grasswire

Had a really relaxing picnic with my ex co-workers this weekend. Could not help but think how much we/things have changed since the days of the crazy attic start-up. To begin with, we were a bunch of five back then, on Saturday, we were fifteen… Come to think of it, if this friendship thingy was all we got out of Daisy, in the long run I guess it was worth it. BTW, I still keep certificate of stock options on my office wall at university to remind me of how great my current job is, regardless of all the hassle with the students.
The pic is from our way back.

I am still fascinated by the documentary film Helvetica by Gary Hustwit that I saw yesterday. Yes, it is a documentary film about typography, about one of the most enduring and attractive types ever designed. One of the things that struck me was its pure omnipresence. Helvetica type is literally everywhere, you will find it on garbage trucks, subway signs and corporate identities of multinational corporations. And at the first sight you won’t even notice it is the same type. I for one consider myself to have an eye for obscure details and that kind of stuff but I was stunned. Since lots of shots in the film are from New York, I went through photographs of my this year’s visit to the city and sure, there it was, Helvetica, looking at me from more than a dozen of photographs. Hence the little homage pic.
In any event, the film is really worth seeing, it is well done, runs very smoothly and offers a brilliant interplay pro and contra statements from an interesting mix of interviewers of different generations, various styles and gradations of fame. And it is not just some wish-wash babble, its a bunch of people really contemplating about design.

Was a bit blue today, it’s at least 30 degrees Celsius outside and I am apparently catching a cold.  
You can expect more photographs themed by colours in the near future.

Here is a story of how I almost didn’t make it all the way to PhD. Before entering primary school, it was mandatory (I guess it still is) that each child was examined by a psychologist to determine if he/she was ready to go to school and “fit” to go to “regular” school. I almost ended in a school with adapted learning programme because of a circus related incident.
At one point during the interview, the psychologist asked me which animals fly.
My answer was immediate: “Elephant!”.
She was stunned. After recovering from the initial amazement, she continued to probe me: “What do you mean an elephant? Elephants don’t fly.” 
“Yes they do.”
“C’m on, elephants cant fly.”
“Yes they can. The one that a crow gave a feather to does”.
The answer further aggravated the lady and my mother apparently spent most of the remaining interview time convincing the baffled psychologist that I was really referring to the elephant Dumbo from the Disney book I loved so much at the time. My mother says that when we left, the psychologist was still not fully convinced.
Serves me right for reading capitalist propaganda pamphlets. Wonder what would Dorfman and Mattelarts have to say about this :) 
My mother also told me that she only took me to a circus once - I was terrified thorought the show since I thought they were using the whips to torture the poor animals.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.