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donate Summary of Revolver Revue 73 (2008)
A richly illustrated story of three Czech typographers' journey to the exotic Bucharest, as recorded by Karel Haloun, opens this winter's RR issue. In the Romanian capital they were all enchanted by an obscure music style called "manel", and one of them brought back another of his personal typefaces: Storm's Stencinul is inspired by the template script of Bucharest streets. Tomás Brousil is also a professional typographer – this time however, we present his photographs in which, for almost a year, he has recorded one of the most remarkable instances of poor taste in architecture in contemporary Prague.
In an essay, "Blue oranges or the eye of Pallas Athena", the Prague native writing in German, Franz Wurm, examines ways of understanding poetry: "Poetry says what it is; poetry is what it says it is. The more of what it says can be said in a different way, the less it is poetry." The years-long discourse on the meaning of poetry and translation took place in the correspondence between Franz Wurm and his friend Paul Célan; we selected several of Wurm's letters dating to the time of his temporary stay in Prague, with special thanks to his memory associations on the town of his childhood and his personal comments on the atmosphere in the final phases of the Prague Spring.
The work of acknowledged Swiss writer Eleonore Frey is represented by excerpts from the cycle of short texts entitled "Seventeen things. A Biography" which were translated by Vera Koubová, alongside the texts by Franz Wurm, for this RR issue . The third part of Lubomír Martínek's travelogue essay "Undoing the Gordian knot", and excerpts from a memoire text "This is not how I imagined my old age" by Eliska Vlasáková represent Czech contemporary literature.
"Naked author and fake painted hunting trophies (carnival masks more likely), a situation without a beginning or end, dramatized by pixelation and music" in the perspective of a Renaissance arcade corridor – this is how Petr Vanous describes one of the videos by the artist Jana Kasalová. Veronika Richterová created a Greenhouse from PET bottles (pet-art), and Miroslava Zychová is the author of the intriguing "Paintings". The historian of architecture Pavel Kalina photographed and commented on the new skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano in Manhattan. Petr Babák speaking for the Studio Laborator presents posters for Tranzit, Jaroslav Rotbauer – a graphic designer and a friend of Vladimír Boudník, Hanes Reegen and Zdenek Bouse – talks about his Studios. For the Documentarists section, Adam Gebert focused on Lucie Králová, the director of the film Ztracená dovolená for this issue.
This Christmas RR issue brings not only Veronika Tuckerová's memories of the poet and critic Andrej Stankovic in the mask of St. Nicholas and the regular Couleur, but also two surveys. Following up RR 70 and the topic concerning Céline in Bohemia, selected personalities talk about their relationship to the writer. As a special supplement we annex, as we did last year, a survey concerning the Event of the Season 2007/2008 in art and culture.
rr
Published 2009-02-23
Original in Czech
Contributed by Revolver Revue
© Revolver Revue
© Eurozine
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