Three-Meter Pushkin

by Karl

Proposed statue

One of the nice features of our neighborhood is Puškinovo náměstí, or Pushkin Square. It's a small city block, shaped sort of like a diamond, with grass, two play areas, and big trees, surrounded by quiet streets and pleasant five-story buildings. This was the site of Garrett's biking breakthrough earlier this month and a great place to take the boys for some running around without a big expedition.

Garrett bikes past the playground at Pushkin Square.

Today was the boys' last day of school (!!). I walked them past Pushkin Square, down to the shuttle bus, and when I got back to our building, as I made my way to the stairs I noticed a flier taped up on the building's information board. It turns out today is the last day to comment on a proposed addition to Pushkin Square.  Prague is divided into more than 20 "parts," each with its own mayor (as opposed to the lord mayor of all of Prague) and local council.  Our neighborhood of Bubeneč is in Prague 6, whose mayor says:

The Russian Cultural Foundation has offered Prague 6 a statue of the Russian renaissance poet Pushkin. They have also requested the placement of the statue on Pushkin Square in Bubeneč. Given that the statue would be placed near the dwellings of hundreds of people, we consider it our duty to ask the residents whether they agree with this plan. Based on their answers, we will formulate our position as a response to the Russian side.

I don't feel particularly confident in judgments of visual aesthetics, so I can't weigh in on whether this is a fine piece of art or some kitchy abomination that will ruin a pleasant neighborhood space. But there's also the whole Russian thing.

Odcházení

by Karl

This post takes its name from a 2007 play by Václav Havel, about a prime minister who is leaving after a fairly long term in office. Havel says he had the basic idea for the play long before he was directly involved in politics, but the autobiographical connection seems obvious, since Havel served as Czechoslovak president from 1990 to 1992, then as Czech president from 1993 to 2003. Last year the play was turned into a movie, with Havel himself premiering in the director's chair; a friend who saw it said that it's fine, as long as you go in understanding that Havel hasn't so much made a movie as filmed a play.

Proposal for movie poster, not implemented

The title means "Leaving," and it's about the difficulty of going away from something that you've gotten very used to.

This morning when I was up at the office handing in my key and picking up some boxes to ship things in, our landlady called to see about coming by with two prospective tenants to show them the apartment. I met them back here, and as they looked around and asked the landlady about various features, I noticed an odd thought in the back of my mind -- "Wait, this is our apartment. We live here. You mean you're going to rent it out to someone else?"

We've gotten very used to it here, and as much as we're looking forward to being back with old friends and the familiarity of home, it's hard to leave our Prague life.  In four days, we're outta here.

Can't we all just get along?

by Karl

Back when there was a Czechoslovakia, American students learning geography might naturally assume that there were people called “Czechoslovaks,” just like in Italy there were Italians and in Germany there were Germans. But this was a long name, with weird spelling to boot (“cz” pronounced like “ch,” and “ch” pronounced like “k”—what’s that about?), so “Czechoslovak” was often shortened to “Czech.” This didn’t get rid of the weird spelling issues, but it did save three syllables, so its use was widespread. If there were an Olympic hockey match between the U.S. and Czechoslovakia, the Americans were said to be playing “the Czechs.”

This seemed innocent enough to Americans—after all, people from other countries in the western hemisphere might object to the way we hogged the title “Americans,” but what were we supposed to call ourselves? “U.S. Americans”? Ungainly. “North Americans”? Well, that would still include Canada—and Mexico, too, technically, though they were part of “Latin America,” and so not really in North America, except to some stickler of a geography teacher.

So we were equally comfortable calling ourselves “Americans” and referring to people from Czechoslovakia as “Czechs.”

But if you happened to study the history or geography of the region more closely, at some point you had the surprising discovery that there were actually two different … peoples in Czechoslovakia: Czechs and Slovaks. What’s the difference? It can be summed up with history, religion, economics, and language.

Just Like Old Times

by Karl

Last Wednesday morning I went to hear a public dress rehearsal of the Prague Symphony Orchestra in Smetana Hall at the Municipal House. Walking away afterwards, I noticed a poster on a lamppost and—WHAT?! I’m not sure whether I first recognized the picture or the name, but it was indeed Ben Zander conducting the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra from New England Conservatory.

That’s my youth orchestra (1982-85). In my day its name was Youth Chamber Orchestra, but that was about the time that Zander started having the group play things like Mahler and Bartok, so calling it a chamber orchestra was getting to be ridiculous.

In 1985 we played Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Zander wisely told us to get hold of a recording and listen to it before rehearsals started. The first time I heard it, I was crushed. It didn’t sound sweet, like the Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Beethoven and Mozart I was used to playing with the orchestra. There were so many harsh sounds and discordances, and I was not at all looking forward to spending the season working on that noise. But as I listened more, I started to hear it differently, and as we rehearsed it, it really made sense.

I had the great pleasure of being second trumpet to Rich Kelley. Many of the kids in the orchestra (like me) were from well-off suburbs of Boston, but Rich was from the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston itself, and if I remember the story right, he started taking lessons with a clarinet teacher, because that’s who was in the neighborhood. After three years, he was good enough to win the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concerto competition for high school students. After that, the principal trumpet player of the Boston Symphony started giving him lessons for free. At first I was disappointed not to be first trumpet—it was my last year in the orchestra, and part of me felt like I had earned it—but Rich was much better than me, and anyway, doing a good job on the first-trumpet part of the Bartók was not quite within my abilities. I was comfortable playing second, and I hope I didn’t make the section sound bad for Rich.

(On my left, third trumpet was covered by Bijon Watson, who, like Rich, has gone on to do a lot more with his trumpet than I have.)

In Spring, 1984, we toured Austria and Poland. In Vienna, we played Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the Musikvereinsaal, where Mahler himself had stood at the podium as the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic.

I remember this view (though I found the picture here).

The Laundry of Rovinj

From Slavenka Drakulić's How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed ~

By looking at the clotheslines I can tell who is a good housekeeper, whose laundry is white enough and properly hung, how big the family is, who lives alone. My grandma taught me all that, and how to hang a man's shirts, trousers, or pullovers. She taught me that you could tell a lot, even the character of people, just by looking at clothes. Laundry was like an open book to her.

'That woman over there, she is playing the lady. Look how many nylons she's hung out!' Or, 'The one from the first floor, she must be stingy, she doesn't use bleach at all.'

Croatia ~ Istria Peninsula

Part two of our Croatia/Slovenia/Austria vacation. Part one on the Plitvice Lakes can be found here.

Monday ~ Senj and Rovinj/Rovigno

We left the Plitvice Lakes and wound our way west to Senj on the Adriatic Sea.

Ben, Karl and Garrett brace themselves against the gusts.

Our first view of the Adriatic was from the very windy pass at Vratnik. This pit stop also provided us the opportunity to teach the boys not to pee into the wind.

Nehaj, the Uskok fortress at Senj, built in 1558.

The Uskoks -- known as Croatian freedom fighters to locals, but mere pirates and hoodlums to Venetians and Ottoman Turks -- used Senj as a base from which they attacked and raided ships (often Venetian) traveling the narrow Adriatic passage. Venetians had a saying in the 1500s, "May God preserve us from the hands of Senj."

Kate and Karl at Nehaj

Even though we'd descended more than 750m/2500ft from the pass, we didn't escape the wind down at the coast!

Kill the Messenger

by Karl

As I’ve followed the local press here, the thing that has come to overwhelm everything else in my sense of the Czech political scene is the level of corruption (it was part of the context for my post on classical liberalism in Czech politics). It’s not that I don’t think American politics is riddled with corruption, but maybe our politicians are somehow … smoother about it.Whatever the reason, when I’m at home the corruption there doesn’t seem to smack me in the face the way it does here.

A lot of it here has to do with military purchases. As Kate mentioned in her post on David Černý’s Entropa, a Swedish company sold the Czechs some Gripen fighter planes for a vastly inflated price. By law, Czech military purchases from foreign companies are handled through private intermediaries, and the justification for this system is presumably that they can get the government a better deal.  But in fact the best-case scenario is that they replicate work that should be done by people in the Ministry of Defense itself, and the more likely scenario is that they function sort of like a very expensive real estate agent (imagine an agent whose commission is one or two times the price of your house) and open up a huge space for illicit money flows to parties or individual politicians.

The latest mess has to do with the investigation—or the non-investigation—of the purchase of wheeled armored vehicles called Pandurs. The first tip that there may have been something fishy in the whole thing was the fact that the Czech military paid too much for them, and that the Czech Army didn’t actually have much use for them. According to Respekt (Jaroslav Spurný and Ondřej Kundra, “Umlčte Stephana S. – Silence Stephan S.,” June 13, 2011), “they’re mainly for decoration, and the chance of their utilization in a foreign mission is practically zero.” But that was years ago and, as seems to be standard practice here in cases of corruption implicating high government officials, nothing happened.