Krakow's Museum of Modern Art Is Enough To Give You Nightmares

These are works by some of Poland's most highly regarded modern artists.

This artist's work makes me realize that I am unappreciated in my time & place. Note the same techniques I use in my noir series of paintings called "Bitter Little Worlds." Note the askew perspective, the use of cutouts, the patterns of floors. This one is his.

                       Mine

                                 His

                             Mine

                                    His

                                                Mine                                                   

This artist uses well-known classic portraits & puts on different heads

This head is made of clams or mushrooms or something equally unsettling

       This is part of a series of paintings with actual cigarette burn holes in women's faces

                   This is a self-portrait...contents of her refrigerator + a bad hangover 

This is a 3D painting made of hundreds of melted plastic toy Santas

               Spouts of red paint seeking to pour from the wall to the floor

This fellow is removing his bulldog head & seems about to replace it with a sheep's head

These three below are life-size photographs of actual dead people dressed in clothing of the artist's choice. 

How did the artist get permission to work with corpses?

Do family members know?

Would you be really pissed if you knew someone did this to you after your death?

Kraków Is An Unsentimental City

The shadow of barbaric wars & occupations looms so large in Europe. Some of the cities bombed into smithereens have built & rebuilt their city centers in a way that has transformed them into places that look like movie sets or dreamy paintings. 

Kraków, it seems, is having none of that. It suffered less bombing damage than most other cities during WWII & seems to have a fuck-you attitude in that not much has been restored or romanticized or softened. 

  The Vistula River is not a winding, mystic waterway for lovers; it's broad, pragmatic...a working river

 This bridge is a cold engineering design intended to let people cross a river...nothing more

                The old buildings survive unchanged & are just part of the neighborhood

          People live in these apartments & there's no attempt to pretty things up

          Age, war, weathering of their buildings are fine as far as Kraków people are concerned

     This is Lee (he does not use his long, unpronounceable Polish name), Kraków guide. He has a law degree but tells rude lawyer jokes & is happy working as a guide.

  During a walking tour, Lee led us past numerous decorative buildings, like this one with large sculptures all along the front gate, but he walked right by them, as if they were boring & irrelevant.

He made fun of much of the architecture in Old Town Kraków. This church has at least eight distinct types of architecture all smushed together. He said that Poles love to stuff every possible style of exterior & interior design together, with no regard for taste or constancy.

He referred numerous times to Krakow's primary preoccupation & source of pride: pubs & drinking. 

                                     There is one of these on every corner

You Never Know Who Is Going To Sit Next To You

Poland has some nice new trains. Lots of leg room, meal service on carts, like on an airplane, except the food is actually decent. Sound-wise, the train is contaminated by endless loud cell phone yacking, to the point where I couldn't actually hear the sound of the train itself. Either lots of people were having excited/angry conversations or that's just the way Polish sounds. 

At first, my seat mate seemed rather charming...a gentle-looking girl covered with a huge lap blanket, which later on turned into her coat. Under that blanket was a dog. What seemed like a nice little dog. They both slept for a while, the dog with his head on her chest & didn't it look cozy & innocent.

That bucolic little scene didn't last too long. The dog woke up & wiggled & squiggled & whined until his mistress woke too. What had seemed like a fairly compact dog stood up & turned into a lanky greyhound. Thus ensued hours of wrangling to keep the dog from staring longingly at my sandwich & panting, trying to get comfortable by letting his legs expand but by bit by bit until they slung halfway across my lap (for a while I thought maybe he was a fawn in disguise...his legs were so long), yawning conspicuously in my face, etc.

At times she let him down and he stood in the aisle, extravagantly in the way of everyone passing by. By this time they both seemed spoiled bratty, possessing some sense of superiority having to do with the dog himself.

At least he didn't bark.

BUT...he farted for 6 straight hours, awake or asleep. At least I think it was him. Maybe it was his mistress, using him as cover. 

They were no longer the slightest bit attractive.

Thankfully, on a train, the scenery always provides a welcome, hypnotic escape.

Gdansk By Day & Night

                           The sky was blue that one day for a few, few minutes

                                                 Big boat, little swan

                    The river is so still...it looks like there are two of everything

                                    Walkway all along the river

           Rain can make you forgive it by turning things astonishingly beautiful at night

                                          Some people are out & about

   

                       Whoever chose that color blue knew what they were doing

               Goodbye, pretty Gdansk

Dissertation on Rain

For three straight days now, the city of Gdansk has been shut down for Christmas. Galleries, museums, shops, restaurants...closed. Local people, gone. Tourists, a few, like me, wander in the strangely warm rain.

One must fortify oneself with mulled wine & a lurid novel about Fran Listz 

                                    Nature likes to arrange things in lines

                       Even on this window, raindrops fall in lines, not random patterns

                      Little streams of water pour down the hull of a ship

                      A leaf pattern on this cobblestone looks like minnows in the rain

                      This thirsty, desperate-looking horse is drinking from the sky

        These souvenirs in a display case become abstract art as rain pools on the glass

                     This fellow is wet, but puddles dare not form in his presence

                                                    

                                                Self portrait: 

                                          Me with blue umbrella

                                      reflected in silver ornament 

                                      hanging from Christmas tree 

                                           in Gdansk town square