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.

The Lisbon revelations: Rock’n Roll IS noise pollution!

17th August. Lisbon, one of these little old plazas that, squeezed between stone houses, knot together some of the meandering streets. And a trendy cafe behind, full of local hipsters, playing some trendy ironic music. It’s a heterogeneous collection of hits homogenized into easy-jazz, cafe-concert style: lush trumpets and a cool mezzo-soprano voice. Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’, Soundgarden’s ‘Black hole sun’, No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Cry’, Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’, Nirvana, Radiohead, Lenny Kravitz, all get the ‘Nora Jones’ treatment and are consumed along steak, chips and beer. After drawing the initial smile, the record makes me wonder: isn’t this reduction to easy-listening form revealing the true core of rock’n roll? Isn’t it stripping reality naked of rock’n roll ideology, like these shades in John Carpenter’s “They live”?

I mean, ‘rock’ songs automatically summon the 'Mr. Hyde' of our bourgeois ego. The whole rock imaginary is a pastiche of a nihilist manifesto, a histrionic mime of the death drive, tickling the bourgeois desire for rebellion, risk, nomadic lifestyle, free sex and cheap drugs. In the flattering mirror of rock'n roll the bourgeois listener sees herself as a dark adventurer, a trangressive vampire feeding on the blood of bourgeois order.

The rock'n roll fantasy survives, generation after generation, just like a vampire; how could it not, each rock song is a member’s card that authorizes anyone to dream, for a moment, that she bites the hand that feeds her, shouting, stomping, throwing angry fists in the air. Rock fans everywhere, from confused teenagers to depressed housewives, from bank clerks to accountants, from masseurs to aromatherapists, from pizza delivery people to suburban high school students, from professors to artsy students gain the right to behave like threats to social order, dress in leather, tatoo a snake-and-skull on their arse, pierce their tongues, put up posters of bikes in their room, talk rudely to their pets, get slightly tipsy or, for the coolest, adopt the louche air of the 1930s apaches they've seeen in Brassai’s photos. By listening to rock you too, the Starbucks waitress, you too, the Gap shop assistant, and yes, especially you, the HMV shelf stacker, are rebels that display their disgust for bourgeois society by wearing dangerously edgy clothes and hairdos. The system is in cold sweats!

In the meantime the rock media, desiring rock to remain the signifier of transgression, keep touting the dirty and dangerous adventures of the rock stars. Rock magazines have developed a morbid obsession with the ‘casualties of rock’, the stars’ stories of hardship, from squatting and poverty to addiction, depression, self-mutilation and suicide. They follow with necrophiliac fascination the handful of ‘self-destructive’ stars, attempting to prove themselves and the fans that rock IS rebellion. A worthy effort, cruelly undermined by our very revolutionary leaders, the rock stars, who show their true desires whenever they get the money: singing their way into the upper bourgeoisie, living the life their songs spit at. What is more satisfying than seeing another ageing rock star being knighted/lady-ed by the Queen? Accepting an aristocratic title from a formaldehyde-smelling medieval monarch? Now that’s anarchy! How many of them send their mediocre kids to the poshest public schools they can buy with the money made by selling songs of fury, danger and revolution? The terror makes the bourgeois order piss its pants. 

By taking the plastic fangs out of all their mouths, this genius cafe-concert band we are listening to brings the form of the songs closer to their function: feeding the bourgeois sack’s desire for comfortable consumption. So here are our 3 axioms:

‘Cafe concert is the artistic essence of rock’n roll!’ 

‘Cafe concert is rock’n roll stripped of ideology!’ 

‘Rock’n roll is cafe concert in denial!’

Yup, rock rebellion is alway the same teenage punk rebellion against dad, while living in the parental house, being driven to the Green Day gig by mom, buying clothes and records on the weekly allowance and putting ‘Danger! No Entry!’ signs on her bedroom door. The bourgeois order is hyperventilating. I should know, I’ve been a rock fan since I was 13!

tchuss-tchuss, la mordue.

The saviour of sea cucumbers.

12th August. At low tide Primrose-the-Pill has made a duty of rescuing stranded sea cucumbers that seem to be gasping for air. In all honesty, it is a bit difficult to ascertain what precisely the sea cucumber feels, our Verstehen of the sea cucumber remains rudimentary. But I join the movement, sandwiching them between my Havaianas and dropping them in the pools of water trapped by rocks. We’re not sure they are sea cucumbers either, they look like giant, spotted, 700 grams slugs. In Messianic mood, we save them anyway. Some of the rocks are fully covered by the soft skin of animal colonies that look like pink viscera from outer space - a strangely repulsive and fascinating thing, as close to the Lacanian Real as any other alien we have seen.

My own private motoboy

10th August. After more than 8 hours of bus ride between the sertao and the coast, we arrive in Trairi, a little town some 30 km of our destination, knackered and stinky, as the sun is about to set. The moto-taxi boys (some of them in their 50s) surround us as we get off the bus: “Going to Mundau? 2 motos, 12 reais each”. We each carry a backpack of about 8 kg and these motos look quite narrow. The Pill sends me the ‘detached-skeptical' look but before she can say anything I agree loudly with the 2 ‘boys’. We climb behind them, and the motos are indeed rather thin and a tad too short for my thick calves. I’m slightly out of balance, the backpack pulls me backwards. And it’s my very first time riding a moto. Yes, we are the other facet of the “rebel rock’n roll gods” social group, the one that uses public transport. Pretty avant-garde, I know. So anywayz, the distribution of weight on and around my body seems to suggest that the safest way to keep my arse from walking the plank backwards is too lean forward and lock my arms around the thick, soft midriff of my 50-something motoboy. That’s how they do it in the films too, right? when the rebel leather boy gives the prudish girl in a tulle headscarf her first moto ride? All the locals gathered in the small plaza watch us with mildly intrigued, slightly amused faces. A guy in a shop encourages me to hold the motoboy tight and, as a joke, i tighten my grip getting the air out of the poor man’s lungs. a bit. we depart, the sudden acceleration almost throwing me to the ground, and i’m holding very tight indeed! By now our public is cheering loudly and i hear their laughter and ‘woooo-hooo’ cries thin out as we move towards the main road. It’s a thrill, to say the least... the moto threatens to throw me off at each bump, so i keep my strong hold on the motoboy, until he tells me, in a slightly offended voice, that i should hold on to the handle at the back of my seat. I get off one arm, prudently, at first, and as he keeps on staring at my other arm still clutching his belly, i let go of this one as well. It’s pretty precarious, my balance. Soon we stop for the motoboy to put 3 reais worth of petrol in his moto and the Pill throwns me a slightly glacial smile of “it’s fun, if we survive it” from the other moto. It’s heaven and hell on wheels from here: i’ve got my shades on against suicidal flies, my cap is stuck down to my ears and i’m holding that slippery chrome backrail behind my back, riding at what i find to be supersonic speed (50 km/h?) on a road that nudges its way between sand dunes and the sea, the sun setting in front of us in an orgy of 80s-cocktail-bar-sign colours, coral and pinks and mauves, the clouds like discarded erotic garments, diaphanously lined in matching tones (see photo, above). Breathtaking, in more ways than one. At every bump or turn in the road, when gravity and centripetal forces whiten my knuckles, i think “not a bad way to go, actually”.

The motoboys have the smoothness of experts though, and we arrive in Mundau 40 minutes later, a bit shaky and a bit hysterically excited. We exchange money and goodbyes on the sandy road going to our pousada and i think i sense a little nostalgic tenderness in my motoboy’s look. Or was it the sad look that the Christian gives the sinner? Of course the Pill, cool as a sea cucumber, tells me she has attentively studied the locals beforehand and absolutely ALL of them are ALWAYS holding on to the back-rail, NEVER to the driver. Oh well, i sure worked hard for those cheers and that look. Plus, the Pill is not unscathed herself, since she has a nice, round, purple branding mark from where the hot exhaust pipe burned her naked leg. We go for a refreshing night swim in the ocean and a swing in the hammock before collapsing on the bed. Another legendary battle in the 100-year war against mosquitoes is about to begin...

Tchuss-tchuss, la mordue.