Happy Birthday, Mr K_____

In late October of ‘95, I flew from the UK to Rome, Italy, to begin a new job. I had secured a post with a company who had been clients of some former employers of mine. It was part of my new employers’ standard procedure to house their new starters arriving from overseas in a hotel for a couple of weeks, until such time as they could find apartments. At that time, there was a choice of two hotels: one not far from the city-centre, and a second, way out in the suburbs, but nearer to the company’s offices. This latter, marginally cheaper option was the one that I chose: the Hotel Capital Inn.

Two others arrived at the Hotel on the same day as I did: Mr L___, a Jewish Londoner in his fifties, and Mr K_____, a Marronite Lebanese in his early twenties. After our second or third day there, it became our routine to dine together most evenings in the Hotel restaurant, where, more often than not, ours was the only occupied table. Nevertheless, the food there was very good, and we were served by the attentive but rather melancholy Enzo, who seemed inwardly to lament that his tourism degree & his mastery of three languages had only led him as far as waiting on a single table in a hotel whose chief distinction was that it was ten minutes’ drive from Ciampino, the city’s second airport.

The days and then the weeks ticked by. My efforts at apartment-hunting were sporadic and half-hearted. I was kept very busy by my work, and was rawly new in a city where I knew no-one. I celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday at the Capital, with my two fellow Inn-mates, but by candle-light, as there was a local power-cut that evening. I had very soon exhausted my standard new-starters’ hotel allowance, and was beginning to run up a very large bill, even before I had received my first paycheck. I grew ever more panicked and frustrated. Mr L___ was content to remain at the hotel, as his was a fixed, short-term contract, but Mr K_____ was in the same predicament as me. Finally, after nearly six weeks, Mr K_____ approached me saying that a colleague of his was vacating a two-bedroomed apartment very near to the offices where we all worked: would I be interested in sharing the place with him?

It was a lifesaver: another week at that hotel, perfectly comfortable though it was, might have driven me to a breakdown. The apartment we moved into was nothing special, a draughty but spacious fourth-floor place with the benefit of an expansive terrace which afforded fine views out to the East toward & beyond Tivoli and Palestrina. Mr K_____ and I became good friends. We had little in common besides our shared predicament, but his was pleasant company. He told me several hair-raising tales of his experience of the civil war in Lebanon, in which he had served, although very briefly, he said, as a volunteer in an artillery unit.

It turned out that we weren’t flatmates for very long. He was unable to agree a mutually satisfactory long-term contract with the company in Rome, and left after only a couple of months. My reason for relating all this is that Mr K_____ is the only person I’ve known whose birthday happened to fall on February 29th. If I remember it right, he stayed just long enough to celebrate his ‘sixth’ birthday there. I stayed on at that apartment for another year, and I kept in touch with Mr K_____ for at least another year after that. He moved back to Beirut, and as far as I know still lives there. Wherever you are, Joe, I hope you had a great ‘eighth’ birthday today…

Horkay

I am much obliged to Istvan Horkay for sending me a mail yesterday including some links to his rather marvellous work in digital collage: I loved this stuff at first sight.

Mr Horkay studied in Budapest, Cracow and Copenhagen. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe and in North America. He has studios in Budapest and Phoenix.

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Horkay’s Museum Factory series combines original drawn and painted images, appropriated masterpieces, photographs, artists’ signatures and commercial logos. These elements are digitally assembled, i.e., collaged, to create a single, layered moment reflecting different places and times. This work is post pop, i.e., post modern pop art. Whereas Warhol took moments from popular culture and turned them into history, Horkay takes history and turns it into a moment, as though the past millennium was a monolithic unit of time - Lee Spiro.

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Click on the images to see larger versions of the same. These works are all Copyright © Istvan Horkay and are reproduced here with the artist’s permission.

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Decalcomania

Max Ernst is one of my favourite artists. Many of what are, to my eyes, his most fascinating canvases were produced in the late 1930s and early ‘40s using a technique called ‘decalcomania’.

Just like collage and frottage, it [decalcomania] was simply a perfected form of a well-known children’s game, the ‘blotting’ game. Here the method was to pour diluted black gouache on to a sheet of white paper of a certain texture, covering this with another sheet and then execising uneven pressure with the hands, in order to spread the gouache. The result, always unpredictable, is a highly contrasted composition in black, grey and white, in which one can discover landscapes, profiles or heads, composite animals, [or] unknown plant life. […]Max Ernst conceived the idea of trying the experiment directly on a canvas, with oil paint reduced to a suitably fluid state. What began as a mere game suddenly seemed to him to offer rich possibilities… - Patrick Waldberg.

The Spanish painter Oscar Domínguez had been the first surrealist to use such a technique, in 1936. In Ernst’s hands, decalcomania ‘gave rise to a considerable number of works full of exuberant vegetation, totally imaginary landscapes, and chimerical figures.’

Ernst’s painting Epiphany, above, dates from 1940, from the midst of a turbulent and hazardous period in his life. With the outbreak of war the year before, Ernst, as a German national resident in Paris, had been arrested and interned. He was later released, but was re-arrested and interned a second time in 1940. The German forces’ push through France threatened to overrun the camp at Les Milles where Ernst was detained. The artist was one of 2,500 inmates whose lives, it was thought, would be imperilled should the Germans arrive there, and were thus evacuated by way of a chaotic train journey toward Bayonne. Further misadventures followed, until his release was secured thanks to the combined efforts of several of his friends, and he was brought to the relative safety of Marseilles. Ernst still felt unsafe in Vichy France, and made plans to leave for the US.

First, though, he had to get out of France, and it was at this juncture that his use of decalcomania may have saved his life, when, at the Franco-Spanish border his passport was deemed invalid, and was confiscated by a suspicious French station-master. Even so, Ernst decided to proceed to the Spanish customs-hall, where he was made to unpack a parcel containing several of his finished and unfinished canvases, some framed, some rolled-up…

Fortunately, they were in the decalcomania technique. As this is a technique which gives the impression of well-finished, elaborate work with rather dark colours, an exhibition was at once improvised in the customs hall. The customs officers were enchanted [...] There remained the (French) station master. He asked Max to go with him to his office. There he said ‘Monsieur, I adore talent, and you, sir, have great talent. I admire it.’ Then he gave him back his passport and led him to the platform, on either side of which a train stood waiting to go. ‘This one’ he explained, ‘is the one going to Spain. The other one will be returning to Pau, the nearest préfecture’ and he added: ‘Be very careful not to take the wrong train.’ After which he very kindly went back to the passport-control office. [...] Max Ernst, of course, took the advice the station-master had not dared to give him more explicitly: he took the wrong train and ten minutes later he found himself in Spain, on his way to Madrid and Lisbon.

Upon his arrival in New York, Ernst was detained again, on Ellis Island. Once again, he was fortunate to have influential friends to vouch for him, and help secure his release.

The images above are scans from my copy of Edward Quinn’s 1977 monograph about Ernst. The quotations, also, I excerpted from this book. Click on the images to see them much enlarged.

Systembolaget

In Sweden, the state exercises a near-monopoly on the supply of alcohol. Besides bars and restaurants, the only retail outlet is ‘Systembolaget’, a government-licensed chain of stores which stock only officially-approved product lines. There is one of these stores in the centre of the town where I live, and a second in a shopping mall on its outskirts. Between them, these two stores must cater to the alcohol-based needs of a population of about sixty-thousand. In supermarkets and convenience stores one can just buy weak beer, cider or fake wine with an alcohol content no greater than 3.5% by volume.

Until a couple of years ago, Systembolaget stores never opened on weekends. Now one can buy booze between ten and two on a Saturday. This is no especial hardship, but obliges a certain amount of forward-planning from the alcohol-buyer, which can seem irksome if one prizes spontanaiety. We end up going less often, but buying in greater quantity than we would have when booze-shopping in the UK, say. I went to our local store on Monday, for instance, and picked up five bottles of red wine, and one apiece of rum, and good tequila. In the UK, the opinion prevails that buying alcohol in Scandinavia is prohibitively expensive: this is not always the case in Sweden, at least, where beer and wine can be cheaper in some cases than in Britain. Even bar prices are not much different than what one might pay in London.

I can be grateful, at least, that I live in these enlightened times: between 1919 and 1955, alcohol was rationed in Sweden; and in 1922, a prohibition on the sale of alcohol was only very narrowly defeated in a national referendum. One can only presume that bootlegging and moonshining thrived here in the not-too-distant past. One other oddity of Swedish alcohol culture are these:

They are miniature bottles conatining flavoured syrups, which, when combined with unflavoured brännvin (a neutral spirit), presumably transforms it into what I can only imagine would be travesties of the liquors in question…

Zichy

The thumbnail images below are of erotic drawings by the 19th-Century artist Mihály Zichy: clicking on the thumbnails will reveal the full images. Zichy (1827-1906) was a painter and illustrator too, but seems best remembered today (outside his native Hungary, at least) for his intimate draughtsmanship.

It is thought that these drawings date from the mid-1870s, when Zichy was in Paris. The artist travelled widely, and also worked in Vienna, and in St. Petersburg, where he became court painter to Czar Alexander II. We read, also, that he ‘founded a society to support painters in need’.

My sources for the present images were these three pages.

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Inkbottle Dream

I once dreamt that I was in London, only a subtropical London by the sea, where palm-trees swayed in a balmy breeze. It was night-time. I was walking the streets with a group of acquaintances, and every few minutes I would feel the need to stop at an ‘ink-box’. Every few blocks, you see, there were these red-painted metal ink-boxes on poles. Upon opening the hinged lid of one of these boxes, one could lift out the large jar of black ink that it contained, and use it to fill ones own personal ink-bottle.

I was the only one in the group who kept stopping for more ink - I thought perhaps my inkpot was leaking, but I could neither see nor feel any ink on my clothes. In any case, I eventually left my inkpot in one of the ink-boxes and went on my way, nevertheless making a mental note of that particular box’s position in front of ‘The Strand’ Hotel a grandly palatial establishment with a health club attached. I left my acquaintances and walked up to the health-club’s windows and looked inside at the wealthy patrons being massaged and pampered. I could hear my acquaintances mocking me lightheartedly: I would never be able to afford to stay at a hotel like that, they said.

And then I woke up. Puzzled by the dream, I looked up references to ink or inkpots as dream-symbols, and about all I could find was the following advice: let your thoughts flow on paper; give vent to your thoughts either verbally or through the written word; you have something to say and it should be made known.

The first two images above I lifted from Jim Gaston’s pen site, and the third is from 1001 ink bottles.

Starowieyski

I am grateful to my correspondent Mr C____ for pointing me towards the Polish Poster Gallery’s site, and in particular drawing my attention to the work of Francisek Starowieyski.

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Franciszek Starowieyski (b.1930). Studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow and Warsaw 1949-1955. Specialises in poster, drawing, painting, stage designing, book illustration. […] Major awards: Film poster award, Cannes Film Festival, 1974; Gold Plaque at International Film Festival Chicago, USA, 1979; International Biennial of Posters in Warsaw, 2nd Prize, 1978; 3rd Prize, 2000.

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The images presented by the gallery on-line are small-format only, but there are plenty of them and the quality of the work is excellent: see also, for example, the posters of Jerzy Czerniawski, Wiktor Gorka, Wieslaw Rosocha, Stasys Eidrigevicius…

Cellarius

Even though it has been posted already at metafilter, courtesy of the mighty plep, and has also been illustrated at dublog, and doubtless elsewhere, I couldn’t resist adorning this page with some images from the Harmonia Macrocosmica of Andreas Cellarius, which is on digital display at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott library’s website.

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The Harmonia Macrocosmica is a sumptuously-produced celestial atlas that was printed in Amsterdam in 1661. One may guess that Cellarius was an open-minded fellow, as the hand-painted double-folio plates in his book variously illustrate not only the competing Ptolemaic (as in the first image above) and the Copernican (as in the second) theories, but also those of Tycho Brahe and Aratus.

As well as presenting his readers with a choice of cosmologies, Cellarius presents two versions of the constellations, the traditional ones drawn from classical mythology (as shown in the two images below), and recently-suggested Christian-themed constellations: it was supposed by some of Cellarius’ contemporaries that reforming the Heavens along Christian principles would have some positive benefit on the piety of those who gazed upon them from the Earth: ‘as above, so below.’

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There is a little more info. about the Harmonia Macrocosmica here. Click on the images above to see enlarged versions of the same.

Snow

Snow fell almost every day here last week, although it never amounted to more than an inch or two’s thickness on the ground. I had it in mind to take some photographs of the white-blanketed town & its environs, but the skies remained so dully & unphotogenically grey that I became quite discouraged.

Friday morning, though, dawned bright & clear, so I brought out the camera and, firstly, took a picture of the view from our apartment’s kitchen window - this is a vista that I never tire of looking upon, and one that a dusting of snow only serves to enhance.

Next, I took a slight detour as I walked to catch the bus for work, and snapped Trefalhigetskyrkan (Trinity Church), whose dome you see in the detail above.

Once at the office, I made my way down to the terrace overlooking the water out front (from where I took these a couple of weeks back), and took a half-dozen or so snaps, including one of some snow-covered trees (above) and one of a man and his dog contemplating the frozen sea (below).

Later that evening, more snow came, but it turned to rain overnight. A couple of rainy days later, all the snow had gone. Click on the details above to see the full photographs from which they were excerpted.

January Books

The first book I started reading last month was The Lunar Men, by Jenny Uglow: a fine, polybiographical study of an informal but highly-influential group of friends in late 18th-Century England that counted Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood, James Watt and Joseph Priestley among its members, and whose collective achievements in the fields of science, technology and industry could, well, fill a thick book. This excellent volume, though, is as much about the men’s mutual friendships and shared aspirations as it is about their inventions and discoveries…

Next, I read Jean Améry’s At the Mind's Limits, subtitled ‘Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities.’ I first heard of Améry in Primo Levi’s memoirs, but it was only after reading W.G. Sebald’s essay about Améry in his book On the Natural History of Destruction that I felt the need to read his work for myself. At The Mind’s Limits is a book whose subjects (suffering, torture, resentment, estrangement, exile) are necessarily rather bleak and forbidding. Even so, Améry’s patient consideration for his readers means that, even though some of his conclusions may be hard to accept, his contemplations are seldom difficult to read.

After that, I read a volume of short stories by Robert Walser (who I’ve mentioned here once before). There were some luminous moments in these (mostly very short) tales and sketches, but, on the whole, I enjoyed this book rather less than his novel Jakob von Gunten. It was at around this time that I also read, by way of light distraction, Paul Britten Austin’s The Wonderful Life and Adventures of Tom Thumb, as discussed here, only a half dozen or so entries ago.

After the Walser book, I moved on to Adolfo Bioy Casares’s tale The Invention of Morel. I had high hopes for this book, and these were only raised further by Borges’ introduction to it, but, as it turned out, the tale itself didn’t do much for me at all. Most recently, I have launched myself into William T. Vollman’s seven-volume essay on political violence Rising Up and Rising Down. I’m currently about eighty pages into volume three. Vollman was just about my favourite author when I was twenty-one years old: I loved You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories and The Ice-Shirt. After another twelve years or so, having attempted but abandoned Fathers and Crows, for example, and completed, but disliked The Royal Family, I had almost discounted him. Rising Up and Rising Down reminds me much more, I am happy to say, of the excitement I felt when reading those first books of his.

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