Cigarettes and Accordions

Well, I've had quite an adventure since last week. I've been to Serbia and back, to attend a really interesting and strange film and music festival at the home and personal village of famed Serbian auteur moviemaker, musician and actor, Emir Kustarica, deep in the mountains of the Mokra Gora region near Bosnia. As I sit here on the couch back in L.A. at 5:30 am, (it's something like 2:30 in the afternoon in Serbia and my body, though never really adjusted to European time, nonetheless made some motions in that direction apparently, because I am usually not wide awake and craving a greasy meal and a pilsner at this time of day,) it all seems like a dream that I was in Belgrade yesterday morning. I hardly know what to write about, it was such a trip. Literally.

I should probably start with Emir Kustarica, one of my favorite filmmakers and a great artist and the benefactor of this trip for Tim and I as representatives (loosely on my part) of Moviemaker Magazine. Kustarica's films 'Black Cat, White Cat' and 'Time of the Gypsys' are two of my favorite films, but I like anything he does. His movies are not for everyone and his one foray into Hollywood with 1993's 'Arizona Dreams' produced a movie with a somewhat weak storyline and galvanized him as a studio outsider, so don't place that one as a priority, but if you like the absurd and can find patience for magical realism and lots of accordion music I recommend them all as alternately a rollicking good time and a complex and melancholy look at cultural reality/political history/social problems/psychological portraits and loosely defined animal husbandry practices of the Balkans, particularly the former Yugoslavia. He has created this festival in a historic Serbian ethno-village, Drvngrad, nicknamed Kustendorf, that he built as a set for one of his movies and then had turned into his personal home as well as a rustic tourist resort and national park. Kustendorf is a play on his nickname, Kusta, and also means village by the sea in German, which it plainly is not. Absurd, and apparently meant to be some dig at his government for their attitudes toward the Germans at the time that he built it a few years ago. As despot of this tiny kingdom of little wooden houses, cobblestone streets named after remarkable characters like Nikola Tesla, Federico Fellini, and Che Guevara, a few restaurants and bars, some kittens and happy little dogs, an indoor swimming pool and incredible, timeless views of the misty, moody mountains and humble little homesteads in the valley below he has managed to pack it over the last 3 years with lots of young, mostly Eastern European filmmakers, journalists from all over Europe, the Cannes mafia, and a few high profile lefty Hollywood rogues, like Jim Jarmusch and Oliver Stone in the past, and Johnny Depp and Ralph Fiennes this year. It was a really good program, with an interesting, sometimes claustrophobic scene of stylish people jammed elbow to elbow in the theater, the restaurant, and bars while accordion music seemed to play incessantly and nearly everyone chainsmoked in all venues like they were their own little personal nicotine factory smokestacks. Pork, potatoes and cabbage were featured at every meal, as well as beer and slivovic at most. Slivovic is plum brandy that you could strip your furniture with, drunken out of little shot containers shaped like lab beakers. I love Eastern Europe. I love the absurd and the irreverent. This phrase was actually said by Johnny Depp in a workshop that he gave at the festival, but it rang so true for me, and so appropriate for this festival that I wrote it down and it's been ringing in my head ever since. Kustarica is a master of the absurd and irreverent, which seem to veritably breed in the Balkans, along with accordions and cigarettes. The opening night band, a Slovenian and Austrian group, covered some local favorites as well as Proud Mary, Like a Vrigin and Besame Mucho in the Austrian folk tradition with an accordion (of course), trumpet, trombone, guitar, clarinet and smoking lead singer babe. It was absurd and wonderful. We unfortunately had to leave before Kustarica's band, The No Smoking Orchestra, (which now having been to a Serbia and had my clothes, skin, hair and innards no doubt fumigated in a stew of second hand smoke, I recognize as the most absurd ironic name of a band ever), rocked the house for the final ceremony. Overall I found it to be a really stimulating and artistically inspiring event, in a melancholy and beautiful part of the world.

I traveled in Eastern Europe extensively about 10 years ago, but couldn't get into parts of the former Yugoslavia with an American passport at that time, so this trip filled in some of my missing passport stamps and refreshed my sense of place to that region. A few other fun Americanized observations from the former Eastern bloc that were reinforced for me this time were the unnerving fact that although people there really are very friendly, helpful and kind, smiling is not widely practiced, but staring is. As soon as help is requested or a question is asked though the somber mask will be broken and people bend over backwards in helpful kindness. And many Eastern European women really are very hot, or even if they're not that hot they really know how to dress so that men won't notice that. Many Eastern European men on the other hand are really big and tall and often (sorry), more in the range of not so good looking all the way to ugly, greasy or scary looking and have a habit of wearing their pants up around their ribcages, yet they always have these really hot babes on their arms, making them perhaps some of the luckiest men in the world! Also, as our cab driver explained to us, Serbian salaries are amongst the lowest in Europe, but still every cafe, restaurant, bar and club are full from morning to....well, the next morning because parties start late and go all night, any night of the week there. As he said, "Serbs live like today is the last day on earth." A short, cold, grey, drunken day but filled with lots of passion, music and cigarettes. And really, who can begrudge you a few cigarettes, and plenty of passion and music if they help to lighten the tortured slavic soul because as a different cab driver explained to us, "Serbs never forgive and never forget," and that's a hard way to live through thousands of years of wars and occupations and broken alliances and broken dreams. Serbia is hopefully on it's way toward dealing with some of the horrible events of the past two decades, joining the European Union and improving its economy. I hope Serbia can change in the ways that it needs to....but not so much that its soul loses any of the beauty, just some of the torture.

I love travel. I love an adventure and am willing to go through a lot to get one. Adventures are often expensive and usually involve being jet-lagged, tired and at least occasionally lost, being stared at and not being able to understand what everyone is saying, eating and drinking strange things and for me anyway, usually being sick for at least short periods of time, and from time to time being pilfered from, robbed or swindled. In short being palpably vulnerable to the world. And that vulnerability, although it induces some fear, also opens something up that lets the beauty in with the volume up. I won't even start on my reminiscences of those unexpectedly beautiful travel moments coined in my memory that are like riches from the universe. Well, ok, just a few; an evening spent in a small hut perched on a volcanic hillside being served beans and rice and playing with a small girl as the fireflies and an electrical storm flashed above the lake outside, waking up on a bus pulling into majestic Istanbul at sunrise and having my hair ruffled and being handed a homemade pickle by a Bulgarian grandpa sitting near me, finding a little town where they make chestnut ice cream and then driving a winding narrow road down through the mountains of Provence to the sea. Now I can add perching in the cold between a railing and the rooftop of a little wooden Serbian house to get a picture of the crowd below drinking and smoking and dancing and waiting for the opening ceremony as fireworks shot up over the wooden roofs and cinders fell down in our hair. My memories of beautiful travel adventures are as dear to me as anything I own. It's all worth it for that wonderful 'soul in wonder' feeling of learning about people living a different kind of life, and being a stranger in a strange and wonderful place. The world opens up, or more likely I open up, and I feel so alive and lucky to be alive and so in love with whatever patch of the globe I am standing on.

American Music

I went to a great old time music party/show last night. Once in a while there is the kind of party so full of creative energy and welcoming fun that it fills your mind like a wonderful painting or a touching song or an amazing meal. An inspired thing was created in the party itself. It was in a loft just south of downtown in a barren neighborhood amongst a bunch of warehouses dotted with gentlemen's clubs. Some enterprising and adventurous fellow lives there and keeps his living room empty except for a piano, a few mics, a lot of extra chairs and his kitchen full of beer. Amazing, wonderful music was made, and there was dancing and joy.

It wasn't like being in L.A. It was like being in Portland, in Vermont, northern Arizona....in just about every place that I have ever lived since my early 20's. In all of these places and apparently here in L.A. too there are groups of mostly young people getting together, dressing up, well, down I should say, imitating old time musicians from the early decades of the past century, drinking, smoking, partying and playing music into the wee hours with abandon. The opening band was headed up by a skinny young blond fellow with pomaded hair and 1950's style dress pants over his destroyed loafers and a thrift store white button down rolled to the elbows. From his narrow 20ish year old body he somehow managed to powerfully pull the ruined voice of a 60 year old chain smoking black man from the south. It was great! He played mandolin and was accompanied by a skinny guitarist with a nice old resonator and new white wing tips, a long-haired, clear voiced young lady fiddler, and a cheerful, chubby jack of all trades who alternated between the piano, the washboard and the jug. Doc Bocs, the Carter Family, Smithsonian Folkways recordings, Roscoe Holcomb, Jimmy Rogers, Lefty Frizzell, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Kitty Wells are just a few of the closely studied and imitated icons of American musical roots talent that are drawn upon by crowds like these to create entertainment and joy.

I grew up watching Madonna on MTV. Yet I spent my twenties learning to play Carter family tunes on the guitar. I know how to play a lot of them. And everyplace that I go I find other people who do as well. This music sounds right to me. It feels right to me. It makes the world feel right to me. I'm certainly not the only flatpicking refugee from the digital age, or the most serious by far. A friend of mine in Portland used to spend much of his time online digitally compiling various versions of traditional songs. Pretty geeky, huh. But it didn't sound geeky when he played them. He sounded alive and wild and totally consumed by the music. I don't know exactly what is going on here. It's kind of a weird, and certainly unglamorous sort of movement. I guess that's part of the point. The anti-MTV cribs kind of musicians. Music parties in random lofts or apartments or cabins out in the woods, potluck and even with homemade hooch sometimes, advertised only by word of mouth. And at these parties you find artists, budding filmmakers, writers, farmers and revolutionaries and probably a few closet computer programmers and bank tellers. Maybe this is my generations counterculture rebellion. Undoubtedly worshipping at the roots of American music in impromptu location for free feeds some cultural need. We need traditions. We need something spontaneous. This party and others that have come before are about as human and un-digital and un-commercial as it gets. It's a real experience in real time. Also, American music is a truly beautiful and great fusing of American traditions. We may have a sorry country in many ways at this point, with over six million people currently living with no income whatsoever and no help from social programs while wall street grows fatter and corporations monopolize the very air we breathe until we can't but exhale and participate in lining someone's unsavory pockets. We do have some wonderful unspoiled riches though, like a surviving democracy, our natural resources, our unparalleled diversity, our thirst for creative enterprise, and our unique and wonderful music. Playing it and loving it and keeping it alive is one way to love America. To love something that's really good about America.

On With The New

I kind of have that deflated feeling that you get when the holidays are over. The decorations are coming down, the fridge and bank accounts are emptied out, the bad eating habits are catching up, the visitors and all the excuses for not working are going home again. I'm tired and kind of getting a cold but it's still time to get serious here. The good thing though is that beyond the debris of the holiday stretches out a new year, clean and clear and fresh and waiting for something wonderful to be made of it.

Having visitors here made me do lots of fun L.A. things that I don't usually do. I went to the La Brea tar pits in the heart of Hollywood to see the amazing Columbian mammoths and dire wolves and sabertooth cat bones from the L.A. basin's pre-human days, preserved in the molten asphalt, now surrounded by seas of asphalt in another form. We went out for ramen and saw a movie and many famous handprints in cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. On New Year's Eve day I took my parents up to the Getty museum in the hills above L.A. It's an amazing place. There is an incredible art collection there and entrance to the exhibits is free but I never get to them because I'm so enraptured by the experience of riding the monorail up the hill from the parking lot and walking through the massive, monumental, fountain filled courtyards and gardens with views of the L.A. basin from the towering, snow covered Sierra Nevada in the east across the sea of humanity to the glittering coast with mountainous islands off shore. It really makes me forgive the traffic and the porn and the overzealous plastic surgeons and appreciate this city. The fact that Maine is now covered with a couple of feet of snow and bitterly cold helps with that too.

I had a nice conversation with the checkout guy at Trader Joe's today. It went something like this:
Him: How was your New Year?
Me: Great!
Him: That's so great, glad to hear it! This was a good one, huh? What did you do?
Me: Oh, not much. Made pizza, watched a movie, went to a fun brunch party the next morning.
Him: That's great! I love pizza and movies and brunch parties. Homemade pizza's the best! (They must train them to be extra nice and cheerful at Trader Joe's, and this guy was admittedly above and beyond the call of duty. Kind of like a human golden retriever.)
Me: Yeah, it was fun. I've just got a good feeling about this year.
Him: ME TOO! man, me too. More this year than any other I can remember.
Me: Yeah, me too. I don't know why.
Him: Yeah, huh.(laughs) The facts don't look that great, but I'm just feeling good about it!
Me: Allright! That's the first step, huh?
Him: Happy 2010!
Me: Yeah, Happy 2010!

Happy 2010 to you! Happy 2010 to me. I hope for this year to bring me more strength and acceptance and accomplishment and joy and compassion and wholeness. I hope for it to bring us all more compassion, more justice, more common sense and resourcefulness, and more hopeful visions for the future.