13-XII-2010.
An evening at the museum. The opening of the exhibition "From Tihuana to Tetka Ana". Tihuana 6 (or 7, I'm bad with names) was a combo band that I once saw, as a kid, back in the kantina, while Tetka Ana (auntie Ana) is what later became of Omege, the band which regularly played at least two evenings a week at Dom since about forever until it was closed in 1974. Then they reshuffled a few times and eventually became Tetka Ana (named after the famous Ana Vukotić, a special lady of our town).
So they showed all the old radios, amps, guitars, newspaper clips. Got a catalog, and sure enough, one of the photos of the Pa šta onda (And so what) I shot in 1972 was in it. Met a lot of old pals - Adža, Sleš, Aćim, Bajlo (the museum custos is his niece), Grne, V. the lead guitar from „Pa šta onda“. Saw a few celebrities - Peca Popović, whose Yu Rock Enciklopedija I have two of (got them as presents when in US, but then this was perhaps Petar Janjatović... or I got them mixed up), Branko Kockica (who is from here; the story says he took the money to go to Belgrade and buy the gear for his band, squandered the cash and dared not return, so made a carreer there)...
And I got a chance to shake hands with Nikola Nešković, the guy whose emisijas I religiously listened to, whenever I could grab a chance, in 1967-1971. I flatly refused to introduce myself, as „that would be contrary to the nature of radio, which is one-way, I'm just an old listener“. Then he got rerouted to wednesdays 18:20, when the reception is bad.
I'm the guy with a hat, in the door.
At some point some reporter girl from some Novi radio raised her mike to Adža and me, to consider something for the air. He immediately switched into some referat-radio voice and text, exactly the style in which all the rockers and folk musicians were drilled, how to speak for the state microphone, the fifties to sixties school. Ow fuckit I didn't expect you to be faithful to that drill, specially forty years later. So I countered, first just dropping a few contrary words over his speech, then the girl turned the mike my way, and I spurted some more ad lib in the same mocking style. I hope that I undermined it enough that she found the recording completely unusable.
Afterwards the whole show moved next door to the theatre club, Zeleno zvono (green bell), where Zaka and another guy sang a set of oldies and everybody generally had a great time.
Too bad that Ana Vukotić, the auntie Ana from the title of the exhibition, came not that evening, but some other day, so I didn't see her.
The blogue for the 14th [fixed a few typos now, though, may history forgive me]:
Life without a car
Now this is where I definitely see the difference between the US and Serbia. First of all, let's see why did I need the car there? For one, to get the groceries. That's most of the driving. Then, occasionally driving daughter to school (long story, actually, the whole last year I had to drive, because her school was 8 miles away, and due to budget cuts the school bus would take a hour and a half - that would be about a hundred hours of her life for the whole year). Going to the beach, a few times a year.
Scratch all that.
Groceries - don't need a car, the next supermarket isn't two miles away, it's two blocks away. And we're at the edge of town. If we were closer to a major street, we'd have three or more within a few blocks, plus a butcher's shop, an exchange office, couple of kiosks, a bakery and a chinese discount store (yep, they're everywhere). So for the daily shopping, we walk; for more than that, ride a bicycle few blocks more (no more than 1,5 miles altogether) and enjoy the wider choices.
I walked to school all the time. The school is at the same place. For elementary schools there's a school bus now, in cases when the school covers a larger area (yes, we have fewer kids but city isn't shrinking), but for high schools it's walk or take a bus.
What if it's night, or raining, or we buy something that can't be carried? Most shops will deliver it to your door, if it's anything larger than a TV. For everything else there's the taxi. Cabs are very cheap - you can get across town for less than 3$. Going out of town, you cut a deal with the driver, and there it depends, but you generally pay between 2 and 3 bus fares. If you share a ride, it's exactly the bus price for each passenger (minus the concourse ticket that the bus station would charge, which is about 65 cents), in the region of about 10$ for 50 miles. The bus itself isn't bad, except the service in some areas has gone sparse - some routes I remember as regular are canceled, so to places where you once had 4 or 5 of them in a day, you now have two. Or they don't run weekends.
And having a car has its serious downsides. The new traffic safety law is severe, and in some aspects, ridiculous. The amount (and cost) of equipment you must have in the car is running up a considerable cost, plus the risk of a cop catching you miss one of those and writing you a hefty fine, plus taking off points off your license. Then, the gas(oline!) is expensive, it's 1,20€ per liter, which comes close to 6$/gallon. Yes, the distances are shorter, but not that much. People manage by installing propane/butane tanks in their cars (which is completely legal in Europe - and completely impossible in the US, I wonder who lobbied for that), which is much cheaper, or drive diesels (and european diesel is much cleaner than the one in US). Diesel costs about the same as gas, at least the even cleaner Eurodiesel, but then european diesel cars consume far less - to the tune of 40mpg or better.
The sum total of this is that I don't feel like buying a car. I'm a happy walker/pedalist/cab rider.
Mentions: blogue, Dom omladine, emisija, Grne, Kantina, Mika Zelenić (Sleš), Milan Šebrcan (Aćim), Nenad Bajlo (Bajlo), Novi Sad, Omege, Pa šta onda, Radoslav Kajganić (Zaka), Stanimir Hadžić (Adža), Zeleno zvono, in serbian
31-III-2018 - 15-IV-2026