Dan – Page 27

When Natural Disasters Collide: Misc. Edition

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A few quick follow-up thoughts on Krafty’s When Natural Disasters Collide: California Edition post:

1. I couldn’t be more excited about the (slim) prospect of Hurricane Jemina wiping out the forest fires ravaging SoCal right now. It’s clearly the best chance that the ‘When Natural Disasters Collide’ concept has of ever actually happening. But, it would be even better if forest fires were also given names, like hurricanes. Imagine how invested one could get in rooting for Forest Fire Gerald vs. Hurricane Jemina, say. You could probably even gamble on the outcome.

2. Another potential matchup that only just occurred to me would be Tsunami vs. Tidal Wave. This would have an instructive component, in that people often confuse the two or think that they’re the same thing. So, this would be for bragging rights, like those pro wrestling matches where one guy gets to tear the other’s mask off. Although, it would be hard to stage a fair fight, because tsunamis are much, much bigger than tidal waves (which actually hardly qualify as natural disasters at all, to be honest). It would have to be a very small tsunami against a very big tidal wave, such as the ones in the Bay of Fundy that supposedly reach 50 feet.

3. All this talk of natural disasters over the last two days, I’ve listened to ‘When The Levee Breaks‘ a good 3 or 4 times. Is there a better song about a natural disaster? Or is this as good as it gets?

Mysteries of Czech language: K(e)rmit

(Part of an ongoing series. Previous installments begin here).

There’s a verb ‘krmit’ in Czech that describes the act of feeding an animal, small human or very old human (basically, anyone who can’t feed themselves). Czech is a very precise language in that there are often these highly specific verbs to differentiate between slightly different activities (feeding somebody else vs. feeding oneself, taking someone somewhere by car vs. taking someone somewhere by foot, and so forth). The pronunciation is phonetic: just say ‘Kermit’, but try to stifle the ‘e’ as much as possible. It helps if you smoosh your chin into your chest to constrict your throat and sort of gurgle the word out. Czech language is full of these consonant clusters– you can in fact say ‘fart, death, burp’ without using a single vowel.

I had a hard time convincing my wife that ‘Kermit’ is actually a real name in the native English-speaking world and that I wasn’t just pulling her leg. I think this might be the worst-conceived name to give a Czech kid, narrowly surpassing ‘Brezhnev’, ‘Khrushchev’ and ‘George W.’.

Amateurism, Elmer Bischoff and Jacques Henri Lartigue

During my just-finished vacation to Poland (described in last post), I had an interesting conversation with a musician/composer guy about a manuscript he’s just finished writing for a novel. His main take was that it had been really fun to write because it provided him with a break from the tasks that he considers his real career, principally composing music and trying to organize stoned, discombobulated jazz musicians. And, because writing is strictly a sideline thing for him, he allowed himself to take his time with it, dropping the manuscript for an entire year and then picking it up again later when the urge struck. Above all, the persistence of fun came across really clearly in the way he talked about his experience with writing.

This reminded me a lot of all things bloggy, naturally– as I’ve written about before, part of the whole point of starting a blog was to find a venue that’s conducive to light, breezy, dilettante-ish writing rather than labored, serious ‘I am trying to be a writer’-type writing. It occurred to me that another, simpler way of putting this is that there’s something inherently amateurish about this format, for better and for worse. This got me thinking about the quality of amateurish-ness, which I would define as when you’re doing something where you don’t exactly know what it is you’re doing and the results perhaps benefit from the circumstance of not knowing.

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Many years ago, I went to a show of works by the painter Elmer Bischoff in Oakland. Bischoff made his name doing fantastic figurative oil paintings but then got bogged down and hit a ditch that he described as a ‘state of immobilization.’ The solution came when he dropped oil paint and suddenly began working with acrylics, producing playful, abstract paintings of an entirely different nature. In fairness, I would have to say that his acrylics are never really as good as his oils, but the significant thing is that you can palpably detect the sense of fun re-entering the picture in these later acrylic works. I’ve always remembered his account of this switch in the exhibition catalog that I read at the time: it felt, he said, like “leaving a church and entering a gymnasium. The lights were turned up and there was a very different spirit and feel about the whole thing.”

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Above: Bischoff oil painting on left, acrylic on right

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The photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue is an example of an artist whose work exudes amateurism, in part because he created his most famous works when he was a kid between the ages of 6 and 18. Lartigue’s early photos have an evident sense of childishness in all the best meanings of the word. Topically, they show a kid’s world, often taken from a kid’s low vantage point: Lartigue taking a bath, his cousin sliding down a bannister, car races, sports. Aesthetically, they show a world full of energy, motion, speed, fun– the things that kids are drawn to.

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Self portrait, age 8

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His cousin, Bichonnade

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1912 Grande Prix

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Self portrait, age 15

Bizarrely, although Lartigue took photos his entire life, he supported himself mainly as a painter until his childhood work was rediscovered and rocketed him to international fame late in his life.

The director Wes Anderson is reportedly a big Lartigue fan. There’s a shot of Max Fischer in Rushmore that’s modeled exactly after one of Lartigue’s teenage self-portraits as an homage.

What I did on my vacation

Before I moved to Central Europe, I never really thought about the words vacation and Polish border fitting into a sentence together. But in fact, that sentence precisely describes what we’ve been up to for the past five days (and, by extension, why I haven’t posted anything here for several days).

It’s interesting how much moving here has changed my sense of proximity and orientation to this part of the world. When I lived in the U.S. and travelled to Europe from time to time, I used to think of Prague as an exotically eastern location, slightly beyond the outer edge of what’s known and familiar (known and familiar being, I suppose, Western Europe), a gateway to a mysterious land of slavic spires and Orthodox churches. Or something like that. Anyway, now that I’ve lived here for three years, Czech Republic feels overwhelmingly central, for better or for worse– as its best, cozily and conveniently in-the-middle-of-things; at its worst, boringly midwestern. So, within that new framework, driving to Poland spent somewhat like when I was in college in Minnesota and we used to drive to Wisconsin on beer runs. (For more on this European nations = U.S. states analogy, see this post).

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Our five days were spent with friends in this renovated old hunting lodge just over the border (the first time, incidentally, that my three month-old son has been abroad), re-christened the Saraswati Hotel by its current owners, Raj and Kamila. Raj is an American of Indian descent; Kamila, Polish– I imagine that this combination must give them a pretty distinct pedigree among hotel proprietors in Poland. Gratifyingly, Raj told me that the lodge had been converted to Communist offices when they bought it, the upstairs subdivided into innumerable dinky offices that were promptly torn down. Leave it to Communism to bureaucratize even the most scenic of places.

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Raj has also built a complete recording studio in a nearby farmhouse (shown above). This was visually interesting to me, in part because the structure itself so clearly retains the character of farmhouses found all over Poland and Czech- such that you could almost picture a babushka peeling potatoes in the main room- and yet was filled with state-of-the-art sound boards and pre-amps and general recording gadgetry. Also, there was this incredible-looking harpsichord sitting in one of the main rooms (shown poorly in this photograph, unfortunately):

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The event was a week-long get-together among a bunch of musician friends, including a troupe of players from the Warsaw Opera. In fact, everyone there was an accomplished musician except for me and my family, who were egregiously freeloading off the creative vibes. Of course, the great thing about hanging out around musicians is that they’re constantly expressing their enjoyment of things in musical terms, whereas I can only express myself through sarcasm. I particularly enjoyed a surprise midnight baroque extravaganza staged for Kamila’s birthday. The weekend in general reminded me a tad of the Simpsons episode where Homer achieves his dream of working at a bowling alley but then has to quit for financial reasons: as he trudges back towards the power plant, his depressed bowling-addicted co-workers are heard in the background: ‘I’m depressed… What should be do?… I know: let’s bowl!’ followed by happy cheers and sounds of bowling. The vibe with the musician troupe had the same feeling, except with ‘Let’s make music!’ interjected at every opportunity.

Finally, there are a few interesting things to check out on the way:

1. Disused Poland/Czech border checkpoint. I love abandoned checkpoints. This one was fully operational as recently as 18 months ago, creating a thriving and pointless bureaucratic traffic jam. Since Czech and Poland joined the Schengen area (the mass of Western and Central European countries that have open borders) and closed their checkpoints, all that’s missing is some rusting girders and tumbleweeds. It was more romantic and lonely on way up when we passed through this point in the rain; unfortunately, I only got around to taking pictures on the way back when it was sunny… so, I converted them to black-and-white as a compromise:

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2. Ještěd. This nutcase sci-fi observatory (pronounced ‘YES-shtead’) sits on one of the highest points in the Czech Republic, just over the border in Liberec. It looks just like something out of one of those 1950s visualizations of the future where everyone takes their own aircraft to work and talks on TV telephones.

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Also, some pics of nice countryside on the Czech side of the border (a bit blurry, as they were snapped from a moving car):

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Name days

Having whined about the Czech calendar and its non-Gregorian month names in my last post, it’s time to talk about the coolest aspect of the Czech calendar: name days. There’s a limited canon of accepted ‘normal’ first names (maybe 400?) in Czech; everyone who has a ‘normal’ name gets a name day, which is marked in the calendar. Thus, all the Jaroslavs celebrate together on one day; all the Petras on another, and so forth. Dan, I’m happy to report, is part of the canon, so I get a name day on Dec 17th where I get together with my friend ‘Big Dan’ and have a shot.

In terms of the stature afforded to name days, it’s basically halfway between a normal day and one’s birthday. Thus: name day = (birthday + normal day) / 2.

Petr Bokuvka’s post on this subject over at The Czech Daily World brought to mind two additional points on this topic. First, as Bokuvka points out, both Adam and Eve (Eva) celebrate their name day on Christmas Day (December 24th in Czech). An Adam I know here told me that this produces a dynamic where whenever an Adam meets an Eve here (there are lots of each), they immediately get to bond about the shared experience of getting screwed out of name day presents by Christmas, etc. Cool.

Also, Bokuvka pointed out something I didn’t know: weirdly, the Czech calendar has doubled up on Peter (Petr) by giving him two name days – one by himself on February 22nd and then another that he shares with Paul (Pavel) on June 29th. As I wrote in the comments section of his post, this gives you the opportunity to literally rob Peter in order to pay Paul, as you could skip buying the former a present in order to buy one for the latter… or, to take it even more literally, by stealing Peter’s present and redistributing it to Paul. Seeing as Peter gets two name days, he probably deserves it.

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Do nothing day

gregory-xiii My favorite small residual thing about my birthday- once the day itself has passed, the festivities have ended, and the giant paper-mache birthing reenactment tube/slide has been disassembled- is easily being able to figure out what day of the month it is for the remainder of August. Because my birthday falls on the 7th, I get three-plus weeks of easy date calculation.

I wish that these powers also extended to allowing me to remember the names of months in Czech. This is one of my real downfalls when it comes to learning the language of my adoptive country. I even get a tingling ‘oh no’ sensation when the conversation swings towards some topic involving dates.

Maddeningly, Czech month names don’t stem from the familiar Gregorian etymological roots. I would be okay with this if it were a sort of pan-Slavic trait and other neighboring countries also didn’t have Gregorian-derived month names. But no: it’s specific to Czech. Even little buddy Slovakia, which shares about 95% of its language with Czech, has months that sound like January, February, etc.

Another thing that makes Czech calendar names hard to remember is that there doesn’t seem to be any handy mnemonic for keeping track of them. The names actually do mean things, like ‘falling leaves’ and so forth, but with the exception of Kveten (from ‘flower’, for May) the meanings are obscure enough that they’re no easier to remember than just learning the month name outright. Others have no meaning at all that I’m aware of and sound to me like lesser-known Soviet leaders: Duben, Brezen. Finally, they don’t have the feature of being grouped by name length – longer names at the beginning and end of the year, shorter in the middle – that I remember helping me to learn our calendar as a kid. Weirdly, the only naming convention that the Czech calendar shares with ours is similarly-named six and seventh months – Cerven and Cervenec .

Days of the week, blessedly, are much more intuitive and have personable, easy-to-remember names. My favorite is Nedele – Sunday – which means ‘do nothing’. Do nothing day. If you insist, Czech language.

Annals of less persistently being confused with more

Last week, we had a meeting with a client who predictably bleated ‘Less is more!’ at us while trying to explain his misgivings about the direction of the book we’re creating for him. I was tempted to point out to him that, actually, less isn’t more, it’s less and more is more, but decided to hold my tongue and nod, pseudo-enlightenedly.

I’ve blogged before on my feelings about this catch-phrase and my appreciation for Milton Glaser’s counter-proposal that ‘just enough is more’. The Polish Blues Brothers poster that Krafty blogged on is one piece of evidence in the case there is sometimes room for busyness in good design: it’s the jaunty details, the complexity, the sense of bustle and personality here that makes it such a winner. The same can certainly be said for this James Brown poster designed by Sergio Moctezuma at Tribal DDB that I discovered while researching type-only posters for an assignment I gave to my Prague College students. Like the Blues Brothers poster, there’s a visual generosity here that doesn’t often occur in the realm of high modernism. Of course, it also resembles the Blues Brothers poster in terms of its distinct blue cast and the evident love of hand-lettering.

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Mailbag: Muluqèn Mèllèssè and Paradise Lost

Reader JS – despite finding the Muluqèn Mèllèssè song I posted ‘nice but not memorable’ – pluckily set out for his local Ethiopian-manned newsstand to get some information on the mysterious singer. Here’s what transpired:

I wrote the name of the song and the singer on a sheet of paper and showed it to the Ethiopians at the newstand. As soon as they cast eyes upon it, the two Ethiopian guys behind the counter broke out in beatific smiles and launched into a duet rendition of the song in close harmony. It was like a real-life evocation of those moments in musical theater where people break into song without apparent premeditation, but unlike karaoke in that it was done by people with strong musical aptitudes who apparently had been preparing for this moment for a decade or so. (Like the Beatles blackbird.) The singer is some kind of legend in Ethiopian music, who produced this masterpiece more than 20 years ago, before he renounced “profane music” for sacred music. These days he lives in Washington D.C., pumping out spirituals. They offered me a CD of his profane music on the house, but they will have to root around in their house to find it. In any case, I am now a hit at the newstand just for knowing someone who likes the song, I suspect they will start singing it whenever I walk thru the door, and I may have to pressure them to take my money in exchange for newspapers. I like ethiopians. Now if I could just learn to like Ethiopian food.

So, there you have it: he’s now living in D.C. and singing church music. Thanks, JS!

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Meanwhile, regarding yesterday’s post on quiet visualizations of evil, occasional guest-blogger and Milton scholar (no, really) Grandjoe provides some context for the image of Satan On His Throne:

Here are the lines that go with the wonderful illustration by John Martin of the infernal conclave in Paradise Lost. I’d never seen it –thanks.

High on a throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat . . .

Given that “sat’ must be the most undignified word in the language, Milton’s choice of it so close the gorgeous fanfare that starts with “High” plays a practical joke on Satan and on us as well, who started out impressed. There are many other places in the poem where Milton pulls the rug out. Why? Stanley Fish argues that Milton lures us into Satan’s point of view, so that he can then snap us out of it into a realization of our own sinful sympathies with evil. But that’s too moralistic for me. I think that Milton just takes pleasure in pulling off reversals and other kinds of surprises. It’s fun. Mozart enjoys springing surprises too. There must be artists also who trick us.

Quiet visualizations of evil

The genius of Alfred Hitchcock is always being talked about in connection with his mastery of suspense: his ability to create scenes that are exquisitely creepy and psychologically intense without relying on gore and button-pushing (i.e., people leaping out from behind corners and screaming their heads off). I was recently thinking about artists who have been able to pull off the same feat with static images, creating visualizations of evil that don’t rely on violence to get the point across– be it actual violence, the impending threat of violence, or the psychic violence of people screaming or leering evilly at the viewer. What does evil look like when it’s atypically shown at rest?

The first thing that came to mind was the illustrations that John Martin created for Milton’s Paradise Lost. I first saw these in an exhibit at the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum in 2002 and got a little chill out of the way that Martin uses darkness and space. Consider Satan On His Throne:

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Martin pioneered the technique of mezzotint, where the artist essentially works on an all darkness-producing plate and scrapes away areas of light. Naturally, this is a great medium for producing images that are somber, obscured, nocturnal, or lonely. Here, the sinister device of those endlessly receding chandeliers creates a suggestion of massive space that’s only dimly revealed – it’s what’s implied and yet not entirely shown that makes the space so imposing. Consider, too, that Martin was somewhat hamstrung by the poem’s depiction of Satan as an ambivalent, not-entirely-evil character (many critics, including William Blake, considered him to be the story’s hero). Therefore, Martin doesn’t get to place a leering, vile devil on the throne (I would even argue that the picture gets both more scary and more relatable if you mentally replace the Satan figure with Dick Cheney’s lolling head and bulging eyes). Rather, what we have is a depiction of awesome strength: “He call’d so loud, that all the hollow Deep / Of Hell resounded.”

Incidentally, I love the device of the throne on top of giant granite ball. Does he simply fly in and land on top, or are there stairs running up the back side? And, if you look closely at the enlarged version, there are tiny human figures inside the throne– are these his evil assistants, more random denizens of hell, or prisoners of some sort? (Maybe I would know if I’d read the poem… but no such luck).

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Last week, I came across this depiction of Moloch, a god associated with numerous ancient Middle Eastern and North African cultures, reaching out to accept an infant sacrifice as he was known to do from time to time. I guess this is sort of cheating by the standards I’ve set, in that the fact that a baby is about to be sacrificed creates a clear suggestion of violence… but I would say that the awfulness of this image has more to do with its unnaturalness, the frozen quality of the profiles, the unbelievable contrast between human characters and the god, and the amazing application of color.

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The Surrealist artists in general and Max Ernst in particular were adept at creating dream-like spaces – often quite empty and depopulated – that give us the unsettling feeling that something unnamable has just gone very wrong. Ernst’s The Robing Of The Bride:

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Ernst created a lot of pieces by collaging together bits of existing Victorian steel engravings, which had been the reigning illustration style for children’s books that were still kicking around in his childhood. So, there’s a whole other psychological dimension involved when you consider that these dreamscapes were often composed of reconstituted childhood images, such as as this illustration from Une Semaine Du Bonté:

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Lastly, Egon Schiele wasn’t the least bit interested in depicting evil. He was just – among other things – giving vent to a smoldering vitality, sexuality and primitivism that had no acceptable outlet in the polite Austrian society of his time. But it’s pretty clear to me in retrospect that he inspired – both with his distinctive line quality and gouache-y water color – the Frank Miller illustrations in the Dark Knight series that thoroughly gave me the creeps when I was 10, 11 years old:

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Blog fight song

Hooray for those who have invented nothing!

Hooray for those who destroy nothing!

But who in awe give themselves up to the essence of things.

Ignoring surfaces, but possessed by the rhythm of things

Heedlesss of taming, but playing the game of the world.

– Aimé Césare