That old chestnut

left to right: the kind of place i'll go to escape the kind of place i'll live

Is the international system characterised by continuity or change?

Well, there's the one hand and there's the other, but maybe because i've travelled mostly in western europe and amongst societies of humans, things generally don't seem much different from place to place. Socially, the same needs are repeated everywhere, and if you ignore the packaging, the same provision. Even the packaging responds to economies of scale, and our beloved Jif became the ambiguous, foreign Cif. Friday night is Friday night, and alcoholics are alcoholics. Social and community support may vary worldwide, but i've not been in any position to explore this.

National borders are less flexible than brands or packaging or government policies, at least in this part of the world, and their nature sits somewhere between what is fixed and natural and what is whimsical and human. So it was with great born-on-an-island pleasure that I went to Vienna for the evening last night. Get this! I finished work at six, went home and showered, (had a panic about making the train after missing my bus,) and went abroad and saw a show and came back and went to bed. All in italics. Of course it's just like nipping down to Brighton, except it's a third as expensive and they speak Austrian. (I got racially profiled - I spoke to the ticket dude in Slovak, fairly since we'd just left Bratislava station, but he insisted I was German and wouldn't take nie for an answer.)

Legs bentest to straighest: Donald Shorter, Leah Cox, Bill T. Jones

And the show was soooooooooooo worth going overseas for. Bill T. Jones is an incredible performer, and if you have the chance to see something by him, do. As I Was Saying was fabulous, gorgeous storytelling, a virtuouso violinist walking around the stage, holding me in that place where the excitement of language overlaps that of music and non-rational pleasure; and the second piece was set to what started at least as a Beat version of Hamlet's soliloquy. But I'm done talking about it - verbal-texty descriptions won't describe dance well or make you want to go and see it more than me giving it Three Thumbs Up. (There are notable exceptions, perhaps, but not from me.) In addition to my for the sake of all that's good etc, I have a) never seen a dance show give an encore of that length, and b) never seen any performer brought back out onto the stage after the curtain, after the house lights went up and people started leaving, and start high fiving the front row of the audience. Last-night euphoria, perhaps.


As a post-script, every time anyone saw me with Colloquial Slovak I was preparing for last night. No thanks to the widespread and utterly baseless "everyone speaks english", I spent a few months learning the lingo, and wouldn't have made it to the station last night sans parler. To Adriana: you are as kind and motherly as you looked when I picked on you to find guidance. Thank you for your help, your taxi phone number and the way you looked with a smirk at my hair when describing me to the driver, and I'm glad we could communicate.