Tag: things gone awry

Queasy does it

It’s always entertaining when friends blow through Prague on the way home from travels to more easterly countries. Our buddy Jim stayed with us a few days this week on a journey that began in Japan and curled through China, Russia and Ukraine. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a souvenir box of Barf dishwashing detergent:

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Honey, I cleaned it with Barf!

I don’t remember where exactly he picked this up, but I like to imagine that it was produced at this curious Sick headquarters building that I recently spotted in Prague for the first time. It’s situated somewhere in Vrsovice– I noticed it while looking south from Havlickovy sady.

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Sick: makers of fine products including Barf

Housekeeping tip

I’m happy to report from first-hand experience that if you stick a yellow highlighter in your back pocket, forget, sit on it such that the cap falls off and wind up with a huge shimmering neon stain on your ass, the ink mysteriously disappears almost entirely from jeans after an interval of about 30 hours. Just hang ’em up in a ventilated area and await the magic!

Oafish state-sponsored art

The New York Times profile of David Černy that Krafty posted does a nice job of framing our understanding of Cerny’s crazy-ass work as a reaction against the state-sponsored propaganda-style public art that was commonplace under socialism. I was interested to find out that there was direct link between the two: a traumatizing experience Cerny had as a child when he unwittingly repeated a negative comment his father made about a new Lenin statue to his schoolmates and wound up getting labeled as a young subversive by school authorities. As an homage to What David Cerny Hated, let’s look at a few notably oafish, condescending or poorly-conceived examples of socialist public art:

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1. Soviet Liberation Statue

Location: Prague, in seedy park by main train station.

Status: still exists, minus explanatory plaque that’s been torn off

Defining characteristics: patronizing, vaguely sexually undermining

This was built to commemorate the Soviet liberation of Prague, which is all well and good. It depicts a Czech solider joyously hugging a Russian soldier as the latter victoriously stomps into Prague, which is… a bit more questionable in terms of good taste, but still acceptable.  The problem is that the Czech solider is outrageously girly and limp-wristed, whereas the Russian solider is a solid hunk of manliness. At some point, the statue’s plaque was torn off, leaving it in a decontextualized condition where it reads like a celebration of gay love in the military.

(photo credit: my former Prague College co-instructor Rory Wilmer).

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2. Stalin’s Monument

Location: looming over Prague from Letna park.

Status: dynamited to smithereens in 1962

Defining characteristics: ill-conceived; giant, politically awkward eyesore; drove its creator to suicide; generally bad mojo all around

The Czech government spent over 5 years building the world’s largest statue of Stalin and unveiled it to the public in May, 1955. They had about nine months to enjoy their work before Kruschev promptly revealed the crimes of Stalin in the 20th Congress in February of 1956. Oops. Meanwhile, the sculptor, Otakar Švec, who had been receiving threats from the secret police on one side and hate mail from disgusted Czech citizens on the other, decided to call it quits and killed himself three weeks after the unveiling. 1n 1962, the Czech authorities finally blew up the statue, which has since been replaced by a giant metronome that is both quite cool-looking and symbolically mysterious.

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3. Soviet War Memorial

Location: Treptow Park, Berlin

Status: still exists as mirthful tourist attraction

Defining characteristics: megalomaniacal, overconfident

After the Red Army reached Berlin and effectively ended WWII in Europe, the Soviet authorities – never the most subtle of propagandists – decided to build  a massive memorial in the conquered German capital basically celebrating their own kicking-of-Nazi-ass and winning-of-the-War. Which is pretty much as unsubtle as you can get, although you have to appreciate the sheer chest-beating chutzpah of the decision. One of my favorite weirdo things in Berlin, the memorial is executed in the massive, symmetrical power-art style typical of Soviet public art and concludes with a giant statue of a Soviet solider stomping on a shattered swastika. Fuck yeah! There’s actually something a bit touching about the place, when you consider that the authorities in charge no doubt felt that Soviet-style socialism was just getting started and would easily reign for a few more centuries. Instead, their commemoration of Communism-over-Fascism has already become a tourist curiosity for snickering Western tourists a scant 45 years later.

Today's entertainment

I just found out that there’s a French mathematician named Jacques Tits. He works primarily in group theory and has a theorem called the ‘Tits alternative’. Professor Tits also introduced a theory of buildings which are sometimes referred to as ‘Tits buildings’.

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I guess there was probably a time when he was only an assistant professor, aka ‘Ass. Prof.’. Incidentally, a google search for ‘ass professor’ yields this totally ridiculous headline from the 1922 New York Times (and, no, it really was published in the Times, not the Onion— here’s the link to the full article):

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I haven’t had this much fun since I found out that my friend’s roommate Zehra- a short, cheerful Turkish woman doing her medical residency in San Francisco – has Akdagon as her last name, thus making her Dr. Akdagon in professional circles. I immediately burnt a copy of the Dr. Octagon album for her, which we all listened to with great enjoyment.

When Natural Disasters Collide: Misc. Edition

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A few quick follow-up thoughts on Krafty’s When Natural Disasters Collide: California Edition post:

1. I couldn’t be more excited about the (slim) prospect of Hurricane Jemina wiping out the forest fires ravaging SoCal right now. It’s clearly the best chance that the ‘When Natural Disasters Collide’ concept has of ever actually happening. But, it would be even better if forest fires were also given names, like hurricanes. Imagine how invested one could get in rooting for Forest Fire Gerald vs. Hurricane Jemina, say. You could probably even gamble on the outcome.

2. Another potential matchup that only just occurred to me would be Tsunami vs. Tidal Wave. This would have an instructive component, in that people often confuse the two or think that they’re the same thing. So, this would be for bragging rights, like those pro wrestling matches where one guy gets to tear the other’s mask off. Although, it would be hard to stage a fair fight, because tsunamis are much, much bigger than tidal waves (which actually hardly qualify as natural disasters at all, to be honest). It would have to be a very small tsunami against a very big tidal wave, such as the ones in the Bay of Fundy that supposedly reach 50 feet.

3. All this talk of natural disasters over the last two days, I’ve listened to ‘When The Levee Breaks‘ a good 3 or 4 times. Is there a better song about a natural disaster? Or is this as good as it gets?

When Natural Disasters Collide: California Edition

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Dedicated Mock Duck readers may recall Dan’s suggestion of a Fox-type show called When Natural Disasters Collide.  Putting aside its merits as a TV show concept, the idea is getting a lot of currency this week as a proposed “solution” to the wildfires that are raging out of control throughout California.  Lo and behold, noted some astute disaster observers, there is a giant hurricane bearing down on Baja California, just to the south of the area beset by wildfires.  Maybe it will shift course, and save the day!  Apparently there is even some vague plausibility to this idea, although it didn’t sound like it when my mother (who would prefer that I move as far away as possible from anywhere where there might be earthquakes or fires) suggested it, as if we could just radio the hurricane and ask it to switch course.

I’m not conversant enough in old monster movies to think of the right analogy, but I do recall this as a fairly common trope, where one wild and dangerous force of nature is held at bay by a second wild and dangerous force of nature.  Based on my experiences as a resident of the Golden State, however, even if the hurricane did hit us, it would probably team up with the fires to cause mass devastation via landslides.

Jack of All Trades

GOLDI’m not sure what gloss I can add to this amazing sign, which I found on Beacon Street in Boston.  Partly it seems like a Bubble artifact, when everybody’s plumbers were getting into real estate speculation.  But does he really have a law degree?  And if so, is this a new sign that he’s put together since the crash, so he can peddle his more practical plumbing abilities?  The mind reels.

Faking your own death

Last night, I caught up with a friend of mine who’s back in Prague after an interlude of living in China. One of the things he’s been doing since he got back is bicycling to Hungary to visit a friend in jail. What’s the friend in jail for? I naturally asked. Faking his own death, I learned. Oh.

Apparently, the friend – one Zoltan Rex, no less – ran up a lot of debt and faked a surfing accident with a few conspirators, including his wife. But, he did a really clumsy job of it, made it really obvious by taking out multiple life insurance claims, etc. My friend originally met him when he was ‘dead’, living under an assumed identity in the south of the Czech Repubic, and never knew there was a prior identity until he was arrested out of the blue. Details of his story are here. What this article doesn’t mention is that he’s now wasting away in a Hungarian prison and has no idea when he’ll be brought to trial.

The jail visit apparently consisted of my friend biking 500 kilometers to Budapest, then standing outside the prison window with binoculars and yelling conversational rejoinders to the jailed guy, who isn’t allowed to yell out the window himself and was therefore reduced to making enthusiastic hand gestures in reply. It seems that the jailed guy had been a big Michael Jackson fan, so my friend attempted to communicate his death by moonwalking and making the cutting finger-across-the-neck gesture at the same time. Which I thought was pretty resourceful.

Edit: Incidentally, there’s a good post up at Moonraking on the very same topic of staged disappearances.

Harris 20th Century Railroad Attachment

One of my favorite possessions is a replica Sears Roebuck catalog from exactly 100 years ago. For a great many rural Americans at the time, the Sears catalog was the only access to goods outside of their local general store and, as a result, the catalog – sometimes called ‘The Consumer’s Bible’- contains basically every commercial product under the sun and thereby provides an inventory of everything that the average American of the time could have possibly thought of to own. You can buy a violin. You can buy a gun. You can buy a cure for baldness. You can buy records with racist ‘humor’ songs on them. For several hundred dollars, you can buy an unassembled two-storey house– as in, Sears delivers all the materials and some plans, and you put the thing together.

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You can also buy this baffling Harris 20th Century Railroad Attachment that promises to make ‘a regular railroad velocipede out of an ordinary bicycle’. I like how the product is meticulously described – all the features, portability, popular with men and women, handsome black enamel – except for the key detail of what you are supposed to do when a train comes barreling down on you from behind, which is left totally unexplained.

Another nice thing about the catalog in general is that it predates the era of product photography. I don’t know whether it was too expensive to shoot all the products, or if the halftone screen wasn’t far enough along to allow for mass printing of photos in 1909, but in any case, the book contains thousands upon thousands of etchings of household items. One can only imagine the army of commercial etchers who must have been scratching away morning, noon and night to produce all this imagery.