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Art – Romania Without Dracula

Romania Without Dracula

Category: Art

  • Rovegan, a Contemporary Fairy Tale

    Rovegan, a Contemporary Fairy Tale

    English version differing from original Italian article first published in “Il Manifesto, Alias” 

    Caprele sunt printre primele animale domesticite de către om. În neolitic, păstorii au început să păstreze caprinele pentru lapte și carne, dar de-a lungul timpului, oamenii au descoperit că pot fi folosite și drept combustibil, pentru îmbrăcăminte, construcții și instrumente. Capra este numită “vaca omului sărac”. Pentru că e ieftină şi bună.

    Goats are among the first animals domesticated by humans. In the Neolithic, shepherds began to keep goats for milk and meat, but over time people have discovered that they can also be used as fuel, clothing, construction and instruments. The goat is called “the poor man’s cow.” Because it’s cheap and good.

     

    Meeting Up at Dianei 4

    I meet Catincă Drăgănescu in a June rainy day at Dianei 4. Like it often happens in Romania, places echo back to other stories, developing their secret connections. Now these shanty chic quiet rooms host a hipster venue, back in Ceaușescu’s days, some Securitate premises. At a given time, they also served as collecting point for Romanian jews in wait for their final relocation to Israel, which could only apply once their diversified “ramsons” were negotiated with Romanian government agents. Today Catincă’s playwright ROVEGAN  gives voice to a contemporary variation of the same dilemma:  the impact of economic migrations on human destinies. Catincă wrote ROVEGAN in 2015 as her Residency project at the Drama League, New York, the first Romanian to be admitted there. We order our cappuccinos.

     

    Badanti, an Invisible Army 

    I had experienced ROVEGAN few days before at Centrul Educațional Replika in Bucharest. The last but one show with no certainty yet that it would run on again in the fall season, it is a piece of brechtian “epic theatre”.

    The performance lasts for an hour and a half and flows at a high emotional pace. I believe that any signora italiana, if not any Italian citizen, should “experience” this piéce. Set design is basic: three chairs and a background photo frame featuring a dusty road reaching out into the Moldavian steppe, the only anthropic element being a Bine aţi venit la Vaslui/ ‘Welcome to Vaslui’ road sign.

    Acting is all on three outstanding actresses, Mihaela Teleoacă, Valentina Zaharia and Silvana Negruţiu: they alternate to create a gallery of characters as well as to give voice to the chorus. Each scene is introduced by an estranging musical track – one for all, the sagacious manipulation of Felicità by Albano e Romina (thank you, Alexei Țurcan, for twisting that song to its utmost grotesque possibilities).

    And, under a badante‘s eyes, what an alienating place Italy may become. Scene after scene, the picture sharpens more and more, with Italiani brava gente/ ‘Italians good people’ inflicting (unawares?) hardship on a silent army of Romanian and Moldavian badanti. Here, the term badante needs analysing a bit. The Italian Treccani Dictionary dismisses  it as “A person without special qualifications, who cares for the elderly, the sick or the not self-sufficient”, real life defines a badante as a supporting column in the Italian contemporary society. She is the person who daily accesses our houses to take care of our old, disabled or little ones, often 24/7, allowing us to pursue our professional or personal goals. It does come with a cost on both sides, but we rarely seem to stop to consider what these persons had to leave behind: they remain an invisible army to us.

     

    Audiences

    Entrance to the show is for free but on reservation basis, so to observe those attending does prove an exercise in behavioural sociology. Fact is, the phenomenon of badanti is a sensitive topic in the Romanian society. It is perceived as a taboo by a vast majority as it triggers sense of shame, guilt or frustration. To my surprise, though, people showing up to attend the performance were quite heterogeneous and, along with the expected ones – young engagé, mostly female – I could spot a considerable number of common middle-aged citizens. Personally, I bear my own burden, involved as I was in “the Italian side” of the phenomenon.

    Rovegan at Teatrul Replika, Bucharest, May 2017

     

    Theatre of Power Vs Theatre of Ideas

    As a whole, though, what a different human gallery I found at Centrul Replika, from the attendees observed just a week before at Bucharest Teatru National for Durenmatt’s The Visit. There, prestigious location, dress code and the related importance of being seen, informed me that power was in the air. Here, Radu Apostol, one of the Centre organisers, explained to me that their performances can go on only thanks to voluntary work, strong social commitment and networking, relying on hardly any public funding. Against all odds, though, their program goes on, their mission being to keep on providing the community with a place where crucial topical issues may be addressed.

    “Theatre of Power – i.e. the cultural industry with its link to the political apparatus -, vs Theatre of Ideas, with its lively offer of independent projects that can rarely benefit from public funding and mostly rely on alternative fundraising channels”,  Catincă would later explain to me, adding up:”If you want to survive, you cannot be only a pure playwright, you must become also the manager of your own project”. Catincă is still very young but she seems to already possess all the necessary managerial competences, with also a degree in Media Communication. I cannot but be struck by her focus on her art and clarity of vision as cultural organiser.

     

    Artwork, not Documentary

    ROVEGAN is the first playwright in a trilogy on immigration to bring the badanti issue on stage in Romania. The immediate source of inspiration for her project was Cireșe amare / Bitter Cherries, a novel by Liliana Nechita, a former badante from Moldova herself. In fact, while migration is becoming a key issue among young Romanian intellectuals and a documentary film already exists, Catincă wishes to underline that her focus is on the artistic representation rather than on the social investigation: “ROVEGAN is no documentary as it aims at creating its own world, detached from any real circumstances.”

    Produced by Asociaţia ARENA, between February and June 2017, ROVEGAN  went on tour all across Romania, with free performances followed by an open  debate: Bucharest, Cluj, Craiova, Iasi, Botosani, Sibiu, Targu Mures and Sfantu Gheorghe. “We found very different kind of spectators. In the smallest centres, like Botosani, Targu Mures and Sfantu Gheorghe, we had very emotional feedbacks, with many women taking it all on a very personal level; at the other end of the spectrum, we found Bucharest audience, with a much more detached cultural approach.

    “Children and Grandparents of the Migration”, seen on a wall in strada Italiana, Bucharest

     

    The Epic of Mother Goat

    “The idea to use a fairy tale to develop my project came to me while listening, one Saturday morning, a reading of Capra cu trei iezi / ‘The Goat with three kids’ on a children radio program: what an epiphany!” Disseminated with the Romanian curriculum, Creangă’s tale was written in 1875. Since then it has proved one of the best-known works in local children’s literature, also becoming the topic of several music, theater and film adaptations, in both Romania and Moldova. The tale illustrates the notion of motherly love.

    As Catincă elaborated her vision, a piéce of epic theatre began to take shape. “Mother goat is Mioara, a 47-old single mother from a Moldavian village. Forced by extreme poverty to go to Italy to work as a badantă, she must leave behind her two little kids and her very old mother.”

    So it is that on this popular background the action in ROVEGAN is built. The script goes on at a steady pace, exploiting at its best the register of the fairy tale and the imagery of the goat ecosystem. Mihaela plays Mioara, while Valentina and Silvana make their voices sound like bleating, other moments one of them uses a neutral tone to illustrate some behavioural habits of the Carpathian Goat.

    That is how, then, the imagery of the goat and the re-elaboration of traditional nursery rhymes, help Catincă to describe “the mixed feelings hundreds of thousands of Romanian and Moldavian economic migrants experience, torn as they happen to be between traditional role models of ‘self-sacrificing mothers’ and pressing new needs of self-empowerment and gender awareness.”

    About the term badantă: it is worth noting that, while its Italian version is officially used in all communications of the Italian State with reference to migration and work permit policies, the Romanian word has not appeared yet in the DEX (Dicționarul Explicativ al Limbii Române).

     

    A Must See 

    The final scene won’t be spoiled, I just borrow a conclusion from a Romanian review (which I cannot track back, help me please if anyone can): “Mioara’s story brought on stage by Catincă and her team, is just one of the hundreds of thousands and this is why this shown must be seen: a phenomenon that takes place in our contemporary world and, more specifically, within the Romanian society. It helps to understand more clearly  the deep tear that is been perceived more and more in recent years between those who take to the streets to resist and protest and those who seem passive and careless. They are those who most suffer from extreme poverty and lack of education in the rural areas of the country – thousands of Romanians forced to migrate in search of work opportunities, with all the consequences that such a decision causes in their lives and in their relatives’, as well as in the Romanian society as a whole. Therefore, go and see ROVEGAN, because if it were a smart, funny and well played show that touches socials issues without provoking any in-depth reflection, it would have already been awarded on top of a podium.”

     

    Seasons To Come

    When I leave Catincă I wish her good luck and, above all, promise to follow up soon with my article. I did prove a liar, as only now, October 2017,  I have been able to keep my promise. A couple of good reasons are on my side, though. First one, I was sure that ROVEGAN would go on in the fall season and so would benefit more from any new review coming up NOW, rather than as a tail of the old season. Second and last one, because a recent relocation to Kiev, Ukraine, has made all offline engagements prevailing and rather time-absorbing. Truth is, Catincă Drăgănescu did not need my review at all as she keeps on reaping wider and wider well-deserved success, season after season. Good luck to such a promising young artist.

    Rovegan Show Poster

     

    ROVEGAN

    Playwright and Director: Catincă Drăgănescu
    Actors: Mihaela Teleoacă, Valentina Zaharia, Silvana Negruţiu
    Original Music: Alexei Țurcan
    Video and Documentary: Alexandra Dincă, Vlad Bȋrdu, Ionuţ Popescu

     

    Dianei 4, Bucharest

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    LINKS:

    Trailer Rovegan

    Platforma GO WEST

    Liliana Nechita

     

     

     

     

  • Carolina Bonaventura, Her Tango also in Bucharest

    Carolina Bonaventura, Her Tango also in Bucharest

    Cover Photo by Pablo Scavino

    Her grandfather was a pianist and run his tango orchestra, his dad was a singer but Carolina Bonaventura discovered her passion for tango as a teenager, while studying classical ballet. These days her school Mariposita de San Telmo located in the heart of Buenos Aires, has become a landmark for tangueros and celebrates its tenth anniversary. I met this relentless Argentinian Tango ambassador on last October, when she featured as guest star at Bucharest Days, the second edition festival organised by Giorgio Panico and Mariela Roșu who in Bucharest run Scoala Urquiza according to Carolina’s Efecto Mariposita©.

     

    Carolina, can you give us an idea of what Argentinian Tango has become today?

    There is a before and after in Argentinian Tango. Until the Forties you learned tango at home: your dad, your uncle would teach it to you, your neighbours, anyone… There used to be a tango culture, those songs were your everyday musical background: the tunes broadcast on the radio, listened to in the streets, from the live orchestras in the milongas. Our lives flowed along with tango. Political events in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, gradually led tango to a sort of social oblivion: it became less and less fashionable, inappropriate, not elegant enough, finally the political regime discouraged social events and meetings in public places. Tango disappeared from the public scene and from Buenos Aires life, along with opportunities to meet up to dance. We reached a point when, even when people did reunite, they did not know those codes anymore and just danced rock & roll or  pop music like that of the Beatles: the scene had completely changed and for good! Even when some tango was still being played, no more than two or three pieces were played per night, while our passing on tango from generation to generation had come to a stop and youth felt like belonging to a whole different society. Then, soon after the regime collapsed, an unexpected event occurred in the Eighties, which would contribute to open up a whole different scene. After many years spent researching across the whole country, Claudio Segovia, a theatre producer,  and Héctor Orezzoli, succeeded in reuniting milongueros and tango professionals  to create a major show. Tango Argentino made its debut in Paris in 1983, soon proving a worldwide success, in fact the very event that triggered a real tango mania almost everywhere. So it was through these milongueros that tango began to be taught again in a range of different schools. By then, though, the scene had deeply changed: tango culture was no more handed down from father to son/daughter inside families and local communities, but in more formal ways through schools and academias. In the process each school started teaching according to their limited knowledge in a sort of copying-and-pasting process: the original codes went almost lost and so did a shared pedagogy and methodology.

     

    “There is a before and after in Argentinian Tango. Until the forties you learned tango at home…”

     

    The way tango is being handed down today has deeply changed: before it was “from body to body”, i.e. from generation to generation, now it is through formal tango schools and academias 

     

    And what about you, when do you reckon you got involved in tango?

    My grandfather was a pianist running his tango orchestra, my dad was a singer,  I may say that even before being born, I had been listening to tango. I started very early to study classical ballet and one day, when I was already in my teens, my teacher proposed me some tango steps. I had no special interest nor prejudices against it. So was it that when I started to listen to that music and began to move my first steps, I said to myself: “Hey, I do know this music!” I was drawn back to my childhood musical background, and it actually was for that call that I started to dance tango.

    Which is your personal approach to tango?

    For my generation it proved very hard, as we had to start almost from scrap: to begin with,  which were the basic steps of tango? A pedagogy was badly needed. For me, a key way to proceed was to disassociate movements in order to understand each single part in them. The point is that affirming that tango is connection or that you have to keep your contact to the soil is not enough: you first have to understand and then be able to explain how all this is made possible! So, my very first step was to disassociate each movement and become able to reassemble them again in a mindful and philological way. This is the kind of research at the core of Efecto Mariposita© at Mariposita de San Telmo, the tango school I opened in Buenos Aires almost ten years ago [celebrating its official 10th anniversary in April 2017, ed.] I decided to locate it in one of the oldest quarters in a hundred-year-old house which I completely renovated. That choice came after having danced almost everywhere and finally having realised that tango deserved a place all of its own. Tango is definitely part of my cultural heritage and as an artistic expression it required a place to suit its needs. To pursue my project properly, I looked after every single aspect – from the best location, to the choice of colours, materials, light inside the spaces, as I said to myself: “I want to create the best place for tango!”

     

    Buenos Aires, Mariposita de San Telmo

     

    Nowadays we are less and less body aware while more and more mind-oriented

     

    Which are the basic elements characterising Efecto Mariposita© that also Giorgio and Mirela teach in Bucharest at their Tango Urquiza?

    As we deal with a physical experience involving our bodies, my method is first of all meant to allow people to re-connect themselves with their bodies. The focus is on technic, musicality, body awareness and couple communication within the tango frame. In order to develop my method, I have had to study in depth a number of elements. For four years I have been researching with the help of an olympian athlete which and how many muscles were involved in tango dancing. Athletic training is not only necessary but essential, at the very core of tango. It’s true that anyone can dance tango but to know which muscles and body parts you need to activate and control is quite crucial too. To achieve that knowledge, I delved into biomechanics, holistic methods like Feldenkrais, Pilates and Antigymnastics,  so to help people to retrieve their correct posture, which we instinctively own at birth and lose later on, due to wrong habits like, for instance, spending too much time sitting in front of screens.  In fact, we do not draw too much attention to our physical dimension, as biased as we are by a culture that considers mind more important than the body. A first step is then to help ourselves to re-establish a contact with our physical selves: should that be missing, how could we get in touch with anyone else?  Not only: to learn our body language, we have to go through a self-awareness process. Another crucial aspect in our methodology is to develop our musicality, that is our capacity to match movement to the rhythm, melody, and mood of the music being played.

     

    Nowadays tango runs the risk of losing part of its original energy, i.e. its capacity to make very different kinds of people share the same dancing floor. That still happens in Romania

     

    Giorgio Panico and Mirela Roșu

     

    What kind of apprentices come to your school?

    It is a very heterogeneous audience: we have young, middle-age, local and foreign people coming from any corner of the world. They do all share the same passion and respect for tango. That is because while the origins of tango are quite humble, it has grown to become a universal and classical artistic form. At its very core we find communication between two human beings who look for something deeper which goes beyond the act of dancing: a form of emotional involvement, a very vision of the world. That explains why in 2009 Argentinian Tango was included in the UNESCO List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Talking about our learners, I believe that while coming from quite different backgrounds, they all share a keen interest in an approach meant to teach them the hidden mechanisms of tango, beyond any fashion or fad of the moment.

    Tango on the other side of the ocean: Europe and the rest of the world…

    We Argentinians have always been strongly connected to our European roots, our intelligentsia attracted by  France, Italy, Spain and Germany. Indeed, approval by the Old Continent has always proved a recurring element in any of our artistic fields and that has also played a major role in the process of rediscovering tango and its bringing it back to centre stage. In fact, it is not by any chance that the very debut of the show Tango Argentino by Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli – which so much contributed to the current worldwide interest in tango -,  took place in Paris.

     

    Bucharest Days Festival held on last October 2016

     

    Tango in Romania: can you perceive any specific element here?

    A first observation is that dancers here appear more passionate and responsive to the music – a trait which I also find in Russia and – generally speaking – in all of Eastern Europe, where they have a higher musical education. That is not all. Here in Romania I can also see that young and less young people still tend to mix and dance together, which alas is proving less and less true in many countries today. In most countries today you find a growing generational gap, with young dancers dancing only with young ones and old with old:  a major changeover from the original tango landscape. Dance floors have always been cross-generational with everybody in the family used to dancing with everybody else: young and old with no age barriers! These days Milongas feature more and more different-age venues: those for seventy-year old, those for third/forty-year old… In fact, nowadays tango is running the risk of losing part of its original energy, i.e. its capacity to make very different kinds of people meet to share the same dancing experience – a real pity for a dance with such a democratic DNA! In the universe of tango a twenty-year old follower may dance with an eighty-year old leader and viceversa, sharing as they do a mood and a spiritual experience. I really miss that approach: you and your tango going to the dance floor to meet whoever he/she is, as long as you both share the same codes.

    Carolina Bonaventura and Mirela Roșu, photo by Sebadochio

     

    When alone, we perfectly keep our self-centred balances but only when sharing our centres of gravity with someone else new things and new personal discoveries can happen

     

    We end up with improvisation: a key word in tango…

    Musicality, communication and improvisation are the three crucial elements which must be combined without any specific order: all of them must be there at the same time. In other types of dances like salsa, rock & roll and waltz, you have basic steps for the leader and the follower to go along but in tango there does not exist any basic step nor beat to start with and your movements are built together from the very beginning: and with the music, there comes improvisation. This makes communication and capacity to react key elements. In fact, to improvise you need to know the technique, i.e. how to keep your balance so to be able to shift your centre of gravity at the right time. We may say that Tango is built through basic bricks which you have to know how to combine as you better like. The total freedom you are allowed in tango is proved by the fact that you can dance the very same piece with the same partner without ever producing the very same steps. More, at the centre of it all you find two dancers with all their potential expressiveness and that is immensely challenging. In fact, when alone, we perfectly keep our self-centred balances but it is only when we share our centres of gravity with someone else that new things and new personal discoveries can happen. That is why tango is like life itself, that is why I insist on stressing the deep humanity of tango.

     

  • In a Clear Mind – Meeting Omu Gnom

    In a Clear Mind – Meeting Omu Gnom

    New Album out on December 24 2018

    Hrana out on March 22 2017

    I met  Omu Gnom for an interview at Fabrica, Bucharest, just before Christmas and a week ago I went back there to attend his concert. You could tell that he is a charismatic and thoughtful chap from his very energetic yet unhurried young audience. While I could not but feel like an ideal bunica (grandma) to them all, I enjoyed their quiet mounting number, many of them  flocking in straight from Piata Victoriei, where together with other hundred-thousands Romanians of all ages, they had been protesting in front of the Government building. Back home, my teenager sons dismissed it all as a clumsy raid into a world apart from mine, ideally sympathising with my unfortunate interviewee. Who, in fact, relying on his clear mind, did prove their perception completely mistaken.

    Why Omu Gnom? Is there any ironic intention in this word combination? 

    It’s a combination between two names, om, which means human being, and gnom, which is a gnome, a mythical creature that lives in the underground and keeps the wealth and the richness of the earth. Basically, when I was little I liked this word gnom very much and then after a while – about ten years  afterwards -, when I began to write, I found that omu gnom sounded even better with their combined syllables, also because “to be a man” in Romania is like something important: sa fi un om! meaning you have to be someone good, with some standards, to try to do good with everybody. In fact, this is one of my targets in writing: I write stuff that uplift people that listen. And yes, I am an optimistic person, also with the pessimistic writing I always want to give at the end a little reason for being optimistic.  As for the combination, I like playing with words: in the word gnom you find also the word om, so I play with the idea that a gnom is little as opposed to om, someone much taller. So, it basically has it all, started from a little spark. Any other meaning comes afterwards and that is the beauty of dealing with words: you know where you start but never know where you are going to end up.

    Why they call you Domnul Profesor (Mr. Professor)?

    At the ARTA (Atitudine, Răbdare, Tehnică, Ambiție) I have different kinds of students, some just want to write lyrics and have their creativity pushed forward, so I help them with their word playing and everything that has connection to music, others are more interested in rhythm, how to put your words into the rhythm and how to make everything be packed, put in a good package. Yes, I have been doing this for two years, I have two classes and all my students are ok, actually you cannot save them all but when you can save more than half of them that is really great. By the way, how do you know they call me “Domnul Profesor”?

    [I found it out in an online interview :)] In fact, you appear as a true educator, literally: helping to take things out from within

    Yes, I want to help people with a better understanding of life, the world order and society. I don’t know if I succeed but I try to do my best to do that. Practically, my opinion of writing is that if you have a skill and you can make other people listen to your words, you must go for it. Maybe you are here for that reason as well…

    What would you have been, hadn’t you been a singer?

    Ok, this is the question every journalist puts you! Each time I give a different answer, so… today I answer to you: probably an investigative journalist.

    Getting to your music, How do you manage your work, I understand that you create all your music…

    Yes I sample the sounds I like, I make all the bits, I am a butcher. Say, I like an Italian song, maybe from the Sixties, I chop it up and add it with something else and I make music. This is Hip Hop. From my point of view, Hip Hop – or at least a part of it – is the possibility to create a movie with different characters from other movies. Which is what I basically do.

    Which are your channels to sell your CDs?

    It’s not a label, it has been a crew for seven years now (Ateliere de creatie) and I have a website,  omugnom.com, for three years. We are independent, we do not have a formal distribution and we rely on support: you can free download our stuff and if you want the original you donate, also if you want to support us you can donate. I am my own manager, my own PR, everything… It’s ok. I am still at that level. It is growing but we shall see.

    Practically, my opinion of writing is that if you have a skill and you can make other people  listen to your words, you must go for it. Maybe you are here for that reason as well…

    Coming to the hip hop Romanian scene. I read Vice 2010 about it. What’s your opinion?

    Actually  I know people that are considering writing a book about the Romanian hip hop. To give you a brief idea, it all started back in the first Ninties, when some radio shows began to broadcast American stuff, after that some local bands appeared. R.A.C.L.A. (an abbreviation of Rime Alese Care Lovesc Adânc – “Handpicked Rhymes with a Deeper Meaning”, Ed.) issued the first hip hop album. Then came the B.U.G. Mafia (Bucharest Underground Mafia) and many more. What the Romanians did after the 90s? They went, say, East Side, that is more lyrical, like RACLA, Getto Daci,  and West side in a more gangster style – so called gangsta rap – like BUG Mafia (Bucharest Underground Mafia), La Familia. At present these different styles are merging together: a combination of toughness – because also on the streets in Romania you have gangs and mafia – with some lyrical contents. Personally, I don’t follow gangster rap, I am more of a spiritual guy, but there are very good street rappers among them.

    Which are the singers who inspire you most?

    In Romania I like Methadon 3000, Norzeatic [he is now in Tokyo to study Japanese] and Deceneu. So these are my main influences.

    About your song Limpede: what is the story behind this song?

    It means “in a clear mind” I started working on this song during the Roșia Montana protest (a successful protest against a mining project in 2013, Ed.). I talked to people and observed the events: I was starting to wake up and watch what was happening in the world, what was happening in Romania. So I made the song with the idea that you should have a clear mind to focus if you want to deal with something. This should be normal for a human and this is what I also say to my students. This attitude also regards your opinion: you need to have a clear mind, even if your opinion is a collage of different opinions, it still becomes something yours and original, reflecting just you, who collect it all.

    In Printe cuvinte you say ai grija sa n-ai griji (“be careful not to be careless”) and “read, open your mind”: quite beyond simple singing life’s ups and downs and the fatalistic mood so recurring in Hip Hop…

    I am a kind of conscious writer. This is where my style is taking me to. And frankly speaking, I would like to earn some money in things that I believe in. I will never leave rap, though. I like that my message reaches more people. I am sure that an open-minded person would be interested in it. For instance, on December 11th (General Election Day, Ed.) I took part in an event called Conteaza Voteaza (“It counts if you vote”) at Expirat, a new Bucharest club in Halele Carol, where you could join in only if you brought along your voting stamp. And it was a good show in a whole new environment for me: I had a very good reception. I made my freestyle on politics and people enjoyed it and wondered who I was. That made me think that I should let my music go to places where it had not gone until now, because there are people that would appreciate it.

    What I basically do, I try to make things that will help you develop. I write things for me, as well to improve myself. I like saying to myself: “it will be ok, try to be better, come on!”, “here are these politicians that are robbing you, don’t be stupid, think! Think! And it will be ok!”. I don’t know if this happens everywhere but the people in Romania must be constantly reminded that they are in control of their lives and that if they think critically then everything is going to be ok. Maybe it is a general human problem… More, now we have too much information and you feel lost: we have Google and everything is there for you but we don’t know what to search anymore and we are tired of all this. I don’t know if I have the right to give advice but I am trying to play my part in this. And I am doing it for myself, first of all.

    Now we have Google and everything is there for you but we don’t know what to search anymore and we are tired of all this.

    Comparing your mood to that I can grasp in the current Italian rap scene- some names: Salmo, Jay Ax, Marracash, Sfera Ebbasta, Guè Pequeno -, I find yours inspirational while theirs, allow me a risky generalisation – full of spleen and nihilism. Does it make any sense to you? 

    I don’t know the music of these artists so I cannot relate to the description. What I can do, though, is to talk about my music, my message.
    I don’t want that the people that listen to me thinks it all sucks and there is nothing to do about it. As a proverb says, in every situation there are at least two solutions. Of course you have to say things as they are, but that is not enough. Obviously there is room for everybody in hip hop: others deal with fatalism, nihilism, drugs, whores… This is my style. I have parents that are fans. At a concert in Sibiu a sixteen-year-old guy came up and asked me to take a picture saying “I am here because my father sent me, he told me, you’ll like that guy!”. These are kids that have a good relation with their parents. Me and my parents did not relate to music in that way. We are in 2017 and more open-minded persons have become parents: we are starting to change. But what this era in which everything needs to be fast is doing for us, is that we also want fast results in everything. But there are not fast results to do things: it comes in time. You cannot jump the stairs from floor one to five.

    Getting to the youngest generation, I observe that they are very responsive to change and open-minded, they have ambitions, speak many languages, more than I can see in our young people in Italy.

    You are right, but a major problem here in Romania is the education system which dates way back. Everything depends on the lack of inspiration. The world has changed but school subjects are still taught with old boring methods. You see, to be a doctor or a teacher requires vocation. This is the basic thing: you have to be prepared on that, meditate much, be ready to be a model for them. So, you realize one of the reason they want to be there (at school) is YOU. The problem comes when teachers start to hate their job and apply strict rules, which, in fact, should not be necessary at all. As a consequence, they do not let students have their own opinions, which would help them so much! The school should prepare students for life, it should help them to express themselves but no, the school wants everybody speak the same, dress the same, think the same, learn the same. It’s an unending subject anyway…

    As an Italian observer, when I first arrived in Bucharest, all your quarters of dehumanising communist blocs deeply shocked me,  “how can individuals survive in there?” kept on asking myself… In an interview you said that you were born “printre blocuri nu dupa blocuri” (through the blocks, not in their mentality). What did you exactly mean by it?

    True, it is a nice wordplay…That is one of our major problems, that we had fifty years of communism and it affected the people’s mentality. For that injury to heal requires time, so right now we are still on the healing process: we are not ready to do something because the wound is not healed yet. It may seems but if you look around the wound is not healed yet. I mean also the young people – not only the fifty or forty-year-old, but also the twenty years old, they have wounds as a reflection because what the children see is what the children do: they follow pattern behaviors, consciously or unconsciously. I can see things that I do myself, without my knowledge, because I saw them at my parents. So, basically patterns of thinking and patterns of choices. It is also a matter of vocabulary… We have then to work out this communist thing in a way to manage its fucking impact on us.

    Still, anything to save out of the communist heritage?

    That’s a good point. The best thing in communism was that you had housing, a job and some money, you had nothing to buy but you had money, now you have many things you would like to buy but you don’t have the money: welcome to capitalism! Communism and Capitalism are the two sides of the same coin: we were so hungry of everything that we wanted it all, and now we have got all that crap from capitalism. The American model sit perfectly on us; these people here had stayed for fifty years with everything portioned, the money, the food, they were not allowed to leave the country; now they want it all. Yes, the Romanians have this incredible need to do shopping and they want to be sure that everything is there at their disposal. It sounds silly but it is understandable and to cure this will take time, generations. In fact, the youngest are starting to realize that and are developing a different mentality: when I speak with eighteen-year old, we understand each other.

    What this era when everything needs to be fast is doing for us, is that we want fast results in everything. But there are not fast results to good things: they come in time. You cannot jump the stairs from floor zero to floor five.

    How do you explain the results of December’s General Elections?

    That kind of result was highly expected. You cannot change everything like that. People are not ready for that yet, because they don’t know what they actually want. Imagine, that result does not reflect the actual will of our population and of our society. Let’s do this exercise of imagination for the sake of argument. Imagine this: 10 people are ALL the people who have the right to vote. So the people who have the right to vote are ten but only four of them actually went to vote. So now, the attention of everybody is on these four people because from everybody’s perception, those four people represent ALL the people. So now, these four people become ALL people, and from these four people who have become ten people, five voted this party (PSD, Ed). In fact, considering the ten initial potential voters, they are just two! So basically, what we should do is to focus on why didn’t six people go to vote? What do they want? The first answer is that “because they are sick of this shit, and it is a shit and nobody wants to deal with this shit”! Most prefer not to get involved at all. A smart person or party should focus on why these are not going to vote and learn something. No! The real problem is that they prefer saying “we are so good; we did ten, twenty per cent…” Still, if you consider the eighteen millions that are entitled to vote, you have gained nothing! In fact, I have my theory – and probably at a certain point I will create my ONG and try to propose things – is that you should not have an election which is validated without fifty percent of the people coming to vote. This is not normal, this is not a majority, why is this legal?! All in all, I think the strategy of the main parties is to keep those six people out of ten from voting: they do not want them to use their vote; they want them to feel sick about it. The real point is that to get diamonds from the mud you have to get dirty and those six do not want to get dirty.

    Coming to the present, with hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets as a reaction to the latest political developments, how should we read that in a clear mind?

    Here in Romania we have a constant displeasure regarding politics and politicians. They have been robbing the country since the communism fell and somehow many people seemed to have got accustomed to their lying and their habits and lived their everyday life not wanting to think about it. I was saying in the previous question that a large part of the people who have the right to vote didn’t vote, that is a lot, around 60%.
    What is going out now? The party that won the elections was trying to give themselves and their partners in crime a law that would help them avoid jail time. That was the last drop for many, so they are starting to protest. The emotional state was in such a way that the protest became a snow ball with the maximum of half a million Romanians on the streets in a Sunday evening.
    I think we are witnessing history in the making. The majority of “I don’t care” just started to get involved and are starting to make a statement against corruption.

    Next concerts or oncoming projects?

    I am almost finished with my project with Dj Undoo. We have an album that will become available shortly. We have been working at this for quite a while and I am really looking forward to make it public. It is a personal, classic one.
    We will be present with a concert in most of the major cities in Romania so come see us live this spring.

    Bio Info:
    Songwriter and beatmaker for seventeen years now, Omu Gnom produced his first solo album      Ai grija sa n-ai griji in 2011 obtaining a very excelent reception. Nu uita sa nu uiti came out shortly after, in collaboration with Norzeatic and other underground artists and Djs. In 2013-14 he focussed on another project, Atentie la neatentie, with a strong social message, with the song Limpede obtaining a warm reception in most of the Romanian cultural media.

    • Performing at Fabrica on February 3 2017 photo by opisicaneagra.ro
    • Sunday February 5 2017, mass protest in Piaţa Victioriei photo by Fabiana Papastefani
  • As I Read Philip Ó Ceallaigh

    As I Read Philip Ó Ceallaigh

     

    When I picked up Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006), a collection of short stories by a Bucharest-based Irish writer, I was thrilled at the chance of finding unexpected insights on the city life, if not on Romania as a whole. I was wrong: by the time I had finished reading Notes and immediately afterwards The Pleasant Light of Day (2009), his second collection, my perception of Romania had remained basically unaltered. All I gathered, when it came to my old quest for a sufletul romanesc, was that yes, Romania may prove an inspirational scene for a writer-to-be, if only for its cheap cost of living. So, welcome into Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s geography, where specific places and objects provide the scenery for staging universal characters and destinies.

    “All around him were men who had given up. Everywhere he saw defeated faces. These men had lost more than love, or the spirit of love, they had lost the fight.”

    Ó Ceallaigh knows the trick: short stories, when crafted with the right few strokes, conjure up whole worlds. In both books,  people are seen in their daily struggle to make sense out of their marginal lives. They are  closely observed and never judged: categories like winners or losers do not apply to this gallery of human beings. Thoughtful readers may end up empathising with them.

    The point is that the uneasiness experienced by the residents of the suburban block of Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse echoes our very contemporary discomfort and quest for meaning. Alas, most of the men and women we meet there have given up and are seen drifting along, elements of a superfluous humanity: “Cavemen that did not hunt or gather, but sat around getting fat and sick and bitter, who could shit and flush it away, and were thrown into confusion and fits of grunting if the pipe blocked or broke. An aggregation of superfluous humanity, herded into concrete cubicles on the rim of a city.“

    A major challenge is to make sense of infinite repetitions and not to be annihilated by them. Only few characters realise that clearly enough, like Alex who “thought of how things and people became each other. Imagine a pair of boots that had been worn a year, or a hat”, or Dorin, the painter who endlessly draws sketches of the very same view with a zen-like approach, reckoning that “there is a moment when – and being able to catch that moment is far from easy – the view from the tenth is good no more: a change is needed, so that you do not become like the thing itself and keep your healthy distance from things and do not allow things to absorb your very being! It is an heroic struggling, only few are able to do it.”

    Ó Ceallaigh is a true democrat and the chance to reach that healthy distance is granted to anyone: “Yes, the crazy and the sane, each had to find something to settle them, some activity. Some cultivated their gardens, some played backgammon, some wrote bad verse.”

    “If you practised you could have the power to say things, even if nobody else heard them.”

    Artists belong to their biographies and  Ó Ceallaigh is no exception. Soon after taking his degree in philosophy at Dublin University, he started leading a nomadic life, till his instinct made him stop somewhere and he decided that Bucharest was the place: a return, in fact, having already stationed there in the late Nineties. In his one-room apartment at the tenth floor of a block on the city outskirts, he spent his first few years facing the threats of nihilism; time and again he had been tempted to give it all up, dubious as to where his passion for writing might finally take him. He did stick to it and something happened: his words germinated and Notes was published in 2006. Skip Forward. Eleven years afterwards Ó Ceallaigh is an unassuming reserved guy as well as an established writer, both appreciated by a globalised – if niche – readership and cherished by a chorus of enthusiastic reviewers. He is still a Bucharest resident, living at the eighth floor of a just more central block.  He rejects the invasive use of smartphones and the modern slavery of internet connectivity, preferring to focus on real faces and places as they unroll before his quick blue eyes.

    “When people were together, always some of those people would be speaking on their phones to people who were not there. Nobody was ever completely where they were now that it was possible to speak to everybody all of the time.”

    His writing style is not only compelling but also endowed with clairvoyance. Compare the discomfort expressed by one of his characters in Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse  to the feelings that are taking so many Romanians to the streets these days. They are protesting against the ruling party’s overnight adoption  of an emergency ordinance to change the Penal Code, decriminalising or/and reducing the criminal punishments for corruption offences such as abuse of office, conflict of interest and negligence at work: “George felt disgust. He knew the type. Usually they were in government offices, heads of faculties. People sure of their power. People with the necessary skills for rising in a dictatorship, people with no ideas beyond smiling unctuously to the man above and being merciless to the man below. Then the dictator was gone and they were members of the ruling party, as smug and sure of themselves as ever, because they were on the inside, with their friends, running the show, and everybody else was on the outside.” 

    “Abraham sat there on his stone throne, alone, through the small hours, contemplating liberty, and sacrifice, and the other things that make America great.”

    Another cluster of stories  in Notes is set in the USA and provides us with similarly penetrating visions of America in the age of Trump: “They bought the land, they put up the houses, and then they got in commando teams of illegals to landscape it to look pretty and civilized, and to maintain it thereafter. Then they sold the units and went off and bought more land and did it again.” 

    Some reviewers tend to associate Ó Ceallaigh’s writing to a cynic or pessimistic bite. I dismiss that reading and rather find that Hope – or elaboration of its loss –  acts as the most powerful agent in his stories. The stories in The Pleasant Light of Day show that even more clearly. I wish you a great reading.

     

     

  • The View from the Tenth – Meeting Philip Ó Ceallaigh

    The View from the Tenth – Meeting Philip Ó Ceallaigh

     

     

    “The world was full of monkeys that had learned lots of words. It was so easy to get words wrong. When words came out right, the right ones and the right amount, you didn’t notice the words so much as the effect they had. The magic essence departed from the substance, the music played.”

    Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse

     

     

    I met Philip Ó Ceallaigh in mid December at Senecanticafe, one of the varied co-working spaces  springing up in Bucharest.  Native of County Waterford, Ireland, Philip has lived in a number of countries and experienced a range of jobs before stopping in Bucharest and focussing on writing full time. In fact, the following conversation does not report on that first meeting but on a later written exchange, after I had completed reading his short stories in Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (Penguin, 2006) and The Pleasant Light of Day (Penguin, 2009).  

    How much of the Philip living at the tenth floor of a Bucharest suburban block is still You today? Is there anything belonging to that period that you happen to miss now?

    Now I live on the eighth floor, similar block, another part of town. So I don’t need to be nostagic.

    Which were your reading back then? How crucial was and is poetry for you?

    Then I was reading the writers who became important to me when I was first developing a style, seeing how experience could be rendered – Hemingway, Miller, Bukowski, Celine, Hamsun, Carver. I wrote poetry for a while and was very interested in how language could be heightened and focused, but when I took the lessons and brought them to prose I saw no reason to go back to poetry.

    Your choice to deal with words,  searching ways to empower them, reaching back to their roots, while living at the tenth floor of a Bucharest block suggests the attitude of an ascetic monk. How much of this impression holds true?

    Many fun-loving degenerates have lived on the tenth floor.

    You have lived in Ireland, Spain, Russia, the United States, Kosovo and Georgia, then picked up Romania as your place for focusing on writing. Does Romania prove a convenient place for that kind of exercise?

    I do think most of our existences consist of noise and agitation. With a little sense and detachment we tend to say less. Bucharest then is a nice big manifestation of the human condition – it’s particularly noisy and senseless, an accumulation of badly fitting parts, failed intentions, everybody rushing around with their desires and ambitions, colliding with each other, getting frustrated and angry and disspirited. I never planned to settle in Bucharest permanently, and I never planned to write about Bucharest. I have nothing to say about Romania in my fiction; it is not my chosen subject. But I do set my stories in a real physical space. I mean, as I write, as I imagine action, I generally see it taking place in streets I know, in apartments where I see the layout of the rooms. In this sense I’m very located in Bucharest. Notice I say Bucharest, not Romania. But it’s very much my Bucharest, the proccupations and sensibility are mine, I’m projecting my own sense of what life is on those specific pictures of life which I draw using the material I have before me.

    Your cynicism reconnects to ancient roots: it literally explains your vagabond lifestyle. The effect on your readers is powerful, they trust your words and empathise with your quest. Any role a writer can play in our society today? Do you feel lonely or belonging to a community? Which?

    I was very moved by Kerouac when I was still a teenager, and later I began to read about that community of writers that later became known as the Beat Generation, and I liked to imagine how it was with Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs and others all in one room in New York, all young and curious and enthusiastic about their work and the idea of writing. How they were friends and helped each other and got drunk together. I like the idea of that kind of society between artists. But I’ve never felt that kind of thing in my own life. Never sought it, perhaps because I’ve never felt its attainability. I have a few friends who are writers, but we’re spread thin across the globe. I have two friends in Bucharest who are writers. One is well known, the other is not and has never shown anybody what he writes. I have very little sense of my role as a writer. What attention other people will pay to what I write or what sense they make of it seems accidental to me, outside my control. I just make the stuff.

    The view from the tenth floor also triggers considerations on the power of money or, alternatively, on the effects of its lack. In fact, how much can we actually afford not to care about money?

    Money is like sex. When you don’t have any, or are excluded from getting any, it is a dominating anxiety. Money has its own eros. More so in society like Romania, where there is a desperate insecurity about social standing that has everyone trying to stomp on everyone else. It infects me more the longer I stay here. I’d like to say it affects me, but it’s uglier than that. It infects me. Because if your common, public space never provides you with enjoyment and security you feel compelled to secure these things privately, so you can have control over your life.

    Your stories generally feature solitary men with women playing marginal or sometimes literally instrumental roles. Are you also interested in writing about female characters or you consider them like novels, i.e. not your bread?

    It’s not male or female characters that interest me in their maleness or femaleness. It’s the interaction between them. And that interests me very much.

    Sex is a recurring element in your stories and often described as a tricky language: temporarily healing but complicating things in the long run. Many of your characters – who are mostly male – seem to experience that dissatisfaction. Is that all or would you add something on the subject?

    We are combined of the animal and the rational, as that Greek guy pointed out a long time ago. So life will continue to be tricky. Woof-woof. Or as the dogs say in Romanian, ham-ham.

    You are a keen observer of Western societies, especially so in The Pleasant Light of Day. You observe issues and hypocrisies and don’t fail to describe how creepy Western imported models have provoked extra damages to social peace and stability here in Romania. How much longer do you think it will take for the Romanian society to get rid of corruption ?

    I can’t tell. I couldn’t have predicted the things that happened in 2016. We were all very optimistic at the end of the 20th century. I don’t know that things are falling apart, but they seem to be fraying at the edges. We can’t take anything for granted, least of all the idea that Romania will become a less corrupt country. Romania was corrupt even before the communist period. But younger Romanians are certainly less scared, less passive, less sneaky than the generation that came before. The people born in 1990 are very different to those born in 1960. They’ve seen another world.

    Accelerating new technologies, social networking, globalised consumer models, all seem to produce growing unhappiness and frustration. We grow more and more passive users, to the point that our mindsets follow standard patterns instead of actively searching our own ways. Are we still in time to steer clear of all this and free ourselves from those invisible chains?

    I do what I can do. I see most of the people on the metro are playing electronic games on their phones. There are a few people reading books. What we need is everybody with a smartphone and everybody on medication for depression, anxiety, general sadness and apathy. Then we won’t need stories or novels. Just better designed computer simulated realities. And then the barbarians will come over the border – people with real lives and appetites, who make babies by accident due to real fornication – and we’ll start anew. They’ll sing songs as they roast pigs – or us – over their fires. Somebody later will come along and make lyric poetry from these lusty songs. And so it goes, art will be saved.

    Both Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (2006) and The Pleasant Light of Day (2009) were contemporarily available in their Romanian translation, whereas on last October Racconti Edizioni translated into Italian Appunti da un bordello turco (2016). Reception of your books has proved enthusiastic, you also won prestigious prizes. What kind of feedback do you receive from common readers? Can you detect any major difference in the reception of your work among English, Romanian or Italian readers or, on the contrary, any recurring pattern?

    Romanians tended to see my work as descriptive of a social reality, journalistic. English speakers as imaginative, exaggerated, fantastic. I’m talking mostly now about the first book, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse. Irish reviewers tended to be troubled by the immorality, misogyny of some of the characters, and by extension the cynicism of the author. Ireland is the only place where I’ve had really bad reviews. As someone who doesn’t have a clear idea of who my reader is, I’ve been pleased by the reception of the book in Italy. Firstly I’ve had a lot of luck in that the publisher is a publisher only of short stories, so the work is targeted at those who appreciate the form. Not having an idea who I’m writing for, I just imagine I’m writing for human beings, and that the stories work as stories no matter where you are from, and that they’ll still be stories years from now.

    Your attraction for the past leads to a kind of continuum between your fiction and non-fiction work. You wrote long compelling essays on whole disappeared Bucharest quarters, particularly about the Jewish area in Unirii. Which are your current fields of study, amid fiction, non-fiction and narrative journalism, where do you feel more drawn at the moment?

    I’m interested in history, or rather how the past is erased and replaced with fictional versions of the past. You would think a reckoning of the past is what is most needed in a society that has experienced genocide and totalitarianism and destructive nationalism – but these traumas make the reckoning even. Each generation moves forward in a fog of forgetfulness and denial. I’ve just finished writing a book in which I use the lives and the writings of a number of authors of fiction in eastern Europe to try to evoke this lost, buried past. In the case of Romania, I focus on Mihail Sebastian, who I’ve also translated into English –  For Two Thousand Years was published in English in 2016. I don’t know when my own book will be published. It might not be.

    • Writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh
    • “There is a little boy of three or four at the stop. His mother hunkers down and rearranges his hat and scarf, though they do not need to be rearranged, and kisses his cheeks.” all quotes from “Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse”
    • “Our own journey is entirely imaginary … It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.”
    • “But you learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where I have lived.”
    • “All around him were men who had given up. Everywhere he saw defeated faces. These men had lost more than love, or the spirit of love, they had lost the fight.”

     

  • Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania

    Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania

    Mike Ormsby, Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania 
    Kindle Edition, 2, 211 pages
    Published June 28th 2012 by Mike Ormsby (first published January 1st 2008)

    Admittedly, it has taken me some time to discover Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania, first published in 2008, yet here I am now, eager to fill that awkward gap.

    In this collection of fifty-seven short stories, Mike Ormsby, a writer and former BBC journalist/World Service trainer, chronicles various moments of his experiences in Romania between 1994 and 2006, when Romania became his home.

    Published simultaneously in Romanian as Grand Bazar Romania (translated by Vlad A. Arghir), Ormsby’s book received a range of reactions – from sheer enthusiasm to harsh criticism – mostly depending on readers’ personal visions, expectations, and sometimes, on their nationality.

    Personally, I could not help getting absorbed in tales that so vividly evoke situations and characters almost identical to those I have come across, eight years later.

    Irony – and, even more valuable, self-deprecating irony – seems to me the X-factor which makes you enjoy reading this book, to the point that some local critics have dubbed Ormsby ‘our British Caragiale’, after the 19th century playwright and satirist. Alas, I wish I knew more about Caragiale – just another one of the huge gaps I still need to fill – to fully appreciate that comment, surely enough, though, the author’s funny and bittersweet tone works as an antidote to his keen empathy with Romanians and their unique land, providing him with a safe distance from which to observe the scene.

    Indeed, Never Mind the Balkans is not the only book about contemporary Romania under “modern foreign eyes”, so to say, and I will be dealing with at least a couple of others soon enough: Philip O’Ceallaigh’s Notes From a Turkish Whorehouse  (Insemnari dintr-un bordel turcesc, translated by Ana-Maria Lisman), and Voyage en Roumanie by Alain Kerjean; each contribute in their own way to unveil some of the deep mechanisms at work inside contemporary Romanian society.

    Back to Ormsby’s book, it strikes me for having succeeded in assembling such a vivid gallery of characters, so powerfully close to the “real thing”: you cannot but feel grateful for that. In each story, the author blends into his surrounding and allows characters to speak for themselves. His voice is never invasive nor in the least sounding like the usual “wise guy from the West”. Rather, quite often he limits himself to acting as litmus paper within his environment, letting people and situations speak for themselves. Like in Why Not, where his artistic projects with his friend Adrian finally cannot but crash when faced with the dumb indifference of an incompetent journalist, whereas in Nice Sofa, Ormsby lucidly stops aside to actually wonder, “Was it my fault? Was I some wise guy from the West, with big ideas?” So, as I went on reading – always with valuable help from my Urban Dictionary – I enjoyed descriptions conjuring up, in a bunch of words, whole human landscapes and situations.

    More. Many tales leave you with a surreal aftertaste, not an infrequent impression in Romania. Take Labyrinth, where characters successfully incarnate one mainstream approach to life here: “Live by the rules and don’t get stressed.” Others – with generous help from serendipity – focus on the past or dig into local history to finally present you with little treasures, like Buried, where, en passant, Mihai Eminescu is described as that chap “with the rock-star looks”. The tale sheds light on the little known, tragic biography of a promising young translator, Corneliu Popescu, whom Ormsby discovers by chance while searching in the public library for English translations of Romanian authors. As a teenager, Popescu translated Eminescu, and brilliantly so, but died alongside his mother in the 1977 earthquake.

    Another kind of sadness takes you when reading tales like Șpaga, depicting the use of bribes as the mainstream strategy to solve any practical problem or life issue, applicable at every possible social level.

    The good thing about these tales is that they are not Bucharest-centred: Ormsby travels the whole country and encounters very different human habitats. In The Wrong Place, we end up in a small village, Tușnad, with poor Tanti Dorina who is caught in her damp bed between past and future, whereas in Too Good To Be True, a hiking trip takes us up into the Carpathian Mountains, dangerously close to angry sheepdogs. But it is definitely in tales like Faith, Hope, and Chablis that I most appreciate Ormsby’s voice. Here, two worlds – West and East Europe (allow me to generalise) appear to get extremely close one another, yet something goes wrong and it does smack of us-and-them – indeed a chasm – unless prejudice and self assurance are not won by good will and a sincere wish to understand “the other”. I won’t say more, because I do invite you to pick up this book and enjoy your reading.

    Overall, I am grateful to Ormsby and will steal a quote from John Lennon, one which the author passes on to his friend George, a character we meet in several tales: “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.”

  • My Take – Walking Down Bucharest Parallel Worlds

    My Take – Walking Down Bucharest Parallel Worlds

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    Piata Revolutiei July 2016, Installation by Sever Petrovici-Popescu


    “Imi place foarte mult sa ma plimb prin Bucuresti, am avut o perioada in care am mers foarte mult pe jos si mi-am dat seama ca Bucurestiul are o arhitectura extraordinara ce trebuie pusa in evidenta. Sunt o gramada de zone faine, mai ales in zonele dintre cartiere si centru.”

    Omu Gnom

    If you believe in the power of serendipity Bucharest is the place to be: here the music of chance may easily lead you to discover something intriguing just round the corner. If you can afford to invest some of your time in random walks, then just go for it. At times you may even experience shy forms of travel in time.

    Adding up to your playlist

    When on a stroll down Bucharest streets, once you have skipped the challenging gaps and holes of most of its sidewalks, watch around for clues. Say, you walk along Boulevard Dacia, your eye catches the sign of a small museum which, like a Theatre in Magheru, is dedicated to a Nottara: no time to pop in? Just take a note to look it up later and you will have added a charming piece to your  Romanian music playlist: Siciliana, composed by Constantin C., actor Constantin I. Nottara’s son.  If you head centre you may then stop to observe the elegant peacefulness emanating from the historic villas surrounding park Ioanid – these days mostly turned into diplomatic residences; you muse on all the secrets those windows and gardens have been guarding since their first appearance on the city map.

    Contemplating new forms of barbarism

    You decide to turn into a smaller lateral street – it never really matters which – and walk past the remains of a rusted iron fence containing a garden grown wild around an old villa on the verge of vanishing. Most of these fading buildings belong to a sophisticated and – curiously enough, for quite many Romanians today – to a nostalgic past. With a good help of your imagination – here comes the travel in time – you catch a glance of what, several decades back, must have been an aristocratic residence with its framed windows, its richly decorated iron bars, its glass-paneled winter garden… At their latest, these villas date back to the so called interbelic period. Shortly after WWII the new communist lords methodically destroyed as much as possible of all the past elites’ symbols: from impalpable aspects such as their social status and lifestyle down to their homes and very material existence, in an attempt at wiping them out of the urban landscape. Yet history repeat itself. Not ideology, rather a  get-rich-quick mentality nowadays threatens to wipe out what survives of the architectural heritage. Critics say a significant number of these historic buildings could be strengthened, rejuvenated and saved – but that the owners prefer to leave them empty, waiting until it is necessary to tear them down for safety reasons and then, in their place, building a modern high-rise. Over the last decade the historic centre of Lipscani has undergone a massive renovation effort which not always has preserved all the charme of the original places.

    New tenants for old buildings

    As you walk down less central areas you are more likely to discover other interesting buildings. Hidden behind wooden boards and remains of deftly wrought iron fences, they seem almost claimed back by chaos. Yet, to a closer look, quite often these houses in complete shambles are not neglected at all and have rather ended up hosting  a whole new set of tenants. They often happen to be Roma families that, having no other place to go, have installed themselves there, until local authorities, on behalf of legitimate owners who have finally regained their property rights after decades of legal fights, kick them out. Paradoxically enough, such a phenomenon did not exist in Ceausescu’s days. Back then the Roma community was integrated – though forcibly – in the Romanian society, both by being assigned a regular job and housing in the very same blocs along with all other Romanian citizens. After the collapse of the regime, that fragile social balance broke down for good, with democratically elected governments regularly failing at envisaging any kind of social inclusion policy, triggering – instead – new waves of racial discrimination toward the Roma citizens. Now back to the street. You can tell the Romas’ presence from the colourful mess of clothes hanging out to dry in the sun along makeshift laundry wires, or from the vibrant frames perceived through the palisades: dirty toddlers watching older peers’ skilful ballgames, cute girls laughing on thresholds, older women in their chenille bathrobes sweeping dusty courtyards – a minor rite which assimilates them to gadji housewives, reminding us that true, whole world is country. Most times, should you pass by over weekends, the scene would be enriched with manele tunes magically rising up from nowhere, electricity being somehow provided for in a place where regular utility bills stopped being mailed ages ago.

    Bucharest live show

    Leaving behind this layer of urban life, you recover your adventurous walk along a typical street with clusters of wild car-parking: no sidewalks for you, the only option being to keep going along  the carriage way beside high-speed cars (the bigger, the speedier). Few more strides ahead and in front of an unexpected  art noveau building you run into a TV crew arranging its equipment for an interview to someone hot expected to emerge any minute from his/her lawyer, as the elegant brass plaque suggests. Citizens must be informed: be it a football player signing a new contract, a vedeta divorcing from his third husband, a politician just charged with plagiarism of his university degree or, more simply, for yet another bribe scandal. As you observe the calm professionalism of the young TV crew operating amid the traffic, the notion that the world is a stage here appears reinforced  with the idea of a dangerous stage.

    Eternity Street

    Surprises are in store even when walking along more peripheral quarters like Colentina or Pantelimon. There, on each side you are surmounted by gigantic ten-storey residential buildings Romanians call bloc. You stroll far away from picturesque neighbourhoods still you never give up and continue your quest for useful clues to understand more of this big city. They could be found in the icons worshipped in candle lit silence inside an orthodox church squeezed amid the blocs and the traffic, or amid the surreal silence circulating amid the tombstones of those resting in peace in cemeteries surrounded by beehive bloc. Take the almost abstract address of cimitir Progresul 2: Strada Eternitatii, Eternity Street. Definitely yet another layer of this big city.

    Me and the rapper

    I stop walking and head home. Serendipity does not stop operating its charms though. Checking out facts and information, I find out that Omu Gnom, a young underground rapper born and raised in the Drumul Taberei quarter – not suspected of indulging in the picturesque like a middle-aged Italian expat – also finds walking down Bucharest streets a unique experience. That is easily explained because all parallel worlds pass through Bucharest, somehow.

     

     

    • Bucharest, serendipity on sale in strada Academiei
    • Bulevardul Regina Elisabeta, pop art on the go
    • Bucharest is a mine of architectural styles, at times with an edge
    • A balcony for two
    • Bulevardul Protopopescu, how many stories buried inside there?
    • Chaos prevailing
    • Bucharest, corner of strada Academiei, Modernist building
    • Glass is a recurrent and often invasive element in new buildings
    • Architectural clashes reflected
    • Piata Iancului backyard, Typical ten-storey bloc
    • Colentina area, Cimiterul Reinvierea, the dead resting amid the blocs

     

     

     

     

  • Downtown Encounters/ Ion Barladeanu

    Downtown Encounters/ Ion Barladeanu

    Bucharest, July 2016. I meet Ion Bârlădeanu one Sunday morning in a sunny deserted city. On my way back home from downtown, some of his collages in the shopwindow of the “Uniunea Artiștilor Plastici din Romania” catch my attention. I tell myself, maybe it is open and he is inside here now. I press the handle and the door opens: he is sitting at the centre of the cool empty room, beside his inseparable piles of magazines.  I introduce myself, explaining that I have been wishing to meet him for quite a while. We start talking and go on for about an hour, then we fix an appointment for the following day, same time, same place: I will be back with my camera, “I will be waiting for you, I keep my word.” He kisses my hand.

     

    Ion B.’s Story 

    Ion Bârlădeanu is born in Zapodeni, historic Moldavia, in March 1946. Ion associates his childhood to a pleasant time: making carnival masks, pieces of chess, baskets out of maize leaves, carving toy arms, telephones. He attends a professional school for masonry in Iasi where he learns to draw. His father, a keen member of the communist party, wishes him to become a regular socialist worker but at twenty Ion runs away from home. From then onwards he changes a number of jobs: digger in a combinat and in a graveyard, dock worker in Constanța, sagristan, lumberman, keeper, workman in the building site of Casa Poporului. In Bucharest he also happens to spend few days in jail because not regularly employed. In Vaslui he is also enquired for political reasons, never having put up with his father back home. After the regime fall in 1989 unemployment is no more a crime and he ends up becoming a boschetar, the local expression for homeless. He finds shelter in the garbage room of a bloc in Calea Moșilor, where he survives by providing minor works and services for the residents. For about thirty years he has kept on collecting magazines which he has been clipping and gluing to create visionary collages.

    Success arrives at a late stage and quite unexpectedly. In December 2007 artist Ovidiu Feneș points him out to gallerist and art dealer Dan Popescu. Things are bound to change in a short time for Ion, as narrated by the documentary In Lumea vezuta de Ion B. (“Il mondo visto da Ion B.”)  by Alexander Nanau, winner of a Grammy Award in 2010. His collages are exhibited first in Bucharest, then in Basel, London and Paris. 

     

    Collages Film-maker

    “I am a film-maker”, he declares with a curious mix of humor and gravitas, specifying: “in fact, now a worldwide director with scissors”. With an inborn talent for drawing and a long-cherished wish to become a film director or an actor, Ion creates his own imaginary world, a sort of “proto-pop” approach to creativeness which anticipates the arrival of the pop culture along with the consumer society soon after the fall of Ceausescu. Art may not describe it all properly: for thirty years that activity has been for him a form of self-therapy. Using minimum resources, his frames create a hybrid which combines pop art and surrealism dada in a way to trigger powerful narratives. His works raise wonder, irony and above all melancholy: hollywood stars and western world brands are inserted in local contests – Romanian landscapes and local scenes – and there they stand as icons of freedom in a dim gulag atmosphere. “Among my favourite international actors I list Liz Taylor, Ursula Andress, Silvia Coscina, Orson Welles, Peter O’Tool, Clint Eastwood, Marcello Mastroianni.” Over the years Ion’s scissors have made up his stories starring all national heroes from Nicolae ed Elena Ceaușescu down the line and each time in his hands reality has taken new unexpected twists making everything become possible. Not by chance “Realpolitik” is the title given to his first exhibition held at H’Art gallery, Dan Popescu’s gallery. Also his latest collages keep that dreamlike and estranging perspective and when I ask him what he thinks of today’s Romania he is quite merciless: “Romania got rid of a dictator who was like a sated wolf to end up besieged by a pack of hungry hounds”. 

     

     

    Fame, Critics, Life

    A picture shows him sitting on a sofa with Angelina Jolie: true, since childhood he had dreamed of becoming an actor but life presented him with a whole different screenplay and the old man now in pleasant conversation with Mrs Pitt plays the unique role of director of collages. Despite his growing success abroad and his being often described as “the Andy Warhol of Romania”, vehement criticism has been coming from some local intellectuals who consider Ion B. as a clear case of shameful media hype and cynical exploitation of a naive by the art industry. No matter what, Ion strikes you with awe for his sense of dignity and self-awareness of belonging to the noble art world: none can doubt that he belongs there, anyhow.

    Moreover, his past clochard life seems  to have immunised him from the whims and tantrums of success and the temptations of money.  I can see it clearly when I come back on Monday and we are walking along Magheru heading to H’Art Gallery. In front of Carturești we come across a street cleaner who warmly greets him: Ion stops to chat with him, his sad eyes attempting at smiling.

    We reach the gallery,  an attic in a palace from the forties in Dionise Lupu. Dan Popescu, the young owner, welcomes us,  then it’s Ion who plays the host and shows me around the current exhibition: “It’s Codruța Cernea, a young artist, like most of those represented by the gallery. Actually for them all I am a kind of old uncle.”  

    We get out to the terrace that overlooks the cityscape. Without saying a word he reaches the balustrade to catch a closer view of Bucharest roofs. He says almost to himself: “they say that works of art go up to tenfold their value after the artist dies. By now I have become someone known with no money problem – even though I am not interested in having it – above all I finally have  freedom. But what shall I make out of it? Too late now, as youth has gone and for  good.” 

     

    Postscript (Stuff for a post to come)

    While talking with Ion Bârlădeanu I realise how much Romanians are seduced by the cinema imagery. So, I guess, Ion’s cinefilia must have something to share with other surreal stories of human resistance during the communist years. My mind goes straight to “The Voice“, i.e. that almost abstract entity behind which all along the Eighties Irina Nistor, a courageous and visionary translator working at State TV programs, secretly dubbed over 3,000 banned movie titles on VHS tapes smuggled in from the West.

    While people did wonder why all the Western movies were dubbed by the same voice, they were deeply grateful for her message of never giving up. It cannot be by chance that Nistor’s is till now the most well known voice in Romania after Ceaușescu’s.(Chuck Norris Vs Communism).  

    Lumea vezuta de Ion B by Alexander Nanau 

    Adevaratele povești din viața lui Ion B. by Andy Platon

    • Talking with a street cleaner
    • “What shall I make of my freedom now? It has come too late”
    • Ion is felt as an old uncle by young Romanian artists
    • Ion chose collages as an instinctive form of self-therapy
    • Ion Bârlădeanu with Sever Petrovici-Popescu, Bucharest, July 2016
    • Ion loves to collect hats
    • Talking with Ion Barladeanu
    • Ion B. with Dan Popescu
    • Ion B. with Angelina Jolie

  • Interview – Lucian Georgescu

    Interview – Lucian Georgescu

    Lucian Georgescu teaches creative writing and screenwriting at UNACT, Bucharest and is visiting professor at Scuola Holden, the creative writing school founded in Torino by Alessandro Baricco. He belongs to the first post-communist generation and he is a member of UCIN ((Romanian Filmmakers Association), SRN (Screenwriters Research Network) and EACWP (European Association of Creative Writing Programs).  Interested in road movies, he is the author of a book about Jim Jarmusch (On the Road with Jim, 2007). In 2011 he wrote, produced and directed a film a tragicomic road movie The Phantom Father. Some of his contributions can be found in The Road movies of the New Romanian Cinema (Studies in Eastern European Cinema, vol. 3, no.1, UK 2012 Intellect Ltd. pp 23-40),  The Point of No Return – Cinematic Expressions of a Nation’s Altered State of Mind (in East, West and Center: Reframing Post-1989 European Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Lucian is currently working at a A Subjective History of Cinema Told in Road Movies.

    Lucian, what is Cinepub?

    Cinepub is the only legally free online channel dedicated to the Romanian Cinema. It represents a unique opportunity both for cinefils and for young Romanian artists. Considering the current distribution system, the risk for many emerging film-makers is that their works never get to reach their audiences at all.

    Cinepub has chosen a very simple approach with little space for any critical apparatus, focus on films, each speaking for themselves…

    That is correct. We intend to reach different kind of audiences, just like different kind of books find each their readerships, we let people chose what to watch and what to think of it. Our main intention is to showcase rather than analyze the New Romanian Cinema. In fact, the very name we chose for the project suggests A very empathic approach. Some twelve years back, at the very first editions of the TIFF (Transylvania Film Festival)  – i.e. still far from it having become a mondane must-be event –  Cinepub happened to be the name for a workshop I held as a non competitive section of the festival. The focus was totally on creating a space for young Non professionals to meet and make ideas circulate. I am glad to consider that some of that idealistic energy has been preserved.

    Coming to the distribution issue, what is the role that Cinepub plays in promoting the new Romanian cinema (as well as the past one)?

    During the communist regime some 4,000 cinemas were being run around the country; nowadays only some 40 are still operative, all the others  having been transformed into restaurants, night clubs, supermarkets or just left into a state of total decay. Now cineplex and the commercial Mall model have taken over all the programming and distribution circuit, with almost no space left for any independent operator.  Along with promoting new talents we dedicate great attention to the rediscovery of the great authors of the Romanian cinema. That is why we call 2016 the year of  Mircea Danieluc, such an important figure in the history of our cinema: we will be programming 17 of his films. We may go as far as to say that we represent for Romanian cinema an operation of Corporate Social Responsibility: a totally new approach in our country.

    Talking more specifically about the films, a recurring sense of tension between plain daily life and private expectations – often leading to a deep sense of frustration – can be perceived. Could we consider it a trait in the new Romanian cinema?

    This is certainly not the place where to define the new Romanian cinema in depth,  yet we may say that we are now experiencing a phase beyond surrealism, involving many similarities with neorealism. If we consider that the style is directed by the means and that a chronic lack of means – both financial and technical – affects the Romanian cinema, a new style is emerging. Among the contemporary directors, Cristi Puiu is one of those who really makes a statement in cinema for neorealism with its strong appetite for contemporary stories –  so reminiscent of the neorealismo italiano and yet so tipically Romanian. By the way, we may go so far as say that even Aferim by Radu Jude, despite its apparent historical setting, can be read as a neorealistic film – which can prove a challenge of kind for a foreign audience, probably unable to catch all such subtle nuances…

    A last question, my recurring one: how do you think we can trace a sufletul romanesc in the Romanian cinema?

    Sufletul romanesc has nothing metaphysical to it: you can trace it back to Caragiale’s unique mix of irony and tragedy as well as to Ion Creanga’s spirit. Nor should we forget the importance of Dadaism’s Romanian roots as well as Cioran’s observation that Romanians never take themselves too seriously.

     

     

     

     

  • Cinepub.ro, a Site with a View

    Cinepub.ro, a Site with a View

    • Cinepub communication campaign by GAV
    On last February 26th Cinepub.ro celebrated its first anniversary totaling 5,372.437 minutes – the equivalent of 10 years and 28 days – of Romanian cinema in streaming. To make that possible Lucian Georgescu and his team had been working hard for previous three years.

    We must be very grateful to this energetic team, as Cinepub.ro is the only legally free online platform dedicated to the Romanian cinema.  The films are available in streaming on AVOD platform ( Advertisement-supported Video on Demand). They are all Romanian productions and include documentaries, feature, shorts and animation. The project is engineered by GAV, a communication agency pioneering in cultural marketing in Romania in partnership with Google.

    The site is bilingual Romanian/English while many films – especially the most recent ones – provide English subtitles. Cinepub obtains free rights in exchange for its curatorial work and – in some cases – protection against piracy.  Its mission is to showcase the Romanian Cinema and promote  films otherwise cut out from mainstream distribution channels. In fact, the more successful a Romanian film is the more their World Sales Agents tend not to agree on free online streaming outside Romania, but Cinepub keeps on working hard to obtain as much as they can and every new Thursday at 20.30 Bucharest time a premiere movie is launched.

    Lucian Georgescu is very proud of his “creature” dedicated to all film lovers and aiming to bring to the audiences not only Romanian films of established authors, but also independent productions made by young passionate beginners very unlikely to find other distribution channels.

    Check out more about Lucian Georgescu and his passion for cinema in our interview.

     

     

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