Tricked-out Gypsy Tombstone Fail

We were back in Czech this past week (yep: already) for reasons that are more complex than interesting to relate: basically, I had been under the impression that my proposal for the Jewish Museum identity was due then, so we also made plans to visit my wife’s father in Karlovy Vary, hang out in Prague for a few days, go to a wedding, and for my wife to play a field hockey game in Pilsen. By the time I found out that my Jewish Museum deadline has been extended to the end of the month, we were already locked into going…

Since it wound up being an accidental working vacation of sorts, I decided to use the time available in Prague to go investigate something my wife had brought to my attention: near where we live used to live, there’s a huge cemetery where she sometimes hangs out with one of her mom allies. She’d noticed a section of gravestones belonging to gypsy families that are apparently dazzlingly tricked out. It sounded to me like Prague’s answer to the highly-accessorized cars, low-rider bicycles and – back in the day – horses of the Mission’s chicano community, so naturally I was intrigued. Unfortunately, when I got to the graveyard, I was helpless to find the section she had told me about–- I mean, this place is GIANT. After awhile, I got tired and was afraid to lie down and take a nap in an open grave, so decided to split…

So, all I have to offer you are a few shots of plain old non-gypsy Czech grave sites. I really liked this one for Leopold Batěk:


The impulse to have a statue of yourself on your tombstone is natural enough, I suppose… but I really like the restless spryness of this pose: it looks like the figure is about to impatiently hop up and go down the street to buy some cigarettes. Good stuff.

Then there’s Zděnek Šimek, who was into training bears:

This strikes me as a more upscale version of the kind of knit sweaters that you sometimes see guys wearing with Kawasaki motorcycles or some other choice hobby stitched on them.

Since this post is looking a little skimpy, here’s some totally unrelated bonus entertainment:

Trashy Czech romance novels! Be still my heart. The title of this one translates as ‘The Heartfelt Guy’. This came from the bookshelf of my cousin-in-law, who has a whole raft of these– perhaps the entire ‘Čteny Pro Dívky’ (Books For Girls) series?

Let The Facile Comparisons Begin!

So far, during our first week in Berlin, my wife and I have agreed to a system whereby I’m allowed one comment per day along the lines of ‘Berlin awesome! / Prague sucks!’ so that I don’t drive her crazy by continually beating the same conversational drum throughout the day (plus, you know, denigrating her native culture and that stuff).

I find that I get the most mileage out of my one daily comment if I present it as a pseudo-amnesiac episode. Example: on Saturday afternoon, we went to a bike store to get help fixing our kiddo bike seat onto my wife’s bike. On the way back, I decided to use my allotted comment this way:

Me: ‘Boy, that sucks that we didn’t get to the bike store before noon and so it was already closed when we arrived.’

Wife: (confused)

Me: ‘Oh, wait– we’re in Berlin, I forgot… the store was open! That’s Prague where every bike store in the city is closed by noon.’

I have to admit that this construction gets pretty contrived after a while, but I don’t think I’ve totally worn it out. Yet.

Other comments-of-the-day have revolved around fairly banal (yet strangely evocative) differences in day-to-day life. The fact that people will stop for ice cream and sit down with it on the curb and idle away a few minutes enjoying themselves there instead of sullenly bustling away as fast as possible. The fact that the bank machines actually dispense notes that you can break without getting the Czech Iron Curtain Face (Czech ATMs for some reason dispense the equivalent of $120 bills, which you’re subjected to eight kinds of contempt simultaneously if you try to use anywhere). You get the picture– lots of small things of the Pulp Fiction ‘Burger Royale’ caliber. Then there’s also the UNBELIEVABLE RELIEF at being able to bike everywhere again. (You can bicycle in Prague, but will quickly drop it if you value life and living to any degree). I almost feel it breaks the entire social contract if you’re living in a city and can’t bike…

But most of all, there’s a startling sensation of dilation for me coming from a place as culturally-compressed as Prague. Everything in Prague is still done in a way that is just Czech, Czech, Czech… often, nobody seems to know why it’s done this way… maybe the thinking behind it hasn’t been revisited in three centuries… but it just is a certain way and there’s no negotiating with it. Berlin has the kind of elasticity preferred by rootless cosmopolitan Jewish homosexuals like myself– the city seems to mutate and adjust to meet the shifting demands of its inhabitants, be it a demand for ethnic food or stores that stay open past fucking noon on a Saturday.

(Photo: on same Saturday, we all biked together to Mauer Park, as I hoped that something interesting would happen that would justify my constant ‘Blah blah, Berlin is so cool’ claims. We arrived at the place where I’ve heard about the karaoke being done and came upon this impromptu mime act. Whew!)

Fahrvergnügen!

So, how did the big move to Berlin go? Well, not so great…

The plan was to rent a giant van, pack all our stuff inside on Friday night while our kid was sleeping. Then, Saturday, leave him in Prague to celebrate his birthday with a babysitter while we drove the van to Berlin (this was horribly guilt-inducing and heart-rending, about abandoning him on his birthday I mean… but at least he’s too young to care about birthdays and likes his babysitter.) The idea was to have everything unloaded and carried up three flights of stairs in Prenzlauer Berg by 5pm, allowing us to get back to Prague at about 9 to relieve the babysitter.

As it happened, we got within 12 miles of Berlin– right by the old Schönfeld airport– when some guy in a pickup truck in front of us started wavering uncertainly. He pulled off the road finally ahead of us, so my wife– who was driving– let down her guard for a moment and started to say something to me. Just then, the idiot pulled back onto the road without indicating and decided to try to do a u-turn (illegal of course– we’re on the highway!) in front of us. I yelled, my wife slammed on the brakes and we collided at about 30mph, smashing the passenger side of the van and puncturing the oil filter. Suddenly, the scenario shifted from fiddle-dee-dee, we’re moving to a new city! to we must now stand on the side of the highway and summon the German police.

The spätzel-eating cretin who’d pulled into our path didn’t have a ‘handy’, so it was up to us to make the necessary calls. I had of course imagined that there would be a point in our moving-to-Berlin adventure where my lack of German would be a serious problem… but hadn’t imagined that the moment would occur before we even technically arrived (at this point, I should mention that, mockingly, the Berlin city limits sign was about 100 yards ahead of us). I managed to reach a police dispatcher who spoke the glorious international language that is English and, after a Germanic long-but-not-as-long-as-you’d-wait-in-the-U.S. interval, two cops pulled up. I’d love to be able to write that the encounter with the German police was either like a Sprockets skit or a Gestapo porn scene, but in fact it was neither. There was a point that involved me describing what had transpired in hand signals only, but otherwise there was nothing funny about this situation whatsoever. Luckily, my wife speaks a decent lick of German, so she was able to make the relevant points such as ‘wait, you realize that the other driver has to be lying when he tells you he wasn’t pulling a u-turn, given that the dent is on the side of his car, right?’

Meanwhile, during the half hour we waited for the cops, the following things were learned by phone: (1) the rental company in Prague will send a tow-truck driver out from Prague who will arrive in four hours; (2) the flim-flam insurance agreement my wife signed leaves us liable for the towing costs, but (3) somewhat amazingly, you can get a tow-truck to come from Prague to Berlin at the drop of a hat and haul you and your vehicle back to Prague for about $600, which seems pretty cheap to me, all things considered. (4) Our babysitter has agreed to spend the night with our kid– this news is met with overwhelming relief. But that relief is entirely cancelled out by the horrifying realization that (5) we’re looking at having all our stuff towed all the way back to Prague when we’d almost made it to Berlin, like some obnoxious video game where your frog is run over by a truck and you have to start over again at the beginning of the highway. This prompts me to call my friend in Berlin who (6) is just rolling out of bed at 3pm and agrees to run out and get another rental truck, meet us at the scene of the accident, help transfer everything from the smashed van, complete the move, and drive us back to the scene of the accident in time to meet the Czech tower at 9pm. Day saved! Otherwise, we would have been looking at… what, exactly? Arriving back in Prague with a smashed van full of stuff and no home to put it (sublettors were coming the next day to move into our place), plus a babysitter who’s already gassed and tired of us from having spent an entire Saturday taking care of our kid. Yikes.

Wife and I blearily watched Strapping Tow Truck Guy do his thing and raise our van onto his truck, then we got into the cab of his truck and immediately slept the entire way home, arriving in Prague at about 3am. Amazingly, at this point, we still weren’t out of the woods entirely: two nights later, we were staying at a friend’s place in Prague and planning to make the final move the next morning when we discovered that our child car seat was broken and couldn’t be fastened correctly. After three of the most exasperating hours of my life spent trying to fix it, we eventually consigned ourselves to making a mad dash out the next morning for a new seat. During the final drive in our car on Tuesday, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the asphalt suddenly rise up and devour the car whole– I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervously prepped for disaster.

Anyway, um………. it’s great to be here! I just wish getting here hadn’t been so fraught. Just to warn you, the two stock overused joke remarks that people have been making about this incident are ‘It’s a sign you weren’t supposed to leave Prague!’ (Czech people make this one) or some variant of ‘Good thing you got all the bad luck out of the way first thing!’ (Germans and Americans). So, if you make a comment along either of those lines, it probably won’t be as original as you think.

Rock-A-Mambo Time

Oh yeah: the Rock-A-Mambo exhibition opening party happened last Thursday. I’ve just been too busy to write one red word about it… but now that I finally have photos from the event, I barely have to!

Details of the exhibition are written up here. Thanks to Tina Simonova for snapping the pictures. She did such a good job that it actually looks like a legitimate exhibition space. In fact, it’s a still-being-renovated wing of Prague College that had no electricity until an hour before the show opened. Glad tidings!

The goings-on:

(That’s me on the far left, anxiously buzzing around and prodding everyone to remember to have a fun time.)

The work:

Blog Fight Song, pt. 5

“Kerouac taped together twelve-foot-long sheets of drawing paper, trimmed at the left margin so they would fit into his typewriter, and fed them into his machine as a continuous roll. Holmes visited his apartment while this version of On The Road was in progress and was amazed at the thundering sound of Jack’s typewriter racing non-stop. Joan had taken a job as a waitress, and when she got home she fed Jack pea soup and coffee; he took Benzedrine to stay awake. Joan was impressed by the fact that Jack sweated so profusely while writing On the Road that he went through several T-shirts a day. He hung the damp shirts all over the apartment so they could dry.”

From Ann Charters’ introduction to the 1991 Penguin edition of On The Road. Previous Blog Fight Song editions here.

Matthew Wilder Running Diary

Speaking of Congolese mambo… here’s Matthew Wilder!

A few comments on this:

00:01-00:17: Mystifying disparity between the number of people on stage doing things versus the overall quietness of sound. There seem to be 95 people dancing, playing various keytars and instruments and pumping out Matthew Wilder’s unique blend of white reggae… and yet I can only hear only a wafer-thin synth upbeat, some drums, vocals, and one or two other things.

00:18-00:22: great pink/purple discotard shirt combo from Matthew Wilder. Reminiscent of our old enigmatic friend Bob Blank.

00:22-00:33: Shocking slur regarding Chinese and laundry. WOW. Pretty culturally insensitive, Matthew Wilder. Even for 1982.

01:01: Wilder’s enunciation of cocky is just totally awesome. I can’t watch it without laughing.

01:33: Whoa, bitch just cut in from outta nowhere. I know I accused Matthew Wilder of cultural insensitivity above…. but is it bad that I automatically assumed that this was Phylicia Rashad until I did some research and discovered it’s actually Marilyn McCoo?

01:49-01:52 After cocky, the way McCoo walks off the stage here is the second funniest thing in this video. Again, I laugh every time.

02:20-02:50 I’m amazed that, at some point in this stretch, they don’t do the thing where they suddenly go up one half-step to breath temporary new life into the chorus. You know what I mean by this, right? Instead, Wilder just emerges from behind his synthesizer to do some dancing, including a weirdly fetal move at about 2:47 that involves shaking the mic back and forth with both hands.

Rock-A-Mambo

My latest time-consuming shenanigan has been to organize a show of student work for an exhibition called Rock-A-Mambo. The work comes out of an assignment called ‘Culture & Cliché’ that I gave to eight successive semesters of bewildered students for my Ideas Generation class. Basically, students are tasked with designing a CD cover (although I’m not sure that some of the younger ones even know what a ‘compact disc’ is these days) for 17 tracks of weird/rare/cool Congolese mambo, from this nearly-forgotten period of music history in the late 50s/early 60s when musicians in central Africa were super into Cuban dance rhythms.

The point of this musical selection isn’t to be willfully obscure. OK, maybe it’s partly that. But it’s also about the fact that the music is so out-of-left-field that students have to do tons of research to unpack the backstory behind the music. And, because it’s a strange urbanized hybrid of African and Latin forms, the usual trusty clichés of ‘barefoot village kid beating on congo drum as giraffe lopes by’ don’t cut it here.

As to expected, there are always a few students each semester who are always stymied by the nature of the assignment. But many more have produced fantastically varied, well-informed, creative responses to the assignment. So, I’m having a show with an opening party on Thursday. Good times.

I originally learned about the genre from our friend Alastair— check out the music below. Above is a poster I made for the exhibition, with an unauthorized assist from Malick Sidibé.

One Nose Horn

One of those semi-incriminating cached searches that come up on your iPhone when you don’t have a good alibi ready:


Along similar lines, I wonder if the mysteries of Czech language point towards a secret unholy marriage between rhinoceroses and unicorns:

Rhinoceros = nosorožec, meaning ‘Nose horn’

Rhinoceros visual aid:

Unicorn: jednorožec, meaning ‘One horn’

Is the rhinoceros the husband? And what would a jednonosorožec look like?

ZMP-fueled Image Dump

My current attempt to redesign the visual identity for the ZMP (Jewish Museum of Prague) is the kind of project that involves a lot of trolling around the internet disguised as ‘research’. Here are some compelling images I’ve turned up along the way. Obviously, most of these have no discernible connection to Judaism or museums whatsoever… but, hey, that’s the digressive nature of the internet for you. You don’t like it, go to France and get on minitel.