S&M and other Christian perversions

26^th August. People clinging to the skirts of transcendent order, religious included, are very boring indeed but I must admit that Christian-orthodox churches provide the punter with entertainment: lurid, surreal cartoons covering the walls; the damp, crypt-like nave fumigated with incense and filled with the high-pitched lamenting of hairy Goth priests (think Bee Gees doing ominous atonal hymns); grannies in black scarfs, collapsed on their knees, ardently kissing icons; trendy youth praying to uninterested byzantine idols (what for? triumph in love? in exams? a new i-pod?).

 
I don’t know if it occurred to you that people’s ideological convictions (e.g. religion) hide their desires, especially from themselves. Well, then listen to Zizek, the Vegas-era Elvis of social theory, arguing that what conservatives truly desire when ranting against the moral decrepitude, decadence and degeneracy of contemporary society is wallowing in a world of sin, decadence and perversion. The 'prude nice liberals' and 'promiscuous and nasty conservative liberals' are not just mythical figures.

So what does the Christian desire when she rants against sin or paints in pornographic detail the tortures of saints and sinners? To wallow in sin, of course. Christian mystics have deliriums in which they are Jesus' private concubine and Christian churches are museums of fetishist erotica that titillate the faithful's mind and flesh. Naked bodies writhing in pain, mouths gaped in wet moans of pleasure, eyes drowned in the voluptuousness of S&M ecstasy cover the walls of those boudoirs of mystical climax. Enough to give Ratzenberg a permanent (transcendent of course) hard-on. Just check out these hot tiles from a convent in Olinda.

So, what do the Christian puritans raving against dirtiness in religious representations really want to see? Those that have put trousers on the characters in the Sixtine Chapel or severed the dicks of ‘too naturalistic to please God’ fountain statues in Palermo?

They desire to see genitalia, obscenity, perversion. A little fresco on the wall of an Oltenia monastery depicts sinners, naked but without the genitalia being represented at all by the original, chaste, painter. And what does some religious puritan do? S/he scratches out, frantically, the place where the genitals were supposed to be (see the row of naked people marching between two devils at the bottom of the picture below).

Why? Well, because she desired to see obscenity were there was none, was appalled by her own dirty desire and transformed her guilt into a simulacra of righteous anger against obscenity – erasing what was not there in an attempt to erase her guilty desire.

And to top all this orthodox orgy up here’s this fellow, wearing a Hell’s Angels jacket, checking out the relics and other ca(nni)bbalistic Christian artefacts with the half-studious, half-pious air people put on when visiting churches, libraries or museums. ‘Jesus rode a Harley Davidson' as one hit wonder band Ugly Kid Joe demonstrates on its uncalled for second album. 

Pornogramorphism

22nd August. 5 pm. The young man grabs my arm and, after realizing I do not understand the stream of Romanian he’s spilling over me, switches:
‘Would you like to see an art show? It explores the hybridization of East and West in Bucharest...’
Ah, the corked Orientalist spritzer one encounters all over Europe by now: trendy cultural eugenics... I ready myself for flight and the fellow, a student of ‘European Cultural Studies’ as he proudly introduced himself, senses this and tops it up:
‘There is a buffet and you can have a chat with the young artists...’
‘Oh, but that changes everything. Did you say buffet? Oui, oui, bien sur, merci madame, mademoiselle, votre sanctité l’attaché culturel... des canapés? ... des p’tits vins locaux, peut-etre?’ I wish La Pilule was here but we don’t do mobile phones.

I follow him through an internal courtyard into an art deco building, into the rumbling and trembling Victorian bird-cage of a lift and finally into a flat that spreads like dark ivy across a whole floor.
There are thick, moth-eaten burgundy draperies covering the windows, black and white tiled corridors scattering our steps into frightened fugues, three meter high doors with brass knobs polished by generations of touches. I drink the sour cherry flavoured drink and glide between squeaky wooden floors and echoing tiles, under light broken green and blue by narrow windows. And all of a sudden I am hit by the bitter smell of walnut leaves crushed between the fingers. ‘Too late’, I think. I drink, I glide, I retrace, I echo and the man looks very dignified indeed in his tailcoat, a stodgy Erik von Stroheim in his late 40s topped by a bellicose Prussian crew-cut. The effect is only mildly spoiled by the mass of testicles balancing heavily between his legs, like a chicken squeezed into the yellowish folds of her own ass and hanged by the tail stump from the leather corset that represents the lower half of Erik’s outfit.

‘Racists, us? What the fuck are you talking about? Are you bloody out of you mind? Maybe Slovaks or Hungarians, them yes! They want to put them in camps. But us? What the fucking fuck? Are spilling shit out of your mouth? They live like pashas here! Like fucking pashas!!’ Peeled off, his shouts uncover the gruelling roars hiding underneath as the smashes his axe again on the torso of the effigy, roses, beads, spit, tears and balls flying everywhere.
‘Who the fuck do they think they are, these coprophagi, these lickers of their mother’s arse hole? Telling us what we should do, what the fuck do they know about OUR country? No, really, I was quite offended by the arrogance...’ Whack! Whack! Whack!
The Gypsy has a piercing that tearfully connects her nipples and eyelids; the Jewess exhibits her circumcised dick; ‘they are afraid, they won’t guess...’ murmurs the Greek one.
‘So, why is a crocodile rather long than green?’ bleeds an eyelid.
‘They’re scared. Try now, if you’re not scared, try to guess: which one is the Gypsy? Which one?’ they sigh together.
‘We’re fucking uncivilized, that’s the problem! The communists put their greasy shit inside our heads and it’s stuck in there and they’ve knotted our guts around our dicks and chopped them off and put an apple into our mouths and that’s that! That’s the problem!’
‘Oh my, oh my, please, please kiss me mommy! There’s dirt coming out of my nose, and eyes, and mouth, and out of my arse too, I think, mommy! I think I’ve eaten my own oesophagus, mommy. Lick me clean, mommy!’ he howls.
‘And then, how can they civilize us, with these fucking rats raping their daughters and stealing their babies? Who can blame them when they abandon us? When they despise us?’ argues the man with the tricolour pin. He slowly pulls out the rusty nail he has hammered into his - strangely enough, still half-erected - penis. He wipes the blood with his coats.
‘That’s the problem! Romanians are primitive! They need to be trained, like dogs! Sanitation, order, law, hygiene, rigour, cleanliness, discipline, respect, soap and water, mister, soap and water! Work, REGULATION, obedience, deference, duty, sir, du-ty!, Detergent, bleach, Vlad Tepes and rules! Yes, most of all BLEACH and RULES!! Whatthefuck!, And respect, more than anything RESPECT!!! Why don’t they respect me?’ he sobs. ‘Why? Why was I cursed to be born here, in this pestilent mass of lawless rats?’
He sooths himself by carving a deep cut into his now fully turgescent penis, blood dripping noisily into the plastic bucket, echoed forever around the corridors.
‘But Romanians cannot do it; dirtiness is in their blood! In their being! And the gipsies are the worst....no respect for hierarchies, for finesse, for the elite. No recognition of true values! No respect! No obedience! THAT’S the problem’.

‘What happened to them? Why can’t they guess?’ ‘Something happened to them’, says the Greek. ‘They have remembered something and they got lost, they lost their way in the past’.
The tall lady has an aristocratic nose and equally distinguished heavy lids, a refined blond bob, gracious breasts hanging like sand sacks from a deflating hot air balloon and a thin strip of black pubic hair and her huge blue Prada hat moves like a parasol on a windy day in St.Trop as she rides:
‘...and then of course, there is the lack of savoir-faire in services! That’s the problem! Everyone agrees that we still have this communist mentality, we cannot provide proper services! I mean, the Westerners won’t put up with that! No wonder they don’t come here, or when they do, leave disappointed. We cannot service them properly and that’s it!’
’It’s long on both sides and green just on one’ she smiles sadly, while the Greek one licks her buttocks and she applies scarlet lipstick on the lips of dangly balls, who tickles the Jewess’ genitalia with his right toe. ‘We’ll have no pensions, that’s the problem! No one is working anymore! It’s always these damned lazy Gypsies reproducing like rats, and our good girls won’t!’ he slurs sensuously through pouty, creamy lips.
‘We should sterilize them! We should inseminate them artificially!’ cries Bourbon nose, nipples hardened, creased thighs trembling whitely, almost translucently.
‘You were scared, you were scared from the moment you entered’ her voice came from afar, feebly.
‘It would’ve been so beautiful if you would’ve guessed which one is the Gypsy, so beautiful...’ she sighs ...’ Now you will have to find the hollowness... finding it... is not so hard... but harder than a toe nail... a bit harder...’
They fall fast down her marbled neck and a bit of spit dribbles from the corner of the grotesquely distended mouth as she finally succumbs...
’Too late!’

Obnoxious Austrian and Irritating French in: “Out of Balkans”

22nd August, 2 pm. This Austrian fellow stops me in the street to ask if I want to buy one of his home-made postcards ... pressed flowers and satin bows... charming, straight out of the Salon of Dull Domestic Decorative Arts. He’s selling them for 5 Euros each to sponsor his trip around the world. My, some of these overstuffed Western-European youth are tank-full of aplomb; they’re the 9th avatar of cosmic self-entitlement, the galactic embodiment of self-righteousness, infernal shamelessness incarnate, a 7th circle diabolical discharge of self-importance. Is he really expecting Romanians to finance his ego-tripping by purchasing overpriced debris Clinton Cards would find too insipid? I imagine for a second what would happen to a Romanian doing the same in the streets of Vienna, then tell him to go shit in his Tyrolese hat, buy a beer from a 24h corner shop and drink it in the shade, lounging on the steps of a flirtatiously crumbly house.

Across the road is this posh ‘Crama Domneasca’ restaurant; Dracula founded it, like every single restaurant in the country, and a French is circumspectly eating an overpriced salad while talking to her 2-year old daughter, gravely, like a professor debating the philosophical legacy of post-structuralism with a colleague. Her attitude towards the whole ignominy of having to be in Bucharest reminds me of Meryl Streep in ‘Out of Africa’: the compassionate plantation owner. It’s a classical role: enduring with patient grace exile among the primitives; keeping contempt and disgust at bay by focusing on the amusingly exotic quirks of the place; maybe even kindly educating them savages. And, of course, this one is savouring the unjustifiable attention colonizers receive over here as if it is her right of birth. I stare at them ostentatiously from behind my shades for a while, spreading my legs so that she sees my dubious pants leering through the crack in my jeans. I have big thighs - did I mention that already? - so my jeans always rip between my legs. I like to think I made her a bit stiffer as she walks out of the Crama, dragging her obtuse offspring behind.

The Bucharest odalisque.

22nd August 2010. 12 pm. It started as a rather plain day that bent concave towards the evening. The night was hot and the mosquitoes ferocious so we walked by the river half-naked until late, sharing a bottle, watching kids do crazy jumps from the bridges into dubious dark waters.

Other half-naked folks gathered around the 24 hour corner shops smoking, laughing, drinking beer and spirits from evil-looking bottles. A melon-sized moon sprinkling the flaking belle-époque buildings with pale powder, making them look stately, weary and disconsolate.

Next morning I get up, boil my coffee pot, drink my coretto. By the time I’m out of the door the Pill is still sleeping, knickers in a twist from the overnight spit-roasting, ravishing. Bleached skies, burning pavement, traffic.

I walk in the shade whenever possible munching on a hot cheese pastry, all the way to Muzica. They have some synths on display there and I go to play them a bit. If I think of a new song I need to repeat it in my head until it’s a mantra, not to lose it. If I also play it a few times, with luck my fingers will remember it later. Plus, with this tour being so packed, I need the practice.

They kick me out fairly rapidly today and I end up in the Lipscani area. It’s been infested by yuppies for a few years now but manages to summon a bit of decrepit charm, like a tired, ill smile: some shops that sell light bulbs and worn out furs and second-hand wedding dresses and drilling machines and lurid ‘sexy’ knickers and weird vodka bottles and plastic shoes and technicolour busts of Vlad Tepes with blood spilling out from the corners of his mouth.

They should be able to put these little gems to death soon, replacing them with chain shops selling trendy trainers or antiques. Gentrification reminds me of of Fellini’s 'Ginger and Fred'. Most bucharestois seem to abhor whatever is left un-gentrified of this area in deep ways; their sore imagination sees it as a bubonic pustule where Rroma pullulate in dilapidated buildings. In fact, the most respectable members of the local bourgeoisie hate the city altogether. Poor Bucharest, an odalisque growing melancholic and lascivious as she waits in the worn-out velvet and silk boudoir, lost in solitary erotic fantasies, reading French Vogue, eating syrupy baklavas and sipping muscatel. Ok, make that Baileys.

Irony and caged seduction in Bucharest

This following image has a little sticker on the Dylan poster that says: "1st of May: the Greeks attack the government; the Romanians attack the sea-side".

On feeling old, teenage pop and plum brandy in Bucharest

20th August 2010. At the moment Primrose doesn’t feel like playing live, it apparently makes her feel old. Is it that going one more time through the pop moves makes one feel ancient, a brittle-boned sentinel of last century cool? Or that pop is roamed by herds of Velociraptor-like stars, not yet graced by pubic hair but crooning about danger, existential angst, lust and love? Plus, the two are connected:  the lullaby of wash-and-go identities and repetition is comforting for the young bourgeois.

Anyway, this leaves us in Bucharest with specifically nothing to do which is not bad, the place exhales magical realism.

My dearest dream now is getting my hands on some home-made (or at least artisanal...) plum brandy, a semi-mythical potion in a place where corner shops prefer to stock refined seepages like Cointreau and Baileys.

Well, they stock more than that but you get the picture; the death of this wonderful artifact came at the hand of the capitalist Reconquista known as “EU enlargement”.

The only things enlarging around here are the reptilian phalluses of the Western victors and the self-satisfied bellies of the local sycophants. Yes, I do take my drinks quite seriously indeed.