#what's interesting in the... warsztat

[masterkirby]

I ranted a bit in that tags and here I'd like to ask you to recommend lit from your culture sphere or otherwise books that weren't included here but are "classics" for you

As for Polish lit I wanted to recommend sth that hasn't been translated, i.e. Wszystko jest poezją (Everything [or perhaps Anything?] is poetry) by Edward Stachura

so I'll just link this article: https://culture.pl/en/article/11-great-polish-books-you-have-to-read

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

[puffpiecesband-blog]

A small band playing little places in tiny countries: Puff Pieces European tour report

By Amanda Huron

Behind the show space in Erlangen, Germany. Photo credit: Tilman Dominka.

When you’re a little band few people have heard of and you go on tour, you get to play a whole variety of strange, unpredictable, wildly variegated places. Like the time my band Impetus Inter played in a tiny metal mobile home in Biloxi, Mississippi in the dead heat of summer, 1995, packed with punks: the sweatiest show, I think, I’ve ever played. Or the time a few years later that my band the Stigmatics played a gazebo in a riverside park in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, cool breezes drifting in off the water and the kids dancing like crazy and my Arkansas grandma watching from a little ways off. Larger venues, of course, have their own benefits. But there can be something special about a small spot.

When Puff Pieces toured Europe this past spring, we were lucky to play a number of little, interesting spots, most of which were also explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-fascist. If you’re a small-ish band thinking about heading to Europe, you might want to consider these places, too.

The storefront show space Handstand und Moral, Leipzig.

A note, first, on the money. What made it all work financially is that every place we played but one guaranteed us a certain payment for that night’s performance — mostly between 200 and 300 Euros. When we added up all those guarantees, plus the money we hoped we’d make selling our records and t-shirts, we figured we could just about cover the cost of our plane tickets, rental car, musical equipment rental, and all our other travel costs, including food (minimal, since most of our meals were provided, see below), gas, and tolls. We did not hire a driver, as most bands who tour Europe seem to do, and this saved us a lot of money. (As the person who did almost all the driving, I can say it was also fun driving all over Europe, on highways without speed limits and tiny crooked cobblestone streets.) If we hadn’t broken down in Poland (that part was less fun: terrifying, in fact) and had to pay for a tow, and missed that night’s show in Brno, Czech Republic, we would have broken even, and actually made a bit of money on the whole endeavor.

Poster for the show, Cafe Siroko, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic.

This is one of the ways in which touring Europe, as a small band, can in a weird way seem more feasible that touring the U.S: in Europe, even the little spots can provide guarantees, even for little bands. Now, I will say that it was not always clear where that money was coming from each night. Some nights, enough people came to the shows that the money was clearly made at the door; other nights, fewer people came, and the promoter seemed to pull the money out of thin air, or his bank account, or some secret cash reserve the venue maintained. Regardless, every night but one, we were paid the guaranteed amount.

It also helps that in Europe, if someone puts on a show for you, they feed you dinner before the show, usually homemade and delicious, put you up in someone’s home or a nearby hotel (I was surprised by how often the promoter paid for us to stay in a hotel or hostel), and feed you breakfast the next morning, before sending you off on your way. All this support seems sometimes to be because there is more state support for the arts and for life in general, which trickles down to these little spots in the form of no rent, or state-provided grants, or even just people who have the time to work on these spaces because they are receiving some form of government welfare and therefore have to spend less time at waged labor. And sometimes it seems to be because of a long history of successful organizing against the state, in the case of the many places we played that started out as anarchist squats and had been able to adapt and survive over time, and were adept at operating on the sly and on the cheap, so as to be able to funnel more of the money from the door and the bar to the touring bands.

On to the shows.

Sleeping bag repair on the patio outside JuKuZ.

Erlangen: JuKuZ

JuKuZ stands for Jugend Kultur Zentrum, or Youth Culture Center, a pleasingly generic name for an odd little space in an enchanted locale. This little structure is in the middle of woodsy fields, crouched along a stream, far from any other buildings. It used to be a restaurant, but then the restaurant went out of business, and somehow a bunch of anarchist punk kids got ahold of it, and now the city just lets them use it to do their thing, which consists of punk shows, films, feminist meetings, political talks, and such. The night we played, two sweet fellows cooked up delicious spinach lasagna for both bands, which they later sold at the show for two Euros a slice. There was a bar, and beer. There were nature walks to be had all around. There was breakfast provided the next morning on the patio overlooking the stream, and flyers everywhere against fascism, against Fortress Europe. 

Parking lot with socialist housing, Prague. Building #7 is on the right.

Prague: 007

I’d assumed, going in, that 007 was some sort of James Bond reference. In fact, this was a punk bar in the basement of one of twelve apartment buildings that make up a state-subsidized student housing complex on a hill above the historic city. The buildings are numbered 1 through 12, and each building has a club or bar in its basement, named for its building number. We were in building 7, so our club was 007. Building 11 had a bar named Club 011, and so on. You might like the pretty historic Prague architecture and the strolls across the famous Charles Bridge, but I prefer the socialist housing complex built around the massive parking lot, adjacent to an enormous unused stadium and surrounded by abandoned structures of fanciful glass and concrete. If you play at 007, you can wander off for a walk through a lovely wooded park nearby, threaded through with the ruins of castle walls, that stretches down the hill to the central city, and later the bar will feed you vegan pizza.

Entrance to Warsztat, Krakow.

Krakow: Warsztat

Warsztat, which means “workshop,” is a scrappy warehouse one block from the Vistula River. We arrived early, casting about for the promoter, who wasn’t yet there. A young chap we ran into explained that a bunch of guys on the second floor were training in street fighting in order to beat up Nazis. Nazis march openly in the streets in today’s Poland, and if you hadn’t heard, the U.S. is not the only country these days to be turning fascist. (In fact we were shocked, on this tour, that no one once asked us about the current U.S. political situation. We realized it was because they are all so mortified by their own political situations.) Anyway, turns out this was an anti-fascist fight club practicing upstairs from the show space. We wandered away for a bit for a walk, and when we returned, we found a gaggle of thuggish dudes sprawled about the entrance. One guy’s face was all bruised up: the fight club guys on break. Later that night, one of them seemed to be guarding the door of the show. I guess I’m glad us wimpy punks had some protection. It was a pretty tough-guy scene, but somehow we sold a few records.

The club under the train tracks, Vienna.

Vienna: Venster 99

This is a punk bar built into the viaduct of an overhead train track, really a genius place to put a loud rock club. The two gents working the spot were voluble crust punks, one a Croatian on pins and needles because his wife was at home, about to give birth any minute. The kind promoter fed us delicious stew. The bathroom was filled with flyers for our friends’ bands’ upcoming shows, and also flyers in many languages about the importance of consent. After we played, a tiny woman grabbed me in an enormous bear hug as I hopped off the stage, her eyes gleaming with joy. Mike talked to her for a long time: turns out she was a witch, who recognized the magical nature of our music, which made me pleased.

”Punk is also up to us.” Behind La Comedia Michelet, Paris.

Paris: La Comedia Michelet

To be precise, this show took place in Montreuil, a suburb just east of Paris. La Comedia was a nice shitty little dive of a punk bar, and one of our best shows all tour. The place was packed, and there were lots of older women there, toughened old punk ladies maybe in their 60s, which I took as a good sign. A French band called The Stratocasters opened up, my favorite band we played with all tour, wearing matching suspenders and playing jumpy, funny, strange music. The show was raucous, drunken, seemed just on the verge of explosion.

The stage before the show, Kiel.

Kiel: Fahrradkino

Kiel is in very furthest north Germany, right near the Danish border. This show spot was nestled in a maze of studios that had once been an art college, which was then abandoned, and was then taken over by squatters in order to do art projects, and has now gained a semi-official status, as the city shrugged and, as in the case of Erlangen, seemed to say, “okay, kids, do your thing.” The complex is currently home to about sixty different art and social projects. No one pays rent. There’s a lockbox nailed to a tree out front where they can all access the key in order to come and go. The name of the particular studio space where we played, “Fahrradkino,” means “bicycle cinema,” so named because it used to be a spot where people showed films using electricity generated by bicycle. Typical anarchist punks! The opening act for our show that night was a vegan barbecue in the central courtyard. The next day we drove a few miles out to the Baltic Sea, just because we could.

On the Baltic Sea.

Hamburg: Hafenklang

The famous Hafenklang! A former squat, right on the river Elba by the now-fancy warehouse district. You can tell this place has been around forever because of how incredibly well-organized it is. Before you play, the cook cooks all the bands an amazing vegan meal made up of many separate components, including potatoes and and fake meat stew and various salads and corn on the cob, and you all sit around together at a big table and eat. The sleeping quarters are right next door to the show space: each band gets its designated key to the sleeping area, on a lanyard, so you can come and go, taking pre-show naps at will. (Incredibly, the drivers get their own, smaller and quieter room, since they have to wake up the next day and drive. Like I said, this place has been around a long time and they've figured out how to do things right.) The show was lovely: many people came, and many women with shining eyes came up to buy records from me afterwards, and later in the night the DJ put on Mission of Burma, and as I reeled around the by-then-empty dance floor to “Academy Fight Song,” I knew I’d attained utter life perfection, if only for a moment. Breakfast was provided the next day at noon, back in the bar.

Potsdam. We played inside that darkened open doorway, to the left.

Potsdam: Black Fleck

Last show of tour, and one of the best. The spot was called Black Fleck, although maybe it’s now better known as “the venue formerly known as Black Fleck,” because it seems to keep changing names in order to somehow evade the authorities. Anyhow, it’s in the ground floor of a grand old squat, which is maybe a former squat, it was hard to tell what was going on there, quite, as we were led through warrens of rooms up to the kitchen where a giant shepherd’s pie awaited. It was the perfect show for ending the tour: the little place was packed, and people seemed to really get the music, and we sold the last of our records. We decided to give away the last of our t-shirts, as we didn’t want to pay to ship them back to the U.S. (they hadn’t been selling well: warning: don't make red t-shirts), and that turned out to be a delightful exercise, trying to match all these differently-sized people with the right sizes, everybody tickled to be getting something for free. Commerce can provide an opportunity for communication, but giving things away for free is magic.

Playing at La Comedia Michelet. Photo credit: Sasha Ivanovic.