Warsaw In A Whirlwind
Scrutinizing Slavic scripts on a whirlwind trip through Warsaw, plodding through long work days alongside Baltic blondes & a jet set ad jury ruminating on the germination of juicy brand communication... Contemplating the catharsis of once captive minds, the legacy WWII and communist dogma left behind, soaking up a sense of solidarity in a stylish city risen anew, thinking about all the things Poland has been through...
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Pics
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Dziekuje
Dinner @ San Lorenzo
Friday, August 20, 2010
Polish Fashion / Amber
Polish Street Fashion
Polish Street Styles
Best Work - 3Q10
Clubbing In Poland: Cutting Loose @ Platinum
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Solidarity
“Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.” - Eduardo Galeano
Doh!
More Alien In Transit
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
A Poem For My Wife
True Love
True love.
Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?
Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.
Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!
It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?
True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.
Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.
Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
Polish Cinema
Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - Andrzej Wajda
Knife in the Water (1962) - Roman Polanski
The Passenger (1963) - Andrzej Munk
The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) - Wojciech Has
Hands Up! (1967) - Jerzy Skolimowski
Camouflage (1977) - Krzysztof Zanussi
Man of Marble (1977) - Andrzej Wajda
Man of Iron (1981) - Andrzej Wajda
A Woman Alone (1981) – Agnieszka Holland
Possession (1981) - Andrzej Zulawski
Sexmission (1983) - Juliusz Machulski
No End (1984) - Krzysztof Kieslowski
Year of the Quiet Sun (1984) - Krzysztof Zanussi
H.M. Deserters (1986) - Janusz Majewski
The Decalogue (1988) - Krzysztof Kieslowski
Europa, Europa (1990) – Agnieszka Holland
The Double Life of Veronica (1991) - Krzysztof Kieslowski
Three Colours: Blue (1993) - Krzysztof Kieslowski
Three Colours: Red (1994) - Krzysztof Kieslowski
Three Colours: White (1994) - Krzysztof Kieslowski
Killer (1997) - Juliusz Machulski
With Fire and Sword (1999) - Jerzy Hoffman
Pan Tadeusz (1999) - Andrzej Wajda
The Debt (1999) - Krzysztof Krauze
Quo Vadis (2001) - Jerzy Kawalerowicz
In the Desert and the Wilderness (2001) - Gavin Hood
The Pianist (2002) - Roman Polanski
Chopin Benches
Starka
"Starka is the noblest and the most mysterious kind of vodka. The recipe is known from 500 years.
La Boheme
Spent a lovely few hours at dinner with the group at Nowa La Boheme, a lovely restaurant with "a swish, upmarket interior of pastel yellow and marble, complemented by a menu featuring good looking Polish dishes served with a nouvelle twist." I found myself conversing with some very entertaining friends, with Anja, Chacho, Pancho, Aliaa, Mohamed, and Pawel all seated around a table, representing Serbia, Argentina (& Iberia), Spain (& Chile), Egypt, and Poland.... After spending 8 long hours in a conference room, we decided to loosely enforce a rule to avoid talking about work, and so over the course of the evening our conversation touched on all sorts of things... Thank you friends for reminding me about what truly matters in life, beyond the industry we happen to work in...
My New Friends from Egypt
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
CJ Art
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
Czeslaw Milosz - from The Captive Mind - I
Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize for his book "The Captive Mind," an outstanding treatise on the affects of working under Soviet domination, originally published in 1953. Poland only emerged from the Soviet Union's sway when communism collapsed in the late 80's... Up to that point, the country had been dominated by the socialist dogma imposed upon them by a series of Soviet leaders, beginning, of course, with Stalin, who cast a long, enduring shadow over Eastern Europe... Below is the first of many passages I've been thinking about as I read this book, a profoundly influential piece of writing from this intellect in exile, who defected to America rather than live under the sway of Stalin....
The Blind Leading the Blind
Monday, August 16, 2010
Dinner @ The Belvedere in Lazienkowski Park
Alien In Transit
A Poem by Wislawa Symborska
Here's a poem from Wislawa Symborska, who picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Fellow Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (who I'll be writing about a lot in the next few days) penned this lovely essay regarding her work, quoted briefly below:
"In Szymborska's poetry the "we" denotes all of us living on this planet now, joined by a common consciousness, a "post-consciousness," post-Copernican, post-Newtonian, post-Darwinian, post-two-World-Wars, post-crimes-and-inventions-of-the-twentieth-century. It is a serious and bold enterprise to venture a diagnosis, that is, to try to say who we are, what we believe in, and what we think."
The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.
From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass which has overgrown
reasons and causes,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.