While reading the myspace of the fantastic Please The Trees band (who pull off a sound as epic as their recordings even on the tiniest of stages as I found two years ago in an "letni kino" set that preceeded a showing of the Johnny Cash movie), I stumbled on a link for a blog entry Patti Smith made about her last gig in Prague.
She writes about going book and instrument shopping with Lenny Kaye, and of building up the nerve to ask for a glass from her hotel cafe. Imagine Patti Smith having to build up the nerve to do anything! Now I won't feel so bad with my own struggles navigating. Anyway her diary describes just the kind of day that happen to me in Prague - frustrating, but full of potential for surprise.
I had just such a day the other day while hunting the Veletržní palác. The museum is rightly described by many as a bit overlooked and forgotten, certainly it does not even announce itself as such from the street in spite of its imposing functionalist style of the 1920s. The building used to be used for trade fairs, and after a fire in the 1970s became the art museum.
I was on a quest - my furnished apartment is full of framed Magritte posters chosen mostly because they all contain dark blue and red flecks. I feel like I'm in a late 90s Time Magazine illustration and it bothers me immensely. So I went in search, getting apprehensive when I walked in the shop as the shop keepers were of the Czech old guard sort – sweet, hyper talkative old ladies who were in the midst of an extremely complex conversation with the security guard about what they had for lunch the day before. I am apprehensive because ladies like this always ask a lot of questions before they will sell you anything, and eventually I will not have the language for an answer and the game is up.
Anyway I managed, after some trying, to get a poster of "Velky dialog" by Czech sculptor Karel Nepraš. It seemed like an appropriate reminder of my work here, which I consider to be first as listener but always through the manner of a conversationalist. What a job! Nepraš's black humor also reminds me of the deep stakes in the kind of listening I'm doing, and that I have to work hard to understand. I suppose that it is true that true mastery of a language is understanding its humor, and so my work is cut out for me.
Pleased to have found a good fit, I wandered home and stopped by the papernictvi to buy some cards. Other than those about beer drinking, I have basically no understanding of why any of the "humor" cards are funny at all. And that is a simple punchline joke, imagine storytelling! Well, I've only been here two weeks so I have time.
