Kranj

A medieval town (with a silent ‘j’) half an hour north of Ljubljana. I’d passed it on the way in and went back for a closer look. Nestled close in under the south side of the Alps,

it lies on an escarpment at the confluence of two rivers, the Kokra and the Sava (which goes on to Ljubljana and to Zagreb, eventually joining the Danube at Belgrado):

A cracking (literally) example of Socialist-era cheapo concrete infrastructure.

Besides the usual medieval centre (narrow, twisting, flagstoned streets, etc) it offers some interesting architecture, like this wonderful instance of timberframing done in 1950s concrete:

Delightful, no?

Slovenia’s most celebrated poet, France Prešeren, spent his last few years here and the fact is commemorated by a massive statue of him, designed (of course) by Plečnik:

The proportions are a bit funny, though, aren’t they, given that Plečnik knew his stuff? The story goes that some dork at the municipal planning department did his sums wrong: the statue was too tall to get under a bridge and into town, and his neck had to be shortened. 🙂

I wandered over to some interesting-looking modern buildings and skaters in the middle of town

And noticed some socialist realism statues in the square:

They don’t make statuary like this any more, although a whole lot of it has apparently been bunged together into Szobor Park in Budapest. So before this lot gets melted down to make into more cars, here are all three groups:

Looking at these wonderful statues I caught myself feeling nostalgic; it’s been a very long time since anybody idealised communal effort and aspiration in this way (though, to be fair, these people are all carrying rifles rather than farm implements). These days, if you want a better world you just buy yourself a Mercedes.

the Jože Plečnik house

Master Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik‘s house has been turned into a museum of his life and work.

If you like architecture at all you will love Plečnik. Creative, original, daring, determined, popular and well connected, he left his mark on Ljubljana (and Prague, and Vienna) with dozens of extraordinary buildings and public structures.

His (self-built) house and garden exudes a quiet, sober composure that must have marked Plečnik himself; he was by all accounts a religious, gentle and hard-working man, who had a few female friends but who never married. No, they don’t make them like that any more.

Here’s the house from the back:

You’re not allowed to take photos inside the house (on the grounds that the shop is full of Plečnik catalogues, which turned out to be untrue), but here are some closeups of the beautiful (and convection-heated!) conservatory.

The trees inside are still happy and I reckon those are recesses for glass covers (‘cloches’) outside, which one might expect, but what comes as a surprise is the really thin reinforced concrete window framing (ca. 1918), still in good condition. The ‘Venetian’ floor uses lots of polished marble, granite, concrete and other bits and pieces, probably offcuts:

Plečnik, who found much inspiration in classicism, tried out all sorts of alternative column shapes in reinforced concrete, keeping one or two of each in the garden for reference:

And as the city’s favourite son he had prime access to the Roman archeological remains that were constantly being dug up during his building projects. He was given so many Roman water pipes that he used them as edging for his garden paving:

These pipes are concrete, of course: the Romans built lots of fantastic stuff with concrete:

Now, take a good look at these objects, if you will. They were inside the house but after begging on bended knees I was granted permission to photograph them. They are allegedly Roman:

but if they are indeed Roman, what on Earth are they? They are made of stone, 40 – 50cm high, and three of them (especially the one in the foreground) actually look machined; that is to say, they are so perfectly smooth and regular that it is hard to imagine they were constructed using anything other than an extremely precise mechanical technique.

The only application I can imagine so far is as non-return valves in a water transport system, but I’m guessing. Anyone know?

another Citroën freak

Meet Grega Tasič and his 1969 Cimos ID 19:

The Cimos was the name by which Citroëns were made and sold in the former Jugoslavia; strictly speaking Tito didn’t want his countrymen buying actually ‘foreign-made’ cars, but there was a factory on the coast at Koper that shipped Citroëns (2CVs, Amis, GSes, DSes, CXes and more) in, tagged the chassis, finished the trim, put the tyres on and flogged them to design-minded Jugoslavs in Gregor’s dad’s generation.

The car is hard and dry and looks pretty low-mileage. The trim is very similar and yet slightly odd; there are lots of extra buttons in odd places, and for some reason the vinyl goes right over the airvents:

It has been lovingly restored, with new trim and seat covers and everything very shiny indeed:

Grego’s nerdiness goes right through to an original box of the Opera chocolates (beloved of the 1960s DS-driving classes) on the hat shelf

and the fact that Gregor plays only 1960s Slovenian songs on the radio when he takes this car for a spin. 🙂

For the hardcore Citroën freaks out there, here’s a shot of a chassis plate you’ll never see on a ‘Western’ DS:

Grega mailed me afew days ago to say that he just bought a 1200cc CIMOS production 1977 GS Pallas, in excellent and original condition, beige with biege/brown interior and a sunroof (standard equipment on all CIMOS GS Pallases, apparently). For less than you’d pay in the Netherlands, since you ask.

So I want to know two things: where does Grega find all the money, and more importantly, can he get me a low-mileage DS Break? Grega, you know where to find me…

Everyone else: I know where to find Grega. 🙂

a Zagreb theatre experience

I must tell you about the theatre piece (W. & T., by Branko Brezovec) I saw at the Frakcija anniversary celebrations… it was just incredible.

A tiny, triangular space; a steep rake; a tall, black metal framework with perforated steel sheet panels along one wall. Operatic music gradually swelling. At the back, a TV shows a man shaving. Lights. Two men start an identical monologue: one, standing on a table, in Croatian; the other, lying on the floor, naked but for a knee brace, in simultaneous Italian.

Doors, windows and shelves in the metal framework swing open, five actors/actresses appear at various places in it, naked but for bits of prosthetic support in odd places, and singing, really well and really loudly. Others come on stage, some in soldierly clothes, others naked, either playing scenes, singing, or shouting, in simultaneous Croatian and Italian. There are eleven of them.

Every five minutes the metal framework is moved, sometimes right to stage front, parts of it actually overhanging the audience. The actors are often literally at arms’ length, naked or otherwise. I can see their fillings. I can smell them. Those of us in the front three rows are getting drops of their spittle, their sweat, on our legs and hands.

They use text, song and music, natural and abstract movement, simple cardboard props, a few costumes, and video. Most of them are never dressed. They are so physical with themselves and each other that by the end of the performance they are covered in bruises. They dance, shout, weep, drool, sing, fight, beg, fuck, and kill.

The scenes, being in Croatian and Italian, are hard for me to follow, but seem to revolve around themes of love, loss, loyalty, patriotism, violence, mercy, war, rape, madness, protection, abandonment, redemption, cannibalism and hopelessness.

This goes on without respite for over an hour and a half. It feels like the theatre is running out of oxygen. It is exhausting, overwhelming. It is not Alan Ayckbourn.

One image that will probably stay with me for ever:
six actors hold up boards, together forming a military wall map. Next: they lie down with the map above them, forming the actual country. Next: a seventh actor wriggles inbetween the boards, in order to enter/disappear in/be buried in that country. Next: all the actors leave but one, who in complete silence, punctuated only by gasps of pain or ecstacy, uses the boards to slice his own body into sections…

…..

Afterwards I talked to various people to try to understand more about the themes, but most of them were unable to talk about it. 🙂

more Zagreb pictures

A few more pictures of Zagreb…

The town houses look pretty big and classy, even here in the middle of the old hilltop city:

which can be reached by its own funicular railway:

Here too, loads of lovely old coach-sized doorways

and strikingly simple architecture

and statues:

It seems the further east you go here, the deeper the religiosity of public life. Croatia has lots of really elaborate shrines set up on corners, in passageways, and accident black spots. These shrines are sometimes enormous, permanently illuminated, and full of candles and flowers. In a passageway in the old town you suddenly get this: real pews, and walls and ceiling covered in thank-you tiles to saints and other dead people:

But to return to the museum of Arts and Crafts: they were holding an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci‘s technical notes and drawings. Now the astonishing scope of this bloke’s inventions is well known – the drawings depict numerous perfectly feasible ideas including a cannon tank, a parachute, a submarine, a breathing-enabled diving suit, a canal lock system, a paddle wheel system for ships, ball bearing system, a hang-glider, a machine gun, a running crane, a double-acting ratchet hoist, an automatic piledriver, and so on. But the inventions, especially the war machines, were sometimes also wonderfully prosaic. Get this – an invention for pushing attackers’ ladders off the wall:

How wonderfully Heath Robinson!

Now imagine my amazement when the claim was made that he also invented the bicycle. They’d made a full-size model:

A cursory examination of this thing shows that it has no steering, so off I went to find the original drawings. Aha, there they were:

Wait a minute… A drawing that was self-evidently a modern, crappy, half-baked, semi-understood concept of a bicycle was actually being passed off as Leonardo’s work? Incredible. And wasn’t that actually a bit of pornographic grafitti at lower left? WTF…?

Sure enough, a moment’s Internet research reveals that the drawing, ‘executed’ in pencil (graphite wasn’t even invented till 1564, well after da Vinci died), was added to the sheet somewhere between 1961 and 1974.

Once again, though, I had been the only one laughing. 🙂

Zagreb pictures

Last weekend I went to Zagreb, capital of neighbouring Croatia. The arts magazine ‘Frakcija’, which is published there, was holding a 10th anniversary bash, and this was a great opportunity to meet people in the scene there. It’s only two hours’ drive away from Ljubljana.

Rainclouds hung in the hills on the way there. Incredibly, this was actually the first day of proper rain I’ve had since leaving Amsterdam.

The countryside was conservative, and so were the people. A filling station actually had a table set with the kind of stuff I haven’t seen since primary school harvest festival:

alongside the usual miserly slivers of eastern European chocolate:

Coming into Zagreb you get a lot of 1950s flats in the daringly modern style for which much of the former Yugoslavia is now famous:

But the city centre is amazing. Every block boasts several huge, classical beauties:

And the trams are 1950s beauties, too:

The Museum of Arts and Crafts

has what must be described as an Endless and Dazzling Array of Croatian Stuff (art, furniture, clothes, tableware, clocks, jewellery, glassware, church bells (!), and more) covering the last 200 years:

On to the cathedral on the hill.

The’ve got the tomb of some archbishop in there, people sit praying to him:

And one wall looks like it’s covered in runes or something – can anyone read this?

While outside, the golden statues of Catholicism vie with the gold standard of laissez-faire capitalism:

More later.

more Ljubljana

A few more pictures of Ljubljana, in no particular order.

What a beautiful solution – a manhole floats up to bring 220v and 380v into the square:

Allotments between residential housing. This is about 500m from the centre of town:

A nice bit of urban furniture detail, especially for Amsterdammers…

Ljubljana has a car problem. Fiercely loved and defended, regularly cleaned and paraded, their cars pack the city for most of the day; parking is a pain and road rage is on the rise. They need to take a lead from Copenhagen and make the place really bicycle-friendly as soon as possible, or things are going to get worse…

A recent treat was a visit to the Čankarev Dom for a showing of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with a live symphony orchestra playing the original score. When you walk in to the theatre here…

it takes a bit of a walk around to learn that this is just a vast lobby, and that the actual theatre is three floors down – in other words, very very underground. Perhaps it’s built in an old bunker; it’s in an area full of government buildings.

The film was visually wonderful, and full of cinematic quotes (Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Brazil, Dr Strangelove) and effects (‘handheld’ shots, camera on a swing) that you had to remind yourself were actually original and that all those other films were quoting this. 🙂

I had to laugh: at the beginning of the film we slowly descend, with Metropolis’s identical, shuffling, downtrodden workers, to their underground world: a hot, dark, crowded, grim and charmless place, far below the sunny world above. And for the audience, that’s exactly where we all actually were. I was the only one laughing, though. That happens to me quite a lot. 🙂

The orchestra was pretty good but one of the trumpets was out of tune; how the hell does that get to happen in a national symphony orchestra?

here+now: new logo

Anton Riedel designed a new logo for here+now and now it’s emblazoned on the DS:

and very nice it looks too. I’ll probably add a tagline (something short and punchy like ‘a totally rocking festival of the best of unscripted performance art in the new Europe’ 🙂 ) with a marker pen later on.

Both stencils, professionally attached to the car, a T-shirt with the same logo, and the relevant CorelDraw file bunged onto my USB stick (so I can have another stencil made up if I need a new door – which of course I will at some point) came to the princely sum of 6900 SIT – about €27. Fab.

Warm thanks to Robert and the Infokart crew who did this – and let me sit at one of their computers for three hours to upload, resize, and post photos to bring the blog up to date!

Wanted: my laptop back, you bastards.

DS photoshoot

I got asked to bring the DS to a photoshoot for Citroen’s new superlimo, the V6 diesel C6. The idea was that the C6 harks back in certain ways to the style and design of the DS and the CX (swivelling headlights, rear window). We got special permission to drive into Tivoli park for some rather classy shots:

Putting the cars side by side is revealing. From the front, the C6 is clearly uglier but the headlights actually work:

while from the back, we see that the DS has less width but more window:

All in all, the DS is clearly the better car. The fact that the C6 is safer, warmer, quieter, better appointed, more reliable, more economical and almost twice as fast, is really neither here nor there. 🙂