the important thing is that we understand each other



Belgrade

 Cluj-Napoca


21 9 2010

12:51-1:01

Here is the Romanian cop with his train-conductor-style hat. Oh, and, well this guy in the red shirt licks his right index finger and rubs at a white stain on his navy jeans, while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette with his left hand.



There is the girl in the baggy green shirt, could be muslin, and her hand is to her left ear, and her left elbow is on the table, and presumably she is operating a mobile telephone, and her left index finger holds a jade-colored ring, and the stone is a flat circle.



There is the girl with the faux rabbit fur hooded vest over a pea-green sweater, and she has dyed her hair a sort of auburn-blonde, and underneath her eyes it is the color of cooked liver.



And in the restaurant behind me there is an advertisement that covers the entire storefront window- it is a man holding a knife in front of a kebab, and the kebab dwarfs him, and his knife is the size of a machete, and his hat is a little fez and is red, and tufts of hair peek out the front of it, he wears his fez like he wore his little beret when he worked at burger king or some such place, and the red letters above this slouched man in white, read: kebab de criza 4.90 lei.



Now the girl with the green shirt and green ring stirs her cappuccino, lifts the spoon, dabs at the foam, dips it, twirls it again, now she is slipping the foamy spoon into her mouth.



And here is a guy in a suit kind of bouncing along, sort of a side to side gait, as if he is like too happy. Maybe he would be sloppy to deal with, too loose.



And there is the little dark woman, with almost a bald spot and she is practically hunched over the teal colored baby stroller, and holding hands with another little boy and her little girl walks out front of the stroller.



Okay, and I am back at the galeriile café, right, outside, and it is a perfect day out, and so the three benches nearby are filled with the usual old gypsy women who congregate there.



And now the policeman in his little conductor’s hat is over and talking to a little gypsy girl and asking to see the contents of her yellow shopping bag that says in English, “cash and c.” I can’t read the rest of the word after the c. but it makes me think of a USA store that is called cash and carry, and who the hell knows what happened to that place, right.





20 9 2010

146-156

We see the red of the chairs in a clump and they are four squares of oxidized strawberry juice, and we see now the faces in the grains of the wood of the table, and how all of these faces are studded with the eyes of the owl, right. And how for some reason I have been able to play the beatles lucy in the sky with diamonds and yann tiersen’s les jours tristes, from amelie, today simultaneously, and somehow it is a comforting like two blankets I huddle beneath.



There is a woman with a peach colored hood.

There is a woman in black who waddles, rather dangerously listing to the side.

There is a small green car with what seems to be only a shadow at the wheel.



Over there is a yellow pipe the color of synthetic banana, framing the doorway of the building. And there is a little taxi with the green, yellow, red of the Romanian flag for a taxi sign, and the word taxi is in the middle, the yellow part, and now there is the burgundy flash of a van, and now there is another silver car followed by a lime green car, and a silver, and there is another taxi, white on top, blue on the bottom, and today the traffic and the passing of cars is such that it becomes a blur of colors, right, and each car is a drop of paint sliding down the canvas, and it is, perhaps, me, that is too small and sitting at the wrong angle or maybe I am on my back.



There is an old woman in a lavender jacket with reddish hair.

The lower windows of the building out there are covered in bars.

Above on a balcony, three green-grey bags appear as the three corpses of captured tortoises.





19 9 2010



Okay found the best coffee here in cluj. The cup is emblazoned with the word ‘maromas’ in lowercase, bold, black font. Above these letters is a gold sort of modernist eagle with five stars rising and meeting in an arc above the bird’s opened wings. The girl working told me that this place has been open for two months. It used to be an apartment building. It is tastefully decorated in a pretty shade of lilac, and the tables are nice light wood with dark grains showing. I am alone here in a nice corner by the window, and so this is ideal. And outside the window I count twenty-two wires that are strung in this one spot. And across the street is a building in light yellow, the color of a the tiny tentacles on the bottom of a dried starfish. In one corner is a brick fireplace. Today they play early nineties ballads. There is an electric piano and two big speakers on the far left of where I sit, and also a microphone, so I am guessing that there is live music here. I apologized to the girl working here for not knowing very much Romanian. She in turn, apologized for not knowing very good English. I assured her that she spoke great English, and she said, ‘the important thing is that we can understand each other.’ I gave her a thumbs up and returned to my table.

KiKi: my dear rough diamond

this is from belgrade, for my friend who loves garfield

Big square, dark table. Big room with one big doorway covered by a sheet of plywood. A small piano in the corner- the upright kind. The coca-cola ad says racoreste-te. And there is a little triangle of light beneath the stairs and the dark wood of the chairs and little brass rivets in the chairs holding down the leather, and the menu, is spelled meniu and features a picture of a group of drinking glasses, in orange, yellow, green, pink, and the rims of the glasses have shadows, right, and so the photo is a weird raised effect and is like a close-up of some tentacled octopus arm.




Out of the window, there is a little square of a window on the way up the staircase, and I see the pink of some little flowers through this, and in the corner of the stars is a big stone pot, and it has a plant like a green leafy one with some of the ends of the leaves yellowed and tinged with black, and I hear the flick of the lighter now.

if someone has flushed the alphabet away

in belgrade, boy approaches basket, pretending it is a horse

16 9 2010


Could be anywhere today



But still, there is the sheen of the glass ashtray. There is the liquid-black of the unused straw. The middle-aged woman swinging her arm like military while staring at the ground and plodding over the stones. There is the obligatory old man in a beige jacket and khaki pants- his posture is such that his chin is level with his shoulders.

We hear a barking laugh that sounds like an aggressive, feigned hilarity. A baby in an orange and black stroller, bumping over the cobblestones. He has deep-black hair, sits fully upright, and looks to his left, to where we sit. More than looks, he is glaring; his brow is furrowed and his faint eyebrows are fully tensed.





15 9 2010



Went back to the galeriile fortuna café. Same table today. Same angle. Later in the day today, though, but, and, the light is lighting up the wall of the old church and it has become a glowing cobalt, and over here, some group of Swiss students has sat down. One of them is a girl with the face of an angry boy, and she keeps glaring and looking scornfully at the currency here, the Lei, as the others produce wallets, dig in purses, and actually, they are all girls at that table, except for one boy who is small and Indonesian looking.

And I see the entrance to a sewer, and there are little raised ‘U’s’ on the thing. Little ones and big ones, spiraling out from the center. As if someone has flushed the alphabet away, and the letter U went careening into the sewer cover causing raised u's for the pedestrians to negotiate.

One of the students eats a white coconut or maybe white chocolate thing, looks almost like dead skin, and I hear it crunch, and it is most likely not the skin of a corpse that she has been drying for months and is now eating in public, feeling secure that the others are fooled by the chips bag that her harvest has been slyly deposited into, right.

Right, and today, I walked through the cemetery again, and I sat down and happened upon some teeth in the ground. I dug with rocks and pulled out an old set of ceramic false teeth. I used two sticks as if they were tongs, to lift the teeth, thinking at the time that maybe they were haunted, and I placed the teeth in a tree.

Here's What Happened on Your Birthday, Stephen Kaskade!

Belgrade

14 9 2010


Cluj-Napoca Galeriile Fortuna

Outdoor café, perfect weather, perfect old stone square and buildings weathered the way I like and perfect colors.



Here, my receipt tells me: “MULTUMIM!”

We see the man in the suit stride by with the flash of a golden tie. The table of three girls smoking cigarettes and they keep looking at me and it could be a variety of reasons. And here are these bright pink/ Nantucket Red pants tight on an old woman with the weathered face of a pug. And the little birds chase each other to steal the bread from the mouth of their brother. And an old gypsy woman sits on the edge of a bench, facing the back of the bench, which enables her to pound at the back rest in adamant gestures holding meaning only for her.



Yesterday I saw a wedding party on the steps of the orthodox church- they released pigeons into the air. Today A white and dazed looking bird wanders amidst this roving herd of pigeons. If you were smaller, be damn sure this roving avian mass would be intimidating and more and more I see how the dinosaurs are inside of the birds.



An old woman holds up a bottle to the waitress, pleading for water. The waitress smirks at the old gypsy woman, and obliges. I am disturbed. The bottle is covered in orange plastic, and was previously used to contain yoghurt or some other cream-fruit beverage, and it seems to me that the rule should be that you can only refill water bottles with water, or at the very least, the bottle should be transparent. One must see the water one drinks. And can anyone enlighten me as to the function of all this pigeon head bobbing? The other birds are not like this.

Morning Milk and Cereals

entering the carpathians

13 9 2010 Cluj-Napoca at Transylvania Hostel, kitchen

10:37-10:47



Look where you’ve eaten breakfast: we can see the spots of muesli that cling to the inside of the bowl. There is yellow, and brown and banana color. If we look long enough at these grain clusters, we see the face of a dog who is rabid and biting into his own paws. The outside of the bowl has a glossy purple stripe around the upper half. The bottom half is white. The bowl has a narrow base and opens up from that, like an open ceramic flower.



A key card is needed to enter the kitchen space, and mine rests on the table in front of me, to my right, and in line with this computer. The card is white, and has a red sticker on it. The edges of the sticker are black, where the adhesive property of the thing has picked up dirt and residue and other filth from the hands that hold it.

The chairs here have the Ursus Bear beer logo on them. This morning, the bear seems to be in full lotus, wearing a tagine pot as a hat, and letting his legs become the tentacles of the octopus.



Ah ha! I see you, little Heineken keg in the corner.



And in front of me a simple sign printed in bold font on a white piece of paper, and hung horizontally on a small bulletin board:



“Morning

Milk and Cereals.”

old people who do not wish to swim or do really, anything

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

12 9 2010


3:39-4:07 pm

Cluj-Napoca, Romania



We see the old woman dipping a spoon into a plastic bag. The contents of the bag are not discernible from here. Behind her is a grey plastic crate, that looks like a milk crate- until I see that there are four more, evenly spaced, and that one of them is rusted, meaning that these plastic crates are metal crates, and so, perhaps they are fixed to the ground. Perhaps they shield some electrical thing. Perhaps they are the front line guarding the underpinnings of a city. The old woman’s legs rest on the low step on which she sits. She sits, not with her legs out in front of her, but resting to what would be her left side. The left leg on her looks reddish and purplish. It looks somehow bulging and uneven in unexpected places. It could be part of a tree; it could be a painted, craggy rock; it could be a fat leg that someone decided to burn- they burnt away the skin of her leg to set free these new colors.



A tree with flaccid leaves clinging with a sort of why-do-I-bother-I’m-gonna-die-anyway attitude.



An old man on a bench with a turtleneck, a burgundy hat with a navy band- almost a feminine hat, and his little mouth is open in a slot, and I have learned that when, on old people, that lower lip curls in, it may be that they have lost those teeth, and so this man sits, and he may as well be a floating cetacean siphoning for krill, and but he has his legs crossed tightly in the way of old people who do not wish to swim or do really, anything. But he is transforming, and now he seems to be a sort of canine panting in the sun, tied to a tree- he looks straight ahead, dully, but sometimes cars catch his eye, or maybe it is passing birds, or young people. This old man stares at a college kid who drapes his leather jacket over one shoulder, wears red pants and smokes. This old man stares and turns his head to follow the progress of this younger man. Now the old man stares up into the sun, but is quickly distracted by that flying bird.

The old woman who was sitting on the low step with the odd leg has finally shifted and sits forward, turns again to pick up a blue piece of plastic, then looks forward again- but she has revealed more of her leg, and I cannot tell now whether there is some sort of protective cast or wrap on it, or if she possesses an elephantitus-leg. It is enormous. It is a massive, uncooked kebab that she must always walk on and rest her other leg on while she stares into the depths of the street. Her hair is cut as if with a bowl, and she may be the type of person who would paint her own glasses in pastel colors with cheap paint- which would have saved her the money she spent on the glasses she is wearing.

And now she is up!

And she hobbles, and her momentum is more side-to-side then forward. She walks in a slow and unsteady walk. Walking on an outsize kebab is the walking of the inebriated. Now she is at the public fountain. She rinses a plastic bottle and submerges it! She picks up some litter from the street and tosses it into the middle of this oval-shaped, sandstone pool, right here in the middle of the pedestrian walkway, this pool. Now she has her hand in the fountain, and is splashing water into the street, over and over, she removes water from the fountain.

Here: Cluj-Napoca, Romania

10 9 2010 Cluj- Café Corso:

Next to me is a planter in a window. Three spaces hold three long, rectangular plastic containers. The plastic containers are full with dirt, and the plants rise up from the dirt. And the table I sit at is nestled up against the window with these plants, and another table. Between the two tables is an angular space where the white of the floor, and part of the seat of a chair are visible.

Three old men sit beneath an umbrella. One of them strokes beneath his chin, then his lower jaw bone with an index finger that looks like a weathered walnut. The door to the massive cathedral is ajar. I can see this from here. The taxis line up in front of the cathedral. Here, they are white cars, with the yellow taxi sign fixed to the rear-roof section. The side of the cars display a thin, black and white checker decal, just below the passenger windows.

I see through a space in the trees, the waving of a blue flag.





7 9 2010 Cluj: Le General- on the balcony



Prime seat here looking out over the street, and the wavering of the skinny trees in their holes- really, their holes- they are put in the sidewalk and can see fully, how big they are allowed to grow. They will never exceed this metal grate. They will see that one day they will be growing up against a metal plate. They see that one day their roots will be pushing into the stone squares of the walkway, that one day they will face the sad blanket of the asphalt.

Hey and I have here a beer. It says: regele berii in romania. It is called Ursus, which means bear.



Over there is hotel meteor. Overhead, we see the orthodox church dome and steeple, black and tinged with slight oxidation, and even a patch of burnt red from god knows what, and on the other side of the horizon, we see the catholic church. And there is the blue sign that says euro-gsm, and of course in my simplicity, I conjoin these words to create a term for some ecstatic novice traveler recounting his daytrip to the Eiffel Tower. And the table I sit at is front and center of this balcony, and is a blue tile mosaic, with aqua and royal blues and some white interspersing this. It is only a patterned table, there is not an attempt at pictorial representations today. Not at this fucking table at least. And a red van has it’s parking lights flashing and has the passenger wheels jacked up onto the curb and there is nobody to be seen, but the driver’s window is open. This street is right next to the pedestrian walkway. And I count twenty-two of those beige colored umbrellas, the squarish ones that they hoist up over the tables, here. And I see an old man in a beige shirt and camel-colored pants, and old people fade into the sand in their own way don’t they, beginning with their attire. And over there is a woman in a bright green like mint shirt doing little gestures with her hand to a woman in a cream-colored jacket and a bright strawberry shirt, and now the police go by and in this country it is spelled polita. And there is a woman who like bounces from foot to foot as she walks, shifting her considerable weight, and wearing a garish bright green shirt with some olive stripes on it. And looking down, I see a man carrying a purse, and a blue plastic sac, and the woman carries a child in a pink sweatshirt, a white and white trainers, and the woman herself wears a black, veil-like head covering. I wonder about deja-vu. Perhaps it is a sort of sign post, an indicator that you are on the correct path, that you have tapped into a greater conciousness.



6 9 2010 Cluj

4:47

Here at Corso café. Here we see the gothic-style catholic church with it’s mottled, orange and purple tint. There is a man in a tan-leather jacket on the street sitting next to a tree. The base of the tree has been painted white. The streets are full of long, dark-haired girls, and bent, bulbous old women. The city exists beneath a web of wires. Maybe there was a man who was in charge of stringing up the electric /telephone /video /other wires. I picture him carrying the coiled wires on his back, and instead of using a ladder, he would toss up the wires, hoping to hook them on the pole, then moving to the next one, and stringing the city together like with dark garlands. Maybe he had only one arm, and wore a long-sleeved shirt with one sleeve pinned up.







4 9 2010 Cluj-Napoca, Romania

9:16 am



Hotel. The carpet is a nauseating red this morning. I am here, alone in the room. A television shows romanian news. A weather man is in a tomato colored shirt. An anchorwoman delivers sultry. Behind me the kitchen staff has taken up seats and they begin speaking and smoking.