My first ABC book! With the fine folk at Snor Publishing, I wrote the freshly released book ABC Holland. It covers 26-plus things that visitors find delightfully eccentric about the Netherlands – such as bitter balls, wooden shoes, drugs, herring and Hazes. Indeed, it’s the perfect gift. (But not for me because I already have a copy.)
Below, I pasted a few write-ups that didn’t make the final cut (for obvious reasons).
F is for Flowers Holland is an economic floral powerhouse, controlling almost half of the global trade. The Dutch are bud-obsessed. Holland’s ‘Tulipmania’ of 1636-7 saw single bulbs get traded for real estate, heaps of cash or endless kilos of cheese, before crashing into a chaos of bankruptcies and suicides. Let’s hope they learned their lesson.
V is for Vindmill Oops, typo! Anyway… Windmills have made a deep impact on the Dutch landscape and psyche. Many Dutch sayings describe insanity and general absurdity in relation to windmills or ‘windmillies’, as a child’s wind wheel is called. This toy twirls without any true function: like the brains of the insanely drunk. Ironically, most still existing windmills also serve no function. They twirl on government subsidy.
Y is for ‘You’re Not Normal’ Yes, the Dutch exhibit wildness and diversity on King’s Day (see K) and Gay Pride (see G), and with their appetite for XTC (see X). But the rest of the year is more about: ‘Do normal, then you’re crazy enough’. Conformity is important: people should just relax, fit in, and not act as if they ‘got hit in the head with a windmill blade’. ‘Y’ is also for yodeling (just kidding: we hate yodeling – it’s just not freaking normal*).
* Apologies to friend and yodel scholar Bart Plantenga. I’m shameless when it comes to low-hanging fruit.
After googling ‘sex’ everyday for four years, it was time to cleanse the palate. So I immersed myself in a whole new and alien supply chain: textiles. Via Book of Denim, Vol. 2 (Amsterdam Publishing, 2018), I got to travel to Tunisia, China, Italy and beyond to write in-depth features on individuals and companies out to transform this notoriously dirty industry. It was educational and inspiring. Thanks book: I’m a sextile pundit now!
Woad rage First I travelled to Méharicourt, France, to take the road back to woad – the original ‘blue gold’ of the Dark Ages. The woad trade brought vast riches to this region, but only after some branding issues were overcome (namely, blue was previously considered the color of Satan). The indigo dye even went on to fund the building of the largest cathedral in France: the almost Disney-esque Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Amiens (the alleged home of John the Baptist’s head – but that’s another story).
With the rise of Indian indigo in the 17th century and synthetic indigo a century ago, the story of woad has been largely forgotten. Until now… The Parisian fashion label Bleu de Cocagne and a rural artisanal dyeing operation are out to put woad back on the map…
Looms with a view Obsessiveness is mandatory if you want to set up London’s first weaving mill in a century – especially if you’re using self-restored Industrial Age looms dating back to the 1880s. The delightfully obsessive Daniel Harris fits the bill.
As founder of the London Cloth Company, Harris has created bespoke fabrics for fashion designers, brands, and films such as Star Wars to great acclaim. He recently added a second mill in the countryside of nearby rural Epping.
Yet, the company remains a solo show: ‘I do have my cat Flo Rider. Unfortunately, he’s fucking useless. He’s in charge of sitting down and licking his ass. He doesn’t bring much to the table. But it must be said he did bring in three rabbits in the last year – two dead and one alive. The living one we kept for a while and called him Dennis Hopper. He loved tangerines. Is that enough of a company description?’
Yes it was enough of a description. So we went on to talk about textile history, the fanatical and war-like nature of weaving, denim dogma, the ‘Cotton Famine’ and the one thing the Brits got right…
Third Paradise I tasted the good life in Biella, Italy – complete with a glimpse of the ‘Third Paradise’ – as a guest of the inventors of world’s cleanest dye: Recycrom.
In many ways, the impossibly scenic Biella is a typical Italian provincial town with low traffic and a high quality of life – where the most sophisticated dishes are built up from the simplest of ingredients. But Biella has also been wired into the rest of the world for over a thousand years through its production of high-end textiles.
With the collapse of European manufacturing, local companies had to get creative to survive. Enter: Recycrom. This remarkable innovation is very much a product of its place: simple ingredients – 100% textile scraps – put through a sophisticated production process…
Made in China 3.0: hacking for chaos I took a bullet train towards sustainable denim. Above the urbanised and industrial chaos of the Pearl River Delta, the area around Shaoguan is known for its forests, rivers, a mummified monk who invented Zen and a phallic mountain range.
The area is also home base for Prosperity Textile, one of the fastest growing denim manufacturers in the world. They pump out enough fabric to circle the equator twice every year while using the best machines available. However when it comes to denim, all this technology comes with a downside…
‘Yes these machines are faster, cleaner and more consistent,’ says creative director Bart Van de Woestyne. “But that consistency is the challenge. People love jeans because they have a certain natural look and feel – something these overly perfect machines cannot always recreate.”
So how do you recreate that organic sense of chaos?
‘It’s all about the slub,’ says Bart…
Tunisian denim independence Tunisia’s recent history has been tumultuous – from triggering the Arab Spring and becoming a democracy, to dealing with terrorist threats. With mass unemployment, many young Tunisians are seeking a better life in neighbouring Europe. However, one of the most successful jeanswear manufacturers in the country, Sartex Group, is working hard to give them a reason to stay.
I talked to many inspiring folk at Sartex but my favourite conversation was with the original founder and his wife. Below, I pasted a few fragments from the feature.
Salem Zarrad (92) was shot in the leg on 24 January 1952 by a member of the French occupying forces. He was out after curfew. ‘Of course I remember the exact date, it almost killed me,’ he says with a mischievous grin in his modest home in downtown Ksar Hellal. The smell of fresh paint is in the air. A call to prayer is heard from the nearby mosque. Above him are colourised portraits of his parents.
His wife Habiba serves some deliciously sweet baklawa fekia apologetically: ‘If I had known you were coming I would have made couscous.’
‘It was an hour ride to Sousse to get to a doctor,’ Mr Salem recalls. ‘I lost a lot of blood. I was already against the system. But getting shot inspired me to become a true combatant. A soldier for independence.’
[…]
‘From the beginning I wanted to save money for the worst-case scenario and to only build on what we had. Forget relying on banks to loan you money – that only leads to pressure and bad decisions,’ says Mr Salem.
Did he make any bad decisions anyway while setting up his company?
‘With the job, I don’t remember. I like people and people like me – so it seemed to always work out. I tried to follow my religion: be good to people and respect them and it comes back to you. Life is struggle and your job can be the best tool for this fight. But of course I’ve made mistakes. But these were with my personal life…’
But you’ve been married for sixty years, surely you also did something right?
‘He did: he was away working all the time,’ says his wife Habiba with twinkling eyes.
[…]
***
You can read the full stories by ordering Book of Denim, Volume 2 here. It’s hardcover, wonderfully designed and features stellar photography by quality travelling companions such as Martin Scott Powell and Zachary Bako.
I was asked by the wonderfully quirky Atlas Obscura to write a weekend guide for Amsterdam. So I visit a nun. I visit a parrot. I cruise through primordial soup. I get all esoteric. I play a pianola. I indulge in a bit of bio-hacking. I sleep in a bridge house. And yes, I do pound back a jenever. Or two.
“Even when suppressed, history has a way of bubbling up to the surface. In Kaliningrad, that gray blob of dislocated Russia in the heart of the EU, local creatives have turned this bubbling into an arts scene. For visitors, the city-formerly-known-as-Königsberg provides a surreal, and economical, crash course in Teutonic Knights, WWII, the Cold War and today’s Russia. Plus, with the Baltic Sea, there are long stretches of unspoiled beach…”
Read the PDF of my travel feature published in Code magazine here.
I’ve had recurring dreams about showing my parents around Moscow. I would be taking them to major sights or exposing them via friends to that majorly psychotic brand of Slavic hospitality. But alas, such a trip never happened. (I did take them to former-Yugoslavia once. It was a mixed success. While my parents did get a taste of Slavic hospitality, they also flashed-back to their WWII childhoods – the taste of war was just still too fresh. But that’s another story.)
Last summer my Moscow dreams came partially true. My parents and I visited Moscow, Ontario, Canada (pop: 65). For a second as we drove across the town line, it even seemed like the real thing. Unfortunately, the rising spires of a Russian Orthodox church turned out to be a cluster of farm silos.
We stopped at the Variety Store and Gas Bar by the crossroads – aka ‘Downtown Moscow’. I hoped to buy local souvenirs to use as payback for hospitality the next time I was in Moscow proper. The proprietor Gord, a large older man who did not seem prone to movement, laughed when I asked if he sold Moscow-branded baseball caps or t-shirts. “I got chips and root beer. That’s pretty much it.” Gord laughed again when I asked if the town was originally founded by homesick Russians.
Apparently, Moscow was originally called Springfield until government agents dropped by in the late 19th century to tell the hamlet to change its name because there were already too many goddam Springfields. So in the name of not confusing the postal services any further, Springfield was renamed Moscow since it happened to be the anniversary of Napoleon’s wintery retreat from Moscow proper. “And hell, it gets cold here too!” Gord laughed.
We bought root beers as a small compensation for Gord’s story before making our own retreat. Just as we were about to pull out, Gord ran outside. Huffing, puffing and verging on a heart attack, he was holding a piece of paper. It was a photocopied certificate embossed with ‘Mos’ and a cartoon cow [pictured above]. He said he just found this last copy in his desk drawer and we could have it. Thanks Gord! Consider it laminated!
As we drove off we all agreed: Moscow is one hospitable town.
The spring/summer 2012 issue of CODE magazine has been out for a while. Besides managing as managing editor, I wrote a travel feature about grey – but mighty and magical – Kaliningrad. This city-formerly-known-as-Königsberg is now a dislocated blob of Russia in the heart of the EU, and offers crash courses in Teutonic Knights, WWII, the Cold War and how to build arts scenes out of freaking nothing. It’s also got killer beaches and drunken pine trees.
I also had the honour of interviewing Magnum Force of Street Style (and cover boy) Nick Wooster, as well as the Dutch artist/designer Joep van Lieshout. As founder of Atelier van Lieshout, Joep has brought the world fully-realised ‘Free States’, slave camps and rectum bars. Now he’s just come out with a line of unisex handbags. So I asked him if he was undermining his past work, playing with people’s minds or just being hilarious – he definitely proved to be hilarious. He also had interesting things to say about order vs. chaos.
This issue also has features from two of my favourite writers: Sarah Gehrke (on Noses) and Floris Dogterom (on doodle tattoos). And the design is by the inspired lads of Het Echte Werk. So check, check, check it out. It’s now available at the world’s better mag shops – including Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum in Amsterdam.
The US economy is generally collapsing more quickly than other economies. So it’s really a perfect time, exchange-wise, to visit New York City and indulge in what is the centre of the food universe. However it does help having a food-obsessed host to point the way. And with some luck, you can also squeeze in some more traditional sightseeing.
It’s smoking
Char No. 4 is a bar-restaurant with a passion for bourbon. Its interior is appropriately amber-hued and woody. The 19th-century row house location in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn might make it potentially pretentious. But it’s not. They serve ‘American fare with a focus on smoked meat’. And anyway, I have long trusted my food-obsessed host to regularly reward me for knowing him. He is the man who earlier introduced me to such global culinary touchstones as the ‘herring in a fur coat’ at Petrovich and the rainbow of innards that they concoct at St John.
Char No. 4 can indeed provide complementing bourbons to accompany each of their morsels of comfort food. The fried jambalaya rice balls with Andouille aioli had me feeling like I was back home in the land of Dutch kroketten and bitterballen – and I mean that in a good way and not a bad. But I am an emotional eater and I only really started to get weepy when I tasted the house-cured lamb pastrami with coriander aioli, pickled onions and grilled rye-caraway bread. By the time we were served the roasted salmon with black kale, roasted garlic and smoked pistachio-preserved lemon vinaigrette, my eyes had turned into waterfalls. It was all top nosh. On our way out, we bumped into the chef who said it was his last night before heading to California. Now it was my food-obsessed host’s turn to get overly emotional.
Borscht memories
After visiting the stacked silver boxes of the excellent and appropriately named New Museum, I was standing on the corner of 2nd and 9th in East Village waiting to meet friends for lunch at the famed Ukrainian eatery Veselka(read a great profile here). I used to eat here regularly years ago as a displaced teen and remember it always being filled with one half Ukrainian locals and the other half proto-hipsters (this was in the late 1980s before the neo-hipsters found succour in Williamsburg).
While watching the traffic going by I leaned back on a newspaper box for Village Voice and started to wonder why this weekly seems to halve in size each time I visit. Certainly Craig’s List took a big bite out of their classifieds business. But did Chowhound take a bite out of their reviewing business?
Suddenly my food-obsessed host bikes by. I experience the moment of recognition as a small stroke as he lives in Brooklyn and this just seemed like too much of a coincidence. But he just happened to be having lunch with his own food-obsessed friend a few blocks up. After I recover, he reassured me that while the rest of the hood has gentrified, Veselka remains a prime choice for lunch. (Later I would bump into him again a couple of times nearer his home while he was out getting Montreal bagels or sourcing fresh sardines from one of the excellent food shops along Court Street. This is just how it flows in a megapolis.)
Veselka’s borscht proved to be perfect and the varenyky dumplings divine. My first urge when confronted with the cabbage rolls was to just slap my face down hard on top of them and just start truffling down like a hog in heat. But to avoid burning my nose and eyes in the rich mushroom sauce, I tried to slow down by telling the story about my best friend growing up. His mother was Ukrainian. Whenever we were overly-energetic little boys, she would yell: ‘Boys please calm up; you are making me climb the ceiling.’ Oh, we would laugh. And then the next day we would point and laugh at my Dutch mother whenever she got all freestyle with the expressions of her new country – ah, the lot of the immigrant. Actually now that I think back, my friend and I were not actually to blame for our excessive energy levels. We were just still buzzing from the beet sugar in the borscht his mother had fed us for lunch.
Veselka’s borsht gave me the drive to walk very, very quickly across Manhattan towards Chelsea and finally check out the much-hyped ‘green’ (read: ridiculously over-designed but nice) High Line walkway that used to be the elevated train track that brought all the meat in and out of the Meat Packing District. Food history: it’s everywhere in New York.
The bread of Georgia
It was assumed by my food-obsessed host that we would stop off at Georgian Breadon our epic bike ride to Jacob Riis Park. Riis (1849-1914) was not a foodie but a journalist-reformer who used his camera to document slum life and invented flash photography on the way. So in a way, he can be considered a father of food photography.
As we cycled through Brighton Beach, not far from Coney Island, I was triggered by sense memories from years past: the sweat of a Russian bath house, the gentle squeak of a Nathan’s hotdog, being hypnotised by an old man slowly baking mighty pies in a pizza joint called Di Fara. This imperturbable Italian would pull out each pizza during the long baking process to give the bubbling mass a few massaging pokes with his fingers. He would then slice out some more fresh mozzarella here, and ladle out some more sauce there. Then he would put the pizza back into the oven for a few more minutes before repeating the whole process again. Meanwhile the line of saliva puddles would extend around the block. When I asked my food-obsessed host about the current state of Di Fara, he answered: ‘Now it’s just completely Disneyland.’
The Georgian bakers were however keeping it very real. In a small, hot room with a single clay oven, two men made two types of bread: a baguette-like shotipuri and a cheesy khachapuri. We opted for the cheesy to go. The older baker bagged it and passed it over a narrow counter. A small fridge was filled with a few dips and the intensely-mineral Borjomi mineral water. (And just to be clear: we are not talking about Georgia the state of pulled pork, but about Georgia the country in the Caucasus, much celebrated for their culinary skills, winemaking traditions, and being the birthplace of Stalin.)
Later on the empty and windswept beach of Jacob Riis Park with its abandoned art deco pavilion, we pulled out the crispy Frisbee-sized disk filled with salty, pudding-textured cheese. As it melted in our mouths, we all stared at each other with disbelief. Can something made by humans actually taste this good? We aided digestion by contemplating the sea, until someone tells us that this is the point where Hurricane Irene entered the city a few weeks earlier. ‘NYC has become a tropical climate, don’t you know?
A perfect Mexican. Dammit!
Perhaps my food-obsessed host had climate change in mind, when we later went to the Mexican restaurant Fonda in Park Slope. After cycling away cheese bread calories, it proved to be the perfect spot to unwind over a couple of spicy michelada beer cocktails. And dammit, the food was excellent again. But I was enjoying it less now because I was beginning to resent not living fulltime in a culinary capital. There were a few moments, for instance when picking at a huge wooden bowl filled with perfect guacamole, that I got distracted and started to unconsciously hum a happy tune. But otherwise I just complained about how Amsterdam has little range when it comes to cheap eats – Suri-Indo-Chin and, klaar, that’s it. Give me cheap Mexican! Give me cheap Vietnamese! Give me cheap sushi! Hell, I’d even be happy with a mid-range Serbian!
Finally, something real to complain about
Welcome to Williamsburg. My food-obsessed host warned us against going to Dineron a weekend, but we did not listen. We were stupid. But we had to be in the neighbourhood anyway and who can resist an authentically rundown diner in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge serving locally-sourced dishes? But while wedged in among the hipsters, we ended up waiting an hour for a table and then an hour for our food.
Except for a signature burger, Diner’s specials change daily – to the point that the amazingly chilled wait-staff sit down with you to write down all the specials on the paper table cloth. But in the end we were too hungry to care. We inhaled once, maybe twice, and our plates were empty. But the meals were obviously straight-up fine. It could have been quite possibly perfect on a week day. But I would never rebel against my food-obsessed host again.
Holy duck
My food-obsessed host remembered that I come from generations of duck harvesters. So it was sweet of him to take me for our last lunch to the corner of 2nd and 13th to Momofuku Ssam Bar, owned by the acclaimedKorean-American chef David Chang (a man known for his swearing and his love for offal). Their duck lunch is definitely of a whole fresh other feather. First a duck-and-pork sausage is embedded under the duck’s skin. This mutant hybridogenesis is then roasted on a rotisserie before being cut up and served with rice (which absorbed the melange of fats), duck confit (which adds yet greater depth to the melange of fats), chive pancakes (also handy to absorb the melange of fats), Bibb lettuce for wrapping (which help keep your fingers less sticky from the melange of fats), and a quartet of freaky sauces (which each combine in their own exotic way with the melange of fats).
As we made quacking and snorting sounds of delight at the bar, a brown-roasted pig buttock – a rather cute, rounded one – is served to the table across from us. It comes with a dozen oysters and rows of bowls with different kinds of fermented kimchi. Meanwhile in the open kitchen a guy is handling tripe that looks as if it came from a water buffalo. Serious stuff. A few weeks after our lunch, NY Times food critic Sam Sifton cited Momofuku Ssam Bar as his top choice for ‘For Blowing the Mind of an Out-of-Town Guest’.
I totally agreed. My mind was blown. And certainly my belly felt pretty blown on the airplane back home.
While Yuri Gagarin was my heroic rocket into Russia, General Ratko Mladic was my runaway genocidal horse cart into Serbia. I would never compare the two men. I’m just saying it’s sometimes handy to have a focus when entering new territory.
And actually my original entry into Serbia in the late 1990s was via the crazy kinetic music of gypsy brass bands. Guca!But I soon got confused by the discovery that this music – developed and played by Rromani musicians – had evolved into becoming the nationalist soundtrack to the idea of a ‘greater Serbia’. How did that happen? Yes, the war in former Yugoslavia proved to be very confusing. For a while I retreated into being a tourist: enjoying the food, the drink, the dance, the people and the non-war stories. I also enjoyed being asked: ‘Um, you do know that lately we don’t actually get a lot of tourists around here?’ Regardless, ignorance was bliss and I even ended up discovering some lovely and largely forgotten wine regions in Bosnia and Croatia… Yes, it’s vital to remember what happened in Vukovar, but it’s also important to visit a place like nearby Ilok. People are people – and the nice ones are often best enjoyed with a glass of fine wine.
Later, almost 10 years ago, I spent a few months living in Belgrade with my ex-Yugo ex-girlfriend who was working on NIOD’s Srebrenica Report. She was there for Mladic and I was along for the ride. Milosevic had just been arrested two months earlier and so it was hoped that Mladic was soon to follow – or at least that he would want to tell his side of the story of what happened in Srebrenica when the Bosnian Serb troops under his command rounded up and methodically massacred 8000 Moslem men and boys. We ended up staying in Belgrade through 11 September 2001 – witnessing the dawn of the emerging apocalypse in a post-apocalyptic city. It made a deep impression.
My ex-Yugo Ex never did get to talk to Mladic even though he was still being spotted enjoying football matches and restaurants around town (and apparently living – bizarrely – on Yuri Gagarin Boulevard). But we did get to share mixed grill with one of Mladic’s best friends. And while I don’t have the balls to name him by name, I can say with all confidence that this general was a scary little shit – a true mini Mladic, but one who had cut a deal with the International War Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to cover his ass.
Sadly, there is no justice for all. But at least today I can finally update the introduction to my Welcome to Yugoville archive which asked ‘Where’s Mladic?’ The runaway genocidal horse cart is now behind bars a few kilometres up the road in The Hague. Perhaps his presence there will help remind many of the governments of Europe – in particular the Dutch one – that flirting with nationalism/populism is as a dangerous game as it’s always been. Sorry to preach in clichés, but it can really still happen anywhere. That’s what I learned in Serbia – and the rest of former Yugoslavia. People are people. Politicians are politicians. And the damaged are damaged and often dangerous – Mladic being the perfect example. There are always those who are willing to turn the rhetoric of politicians into something bloody. But meanwhile I think I might finally plan a return trip for some crazy ass brass at Guca. Hopefully the people are closer to completely liberating the music back from the politicians. Then we can really eat, drink and dance.
Our Road to Gagarin project was originally inspired by what we came to call ‘cosmonautic kitsch’ and the JFK-level of conspiracy theories around Gagarin, the myth. But recently we got to meet people who knew Yuri, the human. In tribute to the 50th anniversary of Yuri’s flight, I have put together some excerpts from these meetings with remarkable people. Cosmos Libre!
As it turned out, the road to Gagarin was one of the better highways we ever drove down in Russia. In 2002, it was very new. Our driver Alexei, meanwhile, was very old school. He was a boy in Moscow when Yuri’s First Flight was announced. Like all his friends, Alexei skipped classes to be part of the masses that flowed to Red Square to celebrate. ‘But we were not punished because it was a great, great day. Our country had nothing, yet we were the first to enter the cosmos. From then on, every boy wanted to be a cosmonaut and every girl his wife.’ But times changed. Alexei doubts that his 15-year-old daughter has even heard of Gagarin. ‘She just wants dance and debt.’
Alexei’s views of the universe have only seemed to have darkened in the decades since the bright and glorious days of the First Flight. ‘By the time Gagarin died, everyone was tired of him. Within a year he was fat from vodka but still he became a general. The later cosmonauts were actually much cleverer since they were real scientists. Yuri was just an animal for an experiment.’ Alexei also claimed that Yuri wasn’t even first: that it was some Vladimir Ilyushin, son of a famous aircraft designer, who was the first to enter space. And in fact, most people now believe that Yuri himself was responsible for the still-mysterious training flight crash that killed him in 1968.
Suddenly our ambitions to make the ultimate coffee table book about Gagarin seemed a bit under-considered.
Alexei tried to cheer us up. ‘But Gagarin will still always be remembered as the first. And he did still risk his life…’ To distract us, Alexei pointed out a wealthy residential area where government officials apparently managed to buy half-a-million dollar houses while only making five hundred dollars a month. When a Mercedes careened past us, Alexei started grumbling about how ‘traffic lights are only for the poor’.
Yuri was born in the tiny village of Klushino near the town of Gzhatsk, now called Gagarin. While most Russian towns named after Soviet figureheads have long reverted to their pre-Revolution names, it’s safe to assume Gagarin will never become Gzhatsk again. ….
Welcome to Gagarin Town
After picking up Tanya, a local guide, we went off-highway in the direction of Klushino. When we passed a destroyed 19th-century estate, Tanya said: ‘No memories, no history’. When we passed the former location of the Pushkin Collective Farm, Alexei said: ‘I think it was Pushkin who said “I love Russia but it’s a very strange love”.’ Tanya and Alexei had only met 20 minutes earlier but these two comrades were already working in existential tandem.
We pull over and take pictures of the sign for Gagarin State Farm: it’s of a sci-fi Yuri rusting in his space helmet.
At Yuri’s first home, the ‘Gagarin Cabin’, we got introduced to the guys next door tinkering on what could possibly be cars. Alexei joked with them, ‘Don’t worry, they are journalists, not spies.’ They don’t look particularly worried as they shake our hands and ask us to buy them beer. Meanwhile, Alexei drives off in search of the caretaker who has the keys to the cabin. Apparently he’s milking cows somewhere.
Tanya told us that the original Gagarin Cabin was built in 1933 and was taken plank by plank and rebuilt in Gagarin soon after Gagarin’s death. The copied replica we were standing in front of was built in 1971 and had its reed roof replaced in 1994 because ‘the birds had stolen it for their own homes.’ Continuing the tour, we are taken out back to the underground turf house where Yuri lived during Nazi occupation. While his older brother and sister were sent to work camps in Germany, Yuri lived here for almost two years with three other children, his parents and his grandmother in six square metres of cold, cold dirt. In his ghost-written memoir, Road to the Stars, Gagarin described the mind games he played with the Nazis as a boy saboteur. And he wrote of the joy of seeing his first planes and meeting his first pilots.
The replica cabin is very pioneering. The front porch is a carpentry workshop and inside there are grain-milling devices, cotton looms and root cellars. A side room is a shed for pigs, cows and chickens. ‘But before the Bolsheviks, it was used for horses,’ Tanya told us. Before leaving, we stopped to drink from the Gagarin Well, an act which is said to ensure one’s safe return from the cosmos. The water was cold and refreshing but came with a few splinters.
On our way back to Gagarin, I started asking Tanya gentle questions around Alexei’s outrageous rewriting of space history and Gagarin’s role in it. She just brushed it aside as useless gossip: ‘For me, these are not questions.’ I gave up and concentrated on making her like me again.
There was plenty of Yuri to see in Gagarin. Seven museums and galleries are dedicated to the town’s favourite son. It is hoped that an improved infrastructure will motivate more pilgrims to take the 180-kilometre ride from Moscow than just cosmonauts and astronauts looking for luck, the countless buses of school children and the stray terrestrial space tourist. Gagarin Town was no Graceland. Yet. And at least Alexei approved: ‘Have you noticed that there are few Mercedes here? That means it’s an honest place.’
…
Meet Yuri’s best friend
Victor Porohnya and Yuri Gagarin became best friends in 1951 as first year students at the Industrial-Pedagogical College in Saratov, a once-closed military-industrial city located 800 kilometres south of Moscow down the Volga River. The two spent four years there together and remained close until Gagarin’s death 17 years later. Porohnya cherishes the memories of their friendship and also credits Gagarin — and his premature death — with influencing his life’s varied course. Not only did Yuri’s tutoring help him excel at school but his friend’s death made him realise he really wanted to do more with the Cosmos.
Porohnya now lives with his wife of 53 years, Valentina, and their cat Mussipussi in a Moscow apartment. Our first meeting with him had been postponed because he was ill, but now he felt better: ‘higher than a floor but still lower than a roof ’. When he picked us up at the metro station to lead us through a maze of alleys to get to his home, he pointed at a newspaper headline that evidently said that the government in our homeland of the Netherlands had fallen. This was news to us. ‘Now you also know what it feels like going to Leningrad only to discover that it is called St Petersburg again.’ Porohnya laughed when we gave him a present of cheese from ‘a country that may, unfortunately, no longer exist.’
Porohnya is an important man. His name googles like crazy in Cyrillic and a carpet with his image hangs on the wall of his living/dining room. He was a success story during Soviet times and remains a success story today. Almost 80, he is currently director of the Centre for History Education overseeing all technical universities across Russia and is head of the historical department of the Moscow Aviation Institute. He has countless titles and is author of more than 100 scientific papers about technology, history, metallurgy and aerospace. He also wrote a book about his friend, The Road to the Baykonur (1977), which was published in 20 countries. We hoped he could set us straight on the slanders against Yuri we had originally heard expressed many years earlier by our ‘man on the street’ driver Alexei.
Porohnya is obviously as nice and open as Yuri was reputed to be. Born in Voroshilovgrad of what was then Soviet Ukraine, Porohnya is a true ‘man of science’. He tells his stories by building up his facts, methodically and in chronological order, but then always returning to the big recurring theme of his life: football. He played it on his few off-hours as a child miner during WWII, as a student with Yuri in Saratov (though Yuri, short as he was, preferred basketball), as a factory worker in Leningrad, and as government bureaucrat organising the development of agricultural land in Kazakhstan. ‘But with all that wild nature there, it was very difficult…’
He was working as a football trainer in 1968 when a player ran up to tell him Gagarin had died. ‘You will never understand what I felt at that moment.’
As his wife spread food in front of us, Victor looked at her and her handiwork lovingly. ‘You know she’s the one who got the medal, not me, for when she was in charge of the Culture House.’ Valentina ignored her husband and claimed she was just doing what she has always done. ‘This house has always been very busy. During Soviet times, we’d have at least 150 people a year from all around the world. Many of them I think were just football fans of Victor.’ She was teasing her husband who responded with a feigned innocent who, me?-look. ‘But when we travel, we also always stay with friends. But the morning after, we never look as good as we did the night before.’ We all laughed, ate and felt very much at home.
Like Gagarin, Porohnya’s childhood was marked by WWII (otherwise known as the Great Patriotic War). In 1943, while Yuri was hunkered down in an underground turf house, 12-year-old Victor, after the death of his father and three brothers, started work with his mother in a grain mill and later in mining. Victor and Yuri were two very different people: ‘I am very emotional, but Yuri was always very ordered.’ They did not actually meet during their first weeks in the school’s iron casting department. ‘We were just 17 so at first we were both much more interested in the older students who were married with kids and had experienced the war. I remember one from Stalingrad who had been able to negotiate with both Russians and Germans for food. A very smart man.’
Porohnya only noticed Yuri — then just as ‘being like everyone else’ — when they were assigned to the same dorm. For the next two years, they would live two bunks apart, crammed together with 13 other people. ‘When we studied, some of us sat on the table and others on the floor. It was that small.’ Yuri ended up tutoring those, like Victor, who lagged academically due to interrupted schooling. ‘Yuri had a fresh mind and a good knowledge of math and chemistry from his time in Moscow at the Lubertsky Academy.’ By the end of the first year, the whole dorm had excellent marks.
After school they did sports or worked. Ships docking along the Volga would hire students to help unload the boats. ‘With this first money we bought clothes, and me, Yuri and another friend would get them in a size that fit us all.’ This way they could exchange clothes and keep looking fresh and interesting when chasing girls. ‘At one point Yura and I even had girlfriends from the same region. This annoyed some local Tartar guys who began beating us up. But we took off our belts and fought back. The school heard about it but our director said we were good boys and just fighting out of self-defence.’ When I asked if it had perhaps been their innocent smiles that helped save them from punishment, Victor flashed a very convincing innocent smile.
‘Once we worked all night unloading a ship and only got to bed at six but had to get up at eight,’ Victor sighed deeply. ‘So of course we slept in. When none of us came to class, our head teacher came to find us. But instead of waking us she sat by the door and told those passing to be quiet. This very tough woman became the guardian of our dreams!’ The next day however, she gave a test based on the assigned lesson no one had done. ‘Everyone got a two out of five but Yuri due to his memory and attentiveness got a five.
‘He was always the first. Even at a very young age Yuri always knew what time it was.’ …
Yuri becomes the first man in space
At the time of the First Flight, the Porohnyas were in an outlying republic where Victor’s football team was training. Suddenly, while they were taking a quiet walk around town, all the radios suddenly turned on to announce that ‘this is the day that the citizen of the USSR, Major Yuri Alexseievich Gagarin, went into space.’ The city’s men started to throw their hats in the air—‘as is the tradition there’. At first, Victor did not comprehend that this was his school friend. ‘Yuri was still very young and had just graduated from the flight academy.’ Before going to his football practice, Victor asked his wife to sit by the radio and write down all the details she heard. When he returned in the evening, Valentina greeted him by yelling: ‘Yes! Yes! He is your Yuri!’
Victor felt compelled to rush out to the post office and send a telegram to Saratov College to tell them that this achievement belonged to a former student, and another to the Minister of Military Affairs in Moscow in an attempt to send his congratulations to his friend. This last telegram was probably the reason for the four men arriving the next day to ask Victor questions about Yuri and their college days in Saratov. These men likely were the true authors of Gagarin’s soon-to-be published memoir Road to the Stars.
A couple of months later, on 13 June 1961, the school chums were reunited in Kaluga as part of the official opening of the Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics. Victor and Yuri only had a five- or ten- minute ‘public greeting’ where they talked about their recent world travels (Yuri as a space icon and Victor as a terrestrial footballer). Before being taken away by his official entourage, Gagarin managed to slip Victor his address and telephone number. They would begin to see each other again during their vacations.
When asked whether he noticed if Gagarin had changed much with his new status, Victor behaved as if he could still tease his old friend. ‘In school we were exactly the same small size, but when he became a big man, he became a BIG man,’ referring to Gagarin’s later weight gain that was due to all the endless toasts he had to endure as a Soviet space superstar. But then Victor got serious. ‘Have you ever met his mother? No? She was a simple, good and straightforward woman. I will tell you this: Yuri absolutely didn’t change. He understood that he wasn’t special and that it was just a twist of fate that he had been selected to be first. That’s why he stayed normal without any pretensions. I’ve had the opportunity to observe many powerful people of the USSR who also came from poor families and became famous public figures. Compared to them, Yuri did not change – absolutely not.’
Victor paused. ‘Speaking of which, do you have Absolut Vodka in Holland? I like that brand very much.’ He got up to look for a bottle. His wife joined him, knowing she was going to have to help him find it.
‘The first toast is to Moscow because none of us are from Moscow, yet we are all here right now.’ Victor is reminded of a night when he was hosting a party and Yuri dropped by. ‘There was food and drink on the table, but not enough, and Yuri could tell I was unable to buy more. So he put his jacket on me and told me to go downstairs to the shop, while winking towards the right pocket. In it I found some money.
‘The second toast is to the health of our guests. And I wish you luck. There are not many people in the West who want to show Russia from a good side. It’s a good subject, especially now the Americans say they were the first ones in space after all and that it was them who won the war. In this way, no matter how much you deny it, your position is political.’ We all laughed. By now none of us were feeling the least bit political.
Valentina tells us of her first meeting with Yuri. It was 31 December 1965 at a New Year’s party in Moscow. ‘I was worrying about how to address him: as a friend or more formally. We were the same age but he was very famous so I didn’t know what to do. When we knocked on the door of his apartment, he opened and immediately began to hug me and throw me around. After that I stopped worrying.’
The only thing that bothered Valentina about Yuri’s life was that it was always being interrupted. ‘You would just have some fresh vodka in your glass and then at the door there’d be some journalist from some newspaper. This would happen again and again. But still he was a very normal person. You didn’t feel like you were with Yuri Alexeivich. You felt like you were with Yuri.’
Victor and Valentina were naturally upset by the stories around Yuri that later appeared in newspapers. ‘In Soviet times we did not have yellow newspapers. In the Soviet Union the hero was always the hero and it was told without any witnesses. It was ideology. All rumours about Gagarin only appeared after the breakdown of the USSR. And everything I read and heard in that time were lies…’
We stuck around for more stories and hospitality. Those old Russians knew how to party. Eventually we left, feeling as if we had just celebrated a New Year’s Eve in Moscow with friends at the dawn of the space age. Yuri’s ghost was close…
…
The psychologist to cosmonauts
To be a cosmonaut, one must be able to deal with both excruciating pain and excruciating boredom—and be smart. And even if you make it through the insanely rigorous selection process and training programme, there’s a good chance you will never make it into space. You must therefore be ready to live out the rest of your life ‘unfulfilled’. But then again, if you do make it into space you can end up suffocating alone in the void or getting pancaked upon re-entry.
… For the past 48 years, Dr Rostislav Bogdashevsky has been the doctor/psychologist to all the cosmonauts, astronauts and space tourists trained at Star City’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. He readies space travellers for the psychic hardships of space as well as for the weirdness that awaits them upon their return to spaceship Earth. And not only does he have a goatee, penetrating eyes and a devilish sense of humour, he was also a close friend of Yuri Gagarin.
Dr Bogdashevsky has loved his job since arriving here as a young doctor in 1962 less than a year after Gagarin’s flight and just as the second division of cosmonauts was being selected. He had originally specialised as a surgeon, but since he’d ‘always been interested in human souls’, he decided to qualify as a psychologist. Star City proved to be his perfect human laboratory. ‘It is filled with my favourite working material: people. And I can confidently say that I know the characters of all the cosmonauts.
‘Cosmonauts are really the elite of all the human beings. They are very unlike politicians, who are too busy with attaining worldly power to fully understand how to take advantage of all the talents and skills of cosmonauts,’ opined Dr Bogdashevsky. I liked the doctor’s vision: that the world was no longer divided between East and West, but between savvy cosmonauts and peckerwood politicians…
‘Back in those early days, cosmonauts were overprotected and everything was a secret. One of the big things I realised back then was that there are two different persons in each human: one formal, the other informal. And a person’s behaviour will be absolutely different in these different situations. If you feel free, you behave absolutely differently than when you don’t.’
After his flight, Gagarin had a very formal role to play with the rest of the world, and that was where, according to Dr Bogdashevsky, his problems started. ‘There were political problems, ideological problems and big problems between civilian and military elements. And Yuri was in the middle of it all. He was a very smart person and he knew a lot. But he was also young and it was difficult to survive in this informational stream. But by nature he was a very direct and truthful man with a good sense of humour. Thanks to this basic character, he was able to stay human. When you see those films of how people interacted with him and celebrated the event and by looking at his face, you realise he was really a very good person. And to be good is a natural thing—it’s like coming from God. You were born with it. It’s nature.’
But of course the many pressures must have had an effect on his essential goodness? ‘Yes, of course, we are all weak. As Stalin said: “If there is a human, there is a problem. No human, no problem’’.’ Dr Bogdashevsky paused to enjoy my Stalin-said-what?! -reaction before continuing. ‘Unfortunately, we did not have time to get more details about his character, because he died very young. And since he disappeared, he’s become a legend. I certainly cannot imagine my friend as old as I am [laughs]. I will always remember him as young and handsome.’
But wasn’t Gagarin also a victim of the State? Didn’t he just want to fly again? ‘Of course he always dreamt of returning to space. He did everything to fly again. And he was absolutely prepared for it. But the politicians and chiefs understood the worth of his phenomenon and kept him away from all dangerous situations.’
Gagarin’s frustration is a common feature in the lives of cosmonauts that followed him. Describing it as the ‘tragedy of being a non-fulfilled person,’ Dr Bogdashevsky said that there are many cosmonauts in Star City who have been here for 25 years but have never made it to space. ‘They just want to realise their goal of flying into space. So of course sometimes they try to cover up their true psychological condition…’
…
Director of Star City and the last citizen of the USSR
Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalyov (1958) is a cosmonaut and rocket scientist. He would happily hop on the first rocket out of here. He is open about not being totally fulfilled with his current job as director of Star City’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. He has lived the life of a science fiction character. And it must be said: ears aside, Krikalyov’s physical resemblance to Spock is downright eerie.
As a cosmonaut, Krikalyov has spent more time in space than any other human being on the planet: 803 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes. He is perhaps most famous as ‘the last citizen of the USSR’, because in 1991/92, he spent almost a year maintaining the MIR space station after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As seen in the documentary Out of the Present, he wondered ‘if anyone down there remembered I was up here,’ while making 16 orbits a day alone in the void.
After his return to Earth, he went on to break many records and receive many medals. He flew on the American space shuttle and was the first resident of the International Space Station. While action man is now administration man, he remains precise. When I asked what he remembered from his first 108 minutes in space, in order to get a feel for Gagarin’s orbit around the earth, he began with a correction. ‘Actually, the actual orbit took 90 minutes. Gagarin’s 108 minutes was the time from take-off to landing.’
‘Your first space flight is something you will remember for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been to space. First there’s the long-term weightlessness. On Earth, you can only recreate weightlessness for about 25-30 seconds in flying laboratories. And second, there’s the opportunity to see the earth through the window and witness the horizon’s ellipse…’
…
And how different is being a cosmonaut today and in Gagarin’s time? ‘Well, Gagarin was the first. And at that time, people had no idea if we could survive in space or even breathe out there. It was all completely new. His flight was the first step. And in this way, even though his flight was quite short, it was very heroic.’ Krikalyov then agreed that cosmic fame comes at a price. ‘Some stories about your life can start living a life of their own. You can no longer influence them…’
…
The landing
Today, if you drive to Gagarin’s landing location near the village of Smelovka, coincidentally just a few kilometres from his old college in Saratov, the route is lined with space-themed flags and endless children’s murals depicting spacey alien visions. After turning down a road lined with tree trunks painted white, it quickly becomes clear that it doesn’t really matter much where exactly Gagarin landed. If you’ve seen one field here, you’ve seen them all. If you wanted to interview a potential witness, you would have to learn cow. There is only the whistling of birds and the rustling of garbage left behind from a recent Cosmonautics Day celebration.
The ‘official’ landing spot is marked by a refreshingly low-tech statue of Yuri happily strutting with his headset in his left hand and waving an eternal greeting with his right. Instead of the prerequisite titanium used in all the over-the-top space monuments in Moscow, his figure has been fashioned out of concrete. The celestial swoop behind him is of aluminum. Still, when his mother saw it, it is said she said ‘He looks so alive!’
…
Yuri’s doctor, the survival artist
Vitaly Georgievich Volovich is a famous Soviet doctor/paratrooper and specialist of human survival in extreme natural conditions. As the first doctor to give Gagarin a medical examination after his flight, he is perhaps one of the few living people who can rate as an eyewitness of sorts to the landing.
In many ways, Volovich resembles Gagarin if he had lived: an amiable, tiny-statured and retired Hero of the Soviet Union living in a cramped apartment in Moscow, surrounded by countless artefacts from world travels — and armed with incredible stories. On 9 May 1949, Volovich achieved his own dramatic ‘first’ when together with his friend AP Medvedev, he became the first to parachute jump into the North Pole.
After spending several years working on the science stations North Pole 2 and the drifting North Pole 3, Volovich joined the Defence Department’s Institute of Aviation Medicine in 1952 to specialise in the survival of air, and later, space crews after a crash or wayward landing. As head of its Survival Lab, he led countless expeditions to jungles, tropics, the arctic, forests, taigas and deserts. He also spent a lot of time in India’s tropical zone, which is where he learned to speak English. As he warmed up his Russian-Hindi accent, he summarised a typical field trip from that time: ‘Near equator on rafts. Floating seven days with no help. Little breakfast. Little lunch. Little water. Much sun.’
Did he ever feel fear out in all these strange places? ‘I’ve only felt something like fear twice. But I would more describe it as difficult situations. There was once when I was a child, when I was separated from my parents and spent a night thinking they were dead. Yes, then I had much fear. The second time was when a parachute did not open during a night jump…’
What happened?! ‘I don’t know. But I survived!’
…
Volovich originally met Gagarin when Gagarin was still an air force pilot in training in the far north. ‘I gave him a medical examination when they were searching for cosmonaut candidates. It was top secret. I met him many times in the process. He was very interesting and had a sympathetic face. And like all the first cosmonauts, he could enjoy life, drink and women. They were all normal males.’
Volovich went on to create his own job: heading a group of doctor-paratroopers that were part of the search and rescue of cosmonauts, and as such, he was often on hand to examine the first cosmonauts after their landing. On the day of Yuri’s First Flight, Volovich was meant to parachute in to the landing site but for some unknown reason that was cancelled. He only got to examine Gagarin on a plane being flown the 30 kilometres to Kuibyshev where government officials, correspondents and the Head Designer were waiting to congratulate Yuri. ‘When I saw Gagarin, he was very good. Talking. Smiling. He spoke of his space flight and some of the details: the blue of the water, how a pencil floated in the cabin of the space capsule. When I checked him, all was good: blood, pulse and the rest. I made a joke: “Yura, maybe you did not fly at all!” Yura answered laughing: “Maybe you are right!”.’ … In the years that followed, Volovich continued to bump into Gagarin around Star City and at clubs and theatres in Moscow. He didn’t observe any major changes. ‘It was very interesting. He was Yura before and after his flight. Whoever chose Yura to be first made the right decision.’
He then poured us a bit more cognac and offered his service as fact checker for any future Gagarin book. ‘Truth is crucial. Mistakes not good.’
…
The first human in space, Yuri Gagarin (1934-68), was our rocket into Russia. But it was usually a wintery Russia. So it was a refreshing change when last month he had us blast us off to a warmer place: Cuba. It was also a bit of a different planet. So thank you, Yuri. Thank you.
Gagarin will always be Cosmonaut Number One. But he also came to hold another title: president of the Soviet-Cuban Friendship Society. As such, the tiny cosmonaut who had conquered the vastness of outer space also became a symbol for a tiny nation who had seemingly conquered the vastness of American business interests. It was interesting times…
Barely a week after Gagarin’s first flight on 12 April 1961, the US-backed invasion of Playa Giron (AKA Bay of Pigs) tried to overthrow Fidel Castro’s two-year-old revolutionary government. But the attack only worked to strengthen Castro’s position and ally Cuba more closely with the Soviet Union. The resulting increased tensions with the US would build up towards the Cuban Missile Crisis (AKA October Crisis) 18 months later.
So what exactly was the role of the first off-world traveller in the events around what many consider the closest the world ever got to blowing itself up?
In Havana, we not only got to ask the first black dude in space (who incidentally credited his dentist wife for his Yuri-competing grin), but also an old chess-playing buddy of Che… Thanks Yuri! We also went off-road in search of a school and a goose farm named after Gagarin. It was ‘ganso journalism’ at its best. Especially since due to unforeseen circumstances (stereotypically involving an unlicensed 1950s Chevy and a young lady of the Revolutionary Police), we went without an interpreter. But luckily the international language of Yuri got us far (as you can see in the above clip).
However, the fact that the Spanish word for goose, ganso, is also Cuban slang for gay, did lead to a few moments of deep confusion. Thanks again, Yuri!
I just returned from a few days at the biggest book fair on the planet. I got lost in the mass that is Frankfurt’s Buchmesse with its 300,000 visitors and 7500 stands belonging to publishers, printers and distributors from 111 countries. As examples: there was one publisher from Haiti, two from Albania, 16 from Iran, 188 from China, etc, etc. With 3,315 stands, Germany easily won out in the property wars. Strangely, many of these stands seemed to reflect the country’s unaccountable passion for books about cats. However I ended up being most charmed by the more forgotten back corners of the fair where, for example, Manga comic publishers nestled up with Christian fundamentalist pamphleteers.
I was one of around 10,000 journalists wandering endless kilometres to follow a story or interview an author. And like me, probably half of these journalists had a personal project to pitch. My favourite came from a guy who was pitching his book by going cubicle to cubicle in the press room. His dream project was called ‘Sulphur is your Friend’ which argued that this smelly element was in fact heroic because of all the worthy work it does within the wine industry. Another highlight of Buchmesse arrived around five or six each evening as the drinks and food began to flow. Rumours would quickly spread as to where the best freebies could be scored. Naturally, the French and Italian bookstands were the most highly regarded. Sadly I missed the big Dutch publishers’ event when they feed the 5000 with bottomless barrels of raw herring. Apparently the whole hall stinks up and there are always leftovers. Actually I guess in the book trade these fish would be called ‘remainders’.
Because I did not book a room a year ahead, I had to stay in the spa and gambling town of Wiesbaden at the end of the S-Bahn. On the way to the hotel from the station, I asked the cab driver about what I should know about this town. After inquiring where I came from, he answered laughing: ‘I think we can compete with Amsterdam here. We have public clubs but we also have very many private clubs — if you know what I mean.’ I did. However I decided to seek my happy ending at my hotel with a shower. Unfortunately my hotel turned out to be the German version of Fawlty Towers. Luckily my Manuel spoke excellent English and we had a good laugh as the mishaps piled up. There was a leak over the bed (not exactly the shower I had imagined) so I was put into another room. As it turned out, that room did not come equipped with a functioning toilet, shower or lock. So in the end I mentioned the war and got away with it. They gave me a free night and a fancy room the next day. And since freebies and slapstick always put me in a good mood, I didn’t even mind later when a lit cigarette butt bounced off my head when I was unwinding with a beer on their patio. In fact it was like the cherry on top.
Actually I’d like to stress how much I love Germany. And my respect goes beyond just their rich culinary tradition in reconstituted meat products (for some thoughts on currywurst, click HERE and HERE). I might even consider moving there if Canadians end up getting stigmatised under the Dutch right wing government that is now being formed with the backing of the populist politician and amateur filmmaker Geert Wilders. I keep getting the feeling that Germany has done a much better job at dealing with its past. There are certainly a lot of books on the subject — it’s a topic right up there with cats.
A website charts out all that is weird and wonderful in the world.
Attention, jaded travellers who are convinced that everything exotic has long become familiar to them. The website Atlas Obscura — “a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica” — should get you all worked up enough to hit the road again. Their Canadian listings alone should give you a taste of what’s in store: the Diefenbunker nuclear shelter in Ontario, the Gopher Hole Museum in Alberta, and the Downtown Hotel that serves Sourtoe Cocktails (a combination of champagne and an amputated toe) in the Yukon.
When it was launched last summer, the website seemed to tap into something that was still missing from the internet and went immediately viral and contributors lined up to donate their own desperately odd destination — ones that have not yet been co-opted by package tours or beer ads.
Atlas Obscura’s mission statement is a noble one: it’s the place to look for: “miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper.” And who isn’t looking?
Two 26 year-olds, the film-maker Dylan Thuras and the science journalist Joshua Foer, came together after discovering a shared passion for the desperately obscure. They met three years ago organising a society meeting for Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century Jesuit scholar and “last renaissance man” who is listed as the inventor of both the “vomiting statue” and the “cat piano”.
But their taste for the wondrous began much earlier: with travels across that most obscure and wondrous of countries: their very own US of A. Dylan Thuras recalls: “I was twelve and my parents took me on a family vacation around the mid-west which is filled with all kinds of bizarre places: Wall Drug, the South Dakota Badlands, and the most amazing and unbelievable was ‘The House on The Rock’. It was like entering a fantastical universe someone else constructed for you.” And indeed, its Atlas Obscura write-up does make it sound enticing. It’s a sprawling construction in Wisconsin that houses a collection of automated orchestras and a 200-foot model of a sperm whale.
Joshua Foer’s coming of age came later: “I was 19 and I bought a beat-up minivan and spent two months driving around the country. At the time, I’m not sure I could have told you why I was doing it, except that I was curious to know what the rest of America was like. I spent a lot of time trying to find wondrous and curious places. It was a life-changing experience.”
Both quickly realised that was no single, great resource for travellers like themselves. Until they realised the power of the Internet and user-generated sites. But while all are welcome to contribute, the listings are edited and fact checked. “We love these places and want to respect and honour them,” says Thuras.
So yes, it turns out that our Earth is still, as Thuras describes it, “a very big and very weird and interesting place, and there are plenty of things left to be discovered by the traveller.” Isn’t that wonderfully reassuring?
The editors of Atlas Obscura Editors give their top wacky destination tips — as of September 2009 (since “our favourites are always changing”).
Dylan Thuras: 1. “The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee in India take at least ten to fifteen years to build. Locals guide tree roots over a river and have them take root on the other side. Some of these living bridges are over a hundred feet long and strong enough to support fifty people. There’s even a double-decker one.”
2. “The Gates of Hellis a 328-foot wide hole in the desert that has been on fire for thirty-eight years after a Soviet drilling rig accidentally drilled into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and poisonous fumes to be released. To head off a potential environmental catastrophe, they set it on fire.”
3. “The Relampago del Catatumbo is a near-constant lightning storm over a river in Venezuela. For almost half the nights of the year, for ten hours at a time, there’s almost constant lightning. Weirdly, it is silent because all the electrical activity happens way up in the air. It’s just insanely cool.”
Joshua Foer: 1. “The other day someone posted an absolutely frightening place that I have no interest in ever visiting: Snake Island off the coast of Sao Paulo, Brazil that is filled with venomous pit vipers: one snake per square meter. Try to picture that…”
2. “The Tempest Prognosticator (a.k.a. the ‘Leech Barometer’) is an ingenious weather-prediction device that debuted at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Leeches get really worked up before a storm, so if you attach bells to them you’ve got yourself a pretty good barometer. A full-scale working model can be viewed at the Barometer World Museum in Devon, England.”
3. “I long to visit New Zealand to see the Electrum, the world’s largest Tesla coil, in action. It stands four stories tall and zaps out three million volts. It’s absolutely beautiful.”
Borka, in particular, has long been a hero of mine ever since I first visited ex-Yugoslavia. As the founder of Belgrade’s Centre for Cultural Decontamination, she has fought the good fight against a steady stream of nationalists, gangsters and populist pricks. The Centre was one of the first places I went when I felt dirty from sitting behind Mira Markovic, wife of Milosevic, on a flight between Amsterdam and Belgrade in 2001.
I went to the awards ceremony in Brussels a couple of weeks ago and certainly had a couple of culturally diverse moments. It was at the Royal Flemish Theater and when we arrived early, my friend and I went to the next-door cafe to kill some time. The waitress refused to talk Dutch with us — which we thought ironic since we were at a Dutch-language theater for an awards ceremony dedicated to cultural diversity.
After the ceremony, I went over to introduce myself to Borka and she greeted me very warmly thanks to some common friends (ah, I do miss the Balkans sometimes…). She asked me if I had ever met Princess Margriet of the Netherlands. I hadn’t so I shook the princess’s hand. Then Borka wanted to introduce me to some Belgrade journalist — “you probably know him, he’s the one that they tried to blow up with not one but two bombs.” But just as I was about to shake his hand, a plate of oysters came by and the crowd — royalty, journalists, etc — swooped in. It was a moment of true diversity. The oysters were dang tasty as well.
My feature on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (and the 60th anniversary of the rise of Currywurst) is published today in the Globe&Mail. It was a hard one to write mostly because it is such a dense and telling tale. I visited Berlin a few months after it happened and the images that still stick was of children playing in the watchtowers and the big bales of collected barbwire — forming 5-10 meter high tumbleweeds of rusting iron. So anyway, I had to leave a lot of wacky facts out of the article in the name of readability. Luckily, I have no such constraints here. Oh, and if you want more on ostalgia just check out my previous Globe&Mailfeature on the 15th anniversary….
Funniest story I heard was from my esteemed hosts Mr and Mrs Cameron (who have been living the revolution in Mitte quite a few years now…) who told me of a group of West Berlin friends who found a hole in the wall and went for a look in East Berlin. When they returned they found the hole had been closed up — they were stuck! But luckily, for them the Wall properly fell the next day.
There are a few tricks for the visitor to differentiate between former East and West halves. East Berlin has much more animated and jaunty figures in their crosswalk lights. Linguists now also know that it just takes 29 years, the time the wall existed, for distinct dialects to develop.
By 1980 an estimated 100,000 West Berliners were living life in a subculture — via cafes, communes, squats and generally radical lefty politics. (Today the most affluent of this generation support some of the largest organic supermarkets in Europe.)
You know you are buying an authentic GDR postcard by its flimsiness — and by the fact that you are overcharged for it.
And in the world of currywurst:
I had some earlier thoughts on sausage. The mighty currywurst is apparently called the “white trash plate” in Cologne and Dusseldorf but “chancellor’s plate” in Hannover. Also interesting: Gerhard Schroeder was known as the “currywurst chancellor”. And Volkswagon developed their own recipe that can only be bought in factory canteens. In 1982, the singer Herbert Groenemeyer sang passionately of his nightly desires for the mighty wurst (this YouTube clip is not for the queasy of stomach but boy does Herbert sing from the heart).
Now for something completely different:
After all that heavy street food (especially since you’ll also have to pay tribute to the Turk, Mahmut Aygun, who invented the now universal Doner Kebab here in 1972), there’s nothing like Japanese noodles. Cocolo (Gipsstrasse 3, 0172 3047584, ) serves some of the best Japanese noodle soup on the planet. Owner Ollie not only cooks but also built everything — from the furnishings to the service to the kitchen — from scratch. Inspiring! Also, Restaurant Schoenbrunn is a lovely and fancy place to dine in Volkspark Friedrichshain. Aid digestion by climbing the nearby hills which were built from the debris of WWII.
For dessert, one can pop into a baker for a Berliner (more commonly known as a Pfannkuchen in Berlin itself), the pastry JFK accidentally referred to in his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech to half a million bewildered Berliners in 1963.
But to conclude: Mir ist alles Wurst!
Es geht um die Wurst!
Sei keine beleidigte Leber wurst!
My piece about the new museums in Belgium dedicated to surrealist Rene Magritte and Tintin-creator Herge has been published in today’s Globe&Mail. Read it here before rushing out to buy a bowler hat of your own.
Is there a future in Croatian Science Fiction films?
By Steve Korver, 31-03-2004, Amsterdam Weekly
Long ago on a planet very much like this one, I spent a year or two being a B-actor in a whole slew of Asian B-movie productions. Sometimes I was lucky and got to wear a black cape, fly around and leave bite marks on the necks of exotically nubile women. Other times I was yet luckier and got to wear a white suit and deliver a bulletgram to some fat and stupid Mr. Chang. But mostly, I just got beaten up rather quickly in low-budget kung fu flicks for being a white trash loser. What can I say? I was just doing what I was good at.
I even had a whole career trajectory planned out: learn the trade in Bangkok and Bollywood before moving onto Hong Kong to make some decent cash, and then later onto Tokyo to make some really decent cash. Sadly I hit a bit of a brick wall in Hong Kong — or as I came to call it: Hong Fucking Kong. Thanks to its history as a Brit colony, the place was already a garbage can overflowing with the whitest of trash. It was just too damn competitive. Sure I could make a living, but never my first million. Besides, my agent freaked me out. He was a tank-like Polish polygamist who liked to hint at his murky past by showing off his numerous inch-thick sword scars.
Abandoning my Tokyo Dreams, I returned to the West with my tail between my legs. When I ended up in Amsterdam, I was cruelly forced to abandon my B-actor Dreams almost entirely since there was no real Dutch kung fu flick tradition with which to earn a decent living. Hell, even when Jackie Chan did come to the Netherlands to make a movie, the bastard chose to film it in Rotterdam! (Though it must be said that the resulting Who Am I? is worth seeing for the klog fu scene alone. Respect.)
But happily through the kindness of both friends and strangers — or rather, cultists who strangely respect the fact that I die on five or six different occasions in Once Upon a Time in China, Part II — I still do get occasionally asked to re-indulge my B-movie acting fantasies by doing the voice-over of an alien here, or by being the first to discover a dismembered corpse there. I figure it helps keep me young.
I gave little thought to my B-movie past until last year when I befriended a Mexican colleague of sorts who had built up a mighty impressive list of B-movie credits in Los Angeles. He was always the bandito. So of course I had to tell him of my own Asian adventures of always being the peckerhead. And either he was impressed or just being nice, but after listening to my tales he said something that I can use to cheer me up in all my future dark moments: “Wow man, being a Canadian in Hong Kong sounds as rough as being a Mexican in Hollywood.”
You said it my greasy-haired cigar-chomping brother!
Indeed, stereotyping is a nasty universal phenomenon that is not just restricted to Hollywood films — for example, the white boy gets pigeonholed just as bad in Bollywood as the Indian does in Hollywood (The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon being a rare exception of course). For most people this is the most obvious of facts. But since I have always found stereotyping’s embrace quite sweet, I had never given it much thought. Any negative feeling I may have had about show biz was always directed towards whoever my agent was at the time. But one prejudice I held about stereotyping was that it was something generally restricted to B-flicks. So hence, I was shocked when I finally had my own personal experience that taught me of the true dangers of stereotyping, it was during the highbrow premier of a truly “A-is-for-Arty” film at the De Balie a couple of weeks ago.
Initially I went with high hopes since I still had fond memories from two years earlier spent filming with a remarkably multiculti cast for Oxygen4, an ambitious 90-minute experimental “social science fiction” video by Croatian director/artist/all-round-nice-guy Dan Oki. I even had the smug memory of playing a Canadian commander of the International Space Station. This was the sort of juicy role (we are speaking relatively here of course) that I hoped would be a step up from all the truly cheesy parts I have played in the past.
Sadly this was not to be… The film goes terribly wrong terribly quickly. It turns out that my character (who, incidentally, I created a quite moody type out of) becomes one of the first to die from a mysterious space malady — a twist in the plot that I immediately perceived as a very dangerous precedent. Not only could I no longer save the film with my undeniable talents at being moody, but since it’s pretty much an accepted fact that it’s always the black guy who gets killed first in Hollywood science fiction films, does my character’s early death now mean that it will now always be a poor hapless Canadian who is the first to get killed in all future Croatian science fiction films? It’s something to think about. After all, only by ignoring history do we risk repeating it! Pantpantpant! Blahblahblah! Huffhuffhuff! Etc!
But now that I’ve thought about it some more, I am of two minds. One part of me is politicised and wants to start organising protests and picket lines at all future screenings of Croatian science fiction films to make sure that this scenario never occurs again and hence save future Canadians from being typecast; while the other part of me just wants to move to Zagreb and start auditioning. It might not sound as romantic as settling down in Tokyo’s Chiba City and getting all those meaty blind swordsman roles, or selling my perfect face to Manga artists, but at least there might be a market for my talents there in Zagreb.
Anyone out there know an agent with some solid Balkan connections?
What are the chances of getting Belgrade on the EasyJet circuit any time soon? Serbian rock star and public intellectual Vladimir Jeric of Darkwood Dub gives us a tour of the White City and all its shades of grey.
By Steve Korver, 14-12-2006, Amsterdam Weekly.
Belgrade is scenically located at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers where cliffs rise to form the fortress Kalemegdan, the perfect setting to enjoy some ‘liquid of the soul’, slivovic, while the sun sets. The city has been an East-meets-West crossroads for millennia, which made it one of the more cosmopolitan cities in its region. It is also home to the hottest peppers, the meatiest mixed grills and the wickedest Romani brass tunes. The cultural scene is vibrant and fuelled by a large student population. Hell, it’s even home to the Nikola Tesla museum!
‘That’s very romantic of you,’ Vladimir Jeric, AKA Vlidi, says over smokes and coffee; obviously the bespectacled Serbian rock musician and media pundit comes equipped with a good dose of jaded Belgrade humour. He’s in town for this week’s ‘Rough Guide to Belgrade’, hosting a media programme at De Balie and playing with his legendary underground band Darkwood Dub in the Melkweg. However, he’s not much help at providing a nice fluff piece that champions Belgrade as a new central European hotspot: ‘Belgrade is ugly; don’t go for the architecture. I only return for the people.’
Since the civil wars broke up the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Belgrade—the ‘White City’—continues to reflect a full spectrum of greys (but it’s still cooler than Prague).
A distinct marketing problem Belgrade as a brand has been battling a marketing problem ever since Geert Wilders look-a-like Slobodan Milosevic used it as a base for his populist Serbian nationalist agenda. But, even while manipulating elections both directly and through the state-controlled media, he would never win an election in Belgrade itself. The ensuing wars, UN sanctions and NATO bombings created both monetary and cultural poverty. Later hot-housing of gangsters by Milosevic only cemented its status as pariah in Europe. The immediate fall-out was that hundreds of thousands of residents left—thousands came to Amsterdam alone.
Those who stayed—and who did not succumb to drug or alcohol addiction in those dreary times—were forced to be creative. Vlidi stayed. ‘I was just stubborn… What happened cannot be summed up in a few words. The basic info is out there. But who’s to blame? You can interpret much by looking at the groups of people who now own the region: follow the money and the distribution of power. But what happened has not been studied enough. A multi-ethnic nation fell apart—with definite warning signs. I’m still puzzled why the EU isn’t interested in researching these signs, so these things don’t repeat.
‘The increasing influence and power of media were fundamental. Political agendas were channelled through pop culture and media. On that level, it became a battle between “strategic media”, owned by the businesses and government, and “tactical” media, based on ground-up and self-organised networks of resistance. Media was key to the sustainability of the regime at the time, and the same media machine is still being used by the post-5 October [2000, the date Milosevic was ousted] government.’ The former Yugoslavia already had both types of media in place: a state apparatus which governed very much from above—but there was also personal freedom relative to its Eastern Bloc neighbours—that helped create its famed underground music scene and network.
Darkwood Dub formed in 1988 and Vlidi remembers the tail-end of those glory days. ‘Belgrade bands would hold their biggest shows in Zagreb. And vice versa.’ In the 1990s, that network was destroyed by war. The nationalists started exploiting popular music to romanticise both Serbian identity and the gangster lifestyle. It came to be called ‘turbofolk’, though the term was appropriated from Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus, who used it satirically. A merry dance indeed.
Belgrade as export product There was a resistance movement, however. Student group OTPOR did the organising, Radio B92 provided the news and soundtrack and, thanks to modems, Real Audio and server space volunteered by Amsterdam’s own—and then still more hacktivist—XS4ALL, it could continue broadcasting even when Milosevic tried to ban it during the three-month-long student uprising in 1996-7, where between 100,000 and 200,000 people a day stormed the streets to protest and party. But Vlidi believes Wired magazine was premature in describing it as the first ‘Internet Revolution’. After all, in the end, Milosevic ended up consolidating his power, UN sanctions continued and NATO bombing began. It was only in October 2000 that dissident forces, along with a united front of democratic parties and businesses, protested Milosevic’s refusal to accept his election loss.
In the prelude to these elections, Darkwood Dub—if you like the name, you’ll like their music—played 26 Serbian cities to rally disillusioned youth into registering their votes. It worked. ‘October 2000 was great. It was charged with optimism and seen as the long-awaited award. But it was in fact just the beginning—all the structures and most of the people were still in place. Everyone was exhausted already and so disappointment was inevitable.’
But did the revolution succeed? Milosevic did end up at The Hague Tribunal. Student activists were sent off to spread their version of noisy, peaceful and internet- fuelled revolution to Georgia in 2003—where they even used much of the same branding, including OTPOR’s raised fist. This was the same year as pro- Europe and democracy Prime Minister Zoran Dindic was assassinated as a reprisal for his battle against organised crime. His death formed the impetus for mass arrests and finally, the jails were getting full.
‘The revolution was a failure,’ says Vlidi. ‘And one should not export failure. Anyway you cannot just directly cut-and-paste an approach on another situation. In Belgrade, the real gangsters are still in power. They just got rid of the competition. Big business won. Heineken. Tuborg. People are now distracted with loans and mortgages. You can actually say nothing has changed.
‘Belgrade is the largest city in the region. It would be natural if it became a major node for ideas and culture again. We could have caught up much more quickly if we studied other countries in transition. We could have cut and paste what worked there to save time. For instance, Slovenia’s government now runs forty-two per cent of its software on open source Linux operating systems. We could have been inspired by what is going on in Brazil. We needed a culture minister like Gilberto Gil!’
Belgrade today Meanwhile, broadcaster B92 has gone mainstream: the radio plays the Billboard chart, the TV is launching Big Brother. ‘[It] equally aligns videos, silicon tits and deaths in Iraq—you can’t take it seriously,’ says Vlidi.
Meanwhile liberal-intellectual magazine Vreme, another beacon of light in those times, ‘now only speaks to the two hundred people who are mentioned in it’. On Wednesday in De Balie, Vlidi joins a panel that includes the director of B92 and a Vreme columnist. Sparks will fly.
There’s good news, too: underground music scenes from the old republics are reuniting and festivals like Exit attract 150,000 visitors, many from the other former republics. But the political reality remains: in Novi Sad, where Exit takes place, 80% of the population support the Serbian Radical Party, fronted by Vojislav Seselj who said: ‘We will scoop Croat eyeballs out with a rusty spoon’ and who is currently recovering from a hunger strike while awaiting trial in Den Haag.
So, go to Belgrade, but not as a disaster tourist. Otherwise you might as well stay home and read stories about Dutch-Bat’s medals for Srebrenica. But even then, keep a sense of proportion: ‘If you think Dutch politics are going through rough times at the moment, check out Serbia’s,’ says Vlidi. ‘Then take an aspirin.’
Who would have thought it? Within hours of arriving for my first visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina, I was already sitting in a former army barracks in Mostar after spending the morning being driven from Sarajevo through epic mountain landscape, while being chilled to the core with views of what’s locally referred to as ‘convertible villages’ (convertible because all the roofs had proved detachable by bombs), and while listening to The Professor providing a non-stop litany of despair. My Ladyfriend had warned me that he was “completely crazy”. This proved to be an stunning understatement by the next day after we had come close to dying a few times.
But at this point I thought I was just getting educated, and so I looked and listened, trying to get my head around what exactly happened in these parts during the War. Some heavy shit is what happened. And so I felt like inanity personified as I sat in these bullet-pocked army barracks, now reinvented as Mostar University, in front of an American History class of Moslem students while I awaited my turn to pontificate as guest speaker. (I made a mental note not to employ the term “pontificate” with a people who had until very recently had been enemies with the Pope-loving Croats across the river.) I was there because The Professor had decided we would be more educational than him droning from a textbook about the Civil War. I disagreed: mostly because I equate public speaking with the public shitting of my pants. But there I was waiting for my turn to talk – About What? About What? – while the Ladyfriend did her talk.
She had no problem holding their attention. Her native tongue was their native tongue and she spoke of the horrors of Srebrenica – something they could surely relate to as dwellers of a destroyed city – which as a historian she had been researching for the last three years in the hopes of uncovering the facts behind Europe’s worst massacre since World War II: the systematic killing of 8000 Moslem men and boys. She was used to talking to victims, generals and war criminals. Meanwhile I can barely negotiate the voices in my head arguing about, for example, whether my spaghetti sauce needs another twist from the pepper grinder. And while she knows of concentration camps, I just know how to be Camp without concentrating…
So what was I going to talk about? In the midst of the hypnotic hum of Yugo-speak, my bloated brain floated back to what had happened right before the class. The Professor, while driving us around the bomb and bullet pocked campus, had hinted while looking at the direction of my wallet at how a few measly millions could make it all very nice again. I’m sure it could. But while I may obviously be a Canadian middle-class suburban boy born with silver spoon in mouth and horseshoe up ass, it does not mean that I actually have my cash act together on that level. We then walked through the medieval streets of Mostar whose ruins would look romantic if it had been achieved by natural decay and not machine guns.
Via a temporary walkway, we crossed the remains of the famously bombed ancient stone Stari Most (“Old Bridge”). Built in 1566, this Ottoman architectural miracle formed a 20-meter arch with the aid of not cement but lead and eggs. Apparently the general who had destroyed it betrayed an infallible logic: “We will build a nicer, stronger and older one”.
And indeed now seven years later, bridge bits were slowly being brought up one by one from the green depths of the river. Here we also bumped into one of The Professor’s students who attempted to be a tour guide: “I show you the theatre… Oh ah but the theatre is destroyed. So I show you the cemetery… Oh ah but the cemetery is still mined…”
So we all drank coffee instead.
Ah shit: it was now my turn to address the class. They seemed intent and focused – on my Nikes or on what I was about to say, I was not sure. I suppressed the urge to be honest along the lines of “Hi my name is WesternBoy and I am ah oh a complete fucking peckerhead. Oh am I allowed to say ‘fucking’?…Oh and do you need ‘peckerhead’ translated?…”
Instead I ended up improvising a stuttered summary of the “Multiculturalism” I had grown up with in Canada where any fierce nationalism when not diluted by the sheer number of nationalities, was expressed in the voting booths. A student asked how Canadians felt about what happened in the former Yugoslavia and I answered that the vast majority of them were too distracted by the fluffier stuff broadcast on their 1.4 TV sets to have much of an opinion.
With my ordeal over, we began cruising through Bosnia with taped music coming from the car’s speakers. The Professor defined the optimum volume as that point where the “doors are shaking”. He showed equal precision in the tunes he chooses: in Croat sections the doors shook with Serb partisan songs, while in Muslim sections they had shaken with Croat hit parade.
This DJ’ing style proved to be an efficient way of getting pulled over by local police – as was his driving technique of randomly jerking between 40 and 100 kph. Admittedly, this pendulum effect may have been caused by the erratic passion with which he had been telling stories about BASTARDS, FASCISTS and the general assbackwardness of these parts: How the Bosnian people failed by falling for self-serving politicians… How a veterinarian hospital we passed failed when confronted with a dead animal by thinking it first to be a radiation-swollen rat, then as some tiny variety of the dinosaur family, before someone finally recognised it as a skinned fox… How the UN failed because they had not taught the local police how to button their shirts or tighten their belts… By this point, I had begun to respect these scruffy law officers for their ability to sense a lunatic when they saw one coming towards them at 100 kph.
The Professor is bitter. He has had the tragic life. As an ethnic Serb who fought for a united Bosnia, his heart was in the right place. For years in Sarajevo, he had dodged Serb snipers. When not teaching or acting as a ‘negotiator’, he had sorted body parts. When the war ended, he then got fucked over a few more times – most notably when he returned from a short lecture tour of the States to find that his position at the University of Sarajevo had been given to a Moslem. You’d like to cut some slack and you do.
But then at one point – say after a two-day roller coaster ride – you just want to sleep. And by the time we finally re-entered Sarajevo, the only image I could retain was that of a hotel bed. But then an innocent question about the name of a famously destroyed neighbourhood, motivated a careen to the right and wham-bam we were in the charred heart of this very neighbourhood. While I accepted the accompanying rush of emotions as good for my development away from pure peckerhead (variety: spoiled brat Westernboy), I saw no potential in personal growth when he then pointed the car upward towards the midnight mountains surrounding Sarajevo. Oh so this pitch blackness is the Srpska Republic… Oh so from this pitch black point, the nationalist Serbs shelled the city… Oh so that shadow was their headquarters where you, The Professor, had come to ‘negotiate’… By this point, I began to irrationally suspect that The Professor has been filled with bile since birth, and that his Basil Fawlty-esque attempts to ‘negotiate’ a peace was what directly led to the siege of Sarajevo lasting three years instead of three days…
Lady MacBeth of the Balkans versus Boy Peckerhead from Suburbia… I sat behind Mira Markovic flying back to Belgrade after she visited her jailed husband Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague. It was very surreal. And boy, did I fail as a journalist…(And yes, that’s me lurking in the background in this still from a news report.)
By Steve Korver
I. Kitsch Personified
It had already been hypothesised that my JAT flight from Amsterdam to Belgrade was delayed five hours because the wife of Slobodan Milosevic wanted to make one last visiting hour to his jailed ass before her three-day visa ran out. So I had some time to feverishly imagine the possibilities of sharing business class – yes darlings, I was booked business class – with Mira Markovic, Lady MacBeth of the Balkans.
She began as Slobo’s teen queen love, and together they rose to rule Serbia and jumpstart the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. Many Yugos had described her as Evil disguised as a squeaky-voiced kitsch bitch…
So I needed to make a decision. I wondered if I should just go for the Pulitzer and take on a Jeremy Paxman intensity and start quizzing her if she was truly the brains behind the throne. Were the rumours true that she took delight in liquidating political opponents in baths of sulphuric acid? And how, Ms Markovic, did you manage to maintain such a consistent output of bad poetry?
But perhaps I should be more self-serving and see if she could arrange for me a summer as suave gigolo to the lonely wives of incarcerated war criminals? Decisions, decisions.
Naturally this was all fantasy and I knew the only thing I could possibly have the guts for in such a scenario is the pulling of goofy faces – and perhaps the holding up of a “Hi Mom!” sign – whenever I made it into a network camera’s viewfinder. But I did ease some fresh batteries into my recording Walkman in case she did actually show up.
Always comfortable in the realm of fantasy, I was definitively taken aback – my slack jaw dropping down to touch my cramped knees – when WOCKA there she was for real, settling into the seat directly in front of me after being paraded through the plane from the back. I vaguely heard from some snatch of English conversation that this route was taken for “for security reasons” — something I vaguely considered as odd since the “security” had not even bothered with the standard hand luggage scan after the tickets were taken…
But mostly I was in a state of HOLY FUCK as I realised that if I leaned forward pretending to search for the JAT-logo barf bag in the magazine pouch on the back of her seat, then my brain was a mere 20 centimetres from her brain. I cursed the Swiss Army for not having developed a Pocket Brain Scanner. I looked around and noticed that I could see no reflection of my own state of absurdoplexy in our fellow travellers who were mostly impeccably suited biznis men who only seemed united by the fact that there was little to distinguish their chin from their chest. Everyone seemed indifferent.
Mira and the boytoy lawyer that accompanied her both seemed positively jovial as if it was all biznis as usual. Hoping to fade into the background, I started to chain-smoke. (Yes of course you could still smoke on this flight.) After a few drags, I was calm enough to deploy one of my previously plotted fantasy scenarios: armed with the knowledge that Mira was a non-smoker, I began to blow my smoke forward. However, I stopped with this wimpiest of all possible forms of political statements when I noticed that I was getting the most intimidating of stares from a rather large fellow across the aisle who I immediately assumed to be part of her private security detachment. Boy did I feel silly later when I found out that he was a network cameraman.
II. Two Hours Later So there I was in a plane heading to Belgrade sitting directly behind the notoriously insane Mira Markovic who was returning from a short visit to her husband Slobo’s jailed ass. In short: Lady MacBeth of Serbia was in smelling range of Boy Peckerhead from Suburbia. And indeed I did regularly lean forward to check if I could catch a whiff of desperation emanating from beneath her famously black lacquered and obsessively combed hair. But alas I had to turn to other senses since my nose was temporarily fried from the chain-smoking I had undertaken as a futile attempt at political activism. I could still employ my eyes to fetishly follow the groomed trails left by her combing – a ritual so secretive that it is said that not even Slobo is allowed to witness it – while imagining how later I would walk into the airplane’s toilet and catch her in the act. Combus interruptus.
And while it was also remarkably easy for me to hear the easy girlish giggles she was sharing with her studboy lawyer as they leafed through the Belgrade newspapers, my ears were not equipped with the language-converter for me to engage in some real prime eavesdropping. My seat companion was certainly no help. Sure, he was willing in the first two minutes of our conversation to share his life story (how he left Novi Sad 25 years ago to play pro-football in Holland and remained there to build a bizness empire…), the reason for his return to his homeland (to visit his mother’s grave…), and every manner of intimate detail (his wife’s mastectomy of two days previous…). But the second I knew we had a basic bond I whisperingly asked him ‘Whataretheysaying? Whataretheysaying? Whataretheysaying?” He shrugged his shoulders indifferently and suggested that I should concern myself less with such old news as Mira and more with what football matches I should catch while in Belgrade.
This indifference – which was visibly shared by the other passengers – was really beginning to worry me. This could mean that the sea of cameras and journalists I was expecting to be there on our arrival in Belgrade would in fact just be a puddle and hence seriously jeopardise my Fantasy Plan #7a which had me pushing Mira aside and pretending to assume that all the attention was actually for me. I would wave, curtsy, blow kisses, and gush: “Goodness me you darling Balkanites, I’ve heard about how hospitable and welcoming you are but this is really just tooooo much…”. I would then grab the journalists’ notebooks and start autographing them.
As this scenario started to sink into the realm of wishful thinking, my brain started to scramble in the name of damage control. Perhaps if I was lucky then my smoke-damaged nose was unable to pick up the fact that my body was currently busy absorbing the stench of Mira. Crippled with a clinging cloud of hairspray and the sweat of antique sausage, I could then write a story about the kind and inspired folks at Belgrade’s Center for Cultural Decontamination and their noble search for a cleansing product that would purge me of the clinging must of Mira…
III. Two Days Later
DEAR MIRA, You may not remember me but I sat behind you on a JAT flight Amsterdam-Belgrade after you had visited your Slobo’s jailed ass in Den Haag. At the time I marvelled at how close and potentially crushable your fantasy-ridden skull was. But my views have since mellowed and matured thanks to certain citizens of this ex-country you helped destroy who convinced me of your current irrelevance and taught me that it is just too cheap to prey on the weak. This newly attained benevolence has inspired me to send you this thank-you note for the most cultural of evenings I just had. If it was not for you, I would not have struck up a conversation with my seating neighbour on that flight in the hopes that he would whisperingly translate your girlish giggles and conversation for me. But luckily, he did consider it much more relevant to inform me that one of the best Gypsy family bands on the planet played in a Dutch-themed restaurant attached to the football stadium in Novi Sad.
Sweet coincidence had it that my sweet hosts were long befriended with said band and were in fact the only non-Gypsies at the leader’s wedding. I even got some juicy gossip. (For example, that leader’s dad was Marshall Tito’s favourite singer, and that leader’s dad had a mistress who was shot by leader’s mom…).
This whole cosy scenario ensured that when we ended up going there to eat and drink, the band played for hours around, on, and even – when the fiddling leader tripped, fell and rolled – under our table. I was so blown away – with my emotions as raw as my throat which had taken a particularly harsh beating by providing Anglo harmonies to a Romani version of ‘My Way’ – that I was about ready to pay the band the highest form of tribute by committing ‘Beli Bora’: the act, as I understood it, of smashing a glass on the table in front of you and WOCKA bringing my wrists down hard on the shards and rubbing them around.
But I was interrupted: not by my pesky brain suddenly deciding to ruminate about how this Beli Bora ritual may be related to the more happy-go-lucky habit of the Greeks to throw plates – and how the wimpier Greek ritual may be more in keeping with EU membership — but by a friend of the family singing a song of undying love to MY date. It quickly became clear that in order to defend my honour — and oh yeah: hers… — I had to highnoon it with this dude with a duel to the death. But after a tender moment of male bonding with date’s dad as he toured me through the choice of firearms, it all turned out to be just a joke. But hey what did I know? I’ve just seen a couple of Kusturica films and read the sporadic Sunday supplement… Until now that is. I have now been emersed.
But anyway, I merely wrote to thank you for your role in making this most memorable/educational of evenings possible and to recommend this restaurant to you whenever you are in Novi Sad and have a craving for some of that honest Dutch fare that you have been having so much of lately. Tell them Beli the Kid sent you and the jenever will be on the house…
Is this General (ret.) I’m mix-grilling with a war criminal? Or just deeply conflicted? Later, a knowledgeable person erased any sense of “ish” from war criminal-ish. At the same, this knowledgeable person suggested that the General (ret.) was too much of a drunk to deal with the logistics of genocide.
By Steve Korver
Weird story, really… I cruised across Serbia in a ‘devil illegal’ Citroen Duckling to end up having mixed grill with a war criminalish General (retired).
The Ladyfriend had to interview him for a noble, scholarly and responsible cause that alas involves talking to despicable assholes, and I had come along for the ride and to keep our hip young driver friend company. So we drove to an “undisclosed location”. OK, it was actually a quite scenic hunting resort/restaurant in the heart of the once imagined Greater Serbia. Once we entered the folksy establishment, Drivingbuddy and I sat our intimidated asses as far away as possible from where the Ladyfriend was settling down to begin her official business with the obviously dwarfish General (ret.).
A waiter soon comes up to say that it’s “the General’s orders” that I as the non-driver must drink a local rakija (firewater) compliments of the General (ret.). I took this as a cue to also order some coffee and breakfast. The firewater came first and I zhiveli (go cheers) in his direction and say so that only Drivingbuddy can hear me: “Thank you Mister War Criminal”. Hey, it was early and I could still get cheap giggles out of cheap shots. Actually I got a bonafide bellylaugh out of Drivingbuddy so it was worthwhile. Also, as I understood it at that time, the General (ret.) was more on-the-fine-line of war criminaldom. What this fine-line exactly was, I was too tired to care about just yet.
And get this straight: I’ve cuddled with more than enough Balkan men to know the score.
But anyway, as soon as Ladyfriend took a toilet break from her noble endeavours as interviewer, the General (ret.) took the opportunity to come over and introduce himself and insist that I drink another firewater. He had the whole Mladic persona down – but then with an eerie elf-like edge. Our conversation was short since he could only speak basic Rambo English and I have a learning disability with that whole Serbian language thing, but I did find that he was rather quick in getting a tad too homo-erotic with my hair. And get this straight: I’ve cuddled with more than enough Balkan men to know the score. In his defence, my hair was looking particularly enticing that morning, but still the sort of hair twirling he was doing I had only previously experienced accompanied with a post-coital cigarette.
But anyway, the Ladyfriend returns and they get back to business soon enough and I’m left to goose bump my way through the other firewater and revel in the absurdity of the situation. Later as I was fantasizing about raising the absurdity quotient by picking a fight with the General (ret.) under the pretext that he was flirting with Ladyfriend, the waiter comes with another “General’s order” that dictated that we join them. I sit beside Ladyfriend and quickly move closer to her for more of a sense of protection when I notice the girlish nature of his purse – I guess you could have called it a leather satchel.
[With the Ladyfriend being a local, I had already long become comfortable with taking on a more wifey persona. Admittingly, this particular persona got a tad overblown a couple of nights before when we had a dinner with some rather highly statured government folk and I hung with the wives (species: official) and within moments was promising them that I would help break down barriers by joining all their ‘spouse groups’ if I returned to Belgrade for another extended stay…].
But anyway, the General (ret.) took command and ordered mixed grill for us all before proceeding to rave and flail his arms about in a General (ret.) sort of way and occasionally telling the Ladyfriend to translate things for me. First, he demanded to be at our wedding. (Wedding? I must have missed that order but my inner-wifey immediately made a mental note to buy some bridal mags.) He then even offered to supply the honey for the big event. Yes folks, honey was his hobby and protective netting was for blue-helmeted UN wimps. He claimed that getting stung just made you stronger. I slid yet closer to Ladyfriend in case he decided to make me stronger.
His ensuing speech about the arbitrary nature of defining “war criminaldom”, was interrupted with the arrival of cow-sized plates of mixed grill, a meal that can only be considered balanced in a land where sausage is regarded as a vegetable. I had just finished an epic meal to gel my belly together after the firewater, so my appetite was limited. And any saliva I did have turned to paste as I watched the General (ret.) methodically eat – two chews per grenade-sized bite – through his plate meat-type by meat-type.
A tad horrified, I tried to exchange a reassuring glance of ‘holy shit are you checking this out?’ with Drivingbuddy but he was too busy as a Serb wisely obeying the commands of a SerbGeneral (ret.) to notice my twitching entreaties or to worry about the fact that he had just finished eating twice as much as me just moments before. But I did feel proud for getting half-way through my plate, especially since throughout the whole eating process I felt like the bookish Lover in the The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover when he was getting murdered with a broom handle ramming antiquarian paper down his throat.
Naturally, the General (ret.) noticed my leftovers and had to say something along the lines of “maybe I’m an army boy but I was taught to finish what was on my plate”. I then wanted to say that my Mom had taught me the same thing but she had also taught me that there are other food groups than just meat. I wanted to launch into my whole shtick about how NATO should have showered Serbia with dieticians instead of guided missiles. But then I figured he had already long typecast me as a spoiled brat WesternBoy anyway and since that is a role that I’m remarkably comfortable with, I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. And there certainly didn’t seem to be any real love lost since he was now calling me son-in-law and seemed to be still demanding the wedding invitation.
As we were saying our goodbyes that thankfully stopped just short of him slipping me the tongue, some folks stopped to pay the General (ret.) their respect. One turned out to be a nephew of another general currently on trial for war crimes at the Hague Tribunal. Both the General (ret.) and I enjoyed the flash of fear in their eyes as he introduced me as being Dutch. The General (ret.) probably enjoyed it because he is a sadist, and I enjoyed it because I like being regarded, albeit even for a brief moment, as a potential avenging angel of international justice.
The next morning back in Belgrade I told this tale to a knowledgeable sort who erased any sense of “ish” from war criminalish. But at the same, he suggested that the General (ret.) was in fact too much of a drunk to deal with the logistics of genocide. It also turns out that the General (ret.)’s obsession with our wedding was probably just a test to see if we knew anything about his daughter’s wedding of two weeks previous which had as guest of honor another retired general: Mladic, the Most Wanted.
I immediately cancelled my wedding dress fitting I had booked for that afternoon.
The house belonging to Zeljko Raznatovic, the warlord and gangster known as Arkan, is the perfect starting point for an architectural tour that takes in Sci-Fi gas stations, glass-floored tv stations,mobster-built theme parks and hastily constructed refugee housing.
By Steve Korver
A few years ago I yelled Hajde! Hajde! (indispensable Serbian which when yelled loud enough means “Let’s get the %#*& out of here!”) to the only Belgrade cabdriver I could find willing to stop for a flash so I could take a quick snapshot of a pink marbled mansion. This wedding cake of a landmark belonged to a man whose official trade was listed as baker: the warlord/gangster Arkan. As such, it was a house that came with lots of local urban lore: most specifically that there were always scary gangster types on hand to abuse and expose the film of anyone stupid enough to try to take a picture of it. Fortunately for me, it was either their day off or they were too ensconced in their morning coffee and pastries in the ground level bakeshop (or more likely: the taxi driver had judged correctly what would be a VERY safe distance…).
Arkan was living in this monstrous architectural statement that screamed “look at me!” while enjoying the status of being on the top of Interpol’s most wanted list for over a decade. While the building’s colour suggests Miami Beach, its structure suggests a mutant Byzantine dream where the small high windows and rounded cupola tower were meant to mirror the classical Serb architecture of Kosovo’s famed Orthodox monasteries. However as the home to one of the country’s most notorious war criminals, it was more suggestive of a potential centrefold for Better Homicide and Garden magazine. While my resulting photograph was a bit of a disappointment since it made the house look almost tasteful, the adrenaline that was unleashed while taking the photo did jumpstart an obsession for modern Serbian architecture that reflected the legacy of the Milosevic regime.
And indeed, Arkan’s house can be seen as the perfect starting point for an architectural tour that could also aptly include gas stations with Sci-Fi flourishes, mobster-built theme parks and hastily constructed refugee housing.
And now happily such a tour is possible. Snap-happy tourists are now able to leisurely line up the perfect shot of this monument to the distinctive fall of a Serb psychotic (Arkan was shot with 37 close range bullets in a Belgrade hotel lobby during the last days of Milosevic in 2000). During the recent crack-down on organized crime that followed the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March 2003 when thousands were arrested and millions of assets were seized, one of the most hope-inspiring acts of all these many hope-inspiring acts occurred when police raided Arkan’s former home to uncover not only a vast array of arms but also souvenirs from his days as the most feared paramilitary leader during the Yugoslav wars. And as icing on the cake, they arrested the home’s main resident: Arkan’s widow, the Serbian superstar Ceca. Long dubbed “The Madonna of Serbia”, Ceca was the queen of Turbofolk, a banal lyriced fusion of Balkan folk melodies and Western electronic beats usually served with a thick video sauce of breasts, booty, Versace and gangster chic marketing. In this position, Ceca had done much since 1991 when she was voted the country’s “best looking singer”, to romanticize both nationalism and kitsch in general and Arkan in particular. Together they were the sugar and spice of the gangster kitsch culture that came to define Milosevic’s nationalist Serbia.
While undoubtedly too busy with costume-changes to run her late husband’s extensive criminal empire, Ceca did apparently find time to offer refuge and money to her husband’s gangster protégés who made up the upper echelons of the Zemun Clan and allegedly masterminded the Djindjic assassination. Ceca’s arrest is of great symbolic value coming from a country that continued to be force-fed a dense media landscape of nationalist/gangster kitsch even two years after Milosevic was hauled off to The Hague War Crimes Tribunal – an event made possible after a chat between Djindjic and Milorad ‘Legija’ Lukavic, the former Arkan righthand man, who was then still the commander of the “Red Beret” Special Operations Unit (JSO) before shortly after opting for the greater profits of leading the Zemum Clan.
After a 2-year mourning period, Ceca also made time for a comeback in 2002 – looking less attractive and more like a plastic surgery disaster – with a tribute concert to her husband that attracted an audience of nearly 100 000 in the Red Star football stadium across from her mansion. Her new album was greeted by with much fawning from such media outlets as TV Pink and TV Palma which had both been set up by Milosevic cronies to present a banal, sterile yet sexually charged version of the Serbian dream. These oddly propagandistic media myth-makers happily mixed symbols from all times and places as long as they functioned to present Serbs as an oppressed but always striving to be a free and distinct people. While most Serbs – in particular the city dwelling ones who had access to such alternative news sources as radio B92 – have long been painfully aware of the mechanics between kitsch and power under Milosevic, the children who are currently the main viewers of these television stations are not. This perhaps accounts for why 90% of the audience at Ceca’s tribute concert were below 19 years of age…
Kitsch with a Distance…
But I’m not here to cast a disparaging eye on kitsch. As a dweller in the land of wooden shoes and brought up in a land that was the first to market maple syrup art, I’ve always had it pretty sweet. Not only did I have access to jobs that earned me enough money to travel widely, I’ve also had the luxury of judging the countries I visited by their kitsch. After all why should you rip your insides apart with stories of concentration camps when you can concentrate on Camp? It’s really the ultimate in defence mechanisms. However as a connoisseur of sorts, Serbia was the place where I was confronted with a kitsch that often echoed a past that was too scary and recent for me to filter through the rose-tinted glasses of ironic distance. This kitsch was very different than for example India – certainly a kitsch Mecca of sorts – where even when Gods sport bloody skull necklaces they still come across as fairly cute entities.
Of course I have no problem investing in a collector’s edition of stamps depicting crumbled examples of “NATO Aggression” or boxer shorts depicting Bart Simpson in traditional Serbian garb and blowing on a gypsy horn. Hell, I live for that kind of stuff. But Technicolor coffee mugs depicting freely wandering war criminal types crosses some sort of fine-line that I cannot bring myself to cross. How is it possible that ex-General Mladic, sheller of Sarajevo and organizer of the killing of 8000 in Srebrenica, has been reborn as a “100% Serbian” kitsch product? Former Bosnian Serb leader Karadjic, another favourite subject for coffee mugs, is perhaps a case apart. As a bouffant-haired one-string-fiddle-playing monk-impersonating psychiatrist and children’s books author, he’s always betrayed a psychotic kitsch edge. Regardless, these sort of cultural mementoes are just too hot for me to handle – after all, I belong to the school that sees kitsch as something that should enrich lives and not celebrate the destruction of lives.
Kitsch with a Chainsaw…
And for me, Arkan came with yet more of an extra edge – perhaps one similar to the chainsaw edge that he was said to favour during interrogations. While alive, he built a mighty myth around him that was equal doses kitsch and psychosis. And this myth still lingers not only in his protégés of the Zemum Clan who see him as a patriot and themselves as his rightful heirs, but also in Serbia’s depressingly unchanged media landscape that worked long and hard in romanticizing the gangster society that Serbia would eventually become. But for many more, Arkan is one of the scariest faces of the 20th century. His baby face features immediately betrayed his stunted-in-boyhood tastes for parades, guns, forts, military costumes, Hollywood gangster flicks, ceremonial swords and female bodyguards. He put the ethnic in front of cleansing and used his own ethnicity as an excuse for his thirst for money and power. He was in fact ready-made propaganda for Serb enemies and hence was fundamental in leading those unfortunate enough to share his ethnicity to the extremes of global pariahism. In this way, he was just as responsible as Milosevic for the fact that the Serb treasures of Kosovo will now undoubtedly fall into Albanian hands…
His real name was Zeljko Raznatovic, a Montenegrin Serb born in Slovenia (reflecting a typical story of cross pollination in Tito’s Yugoslavia), who began his career at 17 by embarking on a bank robbing, drug smuggling and gun running spree across Europe. After a string of spectacular jail escapes – perhaps aided by the Yugoslav secret police for whom he claimed to provide hitman services for – he eventually settled back down in the implosion that was Yugoslavia of the early 90s and turned to channelling the energy of the hooligan element of the supporters of the Belgrade Red Star football team into a lean mean ethnic cleansing machine named the Tigers. Made up of many who would later graduate to become Serbian secret police members and/or Zemun Clan gangsters, the Tigers built a reputation as a paramilitary unit engaged in massacres, rapes, and other atrocities first in Croatia and then in Bosnia (while Ceca built a reputation at the same time as their khaki hot-panted cheerleader…). Later, on the spoils of looting and smuggling, and his connections with the Albanian mafia, Serb secret police and customs (a web that explains the ready availability in Belgrade of such Albanian export products as marijuana and heroin throughout the Kosovo crisis), Arkan was then able to build himself up to stature of Belgrade businessman, a parliamentarian, and founder and President of the Party of the Serbian Unity – a party used by Milosevic to funnel votes away from an equally rabid nationalist that was proving too ambitious, Voyislav “I will scoop Croat eyeballs out with a rusty spoon” Seselj, who is now currently starring daily in his own brand of TV Pinkesque theatrical television as a defendant at the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.
Symbol Soup While Arkan’s mansion remains his Reichstag, his wedding with Ceca in 1995 will go down in history as his Goring rally. Witnessed by thousands, it took full advantage of the fact that there were few other glimmers of glamour in this time of war and sanctions. The 140-minute video became a national bestseller and standard repeat fare for such Milosevic state-sponsored TV stations as Pink and Palma. Today, it remains readily available to buy alongside the mugs of Mladic and Karadjic on many Serbian street corners. And for many tomorrows it will certainly provide meat for media analysts since it reflects Arkan’s savvy at playing the symbology game that developed under Milosevic. Of course bad taste is a universal phenomena, but it has rarely been used so efficiently as a basic tool of ruling as it did under the Milosevic regime. Much has been written about how Slobo sponsored kitsch media in general and Turbofolk music in particular to rid the airwaves of musical alternatives (such as those of the country’s long vibrant rock scene that organized the first Belgrade anti-war demonstrations in 1991) and reinforce certain myths of Serbness that were fundamental for his hold on power as a “soft” dictator. Already excellently observed by Serbian anthropologist and media scholar Ivan Colovic, as well as Eric D. Gordy in his truly fascinating The Culture of Power in Serbia, this wedding attempted to represent all things to all (Serb) people. By fusing elements of Serb folklore – in particular those stories that painted the Serbs as valiant victims – with the more romantic Hollywood notions of the gangster lifestyle, barriers that defined the true Serb national identity began to blur. Repeated broadcasting just made it all blurrier. And certainly a decade of UN sanctions also did much to enforce the idea that the only way of getting ahead was an illegal way.
And certainly, very many Belgrade residences belonging to the rich and infamous tell a similar tale. An “Arkantecture Tour” could conveniently point out Byzantine flourishes while telling stories worthy of Scarface and The Godfather that grace, for instance, the sprawling complex – complete with rumoured escape routes – belonging to the Brothers Karic, who amassed a fortune (some of which they allegedly passed on to fund Arkan’s Tigers…) as Milosevic cronies.
Post-Arkantecture?
Perhaps a coincidence but certainly convenient for Arkantecture tourists, the TV Pink headquarters is just around the corner from Arkan’s mansion. This national station was set up by a close associate of Slobo’s wife, Mira Markovic (herself worth an encyclopaedic study on kitsch gone mad), as a regime mouthpiece and the definitive broadcaster of Turbo culture in the country. Even today it continues to broadcast large doses of gangster chic, soft porn, documentaries on Kosovo monasteries, Turbofolk videos and such international mainstays as Friends. Experts have observed that repeated viewing of such imagery seems to induce a weird militant hypnosis in such underdeveloped viewers as children and potential war criminals. Of course if one chooses to ignore the rabidly nationalist subtext, TV Pink can offer hours of quality viewing to those who take ironic delight from the more garish TV broadcasts in the West during the 1970s when American Country & Western performers were at the height of their high hairdo days, and German schlager singers were revolutionizing the wearing of clashing colour combinations.
Like Arkan’s house, the TV Pink headquarters comes equipped with a large litany of local urban lore: that the management were very proud of their glass floors since they allowed them to admire the view up women’s skirts, that it received an architecture award (of dubious merit) in the same week it was revealed that it was illegally built without a building permit… At first glance, this building seems to have little in common with Arkan’s more openly Byzantine-influenced mansion. But they do share a taste for small gun port windows. They are both aggressive to the point of militancy. Their architectural components lack any unifying organic basis (which suggests a runaway materialism…). Perhaps the TV Pink building’s Sci-Fi styling can be seen as an optimistic statement – by those who regarded Serbia’s downfall into a lawless gangster state as a good thing – that yes the future is now and the Serbs are finally a truly free and distinct people. So would this make the TV Pink headquarters a prime example of post-Arkantecture?
The Road to Slobo…
As a reflection of Slobo’s own banality and preference to rule from behind tall and indistinct walls, the nearby Milosevic compound can be easily skipped. To witness the architectural legacy of his regime one must turn to his gangster son Marko who was a true product of the society his father constructed. Arkantecture buffs are hence advised to drive a couple of hours from Belgrade to Pozarevac, the Milosevic family’s hometown. Here one can not only find the tree under which Partisan Teen Queen Mira wrote bad love poetry to Slobo, but also witness a wondrous vision of TurboKitsch in decline – namely, the leftovers of Bambipark, the amusement park that Marko unveiled during the height of the NATO bombing in 1999 as a propagandistic fuck you to the West. Western propaganda proceeded to paint the park as some sort of huge Serbo-Disney that was later ransacked by an angry mob. However today, you can find it at the end of a dusty road: fully intact and nothing really more than a garishly painted playground for children. It’s open daily from 2pm and the admission is now free due to the current vagueness in regards to ownership since Marko fled to Russia in 2000 to escape either arrest or retribution for having organized Arkan’s assassination (in typical gangster fashion, it was widely rumoured that Mira visited Ceca to plead for “no war between our families”).
On the other side of town, Marko’s outdoor disco, Madona (sic), (apparently the superstar was not amused so an “n” was removed) is a tad meatier for the architecturally-inclined: an atrocity of pastel colours whose Byzantine motifs had seemingly been shit upon by an episode of Miami Vice. Other decorations include somewhat eerie mural paintings that pleaded ‘Stop the Violence’ and ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’. While not visibly “ransacked” as reported in the media of NATO member states, its ghost-town vibe seems to suggest that it is closed for a very extended season…
Gas Stations as Arkantecture
The road between Belgrade and Pozarevac is itself notable for the density of brand new – and often betraying a Sci-Fi edge similar to the TV Pink headquarters – but mostly abandoned gas stations. In fact they can be seen throughout Serbia, and can be regarded as surreal landmarks to the uselessness of UN trade sanctions. Gasoline sanctions just allowed sanction-busters like Arkan, the Karic Brothers and the Zemum Clan to have the monopoly on gasoline. These gas stations – mostly constructed in a time when gas was smuggled and sold on street corners from Coke bottles – were generally built by these and other forward thinking mobsters who used their black market profits not only to sponsor extreme nationalist political figures but also to make investments that would help them establish themselves as bona fide businessmen as soon as the sanctions were lifted and Serbians could live happily ever after as free, brave and distinct gangsters…
The Regular Folks
Of course like anywhere in the world, the tastes and ways of the rich and famous trickle down to influence the less rich and famous. The highways and byways of Serbia betray a huge building boom of more modest and humble houses and apartment buildings for the many tens of thousands of Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Like their luxury counterparts, most of these homes have been illegally built without a building permit. Many also betray the influence of the dubious tastes of TV Pink and the gangster elite with a Sci-Fi feature here and a cupola inspired by Kosovo’s monasteries there. As proof of Turbo-media’s influence on contemporary Serbian design and architecture, one of the more popular features of these mushrooming homes is a double half-circle balcony whose Byzantine roots has been obscured by having been renamed Lepa Brena in tribute to the “Dolly Parton of Turbofolk”. Richer refugees have even gone so far to build perfect replicas of ancient Kosovan churches in their neighbourhoods. It’s certainly understandable that refugees have been influenced by the media landscape they have been force-fed. Hell, it’s even perfectly understandable that many of these house’s residents have been radicalised by their life experiences into having a soft spot for nationalism in general and Arkan in particular – not just from the media’s broadcast of myths but also from the fact that while living in their former homes in Croatia and Bosnia, perhaps Arkan was on hand to stand between them and war criminals on the Croatian and Bosnian sides.
Such realizations relativize… These people are the real victims – of both war and the media. Their new homes do not deserve to be tainted with comparisons to the tastes of Arkan, Marko and their ilk. It’s like driving down Germany’s autobahns and merely seeing them as projections of Hitler’s legacy and not as mighty efficient ways of getting around. These houses actually have more in common with the houses found throughout the world – including those belonging to Croat refugees in Croatia where references to Catholic architecture are currently all the rage – whose resident’s are more concerned with surviving day to day than being beacons of good taste (whatever that relative term actually means…). My obsession with Arkan and his crimes against both humanity and good taste had in fact infected how I digested everything that I saw around me while travelling the highways and byways of Serbia. An Arkantecture tour is in fact very similar to those already organized that visit all the major NATO bombing sites: worthy if one sticks to reality (as a reminder of destruction and death…) but dangerous when used as an ideological tool (as a reminder that the world wanted to kill us Serbs but we survived as a free and distinct people…). Additionally, such a glib phrase as “Arkantecture” can even possibly be appropriated by those out to romanticise the gangster lifestyle. After all the term Turbofolk originated from the inspired Montenegrin musician Rambo Amadeus who used it as a satirical term before having it appropriated by the very folks he was busy despising who fused it to the rest of the symbol soup that was out to proclaim Serbs as a free and distinct people…
Hopefully with the great changes that are finally underway in Serbia, my eyes will soon be inspired to quickly skim over such things as tacky mansions and empty gas stations and instead be drawn to admire the things that have truly endured the millennia of Serbian history: such timeless quality kitsch as the personalized labels on the bottles of home-brewed rakia, heart-shaped cookies glittering with tiny mirrors, flashy golden icon paintings of such saints as Sava and Tito, naive paintings of chaotic village barbeque feasts, Sirogojno sweaters depicting fluorescent nature scenes…
What the country really needs now are the same tours that took place until over a decade ago when the wars and the gangsters so rudely interrupted. Perhaps it’s time to set my sights on writing about the beauty of ancient monasteries, beautiful spas, epic mountains, bucolic country farms, forgotten wine regions, and wiggly rows of plum tree orchards…
Four years after my first visit to Sarajevo, a Dutch-funded project to connect survivors of the Balkans wars by video launches in the former war-torn capital. Some things have changed, some not so much…
By Steve Korver, 14-04-2005, cover feature, Amsterdam Weekly
The first time I was in Sarajevo, four years ago, a man I came to call The Professor treated me to a roller coaster ride through Bosnia’s worst hit areas. He deemed the optimum volume of his car radio as “when the doors started shaking”. This was so that everyone in the vicinity could share the tunes he chose to play. In Croat neighbourhoods the doors shook with Serb partisan songs, while in Muslim sections they shook with the Croat hit parade.
A Serb who had stayed in Sarajevo in the name of a united Bosnia, he had dodged Serb snipers for three years during the siege, only to lose his teaching position to a Muslim once the war was over. So basically he was pissed off at everyone. His DJing style was certainly an efficient way to get frequently pulled over by the local police. So was his driving style, which consisted of jerking erratically between 40 and 100 kph, while screaming stories about ‘bastards, fascists’ and the general assbackwardness of these parts.
‘The Bosnian people failed by falling for self-serving politicians… See that veterinarian hospital? Once they identified a dead animal as a radiation-swollen rat, then as some sort of tiny variety of the dinosaur family, until someone finally recognised it as a skinned fox… The UN failed the most. They couldn’t even teach the local police how to button their shirts or tighten their belts…’ But by then I had come to respect these scruffy law officers for their ability to sense a madman coming straight for them at 40 or 100 kph.
If The Professor was anything to go by, things were still by no means normal in Bosnia, five years after the signing of the Dayton agreement that formally ended (excessive) violence in Bosnia.
This past visit also rated as my second date with my lady friend, herself an (ex-)Yugo. Our ensuing courtship is documented by a series of snapshots showing us in front of bombed-out buildings, crippled bridges, and scenic views overlooking Srebrenica, where around 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in the worst single slaughter since World War II.
An inadvertent photo album of love among ruins. We weren’t sick, sick ramptoeristen (“disaster tourists”), though, but victims of circumstance. Her work as a researcher involved interviewing both war criminals and victims. I was just often along as a bit of arm candy.
Return to Sarajevo Our respective roles had only evolved somewhat when we returned to Sarajevo last week to attend the premiere of a remarkable series of documentaries, Videoletters, by Amsterdam film-making couple Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek, who won the Special Prix Europa, International Journalism Prize, and the Human Rights Prize for their 2002 documentary The Making of the Revolution, which covered the last days of the Milosevic regime.
Each episode of Videoletters involves an exchange of letters on video between two friends, colleagues, family members or neighbours from different ethnic groups who lost contact during the war. Most exchanges offer apologies along the likes of ‘I can blame MiloÅ¡evic for his politics, but I can’t blame Milocevic for me not answering your letter.’ Many express regrets, too. ‘Now, everything that happened seems bizarre, laughable, senseless.’ Often the two became reconciled and met up later too. Even now, doing so can be dangerous, since many of them still live in communities where ‘consorting with the enemy’ is still regarded as a crime.
We journeyed down to Sarajevo to celebrate the completion of this 5-year project with around 40 associates, sponsors, friends, journalists, and Dutch civil servants. We even had musical accompaniment in the shape of by Blijburg house band Hotel.
I figured I’d help out by explaining to any fellow travellers who wanted to know that the local swearing traditions don’t centre on diseases, as in Holland, but on the private parts of one’s mother. I could also assist with the pronunciation of such essentials as cevapcici and pivo. I was even willing to hold master classes with my handy colour chart that explains the Balkans’ two basic food groups: rakija and mixed grill.
But I also had selfish motives: I wanted to collect stories about Amsterdammers abroad being peckerheads. I already had plenty with me as the star; but my lady friend, who had hand-held many visiting Dutch academics in her time, had told me a lot of juicy ones that made me suspect there must be even more. My favourite was the one about the posh history professor visiting Srebrenica. ‘Where can I find a good gym?’ he asked. The town did not even have running water.
But this time it was a fairly sensitive bunch travelling to Sarajevo. In fact, the whole trip was very tightly organised. I counted a dizzying array of four different food groups at most meals. And I was also happy to discover that Sarajevo had come a long way in the last four years. Out of the media spotlight and relatively pumped with reconstruction funds, Sarajevo had become a town again that now even non- disaster tourists could love.
But almost the first thing we encountered after leaving the airport was a Technicolor image of that (in)famously smug sense that the Dutch have of themselves that they can fix anything (This is the same presumption that got them into a whole shitload of trouble in Srebrenica. But let’s not speak of collective guilt here…) It turned out that the Netherlands had sponsored the painting of refurbished apartments in the city — but in really garish colours. This in the name of ‘brightening things up’. The residents were less than appreciative.
‘Great. Now we’ll be the first targets when the war starts again.’
Cutting to the chase A friend of mine once referred to Marshall Tito as ‘one funky dude’, a phrase suggesting a relatively benevolent dictator who just happened to love uniforms — and the ladies.
There are probably many reasons for the Balkans wars of the 1990s, but one thing is for sure: Tito managed to die just as he would have had to deal with the economic downslide that came with the fall of the Wall. Before then, the ruler of Yugoslavia had been savvy enough to keep the country out of the Eastern Bloc by playing the USSR and the USA off each other and collecting money from both sides. Yes, funky.
‘Under Tito, we were all Yugoslav,’ observes one of the people in the Videoletters. Dictator or not, he did set up and rule a genuinely multiculti country with a healthy, well-educated and well-travelled urban population.
At his death, microphone politicians sought to fill the void by appealing to rural populations and blaming the other. Milocevic got the ball rolling in Serbia. But Tudjman in Croatia, and Karadzic for the Serbs and Izetbegovic for the Muslims in Bosnia, were all quick to apply similar tactics. It is, unfortunately, a familiar story. (An Amsterdam dinner party with ex-Yugos these days is incomplete without the observation: ‘Isn’t it incredible how Geert Wilders looks exactly like a young pig-faced Milosevic?’)
It was only when the war actually started that things get really confusing. The media — regional, national and international — got involved. Other countries, mostly from the EU, got involved to protect their many vested interests. It was just next door after all, and bizness is bizness. The worst point was probably when Madison Avenue PR companies began representing individual ethnic groups. The Internet was exploited to spread myths. Truth had become fluid; and it wasn’t tasty, like rakija.
By the war’s end in 1995, atrocities had been committed by all sides on such a scale that any finger pointing became irrelevant. Hundreds of thousands were dead and millions had been displaced. (In Amsterdam, the ex-Yugo population is now around 6,000, just a few hundred less than the Indonesians.) The true victims of the war were, as usual, the people who just wanted to get on with their lives without bullshit.
Today the former republics of Yugoslavia are independent states: Serbia & Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Only Kosovo is still being disputed. And while now there’s plenty of cross-border bizness relationships, the same can’t be said for personal ones. That’s where Videoletters comes in…
Videoletters: the project
Film-maker Van den Broek explained the initial inspiration. ‘We met Samir, a Muslim living in Sarajevo, who was depressed from the war at having to dodge snipers all the time,’ he said. ‘He was also depressed about not having heard from his best friend, who happened to be a Serb. He was so desperate that he decided to commit suicide. He went up onto his roof to wait for a sniper to kill him. Nothing happened for an hour so he finally gave up. But it turned out that Samir himself had never tried getting in touch with his friend either. This was the seed of the idea.’
Five years later, he and his partner Rejger, whose roots lie in the region, has produced a cathartic 20-part series. It produces tears in the eyes of everyone who sees, it, non-ex-Yugos included. But the project’s real success came last summer, when representatives from all the former republics’ public broadcasting stations — all of them once enthusiastic broadcasters of propaganda — came together in Amsterdam to hash out a deal by which the episodes would be simulcast by all the stations. A booze cruise and a dinner at Panama helped grease the wheels of history. This would be the first time since the war that all ex-Yugoslavs would watch the same show at the same time. And on 7 April this year, the first weekly episode was aired.
A few months later, again in Amsterdam, during the screening of several episodes during IDFA, all the ambassadors from former ex-Yugo countries were left crying and speechless. Yes: politicians rendered speechless. A very positive sign indeed.
A representative of the Dutch Department of Foreign Affairs was also on hand to present a cheque to help take the project to the next level: telephone help lines for traumatized viewers, a website with search engine where people could make contact again, counters all over former Yugoslavia where people can make their own video letters (at no charge), and even buses equipped with computers and webcams that travel to the more isolated spots.
Sarajevo/Amsterdam As a symbol of the Bosnian war, Sarajevo was the perfect setting for the official premier. And in many ways, the city has much in common with Amsterdam. OK, Pim Fortuyn will never compete with Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination triggered World War I. But both cities are cosmopolitan despite their small size, painfully scenic, artily inclined and mellow. There’s even a shared humour based on dark understatement.
As a major crossroads and trading centre, Sarajevo is also very welcoming to visitors. Before the war it rated as the most multicultural city in the region. ‘Forget “Venice of the North”,’ I heard a newly converted fan in the group exclaim. ‘We should start calling Amsterdam “Sarajevo of the North”.’ And certainly these days it’s much easier to recognize it as a cool city again. Every exchange with a local feels like you’ve made a new friend. I only encountered one cabdriver (I remember many more from the last time) who started muttering about ‘what they did to us…’
But I had also grown. I no longer asked who ‘them’ and ‘us’ were.
But it’s still easy to equate Sarajevo with war. The valley is smeared with white patches that mark the clustering of graves. UN troops are still everywhere, keeping the peace and acting as regular customers for the overpriced restaurant sector. Damaged buildings and damaged people are still everywhere too. A car with Serbian license plates will still likely get its windshield smashed. But one attending Dutch baby boomer was quick to observe: ‘A car with German plates in Amsterdam will still get pushed into the canal on Queen’s Day, and that war ended 60 years ago. Reconciliation usually takes generations.’
In Sarajevo, the war hovers over every conversation. As a visitor, you are of course neurotic about coming across as a lucky bastard. The boyfriend of a friend I made last time surprisingly expressed certain nostalgia for the war. ‘People smile less. My friends are working harder, staying home more and watching more TV.’
‘It’s only gonna get worse once you join the EU,’ I replied. ‘Or maybe you and your friends are just getting older and more boring. I know I am.’
He laughed and agreed. So maybe universal processes can still happen when there isn’t a war.
It’s easy to get too optimistic. However it’s a feeling that’s quickly cured once you drive by a ‘Welcome to the Srpska Republic’ sign. The Serbian section of Bosnia is still more of poverty-stricken livewire with a population still very much under the thrall of one of the world’s most wanted war criminals, the one-stringed-lute-plucking freak Karadzic. Reconstruction funds aren’t exactly raining there. The region remains seriously damaged. But there’s still a celebratory mood at Cafe Dayton, where several of the series’ reunifications occur, that not even the obvious security presence can douse.
Van den Broek sees the irony. ‘Now the police are helping us,’ he says. ‘Before, when we got stopped, we’d have to negotiate a price and discuss what exactly we as drivers with foreign licence plates were doing wrong.’
When we returned to Sarajevo, I had the opportunity to enter an iconic building that was once the oldest library of Oriental books. It was torched during the siege, though; some two million irreplaceable books were burned. But I saw its renovation and recent function as unique setting for plays and exhibitions as a positive sign.
Later, I tried to impart this optimism to a NOVA cameraman who also happened to come from Sarajevo. ‘I don’t give a shit about that building,’ he said. ‘I give a shit about those two million books that will never be read again.’
Right. It’s sometimes easy to forget. We returned to our ongoing argument about which is the grimiest bar in Amsterdam.
During a luncheon in a beautiful riverside restaurant — complete with tree growing through the building — I was curious to see what the Dutch ambassador to Bosnia and a high-ranking civil servant from Foreign Affairs would say. But neither had a clue about microphone technique, and so we all heard nothing. This gave me another rush of idealism, oddly enough — for the future of Dutch politics, anyway. No one could accuse these gentlemen of being microphone politicians.
But the real story was occurring away from the podium. The different protagonists from the series were meeting each other, recognizing that they were part of a larger group and one that may very well grow exponentially. Normal people ready to embrace a truly post-war future with their pre-war friends.
It reminded me of what my lady friend’s 93-year-old great uncle once said to us. ‘If there were more stupid people than smart ones, then the world would have ended a long time ago.’ Here was a man who’d managed to witness a wide spectrum of 20th-century disaster and still stay an idealist.
Welcome to the Dream Factorski! (Cruising Down the River on a Sputnik Afternoon…)
By Steve Korver, 22-05-2008, Amsterdam Weekly
Once upon a time in the East, there was a Bloc-buster of a film genre—one that the unrestrained could call the ‘The Red Commie Musical’. These films came packed with tunes, drama, dance, romance, sheer wackiness and—most endearing for the modern Western viewer—a solidly alien conception. Who knew musicals could help sell the idea of a worker’s paradise?
In 1997, when directors Dana Ranga and Andrew Horn came out with their excellent documentary on the history of the genre, East Side Story, Eastern Bloc musicals seemed ripe for rediscovery. But they haven’t yet managed to seep into the universal camp unconscious. So it’s a happy thing that Filmhuis Cavia, as part of their 25th anniversary activities, is screening both the documentary and one of its best cases in point: the 1968 East German beach party musical Heisser Sommer!
As the narrator of East Side Story points out: ‘Jean-Luc Godard once said the history of film was the history of boys photographing girls. But Stalin had another fantasy—boys photographing tractors.’ His favourite genre was the socialist (sur)realist musical: endless fields of choreographed farm equipment, a roaring river of yodelling Rasputin look-alikes, a ‘Doris Day of the East’ chirpily strutting her cheekboned stuff in the name of higher production yields.
It all began in the early 1930s, when a film-maker named Grigori Alexandrov returned freshly stuffed with shtick after a few years in Hollywood, where he was Eisenstein’s assistant director and Charlie Chaplin’s drinking buddy. Under the guise of being a ‘crazy guy’—always the safest position to play—Alexandrov made The Jolly Fellows (1934), a comedy of errors going straight for the chuckle jugular where a Crimean shepherd gets mistaken for a famous musician. The film was promptly banned until bigwig writer Maxim Gorky managed to get Stalin in for a gander. He enigmatically responded with, ‘Anyone who dares to make a movie as humorous as this must be a brave man.’ And eventually Stalin helped clear the way for the making of the 1938 classic Volga, Volga—a flick which apparently had the dictator in stitches for over 100 viewings. In his enthusiasm, Stalin went so far as to award Alexandrov with a military medal (for bravery?). And hey, if it lightened the mind of a mass murderer, imagine what this giggle-ride could do for you.
While a few more snappily titled but more propaganda-prone classics—Tractor Drivers (1939), The Swineherd and the Shepherd (1941)—were filmed, the death of Stalin (and his reputation) essentially meant the death of the Soviet Musical.
But after the war, the gilded pitchfork was picked up by the new satellite states. Many of their media products for the proletariat helped to surreptitiously define glamour in lands where the concept didn’t even officially exist. Sure, these surreal-fests came somewhat crippled with ideology, but one can say the same for their Western counterparts. For example, while the celluloid Gene Kelly, with his jones for romance, embodied the American Dream, the real Kelly nearly got his dancing ass blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
Hungary came up with Twice Two Sometimes Makes Five (1954), a love story between stunt pilots that, with its endless charade of parades, uniforms and fighting songs, eerily foreshadowed the Red Army invasion of 1956. Czechoslovakia took better advantage of its Prague Spring by putting the comic muse back into musicals. The ingeniously shot Woman on the Rails (1966), about a woman tram driver who loses it when she sees her man kissing another woman, deliriously walks the tightrope between intentionally and unintentionally hilarious. Your eyes will drool with delight as colour-coordinated housewives lean out of their colour-coordinated apartment building to exchange songs with their colourcoordinated husbands, who are below on the street washing their colour-coordinated Skodas.
But probably the juiciest—and most Technicolor—musicals came from East Germany. ‘Happy’ Hans Hendrick certainly did his best to brighten the working stiff’s day with My Wife Wants to Sing (1958) which exploited a former Miss Bavaria, not only to deal with vaguely feminist themes, but to hype the consumption of all the luxury goods that would appear once the country had dealt with that pesky problem of reaching production quotas. Naturally, it was banned. Not until its audio soundtrack recording became a hit did the state film studio DEFA back down and release it. This led DEFA to start producing more musicals in the hopes of winning back their audience, who were now, annoyingly, swarming to West Berlin for their capitalist-tainted fix.
This resulted in Midnight Revue (1962), a truly zingy vortex of pure entertainment and blatant absurdity that was shot for the funny bone of the masses while the Berlin Wall was being constructed right through the director’s backyard. And if that’s not absurd enough, the plot of four creatives being kidnapped and bullied into making a musical is in fact a direct mirror of what was actually occurring—a film being produced under the mantle of the same state that had the power to censor it. As the refrain goes: ‘It’s simpler to go iceskating in the desert/ Than to make a successful musical.’
DEFA hit the jackpot with Heisser Sommer! (‘Hot Summer!’), the film that precedes the screening of East Side Story at the Cavia. It sold a stunning two million tickets, despite, or because of, its Hollywood plagiarisms, teenybopper cast and generally familiar beach blanket bongo-isms. These days, though, it holds no more sway than, say, Viva Las Vegas (although Elvis musicals did not have to stop shooting whenever the local hospital needed extra wattage). By the time the even more inane No Cheating, Darling (1972) came out, the genre could be considered officially dead, due in no small part to the emerging propaganda power, not to mention the couch convenience of television.
Still, if you have the inclination to dance to the lost dreams of socialism—and these dreams are, my comrades, not so very different from yours or mine—do take time to embrace these near-forgotten artefacts. (If nothing else, they’re a nice palate-cleanser for the Eurovision Song Contest taking place in Belgrade the next day—for which Filmhuis Cavia is also having a party.) And, the sweet thing is that when viewed today, these gems generally require no ironic disposition, just a willingness to surrender your ears and eyes, strap on those worker-built gossamer wings, and fly.
Thanks to Andrew Eddy for making these .giffs dance.
Here is a digital version of an exhibition photographer Rene Nuijens and I made for the European Space Agency, which then went on to be exhibited in Yuri’s hometown of Gagarin, Russia, and have a version of it published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Volume 12.
We first came to wintry Moscow in 2001 to put our Western fingers on the pulse of Russian Cosmonautics. Within two weeks the Mir Space Station, the last vestige of a purely Soviet/Russian manned space program, would plummet back to Earth after fifteen years of service. But shortly after this end there was another date that would represent the giddy beginning: April 12th would be the 40th anniversary of the historic 108-minute orbit of the Earth that made Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) the first man in space.
With more than enough space historians busying themselves with purely technical and political matters, we felt comfortable in focusing in more on the mythic aspects of Cosmonautics. This meant that we could indulge our fascination for such things as stuffed astro-dogs, space shuttles re-invented as fairground rides, and massive swoops of titanium depicting Flash Gordon types. Naturally we were also attracted to uncovering reflections of such now universal tales that depicted the Mir as a long-doomed space station held together by sheer will and duct-tape alone, and Yuri Gagarin as the most immortal of Soviet icons…
And indeed, it was the story of Yuri that struck us the deepest. No one can deny the sheer guts of someone who cheerfully had himself strapped into some tin can to be blasted off towards the centre of the universe and in the process achieving something that only a few dogs, that mostly died, tried. And in our small and modest way, we also paid our respect: by returning to Russia again and again – weakly armed with only two words of the local lingo (“Yuri” and “Gagarin”) – so we could be strapped into some tin can of an airplane or car towards yet another Great Unknown that had played a major role in Yuri’s dramatic and often surreal life. In the process, we hoped to capture (in our small and modest way) the essence of both the man who is dead and his myth that is very much alive.
Certainly few can compete with Yuri. He is a hero of the classical mould whose life story eerily resembles the universally familiar path followed by everyone from Ulysses to Luke Skywalker. Of course, Soviet propaganda did much to inflate this perception, but this alone does not explain Yuri’s enduring stature. While his tragically premature death also aided the myth-building process, Russians often like to point out that Yuri’s continued resonance is more about him having been a “really nice guy”. But he was also the very cute embodiment of the ancient Russian dream of conquering outer space that inspired a school of philosophy and science, Cosmism, a full century before Khrushchev started scaring the West with visions of Soviets pumping out “rockets like sausages”.
The story of Yuri, while it should never be told completely outside its totalitarian context, still tells a heartening tale of the power of positive dreaming. And we ourselves certainly learned a lot from a people – overly represented in the media with images of gulags and gangsters – whose language has no word for “corny”. In short, we are inspired to export the idea of Yuri as a worthy hero beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union, and to present a certain Russian idealism that both preceded and outlasted the Communist Era. Stay tuned for the coffee table book…
Steve Korver (text)
Rene Nuijens (photography)
COSMONAUT #1
Once upon a time long before Cold War competition, the Russians dreamed of space being a place that not only stretched horizontally from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, but also vertically from “Moscow to the Moon, Kaluga to Mars”. Spurred by the vision that “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever”, a deaf and largely self-taught small town school teacher Konstatin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1937) used his spare time to come up with the formula that made rocket flight possible and eventually had it published in 1903, the same year as the Wright brothers flight. While living in a rustic log cabin, this son of a Polish lumberjack also managed to meditate intelligently on multi-stage rockets, orbital space stations, weightlessness, solar energy and the design considerations for space suits and gravity-free showers. However many years would pass before Yuri Gagarin would put a face to all this pragmatic dreaming by becoming our planet’s first cosmic emissary…
DOWNTOWN GAGARIN TOWN
Cosmonaut #1 was also a dreamer. He had dreamed since boyhood of strapping on some rocket-powered gossamer wings and flying towards the moon. But he was also a regular guy – albeit one with a monumental smile – who was born in 1934 in the backwoods of the Smolensk region near the town of Gzhatsk. While most Russian towns named after Soviet figureheads have long reverted to their pre-Revolution names, Gagarin Town will never become Gzhatsk again. Certainly, if Yuri’s many descendents who still live there have their way. Already there are seven different museums dedicated to this town’s favourite son. It is hoped that an improved infrastructure will bring more pilgrims than just buses of school children making the 180 km ride from Moscow. It’s a sad metaphor for the current state of Cosmonautics that the town’s one hotel – named Vostok after the technological wonder that blasted Yuri towards the stars – is in dire need of new plumbing. But the spirit is there…
AT HOME WITH MOTHER
Gagarin Town is already a Graceland for all the Russian cosmonauts who followed Yuri. They came to pay respects to Yuri’s mother, herself an icon of Soviet Motherhood, until her death in 1984. And they still come to drink the cold fresh water from the Gagarin family well beside the recreated log cabin where Yuri was born in the nearby village of Klushino. Downing a refreshing glass of this well water is said to ensure one’s safe return from the Cosmos. Many American astronauts, betraying a balanced view of Space History, have also visited. No one less than Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, was once on hand to place a gold coin in the foundation of the largest museum dedicated to Yuri and declare: “Gagarin called us all to the Cosmos”.
SARATOV INDUSTRIAL-PEDAGOGICAL COLLEGE
Yuri was called to take the trajectory of any bright-eyed child of promise in the USSR. He went off to learn how to become a working class hero. But characteristically, he went further than most: 800 km south of Moscow down the Volga river to Saratov where he would learn steelwork at the city’s industrial training college. He would also learn how to fly at the local flight club. Whenever he would write home to tell his parents how he was excelling at both, his mother would always reply: “We are proud of you, my son… but don’t you get a swelled head”. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian-born Tsiolkovsky disciple Sergei Korolov (1906-66) had long returned from his Siberian imprisonment as a victim of Stalinist purges to invent the intercontinental ballistic and take charge of Soviet Space Program. As “Chief Designer” (his true name would remain a state secret until his death), he would oversee the launching of both Sputnik and his chosen cosmic ambassador, Yuri.
YURI MARCHING TALL ALONG THE VOLGA
“For a space flight they looked for ardent spirits, a quick brain, strong nerves, inflexible will power, stability, vivacity and cheerfulness.” – Road to the Stars, Yuri Gagarin
Due to the cramped nature of the space capsule, Korolov was also looking for a short person to make that first big step into the Cosmos. As a 1.54 metre tall man who needed a pillow to properly see out from a plane’s cockpit, Yuri certainly fit the profile. And as captain of his basketball team, it was also obvious that Yuri was a very special kind of short person. But it is said that it was only after Yuri respectfully took off his shoes before entering the training capsule for the first time that Korolov made his decision and told Yuri “for you the stratosphere is not the limit”. Yuri regarded this as “the pleasantest words I had ever heard.”
LET’S GO!
On the 12th of April 1961, Yuri shouted with an unbridled enthusiasm “Let’s Go!” (Poyekhali!) as he was launched from the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome to become the first human to see with their own eyes that the Earth was indeed round. In many ways these words defined the man: simple, direct and to the point. He was also unnaturally relaxed: sleeping soundly the night before, softly whistling a tune to his motherland while awaiting countdown, and keeping his heartbeat steady during blast-off. While careening around the planet at a speed of 28 000 km/h, he also reported back: “I am Eagle!” “I can see the clouds! I can see everything! It’s beautiful!” and “I am feeling great! Very great! Very great! Very great!” Meanwhile, Radio Moscow interrupted normal broadcasting to play the song “How Spacious is My Country”.
108-MINUTES LATER
After one 108-minute circuit of the Earth, Yuri landed a short distance from where he first learned to fly in Saratov. It was said he was in the capsule when it landed (but in fact he had bailed by parachute). It was said he landed in a freshly ploughed field (but in fact he had landed too close to a secret missile division so the capsule was moved to a suitably ploughed field). It was said an old woman, a little girl and a cow were the first to greet him (but in fact he had to do some fast-talking in order to convince pitchfork-armed farmers that he was not a spy). But regardless, it remained an unparalleled moment in human history. While Yuri claimed that he saw no God during his flight through the Cosmos, two days later when Red Square filled beyond capacity to greet him, he himself would become One – One who worried about tripping over his untied shoelace as he made the long red-carpet walk towards the Soviet star-studded podium. The cult of the cosmonaut was born and “every boy wanted to be a cosmonaut and every girl his wife”.
THE FIRSTS THAT FOLLOWED
Yuri was on hand to lend guidance to Gherman Titov, the second man in space (and whose 24-hour flight made him the first man in space to sleep, eat, etc…); Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space; Alexey Leonov, the first man to walk in space; and Vladimir Komarov, the first man to die in space. They and every other cosmonaut that followed him took Yuri’s national respect to truly obsessive lengths. To this day before any launch, a cosmonaut will visit his recreated office at Star City’s cosmonaut training centre to ‘meditate’ and sign a log, pay their respects at Red Square by laying a wreath under his resting place in the Kremlin Wall, and then finally urinate – just like Yuri did – on the back tire of the bus that had brought them to the launch pad. Though it is likely that Ms. Tereshkova came up with alternative ritual to this last on.
STAR CITY MUSEUM
Yuri adapted remarkably well in his new role as the most pleasant of peasant icons. He charmed both the masses and the elite with the easy manner he exhibited during endless world tours. But it was not easy. Being the first man in space seemed to attract many female admirers that led to stress on his marriage. There were also many male admirers who wanted to be his friend. And hence, his face soon began showing the fattening effects of that certain brand of Slavic hospitality that required the regular communal downing of vodka shots. It almost seemed as if an Elvis-like fate was awaiting him. But he rose above and accepted the fact that he was now too valuable as a symbol to ever see Space again. He returned to school to study engineering, reaffirmed his family commitments, and took the job as the deputy head of the cosmonaut training facility at Star City that would soon bear his name. But he still felt the strain: “I still can’t understand who I am: ‘the first man’ or the ‘last dog’.”
A TRIBUTE TO HEROES
But he needed to fly… So he returned to his first love of flying jets. At 10.41am on the 27nd of March 1968 during a training flight with another Hero of the Soviet Union, the flying ace Vladimir Serugin, Yuri crashed in a quiet forest known only to bears and mushroom hunters near the town of Novoselovo, 100 km from Moscow. His life was over and now myth – as true as it often was – would completely take over. The cause of the crash was ruled accidental but since it occurred at a time when everything was hushed up, it was only natural that whole other schools of speculation arose: that in fact Yuri was abducted by aliens, or that Brezchnev driven by a jealousy of Yuri’s close relationship with Khrushchev had him killed, or that Yuri had finally gone mad from something he had seen in outer space. The most ridiculous scenario had Yuri drunk, flying low, and trying to shoot a moose with a rifle. Of course, the most likely story is that Yuri was indeed pulverised when the jet flew out of control after hitting a weather balloon. His best friend, the space walker Leonov, identified the remains by recognising a mole on a piece of neck that was familiar to him from the many times they had gotten haircuts together. But an air of mystery remains…
GAGARIN, THE PROPAGANDA ICON
A nation mourned and the myth grew. Few people have been honoured with 40-meter swoops of titanium casting them as a Flash Gordonov of sorts. Fewer still have their names still gracing streets, schools, towns, cocktails, fashion labels and casinos, or have their faces – echoing the gilded icons of the Russian Orthodox Church – plastered on candy cases, lamps, bronzes, glass, porcelain, cookie tins, cigarette cases, buttons, clocks, books, pen sets, Christmas ornaments, vodka flasks, toys, cards, postcards and matchbox sets. Certainly none but one is regularly referred to as the “Russian Elvis” or the “Soviet JFK”. But it’s the personal stories of Yuri’s generosity, humour and warmth that still seem to circulate the most. Korolov said, “Yuri personified the eternal youth of our people. He combined within himself in a most happy blend the attributes of courage, and analytical mind and exceptional industry”.
YURI, THE PEOPLE’S ICON
Today, Yuri is the only figure from Soviet times still regarded by Russians with absolute awe and respect. But slowly the passage of time is taking its toll: a niece of Yuri noted that now even the youngest generation of Gagarins are betraying a preference for “Coca Cola over the Cosmos”. But Yuri and the dream that he came to represent will never completely fade away. In 1991, when the ultimately Western phenomena of house parties arrived in Moscow, the first post-Soviet generation chose to call them not raves but ‘Gagarins’. In similar tribute, the many rusting monuments to Cosmonauts found throughout the former Soviet Union are still often brightened with fresh and youthful graffiti expressing such lofty sentiments as “Yuri, we are with you”…
Why? Because space is the place… because Yuri was like the bungee jumper before the invention of the bungee… because Yuri was a really nice guy who became the people’s icon of a really nice guy… because Yuri’s name will be associated with the highest aspirations of our species for millennia to come… because Yuri represented what it is like – as he described it – to live life “as one big moment”. But mostly because nations need their heroes. Just like people…
Thanks to Troy Selvaratnum, Piet Smolders and Lava Design.
