Prague Journal

Monday, July 25, 2005.

The weather report said “sunny intervals,” which apparently means “it won’t rain all day long.” The sun did come out briefly during dinner. Mostly, it’s been pretty wet and dreary.
Today is errand day. I went downtown to change money and then to the bank to inquire about the $1.23 transaction charge and to try to close my bank account. As to the first question, this is the charge for my “cash withdrawal” last month. (I should have suspected.) The second is, closing the account takes 45 days from the time I turn in my ATM card. There is a 400 CZK charge, so I am told that can’t draw down less than that. But, I managed to withdraw all but the remaining 50 CZK (roughly $2) by recharging the mobile phones with the ATM card, so I think I will just abandon the account and not try to deal with the customer-unfriendly bank bureaucracy here.
After my banking errands, I looked at several stores to try to find a store with a suitable card to send for my father’s birthday, and also went to the jeweler that Charlotte had recommended to get Rick’s ring repaired. The ring should be ready on Friday, the day before we leave! I went to Howard’s office shortly after 1pm to drop off the last of the books he had lent us (Rick). Next I sent to Czech National Bank to meet my landlady, Milena, for coffee—and to settle accounts. She was very kind. She calls me her “best friend renter.” She is especially happy that I rented the flat to another Fulbright couple for next year, and she proceeded to tell me about some of her bad experiences with renters. She and her husband would like to move back to this building—to the flat on the first floor (between us and her brother’s flat), but the elderly woman and her son have rights to this flat, at least until the old woman dies. Right now they pay almost no rent, but the state is changing that, albeit slowly.
Rick and I are trying to finish off the food in our fridge, much of which is cheese and sausages and braunschweiger that Rick bought a few weeks ago. We our last “domaci” chicken dinner, and finished the last of the desserts from Jitka and Eva.
After dinner, we went to AghaRTA Jazz Centrum, one of Prague’s classic underground jazz clubs. It’s a cozy cave, probably not much bigger than our living room, and it’s always standing room only if you don’t get there before the show starts. I had wanted to go this evening to hear Jiři Stivin, whom I adore. Seven or eight years ago, we had heard Stivin perform various flute music from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque periods. He’s really an extraordinary musician. He has been interpreting pre-Classical music on the recorder since 1975 and has been intensely involved in jazz, composition, and in the improvisational New Music, using saxophone, clarinet, flute, recorder, and several kinds of folk pipes. He gives solo recitals with harpsichord, organ, or guitar, and sometimes performs with the sole aid of a tape recorder. For over ten years, as part of the Prague Symphony Orchestra’s concert subscription series, he has been giving a series of performances called “All Manner of Flutes” and has written a large corpus of film, theatre and concert music. Jiri Stivin teaches at the Prague Conservatoire, at the annual jazz workshops in Frydlant and is frequently involved in many other projects, including educational concerts for children. This evening’s performance was smooth jazz, with his own jazz quartet, Jiri Stivin & Co. Jaroslav Sindler, his guitarist was wonderful, but Zdenek Tichota, on the bass guitar, was extraordinary. We could have listened to him play solos all night long.
The drummer, Michal Hejna, was playing with a band on a cruise ship in the Caribbean during the 1989 Revolution. He had left on August 22, and came back on December 19—a month after the revolution—to a different country. Otakar Svoboda, who founded Artia Records, the communist-era label that controlled almost the entire music industry in the Czech Republic, hired Hejna to oversee recordings of a new subsidiary, Arta Records, in 1991. An offer to manage the newly opened AghaRTA jazz club soon followed, and Hejna found himself in charge of booking talent as well as recording albums. In 1992 he started using his contacts to bring international talent to Prague under the auspices of the AghaRTA Prague Jazz Festival. Artia was liquidated in 1994, but Arta Records is still a successful independent jazz label.
We can really tell Prague has changed by how few smokers there were this evening. I had to move around a few times, but easily stayed through the last set.

posted by JWinn @ 10:44 PM