is Belarusian involvement in mining good for Bitcoin?” 

On one hand, this would mean the network’s hash rate would increase, thus granting the network greater security. On the other hand, it’s difficult to estimate what kind of impact this can have on the entire mining landscape and to what extent Belarus is planning to be a good actor who plays by the rules. Though it’s unlikely for the hash rate to be great enough to launch 51 percent block reorganization attacks on the Bitcoin network, that calculus may change when allied nation states join together in mining operations.

Nonetheless, if the purpose is to convert electricity into bitcoin in order to generate a source of income, then the incentives align toward becoming an honest actor. Belarus apparently has no interest in attacking the Bitcoin network, as the role of its projected mining operation is to generate more fiat and potentially jumpstart a profitable industry.

Why Countries Like Belarus Need Bitcoin

Let’s take a more careful look at Belarus’ history as a country and why this former member of the USSR has decided to get into Bitcoin. Since December 2017, the country has enacted multiple laws which favor mining, trading and investing in cryptocurrency-related projects. The sale of digital assets is exempt from value-added tax and will not be subject to taxation, at least until January 2023. 

Western countries like the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom would regard this type of decision as irrational and potentially dangerous for the long-term stability of the financial systems they’ve built. Most importantly, they have well-established banking systems whose institutional influence extends toward former colonies (and some would also make a case that this system exists as a form of contemporary economic neocolonialism). 

These factors grant them a privileged position of financial control that can definitely be disrupted by the introduction of Bitcoin. It’s also why these countries tend to impose big taxes on those who deal with BTC: The gains should be reduced as much as possible in order to discourage the average person from adopting a parallel monetary system that cannot be controlled.

One can argue that these first-world players need to constantly position themselves on the side of innovation — just because they came out as victors of the Industrial Revolution and championed the various waves of democratic transition around the world doesn’t mean that they should remain complacent and watch new inventions take over. However, in the case of Bitcoin, the benefits are dwarfed by the costs: Pioneering a field over which you have no control means very little when you have a lot of influence and control over most of the world, and your private sector is spread globally to bring you more revenue.

Breaking Free of Colonialism

This is where countries like Belarus can step in and make small but bold attempts to liberate themselves from the financial order to which they have been arbitrarily subjected. Historically speaking, Belarus has been under the political influence of the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire and the USSR. In the span of two centuries, the Eastern European territories have declared independence twice, only to be annexed and conquered by greater neighboring military powers. 

It was only after 1991 that Belarus was able to regain its independence, work toward building a constitutional framework of its own, and try to build its own national identity outside that of the USSR. However, the country did not have the proper peaceful environment to develop its economy, build trade treaties, and possibly extend its institutional framework in lesser developed nations. 

Opportunities Beyond Belarus

Belarus is not the only European country which finds itself in the second tier of development and influence in global affairs: When former Soviet countries joined the global markets in the early 1990s, they discovered that their industry, trade networks, and agriculture could not compete with those of their Western counterparts. The cars they manufactured were not as good, the quality of their domestic products was subpar and their crops could not produce the same amount of grain. And as soon as superior Western consumer items entered their market, they essentially had to keep up or shut down the operations — and it was more often the latter that happened.

Without a private banking tradition and with very little experience in dealing with free markets, a country like Belarus has nothing to lose if it adopts bitcoin as a currency. When preserving the current system means that you keep your second-class status, then the act of embracing revolution becomes a quest for liberation and a hope for better days. For nation states, Bitcoin can be that new beginning that they need in order to escape the institutional framework that keeps them down. 

When preserving the current system means that you keep your second-class status, then the act of embracing revolution becomes a quest for liberation and a hope for better days.

In the case of Belarus, getting involved in BTC mining is a brilliant choice, especially if it makes use of surplus energy and it serves the purpose of increasing foreign capital flow (assuming that the bitcoin are entirely sold and not held as reserve). Allowing your electricity to secure the Bitcoin network can easily become a national industry, and it’s very likely that private actors will also try to negotiate their positions in this burgeoning sector. 

However, Belarus isn’t democratic enough to allow free markets to blossom and is not part of a large organization of states such as the European Union (which would allow people from any member state to simply cross the border and start a business). Unlike in nearby Estonia, the possibilities for investments are narrower — but given the greater independence from international organizations, there is more room for Belarus to make Bitcoin-friendly political decisions.

Transitioning to Bitcoin

The transition to bitcoin should not be a reckless plunge, but a gradual process which introduces the new financial standard in a safe way. A BTC-only political establishment is still unheard of and may just lead to financial isolation when dealing with neighboring countries. On the other hand, a slow and steady integration of this parallel monetary system, accompanied by a large-scale incentivization of investment by tax exemptions, will definitely attract investors and developers and will generate all sorts of opportunities.

The times that we’re living are truly remarkable, and the fact that digital, sound, uncensorable and unconfiscatable, nongovernmental money can become a nation’s plan for financial prosperity is exciting. 

Most of the current system of international relations, which was created after World War II, is designed to have a rather clear and predictable world order, which was based on treaties and the ability to develop nuclear weapons as deterrents for conflicts and ways of receiving a seat at the table. As a result, nations that got the worse side of the deal are deprived of the resources and means to become world powers, as the tendency of the United Nations framework is to preserve the balance of power.

Nothing to Lose

To paraphrase the late cypherpunk Timothy C. May, countries that try to integrate Bitcoin have nothing to lose but their barbed wire fences. If all of the economic colonies that have very little political power and have been historically forced to embrace other nations’ financial frameworks decide to start mining bitcoin, then they could possibly generate wealth and negotiate better deals with the great world powers. 

Though he seemed to be joking, President Lukashenko could go down in history as one of the first bold leaders who decided to embrace Bitcoin at a national scale. And even though the short-term results are easy to anticipate and should lead to an increased inflow of fiat money, it’s going to be interesting to observe the phenomenon in, say, 2025, by which point the government of Belarus could have mined BTC for half a decade. 

Are we actually going to see any of the economic and political benefits projected in this article? Well, there is only one way to find out.

The post Op Ed: Belarus and the Case for National Bitcoin Strategies appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

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[mozgoderina]

Maverick Sculptor Makes Good (New York Times Magazine) / Martin Puryear

"I'm basically kind of a maverick," Martin Puryear says. "I've always felt - and maybe this goes way, way back to my earliest years - I really feel like an outsider. I never felt like signing up and joining and being part of a coherent cadre of anything, ideologically, or esthetically, or attitudinally. I never felt compelled to do that."

At a time when artists arrive suddenly, unleashing a storm of publicity and taking over New York for a season or a few years, Martin Puryear is a breath of fresh air. The Chicago-based sculptor describes himself as a ''builder, a maker'' and a long-distance runner. His belief that the race will continue to be run by his work long after he is gone has made him wary of success and fame.

This extraordinarily versatile 46-year-old artist may be the least known of all major contemporary sculptors. He is surely the first artist ever to have been included in exhibitions and installations at all four major Manhattan museums, as well as at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, before having his first solo show in a New York gallery. On Thursday, that will change when an exhibition of his work opens at the David McKee Gallery, on 57th Street.

Puryear's independence is hard-won. He has always resisted what he feels others expected him, and blacks in general, to be. Many contemporary artists are determined to forget the past. For Puryear, it is essential to remember. He has developed a way of working that moves backward and forward at the same time. His sculpture is immediate, right there. It is also eternally restless.

Unlike many prominent contemporary sculptors, who prefer hard materials, such as steel and stone, Puryear works deliberately, with his own hands, in wood. His large, uncluttered studio is filled with hundreds of clamps, files and planes, as well as stacks of wood from all over the world. In and around the center of the concrete floor, the parts of his sculptures are cut, joined and assembled. Sculptural ideas are leaning in the corners and hanging on the walls - opened, like bottles of wine, and left alone to breathe.

Puryear's sculptures of rings, arcs, nooses, huts and guardianlike figures do not insist. They pulsate and lock in softly, promising regularity and stability, delivering metamorphosis and change. His circles and arcs chart trajectories of movement; the works are in some way about movement, but they are also about place. They may seem to fly and roll through space, but they are not about speed. ''I think my work speaks to anybody who has the capacity to slow down,'' he says.

Puryear's lack of dogmatism reflects the range of his interests and his ''somewhat nomadic'' existence. He has lived in Sierra Leone, as well as Sweden and Japan. He has lived in Washington, Nashville and Brooklyn, as well as Chicago, where he moved in 1978. He travels constantly, in a variety of ways. Suspended like a mobile from the ceiling of his studio is the canoe that he and his brother Michael, a cabinetmaker, used in 1981 for a monthlong trip down the Noatak River, in Alaska.

Puryear looks at sculpture, architecture, painting and furniture, and he is fascinated by trades such as shipbuilding and patternmaking. He speaks with respect not only about artists with impeccable modernist pedigrees - Constantin Brancusi, Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt - but also about realists like Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud and Andrew Wyeth, as well as Old Masters like Paolo Uccello and Pieter Bruegel.

These manifold interests are concentrated in works of expansive simplicity. ''Self'' was made in 1978, just after Puryear's studio in Brooklyn, where he had lived for four years, burned down. The sculpture is a highly polished, 5-foot-9-inch-tall black monolith, roughly conical in shape, with one side at a right angle to the floor. The closed, upright, irregular mass seems fixed, almost stuck to the floor, but it also seems to turn in different directions and climb through space. Its mountainous, hutlike, phallic shape could have risen from the ashes of a tribal fetish, or tumbled out of a Chinese painting.

As impersonal as the sculpture may seem, it is extremely quirky. Like so many of Puryear's works, it seems pure and simple, but it is in fact a bizarre hybrid, a bundle of surprises and oppositions. Its eccentricity has a great deal to do with the way it was made. Monolithic sculptures have traditionally been heavy, carved from blocks of stone. ''Self'' is hollow and light. It is a wooden shell, constructed by crisscrossing layers of red cedar and mahogany in a shipbuilding technique. Although the work may seem inevitable - to have emerged suddenly, all of a piece - it was, in fact, assembled layer by layer, piece by piece.

''Self'' is essentially private, even autobiographical, but ''River Road Ring,'' installed in 1985 in the River Road subway station near Chicago's O'Hare Airport, was made for the public. It is 27 feet 6 inches in diameter, suspended like a halo, or a ceremonial tribal crown, above the escalator and entrance. ''It's a conduit,'' Puryear said. ''It's an image of what that station is on the line. It's a hollow tube that goes back in and comes up and puts you in the direction in which you want to go. One end points toward O'Hare, the other toward Chicago.''

Here, too, from each angle, the work changes - rotating, opening up and flattening into a straight line, shifting from circle to ellipse. The ring appears seamless, intact, but it, too, was constructed, built with innumerable pieces of laminated mahogany. Because this large ring, its two ends overlapping slightly, like two ends of a string waiting to be tied, is in fact hard wood - because a round form was constructed by bending and assembling material that would not seem to lend itself to a circular shape - the sculpture is edgy, disquieting. The halo seems so taut that it could snap.

In both ''Self'' and ''River Road Ring,'' Puryear has employed geometric shapes so generalized that they seem to belong to no one. Yet they are unmistakably his. Each sculpture seems organic and contrived, predetermined and chosen. There is a sense that the shapes are the only ones possible, but they are the result of a long sequence of conscious decisions. Both free will and determinism seem, almost miraculously, to have been embraced. So do craft and ''high art''; African, Asian and Western art, black and white. In Puryear's quietly subversive sculptural world, separatist notions of any kind are inconceivable and anachronistic. His work does not so much argue as assume that everything is now tied together, whether anyone wants it to be or not.

MARTIN PURYEAR was born in Washington, in 1941. He is the oldest of seven - five brothers and two sisters. His father, Reginald, is now a retired post-office clerk and supervisor. His grandfather was a Baptist minister from Virginia; he went to Nova Scotia to serve a black congregation and stayed. (Nova Scotia was a haven for fleeing slaves, and until the 1960's had the largest black population in Canada.) His mother, Martina, is a retired teacher. The children grew up in a household in which culture mattered.

Puryear is 6 feet tall; without an ounce of fat. Although he rarely appears to be in a hurry, he seems almost incapable of acting without purpose. He is warm and guarded, discreet and firm. His eyes are always animated. There is a bit of a kid in those eyes, something whimsical, cagey and mischievous, but also supremely confident. His eyes make him seem mobile no matter what the rest of his body is doing.

Sometimes he glides, but other times he rolls from heel to toe in a way that makes a point of his black urban roots. His feeling for public art is, in part, a response to his need to make art that people he grew up with can understand. He is very familiar with the history of black artists in the United States, and when he feels their predicament is not respected his voice softly bristles. Like his sculpture, Puryear's manner is so easy that the slightest shift in intonation can seem like an earthquake.

Puryear's forms and craftsmanship flow from black history. His elegant sculptures, resting quietly on a floor or wall, can suddenly reveal themselves as nooses, whips and traps. ''I've been reading a lot by Langston Hughes lately,'' he said. ''It's been really, really pleasurable for me, because he loved people, he really, really loved people, and he was a very secure black person.''

Puryear's work has an almost oracular quality. No matter how many components a floor piece has or how many parts seem to have been splattered against a wall, the works seem to have emerged with a rush. They may stop, start and change direction, a sculpture shaped like a top may seem too large and another like a shrine may seem too small, but everything presents itself with the seamless narrative flow of a storyteller. The immediacy of presentation may also suggest the breathless, musical cadences of a black preacher.

Puryear lives with the artist Jeanne Gordon, his wife of one year, in a converted factory bought and renovated by five artists in the north end of Chicago. He made most of the couple's furniture - including sofabed, Japanese screen, potrack and wooden bathtub.

Puryear's inclusiveness has made him a key figure in contemporary sculpture. On one side are the Minimalists and their heirs. They make work modeled in some way on Minimalism's absoluteness, economy of shape, rejection of the artist's touch and insistence that art define itself in relation to its environment. On the other side are artists exploring an almost dizzying array of sculp-tural approaches, from organic abstraction to unfamiliar treatment of familiar materials, to various forms of figuration.

Puryear has obvious links with sculptors such as Scott Burton and Siah Armajani, who feel no affinity for the tradition of heroic, individualistic sculpture. Burton and Armajani are working to lead sculpture further from the studio and gallery by making public art, for specific sites, that functions as furniture and architecture.

Like them, Puryear makes large-scale functional works. He calls them ''amenities'' - making a clear distinction between his public, functional work and his ''sculpture'' - and they are easy to be around. Puryear has designed ''amenities'' for New Orleans and Seattle. Working with the architect Leo A. Daly, he has designed the fountain, benches, pavilion, and a system of arbor and trellises at the Chevy Chase Garden Plaza, in Maryland, a project expected to be completed next spring.

Other contemporary sculptors are involved with nature and the earth. They range from artists like Michael Heizer who draws upon and shapes the landscape, to Mel Kendrick, who carves wood sculptures that retain something of the coolness and ''objectness'' of Minimalism, to Petah Coyne, who gathers wood and soil and assembles them into highly personalized effigies.

In the remarkable ''Bodark Arc,'' at the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park in University Park, Ill., Puryear has used a wooden arch and bridge, and a ceremonial bronze chair, to draw the earth into a bow and arrow shape -representing a collaboration between African and American Indian culture. Puryear's sculpture is filled with references to nature: ''Vault'' looks like a tree trunk that has been reincarnated as a head and a safe deposit box. ''Sanctuary'' resembles a birdhouse on wheels.

One of Puryear's essential dialogues has been with Minimalism, which he encountered as a graduate student at the Yale Art School. Puryear has learned from the Minimalist sense of precision, economy and proportions. He admires Donald Judd's ''cogency of thought.'' And the power of Puryear's work, like Richard Serra's, has a great deal to do with spatial imagination. Like Serra, Puryear has the ability to make sculpture that is known by the body before it is articulated by the mind. Puryear's gestures and armatures can be experienced as extensions of skin and bones.

But Puryear rejects the dogmatism of Minimalism, its resistance to associations and its rejection of craft. The impersonal working methods are what made him realize that he was ''absolutely not a Minimalist.''

He explains: ''The hand means too much to me. The risk-taking in the process of building and making something means too much to me.

''I never did Minimalist art, I never did, but I got real close. . . . I looked at it, I tasted it and I spat it out. I said, this is not for me. I'm a worker. I'm not somebody who's happy to let my work be made for me and I'll pass on it, yes or no, after it's done. I could never do that.''

IN SHORT, PURYEAR IS VERY definitely a post-Minimalist, and he is a key bridge between the 1960's and 80's. In his ability to work privately and publicly, to make sculpture for himself, driven by his obsessions, and to make work that is accessible to the public, he has managed to combine a traditional view of sculpture as something made by an individual working in the studio, and a view of sculpture as something made in collaboration with others for a community.

In some artistic and academic circles, the idea of the heroic individual, creating himself from scratch, has been fiercely attacked. One reason so many artists have their work fabricated is that its impersonality and often its smooth reflecting surfaces tend to call attention not to the individual artistic self, but to conditions surrounding the work.

Puryear believes both in anonymity and in the self. He is drawn to folk artists. ''I have a certain kind of nostalgic belief in anonymity,'' he says. ''I mean these folk artists who spend their whole lives working without even knowing that they're artists, and they have this kind of compulsion. Somehow there's a part of that that I take a lot of solace in.''

But he also believes that art can come only from the individual. ''I taught for two years at Fisk, which is a black college in Nashville,'' he said, ''and there were times when I found it hard, or a struggle, let's say, to encourage students to find themselves, because they were so busy being members of a group.

''My encouragement was to find the you in there. That's what's going to have to make the art; not your history, not your culture. Those things are reflected. They're never going to go away. That's in your nature. It's in who you are. But there's a you in there that's even more crucial than that, and you've got to find it and you've got to release it.''

Labor has become a source of deepening conflict for Puryear and for art in general. Any artist working on a large scale almost has to have that work realized by others. The time involved in making his work means Puryear cannot keep up with the ideas that now race through his mind.

''I am finding out that I don't want to get involved in enormous commissions, in building them myself,'' Puryear said. '' 'River Road Ring,' that was a mammoth undertaking, months and months to screw in clamps, of laminating layers, months and months of it, and it was so monotonous that it wasn't work in which I profited from the ruminations involved. My mind was tied up, my hands were tied up, and I couldn't get real busy with new ideas at the time.

''And still I had this compulsion to control it, to not give it up to anybody else. And I couldn't have afforded to have specialists - people who had that kind of specialized knowledge, building it. I could afford my own labor. I couldn't afford somebody with the same level of skill. It's a strange situation.''

Puryear's independence can be found in other black sculptors. Mel Edwards, Betye Saar and Houston Conwill are also hard to classify. Conwill's installations, using simple shapes, elaborate and interpret history and myth. In his ''Lynch Fragment Series,'' Edwards uses the syntax of steel sculpture to compose an accusatory lyric poem about violence, vigilance and transformation. In Saar's intimate boxes and installations, domesticity bristles with superstition and danger.

The work of these artists is marked by a fierce pride, belief in evocation, respect for craft, and feeling for the expressive potential of sculptural language. Most important, there is a deep attachment to memory. In contrast, major mainstream artistic developments of the last 20 years, including Minimalism, have generally insisted on focusing attention on the present and future. This alone would explain why Puryear could go only so far with Minimalism, and why he and other black artists remain outsiders.

Puryear began as a painter. ''I was lucky enough as a really little kid to see a guy painting a portrait on my block, a black guy painting in oils a portrait of somebody right out on the street. And I was just transfixed to see in it an absolute likeness. I remember it was like grisaille, it was black and white, it was like monochromatic. . . . I couldn't have been more than 6 years old, but I just couldn't believe it, it just . . . and it was a black guy, painting another black person, with his easel and paints and everything and a palette, right in front of the apartment. And it just blew something open in me.''

At Catholic University, in Washington, Puryear first majored in biology. Today, he finds inspiration in zoos as well as in galleries and museums. For example, he is fascinated by birds. Puryear calls the works in the David McKee Gallery show that opens this week ''decoys'' (they all feature bases and long necks).

In his junior year of college, he changed his major to art, and was exposed to the abstract, so-called color-field paintings of influential Washington artists such as Kenneth Noland, who was teaching at Catholic University. ''In a sense I had to work my way through abstraction,'' he said. Now he sees ''students who accept that as a given from a very early age and who start out making abstractions. I had to really fight my way there, out of my habits of a very meticulous realism.''

The importance of Puryear's two years in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1964 to 1966, can hardly be overemphasized. When he went there, he had made carvings in wood and stone, but he was primarily a painter. There was a tradition of black American painters, including Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, but there was not a comparable tradition of black sculptors.

The years in Sierra Leone provided him with a rich source of imagery, shaping his feeling for wood, for crafts, and for a particular approach to craftsmanship - that of the carpenter, not the carver.

The villagers treated him both as a foreigner and almost as a brother. ''The name for me was the same as for Europeans,'' he said. ''They had a word, pronounced 'pumwei,' which meant European or foreigner or white man. It was very clear to me that I wasn't one of them.

''On the other hand, I'm not sure whether it was because of my personality - I was friendly and took pains to make friends - or whether they were more open to me because of my race, but I know that I had some very, very close relationships while I was there. I felt I was really privileged.''

He found he could hold onto his roots by working with wood. ''I became close to some carpenters, some woodworkers there,'' he said. ''That was pretty moving to me, to see people working without technology. I was taught a lot by just watching them work. That's where I was first exposed to people who worked with wood with any real skill.

''I saw some carvers but I didn't relate to them quite as much as to the carpenters. I guess I had a feeling that the tribal carving of art was something that was really theirs. And I almost didn't quite trust that I could get close enough, because it was generally a secret thing. Magic has to do with secret rituals, most of all.''

It is hard to imagine a sculptor more sympathetic than Puryear to the metaphorical and sculptural possibilities of wood. ''I'm real aware that I'm working something that has recently been alive,'' he said. ''Wood's moving all the time, as you work. It's shrinking and swelling all the time.''

What enables him to combine, juxtapose and piece wood together is joinery. ''It's really a science of penetrations,'' he says. ''It's a beautiful science, really. And it's something that I've enjoyed looking at, to see how different cultures deploy it. I mean, there are some givens that are the same for Egyptian beds and doors, through European fine furniture making, up to the present day.''

That timelessness is essential. ''I really feel it as I work,'' he said. ''I think it's the thing that maybe gives me a feeling of a certain amount of legitimacy, given the fact that this is such a technological society that looks away from all that stuff. It's like, how in the world can you justify this way of working today? And yet, the connection to the past, there's value to it, for me.''

In art, the attitude toward craft is inseparable from the attitude toward memory. ''Memory is a real crucial key to where the work comes from, like a genesis, or some kind of seed, or origin. The process of working, for me, releases it, and a lot of the time, by working, by labor, by physically developing something and changing it and manipulating it, I think there's something that gets folded back into the work. It's like cooking.''

The paradox here is crucial. On the one hand, Puryear's involvement with wood and craft is extremely traditional. On the other hand, the way he constructs and assembles wood, using techniques that also reflect some of the most celebrated methods of avant-garde art, including Constructivism and assemblage, is largely responsible for the freshness and freedom of his work.

AFTER THE PEACE CORPS, Puryear spent two years in Sweden, studying printmaking at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Stockholm; his sister Rachelle, a printmaker and weaver, has lived in Sweden for the last 13 years. He made etchings and explored Scandinavian crafts. And he began for the first time to work ''constructively,'' cutting and weaving strips and pieces of wood into sculptural form.

Sculpture was the only medium that could accommodate all that he had seen and lived, and the complexity of his history. ''The difference is so great when you go into the third dimension,'' he says. ''It's not simply a two-dimensional thing expanded. It's like an infinitely multiple view, an infinitely multiplied sense of possibilities, spatial possibilities. That's what interests me.''

And what Puryear has been doing over the last 20 years is of interest to a larger and larger audience. He has helped construct a bridge that had to be built. On one side is the absoluteness, conceptual clarity and matter-of-factness of the 1960's, on the other the internationalism and pluralism of the 80's. He is not going to abandon the past. Nor is he going to abandon the modernist imperative of transformation and change. His work is taut, and it is elastic. To compose all this into a controlled, unbroken song is no small feat.

  Source: New York Times Magazine / Michael Brenson. Link: Maverick Sculptor Makes Good Illustration: Martin Puryear [USA] (b 1941) ~ 'Maquette for Big Bling', 2014. Birch plywood, maple, 22-karat gold leaf (102 x 23 x 104 cm). Moderator: ART HuNTER.

[sfaioffical]

Born in Portland, Oregon, SFAI alumnus Zach Mitlas (MFA/MA Painting and History + Theory of Contemporary Art, 2013) is a painter and multimedia artist based in Clermont-Ferrand, France.

Zach is participating in a traveling group show, The Third Space (All that we have in common), which recently opened in Zagreb, Croatia and will end in Lecce, Italy this December. We decided to chat with Zach to find out more.

SFAI: What projects have you been working on recently? Anything you’re particularly excited about?

Zach Mitlas (ZM): Currently, I am part of a traveling European group exhibition with the CreArt program, a network of 11 cities supported by the European Union. Our show titled The Third Space (All that we have in common) opened in May in Zagreb, Croatia, curated by Jovanka Popova. In September, the exhibition will come to Clermont-Ferrand, France, where I live now, and it will finish in Lecce, Italy in December. Since my return to France five years ago after finishing my Dual Degree at SFAI, I have had a solo exhibition in St. Étienne at La Serre, I have been a temporary resident at a local artist association Les Ateliers, and I have worked to develop a residency exchange between Real Time and Space in Oakland and with our residency program here in Clermont-Ferrand Artistes en Résidence. Last October, I was selected by CreArt to participate in an artist workshop titled "The Use of Photography as a Sculptural Material in Contemporary Art" in Zagreb. This past February, I also attended a one-month residency in Linz, Austria at the Atelierhaus Salzamt with CreArt.

Sous revêtement (Under surfacing), 2017. Acrylic and oil on medium and pigmented plaster; Dimensions variable. Courtesy of Croatian Association of Visual Artists.

SFAI: Where do you find inspiration for your work?

ZM: I'm really interested in the creative potential that comes from the degradation of painted surfaces. It's the fragile nature of paintings that is captivating for me, like the damaging effects of light that blacken a paint film or the changing atmospheric conditions that crack its surface. There is the birth of a new object due to the passage of time, including the new form’s trauma and defects.

On residency this past February in Linz, I worked on a project that began using found photographs from locations of the Solidarnosć movement in Poland. I also used photos I took in Austria, the last European country my father stayed in before getting political exile to escape arrest in Poland, due to his participation in counter-party activities. The photographs were used to make paintings on aluminum foil, which were then worn down and draped over wooden structures and exhibited with sounds made from shaking and hitting metal sheets. While I know the story of my father's journey well, I actually barely know him as a person, and using found material on the Internet has been a way to recreate this reality of my family story from digital information that is not actually an experience of that moment, just a compilation of pixels and waves that then become a new account of history. Overall, it's the fading collective memory of a nation that inspired my project at the Atelierhaus Salzamt, and the transitory and fragile nature of things that informs my work in general.

Zach Mitlas in the studio.

SFAI: What is your process for creating your work?

ZM: My current works are paintings on aluminum foil that are draped over various freestanding armatures. The paintings on delicate sheets are folded, twisted, crinkled and torn, evoking a process of degradation and trauma on the once pristine and smooth industrially created surfaces. Long painted strips are also pressed, while still wet, onto the face of neighbouring paintings, creating a mirroring effect that becomes the starting point for another picture. This process was informed conceptually by a reading of the book by Gilles Deleuze The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1992), most importantly the concept of the world as something that is infinitely developing, never fixed and always becoming.

Path to no end, 2019. Oil and acrylic on aluminum sheets, wood; 23 x 18 x 550 inches (around the room); Open studio, Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz, Austria, residency supported by the CreArt Network, co-sponsored by the European Union.

My last solo show in St. Étienne, France was at a municipal art space called La Serre. La Serre means “green house” in English, and it was in fact originally a place for plants, which is why the city preserved the vegetation in the space. I say that because the show was conceived mainly as a response to the context. Many of the decisions made in its realization were therefore inspired by the trees that still grow in the space and by the natural characteristics of the environment. The whole show explored the subject of erosion in various ways visually and dimensionally. The first part was painting on supports showing an accumulation of material, followed by a series of degradations, which then gave way to various erasures in following works.

Some pieces played on the context of the exhibition space, using shadows and light patterns to inspire the installation. Other forms included a painted detail of the site, and a wall painting became an experiment with retinal fatigue, where the leaves and trees I was seeing in the space stayed in my vision when looking to a fresh white wall, making it only natural to fix that image in paint. That piece was painted over at the end of the exhibition, forefronting its fleeting nature.

Path to no end, 2019. Oil and acrylic on aluminum sheets, wood; 23 x 18 x 550 inches (around the room); Open studio, Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz, Austria, residency supported by the CreArt Network, co-sponsored by the European Union.

One wall was dedicated to using elements that referenced different locations in and around the city of the show. A mural painting was made with photographed fragments of the inside of a shower, which was influenced by the shower stalls one can find in the charcoal mine located in St. Étienne, an industry that used to define the economic situation of the city, but today only exists as a vestige of a time past. Another painting, this time on canvas, fused the detail of a brick wall, one found inside the exhibition space, and layered on top a graffiti signature that passersby glance at when walking in the street on the way to the show. Even though in the end this piece was rendered in paint, it was greatly influenced by using several photographs as a process of layering, bringing together elements from different locations into one frame, much like the Dutch still life painters of the 17th century did for their flower paintings which included blooms from different seasons and even from different countries.

Detail of work in progress at the studio.

SFAI: What are you working on now?

ZM: Aside from my own independent work as an artist, I run a window-front exhibition space called Off the Rail in downtown Clermont-Ferrand, where I invite local and internationally based artists to show curtain pieces at the front of my studio. In September, we’ll be presenting our tenth exhibition. So far, each artist that we’ve invited has presented something rather different from previous shows, and so the diversity of the programming is something that has come to define the space. The windowfront has become an association, and we’re in the midst of drafting a group exhibition with the 10 artists who have shown this past year. The exhibition will take place next year in Clermont-Ferrand at one of the local city-run venues. A catalog of the series of windowfront shows is also in the works to promote visibility for the participating artists. In terms of my own work, I’m continuing the paintings on aluminum foil which are either shown sculpturally or glued to a rigid metal surface. I’m also doing an artist book on aluminum foil that is based on images conceived from an account of the Polish revolutions from the 1970s and 80s. Formally, the book will explore the mirrored quality of pages and inverted content. I’m very excited about this project and am looking forward to seeing how some of these ideas can come to fruition.

(Above) Forme et asso, 2017. Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on wood; 93.3 x 48 inches. Collaborative painting with the artist association/collective Les Ateliers, Clermont-Ferrand. (Floor piece) Sous revêtement (Under surfacing), 2017. Acrylic and oil on medium and pigmented plaster; Dimensions variable. Courtesy of Croatian Association of Visual Artists.

Links

Zach Mitlas: http://zachmitlas.blogspot.com/

Off the Rail: https://www.facebook.com/offtherailclermont/

Artistes en Résidence: http://www.artistesenresidence.fr/actus-en.html

Les Ateliers: http://www.lesateliers.eu/

Instagram: @offtherailclermont

All images courtesy of the artist.

[tipsycad147]

Mirror Gazing (Scrying)

Written and compiled by George Knowles

Since time began, man has been fascinated by his reflected image as seen in the still waters of woodland lakes, pools and rivers.  Among primitive peoples superstition was rife, and seeing their image reflected in water may have been like catching a glimpse of their souls, for it was widely believed that the soul existed separate from the body.  Others may have found themselves gazing through a portal into the spirit realm, there communicating with departed loved ones or gaining insights into future events.  However, these same woodland lakes and pools were also known haunts of fairy folks and nature spirits, sometimes friendly, but sometimes hostile, and likely to snatch at human reflection to capture the souls of the unwary.  Little wonder then that anything reflecting images was regarded as magical.

The Mirror of Venus by Burne-Jones

Ancient prophets, soothsayers and oracles initially used bowls filled with water in which to scry and divine answers to questions about past, present and future events.  Later, highly polished stones such as beryl, crystal and quartz were used for similar purposes.  The first man-made mirrors used in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome were commonly made of sheeted metal (pewter, copper, tin, bronze or silver etc.) and flattened into rounded disks to which handles were applied.  Some had decorative designs inscribed on the back, but the face would have been highly polished and reflective.

In the Middle Ages when it became possible to make glass, crude hand held glass mirrors were made backed with thin layers of metal such as tin and lead.  Later during the 16th century, better quality mirrors were produced in Murano, Venice (Italy), the backs of which were covered with an amalgam of tin and mercury (normally 75% tin to 25% mercury).  In 1836 a German chemist called ‘Justus von Liebig’ developed the process of coating a glass surface with metallic silver, a process that is still used today.  By the end of the 17th century plate glass was developed, and the use of large stationary mirrors became commonplace household features.

Legends, Myths and Folklore

Dr. John Dee (1527 – 1608)

Dr. John Dee was a famous Alchemist, Mathematician, Astronomer; he was also an adviser to Queen Elizabeth I on matters pertaining to science and astrology, as such, he was commonly referred to as “the last royal magician”.  A serious academic, some thought him to be the most learned man in the whole of Europe.  He was fascinated by all things occult, and was an adept in Hermetic and Cabbalistic philosophy.  Dee had a particular interest in divination, and spent much of his later life experimenting with different methods in his efforts to communicate with Angels.  From 1583 onward, Dee worked with Edward Kelly using both a black obsidian mirror and a crystal ball to see visions of ‘Angels’.  Allegedly they communicated by pointing to squares containing letters and symbols that Dee had transcribed.

John Dee’s black obsidian mirror and crystal ball

This is the mirror together with a small smoky quartz crystal ball used by Dee and Kelly for their occult research.  These are now on display at the British Museum in London.  The mirror is made of highly polished obsidian (volcanic glass) and was one of many objects brought back to Europe after the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish conquistador Hernán (Ferdinand) Cortés. Obsidian was sacred to Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec “Sky God” associated with Kings, Warriors and Sorcerers, and whose name can be translated as “Smoking Mirror”.  The Aztec priests used mirrors for divination and conjuring up visions.

The case along side it was especially made to fit the mirror, it has a paper label written by the English antiquary Sir Horace Walpole who acquired the mirror in 1771 stating:  “The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his spirits...” and added later:  “Kelly was Dr Dee’s associate and is mentioned with this very stone in “Hudibras” (a satirical poem by Samuel Butler, first published in 1664) Part 2. Canto 3 v. 631.  Kelly did all his feats upon The Devil’s Looking glass, a Stone".

Archimedes

In one of the many legends of Greece, the mathematician Archimedes (287-212 BC) invented giant mirrors that were used to reflect the rays of the Sun onto Roman warships during the battle of Syracuse in 212 B.C.

Wall painting from the Stanzino delle Matematiche in the Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence, Italy). Painted by Giulio Parigi - 1599-1600.

“At last in an incredible manner he (Archimedes) burned up the whole Roman fleet. For by tilting a kind of mirror toward the sun he concentrated the sun's beam upon it; and owing to the thickness and smoothness of the mirror he ignited the air from this beam and kindled a great flame, the whole of which he directed upon the ships that lay at anchor in the path of the fire, until he consumed them all.”

(The above description is from Dio's Roman History - Translated by Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1914)

Narcissus

In Greek mythology Narcissus was a handsome young man whose beautiful good looks claimed the love of all the women who met him, but he continually rejected their advances.  One day while hunting in the woods he came upon a clear pool of water and stopped to take a drink from it.  Mirrors were almost unknown in those times, but when he bent down to drink from the water, he saw what he thought was another young man.  Amazingly the young man seems to be alive and responding, for when Narcissus smiled, so did he.  The young man was so incredibly beautiful that Narcissus immediately fell in love with him, but when he bent forward to kiss him, just when their lips should have touched, the young man’s image blurred and rippled and all he got was a mouthful of water.

Narcissus by John William Waterhouse (1903)

Eventually Narcissus realised it was his own reflection in the water, but he could not bear to pull himself away.  As he continued to gaze longingly at himself, he gradually pined away and died.  At the place where his body had lain now grows a beautiful flower, a Narcissus, nodding its head over its own reflection in a pool.

Perseus and Medusa of the Gorgons

In Greek mythology, the Gorgons (daughters of the sea god Phorcys and his wife Ceto) were three monstrous sisters called:  Stheno, Euryale and Medusa.  They were dragon-like creatures covered with scales, had wings, claws, enormous teeth and snakes replicating hair.  They lived on the farthest side of the western ocean, shunned and feared because a single direct glance at one of them could turn a person to stone.  Of the three, only Medusa was mortal and could be killed, a feat that was achieved by the hero Perseus (son of Zeus).

Perseus, with the aid of a sword given to him by Hermes and a highly polished shield given to him by Athena, by watching Medusa’s reflection in the shield, was able to cut off her head without directly looking at her.  The severed head, however, still had the power to turn a person into stone if it was looked upon.  Legend has it that Perseus gave the severed head to Athena who used it to turn Atlas into stone.  This stone became known as the Atlas Mountains that now hold up the heaven and earth.

Medusa painted by Caravaggio 1596-1597

Other legends about mirrors and scrying include the Goddess Hathor, who carried a shield that could reflect back all things in their true light.  Nostradamus is believed to have used a small bowl of water as a scrying tool into which he gazed and received images of future events.  And who can forget the magic mirror featured in the Disney folktale classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, when the wicked Queen immortalized the question “Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”

Making a Scrying Mirror

All types and sizes of mirrors can be used for scrying, but commonly round or oval mirrors seem to be preferred.  Old mirrors seem to work better than new mirrors, and more particularly those encased in a silver frame.  Silver is generally associated with the moon, and while scrying can be practised at any time, best results are often gained in the quiet of night during a full or new moon.

Many people find it easier to scry using a black or obsidian mirror, the dark depth of a black mirror being more conducive to inducing visions.  Obsidian is a black or dark-coloured volcanic lava rock, chemically similar to granite, but formed by cooling rapidly on the Earth’s surface at low pressure.  The glassy texture of the rock is the result of its rapid cooling, which inhibits the growth of crystals.

Obsidian was highly valued by the early civilisations of Mexico, who used it for making sharp-edged tools, ritual and ceremonial sculptures, and polished mirrors similar to the one owned by Dr. John Dee above.  Sadly, the ancient method of mining, grinding and smoothing obsidian into reflective mirrors was a long and drawn-out process, and so true obsidian mirrors, particularly old ones, are now quite expensive.  However, given modern techniques and the demand created in the contemporary market, new obsidian mirrors can be obtained from most modern occult shops who stock them in a range of sizes at competitive prices.

Here’s an old mirror and stand I found at a car boot sale recently.  I then purchased a new black obsidian mirror slate from an occult store in Glastonbury and collected  all the bits and pieces needed to transform and create my own magick mirror.

An alternative to using obsidian is to make your own ‘black’ mirror.  If you have an old silver picture frame lying around the home, simply take out the glass, clean it being careful to remove any marks, finger prints or blemishes, then paint the back of it black.  Matt black paint tends to work better than gloss paint, as does black enamel or car spray paint.  You may need to give the glass a few coats of paint to cover it properly, but allow each coat to dry thoroughly before adding the next.  Also try to leave a smooth finish without streaks or runs.

Having rubbed down the mirror frame with fine sandpaper and sprayed it with black satin paint, I decided to decorate the boarder with appropriate directional and elemental stones.  North is Malachite representing Earth, East is Citrine representing Air, South is Tigers Eye representing Fire, and West is Lapis Lazuli representing Water.  Replacing the silver backed mirror glass into the frame, I then centralised and bonded the black obsidian slate to it leaving a silver rim around the black mirror...

Another good idea is to use the curved glass face of an old clock and paint the convex side black; you will of course need to make a suitable frame to mount it on.  Antique shops are a good source for old clocks, and who knows, you could also find an antique silver frame on which to mount it.  Frames can be as plain or as ornate as you like; you may even wish to personalise or decorate it with meaningful stones, gems or sigils.  Remember the mirror will also need some method of standing-up on your altar or table, ideally at a shallow or adjustable angle.  Some picture frames have a leg on the back for this purpose, or alternatively you could use a display stand similar to those used for collector plates.

... and the end result is my own Magick Mirror.

Before using your mirror, as with all magickal tools, it needs to be cleansed of all previous associations and negative energies, then dedicated and charged with your own energy.  It is up to you how simple or elaborate you wish to make this process, but most people do it inside a properly consecrated circle.  Once your circle is formed and quarters called, a simple dedication might go something like this:

“Into this sacred space I bring this mirror, here to be cleansed and dedicated to my service”.  Face each direction in turn and call on its associated element with these or similar words (start with North - Earth):  “By the spirits of the North and the powers of the Earth, I purify and dedicate this mirror” (repeat the same with the other directions:  East - Air, South – Fire, and West - Water).  Next you may wish to call whatever deities you are working with for their blessing, saying:  Goddess/God (or deity names), bless this mirror, let it be a tool I use for positive purposes.  Guard and watch over the works that come from it, and ensure no harm can ever be caused by it.  In thy name Goddess/God I dedicate this mirror to my service.  So Mote It Be!”

Mirror Gazing (Scrying)

The art of mirror gazing (scrying) is called Catoptromancy, a term that refers to the use of reflective surfaces for the purposes of divination.  Scrying mirrors can be used to make contact with spirit guides, to access knowledge for healing and self-improvement, or to define the past, predict the present, and perceive the future.  As a portal into other realms, it can also be used to aid astral travel, and during ritual to communicate with deity.

Scrying can be practised at any time, but best results are often gained in the quiet of night after the hustle and bustle of the day’s activities.  It is not necessary to construct a fully consecrated circle for scrying; it is enough to simply create your sacred space by visualising a circle of white light surrounding and purifying the appointed working area.  In a quiet darkened room, place your mirror on a table or altar with a dark cloth beneath it.  Light a candle, one on each side of the mirror, but in such a position they don’t reflect on the mirror’s surface, and if you wish, burn an appropriate blend of incense to stimulate the psychic senses.  Switch off all other light sources except for the two candles, and seat yourself comfortably in front of the mirror.  Take a few minutes to relax while you tune into the atmosphere created.  When ready to start, first ground and center yourself then call your guides or guardians to protect the work from unwanted or misleading influences.

To begin, when looking at the mirror try not to just stare at it, but look through its surface as if gazing into a dark and endless tunnel.  After awhile, images and colours will begin to take form, they may even appear and take shape outside the mirror surrounding it on all sides.  When you first start scrying be patient, keeping your first sessions to about 10 - 30 minutes, and gradually work it up to hour-long sessions as you learn.  The art of scrying is interpreting what you see in the images and colours as they take form.  This in a way it is a little like dream interpretation, and initially you may wish to consult one of the many books on the subject to help define the images you see.  At the end of the day however, the real interpretation will be what those images mean to you personally.

After you have completed your scrying session, re-ground yourself and close your sacred space.  You may wish to keep a journal and note down any visions you received during your session and later compare them with a list of dream interpretations.  The more you practice, the more familiar the images and their meanings will become, but you may need to meditate on them for awhile to reveal any hidden meanings.

In conclusion, there are many differing ways and methods of scrying in addition to the one above, so it pays to experiment and use what works best for you.  Whatever tool or method you use, be it your own personalised mirror, a crystal ball, or simply a bowl of coloured water; it can with time and patience become a font of wisdom and knowledge.  As Ostara, the Spring Equinox approaches, a time of fresh beginnings, who knows what future truths can be divined???  Believe in your abilities and may you find what you seek.

End

https://www.controverscial.com/Mirror%20Gazing.htm

[yennefer-fan]

Interview with Sapkowski and Bagiński about their involvement in Netflix series and comparisons to Witcher game, Game of Thrones and old tv series (ENG translation)

interview: http://innpoland.pl/134995,tylko-u-nas-sapkowski-i-baginski-o-serialowym-wiedzminie-nie-boimy-sie-konkurowania-z-gra-o-tron

translation:  toudi815

-The witcher is today treated as a product, but also our national treasure, probably many people have very high expectations of the planned series. Aren't you afraid that it will not meet yours and fans expectations. In the end it will be a production made for a profit, so it might lose original atmosphere and simplify or complicate narration?

AS: Everything is possible. Maybe the production will meet the expectations, maybe not. And most likely: will meet for some, and won't for the others. When, we will see, we will judge the final product. Earlier disputes, deliberations, prophecies, anxieties and existential fears are rather pointless.

Will you influence the script and the production? I read that you are involved, but I am interested in its scope. Will you be a screenwriter, co-writer, co-producer? As long as it is not too early to announce such details.

AS: I will be a consultant. It means that I will consult.

It Immediately raises associations with Game of Thrones, excellent film production, prose no longer mention. Are not you afraid of comparisons?

AS: When thirty years ago began to publish stories and books about the witcher, I was also asked. In the beginning: are you not afraid of comparisons with Lem? A little later: are not you afraid of comparisons with Tolkien? Still later: Are you afraid of comparisons with Conan? The answer was always the same. No, I'm not afraid. And who wants to compare things incomparable, is a fool. And whom do such senseless associations, is a fool also.

What do you think of cooperation with Tomasz Bagiński? He might be a very strong point of this project?

AS: Very strong. It's hard to find a stronger one. If not for Tomek, there wouldn't be this project at all.

According to the official announcement, you will direct at least one episode in every season of the series. Is this the only contribution of you and Platige Image to this project?

TB: I'd really like to say about that, because I know the answer to this question well. But this is one of the information that I cannot give at the moment. I can only apologize, but not all the questions that will surely intrigue readers, I will not be able to answer. I'm obliged to keep it secret. For now , it is just too early to talk more about production and how exactly we will be involved in this project. I cannot say also when we will shoot, what actors we will have, how many episodes, and how big budgets will be

Sure, it's understandable to us. But Platige Image has already gone up on stock, so there is something to enjoy and hopefully this contribution will be big enough.

TB: [Laughs] I count on the same thing, but let's also keep in mind that not many Platige Image actions are aviable in official market, so the course leaps are relatively easy to call. It is not a big stock exchange company, stock market trading is also not staggering.

Basic question: just in case: do you know how to make a better golden dragon than the one shown in the 2002 "The Hexer" series?

TB: This is a question that I consider to be rhetorical and allow myself to refrain from responding.

There are books, there was a serial, there is a game. Spectators will surely put a lot of demands before the new show. Are you not afraid that this requirement, both in Poland and in the world, won't be meet, as din the case of TVP series? Although - in my opinion - it had a lot of good points , like Grzegorz Ciechowski's brilliant music or great pictures.

TB: I think it makes no sense to put an equality sign here. These are two completely different productions, arising in other times and conditions. A lot of people are working on this production that we will be doing with Netflix. The people who deal with it are great professionals, world class. I think such concerns are premature, we do not pay attention to it now. Sure, it is a very difficult work, a difficult industry and we want the project to be of very high quality. We've done a lot to get that right. This is not a one-man project by Bagiński, as it often appears in our media. This is a big effort of a large group of people, many of whom are more talented than me.

But there are also comparisons to two other things. For "The game of thrones," which is a high-budget HBO production. I will not ask if the new Witcher will have a similar budget and momentum. But it will probably be compared to this show, perhaps it will be overshadowed. In the end those are two fantasy stories of a somewhat similar nature, and climate.

TB: And that is - I think - the only resemblance. And "The Witcher", and "GOT" are original fantasy novels, and, indeed both are fantastic. But the resemblance ends. Stories are completely different, they touch other values, they talk about them in a different way. The only similarity is that here and here are the knights and swords. And maybe dragons. But in fact these stories differ in almost every way. The story written by Andrzej Sapkowski is much more contemporary, talks much more about our world

What we will do will be significantly different from what the creators of "GOT" did. Outstanding on the show. I think we will easily avoid comparisons. These productions will not even compare. We do not want the "The Witcher" to be either Netflix or Polish "GOT." The witcher will be the witcher and will have it's own name and value.

They will be also comparisons to the game, which is also visually sophisticated and in some way shaped Geralt's image, the way he moves, what he speaks and what he is like. Is not that a bigger challenge, since the game has met millions of people? Will not it be too far away from their "game" prototype?

TB: I believe that the game is an outstanding production and to CD Projekt did their job exceptionally. I know many persons from their team and I have a great respect for their work. But novels written by Andrzej Sapkowski give the possibility of other interpretations of the same story. It seems to me that this threat does not exist, and fans will be able to make friends or like a hero who will not be a copy of the characters from the game. Both productions derive from the very literary material created by Andrzej Sapkowski. There will be many similarities, but when it comes to how visuals, we will look for our own path.

You have already dealt with the transfer of Polish legends and stories to the screenWill these experiences help you a little bit with the Witcher?

TB: These are completely different projects, but ... I never hid and I do not hide that I'm a Pole and that in this culture I grew up. So the Slavic themes in my heart and I will return to them. It is also something very interesting and exotic for an international audience. It seems to me that it can be used as a visual setting just like Vikings culture, samurai or Indian. This is in some way unused, valuable, very interesting visually, musically, climateally part of the world culture, which has so far been a little bit on the side track. And I have the impression that fashion is now on Slavicity and this kind of emotions. It also falls into the larger program that we want to introduce in our studio, related to the notion of culture, which is a conglomerate of different issues where culture, technology, business - and it's on a large scale. The point is that behind every product, subject, for all that surrounds us, there is a kind of history. And this story is sometimes more important than the product itself. The Polish culture has not always made good use of this potential, which is gigantic. And we have a whole bunch of great creators who are successful all over the world.

[lindsay36ho]

Chopin and His Europe

The whole piano world is teaming up for the 18th International Chopin Competition to be held in Warsaw, 2 to 23 October 2020. Initiator of the festival series ”Chopin and his Europe”, now on its 15th year, the recording project ”The Complete Works of Fryderyk Chopin on historical instruments” and ”The 1st International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments” (2018), Stanislaw Lesczcynski of The Chopin Institute sat down with Piano Street’s Patrick Jovell at the Philharmonie in Warsaw.

The International Chopin Competition 2020

This grand occasion – taking place every five years – attracts the finest young pianists in the world and the competition is regarded as one of the most important venues for creating important international careers. Past laureates lists an amazing number of world famous performers starting back in 1927 with Lev Oborin and include winners such as; Davidovich, Czerny-Stefańska, Harasiewicz, Pollini, Argerich, Ohlsson, Zimerman, Thai Son, Bunin, Yundi, Blechacz, Avdeeva and most recently, Cho. Other laureates include Ashkenazy, Ushida, Fliter, Montero, Trifonov, Wunder and also non-laureates such as Pogorelich. Its influence on piano playing in the world cannot be overestimated.

Piano Street will cover the 2020 competition and as a starter we are happy to share an interview with an important profile in the competition’s history and programming which also includes a multitude of projects managed by The Chopin Institute in Warsaw, hi-lighting the influence of Chopin’s music in the world.

Interview With Chopin Institute’s Stanislaw Lesczcynski

Patrick Jovell: Dear Mr. Lesczcynski, we all know you as a portal figure in Polish music life. As deputy director of the Chopin Institute you are responsible for the prestigious International Chopin Competition. You have also initiated the “Chopin and His Europe International Music Festival”, and started a vast project concerning Chopin on period instruments, involving concerts and recordings of a number of world famous pianists. In September 2018 you arranged the 1st International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments. Tell me a little about your background?

Stanislaw Lesczcynski: In 1978, I was appointed to oversee the classical recordings for the Polish record label Muza and I’ve been doing the same kind of job ever since. I became the first director of the Doslovski studio, which has very strong connections to both piano music itself and keyboard recordings. Our goal was to enrich the Polish Radio so that it could become like the Deutsche Rundfunk or the BBC. After much work, we have succeeded in creating many interesting and excellent recordings under the umbrella of the Polish Radio.

After that appointment, I also spent a few years as the director of the Polish National Opera, but I still kept in touch with the world of piano and pianists. When the Chopin Institute called a couple of years before the great 200th birthday jubilee, I took the job. I then had to examine the national composer of Poland from many different angles. It was extremely interesting to see the influences he had. He was smitten with Bach, who had died 60 years before Chopin’s birth. His background came almost exclusively from the great Leipzig master.

PJ: So, Chopin was a classical romantic?

SL: Well, not exactly. It must be stressed that Chopin was a Classical composer, not Romantic, regardless of when he lived. His compositions have very strict form and are quite precise. Because his music is intensely introspective – even when he’s being boisterous – he seems Romantic; however, his style is strictly Classical. Of course, he also looked forward. For example, Wagner wasn’t the only one to use the “Tristan Chord.” You can hear Chopin use the exact same harmonies on multiple occasions.

PJ: How is it possible to recreate a genuine Chopin sound?

SL: It would be impossible, of course, to perfectly recreate the sound Chopin made at the keyboard. We are, after all, not him. But through our research, practice and process of discovery, we can emulate the Polish master.

Chopin’s last Pleyel grand piano. Chopin Museum, Warsaw

What’s most difficult about approximating Chopin’s sound is that the new materials have different physical properties than the materials from the 19th century. The stuff reacts differently to being struck. For example, it doesn’t vibrate the same way. It’d be the same thing if a violin maker of today claimed to have copied a Stradivarius exactly. He couldn’t do it because not only is the climate for growing wood in the Mediterranean much different now than it was in 1680, the varnish isn’t the same because some of the ingredients no longer exist.

I’m really crazy about the history of both music and instruments. I would also like to travel to the future to see what kind of improvements they’ve made on our improvements. Haha, of course, I’m just joking. I do think, however, that it’s crucial to be able to compare sounds and construction practices between different eras.

PJ: Which are your thoughts on the subject “original instruments”?

SL: Well, not only were these instruments constructed using different techniques and materials, but they were also based on different tunings and centers of pitch. It doesn’t matter which composer the pianist plays, the two kinds of instruments, original and modern, sound quite different.

Let’s take, for example, Chopin’s Opus 10, No. 12, the “Revolutionary Etude.” Chopin wanted the two registers of the piano to sound different, which the 19th-century instruments did quite well. Contemporary models, however, are more homogenized, so we cannot achieve on them the same effect as we can on 19th-century pianos. These were not mistakes of construction; instead, they revealed a different philosophy.

Chopin’s autograph of the “Revolutionary” Etude Op. 10/12, Chopin Museum, Warsaw

PJ: You have a great many years as part of this competition. What happened during this whole time span in terms of performance style?

SL: Nothing very special, really, although we do see, from time to time, different waves of performance style. Take, for instance, the large number of contestants in the 2015 competition who wanted to emulate the style of the 19th century. They don’t keep their hands together. They exaggerate certain phrases. Some of them are typically quirky. But they all have their own vision.

If you remember, critics in the 1970s were fond of saying, “the traditional Chopin interpretation is done,” and “Romantic music is passé”. There was a group of very strong American players from Juilliard that came to Warsaw for the competition. Ohlsson, Ax, Fialkowska and Swann, all showed up with their idiosyncratic styles that reinvented how we both play and hear Chopin. They blended 19th-century style with a more contemporary style and were quite successful at it. I can remember very clearly all their bravado. They all thought, “I’m the one! I’m going to win.” In the end, Ohlsson won, but you could have made an equally strong argument for Ax or the other incredible musicians who were flawlessly prepared.

In 1965, it was also incredible at the competition. Martha Argerich was out of this world in a class by herself. Five years before that, Maurizio Pollini was equally above the rest.

The year 1955 marked the first time that there were real and gigantic differences between the performers. Comparing Adam Harasiewich with André Tchaikovsky, for example, one would notice André playing a few too many wrong notes; however, the performance was electrifying in the same manner as Horowitz. One of the Japanese performers played completely differently than the other competitors, but it was, nonetheless, very interesting.

These young players were not alone, however. In the 1950s, there were still a great many members of the old school playing and being successful. The teachings of Philipp, Leschetitzky, Paderewski and others still made relevant contributions to the interpretation of not only Chopin but also other composers. Still, their differences from the more modern approach were not as pronounced as you might expect.

PJ: Considering your experience and everything you know of the history of Chopin playing so far, what do you think is the paramount quality in performing Chopin’s music?

SL: Well, I was on the preselection committee in 2015, and we were all listening to the 450 DVD submissions from around the world. The process took two weeks. We committee members asked each other the same question. My answer is still the same. It is the attention paid to the space between the notes that is crucial to the success of a performance, particularly of Chopin. The space between the notes is what underpins the structure of the musical line. Otherwise, the notes are just a jumble.

If we pay attention to the spaces between the notes, we could play “The Art of Fugue,” or “Die Kunst der Fuge,” on a collection of beer bottles and still recognize it. If such attention is paid, it matters not upon which instrument we perform a great work. It’s like musical rhetoric, with the spaces between the notes serving as musical punctuation. This is true in both the 17th and 19th centuries.

Expression is organized silence, but it is only half of the whole. A. B. Michelangeli, for example, was never a good Chopin interpreter; however, we loved him for the specific organization of both sound and silence that made him not a good Chopin interpreter.

The trick is to impress your will upon Chopin’s music without burying Chopin completely. If someone can do that, then that is something truly special. The best thing about this music is the diversity in expression. Piano students should never copy their professors’ sounds. I think they should all keep their individuality while still learning; in this way, we can discover someone and something new at any time. This lets us experience the joy of hearing Chopin for the “first time” again and again, which is something we all enjoy.

I International Chopin Competition on period instruments – Winners Concert

The Complete Works of Fryderyk Chopin on historical instruments: http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/institute/publications/musics

The Eighteenth International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition 2020

COMPETITION SCHEDULE 13–24 April PRELIMINARY ROUND 2–23 October COMPETITION 2 October Inaugural concert 3–7 October First stage 9–12 October Second stage 14–16 October Third stage 17 October Celebrations marking the 171st anniversary of Fryderyk Chopin’s death 18–20 October Final 21 October First prize-winners’ concert 22 October Second prize-winners’ concert 23 October Third prize-winners’ concert

from Piano Street’s Classical Piano News https://www.pianostreet.com/blog/articles/chopin-and-his-europe-9747/

[art-now-poland]

"Violet city" (painting no 268), Krzysztof Pajak

I must admit that I am starting to write this text filled with anxiety, which comes from an ever-topical observation made in the 19th century by Eugene Delacroix1 :"Critical assessments of fine arts have been printed from time immemorial,and always,almost inevitably they have had their bad sides: firstly, they bore men of the world, for whom thi kind of writing is always ambigous, tiresome, and full of unclear terms, leaving their mind with a sense of something incomprehensible. Secondly, hate them, because such assessmets not only contribuate to progress in art, but they obscure the simplest problems, and whatever they explain, the explanations they offer are false". It is indeed very hard to translate truly, sincerly and authentically the much richer and deeper response to visual impressions into the language of lmperfect verbal notion. Can one, without a risk of beeing megalomaniac, comment on or evaluate a mere final result, not even trying to understand its context ?. Therefore, the anxiety mentioned en the beginning does not stem from a willingness to give the reader cheap thrills, just the opposite-it comes from the fear of the complexity of the problem I am going to deal with. I have had a chance to see several dozens canvases by Krzysztof Pająk: canvases varying in their final shape, different in guality and form, but at the same time cnnected by the common imperative of a genuine wish to create totally new aesthetic values. And yet, my assessement is of a very subjective, one could say- superficial character. I thus think that what I should aim at is not some penetrating, but illusory evaluative criticism of separate paintings: I should rather seek an answer to the guestion of the place, role,and function of Krzysztof Pająk's painting in Polish art of the erly 1990s. The artist seems to stand alone, far from the most influential centres of modern art. He does not follow any short-lived trends, as noticed by Georg Simmel2 ,"make one free from the burden of responsibility.The give an individual certainty that he is not alone in what he is doing". On the other hand, they restrain, inhibit, and paralyse a true artist. Thus, Krzysztof Pająk has chosen a more difficult road, wich would not be possible without a strong sense of self - confidence.It is not easy to determine the " future course of action".I guess that the artist himself would find it diffucult to foresee it. For the time being, he is fascinated - this seems to be just the right expression, by no means a pejorative one - with landscape painting. Both the artist's creative temperament and his present interests incline him to achieve the final form of his works by stratifying successive sequences of impressions and considerations as well as of mutual interactions between impulses. The townscapes thus created are reminscent of a poem inspired by experiencing and releasing some fervent emotions leads to the state of perfect satisfaction, and it is the laborious and solitary process of stiving for this "state of fulfilment that constitutes the power of both the artist himself and his artistic narration. Among the sources of Krzysztof Pająk's painting we find parallel motifs of 19th century townscapes, idealism of architecture of Renaissance Italian towns as well as an echo of Warhol's serigraphy, or painting of the Cobra group. Those less familiar with the history of may think that such a way of constructing canvases has ben derivved from pointillism.This, however, seems to be true only to a certain extent.Obviously,it is difficult for a contemporary artist to take no account of the experience accumulated by past generations of artists who followed solitary paths leading to sheer perfection.What he should do, however, is contribute s0me new personal experience to the quest for the universe called "beauty". Edmond Duranty3 in his recommendations to painters demanded: "You should not paint what you see. what would the use of painting be then ? It should serve only to show us things that not exist.( ...) What happens around us is uninteresting, just because we can see it every day". Krzysztof Pająk seems to comly with this clear and timeless message of the great thinker.It is confirmed definitely and unequivocally by this exhibition. Thanks to his high standatd of professionalism and honesty in the implementation of his projects, the artist makes one consistent whole of the visible and the unnamed, the past and the enigmatic. Krzysztof Pająk continues his quest for new solutions, he is still on his way.With all the greater hope, attention and friendliness we should follow his future actions. 1.Delacroix Eugene, "On Art Critics", in: "Oeuvres litteraires", Paris, 1923, pp.1-7 2.Simmel Geog, "Philosophie der Mode", Berlin, 1905, p.181 3.Duranty Edmond, "Notes sur 1' art", in : "Realisme", 10 july 1856, pp.1-2 Jacek Werbanowski 1990r tekst do katalogu wystawy w galerii "Test" art historian Editor-in Chief of " Exit" ( New Art in Poland)

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Violet-city-painting-no-268/90942/4012813/view

[flooringinstallation9058-blog]

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20 Up-and-comers To Watch In The Wood Flooring Industry

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You have a broad selection of floors to select from when you're planning to replace the flooring in your residence. It is vital to make sure one understands the kind of flooring that's in a home before beginning any refinishing job. Vinyl plank floors is rather different from anything you will likely see in many shops and colleges today.

Vinyl itself comes in lots of forms. It's often the selection of flooring for several retailers and businesses since it is easily cleaned and is offered in a wide variety of colors, patterns and textures. It is one of the most reliable and versatile possibilities for flooring across lots of different business sectors, and in healthcare, it is the best selection for hygiene, traction and visibility. Along with carpet, laminate and hardwood, it's a favorite choice for the floors of your house or business. Overall, it's by far the most suitable selection for hospital flooring.

Vinyl is resilient because of its capability to expand and contract. Thus it's that your very best answer in the event you're searching for something that's quite hard to be utilized on your house's flooring. It doesn't require a sealant but is recommended for high-moisture regions for an extra layer of protection.

Whenever your flooring is worn or damaged because of heavy traffic or older age, it's the ideal time to upgrade your own residence. Trust our installers to be certain your brand new flooring is correctly fitted into your floor as a way to maximize the product's attractiveness and lifespan. Speak to us today and receive a complimentary quote when you require new house flooring which makes any space something unique.

The Biggest Trends In Flooring Stores We've Seen This Year

The sort of flooring can make a substantial difference in the overall appearance and finishing of your undertaking. Laminate Laminate floors is fast becoming the floor covering of choice, since it is healthy, durable, and supplies a luxury look for an affordable price. It is not only a low-cost option but it is durable and aesthetically pleasing as well.

The flooring you choose can make your house a more comfortable spot for your loved ones. It can also be purchased from a Catalogue. If you've got hardwood flooring on the opposite side of this kitchen floor, you'll have the ability to alter the positioning of cabinets together with appliances easily. If you're interested in floating hardwood flooring, it is better to set up the kitchen cabinets first.

Flooring is among the most significant aspects of a contemporary architecture. Linoleum floors is another affordable flooring alternative which you may wish to consider for your house. Linoleum flooring in the shape of tiles is simpler and faster to set up.

Deciding which kind of flooring to buy is not straightforward. Caring For The Elegant Floor Since hardwood floors truly is a large attraction in your home, it as well a substantial investment. Wide plank hardwood floors appears wonderful.

Hardwood flooring is famed for its durability and hot aesthetic. The hardwood flooring's can also be rather simple to keep and clean. It's possible to discover engineered hardwood flooring in only about any species of hardwood.

There are a number of explanations for why recoating your hardwood flooring can assist you, here are a few of them. It's a long-term investment, so you need to make sure you're happy with the purchase price. Considering that The Discount Hardwood Floors features shipping throughout the world you will have the ability to utilize it anywhere you like.

Hardwood flooring, for instance, is simple to wash and helps prevent allergies. It can fade over time for several of factors. The best thing about engineered hardwood flooring is that is doesn't ruin the pure warmth and beauty of a conventional fantastic hardwood flooring.

In case the flooring won't be reused, utilize a level shovel or shingle scraping tool to eliminate the floor quickly by scraping up several rows at one time. Benefits of hardwood flooring Undoubtedly wood enhances the attractiveness of any room in your premises. Strong hardwood flooring is given in a completely huge array of fashions, designs, colours and stains.

Maintained properly, hardwood floors should at no time need to be replaced. Additionally, it may discolor in sunlight, making it challenging to discover new boards to color-match the existing floor. Engineered wood flooring has become the most popular option for tongue and groove timber ceilings.

9 Things Your Parents Taught You About Wood Flooring

Speak to the sales team in the store in which you would like to purchase flooring. Laminate flooring is created out of fiberboard and other protective layers. It's among the most economical choices on the industry as well as among the easiest to clean. Most laminate flooring was made to look like wood with several patterns and colors to select from.

The timber isn't made from a single solid piece but a lot of layers of veneers which make it more secure and strong. Likewise to solid wood flooring, there are a lot of fashions, species and colors to select from in relation to engineered wood! Engineered wood is made from particles and pieces of wood which maynot be utilized after the milling practice. There are several distinct sorts of engineered wood such as veneer choices which keep the attractive appearance and grain of pure hardwood flooring without the large price tag.

You just consider wood when you want to refloor a space in your house. Wood is likewise an reasonably priced choice for floors, which makes it a much increased investment. 1 other good thing about engineered wood is the choice of installation choices.

If you're unsure what kind of flooring is excellent for you, inquire! Hardwood flooring is much much reasonable to utilize in your residence, and it might also be utilised in a variety of places, like basements, where dampness is a major issue. You can also pick laminate floors rather than hardwood if you're searching for something eco friendly.

The manner by which the tiles join, it's more of a interlocking as opposed to butting up to every other. Additional vinyl tile is simpler to install with no specialist since it requires few tools. Durastone tiles and other sorts of luxury vinyl flooring are normally warmer under foot than normal flooring.

No other sort of flooring comes near PVC in regards to ease of cleaning. The flooring also doesn't require any polish or extra maintenance. Summary Whether you're buying Polaris sports floors or Capilla wall covering, then it's extremely important to decide on a reputed manufacturer.

The next thing you must do is to get your laminate floors and get rid of the adhesive. Laminate flooring will allow you to spend less in the future since it will not have to be substituted it. Moreover, for your security, you are advised to stick the laminate floors to the stair together with adhesive.

How Did We Get Here? The History Of Hardwood Flooring Told Through Tweets

Match the motifs into the subject of the space and put centrally so that it enhances the appearance of the floors and is the most eye-catching quality of the room. The kind of flooring also is contingent on the room you're remodeling. Ceramic tile floors is extremely versatile in the feeling as it pertains in a vast array of sizes, colours, shapes, designs in addition to the cost. It may persist for a life particularly if it's well-maintained.

Vinyl flooring is extremely durable and simple to keep. Moreover, it's a lot easier to take good care of than many natural substances and it is easy to install. In contrast, it's ready to install. It's offered in the shape of tiles or sheets. It's made of the byproducts of the petrochemical industry. Vinyl sheet flooring is a superb option for basement flooring since they are simple to install and don't demonstrate any grout lines.

Flooring is among the most significant aspects of a contemporary structure. Linoleum floors is another inexpensive flooring alternative which you may want to consider for your house. Linoleum flooring in the shape of tiles is simpler and faster to set up.

Laminate flooring, specifically floating floors is a wonderful decision to consider for a new house renovation or installation. It's normally produced from a combination of different layers secured together to make a flooring plank. It is a pocket-friendly alternative to traditional hardwood. It's a good choice for anybody with children, pets or reside a hectic lifestyle. It's not merely a low-cost alternative but it's durable and aesthetically pleasing too. It is sometimes a costeffective and elegant choice to more classic wood or stone, meaning you're in a position to develop a new look on your entire room in just a few hours.

Floors is exactly the same, and you've got to find out more about the various cheap flooring options, before picking the type of flooring you would like to install on your residence. Before you pick the flooring for your cellar, you must check whether the basement is safeguarded from moisture. If laminate flooring doesn't interest you, another inexpensive flooring alternative that you could consider is ceramic tiles. If you are searching for a nice but inexpensive wood floor, laminate bamboo flooring is the very best option available.

Laminate flooring isn't quite as expensive than hardwood floors, and is also simple to install. It's not so well-suited to spiral or curved staircases, on account of the cutting required. It will save you money in the long run as it will not need to be substituted it for years. Bamboo laminate floors is stronger and simple to install.

Wood flooring has been very common. As a consequence, engineered wood floors is not inclined to be affected by fluctuations in humidity because the ply heart is indeed secure, meaning that it can be set up whatsoever amounts of the house. It comes prefinished and unfinished with an assortment of widths and species of timber to choose from.

Your Worst Nightmare About Installing Laminate Flooring Come To Life

A third sort of flooring is laminate. What's more, wood flooring doesn't trap moisture or allergens. Considered among the best companies in the flooring business that is global, Hartco Quality Wood Flooring offers flexibility and versatility for creative men and women who wouldn't wish to only settle the conventional hardwood layouts.

Apart from the occasional layer of earth up rock for durability, you may observe that all floors is created from layers of genuine wood, without the usage of composites. Engineered hardwood flooring is made of layers of several kinds of adhesive and plywood. It has become a top choice in offices and homes across the world. It is vital to make certain you purchase from suppliers which have a fantastic reputation for offering the best quality and moving ahead when it has to do with buying hardwood flooring.

You have to pick a type of flooring which would bring about people's notice making a difference using its signature. For eliminating flooring, the explanations can fluctuate from owner to owner. The laminate flooring may cost slightly more, but it is going to be worth it in the very long run.

From the financial climate nowadays, flooring is really more affordable than 5 or 4 decades ago. Laminate flooring is usually a resin impregnated paper that's placed atop wood chip base. It's a sort of flooring that's specially designed to look like stone or the authentic exotic wood. Tongue and groove laminate floors is not a job that is difficult.

There are lots of sorts of floors which can be found on the marketplace. Laminate floors are able to keep your house looking great, and handicap accessible. It permits you to have your cake and eat it as well. Installing Nirvana laminate flooring is.

You may think the choices are over When you have resolved to go for laminate flooring in your house. Laminate flooring is quite simple to install and whenever you have your sleeves to fold and get to do the job you're going to have to save your money. Laminate wood flooring is wood.