Milan Podobský

“There would be no strike if not for a nearby pub, U Techniků at Novotného lávka. Without that, we couldn’t survive the strike. Other than that, the entire building was ours; there were dining rooms there and the Fámyzdat office. There were bedrooms – with a bit more privacy – and several of our female schoolmates came back to school pregnant post-1989. We didn’t see them for some time after that. Of course, many people literally lived at the faculty, say, until the end of that year, and then they scattered. Also, it has to be said that many people took November and December as unexpected holidays and left. It was everybody’s choice; I really loved this period of my life.”

“I walked home from Národní all beaten up, but that didn’t stop me from meeting others the next day. I don’t think we went straight to the Slavia café. Instead, we started plotting and planning at U Zpěváčků. Pažout… what’s his real name? He’s an MP today… Pavel Žáček; his nickname has really stuck for me. I think Bartuška, Kalup, and Pukalský were there as well. It was very naïve; we started with stickers saying things such as ‘We Will Not Forget!’ Then we went over to the Slavia which, by the way, was really an StB kind of place at the time, as they proved to us right away: ‘Serves you right, bastards!’ We said: ‘We won’t have this.’ Then there was a meeting in Wenceslas Square, where we went. DAMU said: ‘We’re going on strike!’ Pažout hadn’t said anything in a while, so he yelled: ‘So are we!’ Radio Free Europe reported that in the evening, and that’s how the strike happened.”

"I plan to finish writing, what I started, so that is a plan for another hundred and fifty years more. In fact I started writing several storied and I got a project, mapping the history of the city disctict Dejvice and Bubeneč, which I do so that I deal with the history and also document the present. I do that in the form of a magazine called Tamtam, in an electronic verzion it is called Fefíčoviny; it is a kind of a chronicle of our little group around the Dejvice theatre, the café Kabinet, and vine place U hrušky. It is a certain ground of people, which I have been following for over eighteen years, I know their fates and I am also interested in the pubs and their culture, even cultural life, not just pubing as such so it is a continual mapping, and at the same time I deal with the history and architecture of Dejvice, Bubeneč and Prague 6. So that is a life-time job and as I said I got several stories to write down, a certain novel, so that I would like to work on too."

"I went to study gymnasium in Arabská, also in Prague 6, in the district of Vokovice. There my results were not so excellent. It was beginning to become quite clear, but I was not certain, whether I would like to devote myself to journalism, or film making. So I applied to FAMU (the film art academy) and journalism too; in the end I went to the journalism entry exams as back then you needed to graduate from maths to get to FAMU tenkrát. And that was impossible for me, so I went to journalism, but did not pass. So I went to the edition of Večerní Praha (The Evening Prague). Neither my second attempt to get to journalism was successful. My Russian was not good enough. So I went to improve my cadre profile to ČKD companyp press and then they finally took me in to study journalism. I like to think they were truly regretting it all the time I was studying. I did not even finish and in 1991 I asked them to terminate my studies and at the time I worked for the Students papers. A year later we founded Sorry and also I went to serve the basic military service to the faculty hospital in the Charles square, the internal clinic to doctor Bartůněk. I spent over two years there. First I was there as a kind of a cook, which meant I took care of the patients´ food, and then a sanitary worker. So that was a long time serving there. And ever since I worked as a freelancer publishing Sorry. More or less I inclined to humoristic press already during my studies of journalism, there I published Bobkový listy, adding to much joy of the lectorers and the state police."