Arts&Ideas

Skeletons dressed as Mexican Mariachi surrounded by flowers and fanciful patterns.Intricate, multicolored paper cutouts hung on walls, some representing figures related to death and some in traditional, flowery motifs.

Krakow has many fine festivals, but perhaps none so continually innovative, provocative and challenging as the Audio Art Festival, taking place this year from Nov.

Rahim Blak, who lives in Krakow, was born in 1983 and currently studies at the local Academy of Fine Arts at the Intermedia Studio of Grzegorz Sztwiertnia and Zbigniew Salaj. Blak, once renowned for being a child prodigy, has evoked both regard and controversy as an artist with over 40 solo exhibitions to his name.

It has recently emerged that the Polish rock bands currently achieving the biggest international success are Behemoth, who hail from Gdansk and Olsztyn's very own, Vader. Behemoth's latest album, "Apostasy," described by charismatic vocalist, Adam "Nergal" Darski as "difficult" and "extreme," even made the Billboard Charts in the U.S., the ultimate measure of market respectability.

Nowa Huta's Laznia Nowa theater kicked off their Genius Loci Festival (slogan: "October Is Ours!") this week in fine style with a pair of performances by the Wierszalin Theater from Suprasl (a town in the north-east of Poland, near Bialystok).

The highlight of the first week of the Krakow Fall Jazz Festival was probably the first-ever performance in Poland by the legendary (and I don't use the word lightly) Rova Saxophone Quartet last Sunday at Alchemia club.

Autumn may be behind the window but the Krakow Spring Ballet is in effect.

On October 13 at 21:00, pl. Wszystkich Swietych in Krakow will become the scene of a remarkable open-air multimedia show by Peter Greenaway.

The exhibit displaying photographs by Bogdan Borkowski, organized by the Center for Jewish Culture as part of its "Encounters with Jewish Culture" program, launched last week, with a very successful turnout at last Thursday evening's grand opening. The photographs depict the daily life of the residents in Le Marais, the Jewish Quarter of Paris. I had the opportunity to speak with the artist regarding the project and his views on the changes occurring in the area of Le Marais.

Everyone loves Dostoyevsky. This has never been totally comprehensible to me, in fact, but I can partly rationalize it to myself by saying that Dostoyevsky is a seductive combination of 19th-Century melodrama and epic dimensions, a kind of cartoon version of Russian morbidity (in the same way that Chagall paints a cartoon version of the Russian fantastic imagination), psychological introspection and good, old-fashioned kitsch.