„Film nowofalowy”. Rola kina w poezji pokolenia ’68

Artykuł prezentuje rolę filmu w poezji pokolenia ’68 – głównie Stanisława Barańczaka, ale także Juliana Kornhausera, Ewy Lipskiej i Adama Zagajewskiego. Nowofalowi twórcy sięgali w wierszach po postacie aktorów (m.in. Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, duet Laurel i Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Ali McGraw), bohaterów, tytuły, sceny, gatunki filmowe oraz związane z kinem czy, rzadziej, produkcjami telewizyjnymi przeżycia i wnioski. Pozwalało to werbalizować, wręcz „tłumaczyć” na zmysłowe kategorie kwestie dotyczące wyborów etycznych, kondycji człowieka zagubionego w zderzeniu ze światem i nieraz z góry skazanego w tym starciu na porażkę, przemijania oraz prób ominięcia jego bezlitosnych praw.

Survive, Revive, Thrive: Chapter 9: Apparent Horizon

The definition of apparent horizon: the plane or line where the earth or water and sky seem to meet. If you do nothing, you get nothing.—Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician/diplomat/author, 1945 You get a lot of advice in this job. A former SPE President told me that these columns should never be about “where we (presidents) went and what we did last month; nobody’s interested in that.” While I have tried to abide by that rule, I can tell you that this past month was an extraordinarily full month, all from the computer screen, of course. I have dealt with the widest possible spectra of SPE membership from freshman students to geriatrics, like myself. It has been both exhausting and inspiring to see and feel the creativity and labor of our SPE members. As unsolicited advice, if you are looking for inspiration, then I encourage you to talk to those who have lost their jobs or even their businesses. I have dealt with several in both groups during the past month. Listen carefully to them. These colleagues look forward to when they can again contribute to our industry and they have that unique never-say-quit attitude that defines our industry. If you want to understand the word “resilience,” just listen. They are truly inspiring.Luck is where opportunity meets preparation. —Seneca, Roman writer, 54 BC–39 AD Frankly, I spend almost all of my time for SPE just as Seneca suggests. The modern interpretation of this is that “the harder I work, the luckier I get” (attributed to the golfer Arnold Palmer). Specifically, I am looking for that “apparent horizon” where SPE can best serve its members in a fashion that presents a multitude of significant opportunities. In short, we are getting prepared to be lucky. Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone.—Charlie Chaplin, English actor, 1889–1977 The Year(s) of Living Virtually In a recent panel I was involved in, I confess I did not expect (nor hope) to be the one to get the question “Is work-from-home here to stay?”, but I did. I thought I should share my views so you can taunt me with how wrong I am or could be. The obvious answer is yes. The efficiency and effectiveness of work-from-home (or remote working) is well documented, and probably to no one’s surprise, people are working an average of 2 or more extra hours/day when working from home. The positives of work-from-home are obvious. Professionals can work very well with less supervision than anyone might have thought possible before the COVID pandemic. Occasional, or minimal commuting, provides a generally better home life and better time management, and there are exceptional (potential) cost savings from less commuting, travel, etc. There are also negatives for work-from-home. The really bad news is that we probably don’t need as many management personnel. There is significant meeting overload. A rule of thumb is that for 80% of the people, 80% of the meeting time is wasted time. Historically people must be seen in order to be seen as relevant. The presumption being that if one is not seen, then they are not working.

The Death and Life of UK Universities and the Cultural Spaces They Consume

The shift in focus in UK higher education since Thatcherism from the production of knowledge for civic betterment to the production and consumption of knowledge by the university for revenue generation can be read through the social rearrangement of space in the university town or city. A key spatial reconfiguration emerging from the shift in economic conditions is the collapse of the modern university as a singular, ideological construct. Like ‘the city’ before it, the modern university has, at its interior, been reformed into a newly defined, fragmented public–private social space, and, at its exterior, into a devourer of the space of the local community. This article showcases excerpts from a film made by the authors entitled The Death and Life of UK Universities – a title inspired by Jane Jacobs’s critique of great American cities. Our film is a cinematic database survey of the changing space of all British universities which considers this systematic spatial reprogramming of space within the city. The two-year research project is an audio-visual critique of the way in which neoliberalism, corporatization and commercial interests have co-opted the space of the British university. Referencing the films of Charlie Chaplin and Gordon Matta-Clark and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, the film focuses on university cities, critically observing the rise of university marketing material and the consumption of the city and of local community life for university student accommodation. We ask: How are UK universities being spatially reconfigured and what are the consequences?

Feigned and Distorted Bodyscapes

Creative interdisciplinarity in performance and scenography permeate the masking and disguising of the avant-garde. Chapter Four highlights the artistic collaboration of choreographers, composers, visual artists and writers in Paris and beyond, beginning with the production of Parade in Paris (1917) and concluding with work of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in the 1920s. Popular performance disguising by Liesl Karlstadt and Karl Valentin in Munich, as well as Alexander Vertinsky’s Ukrainian Pierrot, contrast with much of the abstraction proposed in other urban bodyscapes. The bold distortions of Aleksei Granovsky’s mises en scène with the State Yiddish Chamber Theatre complement the masquerading described in Paris with the Swedish Ballet and the Ballets Russes. This chapter parades a line-up Charlie Chaplin, Clowns and Pulcinella interpreters alongside the omnipresent Pierrots who offer an escape from the troublesome years of war. In this era, disguising also proliferated in domestic and military circumstances as malingerers and ‘Aspirants and Pretenders’ displayed Chaplinesque masquerading skills throughout the belligerent communities and battlefields of Europe.

Club Petroushka, Émigré Performance, and New York's Russian Nightclubs of the Roaring Twenties

In the midst of the Prohibition era, New York City proliferated with nightclubs that presented patrons with imagined worlds of music and entertainment. This essay explores the role of music in creating such imagined worlds, looking specifically at the Russian-themed nightclubs founded by and employing émigrés recently exiled from Bolshevik Russia. Examining Midtown's Club Petroushka as a prime example of such a space, this essay focuses on the so-called “Russian Gypsy” entertainment that caught the eye and ear of the club's patrons, whose ranks included Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, and the Gershwin brothers. Based on an examination of archival material—including memoirs, compositions, and extant recordings of Club Petroushka's musicians and photographs detailing its interior—as well as on advertisements and reviews from Russian American and other newspapers and magazines, this essay contends that the “Russian Gypsy” music presented at Club Petroushka enabled a transformative experience for patrons while providing a performative space for its recently exiled musicians. I argue that two aspects of this music in particular enabled the transformative process as it was delineated in contemporary discourses: 1) heightened emotionality; and 2) playing with a sense of time (a musical attribute I call “achronality”). Examining the complex cultural entanglements at work in the performance of “Russian Gypsy” music and situating my analysis within a theoretical framework of night cultures proposed by Brian D. Palmer and mimesis proposed by Michael Taussig, this essay illuminates the multivalent role of this musical trope for the different constituencies comprising Club Petroushka, while it also documents the largely overlooked Russian-Romani musical tradition as it took shape in the anti-Bolshevik, first wave Russian diaspora.