a post on RESEARCH

Welcome again to this blog. Thank you so much, first of all, for having completed my short survey. I created this post so you can leave comments/feedback/advice about some of the questions, the video, and the research in general. I will do my best to answer them in due time (you can contact me for a copy of the dissertation in May).

the link to the survey is the following (! it is only aiming at London Hungarians !):

http://calamma.net/questionnaire/hungarianmusic/

As I mentioned in the email I do favor face-to-face encounters the most, so feel free to contact me. And it would be a great help if you could forward this survey to your Hungarian contacts in the capital...

If you are interested in more examples of contemporary Hungarian bands, here is a short list of youtube videos to view:

Csík Zenekar:
- "most múlik pontosan" (by Quimby):
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=D6RaU9n4ZuI

Pálinká band from London:
- see website here
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4dq2ttPPlX8

Balázs Elemér Group
- "Szeretöm e táncba"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDtDDCzM1Wg&feature=related
- "kinek van kinek nincs"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHny23LrGqs&NR=1
- "végig mentem a lonai nagy utcán"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etb-tpNt49U&NR=1

Pálya Beáta in Gatlif's "Transylvania":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrzlVrglDx4&feature=related
and live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhJfoPTGSig&feature=related

A link to the website of documentary "Életek Éneke":
http://www.eletekeneke.hu/hu/index.html

An interview of "Folk/Hip-hop" duo Suhancos on Hír TV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJo_XyZ4gk0&feature=related

Téli Pörkölt

flying suitcase

slick leather suitcase
among the wind of our paths
to go with ease
within the draws of memory

to feel the edge of this box
a forbidden place
that hits her hips persistently
a builder's kitchen kit
left a tale unsaid
a Sunday wasteland

the fleeting leather
abandons a path
stuck
to her knees, dancing
in vain

she flies our streets
companion to her daily stride
an answer to your calls and intentions
the common destinies
of calls muffled by an underground
that shivers in her shadow

the leather of a time
reflects the other
one runs ahead
the other its mirror

ode à la valise

cuir lèché
dans ce vent qui trace nos pas
venir aisé
avec cette cuisine à souvenir

sentir le coin de ce coffre
un lieu interdit
qui ricoche contre ses hanches
partir la cuisine en main
un conte oublié
mais qui répond comme tout dimanche

cuir abondant
se répand sur nos regards
se colle
à ses genoux, qui dance
malgré eux

elle court le long de nos rues
le long de ses jambes
elle répond à l'appel de vos desseins
destins accompagnés
d'appels insonorisés par les souterrains
qui flirtent avec son hombre

le cuir d'un temps
reflète l'autre
l'un court devant
l'autre est mirroir

Béla Tarr, Tango from our East

(picture of the film - Tarr Béla)

Sátántango is a humanistic look on the end of Hungarian communism. Cows are the first to open the ball, a dance that everyone has to dance, a unity of destiny inscribed in those grey times. Mud, heavy rain, plaster falling from the walls. The feeling of waiting is heavily but carefully transcribed for the screen, for the audience's experience. Carefully we drive away from the history of transition back into the poetics of change, the subtlety of relations and the weight of surveillance, the influence it has to shape people's roles, responsibilities and choices.
Tarr paints human islands with the flat lands of central Hungary as main background. This landscape which bares scars washed away by the violent continental rain: the rain its own scar. The metaphor of the watchful neighbour (the "doc") is a beautifully serious picture of the declining Hungarian state: one feeding on pálinká and morphine for work, archives for imagination and cigarettes for history, one painter, consumer and police of its own environment.

doc stumbles towards his shelves
slow and fat like an urban shop-queue
from there he whisks out two files
two drawings to reconstitute
his front window

doc continues to draw on the three sheets of paper
one empty of its actors, subject of his writing
two minutes ago; the one went to pee
the other ran out, having cheated on the peeing man's wife
he draws wires, walls and windows

doc has no more bones to show,
he is filling himself like a flooded river
a body dry from the inside
whose taps are full and cannot weep.

They follow the wind, loose paper.


The sound of Tarr's tango is not the sound of tragedy it is the sound of happening, and its proximity to its subjects, also its pace, give it a pronounced echo of the present, an imagined village theater where there is no lake Balaton to cry in, just the puddle and puzzle of a declining collective.
egység (or unity) is the key refrain of this world, the key to its tragic value, a key for no door, a key for a plain where the eastern wind is blowing and farm animals call for food.

missing out on the revolution

I was not there in Budapest
When fire, shots, flags
blew around the stairs of parliament
I heard it in the news
on chat rooms too far away
they were listening in the neighbourhood
I missed the riot
another revolution I'll have to read about
in that news, painted and tainted
but witnessing is a recipe of choice.

When I was 15, I was lucky enough to be welcomed in an east-Berlin soviet flat, to have a conversation about what I had hazardously overheard of as "ostalgie" or the nostalgia for the former life in the East. Up there on this 'shared terrace', where everyone knew each other, where only kids could be heard, where we were served my favorite cherry cake (Kirsch kuchen, a typical cake I used to have in Brandenburg when I lived there) we talked about the woman discovering her Stasi files years after the reunification, about doctors fleeing the economic situation for the comfort of the West. I still ask myself today (reminiscent of the greatness of the Berlin atmosphere) where our understanding should start - what are its boarders? The boarders of historical definitions, political necessity and phenomenons of communication - the power of being represented - is an important limitation to criticize and use at the same time. Many people did not have a balcony nor a city nor a job to reflect from on this transition. Many continue today to exchange vegetables, wine, meat and other home-made glories. Many did not have that screen, they heard it through their neighbours at the market. Reminiscence and every-day lives may continue with that particular feeling that they are unaffected by the landscapes and seas of policy.
Sociological and anthropological perspectives that emerge need insights from elsewhere, participation within and without such boarders of history and representation..