házi kocsmája

Smell of tobacco in the plastic chairs
Soda in your cheap wine
Good wine is for food
Old coffee resting amidst the fumes
of menthol cigarettes
of mosquitoes from the Tisza

The dog is wailing for company
We recite our week's walks and encounters
How was work, where is the wine?
Home-mades and home-stomachs
Glory be for a bit of kocsmája
in my memory box

Oh for a good wine discussion




I wrote the following lines for the picture above last year. I was told by my girlfriend, who is Hungarian, that this description of her father’s “kocsmája” (* which stands for “his pub”) made her very sad. I wanted to know what exactly she felt, but she simply swept the matter away, as those were my own words, my own images – my own relative reality.
Of course this didn’t satisfy me. The remarks I receive when deciding to picture the debris of a broken-down building 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. To me, it's a gap in between pride and history.
The no-man lands of construction and the marginalised bits of history lie behind the big puma or macdonalds banners, and those kilometres 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 the wind of financial cracks blows 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.
This, at least, is how I see my relative reality.