Budablog

Return to Tooth Town

2008-06-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

(That's one healthy tooth.)

Here Be Monsters

2008-06-29T14:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we visited our friends Nikola and Fanni. Nikola is a playwright-novelist-poet-writer from Croatia. Since we're going on vacation in Croatia next week he drew us a map:

Nikola waxed poetic about the beauties of Croatia, which he loves but has a complicated relationship with (Nikola hates all borders. "Have you ever seen such a country? Shaped like a fucking pretzel.") But somehow all his tales of gorgeous beach holidays slowly morphed into The Hills Have Eyes horror stories. A simple off-trail hike around Susak became a day-long death march. Expecting a quick stroll around the tiny island they only brought a bottle of wine and half a loaf of bread. No water, no sneakers, no directions, no roads. And they soon discovered ... well, take a closer look.

In case you can't read Nikola's handwriting, the notes in order from left to right say:
1. No More Wine Point
2. I Wanna Die
3. Knife Rocks
4. Inbred Fisherman

According to Nikola, the people on this island mistrust all of their neighbors, and have intermarried strictly among themselves for centuries ("Their motto is 'We Save the Blood.' That's why they've got the short little freak legs, you know?") He claims that a bunch of Susak islanders migrated to Pittsburgh, where they all now live on one block and continue to Save the Blood.

Then there was his story about the beautiful canyon that turned out to be a...

... snake pit full of incredibly poisonous jumping snakes that live in trees and prey on unsuspecting hikers at night. ("The snakes with the horns ... we call them a 'snake snake.' You know it? If it bites you, you have maximum one hour to live. Completely fucked.") Other terrors noted on the map include black widows and giant vultures.

Maybe we should go straight to Sarajevo ...

Two Deals with the Devil

2008-06-25T05:49:00.000-07:00

Faust
Directed by Silviu Purcarete
For Teatrul National Radu Stanca in Sibiu, Romania.

Faust was staged in a warehouse in Sibiu, one of the prettiest towns in Transylvania. Sibiu was built by medieval Germans (Swabians), and its historic center looks like a fairy tale illustration. It was magical to see Faust here. Sibiu’s old town was projected in the windows of Faust’s study, a reminder of the city’s medieval past and the story’s modern-day relevance.

Talk about total theater. There’s only one word for this production: Fantastaspectaculomongogantic. The cast was roughly 80 strong. The live original musical score used two full choirs (one of them made solely of children) and a rock band. Dancers, children, puppets, fire-blowers, pyrotechnics, animals, exhausted stagehands – just imagining what it takes to produce a spectacle that size gives me acid reflux.

The design was gorgeous. The foreground of Faust’s large, decaying study was dominated by scholarly junk – a partial skeleton on a stand, a model of the digestive system, a stuffed rabbit standing on its hind legs, hunted by a stuffed fox. It made me miss my buddies at Curious Expeditions. The production was full of these kinds of obsessive details.

Despite the show’s epic proportions, the bald, potbellied Faust and tiny, twisted Mephistopheles (played by a snow-white woman in men’s clothing) dominated the action. Both gave incredibly intense, alive, physical performances.

Ilie Gheorghe (Faust) and Ofelia Popii (Mefisto)

I don’t speak Romanian, but it was clear Goethe’s play had been heavily adapted, streamlined to focus on the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles. Marguerite/Gretchen appears, but Martha is gone, along with Siebel, Wagner, and many of the story’s other secondary characters. Still, I was able to follow the adapted story perfectly, thanks to Purcarete’s visceral images. To name just a few:

- As Faust summons Satan, the floorboards of his study tremble and rock, then suddenly burst open as an army of white demons leap out.

- A black dog runs through Faust’s open door. Faust eagerly catches its leash as it dives into a wardrobe. He pulls the dog back out into the open – but at the end of the leash he finds Mephistopheles.

- As she tempts Faust to sign away his soul, Mephistopheles slowly strips off her black tuxedo to reveal red flesh beneath her moon white face. She has a woman’s bare breasts, and a big red codpiece.

- As Faust flies off to Walpurgis Night, the stage splits in half. Demons leads the audience through the gap into the fire-lit, grotesque world of Walpurgis Night. Mephistopheles, dressed like a baroque aristocrat, wears an immense, aristocratic, red beehive wig. Rings of dancing demons cackle beneath a wall of fireworks. Debauched Gretchens, smeared with mud, rut with gigantic swine…and nightmarish murals in black and white loom on the walls…

- Death appears as a tall, thin, bald man wearing a corset and hoop skirt, his face painted like a skull. His movements are unbelievably gentle. When he speaks, his velvety, reassuring voice is so loud, it echoes in your bones.

Then there was Gretchen. I’ve always thought Faust and Gretchen’s relationship is hard for modern audiences to fully appreciate. After all, these days sex outside of marriage is extremely common. So is having a child out of wedlock. So how can we really understand how wrong it is for Faust to seduce Gretchen?

Purcarete solved this problem in a risky but effective way: Gretchen was played by a chorus of barely teenage girls, wearing white shifts, little anklet socks and mary janes. They carry lanterns and ring little silver bells to protect themselves against spirits. They are painfully young – and the middle-aged Faust becomes a borderline pedophile. What he’s doing is not noble, not sexy, not romantic, but just plain wrong. In the play’s most disturbing image, Mephistopheles lays one Gretchen on the floor, and slowly buries her hands beneath the girl’s white shift. The hands emerge bloody, and Faust trembles with excitement.

The Gretchen chorus helped me see the Faust story in a completely new way. It became a tale about how the devil uses the wicked to hurt the innocent. The message: people think they want love, but they crave sensation. And those who can’t feel love – the bored, the despairing, the damaged – can enjoy inflicting their pain on the whole and pure.

Perhaps the most surprising moment was at the very end, when God wins his bet with the devil by forgiving Faust. Mephistopheles is angry, hurt, but also inspired. She marvels at the miracle of divine love, the one thing the Devil isn’t expecting, is never expecting. She even flirts with the idea of repentance– but soon slowly spirals back into the old habit of hate.

My own favorite part, though, was actually the curtain call. After all of the spectacle, the suffering, the whole horrible tale, all 80-odd performers came out together to take their bows. There was something so touching about watching angels and devils, saints and sinners, children and monsters, turn their faces to the light and take a bow. That’s what we love about theater, right? And I thought I hope that’s the way it is when we die: the show is over, take a bow, and everyone is friends.

The Seafarer
By Conor McPherson
Directed by Jimmy Fay
at The Abbey Theatre, Dublin

The Seafarer was reviewed right and left during its New York run, so I’m not going to summarize the entire story here. The first act introduces the characters, all pretty standard-issue Miserable Irish Losers. Most are pickled, and all are stuck in dysfunctional relationships with their families and friends. The second act, a Christmas Eve card game, is much, much better. Most of the characters think they’re just playing poker with an affable, wealthy stranger. Only one man realizes he’s playing the devil for his soul. Now all the mundane details of the first act begin to resonate and take on cosmic significance. A man’s offer to loan his brother 20 Euros is actually a chance to save his sibling’s soul; a desperate bet becomes a prayer for redemption.

Different Devils

In The Seafarer, the Devil wants to damn people because he’s lonely. He doesn’t understand why God loves man so much – and he wants the whole world to suffer his own exile from the divine presence. (There’s a great Hungarian expression for this, roughly translated: “also the neighbor’s cow should die.”) He doesn’t really have any special powers (except pain rays that shoot from his fingers like the Emperor in Star Wars and, of course, omniscience). He must convince men to damn themselves.

The Seafarer’s men are lushes that still have faith. Their sins are despair, envy, and mourning for the lost past – the sides of themselves that mirror the Devil, trapped in his fear, dread, and bottomless longing. These men are pretty sure they’re doomed, but they gamble on divine forgiveness.

Purcarete’s Faust offers a far different vision of man and devil. Faust delights in the drama and excitement of evil. He destroys other peoples’ lives just to see what will happen. He’s in the grip of an epic self-delusion: he thinks he’s a romantic hero or a deep thinker, when in fact he’s just a common criminal. But in the end, he’s still saved. Faust says the more God can forgive, the greater he is. We deserve to be damned, but we are not – and we’re lucky the decision is not up to us.

Many thanks to Andras Visky for bringing me along to see Faust in Sibiu – but even more for his amazing, gut wrenching play Long Friday, which I got to see in Cluj’s Hungarian State Theater. Stay tuned for more on his work!

Travels with Bip: Dublin

2008-06-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

Spring 2008:

Note to self: never follow a tour of the Jameson factory with a visit to an interactive history museum.

You might see Elvis on the way home.

Travels with Bip: Venice

2008-06-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

Spring 2008:

Kiri Te Kanawa

2008-06-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Apparently soprano Kiri Te Kanawa has a fanatical Budapest fan club...

Is she the new Andre the Giant?

Or maybe she's marking her turf? You know, just to warn Renee Fleming to stay the eff on her own side of town.

The Future

2008-06-18T06:02:00.001-07:00

So it's finally completely official: Rick and I are moving back to New York at the end of August. I'm going to get an MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU. Rick will be holding it down on the day job front while continuing to write the world's most awesome short stories.

More recent news, photos, theater thoughts, funny stories, and randomosity coming up soon.

Back in Effect

2008-06-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

My last post was just after New Year’s, and here it is the last day of school in Budapest. There’s no excuse for my chronic blog silence, so I’m not going to attempt to make one. Instead, I will rescue several trivial, but funny, episodes from blogless oblivion.

1. Yoda.
Apparently Yoda speaks Hungarian. The story (which I really don’t want to check out, lest it prove to be false) goes like this: during shooting for the Yoda scenes in the first star wars, George Lucas worried that Yoda didn’t sound alien enough. So they asked a Hungarian cameraman on the crew to translate Yoda’s lines from English into Hungarian and back again, word for word. The result? Crazy backwards Yoda talk. “Many years study you must if a Jedi you would be.” It’s Hungarian syntax! I wish someone had told me this before, I might be conversational by now. Thanks, Bob!

In other news, my 12-year-old English student Kata continues to be a source of unintentional amusement. When I asked her to use the word “rebel” in a sentence yesterday, she confidently replied “When you are sick, and you want get better, you must eat a rebel.” Next, I asked her to use the word “church,” and she offered “I church my ball.” Then she giggled uncontrollably. I'm beginning to think she's just messing with me.

2. Cherry Pie.
This winter, Rick and I both wrote books on global warming. What does this have to do with Cherry Pie, you ask? This week, we decided to use some of the fresh sour cherries at our local market to make a delicious cherry pie. We decorated the top of the pie with a cute, goofy sun made out of dough. Unfortunately, I turned the oven up too high. Much like our earth, pies are vulnerable to rising temperatures. When humans are careless, our pies pay the price.

3. Unintentional Poetry
It’s summer time, and that means I’m working on new background articles for The Met radio broadcasts. I’m ridiculously paranoid about getting rid of text, so when I edit articles I create an “outtakes” document, where I paste erased phrases. Sometimes this results in tiny, unintentional poems. Here are three of my latest:

THE DAMNATION OF FAUST

Remembering the sensation
the lures and dangers of knowledge
torn between longing for the infinite and lust for earthly pleasures
set in the years before and during Germany’s descent into Nazism.
Towards the Damnation (In the mean time in between time)
and at the end of that decisive section I was obliged to abandon the peroration of my piece
It wasn’t mere paranoia.

THAïS
(“so all three virgins are martyred virgo intacta – a real Medieval crowd-pleaser.”)
What’s a marionette lay?
Their virginity (though not their lives) is preserved through miracles
which provided the famous first couple of humanity with operatic love duets to sing
he marches her through the desert, delighting
and ultimately dies a magnificent martyr’s death in the desert.
It’s almost a Romeo and Juliette story.
the difference between spiritual love and erotic love

LA RONDINE
the original spaghetti western,
with no higher philosophical purpose
And the world was unstable, changing rapidly, and frighteningly, every day.
kept his head in the sand about the war for a long time.

What, she just walks away from the relationship, and that’s the end?
About the death of youthful illusions.
and willing them to become present reality
sorrow, the regret of the passing of the world, the waste and sorrow and heartbreak on the way to the future,
He can’t write what he wants, and he can’t create a perfect muse.
held a poignant sweetness
The past will never return (and nothing will ever be the same again.)
It’s a small tragedy,
It’s a human-sized tragedy.

Hungarian Jazz

2008-01-22T08:28:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, an article of mine was published in weekly Hungarian music magazine Fidelio! The English title is An American Jazz Musician at the Jazz Showcase. Check out the article (translated into Hungarian) here.

Fun Times

2008-01-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

Read Rick's write up of the craziest show(s) we saw in 2007!

Snow Day!

2008-01-01T12:53:00.000-08:00

January 1, 2008:

2007 Roundup: Two Plays

2007-12-31T03:15:00.000-08:00

1. Uncle Vanya in Transylvania (Vanya Bacsi)

I got to check out an excellent Uncle Vanya at the Hungarian State Theater in Cluj, directed by Andre Serban. The play was performed in Hungarian with Romanian subtitles, but I read along with an English translation.

It was hilarious. Thank god there was no pointless slapstick—just absurd yet appropriate character details. For example: in Act 2, the drunk Doctor, on a long and wild bender with his friend Vanya, wanders into the Professor’s living room carrying a 10-foot long plank of heavy wood. He looks around with a baffled expression, and asks “Where are the ladies?” Genius.

Incredible performances: sweaty, committed, over-the top in the best possible way. But what will stay with me are certain perfect, indelible images. During Act 1, the audience was seated on the stage, while the actors climbed over seats and along precarious railings. This struck me as a little silly until the end of the act when, pair by pair, all the characters tango up the theater’s center aisle and disappear. Vanya is left sitting alone in the center of the aisle. Slowly, slowly, the theater’s massive chandelier dims to a reddish amber and descends, until it is hovering just inches above Vanya’s immobile, bald head: a ridiculously oversized cloud of despair.

During Act 2 (the drunkathon), the audience moves onstage, where the action takes place along the three side walls of the stage. Much of the action takes place (dangerously, precariously) on the steep, rickety metal steps that ascend to the theater’s roof. To the audience’s left, there’s a vast expanse of dirt with a dollhouse in the center. At one point Vanya wanders drunkenly out of the house into this field. It’s drizzling on this part of the stage. He drops to his knees in the mud, makes a mess of himself, and lies down helplessly beside the dollhouse.

2. Krétakör’s The Ice (A jég)

Another incredible performance, this one by Budapest’s hippest alternative theater troupe Krétakör. They constructed a giant, naturalistic, two-story house that took up well over half of Budapest's Trafo theater space. The audience entered through the set, filing past the actors who sat around a big round table in the “kitchen.” The actors casually greeted us as we entered—I felt a little like I was visiting a friend’s house during a family gathering.

The plot is a bit too weird to sum up here—set in Moscow, it follows several different people from different levels of society who are inducted into a strange, brutal cult obsessed with meteor ice. It’s fascinating, but complicated. (There were no subtitles, so Eszter did simultaneous translation for me—bless her).

The production was no-holds-barred, anything-goes, balls-to-the-wall physical. Actors scaled the set like a jungle gym, hurled books at eachother, launched into pratfalls, and simulated some very convincing violence. Metal lipsyncing in a bathtub full of water. Lots of dancing. Live music. A man humping a computer screen that displays an image of Stalin. Now I can hear some of you telling yourselves, “What’s she talking about? This sounds awful!” And yet I swear to you, it was amazing.

I directed a production a few years back that had a lot of sexual content, but no nudity. Well, The Ice made me feel like such a baby. I’ve never seen so much nudity and simulated sex onstage. And while I wouldn’t exactly call it tasteful—tasteful wasn’t the point—it was always appropriate, weirdly appropriate, and in service of the story. It was not aggressive or “in your face,” not angry or confrontational, but simply human. The characters are all lost, confused, upset. Their sexual encounters are funny, or tragic or both; usually awkward, drunken, or a little nauseating, or embarrassing. Nothing really “sexy” about it.

Krétakör’s bravery blew me away. But it wasn’t just the nudity, or the athleticism, or the raw emotion that got me. Their show also took incredible narrative risks. I was surprised at every turn. Seeing the realistic set, I assumed we were going to see a naturalistic play. Wrong. There were naturalistic moments, sure. But at other times, two people sitting in front of a fan, waving a spatula like a windshield wiper, were suddenly in a car. The actors broke the fourth wall regularly, transitioned seamlessly from a multi-generational family dinner into a sleazy nightclub without so much as a lighting change. It reminded me a little of Gatz in that way; black box “open theater” in a naturalistic set.

And all that was just in the first act. After intermission, the audience was seated on the two-story set, facing the former audience bleachers, which had been transformed into a forest of miniature Christmas trees. The act was one long monologue, split between different actors: an explanation of the origins of the cult. Those actors not speaking created a soundscape that underscored the monologue. At first the actors voiced the bird and insects of a forest. Then their sounds morphed gradually into into the clattering of a train heading towards a concentration camp, the clack of typewriters in a German office, and later on, the low choral hum of an encounter with a mysterious meteor. It was the most “choral” work I’ve seen in the theater.

I hear that Krétakör will be coming to the Lincoln Center Festival this summer; get your tickets now, I say. Spend whatever it takes. I know I plan on seeing them as much as possible while here.

2007 Roundup: Negreni

2007-12-30T10:12:00.001-08:00

I’m racing to get in a mention of some of the great stuff we did, but did not blog about, in 2007, before it becomes literally last year’s news.

October 2007: The Negreni Fair. Held every year in Negreni, Transylvania, a three hour train trip away from Cluj, Romania. What is there to say about Negreni that hasn't already been said by Dumneazu? I know I certainly can’t offer any additional insight. I was too overwhelmed. But I do have some pictures (some are by fellow Benningtonite and Budapester Matt E.)

To get to Negreni, you’ve got to take a local train at the butt crack of dawn, far out into the autumn countryside. We got off one stop too soon, in the literal middle of nowhere—as we hesitated to step off the train into a deserted field, the gaggle Romanian teenagers behind us laughed: “It’s Negreni!” The train started moving quickly, and we literally leapt off the train onto a sloping grassy hillside. A twenty minute walk into “town” finally brought us to the outskirts of the fair. I loved these rides, named after Coney Island’s Luna Park, the world’s most famous amusement park 100 years ago…

Inside the fair:

Head scarves were the order of the day for women:

Crazy hats for men:

Most people park by the side of the road or in peasants’ front yards. Those who didn’t come by car park somewhere by the river:

We bought handmade textiles for married friends, almost got a Russian gramophone, were sorely tempted by some shitty instruments, saw antique cookoo clocks a-plenty. But my favorite item at the fair was this baby:

Happy Happy

2007-12-29T09:53:00.001-08:00

Translation

2007-12-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

I wanted to write something about the experience of helping to translate Finito while the experience was freshin my mind. Again, I didn’t translate the thing from Hungarian into English—God forbid. Instead I transformed my partner’s precisely translated English prose into rhyming verse. I learned a lot about playwriting and about Hungary along the way.

Playwriting, Directing and Crossword Puzzles
The process was a cross between playwriting, directing and doing a crossword puzzle. Playwriting because you’re writing dialogue—trying to capture a character’s voice, paint vivid images, tell a coherent story, use the right word at the right time. Directing because you also must consider the actions behind each phrase, each exclamation, each word. Why are they saying the things they’re saying? What types of words are they using and why? What’s their strategy? What’s the relationship between the spoken words and the action onstage? As for puzzle—well, try turning this into four lines, ideally of 10 syllables each, where every two lines rhyme and agree rhythmically, and hopefully make sense:

There we go, this is the quality,
The grumpy/rough body covers an unsophisticated/hick/dumb heart!
If I want to say something normally/nicely
“Fuck you”’s are flying around.

Here was my attempted solution to the puzzle:

Well that’s just like you, Gáspár. You’re such a troll:
Thick head, dirty mouth and dumb country soul!
I want to talk nice, like they do on TV
But all you can do is throw “fuck you”’s at me!

Cultural Equivalents
It was an incredible feeling to be inside the architecture of another person’s work—feeling how it functions from the inside out. It felt a little like building a full-scale replica of a historic building. You’re replicating the structure, but using different materials to build in a different location. You trust the structure. It’s the materials that the rest of the world sees and touches that worry you.

Finito is full of puns, inside jokes, cultural references, and double entendres. It just wasn’t possible to find English equivalents (American equivalents, to be exact) for all of them. For instance:

Listen, (young country bride—old fashioned village word used for a young hot chick), should I roll this joint?
This will make you feel like (an old country bandit—like Robin Hood—antiquated village slang.)

There is no American equivalent. All you can do is try to stand next to it:

Howdy, lil’ lady, should I roll this shit?
This will make you Smokey like the Bandit!

I am convinced that one day fifteen years from now I will wake up in the middle of the night with a better solution for that particular couplet. I was actually rather surprised that my partner accepted the Smokey and the Bandit reference, since she rejected this verse, which I loved:

You lie around the house, long face, limp tool,
All you do is sleep, drink, eat, shit and drool.
You’re a wreck, a human Afghanistan,
Useless as a breadwinner and as a man.

My partner was convinced that the Afghanistan reference wouldn't fly.

Translating Hungary
Let’s start with the pig slaughtering feast. Traditionally, Hungarian families in the countryside have a pig killing feast every fall (it’s a little like Thanksgiving in America). Over the course of the day they slaughter their family hog, and friends and family help to preserve every part of the hog in sausages, aspic, cured meat, etc. They make a huge feast, with special traditional pork dishes.

Obviously this is a village tradition, one that can’t survive the move to the city. It’s also totally unfamiliar to Americans. But knowing about this type of party is essential if you want to fully understand Finito. Gáspár’s wife refers to him as a hog. Before Gáspár kills himself, his family throws a kind of pre-wake for him, inviting everyone to dinner. The table is set as for a pig-slaughtering feast. Gáspár is the family pig who will be killed to feed his friends and family. Later in the play, Gáspár takes a pre-suicide bath in his tin courtyard bathtub—the same tub that would be used to bathe a pig before slaughter. (There are more Gáspár-pig parallels in the play, but I’ll spare you the details.) How the hell do you convey that in translation?

The play takes place in a village Hungary that has one foot in medieval times and one foot in the modern post-socialist world. The language shifts easily between media-saavy “TV talk” and folksy, age-old idioms. When Gáspár takes his revenge on the world by humiliating the powerful people of his village world and even visiting media royalty, there’s something powerfully Breughel-esque, psychedelic, and ancient about the scene. The year king; carnival; topsy-turvydom.

But there’s a lot of modern Hungary in the play, too. By now, Rick and I have learned that government bureauocracy and red tape is deeply rooted in Hungarian culture. (Example: recently my mom sent me a birthday gift. At the post office, I had to visit no fewer than 6 separate windows to pick it up. Window one sent me to window 5, who sent me to window 3 with new forms. Window 3 took my forms, gave me new forms, and sent me to window 7. Window 7 took my new forms, gave me something else to fill out, and sent me back to window 1… It was like a Buster Keaton routine.) This uniquely Hungarian obsession with paperwork and regulation is mined for comic effect in Finito:

(Poet reading the suicide note he has written for Gáspár)
Can we accept, this, sons of the nation?
They have robbed our budget allocation
30 percent. Poets are slaves in Hungary,
Broken, oppressed with 20 percent VAT.
We are denied even a simple tax rebate,
Because of intellectual product tax rates.

(Gáspár)
What in the hell do I care what you deduct?
I don’t got no intellectual product.
At most I try to do the crossword sometimes,
Or fill out forms in the unemployment line.

One of my favorite aspects of the play is the (literal) centrality of Gáspár’s shitter to the plot. Gáspár tries to hang himself in the outhouse. He spends much of the play locked inside it. Now I thought this was just potty humor—but apparently Hungarian men are notorious for liking to spend lots of time on the can, especially in an outdoor toilet.

(Police Major giving an interview to visiting reporter)
Let’s look a bit deeper into the hole
The courtyard outhouse is a phallic symbol.
When you travel through the country look hard
Through the window: what’s in every back yard?
Outhouse! Behind every home, there they are!
Ancient apocryphal wood home altar,
Erect fertility symbol, you stand
Proud in the yards of our tiny homeland.
Adorned with totems, the pagan’s revenge,
A powerful, private, slate-roofed Stonehenge,
Where a man can retreat and meditate,
A shrine to the vigor that makes men great.
…
We are all dying, all losers, our resort
Is here, the last place we can find some comfort:
A compact male universe, land of dreams
Where we reign from out thrones as gods supreme.

Then there are the curses. Hungarians have EXCELLENT curses. I have two favorites: first “Go back to your mom’s stinky pussy,” which I am assured does not sound so bad in Hungarian. The second is an old village expression: “the strongest dog always fucks.”

Ironically, however, Hungarians don’t really believe in cursing onstage. My partner and I clashed constantly over the amount of swear words in the translation. She was always complaining that we were swearing too much; the words were correct but the tone was too harsh. Finally the source of the argument emerged. According to Pat, in Hungary, swearing onstage is still shocking. When a character swears onstage, they lose the audience’s sympathy, become less credible. I realized that in American theater, there’s an unspoken assumption that intense feelings must be expressed by cursing—especially if the characters are lower class, as in Finito. In some cases it may be hard to take a character seriously UNLESS they swear. (Think David Mamet.)

The Lost World
But probably the biggest difference was the most subtle. The night that I went to see Finito with my partner, a kind Hungarian couple informed us that this piece would be impossible to translate. Why? “Because it shows the truth—it shows what’s really going on here—such a shame.” I was a little confused. To be honest, I loved Finito but didn’t consider its story very groundbreaking. Desperately poor people selling their souls for fame, media circus spinning out of control, money and power corrupt all they touch…I felt like I’d heard it before. Pat had to explain bit by bit that in Hungary, these themes still are new—really new. Gáspár is unemployed: it wasn’t so long ago that there were no unemployed people in Hungary. Under socialism, everyone had a job. She went on. Gáspár’s bankrupt village, Nagyabrand (Grand Illusion, or Bigreverie) can’t afford to fix its roads, and no one cares. The media will cover Siamese twins and childmolesting priests, but not real the real crisis in this country town. People have forgotten how to talk to each other without referencing television, they’ve losing everything that made them who they are and they’re buying into a new media culture that has nothing to offer them. Sadly, these are all changes that happened a long time ago in the US. But here, the pain of that transition is still fresh, because the change is still happening.

A Shot In the Dark
But my strangest realization came on opening night. We had some loud cheers and some raspberries. I knew that I felt we had produced a good work in English. I know it is much better than anything that a sole Hungarian speaker (or a sole English speaker) could have produce on their own. But I actually have no idea whether it’s a good translation, because I can’t understand Hungarian.

It was the capper on a feeling I’d had throughout the whole process: my writing method had to be in many senses “guess and check.” I had to rely on my partner to tell me whether I had gotten the sense of the speech—just like I had to rely on her to tell me what people were saying at intermission, or what the contracts said, or how the playwright described his characters. I trust her, sure—but it’s a little practicing archery blindfolded. My partner tells me: “a little to the left…up…no, back to the right…OK, now.” I let the arrow fly, then ask “did I hit it?” Or perhaps it’s like a blindfolded treasure hunt in an unfamiliar house. Following verbal instructions, you reach something that feels like a treasure chest—but how can you be sure? You can’t see it. It’s a leap of faith. A shot in the dark.

Holidays

2007-12-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

Key Gun Knife

2007-12-08T01:02:00.000-08:00

I was in Paris in the beginning of November. I couldn't afford to pick up any new clothes or even to buy a really good French meal, but at least I found a good gift for Rick: the world's tuffest keychain.

A gun that turns into a knife. Genius! Can I get a witness?

The Unicycle

2007-12-07T16:11:00.001-08:00

The other night Eszter and I visited some friends of hers. Being helpful television addicts, they decided to teach me about Hungary via an 80’s childrens’ television series about walking across Hungary. It was super evocative—the clothes, the soundtrack, even the look of the light, the quality of the film. Kids in red short shorts and tube socks hiking through a real-life fairy tale: Forests, rural towns, feasts in peasant courtyards, medieval churches and castles…

Since it was a hiking-themed show, there were plenty of shots of the kids walking through leafy woods, with their trusty packs strapped on their backs. One of the kids was pushing a unicycle in front of him. I thought this was really weird since the group was walking along forest trails, and there was nowhere level for him to ride his unicycle. A mountain bike I can understand, but a mountain unicycle? It seemed like a colossal waste of energy to walk this unicycle over hill and dale, searching for a level strip of ground. What had gotten into this kid? Why?

Then I remembered just how often I see people in my neighborhood riding unicycles. I had thought that this was because we live near a unicycle store (seriously). But could there be something more to it? Street performers here often have unicycles. Coincidence? Or pattern?

Sarah: (going out on a limb) So why are unicycles so Hungarian?

Blank stares.

Sarah: I mean, what’s with the unicycles? Seriously.

Eszter: Sarah, what are you talking about?

Sarah: Hungarians and unicycles. Is it like Mormons and trampolines?

More confusion. Unicycles explained as not particularly Hungarian, and how did I get that idea?

Sarah: Then why on earth is this kid pushing a unicycle all the way across Hungary? There isn’t even a place to ride it!

Eszter: What unicycle?

Sarah: What do you mean, what unicycle? The thing with one wheel and a handle!

Eszter: This is for counting the steps. It’s a…a pedometer. The program is called 100,000 steps in Hungary. So they count the steps.

Sarah: …oh.

Anyway, as the night wore on the talk turned to children’s television. Of course when my friends were kids, this was still a socialist eastern block country. And they had socialist TV shows. Like the Czech cartoon Bob a Bobek.

It’s about two little rabbits that live in a hat. Every morning they get up, do their exercises like good little socialist rabbits, then go to work because “Work Makes You Noble!” (translation courtesy my girl Andi.) Of course one little rabbit always wants to sleep in, and his gung-ho proletarian brother must gently remind him of his rabbit duty. Then they go contribute to society.

Rick and I have watched a number of these episodes and, as someone completely unable to understand the dialog, I have some observations.

Not only do these rabbits go to work every day, but they do really punishing work for such little rabbits: stacking bricks, industrial dish washing, shoveling coal on a fucking steamship, etc. Even their job serving ice cream to hordes of school children looks harrowing.

Second of all, Bob and Bobek are often called upon to help foil thieves. They’re not detectives—they just run into a lot of bungling burglars with big eyes. Now I, like others who have visited Czech Republic, have my fair share of pickpocket and restaurant rip-off stories. Coincidence? Or is this a Czechoslovak thing? You’re a good citizen if you lay bricks and fight crime? Am I crazy here?

Alright. So I’m still pretty ignorant about my surroundings. But at least I’m not poor Kelly Pickler:

Verse Comedy

2007-12-05T14:33:00.000-08:00

Last night, after writing about my translation job, I discovered this Marx Brothers clip:

Rhyming verse!!!! Who knew?

The Translator

2007-12-04T07:44:00.001-08:00

Last night was the premiere of my translation (via subtitles) of Finito, by István Tasnádi, at the massive Orkeny Szinhaz in downtown Budapest.

That's right, I finally got paid for doing some dramatic writing. This was a commission for the Budapest International Contemporary Drama Festival.

Not that I know enough Hungarian to make up my own sentences, let alone translate a full-length play. I was half of a translation team. Here’s how it happened. Last summer, my friend Patricia took a playwriting workshop with Tasnádi at a writer’s colony on Lake Balaton. Tasnádi asked Patricia to take a crack at translating his play for the Contemporary Drama Festival. However, it just so happened that his play was

1. A “pseudo-Moliere” play written in rhyming iambic pentameter
2. Full of Hungarian TV slang, rural dialect, literary references, elevated poetry and (of course) tons and tons of puns.

In other words, a little bit hard to translate. As a matter of fact, Tasnádi had already rejected about 10 translators’ efforts. Since this was a task that would intimidate even most native speakers (it sure as shit intimidated me), Patricia asked me to work with her. She translated from Hungarian into prose English, explained the characters and cultural references and idioms to me, and I then converted the prose into slangy rhyming iambics. We did a two-page sample and, miracle of miracles, we got accepted!

The plot, by the way, is roughly as follows: In rural Hungary, a depressed ex-pig sticker named Gáspár is being harassed by his sexually frustrated wife. Gáspár threatens to hang himself in his outhouse (are you laughing yet?). His family calls in the town’s Mayor to resolve the situation, but the Mayor decides to exploit Gáspár’s suicide to publicize his town’s financial crisis. Soon more and more outsiders are getting in on the act. The media descends on the town. A corrupt police negotiator tries to buy Gáspár’s corpse as part of a shady mafia transaction. The head of the New Narrative Union of Hungary decides to transform Gáspár into a poet and present his death as a protest against escalating taxes on intellectual products. And a fading teen pop star, who fears her 15 minutes of fame are up, claims that Gáspár is killing himself for the love of her. Finally the biggest TV show in Hungary joins the fun. Suddenly Gáspár is getting huge bucks to knock himself off on live national television. I suppose I won’t spoil the ending in case anyone out there wants to read it, but let’s just say there is a truly Molieresque ending.

Unfortunately we had just under a month to translate the whole thing—80 pages of freaking verse. Needless to say, I basically didn’t sleep. This was honestly the hardest I’ve ever worked on anything. Just to reach the end of page 80, I had to work about 16 hours a day with no socializing, no distractions, no procrastination, not even lunch. (Actually that's not true, Rick made me lunch). Holy fuck.

But we did it, and we even managed to figure out how to make subtitles for the performance in power point. And last night, Rick and our friends Dylan, Michelle, Matt, and Laci got to see it in the theater. I've never presented work in such a gorgeous theater. It has a balcony and pro ushers in matching outfits! It has marble snack bars! Sold out, a great crowd…

Plus the chance to see my name, Sarah Gansher (why can no one say my name correctly, ever?) in the program. If anyone wants to read a rhyming verse comedy about a dude who tries to hang himself in an outhouse, let me know!

Explain Yourself

2007-12-04T01:39:00.000-08:00

So it’s an in-between time for me right now, in lots of ways. I started this blog when I first moved to Budapest, to write about my culture shock, to make sense of the world around me. But as I got more and more comfortable here, the blog got harder to write. Maybe I need to change my format a little, give myself permission to write a little more about my life and less about the city around me.

There’s plenty to report. Trip to Cluj, my first gig getting paid for dramatic writing, funny encounters with the Hungarian literary scene, shopping for Shea butter in Paris, my birthday (I actually had a party!), my first English lessons, etc.

So let the sloppy new experimental blogging begin!

I am Not Dead

2007-11-21T01:19:00.000-08:00

In fact, I will be posting again soon! Stay tuned...

Birthday

2007-09-06T09:30:00.001-07:00

It's Rick's Birthday! Show him some love at The Little Black Egg.

Grabbag

2007-08-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

Phew, this whole posting every day thing is exhausting! I hope you won't mind if I spend time preparing the next post, and leave you with some amusing randomness:

John the Baptist, Seville

Mini-golf, Rosas

Unicorns, Carcassone

Salvador Dali's Bidet, Cadaques

Salvador Dali's Bathroom Footstool, Cadaques

Happy Pills, Barcelona,

Corpus Christi in Andalusia

2007-08-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

Mom, Bip and I ended up in Spain during one of the most important feast days of the year: Corpus Christi. Now you know I adore a procession. So when I saw these floats being festooned inside Seville’s massive Gothic cathedral I knew I was in for a treat.

Early Corpus Christi morning I got up early and rushed down to the parade route.

The procession winds through the labyrinthine streets of the old city. The city had stretched awnings over the narrow alleys…

…the balconies were draped with colorful shawls…

…and the cobblestones were strewn with aromatic herbs (nice touch!)

Sevillanos in their Sunday best strode the streets, carrying embroidered banners, silver-topped staffs, and giant candles. Tho Thpanith!

Immense, elaborately carved wooden sculptures lumbered through the streets…

…towards scattered bright altars.

Later in the day, we traveled to Grenada, where flamenco gear is de rigeur for Corpus Christi.

There was a procession here, too. Check this immense Last Supper float, which must have been at fifteen feet long.

As night fell, crowds promenaded the brightly lit streets.

Satire is also a part of Grenada’s Corpus Christi celebrations. In one downtown square, the crowd perused an incredibly long string of cartoons lampooning local traditions and politics.

My sister translated several of these for me. There were a lot of poems insulting Seville. Go figure.

On a tent-stage set up in the Plaza del Carmen, a choir of flamenco grannies sang about the beauties of Grenada. After the day’s concerts were over, the sound system came on and hyper little flamenco girls swarmed onstage to play dancer.

I have video of many of these kids dancing; I’m gonna edit together a bunch of my shaky footage and post a youtube Corpus Christi video soon.

How Sweet It Is

2007-08-23T08:46:00.000-07:00

In early summer we took Mom and Bip to Szentendre, a tiny twee tourist town just up the Danube Bend. Szentendre comes complete with churches, cafes, rip-off restaurants, and of course, tourist museums.

I had heard there was a Marzipan Museum and I was determined to keep mom away from it. I knew it was exactly the sort of thing she’d insist on seeing. When we inevitably stumbled upon it, she got that look in her eye and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I groaned and braced myself for 15 minutes of mind-numbing Marzipan history. Cue the marzipan cactus!

I wish my camera had been better at photographing the many glories of the museum. Still life tableaux of lobsters, pumpkins, fruits and flowers. Dioramas of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Scooby Doo, and the Muppet Show. Nativity crèches. Scenes from exotic fairytales with names like “The Magic Radish.” Life-size statues of heroic police dogs. Framed portraits of Beethoven, Mozart, and Princess Di. Terrifying Bunnies. All made out of marzipan!

Some of the marzipan sculptures were frankly puzzling. In “USA Music Truck, The Fifties!” rock musicians wearing sinister white masks play on the back of a cattle truck. The Ninja Turtles, who apparently have their own marzipan genre, crouch on the truck’s roof, poised to leap down and overwhelm the masked musicians.

But the museum is not just amusing—it’s patriotic. How about a little Saint-King?

It’s Saint Istvan himself, and his glorious Saint-Crown!

…If only they had a marzipan version of his Holy Right Hand. Oh, I’m sorry, did you want to see a marzipan model of Hungarian Parliament?

What about a real-life Hungarian Olympic Hero?

This speedskater is (we learned from the English placard) a direct descendant of Renaissance King Matyas Hunyadi:

…But apparently the douche skates for Austria (gahr!)

And of course, what marzipan museum would be complete without…the King of Pop?

The materials listed on his placard are “Marzipan, White Chocolate.” Look at how strangely realistic his face is. Is marzipan the best possible medium for a portrait of Michael Jackson?

Roger

2007-08-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

In Serbia, on our way to the Tesla museum, Rick and I stopped into the Tourist Information office for a better map. The girl behind the counter, wearing a paper-thin smile, turned pleading eyes towards us. She was trying to get rid of a giant, well-dressed man in his 70s, with scarlet cheeks and googly eyes. A Vietnamese peasant hat dangled from his cane. His name was Roger.

TI GIRL: (to him) I’ve already told you, I don’t know what to do…
ROGER: (hearing us speak English, in a heavy southern accent): Where y’all from?
ME: …America…
ROGER: I’m from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
ME: (relaxing a little) I lived in New Orleans for a while.
ROGER: I don’t live there now. I have land in Switzerland! (to Rick)Where you from?
RICK: New York.
ROGER: (without malice) Ha ha! They got a whole bunch of you on September 11. Wish it had been more! They ought to go back and finish the job!

Rick and I stare at him in shock, while he grins boyishly, sincerely expecting us to laugh.

After he left, the TI girl apologized profusely. Roger had been pestering her two or three times a day, and bringing her “his writing.” Apparently he wanted her to help him renounce his American citizenship. Roger had been traveling around Eastern Europe, looking for a country to grant him refugee status. Most lately, he had been beaten up in Bulgaria. The TI girl gladly unloaded his pile of tattered photocopies on us.

It is Very Dangerous In America Because Most People Have Guns

It is very dangerous for a tourist to come to America because most people in America have guns.

When tourists are riding on the bus in America, someone will get on the bus with a gun and take everyone’s money and other valuables.

When tourists in America go into the WC, someone with a gun will take their money and other valuables into the WC.

It is very dangerous in America for a tourist to stop their car by a petrol station or a shop because someone from America will shoot them with a gun and kill the tourist in the car.

Children in America will come up to a tourist on the street in a city in America with a gun. The American children will shoot and kill the tourist with a gun and take the tourist’s money and other valuables off the dead tourist.

People in America with a gun will walk up to a tourist in an automobile and shoot and kill the tourist and take the automobile and the other valuables form the dead tourist. When tourists are inside of a hotel or motel room in America, American people with guns will come to the door of the hotel or motel room. When the tourist opens the room door, the American person or persons with the guns will come into the hotel or motel room and shoot and kill the tourist in their hotel or motel room and take the money and other valuables from the dead tourist.

In America, it is very dangerous for a tourist to stop their automobile at a highway park because someone from America with a gun will come up to the tourist’s automobile and shoot and kill the tourist and take the money and the automobile and other valuables from the dead tourist. It is not safe for tourists to travel in America on their holiday.

****

Untitled
I sit down and write a letter to someone in a safe and civilized and free country.

Because I do not drink alchohol. I never did drink alchohol. I do not smoke cigarettes. I never smoked cigarettes.

I do not use drugs. I never did use drugs.

I do not take part in American sports.

I never did take part in sports.

The only thing I watch on television is the news.

I do not have a car. I never did have a car. I never did drive.

I never did date a girl or anyone else. I always stayed to myself.

I do not have a family, just myself.

I do not speak to people from America any more than I have to.
Because most people in America are predjudiced.
And they insult me.

I do not speak to men or boys in America. Because the only thing they talk about is the stupid American football or something else that is stupid.

I cannot see very good. And I cannot spell very good. I hope you can read my letter. I like to write my letters with no help.

In America, everyone does not have the opportunity to go to school.

I know I have some friends in safe and civilized and free countries.

Most of my friends are married couples.
I love all my friends in every safe and civilized and free country.
And I know that they love me.

I hope I will not be a citizen of America much longer.

****

There were about 12 sheets in all. They reveal that American doctors inject cancer into their patients, describe the new automobiles belonging to a Baptist preacher in Talahassee, praise Kim Jong Il—you get the picture. On one hopeful sheet, Roger had written:

I hope that I can renounce my American citizenship by 2004 (crossed out and handwritten: 2005) or sooner.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

2007-08-21T13:07:00.001-07:00

I’ve got to apologize for spending all summer AWOL from this blog. As of today, I’m turning over a new leaf: I’m going to post every day this upcoming week. There’s plenty to talk about. Since I last posted:

-- I went to Vienna to see my good pal Becky Yamamoto stahhhrrrring in Young Jean Lee’s absolutely brilliant play Song of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, followed by a night on the town: Korean food, Karaoke, and Currywurst. Sweet!

-- Rick and I visited Belgrade: Kalmedgan Fortress, the Tesla Museum, houseboat clubs, burek pastries (mmmm), a rock show (Pere Ubu) for poor rock-starved Rick…

-- In a moment of panic, signed a new lease until December 2007. Decided after the fact it was a good idea. Plans for the future: applying for MFA dramatic writing programs for next school year. Program suggestions? Anyone? Don’t say Brooklyn College because I already know about that.

-- Rick’s parents visited!

-- My mom and sister visited!

-- Spain with Mom and Bip.

-- France with Mom and Bip.

-- My mom (poor mom!) broke her leg here in France...

... while Bip and I were looking at this in Spain:

...chaos ensued. But she's getting better, don't worry...

-- My godfather Goheen and his friend Ljaquida visited. Awful heat made it necessary to repair to the waterslides on Margaret Island.

-- Horrendous Heatwave. Rick finally came swimming!

-- In about a month and a half, Rick and I penned books on NASCAR’s Most Victorious Cars, NASCAR’s Greatest Moments, Digital Sampling and Remixing, American Idol Taylor Hicks, Fingerprinting and Trace Analysis...I feel like I must be forgetting something. Oh yeah, opera articles. Poor Rick didn’t take a single day off for three months! Hot and overworked, I got majorly depressed. The one time I made contact with the outside world, I got in a horrible fight (completely my fault) with one of my most treasured friends. It is still keeping me up at night.

-- But somehow I did get some of my own writing done—detailed skeleton for an 8-episode podcast play series and plans for a site-specific NYC-Budapest theater collaboration with pals.

-- Played at a bluegrass festival in southern Hungary. My band is listed on the t-shirt, y’all!

-- A certain scientist who goes by the initials JGS came to visit. We brought a contingent of Americans—all from our old college, weirdly, although none of us were close back then—to Serbia.

-- In Serbia, we went to the Golden Brass Festival in Guca.

-- Back to Budapest just in time for St. Istvan’s Day. (Remember last year?) Against all odds, Hungary’s first Saint-King, still pissed about his handless corpse, deluged the city with yet another mighty storm! Even more incredibly, we realized we’ve officially been living here a year now. We have great Hungarian and expat friends, more work than we know what to do with (though still not enough money), and we can count to 100 in Hungarian. You can’t say fairer than that.

Harry Potter

2007-07-20T00:43:00.000-07:00

I’m not gonna lie, I’m just as excited as the next guy about the thrilling conclusion of Harry Potter. I am equally excited about Wizard People Dear Reader, by Brad Neely of Fort Smith, Arkansas (REPRESENT!) It’s a complete alternate soundtrack to the first Harry Potter movie—some of the strangest stoner humor this century. Behold:

He’s made an alternate soundtrack for the entire movie. The WHOLE thing! He’s also the creator of this three minutes of brilliance:

More on life, travels, and sweltering heat requiring me to soak in a vat of ice soon!

Vashty Cowboys and Indians

2007-05-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

Rick and I head to Serbia this weekend, so we'll be missing the Amerikai Rodeo.

Let me back up a minute, cause I've got a story about this.

Not long ago, Nate and I checked out City Park. The park's most famous sight is a fake castle: one of those 19th century protodisney deals slapped up for an exposition and left to permanently tickle the city's fancy. On our way to see the fake castle, we see some fake Cowboys.

They're cruising Andrassy like it's the strip between 7-11 and Taco Bell. What could possibly make this more bizarre? Oh yeah:

Monster trucks.

In the park, we run into The Fake Indians. Now, I don't have a picture of this, so you'll have to imagine. They wear war paint, fringed buckskin, huge feather headdresses, beaded necklaces, moccasins--everything but bows and arrows. They dance in a pow-pow-ish circle, war whooping. Their soundtrack? Ancient Cherokee Anthem "The Sound of Silence," played on pan pipes with a Mystical Synthesizer Backtrack. Why pan pipes? THEY'RE FREAKING PERUVIAN. Why Simon and Garfunkel? I can't help you with that. I mean, why Ace of Base? (Q: Do they play "All that She Wants?" A: Need You ask?)

I see the Ersatz Indians everywhere, ALL THE TIME. Their fake-o appropriation of another culture's stereotype makes me so mad I feel the need to either fight them or make a documentary about them.

While I was foaming at the mouth and pawing at the ground, Nate lightened the mood a bit:

"If they call themselves Indians, they should go fight those cowboys!!"

Now that I'd pay to see.

In Short

2007-04-27T00:27:00.000-07:00

Selected Recent Occurances:

1. Fellow Brooklynites and dear pals D & M moved to Budapest. They've been doing some wide-eyed blogging of their own at Curious Expeditions.

2. Taxes. PUKE.

3. In a strange twist of fate, I'm currently writing a kids' book called NASCAR's Greatest Moments. Between watching NASCAR highlights on youtube, drinking Hungarian moonshine, and listening to Dolly Parton on repeat, I'm teetering on the brink of redneckishnessdom. Rick says I'm practically hunting deer with a bow and arrow. By the way, the more you learn about NASCAR, the more you realize that Talladega Nights is eerily accurate.

4. Worrying about money, then getting more freelance work, then going out to fancy expensive pizza twice in one week, then remembering that we actually (oops) haven't been paid for books we haven't even started. One book is about Musical Sampling and Remixing (OK, fine.) The other is entitled...wait for it...American Idol Stories: Taylor Hicks! Aren't you jealous? Apparently he has a fan club nicknamed "the soul patrol."

5. Discovering a number of really cool and fun teahouses where you sit on the floor.

6. Writing an 8-episode series of (podcast) radio plays, to produced this summer (hopefully! cross your fingers please) by the ladies of Red Metal Mailbox. It's about Coney Island!

7. Feeling sad about missing so many important weddings and graduations back home this summer.

8. But at least it's Spring!

9. Eating ice cream every day we get warm weather. That's one Hungarian custom I can get behind.

10. Can't be bothered to blog, apparently.

Recent Notable Conversations:

1. D, on the last night's Besho Drom show:
"That electronic saxophone makes them sound like the alien band in Star Wars."

2. Rick, on the Hungarian rappers who opened for Besho Drom:
"It's weird to watch rap and not understand any lyrics. I kinda feel like I'm in Pootie Tang."

3. Me, during a four-hour political conversation:
"You really think he's the hidden hand behind everything that's happened in America for the last 40 years? You're telling me George H. W. Bush is the Suge Knight of American politics?"

Friday The 13th

2007-04-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

Tonight's the final hurrah of one of my favorite places on earth: Tonic. I interned at Tonic in the spring of 2000, during my second-to-last semester of college. I took one look at their January music schedule and realized (a) I absolutely had to go to every show they had that month and (b) I definitely could not afford to pay. The internship wasn't even close to a fair exchange: in return for entering mailing list names into an ancient computer, I saw upwards of 60 shows.

Oooh, Tonic. The memories ... John Zorn, all the Masada projects, Dave Douglas, Mark Feldman, Charlie Burnham, Jim Black, Joey Barron, Susie Ibarra, Mark Ribot, Ori Kaplan, Ben Perowsky, Sylvie Courvoisier, Hamid Drake, Peter Brotzmann, Ikue Mori, the Klezmatics, etc, etc, etc, and of course my beloved Millenial Territory Orchestra. Probably about 70 percent of the shows I've seen there have made me cry.

Why's Tonic closing? There's a fancy condo going up next door, owners are all mobbed up with the mayor. Higher rents, noise complaints, rinse and repeat. I'm sick of feeling sad about this sort of thing; its inevitability makes it even more disgusting.

My home base here, Síraly, narrowly escaped the bulldozer this week. Luckily at the 11th hour (actually at 1 am the morning the police were supposed to come knocking) they got a reprieve. They'll stay open at least until the middle of May.

Síraly's an interesting contrast to Tonic. It's smack dab in the middle of the old jewish district, the 7th, home of most of the city's hip young cafes and bars. Síraly is the kind of place that is still possible in Budapest, and unthinkable in today's Manhattan: three floors of bar-cafe-music venue-theater-movie screening room-community center-dance club-living room, on a very hip street, run by a collective of energetic young people. Oh--and it's a squat.

That's the problem, of course. When the founder of Síraly decided to build the place, he tried to buy the building, which had been standing empty for over a decade. But his efforts to do things the legal way were thwarted by complex local politics, graft and corruption. The full story has been explained to me, but was too complicated to repeat here (read: I couldn't even fully understand it). The bottom line was that Síraly's founders couldn't buy it, but no one else could buy or rent it either, so it was just going to continue to stand empty. So Síraly's organizers broke in, spent good money on renovations, gave the owner a copy of the new key. Presto-changeo: instant community, the sort of place where you always know someone, where you can book an impromptu gig for tommorow night with one phone call, where you can spend hours nursing an espresso without anyone giving you a hard time. Like Tonic, they get a lot of noise complaints. Here's hoping they don't pull down paradise and put up a condo.

Spring Flings

2007-04-10T04:53:00.001-07:00

Passover
For the last five years in New York, I had the honor of co-hosting the infamous Punk Rock Seder, AKA The Hardest Working Seder in Showbusiness, AKA The Congos Feast of the Passover. Together Garth and I cooked feasts for 35, adopted new Passover traditions, even synthesized our own haggadah. We’ve had guests end the night asleep in the bathtub in a half-inch of used Manischevitz-–now that's a party.

So it was hard for me to imagine how on earth I was going to find a seder that could compare. Would I understand the text? Would it be OK to laugh? Could I even find anyone I wanted to spend the holiday with? Thank god for Eszter, who invited us to the Síraly Seder at Adam’s house (and spent the whole night translating for us!) The scene was much like our Brooklyn seders: jews and non-jews together, too many cooks in the kitchen, lots of jokes and textual arguments and digressions. Síraly published a special Passover issue of their in-house zine, comparing four different haggadahs side by side, including a 1920s joke haggadah.

The 1920s joke haggadah, written by Jews to lampoon Hungarian anti-semites, out-Borated Borat. In this joke version, the plagues include luxury tax and having to buy a ticket to ride the metro. The joke version of Dayenu? “If God had taken us out of Galicia, but not brought us to Hungary, Dayenu! If God had brought us to Hungary, but not to Budapest, Dayenu! If he had brought us to Budapest, but not invented the stock market, Dayenu!...”

The zine also featured some modern humor, illustrating the story of the The Four Children as follows:

The Wise Child: Wise Child comic cover
The Wicked Child: Evil Clown
The Simple Child: George Bush
The Child Who Does Not Even Know How to Ask: Paris Hilton

Well, it turned out I could really understand a lot, even without Eszter’s narration. The songs were the same, even the melodies. The dishes, the order of the meal, comparing notes with my neighbor on our grandfathers’ seders—just like home. Even the littlest guest stealing the afikomen...

Easter
Easter Sunday was a beautiful beautiful spring day. Rick and I walked up Gellert hill.

I’ve heard a lot about this Hungarian Easter tradition where men spray women with water or perfume, and women give them a painted egg. I actually spotted a bunch of giggling kids with huge water bottles in our neighborhood, ringing doorbells and looking like anxious trick-or-treaters.

The night ended in our first party at the apartment of the famous Tom Popper. Tom knows and likes literally everyone in the city. He’s easygoing, sociable, friendly, interesting, in short, the perfect host. Before I met him I heard so much about “Tom Popper’s” that I actually assumed it was a bar.

I was at the party to participate in an American Roots jam with Bob Cohen and a visiting musician/writer friend. We started playing around 9 and didn’t look up until about 12:30. During that time the party had changed dramatically. The night started with a bunch of long-term expats eating ham and talking to eachothers’ children. By 1 am everyone was young and rambunctious and loud and trashed. People danced to our Bob Wills tunes. A bald guy sat listening to us stock-still for over four hours, then wordlessly keeled over onto Tom's bed. The cast of the BBC’s Robin Hood series (which apparently shoots in Budapest) showed up. We met Will Scarlett and Robin Hood himself. They had a curly-haired, big-bellied friend who we assumed was Friar Tuck, but he turned out to be just some dude. When Rick and I stumbled home at 2:45 am, a whole new group of people were just getting there. Happy Easter!

The Mother of All Táncházes

2007-04-04T02:28:00.000-07:00

The Táncház movement started in the 1970s, when young Hungarians began researching and reviving old music and dance forms. The name literally means "dance house," and refers to both the movement and a type of event: a long, sweaty folk dancing party with lots of live music and raw booze.

I really can’t pretend to know anything about Hungarian folkdancing. I'm just barely getting to know the difference between various regional styles, learning how to listen to the music. I still mentally divide the folk dances into four major categories: slappy, skippy, twirly, and circle. Embarassing when I talk to people who actually know what they're looking at. But the tiny bit I've heard about the actual origins of these dances is tantalizing: one dance has connections to old military recruitment traditions, another is a rough but perfectly preserved renaissance court dance, etc.

So, as part of my ongoing effort to feel around the edges of this movement, this Sunday I checked out the mother of all Táncházes: the National Táncház Festival, in Budapest's futuristic Papp László sports stadium. The dome is alive with the sound of music, from a giant dance floor:

To spontaneous jam sessions:

There’s a craft market selling bagpipes, leatherwork, instruments, cookies, clothes, boots ...

...and these shoes (I want them!)

A ton of veeerrry country Transylvanians were on hand to sell handmade embroidery and second hand clothes:

There were performances from kids who go to Táncház school...

...and kids learning to dance.

But the best part was watching some serious folk dancing. Here's some real pros rocking the hell out of a rowdy slappy dance:

And a mind-blowing twirly dance:

I get dizzy just watching it. Damn!

Fringe

2007-04-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

The Budapest Fringe, which took place this past weekend, has a misleading name. Unlike the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s not an alternative theater blowout. Unlike the New York Fringe, there’s no faux-edgy musicals desperately seeking a big producer. The Budapest Fringe is more like a smorgasboard of local theater, dance and music from semi-professional groups. It’s just one weekend, and most acts are 20–30 minutes long. It’s free, which is sweet. Even sweeter is the venue: the incredible “House of the Future.”

It's a complex of old factories converted into theaters, complete with cozy pubs, reflecting ponds, fountains and grassy knolls, plus a technology museum/exhibition space.

We saw a lot of performances:

-A bland klezmer group with an extremely short, very butch clarinet player who who looked like a white female Reverend Run. In the middle of the last song, she grabbed the mike and busted. I caught the words “klezmer” and “kosher."
- A really serious Hungarian folk/rock band that glared at the audience like we owed them money.
-A charming gyspy fusion band.

-A political satire about Hungary and Europe (which I couldn’t understand), stylistically identical to a French satire I once saw about France and Europe (and couldn’t understand).
-The mandatory dreadlocked hippies tossing around burning devil sticks at twilight.

-A good but too-brief set by Balkan brass outfit Adje Braco.
-Last but not least, experimental theater: “thirty-four separate scenes of metaphoric images connected by the fullness of human existence.” I’d describe it for you, but if you’re the type of person wants to hear about it, you’ve probably already seen it at other fringe festivals, by other groups, under other names.

That sounds like a lot on paper, but Rick and I still had time to get French fries, beer and ice cream, and sit around in the sun.

Budapest is a small town. We ran into about 6 different people we know over the course of the day: the ex-metalhead mandolin player from my bluegrass band, a couple Moroccan musicians I have cordial but awkward French conversations with, a Guatemalan filmmaker/poet with a Hungarian girlfriend who looks exactly like Maggie Gyllenhaal, and a couple of Extreme Circus School Dickheads from Schenectady. You know, jokes about exploding avocados and child molesting clowns --ugh, I’m over it.

Afterwards we peeked into the giant Mammut Shopping Center and discovered a bowling alley…with no music. I really wanted to play a game but Rick felt it was sacreligious to bowl without listening to “Fly Into the Danger Zone.” But I have faith I'll win him over.

Dream Empire

2007-03-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

Announcing Rick and Garth's brand new Dream Blog, Idle Brains!

They're publishing real dreams from readers, plus dream-related news and musings. Sneak a peek into others' sleep! Share your wildest dreams! Hooray, Idle Brains!

Street Theater

2007-03-26T05:08:00.001-07:00

Riot Day

2007-03-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve been dreading writing anything about National Day, March 15. Fellow bloggers: you know when you feel like you can’t write about anything because there’s something you should write about first, but don’t want to? That’s my problem.

Why? I guess I’m sick of thinking about worrying about all the Árpad flags on the street (you can read all about the significance of the flag on Dumneazu's great post). I’m grossed out by “protesters” who are clearly just skinheads who want to throw things for fun. I’m disoriented by being caught in the middle of demonstrations I can’t understand, surrounded by signs I can’t read, listening to chants of “vashty vashty vashty.” I’m just done, you know?

But bowing to popular demand, I set down for posterity my personal experiences on last Thursday, March 15, AKA Hungarian National Day. Make of it what you will.

11:00: National Museum.

Rick and I check out the official commemoration of the 1848 revolution at the National Museum. It appeared to be a little pageant—poetry readings, narration, music and folk dancing, people dressed as Hussars riding their horses up the steps of the museum. Rick and I found ourselves in the biggest clutch of Árpad flags I’ve seen yet; and I marveled at how normal the flags’ bearers look. People I pass every day. When government officials took the museum stage there was loud chanting, hissing. Some of it almost sounded like English: I could swear I heard “Less than a poor man” over and over. Angry hard faces, whistles. Unease and almost panic. Thinking about the resonances in Hungarian history; the 1848 revolution was crushed largely thanks to the Czar’s Russian forces; the far right associates the current Socialist government, many of whom started out in the Hungarian Communist party, with Russians; hence the right claims the 1865 revolution as their own.

1:00 Violence on the Streets!

The crowds have left, and there’s a children’s fair going on outside the National Museum. Kids are making Hussar hats for themselves and learning how to chop off an enemy head from horseback.

As we leave Melissa asks me, “Wait, they lost this revolution, right? This is a memory of a defeat?”

2:00 Marcius 15 Ter.

Apparently a couple hours before the mayor of Budapest got pelted with eggs, but Melissa, Rick and I enjoyed the crafts fair.

4:00 Fidesz Aftermath.

Melissa, Rick, Ryan and I wade through the crowds leaving the big Fidesz rally. It’s pretty claustrophobic. The crowd between the bridge and Astoria is thick and intimidating.

5:00-10:00 Síraly!

There’s a party going on at Síraly, a bastion of irony and critical remove from the wild nationalism outside. The top floor features a DJ and several art installations playing with the image of Petofi, the star hero of National Day.

Ryan does a magic show. The crowd is puzzled at first but as the Dreher and pálinka flow they get into it. Ryan communes with the spirit of Petofi. Ryan does an incredible act with grapefruit.

10:00 Saddle Up.

Eszter, who knows Melissa is a journalist, comes up apologetically: “I am sorry but I know you work for the radio…my mother has just called to tell me there are riots at the Octogon, and you probably want to go, but please I think you should stay here.” It’s time to go collect some audio.

Melissa uses her press pass to muscle past lines and lines and lines of riot cops. She has me play the role of her “interpreter” (ha ha) as we question police and other journalists, but this is such a joke that I start claiming the title “guide” instead. I admire her technique; the one press pass should only get her past the lines of cops, but she manages to claim me as a guide, Rick as a producer and Ryan as her husband.

However, we’ve missed the riots. On the deserted Andrassy we see the detritus of some sort of action: an overturned phone booth, a wooden scaffolding torn down and used as a barricade—but the people are long gone. Smell of tear gas still in the air.

10:45 Bajcsy-Zsilinszky útca.

Lines of riot cops face towards Astoria. Drama! Cops and protesters face off.

We pass a guy with blood on his face. This is the scariest part of the night.

We see small groups of protesters—about 15 or so Soccer Hooligan-looking drunk kids staring down lines and lines of riot cops, wondering whether to rush them or just run away now. The whole thing reminds me of capture the flag or paint ball or something; it doesn’t feel like anything is actually at stake.

11:00 Gyros.

We retire to the gyro shop and call it a night.

As Seen On TV

2007-03-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

I'll post more about the "riots" soon, but suffice it to say that we should have waited to catch them on video. Much more exciting with all the long, boring stretches of empty streets edited out. That one burning dumpster was dramatic, huh? Yeah, we were nowhere near it.

Small Victories

2007-03-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

So tommorow is the Hungarian Fourth of July, if you will; a gigantic celebration of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. Our street is festooned with flags, cafes are full, happy crowds are knocking off early from work, businessmen are wearing little red-white-and-green ribbons on their lapels. Riots may be involved tommorow; stay tuned.

I'm celebrating my own small victory: a recent marked improvement in my ability to communicate with the veggie lady. When we first got here I had to point at fruit and mime an amount. Now... (translated from the flawless Hungarian):

Tuesday

SARAH: When close?
VEGGIE LADY: Thursday?
SARAH: No, now day.
VEGGIE LADY: Half seven.
SARAH: Six hours and twenty...uh...thirty?
VEGGIE LADY: Yes.
SARAH: Close Thursday?
VEGGIE LADY: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Open VASHTY VASHTY.
SARAH: Uh...
VEGGIE LADY: VASHTY VASHTY.

Mental lightbulb flickers on.

SARAH: Wednesday. Open Wednesday.
VEGGIE LADY: Yes.
SARAH: 1 kilo tomatoes kindly. Soup!
VEGGIE LADY: (impressed)Tomato soup?
SARAH: Yes!
VEGGIE LADY: VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY. VASHTY VASHTY. One thousand fourteen forint.

Sarah pays.

SARAH: Thank you! Tommorow!
VEGGIE LADY: Tommorow!

Wednesday

VEGGIE LADY: (weighing Sarah's vegetables.) VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY soup VASHTYVASHTY?
SARAH: Yesterday soup good!!!
VEGGIE LADY: Good! Anything else?
SARAH: No.
VEGGIE LADY: VASHTYVASHTYVASHTYVASHTY four days VASHTY VASHTY? Four days?
SARAH: Hmmmm...no.
VEGGIE LADY: Good. OK.
SARAH: Thank you! I kiss your hand! Goodbye!

Doody Utca

2007-03-14T07:33:00.000-07:00

Back in January I was walking with Pablo along Kertész utca, talking philosophy, as one does with Pablo. Then I almost stepped in a turd.

Not just any turd. An enormous dollop of poo. Because I can't censor what comes out of my mouth, I screamed, “Look out for the dogshit!” Deep in thought, Pablo brushed it off continued talking about Hungarian attitudes towards outsiders. We continued walking.

SARAH: There’s another! There’s another! Holy god, what is this? Look, there’s more! Look, there’s EVEN MORE!!! OK, sorry, Pablo, you were saying...

PABLO: It is NOT a nation, it is a tribe. The Hungarians, they were nomads, and they—

SARAH: Dogshit!! More dogshit!!! Sorry.

PABLO: Sarah, are you alright? It’s not so funny.

SARAH: (trying to catch my breath) I’m sorry. It’s really incredible.

PABLO: ...They have come here, the Hungarians, no one knows where they come from. The right wing here, the Nazis, they—

SARAH: DOGSHIT! MORE DOGSHIT! Why???

The doody bonanza continued for the entire avenue-length of the block. There were turds in the spaces behind cars, climbing up walls, trails of little poops that brought Hansel and Gretel to mind.

I put the episode out of mind for a while. Then last week—a full two months later—Rick and I were walking down the SAME STREET, and there was STILL dog turds there. Or was it NEW poop?

Is this where wild dogs with dysentary go to die? Why is all the poo on one side of the street—the side with all the peep shows? Why were all the other pedestrians were walking on the other side of the street? Do they know something we don't? What is the secret of Doody utca?

Apparently I'm not the only one who's noticed this problem. Too bad you made the video in English, geniuses!

Gift From LA

2007-03-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

Do I really need to comment on this? That's love.

Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Hasids)

2007-03-09T04:48:00.000-08:00

When New York comes to Budapest, New York comes to Budapest.

I was already planning on meeting Mel and Ryan at the airport. As you can imagine, after hearing that Method Man and Redman were on their flight, I was hyped to see who would come off the plane. 20 minutes before the arrival of Delta Flight 98, JFK-Budapest, a small cluster of Hungarian Hip-Hoppers began to form: clearly the Wu Welcome Wagon. I waited breathlessly as tourists and Hungarian grannies and businessmen wandered off the plane.

Finally Redman burst through the baggage claim doors, thrust his wheely cart in front of him, hollered “What’s Up Budapest!!!” and gangster-leaned his way towards the ecstatic Wu Welcome Wagon. I waited for Method Man to emerge.

Little did I realize the best was yet to come: DOZENS AND DOZENS OF HASIDS wheeling two invalid rabbis in fur coats. The rabbis were so ancient that they looked a little like apple dolls, or slightly melted wax figures. Every once and a while the Hasidic flood was broken by a member of the Wu Entourage rocking expensive sweats and a massive wheely cart. It was like Duck Duck Goose: Hasid, Hasid, Wu! Hasid, Hasid, Hasid, Hasid, Hasid, Hasid, Hasid, Wu!

Mel and Ryan, as you can imagine, had a hilarious tale to tell. As their plane filled in New York, they realized the composition of their flight was as follows:
25 % Hungarian
25 % Tourist
25% Hasid
25 % Wu

Ever the gum-cracking girl reporter, Mel struck up a conversation with a couple young Hasids, who were on their way to a religious pilgrimage in Poland. She asked their views on the state of Israel and was told to listen to Sean Hannity. She also got her picture taken with Redman.

After deplaning (I love that verb) she tried to strike up a conversation with Method Man. He was distracted and withdrawn; he only grunted responses and wouldn’t meet her eye. He was compulsively shaking a jar, and she could hear something rattling around inside. Finally she ventured, “What’s in your jar?” He sighed with annoyance and opened his hand. Jelly beans.

PSA: The Wu

2007-03-08T16:04:00.000-08:00

Apparently my cherished friends Mel and Ryan, winging their way to Budapest as I type, are on the same plane with The Wu! ... (Well, at least with Method Man. Redman is on the plane too. I guess one out of KILLA BEES ain't bad.)

My New Baby

2007-03-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

It's mine! Mine, I tell you! WA HA HA HA HA! WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Signs of Spring

2007-03-06T23:33:00.000-08:00

Blue Sky: Check.
Blossoms on tree: Check.
Workmen Restoring Historic Building: Check.
Old Men on Bench: Check.

Yesterday's beautiful weather cheered my soul. And yet, as always, my sunny American enthusiasm collided with rock-solid Hungarian pessimism. A few minutes after taking this picture, we ran into our friendly landlady.

Sarah: Agnes! Look, what a gorgeous day!

Agnes: Yes, spring is almost here...blue sky, warm in the air... Only you know my soul is black, I am so heavy, because of my health, you know...

Sarah: At least the winter is over.

Agnes: Yes, but you know this was not winter. There was no winter this year. You know they keep it the records every year, how high the temperature, how low the temperature. They never a winter like this. They say that Hungary will be desert in 20 years. I see it on the National Geographic. In Europe it is only Belgium and Hungary that will be desert, because we have no mountains. Only I like it the warm so I not care. I like so much the hot, I want be hot all the time! No, I kidding. It so bad, you know, the future. I maybe am die first, but you will see it, your children will see it. We must make it the change but the people don't want to make the change, nobody change.

Sarah: Well at least Hungary seems like it's pretty good to the environment already. You have really good public transportation here. In America...

Agnes: Excuse me, but I not think so. Before, before the 1989, it was so good, the bus, the tram, everything work so good, so clean. It's important, the clean! And now every year worse than before.

Sarah: But still, compared to America...

Agnes: And every year they take it more money for the train. The tram get worse and worse, and they want more and more money. So expensive for the people here. Oh, it so bad. You pay it your heating bill? So much money.

Sarah: (slowly falling into a black pit of depression) Yes...we just paid it yesterday.

Agnes: This so much, this bill. All the price go higher. (laughs as if strangely delighted.)

Sarah: (attempting a joke) Well, I guess when Hungary is a desert I won't have to pay this heating bill.

Agnes: Excuse me, I sorry, but then it will be the air condition. And if Hungary desert this will be so high. Because in 20 years they will not have it the oil...

In the Maskmaker's Workshop

2007-03-06T01:31:00.000-08:00

On Carnival Monday, I interviewed maskmaker Englert Antal in his Mohács workshop. Since Antal only speaks Hungarian, his lovely director/actress/storyteller wife translated into French for him. I’m not even close to fluent in French, so I was amazed that I understood as much as I did.

Antal explained how at many points in history, the buso tradition almost died out. Sometimes it was outlawed by the church; sometimes other carnival activities like balls nearly wiped it out. But the greatest change in the Mohacs carnival, Antal claims, came with the invention of photography and film. “Organizers of films” started journeying to Mohacs to record the Carnival. The buso tradition flourished in the spotlight, but also transformed. The masks became more elaborate, more exotic. The town began to organize exclusively tourist-oriented events. Antal thinks that Mohacs is at the very beginning of a buso renaissance, as busos begin to rediscover the roots of their own carnival. Here’s are some excerpts from our (translated) conversation.

“Everyone is interested in making masks. It is something mystic, something out of the everyday. The work is easy, it’s not hard to learn. The hard thing is to truly understand this festival, why we keep it, why we hold it. It is not hard to make the mask, it is hard to understand the mask, the ideas behind the mask. In Mohacs you will find 17 or 18 different mask makers. They know the mask but they don’t understand the spirituality of the mask. You see these masks, they are not pretty. The mask is not supposed to be pretty, not supposed to be well-made, well-crafted. It is made to have power for the person that wears it.” […]

“Socialism didn’t change the buso tradition because it is a primitive tradition, it has no ideology. It said that men could change their normal personalities. And men always want to change into something else, men always have something they want to escape. The roots of the carnival never changed—it’s something very primitive, very human, the idea of transforming into something else. Other carnivals are about putting on fancy clothes and having a good time. In Mohacs, Carnival is something more—something older, more important.”

"We have two words in Hungarian that illustrate the difference. There’s álarc and maszk. An álarc is a normal mask. You could wear it as a disguise, or as a costume for the theater. It could be for a party, or a decoration for your house. Like the carnival masks from Venice. They are very well-made, and pretty, and original. You put them on to amuse yourself and other people. It is not religious. A maszk is something much more. An álarc changes the outside of the person who wears it; the maszk changes the inside. The purpose of the maszk is to transform the wearer into something else."

(Antal shows me a book of photographs of “primitive” masks, animal masks, cave paintings of men disguised as animals.) “We can say that the animal mask is the origin of the buso mask—like a totem. This is a very old religious idea, taking on an animal spirit, becoming a fusion of man and animal. Of course the question for us here is, why did the form of the mask change in Mohács, why did it become human? The clothes, the instruments stayed the same, but the form of the mask changed when the Sokacs came to this area. I have my theories about this, but no one knows for sure…”

“The mask has power—it gives you power—a power that is a little more than human. If I put on the mask, I have more power, I take the power of the mask into me. By the way, here is another difference between buso masks and other carnival masks. Every man in the world is different, and every buso mask is different. And the buso mask should be connected to the man who wears it, to share his features, share something of his spirit. That’s why I sculpt each mask individually, for a specific person—except of course those masks that are for tourists or museums or something. If I make a mask for a man here, I try to capture a small part of him. “

“The mask is always made of one piece of wood. It’s always a human, always a man. Traditionally the mask is always red, a variation of red. Why? Red symbolizes life—the color of blood. What do the Busos do? They bring the resurgence of life, the rebirth of spring. Red is the color of perpetual rebirth. There aren’t other mask colors—just black and white. You never see a green mask, or an orange mask.”

“The form of the eyes and the mouth are symbolic—it’s the form of the female sex. The horns are masculine. And here you have the duality in the buso—man and woman. The buso wears women’s stockings, men’s pants. This is very old symbolism, very deep, hardly anyone knows it anymore. The gap tooth in the busos’ smile? That’s practical, for drinking or smoking or spitting. You know a buso should never take off his mask.”

“The power in the mask, the transformation of the man in the mask—this is why the buso has always been a man. He is something like a shaman, or like a religious actor in the ancient Greek theater. The shaman is something in between the men and the gods, a link between these two worlds. The buso is something similar. And this is also why children, who cannot understand this, should not be busos. In the past, putting on the buso mask was a rite of passage—there is a moment in life where men put on the mask.”

“But this is not to say that women should not participate, that women have no role. All the traditions of man speak of life, of rebirth, the changes of nature. There isn’t a difference, there’s no difference between men and women in this way. Everyone must participate in renewing the world, in bringing the world back to life. For women the easiest way to participate is to change their sex, to put on men’s clothes... During carnival everyone can do anything they want. Women also can do anything. They don’t have to be a good wife—they can amuse themselves with another man. In the past, during carnival a woman did not have to cook for her husband, she can go where she wants, meet who she wants, spend time with who she wants, do what she wants—but only in a costume. And if she has a child that is not by her husband conceived during this time, no one can question her. “

“What is this tradition really about? For the Sokacs people, you have to understand, a small group, away from their homeland. During this time, you make babies. It doesn’t matter with who. Because what is carnival about after all, what is all this renewal, this fertility, what is life about—it’s about children, not just about spring, but also about life, human life, continuing and renewing. It’s about the continuation, the survival of this tiny group of people, because it’s a such a tiny group, a little minority, separate from other people, they could disappear so easily—and they had to continue their traditions, continue their existence. For them it was a question of survival, not a question of ethics. To survive the past. To fight through the winter. And this is important for all people. “

“In the past this was the question; it’s no longer the question today. But the mask contains its history, hidden inside, it carries its history. The men of today search for this secret, but they don’t know its roots.”

“The man in the mask makes contact with the world of the spirit, and brings it into our world, to renew life, to bring the world back to life. And our rules, our laws, they are only little, human laws. The spirit is too big for them. Life is bigger. So we forget rules during this time. The busos today feel that during these three days they are something more than they are in normal life—that there are no rules for them—this is the secret of the carnival’s survival. Men always have the same wish to live. That is why the carnival can never be forbidden, because the wish exists.”

Carnival Time: The Movie

2007-03-02T01:48:00.001-08:00

Carnival Time Part II: Do a Little Dance

2007-03-02T01:29:00.000-08:00

Post Prelude:
I love carnival. I love the idea of a time when all life’s normal rules are suspended: a vacation from order, from responsibility, from accountability, from moderation.

We spent this carnival in Mohács, Hungary, home of the Busojárás carnival. Busojárás originally came here with the Slavic Sokacs people, and has roots in ancient Slavic paganism. But unlike other Slavic carnivals, Busojárás does not feature animal masks. Here and only here the masks (“busos”) are humans with horns, wooly hair all over, and no self-control.

Do a Little Dance, Make a Little Love, Get Down Tonight
The busos are an embodiment of life-force, of spring, of fertility. So they’re given free reign to grab any girl—or guy, or buso—and hug them, grab them, try to kiss them, etc. You often see them come up on either side of some dishy girl and grind on her while their cow-bells clang. It sounds creepy but it’s totally charming; never aggressive, and always welcome. They steer clear of girls who look cranky, and aren’t above grabbing guys or grandmothers either.

Of course music and dance are part and parcel of the festival. Everyone dances the kolo, a Sokacs circle dance. These musicians—apparently Mohács’ most in-demand—were at every carnival event we went to.

The guy on the extreme right proposed to me after I managed to pick out the “super-duper” kolo on his guitar.

Once only Sokacs men could be Busos. That rule was forgotten long ago; today everyone in the city wants to be a Buso. There are tons of masked kids—to the dismay of those who take the buso tradition seriously and see it as a rite of passage for young men. I even saw a couple girls and one old woman suited up as Busos.

Other Troublemakers
Other girls have their own traditional costumes and their own masks—and almost as much freedom as Busos. One girl pointed her cane straight at Rick’s crotch and chased him!

Boys who would rather chase girls than kiss them have another costume; the jankele. Jankeles dress up in rags and chase men and women around the streets with flour-filled socks. Apparently this figure is based on a real person, a famously cranky Jewish leather merchant who lived in Mohács during the 19th century.

Carnival Time
On the big tourist day, Carnival Sunday, Busos parade from Kolo Square to the main square by the church. There’s the sinking of the Carnival coffin and a bonfire at night, where a strawman is burned on top of the giant bonfire. Busos and locals and tourists join hands to dance kolo in a circle around the fire.

By Carnival Monday, the tourists are long gone. We spent the morning with maskmaker Englebert Antal (more on him later) and the afternoon following a group of busos as they went door to door in Kolo Ter. Once, Busos used a plow a bit of a farmer’s field and bury a bit of cinder for a good crop. Then they headed to the stable and hit the farmer’s animals to “protect them from illness.” None of the houses in Kolo Ter have animals or fields anymore, but the door-to-door tradition was recently revived. At each house where they stopped, the busos were offered hot wine, palinka, homemade donuts, cookies and other sweets. The busos danced kolo.

Sometimes they plowed a little bit, sometimes they horsed around and destroyed the lawn furniture.

Carnival Tuesday is strictly for locals.

The whole town turns out—this time with 90% less tourists and 250% more booze. The busos show off for each other, not the cameras.

The guys from Boros Kolo had reached their apex of goodwill towards man. Here’s what happened when they played the old “try this garlic-chili pepper palinka” trick on Rick.

We wanted to stay for the final bonfire, the burning of the carnival coffin, the official end of winter—but our bus left just as the fire was lit. I slept exhausted as we drove the frozen backroads back to Budapest, dreaming of spring spreading silently over the dark fields.

Carnival Time Part I: The Buso Kit

2007-03-02T00:50:00.000-08:00

Post Prelude:
I love carnival. I love the idea of a time when all life’s normal rules are suspended: a vacation from order, from responsibility, from accountability, from moderation.

We spent this carnival in Mohács, Hungary, home of the Busojárás carnival. Busojárás originally came here with the Slavic Sokacs people, and has roots in ancient Slavic paganism. But unlike other Slavic carnivals, Busojárás does not feature animal masks. Here and only here the masks (“busos”) are humans with horns, wooly hair all over, and no self-control.

The Buso Checklist:

Mask. Of course the mask. Unlike other carnival masks, these are never mass-produced—each wooden Buso mask is different.

Our friend Tamasz's grandfather made these masks, which his crew Boros Kolo still uses. (Their group’s name is a pun on fave Hungarian drink “wine and cola,” using the word “kolo,” the official dance of carnival). This is him before “suiting up” for carnival, with the very first mask his grandfather made for him.

Many Mohács men still make their own masks. Although even many natives don’t realize it, every part of the mask—from the horns to the color to the shape of the eyes—is symbolic…but more about that later. Ideally, a Buso never takes off his mask.

Wine. Check. Our Boros Kolo friends told us that the government actually gives them free wine for the duration of carnival.

Cowbells and noisemakers. Used to a) announce the busos’ approach, b) ward off the evil spirits of winter and death, and c) raise the roof. The wooden Buso-Horn—for those who can actually sound it—sounds like a plastic football rally trumpet.

Women’s stockings under traditional Sokacs mens’ underwear. This local in-joke harkens back to the time when almost no one went masked. Centuries ago, before carnival was a tourist attraction, most Sokacs revelers crossdressed: the men dressed up as women and vice versa.

These womens’ stockings are a reminder of that tradition, which still survives among a few serious Mohács partiers.

Hay-stuffed trousers. Theoretically a buso should be totally anonymous, free to do whatever (and whoever) without fear of recognition. Stuffing hay down your pants keeps your wife from Where’s-Waldoing your legs.

Chilis and paprikas and other plant life. old pagan decorations, reminders of the return of life in the spring.

Pitchforks, paddles, cannons, maces and donuts. There’s an added layer to carnival in Mohács: remembrance of the Hungarian defeat at the Battle of Mohács (1526). This defeat opened the door to the Turkish invasion of Buda and Turkish domination of Central Hungary. Memories are long and bitter here; the battle is an essential part of the town’s identity. There’s a “pretty legend” that Busos scared the Turkish occupiers away from Mohács. One dark and stormy night (the story goes), local people hiding in the wilderness of Mohács Island donned terrifying masks, crossed the river in boats, and frightened the Turks away. To commemorate this victory, the Busos paddle across the Danube from Mohács Island every Carnival Sunday.

The donuts on the Busos’ horns are symbolic Turkish heads. Mmmm...symbolism...

The funny thing is that Mohács wasn’t settled until after the Turks were long gone. Many Mohács residents confessed to us that the legend probably wasn’t true. One drunk Buso told us the “real” Buso connection with Mohács Island: once upon a time—before anyone lived on the island, before dad’s car—young couples used to go there to get it on.

Still, the story of the Terrified Turks lives on. The Busos carry weapons to drive away the Turks—and by extension, winter, death and oppression.

The idea of Busos socking it to The Man survives in other ways, too. Here’s a poster of a buso beating up Hungarian PM Gyurcsany:

Staffs. Many people told us that these are just for decoration, but some staffs hint at a more universal symbolism (modest readers avert your eyes):

Water-Carrier. This is a yoke with hooks to hang water buckets from. In the old days, when the Busos used to go door to door bringing good luck to houses, they carried this with them. If a buso entered a house and handed the water-carrier to a young lady, it meant one of his masked brothers wanted to marry her.

Baby buso. When a buso carries a buso doll, it means he has a baby boy and is asking for the community’s blessing. It can also mean that the buso is married and hoping for a child. Our friend Árpád just became the proud father of his first child, a baby boy, three weeks ago:

Talented Caterpillars

2007-02-28T00:13:00.000-08:00

While we were in Croatia—lo these many days ago—we spent some time in a beautiful seaside park, the home of a monastery.

The scenery was gorgeous, but when we looked down we couldn't believe our eyes:

Fuck you, Andy Goldsworthy. This shit is for real!

Seriously, can anyone explain this? A caterpillar ballet, or perhaps a marching band? Sign of an imminent tsunami?

We continued speculating as we walked up the coast. We stumbled on a sort of miniature Croatian Coney Island, complete with murals…

…plus crusty old men drinking homemade pálinka…

...and washing their dishes in the ocean.

Yep, that was Rick in the first picture. They invited us. This must be where the caterpillars were heading!

Delay and Play

2007-02-25T05:56:00.000-08:00

Well everyone, I’ve got to apologize for the dearth of posts lately. The truth of the matter is, I am days away from completing the first draft of a full-length play with a certain genius named Sasha Cucciniello.

( Sasha & Self in Venice, 1999--water damaged)

We've been working on Con for about a year now. It’s a one-woman show about her con artist father, and about con in history, nature, culture, politics, and relationships. I’m learning so much working on it—about writing, about people, about life—and learning so much from Sasha.

So even though there are lots of stories to tell—the Story of the Adriatic Andy Goldsworthy Caterpillars! The Story of Carnival! The Story of the Maskmaker! Save Síraly! A Cousin in Budapest!—I can’t tell them right now. In a couple days I’ll start posting again regularly, promise.

Happy Mardi Gras

2007-02-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

Wherever you are...

Croatian Pizza Heaven

2007-02-16T04:37:00.000-08:00

I must pause to say a brief word about Croatian food. (Yes, I am biting Bob Cohen's style, but hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.)

New York native Rick misses one thing above all about America: Pizza. You see, pizza is a mystery to Hungarians. I’ve mentioned that certain locals put mustard and ketchup on pizza. And every week we get advertisements like this in our mailbox:

Mmm, pizza…with corn, broccoli, and PICKLES. Pickles.

Pickles.

Croatia to the rescue! Just across the Adriatic from Italy, Croatia’s coastal towns understand pizza. I was going to take a picture of our first decent pie in months, but I was so excited I forgot. The last slice was devoured seconds after this photograph was taken.

As for me, I’m a Californian. I can live without great pizza. I miss burritos. Sadly, there are no more Mexicans in Croatia than in Hungary. However, Split had some kick-ass sea food. Behold the fish market:

Here’s the dinner we ate a few blocks away.

Once again, the food was so good that I forgot to record it in all its glory. The table was covered in dishes. But I will note that a mulit-course seafood feast and a liter of wine (!!) set us back about US $10 each. Hallelujah.

Split, Croatia

2007-02-16T03:16:00.000-08:00

Nothing—Nothing!—makes me happier than discovering a tunnel in an ancient building and climbing in. After graduating high school I thought seriously about becoming an archeologist. Volunteering on an archeological dig in Belize, I dug up Mayan trash heaps, cleaned pot shards, and ate BBQ flavored Pringles: good times. Too bad the dig was a sort of Gross Grownup Adultery Summer Camp, where drunken pot-bellied archeologists blindfolded their young blonde colleague and sucked chocolate off her sweaty sandal toes as her “birthday present.” I was drinking my first glass of rum (with Fanta, shudder) and her look of horror and disgust nearly made me hurl. As Professor Graves would say: “that’s the Sympathetic Nervous System.”

My dreams of becoming an archeologist were shit-canned, but not my love for ruins. A few years back in Cappadocia, Rick watched me split my head open in an early Christian monastery. I stupidly ventured into a dark room on the second floor without a flashlight, and slipped trap-door style into a 10 foot hole. The glasses were broken, the forehead gashed. The boy nearly had a heart attack before bravely rescuing me. Still, earlier in the day we had visited an underground city and explored ancient cave tombs. On balance, it was one of the best days of my life.

So last weekend in Split, on Croatia’s Adriatic coast, I was walking on air. Ruins! Beaches! Winding Medieval Streets! Palm Trees! Good Pizza! What more do you WANT in life?

Split is incredible. The core of the city is the enormous palace of Roman Emperor Diocletian (245-312). Centuries later, when the coast was invaded by barbarians, the locals moved into the abandoned palace ruins. They never moved out. They built a medieval city inside: churches leaning against thick Roman walls, winding streets along the ancient palace hallways.

The mausoleum of Diocletian (a real “throw the Christians to the lions” kind of Emperor) was transformed into the town Cathedral, complete with Byzantine statues and Renaissance belltower. The Temple of Jupiter became the town baptistery.

A tip of the hat to Barmaljova for showing us how great it is to take video footage on your camera...I took this!

According to Rebecca West’s amazing Black Lamb Grey Falcon: “After the war [World War I] there was a movement to evacuate Split and restore the palace to its ancient magnificence by pulling down the houses that had been wedged in between its walls and columns; but surveyors very soon found out that if they went all Diocletian’s work would fall to the ground. The people that go so quickly and darkly about the streets have given the stone the help it gave them.”

And so Diocletian’s palace is in some ways one of the best preserved ruins of the Roman world. The little shops and hotels and apartments and churches and cafes of Split’s city center rest on the empty cellars of Diocletian’s home, where you can still trace the layout of the vast palace that was once stood above.

Split spilled out of the Palace walls, of course. A medieval and Renaissance town grew right outside the old stone gates.

In later years, other layers of city have grown like tree rings around the center. The town with ancient Rome at its center has an outside rim of huge Communist block housing. Just like you can read dry years and wet years, forest fires and earthquakes in the rings of a tree, in Split you can see history frozen in marble and stucco and concrete.

Hog heaven.

Cheaters Never Prosper

2007-02-15T23:43:00.000-08:00

Email exchange with my Hungarian bandmates, who don't read my blog: a cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to impress Hungarians by fronting like you understand their devil language.

Just when you thought you had an ace in the hole ...

----------------------------------------------------

Sarah Gancher
to szuteren
10:24 pm

I just got back from my first Hungarian lesson!

Hooray!!

-----------------------------------------------------

Reply Forward
Tölgyesi Péter
to szuteren
8:33 am

Great! Now please tell us what
"megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" means ;)

-----------------------------------------------------

Reply Forward
Sarah Gancher
to szuteren
8:40 am

Hmmm...that is very long...

I would guess "for your ability to not be sacrified"? or "for your
ability to not be desecrated"? Is this right? Just a guess...

---------------------------------------------------

Tölgyesi Péter
to szuteren
8:45 am

It has something like "acting as"... but I couldn't translate it... :)

---------------------------------------------------

Balazs Lengyak
to szuteren
8:49 am

> Great! Now please tell us what
> "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" means ;)

you must be kidding, bet even you can not tell what that means:)

---------------------------------------------------

Sarah Gancher
to szuteren
8:56 am

Horse Dick!

Lagniappe

2007-02-08T09:11:00.000-08:00

Lagniappe: New Orleans for "a little something extra thrown in on the side."

My fellow fiddler Laci showed this to me this week, and I couldn't resist sharing. James Brown (looking like a middle-aged female librarian...with soul) calls both young Michael J and Prince up to the stage. As wonderful as it is to watch the young MJ, pre-alien metamorphosis, Prince is the real star of the show. Does Prince ride up to the stage on the back of a large white Hell's Angel? He does. Does he flamboyantly toss a white glove to the audience, only to have it tossed back in his face? He does. Does he threaten the mic stand with a karate chop? You know what, words can't do it justice, just watch:

James Brown: Prince. Prince! It's not a real lamp po...oh, shit...don't forget your coat!

Twirly

2007-01-30T04:52:00.000-08:00

Folk dancing is huge in Budapest, especially among young people. Hungarians have some very beautiful whirly twirly couple dances and virtuousic (sometimes comical) male solo dances. These dances have fascinating histories--something I know I'll be blogging about later. But for the time being, here's some images and video from the Tanchaz (Dance House) we went to last week...

(Apologies for the sideways video...)

The Little Black Egg

2007-01-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

My brilliant boy Rick is always talking my ear off about music. His musical taste is wide and his appetite for musical anecdotes insatiable. Now you can share the joy. That's right, he's finally started a blog. Announcing...

The Little Black Egg

Go check it out! Hooray!

Szia, Masta Killa!

2007-01-27T02:14:00.000-08:00

The Magyar Ramone
Before leaving New York we spent about a month poring over Time Out Budapest. This excellent guidebook features a half-page article called “Meet the Magyars: Tommy Ramone,” revealing that Tommy Ramone is half-Hungarian. Rick, the universe’s hugest Ramones fan, was enchanted.

In a strange twist of fate, our last week in New York found my bluegrass band opening up for Tommy Ramone’s bluegrass project Uncle Monk. Tommy played mandolin, and his wife (?) played guitar. Disturbingly, Tommy Ramone’s wife looked and sounded exactly like Joey Ramone. They played original bluegrass songs about going through the mountains, or drinking moonshine, or whatever, that sounded exactly like Ramones songs. Same three chords, same “wanna wanna wanna” choruses, same catchy lyrics that you can kinda sing along to, but not really, because you can’t actually understand the words. If you can imagine the music then imagine it being played by Gandalf and a Ramones-themed garden gnome.

Rick brought his Time Out Budapest to the show and asked Tommy to sign. Tommy sort of grumblingly signed it, completely unimpressed with the weirdness of him being in this book. We were telling this story to Bob Cohen the other night. ”Did you know that Tommy Ramone is half-Hungarian? We read it in Time Out Budapest.” “Yeah,” Bob Cohen says, “I wrote that.”

In a lot of ways it’s a small city, and once upon a time there weren’t many Americans here. Those who arrived early met everyone, wrote everything, brushed by every passing star.

Nuthing to Fuck With
Expat American Sue is one of those ageless elegant women with white hair and zero wrinkles. She speaks gently and precisely, as if being in Budapest for so long (over a decade and a half) has given her a slight accent. She is many things: dance ethnographer, swing dance instructor, translator….

SUE: I was a translator for a rap group here a few years ago…Oh dear, I’m going to forget their name… It wasn’t just one guy, there were a lot of rappers. They had strange, strange names. Their group had some sort of Chinese name …
SARAH: Uh, could it be…WU TANG CLAN????
SUE: That sounds right... I remember one was named “Masta Killa”?
SARAH: Yes!!!
SUE: That’s them, then. I remember being in the lobby of the hotel and I had to call up to his room: “Hello, may I speak with…Masta Killa?” “That’s me” “I’m sorry Mr. Killa, but we’re going to be late to the venue …” The organizers asked me to show them around the city in this mini-van. I was pointing out the sights: “And this is the Opera…”

Despite the fact Rick and I were panting, eyes agog, mouths unhinged, standing puddles of our own drool like golden retrievers, Sue was reluctant to say more. Our questions about the Rza, the Gza, the Old Dirty Bza (RIP) were gently brushed aside.

File under More Reasons to Learn Hungarian, cross-reference: KILLA BEES!

Bright Sides

2007-01-22T13:33:00.000-08:00

So I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately from lovely people afraid I am suffering from “heimweh" (Goheen tells me this means homesickness.) But actually we’ve been having a lot of fun.

--My darling Barmaljovans debuted my first-ever original lyrics (to a gorgeous instrumental by Ljova) at Joe’s Pub! You can hear the version with Ljova’s intro to the song here and the intro-less version here. Also, check out the review of their show, and the photographic proof that Inna and Ljova have indeed run back to NYC.

Hungary’s loss is your gain. Check out Ljova's myspace page and go without fail to his next gig. You have not lived until you’ve seen Inna and Ljova live. Here's a youtube clip of the three of us jamming in the basement of Sirály.

--Before Barmaljova flew the coop, they threw a going-away party which climaxed in an incredible three-fiddle jam. Ljova wrecked shop on his viola, Inna radiated song, Yonathan laid down fluid accompaniment, and a cat named Zoltan Lantos melted his borrowed fiddle like it was a plastic sax and he was Charlie Parker. Last night we heard him play in a duo at Sirály, and once again he blew our minds with his sick fiddle skills. Zoltan spent 10 years in India studying Indian music, and you can really it in his music. His phrasing reminds me of my first really serious jazz violin teacher, David Balakrishnan of Turtle Island String Quartet. When I started with David I was so new to jazz that I associated his sound with bebop—but last night I finally realized “THAT’S the secret ingrediant in David B.'s sound...it's an Indian inflection!” David Balakrishnan and Zoltan share a clean, precise yet complex bowing style that I absolutely covet.

Zoltan has this incredible prototype Indian fiddle, with five strings and sympathetic strings (strings tuned to a certain pitch which are not played, but resonate in “sympathy” with regular strings when a true pitch is hit). The fiddle is actually Spanish, not Indian; it was created by a crazy wealthy hippie Spanish hobbyist obsessed with fusing western and eastern instruments. I meant to take a picture of Zoltan and his incredible fiddle but I forgot my camera. So I drew a picture for you.

--My quest to learn about Hungarian culture continues. This week I visited Budapest’s ethnographic museum (News Flash: Hungarian Nativity Play includes Devil Character. More at 11.) Rick and I also visited the amazing history museum with our young friend Peter. After staggering through 1000+ years of Magyar history we had a long post-museum roundtable covering Las Vegas, Tiki Bars, the Revolutions of 1848, Hungarian Literature, and American vs. Hungarian senses of humor. Peter found dead baby jokes funny, and agreed that blondes are stupid, but did not understand lightbulb jokes. In a moment of misguided optimism we made him watch Stephen Colbert’s address to the white house press corps. We averaged three minutes of explanation to one minute of joke. Peter gamely kept trying to understand and we gamely kept trying to explain the humor, but I felt like I was writing a masters’ thesis.

In other humor news, Rick, who has an even harder time with Hungarian than I do, made his first Hungarian pun. This is a big deal since the Hungarian love for punning rivals my Uncle Jimbo's. The Hungarian word for “Cheers” is “Egészégedre.” We were discussing West Coast hip-hop while wine shopping at the 24 hour deli, and Rick observed that if Dr. Dre came to Hungary, and you were drinking with him, you could slap his back and say “Egészege, …DRE!” I didn’t know whether to be encouraged or appalled. I decided on encouraged.

Last but not least, have you seen the Hungarian hip-hop cops? No? They still haven't been caught. My youtube account will still not let me post video, so click here. You're welcome.

Talk of the Nation

2007-01-19T07:45:00.000-08:00

Well boys and girls, I’m back. I’m sorry that I’ve been AWOL; I’ve been working through some issues (“homesickness”) and just haven’t felt like touching the blog.

Here’s my issue: I loved being in France. Besides the incredible beauty of Paris and the joy of seeing old friends, I have never been more grateful for my 12 years of French class. After months in Hungary, it was like a miracle: I could talk to strangers… They understood me…I could understand them! Like discovering a superpower. In Hungary I am just a mute asshole, but in France I am…Communication Girl!

So returning to Budapest was a bit of a let-down. Especially when, just a few nights later, a pimply Hungarian scooping popcorn at the movie theater cursed us out.

SARAH: (speaking timidly in wretched half-Hungarian) Jó Esztet. Large popcorn keret?
POPCORN SCOOPER: Fuck You!
SARAH: Uh…excuse me?
Awkward silence while Popcorn scooper scoops popcorn. Sarah turns, bewildered, to soda jerk girl.
SODA GIRL: I am sorry…it has been a long night.
SARAH: Do you know what that means?
SODA GIRL: Ha ha, I am sorry.

They weren’t that rude in PARIS! What the fuck? All of my perverse New Yorker pleasure in plotting revenge on strangers came rushing back. During the movie I forgot about the dueling magicians onscreen; I was imagining all the awesome caps I should have busted on him. Unfortunately the best revenge scenario involved cursing him out in Hungarian. By the next day I was in a full-fledged funk.

I have traveled a lot. Wherever I go, I always try to learn a little of the language, to learn a little of the music, to learn as much as I can of the history. When I was in Norway for two months (my longest previous stint in another country) I learned to speak and understand quite a bit of Norwegian, read Norwegian folktales, learned a little Norwegian fiddle. More importantly, I was living and working with a Norwegian group in a part of the country where there were no other Americans. But here, I feel cut off from Hungarian culture.

Why? I suppose because Rick and I saw ourselves originally fleeing New York, not necessarily moving to Hungary. We were just going somewhere where we’d have the time and space to write, away from the demands of super-absorbing overtime jobs, social obligations, the draining pace of the city. It didn’t help that our friend Ben, our original Budapest host and the generous facilitator of our move, lived in monkish isolation from the rest of the city, living and breathing his studies, sometimes barely even eating. In two years in Budapest he learned just a handful of Hungarian words and sometimes didn’t venture out of his apartment for months at a time. Hungarian culture was just not a part of his life. We admired his focus and concentration and wanted to emulate it. And then, everyone we met discouraged us from trying to learn Hungarian: “Listen, unless you’re planning on being here three years or more, don’t even bother.”

So somehow this January I woke up and realized: I don’t understand the first thing about Hungarian culture, it’s still a total mystery to me. I know the barest amount about Hungarian history. I don’t understand shit about the language. I know some good music venues, I have some favorite Hungarian musicians, but I don’t really understand how to listen to Hungarian music yet. I finally realized that the only way for me to stop being homesick—to make my living here more than just an exotic artistic retreat—is to learn the culture here. To learn to love it.

So I have broken out my long-neglected Hungarian language courses (two of them). I’ve decided to stop thinking of Hungarian as impossible and start thinking of it as bad ass: I’ve heard it called “the only language the Devil respects.” And I’ve started quizzing my Hungarian friends about their culture. Here’s some tidbits I’ve picked up so far:

1. Longest Word
When I asked Matyas to help me understand Hungarian culture, he immediately rattled off the two longest Hungarian words. They are so long that Eszter, who wrote them down for me, not only had to stop for breath in the middle of one, but actually had trouble remembering all the parts of the words.

--Megszentségtelenűthetetlenségeskedéseitekert *: “for your ability to not be able to be sacrificed or desecrated.”
--Elkáposztásithatetlanségokkodóseikbét*: “for your ability to not being able to be made cabbage.”

SARAH: Those are AMAZING words. I am appalled and fascinated.
ESZTER: But they are not real words. In Hungarian you can make words out of many parts. You can never use these words in real life.
RICK: What are you talking about? Of course you could.
ESZTER: Oh, come on. For your ability not being able to be made cabbage?
RICK: If you were being pursued by an evil witch-step mother, who had the ability to wave a magic wand and make people cabbages, then you somehow had the presence of mind to reflect her magical curse-ray back at her using a mirror, and you turned her into a cabbage instead? Then I could praise you for your elkáposz…elká…
ESZTER: Ha ha, yes.
RICK: Or let’s say that a nemesis of yours contrived to get you committed to an olden-timey insane asylum and a cadre of evil psychotherapists put you on the list to get a lobotomy, but you somehow managed to smuggle a handcuff key in the top of your denture plate, and you thereby unhandcuffed yourself, unstrapped yourself from the gurney they’re wheeling down the hallway with one flickering fluorescent light, and incapacitated them with the electro-convulsive therapy prod and escaped the asylum, pursued by dogs into the night, I would commend you on your eggamcsheggavashtyvashty.
ESZTER: Elkáposztásithatetlan…ségokkodóseikbét.
RICK: Elka-pos-tash-it…
ESZTER: Elkáposztásithatetlanségokkodóseikbét.
RICK: Elka…Elka…

2. Horse Crazy
Horses are really big in Hungarian culture—a reminder of the Hungarians’ mysterious nomadic origins. My Jewish grandma used to say “What am I, chopped liver?” Hungarians apparently have a saying that roughly translates to, “What do I get, horse dick?” The horse dick (Lófasz) of course means “nothing” or “jack shit.” It’s my new favorite word. Since I don’t speak Hungarian yet, I’m practicing using it in English. “What was your bluegrass band paid for that gig, Sarah?” “Horse dick.” “Is there anything in the fridge?” “Horse dick.” “What have you got planned for tonight?” “Horse dick.” See?

*Disclaimer: I would be astonished if these words were spelled correctly here.

Guest Blogger: Rick on Paris

2007-01-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

Well, well, well. Bon soir, Monsieurs et Mademoiselles! I hope that you are all looking good and feeling fine, and have been keeping to your New Year’s resolutions. I know I have.

“Qu’est que ce your New Year’s resolution, Rick?” Well, I’ll tell you. My New Year’s resolution was to be an unstoppable force of joy and mirth. It’s been working out well, thanks. This resolution was made while Sarah and I were trying to exterminate our holiday homesickness by decamping to Paris and experiencing its storied delights.

Accompanying Sarah and I on this amazing mission was our ever-delightful pal Jackie. She was great company, even after I accidentally dumped a glass of wine on her lap.

The storied delights:

• The Arc de Triomphe

Hey, it’s just like being at Grand Army Plaza, except I don't have 20 pounds of overdue library books I’m trying to return. I tried hard to feel a sense of triumph. But you know, I kept thinking about that song “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” by that guy Napoleon XIV. Man, that was a good song.

The Arc de Triomphe is surrounded by a three-lane traffic rotary, so you have to find you way through these underground walkways to get there. In a display of brazen assholery, a tourist dad made his tourist wife and tourist kids hold hands and ran through the traffic, prompting irate French commuters to honk their horns.

We rendezvoused with our pals Ruth and Morgan, who we hadn’t seen in a while. Then we all went to go look at the sewer.

• Paris Sewer

Did you know that you can pay to go see the sewers of Paris? Voulez vouz, mes amis , it’s all true! The Paris sewers have long been a tourist attraction, and French society ladies used to ride gondolas through rivers of French effluvia. I can’t imagine what crippling ennui would drive the idle class to seek out such a revolting diversion, but I ponied up a few Euros to check out this disgusting miasma of waste product myself, so I’m not one to judge.

There is a tour, in French, that is probably very informative. I don’t know French, so I can’t say. There are exhibits and little informational placards, all suspended from the ceiling by counter-weighted pulleys. Why? Because the floor of the museum is a metal grating a few scant feet above a raging torrent of sewage. Should there be a sudden rainstorm, or if everyone in the city flushes their toilets simultaneously, the exhibits can be raised out of the way of the swelling fecal tide. Museum patrons are left to fend for themselves.

There were displays of all these medieval-looking devices that work to clean the sewer when it’s clogged. According to the little information placards, the sewer is most commonly clogged by . . . “hybrid mixture.” That’s how it was described. Kind of an awkward phrase, I thought, but the placard made it out to be the nemesis of your average sewer worker. I checked out the French half of the informational placard to see what hybrid mixture translated to in French. The French word for it is batard.

Much like zeitgeist is an untranslatable German word meaning something along the lines of “the collective culture and spirit of the German people,” I assume batard is an untranslatable French word meaning “the collective fecal matter of the French people.”

Needless to say, the smell was so strong that my eyes were watering. In the space of thirty seconds, I was lucky enough to witness poop, a used condom, and a few q-tips float by. I stopped looking after that. I still sort of can’t believe that I paid to go down there.

• Catacombs

Stretching for several kilometers, the catacombs house millions of Parisian’s bones.

To get down there, you have to descend a circular staircase. The catacombs are really fucking far underground, so this takes a while. Then you get to an antechamber, with info about who is actually buried in the catacombs, and then you pass through this creepy doorway.

When I say there were a lot of bones, I mean there are a lot.

A seemingly endless amount, actually.

It took about two hours for us to walk through the whole thing. And that’s only the part open to tourists.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that many of Budablog’s faithful readers are fans of, or at least vaguely acquainted with, the contemporary art world. Most of you have probably been to museums, galleries, etc., where you have come across installation art. The most poplular kind of installation is the “get a lot of something and put it in a room” installation. The artist takes a bunch of telephones, shoes, crayons—anything—and puts it in a room. Voila! It’s an installation. An insta-llation, really.

Still, for better or worse, there’s something inherently interesting in multiplicity. I’m no Jean-Paul Art History, but I think Warhol was the first guy to make a point about this. You can’t help but think differently about a whole lot of things. Even if those things are human bones.

I don’t know what other people were thinking (except for a pair of bovine Floridianoids, who announced to anyone within earshot that they thought catacombs were “a real hoot.”), but after climbing all the stairs to get out of the place, and emerging into the light, I found the experience strangely elating. It was a new year, and me and everyone I loved was alive. That’s a good feeling. Onward into the year with joy and mirth and etc.

* The Dick Clark moment occurred at Sacre Coeur. We watched all these fireworks explode and made a great number of champagne toasts. None of us knew the words to Auld Lang Syne, but it didn’t matter. People were singing, laughing, drinking, crying, and throwing their arms around one another. The whole year should be like that.

City of Lite

2007-01-05T05:18:00.000-08:00

Friends, Colleagues, Members of the Society for the Study of Stuffed Wildlife,

Not long ago I presented my findings on the stuffed bear populations of Budapest and Vienna. I argued that stuffed wildlife can teach us much about a nation’s character and history. The smug, bouregois bears of Vienna:

contrast sharply with the traumatized soldier bears of Budapest:

On my recent scientific expedition to Paris I discovered stunning new proof of my theory. Gentlemen, I ask you, could a deer be more French?

This deer clearly belongs to a great nation of lovers, of courtesans, of fabled beauties. But beneath the deer’s allure lurks a mystery. How did it get so slim? Why is it so much lighter than the robust bears of Vienna and Budapest? Could Americans benefit from its diet secrets? I had to find out.

Gnetlemen, I set out to study this deer’s diet and discovered...a conspiracy. I will spare you the details, passing over the car chase, the race through the sewers, the leap off the Eiffel Tower, and my discovery of the true tomb of Mary Magdalene. At journey’s end, I finally understood the horrifying reason why French Women Don't Get Fat. The French government, obsessed with keeping its reputation for slimness, is destroying its pâtes, its chocolate croissants, and its tarte tatins, and replacing them with a brave new food… genetically engineered…guaranteed to scare citizens skinny … Le Diét Mùtânt Française!

Those that can't stop snacking are punished...

Devoured by their own picnic blankets! Not even the buildings are safe:

We can’t be sure, but I’d guess this maison had one crêpe too many. Gentleman, no one could deny that Paris is beautiful. But at what price?

See You in 2007

2006-12-28T23:10:00.000-08:00

Outside our window, Budapest has a sugar-coating of snow, the first to arrive all winter. In a few minutes we're off to Paris to spend New Year's Eve with some old friends (straight outta Chicago and Buenos Aires!) I'll take lots of pictures and write you in 2007. In the mean time, allow me to reccommend Bootsy Collins' masterwork "Christmas is 4 Ever." Seriously, folks. Made my December.

Winter Wonderland

2006-12-24T03:33:00.000-08:00

So we had a great (if budget) Hannukah:

And now we have a little Christmas tree, which came to us all the way from Los Angeles, courtesy one Melissa J.M.M.

Even the elevator looks a lot like Christmas:

The Christmas gift-giving activity begins early in Hungary, on St. Nicholas Day, December 6. (One of my bluegrass bandmates informed me that Santa comes to Hungary on December 6 so that he has time to get to America for Christmas Eve.) In Hungary, children put out their shoes for Mikulás (Santa) to fill. Mikulás travels with a good helper and a bad helper. If the child has been good, the good helper gives them sweets and toys. Bad children fall under the juristiction of the bad helper, who leaves a bundle of sticks (I'm assuming this is theoretically meant for bad seed smack-down purposes.) I'm told that because Hungarians believe that no one is all good or all bad, most children get both presents and...stick-bundles. But don't worry, the stick bundles are painted gold. Because, you know, it's Christmas.

I'm also told that instead of going to the mall to meet Santa Claus, like one does in America, Hungarian parents get an adult friend to call their home, talk to their child and give the child a detailed year-end report: "You did well in Math this year, but you've got to be nicer to your sister. And for God's sake, stop putting your cereal up your nose."

When in Rome, right? Rick and I put our shoes out for Mikulás on December 6. (I know, I know, it's not really a tradition for adults...but it seemed like so much fun...)

Another Hungarian tradition is not putting up your Christmas tree until the 24rth. The children are taken to a puppet show or something, and when they return they find a special decorated room with a beautiful tree. Looks like my neighbor is getting ready to do this:

I'm also told that Hungarians exchange their presents on Christmas Eve, at a big family dinner. The traditional Christmas Eve dinner is apparently fish. Check out the line at this usually deserted fish stand in the great market hall:

Rick and I have also been visiting Budapest's Christmas markets:

Where you can buy Hungarian folk arts and crafts:

Eat cookies:

Drink hot wine:

And sample tasty traditional street food:

This is kürtös (kürtöskalács?), delicious dough wrapped around an iron cylinder and then baked to crispy tender perfection, much like a pastry shwarma.

It's served with sugar or vanilla or cinnamon or walnut or cocount on the inside. YUM.

So hope you had a wonderful Hannukah, and have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, wherever you are. Kellemes Karácsonyt!

Jewdapest

2006-12-23T03:41:00.000-08:00

I remember my first conversation about religion. It was in my Berkeley preschool, as my friends and I punched holes in the walls with gender-neutral wooden toys and cheerfully defaced our childrens’ books about diversity. We all knew that there were Jewish kids and Christian kids. Kids who were half-and-half were the luckiest because they got to celebrate both Christmas and Hannukah, the three-year old equivalent of winning the lottery. I pitied my friends who only got one measly holiday.

My parents met at a meditation seminar. My goyish mom is really more Buddhist than anything else, and aside from a few Christmas Eve church services I really grew up Jewish. Bay Area Jewish. On the Camp Kee Tov bus we sang Hebrew camp songs, but also chanted “Me So Horny” and “War (huh) What is It Good For.” I studied Hebrew with a hairless, guitar-strumming reform rabbi who took me to services at the Berkeley Aquarian Minyan (“Now we’re going to sing the Tribal Sh’ma!”) and the East Bay Feminist Minyan (“And when G-d came down, she said…””).

When I moved to New York, where my religious activities included co-hosting the infamous Punk Rock Seder (AKA “The Hardest-Working Seder in Judaism.”) I searched for years for a synagogue that I really liked, and finally I settled on Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, New York’s Lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual conservative Jewish congregation. I started going there because they had free high holy days, and stayed because I loved the lesbian rabbi, who gave hard-nosed, practical, and inspiring talks. CBST had so many members that on Yom Kippur they had to hold services in the Javitz Convention Center, where during services you could look through the huge plate glass windows at the helicopters darting back and forth over the Hudson. I remember one invited Rosh Hashana speaker urging the congregation: “Perhaps you feel that you don’t have enough money to join CBST. I have some ideas for to help you save up and become a member. Guys, cut out a couple of your subscriptions to Maxim and Details. And ladies, on the second date, when you’re moving in together—don’t use a moving company, move yourselves.”

September: I go to the big synagogue on Dohany street for Yom Kippur. It’s a neo-Moorish building, with stained glass windows and a giant organ. The morning service is attended by a handful of older, conservative Hungarians. Whereas the gay New York Jews were really religious, crying and breast-thumping, the Dohany Hungarians talk incessantly, completely ignoring the prayers.

I notice five quiet college-age girls. In the sparse crowd of older Hungarians they stick out like a sore thumbs; they must be Americans, since the younger Hungarian Jews have apparently decided to sit this one out.

I break the Yom Kippur fast at Budapest’s only Mexican restaurant—where I see the five Jewish girls. They MUST be from California. Sure enough they‘re UC Berkeley students, originally from “So Cal,” on a semester abroad in Budapest. I realize that every Californian Jew in Budapest is probably breaking their fast at this restaurant.

Early November: I thought that I wouldn’t meet any Jews in Budapest, but I was wrong. Through fellow New Yorkers Inna and Ljova (Jewish musicians both), I meet Pablo, the Argentinian hurdy-gurdy player. He is an intelligent and passionate dude, who lights up like a lantern when he plays Brazilian music. And he only plays Brazilian music. Pablo is very clear about that.

He is also Jewish—everyone I’m meeting these days seems to be Jewish. But his Jewishness means something very different to him:

On Communication:
“I am Jewish, you are Jewish. If you speak English to me I can understand you better than someone who is not Jewish.”

On Anti-Semitism:
“I have faced this since before I can remember, and it will never change. When I was a little boy, they beat me, they tease me, they throw rocks at me. From the beginning, they saw me as different, and they will always see me as different. They wanted me to be an intellectual, a professor. This is all we are good for, to be a nice professor, an intelligent Jew. I do not accept this. I do not want to be an intellectual. I play music because it makes me feel like an animal.

“The possibility of integration does not exist, it is a myth. It is a disaster. It is not really possible. They hate us, and they will not stop hating us. Every 50 years or so they try to kill us all. I do not like Israel, I do not feel comfortable there, but it is the only thing standing between us and disaster. If they destroy Israel, then you and me and you will have to get guns.

“There is anti-Semitism everywhere. They tell me that in America it is different. You say this and so I must believe you, but I cannot accept it. It must be the same there as everywhere.”

On Language
“I grew up speaking Spanish, I do not speak Yiddish, I understand Hebrew but it is not my first language. I have no language. This Spanish is the language of my oppressors, it is not my language. I have no language, and so how can I write?”

I meet Bob—fiddler, New York native, Budapest institution, walking encyclopedia of folk styles. Pablo grills him: is he Jewish, is he religious, why does he wear a kippah, and so on.

Pablo: Do you see much anti-Semitism in Hungary?
Bob: Look, I’m from New York, I don’t give a shit. If someone starts shit with me I’ll kick their ass, I don’t care. I’m a New York Jew. They know not to mess with me.

Mid-November: Inna and Ljova introduce me to a new bar: Siraly, which they describe to me as “You know, Jewy.” This may be my new favorite word. The clarinet player from their gypsy band is in town, and they want to have a klezmer jam at Siraly. There seem to be two non-Jews in attendance. One is the saxophone player from Hungarian gypsy-jazz band Besho Drom. He turns out to be Jewish. There’s also a well-mannered blonde filmmaker from New York named Gregory Stewart Edwards. You guessed it, also Jewish.

I realize that I’ve never really played klezmer. Some of the melodies come, but from so far back in my brain that I don’t know how I know them. Later, at bluegrass practice, I talk to a bandmate:

Sarah: I’m a Jew who knows bluegrass but no klezmer. Is that weird?
Bandmate: No, Matyas [our mandolin player] is the same. He is Jewish and he plays only bluegrass.
Sarah: Matyas is Jewish?

Late November: I meet a music teacher from an orthodox Jewish school in Budapest. She’s very nice but in passing she refers to reform Jews as “not real Jews.” She ridicules John Zorn for wearing tsitsit but no kippah. I venture that maybe this is his way of sticking it to the man. She doesn’t laugh.

December: Why is everyone here Jewish? Didn’t I just come here from the most Jewish city on earth? I ask Pablo why he thinks that I have been meeting so many Jewish musicans. He tells me: “Of course, Sarah, you’ve returned to the scene of the crime.”

Everyone I meet says that Hungarian Jews are very removed from their traditions, integrated, with no real connection to their Jewishness. But all of the Jews I’ve met (granted most are not actual Hungarians) seem so much MORE Jewish than me. They speak Hebrew, they speak Yiddish, they play klezmer, they keep kosher, they move to Israel and back. I never used to doubt my own Jewishness. Now for the first time I feel how far away from my own tradition that I am.

I am preparing for a Hannukah concert, playing Hannukah songs, niggunim (wordless songs) and Arabic songs with an Israeli hippy named Yonathan. He is a lovable young ragamuffin, but going through a serious quarter-life crisis. He spent some years bumming around the Mediterranean without a care in the world and without a sheckel in his pocket—doing the real hippy nomad Uncle Carl thing. Recently it occurred to him that he ought to devote his life to something. He has a lot of anxiety about this, and every time I see him he announces a new major life decision. He will only play bass, and not violin or guitar. He is giving up music. He will get a degree in computer science. He will become a professional musician. He is perpetually lovestruck and flits hither and thither through the bars of Budapest, charming the pants off hapless Hungarian chicks and then wandering off in a fog of big questions and existential angst.

Pablo: He is charismatic, you know? He is Israeli. They are not like us. They are…pushy.
Yonathan: (suddenly materializing) Sarah! Can I borrow your violin?
Pablo: He has chutzpah. Not like you. (points to Rick.)
Rick: Me?
Pablo: You have no chutzpah. It’s OK! This is the way you are. I have none either. We are chutzpah-less.
Yonathan: Sarah! Let me borrow your violin.
Sarah: Sorry.
Yonathan: (leaves, dejected, then suddenly returns) I just want to hear someone play the violin with these people downstairs.
Sarah: Yonathan, I just don’t lend out my violin.
Yonathan: Then you go downstairs and play.
Pablo: You see?
Yonathan: See what? What?
Pablo: You are charismatic.
Yonathan beams, does a handstand.
Yonathan: (upside down) Hello! (coming back up) Really, give me your violin.

The rehearsal process with Yonathan is hard for me. The forms are different, not American, and while some of these songs are easy to pick up others are so unfamiliar. It’s hard to get used to the idea that the melody is not to be tampered with. Yonathan criticizes my inability to pick up the melodies as quickly and accurately as he does. Of course he’s right, I don’t know this music, but it makes me feel deeply, inordinately ashamed, like somehow I’m being exposed as not a real Jew.

Rick has become the token goy. At Siraly one night, over kosher palinka (I thought all palinka was kosher, but I was wrong) someone asks him in all seriousness: “Isn’t the fish a Christian symbol?” Rick, bewildered, says something about bumper stickers.

It makes me miss California. It even makes me miss the Tribal Sh’ma.

Tubing

2006-12-23T01:05:00.000-08:00

So to add to my technological woes (RIP ipod: your memory lives on!) I have been unable to post youtube videos to my blog. This is seriously annoying because there are two amazing videos you must see. Would you mind following links to see them?

The Good:
Viorica in Clejani
I've been trying to post this for at least a month. My friend Ljova recently helped score a big Hollywood movie in Romania. Before returning to Budapest, he went with the film's director and composer to Clejani, the home village of world-famous gypsy band Taraf des Haidouks. (If you don't know Taraf, you should. When I was working as propsmaster for Big Apple Circus I used to listen to their album over and over while we "made the jump" from race track parking lot to race track parking lot.) Ljova took this video during an all-night jam with the guys from Taraf (my dream of dreams!) The singer is one of Romania's most famous gypsy performers, and for good reason. Daaaaamn!

The Amazingly, Amazingly Bad:
Speak the Hungarian Rapper
We've had occasion to speak before about Hungarian rap. This out-craps the crappiest. It's as if Puff Daddy mated with a cyborg and produced a retarded son. Enjoy!

Resurrection

2006-12-14T05:55:00.000-08:00

Rick may not be able to walk on water or cure leprosy, but he brought my ipod back from the dead. I tried everything on the apple support website, called Apple in Cuperinto or wherever the hell they are, brought it to the Budapest apple store--nope, sorry, see ya. Everyone told me it was a lost cause. But through my faith in Rick, I have my ipod again.

He told me to put it in the freezer for two hours.

That's right. I froze my ipod and now it's as good as new. I can't pretend I understand, but I'm not arguing. A good miracle is hard to find.

Expat Tourette's

2006-12-10T10:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Rick and I trekked out to the one movie theater playing Casino Royale in English. It was a sold out show and EVERYONE in the theater spoke English—it was so strange to eavesdrop on multiple conversations. These weren’t tourists—tourists weren’t wasting their Saturday in Budapest going to see Casino Royale. There were English-speaking teenagers, kids, old people, businessmen, and students. It was exciting to feel like an unwitting part of one of the city’s subcultures.

During the movie I made a shocking discovery: I have developed Expatriate Tourette’s Syndrome. Now Rick knows I’m an idiot, so it doesn’t matter what I say around him. But in English-speaking countries I usually try not to subject innocent bystanders to my idiocy. I don’t say everything I think in public; I keep the stupider shit under my hat. In Budapest, however, I’ve gotten into the habit of talking with my mental filter off. What comes out is plain embarrassing.

Sarah: (commenting in a half-whisper on a Bond villain who keeps jumping off things, like in the video for “Jump”) Who is that guy? Madonna?
Rick: (whispering): Sssh!
Sarah: What? Chill out.
Rick: People can understand you!
Sarah: Oh, right.

Five minutes later:

Sarah: Yeaaaah, Montenegro. Lookin' good. Work it!
Rick: Shhhhh!
Sarah: Shit! Sorry.

Later

Sarah: (remarking on another Bond character) That guy is fat.
Rick: Sarah!
Sarah: Dammit!

The capper came when we were leaving the movie theater. It was raining now, and we hadn’t brought an umbrella. Luckily I had worn a hooded sweatshirt:

Sarah: It’s all good in the hood!
(short pause)
Sarah: Oh—uh—I mean…
Rick (laughs)
Sarah: I mean…Good Thing I Wore a Hood.

And God said "BOUNCE!"

2006-12-05T08:10:00.000-08:00

I don’t know much about Mormons. Do you? We know they wear special underwear, and we’re fascinated. We know their temples look like Disneyland rides. We know they have an angel named Moroney, which sounds like a type of enriched pasta for retards. (Sorry, Mormons. It’s just true.)

In high school I had a pal who grew up in Utah. She told me two more fun Mormon facts: 1) if you’re really broke, they’ll bring you groceries, and 2) they all have trampolines. “All of them?” I wondered. “All of them. All of them!” “But why?” “No one knows.”

A year or two later my high school took me to Belize. As a friendly, tropical, English-speaking country, Belize is crawling with Mormon missionaries. In Orange Walk, we stayed in a little budget hotel where the only other guests were two middle-aged Americans. And you know, I was in high school, so I was kind of a rude little punk. We started talking:

Sarah: Where are you guys from?
Lady: Utah.
Sarah: Oh! Are you Mormon?
Lady: Yes, yes we are.
Sarah: Really? Do you have a trampoline?
Lady: (clearly annoyed) Well we don’t just have a trampoline. We have go carts, snowmobiles, jet skis, sleds, skis, snow tubes, mountain bikes, we have soccer goals, we have a parachute, we have billiards, paintball, foozeball, snorkels …
Lady’s Husband: Handball.
Lady: Handball…
Sarah: (fascinated) But you do have a trampoline?
Lady: (defensively) Well…yes.

I’m not gonna lie, I thought it was pretty funny. Now this all happened before my family had internet. I told Inna this story a few days ago, and she had the good sense to google “Mormons and Trampolines” (duh, I can’t believe I never thought of that.) It’s an actual thing, mormons and trampolines, it’s a stereotype. There are jokes about it on the internet. Holy Moroney! I’ll be damned.

Lost in Translation (Part II): The Hungarian Chuck Norrisz

2006-12-04T01:25:00.000-08:00

We never had TV in New York, just a lot of DVDs. Here we watch TV in very small doses. There are two English channels, CNN and BBC News. After five minutes they get depressing or start talking stocks. After 9 pm, Turner Classic Movies shows WW II movies and Westerns. The rest is Hungarian. Mind you, there’s not much original Hungarian television, except:

--20 Hungarian News and Politics channels, handy in a riot
--A Hungarian “Newlyweds” reality knockoff (Most Boring Ever)
--A sketch comedy show starring 5 wacky transvestites
-- Hungarian music television. Features touchingly wholesome hip-hop videos. Hungarian rap videos are still about putting on some big pants, shaking some ass, and smiling for the people. Hungarian rappers have not yet started to dress in Gucci and lounge around rented Frank Lloyd Wright houses, rap in a haute couture fashion show, drive a steam roller around Toyko, or rap in a space ship.

The rest of Hungarian TV comes from Spain or France or Germany or America, and is either nonverbal (opera, sports, Canadian Candid Camera) or dubbed into Hungarian. Oh My God, you guys. There is SO MUCH television dubbed into Hungarian. Hungarian Simpsons, Hungarian I Love the 80’s, Hungarian Sex and the City, Hungarian Oh Brother Where Art Thou, Hungarian Alien vs. Predator! And shows I’ve never seen before, including:

--A soft-core porn show about topless girls running around a rent-a-mansion. It’s shown on prime-time TV. We call it “Sluthouse.”
--There’s also “Sluthouse: Bloopers!” (Its actual name is “Naked and Funny.”) Guys, imagine you went to the doctor’s office, and she asked you to undress, and when you turned around the doctor was a naked lady! What capers!
--“Sluthouse: The Obstacle Course!” which I’m not going to bother to explain.

The point I’m making here is that the Hungarian dubbing industry has got to be huge. I mean, gigantic. They dub EVERYTHING, and their dubbing is GOOD. People speak for the right amount of time, they interrupt eachother at the right moments, there’s no disconnect between image and sound. At times I’ve caught myself thinking “Wow, Sigourney Weaver is Hungarian! I didn’t kn—…oh.” Or even, “Morgan FREEMAN is Hungarian?”

The other night we were at the bar with a 21-year-old Hungarian pal, Peter, and dubbing came up.

OUR ACTUAL CONVERSATION WITH PETER

Sarah: Hungarian dubbing is amazing! If I was Hungarian I would become a voice-over artist.
Peter: Yes, but it is not so easy, you know? Every actor he has only one man who says his voice on the television.
Sarah: Wait, what? Explain.
Peter: For example, who is this man, he is in the car, it talks, and it is so fast, so loud.
Rick: Night Rider?
Peter: Yes, and the man he drive it The Night Rider?
Rick: David Hasselhoff?
Peter: Yes! Yes! He is to have only one man, only one Hungarian actor who is to say his things. If another voice say it, the people they do not accept. They say “What is this? This is not sound like The Night Rider!” Because he is the voice of this David Hasselhoff, this Hungarian actor, one man, only one man. And if David Hasselhoff is in another show, like this show where they are always run, so slow, so slow?
Rick: Baywatch?
Peter: Yes! Yes! This voice is same voice, same man, Hungarian man, from The Night Rider.
Sarah: So every American actor has their own Hungarian voice doppelganger?
Peter: I don’t know this word.
Sarah: When someone looks just like someone else? Like a double? Like a twin?
Peter: I am very drunk.
Sarah: Like I look the same as you? We look the same? We sound the same?
Peter: Oh, I see what you are say. Not all actors, but say Robert…DeNiro. Or Keanu Reeves.
Rick: (trying to speak simply for Peter, who is very drunk) In America, David Hasselhoff, he is like joke.
Peter: Yes! Yes!
Rick: But like, joke of country. National Joke.
Peter: Also in Hungary. But here, in Hungary, we have special kind of joke, we say always about one actor…it is very funny…always one man, so many jokes…this actor...do you know Walker Ranger in Texas?
Sarah: Walker Texas Ranger?
Peter: Yes! Yes!
Rick: You mean Chuck Norris?
Peter: Chuck Norris! We make it the joke about Chuck Norris, all the time, so many jokes about this Chuck Norris, in Hungary. I don’t know why it is this man, this Chuck Norris, but his eyes are like suns, and his fists are like the bomb, and so many things. Everything! He do it everything this Chuck Norris. He like God. Chuck Norris like the Jesus!
Sarah: Tell us a Chuck Norris joke!
Peter: I don’t know in English, but, you know you count to one million, count it beyond, count it beyond, count it beyond, so many times? You cannot stop the numbers they go they go?
Sarah: Infinity?
Peter: Yes! Yes! Chuck Norris, he count it to Infinity three times.

At this point Peter started to explain there was a government contest to name a new Budapest bridge, and they asked people to vote on the internet for someone to name the new bridge after. The most popular choices were Chuck Norris and Eric Cartman (from South Park). Then Stephen Colbert got involved and won. I can’t believe I never heard about this. I’ll try to find out more and post it for you. Chuck Norris: spanning Buda and Pest.

Lost in Translation (Part I)

2006-12-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

You guys, I’m sorry I’ve been a crappy blogger lately. To tell the truth it hasn’t just been laziness. My birthday came, and then Thanksgiving, now the holidays are staring us right in the face. I’m feeling emotional. Realizing we don’t know when we’re coming home.

I’m finally starting to feel at home here. I know where to get my milk and bread, I can give directions to Japanese tourists. I see familiar faces in restaurants. But now that the newness is gone I start to feel how far from home I am; how lonely, how American. My friend Ruth, spending this year in Buenos Aires with her new husband, echoes my feelings exactly: a little pride, a lot of homesickness. A petty comfort that points to the deep discomfort beneath. One minute I’m so in love with Budapest’s grace and beauty, so grateful to be here. The next I’m reduced to tears by an NYC trivia quiz on internet radio. What a mess.

On Thanksgiving we cooked, we cleaned, we had Inna over for chicken (no turkey) and biscuits and potatoes. I even managed to scare up some yuppie salad—mixed greens with feta and baby tomatoes and roasted walnuts and even some dried cranberries. (As a California girl, the salad was what made it feel like home.) It was a great meal, a great conversation. But of course, it wasn’t really Thanksgiving. No crowds at the supermarket—just a couple fellow Americans looking for hard-to-find stuffing and yams at the Chinese-run Aszia Szupermarkt. No Black Friday stories about people mobbing shopping malls. No movies opening Thanksgiving weekend. No family, no friends home from far away.

Of course it takes years to fully know a city, to build a life there, to understand its mindset. I know that. Lately I’m thinking a lot about how Budapest’s surface similarities to New York—to any other big city—mask real cultural differences, a completely different, completely Hungarian way of thinking and living.

Sunday was my debut at the Acoustic Club my bluegrass band holds once a month in an old warehouse/bar/theater/movie palace/cultural center near my apartment. Three bands including mine played; bluegrass, country, and blues. I was most certainly the only American there (besides Rick). It was so bizarre to see all these Hungarians “szuper” excited about “Sweet Home Chicago.” There was something so jarring about it. It’s not that they’re not fine musicians—they’re really good. It’s more that they play with a Hungarian accent. The phrases are too long, or not syncopated enough, or not executed with the right attitude. Technically correct, but culturally wrong.

It made me think about all the “Balkan” or “gypsy” bands I loved in New York—Zlatne Uste or Slavic Soul Party—full of very great and very earnest American jazz musicians. If I was an Eastern European at those shows, would I feel the same way? “Who ARE you people? What the hell is going on here?” I talked this over with guitar player Tamasz, one of my Hungarian bluegrass buddies. He told me about one American band determined to learn Real, Authentic Hungarian folk music. They had a recording of some tiny Transylvanian village band, and they worshipped this recording and learned it note for note. Finally they made a pilgrimage to the village, found the son of the band leader. “We’ve learned straight from your father’s recording, we haven’t changed anything,” they told him, and proudly their whole repetoire for him. “Oh yes,” the son remembered, “my father was so drunk that day, he was out of tune, it sounded awful...” The American band had spent years perfectly learning a drunk and incorrect version of the tune. Moreover, they loved it.

Of course. Music belongs to a time and a place and to people, it belongs to a way of life. Taken outside of that world, its meaning changes. Learning to play a certain style is learning a new way of thinking. Translating yourself into that language, imagining yourself in that world and that world in you.

Mozart means something different in New York in 2006 than it did in Mozart’s Vienna. The same applies for blues in Budapest. The music is translated as it moves; and it takes on a new meaning in the translation. I wish I really knew what the blues mean here.

Coming soon, Lost in Translation II: “Do you have jokes about Chuck Norris in America?”

Rock the Boat

2006-11-19T01:39:00.000-08:00

In Summer 2005, Rick and I went to the Guca Golden Brass Festival in Serbia. This is the summer we fell in love with Budapest, the summer we decided to flee the States, the summer we permanently damaged our digestive systems with homemade liquor and pork.

In Belgrade, our Serbian friend Sasha bought us an album by a Romanian gypsy brass band called Fanfare Ciocarlia. At the festival, everyone was talking about Fanfare Ciocarlia. On the long drive back from Guca, our ride (Belgrade’s best classical trumpet player) was rocking out to Fanfare Ciocarlia.

We were hooked. This Thursday Rick and I got to see them live in a nightclub on a boat on the Danube. It was one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen. I captured some of it on my wee camera:

Fanfare Ciocarlia at A38 Ship, Budapest (1)

Fanfare Ciocarlia at A38 Ship, Budapest (2)

Fanfare Ciocarlia at A38 Ship, Budapest (3)

At one point, we were jumping up and down so violently that my camera flew out of my pocket and got lost among the trampled beer cups. I didn’t bother to look for it until after the set. So I didn’t get to record the band’s third encore, when they took their instruments down into the center of the crowd, wedding-style. Ecstatic sweaty dancers fought their way up to the band and stuffed bills between the keys of their trumpets, slapped bills on the players’ sweaty foreheads, threw bills like confetti into the air, not caring where they landed. Everyone was singing, the foreigners in the crowd looking around bewildered and delighted, the real hard core fans bellowing at the top of their lungs. I wish I could have recorded that for you.

P.S.

2006-11-15T15:59:00.000-08:00

The lovely Miss Inna of Barmaljova fame recently blogged about our amazing Jam Session last Saturday. Check it out (you can click on the pictures to see more of her budapest images.) I can't say enough good things about the folks who played...at the end of the night I was thoroughly humbled and very happy. If you get a chance to see any of them play in New York, grab it.

The Gringo Channel

2006-11-15T04:57:00.000-08:00

Someday I really will learn Hungarian. In the mean time, ignorance is sometimes bliss.

Vintage Hungarian Sausage Commercial

This sausage makes you strip to your skivvies and sing like the chipmunks… and that’s the type of sausage I like to eat. Good times!

80s Hungarian cmmercial - Stzer?

Rick: Is this a commercial for nuclear power?

Sarah: I’m guessing it’s advertisting a Lord-of-the-Rings Stag Party package for Brits. Elf sex tourism. Huge in Budapest.

Hungarian 80s commercial - shopping center?

Rick: This was made by futuristic robotic overlords to entice humans into their reprocessing plant. Listen to those creepy, artificial keyboards. Something really bad is about to happen to that little guy.

Sarah: According to the folks on youtube, he's saying “I go in, I come out, but how well I come out…if I go in.”

Rick: Soylent Green is People!!!

Llama Toes

2006-11-11T03:27:00.000-08:00

There have been many musical adventures to report in the past week or so. Blame it all on our lovely new friends Barmaljova, who are incredible at seeking out live music. We finally met legendary American-fiddler-gone-native Dumneazu. We’ve met an Argentinian Jewish hurdy-gurdy player who lives in Budapest but only plays Brazillian music. Thursday we went to hear the Ukranian gypsy Tecso band, and ran into Matt Dariau (who I’d never actually met before but have been to hear play a million times in NYC.)

But alas, not all musical adventures are positive. Last night we went to see a jazz band.** Now, I love a nice, active drummer. I love drummer toys like llama toes (llama toes!) But last night’s drummer, well… it wasn’t just that he had a lot of geegaws: chimes, rattles, woodblocks, bells, a triangle, an ocarina—no snare drum, mind you—a metal water jug, and, of course, llama toes (llama toes!) That wasn’t exactly the problem. He was just so busy picking up geegaws and putting them down that he couldn’t be bothered to listen to anyone else. If I was playing with him, I would have been furious:

-----
IMAGINARY BANDMATE: Say man, I don’t want to be a drag, but you gotta lay out a bit, brother. I’m over here trying to solo on “The Days of Wine and Roses,” and every time I look up you doing some other type of ridiculous shit. You got sticks, brushes, a piece of rebar, you got some piece of metal tied to a pipe, you got a turkey call, you got a dreidel spinning on the snare, you hitting the wall with a whip, you chewing a bunch of sugar cubes with your mouth open, you got a can of peanut brittle that shoots a snake out of it. Then you gonna act like the snake surprised you. You know you did that on purpose!

My lady just left me. I mean, I loved that woman, and I’m trying to capture a moment, and you’re over there hitting the cymbals with a Styrofoam pool noodle. You’re dragging a chain over the cymbals, like the jazz is in hell trying to escape! I’m trying to play my heart out, and you over there hitting a watermelon with an icepick. That’s some Gallagher shit! You like Gallagher in prison, killing his old comedy partner in the shower! Damn.

Are you trying to make fun of me? I don’t get it. My lady walks out, I’m trying to express my sorrow, man, I’m trying to communicate it. I’m trying to do something sparse, like Miles, you over there tapping a cheeto with a thimble. And don’t try to help me out by running outside the club, calling your friend’s cellphone in the front row, shouting “bap bap bap bippity BAP!” crinkling some cellophane to make it sound like a long distance call, that’s not helping express the distance between me and my lady.

And I don’t care how good you think it sounds, you don’t bring a washing machine on stage, throw some rubik’s cubes in them and let them bounce around. It don’t matter if they’re solved when you pull them out. That’s not the point, man, that’s not the point. I’m over here trying to paint a picture in sound, the audience wondering about the state of a bunch of wet Rubik’s cubes. I try to block it out, and just go back to the changes, then I look up and you ain’t even playing the drums, you just silently juggling! It’s distracting, man!

You don’t need to use a turkey call on Autumn Leaves. You over there using the turkey call, I look up and we got seventeen wild turkeys in the club! They knocking over drinks, flying all over the place, and instead of trying to rectify the situation you grab one and start making it peck on the snare! How you gonna destroy your own snare with a wild turkey? It ain’t practical! You sold all your ADD medication to buy that snare! You ain’t got no more, that much is obvious. How you going to finance another snare? Don’t hold up those llama toes, man, that ain’t no kinda answer.
-----

Anyway, the night wasn’t all for naught, as Rick got his first glimpse of a tanchaz, a type of crazy folkdancing party where Hungarian hipsters, dancers and party animals drink and smoke and perform complicated folk dances:

Sing-along outside Tanchaz at Reviczky in Budapest

This is actual video of what we saw at the tanchaz Friday. High tech!

P.S. Hooray America!

**(Our friends in Barmaljova and their visiting bandmate, great musicians all, did NOT second my emotion about this drummer, and they probably know better than me. So comedy aside, there is controversy on this point.)

Halloween Hajj

2006-11-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

Rick and I didn’t always have a lot in common. When we first got together, he was fronting a punk band called Weeping Anus. I was staging a whimsical clown show in which people salsa danced with six-foot-tall forks. But we’ve always had Halloween.

Rick inherits his love of Halloween from his dad, who at the ripe old age of 50 was still buying mortician’s wax and yak hair for his Wolf Man costume. For me Halloween has always been about costumes that felt like a good idea, but never quite got off the ground: a horse (first grade); a mini-refrigerator filled with popsicle boxes (third grade); and “Budget Dracula” (junior year college), a costume consisting of a pink wig, magic marker unibrow and moustache, and wool blanket.

In New York, Rick was always a zombie. Over the years his costume grew more and more elaborate. Fake blood, latex wounds, sodium bicarbonate to simulate foaming at the mouth, rice krispy maggots feasting on rotting flesh. When the costume couldn’t get any more elaborate, we mustered a Zombie Army to march in the Village Halloween Parade. A team of scientists from the Center for Zombie Control, equipped with white jackets, Zombie Zappers, and So You’ve Been Attacked By a Zombie pamphlets, herded a mob of the undead. When the zombies attacked the crowd, the scientists controlled them the only way they knew how: by playing Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The best part was, every single time the Zombies performed their Thriller dance, some random fellow-parader threw caution to the wind and joined in. Over the course of the parade we danced with two hoochies in devil horns, Luigi from Super Mario Brothers, a naked guy, Ace Frehley from KISS, and a roller skating chicken.

How do you follow an act like that, a continent away from home, in a country where no one gives a rat’s ass about Halloween? You go to Transylvania.

And Transylvania is beautiful. The Carpathians are covered in autumn leaves. The train takes you through little towns where horse-drawn carts draw loads of hay, shepherds pipe in distant fields, and people harvest by hand. There are crumbling factories and commie apartment blocks, the color of grey October. You eat stag stew and drink homemade liquor out of plastic water bottles.

Like most visitors, we went to Bran (“Dracula’s”) Castle and browsed its kitsch carnival of a souvenir market, where vendors make a killing on Dracula’s Blood wine and Vlad the Impaler coffee mugs. Later we hiked up a steep, winding path through thick pine forest to reach nearly deserted Rasnov castle. At the top of the mountain, a horse wandered through the ruins, grazing beneath a crow’s cage swinging in the wind.

The history associated with these castles is important enough regionally, but it’s not what tourists come to see. The American image of Transylvania has nothing to do with reality. Transylvania is the magical realm of the horror movie, land of dark monsters and blackest night. It is the opposite of historical—it’s timeless. To their great credit, Transylvanians are amused and intrigued by the American obsession with their land. They’ve graciously left history out of their attractions, to let the imagination roam wild. Bran Castle is furnished with a hodgepodge of baroque chairs, twentieth century bearskin rugs, medieval candlesticks, anything grotesque and foreboding. Let’s be clear: this castle has nothing to do with Dracula, who never existed, and nothing to do with Vlad the Impaler. The Romanians know this, they know you know—and they know you don’t care, because imagination is a million times better than dry reality.

Halloween found us in Sighisoara, “Pearl of the Carpathians,” supposed birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. All day long we saw Americans on Dracula Tours: a plump girl with pink hair and glasses, bikers in Halloween Beer Fest t-shirts, a long-haired man in a black silk frock coat, a couple of trenchcoated D&D kids bemoaning Romania’s dearth of Guiness and Cheetoes. I’m not going to lie: I sort of fell in love with them as a group. I mean, you NEVER see Americans like that in Budapest. We wanted to hang out with them that night—if you can’t do it on Halloween, when can you?—but when night fell, Sighisoara was completely dead. Silent. Nothing happened. Crushed, I dragged Rick back to the hostel and made him tell me scary stories.

The next day was an idyllic, sunny November 1. We wandered around the old Saxon graveyard and hiked along the medieval city walls, talking of cabbages and kings. We told ourselves that even if we hadn’t partied on Halloween, at least we were in Transylvania.

And then night fell.

On the way back from dinner with a nice Swiss backpacker, we heard distant screams. I rushed through the gate of the clock tower and found a mob of people in medieval garb, beating drums and hauling around a terrified woman in a torn shift. Three film crews eagerly recorded it all. Naturally I had to know what the hell was going on. A drummer in a bald cap and peasant shirt explained that this was a reenactment of a witch trial in 1026, but it was over now. He sounded a drumroll to emphasize his point. Disappointed but undeterred, I looked around for someone who might know more. One quiet, solitary man with an air of authority was hiking off towards the main square.

MY ACTUAL CONVERSATION WITH THIS ROMANIAN GUY

Sarah: Excuse me, sir, but are you involved in this? Is it over?
Romanian Man: Yes, now the witch will be kept in the tower dungeon, until it is her turn to burn at the stake. Her journey is finished. But now…now we go underground, to the cellars of Sighisoara. And there, at midnight, the new Countess Dracula will be crowned.
(Sarah gapes, dumbfounded.)
Romanian Man: If you like, you will join us.
Sarah: (hastily) Yes, yes, we would love that!
Romanian Man: (stopping in his tracks) We are the Transylvanian Order of Dracula. (bows) You are Welcome.
Sarah: (mouths silently) YESSSSSSSSS!!!

And so we descend into an ancient cellar. There are Americans there in full-on, elaborate costume: not just vampires, but Scooby Doo, a headless man and a mad scientist. A female monk explains that tomorrow, God willing, they will all be inducted as knights of the Transylvanian Order of Dracula. The film crews are already drunk and dancing. The anchorwoman of the Filipino crew (“Miss Universe 1999! A very intelligent woman!” someone tells me) boogies with an elated Romanian waiter. A cheerful reporter from Bucharest shouts “If you think this is good you should see the party next door! There are some real freaks over there!”

And indeed there are. In the cellar next door are scores of completely blasted Americans: cowboys, jesters, princesses, vinyl queens, Elvira. Beneath the fake cobwebs and dancing fake skeletons, they’re dancing their hearts out to Love Shack, La Isla Bonita and Up In the Club: “Go Shorty, it’s your birthday, we gonna drink Bacardi like it’s your birthday...” Prince comes on. An obviously straight, Midwestern transvestite dances on a chair. The helpful hotel staff—safety first—brings him a table to dance on instead. A man in a top hat clambers onto the table and the crowd cheers as the two bump and grind. Our Swiss pal flees in horror. An elf swing dances with a break dancer. A mental patient does the twist.

Rick observes sadly that these people have come all the way from America to transform a real Transylvanian cellar into a New Jersey rec room. But it’s something more than that. These are the people who always had the most fun at the costume party, the people who dressed up for Halloween at the office. They’re not cool. Their costumes have always been a little bit too elaborate, a little too thought out. They try too hard. And here, for the first time, there’s no one to spoil the party. They’ve all brought their costumes thousands of miles, they’ve all scrimped and saved, and here they all are, for one night only, dancing the night away in Transylvania. This is what we’ve all come for, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream: a Halloween Hajj.

Back at the Dracula party, Countess Dracula—an airhead Romanian teenager—emerges from the shadows, languidly showing off the new bite marks on her neck. “Was it good for you?” Scooby Doo shouts, and the Americans cackle. The journalists eagerly interview the Countess. Now a team of Romanian teenagers in medieval garb rushes into the room and starts square dancing to a techno version of Cotton Eyed Joe. The Bucharest journalist yells over the din, “Romania is the Fifty Third American state!” A vampire with shaved head, painted contacts and glued-on fangs flirts with the Countess. There’s a conga line. The electric slide is danced. The Macarena. And suddenly, the party is over.

The next day, we take the train home. In the dark countryside out the window, we see the flicker of candles in a graveyard. All Saints’ Day. Back home at last, I look at my calendar: November 1. We had totally screwed up the dates; we never missed Halloween at all. “Rick! Yesterday was Halloween! Yesterday really was Halloween!”

Gone Till November

2006-10-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Rick and I are off to Romania, and doubtful we'll get a chance to update. Tune in, same bat time, same bat station, after November 3.

If you are in NYC, make sure to catch (or join) the Zombie Army as it terrorizes the Village Halloween Parade, rocking the Thriller dance all the way. We'll be there with you in spirit, guys . . . Stay Sick.

Children of the Night

2006-10-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

Rick and I are in the process of planning our Halloween trip to Transylvania. We're heading to Dracula's home town, and so perhaps we should have expected that even in the process of planning, we would be sickened.
Horrified.
Frightened.
Even disgusted.
Yes...yes...perhaps we should have expected that.
But we never could have expected THIS:

From the website of the Kismet Dao Hostel, Romania:

Why not try The Shagging Room? A private room with a queen sized metal framed bed, dresser, TV and a balcony. The Sun rises on this side for an easier morning shag. Many Towels provided. 3rd floor.

Eeeeeeew. Many Towels...

OK, I'll make the joke so you don't have to: "Children of the night. What Music they make."

Man on the Street

2006-10-23T14:24:00.000-07:00

Today is the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets. It’s a big, big deal. Every museum in town is hosting an exhibit on the revolution, people everywhere are wearing the Hungarian colors. The city is covered in symbols of the uprising: Hungarian flags with a hole cut where the hammer and sickle had once was.

The anniversary also falls in the midst of a major political crisis, originally provoked by leaked tapes of the Socialist PM admitting he and his party lied . The conservative party Fidesz wants the Prime Minister to resign. At the very least they’d like a national vote to recall him. The Prime Minister says this would be anti-democratic. Fidesz calls the Socialists the spiritual heirs of the Soviets. The Socialists portray themselves as enacting tough reforms, bringing Hungary up to EU economic code.

It’s no surprise that Fidesz wanted to hold a rally today. The government tried to get them to change their minds. They refused. I can’t pretend I fully understand the situation. Here’s what Rick and I have witnessed:

-Yesterday we visited a 1956-themed street fair in a part of town. It was by Corvin circle, right near our house; somehow I never associated the plaques adorning this circle with past tragedies. It was a great event: accordions, classic cars, a 1956 museum, kids playing on giant Soviet guns. There was even a “movie-shoot” vacant lot. Kids dressed up in “revolutionary” style jackets that hung down to their knees and climbed on old Soviet tanks. Parents snapped photos. Adorable. Rick and I reflected that this was the best possible use for tanks.

-Today the mood was different. Around noon I returned to the same spot, where there was either a rally or official commemoration. Hundreds of people. I saw a pack of about 10 skinheads. Lots of Hungarian flags, including one with an outline of “greater Hungary” and one paired (bizarrely) with a confederate flag. People were shouting “Kossuth Ter!” That’s the name of the square in front of Parliament, scene of recent protest activity, which police cleared for today’s commemorative events. I got creeped out and turned home. It seemed like some protesters were trying to inspire the crowd to march towards Parliament. There was an angry mood in the air—excitable and nervous. A little later on television, I saw police and protesters clashing on this street.

-Also on Hungarian TV: police lob tear gas at protesters and shoot rubber bullets. Usually the Berkeley in me knee-jerks “pig!” at this kind of news, but I am so clueless (and so freaked out any time I see skinheads) that I actually don’t know who to be more scared of, police or protesters. Also on TV, protesters steal one of those Soviet tanks (!) and drive on police. I actually found that reassuring. In America if someone stole a tank they would be killed. The fact that they got away with it here made me feel like the violence can’t be so extreme.

-Not weird enough for you? Also on Hungarian TV: official 1956 commemoration ceremonies, much like the opening ceremony for a summer olympics. A ballet dancer in a silver unitard, suspended from a hot air balloon, floats in front of Parliament, photographs of doomed 56 protesters projected onto her bubble.

-Rick and I took an after-dinner walk. Do these protests just feel like a bigger deal because they are closer to our apartment? At the main intersection near our house (home of our metro stop) there’s a phalanx of policemen with riot shields. We walked a bit towards the center of the city and ran into a big protest at Ferenciek Tere. Huge flags, floodlit streets, lots of people. We hear the pop of what we think are tear gas canisters, yet folks seem to be running towards, not away from the scene. No one seems very scared (although many seem drunk.) Later, back at home, we see this scene repeated around the city on television.

In closing, we’re OK, just confused.

A Pickle in One Hand

2006-10-22T02:23:00.000-07:00

Hungarian, they tell me, is full of word play and double entendres, almost impossible to capture in translation. But I sure do love it when they try.

From a free Budapest weekly magazine with a couple English articles:

ONE SWALLOW ISN'T ENOUGH FOR SUPPER

Women tend to do things they have no stomach for. At least, it is said so. According to the rules of evolution, doing things you have no stomach for should result in growing that stomach, shouldn’t it? Anyway, certain women should really have more than one stomach to have enough place for all the things they eat. For example, men. They do have the stomach for them!

I cannot think of a more dangerous creature than a woman yearning for a poor and unsuspicious creature, a man. At first she has butterflies in her stomach, then she butters the man up, then comes the phase of flying into a rage (it is not done by the butterflies!) and in the end comes the attack! Sometimes this process makes men happy. Sometimes not.

If you ask me, there are few things more exciting than sneaking behind a woman who is standing barefoot in front of the open fridge, with a pickle in one hand and a chicken leg in the other. I am very hot on meeting this type of women, even though they might eat cold stew right from the pot. I’ve also got to confess that watching a woman biting grape off the bunch fires me up. A woman with her mouth full of food means not only a good company, owing to her being unable to speak at that moment, but also a pleasant spectacle. Don’t you believe me? Then believe your eyes.

According to the old saying, the way to a man’s heart leads through his stomach. Chefs know that it goes for the way to the woman’s heart, as well. Should you be in the black books of your beloved one or wish to pick a chic chick up—take her to a restaurant. Though eating out only once might not be enough, you can be sure she swallows the bait and a supper together will surely be super.

…And bring your swimsuit

2006-10-21T04:38:00.000-07:00

News Flash: Our Budapest friend Inna’s mom just bought a ticket, non-stop from NYC to Budapest, for $500. Another friend has found a March ticket for $400…

So yesterday was my “day off” from writing and I spent most of it at the Szechenyi baths in City Park. For those of you who don’t know, Budapest is famous for its natural thermal baths. Going to the baths is a national pastime—Hungarians are serious about it. Each bath has a menu of options, not just swimming pools, saunas and thermal baths but massages, mud baths, and a whole universe of treatments that I have never heard of, but which sound like they might involve electricity. The beautiful part is the baths are incredibly cheap, so anyone can and does go: grandmas, tourists, mechanics, businessmen, young mothers, teenagers. In fact some Hungarian companies give employees bath vouchers as a benefit (jealous).

This was my second Budapest bath experience. The first was the Gellert baths—those are the ridiculously lavish baths in Buda where Matthew Barney filmed the last installment of the Cremaster cycle.

Here’s what they have going for them:
-Crazy elaborate mosaics, gorgeous statues, sculpted pillars, painted ceilings, fancy wallpaper
-Art nouveau overload
-Pool of sparkling water
-Turn-of-the-century outdoor wave pool
-Classy sunbathing terraces
-Feeling like you’re in Daddy Warbucks’ mansion

The Szechenyi baths are a tiny bit more proletarian, but still housed in a palatial building in the center of a peaceful park.

Advantages:
-Beautiful outdoor swimming pools, complete with neoclassical sculpture fountains
-Old Men playing chess in the hottest outdoor thermal pool
-Amusement park whirly ride periodically appears above bath roof
-Current pool that carries you around in whirlpool style
-Labyrinth of indoor pools and indoor saunas, all different temperatures. I couldn’t find the end of the baths. Perhaps they don’t end.

I’m just saying, bring your swimsuit.

Post Script:
The other day we passed by some Americans, having the Quintessential American in Budapest conversation:

American Dude 1: So, the bar was like, three bucks. Dinner was…what, that whole dinner was, fuckin', seven bucks. The ice cream is…
American Dude 2: 50 cents. No, less.
American Dude 3:(drunk) You guys, my dad is like, really rich. He’s really…he’s just rich.

It was sort of charming, in a way. At least it wasn’t the Quintessential British Stag Party in Budapest conversation:

British Bloke 1:(drunk) Did you see the teats on that one? I like that! Fancy a shag with her, mate.
British Bloke 2: (also drunk) They do dress like sweet whores here, don’t they? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. (vomits.)
British Bloke 3: (of course drunk) Better go to the baths tommorow lads, do a bit of a detox, wot?

Red Letter Day

2006-10-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

And so the summer finally dies away, our neighbors break out their fall jackets, the days grow shorter and the leaves start falling. At three months in Hungary, I’ve reached an important mile-stone: my first non-embarassing encounter with the Bakery Bitch.

Hungarian is hard. It’s harder than most languages. It has eighty million vowels and words ten miles long. It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to learn enough Hungarian to get through simple shop transactions. Most vendors are good enough to bear with me while I grunt, point and draw pictures in a desperate effort to communicate. The Bakery Bitch, in contrast, appears to take great pleasure in my discomfort. She rolls her eyes, smirks, and and makes snarky comments to her coworkers with. Imagine her shock when I rolled in this morning, told her exactly what I wanted, gave her correct change without checking the cash register, and thanked her politely in perfectly functional Hungarian.

TODAY’S COMPLETELY SILENT AND SUBTEXTUAL BAKERY DIALOGUE

Sarah orders in Hungarian

Bakery Bitch: (taken aback) Well, surprise, surprise. It talks!

Sarah: That’s right! You heard me! You know what that was, that was flawless Hungarian! You Know How We Roll! BIOTTTCH!

Bakery Bitch hands Sarah her rolls.

Bakery Bitch: She seems pleased with herself. But what will she do when I ring her up…in Hungarian?

Sarah: Sucka! I already added it up in my head! I KNOW the price, I don’t HAVE to understand you! UHHH! How’s it feel? How’s it feel? Oh, you got served! (Sarah mentally does the cabbage patch)

Sarah pays. Bakery Bitch hands Sarah her change.

Bakery Bitch: Whatever. She still talks funny.

Sarah: I am the Ruler of the Universe.

As the bard says, Today Was a Good Day. Rick fixed our window and figured out how to turn on our heat. I wrote freelance stuff, ate a delicious restaurant lunch with Rick, and went to bluegrass practice. God’s in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Real Art

2006-10-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Colleen is currently in her last year of graduate school, earning an MFA in choreography at a very prestigious school. She recently wrote:

“It's been an exciting two years and I've come a long way with my work as an artist. My long time collaborator, Karen Ivy, and I have been dabbling in the art of dance videos. We recently finished a project we've been conceptualizing for quite some time. We feel it has real promise. I've included the link below for you all to view, what I feel, is my best work yet.”

The video she sent was, quite simply, stunning. I decided that it had to be shared.

As you all know, I hate pretentiousness. But the power of this video demands serious discussion. Colleen’s postmodern critique of workplace culture deconstructs the physical language of the office environment by juxtaposing it with raw urban culture and colliding it with traditional gender stereotypes (giggling, jiggling, wiggling). The exuberance, the spirit, and the unbridled energy of the movement is a searing commentary on the taylorization of the workplace. The use of mass media uncompromisingly condemns the society of spectacle. When the only possible expression is the meaningless, when only the ironic is heartfelt, when only the commercial is touching, when only the irreverant is relevant—what then of mens' souls? This is a grim yet Important work that should send shockwaves through the dance world.

Please, take the time to watch this very important video:

Advanced choreography at OSU

Colleen is the performer wearing the striped costume. And to think, my last collaboration with her was a clown piece about rubber chickens! How far she’s come.

Parliament of Draculas

2006-10-13T02:20:00.000-07:00

In honor of Friday the Thirteenth, I’m posting something I wrote just before the demonstrations and then never posted. Enjoy. Halloween is almost here! Transylvania here we come!

One of Budapest’s many pleasures is the Dracula building. Walk along almost any alley and you’ll find blackening old buildings slowly crumbling into dust. Oxidizing in the sun, caked in pollution, they drop cupid limbs like lepers. In neighborhoods of perky, pastel, disneyified restored buildings, Dracula buildings are menacing and ancient and evil. Suitable headquarters for the local gang of comic book villains, a good place to launch the neighborhood Satanic Youth Center.

Draculicious.

Drac-o-matic.

This one is Dracuguese.

But without question, one building reigns supreme as Budapest’s Most Draculish Building. That building is Hungarian Parliament.

DracTASTIC!!!

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but Hungary is run by a Parliament of Draculas. They flock to this, their stronghold, by night. Millions of flapping bat wings resound through the city as they shriek through the Parliament’s belfries. Some waft beneath the heavy oak doors in a sickly green fog. Others, taking the form of enormous wolves, leap through the arched gothic windows and land wild-eyed, snarling and slobbering in their seats. In the dim artificial light of the dome, a million red slitted eyes glint sinister. Thin red lips smile curl into contemptuous half-smiles. The air resounds with the sound of air hissing though a thousand sets of small, sharp fangs.

“I protesssssst. Thisssss bill is pure pork-barrel politicsssss!”
“Oh pleassssse. What about your highway bill last Sssssseptember? If it hadn’t been an election year, that never would have passsssssed!”
“Gentlemen, pleassssse! Remember, the Blood Bank is this nation’sssssss most vital ressssssssource…for DRACULAS!”

The gentle citizens of Budapest huddle terrified behind their sturdy doors, clutching rustic braids of garlic, waiting for the danger to pass. One day they will finally rise and march in a great, pale, torch-lid mob towards Parliament’s forbidding doors. Till then, we shudder when we look towards the horizon and see its dark towers jutting like fangs towards the night sky.

Under the Influence

2006-10-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

Just before I left New York, Garth gave me a going-away present. It was a little book called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. He told me perhaps you will like this book, it is all about being a writer in Europe and knowing terribly interesting people and having terribly interesting conversations and then writing all about it. And it is a charming book to read on a Sunday first in bed and then on the porch and later in bed again. In this book Gertrude Stein tells about her famous friends Picasso and Braque and Juan Gris and Apollinaire, and how they came over for dinner and said something very witty, and how they remembered it years later when they met again in Italy. It is all amusing and very good gossip but the problem and it is a big problem is that one starts to think like Gertrude Stein. It is all well and good for Gertrude Stein to think like Gertrude Stein but it is somewhat less appropriate for others who are not Gertrude Stein to think in her voice. One gets to look at the little episodes in one’s life as if they were stories being told by Gertrude Stein in this book or in any other book any book that is written by Gertrude Stein.

For instance just yesterday Rick was at his computer where he is very often and as he often does he said listen to this, I have found something to listen to. It was a song about The Blob called Beware of The Blob sung by The Five Blobs. It was a very silly song with silly words about how The Blob creeps and creeps and seeps. It was in short utterly charming and I sang it to myself for days afterwards. Then again today Rick at his computer said look at this you must come look at this I have found something else. Do you remember that song about The Blob and of course I did remember that song about The Blob well that song was written by Burt Bacharach, he said, that is why you remember it so well.

I need a new book to read.

City of Rick

2006-10-05T03:21:00.000-07:00

So like I say, Rick and I just got back from Vienna. I have to say that traveling with the boy is a completely unique experience. He’s willing to go to palaces and to the opera as long as we can also check out the collection of medical oddities on the outskirts of town. But whatever we see, he always has a verdict that catches me off guard.

A few days ago we saw Roberto Devereaux at the Vienna Staatsoper. Great opera, retarded production. You could practically hear the director thinking: “It’s definitely about Queen Elizabeth, so I can’t just set it on Mars like usual. But period is so dull, dull, dull. I’ve got it! The main characters will wear Elizabethan costume. But the CHORUS will wear bowler hats and suits! They’ll stand around with creepily, like a bunch of narcs going to a Magritte costume party. And we’ll set it in …in…a parking garage! It’s brilliant!” The opera’s final image was a three-story clear plastic sculpture of Queen Elizabeth, all lit up like a Rite Aid Santa Claus, which rattled and lurched towards the alarmed front row.

Rick’s verdict: It reminded me of playing pinball when I was little. You know, you have those favorite games. And my favorite game was Pinbot. I got really good at it, and I scored a lot. Then they came out with Bride of Pinbot.
Sarah: Wait, why did this remind you of pinball?
Rick: The big statue at the end. Bride of Pinbot. That’s all I could think about.

The next day we went to the Imperial Treasury to see the Hapsburgs’ crown jewels. Highlights: the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, the spear that poked Jesus on the cross, and a 9-foot tall Unicorn Horn. Not to mention a fuckoff amount of gold and jewels, the type of jewels that have names.

Rick’s verdict: To tell you the truth, I just kept thinking about Santo Gold.
Sarah: Wait, what’s Santo Gold?
Rick: He was this 80’s conman who figured out a way to gold-plate things. He started a company called Santo Gold that sold gold-plated chains. He made all these cheap late-night infomercials for Santo Gold. Then he spent 2 million dollars to make a movie about Santo Gold. He wrote it, directed it, and starred in it, as rock star Santo Gold, who sings the theme song, entitled the “Santo Gold Theme Song.”
Sarah: What was the plot?
Rick: Well no one’s ever seen it. I don't think it ever got into movie theaters. But it was called Blood Circus and apparently it was a “science fiction comedy” about wrestling.

Interested? So was I. Don’t you love how you can find anything on You Tube?

santo gold2

The Hapsburg Treasury and Santo Gold: you know, without Rick I never would have made that connection.

Vienna Bear vs. Budapest Bear: Cage Match

2006-10-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

Rick and I just returned from a short jaunt to Vienna, the “Paris of the East.” It’s chock-full of palaces and castles and museums—much larger, more elegant, and expensive than Budapest. Of course, Austria is a Western European, wealthy, capitalist state, while Hungary is an Eastern European, post-communist, poor state. Both cities have their charm, but their cultures are very different. It’s kind of like—well, let’s just let the wildlife speak for itself.

Vienna bears enjoy fanciful tea parties dressed in colorful folk costumes.

Budapest bears are pressured from childhood to win Olympic glory…

...or sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, simply for looking too much like wolves.

Vienna bears promonade happily hand in hand, showing off that extravagant little parasol they picked up somewhere.

Budapest bears are forced to the front before they’re even big enough to hold a gun.

Vienna bears enjoy forming pop bands with precious miniature musical instruments.

Budapest bears crouch in the corner, wearing the helmet and gas mask they stripped off a dead Nazi, just praying they get a chance to take some fascists down before they die.

Callous Vienna bears run happily over the proletariat.

There are no more bears left in Budapest. Only frightened dolls…

...and bloodthirsty, man-eating horses.

All photographs taken on location in Vienna and Budapest. No bears were harmed in the making of this post.

Tooth Town

2006-09-26T08:29:00.000-07:00

Thank God gynecologists don't do this...

Weekend Update

2006-09-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

Last night approximately 50,000 protesters demonstrated in front of Hungarian Parliament, demanding the resignation of the entire cabinet. So how can my life remain so unaffected? The protests—and especially the few violent clashes—have been all over Hungarian TV. But most of the action is on the other side of the city center, far from our little apartment. (Imagine there are protests in Union Square and we live near South Street Seaport.)

We’ve walked down to Parliament to see the handful of daytime protesters, but most of the protests are at night. We’ve seen TV crews interviewing students near the main University. We’ve heard sirens during the night. But other than that life is normal. The line at the Szuper Dizscount is too long. You’ll encounter the random marching band or wedding procession on back streets. You still have to hunt for seats at Szimpla. People go about their business calmly. It’s possible that everyone is talking about nothing but the protests—but I’d really have no way of knowing that.

Intrigued by the contrast between street reality and TV pageant, I’ve been interrogating all English speakers I know.
“Is it true that a lot of these protesters are right-wingers?”
Hungarian Zoltan: Oh yes, they are all right-wing. The socialists and the left wing are also angry, but they would rather have the left in power than these conservatives and nationalists. They are all liars anyway.
UK Ben: My English students are all upset, no matter what their party. I don’t think it’s sectarian. Then again, they’re teenagers.
Hungarian Zoltan: All the violence is from football hooligans who just want to fight. They don’t need an excuse. These reforms will need to be made no matter what. The budget needs to be cut, and the economy has got to be reformed. The socialists say that they need to raise taxes and cut benefits. The right wing says it will cut the budget by cutting taxes and raising benefits. It’s impossible.

It gets more complicated the more you learn about it. It doesn’t help that Hungarian political parties don’t necessarily mirror their American counterparts. Here’s what I’ve gleaned: the nationalists are socially conservative, sort of like our Republicans. But they are for the welfare state and giving hand-outs. The socialists are socially liberal, like our democrats, but are allied with free-market liberals—they want to remove government controls on the economy and say that the welfare state as it exists now is not sustainable.

Thank god we’ve found Pestiside.hu, a sort of English-language Village Voice for Budapest.:

Budapest ‘06 vs. ‘56: a Guide for Clueless Foreign Hacks

Your Uprising is like, So Two Nights Ago

We’ve been watching a lot of BBC. They seem to be as puzzled by the situation as we are, and have concerned themselves mostly with how the press is covering the event.

Serious Blonde BBC Anchorlady: One side says one thing, one thing says the other. Who is telling the truth? Only one thing is certain, 50 years after the uprisings against communism, there are rioters in the streets of Budapest once again. I have here with me the Hungarian ambassador to the EU. Ambassador, what do the protestors want?
Ambassador: They want the prime minister and cabinet to resign.
BBC: And why haven’t they resigned?
Ambassador: Well, it is a complex situation. The Prime Minister feels—
BBC: There ARE thousands of people in the streets, aren’t there? Does the government not care what the people want?
Amassador: Yes, but we have to see that this is all happening within a context. The economy—
BBC: In a sense, this is much like Hungary’s 15 minutes of fame, is it not? This is your country’s time in the sun.
Ambassador: Some type of coverage is the wrong type. This is a very complex story and—
BBC: A complex context, too often ignored by the press. Everyone has an opinion, and there are many sides to the story. Is the international press doing its job? Are we really getting the full story?
Ambassador: We are getting…one side of the story.
BBC: Indeed. Will there still be international interest in this story when the protesters are gone? Will the press disappear the moment the story is over? I, for one, don’t intend to follow it.

Coming Soon: Rosh Hashanah in Budapest and Sarah’s First Hungarian Bluegrass Gig

Apples and Oranges

2006-09-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

Why did people riot in the streets of my new city last night?

So the Hungarian Prime Minister was caught on tape admitting that he and his socialist government flat-out lied to win the recent elections—not just lied once, but lied repeatedly, lied about everything, “lied in the morning and lied at night.” Moreover, he said it was completely obvious to anyone paying attention that he had been lying. He basically confirmed that all of his political opponents’ criticisms of him were correct. He said himself that his government had not done one positive thing for the country during their entire time in power. According to him, only sheer, dumb luck had kept the nation’s finances from completely collapsing. The tape is full of obscenities—the PM swears like a sailor.

It’s really hard to imagine the magnitude of this. What is this like?

Imagine Bush was caught on tape talking to the cabinet. “Well, boys, it’s a damn good thing we paid off those crooked veterans to lie about that assfucker Kerry, otherwise we never would have won the fucking election, no matter how many dicklicking votes we stole. We’ve been lying through our teeth day in and day out about Iraq, which is so far up shit creek it’s hit shit glacier. Invading Iraq was one of the stupidest and worst thought-out things anyone has ever done, ever. Talk about lack of planning! Whoa, Nelly! We don’t know how to get out, we never did, we never will. Of course we’ve been lying about the economy, which we’ve fucked so hard it needs surgery. And the war on terror! The stupidest hillbilly in Texas can see that the cocksucking war on terror is just an excuse to seize totalitarian executive power! I just can’t believe we’re actually getting away with it all! This country is our bitch, boys, and we’re putting her on the stroll...I’ll tell you one other thing too, she’s going to stay on that corner until I get my motherfucking money!”

At least in the Hungarian tape, the PM says that he’s tired of lying and that the country has got to be turned around in a major way—it’s so candid that some have even suggested he leaked the tape himself. Can’t imagine that ending to the hypothetical American version.

Wait, WHAT???

2006-09-18T23:12:00.000-07:00

Last night at around midnight, Rick was taking a walk and saw fire trucks and policemen headed towards Heros' Square. He grew uneasy, and wondered if he should go up there, but decided not to. A little later he saw a bunch of kids with Hungarian flags and figured it must be a soccer rally. Remember, we just got here and we know barely any Hungarians--we don't speak the language and watch, but can't understand, Hungarian TV--we've had no time to learn about politics here. In the middle of the night last night we heard fire engines and then heard our neighbors' TVs being switched on. This morning: "wait, What????"

From the BBC's website today:

Budapest clashes as protest grows

Police used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators
Police in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, have used tear gas and water cannon against protesters who threw bottles and stones and set cars alight. Thousands of demonstrators had gathered in the city, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. After several hours the police withdrew, allowing protesters to break into the state television headquarters.

The protests follow Mr Gyurcsany's admission that his Socialist government told lies to win a general election.

[...]

The BBC's Nick Thorpe, in central Budapest, says the trouble at the state television station began when a small group of protesters who had spent the day outside parliament tried to hand in a petition. A clash with riot police ensued and the square rapidly filled with mainly young people, some waving Hungarian flags.

"Nothing like this has happened since 1956," one young protester told Reuters news agency, referring to Hungary's failed uprising against Soviet rule in October 1956.

[...]
Mr Gyurcsany's comments were heard in a tape of a meeting he had with his MPs a few weeks after April's election. It is not clear how the tape was leaked. In excerpts broadcast on state radio, Mr Gyurcsany says harsh economic reforms are needed.
He thanks "divine providence, the abundance of cash in the world economy and hundreds of tricks" for keeping the economy above board. In a speech sprinkled with obscenities, Mr Gyurcsany says: "We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening." The prime minister has received the backing of Socialist MPs who on Monday voted unanimously to support him.

However, Hungary's President, Laszlo Solyom, said Mr Gyurcsany had created a "moral crisis", and opposition parties have called for his resignation.

Matyas Oersi, an MP with the Free Democrat Party - the junior coalition partner in the government - told the BBC: "It's a surprise - though understandable - that the people are angry at a political leader who, for the first time, is telling the truth: that the whole political class was lying."

Local elections are scheduled in two weeks' time. The Socialists and their liberal coalition allies are trailing Fidesz in the polls.

In the Details

2006-09-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

I visited Budapest two times before moving here. The first time was in 1999 with a certain Emily J. Farmhouse. After our previous two stops, London and Amsterdam, Budapest felt like the end of the world. It wasn’t prettified or squeaky clean. The train took us past blackening communist block houses, and boarded up factories. The old mansions we saw were crumbling in the heat, the streets were wide but quiet, empty. There were graffiti murals—good ones—on the cement trainyard walls. Because I am a sucker for anything that smacks of Indiana Jones, we laid down good money to visit the Labyrinth, a maze of secret medieval tunnels hidden beneath the castle district. All there really was to discover down there was a series of awkward life-size “spiritual” dioramas (for instance, “The Court For Shadows” and “Spirit Hunt”). Mud-colored mannequins tried desperately to look medieval while tinny speakers piped in synthesized flute. It was all fun and games until the lights went out. We were caught in the pitch pitch dark, groping along walls and calling out for help. After a half hour I was convinced we’d have to spend the night down there. Luckily the resourceful Farmhouse located some German tourists who had paid extra for the Lantern Labyrinth Experience. They took pity on us and lighted our way to the exit.

I’m making the city sound horrible, but it actually just felt undiscovered, off the map. The second time I visited was last summer, when Rick and I stayed with Ben, who was in his first year of the master’s program at CEU. Living alone in a palatial apartment, he was eating and drinking very little, but reading and smoking a lot. He took us on a series of long curlicue walks—really jogs—through the city. Down to the Danube, back up to city park, over to the synagogue, to the island park, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Crazy outdoor club/sculpture garden, bar in a bombed-out warehouse, talk, talk, talk. Medieval guilds, Derrida, Palestine, Artaud, Is Johnny Depp Actually a Good Actor—it was hard to keep up, both mentally and physically. Ben had done no sightseeing and had no interest in starting. We brought him to what may have been his first Budapest tourist attraction, the communist sculpture park. It turns out that after communism, the city tore down the bulk of its soviet monuments. They would have been sold for scrap metal, but luckily one enterprising businessman bought them all up, put them in a fenced-in park, and started charging western tourists money to see them.

Those two big trips were all about big differences. Now that I’m living here I love the process of discovering the small but subtle differences. We’ve gotten used to living a couple blocks from the Danube, seeing eye-bleedingly beautiful buildings on every corner, walking to the 19th century thermal baths—now it’s the small things that seem exotic. A partial and incomplete list:

-Budapest is full of ice cream. Everyone eats it, and it is dirt cheap and good.

-People have no understanding of how to walk in crowds here. They ride bikes through huge crowds of people, don’t watch where they’re going, stop dead in front of busy metro doors.

-Because it’s so cheap to fly to Budapest from London, the city is full of British stag parties every weekend. Often, the bachelors dress up in matching t-shirts (“Craig’s Last Stand”) or even outfits (superheroes, transvestites, janitors, deer.)

-The school next to our house has no bell; it signals the end of periods by playing little opera arias on what sounds like a car horn.

-Cherry juice, cherry soup, cherry soda. Paprika in everything.

-Dixieland is everywhere.

-Fooseball in most bars.

-Some Budapesters (I’m reluctant to even write this) put ketchup on their pizza. Eeew!

-Assigned seats in movie theaters.

-Underpasses not crosswalks. Most underpasses have casino/bars.

-Dental Tourism. It’s major.

-All apartments have lofts.

-Exhibits on theater history in multiple metro stations. (!!)

-If you want to find the closest violin store (like, say, yesterday) just walk out your door and head in a general direction. When you see someone with a violin case (and you will, guaranteed, within 10 minutes) just ask them where the nearest violin shop is. They will give you 2-3 options.

Why must posts have an ending? This one could go on for months.

Hooray for Hollywood

2006-09-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

Today Rick told me one of the best stories I’ve heard in a long, long time. It’s about one Ms. Pam Grier (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Foxy Brown, Coffey, Scream Blacula Scream). Apparently back in the 70’s, Ms. Grier was shooting a movie called The Arena, in which she played a badass sex bomb gladiator. In the movie’s finale, she was supposed to ride a giant horse up to the camera, with no bit and no reins.

Pam rides her horse up to the mark and stops. A cheeky crew member decides to play cute by smacking the horse on the ass. The horse freaks out, gallops off the soundstage, and starts streaking through the studio. Pam, who is riding bareback in a tiny leopard skin bikini, must grab the horse’s mane and hold on for dear life.

In a sublime coincidence, FELLINI is shooting Amarcord on the studio that day. He’s shooting some very subdued scene, when suddenly the now-topless, afro-ed, leopard-skin bottomed Pam Grier charges onto his set on a rearing white horse, screaming at the top of her lungs. Fellini stops the shoot, falls to his knees, and screams “My dream come true!”

Sweet Nothings

2006-09-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

It’s pretty strange to live in a place where you absolutely do not speak the language in any way shape or form. Here is my acquired Hungarian vocabulary so far:

Good Morning (but not good evening or goodbye)
Thank You (but not please)
Do You Speak English?
Yes/No/Good
Hello/Goodbye, for use on telephone (cheating, as it’s actually just “Allo”)
Pardon (“pardon”)
Soda (“szoda”)
Sex (“szex”)
1, 2, 3 (but not 4-10)
I would like…(point to the thing you want)
Tomato
Milk
Pancake

This actually gets me through a surprising amount of interactions. The language barrier, however, keeps rearing its head in other ways.

For instance, on the second floor of our building is a mysterious office. It advertises itself with a cartoon of a smiling dinosaur in running shoes, but is constantly haunted by miserable young people. They smoke cigarettes sullenly, tag up the first floor stairwell, and avoid your gaze when you pass them in the courtyard. Outside the door, boys get in shouting matches with their fathers, couples comfort eachother, and young girls hiss urgently into their cellphones. Rick and I decided early on that it must be a rehab center or a parole office. I’ve even wondered if it was a family planning clinic. Well, yesterday we saw our landlady and asked her to solve the mystery. “It is a lady,” she started confidentially, “She helps the young people…with these things…how do you say this…where you give the money to the state…the tax. She helps easy with the taxes, for all the people. Her sign say, so easy the taxes, so quick, I make you good price, please I am better than the other lady.”

Today Rick reported that a woman in front of him in line at the Diszcount ABC bought 20 candy bars, all different brands and prices, then tried to pay with Hungarian food stamps.
RICK: The checker started yelling at her.
SARAH (not thinking): What did she say?
RICK (giggling): VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY VASHTY!!!

At least we can’t hear anyone making fun of us as we stumble and fumble our way through life’s simplest interactions. Thank God for small mercies.