Fluxspiele's blog

Is it poetic that I am writing this final post from Prague’s airport or is it pitiful?

 

The last few days have been a whirlwind of activity emotions for myself and my friends. We celebrated our final night in Prague approximately three times. There was a mix of sadness, for the obvious reasons, excitement about returning home, and probably a good dose of regret: regret at not visiting certain sites, missing the opportunity to travel to a certain country or city, or for a meal that will have to wait until ones next time in Berlin or Prague.  (But perhaps not only the undone things, but even the nights remembered, or those nights whose events cannot be recalled.)  I would imagine there has been a fair amount of self-reflection and even self-doubt: in a program as small as Prague’s, there’s extra pressure to get a little misty-eyed during farewells (even if they happen on the gloomy dance floor of Cross Club) and to make promises like “we’ll see each other again soon on the other side of the pond.” Don’t fear, dear reader: I am planning to keep most of these appointments.

 

A few of things I will miss about Prague include the cheap price of groceries and thus-far  unparalleled affordability of beer, and Castle vantages when my daily tram crossed the river, as well as the Czech language, which, when muttered, is as ticklish as a bushy Slavic mustache. Listening to the podcast of This American Life while being very much not in America or touching base with the day-to-day drudgery of American politics by watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (commercial free?) have been curious reminders of the digital, hyper-globalized world that I am apparently studying. I’ve had a hard time brainstorming what I will miss less. ‘GMail assuming that I read Czech’ is more a minor quibble, and the throngs of tourists that clog Old Town Square is an overly obvious complaint, though unfortunately, the journey that my friend Dan and I are taking for the next few weeks will bring us through some of Europe’s other most highly trafficked tourist cities, including Paris, Florence, Venice and Rome. (Any last-minute advice?)

 

Though its a week late, an extra realization that’s dawning on me as we plan our jam-packed itinerary and gradually lose the mindset of being ‘settled’ in Prague is that everyone travels quite differently. Some people (like Dan and I) will try to see literally all of Paris’s great museums in a day, racing from one to the next only because of the novelty afforded by Nuit Des Musees – the night when many are open until midnight or 1am – but many others will prefer hours of people watching in cafes, or strolls through the Jardin Luxembourg.  My experiences travelling this summer in Europe have made me more aware of the similarities of landscapes city-to-city and so ideally, I’ve prefered to maximize my time that which can be more challenging to experience (if not altogether grueling) but which cannot be replicated elsewhere. It’s no surprise that this has often been in the artworks and music of the place, with the occasional local night-time haunt, but in the future I’d like to try to focus on the natural beauty outside the city proper, as well.

 

It’s been a pleasure getting to know a little bit about the people behind the icons and reading your reports here on the site, and I hope you’ve enjoyed skimming my own. I wish you all restful summers, and hope that maybe we can have a reunion (IRL), once we are back in New York.  As they say to end cell phone calls all over Europe, Ciao ciao!

[My photo, as usual.  Illustrating the crush of tourists that have descended on the square. A sight I will not see for a while now.  It was so much fun to walk in that gap they left at the front and take pictures of the crowd...]

Though Prague is a European capital, its identity is still very much divided between its Central European Hapsburg history, the decades of communist rule (“the Bolshevik times”) and of course, constantly resurfacing elements of Czech nationalism and Czech language culture.  As a result, many of Prague’s museums and tourist texture is oriented around these eras and much of the most vibrant arts and cultural scene is fairly inaccessible behind the language barrier.  Two places that I would recommend that are the tip of this iceberg is DOX Gallery, an international contemporary art museum similar to the New Museum back home, and the Meet Factory, which, as an old industrial building on Prague’s outskirts that plays host to concerts and alternative theater productions, is like a little slice of the Brooklyn waterfront.  Bear in mind that, except for restaurants and supermarkets, most shops close at 6, and restuarants that aren't chains are shuttered on the weekends!

At the outset, don’t expect the same amount of warmth of Mediterranean-adjacent cultures or the joie de vivre of Parisians from these Central Europeans, but once we got to know some Czechs on a day-to-day basis, like staff and professors, they warmed up, were a lot of fun.  Even the fairly prominent guest speakers in my Reporting the Arts, who we would only meet for one day, were quite warm and casual as they spoke about their photography, architecture, documentary filmmaking, etc. As the Czech Republic is such a small country (and Prague is such a tight-knit community for a certain strata of intelligentsia and artists), they were very forgiving of our unfamiliarity with their work and milieu.  So befriend some Czech people – this might be easier if studying Czech, or teaching English to native speakers, which is also a volunteer option here.
Also, as you may have seen from my previous post, there are a few soccer fields new our dorm (which, for a number of reasons is widely acknowledged to be the best option), and I highly encourage next semester’s students to go and utilize it – sometimes, a few neighborhood Czech teenagers join us.

Lastly, general travel advice that I should have been following better:
As I’m sure most of you students based in Europe already know, traveling here is tremendously pricey.  Beyond the unfavorable exchange rates (fortunately we’re not yet on the Euro here in the Czech Republic!), there are often little fees and charges that arise when trying to buy train tickets, plane tickets, or book hostels. Eating out frequently also adds up – though it’s cheap enough here, a good weeks-worth of groceries doesn’t cost much more than two meals out. That said, I would quite often convince myself not to buy touristy souvenirs like these smart retro Victorian-Nouveau postcards to send from Budapest or a tote bag for my mom from The British Library emblazoned with the phrase “The Riot Act Has Been Read,” making good on that warning she always gave me as a kid.  I’m not sure when I’ll get my next chance to get either of these things and I regret it slightly: all I have to show for a many of my travels is a lot of photos, some ticket-stubs and quite a few postcards. As great as memories can be, a few tangible reminders aren't bad either.

[On the topic of the just-under-the-surface charming Czech attitude, here's a picture I took of our neighborhood's boar going out for his afternoon walk. I can't explain it either.]

As for epiphanies, I am not sure that I’ve experienced anything too major lately. Broadly comparing my experience in the small program here in Prague to that of gigantic New York is that the kids you hang out with outside of class also happen to be your classmates, partly out of necessity.  This was a nice throwback to high school, and I think I might even prefer this over the usual mere ‘good acquaintance’ relationship shared with peers.

I suppose the most important realizations, albeit trite, is that time is short –– I feel like myself and the other students felt we had forever to get around to doing certain things here and we put it off until time was/is nearly running out.  There are a few quintessential experiences that I haven’t done because I figured I would no doubt do so later, such as walk across scenic Charles Bridge (I’ve only been on either end) or see the graffiti’d Lennon Wall – though I honestly feel like I’ve heard so much about the latter and seen so many Facebook photos of the former that I essentially know what the experience will be like. In that sense, also, there are so many similarities between European cities: Berlin has copious amounts of graffiti as it is, and how would the Lennon Wall compare to its East Side Gallery, anyway? Cesky Krumlov, an old Bohemian medieval city that I visited back in February (feels like a lifetime ago) has a number of smaller footbridges flanked by saintly statues, simply smaller versions of Prague’s bridge.

Another epiphany: as much as Manhattan’s cement sidewalks and stone buildings are, its nice to live around greenery. Washington Square Park has trees and flowerbeds, but Prague’s streets are lined with many lilac bushes have that given the air an aroma that undeniably announces spring – one that is forever associated with a beautiful arboretum near where I grew up in Boston.  I love it.

Lastly: get two or more present or former New Yorkers talking, and within minutes, the conversation will turn to real estate.  Doesn’t matter where you are, it’s going to happen. Last weekend I was doing some last minute clothing shopping in “proletarian Zizkov” for some summertime wear – arriving in January is tough! – and walked into a small vintage shop, Bohemian Retro, where the well-dressed proprietor greeted my friend and I in passable Czech. Finally, overhearing our English, he struck up a conversation in English. Turns out, he’s from the first generation of punk musicians in the city, he originally came from Florida, and has been here for 20 years, etc. He also dropped a hint that he owns a sweet apartment right on Saint Mark’s Place where he used to live.  On Monday, we went to visit the provocative artist David Cerny, and he explained that one of his best known sculptures, the giant babies that adorn Zizkov’s TV tower, came from a dream likely inspired by “weird sex in Alphabet City” where he lived for a time in the 1990s before getting dissatisfied with SoHo’s required chummyness. Thinking he might return, he kept subletting it for a while, but wants to stay in Prague for the time being.

[My photo from the first of our many Osadni Soccer Sunday football matches on the large pitch next to the dorm. Exemplary of our hanging-out-beyond-class culture.]

Yesterday, on my way to class via the bright-red #5, a line supplied by the aged part of the fleet, I heard the already-quiet engine stop and suddenly the noise on the tram fell to a near-silent hush (Czechs are far more reserved than more boisterous Spaniards, for instance, or even iPod-enraptured strap-hangers.) We had begun the longest stretch of the commute (though it lasts maybe four minutes), alongside the Vlatava river, before crossing one of the many bridges that span it.  The tram driver hoped out, locked the door to his compartment behind him, and ran across the street to the front of what looked like an empanada shop where the proprietor was holding out a paper bag for him. He grabbed the bag and climbed back onto the train.  A moment later, we continued our journey down the river.

This type of casual moment is not unusual among the tram drivers in Prague.  During my first week, I was surprised that when one tram would pass another which was loading and unloading at a large stop, the driver would be reading the paper, snacking on a pastry or making a phone call.  Given the number of high profile light trail accidents that have happened recently in the States, this would never fly. I have yet to catch one of these events on film here in Prague, though.

Though the culture for street food here does not at all rival the diversity of New York’s many carts or the decadence of Vienna’s quality sausage and kabop stands, the offerings here in Prague have increased as the months pass. The highly aromatic smell of boiling kielbasa and ‘night sausage’ (as we’ve come to call it) are most highly concentrated on Wenceslas Square, where a number of nearly identical booths are permanently stationed along this inaccurately named quadrilateral (it’s a very long square), but smaller carts, one man operations with banners that read Eurohotdog are also found at other areas of the city: in front of the Tesco downtown, or by the larger metro stations peripheral to the touristy zones.

Even Old Town Square, normally a wide brick expanse, has become full of street food, but of a more antique variety.  In the days leading up to Mardi Gras, a series of dark wooden huts were built with spit-roasting hams, big pans of spatzle, skewers of sausages and vats of spiced wine all available (with significant markup for the tourists, mind you). The shacks came and went, though, within the span of a week they were gone again. Since Spring Break, a new, more extensive series of shops have been reconstructed - this time for Easter. There are even round pastries, rings of dough baked on thick metal cylinders in mid-air over a bed of coals.  The throw a nutty, cinnamon-spice scent out, and fittingly so, because they apparently are  a Slovak christmas desert –– but the crowds don’t need to know that.
   
This evening I arrived in Berlin. For those of you not in Mitteleuropa, it has been raining this past week. Prague, unfortunately, doesn’t take on any scent of petrichor (perhaps because of all the cobblestones?), but as soon as we climbed out of the U-Bahn station tonight, the smell, familiar from certain rainstorms in New York, was instantly discernable and made me a little nostalgic for home.

[photos are my own!]

“A great many people can peck at a typewriter and, fortunately, no one can stop them.  But for that reason, even in samizdat, there will always be countless bad books or poem for every important book.”  Vaclav Havel, Six Asides about Culture

Last week one of my classes went on a field trip to one of Central Europe’s largest samizdat libraries, Libri Prohibiti. The director, Jiří Gruntorád, described how many of the formerly prohibited and banned books and periodicals exist in copies numbering less than ten, and many are the only edition. He was, in many ways, a stereotype of an obsessive librarian: gruff, insular and quite protective of the ironically forbidden room containing floor-to-ceiling shelves of books and magazines. The library is open to the public, though and he brought out a rich variety of materials for us to leaf through. Black and white cultural magazines, printed on über-thin carbon paper, with featured articles on a famed New York artist who you may have heard of, Andrew Warhola (born to Slovak parents), and literary publications with hand-printed woodcut illustrations.  Longer novels were printed so small as to fit in a shirt pocket, and, ingeniously, with a rounded plastic magnifying glass that could be taken from the book’s spine. Even though the book, a sci-fi novel by  “Egon Bondy,” seems to be somewhat apolitical, it had a page of instructions in the front about what to do if one was caught reading it and questioned for having it (“confess only that you found it in your mailbox or slipped under your rug” – it was not a crime to own samizdat, only to distribute it).  Of note, the library also had more than 20 copies of 1984 (with 3 different Czech translations) as well as multiple copies of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Among the essays in Open Letters is a series of “asides” in which the dissident playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel wonders about the label ‘dissident’ itself.  He explains that cultural life in Czechoslovakia has not deteriorated but instead “there are theaters crammed full of people grateful or every nuance of meaning, frantically applauding every knowing smile from the stage ... young people traveling across the country to attend a concert that may not take place at all” and plenty of samizdat publishing. He disagrees with another theoretician who, in another samizdat journal, divides culture into a ‘trinitarian’ vision of official art, adapted to the ruing ideology, against the dissident art of ‘rebellious bohemians’, which is as staunchly anti-political as that of the establishment and lastly ‘true, modern art’ which transcends ideology and politics. Havel’s response to this strict delineation is more fluid. He ignores the third group and mixes the first two, saying “I never take any pleasure in seeing someone from the ‘first’ culture fall into the ‘second’; rather, I am always happy whenever I encounter anything in the ‘first’ culture that I would have tended to expect in the ‘second.’”

One surprising artist who he may have been referencing is the surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer – educated in the state’s academies and worked openly. When we saw some of his short films in a class, we spoke about how ironically, under the Communist system, where artists had stipends and did not have to worry about salability, most Czech filmmakers were much bolder than they have been in recent, post-Communist years. Švankmajer’s dark and politically enigmatic works take advantage of this time period, ripe with Havel’s “nuance[s] of meaning” all referring either to a Marxist critique of capitalism, or perhaps more deviously to the breakdown of a system of Communist brotherly cooperation.  Be sure to watch to the end – the previous two parts are equally unusual.

“The degree to which politics is present or absent has no connection with the power of artistic truth.  If anything matters, it is, quite logically, the only degree to which an artist is wiling, for external reasons, to compromise the truth.” – Havel, Six Asides

Quite a few weeks ago my friend Dan [Odysseus] wrote a corker of a post about Sir Toby's, a homey hostel around the corner from our dorm. He described our experience of going to weekly pub trivia in order to meet European travelers, but just as Taylor [tperkins] foretold in a comment, we had too great a time a few weeks in a row and word got out. Now the  lounge/bar at Sir Tobys plays host to roughly a third of the dorm on trivia nights. Though the atmosphere has changed substantially, it is still a certifiable "good great place." But that is only half the story.

 

The full Tuesday Toby's experience often includes a corollary at Cross Club, my favorite nearby  club and something of a misnomer. It too is a ‘GGP’ and we still advise the occasional European traveller who had not yet paid a visit to check it out, especially since it's just a few blocks away. Frequently this develops into an invitation for them to join us when we walk over from the hostel.  One particularly stand-out night that attracted so many fellow students to our Tuesday evening outings was when a group of no less than 140 Danish gymnasium students (who knew American culture better than we did and promptly schooled us at trivia) proceeded to drink Sir Toby’s Kozel kegs dry, and then threatened to do the same when they overran the formidable bars of Cross Club.

 

To say that Cross Club is somewhat well disguised would be an understatement. With a gate constructed of car mechanisms and other stray metal, it looks like a junkyard’s fence and not altogether out of place in our post-industrial neighborhood of Prague. I was fooled into thinking it was an auto shop the first time I passed it on the tram, but the store on the ground floor does appear to advertise a Czech auto repair school. (Almost the reverse of 826 in the States.) The aesthetic of the exterior is maintained throughout: walking through the gate into a courtyard with soldered iron trellises is like taking the first few steps into an alternate reality of cyberpunk and indsutrial dystopianism.

 

Car engines fashioned into chandeliers slowly revolve from the ceiling, motorized LED lights are arranged into patterns on the walls, and everywhere is repurposed metal with just hints of brick behind. A host of other ornaments and lowly lit areas make the descent down from chamber to chamber disorienting and suitably Hadean. Unlike many of the other more glitzy clubs in the area, the focus of Cross Club is not its more removed dance floors, but lounge areas and bars both at its best-lit top floor as well as within its darker levels. Be it weekends or weeknights, compared to the other major clubs, warehouse-scale and ultra-sleek SaSaZu, or five-floored Karlovy Lázně (eager to remind you that it’s the largest in Central Europe!), the feeling underground is that those on these smaller dance floors are more like Prague’s outcasts rather than transient cross-European partiers.  It’s a somewhat comforting feeling, being an individual among individuals, rather than the Adorno-like exasperation that I find evoked in me by the monolithic SaSaZu floor, with its pulsating masses worshipping ‘DJ Brian’ up at the turntables to a far greater degree than he deserves, all blinded by the bright flashy screens that surround his noisy rostrum.  Even if a place like SaSaZu is more your cup of nightlife tea, no visit to Prague is complete without a time in Cross Club’s mechanical cellars. More importantly, no visit to Cross Club is a complete experience of it: months after first arriving, we are still finding new corners of the labyrinth within its depths.

(Top photo, of the gate, is my own. The one of the interior was by one of our new Danish best friends.)

When I first arrived in Prague, my roommate and I endeavored to get all the ‘touristy stuff’ out of the way quickly.  Unfortunately when we arrived at the National Gallery museums, we found that we were essentially the only visitors.  The first, at centuries-old Sternberg Palace, was housed within the expansive Prague Castle complex and we got a little lost as we tried to find the museum’s subterranean entrance. Inside, however, was room after room of rich medieval and Renaissance paintings. Though the galleries had well-known painters from beyond the Czechlands, whose work I love, such as Dürer, El Greco, Goya, Rembrandt and Tintoretto, names that would draw scores of tourists elsewhere in Europe (or internationally), the galleries themselves were almost entirely devoid of other visitors. I actually think that someone assigned each of us a personal ‘minder’ as we were well outnumbered by the museum guards. According to the website, many of the works were from the collection of Emperor Rudolf II or contributed by 19th century patrons, but I am amazed that more of the works weren’t looted by the Nazis or confiscated by the Soviets for their many religious subjects.  However, the holdings at the Sternberg Palace reflect the international appreciation of the Old Masters far more than it reflects Czech tastes and themes in fine art.  For that, the place to go is right in the neighborhood of our Osadni dorm, at Veletržní Palace.

Though this branch of the National Gallery feels much more like an architectural cross of the Guggenheim and the Met (big glass-sided exterior, central interior courtyard encircled by floors of gallery space), the contents include excursions into the history of modern and contemporary art amid solid showings by the 19th century Czech titans like Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Kupka as well as other regional artists. Like the museum housing Old Masters, Veletržní actually has quite a number of famous painters, though the works on display could not be considered their best. There is a surprising number of Italian Futurist artists, as well as a section on Fluxus and its Czech offshoot, though I had long considered the movement quite centered on New York. Most telling, however, is the curators’ introduction to the gallery, which contextualizes the collection and purposefully differentiates it from those found in New York or Berlin:

The National Gallery in Prague's international modern art collections were most affected by the totalitarian regime's interventions designed to curb Czech contact with the world's culture. Nevertheless, several major international artworks were acquired during the brief interregnums of liberty.  Unlike museums in the free world, where collections could be built virtually uninterrupted and with an 'ideal' focus in mind, international works of modern art often found their way to the National Gallery via unusual paths...


 

Even in the way that it is curated, the Veletržní evokes a certain independent Czech spirit that I’ve noticed again and again at different contemporary monographs and exhibitions in Prague.  To name a few, there was the stubbornly DYI aesthetic and fringe subjects of octogenarian photographer Miroslav Tichy, the tenacious fascination with technology and digital cameras’ burst modes of another old-school photograhper, Bohdan Holomicek, and the obsessive methods of documentarian Lukáš Přibyl and his four part Holocaust series Forgotten Transports in which he sought to unearth unseen photos and untold stories. Perhaps the most famous contemporary Czech artists is sculptor David Cerny, who provided giant babies for Prague's TV tower and caused offense all over the EU with a state-funded work called Entropa.  Though one of my professors mentioned that the Veletržní doesn’t have a good reputation among contemporary artists (though this is probably true of almost any museum-space which stagnates, becoming blander and institutional), it highlights one essential element of Czech culture: the desire to catch up, culturally (as well as politically and economically) after the decades of exclusion and isolation.  At the same time, there is high value given to the certain artists, visual and otherwise, who went against the grain in the Communist era, as well today’s continuing tinkerers and experimenters.

(my photo, from the Fluxus collection at Veletržní palác, as well as shots from when Bohdan Holomicek came to one of my classes)
  

For some reason, fate always intervenes and when I'm transversing Europe by train I'm also inevitably reading about World War II.  Previously my booklist has included Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved (Hungary) and Karl Jaspers' On the Question of German Guilt (Austria).  Each time, I tend to be a little more weary about flaunting the cover depending on who else is in the cabin and which country I am traveling through.