Prague - first stop...

Article published in Student journal "Imponderabilia"

You can have access by following this link to an article published about this blog in the "visual and sensory anthropology" section of a student journal from Cambridge named "Imponderabilia":

http://imponderabilia.socanth.cam.ac.uk/articles/article.php?articleid=4

The organisation is doing very interesting work collecting and engaging in student works - something vitally important given the lack of feedback U.K. universities provide us.
Feel free to comment...

I have to follow someone's comment on this article - "I know you like writing about Hungary..." (the person was commenting on my spelling mistakes) - by specifying that I do not claim to portray a Hungarian experience, rather in the first place it is a personal experience with photography and writing.

feel free to get in touch at jamesdyl@gmail.com

blue men surfaced

out of this morning horizon
not a whisper,
as he pedals on - empty
but for his dog's whimper.
round shapes are woven
in a road of no signs,
straight memories
and a curvy heart.
blue men are surfacing already
but he has lost awareness,
no pity or charm feature
in the atmosphere of this peaceful karaoke.
blue men surfaced as he leveled the station
and the rainbow was silk as he deposited those kind
creatures of paradise floating through the plaster
walls bearing the marks of mistakes and a master misery.
blue men traveled with the man
and at length,
they expected no further
dance, they lingered in tumorous waves.
blue men were there and still waiting
for a passing verse, a passing shadow,
a mighty glowworm for the great flat lands
in a night that was his own hunt for a dry patch.
blue men scattered. They waited among the chimneys
They lurked among the barbed wires, blue men.
blue men and a big man were one great spot
on a blank canvas.

On that day, all things laid bare
They had been left to dry in the back yard
Naked shapes and straight roads
Had carved the way for an unmissable arrival

Both a man and those blue men he never knew
A great spot on a blank canvas
Stepped on the moonlight that day
Until the pedaling died off
back up the lane
until some peace
and hajnal

re: Welcome

Welcome to all to my hungarian blog!
I wanted to thank all of the people who encouraged me to spend time on these writings and on the infinite pack of pictures displayed, I could not have done it alone. This blog, from my point of view, is a fruit of a branch to be shared.
You will witness pictures and writings from my last trips to Hungary, from the first to the last one up to date.
Feel free to comment, or to email me if you want to exchange on Hungary (or if you're planning to go there), my research on the Music of Hungarians in London, Hungarian jazz and more...
I put a lot of heart in this whole blog, and I wanted to let you know that WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE, YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED...

please check the "archives" link on the top right of the page for more...

You are free to watch as much as you want anyway, I just wanted to make this clear, after all there are many posts on this blog..

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..

sweeping the fog of memory

Today as I write, as I walk in the streets of Pest and Buda, students are queuing for job interviews while parents are re-scheduling their lives for a third job. The strings of the Rom fiddler in Kálvin Tér metro station echo as the continuing hymn of displaced festivities. The hymn of the musician whose life is out of tune, yet whose life is as linear as some great composers desired their work. The patient melody of the present confronting the towering concertos of shaken states accompanies us on the metro that leads to Nyugati station, on the train to Ferihegy airport, through the clouds withstanding ridiculous cheap-flight commercials as we fly into Luton and Stansted, in a spiral of a wide-ranged imagery, colours and melodies that are now so characteristic of our European travels.

Sweeping the street he dresses his frame
In a theatre for the cold
And whenever he stops the light comes in
Place reflected in his everywhere

Sweeping into the street they dress that fame
A theatre of gold
And whenever they disappear with pens of silver
Space is nowhere but in the heart

Of the street colour’s metteur en scène

The baker had no change for my metro ticket and I didn’t want to confront the boor of controllers. I went back up the streets - the Forint [*Hungarian currency] was continuing his fall down; I breathed the cold air of a country whose Gas storage is emptying itself in the midst of the Russo-Ukrainian pipe wars.

Media-responsibilities are in transition, participation is everywhere and young adults finishing their studies run the risk of falling sick of the human record. Blogs are the bastard-children of the possibilities left by an era of words sinking in rivers, while rivers sing out the words in a language we are too busy to get to grips with.

“One is always ashamed when one finds out he is not a hero but a dupe: a dupe of History” (* Márai Sándor “Memoirs of Hungary 1944-48”)

I leave you with the mark of a bourgeois yet brilliant writer of his times (indeed Márai himself stresses who can write but the bourgeoisie? The deal is different now, but his commentary leaves a trace on the meaning of our travels to the east, the south and those poles of others’ existence), a poet dressing up the times of transition between two wars, while at this very hour a war is being waged simultaneously in the streets of Gaza and on my contacts’ facebook status.
The colours are grey indeed in this October house.

resisting the words of shade
pain to eat
through the blinds
of my tongue's memory
I answer snappily
at the air around me
for shaping the blue
that took me

frame for the new year

Szeretet Ünepel

BETLEHEM-NEK POUSTÁILLÁ-BAN
PÁÁS-TO-ROK VIDIÁZATÁ-BAN
NADJ EUREU-EUM HIRDE-TETIQUE
MERT A BÁRMOK PAITÁILLÁBAN
EUKEUR SAMÁR IÁSOILLÁBAN
UDVEU-EUZI-I-TEUNK SZULE-TETT

Ô SENT YOJEF MIT GONDOL-TÁL
HODJ ICHTÁ-LOT VÁLASTO-TÁL
EBEN A-A ZORD HIDEGBEN
SAILLE BE HOZÁNK MÁRIÁ-VAL
SULETET QUICHE IÉZOUCHKÁ-VAL
LAQUIA-ATO-OK SI-VE-INK-BEN

Boldog Karácsonyt...

ami magyarul

Without realising, I wrote down "ami", which both means "that which is" in Hungarian ('magyarul') and "friend" in French. Familiar signs growing around me as I raise my eyes in streets of North-East Pest or the London underground. In a corridor at University waiting for exam-time or on the staff-board... A Hungarian name, a 'made in Hungary', and the complexities those words swallow for our good use.

Further on while I am searching for colours of those very grounds that project those signs. History bares no dress when one is shy and curious at the same time. Colours referring to the unsaid, to the patterns of life and craft of passing time, which itself is no pure human gift. There is a sense in which one re-creates time as representations go, but the responsibility is so complex there is no one road to it. Responsibility means having the time, means of traveling and walking, and making use of this time in the elsewhere one constructs as an observer. Of course such poetics are a choice, but can one reduce the image to mere personal experience in such media-spaces as blogging?

This is not to say - it would be absurd in the digital age - that each picture is an ethical choice, but merely this is the reflection upon me of my experience as well as the reflection of the eyes of passers-by looking dubiously at me for choosing this particular place and bus tire (see previous post) to stop and observe. They cannot be disconnected, as much as a digital picture is only rarely reserved 'private' today.

'ami' is both an affectionate relationship on my behalf to a certain place and people, as well as a sense of this very place, a part of it.
Similar to the effort of translation; a friendship and a place in the lense of the camera, l'effort du respect.

bíznesz

scaffolded nature

colour mat

words at a loss
shame, imagine
colours slithering
through the grey paper

travels, mat and glass
pain on the edge
of a slippy photo
colours glazing

rejoicing of the heat
of late-summer szolnok
and its memories in a dark
cold, and imaginary capital

colours at loss

their profile was well chosen
colour was as golden as branch
words were leaves drafting dust
and his was a shadow of doubt

The tree of their body
gave way to the cold window
instantly traveling away
to the east, hortobágyi train

the pale blue of the wood
they left on the window sill
was like a bottle on a bench
words of solitude

recherche

I am in London, researching the relation London Hungarians have to their traditional heritage or rather hunting down symbols. I'm also forcing a dialogue, and they tell me they're here to work. Creating a dialogue when things are normal, and again I feel like attracting far-away romantic notions back on the grounds. This 'work' or 'labour of love', or 'labour on work' is for me as much as it is for them. Does it make it awkward nevertheless?
I feel like I'm painting a horizontal line in yellow on one of Depardon's diagonally driven roads thriving for a horizontal landscape, or rather I'm lost in Paris, Texas and really tracing this line (I'll go for black, references old timer's warm melted tar, the kind deserved for a cowboy's shoulders) while the dust feeds into the hot paint, and the white interrupted line goes on to kill the imaginary distance.
Why did Johnny Cash just pop in on the radio? I'm not joking..
I am told to remember the importance of working for others, painting on their grounds, yet sinking into paternalistic visions of truth as I take each step. Wherever the road goes I'm convinced it's for each other's good, and this makes me as living as my subject. Hopefully words will follow as images chill yet words of ponder, not of chilling.
Every evening I come back and pass the shivering cold light reflected along the neck of my bass. I click on the radio and the next day I'm off with a bit of my library humming in the ears. Cables of thought, fort though arsed modern.
Echoe of the woman, living ghost of our university, whose words like a cold knife reminded me of unworthy stillness of our aims, our methods, our texts. "Is this what Goldsmiths has become?" Like the cabin boy I answered in my breath how little I knew..
The best steps, therefore, are those that will be taken unexpectedly.

colours, gaps

It's always ironic for someone to start photography on his first experience abroad. The relationship between fear, loneliness, and foreignness with photographic practice is very often inevitable. It is there for simple reasons if you are still looking for light, colours and contrasts; a struggle against representation, at the same time a kind of tragedy: sacrificing the pleasure of results and frames for more effort and walking.
So for whom are we collecting this massive data? Question worth asking as over the years we learn to travel more and more through the camera obscura.

I'm often told off if I decide to picture the debris of a broken-down building instead of trying to capture the beauty of Budapest monuments or more reasonably to frame a happy moment in a more 'colourful' place.
Those remarks don't just stem from a sense of harmony between a population and a government's politics of representation, nor simply from a sense of national pride. It's a gap in between pride and history.
The no-man lands of construction and the marginalised bits of history behind the big puma or macdonalds banners, or the ones you can only glimpse through the many kilometers of temporary walls are symbolic holes in a country having to imagine its future at extra euro-speed.
The irony of an outsider's position, to catch the cracks whilst through his own country financial cracks blow down an economy so fragile.
The banners and temporary walls on the way to university, to the supermarket, to the bank, to the bar, to bed, to the night-job, to the tube... those banners stay up, reflected everywhere in the plastic colours left by soviet history. They stay up, and mirrors are everywhere that tell history in their own moments.

back in the blue - kék fajó, kék utca

A vision that could be falling
like the dust of the magnificent
burned buildings of the many circling
streets, bruises, presence in descent
But plastic hurts nobody
no one ever heard the scream
save the colour of plastic
memory, deep in its simple
rainbow architecture

Flags - szines Zászlot aranylik

Growing city

1.30p.m. kávét

I feel like a submarine peering over their shoulders. Peeking, picking the crumbs on their window-sills, on their bare shoulders, whilst they give me comfort and patience - nyugadt.
Nostalgia is not a movement anymore. Writing, I feel like loosing the security, the freedom of this peep-culture. At a loss of image but construction still is not there.
Pictures are repeated attempts to an architecture of emptiness in this space, within those lines. This line you repeat, I repeat in a space so well known. A space probably rehearsed in dreams.
Can I escape their welcome? I'm there, and not in those later words. There is no judge in the hot air, just the smell of fruit and sweet, very sweet coffee.
No camera, just a tea-spoon swimming in a soup of words, the song of the 1.30p.m. kávét.

like the silk of family lines

kis kert - little eden

Hír: heatwave

the utility futility of this blog is to travel without and within words, as you wish.
A wish for greater news, more hearted than rooted, more dual than prime-time.
Just because I cannot help it.
I believe it was intuition to feel the warmth of this unique September heatwave. It was history in paper and in sight. Through the glass window-pain of my old neighbour's read, I confused the sun for the past, as memory was so much present, presence.
It was all around us in the flower dress of her grandmother, in the powerful darkness of the night-train's yellow, in the encounter with her high-school friend. Or simply without.
It was presence and absurdity in one on my bottle's cover (Luis Figo, Portuguese football striker who recently came back from comfortable Quatar now figures on the advertising for the szentkirály Hungarian water), in his son's "Brasil" tee-shirt, in my own o'neill bag carrying a bunch of great Hungarian-made cds...
A wish is better than novelty in my view, as it is not taken for granted, nevertheless we generally wish for both.
Alas for air conditioning and the wish for ecological security, alas for the heatwave. Hungarian is not so much a country that thinks in the future as one that wishes for the future; a heavy burden but this present wish.
so my neighbour reads on his "national freedom" (népszabadság) for all the heat within, without; here and there.

still

I always wonder how things can change in a small paradise of reality.
Coming in at the gate of this lego-coloured building, through the doors under the piros-fehér-zöld flag, things could be as simple.. as imagination.
Leaving my bag at the entrance for trust to care for, entering the canteen a hundred little faces turn to face us with a shy little twinge in their eyes. Here the teacher turns to us with her passionate smile, and takes us up to the second floor. More happy adults, responsibilities fly in passion and youth in happiness. The warmest greetings, as solid as the years go by, as invisible as a window cleaned with care... People here know too well why they keep on living in this place. Back down from the office, through the corridors of this large family, and out of school, trust handing me my suitcase, and a warm african air brings us slowly and calmly through to our home, through Szolnoki út, past the television tower into the home.

Hajku for the lost branch

Not to write
words cut down
your choice
of grammar