Cuteness!!!

I've blogged before about the cuteness that is Martinka Bobáňová from Terchova -- she was by far the star of Slovensko Má Talent.  Last night, she was on the show Modré z nebo with a South Korean girl who lives in Svit (right under the Tatry) and sings Slovak folk songs (and speaks perfect Slovak).  Super cute!  Here's a link to watch the video: scroll down to #2 directly below the video for the correct segment.

Fašiengy in Oľšavica

It's a bit late to be posting about fašiengys, since we're in the complete middle of Lent already, but I just came across these and had to share.  These are two news stories from Oľšavica, Špiš:

• Markíza: scroll down to #6 on the list below the video.  This one is about 5 minutes long and has great music and really shows how it's the young people who are leading the party and setting the pace -- similar to the fašiengy I was at in Jakubany.  There's also the added benefit of an anthropologist explaining the traditions and actions as they show them.
  

• TA3: This one is shorter, but also very good and worth watching -- boost the page view count!

Alas, Rusyn customs shown on Slovak television -- a good thing.  We've got to get in the habit of calling the news stations when doing Rusyn activities -- because when people see these types of things and see other people self-identifying as Rusyns, it'll boost our head count and we can have us some more fist-pumping Rusyns.  In 2001, out of 327 total residents in Oľšavica, only 35 said Rusyn was their first language.

I’m a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves, I’ll give you a topic.

"Rhode Island is neither a road nor is it an island. Discuss."

Here’s an analogy I’d like to present for consideration (considering that I have like no real mastery of three of the 4 languages I’m about to mention):

Slovak : Czech :: American English : British English

I watch quite a bit of British television, and here there is quite a bit of Czech on Slovak television. For example, when there’s something on the news from Prague, they don’t really bother translating it. People can understand it, like 98% of the time, except the other 2% when they’re like “what?” which is like Americans watching British television.

Yes no?

A void, filled

Just as I was getting a bit antsy about what my one weekly American TV fix would be, now that Mad Men season 2 has been over for a few weeks, the answer to my question "What will I do?" has come to me: TOP CHEF!!!

Autumn Palette a potom tak dalej

This is the first autumn since I can remember that I have genuinely enjoyed, probably because I have given myself the time and allowed myself to enjoy it.

On Monday, I went for a walk, as I normally do on Mondays after lunch, and I was so glad I brought along my camera -- because I was able to enjoy and then capture some amazingly beautiful details:

(click through to the website to see these pics if you're reading this via e-mail)

I love the palette -- I don't think I'd paint any living spaces in these colors, but I can most definitely live with them for the season. And while I'm at it, a shoutout to Leonardo da Pisa, detto Fibonacci -- for the enduringly amazing Fibonacci Sequence so often visible in nature (and elsewhere).

But in the Western World, we are (subconsciously) into the idea of the Best General View -- so here's one:
The hill is called Kalvária (see the Stations on the right), and the photo is looking towards the east -- so the mountains in the very background distance are the westernmost of the High Tatras. Right in the middle is the paper factory and the river Váh.

Finally, in the middle of everything back in town, there's the Hlinka Mausoleum (under the Slovak double cross):
But actually his body isn't even there, because it disappeared sometime during the war. I'm totally interested in this part of Ružomberok-related history, because even after asking multiple people, I've yet to get a satisfactory answer. Hlinka's party became Tiso's party, and Tiso was (in my opinion, but not in the opinion of most Slovaks I've asked) a fascist, because of his collaboration with the Nazis during the war. The Slovak historiography seems to be that they were just doing what they could to make Slovakia independent (i.e. not Czech+Slovakia) but I don't see how a puppet state is independent at all... However, even though I think Tiso was pretty fascist, I also really think that Hlinka's popularity and memory was grossly misused after his death (cf. the Hlinka Guard) so maybe he (Hlinka) wasn't all that bad but Tiso was. But the really interesting part of all of this is that when I ask people about this period of history, the answer 90% of the time is, "We don't know, and we'll never know." An entire generation of people here were taught history at a time when it was being rewritten, and I think 20 years later things are still being sorted out.

Speaking of things still being sorted out after the fact, nearly 100 years after the independence of Slovakia from Hungary, there's still big-time, major anti-Hungarian sentiment here -- which the Hungarians tend to be highly mutual about. Last Sunday, the Slovaks and Hungarians played a (friendly) football match which turned deadly due to the presence of right-wing Hungarian football hooligans. After being subdued by the Slovak police, another crazy scary right-wing group started burning Slovak flags in front of the Slovak embassy in Bratislava -- they've been protesting since Sunday. I actually heard about this crazy scary right-wing group (Magyar Gárda) on Deutsche Welle's Inside Europe podcast -- and made the connection, which the TV news confirmed. The crazy scary thing about them is that their beginnings sound eerily similar to the Nazi party, right down to the disenfranchized, xenophobic, country-dwelling, young males. All of this makes me quite sad to see. When will we (humans) learn?

So yesterday on the news, in order for Slovakia to get back at Hungary for everything, they do a puff piece about the quality of Hungarian bread -- which is oft bought in Slovakia. It was unbelievable how un-newsworthy the subject was, especially because the people they found to talk about it tended to complement the quality of the bread anyway. And along the lines of further un-newsworthyness, last week there was a story of Czechs finding unexploded grenades around Dukla -- what can we expect? The stupid thing about it was that they take them and sell them at flea markets, and that is really stupid.

But not stupid is one Martinka Bobáňová from Terchová, also the birthplace of Jánošík. She's quite the little star of Slovensko Má Talent, and here are some supercute videos (especially the last one on the page -- it's chronologically the first and the best). She sings and plays the accordion and dances and I hope wins the entire thing. When they asked her what she'd do with 3million SKK (about $125,000), she said, "I've got lots of Barbie dolls, but they are homeless!" Supercute and totally worth a watch.

This morning at 6am, my mom woke me up with some great news. When I walked into the zborovňa, I got congratualations from all of my colleagues. By voting, we make the country we want to live in, we made a huge wonderful change and I believe we can do so much more together. I'm so excited to see how things work out, and I want to be part of it. Yes we can! -- I know people are saying Yes we did! which is true -- but as the Italians say, la lotta continua.

So alas, I started this post out all nice and then it rather turned into a beast. But that's how my mind kind of works.

What will I do?

Now that Mad Men, season 2 is over, what can fill the ensuing void?

Pošta pre teba: Pani Carol

This summer with my Slovak class classmates, the question came up as to whether or not it was possible to speak Slovak with an American accent. I now know the extent to which it is possible, and I'm happy to share it -- here it is -- but it's really very impressive how grammatically correct she speaks. Pošta pre teba (Mail for you) is this show that reminds me of elements of a Clinton-era daytime talk favorite, Forgive or Forget with Mother Love. People come on the show because they're looking for some long lost friend, their biological parent or child, or to thank or recognize someone important in their lives for being so special -- there's also a door and a dramatic reveal. Alas, I'll have to make you watch the segment to see what happens at the end, because I don't want to give it away. They do such a great job of telling a story.

TV and supermarkets

Two of my favorite meters for monitoring the flavor of whatever country I'm visiting are television and grocery stores. They both have global elements, but a lot of local flavor (as the saying goes, 'what's global is local and what's local is global') is involved, and they show priorities. For example, a Velvet Underground documentary subtitled in Català can be seen as an interesting statement for both Catalunya and Spain, what the media presents, and what types of culture people are interested in. Also today I spent a significant amount of time in Tesco (a British chain) and I love watching people shop for food. It also takes me a long time to grocery shop anyway because I don't know where stuff is. I'm slowly learning the supermarket closest to me, but it's all a process -- they're all like as big or bigger than Giant Eagle or Shoprite and it can be really overwhelming.

This evening, I put on the TV, and there was a rather fascinating thing on STV2 (called 'dvojka') -- a 20-minute, blast-from-the-past, back to the future newsreel show called Československý filmový týždenník (you can watch online). It turns out, this year they're replaying the news from 1968 every week. A fascinating way to honor the memory and courage of so many -- although at this point in the year, the country was already occupied by the Warsaw Pact. In the episode I saw, there was this excellent show of products from (capitalist) countries, with a focus on Fiat cars and motorcycles -- they made huge amounts of money during the Cold War by building factories in the USSR and their Italian workers were mostly highly sympathetic to the cause anyway. Then there was a motorcycle rally type race on mud paths in the mountains, which looked really fun but also supremely dangerous, proletarian-on-the-street interviews, and a oh-so-1968 ČSSR version of Nancy Sinatra + Patty Pravo -- that powerful yet somewhat mournful female late-sixties pop singer type of style.

Then there was a newsmagazine-type show on, and the big news of the day is that now Slovaks can go to the US as tourists (up to 90 days) without a visa. People have been talking about this for months and it's a really big deal. During the segment, there were clips of Forbes Avenue in Oakland, which was kind of strange to see but I recognized it immediately of course -- and of course, President Gasparovič was in Pittsburgh last week, so no surprise our fair city was part of the stock reel. The US ambassador to Slovakia was on the show talking about the no visa thing, but it was mostly boringly information, not really any policy statements. Another segment was about the types of food Slovaks buy and who eats the least healthily -- Bratislava and Košice regions have the worst diets. The top three products people buy are apples, chicken and potatoes -- not very suprising but definitely not a bad thing either. Finally, the Rusyns made it onto the news, although in a Fark-ish non-news sort of way: apparently residents of Ulič live very close to the Ukrainian border and people could theoretically walk back and forth between the countries even though there's no actual road connecting them, just a path. The two countries want to build a road I think, but of course it's kind of an issue because Ukraine isn't Schengen.

Also, I'd kill for a fresh salad right now, preferably containing romaine lettuce, but really any kind of fresh (raw) greens and vegetables. I'm really starting to love cabbage, but it's not the same. I'm in a salad kind of mood, but I can't act on it.

Accuracy and brilliance

Today, while watching a little girl play with some dolls and small plastic farmyard animals on the train, I realized the absolute brilliance of Gilda Radner as Judy Miller:

This week, teaching

Oh my nearly sacrosanct Wednesday evenings. Boiled potatoes, red cabbage, beer, and Mad Men.

I'm learning (as I bumble along) of the many special needs that some of my students have. Generally, what happens is that I recognize some sort of pattern of behavior, then talk to my special needs coordinator colleagues, who say something like, "Wow, good for you that you noticed that, that's the sign of a good teacher." At which point I respond with something like, "that's nice, now what do I do?" I think most of the big things I need to know about I know about now, but I'm starting to get concerned because we're already more than a month into the school year and time's a wastin'.

The crew (I generally call my classes my crews, and start class with "Righto, crew." Every foreign language teacher I've ever had has had a signature starting line, and this is mine) I had po škole last week were absolute angels this week -- ideal students if there were such a thing. They participated, they were mostly quiet, and they were really paying attention. The worst offender has apparently found Jesus, because every time he saw me this week he greeted me with the Slovak equivalent of "Slava Isusu Christu" which is a phrase I really have trouble remembering -- the first word is really long and complicated. We'll see how long all of this lasts. While talking about the general phenomenon of their angelicitude with one of my colleagues today, an interesting dialogue happened (in Slovak):

Colleague: Well, it's good that they respect you.
Self: I respect them, too. It's important that we respect each other.
Colleague: And become friends.
Self: Uhm, I'm not really here to be friends with them.
Colleague: (perhaps not understanding my POV) Don't worry, it's still early in the school year.
Self: (blank stare) ?

For real, as much as I know the way I handle my classes is probably completely not like how a lot of their other classes are, it is important to me that there's that mutual respect. I know they're not stupid, and I think they realize that I've got a lot to teach them.

Another interesting thing that another colleague brought up (there's a lot of colleagues -- this one we speak to each other in broken Slovak/broken English, and usually about things that can be vaguely politically related) was how hard it is to be able to support a family now, and in how many families both parents work outside the home, which the teachers can tell in school because of how the kids act.

Now, if I may tend towards the slightly ribald for the rest of this post:
This weekend the general buzz throughout all of Slovakia surrounded the presence here of one Pamela Anderson and her sometimes-heaving bosom. After the news on Sunday evening, there is a (rather insipid -- worse than E.T. and Access Hollywood put together) show called "Prominenti" that I think is about famous people. They dedicated the entire show to Pamela on Sunday, because she was here for (judging?) a (pageant?) called Cat Girl 2008. Pamela even gave a very sultry "Ahojte Slovensko" when she came up on stage. My students felt the need to comment on the entire occasion this week - I don't know what could have interested me less.

Quite possibly the funniest moment happened towards the end of my class of currently-angels while I was trying to sum up everything. They were starting to get a bit chatty and restless, and so I began with my (seemingly) constant refrain of "In English!!!!!!!" So one student began: "My neighbor... very bad... (if only you could have seen the look of sincerity on this kid's face) Every night (brings) different girl... and I can't sleep!" As Authority Figure, I thanked my student, finished up class as the bell rang, and saved my chuckles for the walk back to the zborovňa.

Slovensko Má Talent - Slovakia's Got Talent

I've seen one or two episodes of America's Got Talent, with Jerry Springer and Sharon Osborne and various trained dogs, cute kids who sing, and breakdancing crews.

The Slovak version has all of that, plus some 'folksier' (though that word now has a bad connotation, thanks to Sarah Palin) elements. For example, a Roma folk group from Kežmarok in which the lead person introduced everyone as "This is my cousin, Sílvia. And this is also my cousin, Mária. And this is also my cousin, Lubo. And this is also my cousin, ..." Also quite impressive was a 40-year old man who was able to chug a pint of beer while also doing a handstand, then chug another pint standing up, and finally begin to sing a song extolling the virtues of beer. One of the judges then asked, "Sy ženatý? -- Are you married?" Somehow, it wasn't a surprise that he was not. If I had to guess, I'd say that the Slovak version has an exponentially higher number of accordions per hour, on average (I think I counted 4), than the American version, including one 6 year-old girl playing and singing -- supercute.

today + television

About 1pm, while we were eating lunch (rabbit! -- the little rabbit foot part is well worth having to look at for the excellent meat, and you just kind of pick up the spine and get the meat out from around the vertebrae), the oldschool socialist speakers came on. They're kind of like the adults in the Charlie Brown TV specials, because you really can't understand what they're saying.
Nonetheless, right after lunch I was helping in the garden, and Petra's grandmother comes in the front gate. I hadn't even realized she was gone, but she's super fast. She had something over her shoulder, and Petra's mom was talking to her about it, but I didn't understand. It turns out, the announcement was that the people selling chickens were there, and Petra's grandmother went and bought two chickens! One is 2 years old and will be good for eating, and the other one is crazy looking because it's missing half it's feathers and is only one year old. It seems to be not liked by the other chickens, I was watching them this afternoon.
This evening, we watched this drama that takes place in the gynecology department of a hospital. At one point, the one doctor is so drunk that they have to call in another doctor from home to do an emergency c-section, because he's plastered. Obviously, this can happen in Slovakia, not on ER or whatever... At one point, they're basically delivering a baby, and not much is left to the imagination -- this is rather effective birth control, I think, because the whole process does not seem very enjoyable. Then, this other doctor's son was like an orderly in the same department as this other doctor who she had had an affair with, and it was some sort of problem. There was also an anorexic girl who was sedated immediatley after she screamed that she wasn't anorexic. Overall, a very engaging drama.

written last night

After I got back from Aachen, I went to the train station in search of a small suitcase on wheels to accommodate my recent book acquisitions. For the price of the small suitcase, I could have sent home only one envelope. So, I will become considerably stronger while lugging around what is effectively a portable library, very strong in museology and art history, but not without some anthropology and European fiction. The other day at the bookstore in the train station, I got Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka, who is a hysterically funny Ukrainian-British writer. Her style is somewhat similar to Johnathan Safran-Foer's in Everything is Illuminated, although this is funny the whole way through, whereas Safran-Foer has some melancholy. Last summer, a recommendation from the Irish bookseller at The Almost Corner Bookshop in Rome led me to Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and Two Caravans actually refers to the first at one point in the plot, so I'm happy to have found this. I love her writing because she uses English so well, and to her advantage. At times, I found myself laughing out loud, which is healthy and I can't remember the last time I read a novel for pleasure like this -- probably last summer. In Paris, I bought a bilingual edition of Pasolini's Novelle Romane (Roman Novels) which will help me with French and Italian at the same time. The prices for used books in Paris were insanely low even with the unfavorable Euro, and it made me feel apart of the bursting-at-the-seams intellectualism of the Latin Quarter.

Besides various German junk food/fast food of which I am fond, there is also German television. Right now, there is this show on about squid reproduction, which is fascinating even though I can't understand it, because I find squid to be kind of gross yet endlessly interesting. They are not something I enjoy eating, so I think that's kind of why I'm interested in them (aggiungi anche questi alle cozze, Bill). This morning, as I was getting ready to go, there was this show called Stein Zeit: Das Experiment. I think I saw the companion series meant for children, called Die ,,Steinzeit"-Kinder, and it features people somewhere in Bavaria recreating the Stone Age. This guy, without talking, cooked a rabbit, carrots, and potatoes over red-hot stones in a small pit, and then cut the rabbit apart using a piece of flint. It looked really good and he seemed pleased with himself.

The Museum Ludwig was open today because of the holiday, and it was nice, although my brain is exhausted. I'll go back tomorrow morning as planned to relook at some of the High Modern works and then go look at the Pop Art collection. It seems that they have representative works from all of the right people, from all of the right movements.

One general discovery of an artist this trip has been Nicholas de Stäel, who I wasn't aware of before seeing a fantastic non-objective piece in the Centre Pompidou. The Museum Ludwig has a interesting little objective still life, and I've decided I really like his work. The photography exhibit at the Museum Ludwig was quite good, featuring a good mix of photographers, and presenting an almost perfect visual comparison of Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies with Andreas Gursky, especially including the fantastic Montparnasse. In painting, there were some excellent Max Ernst paintings, and I liked what I saw, which was generally a specific type of surrealism -- Ernst and his friends, including Picabia, another artist I'm appreciating more this trip. My favorites though were an exceptional group of Russian suprematism, with Rodchenko well represented in painting, sculpture and photography. In another area, there were some great Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy photos, which in some ways I think are complimentary to suprematism. Further connections to the Centre Pompidou, as there I saw again (it was a huge surprise and I'm so happy I got to see it again) the film Moholy-Nagy made of his perpetual motion/light reflection machine thing. I took 1 minute of the film with my digital camera, and one of these days I can post it here via google video. The actual perpetual motion/light reflection machine thing is at the Bauhaus-archiv in Berlin, and so I didn't think I'd see the video again until I got back there.

The weather is totally dreary, it's around 55°F/13°C and raining a lot, which does not promote a good mood. There were lots of people out in the streets today, but most of the stores were closed so everyone was window shopping. The galleries were open, and I walked into one to get out of the rain, where I came across tons of soggy Scouts hanging their wet outerwear over an escalator railing! There were a lot of Scouts in transit today whose day was ruined by the crappy weather. Despite the cold weather, I was roasting most of the day due to my 100% nylon rainjacket, which also makes me fit in with German fashion, because today everyone was wearing walking shoes like mine and nylon jackets like mine. Usually when travelling I am most often taken for German, and it is rather obvious why, although this also means that people assume I also speak German. This afternoon, while trying to make the most efficient exit from Aachen, I had issues pronouncing Hauptbanhof, which means train station, so the very nice gentleman repeated it for me.

I have yet to be able to get beyond the rear of the cathedral, because I always seem to walk in during a service and there are sextons in red and black robes stopping people from moving towards the front. It's a very impressive building, because it's actually a lot longer than it seems from the outside. Evidently, it was only completed in the 1880s, but it's definitely quite Gothic. If the cathedral in Köln is Gothic, then the cathedral in Aachen is a triumph of Romanesque exuberance. I must confess, it was exactly what I pictured from Janson's History of Art. The mosaics in there were great, and I think in the Treasury Museum I saw some mention or comparison to San Vitale in Ravenna. I went into the Treasury Museum because it was raining and there wasn't much else to do because everything else was closed. Normally I find Treasury Museums to be really boring, and this one was no exception, but I did see Charlemagne's right forearm and the rope used to scourge Jesus, His belt, and Mary's belt. There was also a collection of broken locks and keys, which has something to do with a connection between the church and city of Aachen, which I didn't understand. Kings from all over Europe sent things to Aachen, I assume to promote their own legitimacy, and so there was an interesting collection of things from farther east as well. The German Catholics appear to still be reveling in the fact that il Papa Ratzinger is pope, and this region is also the objective of pilgrimages from all over Europe, including a lot of Spaniards right now it seems.

Tomorrow, the Römanisches-Germanisches Museum, the Ludwig Museum again, and then off to the Köln-Bonn Flughaven to go down to Munich.

When I'm in large cities, like Paris or New York, I always find it hard to tell if people are really happy, which leads me to think they're not. Today, both here and in Aachen, people were smiling, laughing, and greeting each other in the streets, which makes me think that they are in fact happy, and this is a good thing.