The film is set in 1967-8 in Poland, at a time when the authorities were losing their grip on power (or at least felt that they were), as they were across much of Eastern Europe. The film documents the persecution of anyone suspected of having Jewish/zionist background. This was an area of the Communist era which I’d never really understood until watching this film. How could they be anti-semitic when Hitler had effectively killed the entire Jewish population?

The answer, it turns out, is that they turned their hatred on people who had any Jewish blood in them at all  – Hitler had focused mainly on pure Jews but there were many thousands left who had suspiciously Jewish surnames. What’s more it wasn’t necessary for any connection to actually be proven. The mere suggestion of an Israeli family member would be enough to cast doubt on somebody’s patriotism. An extremely depressing part of European history, about which little is commonly known outside the old Soviet Bloc.

The reason is that they needed scapegoats for the obvious failings of the regime. Communism was by that time obviously running out of steam, after the building frenzy which followed the second world war. People were all too aware of this and the powers that be needed someone to take the blame.

I’ve been subscribing to the LSE podcasts for a couple of years now. The interest level varies, but from time to time they throw up a truly fascinating lecture.  All the public lectures that are given by the university are broadcast free over the internet. How lucky to live in an age where this is possible – what would people even 2 generations ago make of the amazing flood of knowledge which is available to us?

Anyhow, today one of the more interesting ones came up on my iPhone – about the art of remembering, in which a journalist discussed the ability to train one’s memory to perform amazing feats. But the greatest lesson I got from it was the way in which he discussed training in general.

There are three stages to learning a skill. In the first stage we explore and investigate cognitively what the skill involves. In the second stage we develop the skill ourselves, and in the final stage, we seem to stagnate as we just repeat over and over again the things we have learnt to internalize them so that they become second nature. What he argued, and I can definitely see the sense in what he’s saying is that the key to becoming a greater master at a certain skill (memory, music, sport) is actually not to allow ourselves to leave the second stage – always look to practice the things which we can’t do, not just repeat the things which we can do, and which therefore give us pleasure.

This could be the most fundamental idea that I’ve heard in years connected with musical training. The value in a teacher is that they force you to address these things, and that’s where self-learning falls down against traditional methodology. What you need to seek out is ways in which to constantly prove yourself.

What happened to me in the last year is that I forced myself into uncomfortable situations so that I would have to progress. The question is how to keep that up, and how/where to direct the good momentum!

Talking of which, Adam Popiel, a friend from Boston, runs a fantastic radio show on student radio (radiofonia) here called Power Nap. He emailed me today commissioning a new piece with the theme animals. It’s the third time I’ve produced something for him for his shows, and I always really enjoy doing it. I’d like to try to find ways to get into this type of collaboration with as many different people as possible. This next (academic) year is promising to be a really interesting one, assuming the Codes return, Phil M will be here, the Awarians are starting to look experimental, and if we can just get the Kowalskis up and running in some style or other.On top of all this I really feel like I’m starting to get my production chops together. Bring it on!

And via them:

These guys played at Off but I love this video:

and finally this guy is amazing… I hate RnB but he seems to have done something really special with it:

This drives me insane here. So many places need a kick up their arses to get into the 21st century. On a similar note, I discovered to my surprise on Friday that Biedronka only accept payment in cash. Biedronka is a cheap supermarket chain, not dissimilar to Lidl or Aldi. Biedronka means ladybird.  The produce is good if a bit limited, but they have a reputaion for being for “poor people” since the ex-president’s twin brother made a joke at their expense a while back.

I’ve heard that Lidl also won’t accept credit cards, but are happy to use debit cards. I’m sure there’s a logic to this, but really the problem is that it should be slightly more publicised at the entrance. To be fair, the woman at the till in Biedronka was very understanding when I said I didn’t have any cash – there’s a cashpoint right next to the supermarket. However, I do wonder whether the reasoning for this is that they get paid to have the cashpoint but they pay to use credit cards… Short-sighted, right?

Our local Biedronka is in the middle of a weird shopping centre which I can’t figure out. It’s a huge clothing market, with  five buildings plus a massive outdoor covered market dedicated to cheap clothes. It seems to be largely run by vietnamese immigrants, and the business model is that they stay open all week, despite making almost no money (there’s no-one there on a Thursday afternoon, which is when I popped in) but it’s  rammed on a Saturday and Sunday morning. The Biedronka is in the newest of these buildings, called King Square, which is still about 3 quarters empty of shops. For the next six months I’m going to do all my clothes shopping there just to see whether the clothes are good enough.

The best thing is that this shopping centre is (colloquially at least) known as Tandeta. The street it’s on is actually called Tandeta Street. Tandeta is polish for “tacky” or “trash” or “tat”. Tandeta Street is next to Krzywda Street – Krzywda means either harm or mischief.

Watched the film Smokin’ Aces today – basic hollywood trash mob thriller: it suited my mood (semi-hungover). It seems to me that the same film might have been made 100 times in the last 20 years. Sort of sub lock stock. The plot was ridiculous.

The boys have started to return – Shaun came home early from his trip to the Balkans after having his wallet stolen, and Bogdan came back with his new girlfriend (from Munich) so we had an impromptu get-together last night that lasted a few beers longer than was strictly necessary!

Have to say the gym in Galeria Gazimierz looks impressive, and seems well-organized and 110PLN per month for everything is a fantastic price – even if you just go for a swim and a sauna a couple of times a week that’s pretty good value. I haven’t been a member of a gym since the UK though and I’m a little bit worried about how much I’ll use it, but if the experience I had while working for DV is anything to go by, it shouldn’t be a problem – you make time!

Had a typical experience on the Polish roads this morning. I drove to the bus stop to drop Monia off as she’s going to do some work in Kielce for three days. Kielce is a medium sized town about 100km to the north of Krakow, that is apparently famous for being the home of Polish hip hop. I’m guessing it’s the Polish Compton or Brooklyn then (not). Here’s an example:

Anyhow, after dropping her off I had a lot of time to drive to work so I decided not to stress out and drive according to the speed limit etc. Not a good idea. Stopped at some traffic lights and a hugely swollen lorry driver jumped out of his cab and started yelling at me to “grab hold of the steering wheel and drive for f**k’s sake”. Heart attack waiting to happen. I pulled the old “don’t speak polish mate” trick and that really pissed him off, as he started a torrent of abuse. Obviously I slowed down even more after that in the hope that he’d physically explode. This sort of thing is not unusual.

This was the second time I’d been down there – the first being the christening of Monia’s nephew Igor, which was a much more stressful affair for me – meet the family time. This time it was just a social visit – under the pretext of getting Monia’s brother-in-law’s help with our cars (which he did, the Citroen is, mechanically at least, in much better shape), a peaceful afternoon spent playing with Renia’s kids around the town fountain.

Life in the small town is so much more chilled than back here in Krak. You feel the weight lift from you as you arrive, the air is clean, people are relaxed and friendly. The worst part is the journey home in the evening: there’s a real feeling of dread as you approach the metropolis.

Much of Monday’s lessons were occupied with the discussion of work in Poland. Employment here is a problem. Not in the sense that no-one has a job – especially in Kraków most people are employed. The problem is the attitude of the employer to their employees. People are effectively replaceable – if you don’t like your conditions, you have to just put up with it because it’s easy to find someone else.

One consequence of this is that pay rises are extremely rare – i.e. people’s income, due to inflation, is constantly falling. This means that the only way to secure your income is either to constantly work harder (if you have the luxury of being paid for doing more work, which most people don’t), or to constantly change jobs. A strong minority people opt to attempt the former, and a few sensible ones opt for the latter. Most people don’t have either choice.

Everyone’s dream is to own their own company, but the conditions here are such that it’s very hard to make a profit. You don’t just need a good idea, you need a fantastically good idea. Otherwise you need to be a miner, farmer or mechanic, in which case your income is guaranteed.

England beat India 4-0 in the cricket test series. Hard to know what to make of that – it was so easy for us that I suspect that something is wrong in the India camp. Their batting lineup looks unbeatable, but a lot of them are coming to the twilight of their careers, and their bowlers have never been a strong point. The real test will be South Africa next summer. If we do the same to them, we’ll have good reason for our pride!

Alter Ego is one of these. Although it’s nothing spectacular in itself – nice garden, Zywiec and traditional polish food, being pretty standard in these parts – it is a nice, unpretentious place to spend an evening, especially as Monia’s friendly with the bar staff. Possibly too nice, if this morning’s hangover is anything to go by, although I suspect that a couple of unplanned wisniowkas (cherry vodka) in Awaria on the way home may not have helped in that regard.

All I could do this afternoon was lie in a warm bath and watch Slumdog Millionaire. I’d never seen if before (to my shame) and it’s an instant classic. Innovative idea, great story line, humourously written, well acted. Absolute highlight for me was the Indian Chris Tarrant – brilliantly evil and self-serving. The only one complaint I would have is that it did feel a bit like it was India for an English audience – in other words it had all and only the things which we would be expected to know about India (slums, religion, begging, call centres, taj mahal) – I’d love to see the same film written the other way around…

After that I went to get a temporary petrol cap for my car and decided, on the spur, to head into town (to one of the above-mentioned Galerias in fact) to get some pants. While there I picked up some very very cheap Polish fine art magazines. I’d like to think I’m going to try to read my way through the articles in them, but on the tram home I realized I’d been a bit optimistic about that. Nevertheless there’s a lot of stuff of interest in there, so hopefully it won’t be a waste of 20PLN.

It’s interesting that it’s possible to be resident in a country like Poland for 6 years and totally fail to catch on to some of the more authentic artistic movements that are going on. If you don’t dig, you could believe that all that’s happening here is a photocopying of old Western trends, and cynical mass-produced consumerism. I always knew that’s not really the case, obviously, but compared to somewhere like Berlin or London, it’s possible to completely miss any of the wider culture things that are happening. One of my aims for the next year is to connect with that a lot more.

Today I finally got the rear windscreen fixed on the Citroen only to discover that in the meantime someone had broken into the car, breaking the lock, the alarm system, and the petrol cap – presumably in order to steal petrol from the tank. I mean really – how fucking low? I’m going to maintain a list of things which have gone wrong with the Citroen:

1. Engine cuts out. Unexplained. Mechanic cleaned some bits and it started working. 100PLN.

2. Wing mirror kicked off by hooligans. 200PLN

3. Radio stopped working with no cause. Unfixed.

4. Plastic cover to the bit under the steering wheel fell off. Unfixed.

5. Rear windscreen shattered. Fixed 300PLN.

6. Exhaust pipe fell off. Unfixed yet.

7. Headlight bulb needed replacing. 150PLN.

8. Engine cut out when temperature dipped below minus seven (i.e. most of the Polish winter). Unfixed.

9. Fuse blew. 20 PLN

10. Thieves stole cover to petrol cap, broke lock, turned off alarm. Unfixed yet.

I’ll take some pictures later to illustrate the total wreckage that is my Citroen.

I’m sure there’s more, but you get the point.  I’ve had this car for 15 months. It’s been out of action for about 6 of those months in total. On the other hand, it has seen a couple of great trips – Katowice twice (once for 0ff 2010 and once for Joel and Jola’s wedding this year), and the infamous Kowalskis in Prague road trip. So I do have some affectionate memories of it.

I could also list the various things which need fixing in the Alfa Romeo (Monia’s car, which nominally at least belongs to me) but I might collapse in a heap of depression.

Add to this a couple of little local pubs with dead cheap booze (4PLN for a pint of Kasztelan) and I’m starting to feel a bit more at home. Have to wait until the chill sets in though because I don’t know whether it’s going to be such a great place in January!

I’m not sure if this is just because of a reluctance to use things that aren’t Polish, or whether it’s because they have a lot of highly qualified programmers with too much time on their hands.

I watched the film Live Forever – a documentary about Britpop made in 2002. Britpop was a musical and cultural phenomenon that came out of London, Manchester and Sheffield in the years 1994-1997. The main proponents were Oasis, Blur and Pulp, but there were a host of other decent (some might even suggest better) acts such as Sleeper, Supergrass, Menswear and many others. It was a wider idea though, coinciding with the rise to power of New Labour and an aesthetic of flamboyant laddish britness that, in hindsight was really tasteless, and driven by too much cocaine.

The film was interesting as much for the way people were thinking in 2002 as it was for the subject of the documentary which was ostensibly the rise and fall of British culture in the 1990s – effectively it’s about the soundtrack of my youth from The Stone Roses to the end of Oasis. Well put together, if a little bit cliched at times – many of the people involved had a role which they wanted to fulfil and which they were always going to play up to. By far the most interesting speaker was Noel Gallagher whose opinions had a degree of honesty lacking in some of the others, but that said, Jarvis Cocker, given less time on camera, also had a lot to say. Liam, predictably, was a twat, and Damon just came across as totally angsty and annoying.

The interesting thing from a music history perspective is that since the demise of Britpop (around the time of the rise of the internet),  no trend has dominated music in quite the same way. We could talk about the pop, we could mention the rise of karaoke TV – pop idol etc, but in terms of the musical content there isn’t any musical or artistic movement in these, in fact they are notable for the lack of such. There have been smaller movements (and lots of them) but nothing like the earth-shifting phenomena of Grunge and Britpop, Acid House and Hip Hop. Dubstep and Grime? These things have given music a new impetus but they’re never really mainstream enough to be seen in the same light. Who is the Oasis of Dubstep?

I’m working on a house remix of the Hobo Codes song “Down when I want to”, which is an interesting process. I’m taking the vocals and trying to create an interesting house-style line over the top of the usual kick beat and bass. What I’ve ended up with so far is about 10 years old, but sounds ok. There’s still a way to go.

What made it special was the fact that all the main characters were female – men played supporting roles at best, and were often shown to be weakly controlling of their wives – ignoring their real needs, which weren’t always necessarily the predictable “have children, live in a big house” type of needs. At several points, the film confounded our expectations, although there was never the feeling that we were being forced to witness an awkward plot-twist – the characters’ motivations gradually becoming apparent as the story unfolded.

Szrot is a new Polish word for me – it roughly translates as car scrapping shop – the kind of place where you can buy used parts for a damaged car that you don’t want to spend a fortune repairing! This is what has happened to my citroen saxo – the back windscreen got smashed in Prague while the Kowalskis were on tour in late June, and, lazy as ever, I am only now getting round to fixing it.

However, the word has taken on another significance for me – Monia has been talking about this szrot for weeks and only now have I realized what it meant. For a long time, I thought she was talking about a specific chain of shops which sold car parts – I’d never heard the word before and the way she was using it implied that there were a lot of them and they were connected.

So I muddled it all up in my head. This still happens after six years and it’s really frustrating that I can’t teach my brain not to make assumptions about the way things work or the meanings of words. Anyway, henceforth the word szrot will come to mean “Polish concept which I completely misunderstand as an ignorant foreigner”.

A quick note also on the Eurozone – it seems that it’s collapsing at an alarming speed now. Some of this is over-dramatized by ratings agencies (these institutions really are the spawn of the devil), the press and wide-boy investors, but there’s clearly some serious trouble looming. The solution currently being proposed – much closer fiscal unity between members of European states – is hugely attractive to me,  and here’s how I think it would play out.

The weaker Southern EU states will shrink rapidly, allowing for private investment to fill the spaces. This might have to happen fairly quickly and there will obviously be some pain, but I think that the governments of most of these countries will probably be able to sell the concept to enough voters to allow it to happen – one or two may fall out of the Euro entirely, and possibly become something akin Montenegro, unilaterally adopting the currency without participating in policy discussions. I can’t see any reason why Greece couldn’t make this work for the same reasons that MN does – it makes a huge amount of money out of tourism and simply having the Euro is useful to encourage this.

A good portion of the Eurozone is stable enough to survive on its own – Germany, obviously, Netherlands, France (despite recent panics which probably indicate that some adjustments need to be made, Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia, Finland and Estonia and possibly Belgium (plus some other minor states).

Meanwhile most of the failing states – most importantly Spain and Italy, will have to make significant reforms – ultimately they will have to re-build their countries to a German model. Possibly an unpleasant homogenization, but in 10 years time it will  pay dividends for them. I’ve long been of the opinion that all countries should strive to look like Germany, politically and economically – it has most elements of post-industrial society figured out.

In the short term what will happen is that fiscal policy will start to be made centrally (i.e. by the ECB, but probably mostly at the behest of the Germans, at least until the rest of Europe gets its ship in order) mainly in the form of a Eurobond. Debt-reduction plans will work out over 5-10 years of pain but the emerging Eurozone will be significantly stronger -  a clear rival to the declining dollar.

So much so, in my opinion that much of the rest of Europe, which at the moment is extremely reluctant to join the Euro, will be inclined to jump in as quickly as possible. The East (Poland is what I’m thinking of here) would see clear benefits of sharing a currency with the major economic power-houses of Europe

The central argument against this position is that Europe has a diversified economy. What might make sense in Southern France would not make sense in Eastern Poland. This argument has some merit, but is flawed because it assumes that all of these regions operate independently and do not trade with each other. An economically successful Southern France is beneficial to Eastern Poland because people in Eastern Poland produce things which they can sell to people in Southern France. A unified currency can only make this easier. Economic success is contagious.

Ultimately the Euro’s problems are acute ones, rather than chronic. There are structural issues which need to be resolved as a matter of extreme urgency – with the ideal result being much much closer political and economic union. But if these issues are resolved then the medium to long term prospects are for rosy good health. The solution lies in forging ever closer integration, not severing the links.