Hi everybody!

I hope you enjoyed Christmas as much as I did. Mostly because this year my family and I didn't have enough time to argue, although we managed to carry on other traditions. Moreover, this year the Christmas tree didn't have a suicide attempt on Christmas Eve. And I ate so much that I can't even describe it. Shame on me.

Now I'm preparing for the New Year's Eve, which means that I do everything to get some rest so that I not fall asleep before midnight (as I did last year). And I was wondering if you've already made some New Year's resolutions. I used to make lots of them and then I had no chance to keep them because I always lost the list on the New Year's Eve party. What about you? If you're curious about other people's resolutions, watch this monologue by Ellen Degeneres (who I truely adore). 

Happy New Year!

Hi! Christmas is coming! That means that the majority of vegans will have to endure big amount of tiring questions from carnivorous. 'How can you celebrate Christmas and not eat fish?' or 'Are dumplings vegan? What about wafer?'. So, I decided to share with you a very funny video by Buzzfeed, which I really love and which is the main reason of my backlog of work and studying. 

Enjoy!

Hi!

Some of you already know that this week I'm more musician than philologist, spending whole days on rehearsing and practicing for the concert of Chamber Strings Orchestra of the Academy of Music in Poznań. I suppose that most of you have already read my post about the details of the concert on Facebook, so I decided to put here only some additional information that you might find interesting before (or even after) the concert.

The programme of the concert includes three pieces: 'Trzy utwory w stylu dawnym' by Krzysztof Penderecki, Violin concerto in d minor by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Serenade for strings op. 48 by one of my favourites composers, Peter I. Tchaikovsky. 

The first piece is the only composition of Penderecki written as a soundtrack for a film - 'Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie' (1964) directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has. Although the music of Penderecki appears also in other films (for example, in 'Katyń' directed by Andrzej Wajda or in Stanley Kubrick's 'The shining'), it wasn't composed to be used as soundtrack - it had already existed before it was taken, unlike the piece we'll play on Thursday. 

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is well-known among the violinist because of his Violin concerto in e minor, also very easy to recognize for non-musicians. But the Violin concerto in d minor is hardly known and it had remained totally unknown until the 40s of 20th century, when it was finally discovered and edited by Yehudi Menuhin, a very famous American violinist. Why? I haven't found it out yet, but I'm sure that it wasn't because of its quality - the concerto is really nice, even though Mendelssohn composed it when he was... 13.

The last part of the programme is a composition of Tchaikovsky, whose biography has been equipped with lots of strange stories about his alleged habits. It is a fact that he suffered from depression, but he is also supposed to be hypochondriac with strange obsessions. For instance, probably he never drank unbottled water, what was actually not a bad idea, given the epidemic of cholera in Russia in the 19th century. On the other hand, he was diagnosed with cholera which, probably, caused his death at the age of 53. But according to some other theories, Tchaikovsky committed suicide by poisoning himself with arsenic. It's not decided what was the real reason of his death, but it's also impossible to reject the theory of the suicide after listening to the music of Tchaikovsky, full of pain, suffering and longing. 

I hope you'll enjoy the concert as much as I do enjoy preparing for it. 

By now, here's one of my favourites Tchaikovsky's piano pieces:

I don't know if you missed my commentaries or you didn't even notice that I wasn't here for such a long time. I won't try to justify it, despite of the fact that the truth is that once again I realized that I don't live in accordance with Mars's solar day. And it... is not very nice ;)

Tonight I'd like to share with you some thoughts about one of the most particular European cities: Berlin. Now I'm in Polski Bus, going back to Poland and trying to stop thinking about my poor violin that has been forced to travel in the hod of baggage instead of sleeping on my tired arms, and I'm thinking about some features that makes Berlin so special.

When you look around the streets, you realize that it's impossible to be 'different' there. You can see people from all around the world, people of all religions, all nations, all political beliefs, all appearances... The best thing about it is that nobody feels strange there. Strange as a stranger and strange as a different one. What I'm trying to say is that there are so many foreigners (strangers, xenos) that you don't feel like you don't fit there because of your mother tongue and origin. At the same time, you don't feel strange because of your clothes, your haircut or who you're going out with. There will be always someone like you or someone far less ordinary than you.

Is it only because of the fact that Berlin is one of the biggest 'multiculti' society? Is it impossible for more homogeneous communities to be more like this? I don't know it yet. I only know that Berlin is a unique place on the European map. And that I wish that some part of Polish people wouldn't feel so uncomfortable being themselves in their own country. That they wouldn't feel strange there where they're not strangers.

Human stupidity has no boundaries. And I only wonder why it takes me so long to get over it. Again.

What happened in Paris is unbelievable. Even though it's not the first terrorist attack in last years in Europe, it's not less dreadful that any other one. Maybe even more because of its organization, because of its range and because of its course. But what's also dreadful is what happens on Facebook, Twitter (I guess, because I don't follow it) and in the commentaries that appear below the articles on gazeta.pl, onet.pl and other websites. I think I've just losen the rest of hope - there's no chance to make people aware of the fact, that the refugees that come to Europe are not terrorist. Have anybody of these... OK, let's say 'messed up' people thought about what they are running away from?

No, there's no point in making these questions. But maybe we should think if there's any point in posting photos of dead people on the streets and plastic sacks on the pavement. Was I the only indignant person after what happened with the photo of Aylan Kurdi?

I'll try to explain my point of view in some other posts. By now, let's just listen to Edith Piaf.

Hi, everybody! It’s always hard for me to find something to post here because even though my life is very intense, I’m not sure if you would find it interesting. And I don’t want to talk about politics because I’ve already spent so much time trying to convince some of my acquaintances that we don’t have to live in the Middle Ages and saying: ‘no, the refugees won’t bring us dangerous illnesses’ that I got bored with talking about it.

That’s why I recalled a conversation I had a few days ago, when I was trying to make new friends with someone from one of our English groups. I was asked about my favourite director and, without taking any time to think about it, I said: Michael Haneke.

The first film written and directed by Haneke that I saw was Funny Games, a psychological thriller from 1997. It's a story about two men who hold a family hostage and torture them with sadistic games. Georg, his wife Anna and their son Georgie are subject to a large session of pointless cruelty that seem to have no reason an and no aim.

The spectator experiences an endless feeling of inconvenience. There is no pleasure in being part of this irrational performance, but there is no possibility to leave it. Once you start watching, you turn into a passive observer frustrated by your helplessness and confusion.

There's no point in this terrifying violence and brutality. There's no reason for this uncontrollable aggression. So what watch it for? That's one of the questions that Haneke leaves without being answered. He's well-known for his passion for 'breaking the fourth wall' and for playing strange games with the spectators. The frame, the light, the music and the silence: everything has its own meaning and function. And the only rule of this game (these Funny games) is that you can't stop watching it because there's no place to hide. If you're watching it, you're in. Because there's no place to hide from the violence that surround us. If you live, you're in.

'My film are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus' (Michael Haneke)

So here I am again, after spending some time trying to find something interesting to share with you.

As most of you know, reading Cervantes is not the only thing that makes me have no time to visit my friends or to go to the gym to do something to avoid being such a flabby set of bones. If you follow all the invitations to the concerts I send you on Facebook, you know that I also try to be a professional musician with a respected academic title (what makes me have quite athletic shoulders).

I’m sure that you have some kind of an image about artists and, as a consequence, about musicians: they are usually absent-minded, living in a parallel universe full of sounds, they hum symphonies even when you’re trying to talk to them and they are unable to understand that there are some universal rules valid for everyone, so they can't spend the whole lifetime without visiting the dean’s office from time to time.

Each stereotype is prejudiced and we should stop using them and making them stronger. However, this stereotype perfectly reflects how the Academy of Music works. In comparison to the University it is like a huge mess impossible to control, in spite of the fact that the ladies from the dean’s office are wonderfully helpful and irreplaceable.

That's why the whole timetable and the plan of study seems to be more disorganized than a headphone cable after being left in the bag for a moment without taking care of it. But there are still some classes that I'm obliged to participate in, for example, the seminar of public lecture. I was required to prepare a kind of a commentary that would introduce people to the piece of music that I'd like to share with them on the radio. Apart from the fact that it turned out I'm totally unable to talk about music without falling into a trap of using a language that is totally incomprehensible to the people who haven't spent all their lives studying music and its theory, and (what's definitely worse) I should probably consult a speech therapist, I really enjoyed putting into words what I usually express without them. Especially because the piece I'd chosen is like a huge post-modern jigsaw puzzle composed of plenty of elements. 

But, as I told you, I'm not good at talking about music to the 'normal' people. That’s why I won't bore you with my gobbledygook and I'll just encourage you to listen to the Alfred Schnittke's String Quartet no. 3 and to try to see it as an essence of post-modern aesthetic with its fragmentariness, intertextuality and feeling that's there's nothing left. 

I've spent a couple of days thinking about how to write this blog, primarily because I had never written a blog (contrary to, I guess, most of the teenagers), due to the fact that I was too busy playing violin, reading books and being an outsider. Not to mention the fact that my computer skills stopped being improved in the Middle Ages. 

But now, when I finally discovered how to put a title, a web address and that it is possible to edit your profile (sic!), I can start worrying about whether there is anything interesting I could share with you without joining the group of people who are so convinced that everybody should know the whole list of of the ingredients of every meal they had during a day, that you start to believe them. I don't know that yet, so I'll just put here whatever comes to my mind and can be shared without being followed by a criminal trail.

And for now, because I don't want to leave you without any meaningful observation, I will share with you the words of Sigmund Freud: ‘Time spent with cats is never wasted’.