If making movies was my thing, I’m sure that Bruno Schulz’s writing would be the first thing I’d long to turn into a film. It’s exactly the kind of visual, magical, weird, dream-like, distorted and singular storytelling that I seek out.
That said, I was kind of offended for a second when I heard that it already had been made into a movie. Ten years before I was born, in fact. All the good stuff happened before I got to it. And sometimes books can feel so integral to your own inner world that you forget you don’t own those images and that the fact someone has reinterpreted them for all to see is not the same thing as ruining your childlike fantasies. Or something.
But then I figured those 1970s Polish filmmakers probably knew what they were doing when it came to Bruno Schulz. Read more »
I just returned from the Baltic Coast, near Gdansk, where I talked with a friend about simplicity.
This is the point of a vacation: you’ll endure any travel inconveniences and dramas just to get to the moment when you swim out to the middle of the still-cold lake and stay there treading alone. And then later, sitting on the porch barefoot looking through fashion magazines in a language you can’t read, you feel like the people around you are the best ones yet, even if they mostly speak in a language you can’t understand. This is the point of the vacation: everything back at home that left you helpless and buried seems small and vaguely solvable.
If only you could get rid of a few extra things: Everything you bring on vacation fits in a small backpack and when your clothes get wet you dry them on the fence in the sun.
The same friend I talked to about paring down our lives showed me some short documentaries, including this one, “Gadajace Glowy” (“Talking Heads”), made by Krzysztof Kieslowski in 1980.
It seems like all stories go pretty much like this:
Apparently, these are some of Delillo's notes as he worked on the novel.
I finished Don Delillo’s Underworld a few days ago and now I owe 16 Euros and 50 Cents to the Gedenkbibliothek on Hallesches Tor.
So it’s a long book and my life has been such that I had to go whole weeks without reading it. But the other reason that it took me so long to read was that Underworld is a history book. It’s a complex, non-chronological, intimate, political and far-reaching novel akin to nothing else I can think of except maybe Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Or maybe I just say that because I think there are few writers who are able to make “History,” as in, “the-subject-we-all-have-to-learn-in-school” clear and relevant and fascinating and both of these books woke me up to some kind of crucial perspective at different points in my life.
I went to check out Hamburger Banhof (Museum of Contemporary Art) with two friends the other day, and we all ended up wishing we’d saved our 8 Euros to go toward vegan cake or good tequila or vintage lingerie or whatever it was we were wanting that day.
Part of the problem was this “Land Art” exhibition, of the sort where the artist uses natural materials, like stones and logs, to create huge and uncomplicated geometric patterns on the ground. The concept, as I’m describing it here, sounds far more satisfying than the art itself, which was flat, unemotional, almost sterile; in the high-ceilinged, air-conditioned museum it could not have felt more divorced from its wild origins.
Also, you couldn’t touch it. Which always seems counterintuitive to me.
The aspect of the exhibit I liked, however, that I’ve continued to think about since, was a piece of text posted next to one of the artworks. I didn’t write it down and can’t remember who wrote it. But whoever it was talked about walking.
Walking, the writer said, is an inherently creative act. Walking is art-making, is writing, is making something of nothing. Read more »
Someone lives here: Courtyard in Bucharest, Romania. (Photo by MCR)
1. You know the cliche/true story about the man selling apples on the side of the road in post-communist Russia? “Back then,” he says, “I used to be an engineer.”
2. You’re talking about music venues, or cheap brunch, or falafel stands. “It’s not as good as it used to be,” someone will say.
3. And there’s a New Orleans theme restaurant here in Kreuzberg, near a park. Closed the cold day I walked by.
In Part 1 of this post, I left off with: “Sometimes I forget and think I am equal to everyone.”
What I want to know is whether or not displacement leaves a human being equal to his or herself. The self he was on his own ground. Or whether it’s just a false, discomfited nostalgia that leaves us longing for whatever came before. No matter how stifling or stale or persecuted: it was home.
One of the truly great things I have seen was the Lincoln Center production of the Théatre du Soleil‘s Le Dernier Caravansérail– a two part, six hour performance that showed fragmented, interesecting stories of refugees fleeing, traveling, and sometimes arriving in destinations all over the world.
Because I studied theater for many years, Ariane Mnouchkine, the theater’s founder and director, had been a kind of hero for me since I was introduced to her work by an amazing professor named Shawn-Marie Garrett in an introductory theater class my first semester at Columbia. (Seriously, this Wikipedia page does nothing to give you an idea of how inventive and prolific Mnouchkine is.)
And so the impact this performance had on me was undoubtably due to many elements. But what I remember now is that the actors were all speaking many different languages. Each family or group of people portrayed spoke their own language– Arabic or Serbo-Croatian or French– and then their words were translated on supertitles like they do at the opera. This was an undertaking that was both new and welcome for me. I had studied theater at the Moscow Art Theater two years previous and so had seen many productions that were purely in Russian whose impact were not lost. I already felt that well-done art could transcend logic/language.
But Mnouckine’s production seemed somehow emblematic of a kind of international mentality that I hadn’t yet experienced. It showed a fluidity between cultures, a certain kind of inclusiveness that at times I think we fool ourselves into thinking we have when we live in big metropolitan places like New York and have lived in Greenpoint where they sometimes greet you in Polish when you go in to buy some bread for breakfast. Read more »
There’s a Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at the San Francisco MOMA until the end of January that I highly recommend. In it, there are some killer portraits, including one of Matisse, French writer J.M. Le Clezio, and a young Robert Capa, the “self”-invented Hungarian photojournalist famous for saying of wartime photography that “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
One person not pictured among Bresson’s portraits, however, is Robert Capa’s partner in art, revolution, love, and (his) legend– a Polish-Jewish, German-born woman named Gerda Taro who is now recognized as the first female photographer to cover the frontlines of a war and to die in the process. Read more »
I spent the weekend going through boxes in my parents’ basement, all of them filled with childhood books. I was feeling ruthless and exacting as I did this, because I need that space to store more recent and necessary things. And furthermore, I had enough books stored there to open a Young Adult library (which I absolutely would do if I wasn’t in the process of moving kind of far away) none of which are being rediscovered by today’s youth while they’re packed away in the basement.
I was at an art museum in Krakow sometime in the middle of last month when I walked into a room so filled with smoke that I couldn’t see a few inches in front of me. At some point the smoke began to clear so that I could tell I was in a big, empty, white room, where at intervals a neon sign read I TY MOZESZ ZNALEZC WYJSCIE, and then disappeared.
In Constanta, Romania, a week before, my friend and I had found ourselves walking in circles in a shopping mall, when I realized I knew the words to ask for the exit.
And before that, in an outpost past the Bucharest dumpsite called Vadul Lat, we’d sat on the train tracks for hours in the dark unsure of whether or not the last train was coming. Meanwhile, a kid from across the field behind us played some gypsy-techno song over and over from his cell phone.
In all these places most of the words we learned were for “thank you,” or “good bye.”
So mainly I’ve been surrounded by everything I didn’t know or couldn’t envision, by things that were much warmer or more evil than I could have made up. And now that I am back and remembering myself as a writer, I’m in an in-between state of waiting for some distance that will make these sounds and sights and feelings clarify and connect.
How much distance do you need from experience before it can be handled as art?
While we wait: some images. Maybe you all will sort them and pair them in a way I couldn’t.
4 Comments 
If making movies was my thing, I’m sure that Bruno Schulz’s writing would be the first thing I’d long to turn into a film. It’s exactly the kind of visual, magical, weird, dream-like, distorted and singular storytelling that I seek out.
