One World Cup I watched a Brazilian match in a bar full of Brazilians. As soon as the final whistle blew the TV was turned off, the music turned on, and everybody in the place got up to dance.
Yesterday I watched the Poland-Colombia match in a house full of Poles. As soon as the debacle was over, cartoons began appearing on two of the Poles’ smartphones. One showed the white Polish eagle against a red background, its left wing folded over its face in shame. Another featured a series of photos – a car sitting on a roof, a horse stuck in a fence, the Polish national team posing on the pitch in Russia – under the heading: “How Did They Get There?” A third showed a man looking at a World Atlas in front of the television and saying to his wife, “There must be some country in the world that we can beat.”
Some countries know how to win, others know how to lose.
Went to see the Polish movie at the film festival on Friday because, judging from the synopsis, it was a contemporary film about family life, not another depressing movie about the war.
Within the first few minutes, the mother suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. As if that weren't enough, the father, toward the end, got diagnosed with a brain tumor. Though, to the director's credit, he handled the news with humor. It reminded me of the Polish philosopher who said that Poles can only be happy in those situations when they have no reason to be.
Polish competed with Spanish last night at Regal South Beach Cinemas as the local community of Poles came out for Andrzej Wajda’s final film, Afterimage. (If you watched the Academy Awards the other week, you saw a photograph of the great director during the In Memoriam montage.)
The film tells the story of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, an artist and art instructor in Lodz who, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, refused to submit to the state-mandated ideology of socialist realism. In an early scene, Strzeminski is in his apartment, about to dab paint on a blank canvas, when the room, and the canvas, are suddenly washed in red. Outside men are raising a huge banner to Stalin on the building’s façade. The artist, who is missing an arm and a leg, uses his crutch to rip a hole in the banner and return natural light to his living quarters. It is the beginning of his demise: He eventually loses his job, gets kicked out of the artists’ union, finds himself unemployable and ineligible for food stamps. In one heartbreaking scene, he is even refused paint in a store he’s shopped at for years.
After the movie, there was a reception, attended mostly by Poles. One expressed regret that Americans were seeing such a depressing depiction of Poland. I had a different view: Americans tend to know about the horrors of World War II, but what came after has not received all that much attention in the States (despite the efforts of Wajda, Milosz, and many others). Poland suffered greatly under Stalinism, a suffering that seems all the more cruel when you consider that, in the war, Poland was on the winning side.
Friday morning I drove to Miami to see my friend Zosia who is visiting from Warsaw. Listening to Chopin's Scherzo No. 1 on Classical South Florida I thought I heard echoes of my favorite Polish Christmas carol, "Lulajze Jezuniu."
Driving home I listened to the Anna German CD Zosia had given me.
But before I got here, I stopped in Hollywood to see our friends Magda and Ryszard. Ryszard was listening to a Polish radio station that was playing the top ten songs for the week. "They're all sad," he complained while the No. 3 song played. A short time later, the No. 1 song came on. It was by the old rock band Kult. "Nine sad," said Ryszard, "and one angry."
I came back from Poland - where bookstores have large sections devoted to travel literature, sometimes next to sections of international reportage - to find Extreme RVs on the Travel Channel.
Oh, and the new editor of Conde Nast Traveler is the former editor of Martha Stewart Living.