78 78s - In Search Of Lost Time - is a streaming mix of beautiful 78s from around the world, collected and curated by Ian Nagoski. "I started sifting through boxes of junky old 78s that no one else wanted about 15 years ago, and almost right away, I made a rule: Anything that wasn't in English, buy it."
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posted by carter
on Jan 29, 2012 -
15 comments
On December 13, 1981, Poland awoke to an announcement by Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski declaring a "state of war" (
stan wojenny).
Martial law would last until July 22, 1983.
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posted by orrnyereg
on Dec 13, 2011 -
15 comments
802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91,
he tells his story.
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posted by zarq
on Apr 13, 2011 -
30 comments
"The
Szpilman Award
is awarded to works that exist only for a moment or a short period of time. The purpose of the award is to promote such works whose forms consist of ephemeral situations." This years winner is
Treebute to Yogya. The organisers also maintain a
blog and an
encyclopædia of ephemeral works.
posted by unliteral
on Jan 10, 2011 -
9 comments
World War II was a time that called for many things from many different people. However, one Polish soldier stepped above and beyond the call of his nature. He carried ammunition, he helped his squad members get better at wrestling, and he drank and smoked with the rest of them -
Wojtek, the soldier bear.
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posted by lizarrd
on Aug 12, 2010 -
48 comments
The history of Poland, in eight minutes,
in CGI, from the country's exhibition at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. The film is full of blink-and-you'll-miss-it references - check the date at the bottom-left of the screen and see how many you can find!
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posted by mdonley
on Aug 7, 2010 -
24 comments
Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's
Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 23, 2010 -
9 comments
Queens of Poland Long review/essay at the
DRB on
Michał Witkowski's
Lubiewo (forthcoming in English translation as
Lovetown; extract
here), a book about gay life in Poland both in the days of communism and the subsequent Third Republic.
posted by Abiezer
on Jan 17, 2010 -
7 comments
This year's winners of the Ig Nobel prizes are a bumper crop of wild and crazy SCIENCE!, featuring sword-swallowing, knuckle-cracking,
benefits of cow-naming,
pregnant women NOT tipping over,
a household use for giant panda poop (take that,
Packham),
diamonds made from tequila,
a brassiere that can be used as TWO gas masks,
"Ireland's Worst Driver", Icelandic banks, Zimbabwean currency, and a 'Peace Prize' earned by hitting people over the heads with beer bottles (and comparing the effects of
empty vs. full bottles) (
related inquiry)
posted by wendell
on Oct 2, 2009 -
23 comments
September 22, 1939: In the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk (now Brest, in Belarus), "a monumental military parade took place.... What is unusual is that the parade was held not by the Polish army, but by the soviet Red Army and the Nazi German Wehrmacht –
together." The excellent blog
Poemas del río Wang (which usually features gorgeous illustrations from books) provides historical context, many photos, posters, and cartoons, even a five-minute official German newsreel (the parade takes up the first half). The event itself is a historical footnote, but in Russia, with the "cult of the victory of Soviet people and of the Soviet state in WWII," the very idea of it was anathema and it was denied until last year.
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posted by languagehat
on Sep 27, 2009 -
26 comments
Bolek i Lolek and
Reksio are both Polish cartoons with little dialogue and similiar animation style. Both cartoons originated in the 60s (during the Communist era in Poland), and were extremely popular for decades. Due to their general lack of vocalization (except for Bolek i Lolek's later seasons), both cartoons were easy to bring to other markets. Famously, Bolek i Lolek was one of the cartoons broadcast on Iranian television after the 1979 revolution.
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posted by Askiba
on Aug 2, 2009 -
11 comments
"Commonwealth of Diverse Cultures: Poland's Heritage is an international educational exhibition which presents the history of tolerance and cohabitation of various ethnic groups in the territory of Polish-Lithuanian Commowealth and is addressed primarily to foreigners all around the world
". This is achieved via a very beautiful flash site.
posted by peacay
on Mar 25, 2008 -
11 comments
modulation is visiting warsaw. not a city which has ever appeared in my top ten tourist destinations, but i am much more inclined to visit it after reading his thoughtful reflections on its
architecture and history not to mention obscure (and in classic polish style,
rarely open to the public or about to be shut down/demolished because they are too popular, attractions.)
posted by toycamera
on Oct 8, 2007 -
1 comment
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz ,
Witkacy for short.
Artist, photographer,
absurdist playwright, surrealist novelist,
philosopher,
witness to the Russian revolution, art theoretician and
critic, the
Great Malinowski's closest friend,
drug fiend, and by most accounts a
raving maniac and
self-involved pain in the ass. His
greatest novel was sadly prophetic: fleeing east to escape the invading Nazis, and then hearing the news that the Communists were also on the way, he slit his wrists on September 18, 1939 in the village of Jeziory,
a martyr and victim to his obstinate belief in the freedom and independence of man against the bankruptcy of ideology and the coming wave of totalitarianism.
Previously
here, but this guy's work is just too
bizarrely compelling, and his legacy too obscure, to not get a little bit more attention.
posted by Meatbomb
on Nov 18, 2006 -
16 comments
An international manhunt is under way seeking the
man who expressed his displeasure of Polish president
Lech Kaczynski by forcefully expelling intestinal gas. No word on whether he did another for the president's twin brother, nor whether he will attempt arson by lighting these farts on fire.
posted by Kickstart70
on Oct 10, 2006 -
31 comments
In 1945-46, some of the (very few) Polish Jews who had survived the Final Solution returned -- sick, poor, wounded -- to Poland. In Elie Wiesel's words, "they had thought all too naively that antisemitism, discredited 6 million times over, had died at Auschwitz with its victims.
They were wrong." In 2001 Princeton professor
Jan T
Gross published
the story of the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community at
Jedwabne, Poland, and proved how Jews were rounded up, clubbed, drowned, gutted or burned to death not by German forces as previously believed
but by mobs of their own non-Jewish neighbors. Now professor Gross tells the story of the
Kielce pogrom in his new book, "
Fear". Of course, the Kielce butchery took place in 1946 -- more than a year
after the end of WWII and defeat of Nazism. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jun 25, 2006 -
107 comments
"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis,
Adam Czerniaków was made
head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders
in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 --
Tisha B'Av, the "
saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that
all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the
most prominent Holocaust
scholars,
Raul Hilberg. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 17, 2006 -
23 comments
