Gem is Truly Outragious

Dora and I had house guests this weekend. Jamie and Pete came in from London and we all spent a few days wandering about the city. They have been fabulous house guests, and if they ever read this, please know that Dora and I hope you will visit more often. I know we will try to get up to see you in the near future.

Showing the city to guests gave me the opportunity to consider Budapest from the perspective of an outsider for the first time in few years, and this weekend I was struck, once again, by a certain something about Budapest.

Say you’re a curious traveler walking through the smaller streets of Budapest’s Seventh District. It’s got some nice old turn-of-the-century buildings and a few cobblestone streets, but for the most part the place is ragged at the edges. It is clear on these streets that Budapest is a once-great city that has slipped slowly into disrepair. Perhaps you will leave Budapest and go tell your friends back home that this is a nice little burg, but still a far cry from its former glory.

Interestingly, if you had been less curious and stuck to the more-maintained Castle District or the walking streets near the river, you’d head back swearing up and down that Budapest was a cultural gem preserved with the tenderest of care.

If, however, before you decided to explore the district that once housed the Jewish Ghetto, you thought to ask an honest concierge or an English-speaking resident where to go or what to visit, then you might be lucky enough to stumble into one of the places that illustrates just how subtlety Budapest has linked its past, present, and future. For reasons that are difficult to explain, this city is keeping its real recovery a secret.

The places have unobtrusive signs hung over non-descript doors: Lampas or Szimpla. (In other districts the entrances are the same but the names change: West Balkan or Pot Kulcs) If no one told you where to look, you would walk right by. If you were told where to look, however, then you would step into the Budapest only spoken about in hushed tones, a Budapest full of lively bars filled with young people and artists, a Budapest where folk musicians open for rockabilly blues bands, a Budapest where video art and cutting-edge paintings adorn the walls of pubs, a Budapest where classic movies are shown on the brick walls of vacant buildings.

While the government, UNESCO, and private investors renovate the tourist attractions in an effort to make the city more lucrative, the citizens here are working to make the city more livable.

It’s a slow process. There is an ongoing effort to teach people to clean up after their dogs (and themselves). The homeless don’t have any significant support system, so they sit on the street and drink the days away. The political situation is a disaster, and the economy could use a jump start. Still, the young people wanted a vibrant scene they can call their own, and they’ve built it on the ruins of a once great city. Artists wanted unique places to display their work, and they’ve hunted through the abandoned courtyards and cellars to find those places. Musicians wanted to play for a young excited crowd, and they’ve built stages in the tiniest corners of the city – covered the walls in spray-painted egg-cartons to dampen the sound – and started playing music to people who feel like they are in on a special little secret.

Budapest may be a far cry from its former glory, but something precious remains; even if the word gem, with all its showy connotations, fails to depict the source of that nature.

Good Question

Kelsey Madges is an old friend of mine who also keeps a blog. Our subject matter doesn’t cross paths very often, but our reasons for writing are similar. We’re both keeping friends and family abreast on our lives.

Anyway, she wrote me recently and asked an interesting question, and I thought I’d address it here.

She asked: “What do you think about the idea that what people think of America(ns) comes largely from our exported media? Can better communication between cultures at a younger age make a difference?”

I believe that for me to best address this question I should start with the song that has been stuck in my head for the past three days. The artist is Akon, and the song is titled “Smack That.” While the catchy nature of the tune is a credit to its producer, the lyrics make me angry. I mean that literally; when I hear them I actually wish physical harm upon their singer and author. In his opening verse Akon finishes five of the eight ‘rhymed’ lines with the word “now.” The other three lines end with the word “down.” Now that’s just lazy. Do we really need to explain the concept of rhyming to the hip-hop artists of today? This is particularly frustrating when the artist’s father is a highly respected Senegalese percussionist.

Anyway, back to Kelsey’s question. Very few American artists or consumers think about how our highly contextualized pop culture is interpreted by the rest of the world. And why should they? It’s our pop culture. Our market is huge, and the consumers want to feel like the message is directed at them. So when Akon suggests we “kick it, like Tae bo,” it doesn’t really matter whether or not people dancing in a Hungarian club have ever heard of Billy Blanks. They are going to hear the song and think one of two things:

1) “I don’t understand any of the words this man is saying.”

or

2) “Yes, I am kicking it like Tae bo. Very much like the Tae bo.”

Here is where that becomes a problem for America’s image abroad: Record companies, television syndicators, and movie producers all love the foreign markets. Places from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe all devour American media products. Everything our media outlets produce is shinier and more polished than the domestic stuff.

The message being espoused by our media products, unfortunately, is little more than an afterthought. Akon could sing about his dream of becoming a certified public accountant, and the majority of Hungarians (or any other foreign market) would never blink an eye.

So what American media does my part of the world consume? The answer isn’t going to help improve America’s image.

Movies/TV: Forget wide distribution for any American movie that does not involve explosions or fat-suits. If you can get both into one frame, all the better. This is because the Hungarians have become convinced that Hollywood peaked with “Armageddon.” Most Hungarians know the movie is awful, but they do not believe Hollywood can do any better. They’ve decided Hollywood panders to the lowest common-denominator, and we produce enough crappy movies to drive the point home. If they want smart cinema, they will turn to other countries.

Music: As far as I can tell, in order to sell a significant number of records in continental Europe, you must include a synthesized drum n’ bass track on every song. Madonna, Britney, Justin, and Akon all do very well in Europe, but our clever lyricists and intelligent signer/songwriters are less then insignificant over here.

Can we solve this problem? I don’t know.

Kelsey’s suggestion is a good one. Every student I teach who has visited the States has a much more realistic idea of what the US is all about. It would also help if American children became a bit more aware of what’s happening beyond their own borders. Ask 10 kids where Hungary is – No, better yet, ask 10 adults. The results would be interesting.

It frustrates Europeans when they find out that America doesn’t know anything about the rest of Western Civilization.

I’m not so sure how much can be achieved, however. The US markets its media products with an aggressive savvy, and explosions and fat-suits are what sell US movie tickets. Smacking asses is what sells dance club singles. So that’s what gets exported.

If we really want to improve America’s image abroad, we need to improve American taste.

“Norbit” topping box office sales didn’t help.

Beyonce singing “I could have another man in a minute / In fact he’ll be here in a minute” isn’t helping either.

But both have made their way across the pond, and now we look like gluttonous adulterous sex-fiends who can’t find anything to rhyme with the word minute.

Bloody New Neighborhood

Dora and I woke up in our new apartment the other morning (it’s fantastic, you have to come visit so we can show off in a shameless and despicable manner). We made smoothies because we’re trying to be healthy without denying ourselves too much. We got ready for the day, and we went down to the car. Before opening the diver’s side door, Dora recoiled and said, “Blood.”
Sure enough, in a splatter pattern familiar to many CSI viewers, several small drops of blood had been left to harden on our car window and door.
Perhaps this would be a good time to describe the neighborhood we live in. Akácfa utca (which translates to Acacia Tree Street) is located in the very center of downtown Budapest. I mean, we are really in the thick of it here. Up above is a photo taken on my street during the 56 Revolution. That's a statue of Stalin being torn down.

And picking a place in the middle of everything was no accident. With the option of going out to the family house in Leanyfalu, there was no reason to search for an escape from city life. Anyway, being in the center of the city comes with its ups and downs. And those ups and downs are particularly pronounced on our little street.
The first thing people notice is that our building’s basement houses one of the more popular pubs in the city, Old Man’s Music Pub. While we don’t hear the noise from the bar itself, we do feel the effect of being close to such a hot spot. There are the occasional bursts of noise out in the street, but the bouncers (who are huge) consider keeping the crowd quiet one of their main tasks. And of course there are the bottles and glass which are cleaned from the sidewalk each morning by a little old lady with bad posture, who I believe has some kind of mental disability. She is kind, but seems to be a bit detached from the ah… well, everything really. She wears a vacant expression that is both harmless and creepy.
The next attribute of note is the presence of homeless drunks. Quite a few of them find a place to sleep somewhere on our street, mostly in the doorways of stores that have closed for the evening. Many of them are the piss-soaked incoherent men that make one wonder how a person can fall so far, but there is one gentleman reminiscent of the much-romanticized American hobo. He plays a bad harmonica and talks to every passerby with a half-drunk smile. The good news is that these men are harmless. They knock down the quality of life meter, but they don’t want to cause trouble.
If there ever is any trouble, it starts in the wee hours of the night. And that is probably when the blood found its way onto our car. Downtown Budapest is a lively place, and lively often translates into drunk. And for so many, drunk often translates into fighty.
I don’t want to posit any definite guesses as to how the blood ended up where it did, but its presence gave me a reason to describe some of the more unique aspects of my neighborhood.
It may even help to explain my previous post.
But don’t take any of this as a complaint. I do feel safe where I live, and I feel excited to be in a part of the city that is changing for the better. After all, if the entire world was clean, law-abiding, and void of gruesome street fights, what kind of drama would we seek to get our blood flowing?

People Suck

I can only assume that there are others who share my desire to live within the lyrics of a Tom Waits song. Though I can’t imagine it’s a universal sentiment. I certainly understand that there are some who’d question this desire, remembering the company of drunks and failures that make up the characters who populate Waits’ music. I, however, can’t help myself. Fortunately, life here in Budapest has helped me understand why I feel this way, which is funny because Tom Waits is such an American institution.

He is, in my mind, our version of Jacques Brel, telling the stories of people who are too close to the gritty-yet-vulnerable underbelly of life, and telling those stories with a straightforward nature that goes beyond earnestness.

Back to the city.

It is while I walk the streets of Budapest and ride the public transit system in this city that I am driven to the conclusion: people are despicable, foul, and dirty creatures. We are. There’s little use denying it. Our greatest institutions do nothing but point out our own failings. Science consistently proves that humans do little but sully our own environment, while religion serves as a constant reminder of our inability to attain the higher purpose for which we were placed on this Earth.

I was getting lunch at a Chinese buffet yesterday. One of the customers was complaining about his food. He maybe got a bit too emotional, but he wasn’t out of line. The cashier argued with him for several minutes. It was uncomfortable; I was standing there waiting to be served. The argument ended eventually, but it ended badly, the customer leaving in a huff. And that’s when the cashier called him a “dirty fag” in Hungarian. The customer was clearly gay, but the dirty part was the cashier’s own invention. She said it loud enough for the customer to hear, but she directed the comment at me and the person standing behind me. She said it with that conspiratorial tone, like, “You and me, we know what those kind of people do.”

I boarded the 4/6 tram the other night. It must be one of the most popular trams in Europe. It runs every two or three minutes and is nearly always packed. I was coming home from an evening lesson. When I got on board I noted the strong smell of paint-thinner, or something similar. It was a minute before I found the source. He was maybe eighteen years old, and had emptied a tube of glue into a grocery-store vegetable baggie. He would take three deep breaths of the fumes, take a moment to recover, and then go back to the baggie. His eyes were completely clouded over. He couldn’t sit up to allow other passengers to pass by.

When Dora and I lived on Vörösmarty utca, I enjoyed walking the dog along Andrasy út, Budapest’s grandest avenue. Tree-lined boulevards and palaces adorn the length of the street. I’ve seen quite a few sights there. I will always remember the image of an extremely obese and extremely drunk woman teetering at the lip of the curb of Andrasy út in the middle of the afternoon. She was shoving a gyro into her mouth. Yogurt sauce was smeared across her cheeks. After an especially sloppy bite, she pealed away some of the aluminum foil and flicked it off of her sticky fingers, flicked it in the opposite direction of the garbage can that stood beside her. She then pealed the napkin away from her gyro and dropped the napkin at her feet. Szóda tried to snatch it up.

Despite the barrage of reminders of how low the lowest-common denominator has fallen, I find myself drawn to the dregs, in a strange kind of way. I don’t hold any desire to become bigoted, wasted, or slothful. But to hear Tom Waits tell it, there is a sort of romance that only accompanies those who have regular brushes with desperation. As the gods envied the precious nature of mortal life, I envy the desperate man’s understanding of fulfilling a real need. I don’t want to come off as a wannabe. I know how much insulation there is between me and the people drinking out on my corner. But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that those are people who are drinking out on the corner.

People may be despicable, foul, and dirty creatures, but only because we so desperately need things like acceptance, escape, and gyros.

I’m not sure I’d want to live a life without such things.

Rich, very rich

I’ve been without any internets for a week or so because Dora and I were moving out of our old apartment.
Needless to say, the last week has been a flurry of activities, not all of which were related to our apartment. Dora’s folks took us on a trip to France. We saw a bit of Paris and a bit more of the Loire Valley. The trip was spectacular. France is a hell of a country, but I think I’ll save that for another entry later this week.
Today I want to shamelessly brag.
I called home last night and caught them on their way out the door to brunch. I got passed around from my Mom, to my brother Drew, and then to my Dad. I could tell my dad was hungry and he wanted to get to that delicious buffet. I understood. I’m like him in that way. Once the promise of food has been extended, I don’t like things getting in my way. Anyway, I told him that I knew he was in a hurry, but I had news.
I explained that there’s been a change in plans with the apartment Dora and I were going to buy.
I meet a guy who told me that with $30,000 I could buy a nominal claim on a large block of real estate in Romania. I could then sell off the rights to smaller chunks of the property to investors. If everything goes well I should quadruple my money in less then a month.
My father asked , in a measured tone, if I had spoken to anyone else about this.

That’s when I said, “April Fool’s.”
It took him a second to recover, but I had him hook, line, and sinker. It’s the first successful April Fool’s Day prank I’ve pulled in a long time.

Poetry and Politics

Today, after reading some war poetry, an Israeli student and I engaged in some heated discussion about post 9-11 politics.

That's the kind of shit you can't make up.

The poems are part of my syllabus in English Composition II, Writing on Literature. I teach the course at McDaniel, and this semester I choose to focus on the literature of war. We start with "The Iliad" and finish with "The Things They Carried". It's a wild ride.

To find poetry, I took a random swat at stuff lying around on the Internet. The last few that we read are very contemporary, and the last two are a bit political. The first is "Palestine" by Lorna Dee Cervantes and the second is "The Daisy Cutter" by Louise Rill. Cervantes started writing "Palestine" the day after the attacks, and the poem links the images of 9-11 to the plight of the Palestinians. This did not go down well with my Israeli student Avi. He's a nice kid, but being raised in a country constantly under attack has led him to believe that all the Palestinians, perhaps even all the Muslims in the Middle East, are bloodthirsty monsters. I don't want to paint him as naive (although he is 18, and by his own admission doesn't care much for reading). Avi understands the complexity of the situation is Israel, but when there are people out to destroy your country, certain shades of gray become difficult to discern. By the time discussion of the poem was wrapping up, Avi had suggested that the poet should, "Cry me a river". He got close to accusing the poem of being Al Qaeda propaganda, and finally suggested that Americans are weak because they allowed the terrorists to affect them.

Then we got to "The Daisy Cutter". Now, I don't really like the poem, but I felt I should include at least one straight-up anti-war poem. (I did have them read Crane's "War is Kind", but that poem is more about the contradictory nature of the way we understand and rationalize war. It frowns on our insincerity in times of war, but I don't think it condemns war outright.) I am a bit uncomfortable with the preachy sarcasm and the prescriptive theme in "The Daisy Cutter", but I thought opening by drawing a parallel between the Taliban and a Christian martyr was interesting. The poem ends up suggesting that going to war after 9-11 was a shallow effort at revenge. Maybe not the most profound stuff, but it gets freshmen talking. Anyway, Avi couldn't stand it. He suggested that I would burn such verse if I had lost a family member in the attacks. We went round and round for a bit. I suggested his point of view was myopic. He told me Americans don't understand the enemy. I asked if he were accused of murder, would he want the grieving mother to serve as the judge in his case. Eventually we had to bring things to a close, but I thought I'd share.

Now here's some Willie.

Board by the Riots

We had a long weekend. I left all my work at home and spent the holiday at the country house with Dora and her folks. I may have fallen behind at work, but it was worth it.

I should start with the holiday, because it sheds some light on this country I’ve been calling home for the past few years. A little over 150 years ago there was a revolution in Hungary. There were actually several revolutions in Europe that year. 1848 has been dubbed the year of revolutions. Hungary’s was an exceptionally romantic one, however, led by a warrior poet (literally) and a reformist politician, among others. The March 15^th holiday commemorating the revolution hasn’t been considered a political event for some time. It is simply a moment in history that all Hungarians are proud of. It is also when spring finally starts to gain an upper hand on winter. The plum trees were in blossom this year. It was very pretty.

Unfortunately, the leader of the opposition party Victor Orban has a tendency to politicize historical events. This year he encouraged people to celebrate March 15^th by marching in protest against the ruling government. This is not something I oppose. Peaceful protests and spirited opposition are all a part of healthy democracies, and I’ll admit there are plenty of issues to protest and oppose here in Hungary. The problem is Mr. Orban is not fostering a healthy democracy here in Hungary.

He is encouraging citizens to take to the streets while his party walks out of Parliament every time the ruling government takes the floor, effectively riling his voting base into action while pursuing a line of total inaction within the houses of government. Meanwhile he does nothing to dissuade the extreme elements of his constituency. Composed of football hooligans and bigots, these people are not truly representative of the opposition’s constituency, but they are loud and easily provoked (think of red paint cans at a fur show or Confederate flags on MLK day). These groups should be marginalized for the sake of the various political parties’ reputations. They are, however, all too visible at rallies around the city.

On the 15^th, as predicted, the events devolved into violence. Nothing as bad as last year’s events in October, but it was ugly.

I had little interest in losing more of my already-weakened faith in humanity. Same goes for Dora. So we spent the holiday in nature. We took a lot of walks with the dog. On one of those walks we saw a family of wild boars. Those things are huge, except the babies. The babies are cute. Ask Dora. She’ll tell you just how cute. We ate well and got the proper amount of sleep every night.

Of an outside land

Hungarians describe anyone from outside of Hungary with the word külföldi. It is an adjective meaning foreign or alien. It can also serve as a noun meaning foreigner. The prefix “kül-” means outside or other. The word “föld” means land, soil, or ground. The suffex “i” makes a word possessive. To most Europeans the linguistics of this word are intuitive; a foreigner belongs to another land. Yet for an American, or for a Hungarian-born American, the idea of belonging to a land is troublesome. Being American isn’t an intrinsic quality. It’s more of a right, a duty. These contrasting concepts of nationality get at why so much of the world finds Americans simultaneously enviable and obnoxious. But it doesn’t make the term külföldi any less vexing for a couple dealing with cultural identity crises.

This linguistic stumbling block is made worse by the connotative qualities of the word külföldi. Though it is not always the case, külföldi is often dismissive, sometimes even insulting. The word is used to explain away the complaints of tourists and visiting businessmen. If a foreigner is foolish enough to broach the subject of politics and the Hungarians on hand disagree with the leanings of that foreigner, then the offending remark will be squelched with the word külföldi. To put it simply, if you are not a Hungarian and you dare to raise an objection over any of the country's many issues, your comments will be met with proud defiance and the word külföldi. Interestingly enough, those same objections are the subject of nearly every heated discussion in cafes and dining rooms across the country, but they are not to be discussed by anyone who belongs to another land.

For many of my students who come from the East or from the Balkans, the attitude behind külföldi is commonplace, the product of innumerable invasions and conquests. But for anyone with a US passport, there is something hypocritical at work. Everyone in Europe feels the need to explain to me the failings of the United States. Students like to remind me of the racism, homelessness, educational inequity, lack of culture, and imperial overtures that make America the squalid vapid hellhole of a country that everyone loves to hate. They also love to complain the strict post-9/11 visa policy.

The above is an edited bit from what I'm working on right now. The book will follow the doings of a couple living in Hungary. The husband is an American. The wife is a Hungarian and an American. I plan to interrupt the narrative with bits like what I've posted here. Reflections on what it is to be Hungarian, American, or just a citizen of some place. I'm curious about people's reaction to the ideas.