It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (or The Audacity of Hoax Prequel)

I have been waiting quite a while to post this on just the right day.  Two decades ago, a month before the first large-scale protests against  Czechoslovakia’s communist government, the following brief announcement appeared on the “Society Chronicles” (Spolocenska Kronika) of the “Hello Saturday” (Halo Sobota) supplement to the official newspaper Rude Pravo (“Red Right”).  It says:

“On the day 5 October 1989 Ferdinand Vanek of Maly Hrad celebrated his birthday.  Thanks to him for the hard work which he has done in in his life and continues to do, and his friends and co-workers wish him many more years of health and further success in his work.”

“Dne 5. 10. 1989 oslavil narozeniny Ferdinand Vanek z Maleho Hradu.  Za jeho namahavou praci, kterou ve svem zivote vykonaval a vykonava, mu dekuji a do dalsich let hodne zdrave a dalsich pracovnich uspechu mu preji jeho spolupracovnici a pratele.”

The picture, of course, is that of Vaclav Havel who within 10 weeks of the Halo Sobota article would feature prominently on hundreds of thousands of much higher resolution pictures recommending him for the presidency of Czechoslovakia.

Ferdinand Vanek is the name of one of playwright Havel’s most famous (and most autobiographical) characters, the protagonist of a trilogy of plays: “The Audience” “Unveiling” and “Protest. “ The address, Maly Hrad, is almost identical to Hradecek (both meaning “Little Castle”) where Havel had a cottage.

So what? Well, twenty years ago, when Poland and Hungary were changing but Czechoslovakia was not, someone had the courage to submit to the Communist Party’s main newspaper a birthday announcement for the country’s main dissident praising him for his work and wishing him a long and productive life!  And because the dissident’s picture and works had been suppressed, the announcement made it past all of the potential censorship points.  Either the editors of the Society Chronicle page didn’t know what Havel looked like and had not heard of characters in his most famous plays or they were complicit in publishing it but could plausibly claim that they didn’t know.  Either way, a combination of individual daring and official ignorance and incuriosity put a subversive message in a very public place.  It’s no surprise that this same environment produced the Pink Tank and Entropa.

Thanks to my student Daniela Brabcova from Plzen who knew enough about Havel to spot this gem when it came out, kept a copy and shared it with me in the spring of 1991.  Below is the full page from which it came:

Audacity of Hoax Update III: Listening to Cerny

The New York Times gets into the act with an interview with David Cerny.  But when we read an interview with a man who just falsified biographies of 26 artists for a major EU commission, should we believe anything he says?  This is not a question that the Times addresses.

Euroblindness, again, briefly

Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros has interesting things to say about a Radio Free Europe report that “Azerbaijani Authorities Interrogate Music Fan Over Eurovision Vote For Armenia”  So maybe my unhealthy interest in Eurovision isn’t completely irrevant.  (Update: even the New York Times finds this interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/arts/television/31iht-eurovision.html?_r=1)

In any case, it is an odd coincidence that an article about this particular interest should come to me on the same day (I’m a bit behind in reading my RSS feeds) that my inclination toward graphic design blogs led me toVisual Complexity’s article about Baris Gumustas’ visualization tool for Eurovision voting.  The static images are quite striking but the animated visualization is even more remarkable, far more beautiful than the show itself:

Infinite Recursion

This headline is from Vice Premier Dusan Caplovic is too piquant to ignore:

“Protirómsky extrémizmus je importovaný od susedov”

Literal translation:

“Anti-Roma extremism is imported from neighbors”

Metaphorical translation:

Foreigners are the cause of all of our problems including our xenophobia.

Slovak national extremists apparently are keen to learn from their Hungarian counterparts.  Could this be the beginning of a new era of cross-national understanding.  The mind reels.

Euroblindness II: Curse of the Habsburgs?

I could not bring myself to watch last night’s semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest (the finals will be enough, thank you) but I was amused to find this morning that virtually my entire region of study was wiped out in the voting over the last several days.  Thanks to a Wikipedia map (wow, that was fast) it’s graphically apparent that not one country from the Visegrad 4 made it past the semifinals.  Slovenia also didn’t make it and Austria (on the map in non-participant yellow) didn’t even bother.  The only other Euroregion to be similarly shut out was Benelux.

As a social scientists, I must ask why? The Danube appears to have something to do with this, and already yesterday Pravda prepared Slovaks for their unfair defeat by pointing out the non-musical charms of semi-final rivals and the academic qualifications of Slovakia’s participants.  But I’m putting my money on a different causal factor:

Past visits by Mozart (see above) appear to inoculate a country against selection to the Eurovision finals (Germany, France and England have automatic bids) and in some cases (Luxemburg, Italy, Austria, even from desire to enter.

Regardless of the causal factors, this spares everybody the awkwardness of having Slovakia’s 12 points go to Hungary and for that everybody can be grateful, except maybe Jan Slota of the Slovak National Party (who could use a national distraction from other troubles).

Euroblindness

It is nice to see that my rather painful obsession with the Eurovision Song Contest (other people’s tragedies are always more palatable) has some relevance for my profession:

Nice to see, too, that Slovakia will finally have an entry so that I can see who likes the Slovaks (and watch the excitement as Slovakia’s Hungarian minority votes the whole country’s 12 points for the Hungarian entry (on the odd chance that the Hungarian makes it to the final round): http://www.eurovision.tv/page/news?id=1989

Life imitates Onion (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AC/DC)

First there was the monument to Bon Scott (among other ‘died young’ rockers) in Samorin, Slovakia (http://pozorblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/meet-the-new-boss/).  Now we find an even more astounding tribute: “AC/DC Inspired Czech Leader’s “Road to Hell” Riff” (http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/czech/?hp).  It is hard to say which part of this story would have been more astounding in, say, March 1989: that the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic attended an AC/DC concert or that AC/DC was still touring.

Regardless, it is tempting to follow the lead of Scott Brown of “Springtime for Dubcek” (http://springtimefordubcek.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/for-those-about-to-shock-we-salute-you/) and speculate about other songs that Topolanek might have used with regard to administration policies:

• Money Talks
• Nervous Shakedown
• Back in [the] Black

In general the list applies better to the Clinton adminstration.  Alas, Vaclav Klaus does not appear to have attended any in the mid-1990’s AC/DC concerts.

Elected Affinities in the Cloud

The first blog I ever read on a regular basis was BldgBlog and I still read every word, so when it posted a word cloud of the upcoming BldgBlog book made on wordle.net , I felt obliged to try it with my own book. The results are gratifying:

Not only does it look a bit like Slovakia and/or the Czech Republic, but it really does contain all the ideas I cared about when I was writing it (and care about still).  And it helps me think about the idea of machine-based content analysis.  While this counting words does not say much about what I think, it does accurately capture what I am thinking about.  (See here for other ways to determine what I am thinking about; see below for wordles with different font and color schemes).

Audacity of Hoax Update II: Riffing on Entropa

Springtime for Dubcek–whose author, Scott Brown, does nice work on Slovak and Czech political cartoons–offers a nice roundup of Entropa related images here.

A Fistful of Euros–which does extraordinary work on European economies–offers another summary and links here.  And if that weren’t enough, there’s a link to its entry on European stereotype jokes here (some of them particularly stereotypical).

Audacity of Hoax Update: The Slovak National Party weighs in on Entropa

They don’t like it:

Case closed.