Karaoke Culture

MY DIGITAL LIFE

Someone said that God is disinformation, and someone else that God is Google. For a long time I believed the former, but recently I’ve been more inclined to believe the latter. They say only God is all-knowing, omnipresent, and invisible. Oh, hold the phone — that’s Google!

Despite my atheism, lately I’ve been having these strange, inexplicable “spiritual” cravings. I go to bed late, get up early, and in the time between navigate the Internet like a demon in the hunt for divine vitamins, a metaphysical supplement to nourish my famished soul. I glide over the online newspapers, American, Macedonian, English, Serbian, German, Russian, French. . their menus, news, and pictures all the same. I’ve got a habit, and local newspapers are no longer enough for my daily fix. I set a course horizontally and vertically, eastwards, and westwards, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, but the same vacuity and same abundance await me everywhere. Maybe the excess of information is actually the cause of my unrelenting hunger. I dive into Internet forums with a passion. Maybe divine revelations are buried in the screeds written by the studious folk who like fly-fishing, cooking, tarot cards, and who knows what else. I recently stumbled upon a site about underwater gymnastics. There are no metaphysics under water. I checked.

The computer screen is constantly flashing junk in my face, about Shakespeare, Tutankhamen, Seinfeld, Sarkozy, the economic crisis, Thai resorts, Italian pasta, child molestation, herbal remedies, and budget flights. Sometimes I get the feeling that the Internet is an enormous global gossip-driven soap opera. I look for the truth hidden between the lines, exhausting myself watching American films with Russian subtitles, Russian films with Korean subtitles, Korean films with Azerbaijani subtitles, you name it. I feel like a penitent, flagellating myself from morning to night, without ever knowing the point of it all. The only thing I do know is that a deep hunger drives me to it all; I’m constantly on the prowl for a metaphysical morsel.

Scientists tell us that our brain’s ability to adapt to new experiences is called neuroplasticity. They claim that from an evolutionary perspective this elasticity can be useful, but that it also means that left unused, brain function simply atrophies. Tests show that the brain structures of London taxi drivers have changed since they became reliant on GPS navigation systems, their own sense of navigation having simply shriveled away. I sympathize with those London taxi drivers, and in future I’m going to leave them a slightly bigger tip than usual.

At this very moment my neuroplastic consciousness believes that God is an octopus and that his name is Paul. Because that’s what happens when you’ve more-or-less become an Internet junkie. I spend hours watching the YouTube video, over and over. I watch Paul’s supple tentacles open the box with the Spanish flag. Why the one with the Spanish flag? I ask myself. Then I quickly remember that it’s not my place to ask questions—God knows. And then I foggily remember the cry from the stands at village fairs—“The white mouse shows his nous!” A small fee to the owner and the white mouse would pull a scrap of paper from a hat, each scrap bearing a suitably portentous message, just like the ones hidden in fortune cookies.

In English God and Dog are inextricably linked. In my search for God my life has become that of a Dog. Google has drilled a dog’s loyalty into me, and with tongue dangling out, I obediently toddle around after my master. My master’s hand beckons me with a divine bone, but it’s one he never lets go.

So here I am, back at the beginning. God is a trickster. And God’s son, Jesus, is a trickster too (after all, isn’t he the one who turned water into wine and fed thousands with just a couple of sardines?!). But the creator of the Internet is the biggest trickster of them all. He took two things—panem et circenses—and joined them in an unshakeable union: in a game as vital as our daily bread, a game that really is our bread.

July 2010

CANS OF TUNA FISH AND THE EUROPEAN CLASSICS

I’d be hard-pressed to claim that Europe is coming apart at the seams. All I know is that a friend of mine, a Dutch writer, decided to put aside his career as a writer for a while and actively stand up to the imminent crisis. He opened a how-to-survive-the-recession advice center. Work is booming, and the newly minted “crisis coach” has no complaints. Except that his own transition, he says, sounds like a bad joke.

Another Dutch friend of mine, a journalist, lost her job. She turned the living room of her apartment into a kitchen. She makes pâtés and sells them to fine restaurants and specialty food stores. Her work is going well, and she has no complaints. The only thing is, as she remarks with a tinge of melancholy, she is up to her elbows in meat.

Seen from without, everything seems to be in its place. Venice hasn’t sunk; the tower in Pisa stands firmly aslant. But every now and then a seam rips open somewhere: immigrant youths go wild in Paris suburbs and smash everything in sight, the young of Athens are in a frenzy, and then the northern dominoes topple: Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn. For the wild and embittered players in these incidents, the media word is hooligan. This word, by the way, was in lively usage during communist times. Back then they called boys who sported Elvis-Presley haircuts hooligans. European hooligan outbursts are treated in the media almost as if they are meteorological phenomena, like a sudden hurricane, for instance. Once the hurricane has passed, the media stitch up the seams as skillfully as if there had never been seams at all — until the next hurricane strikes.

Internet sites about the world recession have the drawing power of porno sites. I can’t say the recession has much to do with pornography, but I do know that Charlotte Roche’s book Wetlands has had a Botox-like effect on the European masses: The worry lines have been smoothed on German faces. Every country has its Charlotte Roche. This is how ordinary people forget for a moment that they have been, or will be, laid off; they forget their worries about their children and how to get them through school, about evaporating welfare funds and the future, which no one, besides the blessed who have drowned in denial, imagines in the form of tourist ads for travels in the southern seas.

Ordinary Europeans ooze solidarity. The circulation of human cargo — thanks to the fall of the Berlin wall (Europe is celebrating the 20th anniversary this year!) and the benefits of globalization — is greater now than ever. First Polish plumbers went off to fix plumbing from Dublin to Madrid, then Romanians flooded European train stations with their accordions. Young Moldovan teachers joined the western European prostitutes who were soliciting on every corner of Europe; Bulgarian women are fine maids in the homes of western Europe; Albanians are clever traffickers and pimps; Serbs and Croats are trusty drug smugglers; Croatian women are sought as caregivers for the Italian elderly, while Slovakian women tend to the elderly in Germany and the Netherlands. Ordinary people, the Wessies and Ossies, have struck up a dialogue.

If Europe is not coming apart at the seams, the idea of European multiculturalism is showing its cracks. Romanians pelt a Gypsy (because he is a Romanian just as they are); Hungarians flog a Romanian (thinking he’s a Gypsy). Dutchmen trounce a Moroccan; Moroccans thrash a Dutchman. Italians clobber a Romanian, an Albanian, or whomever they can grab. The number of Europeans complaining that Jews are getting the cushy jobs in banking and politics is mushrooming. Apparently this is because of Gaza and the recession, they say (history clearly is not the teacher of life!). The young, self-appointed champions of national values, in some places called street gangs, elsewhere (as in Hungary) called the young guards, go after someone every other minute: The Russians go after people with non-Russian faces, Croats thrash a tourist (thinking he’s a pedophile), Serbs clobber a Gypsy (claiming he’s gay), Bulgarians beat up a Turk, Austrians a non-Austrian, the Italians a Moldovan, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian master of life and death, has forbidden people to die. People are edgy, but for now, as far as the analysts are concerned, these are merely incidents.

Ordinary people in the West and the East are sinking slowly into the underclass, according to the sociologists. They’re losing their faith in banks, courts, institutions and politicians, though a majority of them gave their free votes, what a paradox, to those same politicians. Indeed, some western European politicians, (those transitional leaders of the people who thumped the nationalist drums, the semi-criminals and criminals, the profiteers, smugglers of cigarettes and guns, the liars, compromisers — don’t offer much hope. Political apathy and a deficit of social imagination are on the rise.

Europe is holding on tight despite it all, and even if seams were ripping, all were magically re-sewn on the day of Obama’s inauguration. Many Europeans roused from their political lethargy, put down their bottles of beer, and listened to Obama’s address with rapt attention. Obama (briefly or not?) united millions of legal European citizens of non-European origin; he united the French, the Moroccans and Dutch, the Walloons and Flemish, the German Turks and Germans, the Serbs and Croats, the Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. Even the Slovenes momentarily forgot their quibbles with Croats over the Adriatic on the day of Obama’s inauguration. What was the trick? Obama succeeded in doing something not a single European politician has been able to do. People believed him. Obama gave the word change back its credibility; he gave solemnity to the word hope; he made the word future real. Obama brought back forgotten values. One of them is decency. With Obama, many not only feel better, they have, at least for a moment, become better.

Europe and America are bound by an umbilical cord. Like my friends, I prepared for the recession. I ordered many tins of tuna fish from a Yugoslav dealer in Amsterdam who supplies the diaspora with products from home. Adriatic tuna is the best; the tins are square, flat, and thin. You can pack an entire library with them: the European classics — Proust, Kafka, Joyce — in front, and behind, tins of tuna. Like in Russian homes during communism: in front, the classics of socialist realism, and behind, the dissidents.

February 2009

CAPTAIN, SIR, WE HAVE PLENTY OF COFFEE!

The lips pursed in the shape of the letter “O.” “Pu”—a little door bulging with pressure from within. A mouth full of morsels. O-pu-lence. “Lence”—rings like a brass bell. The word swells, then pops like a fountain gushing with sprays of gold coins. Opulence: rivers flowing with milk and honey, plump pancakes dropping from the sky.

“What image does the word opulence evoke for you?” I ask a friend.

“An American refrigerator!” he shoots back.

The American refrigerator is an accurate representation for many Eastern Europeans — especially those Yugoslavs who watched American movies from their earliest childhood — of the mythical “horn of plenty.” The image of that vast American refrigerator, so full to overflowing that food tumbles out of it; the picture of the fridge (what a warm, soothing word!) out of which the half-awake American pulls a plastic half-gallon jug of milk or orange juice and chugalugs it down; or removes a whole tub of ice cream, brandishes a soup spoon, and sitting cross-legged on a comfortable sofa, clicks on the TV and slurps the ice cream from the tub as if it were soup. This has been etched on the imagination of Eastern Europeans for generations as the clearest and most appealing image of wealth and ease.

There are as many notions of opulence as there are people! To know what it means to be full, you have to be hungry; to know what wealth is, you have to be poor. In an episode of that old American mammoth soap opera Dynasty, Joan Collins’s Alexis and her lover Dexter are soaking in a jacuzzi, sipping champagne. Dex scoops something up with a spoon from a bowl and downs it.

“Hey, go easy with the spoon,” says Alexis, chronically vulgar, “that’s caviar!”

The director probably thought it gauche to zoom in on the salty roe, yet the audience still needed to register the couple’s indulgence, hence Alexis utters her improbable sentence. Out of place in the scene of luxury, of course. The champagne, the caviar, the jacuzzi: simple symbols of opulence the media have foisted on the imaginations of the poor in America and all over the world. Yet during the famines that followed the Red Revolution, many Russians had so much caviar that they were sick of it; there was absolutely nothing but caviar to eat. Those who were short of a spoon scooped it up with their bare hands.

Poverty knows affluence best. Maybe that is why one should go rummaging around the open markets, the flea markets, the big retail chains for the poor, and see the pile of “garbage” that the poor spend their money on. Because “garbage” is the most precise expression for a poor person’s general impression of opulence. Perhaps it is only in this context that we can make sense of why the Vanderbilt family imported, brick by brick, lavish sixteenth century Italian rooms and built them into their “cottages” in Newport; and why today’s rich Russians blast great holes in the Montenegrin cliffs to build villas that are reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum, with swimming pools from which the swimmer gets an eagle’s eye view of the azure of the Adriatic.

Peer into a poor apartment where the largest wall in the living room is wallpapered with a lavish sunset. Or into the little city gardens done in plastic grass with a flock of plastic flamingos and plastic frogs swimming in a plastic fountain. Peek into the stores selling gilded nylon brocade, synthetic lace, polyester silk and satin. Check out the Eastern European hot springs that date from the communist period, where weary Western retirees purchase accessible pleasures: a swim in the shabby pools, a massage with the hotel masseuse, a pedicure.

The idea of opulence is the meeting point between the poor and the rich. We all encounter each other at that place, as if it were an old abandoned railway station at which trains never arrive or depart. We came to the station, it seems, when God banished us from paradise. For opulence exists only in paradise. Everything else is a substitute, regardless of whether the silk is real or synthetic.

There was a popular ad for Franck coffee on Croatian television back in the early nineties. A space ship with its crew. Sudden turbulence. The horrified expressions on the astronauts’ faces signal that the spaceship will never return to earth. A stewardess wearing a Gagarin costume steps into the captain’s cabin and smiles brightly: “Captain, Sir, we have plenty of coffee!” An explanatory line of text runs along the bottom of the screen: “The first Croatian expedition into outer space.” The ad was a nostalgic evocation of a time of turbulence on the former Yugoslav market when there were coffee shortages, while at the same time announcing that a new Croatian future was coming in which there would always be coffee. For three things signified opulence in Yugoslavia: coffee, detergent, and cooking oil. Yugoslav women went over the border by bus on day trips to Trieste or Graz to buy their supplies. For no apparent reason one of the must-have items on the list was raisins. My mother’s cupboard at one point was nearly bursting with little packets of them, and I nearly burst with pity for my mother.

Opulence is kept shut away in the realm of the imagination. For death usually lurks just beyond it. (Moths will get into it! Mice will nibble it! Fire will reduce it to ashes! People will snatch it! The banks will go bust! The money will be gobbled by inflation!) There is nothing lurking beyond poverty but the necessity of survival.

When I was a child, we lived in a small town near Zagreb, a couple of miles from the Zagreb-Belgrade highway. In summer the traffic of Turkish and Greek guest workers on their way home from Western Europe inched along the road. One day the local police knocked at our door and asked my mother to help as an interpreter. That very day the Bulgarian ambassador to Mali had been on his way home for a hard-earned summer vacation, and just where the exit splits off the highway toward our town, the ambassador had collided with another car. His wife was killed instantly; he and his two little girls were unharmed. There were many formalities to attend to, far too many for the local police, but the poor man and his children also needed to be cared for. So the Bulgarian and his two little girls were our guests for several days. When the ambassador departed, he left behind two large sacks of peanuts he had been taking to Bulgaria in the trunk of his car. He probably felt it no longer appropriate to deliver them home along with the news of the death of his wife. Perhaps this was his expression of gratitude; he had nothing else to give us. None of us had ever seen or tasted a peanut before. Our whole neighborhood roasted peanuts with us in the oven, shelling the unsightly husks and nibbling at the unusual oval seeds for months. From the horn of plenty, peanuts showered down upon us.

I have disliked peanuts ever since. Opulence should be left where it can do the least harm — in the realm of the imagination. I make an effort, as much as I can, to steel myself to its siren call. That Captain, Sir, we have plenty of coffee will do for my daily dose of happiness.

June 2008

NO PLACE FOR SISSIES

When God created the world, and donkeys, dogs, monkeys, and man along with it, he gave each a lifespan of thirty years. The donkey knew life would be hard, so he asked God to shorten it: God sliced off an eighteen-year chunk. The dog and the monkey had similar complaints, so theirs were cut short too, the dog’s by twelve years and the monkey’s by ten. But as for Man, he felt thirty years too few and asked for more. So God went ahead and gave the greedy one the years he’d taken from the donkey, the dog, and the monkey. Now greedy humans would live for seventy years. The first thirty years are the human years, the ones we enjoy, happy and healthy; then come the difficult donkey years, when we have to carry others, and receive only kicks and blows for our trouble. The dog years follow, the twelve toothless years we spend growling in the corner, with no teeth with which to bite. Finally, there are monkey years, the ten years we spend as old fools, mocked by young children.

The Brothers Grimm heard that story from a peasant and recorded a version of it as The Duration of Life. I read it (or something similar) when I was a child. My socialist readers were bursting with didactic stories, proverbs, puzzles, and other forms of oral literature. Naturally I’ve now forgotten all of them, but ever since I’ve had an aversion towards folksy aphorisms. I can’t stand those little pearls of wisdom you find in Chinese fortune-cookies either. I don’t like people who parrot folksy sayings; they’re usually old and half-senile.

Man is an insatiable being, and our haggling with God over the duration of our lives continues to this day. With all our might we try to usurp God’s throne, to take the question of our lifespan into our own hands, a tendency that goes on apace. There’s the pharmaceutical industry, the cosmetic industry, the self-help industry, not to mention the tons of products designed to both prolong our life and improve its quality. People spend enormous amounts of time going running, working out at the gym, dieting, frequenting health food stores, going to the dental hygienist, the sauna, meditating, cutting out stress and meat, consuming healthy fats, reducing unhealthy fats, cutting out sugar, working on their mental health, practicing work-out routines, relaxing, quitting smoking and drinking, gulping down water, having regular health checks, speed-walking, avoiding tomatoes, eating more tomatoes, carefully reading product labels, learning exercises to prevent wrinkles and firm the buttocks, starving themselves, steam-cooking, detoxing and botoxing. All told, were Hitler to today rise from the grave, it would warm his heart to see the millions-strong masses of potential Übermenschen, optimistic and disciplined, glowing with rude health and physical vitality.

Longevity is currently right up there on the ladder of our civilizational values. Flanked by the media, the Croatian President recently offered his personal congratulations to a woman who had just turned 104. Why? Because she is the oldest Croatian woman alive. Premature death, particularly if it’s due to terminal illness, is no longer seen as lucking out in the divine lottery, but as a personal failure, like a self-induced bankruptcy. The more benevolent treat untimely death due to sickness as a kind of genetic affliction, which is also seen as a kind of personal failure. We should have chosen forebears of better genetic material. Today life is like a marathon of uncertain duration, at the end of which — providing we aren’t disqualified by a higher power — the head of state might be waiting for us, a bouquet of flowers in hand.

By and large, in the past fifty years life expectancy has dramatically increased. Today every Tom, Dick, and Harry is eighty years old. There are experts who maintain that this increase in life expectancy will result in a tectonic global disturbance more dangerous and alarming than global warming. Yes, people are living longer, but their pensions are increasingly precarious, and when they do have one, it’s too meagre to live off. People are living longer, but a longer life means greater susceptibility to illness, and the health services in many countries often refuse to treat the elderly. People might be living longer, but their children are so overworked, struggling to support their own children, that they have neither the time nor money to look after their parents. In many countries, rest homes, just like prisons, are in seriously short supply, and the expensive private ones are raking it in as a result. The state is keen to see private rest homes prosper, but lacks the desire or means to monitor them. If we then factor in the global economic crisis, things look all the bleaker.

In many cultures euthanasia and geronticide were inescapable rituals. Such rituals were often innocuous (leaving the windows open so the draft would hasten death and allow the soul an easier departure, or sealing the house shut so the soul wouldn’t have anywhere to hide), but could also be quite pragmatic and efficient (murder, incineration, starvation, drowning, abandonment, being throwing off a cliff, etc.).

A Serbian newspaper recently ran a story about two sisters from the village of Lučica near Požarevac. The old women had no means of income and survived on scavenged scraps. When one died, the other apparently lay down beside her, took a sharp object, and began slicing flesh from the soles of her sister’s feet. Suspecting something amiss, the other village residents called the police. Asked why she didn’t declare her sister’s death, the old woman replied: “What would I have eaten then?” Other newspapers reported the story of a poor Italian family who hid their deceased grandmother in the fridge for months. They didn’t declare the old woman’s death, as doing so would have meant forfeiting her pension.

These kinds of stories probably fall into the category of sensationalist modern folklore, but they could also prove a bleakly comedic foreshadowing of the near future. Faced with the dilemma of feeding their children or their parents, that the poor will revive a form of geronticide can’t be ruled out. In wealthier countries, as a result of both expensive gerontological services and the general economic crisis, a different practice is in evidence. The practice is still very hush-hush, because people would rather keep mum about it. The Swiss and Germans pack their parents onto one-way flights to low-cost Thailand, where the Thai medical staff nurse them until their deaths. Funeral services are included in the package. In one hit, cash-strapped children combine the recreational and the functional, returning from holiday with parental ashes in their luggage.

Croatian entrepreneurs are on the ball. One is currently building a rest home for Swiss clients, while another apparently already has a contract with the Japanese. It turns out that it’s cheaper for the Japanese to send their parents to Croatia and visit them twice a year than to have them cared for in their exorbitantly-priced homeland. In the years to come, hundreds of elderly Japanese might make their way to Croatia. The Japanese will end their days looking out across the idyllic rolling hills of Croatia, slowly letting out their souls like little shriveling balloons. That is, until the day our overheated and overcrowded planet hastens things along.

April 2009

THE CONSOLATION OF THE LAST RESOURCE

On a grey housing-estate wall somewhere in the former Yugoslavia there’s a piece of graffiti that reads: My boyfriend’s so rich he doesn’t need to lick the lid of the Eurokrem jar! In the gastronomic consciousness of its citizens, Eurokrem is remembered as a) a cheap snack for children; b) morning-tea for soldiers of the former Yugoslav Peoples’ Army; and c) a hotel breakfast for budget-conscious pensioners, both local and foreign, who spent their “summer” holidays in Adriatic hotels in mid-winter.

It seems that the idea of poverty has finally gotten through to the average citizen of the former Yugoslavia. Stupefied by the country’s disintegration (The Communists robbed us blind!), patriotism, war (the war impoverished us), and hatred for Serbs, or Croats, or Slovenes (they economically destroyed us!), until now the average citizen has rejected any confrontation with his own social status. He has survived thanks to the consolation provided by last resources (We’ll sell the village land dad left us; We’ve got a good garden, big enough to feed us; If it comes to the crunch, we’ll sell the summer house; My uncle’s a big-time Charlie, he’ll always be able to sort me out; Grandma will leave us the house in her will; My brother’s doing well in Germany, there’s no way he’ll leave us to starve; We’ll rent the house on the coast to foreigners; If nothing else, we’ll always be able to sell the family grave). These resources, however, are now fully depleted, the options exhausted, aces up the sleeve thrown. Grandma’s house is gone with the wind, the family land sold, society has stratified into a tiny minority of wealthy and a massive majority of poor—“fuckers” and “suckers.” Much hastily-acquired wealth is slowly slipping away, businesses are shutting up shop, people are losing their jobs en masse, that big-timer uncle Charlie is in jail, the money from the family grave long spent. Many go to work, not having been paid in months. The lucky receive half their monthly salaries in cash and the other half in coupons. Naturally the coupons can only be redeemed at the workers’ own companies. They trade them for sausages that are past their expiration date, and Eurokrem, which doesn’t have an expiration date. Many work Saturdays, although no one sees the point, except, of course, the owner of the firm who’s doing all he can to engineer voluntary resignations.

A married couple by the name of Pevec own what was until very recently a successful chain of stores in Croatia. Today the Pevecs are bankrupt. They left behind hundreds of ragged employees who, having been unpaid for months, were then made redundant. At a recent party at a local hotel, the Pevecs had a great time dancing into the wee hours. Employees at the hotel — also in receivership, and who themselves hadn’t been paid in months — watched the obscene shimmy of the failed Croatian tycoons, barely able to draw breath.

Only these kinds of “entertaining” details find their way into the Croatian media. The bitter everyday is left to gurgle away in anonymity. Headlines — such as those informing us that the American actress Jennifer Love Hewitt not only has her, um, you-know-what, regularly shaved and trimmed, but that she recently had it “vajazzled” with a Swarovski crystal, so now her “vajayay” shines like a disco ball—stupefy the impoverished masses like a non-stop water sprinkler. They see their own lives of servitude shimmer like a disco ball.

Are they really lives of servitude? As a new slave trade snakes its way along subterranean European pathways, the united European idyll is slowly revealing its dark underbelly. An “innocent” asparagus farm in the Czech Republic, growing asparagus for an “innocent” importer in the Netherlands, employed a convenient group of Romanians as pickers. Why convenient? EU passports in hand, they could cross borders unhindered, and the question of their non-existent work permits was somehow swept under the rug. As it happens, a good part of Western Europe exploits itinerant Romanians, Bulgarians, and others, and the question of work permits always magically disappears. It turns out the Romanian asparagus pickers were recruited by a Ukrainian gang. They never saw the promised wages, the food and lodgings were subhuman, and their brutal Ukrainian masters threatened them with death if they tried to escape. Thanks to the few who managed to escape and bravely complained to the Romanian Embassy in Prague, the slave-running ring was (temporarily) broken. There are scores of similar farms scattered all over Europe, scores of slave drivers, innumerable desperate wretches, and more than enough corrupt police and members of the judiciary.

The media, particularly the transitional Eastern European media, have for years done their utmost to prove that education, expertise, and competence are no guarantee of a stable and prosperous life. Big Brother, authentic entertainment for millions of viewers, proved that anyone could be a star for any reason under the sun. At the same time, it was also a harbinger of what was soon to come. The media, life experience, and often educators themselves took education down from its throne, and on the pedestal of values the body took its place. With its own market value, the body is both the first and last resource. The body can be sold, beautified, inflated with silicone, injected with Botox, shrunk, thinned, enlarged, bulked-up, tattooed, clothed, or stripped naked. Of course one can increase the body’s market value — one just needs to know how. Prostitutes, both female and male, sell their bodies directly. Some parents sell their children, and some children sell themselves, without a middleman. Some parents maim their children, banking on compassion to increase begging revenue. Many Indians sell their organs. Some people sell their blood. Even a dead body has a market value. According to Amnesty International, the six thousand Chinese prisoners executed every year supply ninety percent of black-market kidneys. Wealthy foreigners pay between ten and forty thousand dollars a kidney. The organ harvesting doesn’t, of course, end with kidneys. In Chinese prisons executions are carefully conducted: if the convict is in poor health, he’s shot in the chest; if he’s a suitable candidate for organ harvesting, he’s shot in the head.

Wanting to build himself a house, King Erysichthon of Thessalonica cut down trees in a grove that was sacred to Ceres, who punished him with an insatiable hunger. Erysichthon ended up eating himself to death. If we ignore the ecological reading, the story of Erysichthon offers another example of how, when our survival is in question, our own bodies are, indeed, the last resource.

January 2010

MY EAR THE CHAUVINIST, MY EYE THE MISANTHROPE

He moves towards me like a soldier in full combat gear. He strides along an imaginary straight line, rucksack on his back, iPod in hand, earplugs inserted in his ears. His sunglasses exclude all possibility of negotiation by eye contact. He uses his body like an invisible plough clearing the snow ahead, and I stand obediently to the side. In the urban public space, more and more people use their bodies like ploughs. I’m always the one who steps aside.

While queuing at my local Lidl, a muezzin’s call pierces my eardrums like a sudden pain. I turn around and see a young woman decked out in a hijab and long denim skirt, chintzy-decorated flip-flops on her feet. She takes a mobile phone from her handbag and has a fiddle. Perhaps a reminder to prayer, I think calmly. My ear goes back to sleep. But then it’s rattled again, this time by the sound of a young Chinese woman screeching something into her mobile. Both voices are equally piercing, I think to myself. Embarrassed, I delete the thought. I swear, this isn’t about me — it’s my ear. Where it grew up high Cs were never popular. My ear is a chauvinist!

I’ve noticed that more and more cyclists are singing in the streets of Amsterdam, pedaling along and singing at the top of their lungs. This public reclamation of personal freedom, showing off just how relaxed you are, is a new thing. My ear is uneasy, unaccustomed, and un-accepting. My ear is a spiteful control freak.

I’m sitting in a café with a view of the lake, waiting for my coffee, when a young couple at the next table catches my eye. The young woman, long blond hair, casually puts her bare feet up on the table, right alongside her partner’s bowl of soup. The young man gently massages her toes with one hand and finishes his soup with the other. The young woman titters with delight and tries to tip the soup over with her toes. The sight of her bare feet on the table makes me slightly nauseous. My eye is a misanthrope. I don’t have an invisible remote to switch the scene from the opposite table off, which is what I secretly want, and so defeated, I get up and leave.

In many European cities the metro station elevators (used mostly by mothers with baby strollers, old folk, and cyclists carrying their bikes) are always plastered in piss and spit, used by men as urinals and spittoons. Taking the lift up to the platform, I cover my nose with my hand or scarf. The stench is unbearable. My nose is the guilty one. It’s a damned elitist.

I’ve noticed that as soon as they find a seat on the tram, an ever-increasing number of young women take out their makeup bags and do their make-up for the day. They’ve got everything there: eyeliner, mascara, nail files and nail polish. But why, of all places, do they have to do their make-up on the tram? If they really have to do it in public, why not in a public toilet or on a park bench?! Metro stations are obviously more convenient — I recently saw a middle-aged woman plucking her chin hair with a pair of tweezers while she was waiting for a train.

I’m standing on the street when a passing cyclist tosses a drink carton towards a non-existent rubbish bin, missing my head by about ten centimeters. Hey! — I yell, but there’s no chance of having it out with him as he quickly disappears from view.

There are several places of worship in my Amsterdam neighborhood. One of them is obviously a bit small, so when the weather’s nice the faithful head outside, unfurl their little prayer mats or whatever they have, and kneel down. When the faithful pray, no one, neither believers nor non-believers, can use the sidewalk. A signpost stands watch next to God’s temple; on it is a dog with a cross through it. A friend of mine has a dog. The self-appointed religious police have already warned him several times that dogs aren’t allowed to be walked past God’s temple. The space around the temple is, incidentally, filthy, because the children visiting the temple ditch their soft drink cans and snack wrappers there. But God obviously has his preferences: rubbish doesn’t bother him, but dogs do.

On both the trams and the metro, adolescents, kids, occupy most of the seats. Older folk meekly stand. The urban public space has become a field on which to exercise repressed sadomasochism. The stronger have their way, the weaker suck it up.

For months now, a thirty-something jerk has stood banging on his guitar in front of my supermarket. The guy is tone-deaf, and obviously can’t play, but he just stands there and doodles away, clearly hoping the racket will draw attention to his presence and that people will toss him a coin.

In apartment blocks some residents think it’s funny to throw food out the windows onto the street. To feed the birds. These birds, seagulls and pigeons mostly, hover overhead and crap on the windows below. What the birds don’t eat the rats finish up. At night rats freely roam the public space. This pushes animal rights activists’ like buttons.

In New York I climb into a taxi. The taxi driver, white knitted cap on his head, is saying his prayers. Holding a little prayer book in one hand, he repeats his mantra. From time to time he needs to brake or pay attention at a traffic light, so he interrupts his prayer. The monotonous mantra jars my agnostic ear, but I politely put up with the situation I’ve happened into. Not having anything smaller, I give the driver a large bill when I get out of the taxi.

“How much is the tip?”—he asks gruffly.

I notice how his tone of voice has suddenly changed: that meek spiritual bleating from a minute ago was for God, the threatening tone is for me. He’s already holding the bill in hand, so negotiation isn’t really an option; he could floor it and make off with the lot. Hoping for at least something back, I give him a generous tip.

In an Amsterdam metro station I take the steps down towards the exit, holding the side rail. A kid climbs towards me, stops in front of me for a second, and just glares. Hypnotized, I forget to move aside. The kid swears, hits me, shoves me aside, and continues on his way. Frozen with fear, I slowly make my way down, terrified that he could have ended up pushing me down the stairs. It was my mistake; I was on the left side, the wrong side.

The urban public space, which is governed by both written and unwritten rules of behavior, today serves as a stage for the exhibition of personal freedom. The old rules of etiquette no longer apply. “No Spitting” signs are long gone, seen as absurd and a bit of joke. As a result, nowadays, many simply spit wherever they like. Spit, piss, the body, the voice — it’s all about marking out one’s space. Nobody wants to go unnoticed. Everyone fights for his or her personal rights, but few respect the rights of others. Incidents of this demonstration of freedom are becoming increasingly common and increasingly violent.

I notice that I go outside less and less. I’ve put three locks on the front door, and I keep the curtains pulled. My apartment is slowly turning into a guerrilla nest. I notice that I don’t love my neighbor anymore either. Loving one’s neighbor requires a superhuman effort. It’s love without reciprocity, and I’m just a common, fallible human specimen. In any case, that’s God’s department, he created man in his own image, let him love him.

A blogger recently accused me of using exaggeration as a writing strategy. I allow that this is the case. It’s true that not everyone spits on the floor, puts their feet up on restaurants tables, walks the streets naked, or pushes people over for walking on the wrong side. My exaggeration is a form of concern for the future. It’s completely possible that in little more than a decade this document will seem like an unintelligible snapshot of the urban everyday. Future readers won’t know what phrases like urban public space mean, nor will it be clear to them what the writer meant to say. I admit, at this very moment I don’t know either. I’m not a prophet. Nor am I a saint, like Mike.

Mike is a well-respected sixty-something American university professor, who collects empty bottles and cans while walking each day from his home to the university. He stores them in his office for the day, and at day’s end takes the morning stockpile and supplements it with whatever he collects on the walk home, as much as he’s able to carry. He then sorts the empties into piles; glass, plastic, cans, stacking them neatly on his porch. At night, when everyone is asleep, human shadows converge on Mike’s Los Angeles home. Young Puerto Ricans. They spirit away Mike’s collection and recycle it for a little small change.

November 2008

FEAR OF PEOPLE

When Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange appeared in 1971 (based on Anthony Burgess’s eponymous novel) it was seen as a dystopian film, a black comedy, a futuristic satire. The adolescent protagonist Alex and his three friends (called droogs—from the Russian drug) amuse themselves with ultra-violence. Alex undergoes the Ludovico treatment, which induces in him a powerful aversion to violence, but then he himself becomes a victim of both his droogs and his former victims. Today Kubrick’s film is one of the key cultural references on juvenile violence. It seems, however, that today’s youth violence has far surpassed that imagined by either author or director.

For a time Golding’s allegorical novel The Lord of the Flies (1954) was regarded an iconic work of modern literature. But when Golding’s vision became reality, the novel was stripped of its allegorical power, the fate of all such prescient works.

One of the most powerful episodes in Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the phantasmagorical portrayal of Tamina’s death. The young angel Raphael takes Kundera’s heroine by boat to an island, where, in a setting reminescent of a Boy Scout camp, children molest, abuse, humiliate, and rape her, acting out their basest instincts. In Kundera’s dark phantasmagoria, children are executioners, the angels of death.

The Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures (1994) is based on a true story from the 1950s that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand. In spite of their class differences, two fifteen-year-old girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme (played by Kate Winslet), form an obsessive mutual bond. The girls brutally murder Pauline’s mother, who they see as an obstacle to their future plans together. The media attention generated by the film led to the discovery of Juliet Hulme’s subsequent identity. After five years in a youth prison, Hulme left New Zealand and is today known as Anne Perry, a well-known writer of Victorian-era detective fiction.

Austrian director Michael Haneke first filmed his feature Funny Games in 1997, and in 2008 shot a remake with American actors. In the film a pair of good-looking, well-mannered young men (who could be the post-Ludovico sons of Burgess’s hero, Alex) brutally torment a family of three in a summer cottage, ultimately murdering them, just as they had previously murdered their neighbors, before calmly proceeding with a new wave of violence. Their brutality is driven solely by their delight in a sadistic game in which they have the upper hand. Watching Haneke’s film, as voyeurs, we too become parties to the crime.

Early in 2008 a Dnepropetrovsk court sentenced Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck to life imprisonment on twenty-one counts of murder. A third accused was sentenced to nine years. Armed with hammers and metal bars, these former local school pupils beat random people to death, gouging out the eyes and slicing off the ears of a number of their victims. They filmed the murders with a video camera, and there’s at least one of these terrifying clips out there in cyberspace. You hear their voices (Vitja, neater, you fuck!), but their faces remain out of view. The camera painstakingly records a battered old man drowning in his own blood, as screwdrivers are stabbed into his stomach. The two adolescents apparently documented their murders on camera so that they would have memories to look back on in their old age. The father of one of the killers accused the police of fabricating the charges, because, he said, his son was a normal boy. The mother of the other claimed that her son couldn’t even kill a cat. A defense lawyer for the young killers stated that the boys killed to overcome their fear of people.

Recently an eleven-year-old boy from the community of Wampum in Pennsylvania was accused of murdering a pregnant woman and her eight-month-old unborn baby.

In Yorkshire two brothers aged ten and twelve attacked and robbed two other boys, subjecting them to a physical and sexual assault that included poking them with sticks and stubbing out cigarettes on their skin. It was not the first criminal incident in which the brothers had been involved.

News stories like these have become part of our everyday lives. One can no longer separate juvenile violence from regular adult violence; violent children feature in newspapers’ court pages as frequently as violent adults. We regularly read stories about gangs of boys who have beaten one of their classmates to death, young people bashing old women while trying to snatch their handbags, or physically assaulting their parents. Youth violence is on view everywhere, captured on mobile phones, in newspapers, on television screens, in documentaries, and on the Internet. Several girls were interviewed in a documentary on teenage Russian killers. One had killed her newborn baby, another her grandmother, a third, helped by a couple of boys, a friend. Typically these young offenders were coolly indifferent to their crimes. Asked by a journalist why she had killed, one replied more-or-less: Why do you think? It’s a jungle out there! Responding to the same question in a documentary about young American killers, one young killer replied bluntly: Because it’s a thrill!

Crimes committed by children occur everywhere. The stereotypical psychosocial model — an impoverished and traumatic childhood, a mother who was a prostitute or drug addict, a violent father — still predominates, but can no longer be assumed. Violence is a part of children’s everyday lives, and children’s violence is part of the everyday lives of adults. Parental violence in the home, the prevalence of pedophilia, child prostitution, adults purchasing the services of children, criminal exploitation of children, training child soldiers to become cold-blooded killers, forcing children into crime — these are all part of the contemporary everyday.

The young Ukrainians tortured and killed people and animals with the same cool indifference, filming their crimes as mementos to look back on in their old age. Their crimes can’t be explained away; there are no answers to be had, no messages, no meaning. The evil is a dull, empty space. As the judge handed down his verdict, one of the two boys from Yorkshire yawned. The killers in Haneke’s film dress in white, on their hands they wear white gloves, the golf ball is white, as is the egg they use to begin the game. The murders are bloody, but there isn’t a drop of blood on the killers. The killers are free of remorse: there are no second thoughts, no compromises, no compassion, and no respite.

“There are no children anymore!” announces the nine-year-old Victor in Roger Vitrac’s classic absurdist drama Victor, or Power to the Children. There are no children any more because, simply, there are no adults. During the brutal siege of Sarajevo, asked what she feared most, a young Sarajevan girl replied: “People!” The little girl had adults in mind. Today, people also implicitly includes children.

March 2009

FILIPINAS

I recently visited some friends who live in Hong Kong. My friends do well for themselves, and although their apartment was large by Hong Kong standards, it was still smaller than I expected. My friend and hostess showed me a narrow cubicle that exited onto the balcony, the purpose of which wasn’t immediately clear. What do you do with a pokey recess that you can’t use for anything and just makes the apartment smaller?

“Lots of people in Hong Kong keep their Filipinas there,” she said.

Hit by the jetlag, I woke up early those few days, and in the morning stillness I watched the Filipinas from the balcony. In the early morning the Filipinas walk the dogs around a beautifully-maintained (not to mentioen gated and guarded) residential compound. A little later, I saw them carrying shopping bags from the nearby supermarket and shepherding the children to the school bus. Sometimes — in the lift, at the pool, in the massage studio, or in a restaurant — the fashionable owners of these Filipinas would appear: stylish young white women, two or three gorgeous children in tow.

My hosts say that Hong Kong is a magnet for young business people. The money’s good, the accommodation luxurious, the Filipino maids cheap — ideal conditions for keeping the family wheels turning.

Aside from their work, in the evenings and weekends my friends live within their own, Anglo-American, enclave. In the evenings they have drinks in bar owned by a Filipina whose husband is a successful English businessman.

One evening, my friends were invited to the birthday of a Filipina who was happily engaged to a Dutch guy, so they brought me along. It was a Filipino bar, there was a Filipino band, the singer was a Filipina, and, apart from my hostess and myself, the female guests were all Filipinas. The male guests? — “Englishmen.” The Dutchman was still somewhere in the air on board a Hong Kong bound plane.

Entering the bar felt like entering a cave full of bats. The twenty or so Filipinas were quick off the mark, their movements finely honed. They swarmed on us from all directions, omnipresent, amiably plying us with food and drink, patting and nudging us, intermittently letting out short sharp bursts of laughter. For a moment I thought they might all be sisters — they all gesticulated in the same way, their bursts of laughter on cue, all of which made me uneasy.

The shenanigans soon got underway. The Filipinas wiggled their butts, wrapped themselves around invisible poles, and flashed their breasts. Lining up one behind the other, each grabbed the hips of the woman in front, bumping and grinding their pelvises into her rear. Or one would stick her rear out and another would bend down and nestle her nose where the other’s anus had to be. This vulgar pantomime was accompanied by peals of laughter. Each wave of laughter rang out like a command for others to laugh along. One Filipina popped her breasts out, asking those present to rate them.

“Don’t pay any attention,” said my hostess, catching my disapproving glance. “They always carry on like this.”

Yes, Filipinas. Some are married to “Englishmen,” and others are on their way to finding one, says my hostess. The husbands, “English” businessmen, come to Hong Kong to earn money and lay the foundations of family life. That’s how it starts out: They bring their wives over, have children, earn money — and then a Filipina turns up on the scene. I spoke to an Englishman at the bar, a friend of my friends, who told me that he had an adult daughter and a wife in Australia, and here, in Hong Kong, a Filipina. As we spoke, she kept coming over, rubbing herself against him. It was as if she were running around on an invisible leash, like an impatient dog.

Another Englishman had the same story: an ex-wife and two children — and a Filipina. His Filipina was the star of the evening, her routine unforgettable. She took a largish bone from the table (dinner was delicious grilled pork) and performed a lengthy and well-rehearsed fellatio pantomime. The Englishman was wealthy; my friends told me that he’d built the Filipina a luxurious villa in the Philippines, that he supported her many relatives, her child from her first marriage, and her ex-husband, while she just goes wild, spending and spending. This Filipina has carved out a career sought by many; for while many are currently still the home help, which is how they feed their parents, unemployed ex-husbands, and their children to unemployed ex-husbands, they all dream of one day finding their “Englishman.” Back in childhood someone drilled it into them that “Englishmen” don’t fall from the sky and that only girls who are good at gyrating their hips and shaking their asses deserve them. Later, life just confirmed the truth of the story. Although many of them completed their schooling, gyrating their hips has proven to be a more secure and profitable path. That’s why in the evenings many Hong Kong Filipina Cinderellas transform themselves into porno-comedians. The night belongs to them.

“Look at them,” my new bar-friend says warmly, “like snakes. .”

He was obviously looking for a way to tell me to relax, to not be so judgmental, because it’s all a bit of innocent fun, for Pete’s sake, “we’re all the same under the skin,” “a drop in the ocean,” our common home is “a valley of tears.” I didn’t say anything. Allowances for life in all its color, for its peaks and troughs, are usually sought by those who stand to gain from such an “anything goes” position — an excuse for themselves at the very least.

I spoke with two Filipinas, who, like me, had gone outside for a smoke. One complained that everybody thinks Filipinas are prostitutes. The other nodded in agreement. They just came here to earn an honest living. They dream of buying a little homestead in the Philippines and growing vegetables. For a moment I’m carried away, I feel like Betty Friedan: “Yes, veggies,” I say, “good idea.” They shrug their shoulders and sadly exhale cigarette smoke into the steamy Hong Kong night. In their heads they tally up the dog walks, the bags of groceries, the mornings getting the kids on the school bus, and the nights spent wedged into the cupboard-like space where some keep Filipinas, others washing machines. Then they go back inside. From the street I watch them rejoin “their kind,” wiggling their rears, curling up “like snakes,” household knick-knacks, efficient little sex-machines.

“Englishman” and “Filipina.” The only irony is that the players in this game don’t know how to enjoy what they’ve achieved in life. In a Gucci dress and Prada shoes, the Filipina licks stubbornly at the pork bone, although there’s no longer any need. The Englishman, I assume, has it in mind that although his Filipina still works — her expiration date not yet up — he could still trade her in for a new one.

Filipinas have left a dark stain on the glittering panoramas of Hong Kong, like sepia ink. Half-crazed bats lay siege to the tall and slender Hong Kong skyscrapers, flapping their wings and flushing gold coins out from somewhere. The coins fall to the ground like snow, like fireworks. The sound of the metal coins hitting the ground echoes like short sharp bursts of laughter that chill me to the bone.

July 2010

SERBIAN HOLLYWOOD

1.

I recently visited a small settlement near Groningen in the north of Holland. The place is called Eelde, and the chances are fairly remote that I’d ever go out of my way to visit. Eelde is home to one of the most beautiful small museums of figurative art I’ve ever seen. Everything is perfect: the unusual architecture is perfectly integrated into the natural surroundings, which were perfectly designed by Holland’s most famous landscape architect. The museum catalogues are exquisitely designed and the café wonderfully situated in the museum’s natural landscape. It was a Sunday, and the museum was full of locals. I’m not sure if it was because the museum shop was open or because there are only two things one can do in the tiny settlement: go sailing, or go to the museum. The museum in Eelde would represent a commendable example of the synergy between money (a Dutch bank is one of the sponsors), meticulous environmental awareness (the museum is in perfect harmony with its surroundings), and art, if only it fulfilled its primary function. Namely, the museum has everything except art! Yes, there were a few pictures hanging on the walls, but you couldn’t even call them amateur (even amateurism can have its charms); what you got instead were exemplars of the worst kind of pretentiousness. A quick look at the prices in the catalogue, and the only thing a visitor could possibly conclude was that being an artist really does pay, particularly if you’re a crappy one.

2.

A few years ago I attended the unveiling of an Ilya Kabakov installation at a wealthy Californian university in Santa Barbara. The installation was situated in one of the university’s parks, and it consisted of a bottle made out of wire, or more to the point, wire shaped like a bottle. The bottleneck pointed down towards a barely visible stream of water trickling from a small opening in the grass. The installation was called Mother and Son, although it wasn’t clear what was supposed to symbolize what. You could see the satisfaction on visitor’s faces, Kabakov devotees the lot of them, myself included. Indeed, out of a deep inner feeling of having been cheated — or out of shame — many of them launched into passionate explanations of the somewhat less than transparent — and therefore all the more profound — meaning of Kabakov’s installation. Kabakov is one of the stars of modern art. We never call a star’s fiasco a fiasco, but rather, a new phase, a new high in the ouevre of a celebrated artist, actor, musician, or writer. .

3.

If you type “Mutanj, Serbia” into your search engine, it will immediately respond with the question: “Do you mean: Mutants, Serbia?” I mean, yeah, whatever. The little test proves that geographers are the most passionate, precise, and pervasive professionals on the Internet. Mutanj is a hamlet on the mountain of Rudnik in central Serbia, and on the Internet you can find maps, satellite pictures, and all kinds of other information about it. Geographers don’t differentiate between massive New York and minuscule Mutanj, which has all of eighty-four inhabitants. Why is the village of Mutanj important? It’s not. Nevertheless, driving down the Ibar Highway in late-October 2007, someone caught a glimpse of a group of phantom white letters spelling “Holywood” up on Straževica hill and set off to investigate what appeared to be a bizarre teleportation of the famous sign. It turned out that the lone creator of this peculiar installation was twenty-year-old Ivan Jakovljević, a Mutanj villager and employee at the local lead and zinc mine. Above the big “Holywood” letters, there was a smaller sign in Cyrillic that said “Srpski” (Serbian). Jakovljević’s “Holywood” was missing an “l,” which he deliberately left out, wanting, as he put it, “to avoid copyright issues.” Apparently, Jakovljević wants to attract the “Seventh Art” to his village, and in particular, creators of “films about ecology, history, and ethnology.” He has stated that his campaign doesn’t have a “political background,” and that his “installation” is just a “symbol of the seventh art and nothing more.” In order to realize his project, Jakovljević took out an 800 euro loan, and over the Christmas and New Year holidays he plans to have “Srpski Holywood” up in lights.

4.

In the countries of the former Yugoslavia a capricious culture of public sculptures is in full bloom. The situation might be best explained as a kind of wild “monumental” polemic: the destroying of monuments bearing one ideological message, and the erection of new ones bearing a different message. The countries of the former Yugoslavia also boast an authentic and spirited headstone culture, with fierce competition for originality. In America the celebrated Ilya Kabakov today reconstructs vanished Soviet toilets, schools, and other emblematic Soviet constructions (Mother and Son is one of his rare fiascos), while in a God-forsaken Serbian village a replica of the famous Hollywood sign surfaces. If this happy teleportation of symbols continues in our world without borders, the field is wide open for New York’s Twin Towers to one day rise again in Shanghai, and the numerous decapitated heads of Stalin and Lenin to re-emerge from the Antarctic ice.

All of this is understandable, and a bit of a laugh. Only one thing remains a mystery: earthlings’ obsession with art. It’s almost beyond comprehension why someone in Eelde in the north of Holland would pay five thousand euros for a picture they could get at a flea market for three, or why anyone would pay ten, twenty, or thirty times more to have an ugly wire bottle in a university park, or why someone would take out a loan of several hundred euros to put up big metal letters in a forest next to his hamlet, especially when those letters already exist on another hill, on the other side of the world.

Although the motivations remain incomprehensible, the obsession with art, and art itself, are facts of life on earth. Thus I can but only encourage Ivo Jakovljević from the village of Mutanj. If he were a Serbian conceptual artist, somebody would have already lauded his installation, acclaiming it as an intelligent and incisive satire of Serbian megalomania. Were Ivo Jakovljević Andy Warhol, his installation would be exhibited in museums, acclaimed as a work that wittily unites the symbols of two cultures, Latin and Cyrillic. But Ivo Jakovljević works in a lead and zinc mine and his “Srpski Holywood” is just the lonesome enterprise of a lonesome village idiot. I don’t know if it would be of any comfort to the currently out-of-pocket Ivo Jakovljević to understand that the difference between “high art” and amateurism is negligible, and that it’s all just a question of context. People in the art world behave like the majority of people do in other spheres of life — like a majority. In other words, they behave just like those Serbian voters, who, when asked by a representative of a small anti-nationalist party whether he’d get their vote in the next elections, responded: “First of all get elected, and then we’ll vote for you!”

December 2008

BITCHES

Even those who can barely say their name in English know what bitch means. Bitch is as promiscuous and freely-spouted as the word fuck, its circulation global. Bitch rings out everywhere, for the simple reason that American films and TV series are everywhere. In Slavic languages, bitch has displaced the imposingly inventive local repertoire of words with the same meaning.

Who knows where the word bitch was ripped from? Maybe from the phrase son of a bitch, where the word renounced its mother, abandoned its son, and shimmied off on its own carnivalesque conquest, elbowing all similar words aside. Bitch is not only an expression of familiarity among young women (nigger serves a similar function among young urban African-Americans), nor is bitch simply social, gender, and age-defiant American slang. Bitch is more than this.

The word’s global conquest came with the seal of approval of “third wave” American feminism, which grew out of the punk and hip-hop scenes and the eras of consumerism and the Internet. Bitch is most often used in reference to young women. Having adopted the slogan To Be Real, women thought it better to endow the word with a positive connotation rather than censor it. While Gloria Steinem united American feminists under the auspices of Ms. magazine, “third wave” feminists are associated with the magazine Bitch. Having rejected the assumption of a universal female identity built on the life experiences of middle-class white women, the mixed bag of “third wave” feminism contains many divergent schools of thought. All of these tendencies — the “Riot grrrl” movement, ecofeminism, transgendered feminism, queer culture, anti-racism, postcolonial theory, and traditional activism — are linked by a female perspective on the contentious issues of race, class, and sex.

So who, then, is a bitch? People say a bitch is a woman with a mind of her own and who isn’t afraid of speaking it loud and clear; a woman who knows what she wants and uses everything at her disposal to get it. A “bitch” would seem to have adopted the title of the popular American song “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets” as her catchphrase.

Everybody knows that the media — television, film, the Internet — is the most powerful promoter of images, ideas, ideologies, and trends, and that it shapes our consciousness. As a passionate devotee of Hollywood film, my mother became a smoker, emancipated by Hollywood stars. Today, only bad guys smoke on-screen, and everybody knows that a smoker is capable of anything.

When my mother was a teenager, there was no such thing as teenage popular culture. She didn’t have much option but to go to the cinema (most often on the sly), where she would dream away and identify with the great Hollywood stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to my mother’s cinephilia, and the same absence of teenage culture when I was growing up, my childhood pleasures came from books — and Hollywood films.

Today, the mass culture market is spectacularly diverse and caters to the needs of all consumer age groups; even impecunious children have become serious consumers. Children, teenagers, twenty-somethings, the middle-aged, each group has its own stars, although the boundaries have become uncannily porous and elastic. Take the notorious Sex and the City as an example: The show’s anorexic thirty-something women look like teenagers, put on teenage affectations, speak in squeaky anemic voices, and the problems of these seemingly self-confident urban women — embodied by Sarah Jessica Parker and her fellow heroines — appear to be almost identical to those of the average twelve-year-old girl — the twelve-year-old of our time course. Because, when I was a little girl, in the absence of richer and more entertaining cultural offerings, my hero was Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

In the dynamic, diverse, and generationally-divided world of popular culture, capturing every typological representation of women is no walk in the park. Representations frequently carry mixed messages, and patriarchal content is often packaged in emancipatory images. In the broad typology of female characters, of those with feminist pretensions only the “woman-warrior” seems to be truly emancipatory — the tough girl, the wonder woman, the action chick, all of which have spin-offs in various forms of popular culture. “Women-warriors” are generally first seen in comics and video games, then “spun-off” into films, television series, and genre novels (fantasy, gothic, etc.), before finally becoming products for the toy and souvenir industries. “Buffy” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a good example of a teenage “woman-warrior.” Buffy isn’t an adventurous type keen on hunting vampires, they’re right there for her at school. In contrast to the demure Buffy, Lara Croft is a real adventurer, a wealthy and athletic noblewoman, an archaeologist and expert in ancient civilizations and languages. A female Indiana Jones, Lara Croft was originally a video game character, before going on to appear in films (starring Angelina Jolie), comics, novels, and cartoons. Xena, Warrior Princess is a product of the tacky genre of historical fantasy. An Amazonian, Xena is a female version of Hercules, and although they never actually say that she’s Bulgarian, her battle cries sound like something out of a Bulgarian folk song. Bulgarian yelps and New Zealand landscapes make for a pleasant emancipatory cocktail. Played by Uma Thurman, the woman-warrior character from Tarantino’s Kill Bill is a mash-up born of Hong Kong cinema, spaghetti westerns, and Japanese Samurai films. More recently, the imaginary of popular culture has been colonised by mysterious and aggressive women warriors from visually striking Chinese films.

The emancipatory transformation of a woman is most explicit in the film Batman Returns, where Mousy Selina (Michelle Pfeiffer), a feminine, insecure, and demure secretary who lives in a world dominated by men, is transformed into the dangerous and seductive Catwoman (Life’s a bitch and so am I!). Cultural products with pretensions to seriousness such as the iconic film Thelma and Louise use the same principle of transformation — a woman goes from mouse-woman to cat-woman, from a woman in danger to a dangerous woman.

When I imagine my mother and her granddaughter, compare their cultures, and consider their formative influences and icons, the differences are striking. My mother’s formation was shaped by Hollywood films; her icons were Katherine Hepburn, Carol Lombard, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Joanna Crawford, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Monroe, and many others. When I watch those films today, I’m gobsmacked by the fact that the male and female characters appear as equals, above all because they converse as equal and intelligent human beings. Whenever I think about the eloquent and witty dialogues between Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, or between Cary Grant and his female partners, I’m dumbfounded by the humiliating fact that today’s supposedly emancipated female characters inevitably hold their tongues. And they hold their tongues because they evidently have nothing to say. The old Hollywood film and television scripts were predominantly written by men, and while the male-female relationships in them were clearly idealized, they concomitantly established an ideal standard of behavior between men and women. The absence of dialogue in contemporary films is stark proof of the humiliating absence of the need for dialogue.

For all that, it seems, at least in part, that female popular culture revolves less and less around men. Lara Croft and the heroine from Kill Bill are both solitary, independent “players” and barely differ from their male counterparts. Female culture is slowly becoming monological, as is male culture — the monologue being not only a confessional form, but also a form of domination over the listener. Women are slowly establishing this domination of the monologue in many spheres: in literature, in the genre of the personal memoir, in newspaper columns, in television shows, in contemporary art. Women are now “loose tongues,” “loudmouths,” “chatterboxes,” and “fishwives.” They have won the right to their monologues, to their “loose tongues,” although they’ll respond to that with the claim that a loose tongue was always the weapon of frustrated court jesters, fools, and of Scheherazade. They might be right about that, but they might also be wrong.

How women will use the position they have won both now and in the future is up to them. My only hope is that one of today’s female icons, Victoria Beckham, will have faded from the media horizon by the time my mother’s granddaughter begins imitating her female icons. Why single out VB from the multitudes like her? Because VB is notorious for saying that she’s never read a book in her life.

June 2008

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

In the closing scene of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford, reprising his role as Indiana Jones, responds to his son’s question about the meaning of the legend of the city of gold by explaining that the word gold translates as treasure. But the treasure wasn’t gold — it was knowledge. Knowledge is treasure, declares Indiana Jones, his gaze fixed towards the gold-tinged past, but also towards the future represented by his son. The film takes us back to the America of the 1950s and the McCarthy era, and in this respect the evil Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) is a worthy opponent. Having imbibed the slogan Knowledge Is Power with her communist milk, Irina remains loyal to that idea to the bitter end, paying for it with her head. The antagonism between Indiana Jones and Irina Spalko is actually false, because the same passion for knowledge draws both into the dangerous adventure of the film. But Irina is a woman, a communist, and, unlike Indiana, has no family, all of which makes the outcome of their battle clear from the outset.

I drank the slogan Knowledge Is Power with my socialist Yugoslav milk. Hand in hand with Greek mythology, as a child I swallowed the myths about communist leaders who crammed for hours on end, who from humble beginnings as poor village children became PhD scholars, polyglots, and “Great Men.” The story about Maxim Gorky, the orphan boy who read books by the light of the moon, was forever burned into my consciousness. Communist leaders posed for their portraits with glasses on their noses, the backdrop a symbolic row of books. The glasses were an incontestable sign of erudition. Tito also underwent a similar mythological transformation: from a poor village urchin, then a locksmith’s apprentice, he, in his turn, became a man with glasses on his nose.

Such images of glasses-wearing, book-loving communist leaders had a propaganda function and highly visible results. In Yugoslavia the spread of literacy among the people began with Partisan courses during the Second World War (bolstered by the legends of wizened old peasant women who learned to read and write). The popularization of education began in earnest, studying became accessible to all, and a network of “workers’ universities” and “evening schools” for adults was created. (Education in the workplace! was one of the more popular Yugoslav-era slogans). With the arrival of television sets to Yugoslav homes, and the production of educational programs for both adults and children, the education of the socialist masses went on apace. At the time, newspapers also had an educational character.

Abraham Lincoln, the self-educated American president, is one of the founding fathers of the educational-enlightenment myth in American culture. The propaganda-like and Enlightenment-inspired mythologizing of literacy and education and the right of citizens to education took hold in America long before they did in the short-lived Communist epoch. America created college culture and, along with it, campus films and television series, literature and fashion, rituals and customs, all of which are inseparable from this culture. In America the slogan Knowledge Is Power never lost its credibility and strength, Barack Obama being its new torchbearer.

In Yugoslavia the slogan Knowledge Is Power vanished before Yugoslavia itself did. “Workers’ universities,” evening schools, and educational programming on radio and television simply disappeared. Newspapers yellowed with scandal and pornography, and television became lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Writers became comedians and salespeople. Nationalism became an alibi for self-pronounced “avengers” hell-bent on knocking “Yugoslav” giants, literary and otherwise, from their pedestals — and I mean literally. In Croatia, the monuments to Nikola Tesla (because he was a Serb) and those of the sculptor Vojin Bakić (also a Serb) came crashing down, as did the monuments to Ivo Andrić (a Nobel Laureate in literature) in his homeland of Bosnia. In a moment of furious ethnic and ideological cleansing many books were tossed out of libraries, some ending up on bonfires.

On an October visit to New York in the run up to the 2008 US presidential election, I was invited to the Union Settlement Association in East Harlem, a visit organized by the Unterberg Poetry Center. Union Settlement is an American version of a “worker’s university.” I was the guest of an adult education program, which for many years has helped immigrants master both written and spoken English as efficiently as possible.

There were about two hundred people in the auditorium, and the program coordinator translated my English into Spanish. My audience consisted of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other immigrants whose first language was Spanish, men and women working tough physical jobs to put food on the family table. It wasn’t important to them where I was from; for them I had a symbolic value: I was a writer, and a female writer at that. I represented all the values my audience believed went hand-in-hand with a writer’s calling: erudition, courage, moral values, honesty, and a commitment to justice. For them I spoke a language that “recognizes no borders,” a language understood by all classes and all races. In short, I was a woman with glasses on my nose, and that night signed many books and shook many hands. I received a bouquet of flowers and, as a memento, a plush teddy bear. My throat tightened. Accepting the role they had bestowed upon me, I really did feel like a writer, though a bit like Rosa Luxemburg too.

Later, walking the New York streets armed with a bouquet of flowers and a teddy bear, I wondered why I had been so moved, and where all the soppy sentimentality had come from. Then I wondered how my countrymen, those semi-literate do-nothings, those Yugo-shitters and smart-asses, who get off on making jokes at the expense of others’ talent, knowledge, and work ethic, would have fared among those earnest Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, who still believed that literature can save the world. I wondered how those who used to taunt Ivo Andrić with “Hey, four-eyes, done your scribbling for the day?” would have fared, let alone those who still today get off on regurgitating the anecdote, thinking it oh-so-funny. Actually, it’s for the best that I couldn’t explain to the Mexicans where I was from, I thought to myself. I mean, what could I have said? That I come from a place where arrogance is a kind of unwritten etiquette, and ignorance a treasured human value? That I come from a place that cultivates disdain for every intellectual effort, a place where they understood the slogan Knowledge is Power literally, and, this being the case, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić set his cannons on the Sarajevo Library? That I come from a place where local politicians, criminals, liars, thieves, thugs, and murderers are models of courage, morals, honesty, and progress?

I gave the teddy bear to my six-year-old niece. When she’s a little older, I’ll tell her the story of how the teddy bear found its way to her, the story of impoverished immigrants who arrived in America with the belief that knowledge is the only real treasure. I’ll do everything I can to instill in her that same belief. She might say, “Thank you, Indiana Jones,” or “Thank you, Irina Spalko,” but that really doesn’t matter.

November 2008

THE HAIRDRESSER WITH THE POODLE

A homeland is a fact in a person’s private life just as a person’s place of birth and date of birth are facts. The encounter with the homeland begins at pre-school. One of the first things a child learns is the famous sentiment: My country is. . Here, at a tender age, begins the homeland briefing that lasts from the cradle to the grave. This briefing continues at school, through classes in the history, language, and literature of the land. The poets tell us that the homeland is the land of our grandfathers, our home and hearth, our native soil, amber waves of grain and eyes the color of the sea, the prairies, mountains and valleys, seas and plains, and other such things. Today, particularly from a broadly neo-liberal vantage point, all these thousands of patriotic verses — particularly the ones which urge expropriating the native hills, rivers and plains, hearth and home, sky and sun (my sky, my sun, my prairies and my mountains) can be read as a list of real estate holdings which were acquired under suspicious circumstances. Poets, of course, as proof of their right to this imaginary property, unfurl their direct ancestral line, claiming that the homeland is their mother, which, from a gender perspective, is discriminatory, but easy to understand. Homelands are generally mothers for their sons. Poetically inclined daughters seldom refer to their homeland as mother.

Whatever the case, the homeland and the state meld in an alloy, two concepts merged into one, a traditional marriage: the homeland — the female emotional charge; the state — the male rational side. The alloy comes more readily into focus after the first call to military service and the first tax bill. A divorce between homeland and state is not permissible, and the notion that the homeland might be a Utopian project is out of the question. So it is, for instance, that the poem by the Croatian poet S. S. Kranjčević (I have a homeland, I hold it in my heart, with all its hills and plains/Where will I spread out this Eden? In vain I ask the world, and choke back my pain) is interpreted in schools as a Croatian document confirming the exclusive Croatian copyright to hills, plains, pain, and Eden.

A person needs to trudge down a long and hard road on the way to figuring out how to relate to things, among them the homeland/state. Profound insights do not come dropping out of the sky like the roast chickens of fairy tales. When I left my homeland of Croatia, the one which had slipped out of my Yugoslav homeland, and turned up here in the Netherlands, my feelings were at first confused. I didn’t know how to think about homeland. And then — though this took some ten years of cogitation — I discerned within myself an unusual urge. As soon as I turned up in a new country or city, the first thing I’d look for is — a hair salon! My hair grows slowly, and I haven’t much to spare, so getting a haircut is not a high priority. When I go to the hairdresser’s, I don’t get all the bells and whistles, I just have it cut. So my neurotic urge to have my hair cut would be difficult to classify as simple female vanity.

I will not list all the cities and countries where I’ve had my hair cut, but as evidence of my competence I can say with a certainty that that the cheapest haircut currently available in New York City is at salons run by Uzbeks, no longer with the Russians the way it used to be a number of years ago. The able Uzbeks will cut your hair in Brooklyn for ten dollars. Not even the barbers in the Serbian town of Čačak will pick up a pair of shears for that kind of money.

I thought about what all this means, and I wondered whether my neurotic urge to get my hair cut in each new place I visit is a form of masochism or a ritual form of internal apology — apology for what I don’t know. In the Netherlands I long felt that I had been missing something. Yes, I had friends, a tax accountant, my own dental hygienist; I had mastered the many facets of ordinary life that made life more ordinary. Then, as a result of the deficit I mentioned earlier, I embarked on painful introspection, until at last I stumbled upon a moment of epiphany: my biography suddenly emerged as a chronicle of all my haircuts. In Amsterdam I have changed many hairdressers, the fancy ones, the famous ones, and the cheapest ones at the barbershops run by Moroccans, but none of these felt like a comfortable shoe on a weary foot. And then Liesbeth took over the hair salon in my neighborhood.

Liesbeth is a tall, large, young woman with a very pale complexion, who must have grown up on Dutch cheese and milk. Liesbeth has blue eyes and a slightly melancholic look, perhaps from her porcelain complexion. All in all, she has a charming face, which looks diminutive next to her vast posterior. It is difficult not to notice Liesbeth’s behind, especially because she prefers tight pants. Liesbeth has a different hairdo and hair color every time I see her. Sometimes she dyes her bangs platinum blue while the rest of her hair is black. Liesbeth knows that the hairdo of the proprietress is the best ad for a salon. She has a boyfriend every bit as large as she is, and the two of them are like young walruses; they adore each other, and together they adore a poodle. Liesbeth has the tiniest poodle in the world, the size of a squirrel, except that unlike a squirrel her poodle has a short tail. The poodle, unusually docile and adorable, never barks, or at least I have never heard it. It spends most of its days in a little basket that Liesbeth sets by the window, so that the poodle won’t be bored. It is a little odd that Liesbeth’s salon is always empty. I call in advance to make an appointment for a haircut, and she invariably hesitates a moment, consults her calendar, no, ten o’clock wouldn’t be so good, how about eleven. We go back and forth about the time, although I know that Liesbeth is free at ten and eleven, and whenever I want. Liesbeth’s salon is done up in bright colors, the door is violet, the door frames light green, the walls pink. Whenever I cycle by Liesbeth’s always empty street, I can see her out on the grassy patch in front of the salon walking her poodle on a slender leash. Liesbeth is large, the poodle is small. She looks as if she is walking a mouse. She and I speak of nothing but the haircut, whether I want it this way or that, shorter or longer. The conversations are pointless because she cuts my hair exactly the same way each time, and each haircut is every bit as bad as all the others.

I don’t know why, but sometimes a fear gnaws at me that Liesbeth, with her shears and her poodle, might vanish like a soap bubble one day. The murky stab of terror drives me to dial her number.

“When would you like. 11:00?”

“What about 12:00?”

“Sorry, that won’t work. 12:15?”

“OK.”

With a sigh of relief I hang up.

As far as hair is concerned, this is what I recently learned: In ancient cultures, the act of cutting the hair was a symbolic sacrifice for the good of the people. Through history long hair was worn by martyrs, hermits, the holy, kings, warriors, aristocrats, dignitaries. The servants and the underclass had short hair. Cutting hair was a ritual of obedience, sacrifice, grief, disgrace, punishment, and self-punishment.

After the long, painful, and geographically diverse experience I have gained traipsing through hair salons, the very essence of the homeland/state finally became crystal clear to me. Yes, I am the perfect subject! I am what every homeland-mother desires.

February 2009

A POSTCARD FROM BALI

The “postcard” is here a literary genre that presupposes three things: the presence of its author in a particular place, brevity, and randomness of content. The reality is that nowadays people send e-mails from Bali. The postcards I stumbled across in a small shop at a Bali resort reminded me of Eastern European ones, sixties-style. Back then, few had cameras, and digital cameras were in the distant, inconceivable future.

Postcards, frankly, just aren’t around anymore. What Bali has is Vespas: everyone’s got one. This makes traffic lights and gas stations few and far between, so they sell gas in plastic bottles, like homemade plonk. All in all, settlements on Bali have little in common with the European conception of urban planning; they are more like Slavonian village lanes, popping out one after the other like sausages: Kuta, Legian, Seminyak. . I was after 47 Raya Seminyak Street. It turned out that street numbers, if there are any, don’t mean a thing. Raya Seminyak Street actually has two number 47s, and for some reason none of the local residents, not even the traffic police, seem able to mentally internalize house numbers. Places are remembered by their function: one of the number 47s was some kind of store, the other a massage parlor.

This type of thing, like many other things, is the stuff of life off the resort. Because on Bali you have life on the resort and life off the resort. Tourists live on the resorts, the Balinese off. The Balinese go around grinning like Cheshire cats, while tourists’ lips seem firmly jammed together by invisible pegs; you first have to take the peg off and return the smile, which is pretty tiring if you’re out of practice. On Bali there’s a “Center for Laughter,” opened by a former-tourist-turned Bali resident. The woman decided to recoup the money she had invested in annual holidays and transform her annual holiday into a lifelong calling, passing on her smile know-how to incurable sourpusses. Bali is the “Island of the Gods,” and many here have experienced similar enlightenment, including Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the global bestseller Eat, Pray, Love—six million copies sold and counting. When the film version hits the cinema, a lot of women are going to be hurtling off to Bali in search of their happiness — and their Javier Bardem.

Joss sticks burn everywhere, and yearning for any kind of sensation, physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, everybody burns with them. The locals’ lives revolve around tourists, something I know a little about from my former homeland. I once saw a little boy in a small Adriatic town holding a plastic yogurt container with some water and a jellyfish in it, hollering: “Buy the jellyfish that stung you!” There are similarly ingenious hucksters here too. In a large opening in the rocks near Tanah Lot, an enterprising Balinese dressed as a Buddhist monk offers tourists their chance to stroke the head of a bulging, allegedly deadly, serpent-like creature. Like many tourists that day, I too stroked the head of the docile slow worm, leaving his owner a few rupees.

Balinese supermarkets reminded me of early communist supermarkets: frozen fish and meat, “Nivea” cream with the kind of obsolete packaging that’s no longer sold in Europe, a handful of symbolic products — English biscuits well past their expiration date, inedible Japanese rice crackers — just enough to satisfy a tourist who needs a fix of nutritional nostalgia. The cosmetics section, with all its skin-whitening creams and potions, was disconcerting to say the least.

Indonesia had its place in my childhood imaginary, albeit a humble one. As a little girl I eloquently pronounced the names Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru, and Sirimavo Bandaranaik; sarongs, skullcaps, and flowers in my hair were part of my childhood landscape. How so? Because of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Non-Aligned Movement brought exotic images to Yugoslavia — either they came to us, or Tito went to them—and Indonesian, Egyptian, Ceylonese, and Indian children waved their miniature flags, just like me.

There is a small well-integrated community of former Yugoslavs on Bali. Some came as hippies, others as hippies who missed the party the first time, and some as eager entrepreneurs. A woman from Korčula opened a sandwich shop, a guy from Belgrade is involved in tourism, and there are a few young Slovenians living as surfers, actively practicing life as permanent holiday. “Even God forgot me,” said one of my countrywomen who has lived here for the past eighteen years. Given where we were (Bali is the “Island of the Gods,” right?), the melancholy of her sentence was hard to process, particularly in light of Elizabeth Gilbert’s diametrically opposed experience.

In complete contrast to Elizabeth Gilbert, I didn’t go to Bali for self-discovery, but to briefly forget who and what I am. I didn’t experience self-discovery in the form of a charming Brazilian businessman like she did, but self-discovery didn’t completely pass me by either. Each to her own, I guess. My self-discovery was waiting for me on the hotel courtyard’s bookshelf, which was full of books other guests had left behind. Seeing the covers, with their large embossed gold letters, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything to read, let alone one of my own books. Dan Brown, Elias Khoury, Danielle Steel. . there were also a few Russian books by writers I’d never heard of, which just means that the Russians had made it to Bali too. I took out Dmitri Gluhovski’s novel Metro 2033. The entire world is in ruins, humanity is devastated, Moscow polluted by radiation and inhabited by monsters. The few surviving humans hide in the Moscow underground, where terror and hopelessness reign. Artiyom, the hero, makes his way through the entire underground in order to save his metro station, and perhaps the whole of humanity with it.

On the last page of the book — I only managed to read a small snippet — I stumbled upon a written appeal. The book’s publisher and members of the Russian PEN organization announced the establishment of a “Warm Heart” fund and asked readers to send in donations to support down-and-out contemporary Russian writers. They desperately need your help, the appeal read. There are well-known authors among the writers, war veterans (from the Second World War), and former camp inmates who these days literally can’t put food on the table. By my reckoning, half a million readers would have read the appeal, about the same number as the book’s print run. Optimistically, I thought that if those half-million had left the book behind somewhere, on a park bench, in a café, in the metro, or in a resort like this one on Bali, the real numbers could be off the charts.

To cut a long story short, I jotted down the bank account number. Instead of buying Elizabeth Gilbert’s illuminating chronicle of self-discovery, I decided to send the equivalent sum to the writers who’ve discovered the very bottom of their useless profession. Because I also have a “heart.” What’s more, it seems that it’s still “warm.”

June 2010

BATTLE ROYALE

Everyone understands the IKEA thing: you get caught once, you’ll go back to the scene of the crime. Somebody calculated that no one has ever been to IKEA and walked out with less than five items. I tried it once. Before heading in I swore to myself that I wouldn’t buy anything, but I ended up at the check-out with a candle, two small wooden hooks, a packet of paper serviettes, a rubber placemat, and a little green plastic flower. I felt like a kleptomaniac. Even if I’d have gotten past the check-out empty-handed, I would have caved at the little food section near the exit and bought a jar of Swedish cranberry jam, dry Wasa crackers, a bad coffee from the machine, and the kind of crappy hotdog I only ever buy at IKEA, and in the streets of New York, which is of course a completely different story.

What’s so irresistible about IKEA? Some guru pretender said that IKEA is about being, not buying, and it’s true — IKEA is set up like a cozy simulation game for adults. Parents can leave their children in the IKEA playground, have something to eat in the IKEA restaurant, stroll through the enormous display rooms, and then there are the ubiquitous pencils, pads, and tape measures, which transform potential buyers into master craftsmen and craftswomen, measurers of length, width, and height, into builders and designers. There are those well-marked arrows on the floor, gently coaxing us through the IKEA labyrinth to the exit. Admittedly, there are no signs for shortcuts; they’re for our sense of orientation to figure out. From the display rooms we automatically end up in the IKEA self-service warehouse, pushing shopping carts that are just waiting to be filled, all the while following the guiding arrows to the check-out and exit. At IKEA everything is welcoming and accessible; IKEA doesn’t rub our social status in the dirt. At IKEA we buy the feeling that things are under our control — we do the measuring and choosing, we assemble the furniture, we take the responsibility. IKEA doesn’t underrate our intelligence; IKEA makes us an equal player: IKEA gives our self-confidence wings. At IKEA we don’t feel disqualified for a second, with IKEA the word impossible is eternally deleted from our dictionary.

The game is, without doubt, deeply embedded in our brains, our instincts, reflexes, and behavior; that’s why we buy toys, proudly showing them off to one another. This reflex — visible even in one-year-old babies, who’ll push every button they can find — remains with us until our last breath. We adults also push buttons on a daily basis: on the remote control, television, radio, VCR, computers, elevators, home intercoms, ovens, lamps, mobile phones, and bank machines. We’ve wised up: we know that as soon as we forget to push a button, that’s when the trouble starts.

That’s why today’s banks look like Internet cafés. That seems to be why ABN-AMRO, the biggest Dutch bank, refurbished its branch in downtown Amsterdam: there are no tellers or employees anymore, just computers — every client serves him- or herself. Today, we serve and look after ourselves in all kinds of ways: we organize our own travel, book our flights and hotels, do our own banking, pay our bills, make our own diagnoses, figure out on our own whether garlic or green tea is better for reducing high blood pressure. We pick out and try on clothes ourselves, because there’s no one to give us any advice; we are left completely to our own devices when we buy technical gadgets, the youthful assistants usually clueless. We communicate with invisible service centers, which then refer us to their websites to find the information needed to solve our problem. We’ve become self-sufficient, the term has entered our dictionaries and it’s intent on sticking around forever.

The greatest erosion of our self-confidence and our strongest internal protest are not caused by our social, sexual, racial, national, physical, age, fashion, or any other kind of incompatibility, but by a button, the symbolic button that — if touched incorrectly — will disqualify us from the game. We didn’t make it into the packed tram; we locked our keys inside, having slammed the door behind us; we forgot to charge our mobile phones; we didn’t bring our glasses; the key got stuck in the lock; we didn’t turn the alarm on; we don’t know how to turn the alarm off; we parked the wrong way, and there’s a ticket waiting for us on the windshield; the computer crashed and we didn’t back up in time — all of these, and thousands of similar details, result in internal emotional upheavals whose intensity is completely disproportionate to whatever provoked them.

At the beginning of January 2011 I was supposed to travel to New York and participate in a roundtable discussion. New York is a city I love, I’ve been there numerous times, and from the moment I land at John F. Kennedy Airport I enjoy every second.

At Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, checking my passport and ticket, the check-in person asked me:

“And where’s your ESTA form?”

It turned out that the ESTA form — Electronic System for Travel Authorization — is a new bureaucratic obstacle to be negotiated in order to gain permission to travel to the USA. The clerk advised me to complete the form on the special computers there at the airport. Filling out the form on a pokey little screen, with a ball-shaped mouse that was hard to move and kept getting stuck, following less than clear instructions, and anxious that I’d be late for my flight, it was no walk in the park. The guy at the computer next to me seemed to be making good progress.

“How’s it going?” I asked, hoping he might help me.

“I’ve been hunched here for an hour and I’m still at the beginning,” said the man jumpily.

I approached the airport’s KLM hostesses.

“The machines aren’t under our jurisdiction,” they said.

“Whose jurisdiction are they under then?”

“The Americans’.”

“Is there anyone who can help me?”

“No, the details you enter on the form are strictly confidential,” they said.

“How can they be confidential when I’ve got to supply them when I check in?!”

“Yes, but you’ve got to fill the form out yourself, unassisted.”

“Like packing my own luggage, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

Although I knew negotiations with these Dutch clerks would come to nothing, I persisted.

“What if the person traveling is blind, illiterate, or has never seen a computer screen in his or her life?

“Those kinds of people don’t usually travel,” the tall blonde KLM hostess brushed me off.

I gave filling the form in another two or three tries, then gave up and headed home. The organizers kindly agreed to change my flight to the following day, so I sat down enthusiastically at my computer, found the ESTA form on the American Embassy’s website, breezed through filling it in, and paid the requisite fee by credit card. A slightly worrying message appeared on the screen saying that I’d get an answer within seventy-two hours, but sometime after midnight the permission arrived.

In the morning I set off again for Schiphol. The check-in clerk went through my documents.

“You’ve put your passport number in wrong!” she said.

And really, a mistake had snuck in.

“What shall I do?”

“Try to correct the mistake on the computer. . let’s hope it’ll be entered into the system before check-in closes. .”

Sweat ran down my spine, my heart pounded. The ball-shaped mouse was unresponsive and a message kept popping up saying that my session had expired. The program kept sending me back to the beginning, deleting everything I’d entered in the process. The young guy at the computer beside me was sweating through it too.

I replayed these twin episodes in my head, hoping I might find a detail to reassure me that it wasn’t entirely my fault. But it was: I was the one who didn’t find out about the new rules on time; if I had, I would have known that I couldn’t travel without authorization, and then, when given a second chance, I was the one who filled out the form incorrectly. I felt hopelessly disqualified. The KLM staff were right: such people don’t travel. Crestfallen, I went home. The organizers didn’t get in touch again, and even my closest friends felt no pity for me. A logical and justifiable disqualification had come my way.

In totalitarian systems nothing was tailored to the individual, nor did the system depend on him or her, a hostile, invisible state apparatus controlled everything. The individual navigated through his or her little life by making adjustments, by cunning, hypocrisy, corruption, haggling, compromise, bribery, and God-knows-what else. The individual could blame all his or her troubles on the cruelty of the system. What’s more, in totalitarian systems disqualification was often fatal. People lost their lives in prisons and camps, and their being “unaccommodated” also often meant the suffering and death of those close to them.

The controversial and unrelentingly brutal Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), directed by Kinji Fukasaku (based on the eponymous novel by Koushun Takami), is set in a Japan of the future, which is in the throes of a severe economic crisis. As part of the state’s economic revitalization program, the army kidnaps a class of Japanese secondary school students and takes them to an abandoned island, which serves as the setting for a monstrous “Battle Royale.”

The students, who had set off thinking they were going on a class trip, are forced to participate in a game on which their survival depends. Fitted with dog collars, which are both listening devices and timed explosives, they are given “survival kits,” some of which contain useful objects such as a knife or a revolver, while others include little more than a saucepan lid. Whoever eliminates all the other players wins the game, which is being monitored on army computer screens. One couple, a boyfriend and girlfriend, disqualify themselves from the game by committing suicide. Some kill to defend themselves or their partners, and others discover that they enjoy killing games. The teacher, murderer, and, obviously, creator of the game, leaves the students a simple ideological message: Life is a game!

In non-totalitarian systems everything is transparent and tailored to the individual. Accordingly, the individual only has him- or herself to blame for their personal failures. Disqualification from the game is, of course, temporary. The fact that there are millions of disqualified people in the world doesn’t make our hearts bleed, and in any case, why would it? We haven’t been eliminated from the game, they have. We’re in there, boxing along, surfing and navigating, our computers sending out little bleeps to announce new messages. Our telephones and PINs are fully functional, money machines spit out fresh bills at the touch of a button, our answering machines are switched on, agencies send us ads for cool holidays, we get invitations to do this or that, department stories send us stuff about upcoming sales, hotels offer cheap off-season deals, our diaries and day planners have our dental hygienist appointments, hair appointments, and yoga lessons, our mobile phones buzz impatiently, our fingers caress the little buttons. No way, we’re not disqualified, the race is still on, the game still in play. .

January 2011

ASSAULT ON THE MINIBAR

I’ll put my cards on the table: over the years my statistical sample has become a substantial one. I can reliably claim that in the matter to follow, the quantity of experience really does determine the quality of the assessment. Every new experience just reconfirms the rule — and I had a new experience recently. .

At the reception desk I filled in all the necessary details and got the key. Before I headed off to my room the receptionist asked:

“Would you like to open a hotel account?”

“What’s that?”

“It means that you don’t have to pay for everything you have or use in the hotel immediately, you just give your account number.”

I declined. What do I want with a hotel account? I’m only here for three days. Breakfast is included, and most of the time I’ll be out and about.

The room was large, luxurious, and had that fresh new smell. The furniture was certainly brand-new, the bathroom enormous, and the heavy windows opened gracefully with the touch of a button.

I hadn’t even gotten around to unpacking my things when I heard a knock at the door.

“Can I help you?” I asked the young porter.

“Sorry, but I have to lock the minibar.”

“Why?”

“Because you didn’t open a hotel account,” he said, before heading for the minibar, locking it, and leaving.

All of a sudden I felt the blade of the invisible sword of injustice pressing on the back of my neck. I don’t even use minibars. Alcohol doesn’t agree with me; I don’t like greasy stale crisps; I hate any kind of peanuts; candy bars of uncertain origin aren’t my thing; random bottled liquids inevitably give me heartburn; and carbonated non-alcoholic drinks are just plain bad for your health. The bottom line is that a minibar doesn’t have anything I’d ever want. So why did I feel so humiliated? Just because the bellboy locked the minibar? Did he put a padlock on the shower, the bathroom tap, the TV remote, the toilet seat? He didn’t. Rationalizing it, comforting myself with thoughts of the palatial bed or a hot shower, nothing helped. I was inconsolable. It was just the hopeless sense of deprivation.

They say that a German company called Siegas first manufactured the minibar. But apparently we’ve got the visionary mind of hotel executive Robert Arnold to thank for its ubiquity. As Wikipedia reliably informs us, Arnold was on a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong in 1974 when he spotted miniature bottles of alcohol for the first time. Arnold ordered a supply of the bottles and his employer, the local Hilton, took a gamble on the honesty of its guests. Honesty minibars are what they called them. A few months later, word spread in the hotel world that the minibars in the Hong Kong Hilton had increased turnover on alcoholic drinks by about 500 percent, and from then on minibars were part of the furniture in every hotel in the world. All thanks to Robert Arnold and an epiphany inspired by a quick glance at a tiny bottle. It might seem by the by, but similar miniature bottles were sold in the watering holes of my former homeland. Their devotees lovingly called them “kiddies.”

And this is actually the point: love. Minibars are all about love. Let’s think about it: What is, in actual fact, a minibar? A minibar is designed as a dollhouse for grown men. Men love their “kiddies.” A hip flask, the teenage dream of today’s seventy-year-old, was known as a “buddy.” Kiddie, buddy, minibar — they’re all diminutives for a guilty something. Guilt in the diminutive is not guilt; it’s the simulation of guilt. And therein lies the unique psychotherapeutic effect of the minibar.

For many a lonely businessman, the minibar is a symbolic substitute for home. Getting back to your room, opening the little fridge door, popping open a bottle of beer, flopping down into an armchair and putting one’s feet up on the table — it’s a ritual deeply ingrained in the imaginary, even of those who don’t come home, open the fridge, and take a beer.

The minibar is also designed as a first-aid kit. Even if you’ve never used it, the thought of your home first-aid kit makes you feel safe and protected. That’s why some minibars also have condoms. “Buddies” to protect you from “kiddies.”

The minibar is also a kind of temple, a place where we come face-to-face with the metaphysical. In a hotel room you wake from a nightmare. Surrounded by the indifferent darkness, there’s no one to hug and comfort you. The minibar gives off a dull (transcendent) light, bottles and bags stand contritely upright, as if in a chapel. The minibar radiates serenity. In the terrifying darkness of the hotel room this lit-up display acts like apaurin. Everything is OK, I’m back in reality — the nightmare is over.

This psychodramatic riddle — home, guilt, first aid, temple — is solved at the reception desk when you check out. The answer is the final and finale-like question that every receptionist asks every guest in every hotel of the world: “Did you have anything from the minibar?” At that moment the guest senses the painful prick of metaphysical guilt. An honesty minibar? In some hotels the maids audit the contents of the minibar every morning, restocking it as they go, making the question superfluous. Nonetheless, all receptionists ask it — and they all ask it with that same snippy interrogative tone. The guest’s rage begins to swell. Not only did you pre-pay for the room, not only did you pay for overpriced coffee in the hotel bar, not only did you pay for this, that, or the other thing, but you then have put up with a lowly receptionist humiliating you with an honesty test. Nothing’s free in life. No argument there. But why oh why is the cost so high?!

The minibar is an expensive escapade, just like a psychoanalytic séance. The minibar perpetuates the same psychoanalytic model. Hence the receptionist’s authoritarian tone, hence the sniffing around your room and inspection (of your minibar!) in your absence, hence your righteous rage at this mind-numbing display of power. In this psychoanalytic séance the receptionist turns into an authoritarian mother or father, into your boss at work, the police, an institution of power with which there can be no negotiation. For God’s sake, you could pinch the towels, the bathrobes, the table lamp, remove the hand basin and shower taps, and make off with the lot scot-free, but the thought doesn’t help. They pin you to the wall over a piddly bottle of bad vermouth and a rancid bag of crisps.

I don’t know whether hotel staff read Internet forums. It’s enough to type in “minibar” and private armies of the aggrieved assemble, many waging personal guerrilla wars. Did you know that there are people who pee into empty beer bottles, jam the lids back on, and put them back in the minibar? Did you know that some people plaster the base of bottles with hairspray, stick them back down in the fridge, and leave the next person to desperately try to pry them loose? Did you know that if you don’t check the minibar as soon as you get into the room, they’re likely to sting you for a half-empty bottle of beer someone snuck into your fridge? Or how’s this: There are even minibars with built-in sensors that clock every movement and change in weight, so that if you don’t put the bottle or the chips back within ten seconds you have to pay for them, no matter what. I mean, who wouldn’t get in a huff? They’re busy trying to pull a quickie on you, while, at the same time, demanding your honesty. They’ve got it in for you in advance — you’re a thief, a grifter, and a boozehound. The minibar is a symbol of the totalitarian world. And by the way — can you be sure that at the pearly gates St. Peter isn’t going to welcome you with the question: “Did you take something from a minibar and not pay for it?” and then, depending on your answer, send you to a heavenly hotel with one, three, or seven stars?

In my native language the word “minibar” contains a number of other words. Two of them are critical here: rab or rob, which means “slave,” and mina, which means “mine”—as in “land mine.” The minibar is a psychoanalytic minefield, for as soon as you cross its path you’ve immediately become a slave. Today, when almost every totalitarian system has exploded (OK, fine, it’s more that they imploded), the minibar is totalitarian shrapnel snugly nestled into a cosy space that’s devoid of all ideology — the hotel room. The minibar is the last bastion of totalitarianism, its invisible nest. Struggle against the minibar is possible, but only as a personal guerrilla action.

So, getting back to the hotel I mentioned at the start, this is my confession: I launched the assault on the minibar in room 513. I wrestled it into the bathroom. I defaced it with the hotel key, scratching Death to the Minibar! into its smooth surface. I threw it in the bath tub, and I turned on the tap. And finally, when the receptionist asked, “Did you have anything from the minibar?” I replied: “I wouldn’t be caught dead!” We need to put our heads together. If hotels know how to put sensors in their minibars, they’ll soon figure out a way of charging us for the mere thought that we might fancy a little something.

And that’s why, next time around, I’m planting a mine under the minibar.

January 2010