Owlspotting

Top five lists don’t often get blown up. Look at the drama it caused Rob in “High Fidelity” when he had to admit to himself that Laura had to be included among the Top 5 All-Time Breakups.

Last night, Niste Baieti, a makeshift punk outfit from Bucharest, broke into my Top 5 concerts list, which now looks like this (again, in no particular order).

* The Arcade Fire at MoJo’s in Columbia, Missouri.
* Something Corporate at The Blue Note in Columbia, Missouri.
* Marilyn Manson at The Pageant in St. Louis, Missouri.
* The Decemberists at The 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.
* Niste Baieti at Red District in Targu Mures, Romania.

Niste Baieti (Some Guys) rocked and if you ever have a chance to see them, drop the cooking and dishwashing and go! Their punk covers are the best thing that ever happened to Romanian pop hits of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But before we get to their show, let’s put the rocking out in context.

No matter how things have changed for Targu Mures (bars, restaurants, indie theaters), there is no underground rock scene worth one’s time and money. The local bands that do exist are still caught in the hardcore age pioneered by bands like Deftones a decade ago. No offense, but hardcore is about as dead as Michael Jackson’s career and wearing a NY Yankees cap over a shaved head sporting a goatee wasn’t cool even during Fred Durst‘s better days.

So Targu Mures despite a budding music scene (more noise than skill), a summer rock festival and minor concerts is still not the place to rock out in. Which is why it was great that the “Oldies but Goldies Tour” of Niste Baieti stopped here.

I knew they were coming because Lavi and Sandra both posted their tour poster. Still, I had no clue what venue they would play in and there was no advertising in town (a flyer for their Cluj concert mistankenly listed the band as Niste Oameni–Some People).

A friend had to call the band’s bass player to confirm that indeed the only club they could perform in was Red District, a dungeon with no stage. What it does have looks like a ditch where the singer can climb out of to engage the troops.

There were few people present and the great majority were 16-17 year-olds carrying their trusted, always bulging, backpacks. There was even an opening band from Targu Mures called Claymood. With all respect and gratitude for their decision to pick up instruments and rock, they sucked. Screaming lyrics in bad English is not engaging, no matter how much firepower is behind the bass or the drums. My bias has always been for storytelling in music and by God, there is very little of that in hardcore.

Claymood had no story, no presence and their songs packed no punch despite their supposed heaviness. They have a young bass player and a young guitar player, which will hopefully go on to bigger and better things than angry riffs to accompany a poor man’s version of an angry lead singer.

You can listen and download Claymood on their website or stream them on MySpace. I was positively touched by their decision to cover System of a Down’s “Sugar” and the Guano Apes 1998 smash “Lords of the Boards.” But when you cover within your genre, you’re not doing yourself any good–you’re just reminding people that you really can’t cut it.

Niste Baieti (three members of E.M.I.L. and one from Molotov Cocktail) were next. The easiest way to describe them is to call them a Romanian version of Me First and the Gimme Gimmies, the American punk outfit that has covered loads of big American tunes from the past 50 years. The main difference seems to be that a lot of the Gimmies tracks sound like tributes, while the Niste Baieti covers sounds like mockery.

But the truth is that Romanian pop-rock music of two decades ago was souless, spineless and quite creepy at times. What Niste Baieti have done–more or less consciously–is reclaim the time we spent as kids singing along to dumb anthems like “O lume minunata” (“A wonderful world”). To me, they took ten tracks which we heard over and over at musical festivals and TV shows and made us feel less guilty about wasting time with them when they came out.

Geo and I screamed and jumped and yelled and went crazy when the band launched into a cover of the theme to “Tezaur Folcloric,” a Monday evening staple from the days of yore that broadcast the latest in Romanian folklore as approved by the ladies and gents of the party. It continued in the same fashion through giants like “Un actor grabit” (“A hurried actor”), “Un copac cu flori” (“A tree with flowers”) and the aforementioned “O lume minunata.”

A wonderful world in which you’ll find
Only children
A world with sun and lots of toys
For the children.

I have no idea if the kids in the audience knew these tracks (they probably didn’t)–they came of age long after the era of “muzica usoara” (light music) waned–but I don’t care. This was one of those rare shows where one feels the band is singing just for them. Thursday night in Targu Mures I can say that Niste Baieti sang for me and made me feel great (and sweaty and tired).

They were so good that I actually bought their CD (the second time in my life I buy a record at a show after Tilly and the Wall’s “Wild like Children”). It was the best $3.5 I spent in Romania. The boys are still on tour (check dates here) and you should see them if you can because this record probably won’t get a wide release.

* Download Niste Baieti – Un actor grabit.

I know most of my readers wonder what I’m up to when I don’t play guide to the undercurrents of Romanian society or investigating the whereabouts of Coca-Cola C2 (what a quest my friends).

Well, there are several potential answers and they do depend on the day of the week. Tuesday for example, I discussed with my brother the concepts of dobrosexual, moldosexual and ardosexual. Who are these people you might wonder? Well, they are young impressionable Romanian clubbers (from Dobrogea, Moldova or Ardeal) who sports identically chopped hair and who love to go to clubs named Obsession or Crystal. They are not metrosexuals, because deep down inside they still believe Costi Ionita makes good music.

These sexuals will party in a club wearing the latest in crap (such as patches stiched on jeans) until the wee hours of the morning, having a hard time finding their friends in the crowd as everyone looks the same.

This completely unlike the six types of creatures available in Heroes of Might and Magic V, one of the wickedest games available on the market today.

Listen, it’s HOMM V that I was planning to write about all along. The sexuals thing was just a way to tone down any impression of me being less attuned to pop culture and more plugged into virtual worlds where mages, rangers, elves and knights beat the crap out of necromancers and demons.

I have played the previous installments of HOMM so getting number V was among my priorities when I returned. After more than two months of game play I finally wrapped up the game today and I have to admit I kicked some major ass. It’s true that I played on the easiest level, but my aim is to finish games not master them. That’s for people who are not curious enough to investigate the newest sexuals available in local clubs (sorry Geo).

Anyway, the story in Heroes V is complicated but interesting, which is why the summary below will completely destroy it (this blog chronicles the story of each of the six campaigns, but it’s moving slow).

So, here is how it all goes down. Angry demons break up the wedding of Griffinn King Nicolai to Queen Isabel. Nicolai gets pissed and like any angry man with heavy armor, he decides to go off to war. He sucks at it and gets killed. Isabel, who has been hangin’ by the pool drinking Long Islands, gets pissed off (sort of like the Elven lady Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings –minus the “No living man am I! You look upon a woman.” proclamation) and marches of to war with the help of trusted sidekick Godric.

At the same time the demon Agrael has some second thoughts about his purpose in life and decides it kind of sucks to serve the Demon Sovereign. He also loves Isabel, which is creepy. At the same time, ranger elf Findan is going about his business of saving his kingdom now that the world is getting ready for war. He is the equivalent of a third party in American politics–always getting screwed by both sides. But Findan is a cool dudu and the hunters are awesome creatures to have in your army.

Over on the dark elves side another dude, Raelag, seems to be doing the same saving of his own world although no one quite knows who this raven-haired angry man riding some sort of dinosaur is. There is also Markal, a wicked necromancer who promises Isabel he can resurrect Nicolai and make love happen all over gain. Right, and then he will patch things up between Brad and Jen, huh? Yes, of course he lies because Isabel is actually pregnant with a demon child, which upon birth will be mighty evil. Cue up the eery music.

Things progressed from there and eventually a young mage named Zehir rescues Godric (imprisoned by a Queen Isabel high on dark spells) and joins up with Findan to kick Markal’s ass. Raelag also joins the team and it becomes obvious to anyone but the blind that he is Agrael (stay tuned for the Fight Club of Ashan). They all have a jolly good time whooping the Sovereign’s ass and rescuing Isabel. Isabel returns home and the final scene tells us that she is evil and that the Griffing kingdom is in trouble. She obviously had one too many Long Islands.

It’s true that a murderous, maniacal queen is something way more interesting than a dobrosexual practicing his latest moves to the best of German club music.

Below are some HOMMV screenshots.

Stuff blows up–most likely as a result of a well-delivered meteor shower spell. Griffin Eternal!

Godric, frustrated at Zehir for eating the last piece of cheese.

Four angry heroes ready to bring te pain to the Demon Sovereign.

Raelag–a shot from his pictorial for the DarkElfGirl Magazine.

Our four heroes and the demon plant Biara deciding what kind of toothpaste to put on sleeping Isabel’s face.

When I arrived home this summer I asked around for new Romanian music that might be worth a listen. I didn’t get many suggestions–the lead singer of a Romanian rock band actually replied to my query in an e-mail saying: “Are you serious?”

It was at that point that Luiza told me I should look at Romanian film to see things moving. Now, almost three months into my stay, I can say she was right. The cherry was served tonight tonight when I laughed so hard that found myself muttering outloud: “this is so good, this is soooo goood!”

Tonight I saw “A fost sau n-a fost?” (“Was there or wasn’t there?”), another film about the Romanian revolution. It was precedeed by “Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii” and will be followed shortly by “Hartia va fi albastra” (“The paper will be blue”). This is no Romanian revolution trilogy, just a happy coincidence out of which I believe “A fost sau n-a fost” will stand out. This is the best Romanian movie I have seen in my life and certainly the most lighthearted one despite its sober premise. Thank you Corneliu Porumboiu.

We’re in a Romanian city, 16 years after the 1989 revolution. A pensioneer, a history teacher and a TV journalist come together in a local TV broadcast to discuss whether their town experienced a revolution or not. This is no big picture debate over whether Romania experienced a revolution. Actually, it smartly takes for granted the fact that something happened in Timisoara and Bucuresti. But what about the smaller cities? Did they join in?

For the over zealous local TV journalist who tends to quote mythology as he opens the show, whether a revolution happened or not is determined by the time people took to the streets. If they were protesting in the square before 12:08 PM (the time when Ceausescu fled the Bucharest Communist party headquarters on Dec. 22, 1989) than it was a revolution because people would have been there without knowing how the events would play out. They would have taken a risk. If they came after 12:08 PM then it wasn’t a revolution.

His guests don’t question the premise but don’t dwell on the significance of the time either. The history professor says he was in the square before 12:08 PM although several callers to the show accuse him of being a drunkard (true) and a liar. The pensioneer admits he only came after 12:08 because it was the safer alternative.

The movie’s best feature is that it doesn’t take this debate too seriously. The production of the broadcast is a complete failure, the guests are bored (the old man makes paper airplanes), the callers use foul language and the host loses his temper. In the end their debate doesn’t illuminate the question it wanted to, but it tells us viewers that it’s perfectly OK if the revolution wasn’t the seminal event in our life.

For the host it was his chance to jump from textiles into journalism (not much seems to have changed in his approach to working), for the professor it was another failed opportunity to make something good of himself, and for the old man it was just another day that started with a domestic quarrel. To those that the revolution touched personally (a woman caller whose son died that December), the answer to the question doesn’t matter anymore. What matters to her is that it’s finally snowing outside and Christmas is near.

There is another wonderful character in this film–a Chinese immigrant who owns a little store in this city. People bully him and pick on him for being foreign and for selling firecrackers to children, but he loves them anyway because they are the family he lives among. Despite all their faults, he is willing to wait until they all come to their senses.

I guess that’s how many of us are. Waiting for the country to come to its senses. With movies like this one, I’m more and more optimistic that it’s on the right track.

*** The film’s English language title at festivals was: “12:08 East of Bucharest.”

For the first time in more than three years I was home for my mother’s birthday.

I am only posting about this because I needed the excuse to showcase my brilliant artistry. Among the gifts me and my brother gave her was a cup that I drew on with a white porcelain marker. It’s a simplistic representation of the three of us as stick figures. From left to right you’ll see my brother, our mom and me. Good work, right?

There is something about my Fridays in Targu Mures. They are odd, conflicting, almost schizophrenic. Last night fit the bill perfectly. Things kicked off around 6 PM when I decided to attend a photo exhibit opening coupled with a poetry book launch. This local artist had traveled to India and she was displaying some photos and launching a book inspired by her travels (read an interview with her in a local newspaper).

What a pathetic event it turned out to be and it wasn’t because of her art. The photos were nice. Not spectacular, but nice. Plus, I didn’t have a chance to read her poems as the show was stolen by the local intelligentsia, as embodied by high school literature professors.

I had to get out of Teatrul 74 after two local middle-aged white guys with literary pretensions introduced her work. I felt chained to the totem pole of metaphor and whipped until the stream of blood became thick enough to carry hairballs of thoughts, which unraveled on the cement into perfectly calibrated haikus. You get the idea.

In Romanian literature classes no one cares what you think–a professor type the speakers embodied. The hierarchy of greatness has been established decades ago and there are dozens of great minds who have labored to craft an analysis of a poem or a novel. Who needs the student’s opinion? They would probably add shit to the literary conversation, so what they do is copy down everything the teacher dictates and then recite it back word for word. That’s how you score big! Not by thinking, but by endorsing the wisdom of middle-aged white guys with a poached belly who speak about the “lyrical discourse of amazement,” the “surrealness of love” and other assorted crap.

I hate acts of public masturbation and last night, the local literature crowd performed plenty of them. Metaphors, criticism built from joining words only devout dictionary readers can define and a cacophony of quotes from middle-aged white guys of the past. That’s what a book launch should be like. It made me feel like watching a sleazy fat creative writing professor trying to pull the panties off his students with musings on the “civilization of the hand.” It was gross, but all so fitting in the pool of Romanian arts, where (I’m generalizing for literary effect) men are the misunderstood thinkers and women the whores that torment the purity of their inner lives.

If you think this kind of discourse applies to the fading generations of Romanian lit professors, think again. The hip generation has its exhibitionists, too. They publish a magazine called Re:Publik, a glossy, over-priced exercise in snobbery.

Next on the list was a recent and heavily decorated Romanian film called Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii (The way I spent the end of the world). At heart this movie is, as the tagline suggests, a trip through memories. But the memories of this movie are the memories of the last year before the Romanian revolution of 1989. I can’t help describe Cristian Mitulescu’s movie as a movie about the revolution, even though the actual revolution only takes up a few minutes at the end. But the state of mind that preceded it, is beautifully captured. The paranoia, the absurd of it all, the poverty and the happiness people found in everyday life are all packed in this time capsule.

The word “revolution” is easier on some and harder on others (my dad, who was in Bucharest tending to patients shot during those days, called it a “bloody perestroika” once) but few could deny its value as a turning point. What the movie does so very well is ignore it for a good period of time. Why? Because there was no way a high school student in the fall of 1989 could anticipate the fall of the regime two months later. So lives were being lived. No great plans were being masterminded. Sure, some dreamt of leaving the country, others dreamt of Ceausescu’s death, but wishing for change is a natural part of the minutiae of daily life, which includes love, laughter, sadness, school, work and so on. You can see a lot of the products we used during those days (and the days immediately following December ’89) on the La trecut blog.

Mitulescu creates a brilliant character in a little boy who decides Ceausescu is at fault for the problems of his family and decides it’s his job to get rid of him. It’s touching because the movie allows him, and us, to believe Lalalilu did play a part in it. When the December days finally roll around, I was shifting nervously in my seat. Yes, I was only a little older than Lalalilu is in the movie and I remember being on the balcony of a friend of mine staring at people marching towards downtown and yelling for “freedom.” I had no idea what “freedom” was but if so many people asked for it, I thought, it should be something pretty good.

Lavi said it already, but it’s important. This movie doesn’t have the misery, violence and the purposeful grotesque that so many filmmakers use and have used to portray Romania. We are nowhere near making a brutally romantic and disarming film like Amelie, but “Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii” is a step in the right direction.

No matter how cynical I get about the revolution, its spark and its backstory, I can’t deny that it has allowed my generation to walk out of a theater after watching a political movie and into a club where a Romanian rapper dropped waves rhymes over a bunch of ecstatic 17 and 18 year-olds. I couldn’t help feel odd and overtaken by corny pronouncements. Vexxatu Vexx was rapping in a Targu Mures club on a Friday night because something happened on the streets of Bucharest.

I once wrote about how this 18 year-old kid practically died in my father’s arms in December ’89 telling him: “I hope I’m not dying in vain.” Romania is a much different country now than it was then and yes, it’s no shame in admitting people died so we can see a movie about how they felt in the months and days before a stray bullet killed them. People died so we could wear jeans, find a suitable definition for freedom, eat chocolate, experiment with hairstyles, buy unlimited amounts of bread and listen to a rapper bring down the house on a Friday night.

On a crazy Targu Mures Friday night.

That’s the question of an opinion piece of mine that just ran this Friday in The New Republic. Unfortunately, you have to pay for TNR Online content, so I copied and pasted the article here.

Is Romania really ready for the EU?
Country Bumpkin

Next week, the European Union’s executive body, a beast that thrives on rules and the enforcement thereof, will decide whether Romania is ready to join next year. This is the final review in a seven-year process whose litmus test remains the adoption of a truckload of regulations dumped at the slopes of the Carpathians. Even though, in 1974, communist Romania became the first Central European country to develop relations with the EU, it wasn’t until 2000 that it was finally invited to sit down and discuss its accession. Now, according to most metrics, Romania is almost on track.

Joining the EU’s 25 member states is a process called “negotiation,” but no country really negotiates the rules of the game–only the minutiae of implementing them. The EU has demanded that Romania fix its justice system, ban international adoptions, eliminate corruption, reform agriculture, and more. With new laws now in place, almost all 31 chapters of “negotiations” have been addressed to the satisfaction of the Union. At the last review in May, the EU had just minor requirements, asking for, among other things, tax-paying mechanisms to match the EU’s, an infrastructure to channel funds to farmers, and improvements in food-safety issues.

But, even if these problems have a legislative fix by the likely accession date of January 2007, that doesn’t mean they’ll be resolved. Agriculture is an emblematic issue. Despite adopting EU regulations, Romania lags behind in treating swine fever and bringing milk to European standards–only 30 percent of the milk currently complies. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Romania might look ready on paper, but it’s not ready on the ground.

That’s because drawing up new regulations is the easy part. Enforcing them in a politically and economically immature society like Romania’s will prove far more difficult. Adrian Lungu, an editor at EurActiv.ro, an online publication dedicated to EU news, says that, although Romania’s legislative structure is more than 90 percent harmonized with the EU’s, “it lacks consistency when it comes to implementing the new laws and creating institutions to cope with the new regulations.”

Corruption, for example, remains a significant problem. In May, the EU praised Romania for progress in cleaning up its government, saying “non-partisan investigations into allegations of high-level corruption have substantially increased.” (Current investigations include 100 or so cases brought against politicians and other public officials for bribery, embezzlement, and influence peddling, though a big catch has yet to be made.) But these grand-scale efforts do little to address the small-time, greasing-the-wheels corruption that affects the daily lives of average Romanians: everything from paying teachers for higher grades to rewarding local clerks for expediting bureaucracy. Studies by Transparency International have consistently indicated that Romanians use bribes to make daily life easier. On a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being “highly clean” Romania’s corruption perception index (CPI) in 2005 was scored by Transparency International at 3. The average among current EU members is 6.7.

The justice system is in a similar state of disarray. An EU readiness review by the Open Society Foundation (OSF) found that many of the statutes under which the Romanian judiciary operates are confusing, and problems continue to exist in areas like the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary, especially concerning the appointment and promotion of judges and prosecutors. Scandals in the last decade highlighted a cozy relationship between the parties in power and the judiciary and have crushed public trust in the rule of law. A January Eurobarometer poll indicated only one-third of Romanians trust the justice system. True justice is such a foreign notion that, the OSF report noted, “[I]t is worrisome that … the defendant’s rights to personal freedom and fair trial are still seen as tricks instead of being considered fundamental procedural rights.”

And then there is the economy. Romania is poorer than any current EU member-state–a country where the average annual income per capita is $7,700. Twenty-five percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Romanians had hoped the EU would improve their financial prospects, but recent news hasn’t been good. The press is predicting a post-accession spike in the price of basic goods like gas, alcohol, and cigarettes–a fate that befell neighboring Hungary following its 2004 accession–which could hit the poor in their pocketbooks and turn them against the European idea.

Potential price hikes are not the only thing affecting the accession readiness of the Romanian psyche, which already displays ambivalence toward the European Union. While politicos talk about money transfer mechanisms, farmers are worried that the EU will impose draconian changes on their way of life: Don’t make your own alcohol; don’t slaughter pigs with your bare hands; don’t grow abnormally large cucumbers. Most of these are myths, but the government has not debunked or explained them in the mainstream press, which loves to fuel firestorms of panic.

Most ominously of all, the majority of Romanians tends to view the EU as a knight in shining armor that will rescue the country from its social and economic ailments. According to the latest Eurobarometer poll, 68 percent of Romanians trust the EU–a level higher than in current member states–and half expressed unhappiness with the present and optimism about their future as part of the body. (By contrast, EU citizens said they are happy with the present and pessimistic about the future.) Romanians, however, are likely to be disappointed. Joining the EU could allow Romanians to work in other countries for better pay, for example, but a recent European debate on immigration has cast a shadow over this possibility. Currently, Great Britain is debating whether to open its borders to Romanians and Bulgarians, and fear of a labor-force migration has prompted other countries to consider restrictions as well.

If the EU doesn’t turn out to be the savior Romanians are expecting, the blow could be fatal to an immature political system. Postponing accession (still a possibility) or disappointment with the reality of being part of the EU might send Romanians running to the extremist parties, which are popular anyway. A recent survey showed that 38 percent of Romanians trust Gigi Becali, a right-wing politician with a heavily nationalistic platform–and the number has been growing.

It’s true that countries always scramble to meet their new requirements in the period just before their accession is approved. But, even by those standards, Romania is not ready. Former chief negotiator Leonard Orban said Romania was a tougher case than the 10 countries that joined in 2004. “You transform the economy, you transform elements of political life, of social life and so on,” he told a Croatian magazine.

That’s a tall order for a spate of dinky regulations. The marriage of Romania and the EU is like the marriage of a grumpy, old-Europe gentleman who built his fortune by following strict rules to a smashing young woman who needs a protector. The trouble is, there’s every indication that she’s not prepared to settle down.

The latest issue of Dilema Veche, the Romanian magazine I write for, had the Internet and the citizens’ interaction with the medium (“Cetateni pe Internet”) as its central theme. It’s a great discussion to have in Romania, where political and social opinion currents born online are just beginning to take shape.

Back in March I wrote in the English-laguage magazine Vivid that 2006 could be the year of the Romanian blog. By that I meant that the online community would mature quickly enough to produce voices that will be heard outside the virtual echo chamber. It’s only mid-September and a bunch of voices have emerged–either born online or recast online from good ol’ print. Some of these voices are featured in the Dilema articles, which I highly recommend (if you can read Romanian). Dilema Veche is worth a visit anyway–if only to check out its new website.

My contribution to the issue was a piece on how the Internet interacts with American politics.

There was one piece of furniture I never wanted to see in my Bucharest studio—a bed. I had one when I moved in, but it had a thin metal frame and at the first party I threw about 10 people sat on it for a picture and quickly turned into a hammock. This gave me an excuse to throw the frame away and settle for mattresses.

One day a City employee came to check the gas pressure of my stove. I let the man in and sat back down on the mattress, my back against the wall. I was on the very left of this picture wearing my red sweat pants and a T-shirt. To my right sat my tall roommate, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and a guitar, which he strummed in peace. To his right was a skinny guy in urban chic gear. We were quite the sight for a man checking the pressure of gas.

As he was walking out, he stopped, grinned at us and said: “Have a good day boys” as if he anticipated we’d be engaging in the craziest lube party of 2001.

None of us took it as an affront and none of us felt the need to chase him down the hallway to the elevator with a picture yelling: “Sir gas-pressure-checker-man, this is a picture of my woman. W-O-M-A-N. We don’t engage in man-to-man combat as you rudely suggested.”

But that what if we had been offended? Or scared that we gave the gas-pressure-checker-man weird ideas about apartment 47?

Those are the questions tackled by “Nu de gat” (Not by the neck), a play by Mihai Ignat and directed by Catalin Chirila, which premiered this weekend at Teatrul 74 in Targu Mures (what a spectacular location T74 it is). “Nu de gat” is an engaging play about homosexuality set in a Romanian context.

As I wrote earlier this year, Romanians are not necessarily the most tolerant of people. And it’s not just gays we dislike; it’s all these “others.”

This is a country after all in which Ion Antonescu (well known for exterminating much of the Romanian Jewry) has been voted among the top 10 “Great Romanians.”

The play is about two male friends (played by Stefan Roman and Ciprian Mistreanu) who are having a beer in a bar (the audience is supposedly sitting at the other tables). They start by talking about how one of them needs to have the electricity in his bedroom fixed and how the other one’s uncle will help get the job done. Then we learn that the uncle has two gay children (a boy and a girl). The guy with the electricity problem says it’s fine with him (he’d love his children just as much), while the nephew telling the story acts outraged.

Then, in a swift turn of events the nephew tells his friend that he is gay and he only used the uncle’s story to test his friend’s tolerance. This is where roles change and two friends become gay guy and straight guy. Gay guy insists he is telling the truth and says all the women around him are for show. Straight guy can’t believe it. The guys must be in on this joke, right?

Soon enough straight guy realizes this is no joke and defensively asks gay guy if he was ever attracted to him or had sexual thoughts about the two of them. Gay guy laughs it off but straight guy is getting more and more uncomfortable being on the same couch with gay guy.

By the end of the play gay guy tries to say his coming out was a joke, but straight guy doesn’t buy it anymore. They almost get into a fight when gay guy tries to put his arms around straight guy. Not by the neck!

As the play wraps up, gay guy is left alone staring at us, the other people in the bar, trying to gage whether we heard any of this and whether he is safe. Great play!

Maybe it’s through art that people will learn more about other people and understand that the differences are nothing but blind spots we refuse to work on and, even worse, refuse to acknowledge. The contrast between the seemingly tolerant straight guy at the beginning of the play and the scared and angry straight guy that stormed off at the end perfectly illustrates the confusion, lack of understanding and intolerance permeating Romanian society today.

About a week ago I was walking with a friend through downtown Targu Mures and came across a group of teenagers putting up posters that said: “In Romania, polygamy is banned and marriage is allowed only between a man and a woman.” I knew instantly this was a campaign against gay marriage and I found it amusing to see how quickly we import big American debates in Romania. The gay marriage issue aside, I was curious to see who was behind this.

So I went up to the kids and asked: “Whose money is behind this?”

“The church’s,” they said.

“The Orthodox church?”

“No, all churches.”

Wow, I said to myself. Leave the churches to find common ground in hating gays. Hey, who am I to judge? Any cause bringing various denominations together is great. Gays, watch out. The United Forces of the Romanian Clergy want you!

Apparently this initiative is looking to gather 500,000 signatures to push for a referendum amending the constitution to specifically state that marriage should be between a man and a woman. “The purpose of starting a family is to procreate and contribute to the natural demographic process, a process sufficiently endangered by leniency towards abortion and birth control.”

It was bad enough that women decided to have careers and not shoot out babies like Pez dispensers. Now there are these gays that don’t respect the moral values of the country and don’t (or can’t) fulfill their civic duty to procreate and keep the nation strong.

I wish the church had convinced those kids to campaign for something else. Better schools, better education, more dialogue… But those aren’t things in need of salvation. Those are just fine and dandy in their rotten state.

Moral values on the other hand need knights in shining armor parading their sweet intolerant innocence from town to town, praying left and right that no devious gay man or lesbian woman will ever grab them by the neck.

On Friday morning, my brother and I drove towards Bacau for a story I’m working on. We chose the Targu Mures-Sovata-Gheorgheni-Piatra Neamt route. We talked some, but we mostly let the car stereo do its thing. My brother is into electronic music (drum n bass), while these days I’m into softer indie rock stuff.

It’s this softer rock that was playing as we reached Cheile Bicazului, a scenic wonder in Neamt county, where the road cuts through the mountain and rarely allows for anything more than the two lanes of traffic. The canyon serves as a border between Moldova and Transylvania and it’s been more than a decade since I was there last.

Pictures wouldn’t do the experience justice–because it’s the experience of driving through it with the right soundtrack that resonated with me–so I decided to use the camera to shoot some video.

The first one is set to “The engine driver” a song from “Picaresque,” the gorgeous 2005 album of The Decemberists. I think I might have mentioned before that I am sucker for the “I am a writer/A writer of fictions” part.

This second one is set to the tune of the Violent Femmes song, “Kiss off.” Yes, it’s true. I just can’t get enough of this song.

I was at a wake for a distant relative last night and I realized how different my life has been from that of generations past. The wake was about an hour drive from Targu-Mures on the less traveled roads, where potholes reign supreme and both lanes take on the appearance of an exploded minefield. A 30 kilometers trip turns into an hour-long affair, with phones losing signal and the car stereo losing reception.

As we drive further, the road gives up any pretense of being drivable and turns into a country road, just gravel and dust. It was never paved and it probably never will be. We drive 7 kilometers on that road and it seems that every 500 meters gets us further away from the city. As we get to the village, cows are coming home for the night and they take up one lane of traffic, moving heavily. The sun is still up and the view of the Transylvanian hills is beautiful.

My dad says something about building a house in the middle of nowhere, maybe even buying a hill and running away from it all. I know he doesn’t really mean it, but sometimes voicing such thoughts is more important than ever putting them into practice. I say that I’ve given up on trying to respond to the countryside from the heart. My brother says “if you don’t know what do to with money, just give them to me.” I don’t feel bound to the earth. Endless hills, a star-paved sky and a sea of silence make me edgy. I don’t see quiet in them, I see isolation. It’s true that I am not the most outgoing person so you’d think isolation and me would make a pretty good team. But it isn’t so: one of the reasons I wanted to do journalism is so that I can cure my social stage fright. I need the urban landscape, the rush, the schizophrenic pace of the city to keep me at it.

I don’t want to own a hill, I want to own a street corner.

I remember standing in the window of my eight-floor apartment in Washington, DC in the middle of the night. Three streets were coming together just below us and except for the weekends, there always seemed to be heavy traffic. The 6 PM jams were a car bonanza and I stared in awe at the thousands of people stranded below, more or less coerced to live among so many other people and yet embracing this role. Ambulances and police sirens would blare at all hours of the night and when they woke us up we’d curse this and that politician for using the official convoy to make their way home. But I knew that I wasn’t really complaining. I needed the city and its noise and I know I’m not complete without it.

The wake was at the house. All the wakes I’ve been too in my life–which are not many–were held either in a room at the morgue or at the cemetery the night before the burial. Here, the dead was brought home to the village and she lay in a room surrounded by mortuary flower arrangements. The room was imbued with the smell of formaldehyde and I asked myself how long the smell would remain there. I fear death so the idea of living with its smell after there is no more body to make it real makes me uneasy.

I’d seen most of the people present only a handful of times. They spoke Hungarian and I mostly nodded politely. I understood what they were saying, but my Hungarian has deteriorated so much that I don’t attempt a conversation anymore. We stood in the yard and I watched as men were stuffing huge plastic bowls with pork meat that would be cooked at the funeral the next day. The house was old, and the walls irregular–I thought of how much fun one would have using one of those bubble things that tells you stuff should be straight or at an angle. There was electricity, but that’s about it. The kitchen was a separate room and they pumped water from a hole in the ground that was connected to the well.

The visitors that lived in the village were older–probably the last generation to live there. The youth has left and some have gone far away. On a shelf in the kitchen, in see through plastic, were two printed pictures of people my age. I knew right away these were taken in a foreign country. That’s how far we run.

There are many houses in the village that are uninhabited. There are no jobs. People make a living from selling fire wood and doing agriculture. They talk to my dad about the surgeries they had and about the only medication that has helped them in their lives: a shot or two of palinka a day. Their fingernails are black and bunted, their skin coarse. A dying breed, I think, but it’s not regret I feel. I feel a tinge of sadness, the sadness of losing something I never owned, but at the same time understanding that the world won’t be the same after without it.

This is not good, or bad, it just is. When they poured me a shot of palinka, I downed it thinking of this. Sometimes, life just “is” and we just “are”. And what I want is to be able to remember all of it, because I’m afraid of forgetting more than I am afraid of losing.