Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Crosshatching

Back in Warsaw. The festival was great, and I'll try to do a proper post about it, but only after I've gotten some sleep.

On my way back I dug deeper into China Mieville's The City and the City, and I really like what it does with my head. It starts out as a pretty straightforward noir crime novel, but as the camera pans out, you learn it's something much more complex. And you're not really given any sort of systematic backstory to all the weirdness, you have to kind of reverse-engineer the big picture from various everyday practicalities. These hints are delivered so subtly that at first I actually took them for witty turns of phrase.

An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling way. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.
And with a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrasz after all, and that I should not have seen her.
Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent (...) after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away...

To my surprise, they turned out to be quite literal. Without giving away too much, it's the story of two cities (city-states, really), Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupying the same space, with parts belonging to just one (referred to as being "total" from one's perspective, or "alter" from the other's), and a whole patchwork of shared areas. The citizens of both are trained to only perceive their home city, or rather, to fail to perceive the other one, and its inhabitants. Openly and deliberately noticing the other entity is a very serious existential offense (again, trying not to reveal too much), and inadvertently doing so causes great unease:

I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passerby who tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintly over fucking couples they assidously unsaw.

The fun part is both cities are sovereign entities and it is for example revealed that they were on opposing sides during World War II, and that to this day Ul Quoma is the target of an American embargo (think Cuba). Another neat, and I'm hoping deliberate twist is that you can't pinpoint the city's whereabouts. You are given plenty of context: ther's mention of Balkan refugees, direct flights from Budapest and Istanbul, and Beszel street names sound decidedly Hungarian... but then, the city is a sea port. So whenever you are given another scrap of origin information, you feel this low-level anxiety/frustration as the exact location keeps eluding you - which echoes the descriptions of people "unseeing" its phase-shifted streets.

I read most of the book on the train from Wroclaw to Warsaw, and when I got out of the train station, I couldn't help but look for glimpses of the city I just left - fully realizing how silly it was. I couldn't shake it even on the tram home, and kept comparing the two, noticing how empty Warsaw streets look in comparison.

Between the cities, Breach watched. None of us knew what it knew.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

You couldn't get in

It's been quite a while. Guess it's a testament to how... settled my life's become (the word "routine" was quietly put down behind the shed before it had a chance to get a foot in).

Anyway, tonight was unusual and hilarious.

It started out with a delicious dinner at tiny new Sri Lankan place (although they use the name Ceylon, which I thought was politically incorrect - go figure), followed by the Warsaw Film Festival opening gala. The gala itself turned out to be something of a black tie event, with an actual red carpet and stuff, so we - me and... let's call her G, as she always makes a fuss about being featured in online stories - were a bit screwed from the get-go (her moreso than me), but hey, free champagne and people in costume! Yay!

We immediately devised a score system - 3 points for every celeb you spot, 2 points for a pretty person, and 1 point for someone you personally know. G was way ahead of me within minutes ,so I decreed she was cheating (she claimed 6 points for someone she then refused to point out in the crowd, for example, how's that kosher?). It didn't help matters that the first familiar person I saw was someone I didn't really want to interact with - one of those very distant, awkward acquaintances - so I ducked out of sight. G schooled me in the best way to deal with these situations: you avoid eye contact, and if for some reason that fails, you look them straight in the eye, say "Hello!" and walk right past them. And sure enough, that's exactly what they did two and a half hours later when we incidentally locked gazes.

The movie itself was pretty bad. The best part was when halfway through half of the screen was filled with the logo of the subtitle projector - the machine went into some sort of standby/screensaver mode, so several minutes of the huge fucking festival premiere in Sala Kongresowa went without Polish subtitles, while the tech guys scrambled to restart the system (we even got a glimpse of Norton Commander, how old school is that). For someone who knows people who work in subtitling it was the equivalent of a spectacular nip slip.

Afterwards we mingled, bumping into various acquaintances, including G's friend Ewa, who in my cosmology features as probably the only strikingly beautiful girl I know who is also perfectly aware of her good looks. She isn't obnoxious about it, or anything, but it seems like she certainly knows how to get her way. I also met another friend of G... but for that, we need to go back ten years.

It is 2000, I'm 18 and about to apply for uni. I'm taking these weekend preparatory courses in history, organized by the university, and so is W., my best friend from high school. I've always been too intimidated to yell out answers to the teacher's questions in class (omg what if I'm wrong?!) so whenever I knew one, I would mutter it under my breath to W. Now, there was this guy who sat in front of us, and whenever I muttered the answer, he would repeat it to the teacher, only outloud. I shared this observation with W. and at first we both thought that he might just know the same things I do, but we tried it out a few times, and he only spoke up in class after I'd croaked out the answer in my impotent nerdiness. Needless to say, he became our running joke for the rest of the course.

And so, who comes waltzing up to G at the gala? That's right. At first I wasn't sure if it was really him - it was ten years ago, after all - but it turned out he's my age and he majored in something that likely required a history test, so... Yeah, I got a giggle out of it.

Meanwhile, another one of G's friends called (they are legion - let's call this one "DJ friend") that there's some sort of party in the basement of the Europejski Hotel, so we decided to move there. The history prep guy actually works at the festival and said he'll try to get us to the venue in one of the festival town cars if we only pretend that we're some sort of festival guests. He sized us up and decided we should pose as "short film directors" which I thought was spot-on - "director" sounds impressive, and the "short film" part somehow gives leeway in terms of age and general blubbering idiocy, at least in my head. We agreed we'll pretend to be FOREIGN (because of course we did) and poured into the car spewing English platitudes. History prep guy immediately blew our cover by asking us something in Polish, so we spent the next couple of minutes trying to supress a bout of decidedly undirectorial giggles.

When we arrived at the spot, we learned that G's DJ friend would come get us in about 20 minutes. We weren't really sure how to get in there on our own, so we hung out in front of an inoperational automatic door to the hotel, watching equally confused people try to get in and bounce right back. Until suddenly, a girl with two guys walked up to the door and without missing a beat just pried it open with her hands, like they do to elevator doors in movies. We went "score!" and followed her inside, but once we entered the dark lobby, the girl turned around and said "I wouldn't follow me if I were you - I actually work in this place". This initially confused us, so we stopped dead in our tracks, uncertain, but before we could discuss this new development amongst ourselves, one of the girl's male companions apparently felt the force surge strong within him, so he extended his hand towards us dramatically (fingers spread out and shit), uttering with deep conviction "No! ^* Stop!" Ewa, as I mentioned, is very pretty, and probably oblivious to inadvertent Star Wars references, so this bizarre little display merely inspired her to walk right past the dude and into some random corridor. I'm good at doggedly following in other people's wake, so off we went.

Now, the party was supposed to be in the basement, so obviously G led us to a staircase leading up to the next floor. It's good that she did though, because the hotel was quite incredible at night - totally deserted, and really Shining-esque, except the corridors are green, and when you stand in them, the light reflected off the walls makes you look greenish as well. It's very creepy. Hopefully there's even a photo to prove it, but I didn't take it, so I'll have to get back to you on that.

It turned out that we went upstairs to find an elevator that would take us to the basement. Long story short: it didn't work out, we got caught by the security guy and asked to leave. We ended our little escapade just in time for G's DJ friend to appear and "get us into the club" which translated into paying 1/3 less than the regular folks, so not exactly the stuff of glamour fantasies, but at least we didn't have to stand in line. There was also a pretty hilarious "I got in, you couldn't get in" moment, as the DJ got stopped by the bouncer, and did a little "They're with me" spiel (even though we had already actually paid to get in), to which the bouncer replied "Great, dude, but where's YOUR pass?"

The music inside was the thumpy stuff of CSI murder-at-a-club montages. There was some more drama with additional passes to the "chillout room" which to everyone's confusion and dismay was revealed to be the nightmarish club next door, but apart from that, nothing else of note happened. To my surprise, there was quite a lot of talent around (that is what the kids are calling it, right? At least the sleazy ones?) but it was all of that peculiar variety that comes up as white noise on my scanner, so I honestly couldn't tell which ones - if any - worshipped the schlong. And that's sort of demoralizing, even if you're just window shopping.

Unfortunately, the free booze from the reception had evaporated from me around the time of our short film director town car extravaganza, so I soon vacated the premises, feeling a bit like I'd just recaptured a managable slice of the crazy youth I never had.

And now it's fucking late. Good night.

* ^ is voiceover lingo for short pause in delivery