I was refused a haircut on czech tv. I met a one-handed poet and left Prague satisfied. In Krakow I fell in love, a cats and cobblestones kind of city, small and quirky and parkful – it’s a perfect place to write and feel that good kind of misfit’s loneliness amongst the bad house music clubs and drunken yoof. On the street I was called a clochard and a sataniska. I met some art restoration students (“I am condemned to be a master of duaphins”) who told me stories i will finish one day. It was a very beautiful place, and I was happy there, knitting in the jewish quarter with the babushkas.
Almost. Because the day I should have been going for a drink with Brett, I went instead to auschwitz/birkenau. Everyone should visit this place once. No-one should go alone, but I am not clever like that. Auschwitz is a museum, preserved and rebuilt and nauseating, an intense education but slightly cold. Birkenau is much much worse: an emptiness which has been left to decay. They’ve left the ovens smashed and mossy, the buildings falling apart, built a simple memorial and left the place to grow back like a massive scar. I closed my eyes and heard a rooster and a dog like it was any other village. I opened them and saw the squat brick prison, grass now where it would have been mud and bodies. I tried to imagine the smell and the sound, the panic and terror. It is vast: so big that its edges slip over the horizon.
It took me a while to recover. I tried to go to church on sunday but the sight of Catholic gold made me physically ill. Collaborators’ gold. Gold of dead teeth. A thousand thousand broken spectacles in a glass case and they dare paint gold on their cathedrals, dare to remain fascist. I was feeling that extra straw of mysanthropy that broke the back of my somewhat overburdened camel of tolerance, so I went and climbed some mountains.
I have acquired the habit of climbing smallish mountains somewhere. This lot were a bit more challenging than i thought and therefore lots of fun. I did a three day hike on the polish side of the tatras over magnificent rugged rocks and vertical ice (in motorcycle boots, of course) and beautiful black lakes to emerge at the horse and cart serviced morskie oko, the pope’s glacial lake of choice (everything in poland is advertised as the pope’s choice, even the whitegoods tho i can’t imagine he does his own laundry). I prioritised coffee over paying for transport which resulted in another half day’s walk before bussing it in short hops across the border.
I have nothing to say about Slovakia.
In Budapest I met some food not bombs kids who turned out to be squatters and hung out with them for a while as there was a new project being set up in a vast soviet era supermarket. They needed my help and I needed to work. Managed to go from excited to burnt out in ten days, this may be a personal record. Suffice to say that i was not happy about the gender politics in the space or the fact that being young and inexperienced the kids chose to alert the mainstream media to their cause resulting in swarms of smarmy hungarian journos who woke me up. Decision making processes in hungarian are not conducive to the participation of sleep-deprived foreigners, and boys in front of cameras don’t tend to consult the rest of their group. Generally though budapest was a lot of fun and i managed to hook up with some lovely people and spend some time doing non-squat-related things such as soaking in the thermal baths and other tourist type behaviour. I honestly had to force myself to leave.
That’s how I ended up in Belgrade. I’m staying with some really lovely punks in a tower block outside the city, surrounded by a big forest and a few too many churches. It’s snowing. I am sleeping too much. In the local folklore I am eminently marriageable cause i make good Turkish coffee, or so I’m told. I respond by singing harum scarum.
Belgrade has one of the best parks in the world (I am making a list), and a good amount of forest interspersed with high-density living and more stray animals than i have ever seen in one place before. There are a lot of cops doing random searches, you know the drill, police now targeting poor people while the government is corrupt as hell – they recently found half a tonne of smack in the national bank! There are a few problems here with the immigrant thing. Serbs like to complain about foreigners and how their standard of living has fallen, some blame the croats/albanians/roma/etc rather than the war. This was a well-off country until the late 80s, and there’s a lot of nostalgia for communism, when people had jobs and housing. It all just collapsed, and everyone still deals in nervous cash. Milosevic is to blame for everything, including tuva folk. But the city is recovering, adjusting, forming itself into a tentative shape. And now there’s only kosovo, where soon there will be a desert called peace.
The efforts people go to to get out of military service remind me of all those work for the dole stories, except that centrelink isn’t gonna send you to kosovo with two weeks’ training (not yet anyway). Apparently during the last civil war they were so desperate for cannon fodder they were sending people with broken legs and raiding the psych wards for soldiers. I find it desperately ironic that all the young people who faked madness to get out of the war are the only sane people left in the former yu, cause the rest of their generation is nuts from the battlefield.
Speaking of going mental, I hope this cloud-cover-with-occasional-storms in my head clears up soon. Yep, it’s that time of year again. I just want to lie in the bath and read bad science fiction, smoke and drink coffee and listen to depressing hardcore. It could just be fallout from recent election results, trauma cities, watching the news, and the disappointment of this never learning world. It could be i’m tired. It’s always the same: I never know what i need and i don’t know what to do with it when i find it, like yesterday’s doll’s-house piano.
Sigh. It’s not so bad. I am still writing. I am not in a war. There is a bath in this flat and a lot of depressing hardcore.
I will write again, probably from istanbul where i expect to be in two weeks’ time. I also expect to be less confused, but don’t hold your breath.
Will somebody please send me the antidote.
Volim te. x j
PS Australia is well known in this part of the world as the place where all the nazi war criminals went and from which they are financing the current fascists. Between them, iraq, elections, and steve irwin i am feeling very proud to be irish.
Almost. Because the day I should have been going for a drink with Brett, I went instead to auschwitz/birkenau. Everyone should visit this place once. No-one should go alone, but I am not clever like that. Auschwitz is a museum, preserved and rebuilt and nauseating, an intense education but slightly cold. Birkenau is much much worse: an emptiness which has been left to decay. They’ve left the ovens smashed and mossy, the buildings falling apart, built a simple memorial and left the place to grow back like a massive scar. I closed my eyes and heard a rooster and a dog like it was any other village. I opened them and saw the squat brick prison, grass now where it would have been mud and bodies. I tried to imagine the smell and the sound, the panic and terror. It is vast: so big that its edges slip over the horizon.
It took me a while to recover. I tried to go to church on sunday but the sight of Catholic gold made me physically ill. Collaborators’ gold. Gold of dead teeth. A thousand thousand broken spectacles in a glass case and they dare paint gold on their cathedrals, dare to remain fascist. I was feeling that extra straw of mysanthropy that broke the back of my somewhat overburdened camel of tolerance, so I went and climbed some mountains.
I have acquired the habit of climbing smallish mountains somewhere. This lot were a bit more challenging than i thought and therefore lots of fun. I did a three day hike on the polish side of the tatras over magnificent rugged rocks and vertical ice (in motorcycle boots, of course) and beautiful black lakes to emerge at the horse and cart serviced morskie oko, the pope’s glacial lake of choice (everything in poland is advertised as the pope’s choice, even the whitegoods tho i can’t imagine he does his own laundry). I prioritised coffee over paying for transport which resulted in another half day’s walk before bussing it in short hops across the border.
I have nothing to say about Slovakia.
In Budapest I met some food not bombs kids who turned out to be squatters and hung out with them for a while as there was a new project being set up in a vast soviet era supermarket. They needed my help and I needed to work. Managed to go from excited to burnt out in ten days, this may be a personal record. Suffice to say that i was not happy about the gender politics in the space or the fact that being young and inexperienced the kids chose to alert the mainstream media to their cause resulting in swarms of smarmy hungarian journos who woke me up. Decision making processes in hungarian are not conducive to the participation of sleep-deprived foreigners, and boys in front of cameras don’t tend to consult the rest of their group. Generally though budapest was a lot of fun and i managed to hook up with some lovely people and spend some time doing non-squat-related things such as soaking in the thermal baths and other tourist type behaviour. I honestly had to force myself to leave.
That’s how I ended up in Belgrade. I’m staying with some really lovely punks in a tower block outside the city, surrounded by a big forest and a few too many churches. It’s snowing. I am sleeping too much. In the local folklore I am eminently marriageable cause i make good Turkish coffee, or so I’m told. I respond by singing harum scarum.
Belgrade has one of the best parks in the world (I am making a list), and a good amount of forest interspersed with high-density living and more stray animals than i have ever seen in one place before. There are a lot of cops doing random searches, you know the drill, police now targeting poor people while the government is corrupt as hell – they recently found half a tonne of smack in the national bank! There are a few problems here with the immigrant thing. Serbs like to complain about foreigners and how their standard of living has fallen, some blame the croats/albanians/roma/etc rather than the war. This was a well-off country until the late 80s, and there’s a lot of nostalgia for communism, when people had jobs and housing. It all just collapsed, and everyone still deals in nervous cash. Milosevic is to blame for everything, including tuva folk. But the city is recovering, adjusting, forming itself into a tentative shape. And now there’s only kosovo, where soon there will be a desert called peace.
The efforts people go to to get out of military service remind me of all those work for the dole stories, except that centrelink isn’t gonna send you to kosovo with two weeks’ training (not yet anyway). Apparently during the last civil war they were so desperate for cannon fodder they were sending people with broken legs and raiding the psych wards for soldiers. I find it desperately ironic that all the young people who faked madness to get out of the war are the only sane people left in the former yu, cause the rest of their generation is nuts from the battlefield.
Speaking of going mental, I hope this cloud-cover-with-occasional-storms in my head clears up soon. Yep, it’s that time of year again. I just want to lie in the bath and read bad science fiction, smoke and drink coffee and listen to depressing hardcore. It could just be fallout from recent election results, trauma cities, watching the news, and the disappointment of this never learning world. It could be i’m tired. It’s always the same: I never know what i need and i don’t know what to do with it when i find it, like yesterday’s doll’s-house piano.
Sigh. It’s not so bad. I am still writing. I am not in a war. There is a bath in this flat and a lot of depressing hardcore.
I will write again, probably from istanbul where i expect to be in two weeks’ time. I also expect to be less confused, but don’t hold your breath.
Will somebody please send me the antidote.
Volim te. x j
PS Australia is well known in this part of the world as the place where all the nazi war criminals went and from which they are financing the current fascists. Between them, iraq, elections, and steve irwin i am feeling very proud to be irish.
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