Athens Plus...
A rather cheeky title, stolen from the unfortunately defunct weekly English-language subsidiary of e Kathimerini, here intended as an update of pieces that either didn’t make it in to the final edit of the book or happened too late for inclusion. I will also be amending errata and including updates of information about places, people and themes from the book. While some of these late news additions will be informative, some are just intended to entertain, as we begin…
Fun with Theo...
Angelopoulos, that is. A recent viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 movie-about-a-movie, Le Mépris (Contempt), throws up a fascinating, if it seems entirely coincidental, synchronicity between its script and the title of Angelopoulos’s 1995 film Ulysses’ Gaze, in which Harvey Keitel’s filmmaker “A” goes in search of lost footage by the early Balkan filmmakers the Manaki brothers. Watching Godard’s film again, in which the young Brigitte Bardot’s playwright husband Michel Piccoli is hired by Jack what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here? Palance’s film producer to rewrite a version of The Odyssey being filmed on Capri by the legendary Fritz Lang, I was fairly stunned to see Lang (pointing), in a final scene on the roof of the Casa Malaparte villa on its dramatic bluff above the sea, tell the Piccoli character (in suit) that he was filming “Ulysses’ gaze when he first sees his homeland again” -
- although this may not explain either Godard’s film or Angelopoulos’s, given that Godard’s camera then dollies along those rails, passing a gesticulating Ulysses/Odysseus figure and comes to rest gazing out at a sea as wide and empty as either Coleridge’s or Luc Besson’s in The Big Blue. Godard said that his film was mainly about the alienation of the characters, famously commenting on it that “a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order”. While Angelopoulos would no doubt concur with that sentiment, his office tells me that there is “no connection whatsoever” between the two films. The greatest living poet-philosopher of Greek cinema has said of his film (at his website) “there comes a moment when the filmmaker begins to doubt his own capacity to see things, when he no longer knows if his gaze is right and innocent”, which we might connect with Godard’s Ulysses’ uncertainty when he first sees his homeland again. A Paul de Man might argue for a more, er, intertextual reading, but it makes the random synchronicity between Godard’s script and Angelopoulos’s title all the more beguiling.
Rolling news
While Kathimerini’s weekly English-language edition Athens Plus may have gone under, its much older rival Athens News has been thriving – alas! – in the current economic and political crisis. The weekly usually hits the newsstands in Athens Thursday afternoon, and the provinces and islands on Friday, but the newspaper’s website, which transposes much of the print edition’s content on to the net, has become a must-see daily check-in, with news stories being updated daily and sometimes even hourly, making it gripping, if often depressing, reading.
It could, frankly, do with a chief sub-editor to chase down its sometimes hilarious infelicities of language, but its short and pithy page two editorials have offered some of the most balanced, sensible and (whisper it) liberal commentary on the crisis as it unfolds. Whack the screengrab to open the current live front page.
Greece at the 2011 Venice Biennale
Unstill waters run deep: Diohandi’s work Beyond Reform at the 2011 Biennale
Circumstances prevented a last-minute attempt to shoehorn it into the book, but a personal favourite and revelation on a flying trip to Venice and a diversion to the Giardini Gardens was the Greek pavilion in the Venice Biennale, this year given over to an austere but stunning multi-media installation by the legendary Athenian artist Diohandi. She clad the pavilion with tall strips of wood, erasing the 19th-century brick structure from the wooded park, and inserted a large white walk-through cube (above) inside, flooded it with rilling water, threw an L-shaped walkway across it, planted that ambiguous column of light at the far end and asked her friend, the composer Stefanos Barbalias (his homepage can be found here), to fill the space with an eerie electronic soundwork. As the title and her curator Maria Marangou’s notes (which can be read at the Greek Biennale site) might suggest, the work is her response to the ongoing crisis in Greece.
The work was later ‘signed’ with graffiti on the exterior by activists from the Anonymous online action group (easy-to-follow recipe for revolution here), as was the Danish pavilion, which struck me as rather cowardly, as they didn’t appear to have signed the hilariously suprematist US installation of athletes exercising on the tracks of upturned (er, British) tanks, or others besides. Diohandi took it all in her stride and even sympathised with the activists. I would have warmed to them more if they had tagged Boris Abramovich’s mega-yacht when it was moored on the Grand Canal...
Bookshops in motion...
Which is the weaselling journalist’s excuse for misnaming one of the best bookshops in Athens, Best Book Hunters, which I referred to (although so do virtually all web listings that have yet to catch up with its move of premises) as being closed on Solonos street but still active at its Lefkados street branch. In fact, the shop recently consolidated its stock to a new home, halfway up Zoodochou Pigis street (number 41a, to be precise, on the left heading up) from Akadimias, and halfway cross-wise between Benaki and Ippokratous streets. I made no less that three visits to this shop on my last visit, once seeking help, graciously given, in hunting down a Greek translation of a Pynchon novel for a friend (Against the Day; even longer in Greek than in English...), but twice to feast on the shop’s various sections. As promised in the book, it is still probably the only place to find Derrida in English in Athens, in a large and often startling contemporary philosophy/criticism section (Žižek, Guattari, Virilio; almost the whole gang is here), as well as a treasure-studded travel section (I returned to make a dive for Peter Conrad’s Islands, which I hadn’t heard of on its publication in 2009), sections on astronomy and other sciences, history, linguistics, language ed texts, fiction and a bulging music books corner.
A little bit of heaven at 41a Zoodochou Pigis street...
Given a decent budget, I could go through this shop like a one-man cloud of locusts. While small, and very friendly, Best Book Hunters also has a much larger online bookstore, with a bilingual (Greek-English) catalogue and search facility, here. A bookshop not just to support, but cherish...
poets, penyeach...
Trying to encapsulate the splendours of two centuries of modern Greek poetry became like trying to pour a few litres into a thimble, and given that I had to touch on as many of the main names of the twentieth century as possible I was lucky to squeeze even Kostas Karyotakis in. One poet that I seriously regret having to exclude, or perhaps throw overboard, was the magnificent “poet in the radio room” Nikos Kavvadias. Born in Manchuria in 1910, from where his family soon returned to his parents’ birthplace of Kefallonia (what adventure, you wonder, took his parents from Argostoli to Harbin?), Kavvadias spent almost his entire adult life roaming the oceans as a working seaman, usually in the radio room, and his poetry (which you can find, in English, here) is as redolent of the sea as Melville, Lowry or Aiken.
On the subject of Karyotakis, the poète maudit who tried to drown himself at Monolithi beach outside Preveza, a random Google unearths a very droll bilingual MySpace page for the “103 years old” poet. The splendid Mhlanas website also features a lengthy tribute to the poet, links to translations of his work, and, perhaps a little gruesomely, the police “crime scene” photograph of Karyotakis after he shot himself, although perhaps thanks to the ministrations of the police photographer in fact he looks like a dapper businessman taking a nap. The Mlhanas page is here, where you can erase the url back to the homepage address to explore this ever-expanding online encyclopaedia of Greek culture.
Songs from the underground
The US National Public Radio network has collected a series of topical protest-song videos linked to ‘Flame On’, a documentary radio show about the soundtrack to recent events in Athens and across Greece, ranging from lyric rebetiko to Greek-language hip-hop, which you can see/hear here. 
Perhaps the most interesting of all is an Athens group that I am ashamed to say I hadn’t heard before, Υπόγεια Ρεύματα (above), a folk-tinged indie post-rock combo from Kallithea whose name [transliterated: Ypogeia Revmata] may or may not translate as “undercurrents”. You can also hear more of them at their MySpace page, and YouTube is littered with live videos.