(the Status Quo concert did not happen this week, it was in september... see 11-IX-1971.
On 8th (though in a recap, without precise dates) I'm just noting that the DC-99 is finally founded, that we had a few sessions already. I invented the name - all the soc-realistic names (like keeping the name of the city, like the previous club did twenty-some years ago, or taking some important date for a name) were out, and then I remembered the address, shortened it and that was it, accepted by acclamation. The first bursts of originality. We had some budget already, so we got an apothecary scale (we'll make a lab), a 2x8mm camera (a Meopta Admira, with a rechargeable battery), and from real work so far we did develop some 8mm spools. A good beginning. I developed, guess what, the spool from 29th, with Zafir and V. dancing. Not that there's much of her, just a couple of seconds, but I played that slow, back and forth, analyzing the movement as they say. She's beautiful, the movement, face, hair. One good soul. She never said a harsh word to me...
Meanwhile, the gang from ruža took to cleaning up the almost finished apartments on 25. maj. Đ. brought a broom (on shoulder), bucket (on broom), knives and bread (in the bucket), did the most; Gradivoj came to have fun and mock (ran away from home a few days later); Džok - brought the cassette recorder, refused to play waterpolo in a bathtub, for fear of slipping into the sewers (he is a tad smaller); F. (later married to Miljka) wiped the windows, R. just had fun; Dragana was a goalie when they played football in an apartment (no ball, just a lump of bread); S. worked seriously, just at half of Đ.'s speed.
Finally found V. and planned to shoot a "night movie" with her. She and Z. would come this week to see the tape from 29th.
Didn't come on 14th, but Duca and Tejka did. One was in excellent mood and had fun, consequently the other one was gloomy ("popizdela" - cunted all over). Duca finally took away the shoes she left here on doček.
Accidentally, found that she wrote somewhere in my atlas "if you ever see [nickname here], you tell him that I love him"... yeah, too late now. She changed her mind in the next line... wrote that she, rather, loves Beštara.
DC-99 is getting equipped, got a new Quartz 5 camera - zoom, optical viewfinder, several speeds, exposure meter, something serious. Bukac and I should make a documentary about the city, 10 minutes, color. We don't lack ideas.
Some bits of news, shredded into my ramblings these days:
- we had sour cabbage but it already stinks, something's wrong
- the sound library of 202 is getting stale, too much Ray Coniff, too many times they run the same tape with same fifteen songs in the same order (learned to hate them individually and collectively), too few news
- there were rumors that Nikola Nešković would be sacked from Second program, allegedly turned his emisija into a private party, too chummy with the listeners (read this in Radio TV Revija)
- there was a "Whole life in a year", where they did show someone's entire life in weekly installments; the language annoyed me vastly, but that was intentional - all the dialogs were written in official language. Would probably be hilarious, had I watched it ten years later.
- advertising is even more obnoxious than a couple of years ago
All in all, I was annoyed with just about everything.
[writing this two years later, october 2022:]
Now about the sour cabbage. There may have been places where you could buy it. Not yet in retail, they didn't have proper ways to package it for another decade or two. On the green market, perhaps, but then the peasants who'd do it commercially would always try to make a quick profit, so all kinds of tricks were employed to speed up the process and be the first to offer it, including vinegar, warming up the water. Generally it would come as too sour or would just stink, so nobody we knew of would buy it. If you were a proper household, you fermented your own.
That was a radnaakcija for the whole day. The cabbage is soured in two shapes - whole heads, with the center cut out, and the hole filled with salt, and shredded cabbage to stuff between the heads. Or just shredded. Funny, though, the sour head of cabbage is called prokola, which probably relates to broccoli - and nobody here ever heard of broccoli, or brussels sprouts for that matter.
Cutting the stem from the head was always dad's job. It can be dangerous, one stabs the head while holding it in his lap, it's hard and not yielding easily. There were accidents. So don't distract the cutter and leave him some space. The shredding was also not a laughing matter, as it required a special cutter, a board with a slot at about 30° angle, in which two or three steel blades were mounted. One would slide the head over the board and the shreds would fall into a vat below. The whole thing took all day.
Then there had to be sufficient salty water. The amount of salt is a matter of recipe, there are several schools of thought. There's a neighbor who got his recipe while drunk in a tavern, and overdid the salt at least twice over, so his cabbage was fermenting quite slowly, got eventually right by late april. Normally, the fermentation should be over by november.
The heads were laid out in any vessel big enough. We used to have a wooden vat, inherited, which was tough to wash and clean. When that, thankfully, fell apart after a couple of skipped years, we switched to a big plastic barrel, of 100 or 200 liters (both would have looked big to me). That was easier to wash.
The stone. As the fermentation is anaerobic, all of the cabbage needs to be immersed. And it's lighter than water, specially when it starts developing bubbles of carbon dioxide („it whispers“), so it needs to be pushed down at all times. For that we used some slats left over from some old barrel's lid (these had to be specially scrubbed and thoroughly washed) which we'd top with a stone (again, scrubbed and washed each time). The stone was a half of some itinerant sharpener's grindstone, semicircular.
Over time dad developed a few tricks. One was to take out some of the rasol (the salty juice) by means of a hose, bring it into the house and warm it up, then pour it back into the barrel. The barrel being usually in some back pantry, or nowadays rather in the garage, where it's always cold, some extra heating surely helped the bacteria do their thing.
It's just that the whole operation got written down only this year, when it failed. We never understood what went wrong, and generally avoided cooking with this batch of cabbage. Even if cooking it would mostly remove the smell, the whole house stank of it while it was cooked. Eventually we just dumped it.