Day 31: Jazz

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 

We have now started coming up with ideas for our final projects in the fibers studio. I still have no idea what I'll be doing - something based on Tyn Church, perhaps. 

What this means, though, is that the end is in sight. I'm not sure how to feel about that - I'm looking forward to going home, but I wish I could do that and stay here for another few months at the same time… 

The ATM told me last night that my account has insufficient funds, so I will be living off of my remaining traveler's cheques for a while. 

Tonight: Jazz Club! 

This was another of the musical performances included in the trip. After dark, we walked across several blocks and down a set of neon-lit stairs to a long underground room filled with chairs, tables, and portraits of famous jazz musicians. This is an entire club, apparently, devoted to jazz. Unfortunately, the lighting was far too dim for photography. 

The musicians tonight were the František Kop Quartet: piano, saxophone, drums, and electric bass. All four men were extremely talented, and large parts of the performance consisted of one of the four showing off his ability to do dizzying musical pyrotechnics with any given theme. They shared the spotlight fairly equally. They played several of their own original compositions, as well as a beautiful piece called "Sleepwalking Girl." (I went up and asked the title afterward.) It was a lovely way to spend the evening. 

There's a video of the quartet here, playing three years ago in the same place. The stage looks much the same. 

Day 27: Solitaire

Friday, June 8, 2012 

Weaving all day! Finished tapestry number 2 and started number 3! Stripes and gradients and an attempt at a fringe! I might be addicted to weaving! Yay! 

The soundtrack for this project turned out to be the album Right Outta Nowhere, by Christine Kane. Good music for weaving. Good music for anything, really. 

The power cord for my laptop inexplicably broke in my backpack earlier this week, so I've been using my laptop sparingly to conserve power. Today, I managed to get in touch with the Institute's IT expert, who loaned me an old spare cord he had. I can type again! 

After all the walking yesterday, I didn't really feel like going anywhere today. (Besides, I had weaving to do.) I'm not sure if I left the Institute at all before the trip back to Vinohrady in the evening. This is something that happens to me fairly often: I'll start making something, look up a little while later, and wonder when it got so dark outside... 

There are actually signs up in the Metro forbidding passengers to put stickers on the walls and doors (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what the signs say). Despite this, someone had looked at the lines and dots of the station diagrams above the doors... 

...And had added a little PacMan and ghosts. 

I had dinner at Bong Sen, the Vietnamese restaurant around the corner from the Penzion. I got a large amount of meat and vegetables for a small amount of money, with a white pillow of rice on the side. Delicious. It was nearly closing time, so the restaurant was quiet, nearly deserted except for the wait staff and a small girl (related, I think) whom they were helping to practice counting in Czech. I think she was better at it than I am yet. 

I have found myself returning to the Penzion later and later each day. (Still never after 11 pm, I think.) Partly, this is because I have a tendency to work and forget to eat dinner until after the Institute closes. Partly, though, it's because the later I get back, the fewer people will try to talk to me on the way up to the room. 

They keep inviting me to clubs and bars and restaurants. This is very nice of them, and I appreciate the thought. I've passed by the doors of the occasional bar and club, though, and they seem to contain mostly alcohol, crowds, and noise. If I wanted that kind of fun, I could just beat my head against a wall for a few hours. 

Dinner might be nice, if it was a quiet restaurant; after about 9 pm, though, I'm rarely in a mood to spend time with people, or talk to people, or remember that people exist. That's what I do in the morning and afternoon. All I want after sundown is to shut myself in a quiet room and forget that there's a world outside my head and the book or screen in front of it. 

I am a nearly complete introvert - always have been - and I'm happy that way. But I hate to disappoint the extroverts who invite me to places. I like these people, I really am grateful for the offer, and I can only hope that they aren't offended that I have to keep refusing it. 

Day 26: Stitches and Stories

Thursday, June 7, 2012 

Having finished my first tapestry - a sampler of sorts - I started a second one today, a somewhat more ambitious design of stripes and concentric circles. I'm starting to figure this out. 

Our trip after class today was to a textile academy in Prague. Like most buildings in the city, it was tall and narrow, with a staircase looking out onto the roofs of the neighboring buildings. We started in the lace archive. This was a room full of wide, flat drawers full of lace patterns, embroidery, beading, and other fine work with thread. There was even a series of lace designs based on drawings by children, many of which were quite beautiful; the hedgehogs and the giraffe with little lace rosettes for spots were some of my favorites. (Photographs, unfortunately, were not allowed.) 

Some of the most exquisite work in the collection - and, I suspect, in the world - was by the legendary lacemaker Emilie Paličkova. Some of her work is so fine that it hardly looks like fibers anymore. It looks like it was etched on the air, painted by a brush with a single bristle, spun of cobwebs beaded with dew. 

At the academy, we also got to see weaving, printing, a couple of different drawing classes, sculpture, fashion design… They seem to do just about everything with any relation to textiles there. 

The rest of the afternoon was fairly uneventful. I'm trying to use up my remaining food before I buy more, so my lunch was bread, bread, tangerine and bread. After that, I wove some more. For dinner, I got a sausage at one of the booths in Wenceslas Square, with a Toblerone from a nearby potraviny for dessert. I had never tried these segmented, triangular chocolate bars before (do we have them in the US?), but after reading about them in Australian romance novels, I thought I'd give them a try. Quite good. 

The same student who found out about the blind tour and the Choco Cafe (she really does have a gift for finding things) had invited me and another friend along on a ghost tour this evening. We left at dusk and met in one of the busier under-building passages. 

The guide was a young man ("young" meaning perhaps a little older than us) dressed in a long black coat and top hat, with dark circles under his eyes (makeup?) and a vague, haunted expression. 

I'm not sure how much of his demeanor was an act, but it was perfect for the ghost tour. I could never quite place his accent - British? Czech? American? Italian? - and I forgot to ask him where he was from. Every sentence seemed to have an extra little half-syllable hooked onto the end, a bit like Jimmy Derante. ("From here you can see the palaceh… It's not haunted, I just stopped here because I like the vieweh.") 

The first half of the tour took place above ground. Coincidentally, it also took place entirely within my assigned section of the city, which meant that I was at least slightly familiar with all the places we visited. The guide had a substantial collection of the most grim and grisly gruesome legends from Prague - torture, witch burnings, executions, live entombments, a darker version of the clockmaker story... 

He told us a couple dozen of them in the course of the tour. This was only shortly after dark, so the city was still busy, and the touches of melodrama were - intentionally, I think - more funny than creepy. It was a fun way to hear some of the city's darker history and legends. 

The second and best part of the tour, worth the price of admission all by itself, was the tour of the old dungeons and torture chambers beneath the town hall. This is some of the most terrifyingly solid stonework I've seen here - not surprising, considering its function. There are places where you can still see the words scratched by prisoners on the walls. There are no lights down there - or, if there are, they were turned off - so we walked around by the light of lanterns and any flashlights we'd brought with us. (Conveniently, I carry a small one in my backpack all the time.) 

According to the guide, many of the underground rooms used to be the ground floor. Medieval Prague's waste disposal system was, in a word, nonexistent, so garbage and other things gradually built up around the buildings and actually raised the ground level of the city. Like many medieval cities, Prague is largely built on Prague. 

Day 25, Part 1: A Feast for the Eyes

Wednesday, June 6, 2012 

We learned tapestry weaving this morning from our Fibers teacher and a guest teacher. After the basic technique, we learned how to make patterns and shapes, then how to remove tapestries from the loom (we're using simple hand looms - just boards with nails in them) and how to attach a new set of warp threads. 

I've found that I enjoy weaving. There's something satisfying about it. It's like painting with yarn - but the warp and weft threads (I now know the difference) give it more built-in structure. Weaving, after all, is one of those mediums that were using pixels for thousands of years before the computer was invented. It also seems like it could be an almost infinitely flexible medium if you were familiar enough with it. 

My first tapestry, in progress. I finished it and promptly started coming up with ideas for a second one. I might end up doing a lot more of this… 

After class, we took the tram across the river to the National Gallery (Národní Galerie), Prague's major modern art museum, stopping on the way to look at more street repairs and a tiger moth on a lamp post.

The building itself is actually one of the least interesting ones I've seen in Prague...

It's really more of a backdrop to the giant sculptures in the front. 

Again, the museum was built around a main staircase. Here, though, there was an enormous central opening that cut through all the floors of the building, allowing you to look across and see art on the other side.

It was fun to look over, see something interesting on a lower floor, and then wander over there trying to find it. 

We started in a temporary exhibit - a series of paintings by Alfons Mucha, called the Slav Epic. They were monumental, gigantic, cinematic paintings. Each one was two stories high, most of them overflowing with crowds and festivals and saints and allegorical figures painted larger than life and in exquisite detail. We had a booklet that explained each painting - fortunately, since many of them were loaded with history and allegory five and six layers deep. They were painted with what must have been half an ocean of egg tempera. None of them used full black or full white; they were all in a series of subtle middle tones, ranked with the finest control I've ever seen in a painting to create a sense of depth with, in many cases, hardly any variation in value. They were like visions seen with half-lidded eyes, like the shining scenes of a dream, otherworldly and yet vivid enough that I felt I could have simply stepped into them. 

Photographs were forbidden in the gallery, which was just as well. No photograph could possibly have done the paintings justice. 

They were kept out of sight, apparently, during World War II; their sense of freedom and pride in the culture and history of the Slavic people was not something that those in charge wanted publicized at the time. (Mucha painted the last few paintings in the series fairly late in his life, to celebrate the independence that had taken so long to win. He died the year before the war broke out.) After the war, the paintings were split up for decades. This is the first time since then that the complete series has been exhibited together. 

Apparently, there is discussion of giving it a permanent space somewhere in Prague. I hope it gets one. 

After far too short a time, we moved on to the rest of the museum. I kept up with the group fairly well until we got to the galleries of early 20th century painting. There, there were more František Kupka paintings, a panoramic mural by Alfons Mucha that spanned nearly an entire wall (still small in comparison to the Epic), some beautiful work by Czech Impressionist painters… 

After a while, the teacher came back, found me wandering dreamily from painting to elegant painting, and brought me down a few floors to make sure I saw some of the more modern art as well before the group got too far ahead and lost me altogether. 

I'm not posting photographs of the paintings, since those never turn out well. I did make a list of the names of my favorite painters (aside from the ones listed above); however, I have misplaced it since. I'll add them to this post if I find them again. 

In addition to paintings and sculptures, the modern section of the museum had jewelry...

Tiles and metalwork...

Architectural models...

Glasswork ranging from the elegant to the spectacular...

A surprising amount of industrial design (particularly appliances shown in various World Expositions)...

And a lot of the quiet, subtly playful pieces that are some of my favorite things in modern art.

Fastener II, by Běla Kolářová: a button made of buttons.

One of a series of... I'm not sure what to call them. Texture paintings? They had no color variation to speak of - just elaborate, marbled, metallic surfaces. Beautiful work.

 Destroyed Music, by Milan Knížák.

I particularly liked the record that had had guitar strings nailed across it. Ruined for one type of music, altered for another...

A whole platform full of clocks, second hands only, almost - but not quite - ticking to the same beat. The sound of them all was incredible.

Ouch.

This is not a camera problem - the whole room, floor to ceiling, was painted in this screaming yellow. The most unsettling art in the museum was in here. I didn't photograph the other scuptures.

Table - Non-Table, also by Milan Knížák. 

I stayed in the Gallery, wandering from room to room, until nearly closing time. I could have stayed for a week. 

Day 23: Further Adventures in Baking

Monday, June 4, 2012 

After planning it for weeks, today I finally got everything together that I needed to bake brownies. 

I did have to improvise some of the ingredients based on what is possible to find in Czech grocery stores. I used kakao powder instead of baker's chocolate, got butter in the single package it comes in here (fortunately, it's about the same size as two sticks in the US), and left out the vanilla extract entirely, since as far as I can tell, it does not exist in Prague. 

Fortunately, there was no one else using the Institute's Miniature Kitchen # 3 at the same time, or it might have been hard to find room for everything. 

I was trying to remember how to convert from degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius, so I'd have some idea what temperature to use in a European oven, when the IT expert at the Institute walked in and said he just bakes everything at 170. That seemed worth a try. 

It was a long and nervous half-hour wait before the brownies came out. I thought I'd burned them at first, but it turned out to just be the darker color of the chocolate. 

After another long wait for them to cool, I finally cut out a corner and tasted it... 

Perfection. 

It would have taken me weeks to eat a whole pan of brownies by myself. (Well, one week. Most of a week. Certainly a few days.) Instead, I left a note inviting other people to take one each. 

Four hours later, they were gone. I think that's a good sign. 

Day 19: The Unseen

Thursday, May 31, 2012 

We've spent the last few days carving our forms for blue printing and testing them with watercolors. We made both a pattern block and a signature block (backwards, of course).

My pattern is based on the sidewalk tiles and manhole covers in Prague.

Having finished the forms, we got sheets of cloth today and got to actually print with them.

Blue printing turns out to be a surprisingly strenuous process. All you have to do is take your form (ours are blocks carved out of foam, not the wooden ones that can last for centuries), press it into the pap, and then stamp the design onto the cloth… But when your design is a small and precise one that you want to stamp onto your cloth over 100 times, this becomes slightly more challenging. The process required me to spread more pap into the cushioned tray with a brush, press the form carefully into it, carry it across the small room to the table that held the cloth, bend over this while getting the form into precisely the right position to make a seamless pattern (or my best attempt at one, anyway), and then press it down hard enough to print the design clearly on all sides. This still might not sound like all that much, but when you consider that I had to do all these steps for each of the over 100 copies of the design… Well, I was rather sore by the end. I think I'm mostly satisfied with the result. 

I won't know for certain, though, until all the patterns get dyed. The white sections will then become blue, and the green will stay white (after being washed in acid to remove the pap).

This is one thing that printing, baking, and several of the other more patient arts have in common. No matter how much work you put into them, there's no way to be sure of your results until the very end. Whether it's a dye vat or an oven, nothing's finished until it comes out for the last time. 

We shall see. 

Several of the other students were going to an unusual tour/exhibition this afternoon, and they invited me along. It sounded interesting, so I accepted. It was called Neviditelná Výstava ("The Invisible Exhibition"). The website is here, if you want to take a look. 

The tour took place entirely inside a series of rooms in a building on a street somewhere. (We got lost several times trying to find it.) All of the rooms are completely dark - no light of any kind. Tour groups are led through them to get some idea of what it would be like to be blind. Our guide was blind himself, so he knew what he was doing and patiently led our slow, fumbling group through the tour. 

The first few rooms were set up like rooms in a house - kitchen, bathroom, living room, and so on - with furniture, appliances, and various other objects that we tried to identify. Later rooms included a cabin, a forest with a bridge over a stream, and a city street. All of these had sounds playing to make the illusion more convincing. The street was actually rather intimidating - we could hear the traffic going by, but we couldn't see it. We stayed pressed against the rough wall by the sidewalk and groped our way from windowsill to windowsill. Another room was set up as an art gallery, with sculptures that we tried to identify by feel. (One of these was Michelangelo's David, which made for a rather awkward moment about halfway down.) 

It was interesting to find how easy it was to get a picture of small objects just by feel - and how difficult it was to navigate through larger spaces. I could get a fairly good mental picture of everything within arm's reach, but beyond that, the world was a complete blank. It was a strong reminder of exactly how much I rely on my sense of sight. Without it, I could only tell what was nearby with my sense of direction (I don't have one), my sense of hearing (half the sounds around me were recordings), and my sense of touch (range: about two and a half feet). It was a surprisingly disorienting experience. 

At the end, we stopped at the "blind bar" (also pitch black) and ordered drinks. Fortunately, Czech coins are all different sizes, and half of them are thirteen-sided instead of circular, so it was possible to pay in the correct amounts. (Czech bills are different lengths, depending on denomination, and there are tools for quickly measuring them if you're blind. I'm curious now about what people do in the US, where the bills are all the same size.) 

At the bar, our guide stopped for perhaps half an hour and just let us ask him questions. We had quite a lot by then. Some of the main points he emphasized are that you should ask a blind person if they need help before trying to give it to them (many don't need or want it), that you should let them hold your arm (instead of vice versa) if they want to be led somewhere, and that only one person should provide help at a time. These all seemed fairly obvious to me, but apparently, not enough people are aware of them.

He said that he's actually trained his sense of hearing so well that he can get a feeling for the space around him - where there are buildings, where there are vehicles and how fast they're moving, where there are people, even what they're doing with their hands - just by sound. To learn the entire course of the tour he gave us today, he only had to walk through the rooms once. 

He's likely to be one of the most all-around competent people I've ever met. He speaks three languages, plays eight instruments, competes in a sport designed for blind players (it involves a ball filled with bells, caught with what sounds like a rather terrifying amount of full-body tackles), and thinks that guide dogs and assistants make things too easy. He said that there's really nothing that should be impossible for blind people - except perhaps driving. 

Day 15/16/17: His Only Desire

Monday, May 28, 2012 

Today, I ate breakfast before going to the studio to start work on my lace project. I'd finished the sketch yesterday but hadn't had time to start weaving. The project was due Tuesday morning. 

I took a half-hour break to use the restroom and get a sandwich for dinner at the closest affordable place I could find. 

I skipped lunch. 

I had to stop for perhaps another half-hour to ride the Metro back to the Penzion. 

That was all. Other than that, I worked on my lace project all day and all night. I worked in the studio until the Institute closed. I worked in the hotel room until my roommates came back and needed to sleep. I worked on a chair in the hallway outside, clicking away as the late-night wanderers among the students gradually trickled back into their own rooms, expressing surprise and occasionally concern to find me still working at such a late hour. 

I like to listen to music while I work, to occupy the part of my (left) brain that's in charge of distractions. I've found that, after a certain point, it becomes easier to keep focused on a project if I simply listen to the same song over and over again. The song for this project was one by the incomparable Kirsty MacColl (repeated 61 times, according to my laptop). It worked quite well. 

I finished just before dawn (not as late as you might think, since we're quite far north here and the days are a few hours longer than they are back home) and climbed quietly into bed for several hours of deep sleep. I felt like I'd earned it at that point. 

There is a certain fierce joy that comes only from this kind of stubborn, sustained effort. If I tried to do it routinely - or even twice in the same week - I suspect it would kill me; but every once in a while, it becomes necessary to throw all the time and energy I have into a project, casting everything else aside for one unceasing burst of creative work. I love it when it happens. There is nothing quite like it. 

And the result was this: 

So I'm satisfied. 

Day 15: Rest

Sunday, May 27, 2012 

Everyone is exhausted from the excursion. I went to the Institute, looked through my hundreds of photographs, and finished a sketch for my upcoming lace project - but even that small amount of work was exhausting. 

Another one of my roommates returned from the glass studio's excursion with what turned out to be a sprained knee. 

More than perhaps any other day on this trip, I think this is a day to rest.