Must say that I am very glad that Germans didn’t win Euro. The mere fact that I did not watch a single game really does not make me a true fan of the sport but it does not mean that I didn’t have an opinion on the subject. Why didn’t I watch the games? Well, first of all we don’t have a TV. Or I should say, we don’t care to have a TV. Perhaps you can call it reverse snobism of a sort but unlike people who obsessively buy giant plasma/LCD TV sets, our living room is (for now) “screen-less”, a fact that rarely escapes our mostly amased first-time visitors.
But back to football, one thing is sure, it does have beneficial effects on social communication – you have probably noticed the ease with which you can strike politer conversation with people you hardly know, from grocery store seller to your new taciturn next door neighbor. And those little stickers of football players that kids collect adorn the basement doors in apartment buildings for years to come.
Had a lovely, relaxing (and hot) Friday afternoon in Ljubljana with my girls which we concluded with a cold drink in a relaxing atmosphere of Slovene ethnographic museum cafe. The number was just around the corner.
Well she’s all you’d ever want,
She’s the kind they’d like to flaunt and take to dinner.
Well she always knows her place.
She’s got style, she’s got grace, She’s a winner.
She’s a Lady. Whoa whoa whoa, She’s a Lady.
Talkin’ about that little lady, and the lady is mine.
Well she’s never in the way
Always something nice to say, Oh what a blessing.
I can leave her on her own
Knowing she’s okay alone, and there’s no messing. :))
Well she knows me through and through,
She knows just what to do, and how to please me.
She’s a lady. Whoa, whoa, whoa. She’s a lady.
Talkin’ about that little lady and the lady is mine.
You can also listen to the original here.
Filed under: Illustration Friday, illustration | Tags: illustration, Illustration Friday, punch line, slapstick
Here we go folks, my first entry for Illustration Friday. For the uninitiated, Illustration Friday is a weekly illustration challenge. Each Friday, a new topic is announced and you have a week to come up with an illustration. I have been following it for some time now and it was always been challenging (and fun) for me to try and visualise the topic.
Anyway, this week’s theme was “punchline” and although I know that the phrase refers to “climatic” part of a joke or phrase, my first association for punch line are scenes from old slapstick comedies of Marx Brothers type. Though admittedly in those films the more appropriate phrase would be “kick line” as there is very little punching in them…
As always, comments are more than welcomed.
Filed under: Black eye cafe, Life in general, photography | Tags: Alan Ford, exhibition, Ljubljana, photography, rural, rustic, urban ethnography
There is a peculiar courtyard building on Eipprova street in downtown Ljubljana. If you have the chance, it’s worth peaking because it will transport you to another time. Or place. Or medium. I always feel as if I had entered a scene from my favorite comic book Alan Ford. The place looks almost exactly like this, even the caption suits the real building. Be as it may, the peculiar place became an object of fascination and a photo project by a young Austrian photographer Anita Strasser who documented the building and its residents. The photographs of this “urban ethnology” project are currently exhibited on the spot and in Slovene ethnographic museum. I plan on using one or two vistas from the place for my own “urban ethnology” project that is about rural nature of Slovene capital, of its rustic residue. Like in the pic below.
Filed under: Life in general
As I ended my vis. culture course yesterday, students asked me if they will have a second part of the course in the next years since this one is only called Introduction to… My negative answer was quite a disappointment for them. It was one of the nicest compliments I got from my students recently.
Talking about bragging, literal translation of the text in the pic is I have bigger tits than you. From downtown Ljubljana.
Filed under: Life in general | Tags: cherries, complementary, Ljubljana, strawberries
One of the things that really changed during my first year at university was my vocabulary. One of the fancy sounding new words that we picked up and would than mockingly infiltrate into our everyday conversations was complementary. It appeared in one of exam questions for sociology where we had to write down complementary social phenomena to a given list of terms.
This story came to my mind as I realised that I just went through two very similar but than again utterly different days. The morning that G. Bush visited Slovenia I had an interview with one former forreign news correspondent on the topic of covering Third World for an article I would suppose to turn in tomorrow. It was a perfect summer day and the city was swarmed with policemen in their summer outfits, the lucky ones discretely hiding in shadows to avoid the blistering sun. As I was already downtown I made a short stop at the market to buy some strawberries for making jam (see cashmerelady’s post on the subject) and as I came back to the faculty, had an unexpected coffee with a very dear friend of mine. The afternoon was all fun with Tamara in nearby Arboretum. The next day was strikingly similar, only completely different. My second interviewer on the same topic was completely (and disappointingly) different than his former coworker, the policemen were on the streets again, only this time they were completely relaxed as they were securing a bycicle race. The fruit I bought at the market were not strawberries but cherries and back on the faculty, I had another unexpected coffee with a dear friend who could not be more different from my professor/poet friend from the day before. Spent the afternoon with Tamara in the same place again, only this time it was all three of us which made it totally different.
One of the on-line dictionaries defines complementary as “so related that each is the negation of the other” and “providing something that completes the whole”.
Filed under: Life in general | Tags: castle, dragon, Kamnik, medieval, Veronika
There are days when it becomes pretty obvious that we are, after all, living in a medieval city. Kamnik was taken over this weekend by knights and princesses, sword fighters, magicians, peddlers, and children looking for the lost treasure of Veronika, the stingy countess of Kamnik. The festival caught us by surprise and we only caught a glimpse of it – just enough for our little princess to see a real (and really small) pony. As you can see, the dragons were not ready yet so we didn’t have to fight out way through to our cup fof coffee. Than a few hours later, we were navigating our way up to a proper castle, or a mansion, to be precise, where CC’s co-worker got married. The setting was perfectly romantic but as we sat in the ballroom decorated with floral pattern frescoes and a big brass chandelier (which was the main attraction for Tamara who kept pointing at is and going “uuuhh uuhhh”), I started to sense the difference between the castles belonging to wealthier nobility and those of their poorer cousins. I also could not help not noticing the three miss functioning bulbs on the chandelier while trying not to hear what the registrar had to say about the moral crisis of our society.
Had a rainy morning of surprising encounters – on the way from the doctor (hurrah, am officially done with chicken pox) I ran into my former boss. Well, it is really weird to describe him as “boss” (those of you who know Kristjan know what I mean by that) with whom I had an interesting coffee throughout which I tried to distill what exactly was he doing. Again, those of you who know him also know the feeling I am talking about (apparently, he is into artificial intelligence and neuro-programming thingy). And as our visionary drink came to an end, a Smurf tapped me on my shoulder. And no, I was not drunk, that’s just a code name for one of my friends I haven’t seen in a long long time, and who now happens to be pregnant.
Wondered a bit which of my past lives I might have run into if I had continued my way into the old town. Anyway, have a nice weekend.
Filed under: Black eye cafe, photography | Tags: Eugene Smith, gold, photography, street name, street sign, water
My quarantine days are slowly coming to an end, at least I hope so. Although I have not been idle, the days of isolation have left me with little exciting things to share. Today I went over some older files and dug out this little tribute to W. Eugene Smith. Some of you might be familiar with his monumental and inspiring Pittsburgh project, part of which included photographs of the unusual street names of the city. The Gold-Water corner is in a run down part of Dumbo, NYC.
Come to think of it, Smith would have done it in black and white. I think I actually prefer it in black and white. How about you folks?
