benn:org

Yesterday Lavinia, a good friend that is quite familiar with the local electronic music scene, took me to a seven hour DJ/VJ performance with many local artists and some from abroad. The event took place in another old villa transformed into a mix of art exhibition and small concert venue. An interested changing crowd was sitting or standing on the floor infront of the stage and screen. About fifteen different DJ/VJ sets gave a good overview about what’s going on in Romania’s avant-garde clubs at the moment: IDM, Experimental, Breakbeat, Ambient, “Illbient”, Noise, Gabba, Glitch, Punkability, “Extended Drones”, 8bit Music.. My clear favourite was heavy-weight Gojura with Kosak who were playing their IDM/Illbient, a Breakbeat/Drum and Bass like mix with heart-stopping gaps, loops, delays and jumps and dirty, endlessly distorted beats and samples, spiced with pure electronic noise and things that sounded much like broken mp3 files. Hard to describe, but it was very uplifting and dancable. Listen to SomaFM‘s cliqhop and you’ll get an idea. In the afternoon there was some talks and presentations. One remarkable thing was the Vegetable Orchestra of the Transacoutic Research Institute in Vienna. The song that was played from CD was an example of their dance music entirely made with the sounds of vegetables. After their concerts they chop up their instuments and cook a soup for the audience. Vegan music! (“Music not bombs”?) – Bon appetit!

The day before yesterday I arrived back to Bucharest. From Sighisoara I got a lift with my host Tino to Timisoara near the Hungarian and Serbian border. Thanks again, Tino! At 2am I got to the squat / bar / social centre “INCA” in Timisoara’s centre. I opened the door and to loud drum and bass the last remaining guests were dancing on the benches. Wow, that’s my kind of place I thought. Claudia from Portugal welcomed me and showed me around. I met her and her boyfriend with the van before a few times in Bucharest and Sibiu in Transsylvania. I put my mattress and my stuff behind the bar into the big, cosy, rustic living part of the place with a lot of improvised contructions, a big painting, black-and-white punk and activist posters and a small kitchen corner. There was another five Portuguese people, an American, two Romanians and a dog as well. The jolly crowd was partying late.. The next night there was a hard-core metal concert in the concert room, which was packed with many, many young people. It’s kind of handy to have all this in one place and just step out of your sleeping room into a concert. ^_^ The night after was cinema night and because there was no movie scheduled I could put on 90 minutes of short movies, trailers, documentaries and music videos about alter-globalist activism that I had collected on my laptop. Brought to you by truely free software of course (Xine on Debian Linux)..

The morning after I got up very early, ugh, walked to the popular hitchhiking spot towards east. I knew I have 9 hours of driving alone infront of me, plus waiting for lifts. It was a few degrees below zero, thank god someone gave me a warm jacket the day before. It was like a bus stop, in fact it was a bus stop, people arrived, stood for a few minutes and got picked up. The people hitchhiking were students going home for the weekend, commuting or just coming from the open market. They saw my sign, looked at me again and wished me good luck. After an hour a man going to Craiova, that’s half the way, stopped, took another person with him and went on towards the rising sun. We didn’t talk much, every now and then he pointed out something along the road. My bits of Romanian were sufficient. I used the tram to get through Craiova to another busy, busy hitchhiking spot towards Bucharest. After half an hour a smaller truck stopped, the driver pointed at my sign and waved at me, sending away the other people that were quickly rushing towards the lorry. It was dark when we arrived and I had quite some problems orientating and finding a way from the big shopping centre outside Bucharest that I was dropped at to the centre. Monstrous Bucharest grunted and farted, infested by thousands of cars and ugly concrete structures. Big roads, bridges, trucks, darkness, city dirt, Romanian-style big unmarked gaps and holes in the paths – not a pedestrian-friendly place at all.

Three days ago I went to the sweet little town Sighisoara in Transsylvania again. Hitchhiking from Bucharest with my flatmate Sasha was pretty easy. First we went by bus to the airport which is a bit outside directly at the road towards Brashov. Sasha put all her creative skills into drawing a wonderful sign for Brashov. We didn’t even have to put out the sign when a delivery van carrying soya products already had stopped. The driver spoke very good English and told us about his plans to cross Russia and the Bering Sea to Alaska with a motorbike next year. We drove through wonderful mountains, he made some deliveries on the way and dropped us on the other side of Brashov directly at the road to Sighisoara at a petrol station. A new sign, snow falls, 20 minutes later we were driving on with an older truck driver in a small lorry. The snow on the street made it quite difficult to drive the truck through the mountains. With blaring traditional Manele music, the cozy growl of the engine and hair-drier like heating we crawled through wintery landscapes into the dark. We were dropped right in the centre of Sighisoara and walked to Tino’s house. Tino is one of the many Germans in Transsylvania building up their existence based on the traditionally good relationships of the area with Germany and the admiration of everything German. He was showing us our room in his newly build small guesthouse and the computers that I should take care of during the next days. Tino took Sasha and me to the sourrounding villages on his way to different constuction sites that he is involved in. So here I am enjoying my little break from life in Bucharest, tinkering on computers, having traditional food and going for walks.. ^_^

Ha ha ha, ich lach mich schlapp! I couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of the course of last night. First I went to Jean’s farewell party, he is going to hitchhike to India. Then Raluca, a friend that I was helping out as a lay actor in her short film the last two weekends, took me to a private party of Wesley Snipes, who happens to shoot a movie in Romania at the moment. The huge rented villa was a wonderful classic building fitted out with finest funiture and a lot of antique kitsch. Some stuff was pushed aside to make room for various folded up body building equipment. A sweet smell of vanilla insense was in the air. The rest of the scene was like taken out of some American hiphop music video. A lot of wanna-be mixed with a little sincerity. At least all of the equipment, drinks and music was top shelf. There was a big table filled with classy wines, spirits, juices and a lot of Red Bull cans. The man himself – I was mixing up the huge bodyguard at the entrace with him in the beginning – was DJing most of the night. He has quite some skill and really seemed to enjoy himself. Still he was very distant to what was happening around him, to the people that all knew him, but that he didn’t know and maybe not wanted to know. Someone else took over the turntables and after a while Elvis had left the building. We stayed until around 5 and then took a taxi home. Ha, first we were celebrating someone that went off to live in poverty and a little later we found ourselves amongst this celebration of luxury and fame. (Thanks for pointing that out, Raluca)

I found a place, a place found me! Later today I will move into my first own room since I got to Bucharest nearly two months ago. The first few days I was living in an empty house a bit outside, then I was staying in a small exhibition space at night when there were no visitors, during this time I also spent some days in Monika’s Erasmus student flat, the last week with the lovely French couple Maylis and Raymond, and now I’m moving in with Sasha, an American girl living in Romania for an undetermined time. All is good and I have a lot of time to read and to work a little, and to cruise around the city’s nightlife with Avant Garde clubs in old villas, pubs, private parties, dinners, cheap cinemas and theatres. It was a bright day today, the cold wind and the sun had a nice play with each other. I got an old German book with Japanese poetry in a small, dark bookshop. There are friendly dogs everywhere. When you are walking by they peer at you with mistrust and have a cautious eye on your every movement. They watch entrances of appartment towers, accompany soldiers and security guards on duty and even around the heavily guarded American embassy they are tolerated and rest curled up on foilage piles.

After looking around for a while I found an Internet cafe in Bucharest that allows me to hook up my laptop. It seems to be the only one in town and to my surprise laptop access is free of charge! Happy days! It’s called EarthNet, find it in the basement of Bd. Nicolae Balcescu Nr.24.

Things get more and more exciting in Bucharest: Last night we had an earthquake! People say it was more than 6 on the scale. Pretty scary when you are on the 9th floor of a tower block, built up in big hurry in the seventies. I was in a jolly round with a group of french people, Monika, Oana and Gabriela. First we didn’t realise what was going on, because someone was dancing and we thought that made things swing. I like the way everybody sits in the same boat in this kind of moments. It’s everywhere, you can’t escape it, everybody feels the power of our Great Mother, there is no other worry for a few minutes, no matter how poor or how rich you are. — A few hours later we had a lunar eclipse with the appendant full moon. Some people on the street said the it’s related to each other.

I helped some friends with an exhibition about the domestic life in communist Romania and I spend a lot of time with them. A website should be up soon as well. Swedish Monika that I met in Sibiu and the other Erasmus people in her flat are very hospitable, so I am staying here every now and then. Also I went to different cultural happenings, there is always a way to sneak in for free.. Days go by and something is holding me here. Maybe it’s the wonderful people, maybe the simple life? Anyway, I’m not planning to leave during the next days..

Sebastian and Matthias from the fortified church in Apold took me with them to Bucarest. A pretty big city.. Romania’s former dictator put huge, huge parks, roads and buildings everywhere. The people’s palast is supposed to be the third largest building in the world. Yesterday evening after accompanying Sebastian at a cultural heritage management seminar organised by the British Council I ended up going to a reception at the residence of some very important person in the british embassy. The three of us felt a little displaced between all the suits and there were people with machine guns guarding the place. I might go to the mountains tomorrow with some Antropology students that I met through Sebastian yesterday in the pub. All good, it’s nice and sunny.

Imagine: We are staying in an old fortified castle in the middle of a small village in the hills and forrests near Sighisoara at the moment. And tomorrow it’s full moon. Spooky, eh? We are hanging up the garlic around the doors. You never know.. =)