Urban Stories. The Cleaning Lady.

She starts her day as usual - sweeping yellow leaves into bigger and smaller piles, swearing on guys who throw the butts of cigarettes on the ground instead of bin and she's always there - welcoming random people on their way to work, being a psychotherapist while listening to petulant stories of grannies, telling how much old bones are hurting and complaining that the prices for medicine are raising up, greeting the postman, who's trying to enter the house, but apparently forgot the entry code as he stays too long at the front door thinking [Yeah, the time goes and modern technologies come with the time]. This everyday ritual hasn't changed at all. At least for last 20 years. Might happen that prisoners of the cells of the Blockhouse Paradise have changed, the kids already grew up, but she's still there - sweeping the streets and washing the stairways with chlorine [so the smell is worse than in a public swimming pool afterwards]. So invisible and regular she is. Like a thing. Like a clock of existence. Like a painting on a Museum's wall [which is admired through centuries, but actually nobody gives a damn about it - only in a matter to be well-educated/informed]. She could easily be an icon of this live Museum of Cells, where behind the closed doors people tend to quarrel, love, cook dinners and oversleep working hours. This is a way of being a part of a randomly formed social group, even unintentionally.

Her bluish purple smock doesn't change colors either [meaning of royalty and wealth, and wisdom] - paradoxically it's a part of this Urban Museum icon. A face of an angel in the Forgotten World - filled with degenerates, drug addicts, young families and old couples, homeless cats and sometimes dogs, living in or nearby this Blockhouse Paradise. No signs of high culture, no signs of buildings of high appreciation and amazement, no positive vibes around... maybe that's why it's called the "sleeping" residential complex... and there are many of them, having many of these fairies in bluish purple smocks sweeping around the magic dust.

Snow White and Russian Red.

Dorota Maslowska leaves me ignorant, despite she’s called a new rising star of Polish literature. And I can see she’s definitely a new one... just I couldn’t stand the very descriptive context in which she tried to make an insight of modern Polish youth. Beside the true hate of Russians [and everything what’s connected to that], the regular fun and loosing sense of reality under the impact of drugs and creation of virtual reality thanks to an addiction of the New Age – video games. I guess I will never get through the real meaning of the book, as I stopped reading it after a few pages. Maybe I’m getting older or maybe the translation was too direct, but I could get the opposite of aesthetic pleasure of reading. This game of words seemed so dirty and unpleasant to my senses of beauty. Maybe not even unpleasant but just SIMPLE, like hearing the chat between two drunken guys of my backyard – who are not kids anymore, but they remained the same, getting all great influences of street life – especially all swear words and all the synonims of normal things in more „poetic” way. Well, I leave this peace of modern literature for another undefinite time with hope that someday somebody will tell me the whole story of „The Polish – Russian war under the Red-White flag”.