Jodie: Life in Warsaw. A short film about an American woman trying to grow happiness, living in the socialist-era housing estate where her husband grew up.
posted by Flashman
on Mar 20, 2013 -
8 comments
On March 5 a team of four Polish climbers completed the
first winter ascent of
Broad Peak, one of the world's
8000m mountains. On the descent two of the climbers, Maciej Berbeka and Tomasz Kowalski, ran into problems and were forced to spend the night at 7900m. Despite efforts to establish radio contact and locate the climbers the next morning they were declared missing on March 6. On March 8 expedition leader Krzysztof Wielicki
reported that Berbeka and Kowalski were dead and that the team was heading home.
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posted by edeezy
on Mar 9, 2013 -
20 comments
"A farming town hid a Jewish-born teacher during the Holocaust. I went to dig up what it had buried." Though I grew up in America, I have been visiting my family in Poland since I was a child. But it is only recently, since the great debate began two years ago between [Jan] Gross and [Timothy] Snyder over the causes and extent of Polish co-operation with the Nazis during the Holocaust, that I thought to ask the old people of my family village about what happened during the war. My grandparents mentioned bits and pieces of our family’s World War II history over the years, but it often seemed too painful for them to recall, or as though they wanted the memories to simply be forgotten. When I finally decided to broach the topic with them, my grandmother repeated that she didn’t understand why I cared to dig so deep into the past, why I cared so much about Wladyslaw and his story.
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posted by nonmerci
on Aug 21, 2012 -
15 comments
Heavy Breeding. "In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, began a two-decade breeding experiment. Working with domestic cattle sought out for their 'primitive' characteristics, they attempted to recreate 'in appearance and behavior' the living likeness of the animals’ extinct wild ancestor:
the aurochs. 'Once found everywhere in Germany,' according to Lutz Heck, by the end of the Middle Ages the aurochs had largely succumbed to climate change, overhunting, and competition from domestic breeds."
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posted by homunculus
on Jul 21, 2012 -
31 comments
The eight fingered Polish-Norwegian artist
Andrej Nebb with his band, performing
Bo jo cie kochom in Oslo in 1980. How he lost two fingers? Cutting his guitar with a chainsaw. That’s why he had to play bass instead. Basically he fled communism to live a rock ‘n’ roll life.
Here he is back in Poland in 2002, at
Przystanek Woodstock.
posted by nordlys
on May 16, 2012 -
9 comments
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.
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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
