Month: June 2006

Back to the Hometown

Posted on by boj Posted in General

Zagreb was a bit empty because of the four day weekend. We got here just in time to watch Croatia lose the place in the second round of the World Cup to Australia. There are six or seven Croatian players on Australia team so people here did not take it too bad.

Soccer Match on the Square

To escape the concrete jungle we run off to Maksimir Park and checked out the Zoo. The Zoo is holding its own in this day of safari and grow-our-own-eucalyptus-trees Zoo trends. As always, Zagreb Zoo ain’t too shabby.

Zoo Lions

Yesterday we checked out the gay pride parade. Hopefully in five to ten years there will be more gays than cops, but you’ve always got to start from somewhere.

Zagreb Pride Parade

Fringe, the other part

Posted on by boj Posted in General

I saw all the Fringe I am going to this year. Chris caught a few shows more but I was too stressed out about preparing for the trip to join him. So if you’re in Ottawa and would like to check some shows out here are my Fringe findings.

Pentecostal Wisconsin
This was the most energetic show. The storyline is similar to Complicated Kindness but without the desperation and family disappearing into nowhere. It has the added bonus of singsong.

Cassandra
A nice play about effect of a mediocre self-help book on a 9 year old girl. It is hard to take charge of your life before you hit double digits. I had fun and bought a button.

So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!
Yet another fun play about Jewish summer camp. It was not as great as Swimming Lessons with Paisley Kite from two years ago but it had us rolling on the floor laughing.

Trevor Thompson’s Very Disappointing First Play
I don’t know about this one. It was more of a stand up routine than a play. Some jokes worked though.

Aphrodite’s Turn
This play is of a sort that seems to come from the left field (wherever that is) and it grows on you.

So Close To My Skin
Another singsong drama. The use of technology was amazing. At first I was surprised that the actor was using a microphone with only 20 or so audience members sparkled around first three rows, but with distortion and ambient noise he created unique sound texture that complemented the performance.

Porn name is Jimmy Buttons

Posted on by boj Posted in General

Buttons

My friend Jimmy pushes buttons. He tells people their haircuts are bad or that their ethnic cuisine is smelly or that they should go kill themselves.

Underneath this veneer of infantilism he is really funny and smart. In fact, when I’m down there are only a handful of people who can make me smile and he is one of them. Despite our steady friendship every once in a while he’ll try to make me upset. He’ll say something like Croats stink or something equally absurd and ineffectual. This amuses me greatly and I’ve often wondered if he’ll ever figure out how to actually upset me. I also wondered about what he could possibly do to upset me. Well, he finally did something that made me feel like crap.

The best part about is that he didn’t do anything out of character or anything much worse than what he’s said or done a million times before. In fact, he did something frivolous and of very short-term consequence. It is just that he finally found my button. You can tell a lot about people from their buttons.

Go Jimmy! It took you seven years to make me flinch. Here’s to another seven years of you guessing wrong!

And the new Prime Minister of Canada is…

Posted on by boj Posted in General

We hit the Fringe with vengeance this year. It has only been two days and we’ve seen seven plays.

SIC: Scenes of Invesitgatable Crime
This one was all right. The troupe had tons of fun with it and the energy shone through. The show is a spoof on crime drama such as CSI.

G-Men Defectives
This is very much along the lines of the previous play. It is a slapstick comedy about crime fightin’ men.

Smoked Glass Ceiling
I think we’ve found Canada’s next Prime Minister. The memoir of Rita Deverell as dramatized by herself is fascinating.

i
This was a blast. It is a physical play about events of a day.

The Big Kiss off
Hardboiled and fun!

Zombies
I was exhausted by the time we got to this one. It is insightful story detailing a bus ride with a guy who can see people’s thoughts.

Can’t Get Started
Along with Smoked Glass Ceiling, this one is my favourite of the festival so far. It is a dialogue between an actress and a playwright about his hopes in life.

Slow week

Posted on by boj Posted in Gardening, General

Nothing much happened this week. I biked to meet up with Chris after his baseball game and it took me hour and fifty minutes. That’s pretty bad considering that I could cover the distance in 45 minutes last year. But, not to worry, the season has just begun and I will get in shape.

Today I spent 5 hours weeding and mulching the front yard. I got about two thirds of it done with the trickiest parts still left to do. We bought nine bags of mulch and I’ve three left. It is crazy how red the red mulch is when you first take it out of the bag. It will be brown in a few weeks so I made a point of capturing it in a picture.

Red Mulch

Book Reviews

Posted on by boj Posted in Books

Just to convince you that I have not only been watching movies, I will now mention some books I’ve read of late.

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – Boy was this novel fun. Much like Dickens’ it was written for 60 pounds per chapter, and it shows. Where I was annoyed by Dickens’ constant prattling about misery, riches and what not, Thackeray’s odes to vanity are only slightly worn. I suppose the endless paragraphs about the silliness of the upper classes and wannabies were controversial and exciting at the time they were written, but to someone educated at the tail end of 20th century, by communists none the less, they are hackneyed. To the novel’s credit the main storyline is fun, exciting and well worth the read.

Povratak Filipa Latinovicza by Miroslav Krleza – Anyone who has had the pleasure of being entertained by my husband in our living room *cough*library*cough* knows how heavily our collection leans towards the British. In this tea stained environment I sometimes feel a bit homesick. I am ever so lucky that some of Krleza works have been trasfered to e-books. I really enjoyed “Povratak Filipa Latinovicza”. There is nothing like constant and tender references to mud to make a girl with inferiority complex feel better.

Here is a paragraph that really struck me:

“Ogenj!” Ta stara, zaboravljena rije? probudila je u Filipu jaki osje?aj panonske podloge. On ni sam nije znao zašto, ali u taj tren osjetio je neobi?no jako neku subjektivnu elementarnu pripadnost toj podlozi: osjetio se doma.

Or translated by my inexperienced hand:

“Fire!” That old, forgotten word awakened in Philip a strong sense of Panonian base. He himself did not know why, but in that moment he felt uncommonly strong subjective elementary belonging to that base: he felt at home.

The word for fire “ogenj” I did not translate exactly. It means fire but it is not commonly used in modern Croatian. Where used in the novel it is peasant slang. The word also connotates fireplace and, by extension, household and family. In the novel Philip returns to his hometown after spending most of his life in England and Western Europe. I sometimes get the exact feeling described in above paragraph when I hear words that have long been absent from my dialogue.