V praze: crawlspace, castle tour, throwing up in public, or just another weekend on a Czech punk tour.

You may wonder what I've been up to. What have I been up to? Things got a little wild since I started working for Tamizdat, and well, I between school (like going to work, long days, much studying), work (writing album reviews for the site), ex-currics (tours, lectures, etc) and trying to get some other visions of Prague + work on several late and current projects – life has been too much to blog about. Wow, I just realized how much this is like that annoying part of a zine where the editor complains about how late the finished product is.

So I went to this insane festival in Mikulov, Moravia, which featured the big beat group Blue Effect and of course Plastic People of the Universe, Uz Jsme Doma and Marian Varga, who is this really eccentric keyboardist somewhere between Glenn Gould and Keith Emerson who used to be in the group Collegium Musicum. The trip was ½ the fun for me, and less than that for my unfortunate but good-humored friends who couldn't be on the bus with me (pozor: if you travel by bus out of Prague, get a freaking reservation, seriously!) so had to go to Brno and take a cab! to Mikulov (but were offered a lucrative franchise opp. For some dieting formula by their generous cabbie).
Turns out I have been to Mikulov before, five years ago when a friend convinced me that is was 'the real CZ' and I spent a week there drinking wine and reading the bible at the city pool. I was also trying to 'relearn' Latin, which could give you some indication of my stuck brain at the time.
Thank god for the long study to PhD-dom because it'll be a good while before I get Czechs and their music. The festival was open air, super cheap and you could just camp right outside the wall for free. Toilets however cost 5 crowns! There was constantly food cooking and beer flowing, the weirdest mix of music possible from 2pm to 2am (or longer, with friends I was convinced to leave early) from Czech Latin jazz to well, Marian Varga, post-punk, hippie rock, folk, accordion humorists and, like in the disco polo videos I know and love, always children on stage dancing around. And dogs, everywhere.
I was by myself for most of the first night and fell in immediately with some raucous Czechs who were addled enough that our mutual ability to communicate was no barrier. That is to say, I was offered weed by sign language. To toke, universal! Luckily enough for me I declined, so as to chart the insanity of the folks over the course of the evening. I save the juicy details (he!) for my dissertation, but let's just say that later when I said "…and then I realized that the one who was doing the surprisingly nimble interpretive dance to PPotU had a huge swastika tattoo on his forearm," I broke open a good conversation with another Czech punk friend, who told me that this type of 'hate speech' is illegal in CZ. Well, it's a start…
Still on the theme, went to an exhibit called "The Pope Smoked Dope" at the Museum of the City of Prague, which charted the history of big beat (bigbit) in CZ and 'psychedelic visual culture' mostly from hippie central, CA. An intense explosion of artifacts (over 800 in the exhibit) mostly album covers, posters, printed materials, put Czech big beat bands (with names like Flamingoes, The Matadors, The Roosters, Blue Five Dogs, Rebels, Primitives, The Awe telling you that they referenced mid-60s British Invasion although playing and recording later (the exhibit said that the first rock records were produced in 1968 tho I'm going to do more work on that number)). Anyway, am planning to get ahold of the curator and track down a lot of the music if possible. His catalog has some writing about how useless it would be to try to do a sociological study of Czech music from the 60s. Luckily, I still don't know most of those words in Czech so can pretend not to understand.
Also, seeing all those Dead posters and shit shocked me into total admission that there is some serious hippie regression going on in our dear beloved world of 2004 novy weird psych folk groovie death cult jams. Been listening to a lot of irritating posthardcore and you know what, it suits me better! Hating this fake love bullshit is making me more Matos every day? I just want to wear plastic clothes and listen to shiny techno?!? Only six days til c/o Kompakt fest Koln!
So to the subject line: Friday/Sat I was tagged along with Ememvoodoopoka to two shows, a festival in Brtnice and a place in Pisen. The Brtnice show was a two-day festival in the barn behind an architecture museum in Brtnice, a pretty damn small town boasting the relics of a castle and Sv. Julian, as well as a miniature Charles Bridge, complete with statues, over a creek. $2 admission, seven bands and a DJ tent doing some Czechtek-style trance and techno, a tea hut, beer hut, food stand, art exhibit and grounds covered with rope made into spider webs to go with the name: Pavucina. Got there in time to see Lajky, a six-piece sounding somewhere between Arcade Fire and Paris, Texas with hark! a female bass player who had a punchy voice to her male counterpart's hilariously effete indie boy stance. Emem play some dystopian krautrock with boogie moments, and my friend Martin jumps around and pumps his fists like a true leader. Brood, from Pottsdam, got the ubiquitous 15-yr-olds with dreads and short pants (romance) to slam with post-hardcore abandon. Tabletky were a local band whose lead singer looked like, well, Eric Weisbard actually, and who sang like Eddie Vedder. Serious presence. They had a 7-string guitarist and the crowd really loved them.
Or maybe they were really drunk. I am now approaching 10 years of going to shows pretty much continuously and I can say that I have never seen so many people as drunk as all the people seemed on Friday night at Pavucina. There were also 'cookies,' which I watched one person eat so many of that he immediately became ill. Others were just laying on the ground, shouting while dangerously nearby others were just peeing out into the night air. This is where I might tell you that I, having had a nice toast and tea, was looking at the sickeningly lovely moon and Mars, it was pretty bright out. I have never felt so unafraid but so alone as there, standing upright amid this nearly Bosch-ian spectacle. I slept, like most people, in the kulturni dum, in a sleeping bag on the stage. There was no women's room open, and there was a dead daddy longlegs in the men's sink that was so big looking, even in its ruined state, as to inspire great fear. They say you swallow three spiders a year, but this number is suddenly not so important as the size of each one. Ahh.
And Saturday I wrote around with Brood in their van to various small towns in CZ, looking for adventure until someone from Pavucina called saying they forgot their bag of cables, so we made a four hour return and back to Pisen so they could play with Emem at Palubkov, an all-ages club booked by teenagers and likely the meeting place of all the city's alternatypes. I forgot to mention Vicky, Emem's drummer's girlfriend, who did merch for the band and who, at Palubkov, secretly got very drunk. For whatever reason, the crowd was weird and not attentive, but a dedicated group raved for Brood, and we didn't end up leaving to return to Prague until 1am. Five + gear packed in a modest eurocar, I had the good sense to have had several glasses of Frankovka before getting in the car to make me sleepy, but lo! When Vicky decided to start throwing up out the window, I was shocked into awakeness, realizing that we had some intense mrla (fog) and sat shivering as V sat limply, waiting. The only thing worse than waiting to throw up is waiting for someone else to throw up. This is another reason to not have kids, although I'm pretty sure that true love involves not actually being grossed out by the vomit of said loved one. If this is true, I know in my heart that I have loved (and will never buy the cheap absinthe for you again, I'm sorry!) and will surely love again.
This missive will do nothing for my hits. No links, no photos, no pauses, but I think that it will likely be my last in Prague so I'm getting everything out. This week I have my main Czech test, my birthday (that's right it's on Wednesday you slackers, it's too late to send a card) and Friday is likely off to Koln.
WARNING, DEATH: Also, I will be dropping my grandma Carr's ashes in the Vltava on Wednesday and trying to think of some way to honor my great aunt Kay, who passed away on Friday after a month of intense hospital time. I've now lost four loved ones in the last two years and today even dreamed of my grandfather, who died when I was really young, too young to know him. Was at this castle Landstejn with Martin on Saturday and walking up a tower that was 700 years old, thinking what does it mean to be climbing these stairs to look out over this forest and grounds. Got caught in a flash rainstorm so we were the only ones up there, looking out. Am I telling all this to you now so you too see from this place? (I wouldn't be so naïve and selfish to presume) Would I go up if I could never tell anyone about it? I am sad for not knowing what my Aunt Kay might have seen and known that I didn't know to ask.
(please don't wait for me to ask).