Owlspotting

Here are some great Romanian music videos I had the pleasure of coming across in the past few weeks. They say plenty about Romania so let’s get down to business.

Of course that every second neighborhood in a Romanian city houses Mexican restaurants, sparks Cuban revolutions, sports Puerto Rican flags and kicks it daily in freshly groomed low riders. These barios are full of blinged up Eastern Europeans calling each other “bandolero” or “cabron” while grabbing their crotches and asking a mamasita to the left to shake it, albeit slightly. They are against immigration reform and live their lives con mucho passion, connecting Romanians to its reggatonic roots. Escuchalo! The “sensuous Alex and the romantic Pachulo” are Chicanos. The song is called: “En mi corazon.” (In my heart)

Sisu & Puya with CIA: “Ce mai vrei.” (What else do you want) This is Romanian gangsta rap at its finest. As this song came out, the Sisu character was in prison for drugs. The lyrics talk about Romanian intelletuals being disconnected and make the observation that too much school makes people incaple to adapt to life. Notice the guy flexing his abs until he pops a blood vessel. The song features CIA–not the American one but the one from Craiova as the song helpfully explains.

Yes, this next one is for the clubbing generation. There are maybe a dozen songs this summer that sound so much alike that it’s scary. They even look very much alike with a bunch of trendy people overwhelmed by their sense of cool jumping and dacing in the streets and on buses. Which happens every day in Romania–we are so happy we could dance our lives away. Crush and Alexandra Ungureanu: “Aprinde dragostea.” (Light the love)

Can you spell sex? Look at the great moment when oil shoots out a guy’s canister as the hot woman takes her laundry home (or to the laundromat). The imagery must be inspired by early 1900s Italy, which is more props to our Roman heritage and our national ability to integrate foreigness into our culture. Simplu, “Oficial imi merge bine.” (Officially, I’m doing fine).

Andra, “Ramai cu mine” (Stay with me). Andra has rebranded herself as a Romanian Kelly Clarkson, complete with eyeliner extraordinaire, very torn up clothes and some God and punishment imagery. There is so much pain on Andra’s face that I want to give the poor woman some morphin. Carpathian love all the way.

Cleopatra is three and sings about missing and loving Ghita. Cleopatra Strahan, “Ghita.”

Laura is one of our national Smut Treasures. I have no idea if anyone ever broadcast this video but you have to see it to believe it. “Climb the Mountain of Venus, so I can feel the explosion,” goes the chorus. “I’m not just a dream, touch my clitoris” go the first two lines. Not to mention the limagery of the last 30 seconds or so. Laura Andresan, “Muntele Venus.”

I know that my “expertise” is saying stuff about Romania, but there are some passions lingering from my childhood that I just can’t shake.

Wrestling (as in putting bodies through tables) is one of them and I finally got to publish my first wrestling-related piece. It’s a review of a book called “Ringside,” written by Scott Beekman and it ran in SLAM! Wrestling, a Canadian online magazine.

Read it here.

Omul su Sobolani (The Man with Rats) is the rags-to-riches story of the Romanian music scene. The underground idols of the early 2000s are now as mainstream as rock can go in Romania. I have been listening to OCS since 1999 and have become a dedicated fan when they released their first LP, “Ne punem in cap” in 2001. I have probably seen OCS perform more than a dozen times since (only once since the summer of 2003).

It was around that time that the Romanian “alternative” scene really blossomed and people were rocking out in basements across the country. We had somehow taken alt-rock outside of the house and into clubs. There was nowhere to go but up. At the time I wrote about Romanian alt-rock for Playboy magazine and then later I did a business story on alt-rock record sales and how hard it was to survive in the dance-infested music landscape.

Rock music is scarcely promoted in Romania and no matter what people say, it’s always an afterthought to dance and electronic music. There are people who make music using guitars, drums and the more “traditional” instruments, but the recognizable ones are Bon Jovi-like pop funnel cakes that drip with the sweet syrup of break-up songs. In other words, most Romanian rock is a poor man’s version of a Top 40 band’s reunion tour.

In early 2000s I thought rock was about to become a music industry force, sharing the spotlight with Romanian hip-hop (you can’t even begin to imagine this one) and the perennial summer dance anthems. I was wrong. Rock is dying (if it’s not already dead) in Romania. Sure, people listen to foreign bands, go to concerts and some clubs still dedicate evenings to the genre–but the home grown music has stopped growing. The sounds are stale, passe, repetitive and tiring. The bands are crap and the ones that had something going have aged much worse than Green Day.

Omul cu Sobolani was accused by some fans in 2002 of selling out because their sophmore release, “Mainile sus” was preppier and lighter than “Ne punem in cap”– a record many used to channel all their frustrations into. I had no problem at the time–the band was moving, innovating, doing new things. Now, one album and a best-of record later, OCS has become rancid and the icon of any 12-year-old looking for a first joint and a first batch of suicidal thoughts. The lyrics are repetitive, pointless and the music is redundant.

It’s probably hard to remain one of the only alt-rock bands standing after dozens of them chrashed in the smoke-filled dungeons of homes such as Fire Club in Bucharest. Without much competition, there probably is less drive. I still listen to Omul cu Soboloani every now and the because they were such a large part of my life a few years ago. Call it occasional melancholy rather than fandom. And fandom is what such a pathetic scene cannot create.

Today, drum and base is the alternative to the mainstream music offering (still dominated by crappy dance) and rock has returned to being the comfort zone of 50 year old white males with horrible hair singing about who know what lost love.

Here is some Omul cu Sobolani–the first two videos were recorded by my friend Adi at the Peninsula festival last week. The other two are OCS videos.

OCS perfoming “Nu incerca asa ceva acasa” while young Romanians mosh their hearts out.

OCS perfoming “Razna” at Peninsula/Felsziget in Targu Mures.

OCS’s latest single, the dull and been-there-done-that “Nu incerca asa ceva acasa” (Don’t try something like this at home)

This is the video for “Razna,” OCS’s hit and their show closer for years now.

Bucharest. The same yet always changing. The irony is that so many of us wear Converse shoes these days. Almost nobody had them when I left in 2003. We read lousy pop culture magazines that are a study in name dropping and out of context music and movie criticism. We watch the latest movies with their titles translated into Romanian (“Failure to Launch” was “How to kick out of the house a 30-year bachelor”). We read the latest books and we translate those in Romanian with a tinge of vague desperation to get it on the shelf rather fast than get it done right.

We have also become responsible and return home before 3 AM.

My friends are doing well. They are working in (or even coordinating) local branches of international organizations, working for foreign media, running Romanian media, making money staying at home, starting and selling companies, having babies, playing Counter Strike on government payroll–more or less having the sweet Romanian life of 2006.

They have asked me numerous times what I plan to do with myself. “Something with journalism” is always my reply, but it’s too vague and, for some, unsatisfying. I briefly ran into someone I went to college with last night. We chatted for a couple minutes and then she asked me: “Are you still an idealist?”

“Is that an insult?” I replied.

“No,” she said.

“Somewhat,” I said, but felt I couldn’t leave myself open to a strike–paranoia sometimes takes over. “But I painted with some capitalist brush strokes over it.”

Who am I kidding? The journalism I sometimes talk about is idealistic.

I remember this story a great journalist I worked with over the past year used to tell the journalists he trained. A father and his little boy were in the living room. The father was dutifully reading the newspaper but the little boy was getting antsy. He tugged at his dad’s pants, started circling the room, becoming more and more impatient as the minutes went by.

The father wanted to finish reading the paper before turning to play with the boy, so he had an idea. He grabbed a magazine from the table and ripped out a page that had the map of the world on it. He then ripped that page into smaller pieces and handed them all to the boy. “Here is a puzzle,” the father said. “Try to solve it while I read the newspaper.”

The boy went to work and the father resumed his reading. Barely a couple minutes passed and the boy exclaimed: “Done.” The father was stunned–the boy was too little to know enough geography to be able to piece the world together so fast. “How did you do it?” he asked his young son. “You don’t know the world map yet.”

The kid confirmed with a nod, but then said: “There was the picture of a man on the other side. I put the man back together and the world came out alright.”

The county building (Prefectura) in Targu Mures is about 100 years old and it’s built next to the Palace of Culture, one of the more important landmarks in the city. Prefectura has a beautiful clock tower which had been closed to visitors for years. It’s now finally open to the public–you climb more than 200 stairs to get to the top and you have a spectacular view of the whole city. There is a guide and the whole deal costs less than one dollar.

Here are some photos and a video of downtown.

The clock tower of the Prefectura. You can catch a glimpse of the Palace of Culture on the right.

A view of houses in downtown Targu Mures. They are vividly colored and have been looking pretty spiffy since the mayor made owners repaint the facades a few years back.

A few days ago, Megan wondered about the Romanian theater scene: What are theatre-goers going to see? Are there many musicals? What can Western theatre artists offer to Romanian theatre artists, and would they even be interested in a collaboration?

I thought Luiza might have some knowledge of this as she did some reporting on the topic a couple years ago and still keep abreast of some developements. Her answer is relatively Bucharest-centric so if anybody has any knowledge of the theater/dance scenes in other Romanian towns, please share your views.

Luiza says:

“In no way is this statistically proven, or at the very least I’ve not done research on the topic, but it seems to me Bucharest theatre goers still prefer the ‘conventional’ scene – you know, the big old theatre, classic play structure, famous and somewhat critically acclaimed cast and director and the like. However, over the past few months I’ve dabbled in the alternative/experimental scene, and the offer is surprisingly varied.

Also, Romanians, do go to the theatre a lot, be it Shakespearian or alternative plays – at least in Bucharest they do. As for musicals, the Romanian version of Chicago, launched maybe two seasons ago, played with a full house for many, many months.

Also, from my limited experience, I would say one could see plays in English or French, at the very least during various festivals. Somewhat off topic, we have a very beautiful and old Jewish theatre where most plays are in Yiddish – with some simultaneously translated in Romanian.

Now for that alternative scene I mentioned – there’s this little theatre company that staged a play in a car – for an audience of three people at a time. Maybe three weeks ago I’ve seen a beautiful experiment called Un Tango Mas – tango dancing on a theatre stage; the story was there, except it was told not through dialogue but through brilliant choreography and the music to match it.

There is improvised stand up comedy, there’s a multitude of plays and experiments done in various Bucharest clubs, there are theatre elements meshed with dance lessons for amateurs at youth clubs and whatnot. The fine arts institute in Bucharest has this thing called Studioul Cassandra, where acting/directing students stage their own plays as a graduation requirement – the quality is excellent, the entrance to the shows is free and during my student years I was quite the regular.

So, yes, we have the traditional big theatre that can accommodate a great number of spectators, but recently I’ve noticed rooms getting smaller and theatre becoming more intimate.

Last I checked, though I’m not an expert, there are theatre festivals all over the country. We have quite a talented generation of young actors and directors moving things along, in addition to the renowned old school guard. Also, there are all sorts of collaborations if you will – local or regional troops coming to Bucharest theatres and vice-versa. I’m sure a reviewer from any number of print or online publications would be far more up to date with the theatre scene than I – I don’t have a theatre going tradition or pattern, I’m just experimenting (based on the ‘one of each’ approach).

I’m also appreciating the selection of plays – you could still see the classics, but more and more contemporary plays are getting out there. Also, experiments, combining film, music, dancing, laser shows and the like with theatre are increasing in numbers.”

You HAVE TO read the cover story of this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “The Brand Underground” is the most fascinating analysis of the mainstream/subculture tensions of modern life that I have read in a while. Rob Walker has been writing about consumer culture for a while and he has a weekly column in the magazine, but this lenghtier piece is mind blowing.

Being part of brand underground has always seeemed to me to be a lot of work. I own a few T-shirts of the kind Rob Walker mentions–limited edition prints that are in themselves the subculture are not just a sidekick to a lifestyle. If I had to put one on everyday and live accordingly, I would probably go crazy.

The symbols and references and logos these minibrands create are usually said to “represent” a culture or lifestyle. But I found myself asking, What, exactly, did that culture or lifestyle consist of — aside from buying products that represent it?

Bobby did his best to clue me in. “It’s just the idea of trying to be rebellious,” he said. “Or trying to be a little bit anti, questioning government or your parents. Trying to do something different.” Those are familiar answers, and this is hardly the first time that vague rebelliousness has been translated into an aesthetic. The style and iconography of punk, like that of other “spectacular subcultures” (to use the phrase Dick Hebdige coined in “Subculture: The Meaning of Style”), arguably did more than music — let alone ideas — to fulfill one of the crucial functions of any underground: group identity. It just happens that in this instance the symbols, products and brands aren’t an adjunct to the subculture — they are the subculture.

Not all of us should should be trying to figure out what group/identity/subculture we’re promoting through our style, our clothing or our consumption of music and movies. But being conscious of this makes it easier for me to navigate the world. The danger is that some of these brand underground consumers don’t buy the ideas behind it; they don’t even care as long as it helps them climb the ladder of “cool.”

Here’s a T-shirt I got as a present a couple days ago. It’s from a Bucharest-based company called Paria Wear. It’s a vulgar T-shirt satirizing the vulgarity of Romania’s capital and pointing out the irony of being the victim of verbal and visual aggression to an imbecile driving a Dacia. But that’s my reading of it.

So, what if I run into someone who wears it because it’s an alternative T-shirt to the ones that simply say “Fuck you?” Or because he simply wants to make it a conversation item at college parties? Then maybe you seek comfort in the idea that the makers of the T-shirt were more on your side of the fence than his. And you understand that printing the idea on a T-shirt might be the only way to make a little sense in all the chaos and noise we wear daily.

Refusing to be the fodder for someone else’s lifestyle-making machine because you are building your own still strikes me as a hollow victory. But maybe I’m just too old to get it. And I have to admit, the more time I spent with the minibrand entrepreneurs, the more I had to concede that what they have been up to is more complicated than simply imitating the culture they claim to be rebelling against. They believe what they are doing has meaning beyond simple commercial success. For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them.

I’ve been testing restaurants and bars in Targu Mures for the past two weeks and I’ve finally found something remarkable enough to mention. It’s called Excalibur and it’s a medieval-themed restaurant (that’s the sell line). To the owners this implies humongous portions and the possibility to eat without cutlery–use your fingers, dip them in a bowl of water and wipe them on a towel.

We ordered a dish for four people (six of us ate from it) and it weighed more than 11 pounds. As you can see, that included two chickens and a bunch of other types of meat, potatoes, vegetables and two bananas. I don’t know how medieval bananas are, but they certainly added to the feast.

The best part is that drinks and food for 8 people cost a little more than $50. For the amount of food and drinks we ingested that’s cheap even by Romanian standards.

I always said “one thing that can make a day suck is hitting a pole on the side of the road.” It’s not as bad as being hit by a tram as the week kicks off, but it’s still pretty bad.

I have been home now for almost two weeks but have yet to really tackle Romanian news media. This post will kick off that assignment. It’s a struggle my friends, but someone has to stare the devil in the face.

Let’s start with that broadcast phenomenon of the “newspaper review” or “newspaper medley” (although a more appropriate name would be “imbecile on camera reads from newspapers creating hours of horrendous television”).

You see, newspapers in most of Europe still have a mythical quality to them that televison was unable to supplant–they are seen as the only ones able to understand the world we live in. Newsgathering is almost universally stronger in the realm of print, but broadcast is rarelly as enslaved by the printed word as it is in the Old Word and certainly in language-obsessed Romania.

After all, the printed word started and stopped wars, fueled revolutions and toppled governments. If you don’t believe that, you are probably a spy, a government worker or some sort of minority interest group that aims to subvert the national campaign for greatness.

That’s the context to why print is thought as being the media messiah. That and the great Romanian protest chant “Cu televizorul ati mintit poporul” (With TV you’ve lied to the people).

Romanian-language TV stations (Plenty of them exist today) pay their dues to King Print daily–sometimes for hours at the time. Mircea Badea, whom you see in the picture above, spends an hour every night scanning the papers. He has them stacked on his table and he reads from them. Surely that alone would be boring, so the show gets its spice from Badea peppering it with “truth telling.” He is there to decode news for the unsuspecting viewer and, more often than not, to trash the newspapers that allow him to do this job. Isn’t that ironic?

Most others add less commentary. The Romanian 24-hour news channels (three of them today) dutifuly take people through the newspapers–reading headlines, story fragments and telling people where to go to get the whole thing. These wonderful segments are illustrated with shots of said newspaper or story. My favorite feature is the panning down (or across) the page so the viewer can read the story on her television screen.

I remember American news photographers and how they hated taking pictures of signs. “I don’t photograph words,” some would say. On Romanian television, the opposite is true. Since words are so much better than images, broadcast spends hours zooming in on the almighty newspaper pages.

Why hours? Well, there are a couple dozen papers in Romania with national reach. Local print news, for the most part, is underfunded and really awful, so the fight to inform the people happens at the national level. Actually, this would make getting on television much easier. Just make sure you are the reporter assigned to something that lands on the front page–like the prime minister chrashing his motorcycle–and you’re the talk of the TV shows baby!

They might even zoom in on your byline. Talk about name recognition.