Brno photographs

Brno, Czech Republic, summer 2007

Brno's 'new constructions' just visible through the mist

Brno's Cathedral of St Peter and Paul

A curious memorial outside the cathedral











The so-called Dragon of Brno at the Town Hall: nobody's sure how it got there.

The Hotel Avion

It's not every day you find that you've inadvertently stayed in an historical monument but my friend Alex (see Vrsovice Daily blog link just over there) has pointed out that the Hotel Avion in Brno in the Czech Republic has just been listed as one. This is where we stayed, with him, en route by rail to Transylvania in 2007. At the time, the hotel staff didn't seem to be particularly used to having guests, several floors housing dining rooms, ballrooms etc were unused and the interior decor (complete with rather ominous-looking leatherclad doors) clearly hadn't been changed since the communist era. Breakfast was served in the pizza parlour next door.

http://www.radio.cz/en/article/124875

Brno is proud of its Austro-Hungarian, cubist and communist architectural heritage: the avant-garde architect Jiri Kroha (who, amongst other things, designed a 'perfect socialist town' and a new waterfront development for Prague - neither of which were built) is amongst its most famous former residents, while even the ring of dense communist-era towerblocks around the city inspired the tourist office to come up with the slogan 'Brno welcomes you with new constructions'.
The original plans for the Hotel Avion along with several photographs of it in its 1920s heyday are on display in the museum of Brno inside Castle Spilberk - the museum requires considerable stamina as it is, to say the least, extensive.

Poem: The Breakage Suite

The Breakage Suite

Whenever you came home, there
was always something to mend
or tinker with. The disembowelled
washing machine’s rubber guts
coiled out from an unhinged panel,
bleeding milky water.
Rewired, retuned, a radio
cut in on your modest ta-da.
Nothing went back to the shop.
Spare parts that would come in handy
one day cluttered chests of drawers.

Somewhere around this time
there would have been rumours
of strikes, a change of government.
You visited the Ideal Home,
brought back the textured sofa
we sat on through the power cuts.

*

Further into this same age was said
to be only just beginning,
the soft taps momentarily halt.
My daughter calls me in
to diagnose frozen windows
on the laptop’s screen.
A glitch, a virus, I’ve no idea.
Warranties expired the other week.
Together we wait on an error report.

*

It’s the closest I’ve come
to turning back: Euston Station
through the window of a cab.
As if fifty minutes up the line
there'd be spark plugs in the sink
and her exasperation.
There’s nothing I could do.
What kind of fix were we in?
The glass and steel remain
inscrutable as circuit board.

 
Under skies that thin to brightness
by this concrete plaza’s to-and-froing,
we might have been speaking
of watch repairs. Only now,
as time changes gear
into the traffic’s thawing,
we have other things on our mind,
another elsewhere into which we’re going.


Tom Phillips
Feb 2010
Previously published online with Various Artists

Poem: Note

Note

I can only hope
in speaking to you
that you’re the kind of person
who’ll forgive my presumption
in imagining you to be
the kind of person who’ll forgive
my presumption in imagining you at all.

Tom Phillips
Feb 2010

Marxist Leninism on the silver screen

During the communist period, the Albanian state produced a wide range of propaganda, for both internal and external consumption. The link below is to a clip on YouTube from an Italian documentary called 'Albania - il paese di fronte' ('Albania - the country opposite') which includes several examples, including a Radio Tirana broadcast, a particularly peculiar film about WW2 partisans (a variant on the 'Valkyrie' sequence from 'Apocalypse Now' involving a loudspeaker strapped to a bus and some dancing Italians), some 'racy' communist-era jazz and a ballet written for Enver Hoxha's atheism campaign. It's quite tricky to follow if you don't speak Italian but the images speak pretty much for themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-u5B2TSaDY&feature=related

Should this whet your appetite, the remaining ten parts of the documentary are also on YouTube and include footage of, amongst other things, King Zog and his wedding, the Italian invasion in 1939, Mayday parades, Khruschev planting a tree in Tirana, Enver Hoxha dancing with a Chinese delegation and, in the final instalment, the toppling of Hoxha's statue during the anti-communist revolution in 1991.

Two revised poems

The Air Display

Jetstream mirage and the taste of kerosene
is how it might start across the field,
or a Hawker Hunter hanging on a stall turn,
its chevron tailfin roundel against clouds.
Armed with bulbous candyfloss,
we’re walking between disputes,
provenance issues, these tanks
too often repaired, no longer ‘authentic’.
Redundant fighters’ afterburners sear
the early afternoon like rough nostalgia,
aerobatics over middle England.

And still it is easier to find a name
for Venom, Tempest, Fury
or how we might be expected to feel
about splintered tree-lines,
sand-bursts across that combat zone,
than for patterns of thought
in these actually occurring vapour trails
which backdrop one last fly-past:
impervious Spitfire, engine growling,
over woods and out of the sun.


Beginning with Palma

This is where a poem might start out,
here, on this terrace curtained with rain,
a Mediterranean afternoon
stifling with sweat and Ducados.
The cathedral’s too drab for a ticket
(history priced out of the market)
and you won’t find time to trace
intermittent carnival noise
to its roiling, gaudy source.

So never mind that you can’t recall
the word for it or put a name
to that face which insolently
stares from each window you look in.
Those booted boys – or others –
will be there the same tomorrow,
conveniently just out of focus,
details for your composition,
sketches for your Hemingway phase.

Is this boredom or fear? On the far side
of the rain, the Guardia Civil
patrol a cobbled, almost-empty street.
Keep your eyes peeled, they’d suggest.
You have, of course, and found them wanting.
The carnival’s moved on. Would you reach
for coins left lying on the ground?
You might do, if it didn’t mean
leaning over, wetting your hand.


Tom Phillips

Poem: Catching the Drift

Catching the Drift

Collared by its spectral bridge, the bay’s incursion
narrows to a creek, these tongues of sand
where mist-wreathed skiff masts lie at odds
among the trees. “The well-to-do,” you say
and point at the far shore’s terraced villas.
What else to add? It wasn’t to be
that you’d put your name to such deeds
would allow you such possession.

Only here, on this shack’s uneven planks,
the morning’s steeped in diesel fumes,
or whatever else that smell might be,
and flies, perplexed by angling lures,
are seething on lopped fish-heads,
grounds for some complaint, perhaps,
were that your way. We push out
the boat instead, catching the drift

which squirls at fallen branches,
knots of weed, the sure-footed bridge’s
concrete stanchions, then thickens
to an estuary. If the jetstreams
unfurling north and east
register as promises, promises
made at one time to yourself,
there’s not a sign in your straight gaze.

Tom Philliips