Improvised Histories

A jester jests
for and about his king
poking his ribs
from the inside out.

-BD 7/13/16

Wormwood arrived in Prague on Monday and so far it has been a refreshing, energizing city. While it contains a rich history, it clearly embraces a thriving present that isn’t afraid to laugh at itself (See David Cerny’s “Piss” as our featured image). Apparently, if you text a message to a specific number, these statues will “spell out” your message onto the map of the Czech Republic.

In addition to lots of green space scattered about the city, something our midwestern spirits have come to rely upon, our eyes have fallen upon snapshots of David Cerny’s sculptures, a statue in a pond consisting of two legs splayed towards the sky, artistic graffiti covering old stone walls, and a refreshing book store near the Kafka museum whose featured titles include modern philosophy, social critiques, Czech poets, classic works, and even three Kafka works adapted into an illustrated children’s book titled “My First Kafka.” I couldn’t help but enjoy their version of Metamorphosis! While we both wanted to buy about 20 books, we could only realistically add one per person to our light pack. All in all, the presence of these things are a refreshing contrast to the things we wrote about in “Monuments.”

On Wednesday, we enjoyed an “improvised walking tour” led by Baylen Wagner. We’ve recorded its contents here. Please note that 100% of its contents are total nonsense…as you’ll quickly discover. Enjoy some of the silliness of our day!

In the middle of the walking tour, we stopped off at this giant metronome (or magic wand, if you’ll believe our tour guide) for a few sets, met a few folks (one of which was celebrating her birthday and got a Wormwood birthday set), and continued on our merry minstrel way. Here is one of those sets. What do you think? Did we keep time with the metronome?

Finally, since we were in a playful spirit, our child-like curiosity combined with our years of studying avant garde music (two sides of the same coin, really) got the better of us. As we were strolling through a park, we noticed these tall, hollow pipes that reminded us of organ pipes. Then this happened…

We have a couple more days in Prague which I anticipate we will enjoy tremendously before heading to meet up with our friend Maya Markwald in Berlin. Oh, and we had our first sips of real absinth made with our namesake…wormwood! No need to believe in the myths, it’s simply a tasty, bitter liqueur.