explore the magical charms of a real renaissance town!

I have been impossibly busy. I apologize for jumbledness--Chris Burke is here and we just drank some wine with lunch sitting in the park outside the building my classes are held in. it was Bordeaux from Bordeaux. Lovely.

I'd love to talk more about česky krumlov but it's sorta far away now and I can only remember basics (additionally, i am abandoning the use of capital letters). my hotel room was pretty great except for the fan that turned on when you entered the bathroom and then stayed on for 15 minutes. the door to the room was this great big metal monstrosity that opened with an old-fashioned key. i kept calling my room the "poet's suite" but nobody thought that was funny or made any sense. the first night in česky krumlov was drunk night. i had almost an entire bottle of becherovka, which is a very typical czech liquor that tastes a bit of cinnamon, a bit of licorice, a bit herbal, and a bit sugary. i ate a huge dinner beforehand, and by the time i realized what i was doing it was too late. everyone in the group says i should get drunk more often.

second day we had a tour of the town; essentially the center of the place is comprised of all renaissance-era buildings, and across the river up on a cliff is a big castle. after the communists fell in 1990 the population of the town has been slowly restoring the place to its original state. all the structural architecture of the place has been intact because one of the noble families that lived in the castle decided it wasn't good enough and built another one a hundred-something miles awayin the 18th or early 19th century, thus abandoning česky krumlov for hundreds of years. not much went on until the restoration work began and the tourists started streaming in.

next we met with an artist who restores gothic frescoes as his day job (he uses bread to remove the layers of plaster) then went to the egon schiele art centrum. they had a huge exhibition on this guy named milan knižak which i enjoyed. he has a good sense of humor and interesting ideas, particularly regarding his performance art. i bought a book of his called "Actions," which was one of the few available in english, but documents his performace work and ideas. it's something of a mix of poetry, pictures, and philosophy. knižak actually has a very broad career spanning a lot of different formats: painting, sculpture, film, music, whatever. for example, in the 60s he made a record called "broken music." here's read something i didn't write:

Widely regarded as one of the most important sound art documents on record, Ampersand is proud to present the first CD release of Czech artist Milan Knizak's groundbreaking work of art damage." "From 1963 to 1964 I used to play records either too slowly or too fast and thus change the quality of the music. In 1965 I started to destroy records: scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them (which destroyed the needle and often the record player, too) an entirely new music was created -- Unexpected, nerve-racking, and aggressive. Compositions lasted a second or for an infinitely long time (like when the needle got stuck in a deep groove and played the same phrase over and over again). Soon I developed this system even further. I began sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing parts of different records back together again to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds. Later I began to work in the same way with scores. I erased some of the notes, signatures, and whole bars. I added notes and signatures, changed the tempo and order of the bars, played the compositions backwards, turned the lines upside down, pasted different parts of different scores together, and so on." -- Milan Knizak.

hardly any schiele at the schiele centrum, however. who cares about the guy's birth and death certificates? blah. disappointing chagall and le corbusier exhibits as well.

third day we did a tour of the castle complex, including the baroque theater, which is one of only two intact examples of such a thing in europe. i love the illusionism of baroque architecture--the stage was 19 meters deep, i think, but it seemed to stretch off into the distace forever--fantastic (the cathedral ceilings that are made in this style are pretty great as well). after a rather poor guided tour through the castle itself (along with about 75 million of our closest friends) we got to check out the gallery that's housed in the old vaulted brick cellars beneath the castle. it's run by an artist named miroslav paral, who was a pretty interesting guy, and his freaky humanoid sculptures really suited the space. afterwards he took us to a little café he built inside his studio and rambled on about being an artist under communism for awhile (this is all through a translator, mind you, a translator named bryce belcher who i'm not even going to get into). then he rushed through a bunch of slides of his work so we could leave and make our restaurant reservations for a place that was supposed to have live traditional romany (gypsy) music and yeah, they did have live music but the guys never came to the room our table was in so it was pretty much a complete waste of time except for the nice onion soup in a bread bowl i ate.

sunday bryce belcher went on a pretty long self-important ramble about recent česky krumlov history (he's been living there for nine years). it was interesting but somewhat long-winded and man is that guy happy with himself.

after that we left for prague, and after one more awkward dinner with my first home family, i moved into my new host family's house, the mojžišovi (i later randomly discovered that mojžiš means moses). i wish i'd been with these folks from the start; they're very nice people, really smart, and interested in talking to me (!). but this will all have to wait because now i have to go and watch czech animation with keith jones. shit better be crazy or i'm leaving.