Our Good Friend Yugo

Maaarijaa come onnn!! Deki was yelling out to my window from the street, leaning on his white Yugo and reaching in through the window to honk, in his shiny-fluorescent-red tracksuit and rave shades, with trance blasting as loudly as it was possible with the car’s humble sound system. The tracksuit was sent from his uncle in Germany, making it very cool, regardless of the black two-headed eagle emblem, just like the one on the Albanian flag.

It was 8 AM and he had partied all night in a city in the north of Serbia but he was conscientious enough to leave for Belgrade and drive fast enough to make it in time to compete at the hair show at Hotel Yugoslavia. I was his “model”. I ran down and, before leaving, we did our usual synchronized Yugo shake – Deki stands on one side of the Yugo, I stand on the other, and we sway the car back and forth to hear how much gas is juggling inside. Yugo gas meters never worked and were impossible to repair.

We rushed over the bridge, crossing the Sava River onto New Belgrade and were in front of good old proud Hotel Yugoslavia in no time. With not as many cops and traffic on the streets of Belgrade as there are today, the Yugo was great for bringing us everywhere in time. We entered shabby Yugoslavia and walked through the dark hallways of what had been considered to be the most prestigious hotel in the Balkans, with a few shattering lights greeting us, to the room reserved for us and the hairdo. It was one of those rooms where Queen Elisabeth II, Nixon and Tina Turner would have stayed when visiting Tito’s great country in the 70’s and 80’s. It too was dark and shabby.

Deki did a few of his tricks and shortened my “model” hair even more, I painted my face with drastic make-up and we went to the show hall. As I walked the stage, everyone seemed to like my boy look, and Deki enjoyed himself mocking and making faces at me. The more I “modeled”, the more I resembled a boy, and all that seemed to matter at the time was to have fun while satisfying Deki’s strict boss, a coked out 40-something-year-old and the owner of the salon where he worked. Neither Deki or I ever earned any cash competing and presenting at these hair shows.

***

It’s 2 PM, following a successful hair show. A guy in a shiny-fluorescent-red tracksuit and rave shades and a girl with short white hair, black eye makeup and punk clothes are leaning on a white Yugo in front of Hotel Yugoslavia. The sun, fortified in the midst of New Belgrade’s communist blocks where shade is scarce, is melting the girl’s cakey and over exaggerated makeup. The guy is also sweating severely under his cool polyester outfit.

What are they scheming?

***

We decided it was useless to go home, rest until the evening and meet up again. We hopped into the Yugo, put on a psychedelic trance tape and let the fun begin. After a stop to the gas station for beers, we headed to our usual parking lot, where I would practice driving. Deki considered the Yugo to be sort of like a drivers’ boot camp. He would always say that the best drivers learnt how to drive on a Yugo and that, if I learned all of the tricks on a Yugo, it will make any other vehicle a piece of cake. We parked the car to drink a beer and relax a bit. He was giving me some pointers on parking as I noticed two cops approach us. We turned down the music. What a pain. They rarely ever approached us for something substantial and it seemed like too nice of a day to chitchat with them, especially since we were looking to save up the little cash we had for beers in the evening, not waste it on bribes.

“Good day”, they looked at us as if they were on to something. “Can we see your license and registration?”

It was a good thing Deki and I hadn’t swapped seats yet. He had me hold on to his beer as he searched for the documents and handed them to the fatter cop.

“So, what are the two of you doing here?” –the other one asked.

“Uh, you know, we just thought we’d enjoy the sun, hang out… the usual…” Deki responded nervously hoping the cop would stop gazing into the beers I was holding.

“Open your trunk.”

As the fat and the fatter cop shuffled the messy trunk, we rolled our eyes. This annoying procedure was a standard way for to get us to pay up when in hurry or simply looking to avoid embarrassment in front of a girl. This would have been the 30^th time that the Yugo was undergoing such an exhaustive search and Deki and I were too good of friends to be embarrassed by this situation so we silently agreed on not giving them the cash. 45 minutes later, the fatter cop was sweatier than polyestered Deki and pissed that we had all the time in the world for their “procedure”. His red dripping face crawled in through the window.

“Next time, take her home to fuck her. It must be rather uncomfortable here,” he said as he returned Deki's papers.

Like a pair of angry chubby boys disappointed about not getting the candy they had been anticipating, they trotted off to their Yugo 101 Skala and drove off. The finishing touch of their performance, the degrading childish line, left us in numb shock. It was the type of shock you would get from the behavior of a person, who you know pretty well but disliked, who you thought would not be able to shock you anymore than they already had, but they still manage to. Time after time.

We watched the sun set behind Belgrade, poured down a couple of more beers, and decided it was not the day for me to practice driving. “Besides”, Deki was now arguing a contradictory yet equally valid Yugo theory to the one he had been selling an hour before, “if you learn how to drive on this Yugo, you will have trouble shifting gears on other cars”. Every Yugo has its own way of handling the stick shift and, more often than not, the first and reverse gears are particularly challenging and require extra strength and special angles in entering. Every owner is the master of his/her own stick shift and it is difficult to get accustomed to others after.

***

It was finally getting dark. Our time to shine. We drove over to Ivana’s and picked her up. Now when I look back at Deki’s white Yugo days, all I remember is excitement. The night after the parking lot incident with the cops was no different, no special. We drank, laughed, talked, smoked, mocked each other, danced, stuck our heads out the windows singing from the top of our lungs (to tracks blasting as loudly as it was possible from a Yugo). It was one of those moods that would make Ivana and I blow kisses at random drivers in cars around us. Bored cab drivers, lonely men and women, other careless youth like us. Blowing the kisses seemed to have a wonderful impact on everyone, confusion and surprise on their side, fun and spontaneity on our side.

The bastardly cops, the absurd hairshows and ridiculous hairdo’s, the coked-out boss, the messed up country and the shitty car couldn’t have mixed better. It was an accidental film for us to cast in as teenagers, a film full of mistakes and adaptations. And, for us, this life worked perfectly. Just like Deki’s white Yugo.

"Super-duper-natural"

Yesterday, I went to a festival called Supernatural, where the point was to promote sustainability through amusement with various band and DJ performances. In order to enter, we had to swap 3 cans, 3 plastic bottles and 3 magazines for 1 ticket. Everything seemed so idyllic, the Kosutnjak forest was full of beautiful people throwing frisbee and playing badminton to electronic music. However, as the day unveiled, it started getting colder, the happy pretty people got drunker and the green surfaces turned gray. Covered with trash.

"Well, they're going to have people clean it all up afterward either way", a friend of mine tried to make me feel better.

That's not the point. If one of the goals was to acquaint the Serbian youth with one of the easiest forms of waste management, then why was it difficult to set up recycling bins apart from the ones behind the bars and the one set that I spotted at the very entrance of this large two-stage festival? Moreover, water was only sold in plastic bottles and the bartenders were given orders to pour it out of the plastic bottles into plastic cups. I saw the bartenders dispose the original drink beverages - cans, water bottles, juice boxes and other glass bottles - into recycling bins but what about all of the plastic cups? I found myself having to put them down on the grass upon finishing each and I am not sure if the cups that covered the grass by the end of the night were recycled. Regardless, we generated much more waste than needed.

I felt like a fool walking my way out of the forest and to the bus stop. This, too, was one of the ways to decrease waste. A great one, I must say. The festival was made to be inaccessible by cars and the visitors were pushed to walk to and from the party in the beautiful spring weather. As much as it "added to the experience" on the way there, it felt rather silly on the way back.

Thank you forest, I've trashed you, and now I am walking home to feel good about it all.

The Virtual Take Over

This is a short film by Patrick Jean, titled Pixels. It's about 8-bit icons from the 80's spreading across New York City. This is how I feel when I spend too much time on the computer. 

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Independent web videos.

I'll have some ash in my pancakes, please.

This week, Grandma treated me with her wonderful pancakes! The occasion? My 87-year-old grandparents have only two friends - a couple of the same age - with whom they organize Sunday lunches at each others' houses. It's exhausting, boring and often frustrating. Boba, the male friend, usually falls asleep within the first five minutes of sipping the aperitif, wakes up to groggily move over to the dining room to eat, and falls back asleep shortly after.

Nonetheless, this tradition gives my grandparents, and probably the other couple as well, something to prepare for, something to plan, and something to gossip about after.

The pancakes that Grandma spent Sunday morning making and that ended up as a treat for my coworkers were in fact intended for Boba and Jovanka. Grandma called me around noon to ask me to pick up the pancakes as there had been a sudden change in plans. The Sunday lunch that had not been skipped in a decade was not happening. Boba and Jovanka were not coming.

After a dramatic pause called for by the sudden shift in my heart from being excited for the pancakes to worrying about my grandparents' only friends, I gathered the courage to ask: "...why?"

"Boba is afraid of the volcanic ash cloud! He won't walk out of the house, you know him." - We simultaneously burst into hysterical laughter. Secretly feeling at ease, I told her I'd be there in 10 minutes.

Born in 1922 in Belgrade, my grandparents and their friend Boba witnessed a lot throughout their lives - the Nazi occupation followed by the "liberation" carpet bombing, the often kind and sometimes very unkind communist rule, Milosevic's rule, sanctions, embargo, the second highest hyperinflation in world's history, the NATO bombing, the October 5th revolution and countless additional life complications - all to be lucky enough to be healthy and alive at the age of 87.

Why on Earth is Boba worrying about volcanic ash?

The names mentioned in this blog entry are fictional based on real characters.

France in Springtime - Tecktonik Everywhere

I am looking forward to catching more Tecktonic dancers with funky outfits and Mohawk hairdos on the streets of Lyon, for May Day (International Workers' Day) holidays. Tecktonic is a relatively young street dance, originating in the Parisian suburbs in the 2000's, consisting mostly of arm movement. It's static in the sense that the feet do not move as much as in other forms of dance, yet so hectic that it is difficult to tell what the dancer is actually doing (I realized this when secretly trying to replicate in front of a mirror at home). It's surprising how much our arms can twist and twirl!

Here's the video for A Cause Des Garcons by YELLE with Tecktonic in it (you can download the original version of this song, along with 3 remixes in a zip file, here):

The creators of this dance (two guys are considered as creators because they catalyzed the movement by organizing massive Tecktonic parties, hosting 8000 people at a time) actually copyrighted it and made Tecktonic into a trademark. Tecktonic has "grown" from a street dance to an industry, offering many branded products from t-shirts and backpacks to energy drinks and Play Station games.

However, this witty way of making money has been criticized for robbing the youth of its movement. "When you're young, you dance to tell your parents 'I'm a free man! I've got my sexuality, my desires and they aren't yours!' You dance to express your freedom! But, here, it's not this kind of dance. Because it's a commercial dance. It's a safe dance. No sex, no drugs, no alcohol… It's anti-rock 'n' roll! It's a Sarkozy dance!" - says Vincent Cespedes, a young French philosopher and writer, for BBC News.

Knitting 101: The Product

Meet Zucha, my life-long friend, modeling the very first scarf that I knitted for my baby niece. Who is going to wait for winter to wear this chic one-of-a-kind sustainable piece of art?

And here is a better view of the stitches, loose and messy, but not bad for a first timer and the thick colorful thread allows for imperfection. Start with thicker threads!

Knitting 101

I spent the day learning how to knit from my friend's grandma. Here are some of the reasons why I am already addicted:

• The more "trades" you learn, the happier you will be. I just cured a kidney infection, which impacted me psychologically more than anything. I had to lay in bed for over a week (the only "walks" allowed were to the restroom). The fever, pain and nausea were so exhaustive that I had trouble comprehending whatever I attempted to read or watch. I keep thinking about how knitting would have given me a sense of productivity and a way to to pass the slow monotone days. 

• My friend's grandma who is teaching us to knit has been successfully battling dementia through knitting and sewing. I believe this as I've witnessed it, but this is not an unexplored therapy method - here's an article that explains how knitting, and other similar cognitive activities, can be linked to the delay of memory loss. 

• I know very few people my age (early twenties) who know how to knit. This gives me the feeling that, by the time we all become grandparents, knitting will be a virtually forgotten skill and hand-knitted products will probably be so rare that they will become valued and cool.

• The scarf I am making for my 1-year-old niece is going to be one of a kind and she is way too special to be bumping into random babies wearing the same outfit as her.  

• Through knitting, I will be spending more time with my friend's grandma and there is quite a lot to hear and learn from her.

I love knitting and so will you!