Immersion

I was always tickled by how seamlessly Bollywood actors switch back and forth between English and their native language, even in the middle of very intense exchanges. It just seems so natural, like they're instinctively drawing upon whatever tools best express their emotions at that particular moment. Fascinating as it is, I still had mixed feelings about it, what with the residual stigma of collonialism, and all.

But now I was just flicking through some Swedish film, and noticed the exact same thing. It's not yet as pronounced - the English bits are sparse, and sometimes delivered with such a thick accent that even their own subtitlers seem to treat them as an integral part of the source message, and parse rather than transcribe them (for example, at one point a girl finishes her sentence with You can go now and the English subtitle states Go away). Then again, there's also a scene where a highly agitated guy yells at his cheating girlfriend and halfway through, without missing a beat, chucks in an almost textbook, pronounciation-wise, IN YOUR FUCKING DREAMS.

The stigma? Not so much residual this time, but for some reason I find this sort of hegemony far less objectionable. Some part of me rails against the encroachment, but at the same time it's so... exciting. Another tantalizing whiff of Cyberpunk Now.

Not there

I went to visit Kaska and Piotr yesterday. Piotr made pizza (or rather: two pizzas), we had a few good laughs and more than a few moments of extremely non-PC behavior. Kuba - their son - was adorable, as always. I'm still tickled by how matter-of-fact Kaska is about him. No doting whatsoever. It's such a welcome change from borderline hysterical mothers. Piotr, on the other hand, is very affectionate, which I find equally entrancing. Just not used to seeing that side of him, I guess. A moment in time:

Wiska is playing with Kuba, dangling a plastic bag in front of him, and then hiding it behind her back
Kuba: Not there!
Wiska, extremely excited: He just said "Not there!"
Kaska, barely looking up: Yeah, he does that.
Wiska: But he actually said it a propos, I took away the bag and he went: "Not there"!
Kaska: Well, he says it about a 100 times a day, so chances are he'll sometimes get it right.
Kuba, smiling proudly: Not there!

Friendly fire

Go out to dinner with friends and have your private life inadvertently summed up in 2 sentences.

Alternatively: eat a bagel and stab yourself with a fork.

The choice is yours.

Give

Sorry, haters - TVAB is my favorite, so I was unable to resist this one.

Burn

I came home on one of the new subway cars last night, the ones with a red LED time/date display. Mine read:

So 09.05.09 23:11

And I thought to myself: Wow, subway car. You're incredibly specific in your condescension.

Lokomotywa

Wpadlem na chwile do domu rodzicow wydrukowac umowe. Tym razem wzialem klucze. Matki nie ma, ojciec spi. Nie obudzilem go.

Gdy zasiadlem do komputera znalazlem oparta o monitor pocztowke z parowozem jadacym przez jakies sciernisko (rodzina byla w weekend w Wolsztynie na jakims zlocie starych parowozow z calej Europy).

Pocztowka zaadresowana do nich samych, zgodnie z ojcowska tradycja.

Tak jechalismy.

Wagonow bylo wiecej.

I lato w pelni.

Wyniki w poniedzialek.

Pooh

Turns out the last.fm radio thing isn't broken - it's just that my trial has ended, and now they want me to pay 3 bucks a month for it to continue streaming. I'll have to meditate on it.

If I ran away

On a day like this, there are worse things you could be doing with your time than playing Frozen Charlotte and taking a few minutes to stare at the lilac outside your window.

Just saying.

Grooves

If some alien lifeform were studying my daily routines, they'd probably notice a particular pattern I have followed since my 2nd day here: Take a lemon out of the fridge, slice off a small chunk and squeeze its juice into tea, place the remaining part of the lemon under a small glass dome, doubtlessly designed just for that purpose, proceed to ignore it until it's rife with mold, toss it out, wash the dome, take a lemon out of the fridge...

I went to two recordings today, and was reminded just how much I hate them. For me they're always a game of "spot all your failures". I loathe listening to the lame jokes, and my even lamer attempts at translating them. It turns out some good has come out of the absurd anal retentiveness of the new contract guy - I might have spent an entire week on something I'd usually do in a day's work, but my text was so polished, had been thoroughly checked by so many people, that the recording session was virtually painless. Plus, it was a documentary. That always helps.

Met a cute translator at the studio, I think we even got introduced, but of course the name bounced right off my brain. Also had a bit of a laugh with the nexus girl. Recession is so funny. Ha ha.

My parents went to Cracow for the weekend (and Wroclaw, and Wolsztyn, and Kalisz, and Lodz, all in all, they covered 1500km), so I stopped by today to learn how their trip went, and tell them about Berlin. Halfway through one of mom's stories I caught myself feeling this little spike of misty-eyed exuberance, the sort you sometimes get when you're kind of drunk and having a really good time talking to someone you like. Which was pretty awesome. Dad's going in for tests on Thursday, but they seemed in really good spirits, so... Well, we'll see.

I've been watching the new season of In Treatment and was a bit disapointed at first,that none of the patients' stories drew me in, and some of them even annoyed me. I'm on week five now though, and find myself really looking forward to the Mia sessions, even though I used to find her completely unpalatable. April's ok too, and Gina - the one constant - never fails, because I find Dianne Wiest just too damn engaging. So that makes 3 out of 5. Not bad, I guess. I still liked the first season better, but I also admire how they actually moved shit forward. Paradoxically, I almost like seeing Paul, the main character, reveal in the Gina sessions what an asshole he is, or use these kind of low, transparrent gambits during his own sessions with his patients. It makes him feel so real. And it's quite a progression - it wasn't so pronounced in the first season. The signs were there, but you didn't see him openly struggle with his life.

Aaand that's that.

There is something exciting...

Yesterday, we went with Ana and Yssy to Berlin, to see Sia in concert. I use the word "yesterday" deliberately, because we left Warsaw at 11a.m., and arrived back within 24 hours. And it's a 12 hour roundway trip.

The governmental area of downtown Berlin, around the Hauptbahnhof, is absolutely awestriking. Wide open spaces, clean architectural lines, not a speck of dirt in sight. And very little human presence. The place seemed deserted. It all felt very Gattaca, except in muted (though not oppressive or dull) greys instead of golden browns. And then there was the gothic Reichstag building topped with this futuristic, glass-and-steel dome that nevertheless seemed perfectly integrated into the design.

The concert itself seemed awfully short. Sia was adorable, as always, but much less talkative than in Dublin. I guess that's the difference not being in an English-speaking country and not doing the last performance of the tour makes.


We had several hours to kill before the morning train, so we went wandering around Kreuzberg. But before we even got there, we stumbled upon this... I don't even know what to call it. You walk along this brick wall right by a multi-lane, busy street just off the Ostbahnhof (think the Powązki part of Okopowa, the train station being Klif), and suddenly there's an opening in the wall, from which you hear the sounds of some vaguely tribal music. Beyond it lies a courtyard with some brightly coloured barracks to the sides, undoubtedly housing a bunch of clubs (this time - think Dobra). The inside of the brick wall is painted with vivid, rastafarian graffiti. And then, of course, there's a ramp. Leading up to an artificial, hilltop beach overlooking the river, complete with a beachball net, a tiki-style bar, and the almost opressive smell of weed. We wandered in there at around 11p.m. so I've no idea how the place looks like in sunlight, but the mere fact that you could step off a busy street in fucking industrial, post-socialist East Berlin and find yourself in this pocket universe, cut off from the city bustle... So uncanny.

In Kreuzberg proper we found a relentlessly stylish bar called "Mysliwska" with a photo of Cybulski hanging over the toilet entrance. There was also another one, much more to my liking, with live music, and some sort of secret passage leading out of the men's room (people kept going in, but reappeared out of sequence, and only after an hour or so), but I don't think we ever learned what it was called. Not for lack of trying. We ate mostly fast food (either because we were in a hurry, or because it was the middle of the night). At our last meal in Kreuzberg, the Turkish kebab guy started talking to us in Polish, and told us he has a villa in Zielona Góra.


I returned home with an all too familiar feeling of frustrated wistfulness, as if throughout the entire trip I'd been trying to make out with someone through a windshield - my system's fucked up way of saying it really liked what it saw.

[All photos courtesy of Ana]

Petrie

I could never fully relate to family dramas. I figured it was because my family was exceptionally issue-free. Turns out the reason was my arrested development, and now that I've finally left the nest, I find myself getting a crash-course of all the cliches you could think of. I had them over for dinner last Friday and the whole family dynamic got turned inside out. It's like this heaving, freaky blob that's mutating at the speed of light, up to a point where I'm not sure where we'll be at in a week's time.

I cooked an ungodly amount of pasta with feta cheese, olives and sundried tomatoes, and there was a lot of leftovers. The pasta turned out to be surprisingly good though, so I helped myself to two offerings today. Ergo, no lunch for tomorrow. The whole food logistics thing still eludes me.

Got a haircut. I kinda like it, but there's an issue. I'll see if I can work around it.

Need lots of random stuff for the apartment. Mop head. Scissors. Sugar bowl. Sofa. Extension cord. Salad bowl. Bowls in general. A stick of dynamite to blow the fucking armchair up. I already bought a big-ass knife, a bedspread, and new curtains. They need to be shortened though. Sigh.

You know how sometimes the only way to salvage some relative sense of self worth is by realizing that luckily there isn't enough time in the world for this other person to achieve everything they're capable of? Yeah, I figured you wouldn't.

Shiny

A lot of apartment stuff going on, but I don't really have time to go into that right now, so I'm just posting this brilliant disclaimer I found in one of the festival dialogue lists:

Translators & laboratories: the director, mr. Pasolini, has personally written, timed and layed out the Sinhala to English subtitles. He has requested that you only subtitle what he has subtitled, that you keep his timings and that you keep his layout and punctuation as closely as possible.

That's some hands-on directing.

Deployment

I've been feeling pretty weird for the past few days. Unsettled. This moving-in-installments business is more destabilizing than I thought. Last night I couldn't sleep because suddenly, for no apparent reason, I was convinced I hadn't locked the door on my way out, and someone probably ransacked the place. I went there today after the Easter breakfast under the pretext of moving some of my stuff. Of course everything was fine, and I celebrated by cleaning a window. One out of four. Small victory - small celebration.

Still no idea what to do with the bedroom layout. There's this horrible armchair that's taking up space that I can't get rid of (landlord's decree). And I've no bookshelves yet. And I'm not sure about the positioning of the desk. So that's been keeping me up too. I just want to get it over with though, so I'll probably transport the desktop to the new place tomorrow and that will be that.

Interior design conundrums aside - the only downside of the transition I'm concerned with right now is all the time I'l now be losing worrying about and foraging for food. But I imagine I'll have bigger fish to fry (pun! kinda!) once - finally rid of the family background static - I actually feel the full brunt of the L word. Speaking of which - the new Bat for Lashes is out, and the chorus on this thing amazing (though my favorite is still Glass).

The Chinese were wrong

For reasons not really worth getting into, I hit the Internet to read up a bit on the US public debt. After a while I started feeling as if I were listening to the intro of some postapocalyptic cyberpunk video game. And it's actually not the first time I had that feeling - I got a very similar, surreal vibe when I read last year that Iceland went bankrupt. I guess I'm gonna have to start getting used to it.

It's absolutely terrifying and thrilling at the same time. How often do you witness the collapse of a true empire? It's like we're Byzantium watching Rome fall, except, you know, not at all.

Chwyty

Szukalem polskich piesni religijnych, bo musze przelozyc jakis hymn do filmu, i znalazlem z pomoca bohdana te oto strone ktorej layout doprowadzil do powstania dosyc frapujacych tytulów. Ponizej probka:

Gdy srebrnikow garsc chwyty
Getsemani - spojrz, tam w gorze chwyty
Jakbym bardzo chcial chwyty
Krzyz a na nim Bog chwyty (anty-syty, I suppose)
Naucz nas, Panie chwyty
Oto nadchodza dni chwyty (brzmi nienajlepiej)
Pewnej nocy chwyty (Suddenly intruder)
Rozpiety na ramionach chwyty
Z Twego boku, Chryste chwyty
Zagubiony slad chwyty

Dostalem totalnej glupawki. A niektore i bez chwytow sa masakrycznie ("Na przydroznym krzyzu wykonawca"? WTF?)