Dumneazu

Obama and Solinsky. Again.

2012-01-23T12:27:00.000-05:00

"My Grandmother, Mrs. Imre Zala, meets Finance Minister Győrgy Matolcsy"

It has been a slow month here in blogland. Hungary has been in the news in a big way, and as long time readers know, I tend to avoid discussions of Hungarian politics in this space. You want to hear my opinions about Hungarian politics? Take me out and buy me a few drinks. You will get an earful. But more to the point, other people do it better - check out my blogroll for Eva Balog's Hungarian Spectrum, or the newer Hungarian Contrarian and Andor Jakab's Blog. Paul Krugman has been examining Hungary's antic relationship with its new constitution via a series excellent posts by Princeton Proffessor of constitutonal law Kim Scheppele. The Economist, Financial Times, and Washington Post have also kept our addled one-Party rulers in their sights. When you read the NY Times pieces, the Economist, or any of the other newspapers on stories about hungary, please do not fail to read the comments sections.They are infested by the uniquely Hungarian version of internet troll. Now, Hungary is not the only country that pays PR hacks to troll for stories and correct them in the comment sections. But it is fun to watch the language-challenged Ministry of Propaganda hacks try and take down a Krugman or a Princeton Law prof by labeling them a "post-commie" or attacking them for causing Hungary's serious economic ills. Because in Hungary, propaganda is very big business. FIDESZ, the ruling party, is nothing so much as a gigantic PR machine, driving home its talking points wit a grim determination and a surprising lack of ideology. FIDESZ prospered in opposition due to its skillful use of public relations firms and advisors to drive a wedge into the Hungarian public opinion, dividing every conceivable issue as one of "Us vs. Them." It is all done with mirrors. Here is a secret: public relations is the enemy of democracy, folks.

The Father of Modern Public Relations

It was invented by Paul Bernays, a cousin of Sigmund Freud who emigrated to the US in 1892 from Austria. In his main work "Propaganda" in 1928 Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized." Bernays was behind PR campaigns that convinced the American public that smoking was acceptable for women, that bacon and eggs was a healthy breakfast, that Calvin Coolidge was a nice guy, and that ballet was fun to watch. But beneath it all he was aware of the power that comes from lies. "PR must create news." wrote Bernays in his 1923 book 'Crystalizing Public Opinion' "in order to appeal to the instincts and fundamental emotions of the public." If you have a few hours and want to spend them watching a highly disturbing BBC documentary about Bernays and his work, I highly recommend the three hour long "Century of the Self" on Youtube. Yes, indeed, it is all done with mirrors... no hay banda...no hay banda...Anyway, the reason I delve this far into politics at all was that I took a peek at my blog statistics and noticed a serious jump in readership in the last few weeks. Was it because of a sudden leap in interest in Hungarian politics? Looking through some of the clicks I found out, why no. Something even more silly and ignorant was to blame. The American Tea Party! Back during the 2008 presidential elections Sarah Palin accused Barak Obama of following the teachings of "Solinsky" - which was her addled attempt at conceptualizing the name of social activist Saul Alinsky. I posted a story about that. Josef Solinsky, however, was the name of a Klezmer violinist who recorded several rare Jewish fiddle pieces on gramophone records back in the pre-World War One era, all of which have become basic to the recreated style of traditional klezmer fiddle.

Not Josef Solinsky, either.

That story died back when Obama won the election and I thought the American looney right wing would never again become riled up with a lond deceased Klezmer violinist. But I was wrong. Never underestimate the ability of the wingnut to run with wrong information. For days now, I have been getting up to 500 blog visits a day looking for information on this nefarious "Solinsky." So here he is, in the original: Josef Solinsky on the violin. And given that the US Republican presidential race is narrowing down to a contest between Obama and either a lying billionaire who believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County Missouri, or a guy who was cheating on his wife while he was trying to have President Clinton impeached for a blow job. I'm sticking with Obama. He's a lot more my style - a fly fisherman. And so is Solinsky. So if you want to complain about my lack of comment on the growing crisis in Hungary, I hear you. If things hot up I may change that policy. But for now I will stick to what I know. Want to tell me I don't know about Klezmer fiddle? I don't think sooooo....(Oh, and trolls? The delete button anxiously awaits you. But you knew that.)

Slovakia: Extreme Fly Fishing with Diplomats.

2011-12-15T09:26:00.001-05:00

It is Christmasseason and cold and wet in Budapest. What better excuse do I need to yearn forthe hot days of summer? Yes, when I am not traveling with my band or ferretingout Chinese groceries in Budapest, I do like a vacation sometimes, preferablyin an exotic locale. And what could possibly be more exotic than… Slovakia! Ithas all the necessary ingredients I require of a strange and enlighteningholiday destination. Bizarre accordion music!

A language that is absolutelybeyond my powers of comprehension! A cuisine that is based on the theory that foodshould all be one color (white!) And most important: pristine mountains coveredin forests and rivers filled with trout. Yes, I am a trout fisherman. Hungary isnot a paradise for trout fishing, although it is a Mecca for European fishermenwho travel here hunting for its legendary monster sized carp. Yes, there are afew places one can find trout streams in Hungary – the Garadna and Szinva nearMiskolc come to mind, although the Szinva suffers an almost annual indignity asa dumping ground for photographic chemicals producing spectacular fish kills that drift into the downtown area of Miskolc and stink up the business district.The Josva stream near Aggtelek actually supports a wild trout population, butsince it is located in a National Park zone, fisheries experts are not allowedto develop it as a proper sport fishery. But the trout fishing is better in theneighboring countries.

Release me! Please! Release me!

Slovenia has some of the best trout fishing in Europe,but the license fees are steep and it is not exactly close to Budapest. Thatleaves Slovakia, which offers reasonable fees for non-resident fishing permitsand good, cheap accommodation in the off season ski regions in the mountains. Evenwithout a car I can take a train to the small town of Liptovsky Hradok and haveaccess to two excellent mountain rivers, the Bela and the Vah. But luckily, Ihave a fishing buddy, and he has a driver’s license, and at least once a yearwe rent a car and head north to be humbled and shamed by a creature with noarms and legs and a brain the size of a lentil. Claude has been met in thesepages before. Once an iconoclastic punk rocker he has transformed into aninternational diplomat and campaigner for Human Rights, and is now married andraising a pair of beautiful and clever daughters. He has put aside thefoolishness of youth, and taken up the foolishness of middle age. Fishing for trout.I mean, usually Claude goes out to fight The Good Fight armored in a threepiece suit with a silk tie in a big Windsor knot.

Come to Papa!

On fishing days Claude looks likethis. He walks around in this outfit entirely without any sense of irony or shame. He claims it "keeps him dry" even as we watch the water seeping into his pants. The first time we went fishing in Slovakia, his wife Mina and Fumie tookone look at us in our rubber pants and hit the floor howling with laughter.While Claude goes for the full chest wader “Michelin Man” look, I prefer hipwaders, and until it was pointed out to me I never considered that they made me look like aslightly chubby Chippendale Dancer.

World's only Judeo-Romani Fly Fishing Team

Another issue is “catch and release.” Afterstanding in a cold alpine stream with ice water lapping at our family jewelsfor hours, I don’t really want to kill the fish and take it home and eat it. Iwant a hot soup, or in Slovakia, at least, something starchy and white with sheepcheese and bacon bits on top. Halushky is probably the Slovak national dish. Potato dumplings with sheep cheese and bacon bits. Eat it and you will never be hungry again. It doesn't sound like much, but it is one of Europe's great foods. You can fnd it in literally every resturant in the land, but it is best when you get it a cheap lunch stops attracting lumberjacks and truck drivers. Thousands of Slovak truck drivers can't be wrong.

There is no such thing as "lo-carb" in Slovakia.

Wild trout are so beautiful, and as we fly fishermensay “too valuable to only be caught once.” Mina, however, comes from a Romafamily in Romania, and Fumie comes from the fresh fish mecca of Tokyo, so theywere no laughing mood when they informed us that anything we caught was to be killedand considered as food, no argument, were we crazy, and why the hell were wefishing, anyway? We nodded dumbly (never argue with women armed with fly rods!)and we released our fish in secret. On arriving in Liptovsky Hradok, we checkedout the river Vah and decided that it was too high to fish. That left thealpine Bela, which flows into the Vah from the High Tatras. And we needed toget fishing licenses. In Slovakia this is never easy – you need to have a statepermit and then a local day permit to fish a specific trout stream. Nobody everknows where to get both, although local fishing tackle shops are a good bet ifyou can find one. In Hradok you need to go to the paper store next to the hotelacross from the train station.

Bravely standing up to the EU.

The assistant there informed us that we neededto pay double the local rate for a day permit (a regulation that we didn’t encounterelsewhere in Slovakia) and Claude – who has a degree in law and can often befound prowling the halls of the European Parliament in Brussels - calmly explainedthat under EU law, administrative fees such as fishing permits can no longer allowdiscrimination between EU passport holders (such as both of us.) Claude toldher this in his fluent and formal Czech learned from years teaching in Prague. Thewoman sputtered something and turned red. Nothing seems to enrage a Slovak storeclerk more than being lectured in EU law in Czech by a foreigner. The breakupof Czechoslovakia wasn’t so long ago and the languages are still mutually intelligible,but she wasn’t having it. Claude immediately sensed her frustration and – in thecalm and monotonous voice that comprises the ninja arsenal of EU Human Rightslawyers – began to prod her into conniptions by reciting a long list of EU laws and regulations backing up hispreliminary objection. It was getting late. “Let’s just pay the fee and gofishing, Claude.” “No. It is a matter of principle. She has no right under theEU laws to double charge for a foreigner’s permit.” I went outside for a smoke.Twenty minutes later Claude emerged from the shop, muttering about bringing thecase of the Stubborn Paper Shop Fishing Permit to the European Courts. I justwanted to get on the water. Now, here is a basic tip for fly fishermen: alwaysask the locals where to go.

Of course, we did no such thing. We drove up theBela valley marveling at the scenery and the fact that here seemed to be absolutelyno access roads to the stream itself. Where there was it was only accessible byrappelling down limestone cliffs where one false move would cost you your life.This never seems to bother Claude, who approaches fly fishing as an extremesport combining the best features of base jumping with the thrill of deep seafree diving. I come from a more Isaac Walton, “pastoral pleasures” school offly fishing, so we continued driving until we finally found a spot near a localholiday camp, so we could fish while watching fat nude Germans splashing in theicy waters across from us. As always, Claude found a classic pool and was soononto some trout. After a while he graciously moved on and Fumie took her shotat the pool, and again, trout.

Sushi. Step number one. Catch it.

Fumie is not a “by the book” angler. She doesn’tcare about careful casting, or spooking the fish, or having a perfectlystraight leader. She only uses two fly patterns: the Red Tag – because shecaught her first trout using one, and a ridiculous chimera of a beadhead nymphshe calls “The Dancing Queen” because I tie them for her in colors usuallyreserved for inking “Hello Kitty” illustrations. It makes fly selection easierfor her and, in terms of fish caught; it beats the rubber pants off of me. So,at the end of day one, everybody goes home happy and I have caught absolutelyzip. The next day we tried the Bela closer to the town of Hradok, but thesummer temperature had put the fish into slow mode and we were all without anyof what fishermen call “luck.” We watched one local took some fish using the specializedform of fly fishing known as “Czech nymphing.” This consists of tying aboutthree heavy sinking nymph flies to a long nylon leader, wading out to themiddle of the stream where the current is constantly threatening to drown you,and then flailing a short line upstream as if whipping a team of intransigent oxen.Yes it seems to catch fish. No it doesn’t look like a lot of fun.

I dare you to release me!

Having beentaught a lesson by the wily trout of the Bela, we decided to move on to morefamiliar ground. The Revuca, flowing between Donovaly and Ruzemberok, has beenour home stream for the last few years. Only three hours drive from Budapest,it is a smaller woodland stream where we have all caught some beautiful troutand grayling. And we knew where to get our day permits. Like a lot of Slovak fishing licensors, it is located in a private homeand handled by a little old lady who speaks only Slovak and thinks that allJapanese people are the same person. Unlike the wild rapids of the alpineBela, the Revuca is gentler, full of pools and holes that we have fished manytimes before. We never get skunked on the Revuca. Almost never. This day, however,started off difficult. No trout. At least for me, no trout. Claude and Fumiecaught and released a few small ones, but I had nothing and we had to get backto Budapest by evening so we couldn’t stay until the evening when stream fishusually start hitting at the end of a hot day. After wasting several hoursbeing cruelly taunted by a school of anti-Semitic grayling in one of the downstream holes that had always given up some fish in previous trips, I accepted defeat and was hiking back towardthe car when i heard Fumie and Claude shouting. They had fish.

The exciting denouement of Cahn's ballet "The Fingerling"

Claude told me tolose my nymphs and tie on a dry fly, so I picked out a deer hair caddish flythat I could easily see in the shallow rapids, waded out, and started casting.Fumie and Claude were catching rainbow trout on almost every other cast andsoon so was I. This was great. And then… I get my fly line caught in a tree.No, problem. I know how to deal with this. A gentle tug and… my rod tip breaks.Clean in the middle. After sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream andfuming while watching Fumie and Claude reel in fish after fish, I re-strung myrod without the tip and began casting with the stumpy, unresponsive stick I wasleft with. And yes, I caught trout. And yes, it was fun – catching trout on dryflies is always fun, even if they seem to be small stocked rainbow trout who don’tknow the difference between a size 14 deer hair caddis fly and trout farm puppychow. And yes – I have a spare rod, but it was home in Budapest. Where elsewould a serial fly rod murderer like myself want to keep his spare fly rod,right? And yes, I actually like the cheesy starchy halushky dumplings that are served all over Slovakia, especially after a year of a very lo-carb eating regimen, and I like some of the other stuff that Slovaks produce as well and I like just being in a place called Slovakia.

And now it is winter. I have a new fly tying vise. It is time to tie afew dozen flies and wait for next year’s Slovakian trout trip. I can hear thetrout mocking me in Slovak even now. I never learn.

Maramureş: The Fashion Shoot!

2011-12-02T05:29:00.008-05:00

Last spring I managed to get to one of my favorite places in Europe – the Maramureş region in northern Romania – twice in the space of a month. The first trip was in May, part of a project involving my ongoing folk music research. The second trip was even more interesting. As soon as I returned to Budapest I was contacted by Nigel, a professional photographer who had contracted with an American fashion company to arrange a photo shoot in Maramureş. He was already occupied with a job elsewhere, so could I return to Maramureş to do some preliminary location scouting, shoot some photos, and set up some contacts to prepare for their upcoming fashion catalog shoot for the USA based clothing and design company Anthroplogie, which situates its catalogue shoots in various exotic locales. The next shoot chosen was in Maramureş, which the art directors had seen while browsing for “exotic” locations on the internet. Of course, with me being the anti-matter version of a fashionista, I had no idea who or what this was all about, had never heard of Anthropologie (spelled with a ‘y’ that was what I spent a decade studying at University and is a pretty good explanation for why I can speak a bit of Zulu) And, Nigel added, it was a fully paid gig: travel, expenses, honorarium. Even though I had just returned from ten days on the road in Transylvania I was all over that like sheep cheese on mamaliga. First I had to get there. I don’t drive. Luckily, my old buddy Gabor does, and as a Hungarian theater musician he is/was/will always be severely underemployed and has way too much idle time on his hands, so he was happy to jump at the chance to act as paid chauffeur in his 1985 Mazda – an ugly old little machine, but tough as a billy goat and it did run.And I was able to take Fumie along – an added asset since we would be visiting our friends in the archly traditional village of Ieud, where Fumie began learning to speak Romanian back in 2001 from our host Nitsa, an amazingly strong and independent village woman who is a living encyclopedia of local Romanian folklore and a pillar of her local Greco-Orthodox church. There is nothing Maramureş villagers love more than a Japanese girl who can speak basic Romanian with a Maramureş dialect.The fashion shoot folks were going to need some local help as a fixer for their work, and Nitsa – one of the most beloved and respected figures in the village hierarchy - was just the ticket to do it. And, best of all, she was well compensated for her time and trouble. That was in June, and in September the catalog came out online.I had never heard about Anthroplogie clothing, although asking around it seems to be well known and quite trendy (and expensive) but it was great seeing our friends in Maramureş included in some of the photos alongside towering Danish models draped in upscale fashions. Of course, the fashion models and photo shoot staff stayed in the city of Sighet at the swank Hotel Marmaţia with all the mod cons.I stayed in that hotel back in 1997, when it was a classic post-communist dump with stained furniture and odd wooden chandeliers in classic Ceaucescu hotel style. Today it is wall to wall wifi and quality capuccino and cable TV in every room. I shouldn't really be surprised. So many travel writers have made a living stereotyping Romania as Europe's backwater for so long that when you find a five star hotel in a small town it still elicits a sense of surprise. But I still prefer village life. While we were in Ieud, however, we stayed with our friends in the village. On the first morning, Nitsa invited us to a ceremony at the wooden church across the street. It was the seventh month after the burial one of the villagers, and a memorial ceremony was held in the church.Afterwards, everybody gathered in the churchyard and was given cake and a shot of home brewed horinca brandy, and then all marched down to the village hall for the feast. It was around noon, but already the "paharnic" - the bottle bearers - were in action serving drinks. What was amazing was that as they moved around the tables serving a glass of 110 proof plum brandy to groups of three or four people, they would also take a drink as a toast, yet we never saw any of them get noticeably tipsy. In Ieud people drink a lot for ceremonial situations, but we rarely saw anybody drunk. Which is not the case in all villages.Nitsa pulled us in and we were seated for a lunch of meatball ciorba and sarmale stuffed cabbage. These are different from the stuffed cabbage we have in Hungary. Smaller rolls, almost no paprika to speak of, more rice and less meat, and flavored with dill and thyme. There is even the vegetarian version, the lenten sarmale de post made with vegetables and rice which wins my vote for best vegetarian food in the world (in a close race with pizza and felaful.) Romanians eat a lot of sarmale and never get tired of it. It is the perfect food.These funeral anniversary feasts are held quite often in the village and within a few days we were invited again, on a day when Nitsa was part of the catering and cooking brigade who donate their time and services as part of their duty to their church. While the crew was doing their shoot they also did some shooting at musician Ion Pop's home in Hoteni. When their fixer, our Transylvanian-from-Budapest friend Andrea called him up to set up a meeting he told her "Come by any time, I'm always at home. I'm a peasant from Monday to Friday. I'm a musician only on weekends."

Berlin: City Changes, Curry Wurst Stays the Same.

2011-11-13T10:12:00.004-05:00

This has been the longest hiatus our blog has ever taken, sorry about the delay, but I have been on the road and not a little bit lazy about updates. Don’t worry – we’ll be making an effort to be more regular in the upcoming months. What can I say – I started this blog in 2006 while in Istanbul as a sort of personal web site to share photos and food with my close friends and over the years it seems to have taken on a life of its own. The latest escapade was a trip to Germany – to Berlin and Westphalia. Berlin, however, was the highlight – good friends, good food, good music. I used to play a lot in Berlin during the 1990s, staying in the then run down and alternative/funky eastern nabe of Prenzlauerberg in what used to be East Berlin. I haven’t been back in over a decade, and my, it has changed. For one thing, Prenzlauerberg has become an attractive upscale neighborhood that caters to young families. We met up with my old buddy Paul Hockenos and checked out the Saturday market.While I don’t have a strong affiliation towards German cuisine, when they do it well they do it well German style: extremely well. German bread, for example, is fantastic, which it should be since that is pretty much what Germans eat at night: abendbrot.Slices of bread with cream cheeses and cold cuts. Perfect for sitting in front of the TV set with. If you like that sort of thing. Not exactly the kind of thing you fly across oceans in anticipation of. Luckily, they have a lot of amazing cold cuts.And cheese. Especially if you wander into the giant department store across the way from the Alexander Platz metro station. And after all, this is Berlin, and you can get some of Europe’s most affordable (read cheap) ethnic eats as long as ethnic means Turkish or that strange German adaption of Asian food called “Wok.” Wok seems to be the name of every pan-Asian corner joint run by either and serving both Vietnamese and Thai food. For some reason, Berlin has no real “Chinatown” neighborhood or active Chinese restaurant scene (which is probably best explained by ex Berlin resident Ed Ward as being because China doesn’t have a sex tourism industry) but you find uninspiring southeast asian “Wok” places on every street corner.But when in Germany, you want the wurst. Germany does a damn good street sausage, and you are never more than five minutes from a hot bratwurst. There are these guys who walk around with a hot grill contraption strapped to their backs selling wurst for Euro 1.20 at tram stops and in the park. And then there is the Berlin curry wurst, invented in 1948 by Herta Heuwer from ingredients she had cadged from occupying Allied soldiers: ketchup, curry powder, and bratwurst. It sounds wrong, I know, but it works. Yes, try this at home: grill a bratwurst, cut it in slices, squirt some ketchup over it, and dust with commercial curry powder (yes, you can choose the spicy stuff.) Eat with a roll.Fumie tolerated my adventures in curry wurst with an ill disguised patience – she wanted to get to the next supposedly Thai wok joint along the way. Luckily, I was in Berlin to work on a yet unannounceable music project involving Dan Kahn, Psoy Karolenko, Jake Shulmen-Ment, and the spectral presence of Michael Alpert.This meant I got to get down to the Kreuzberg/Neukolln district where the studio was located. Visiting these districts is a lot like visiting an upper class neighborhood in Istanbul. Over 30% of the population is foreign born – mostly Turkish – and that meant that I could go shopping in Turkish supermarkets, browsing in Turkish music shops, and lunching on excellent and cheap Turkish kofte, kebabs and burek.

Bosnia: The Burdens of History

2011-09-25T07:18:00.007-04:00

Having just written an article about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and poring over documents describing the destruction caused by urban warfare in cities, it is doubly unsettling to remember that Sarajevo went through a much longer, much more destructive trauma a mere fifteen years ago. The Siege of Sarajevo lasted three years, as Bosnian Serb militias backed by the Serbian Army ringed the hills over the city and poured shells into the downtown areas to which the Muslim majority had fled for safety. In Budapest we could listen to the reports on the BBC, or if we wished something more immediate, to the live broadcasts of Radio Sarajevo on regular AM radio. It was that close. Today Sarajevo is alive again, but the scars are still obvious for all to see. Aron and I went to the Sarajevo City History Museum, located across from the gaudy Yellow Marriot Hotel in the narrow strip of downtown that used to be called “Sniper’s Alley. One exhibit was dedicated to objects concocted during the siege of Sarajevo, and to the will to survive while dodging bullets in one’s own apartment or trying to feed a family on meager rations smuggled in through the enemy lines.Without access to resupply of guns, locals came up with their own home made weapons, zip guns on a military level. Electricity was provided by a variety of jerry rigged devices, from car battery generators to crank powered flashlights made from bicycle lamps.On entering the museum, there was a wall where it seemed that local residents had donated personal mementos – photographs of family members lost during the siege, newspaper clippings, and a blood stained sweater that had obviously belonged to a child.There were several fresh hand-made posters calling for the unification of the two separate Bosnian governmental zones now that Ratko Mladic had been arrested and handed over to the International court in The Hague for trial. After the museum, more history. I hailed a cab and took Aron up to the Jewish cemetery in Grbavica, up along a hill just above the city center. The cemetery occupies a hillside that slopes steeply down to the river and exposes the city center itself.During the siege, Serbian militia snipers used the protection of the cemetery to shoot and shell into the downtown of the city. Until a few years ago the cemetery was heavily mined and unsafe to visit but like most of Sarajevo it has been demined now. Although most of the names on the stones reflect the Sephardic majority of Sarajevan Jews, the Ashkenazic element is obvious by the appearance of Hungarian Jewish names as well. Not surprising, since Jews from Hungary and Galicia went to Bosnia in the 1870s after it became a protectorate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I wrote about Jewish Sarajevo on the blog here, so I won’t repeat myself, but in the spirit of presenting too much history, there is one photo from the Jewish museum that bears repeating.During WWII the Jews of Sarajevo were forced to wear yellow Jewish stars. Here we see a Rivka Kabilo, a Jewish woman being escorted by Zenejba Hardaga, a Muslim woman, who held her arm to obscure the incriminating star. Today Hardaga and her sister are both recognized as “Righteous Gentiles” at the Yad Vashem museum in Israel. And of course, if that isn't enough history for you, remember that Sarajevo is where the first world war began when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Grand Duke Ferdinand of Austria on the Latin Bridge crossing the river in downtown Sarajevo. From a dispute about Serbian nationalism grew a typically silly bush war that quickly became a pointless tragedy. Within a month of the assassination Europe was at war, and nobody has ever explained exactly why.Nobody knew what they were actually fighting for. All that history makes you hungry. And the reason we were in Sarajevo was that I had promised to show my son the Glories of Sarajevo Cevapi, which we covered in the last post. But man does not live on cevap alone, although it is not inconceivable that I could. There was burek to be had, usually for breakfast, and our Hotel was located a full thiry seconds from the alley that is home to Sac Burek, which I crowed about the last time I visited Sarajevo.A sac is a metal pan hung by chains above a charcoal fire, kind of an Ottoman dutch oven. While most burek is now baked in a pizza oven, Sac Burek does it old school, meaning the burek is probably the best in the old city, and served with a ladle of slightly soured kaymak cream.After breakfast, coffee! Coffee shops are usually tiny, and located near to other eating places. You don’t get coffee where you eat, you go to a specialist for it. And then, just when you think you will never see a vegetable again, there are the Ascjinicas.These are small restaurants specializing in stews and soups.The most famous is Asem, which serves up some fine okra and veal stew, to be sopped up with spongy somun bread. Alter we tried the Sofra, just off the Sebilj square. Aron ordered the mixed plate of stuffed peppers, but also stuffed onions and stuffed grape leaves served with a dollop of yoghurt.Did I mention that we visited during Ramadan? Yes, and it was a hard one – with temperatures in the area of 38 (that’s around 98 Farhenheit) and the days long, a lot of people simply closed up their shops and waited the day out. But nobody ever worried themselves about the people who do eat during the day. Bosnians are like Turks in their attitudes towards Islam – rather easy and tolderant.This is not Wahabi run Saudi Arabia or fundamentalist Iran. At around 7:45 a canon – yes, a real canon – would go off signaling the end of the fast and the time for the nightly iftar feast, and Sarajevo’s old city would fill up with families looking to stuff themselves through the relatively short night in order to fuel up before the next dawn.

Sarajevo: Cevapi for the End of Summer

2011-09-09T09:03:00.009-04:00

Summer is winding down but I managed to squeeze one last road trip out of it before the temperatures cooled down. I met my son, Aron, in Sarajevo, keeping good on a birthday promise that I would show him the best cevapcici in the world. And Sarajevo has just that, along with a beautiful Ottoman style old city and enough history to keep an eighteen year old history buff occupied for four days. It's been two years since I last visited, and I have had a yearning to come back ever since. It is a city of heroes, a city of survivors, and a city in the midst of renovation and rebirth. Oh… and coffee.Aron has developed into something of a coffee fanatic, and Sarajevo is a coffee obsessed city. Unlike the tea addiction that characterizes Istanbul or Skopje, my other two favorite Ottoman café cultures; here you have Bosnian coffee at every corner. Essentially, it’s the same as Turkish coffee, but like a lot in Bosnia, it comes cheaper here than elsewhere – with the Bosnian mark running two BM to one Euro, coffees cost fifty Euro cents.With rooms renting out at 15 Euro each, and a plate of the world’s best cevapi going for 3 Euro, Sarajevo is a place I can afford to kick back and enjoy without feeling like I need to have an ATM machine strapped to my back. When I lived in Skopje, Macedonia, during the hyperinflation era in the late 1980s my Macedonian friends had a term for spending the day passing the time in cafes rather than pursing the protestant work ethic in a deflating economy: badialdzija. Its from an old Turkish term meaning “producer of nothingness.”They were masters of badialdzija, spending the days sipping tea with art students in Skopje’s old town and nights drinking rakia. I used to change a US $20 bill at the bank and walk away with a shopping bag of Yugoslav Dinars, enough to pay for cevapi and teas for my whole crowd of lazy intellectuals and shiftless Roma and Turkish sufi friends. Sarajevo brings me back to that vibe. Aron is a hardworking, industrious kid, and he desparately needed to be taught a lesson in Balkan sloth. With temperatures outside at the hottest of Europe’s this summer (38 c. or 98 Fahrenheit) there was little to do except sit in the shade of the coffee houses and watch time pass idly by.After his discovery of Bosnian coffee – served in a finjan that will fill two small cups after a nerve-wracking wait for the muddy dregs to settle, accompanied by a wad of loukoum, a soft Turkish sweet to take the edge off the bitterness – my son had a goal. He would himself become a master of Bosnian coffee. So, off to buy a coffee set.The street of coppersmiths had all manner of coffee paraphernalia on sale, but thinking better of it we wandered just a bit outside of the Bascarsija center to a small copper shop I had seen on a siise street near the Bascarsija tram stop. Aron picked up a set at 20% cheaper than our lowest negotiated price in the market. And then there is Bosnia's entry in the world of ground meat: cevapi. Of course, we can digress endlessly on where you can find the best cevapi, and I have on these pages previously, but there is no way out of presenting the latest in cevapi porn here again.Zeljo’s is usually mentuioned as the Big Daddy of Bascarsija cevapdzinicas, with two locations located on opposite corners. Zeljo’s meat is excellent, but they differ from other cevapdzinicas in the way they serve their spongy somun flatbread toasted but not dipped into a broth to dampen it while toasted on the grill. For that, try the cevap at Hodzic’s, which has spread into a mini empire of cevap houses all over the old city (named, appropriately, Hodzic #1, Hodzic #2, etc.)Cevap slightly bigger, and the somun bread is fluffier and dipped in some broth before being toasted. How many hours of my life have I spent arguing with friends whether Zeljos or Hodzic is better? How many more will I waste? Hmmm... How about something completely differnt. So different as to almost comprise a completely alternative food group? How about... the Banja Luka style cevapi! The Banja Luka style cevap served at Kastel is still one of my favorites.The Banja Luka style means that the cevap are made somewhat smaller, but served in bricks stuck together, which preserves their juicyness, and an even damper steamed bread. Apparantly, in Banja Luka itself, which is now in the Serbian Republic, the secret ingredient is a bit of pork mixed into the cevap meat mix. That doesn’t roll in Sarajevo with a Muslim majority population and a very large population of Muslim refugees resettled from Banja Luka. I noticed this elsewhere in the Balkans: cevap places often prepared their products with a stated intention of being off limits to Muslim minorities. This reaches its most absurd peak in Bulgaria, where almost every meat product available is made from ground pork, unlike Turkey, where beef and lamb rule. Needless to say, Bulgaria is not a culinary standout. One final cevap discovery came when we took a tram ride to the far end of Sarajevo – in the Ilidza neighborhood out near the Sarajevo airport. Ilidza was heavily bombed during the siege of Sarajevo, and many of the ruined buildings along the tram line have still to be renovated or bulldozed, and then you arrive in a cement city center evocative of communist times when pleasant architecture was secondary to providing quick cheap housing for the proletariat masses. We had been hoping to connect to visit either the famed tunnel museum or go out to the beautiful park in Vrelo Bosna, but a lack of information and the baking heat drove us into the nearest lunch joint.Excellent cevapi for 3 BM (Euro 1.50) Given that I live in a country that lacks decent hamburgers, I can get by knowing that an annual trip to Sarajevo (only Euro 54 round trip on the train, albeit an 11 hour gruling slog through Slavonia) will keep me fueled for a year’s worth of excellent ground beef goodness. Oh, and did I mention that we visited during the final days of Ramadan? I will in my next post.

Sziget Festival: the Klezmatics, Socalled, and some guy named "Prince."

2011-08-22T12:12:00.010-04:00

The Sziget Festival ended last Sunday, and oddly for me, I was in attendance for three days of the festival. Oddly, because usually I am never in Hungary in the beginning of August when it takes place, and also oddly, because I don’t really like going to gargantuan rock festivals that host thousands of unwashed party people in rapidly deteriorating states of sobriety for a week of drum and bass lines wafting in from several competing stages all at once. On the other hand, it is fun, if you like that sort of thing. And Sziget is the big one in Europe: from modest beginnings as “Student Island” back in the early 1990s the festival has grown into one of the world’s largest festivals, an uncomfortable marriage of retro-hippie crunchyness meets music industry commodification and has a baby that is drunk and eating dodgy fried foods on an island in the middle of the Danube. But I have to admit. It is fun. It would be a lot more fun if I was 20 years old and thought pouring beer over my head was a viable artistic statement, but, in my own geezerly manner, I had fun.The festival usually lasts a week, with day tickets running around $60, but the first day of the festival was deemed “Zero Day” which meant that if you had a week pass you still needed a special ticket for Zero day unless you were camping on the island. People could gripe about that, but the Big Act was none other than... get ready... Prince. Originally the headliner was to have been Amy Winehouse, but given that Amy checked out of Rehab for good last month, we got Prince. Prince does not do drugs of any kind. Probably a very good thing.The Klezmatics had a good time with their set. Amid the classic Klezmer they did a lot of their recent work based on original compositions and arrangements from their forays into Gospel music and Americana folk. A large number of the audience knew the lyrics to their songs, not surprising given that the ‘Matics (or one of their satellite formations) have played nearly every Sziget Festival for the last twenty years.This was acknowledged later by the US Ambassador to Hungary, Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis giving them an official award for promoting Cultural Diversity. And most importantly, they got me a backstage pass. And the catering backstage far outclassed anything to be eaten elsewhere on the island. Thanks Klezmatics!We also caught a bit of Boban Markovic’ Brass Band from Serbia, another band that plays here nearly every year. Serbian Gypsy brass band has been avidly embraced by the Hungarian festival crowd as the official "We are Nearly Balkan" party music of Hungary. Oh, and there was Prince. Yes, that Prince.After the Klezmatics set I went out with Frank London, Dave Likht, and Lisa Gutkin to check out the Artist Who Previously Was Weird About His Name, along with about 10,000 other concert goers in a huge field. It was pretty damn funky. Frank and Dave went into music analysis mode. Here you had the 53 year old Prince fronting a five piece band, kicking out the jams and almost entirely avoiding the use of sequencers and other electro-digital tricks of modern arena stage acts. Basically, rocking the house with a five piece funk band. Impressive. Very impressive. And he played an hour set with an hour of encore. Not shabby, Prince. Not shabby at all.I was back two days later when the Klezmatics asked me to join them for an impromptu jam set at the US Embassy tent. Given the political atmosphere in Hungary this year, the US Ambassador has been using her influence to try and steer Hungary back on the road to something resembling a democratic state. We wish her the best of luck in her sysiphean task, and each day the Embassy tent featured a different multicultural act playing for whoever stumbled by. For us, it was just a fun day out for jamming and iced coffee.Matt Darriau’s new bride, Katie Down of the UkuLadies even sang a Sephardic Jewish song from Turkey that blew me away, all the more so for being accompanied by ukulele. The Klezmatics had to travel the next day, and wanted to enjoy the fancy hotel that the Embassy had arranged for them, so they left and I wandered over to the Roma tent. As the Sziget has become more commercially oriented, the funkier folk music events of the past have shrunk and what is left of the original Sziget alternativo feel resides at the Gypsy tent.Mixing local Roma bands and up and coming international acts, it’s a cozy atmosphere, with performers hopping off the stage to greet their friends and – besides fried langos - probably the most “Hungarian” experience on the Island for most f the predominantly foreign festival goers. We caught the amazing Roma Rap from Sutka (Suto Orizari, the majority Roma suburb of Skopje, Macedonia.)These guys are the generation of Gypsies that grew up watching rap videos on MTV, and they have it down - including rapping in staccato Balkan Romani and doing it to the accompaniment of a live Macedonian brass wedding band. Some days you can wander into the Gypsy tent and make some amazing discoveries, This was one of them. Also on the bill was our good buddies from Belgrade, Dragan Ristic and KAL.Three days is almost enough for me, but DJ Socalled called, and when Josh Dolgin says so, you got to move. I travelled with Josh on his epic Ukrainian journey in 2007, and worked with him on Geoff Berner’s recording session in Montreal last year, so who was I to say no to comp tickets. The show was booked early in the evening, so the crowd was light (seeing as The National was playing on the main stage at the same time) but everybody loved Socalled's decidely strange stage show. If you have Katie Moore on vocals and Mike Winograd on clarinet, you can get as strange as you want and still pull off a great show. Josh can make klezmer very funky, and his antic way with stage presence – including doing magic tricks, rapping puppets, and working Allen Watsky’s shirt changes into the show, he grabbed he crowd and held them where he wanted them.

Josh even arranged for Aron to get backstage. Aron, of course, was running off to catch The National at the big stage, but stayed long enough to say hello to the rapping puppet.After the set, we ran off to check out the Gypsy tent again, and the Socalled crew was able to catch the second half of the Tecsoi Band's set with Kiss Ferenc in something called the Karpati Roma Project.

A Gypsy Musician's Funeral in Transylvania

2011-08-08T08:37:00.008-04:00

Been a bit too lazy for frequent updates to the blog, folks. Summer seems to have bypassed Europe this year, with cold weather and rain nearly every afternoon. It’s like an endless April that won’t go away, except for the occasional scorching hot day to turn the damp soil into a steamy fermented stink brew that means you can only go out at night. But I was lucky this year: I got to Transylvania early, in May and June. Traveling around with my musical colleagues Jake and Eleonore with Scribbling Mystery Guest in tow, we managed to visit several great old style musicians, both living and dead. When I started traveling around Romania with a tape recorder looking for traditional music in the 1980s, I was convinced that the folk music was on the verge of disappearing. I, very fortunately, was wrong. In some places it has remained, in others it has changed, in some it has gone out of fashion entirely, but it is still there. Every year I meet a few visiting foreign musicians who want to collect folk music in East Europe, asking me for advice. What you need is simple: working knowledge of about three languages that are not taught at your local community college, a recording device, and a pocketful of cash, preferably won at the track or a casino so that you are not too attached to it. Musicians like cash. They like it very, very much. And traditional musicians – particularly professional Gypsy musicians – do not play because they love you and your deep respect for their heritage and want to share with you. Oh no. They play for cash. As Antoine Baptiste says in the TV series Treme “Play for that money, boys. Play for that f***ing money!"While I was in Cluj/Kolozsvar we were set to visit the village band in Sopor, but a phone call to the band leader revealed a small problem. Could we loan him a few hundred Euro? Now, within Roma culture borrowing money is a sign of acceptance within a family or clan. You should be proud that you are so accepted that you are now part of the great economic web that feeds the tradition. However, a loan doesn’t really mean a loan in the accepted sense. Basically, if you lend anybody money east of Vienna, it is a gift. Same problem happened with Palatka – a tour had been cancelled and the band was on high alert for any new source for a float and could we get out to the village as soon as possible with our pockets stuffed full of lovely cash? Er, maybe not. In the end, we lucked out. We went to visit a musician who had no cash flow problems at all. We went to his funeral.

In Cluj I met up with Raoul Weiss, the Alsatian polymath, linguist, and gourmet who also happens to be the Palatka Band’s friend and sometime French manager. Through Raoul we got a hot tip that Iosif Ghemant, the primas (lead violinist) in Gherla (Hungarian Szamosujvar) had passed away and was being buried the next day. Without a clue to where the funeral was taking place (or, in fact, the name of the deceased at the time) we drove forty minutes east to Gherla and started asking around. Nobody knew about a funeral, so we asked where the cemetery was, and drove in that direction. Sure enough, on a near the outskirts of town we saw some musicians in suits turn down a street and followed.A large crowd of Gypsies was gathered in front of a house, and dozens of musicians waited outside. The deceased was Iosif Ghemant, who had led the local folk orchestra and it was time to pay proper musician respect by fiddling the man to his grave. Nobody made any comment about our obviously foreign presence. When musicians slag each other off they often comment “And how many musicians will there be at your funeral, huh?” In the case of Iosif Ghemant, quite a lot. Much respect. And so a few foreigners just adds to the prestige of the event.As people arrived they were ushered into the house to pay last respects to the deceased, and suddenly I found myself escorted inside by the violinist’s son to view the open casket, surrounded by weeping daughters and wife. I excused myself and returned to the yard just as the band began to play.Gherla is smack dab in central Transylvanian plains, the Mezoseg, and the music here is fiddle music, accompanied by the three string kontra viola and bass. Gherla, however, is one of the places that started adding modern instruments after WWII, and saxophones and accordions became accepted in lautar bands here, while in the nearby villages such as Szek and Ordongosfuzes the string bands maintained their primacy.

Ghemant was one of the musicians who played on one of the now-forgotten Argo folk music series recordings that I heard decades ago when I was just beginning to learn about Romanian folk music. He was one of the musicians who straddled the border between tradition and folklorized arrangements, and the musicians who came to play included everybody from the hot younger city fiddlers to village musicians to journeyman musicians who never made the lautar grade.The tune here is the traditional “accompaniment to the grave” song used in Central Transylvania. Unlike a New Orleans funeral, there was no “second line” on the way to or from the graveyard. The procession marched through a run down residential neighborhood about two miles to the new graveyard, and we left before the march had gone very far. But when the day comes and your number gets called, this is one fine way to take that long last road to the cemetery. And to get a taste of Ghemant's sound click on this link. The man was a master of Transylvanian fiddle.

Krakow Festival of Jewish Culture: The "Hang"

2011-07-19T05:45:00.009-04:00

Klezmer music is a marginal music market at best. It has never produced a cross-over superstar figure. It is rarely broadcast on radio or played in clubs. It isn’t sure whether it is a folk music, a branch of world music, or a launch pad for contemporary composition. It is all of these and none of these.

Mark Rubin said it best in his blog Chasing The Fat Man when he wrote that Klezmer is the vernacular music of the Yiddish world. "Klezmer" is a term only genuinely applied to the recent revival of Yiddish dance music. It's a construct, a re-imagination, made up in some cases whole up cloth from people who have only a tangential relationship to the culture that the music originally sprang from… there is no “klezmer” music, there is simply a Yiddish vernacular performance style. Thus, any tune can conceivably be played in a Yiddish style and thus made Yiddish, when filtered through the experience of the Yiddish vernacular speaking Jews of Eastern Europe. With an opinion like that coming from one of the best Klez musicians, it is easy to see why the Krakow festival works so well. It allows the different strains of Jewish music to stretch out and grow. By bringing in some of the best musicians in the Jewish music world (notice I didn't narrow that down to just “Yiddish”) the Krakow festival becomes a fertile ground for new ideas among the musicians, for new cooperation between bands, for meeting people, jamming, and just the general “hang”, which Rubin says is one of the three pillars for accepting any gigs (the other being pay and quality of music.) And the hang at Krakow was excellent.First of all, it gives us a chance to hang with our singing clarinetist (and cantor) Jack “Yankl” Falk, who lives far away on the other side of the planet and only gets to Europe when the stars are aligned correctly and there is something like the Krakow festival or a major tour for the band.And why not stick Yankl alongside the legendary Bobov cantor Benzion Miller for some otherworldly scat nigun singing on the basis of Dave Tarras and Moishe Oyser's “Stanton Street / Chassidic In America” arrangement. Hey, and let's throw in cantorical world music wonder boy Jeremiah Lockwood of the Sway Machinery for good measure? Now are we satisfied? Michael Alpert is another friend who I actually hang with more on the road at festivals than at home in New York.He was presenting a program of music reflecting his decades of working with Julian Ktasty, the New York Ukrainian American bandurist who is one of the leaders in the revival of the bandura tradition (Stalin murdered all the existing Ukrainian bards in the 1930s in his effort to destroy Ukrainian identity.) And where there is an Alpert, it is not unlikely to find Stu Brotman playing bass.Stu – whose roots go back to the psychedelic 1960s in Los Angeles (he was in the original Canned Heat and the band Kaleidescope) is always welcome to any jam session since he carries his specially setup folk bass (basy) designed for portability (just look for the little man with a bath tub strapped to his back.) Stu was one of the silent masterminds behind the whole Klezmer revival, producing early LPs by the Klezmorim and Maxwell Street bands, as well as holding down the bass clef in Brave Old World. I caught up with him at the dance workshops led by Steve Weintraub.Steve is a professional Broadway choreographer as well as a dance ethnologist, and his first love is to get ordinary people up and dancing, and let them get fussy about the ethnography later. So he teaches small sets of fun dances with a vocabulary of hand movements and short figures that allow even the most club-footed of dancers participate. Yes, people have fun at Steve’s workshops. Hmmm… maybe we should all learn from that. And of course, Le Roi de Brass Klezmer Hizzonner Frank London - seen here beside Latvian songbird Sasha Lurje.I know frank from way back in Boston in the last century, when the Klezmer Conservatory band was starting out and we used to meet at latin jazz sessions in Alston’s sprawling hippy ranches for jam sessions. When Frank moved to New York he roomed with my buddy, drummer Samm Bennett for a while and we stayed in touch over the years as the Klezmatics took off and brought them regularly to Budapest (Frank would occasionally bring me vacu-packed pastrami from Katz’s when he was on tour.)Frank met me after our gig at the big Synagogue with a bottle of home brewed Polish Jewish slivovitz that he scored and we were off to dinner at the Kura Japanese Restaurant with Roger Davidson and some of the other musicians. The Kura is the only Japanese restaurant in Krakow with a Japanese chef and so Fumie and I ate there as often as possible. Which was a lot. And what Chinese food was to earlier generations of New York Jewish musicians, Japanese food is today.Yes, it was good. And when you compare the prices to Japanese food in Western Europe or the USA (or even Tokyo) it was excellent value for the quality and service. Of course, we were in Poland... and as soon as we got into our Hotel Painted Birdster Dan Kahn turned us onto a tiny pierogi bar - the Vincent - just around the corner where we could load up on excellent lamb-stuffed dumplings in garlic sauce for only four Euros.Bewteen fruit peirogis and home style real ramen noodles and sushi, Kazimierz is the perfect spot for the perfect Klezmer hang.

The Festival of Jewish Culture, Krakow.

2011-07-04T07:33:00.011-04:00

The 21st Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, Poland took place last week and I was honored and excited to take part as a performer with Di Nayes. It is a festival like no other – ‘festival’ hardly describes how the entire city quarter of Kazimierz is transformed for a week into a center for Jewish and Yiddish culture including concerts, workshops, gallery exhibits, museum presentations, dance, and food. It is pure nakhes to be there, not the least because it gives us Klezmer musicians a chance to spend some real quality time hanging with each other, hatching new musical projects, and meeting the people who actually listen to us and sipping coffee with them in the many cafes that have sprung up in Kazimierz. A lot of writers have mentioned the supposed irony of the Jewish revival in Kazimierz since the release of the film “Schindler’s List” but to visit Krakow during the festival is to see how a small but dedicated group of people – Poles trying to recover the multicultural heritage of their country – can make an annual festival the cornerstone of a cultural movement that ensures that the Jewish culture of Krakow endures all year long. The founder of the festival, Janusz Makuch, is well known to all of us dealing in East European Jewish culture. Janusz embraces the old multicultural heritage of Galicia – the southern Polish region that anchors itself to the urban center of Krakow.Not born as a Jew, as a young man Janusz learned that half of his town was once Jewish, which lead him to learn Hebrew and Yiddish and study the works of Polish Jewish literature and folklore. Janusz introduced himself to an audience in Israel a few years ago this way: “My name is Janusz Makuch and I come from Poland. I come from a country of rabbis and tzaddikim, gaons and melameds, from a country of Jewish sages, writers, bankers, architects, painters, doctors, shoemakers and tailors, physicians and politicians, scientists and Jewish soldiers, from a country of devout, good people… I come from a country of anti-Semites and goodhearted people and the greatest number of Righteous among the Nations… from a country of countless shtetls, yeshivas and Hassidic courts, from a country of Jewish autonomy and pluralism and I come from a country of pogroms and murder. I come from a country whose greatness was co-created by Jews who were Polish citizens. And I come from a country that after the war kicked out Polish citizens who were Jews. I come from a country of anti-Semitic madness where they burned Jews in barns. And I come from a country of Christian mercy where they hid Jews in barns. My name is Janusz Makuch. I come from Poland and I am a goy, and at the same time for more than 20 years I have created and run the largest Jewish culture festival in the world. I'm a Jewish Pole - and I'm proud of it." That is about as cogent a sense of Janusz as I could find, and it shows the depth of commitment and understanding that motivates the Krakow Jewish Culture festival and sets it head and shoulders above so many other festvals working with a similar theme.A festival has to be more than a charismatic organizer – and Janusz leads an office of organizers unlike any other festival I have been to. Patient, efficient, with an endless well of good humor, Kasia, Robert, and a small army of young volunteers guarantee that everything flows smoothly, no small task when dealing with dozens of musicians and artists’ bruised egos and lost luggage. While there are other good Jewish music frestivals in Europe – London comes to mind, as well as the projects coming via Paris’ Medem – Krakow is the Big One. (This makes me more than a little ashamed to even think about the ridiculous schmutzerei that is Budapest’s idea of a Summer Jewish Festival – a festival that can’t ever seem to find any decent Jewish music or arts even with a budget large enough to float the Titanic. But then Hungary is not Poland.)And then there are the venues – especially the glorious Tempel Synagogue where we played our big concert. A classic 19th century Moorish Revival style synagogue restored to a fully functional state with excellent acoustics and room for a large audience, this was a place that could serve performers as intimate as Lauren Sklamberg and Frank London’s Tsuker Zis Project, and as big and party happy as the amazing show by Jeremiah Lockwood and The Sway Machinery with guest Sarahwi singer from Mali, Khaira Arby.Lockwood has done amazing things using cantorical music and has also done some amazing work that has been documented on the Nigun Project via New York's The Forward web site, but he has deep roots in country blues and with a lineup including alumni from the New York Afrobeat band Antibalas they simply blew me away. Late at night the crowd gathered at the funky Alchemia Club next to the old market for late night jams led by Paul Brody with a changing cast of musicians. And then there is the big closing concert at Szeroka Square – the Mother of All Jewish Music concerts, ever. From Israel came the stunning and innovative Yemen Blues. This year the special guest – nobody can be said to be the ‘headliners’ here – was Abraham Inc., a project that and… Fred Wesly, the trombone player from the legendary James Brown Band in teams clarinetist David Krakauer with DJ Socalled Josh Dolgin the 1960s and 70s.Yes, the driving sound behind “Hot Pants” and “Say it loud, I’m Black and Proud” before joining my all time favorite funk band Parliament-Funkadelic and leading their offshoot The Horny Horns. Yes, that Fred Wesly, pumping out funky horn lines behind Yiddish samples mixed by Socalled and held up by one of the best lineups of contemporary funk I have seen in years. And that's just the finale. Dan Kahn and Painted Bird had to leave early, but their show was one of the most memorable of the concert series - most of the shows are available on the festival website – including ours (Scroll down for Di Naye Kapelye.) I could go on and on… which it already seems that I have… but I will save it for a post later this week. There is so much to talk about… and I still have to go through my photos and unpack my bags and put all the instruments away… Serdecznie dziękuję, Krakow!

The Mansions of Oaş, the Trout of Mara.

2011-06-16T06:09:00.011-04:00

In the time since I last posted about the wonderous Maramureş region of Romania,, a call came in, a gig was secured, and within days I was back in a 1983 Toyota coughing its way across the border and back to Maramureş. So, yes, there will be a lot of Romaniacentric posts in the next few weeks, and yes, I urge all of you readers to visit Romania this summer and enjoy the hospitality offered by the people of this amazing country. One of the reasons Maramureş is so stubbornly unique is simple: it is damn hard to get there. Sure, you can take a bus from Cluj or Satu Mare, and there is a train line, a long, inconvenient one, but coming from Hungary by car means a choice of two roads: either the northern approach driving from Satu Mare through the Oaş region (through Negreşte-Oaş, Certeze, and the mountain pass at Huta) or the southern approach (via Baia Mare and Cavnic.) We did both so you don’t have to. First we crossed the border into Satu Mare (Szatmar in Hungarian, and Satmar in Yiddish.)Satu Mare is the town from which the numerous Satmar Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn get their name, and although there are very few Jews (and no Hasids) left, we did see this surprising license plate (The SM stands for “Satu Mare.") Man, I’d love to cruise down Division Street in Williamsburg with those plates. Driving east from Satu Mare we hit Livada, and took the road north through the Oaş country. It was strawberry time in Satu Mare and we stopped several times to buy buckets of delicious sweet strawbs from Gypsies along the side of the road.These were some of the best berries I ever tasted, and Fumie easily “drank” down a kilo and a half before we hit Maramures. The Oaş country is lowland Maramureş, and until 1990 was one of the poorest regions of Transylvania, known to most people for a screaming fiddle music accompanied by asymmetric howling vocals. Like a lot of Maramureş farmers, the Oaşeni began to go abroad for jobs, especially construction jobs in Italy. Back in the 1990s a lot of the Oaş villages still looked like this:Today, after nearly everyone has spent the last decade working on construction sites in France and Italy - to the point where you are likely to hear Italian spoken on the streets of the village as the "cool" language - they look like this:Especially in the village of Certeze – which is called ‘the richest village in Romania - the locals came home and began building immense, modernistic Mediterranean mansions like the ones they had worked on in the suburbs of Milan, competing with the neighbors for the most ornate and impressive. This house, though, takes the cake.Apparently this house is famous throughout Maramureş – the guy built it to impress a woman to marry him, but, as it goes, just as he finished it she divorced him. So sad. And onward to the Huta pass, at which point the county line passes into Maramureş and the road deteriorates into a mess of potholes. Not just any pothole. These are axle-shattering, rim bending, tire destroying mountain road craters that lie in wait for any unsuspecting vehicle. Do not even think of driving this road at night.The fifty kms between Huta and the main town of Sighet becomes a tiresome stretch of pothole dancing and avoiding trucks and cars veering into your lane to avoid their potholes. On the way out of Maramureş we decided to try a different route: south from Sighet towards Baia Mare aqnd then up towards Satu Mare again. And guess what? No potholes, at least none of the Mother of all Asphalt Craters we met on the way in.And the added bonus was we got to have lunch in the village of Mara at the Alex Pastravaria, a trout farm and restaurant that lies along the road just before the mountain pass at Cavnic. Now, I like trout. I like to fish for them, and I like to eat them, particularly rainbow trout, which are about as perfectly synthetic a fish as can ever be devised.Originally a localized species of trout from California, the rainbow trout has been bred and fish farmed into the genetic equivalent of Wonder Bread, and spread throughout the world as an easy to stock alternative to brown tout, with the added advantage that it rarely adapts to its introduced environments enough to breed on its own, making it the perfect put-and-take fish. Rainbows can live in slightly warmer waters than wild brown trout, and can tolerate pollution better, and quite honestly, they taste better than wild trout, which is a good reason to release any wild brown you catch and feast on farm fresh rainbows instead. Which we did.For the insane price of about EU 3 (US$5) you get a hefty grilled or fried trout with crispy fried potatoes and their signature sauce of sour cream and garlic. And you can eat it sitting on a wooden bridge watching trout swim past you as you chow down on their brethren.Driving south, we threaded through the hairpin curves along the Cavnic pass and finally reached the dusty industrial plain around Baia Mare, and headed north to the Hungarian border. Guess what? No potholes. Slightly longer route, but we could drive it faster than the northern route to Maramureş. So it looks like the next time I cross through the Oaş country I will probably be there on a new mission: I need to record more of their crazed, wild fiddle music.The Oaşeni like to scream their lyrics above the melody played on a modified violin. In order to get the higher pitch, they tune the fiddle string nearly to the breaking point, and then push the violin bridge nearly up to the fiddle neck itself, thus shortening the scale of the strings. Rather like capoing a fiddle. The result is a clear, bell like shimmering sound that is unique to the region. Master musician Ion Pop of Hoteni had a fiddle set up in Oaş fashion and played us a few tunes.

Maramures: Fiddles, Song, and Food for the Dead

2011-05-29T09:00:00.005-04:00

In the summer of 2001 I had made plans to travel back to New York with Fumie to work a few months (probably as ignoble temp Christmas warehouse help) as I had the year before. It’s the expat version of Romanian migrant labor, only it requires a US passport and knowledge of Windows Excel. But the attacks on September 11, 2001, changed all that. After a few weeks of overdosing on news (Anthrax! Sleeper cells! Weapons of Mass Destruction!) and faced with several months of no work and no gigs while stuck in Budapest, I decided it would be best to get as far away from the news as possible. We decided to go back to Ieud, one of Maramures’ most isolated and traditional villages, and spend a month hanging with the late Gheorghe Ioannei Covaci, who at that time was the oldest living Maramures fiddler, and one of the few still alive who had actively played for Jewish dances before the second world war. On the second day my crank-operated wind-up survival shortwave radio died and after that we had no news at all. The local peasants all wanted to know what we thought of the terror attacks (Razboie! Boom! Boom!) but were genuinely nonplussed about the anthrax attacks. After all, in a village where everybody lives with sheep and cows anthrax was anything but an exotic weapon. While there we met the amazing Nitsa, who offered to rent us a room in her home. I spent the days fiddling with Georghe Ioannei while Fumie learned Romanian from Nitsa and temporarily became the village mortuary photographer, snapping portraits of people to be used on their grave markers.Today, the Greek-Catholic cemetery in Ieud is Fumie’s most enduring gallery presence. It is hard to forget a Japanese woman living in your village and everybody asked about Fumie… and Nitsa announced to her friends “I taught Fumie to speak Romanian!” by pointing to objects and shouting out their names. She also taught Fumie to make stuffed cabbage and mamaliga, skills every Japanese housewife should master. We’ve been back to Ieud a few times since then, including one visit with Canadian singer songwriter Geoff Berner (“The Whiskey Rabbi”) and his band (fiddling Dione Davies and drumming Dwayne Adams) Geoff eventually incorporated a lot of Maramures energy in his re-imagined take on Klezmer music which culminated in his most recent release “Victory Party” (which was recorded in Montreal last year and included Klezmer major leaguers Mike Winograd, Benjy Fox-Rosen, Josh Dolgin, and Brigitte Dajczer as well as myself on vioara cu goarne and insane screaming.)Geoff also used an image of Nitsa on the cover of his 2007 CD The Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride and last year asked me to deliver a few copies. She was delighted. Nitsa housed us in her huge wooden house up the street a bit, and she used to wake the band up in the morning by standing over the bed with a bottle of 110 proof horinca and booming "Goooooddd Moooorning! IT'S HORINCA TIME!" She has become something of a legend out there in western Canada.She was also delighted to grab Eleonore and dress her up in proper Maramures costume, and when I asked her if she would sing for us she demurred just long enough to fill a bottle of horinca brandy and then… she sang like an angel.Nitsa is often sought out by Romanian folklorists because of her vast knowledge of Maramures folklore, especially the singing of colinda (Christmas carols) and ritual music. In Ieud the religious traditions are more conservatively guarded than in other villages, and special regard is given to the presence of the dead in daily village life. When we arrived we found Nitsa with some neighbors making a prodigious batch of sarmale (stuffed cabbage.) When asked who it was for, she answered “For the dead!”The next day they would take it to the pauper’s cemetery in Sighet to be blessed by a priest and distributed to the poor. Ieud attracted the attention of American ethnographer Gail Kligman in the 1980s, a time when it was especially difficult to work as a field anthropologist in Ceausescu’s harsh communist era. Her monograph "The Wedding of the Dead" describes how the Ieudeni resisted the collectivization of the communist era by withdrawing into a maze of traditional custom and ritual, including the tradition that any young person who dies unmarried will be symbolically “wed” at their funeral. American ethnomusicologist and fiddler Maimon Miller also worked in Ieud in the 1970s at the time when Gheorghe Ionnei was more active.Gheorghe’s brother Nicolae Covaci, however, is still alive and fiddling two villages over in Dragomiresti, though. At ninety years of age he was actually playing better than I have ever heard him. Both Jake Shulman-Ment and myself have learned Maramures Jewish music from Nicolae over the years. As they say in Maramures, you don’t learn fiddle…. You steal it.Like so many folk traditions, the fiddle style is not directly taught, but learned by generations of younger fiddlers immersing themselves in it. I have sat in a bar in the nearby village of Botiza, which is known for its fiddlers, and watched as a series of peasant men passed my fiddle from hand to hand around to play tunes. And over the years we have stolen quite a lot, so it is proper when visiting a musician to bring a bag of gifts (coffee, chocolate, fiddle strings) and pay the musician for his trouble.Remember folks – when you visit a Gypsy musician (as opposed to peasant musicians) these guys live off of tips for playing, not for “sharing” their wonderful music for you, so if you do visit cough up a hundred lei for the fiddler and bring his wife a kilo of coffee, at least. Not that Nicolae is feeble at his age, though. When I arrived he said he had been to Israel four years ago. Why I asked? To work on a farm. Now, a lot of Romanians go abroad for work, but usually to western EU countries – Israelis used to hire a lot of Romanian peasants for agricultural labor after the Intifada made imported foreign labor necessary in Israel. Think about this. Who the hell would have hired him? A tiny 86 year old toothless Romanian Gypsy musician? What were they thinking? But work he did, and he made enough money to fix up his house and buy a watch. Nicolae is probably the last of the oldest style fiddlers of Maramures – comparable to an old time fiddler in the USA as opposed to a modern Bluegrass fiddler. Most Maramures fiddlers today are influenced by recordings and videos of other famous musicians like the Petreus Brothers and the late Gheorghe Covaci of Vadu Izei. Nicolae still plays in a less ornamented, highly rythymic style unchanged from the recordings he made in the 1970s when he and his brother were recorded on a Radio France Ocora label LP of Maramures folk music. There, the two fiddles played against a single guitar, strummed to produce a drone without any of the distinctive chord changes that usually distinguish Maramures songs. And that means one thing: when the ethnomusicologists arrive, there is no need to hire (and pay) extra band members. Just have your wife play!And whenever the wife plays, you don’t hear any chord changes. The guitar here is called a zongora (which is the Hungarian word for piano, oddly enough) tuned to a re-entrant open 'A' chord. This was probably the same guitar used on the Ocora recordings, and it was held together by some stiff wire to counter the fact that the home made wire strings had easily pulled the neck off of the body years ago. Check out the high action of the strings - about an inch above the neck.No matter, because it basically morphed into a percussion instrument. The tail bridge was also a bit of masterful jerry rigging. And the funny thing is it absolutely worked. The old time Maramures fiddlers also liked to cut as much of their violin bridge out as possible, to increase the volume of the instrument.Nowadays they tend to simply switch to playing the $150 electric violins manufactured at the insidious Hora instrument factory in Reghin. Nicolae - for those of us interested in the Jewish and other multiethnic traditions of Transylvania – is like a Rosetta stone of folk music, a unique yet modest musician bridging the lore of the past with the practice of the present. Ninety years old and still kicking strong. Sa traiste, Domnu’ Nicolae!

Asa bea' oamenii buni: How the Good Folk Drink

2011-05-24T06:33:00.012-04:00

Some people think “European Vacation” and dream of the canals of Venice, the boulevards of Paris, the coffee shops of Amsterdam. I however, dream about Maramures. This northern region of Romania, remote and mountainous, preserves a Europe most of us can only wonder about, a slice of history preserved in vague memories from our grandparents, cloudy ideas about the “old country” and the accounts of ethnographers plainly surprised that anyone in modern Europe still lives in log houses, uses horse wagons, and wears home spun folk costumes in the 21^st century.

Maramures is all that, a starkly conservative culture that survived the communist era by withdrawing into a domestic fortress of folk ritual and custom, rendered virtually impenetrable to outsiders by a lucky combo of wretchedly bad roads, a thick dialect, a tradition of class and economy based on barter rather than cash, and the inability of visitors to live for months on end on nothing but corn meal mush mamaliga and sheep cheese. But change has definitely come to Maramures. Since Romania entered the EU in 2007, Romanians have gone abroad in droves to work in agriculture and construction in countries like Italy, Spain and France. The local mountaineers – Morosani in the local dialect – have an international reputation as hard workers, earned by farming the poor soils of the Carpathians where it takes double the work to produce half the potatoes of any other region. The money they sent home is evident in the building of new homes and the sprouting of new small businesses in villages that used to have nothing but a bar and a general store (usually in the same location.)Add to that the growth of a well developed agro tourism industry and one can feel the sea change in the local culture. Maramures is heart-stoppingly picturesque, and and until recently only the most adventurous tourist would cross the mountain passes to visit, but about a decade ago the region became a magnet for French eco-tourists and one transplanted Frenchman, Bernhard Houlihat (now the director of the Institute Francaise in Cluj) began working locally with village mayors and peasants to set up a network of local homes that could accommodate the flood of tourists.The results are an open secret to informed tourists: where else can you stay and be fed for about EU 25 a day? Agrotourism pensions have sprouted everywhere in Marsamures. For a culture that, until very recently, lived on almost no cash the sight of tourists is welcome indeed. We stayed at the home of a fiddler I had met previously in the village of Poenile Izei named Ion Ilieş, well known as a musician by the name of Ion de la Cruce.For no extra charge, Ion also gets dressed up in his local folk costume, calls over a neighbor to play the zungora (the local version of a cross tuned guitar) and presents an after dinner fiddle party with his wife singing and pouring out copious shots of the local home brew. Thinking of making fun of the funny little hats? Don't. The "clop" is a symbol of Maramures male identity, and until about a decade ago it was still everyday wear for huge, beefy, easily antagonized truck drivers and lumberjacks. No, you do not make fun of the funny hats around here. Ion’s house has been set up with spotlessly clean guest rooms and modern bathrooms, and his wife cooks local Maramures food from the produce of Ion’s own farm and animals.Now, I have been on a pretty stern diet for the last half year, but there was no way I was going to refuse my host’s meals. No. I did not eat the cute bunnies. I wanted to - cuteness always tastes good - but my hosts had other things in mind. Pancakes. Donuts. Fried bread. All the things I have avoided for the last half year. And you know what? Carbohydrates taste really, really good. After a half year of nibbling on the occasional Wasa rye cracker I got to wake up to this.Home made clatita (thin pancakes) served with home made plum jam. Everything was served with fried bread, called placinta, which was like a Hungarian langos but less greasy and filled with a light cheese, green onion and dill mixture (just to add to the confusion, in Hungarian the pancakes would be called palacsinta.)Later there would be dinner of ciorba de perisoare (sour soup with meatballs) and the ever present mamaliga. Mamaliga is one of my favorite foods, often described a “polenta” but in fact much more robust and filling. My father grew up eating this during the depression in the USA, when my Moldavian born Grandmother had to feed four kids while my Grandfather was ill and unable to work. We called it "Jewish cement."The Romanian version here is usually layered with cheese and fried bacon bits, it is something I dreamed about and will probably obsess about while I go back on my weight loss regimen, but I am glad I got to slake my hunger on a bowl nevertheless. But wait! There is oh so much more! Homemade donuts! Yes!Called pancovi in Maramures, gogoaşa in most of Romania, these were just what the diet doctor did not order. You could split one open and fill it with a spoonful of jam or just eat them plain, cramming them into my mouth as fast as my greedy hands could manage. For months I had been dreaming about donuts, waiting for a visit to Cluj, Transylvania’s capital city, to get my hands on a Gogoasa Infuriata (“The Angry Donut”) at the city’s signature donut stand, only to find that my beloved Cluj donut has disappeared. Either gone out of business or going into some kind of franchise hell, I considered myself lucky to jump on a donut feast in Maramures rather than pin all my hopes on the now lost fried dough of the lowlands. Of course, all this eating can create a thirst. In Maramures, this is easily solved by drinking horinca – which astute readers will know from the URL of this very same blog. Horinca, the nectar of the Gods, or at least of their Romanian speaking lumberjacks and shepherds is thrice distilled fruit brandy. Ţuica is single distilled, palinka is brandy that has gone through the still twice, but horinca cashes in well over the 100 proof mark and is usually so clear and pure that it is more like fruit vodka than brandy. Which means less of a hangover to worry about, a good thing since the Morosani here drink quite a lot of the stuff on a very regular basis, poured fresh into the ubiquitous plastic Coca Cola bottles from two gallon plastic jugs.Most homes make their own from their own fruit trees, although by EU laws they are supposed to have it distilled for them in a village EU designated still. I had promised Fumie a bottle of horinca (with strict instruction by her not to accept any inferior twice distilled palinka) and had let it slip my mind until we were actually on the road out of Maramures. I asked Jake to stop in the village of Sacel, where there is a weekly market, and walked around looking for a suitable underground moonshine contact. Walking up to a big Maramures peasant guy selling axes and other lumberjack tools, I asked if he know where we could get any horinca. “Yes. From me.” Five minutes later his wife was pouring 110 proof goodness out of a blue plastic vat into one liter cola bottles.So if you haven’t made any summer plans for travel, consider Maramures. Heading into Maramures is best done by car, but there are now a lot more village bus services that can get you from the main town of Sighet Marmatei and into the countryside on a regular schedule. Just about every village offers “cazare” (accommodation) in both official guest houses as well as in regular village family homes. Certain web sites such as can make reservations for you, but I actually just called Ion from the outdated website that started the rural tourism business, and got his information right here.

Back in Maramu'

2011-05-15T03:22:00.003-04:00

Early May. The best time of the year to be tooling about Romania with my friends Jake and Elenore. It has been about five years since I visited some of the older fiddlers here, and it is good to know some of them, at least, are still with us. "It sometimes seems that the viability of traditional music is proportionate to the amount of potholes on the road it takes to reach that music. That certainly is the case in Romania. We have been jolting our merry way across Maramures and the Szekely country over the last few days, and travelling on the back country roads is more akin to dancing that driving. Distances that seem small on the road map become long drives as one weaves between potholes and washouts and gets stuck behind horse wagons. Every evening around 7 pm the real traffic jam starts: goats and cows clog the roads on their way back to their barns in the village from the upper pastures. But if you don;t mind the slow pace of travel, and don't crack your axle in a fit of pothole jumping impatience, you can be rewarded with some of the greatest music you will ever hear. “Maramures covered with flowers... mai dorule mai...

Now that Romania is an EU member nation, so many Romanians have gone abroad to find work in Italy, Spain and France that some villages have been transformed beyond recognition by the cash sent back home from abroad. The Oas region, once one of the poorest zones in Transylvania, is now a riot of sprawling palaces, including one famously kitsch palace with ornate marble sculpture befitting a renaissance prince or a minor New Jersey mafia don.Even in staunchly traditional Maramures, the old massive wooden houses are slowly being replaced by stone houses and suburban palace fantasies now dot the hillsides. I asked one farmer how much it would cost to buy one of the old wooden houses, and he said “I don't know. We all want new stone houses now. Only foreigners come here and want to buy a wooden house these days. You know... those that have old want the new, andthose that have the new, want the old. We are still on the road, and internet access is spotty, so more to come in a few days.

The Republic of Hungary: So Long, It's been Good to Know You!

2011-04-20T08:50:00.013-04:00

Well, they went and did it. Our new FIDESZ government voted in a new constitution for Hungary, replacing the former constitution adopted after the fall of communism in 1990. A lot of people both inside and outside of Hungary are not extremely happy about this. During their election campaign, which saw FIDESZ running against the MSZP (Socialists) FIDESZ never proposed any program for dealing with the economy or mentioned proposing a new constitution, which can only be done if a party has a full 2/3 majority in the Hungarian Parliament. Since the MSZP and SZDSZ (the two liberal parties who were the ruling coalition since 2002) had become flabby on the issue of internal corruption, FIDESZ easily ran over them, rather like a steam roller meeting a small animal on the road at night.Poor things didn’t have a chance. (Actually, that’s a hedgehog that Fumie saved a few nights ago from being squashed by a bus in the city park. Which brings to three the number of hedgehogs we have saved from death in the past year.) Now, if you want to learn more about our new constitution, I suggest you read about it in the Economist or perhaps the German reaction in Der Spiegel, which carries a quote from the late-night news program Tagesthemen on German television station ARD: "It's strange, the more some countries profit from the European Union, the more prone they are to anti-European sentiments. The constitutional state has largely been abolished, future elections are efrfectively meaningless, the media are being whipped into line, as are theaters and museums and everything else that could shape the nation's culture..."After kicking up a big storm of debate in the EU parliament last January over the arcane new media law, FIDESZ reformulated the media law somewhat and plowed on formulating its new constitution. What stuns me the most are not the details about gay rights, or definition of when life begins, or even the religious references to Hungary being a Christian nation (it case anybody thought they were all Baha’i.) What gets me is that we just went from being the “Republic of Hungary” to simply “Hungary.” Magyarország. What does that mean? Well, considering that FIDESZ started out as a bunch of law students at the Bibo Collegium of the ELTE Law School, you have a bunch of hair splitting lawyers taking apart the idea of what “republic” means and stands for, and replacing it with something that can be molded to fit the Dear Leader’s vision of what he wishes it to be - which is increasingly the idea of one Party rule, a form of governance that Dear Leader's generation is all too familiar with and perhaps nostalgic for. The new constitution also reinstates the Hungarian Holy Crown as the seat of political authority in Hungary. This is interesting in a modern, EU state, since the Holy Crown’s role in history has been that, unlike western Monarchies and later Parliamentary Monarchies in which the King is the legitimizing authority because he has the crown, in Hungary the legitimizing authority is the crown itself.According to popular tradition, St Stephen I held up the crown during his coronation (in the year 1000) to offer it to the "Nagyboldogasszony" (the Virgin Mary) to seal a divine contract between her and the divine crown. Anybody who has read Harry Potter can easily understand where this is going. We have a Magic Hat, and if the Bishop of Esztergom lets you wear it, you are the ruler. In truth, nobody has worn the Magic Hat since Franz Jozef in 1867 – which legitimized his authority over the Hungarian domains in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But now it all goes pear shaped and trying to explain the twentieth century history of the Hungarian Holy Crown becomes something you do not want to attempt in a bar after 11 pm because it quickly becomes a bad parody of the Jerry Springer Show in Hungarian, as do so many historical arguments in Hungarian. But I’ll try… After the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918 the new Hungarian Kingdom quickly passed from a Social Democrat coalition to one led by Communist Bela Kun, who hoped that the new Soviet Union would help Hungary regain lands lost during the war. Kun declared the First Republic of Hungary, won a few battles in Slovakia, but soon was faced with Romanian Army occupying Budapest and Serbs in the south demanding territory. In marched Admiral Horthy on his white horse, which reinstated the Holy Haberdashery as the legitimate apex of power in Hungary, with himself ruling merely as regent. And rule he did.Having signed the flawed Treaty of Trianon, Horthy immediately set about denouncing it and for the next twenty years led Hungary towards its tragic collision course with World War Two and Fascism. In 1949 the Communist Party of Hungary, having easily jacked the elections, redefined Hungary again as a “Republic” albeit a “People’s Republic” in much the same way as East Germany and North Korea loved to define themselves as “Democratic Republics.” Stolen by the Nazis and held in Austria, in 1945 the Holy Crown was placed in Fort Knox, Kentucky for safe keeping by the US Army, in order to deny any legitimacy to the Communist rulers, a state of cold war affairs that lasted until 1978 when Jimmy Carter negotiated its return to Hungary on conditions that made it a museum piece which no Communist government official could take any part. So you can see why FIDESZ, a party of hair-splitting, bone-headed lawyers would decide that “Republic” is probably just some smart commie trick to push the Holy Headgear into the background and make all decision making a function of the messy rabble of democracy. On January 1, 2000, during the second year of FIDESZ’ first round as government, the Holy Crown of Hungary was moved to the Hungarian Parliament Building from the Hungarian National Museum. It has been there ever since… symbolically ruling.But enough of our bygone republic and its crown bedazzled rulers. Let’s get more local! In our District, (Zuglo, District FOURTEEN REPRESENTIN’, y’all) the city council has erected these welcome signs at six roads leading into our district. Notice the runic script on the signs. This is an ancient Hungarian form of writing based on the old Turkic runes of central Asia, which was brought to Hungary during the great migration and actually remained in use until the 1700s in Transylvania. Of course, only a few people have learned to read it, but it has become very popular among the extreme right wing crowd who like to wear T-shirts with maps of pre-Trianon Hungary with some runic inscription on it, and you can even find it on a local brand of “Extra Hungarian” bread. And so our local right-wing Jobbik representatives took time out from their busy schedule of harassing Gypsies to push the district government into officially marking Zuglo as a right wing territory. Great.Yes, when Jobbik tell us that "The Truth will set you free" all I can do is to quote George Clinton: Free your mind and your ass will follow. Personally, I would like to see the Nagyboldogasszony herself appear and give them a lecture on the power of love and tolerance. Speaking of Mary and the whole Ben-Joseph family, it is Easter this weekend, and in Hungary that means… pork-pork-pork-o-rama!It is the ham festival, heavy on the smoked pig, a few hard boiled eggs, and sprinkling water or cheap perfume on girls on Monday! The market this week is bullish on hams of all varieties: smoked knuckles, great wanking peasant hams, haunches smoked almost until they are black with soot and salty goodness. But what would Jesus think of this. He was after all, the King of the Jews. You can’t even get to the point where that is debatable unless the person in question is, in fact, Jewish. (And there are an awful lot of folks on the right wing in Hungary who just don't abide with that line of thinking...) So here the whole country is celebrating His Escape from the Tomb with… a feast of forbidden treyf meat. But hey… it tastes good. It’s completely hamalicious! OK, the Savior would probably be fine with matzoh balls and gefilte fish, but that shouldn’t stop Hungarians from engaging in a national pig out for a few days of gleeful swine ingestion.Actually, most of these hams are terribly salty… you need to soak them in water overnight at least to remove some of the salt, but most people don’t, so the upcoming week can be characterized as National High Blood Pressure Week.

Táncháztalálkozó 2011: The Unpronounceable Power of Music

2011-04-07T13:40:00.006-04:00

The surest sign that spring has arrived in Budapest is the National Folk Festival, otherwise known as the Országos Táncháztalálkozó és Kirakodóvásár, or but if that is too many Hungarian consonants to pronounce you can shorten it to simply Táncháztalálkozó (Dance House Meeting.) Don’t worry - by the end of the weekend, even the most linguistically challenged foreigner can pronounce it. I wrote up the festival on the blog last year, a post which unexpectedly turned into a tempest in a teapot when it was reprinted on the Táncháztalálkozó web site and in a Hungarian folk music magazine. Hungarians don’t react well to criticism, whether constructive or not. Rather than run through that gauntlet again, this year I went to the festival with a different attitude: I wasn’t going to expect anything other than a good time hanging with friends and hearing good music. Which is what I did. I managed to avoid the consumer zone although it is hard when you have stands selling books and CDs of things as minutely focused on the ‘Hey, you! Bob! Buy Me!’ market as regional Hungarian bagpipe repertoire books and rereleases of Moldavian Csango fiddle music recorded in the 1950s. I used to snatch these up and come home wondering where all my money had disappeared to… no more.I am able to resist temptation, even while passing through the Room of Many Transylvanian Peasants Selling Stuff: wall hangings, table cloths, embroidered shirts, dancing boots, old ceramic painted dishes and pottery. But I already have enough of that to stock a small museum, so much so that most of it lives in cardboard boxes in my small flat and only comes out when I have need of a special birthday gift. But the real attraction was the outdoor bar area – actually the rear parking lot of the sports arena. Sure, it is a party in a cement walled bus parking lot, and everybody is complaining nonstop about it, but you can smoke there, which is something that the Hungarian folk scene definitely likes to do, and there is beer, and you can dance, so bus garage or not, this is the party. A group of Gypsy musicians from Gőmőr, a Hungarian minority region of Slovakia were playing at a table when I arrived, and this was some of the old fashioned Gypsy music that was the basis for the modern Gypsy restaurant music that most people associate with Hungarian folk music.Ethnologist Gergely Agócs was there with an elderly Hungarian shepherd who sang and played tarogato as well. Think of that. It is the year 2011 and you can still find shepherds who play shepherd music in this part of the world. Of course, they aren’t parked nose to nose in every village, but there still is some tradition out there if you look for it. And at least at the Táncháztalálkozó you don’t have to travel far to bump into it. Our old friends the Gypsy Band of Palatka were there after a stage set, playing for younger dancers and musicians for whom they are living legends.I was standing there listening when Sue Foy and Portaleki László showed up. We watched the amazing synchronized bow strokes of the two fiddlers and reminisced about how the village kids in Palatka grow up playing alongside their parents. To them it "comes naturally" after years of playing. “Poros” is a fiddle legend on his own: the original fiddler with the Teka band, he now shares lead fiddle work in Muzsikás and has his own band comprised of family members which is about to tour in the USA – do not miss them, they are one of the best things happening in the Hungarian folk music scene these days.When the leader of the Palatka band, Kodoba Marton (father of Florin, the younger lead fiddler today) passed away a few years ago the band asked Poros if he would step in and become their new lead fiddler, an offer that Poros considers one of the greatest honors ever bestowed on him. I spent a few hours just chatting with old friends who I don’t see as often anymore, since we aren’t; all meeting every weekend at some dance house or another. Kids, career, the same old reasons. But the vibe was like the old days and the hang was great. Before I left I passed a crowd of young musicians singing their lungs out while the musicians stood on a table for room to play.One of the Transylvanian Gabor Gypsies who sell handicrafts at the festival was listening… and this is a first for me… recording the whole thing on her I-phone. Like the old folk song says: Nem úgy van most, mint volt régen. Things just ain’t like they used to be.

Hani Gets a Haircut: A Roma/Jewish Love Story

2011-03-20T15:21:00.009-04:00

Last week we had the honor of being invited to the first haircut ceremony of Hani, the daughter of Claude and Mina. Among the Roma the haircutting ceremony is a rite of passage between the two most important life events: birth and marriage. As Mina explained, in the traditions of her group of Roma, the Dzambaş, the child is given four random objects and urged to choose one from among them. The Godmother (Mina’s sister Otela) and the Godfather - in this case Claude’s old friend Vijay who works in Geneva - chose the objects which included things like a Burger King drink cup, a Bic lighter, a flower, and other random effects picked up during the day. Hani chose the lighter, and then a lock of her hair was shorn, to be placed in a vial of water. These objects will be saved away and given to her on the day of her marriage.Claude and Mina are among our oldest friends in Budapest, although today they are residing in the Republic of Moldova where Claude works as a UN official. Claude was part of the posse in the wild east days of Budapest in the 1990s. Originally from the US, he taught English in Prague and slung his guitar around the alternative punk clubs of east Europe before settling in Budapest. Eventually he found a position with the European Roma Rights Center, learned to speak Romani, and soon was active in the defense of Gypsy human rights campaigns as a case worker and writer. He also worked with legendary Serbian Gypsy singer Saban Bajramovic to reclaim the copyright and publishing rights to Saban’s music, which the singer had never protected. Not bad for a Jewish kid from Hartford. Along the way he met Mina.Mina comes from a Roma family in Romania, and she was the first in her family to finish school and attend University, taking a degree in Psychology. She and Claude met at a Roma Rights conference and kept in touch, and pretty soon they fell in love and decided to marry. It wasn’t an easy matter. The question of marrying out of one’s official religion, which is taken rather seriously in Romania, was solved by fabricating a mixed ceremony for the wedding, which took place with a Romanian Orthodox priest and included a Reform Jewish blessing added into the mix. Claude used to describe himself as “The King of The Yekkes” – Yekke being the Yiddish term for a German Jew, his father’s family, from Furth, having gotten out of Germany at the last minute before the Holocaust.According to Romani tradition, there were traditional dowry issues to overcome. A certain amount of wealth is required to “reserve” a bride, and I used to send Claude SMS text messages saying “Hey Claude, want to go fishing this weekend?” and get responses like “Yes. Do you have any gold? Bring lots of gold!” If you think about it, that was one of the most romantic things I ever heard about any relationship. How many of you need to collect gold to make your bride’s parents assent to wed? I never did that for my girlfriends…Speaking of fishing, this is a photo we took while fly fishing for trout on the Revuca river in Slovakia. Jewish-Gypsy trout fishing is something not to be missed. Normally Claude and I, like any self respecting noble fly fishing anglers, practice catch and release with trout – carefully landing trout on artificial flies I myself tie on tiny de-barbed hooks, never using live bait, and settling down to a nice hot soup or something else for dinner instead of killing fish. This practice ended with Mina, who does not stand for the idea of going fishing and letting perfectly good, legally caught food go running away after having even paid for a damn license to catch them. Goodbye catch and release. The problem is that now we miss going to Slovak restaurants and when the waiter asks if we would like the English language menu, we ask if they have a menu in Romani... and while we burst out laughing nobody else ever seems to get that joke. Fumie and Mina spent the weekend cruelly laughing at us in our rubber fishing waders and calling Claude and myself the “Chippendale Boys.” Of course, Mina caught the first fish.The girls: Kali and Hani, are beautiful. Born in France while Claude worked in Geneva, they now go to a Romanian language kindergarten in Moldova, while being raised in both English and Romani by their parents with equal respect for both Romani and Jewish culture. They always get a little giggly when I speak to them in Romani, which is like “our secret language with Mommy” but they are going to grow up to be amazing multilingual European language monsters when they start school.Thanks to Tom and Amy for lending their apartment for the ceremony, and for piling on the hospitality we take for granted when there is a “Tom Party” although this was a heck of a lot more like a combination children’s play date, family gathering, and informal ceremony than the blow outs we usually enjoy at Casa Tom. And hopefully we will all find the time to get outdoors and meet again on a stream in Slovakia someday soon. The trout are biting, I hear. And always remember to use barbless hooks, and carefully release your catch... a trout is too valuable to catch only once...

Budapest Comfort Food: Home Made Italian Sausages, Natto, and Kimchi

2011-02-22T09:07:00.013-05:00

One can never get away from the flavors one grows up with. I was raised in the east Bronx, and while our household was an Ugrian-semitic island of Hungarian food mixed with matzoh ball soup and chopped liver, the east Bronx was - and is - one of New York City's strongest Italian neighborhoods, alongside a healthy dollop of Irish and Plattsdeutsch speaking Germans. But in my nabe off of East Tremont Avenue, we ate Italian food. The neighbors were all Italians from Calabria and Abruzzi, my Dad's best buddy (and NYPD patrol car partner) was Sicilian, and I was essentially raised on Italian American home cooking, a style my immigrant Hungarian mother came to know as "American" cooking since she learned it from the neighboring wives in a place called "America." Even today, the east Bronx is full of Italian bakeries and butcher shops and some of the best pizza to be found in the entire city. It was there that I defined my taste in sausages: Italian sausages, southern style, flavored simply with fennel and hot peppers. My Mom sometimes took us shopping in Yorkville, Manhatten's old Hungarian neighborhood which used to be lined with Hungarian cafes, restaurants, and grocery shops. It was the place where we could stock up on paprika and buy Hungarian debreceni kolbász and hurka (liver or blood sausages) and "real" bread.Yorkville's Hungarians have pretty much disappeared these days, except for the Hungarian church and a couple of newer Hungarian restaurants, mostly pushed out by rising rents and the lure of the "Hungarian" suburbs like New Brunswick, NJ and Bridgeport, Conn. But when I visited Hungary and finally moved here I was a sausage demon. In Hungary, you won't often find sausage on any menu - you eat it at home or standing up in a butcher shop. And it used to be, in my opinion, a lot better. Today, most kolbász seems to be an industrially produced cheap meat tube with a rubbery consistency and an over salted spicing of low grade paprika. Sausages made for grilling - the ones that are "raw" and not intended for a long refrigerator life - tend to be so stuffed with paprika that they end up dry with an almost almost sandy consistency. After a decade or so, I grew strangely tired of the Hungarian grilled kolbász. And so... I learned to make my own. The sausages of my youth. Italian sausages. It really isn’t that hard, although I would need a full meat grinder to do it right. I have one, an old crank handle model I picked up at a junk market, but the blades are wrong, although it does a decent job of churning out the sausages with already ground meat.But for smaller amounts I just use a plastic sausage nozzle attachment and push the kolbász through with my thumb. It leaves air bubbles in the sausages, but since I am not going to smoke or store these babies, I can simply prick the skin with a toothpick and carry on without worry of food poisoning. . Most butchers here sell kolbász bél, cleaned intestines for stuffing kolbász, so after rinsing a meter long section by running water through it in my sink, I mix up the meat and spices. To get the right mix of meatiness and juiciness, I take two thirds measure of somewhat fatty ground pork, and add to it a third measure of hand chopped pork belly meat. This is a fatty bacon cut called "nyérs csaszár" sold cheaply for home bacon hobbyists and emigre chinese home cooks, who seems to be the main customers for pork belly at the Bosznyak ter market where we shop. The spices are insane amounts of black pepper, fennel seeds, and nutmeg, with some chopped parsley for good measure.In the summer I might add chopped fresh basil from the “garden” as well. Half of the batch gets a palmful of crushed dried hot pepper flakes, the other goes without. Fried or grilled, these are a pretty close approximation of a New York Italian sausage. I’ve also experimented with other combinations including fresh Portuguese chourizo sausage (hot paprika and garlic) and German bratwurst (nutmeg, black pepper, and coriander.) Under normal conditions I would eat this with a hunk of crusty bread or a plate of pasta, but since I am under a self imposed regimen forbidding those wonderful things it usually gets served with a salad or my old friend , Mr. Zucchini.I’m gonna hate Mr. Zucchini pretty soon. Fumie is not a stranger to the odd hunger pangs of home, in her case, Tokyo. You might think that recreatring Japanese local specialties would be harder to satisfy than simple Calabrian food, but she does pretty well, what with cans of smoked eel and seaweed sent to her from home and local Chinese groceries and the occasional trip to Vienna. But Edokko people (people really native to Tokyo) like Fumie are crazy for natto. Natto is rotten soybeans, fermented by a special bacteria until they turn sour and emit a gummy stringy slime that Edokko love.Most other Japanese won’t eat natto, and it is one of those foods that foreign food writers always highlight as examples of weird cuisine in Japan, after fried bees and poisonous fugu sashimi. This is the dish that brought Anthony Bourdain to his knees, and he described it as "an unbelievably foul, rank, slimy, glutinous, and stringy goop of fermented soybeans... Given a choice between eating natto and digging up my old dog Pucci (dead thirty-five years) and making rillettes out of him? Sorry, Pucci." Fumie makes natto at home, on top of the living room heater, in fact. It is not that bad, actually. Stirred into a stringy mush with hot mustard and soy sauce, eaten on rice for breakfast?

Maybe natto takes some getting used to, but I’d say it is a big improvement on Pucci. You can buy natto in Japanese grocery shops in small styrofoam cntainers, but the closest to us is in Vienna, and thus we have been forced to produce natto ourselves. And we only produce enough for ourselves. So don't even ask... On the other hand, Fumie has to have kimchi, the Korean pickled cabbage that has become to Japanese cuisine what Pizza is to New York cuisine. To make decent kimchi, you need napa cabbages (which are easy to get here - although I wonder what, exactly, Hungarians do with them) and red pepper paste - which we can get at the chinese grocery. And also fish sauce, various spices, and glutinous rice flour, all of which we keep stocked in our pantry.The amount you see here lasted about a month, only long enough for it to ferment and get really tangy. Kimchi is something you make in the winter months - while you can store a few pots of it outside on the terrace where it can ferment into stinky perfection. With March coming up... guess we will have to make another batch real soon.

Hungarian Bagpipes and Media Dignity.

2011-01-29T03:50:00.005-05:00

When I moved to Hungary in the 1980s, I was already a bagpipe fanatic. I had first heard the Hungarian bagpipe - the duda - on recordings in the 1970s, and it simply grabbed me by the neck and changed what I thought about music. Between the sound of the Hungarian duda and the raw power of the Transylvanian fiddle bands that I heard on Hungarian field recordingsI was hooked. Although I played fiddle in all kinds of bands – bluegrass, country, Greek, Irish and Cajun – I never gave up trying to get that Transylvanian sound, and the search for that sound eventually was the thing that brought me to Hungary in the 1980s. And since I couldn’t get my hands on a Hungarian bagpipe, I wound up playing the somewhat different, but still raw and riveting, Balkan gaida. I actually once put together a Transylvanian string band with some band mates from an African band I played in – a Ghanaian on the kontra fiddle and a Senegalese on the bass. It is a pity we never recorded. By the time I got here in 1980s, the Hungarian bagpipe – the duda – had largely died out, due in part because the shepherds who played it were replaced by electric sheep fences and the simple fact that society preferred more pleasant sounding instruments than the lowly duda.In the 1970s, however, Hungarian folk musicians such as Sándor Csoóri, Juhász Zoltán and Ferenc Tobak (shown above researching Moldavian bagpipes in the 1980s) sought out the last active duda players and learned the technique and most importantly, the manufacture of these instruments. But most of us were convinced that there were no older Hungarian duda players left in Hungary (except for a handful of Croatian ethnic players of the Croatian bagpipes in south Hungary.) Then, in the 1990s, while inquiring about the survival of any memories of duda traditions anthropologist Gergély Agocs and musicologist Juhász Zoltán found Pál Pista, a retired shepherd who had played duda – as well as shepherd’s flute - in his youth but had given up playing.Alone after the death of his wife and son, Uncle Pista was surprised to find that anybody would be interested in him, but encouraged by the younger musicians and armed with a new and functional bagpipe made for him, Pál Pista became an active performer at folk festivals and dance houses. The “discovery” of Uncle Pista was also important in that it gave a whole generation of young Hungarian bagpipe enthusiasts a living link to the old traditions, a face to face teacher and transmitter of the old aesthetic of the shepherd. And Uncle Pista took to his new role avidly – he still loves to give performances to schools and cultural clubs, but he is now 91 and over the last few years he has been slowing down a bit. His hearing is going, but he will still rise to the occasion if asked to appear to play his pipe and tell a few stories to the students and schoolchildren he adores so much.And now it gets ugly. Surfing around the net I came across this clip from Hungary’s “who’s got talent” reality show ‘Megasztar.’ Last May the show contacted Uncle Pal Pista, and asked him to appear on their “talent show.” Uncle Pista had no idea what the Megasztar show is, and thought he was being asked to demonstrate his traditional bagpipes for TV, which the only reason he ever gets called in by any TV station. Dressed in his traditional clothes – which appear funny and outlandish in the Megasztar context, especially with a ridiculous contestant number attached to his hat, Pal wanted to play his bagpipe. But backstage the show’s assistants asked him to play his flute, and then onstage they asked him to just sing a song for them. Onstage, however, celebrity talk show host and contest judge Sandor Frederikusz requested that Uncle Pista play a cowherd’s song (called a ‘gulyas nota’ – these are usually known to be obscene ditties.) And Uncle Pisti refuses and wants to sing a patriotic Hussar song instead.This clip takes the cake for bad taste – trying to get cheap laughs from an old man who just happens to be a cultural icon of Hungarian culture. The other contestants know what they are in for when they go on a cheap Gong Show knock off like Megasztar – Uncle Pista did not. Watching this, I can feel my stomach churning. I can understand why people talk of the need to protect “dignity” in broadcast media. I can’t understand the need, however, to legislate it.Which brings us to the new Media law and the concept of decency in broadcasting. Hungary is in the international spotlight these days because of its adoption of a new law governing press and media freedom and regulating fines for broadcast or published “assaults on human dignity” and “public morals.” What one must understand is that Hungarian TV offers some of the most invasive, hideous and downright scratch-my-eyeballs-out horrible television to be seen anywhere west of Azerbaijan (which has some truly unique bad TV of its own.) The best protection from such assaults is to simply turn the damn TV off. We had our cable company shut our TV off two years ago because of all the 50 or so channels, we were reduced to watching the Animal Channel, the desperate Hungarian cooking channel PaprikaTV, and BBC news until they took it off the cable service as well. Instead we chose to repurpose our TV more productively as a stand for potted plants. In truth, the new media law won’t be used to protect people like Uncle Pista from the indignities of broadcasting. It will be used to protect governing politicians when their mouths move and – as so often happens when their mouths move – lies and fabrications come out. It will be used to go after the media and press that report that simple fact and cause embarrassment to those politicians. The law is not there to protect us, but to control us.

Shrimp in Budapest? Shrimp?

2011-01-14T08:09:00.011-05:00

Amid the international froofrah that Hungary has stepped in since taking the rotating presidency of the European Union, one burning question has been pushed aside in the tumult: what’s for dinner? Yes, at our house that is the burning daily issue, a struggle between what we can get in the market and what we actually would like to eat in a pleasant and perfect world. Winter in Hungary means… cabbage, carrots, and very expensive imported vegetables. Meat narrows to a choice between pork or chicken. And in our home, we simply get tired of the traditional Hungarian round of stews, soups and veggies-in-sour-cream that make up the winter Magyar diet. And the worst time is around Christmas, when Hungarians go beserk with overproducing the really good stuff, and everybody ends up sending beiglis to each other and sharing wheelbarrows of leftovers, like our friend Judit’s stuffed cabbage cooked by her Mom.The sad fact is that during the winter I tend to put on weight, happy to chow down on a default diet heavy on pasta carbonara and chicken paprikas ladled over mamaliga until, sometime around May, green veggies return to the market. This year I said a firm No! I have basically cut out 95% of all those tasty carbohydrates and have halved the portions I eat. And this gives Fumie an advantage to our daily dinner debate: Hungarian, Italian, or Asian? With Italian food knocked out of the picture, and Hungarian cuisine hobbled by a wintertime starch glut, we eat a lot of Chinese and Japanese food.

The secret to keeping a Japanese garufurendo happy is basically the same as keeping a pet seal happy: they need fish. A lot of fish. Fresh fish, dried fish, canned fish, powdered fish, cute fish, ugly fish, fish, fish, fish. And Hungary is a landlocked country where ‘fish’ usually means one thing: carp. I do not like carp. I agree with the Romanians whose word for carp is the much more indicative “crap.”But somehow we manage. We can occaisonally get frozen sardines. We have learned how to home process frozen fish from the supermarket so that it almost resembles fish again. Fumie makes her own kimchee, (the Korean cabbage and pepper pickle that conquered the world.) We grow fresh herbs like shiso and Thai basil on our terrace. When we returned from the US last fall half of our luggage consisted of canned fish and sauces from the gigantic Mitsuwa Japanese supermarket in Edgewater New Jersey. Luckily, we have some Chinese groceries in Budapest, and Fumie manages to create some semblance of an Asian cuisine in a uniquely McGyverish way. Shrimp wonton soup a la Budapest, anyone?Not everything the Japanese eat is fresh and healthy and prepared with Zen-like sense of purity and balance. The Japanese have an amazing appetite for snacks and junk foods and glow-in-the-dark candies and weird soft drinks like the fabled "Cowpiss." These are stored in big boxes in our Budapest pantry for days when the garufurendo has a nostalgic snack attack. And most of you have not eaten Japanese school food. Fumie gets very nostalgic for school lunch menus, and then it is time for the dreaded Japanese curry! She's stocked enough boxes of Japanese karē sauce in our pantry to survive anything short of a nuclear attack. Now, if you haven't tried it, Japanese curry is a sweet, curry powder flavored glop that is an acquired taste at best. I have simply never acquired it.Japanese love to see how far westerners will go with heir food: can you eat sushi? Seaweed? I have gone as far as eating raw sea squirts and sea cucumbers, and I have even munched on a bit of TV snack package jellyfish. But for me karē is my Japanese Maginot line. No problem... but it means I do not get to warm up any shnitzel leftovers. Katsu karē for lunch! But the most significant event of the last half decade in Hungary has been the arrival of shrimp. Since Hungary entered the EU imported foods became a bit more widespread: shrimp appeared. Once only available at five star hotel buffets, Hungarians have acquired enough of a taste for shrimp so that one can now find relatively affordable frozen shrimp. I have absolutely no idea what Hungarians do with shrimp – batter-fry them with mayonnaise sauce Orly modra? Stew with paprika and sour cream? Crush them with poppy seeds and sugar and serve on noodles? But as long as we can wrap them in rice skins with a little ground meat, cellophane noodles, and mint we are happy with Vietnamese chả giò.This isn’t to say we have sworn off western food entirely. No way! One lucky side effect of the Hungarian holiday feast-a-thon is that butchers still have a glut of leftover duck and goose. Duck breast is actually easy to prepare, and given the absence of decent beef in Hungary, duck breast is the closest thing we have to steak, albeit with feathers.Served with a nice Hungarian sweet and sour red cabbage (I use apples for the sweetness) and some cauliflower gratin, this actually fits into the diet plan quite well. Now, if I could only stop dreaming about spaghetti carbonara…

Happy New Year! Boldog új évet mindenkinek! La mulţi ani!

2011-01-04T11:10:00.008-05:00

On December 31, did we worry ourselves about the state of the Hungarian economy, the wretched new press law that had just come into being administered by a state secretary whose only former publishing experience consisted of publishing the Hungarian franchise edition of Penthouse magazine? Did we stay awake agonizing over the next moves of our pugnacious Great Leader as Hungary prepared to take its revolving seat as President of the EU? Did we watch the new President of Hungary make a travesty of the words to the Hungarian National Anthem as he gave his New Year’s speech? No we most certainly did not. We did what thousands of Hungarians do on December 31. We went to the horse track.I don’t know when the trotting races became a New Year tradition in Budapest, but it is an invisible, almost unnoticed ritual that stays largely hidden from the view of foreigners – which is kind of like Rio de Janeiro keeping Carnival hidden from outsiders. This used to held at the old race track just behind Keleti railway station, but the new park, located in outer Zuglo, suits the crowd just fine as a way of reminding us of the snowy Siberian steppes from which our ancient Ugric-Magyar ancestors fled so many millenia ago to find a brighter future sitting atop horses, a trend that eventually led to horsing our way into the Pannonian plains and eventual membership in the EU and lots of very tasty pastries and cakes.

Thousands of Hungarians bundle up and descend on Budapest’ Kincsem Park in the afternoon to freeze their butts outside while ducking inside every half hour to warm up while making bets and glugging hot spiced wine. It is a sea of Magyars in funny hats, downing all manner of Hungary’s wide selection of cheaper and less delectable liquors in a vain attempt to party in the snow.And Party they did. This was a long-needed antidote to the stereotype of the sad, dour, pessimistic Magyar. If you have never seen a few thousands of Hungarians out for some serious Hungarian fun, try it sometimes. It doesn't happen everyday, and when it does, looks out! We stayed for a few races but I don’t gamble and so it was more a chance to watch Hungarians having fun – something you don’t see very much outside of the Croatian coast these days. Families with kids, teenagers, old grizzled denizens of the horse track life, Chinese immigrants, Gypsy familes, they were all here. And we got a chance to see… Lagzi Lajcsi!

The king of Hungarian Wedding Rock! Singing in full playback mode – a common form of entertainment in these partst in which a performer jumps around stage while a tape of them plays, giving them the chance to talk over their own singing. The crowd loved it and sang along. My own tastes in music allow me only so much Lagzi Lajcsi, so later we were off to the Instant Bar downtown for New Years with the Kocani Orkestar.

About a decade ago, when a lot of cool young Serbs chose to find refuge from the Kosovo War by moving to Budapest, Budapest started to import live music by the simple expedient of calling in Balkan Gypsy brass bands. I mean, after all, they are not located very far away and they have a knack of getting a party going for a lot less of an investment than hiring some name reggae band or risking your party on some local folkies. If you want a party, you hire a Balkan Brass band. This pretty much guaranteed that our New Year's Eve party would not suck. Our Croatian Contingent (Captain and Madame Squid) was along for the party, and Captain Squid hadn’t heard the program specifics beyond “some Macedonian band will be playing.” He was in Yugo-heaven when he saw it would be Kocani – he could never afford to go to see them when he was a kid in the old Yugoslavia. For FT2000 (about $9 USD) that’s not a bad way to go out for some insane Macedonian Gypsy Brass band party music. Of course, it was “a version” of Kocani… apparently, the band had become so successful that they can appear simultaneously in several forms at any given time… but we were fully satisfied with the version we got, full of dented tubas and screaming Gypsy trumpets and a lot more Turkish influence than you usually get from Serbian based Gypsy brass bands. After a midnight set we headed off to be with our friends at the Sixtus Kapolna, one of the seventh districts smaller watering holes where we are “inner circle” and thus we got in for the closed party.And lo and behold, there was a nice warm cauldron of Lentil soup waiting for us - Hungarians, along with Italians, believe that starting the New Year off with a bowl of lentils (which resemble little coins, get it?) ensures that you will see wealth in the upcoming new year. With explanations like that it also explains a lot in terms of economic failure in these two nations as well.

The Demise of Press Freedom in Hungary.

2010-12-27T10:07:00.004-05:00

The New York Times, which rarely takes notice of anything happening in our little corner of the Carpathian basin, ran a story today that just about tells it all: Hungary Waves Off Criticism Over Media Law. “Prime Minister Viktor Orban, poised to take over presidency of the European Union is fighting back against criticism from Germany and other countries over a new Hungarian law that some fear could be used to curb press freedom.” That’s putting it very, very lightly. As of January 1, Hungary’s new media law goes into effect, which literally means that the State – embodied in the Ruling Party, FIDESZ – has carte blanche to fine any media reporting that it deems “unbalanced” or offensive to “human dignity.” Particularly the dignity of politicians.

And our new FIDESZ overlords are likely to use it in precisely the Orwellian manner we expect, with statements warning bloggers of the dangers of “unlicensed and irresponsible journalism” and calls for more Hungarian-only content in the Hungarian broadcast media. The Washington Post put it grimly today in an editorial entitled “The Putinization of Hungary: “The right-wing Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban won 53 percent of the popular vote in an election this year but gained 66 percent of the seats in parliament - enough to change the constitution. It proceeded to take over or attack the authority of every institution it did not control, including the presidency, the Supreme Court and the state audit office; the central bank is now under its assault… Meanwhile, Mr. Orban has overseen passage of two media laws that will put Hungary in a league with Russia and Belarus on press freedom. One puts FIDESZ in control of all state television channels and other public media outlets. The second approved by Parliament on Tuesday creates a powerful Media Council with the authority to regulate newspapers, television, radio and the Internet. The council may issue decrees and impose heavy fines - up to $950,000 - for news coverage it considers "unbalanced" or offensive to "human dignity." Journalists can be forced to reveal their sources, and the council can search editorial offices and require that publishers reveal confidential business information”Now, my little corner of the blogosphere is hardly the kind of publication that I expect will attract much attention from our Illustrious Leaders. First of all, it is in English, and devotes a lot of focus on pastrami sandwiches, Gypsies playing Maramures Jewish music, and Turkish grilled meat. Secondly I already censor myself severely. If any of you know me you know that I also write about Hungarian and regional political matters for publication. Just not here. Why? Others do that better and more efficiently. And others often pay me for it, something I never do for myself. And I sincerely do not want to be identified as somebody who writes only about Hungarian issues. The crux of the media law is that 75% of Hungarians are monolingual. If a party can control the information reaching them, you can forget about the impact that foreign news and opinion have on the 25% who can and do use the internet and foreign sources of info. And now we have MTI - the old centralized News Agency of Commnist times - once agin delegated as the State official news agency, who will compose all the major TV evening news broadcasts centrally so that all us little Magyars can recieve news carefully vetted and positive and devoid of all possible embrassment to our Beloved Leaders. MTI has already begin self censoring international news. Today over at Hungarian Spectrum, Eva Balogh looks at how a news story can be re-translated and edited by MTI to mean something very different from what the original intended. And for all those Hungarians who live as writers and journalists this is a time traveling journey back into the days of Goulash Communism. An essay a few days ago by Imre Para-Kovacs in the online news portal Hírszerző: Egy hatalmas, szocialista segget látunk, barátaim, a tökéletes kádárizmus Kádár nélküli valagát, és nem lehet hibázni: vagy nyaljuk, vagy éhen halunk, nincs középút, hiába vagyunk tehetségesek, hiába vagyunk zsenik, akkor is itt kell élnünk, mert Magyarország a szeretett hazánk, a hely, ahol szívhatunk “We’re seeing a giant, socialist ass, my friends, a form of perfect Kadarism without Kadar, and make no mistake: either we kiss that ass or we starve to death. There is no middle of the road, our talents are worthless, our genius in vain. Because we still have to live here, since Hungary is our beloved homeland, the place where we can suck on it.”The new law takes effect on January 1. I'll still be here. Sucking on it.

(Above: parody of the poster anouncing "National Unity" which FIDESZ requested be posted in all public places in Hungary. The text of the original can be found here in PDF form in English. Hurry up, the lines for your quarter loaf of black bread is starting...)

Christmas in Budapest - or Yambol?

2010-12-21T09:21:00.008-05:00

Looks like we are staying in Budapest for Christmas this year. Somehow I have managed to be out of Hungary for most of the last few years at this time of year, and I am pretty grateful for it. Hungary shuts down for Christmas like no other country I have ever seen – although I have heard this is true of other Central European countries like Austria and the Czech Republic.

Starting on Dec. 24th families cocoon themselves at home, speaking to no outside, making no telephone calls, going to no parties. They stuff themselves on carp (yes, carp) and light actual candles in desiccating fir trees in their living rooms. And on Christmas Eve Hungarian children open their gifts, which do not come from Santa's workshops at the North Pole. They come straight from the Baby Jesus his own self! Contact with anybody outside of the family is strictly off limits in the home for at least three days. If you are not a participating member of a Hungarian family, you get to wander empty streets that look like a scene from some post-apocalyptic movie … where are all the people? What happened here?… The options are narrow – the traditional Jewish Christmas at a Chinese Restaurant (some stay open, and I'm not telling which) or dinner at Uncle Tom’s Annual Orphan Xmas Dinner.

Since there is no public transport on Christmas Eve in Budapest, and very few taxis, we are hoping for mild weather so we can bike to the Annual Ex-Pat Orphan’s Xmas Dinner, but Budapest has been covered in snow for the last few weeks and Christmas is no time for extreme sports. And to think that a few weeks ago I suggested to Fumie that we spend Christmas in… Yambol, Bulgaria.Yes, Yambol. Why? Because they have the most vibrant koledar tradtion in the Balkans. The Koledar are dancers who perform publicly at Christmas – their name, Koleda, is synonymous with Christmas carol – but they have roots in even more ancient martial dance traditions closely related to Morris dance.

The term “Morris” dance refers to “Moorish” and throughout Europe there are dance traditions of men performing with swords and figures of the Fool, the Mute, and the “troupe.” Usually there is one per town or village, but in Bulgaria you can find several in any area, and in Yambol it resembles something like the social organization of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian tribes, in which very macho guys get together during the year to sew costumes and practice their precision steps.

And in Yambol, a good proportion of the guys are Gypsy, albeit Gypsies who no longer speak Romani. But the macho thing is there in good dose, especially when expressed as a willingness to perform the most erotic possible belly dances “cocek” for admiring women. there is a part during one of the Koleda dance routines in which two guys face off inside the circle of marching Koledars and do a pantomime fight dance based on belly dance moves.Every now and then the guys shout out short verses to which the amswer is "YAMBOL!" so I can pretty closely guess what the questions are - Who is the coolest? YAMBOL! Who is the slickest? YAMBOL! And these guys wear some pretty serious bayonets in their boots and also sport spurs for the clinking effect as the dance. You don't want to mess with these guys.The groups portrayed here were Yambol groups who performed last summer in Koprivshitisa, during the festival. We hung out with them for several hours, since they were the ones with the best gaida bagpipe players and they were in constant party mode before their scheduled stage performances, guzzling beer and dancing in the fields and generally having a good time. I found a few videos on Youtube, including this one of some the dancers pictured here - in fact, if you know my straw hat you can see me for a second in the audience. The good stuff starts around 2:30.To get an idea of what the Yambol Koleda looks like while marching around the streets of a provincial Bulgarian town, try this out. Sure beats singing for figgy pudding,anyday.Ah, to be in Yambol at Christmas time!

Chanukah: Why no Jewish Mandolin Orchestras?

2010-12-05T06:41:00.003-05:00

Chanukah is on this year in Budapest, with much spinning of dreydles, lighting of candles, and a pretty extensive culture festival in Budapest’s 7th and 6th districts (the historical Jewish Ghetto) sponsored by the city council and the alternative Jewish culture club Siraly. No, my band isn’t playing – foreign based bands are on the menu this year. But that raises a good question: where is all the good Chanukah music? Answer: there isn’t much. Compared to other Jewish holidays, Chanukah lacks any catchy musical traditions (heck, we get to play percussion at Purim!) The few songs we use at this time of year are either recent compositions or songs we borrow from other Jewish musical traditions (everybody sings “La Nonya” Flory Jagoda’s Bosnian Ladino Chanukah song “Ocho Candelikas.” Which is cool in the USA where you have bands like Hip Hop Judeos, but here in Hungary it means it is just another song that nobody understands the lyrics to.)If there was any special Chanukah music tradition, my guess is that it should have mandolins in it. Chanukah is probably the most publicly visible Jewish celebration, the one known to non Jewish communities the best, probably because it falls close to Christmas and has developed into a kind of “Jewish Christmas.” That is kind of natural – as Jews assimilated and found acceptance in the secular worlds of the 20th century, Chanukah became the holiday focused on children. The custom of giving “Chanukah gelt” morphed into a tradition of giving children gifts (and the pseudo theological challenges faced by eight year olds debating with their parents whether the Talmud demands a new gift for each of the eight nights of Chanukah.) The fact is that Chanukah is a relatively low level holiday on the Jewish calendar. The Big Fun One is Purim, which usually pops up around March – Purim is the one with parties, costume plays, fun music, and tasty food. And mandolin orchestras!A post at Tablet Magazine about Avner Yonai's discovery of the Ger Mandolin Orchestra and his attempts to revive their sound and repetoire inspired me to poke around the archives. While I have almost 100 90 minute casettes of recorded Jewish music almost none of it is mandolin, yet mandolin orchestras were ubiquitous in Jewish communities. Like a lot of the music we play in Di Nayes, this was music that was outside of the realm of commercial recordings. And, although the idea is wonderful, the experience of a large mandoln orchestra is, as any jaunt through the possibilites offered at youtube will show... somewhat underwhelming. A dozen eager string tremolos is only as good as the weakest mandolin player, and there are always a few of those wherever mandolins come out. Most people identify Ashkenazic Jewish music with Klezmer bands. Mandolin orchestras, however, were a part of Jewish musical life throughout the twentieth century in both east Europe and the diasporas.Mandolins were often the instrument of choice in Jewish schools and among Jewish fraternal organizations. Cheap, easy to play, and not given to virtuosity, the Socialists and Unionists who founded the Yiddish school systems considered the humble mandolin to be the perfect “Instrument of the People.” Whenever I play mandolin with my band on stage in cities where the audience includes and significant number of Jews, there are usually a couple of seventy year olds who approach me after the show to say that they or their parents were members of a Jewish mandolin orchestra. There is a lot of nostalgia for the mandolin. A lot of Jewish families had a mandolin lying around – they were the kind of instrument you could play indoors in a Brooklyn tenement without disturbing the neighbors.In Hungary there really is no tradition of mandolin playing. Audiences at our gigs often ask me if I am playing a banjo. (No, I am playing a 1934 Gibson A40, dammit! That was the first year they put F-holes on the A models.) Mandolins are used by Roma bands but usually these are just substituting for the more common tamburica. The tamburica has a string tradition in Serbia and Croatia, and is still quite alive in the southeast of Hungary around Pecs and Mohacs, mostly among Gypsy musicians playing for Gypsy, Sokac, and Bunyevac minorities – you don’t see the tamburica bands outside of local ethnic festivals anymore.Romania has a bit more mandolin mostly along the Black Sea coastal towns for urban music – I have heard it played by a Tatar hotel band in Constanta, and Electrecord records put out an LP of Dobrudja Tatar Grigore Kazim playing classic lautar pieces on mandolin around 1970. The Czech Republic has a strong mando culture – a result of the Czech adoption of American country music as the musical culture of their own “Tramping Hobo” culture in which guys dress up in camo and carry big knives backpacks and go tramping around the fields and roads of Bohemia, stopping at “Hobo Bars” where everybody sings Czech language “tramp songs” that sound suspiciously like reworked Jimmy Rogers ballads. That led to a full blown Czech Bluegrass music scene, and eventually the Czechs produced virtuoso mandolin wizards like Radim Zenkl, who now makes his living on the somewhat more lucrative American mandolin scene.For Jewish mandolin in the US, we have Andy Statman. Andy is a force of nature – without him there would have been no Klezmer revival. I knew Andy through the old time and Appalachian music jam sessions at the Eagle Tavern on 14th street in New York during the 1970s, where every Thursday the overwhelmingly Jewish folk music scene would gather for Jam sessions – fiddles, banjos, and mandolins. Statman was the first musician of the younger generation to work with the great Klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras, who was retired at the time and living in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Statman absorbed not only the klezmer music of Tarras but also a deep respect and faith for the Jewish tradition – he went from being a bushy haired jazz mandolinist to being a pious Orthodox Jewish jazz mandolinist.With ethnomusicologist and cimbalom player Zev Feldman, they recorded one of the first well researched traditional Klezmer LPs “Jewish Klezmer Music” on Shanachie records. Subsequently, Staman went on to record some classic Jewish music with David Grisman (whose indefinable mix of mandolin styles he terms “Dawg music”) producing one of the most ethereal collections of Jewish music for mandolin, 1995’s “Songs of Our Fathers” and the more recent “New Shabbos Waltz” (2006.) My personal favorite is a cassette Statman made in 1991 in Israel with Breslover Rabbi Yaakov Klein and his choir: “Songs of the Breslover Chassidim Today” that is, apparently still available. And all of that is mainly inspired by an interview with Andy Statman at the Mandolin Café web site. Most surprisingly, Andy has traded in his trusty old Gibson oval holed A model mandolin for an F-5 style.Statman opened up a whole field of mandolin music to North American Jewish musicians. Jeff Warschauer started out in Boston as a bluegrass mandolin player who moved into the world of country swing, and eventually took a scholarship to study Yiddish and polished up with the Klezmer Conservatory Band on mandolin and guitar. Although he mostly performs on guitar accompanying his wife, Klezmer violinist and dance teacher Deborah Strauss, he has one of the most distinctive styles in Klezmer mandolin today, not to mention he leads Jewish mandolin orchestras at Klez Camp and occasionally at the New York Arbeiter Ring, making him one of the last of the long chain of mandolin orchestra leaders.Up in Canada, mandolinist Eric Stein leads the Toronto based Beyond the Pale, a klezmer and East European folk band, which just won the Instrumental Group of the Year and the Pushing Boundaries awards from the Canadian Folk Music Association for their third album Postcards. Eric is an old buddy of mine as well as director of the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto, and a monster on the cimbalom as well as the mandolin.

Why Can't We Have Pastrami for Thanksgiving?

2010-11-24T11:32:00.010-05:00

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, that particularly American holiday during which millions of cooks attempt to roast a turkey, a notoriously tasteless industrially refined bird that tastes a lot like textured cardboard. Everybody loves thanksgiving turkey. Well almost everybody. If I had had my way with history, the dour Pilgrims would have stayed stuck in Leiden, and adventurous and far more amenable Bessarabian Jews would have gone in their stead. They would have had far more peaceful relations with the local Wampanoag Indians, and we would all be sitting down to a nice Thanksgiving meal of hot steamed pastrami today instead. With sweet potato latkes, maybe, and definately pickles. There is no holiday that can not be improved by the addition of pastrami. It has been a very good year for pastrami. Last summer I got to meet and translate for Toronto born writer David Sax, author of the great book about delicatessens and the people who love them: “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen” (and the blog of the same name) who was on assignment in Budapest doing a story for Saveur magazine on Jewish food in Bucharest and Budapest. That article is now on line for all to see, illustrated by Landon’s Nordeman’s great photos. I got to spend a morning hanging around the Kazinczy utca Orthodox Synagogue with them sampling kosher cold cuts and watching the butchers reduce a cow into kosher sausage and salami in about a half hour of furious knife work.

And I also got to spend some time in Canada, sampling some of the smoked meat that stands in for deli meat in the Great Neighbor to the North. I had read about smoked meat for a long time – I traveled through the Ukraine with Barry Lazar and the film crew that had done the documentary Chez Schwartz about this legendary Montreal eatery. I had sat through several showing of the film to audiences of Canadian Jews all loudly moaning and making nyom-nyom sounds during the hard core pastrami-porn segments of the film. So when Geoff Berner invited me to lend a hand (or at least a vocal chord) on his new recording project, I was glad to be whisked up to Montreal and ready to try some smoked meat.Specifically at Chez Schwartz Charcuterie Hebraique in Montreal. The question has since arisen: which do you prefer, Schwartz’s or Katz’s? It’s a tough one to answer. So much rides on the decision. And for the winner of the 2010 Deli Meat of the year the award has to go to… Chez Schwartz. What? Is this not blasphemy? Is this not the equivalent of me turning my back on a half century of pastrami loyalty to Katz’s sandwiches? No. I’m just having a strange year. For one thing, on the last trip to Katz’s, I got stuck with a younger sandwich cutter, who inadvertently made me a sandwich fit for tourists: thinly sliced, lean mixed with lightly fatty meat, it kind of melted in the mouth instead of putting up any of the uneven, chunky resistance I like in pastrami.It was good… hell, it was fantastic…. But not as good as the sandwich I had eaten at Schwartz’s in September. And it was $16. That’s right. In Save the Deli David Saxe writes about the combination of evil influences – rising rents, loss of the kosher lunch crowd, the influx of tourists seeking a taste of New York – that have driven New York pastrami and corned beef sandwich prices into the heavens. Schwartz's sandwich is five bucks, Canadian. Yes, five loonies.

If you want more you can order a straight plate of smoked meat which comes with a stack of rye bread so you can make your own sandwiches or just cram the meat into your mouth as you wish. It may not look alike a lot, but our waiter warned us it might not be the right thing to go with on ones first trip. And he was right. At the next table a couple of beefy Quebecois men – the kind of guys who eat caribou smothered in maple syrup for breakfast – surrendered far short of a full plate of meat.

As for the pickles… excellent, but I still like the half sours at Katz’s better. So, we end the Year in Pastrami with a win for Schwartz’s. Hopefully, I will be back for a rematch soon. Runner ups were Liebman’s Deli in the Bronx and Caplansky’s in Toronto coming in a strong fourth. So enjoy your turkey, but things could have been so much different if only… And while you are at it, consider the real history of Thanksgiving on this annual Turkey day. First of all, there was no turkey. Nor pastrami. No friendly countermen at all.A bunch of absolutely incapable religious fundamentalists who had been driven out of England, the Pilgrims survived their first winter in 1621 by looting the stores of Indians who had died during a massive smallpox epidemic in the previous three years. Arriving at the Wampanoag village of Pautuxet, they were more or less parasitic on the good graces of the Indians there due to the political machinations of the local leader Massasoit and the incredible luck that there was one Pautuxet native – Tisquantum ( which translates as “Rage”) who became known as Squanto – who could translate for them. He had been kidnapped into slavery by English seamen five years earlier and managed to return. For a good antidote to the Thanksgiving mythology that we will all be swimming in, check out this article in Smithsonian Magazine by Charles Mann, which is essentially the first chapter of his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Rage indeed.

New Jersey Nostalgia

2010-11-19T07:34:00.008-05:00

I haven’t posted anything in a while since I returned to Budapest, but that reflects on me more than Budapest. I’ve been busy tying up ends on various writing work, and not going out an awful lot. I tend to eat out mainly when I am on the road, and in Hungary I mostly eat at home, and for a few months that means a dull diet from which carbohydrates have been more or less expelled. Yup. No pasta, no spuds, no mamaliga, no rice, no bread. After a few months of this, I should be able to crawl through keyholes and hide under chairs once again. Not my favorite state of affairs, but one I can manage as long as I have a lot of steamed cabbage, and in Hungary it isn’t hard to find cabbage in the winter. And we don’t have any gas in the building, and won’t for a few weeks. This hasn’t been so bad since the fall has been mild, but soon we will have to turn the electric heaters on, to the delight of the Budapest Electric Works and their bill department. And we can’t cook very well, beyond using a microwave and a hot plate, and the hot plate has to do double duty heating up water for the two of us to take something resembling a bath every now and then. In other words, it sucks. Which is not the point of this Blog.But it makes me nostalgic for some of the chow I wolfed down while I was in the States and Canada, so since I cannot stroll into a Hackensack burger joint and order a one dollar depression era style onion burger, I can at least write about it. If you ever find yourself stuck in New Jersey, which is the state most New Jerseyites consider themselves to be found in, one thing is cruelly clear: the restaurant scene sucks. OK, not entirely – ethnic food in ethnic neighborhoods like Palisades Park and Paterson can be superb. Working class lunch joints shine. But the Garden State is a sprawling suburb connected by horrid highways linking mall to mall to suburban tract houses. People living in one town generally don’t explore a lot in other towns. If they want something good they tend to use it as an excuse to hop into the maws of New York City just across the river. And I don’t drive. Finding anything truly great is rare and worth tooting about.Which is why I was happy to discover the Seafood Gourmet Fish Market in Maywood, New Jersey. Basically, it’s a fish market with a dining room in the back, and somebody who knows how to cook fish in the kitchen. A simple idea, but it works. I had to impress both my parents – who are never wildly enthusiastic about trying any place that they didn’t try before 1970 – and Fumie, who is possibly the most critical consumer of seafood in the world, having graduated from Tokyo Harbor to the Danube bend in fish Eating Studies.We began with clam chowder – creamy New England and tomato based Manhatten style – and a lobster bisque. It was so freaking good that my Dad bought a quart of the bisque in the fish market on the way out for him and Fumie to eat the next day as well. I had seafood pasta – scallops and shrimp tossed with arugula on angel hair pasta.Better than anything I can find in Zuglo, damn sure. Just next to Maywood is Hackensack, which is a virtual museum of a town that seems to have stopped developing sometime after World War two. I know it well because I worked here as a municipal garbage collector for the city of Hackensack for a year after high school, slagging cans into a rolling garbage truck manned by a Black Gospel Choir and an alcoholic Micmac Indian from Canada. I know every lunch counter and deli in Hackensack, because we were always given free lunch if we illegally took away their garbage, saving them from the usurious mafia-run private garbage companies.

Hackensack is the home of White Manna hamburgers, which I have drooled over elsewhere, but on the advice of my nephew Max - who has very strict and carefully researched opinions about Jersey Guy food - my sister decided to throw caution to the winds and took us to Cubby’s BBQ.

Cubby's is a bizarre little eatery in south Hackensack, nestled picturesquely amid used car lots and industrial garbage incinerators. The owner of Cubby’s is a Vietnam Vet, and the place is decorated as a testament to his obsession with American soldiers missing in action during our many wars. That’s an interesting theme for a restaurant, and one that you could really pull off only in New Jersey.

Cubby’s is about Jersey Guy Food: huge portions of meat, preferably in the form of BBQ Ribs or cheeseburgers. The obsession with huge portions explains why so many suburbanites around New York resemble those Belgomorphs I wrote about. If you finish this food, it finishes you. And if you have ever been to a place that does real Texas or North Carolina BBQ, you will look askance at the Damn Yankee obsession with slathering everything in a thick, sweet BBQ sauce, as if the meat isn't good enough to stand alone.Well, at least some people like it. And thus, even though I had been dutifully limiting myself to no more than five French fries a meal at any diner, I am now relegated to high fiber cabbage for the rest of the foreseeable future. Farewell, oh low brow fantasies of lunch at International House of Pancakes, where the boysenberry syrup stains my soul as well as my new shirt.

Brussels: An Unexpected Afternoon in the Land of the Belgamorphs.

2010-10-29T07:12:00.009-04:00

We’ve been home in Budapest for two weeks already, and I haven’t posted anything due to work and the general acclimatization of being “home.” Having been on the road almost constantly since May, “home” is a relative construction, which now settles down to a winter here in Hungary. Getting here, however, was not as easy as hopping on a plane Newark, watching a few episodes of the Simpsons, and calling a taxi. We flew with Continental Airlines, whose equal opportunity policies are enthusiastically offered to crackheads, and so we arrived in the morning in Brussels two hours late for our connecting flight.

After an hour of sorting out our tickets (this is where our conviction of a crack problem at Continental stems from – their staff never informed our connecting flight on Malev of our transfer. Thanks to the kind folks at Brussels Air we got on the flight and got home late at night.) But that meant that we had seven hours of hang time, and Brussels is only a twenty minute metro ride from the airport, so it was off to… Chocolate City for the day! No sooner did we enter the metro than the unique Belgian approach to languages was made apparent.

Brussels is an officially French speaking zone, but it is an island surrounded by Flemish speakers. The two language communities have never actually melded into one national entity. While I have been to Belgium many times (on tour with my band) I have never been to Brussels, only to smaller towns and a festival on the French border where the back stage spoke French and the main stages spoke Flemish and never the two did meet. It is like a microcosm of the Balkans, but with strawberry waffles and Zairean immigrants, and not as talented on brass instruments. And chocolate. Lots of chocolate.And short of Continental Air staff and their expertly utilized crack pipes I would never have gotten to see it. Brussels is overwhelmingly cute. It is tourist heaven. It outdoes Paris in terms of mega-touristy cuteness and crowds of EU package tourists mob the downtown. And so we joined them. The first thing you notice is the chocolate shops.

Belgium is one of the few places in Europe where you can find seriously fat people. I mean obese, waddling, get-me-to-the-liposuctors Belgomorphs who could give a Nebraska volunteer fire department a run for their money at a Big and Large Clothing store. They dine on excellent beer, French fried pommes frites slathered in mayonnaise and… chocolate.

It is one of the few places in Europe where I can walk the streets feeling confidently svelte. So, no, I passed on the mayo and frites. In fact, I passed on the mussels in wine and cream… I passed on the steak frites… been there, done that. What I wanted was… Chinese food. I didn’t know this until we suddenly hit Brussel’s Chinatown, which is located just on the outskirts of the Downtown towards the fish market.

On a Saturday afternoon the outdoor fish market area is crowded with people tossing back seafood with a glass of wine or beer. What caught my eye was the Dutch new herring offered on special by one Spanish run tapas fish bar. Hollandse nieuwe herring are fresh herrings that are merely gutted, boned and lightly brined and served as with a side of chopped onions. You eat them fresh as can be, which is why most people outside of the low countries have never tasted them, and won’t.They don’t travel. They are also about the best fish I have ever tasted, and Fumie – who knows her raw fish – promptly ate her way through both our portions and ducked into the fish shop to buy out the remaining stock of new herring for her dinner.Happy, but not stuffed, we continued down the street and checked out the Chinese restaurants. They were all full. Belgians, maybe even more than the French, are fanatic foodies, and dine out more than any other people in the EU. Finally we settled on a Langzhou noodle shop, serving hand rolled artisanal noodles in beef soup.

We weren’t looking forward to our meal on Malev (which in Europe usually means usually a hermetically sealed pseudo-sandwich and a turo rudi chocolate bar) so we had to fill up on Chinese food while we still could. Note to Budapest friends: yes, there is Chinese food in Hungary. But with the exception of Master Wang’s, it just is not that good. Don’t argue with us. We travel the world researching this issue. I once spent ten days in Paris eating only Chinese food, so I should know.

Now that we are back in Budapest, I will try and update more often – I replaced the digital camera I lost in the Great Istanbul Robbery and will probably post a few more entires about our summer travels now that I have access to Fumie’s pictures from Bulgaria and Turkey. And a lot of the research we did on comparative Jewish salted meats... and an amazing seafood place we found in New Jersey. Oh... the tales I could tell!

We arrived in Hungary this year at a surprisingly exciting time. Just as the world turned its attention to the devastating toxic sludge flood in western Hungary, our new Government has been… pushing for new political and economic policies that – I swear – sound like they were inspired by reading bottles of Dr. Bronner’s soap. For years now I’ve been of the opinion that much of post 1989 Hungarian politics has been formulated by people shampooing with Dr. Bronner’s, and now I am convinced. All One! All One! This will get interesting. It will indeed. Stay tuned.

Farewell, Wonderful Chinese Food of New York! Farewell!

2010-10-15T12:03:00.006-04:00

It is with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to the Chinese restaurants of New York. In a few hours I willbe soaring in the skies above Newark, NJ on my way back to Budapest, to poppy seed pastries, lard bread with onions, toxic red sludge, and Chinese food that couldn't hold a candle to the stuff we have been cramming down our hungry faces here in New York. The last week here has been crowded with dim sum, fried noodles, wonton soup, and fortune cookies with orange slices.We began just outside of the city, taking my parents to the Silver Pond Seafood Restaurant in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the George Washington bridge from Manhatten. Silver Pond fills up early on weekends with Chinese families out for the weekly dim sum feast, and they do an excellent job of it - the clams were perfect, the classic shiu mai light and shrimpy, and they even had fried soft shell crabs.I don't think there is any place in Budapest or any place east of Paris that even comes close to earning the title of dim sum in Europe - you have to have enough of a prosperous local Chinese community to make having a place like this viable. And then you need Jews - preferably of the Ashkenazic variety, about one generation removed from the absolutism of eating strictly kosher food. Once upon a time Jews did not eat Chinese food. That was a long time ago.

In fact, Chinese food more or less supplanted Jewish food in the Ashkenazic diet about fifty years ago - stir fried replacing long boiled, ginger replacing horseradish, wonton edging out kreplakh. There is even a well researched academic paper out that can be downloaded in PDF form entitled Safe Treyf - "New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern" by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine. Beginning in the 1920s, New York Jews began eating at Chinese restaurants. Previous to that, observant East European Jews did not go out to restaurants because they did not know if the restaurant owners who claimed they kept kosher really kept kosher. But the sons and daughters of those immigrants, the first generation to be born in the United States, were a different story.One hurdle for Jews to get over was that Chinese food was filled with non-kosher ingredients like pork and shellfish. Some just held their nose and ate it, and I think after World War II, maybe in the late 1950s, there evolved this concept of “safe treyf.” Obviously, treyf is forbidden but safe treyf means it’s forbidden but OK. If you can’t see the pork in the wonton soup stock, well, it’s OK. Or if the shrimp in the shrimp chop suey is chopped up into little tiny pieces so that you really can’t recognize what it is, then it’s OK. On our last day in New York, we went out for lunch with two New York Jews who know an awful lot about Chinese food... in fact, they know an awful lot about a lot of aspects of New Yorks many Chinese communities, since Ethel Raim and Pete Rushevsky run the Center For Traditional Music and Dance, a foundation that promotes the music and cultures of New York's many immigrant communities. We met them at the Grand Sichuan Restaurant on Lexington Ave. in Midtown Manhatten where we had gone two nights before to have Sichuan hot pot for dinner. If you haven't tried hot pot, the drill goes like this: they bring out a bowl of boiling soup stock (half mild and half filled with red peppers) and you order items like fish balls, lamb, tofu, and vegetables to toss in the pot and then you fish them out with a sieve they give you and chopsticks and eat them with a variety of sauces. It's great for a party - heck, it is a party - one that leaves you splattered with hot sauce and soup.

All the Japanese papers in town rave about the Grand Sichuan's hot pot and Ma-po tofu, and theis place has been voted best Chinese restaurant in New York on the Serious Eats website as well as by Time Out! New York. So we had to see what the fuss was about. It was worth it. Pete and Ethel gave it the CTMD stamp of approval, a less than rare honor granted to only several dozen Chinese restaurants in the New York area. Incidentally, when they are not organizing cultural events, both Pete and Ethel are astounding musicians in their own right... Ethel Raim was on the of the founders of the womens singing group the Pennywhistlers, who first introduced Balkan and Bulgarian singing to American audiences during the folk boom of the 1960s. She followed that up by popularizing immigrant cultures and Balkan music in particular as a teacher and folklorist. You like Balkan Music? Ethel pioneered teaching this othwerworldly style of music to American ears. It was one of the unsung Crusades of the Great Folk Era of the 80s that we all learned how Bulgarian harmony and rythym worked from Ethel's workshops. Here the Pennywhistlers appear on Pete Seeger's "Rainbow Quest" network folk music television show around 1964 singng the now well known Macedonian folk song "Sto Mi e Milo." Ethel is the singer standing on the far right.Pete Rushevsky also gets around as one of the Klezmer scene's most active players and researchers of the small cimbalom in Klezmer music. He's been in these pages before, but never pass up a chance to spread some of his music around. Here is the lot of us accompanying Pete and Steven Greenman (Di Tsvey) for the midnight dance at the Ashkenaz festival last month in Toronto.

Korean Food in Palisades Park, NJ. I'm a Seoul Man...

2010-10-11T11:08:00.006-04:00

With less than a week to go before we return to Hungary, we have to cover a lot of ground finding things that we can't ever eat in Budapest. Although Hungary actually does have Korean food, it doesn't have Palisades Park, New Jersey, a suburb just across the George Washington Bridge that hosts the densest population of Koreans in North America. The northern New Jersey towns of Fort Lee, Cliffside Park, Leonia, and Teaneck all have large populations of Koreans, but Palisades Park wins on the culinary front. Broad Street, the main drag, is a two mile long taste of Seoul, with all manner of Korean BBQ joints next to catering shops, bakeries, noodle shops, and Korean fried chicken places.There is a huge Han Ah Rheum Korean shopping mall nearby. Last year I discovered the amazing Dokdo Seafood restaurant (Raw sea squirts! Raw sliced sea cucumber!) on Broad street, but this year we were headed to our favorite soft tofu soup diner in Fort Lee when I remembered a Tofu restaurant in Palisade Park. We decided to try something new. Officially, this is the Pal Gak Jung Restaurant at 268 Broad Avenue - a place often known simply as the Tofu Restaurant, although the menu is a pretty full of all of my korean cravings, from meat to seafood.

The lunch menus were excellent value, averaging about $10 a lunch, which comes with then obligatory slew of ban chan plates – pickles, small bites, and the ever present kimchee without which it is simply not a Korean meal. I had the soft tofu soup – as good as any I have ever eaten, in which the tofu serves the purpose of noodles, and you can take a spoonful of rice to slurp up the spicy red pepper stock, which in this case contained beef, shrimp, and seafood. Fumie went for the octopus stew on rice lunch plate, which was a huge portion of fresh octopus bathed in a mildly spicy red pepper paste.

This place was so good that a few days later when our friend Bob Godfried suggested we go out for some Korean food, we jumped at the chance to return to the Pal Gak Jung Tofu Restaurant. We weren't disappointed, Bob knows New York's ethnic music and food scenes inside out – anything diluted for tourists or compromised into unspiciness would immediately earn a rain of opprobrium from the astute Godfried. But no... he liked it. More kimchee banchan,,, and then out came a free plate of cold sliced pork with the skin on and two dipping sauces. This is why it is good to go to places like this late – they realize the goodwill value of dumping the day's banquet leftovers on you. We ordered a bit of everything: Korean seafood pancakes came out nice and crispy, stuffed full of crab and shrimp.

The grilled short ribs here were cut in a special style leaving a nice hunk of bone to gnaw on, but these were some of the tenderest kalbi ribs I ever had, and three of us could not quite finish the whole order.

Fumie ordered a red kimchee stew while Bob went for a beef bulgogi stew, both excellent and filling. After our first lunch trip, we went down Broad street to the Parisian Baguette Bakery.This a is a chain that can be found in any Korean shopping mall or town, and it competes on Broad street with the equally good Shilla Bakery and a few other trendy coffee and bubble tea spost for the very active Korean need to eat high quality Euro-Asian pastries and coffee. Fumie went on a buying spree, setting aside boxes that would serve as her breakfast for the coming days.

I have an addiction to Korean food... which shouldn't be pricy. Why pay double to eat in Manhattan when you can eat in style in NJ. Well... for some reason, New Jersey absolutely fails in the American restaurant category. There are some pretty bad places to eat out here, but when it comes to certain ethnic communities – Korean, Dominican, and Lebanese come to mind - you can find some of the best food in the USA just off some highway exit tucked into some nondescript ethnic neighborhood. Just ask Mr. Godfried.He gave the Tofu Restaurant in Palisades Park a great big thumbs up!

Coney Island and Brighton Beach: Shooting Freaks in Little Odessa

2010-10-09T17:19:00.008-04:00

A week ago when my Dad - still feisty at 84 - had to drive down to south Brooklyn to deliver some important papers to somebody in Sheepshead Bay area, and we decided to go along for the ride. My Dad is a long retired New York detective with a lot of time pounding the pavements as a beat cop back in the classic days of New York cop life, during the 1950s, and whenever I get a chance to cruise around with him in the city I get to listen to his nonstop stories from the old police precincts.

Papers delivered, we took a cruise down memory lane to see Coney Island, where my Dad lived for a few months in 1931 and where my Uncle was born. Coney Island is one of those slices of New York life that never really changes - it spruces itself up now and then, but essentially it is a visit back to 1935 every day in this part of town. At least on the boardwalk. The old neighborhood used to be characterized by hundreds of small bungalows and homes that were rented out each summer to New Yorkers looking for a beachside weekend or a summer at the sea.

In the 1950s the area began to run down and New York's "Master Builder" - the never-elected-to-office Robert Moses - decided that the seedy amusements day had gone. The Luna Park and other fairgrounds were closed, and the Aquarium were built in its place. The last big fair, Steeplechase Park, closed in 1964. The cozy bungalows were replaced by ugly apartment projects. Robert Moses remains one of the most hated names in the history of New York - he destroyed nighborhoods, even entire boroughs in order to carry out his megadevelopent plans between the 1940s and the 1960s (ending with the construction of JKF airport and the site of the 1964 World Fair in Flushing.) Still.. a lot of housing went up during his years. Ugly housing, but housing nonetheless. In fact, Klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras spend his twighlight years living in this building, across the street from the boardwalk, and spent most of his days in a chair by the window watching the endlessly turning Coney Island Ferris wheel. Coney Island went on a decline that lasted until about a decade ago. The new Coney Island owes a lot to the Nathan's hot dog stand and Delicatessen.

Nathan's has long since franchised itself into a thousand suburban malls, but the original still serves fried clams and boiled corn - and Nathan's excellent but ridiculously overpriced NY beef hot dogs. Ya want heritage, ya gotta pay for it. And while Robert Moses was able to pretty much destroy Brooklyn and much of New York with his Stalinoid building projects, some of the old Brooklyn spirit was guaranteed to creep back. They didn't have paint ball back in the day, but if they did you can be sure they would have featured "Shoot the Freak."

Basically, a guy (from Bensonhurst, we met him) gets armored up in hockey gear and hides amid the rubble between two clam and beer bars, and for $5 you can shoot at him with a paintball gun. This, in Brooklyn, constitutes "fun." Who could resist an advertisment offering "Live Human Targets!" It was a bit early for us to start shootoing freaks (they begin at 11 AM) so we cruised down to Brighton Beach, to the nighborhood known as Little Odessa. Starting back in the 1970s, as Russian Jews began emigrating to the USA, this became the single most concentrated Russian nighborhood in the USA. It is a little like being in Chinatown, only with Russians instead of Chinese. And these are happy Russians, at least the ones we met. With markets serving all the flavors of home and produce you would only dream about back in Moscow, this is a bustling, healthy ethnic nighborhood that has some amazing places to discover.

We stopped at a small cafe on Brighton 12th street, ordered a coffee, and by chance lucked into the best cheese pastry any of us had ever had in our lives. We live in east Europe, so we know our cheese pastries, and this place had the most exquisite, mouthwatering, delicately flavored, harmonious cheese pastries ever encountered. I know of what I speak. These were gooooood. I should just drive down to this joint in the morning, buy all their pastries at $1.50, and then sell them on the street in Manhatten for $4 a pop.

My Dad immediately wanted to jump from breakfast to lunch. The counter was filled with good old Russian comfort food: pierogis, pelmeni, roast chicken, kasha, potatoes, latkes, mayonnaise salads, boiled beet borscht... all for $3.99 a pound for the meat dishes and $3.49 for the carbs.

All the foods of my grandmother's depression era kitchen - the amazing things one can do with chicken and spuds. We didn't have enough time to really eat our way through Brighton Beach, but it is worth a return trip, if only for those cheese pastries.

New York's Chinatowns: Fa-lo-shen and Manhatten

2010-10-07T22:37:00.005-04:00

Yes, I have been lazy posting while traveling, something that I have never been guilty of before. Since the Ukrainians left town we have both been taking it relatively easy - we both have writing work to complete while we are here, and the weather is still warm, and since we can sit in my parent's garden watching the squirrels while working, we have been enjoying life in New Jersey. New York is a ten minute, $3 "Spanish bus" ride away, though, and we have to make up for lost time eating Chinese food. For some odd reason, New Jersey doesn't have much in the way of consequential Chinese food. Lots of local Chinese , check... lots of Asian supermarkets... check. But the Chinese food in Jersey... meh. The Korean food here is amazing, and good Japanese is never far away, but for good Chinese you have to hit The City.
We started out by exploring Flushing with my Dad. Flushing, Queens (written as "Fa-lo-shen, Emporess City" in Chinese on the shuttle buses that run to Manhatten's Chinatown) is an half hour on the subway outside of Manhatten in the Borough of Queens, known to most as the home of JFK Airport. It is also the home of New York's largest and most vibrant and diverse Chinese neighborhood. This is where all the different ethnicities end up, including Manchurians and Uighurs, and everybody eventually dines at the Flushing Mall, featuring a food court and a few offball shops. The Food court is the main attraction - noodles, regional foods, almost nothing over $6.00.

But we were here because my Dad once tried out the Dim Sum lunch at Ocean Jewels Dim Sum Restaurant, across the street from the mall. We got there on a Saturday at lunch - a great time to check out full fledged Chinatown dim sum frenzy, a bad time to cruise for parking. But finally we did it. Rice Noodle Rolls with Shrimp.

And amid the shiu mai, the turnip cake, the bacon wrapped shrimp balls, the stewed tripe (two kinds,) the har gow, there were the highlight of dim sum for me, the steamed vongole clams in garlic hoisin sauce. The road to heaven is paved in the crushed shells of Cantonese dim sum clams, believe me. Of course, there is a lot more to find in NYC if you like calssic Cantonese food. Manhatten was next, two days later. We were too lazy to head all the way to the eastern edge of Chinatown by Division St and the Manhatten BVridge, but we hit the nabe near the old remnants of Little Italy and found one of the classic roast duck in the window joints and gave it a shot for lunch.

Two kinds of roast meat (here, roast duck and roast pork) with rice and stir fried cabbage, five dollars. a bowl of Cantonese style nooodle soup and shrimp and pork wontons, $3.75.We have no complaints. None at all.

Manyo in New York

2010-10-03T11:56:00.009-04:00

It has been a week since the Técsői Banda played at the Central Park Summerstage for the New York Black Sea Roma Festival. It was the high point in the life of these guys, who today are safely back in their home town of Tjaciv recieving an award from the Mayor of Tjaciv himself for playing at an esteemed international festival.

Not to mention that tsymbaly player Vasil Hudak's daughter is getting married today. Not shabby at all for a traditional Hutsul band from the western Ukraine. The boys were a joy to be with while they were visiting New York, especially when we brought them down to the East Village for their gig at the Ukrainian National Home Restaurant on 2nd Ave.

With some time to spare, they strolled around the village, amazed at the presence of so much Ukrainian culture to be seen - the Ukrainian Museum, Ukraianian churches and schools, the impressive Surma bookstore. Even more impressed was the crowd at the Black Sea Roma festival. Alongside some of my favorite East European and Balkan musicians like Selim Sessler from Turkey, Yuri Yunakov from Bulgaria and now the Bronx, and the Mahalla Rai Banda from Romania - who are old friends who remembered me from our now legendary festival gig in Finland some years ago during which we spent three days trout fishing on a river near our festival.Yes, I taught the Mahalla Rai Banda how to fly fish for trout. Sombody had to. I'm in a bind for time so more posts to follow. The last week has been a non-stop manuscript race against the clock for some contract work I had to finish... but the joys of watching the the Técsői Banda discover New York Pizza - eyes bulging in surprise that pizza was never like this before! Thanks goes out to the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in NY (Ethel Raim, Pete Rushevsky, and Eileen Condon,) and to Isabel Soffer of the World Music Institute, and especially to Shaun Williams for getting the details done that got the band here. You all did a great job.

Técsői Banda in New York City

2010-09-25T08:34:00.003-04:00

After a half year of organizing, negotiating, and waiting for visas, the Técsői Banda has finally made it to New York city. I've written about - and played with - this Ukrainian Hutsul Gypsy band before in these pages, and tonight they are playing on 2nd Avenue in the Village at the Ukrainian National home Restaurant for a dance sponsored by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. Tomorrow they play at the Black Sea Gypsy festival in Central park at summer stage. The first few days they were here we put them up at my sister's house in New Jersey. We didnt have room for a huge party, but we did manage to grill up some cevapcici and with the help opf Michael Alpert, Sruli and Lisa, and Pete Rushevsky we were able to play outside and disturb the sleeping chipmunks a bit. It has been fun to watch the guys observe us Americans and our strange and outlandish ways.I'm in a rush... this post is more of a space holder. The guys are leaving on Monday... and I will have more time to write then.

Montreal: Geoff Berner, Josh Dolgin, and Smoked Meat Chez Schwartz's.

2010-09-15T22:37:00.006-04:00

In Toronto Geoff Berner said “Arise and follow me to Montreal.” For a recording session, at least. Geoff - last seen in these pages verbally harrassing neo-Nazis in Budapest - has spent much of his career verbally and musically harrassing the forces of hypocrisy and greed as one of Canada's most prolific politico-Yiddological singer songwriters with several great CDs to his credit. I first met Geoff years ago when he convinced me to take him on a trip to Romania to look for Gypsy and Jewish musicians in Maramures and Moldavia. I was wary about it - I didn't know who the heck this dude was and what the heck he wanted... and when I get wary, I mean slit-eyed, nasty-ass cynical about what a person's agenda is... and I basically told him to frack off and be on his merry way. But he persisted, and eventually we traveled together with his band in tow, and I was converted. We actually had a great time together. No simple folkie pilgrim, Geoff came with open eyes and a musicians' Big Ears and soaked in the history of the past and the stark reality of the present in Maramures, and eventually turned his experiences into some amazing new music.

For Geoff's new CD he got together with Josh Dolgin as producer to put together a crack band of klezmer musicians including Mike Winograd on clarinet, Benjy Fox-Rosen on bass and vocals, and Montreal native Brigitte Dajczer on violin to build up the sound he's worked out.On hand were Geoff's go-to musicians: my old Maramures traveling buddies from BC, Diona Davies(fiddle) and Wayne Adams (drums and percussion.) Me? I was brought in to add the quality called “skronk”... either playing the Romanian vioara cu goarna or just plain screaming into the mike in Romanian.Studio work is a combination of intense focus and concentration interspersed with long periods of wasted time and what we musicians call “the hang.” This was one of the best hangs I have ever had the pleasure to spend with musicians...This was a non-stop jam with epic tales of musicians' road stories, joke telling, and opinions about Chinese take out food.We started our Montreal experience with Geoff's gig at the Casa del Popolo on Bl. Saint Laurent to a rowdy crowd of Berner loyalists fueled by eminently affordable beer and shots. Geoff is known in Canada as "The Whiskey Rabbi" and he playes an audience like a fined tuned violin, shot glass in hand, reeling with a balance of drunkards swagger and the timing of a top notch stand up comic. And while his songs are funny, they are a dark kind of funny that makes you want to run loose in the streets yelling "No Pasaran!" and upsetting garbage cans until you can find another bar that is still open. Folks... Montreal proves that you don't have to spend a lot of money to have a nightlife. As Brigitte told me “Toronto works so that Montreal can play.” Amen.I'll post more about the food we encountered... such as the famed Montreal bagel. No, it is not like a New York Bagel. It is its own animal, slightly sweet, small, and perfect for breakfast - especially if the breakfast is at the Club Social cafe, in the Mile's End nabe next to the St. Viateur bagel shop... which Winograd declared - rightly so - to be the best coffeehouse in the entire Universe. .And yes, it is very, very good. As bagels go. But the Holy of Holies, the grail of Montreal munchies, the steamed, rye wrapped prize atop the highest Himalayan peak of Jewish meat products was finally within my grasp... Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... the smoked meat sandwich from Schwartz's Delicatessen, or as they call it, Chez Schwartz, Charcuterie Hebraique.C'est magnifique! C'est almost better than Katz's pastrami, si c'est possible. Take one Canadian Jewish singer songwriter (yes, he idolizes Leonard Cohen who also like to frequent Chez Schwartz' for the occasional smoked meat sandwich) and add a steamed, fat laden, delicious helping of Jewish culture that has morphed into a solid piece of Montreal - and Canadian - identity... stick it between two slices of rye bread, slather with mustard, serve with pickle...And that deserves an entire post in itself... when I get some rest. After a ten hour drive from Montreal... no more tonight!

Toronto, Ontario: Smoked Meat and Ashkenaz Festival

2010-09-10T08:42:00.005-04:00

It hasn't been all that long a time since I was sitting on the roof of our flat in Istanbul mourning the loss of my laptop. Since then I have moved on... to New York via Canada. It has been a week of jet lag, long and loud jams, and smoked meat sandwiches with some of the best musicians in the Klezmer scene. I'm exhausted. For access to the computer world that we all know and love, in front of me is a tiny computer. I was given a "net book" - sort of the pygmy monkey of the laptop family - and it is tiny and occasionally annoying. It is like typing on a paperback book sized keyboard with a 10” screen, but for the time being it is what I have to use. I just spent last weekend at the Ashkenaz festival in Toronto.Ashkenaz is held at the Toronto Harbourfront Center, a pleasant stretch of Lake Ontario dedicated to events celebrating Canada's diverse patchwork of cultures that hosts a series of ethnic festivals each summer culminating in this huge Klez-ma-thon of Jewish culture. Canada's Jews are quite diverse in themselves, and it would be misleading to characterize the festival as one of simply Yiddish culture – although it is one of the most Yiddish festivals around on the klezmer circuit – because of the strong presence of Canada's large Sephardic and Mizrachi Jewish communities. Chickpeas and bourekas (the Israeli/Turkish Sephardic bureks that have become one of Canada's main snack pastries) far outnumbered Ashkenazic foods, but I finally got a chance to taste Canada's version of pastrami – smoked meat. And I can say that while different, it is good. Very good.I started at Caplansky's on College avenue in the company of my old friend... let's call him... Walter... AKA Marshall Tito and his family. Marshall Tito had a brisket and smoked meat combo, which may be the only possible improvement imaginable. Later at the festival site, we discovered that Caplansky's was a festival sponsor and had a stand in the food tent, further narrowing any decision I could make as to what to eat. Caplansky's is described at length in David Sax's must-read encyclopaedic examination of the world of the delicatessen Save The Deli, and it is a modern, hip answer to the deli of old. I ordered the $11 (Canadian loonie) smoked meat sandwich with fries and the sandwich arrived surprisingly smaller than those parodic NYC pastrami towers, but all in all, just about the right portion to eat without waste.It isn't pastrami or corned beef at all, but somehow manages to make a third way in between the two noble deli meats and carve out a niche and identity for itself. Less processed than either pastrami or corned beef, more like a cross between pastrami and rare roast beef. And there is Caplansky's pulled brisket sandwich... which is a protein-pcaked ode to the joys of slathered mustard on cheap belly meat.If I had these in New York I would be in utter confusion about which to order – as it is I usually jump between my beloved pastrami and my old friend corned beef, but these would leave me in utter confusion. With luck... not promising anything yet... there is a chance I may go to Montreal next week in which case I will get a chance to sample the legendary Chez Schwartz' smoked meat sandwich. More on that later. If you had to visit only one Jewish cultural festival a year... Ashkenaz would be it.Unlike festivals in Europe, Ashkenaz not only features concerts, but workshops, lectures, events for kids, and more all compactly located on the shore of beautiful Lake Ontario. For the participants, its a chance to get together and meet old friends and hang out and play together. I was there alone, but I also sat in on Alan Bern's Other Europeans panel and played in a variety of bands for dancing.I met old friends like best-selling author Michael Wex, who was flogging his new novel The Frumkiss Family Business, and his wife Marilla,British born stand up comic and all around whirlwind who wore a participant's ID identifying her as “Wife of Wex.” Mark Rubin – about one third lighter and more compact than the last time I saw him – was on hand for blues fiddle jamming. My old buddies from Vancouver via Maramures, Geoff Berner, Wayne and Dione were in on Monday and we had a klezmer musician vodka and smoked meat sandwich party to end our festival. At my age one is not supposed to have this much fun. Thanks to Erik and all the Ashkenaz organizers (Ilana... I'm talkin' bout you!) for a great weekend. And don't worry - after our north American travels I should have some more details about what we did in Istanbul, as soon as the ophotos I lost in the Great Laptop Robbery of 2010 are replaced by even better photos of the same shots. Until then, the midnight "Quiet Dance" wiith Pete Rushevsky and Steven Greenman (Di Tsvey) along with Mike Winograd and Amir and others, led by Steve Weintraub on the shores of Lake Ontario .

Istanbul... Ah, Istanbul

2010-08-24T12:50:00.006-04:00

The vıew from the rooftop of our digs in Istanbul. I shall be forever grateful to our host, the editor of the great Istanbul Eats blog (and now book, advertised on every wall in the Beyoglu area) and a great place to unwind at the end of a day of kebab hunting and bazaar shopping (or non-shopping as the case may be.)
I had been hoping to post daily about our travels here in Istanbul, but alas, that was not to be. A few days ago thieves broke into our flat at dawn and within 30 seconds ran off with everything they could grab off the kitchen table: laptop, digital cameras, cell phone. We are OK - passports safe, cash accounted for... but millions of pixels of photos and videos of local music, gone, lost, yok, yok, yok... So descriptıon and comparison of the inner world of kebabland will be delayed until İ get back to Budapest this weekend. Luckily Fumie's photos are safe... and so we will have to wait a bit for some of the food porn and kilim pictures. At least by then I won't have to struggle with these devilish turkish computer keyboards.

Alec Wittek: Mourning A Mensch during Ramadan.

2010-08-19T15:42:00.006-04:00

One of the harder things to bear if you live a traveling life is that when something happens back at “home” you are not there. In fact, I am almost never at “home” – in Budapest, in New York, or wherever my backpack is parked, “home” is more of a state of mind. But someplace out there one has family who keep track of you and whom you love and tend to take for granted as a constant. And now one of my constants is gone. Since I arrived in Istanbul I received the news that my brother in law, Alec Wittek, passed away suddenly in New York at the age of 59. My family in the USA immediately rallied to my sister’s side, but I had to deal with the tragedy from afar, via email and skype.
Alec was a patient and loving father, a good husband to my sister, a son to my parents, uno amigo para todos, and – like me – a Yiddish language loving fisherman. He and I spent hours at the seaside in Delaware (or “Delfer” as it is called in Yiddish) not catching fish while chatting about how stupid President Bush was in in broad Galizianer Yiddish. Fish were not important. Friendship was. Alec was one of the last of the generation of Brooklyn Jews who really understood and cared about the old time Yiddish aesthetic, like a living bridge between the 1920s and the 2000s, and he was one of the only guys in my family who really understood what exactly it is that I am doing with old style Yiddish music and why. Alec was what we call a mensch. I will miss him, not the least because he was one of the two Yids (“yud’ yud”) that I could make a l’chayim with who understood the irony – it takes two yids (the Hebrew alphabet for “yah” and “weh”) to make the name of God. Now half my l’chaim is gone. My sister is in mourning, but my nephew Max has really stepped up to take the man’s role in the family, and … sin nuestra hermana Mexicana, no podríamos manejar todo el esto.

If I were anywhere else in the world – including Budapest – at a time like this I would feel terribly alienated, alone, and simply wrong for being away from home. But not here, at least, and not now. I am in Istanbul, Turkey during Ramadan. All around me people are fasting during the sweltering and long summer days without complaint and waiting for that moment after 8 pm when they can indulge in the pleasure of life for a night before taking on their fast again. All around me people are focused on the value of their lives. I scratch through the language barriers and talk to them in a mix of my terrible Turkish or their fluent English, which so many speak. I am surrounded by people in a state of contemplative grace, people spending a fasting month considering the worth of their lives and their moral values and personal responsibilities. I sometimes ask the local people how it is during their fast, and what it means to them. And every person so far has taken the time to answer carefully that it is hard but good. Like life. “We are people. We can do this.” It makes me grateful to be where I am at a time when my family has experienced a loss. During Ramadan nobody feels alone.

This evening Fumie and I decided to venture into the staunchly Islamic conservative neighborhood of Fatih to experience the ending of the fast and the iftar feast which follows. We went to the Siirt Bazar Market, which is the center of a community of internal immigrants from the area of Southern Turkey bordering on Syria, and Arabic is heard in the Market as often as Turkish. Outside the market the Fatih Municipal city council had set up a free feast tent for those who had no money for the feast. Of course, while taking photos we were invited to take part.But we want the amazing roast lamb that is sold by about a dozen Siirt “Buryan Kebab” restaurants located around the market. We sat down at one about fifteen minutes before the final call from the Mosque ending the fast. All around us people were fiddling with their food – squeezing water bottles, playing with salads. Each restaurant sets out the tables in a pre set iftar feast, just ready for the minute when the faithful can finally break their fast.

And just about 8:10 pm, in the middle of the call… everybody simultaneously peeled open their plastic cups of water and drank… and drank… and drank. Cig kebabs (raw spiced lamb wrapped in lettuce) were popped into mouths, chilled salty iced yoghurt ayran was drunk… cigarettes were lit. Life begins again.Afterwards we sat in the tea tent and listened to an ashik play the saz and sing Anatolian songs of devotion. I could not ask for a more proper atmosphere than the one I am in now to contemplate the passing of my brother in law. It makes me grateful to the people opf Turkey that they can welcome us during the month of their fast in such a warm and accepting manner.

Alec would have loved it here. But he’ll always be here with us in our memories and in how we take actions in the world. Alec... legn zol in Gan Eden. May you lie in the Garden of Eden. There are good people out there in the world, people of many religions, of many cultures. We are honored to have shared it in your presence. And everyone, take the advice of Alec’s son Max, who posted a facebook message the evening his father passed: everyone, go out and hug your parents. If you can. While you can.

Istanbul: Defying Cliches since 1454

2010-08-14T10:41:00.008-04:00

I wake up each moring and this is my view out the window of the flat my good friend Yigal has allowed us to use. Pull head off of pillow to the right and I see Asia... to the left, Europe... and all around me... I'm in Istanbul, a city that is plagued by cliches that can never come close to describing it. I've been waking up rather refreshed these days, granted that at three in the morning some kids run through the back alleys beating drums.It happens to be Ramadan (Ramazan in Turkish) and the drummers are waking people to eat before the fast begins at sunrise. Istanbul is a city that too often gets more than its share of cliches. East vs. West, Europe meets Islam, Old meets New, you name it and some hack writer has applied it to Istanbul. And some of those cliches may be valid, but they get packed into nearly every Sunday magazine supplement ever written about the place.

For me, Istanbul is one of my favorite cities in the world for a simple reason. It is a History Sandwich. Take two slices of Empire, add a generous smear of social history, mix in a salad of religion, sprinkle with politics, and the pile on some nice spicy ethnicities. Serve on a twin peninsula straddling Asia and Europe. Now, that's what I call lunch.

This blog started back in 2006 as a chronicle of one of my trips to Istanbul, and it seems only reasonable that I retrace some of my steps during this trip. Of course, back then I was here a lot longer - two months - and had a fresher command of the Turkish language than I do now, but I am excited to be back, even though Istanbul is undergoing a heat wave that is nasty even by Anatolian standards. But Istanbullites know how to deal with the heat - almost every indoor space is air conditioned in either modern or Byzantine style: ancient thick stone walls that keep places like the covered bazaar comfortable even in the miserable baking heat.

The heat has another consequence: a lot of shops and markets are closed for Ramadan. In most of Istanbul this isn't a problem - in Beyoglu, Sultanahmet, and other areas everything is open as usual. Turkey remains stubbornly secularist, and about a third of Turkey are not strict muslims or are Alevi who do not fast during Ramadan, but in conservative neighborhoods like Fatih the city is almost deserted in the afternoon.\Folks can't drink, smoke, or eat so their is little action. And you don't want to be rude and walk among the more pious fasters sipping cold water or slugging down mojitos in the burning heat. Traditionally, Ramadan is a time when restaurants do renovations and shops take inventory. And then, at night, canons mark the end of the fast time and the city goes on an eating binge.

The iftar is thhe feast that follows the day of fasting and there are special iftar set menus advertised at every restaurant in town.

Tents are put up serving specialty foods, and Ramadan is a time when money is no object and the family goes all out for fancy sweets, intricate baked goods, and quality snacks each evening.There are even free food tents set up in Fatih to feed the pious poor. But prices in Istanbul are extremely reasonable - you can eat quality food served with care at low end kebab shops as well as in posh restaurants. In fact, in most high end places you are paying for the atmosphere and the snob status. For me, I'll be eating street meat for a few weeks. And posting about it. Afiyet olsun!

Koprivshtitsa: Like Burning Man... for Bulgarian Music.

2010-08-09T13:18:00.006-04:00

We are in Koprivshtitsa, a mountain village in the heart of the Balkan Mountains in central Bulgaria, and we are surrounded by music. Literally – music on every street corner, in every café, and music sprawling over the mountain slope behind us. Think of it as the Burning Man of Bulgarian folk music. Every five years Koprivshtitsa hosts a folk festival unlike any other, a weekend filled with folk musicians, dancers, and singers from all regions of Bulgaria, none of whom are professionals.None of the prancey, choreographed showbiz routines that usually plague national folk festivals. These are village folks, or representative regional groups that may meet weekly to practice singing or dance, competing in annual regional festivals and eventually reaching the level of being sponsored to perform in Koprivshtitsa every five years. The village fills up each evening as buses arrive to unload some of the best Bulgarian folk dancers and musicians in an army tent camp set about mile outside of the center. Some of the best music happens here, without an audience, around the tents and beer pavilions as the groups relax and visit and dance late into the night.

During the day the action moves uphill to seven stage areas on the mountain above town. The performer to audience ratio is something like 1:1, and for the Bulgarians it is as much a chance for them to meet foreigners and shower them with gracious Bulgarian hospitality, which means being offered drinks, food, and having a gaggle of grannies decked out in full Thracian folk costumes grabbing Fumie and her friend from Tokyo, Rieko, to have their picture taken with them (for some reason Rieko gets more attention than Fumie…)I’m amazed at how well these folks hold up in the heat, dressed head to toe in layers of heavy folk costumes, some part of which is always made of raw wool, but there were no casualties that I know of during the festival.I play Macedonian and Bulgarian music, although less these days, but I’ve been able to fight off my compulsive acquisition of folk instruments. It isn’t easy. There are gaida vendors up on the hill, and I was thinking of picking up a new bagpipe, but the instrument has been subtly changing over the last twenty years. Except for the players of the large Rhodope kaba gaida, almost nobody performs using the drone pipe anymore. Plugging the drone makes it easier to play with accordions and other orchestral instruments, but it’s a bagpipe, fer chrissake, you need a drone.Also, gaida reeds have become harder, making a much louder instrument better suited to playing for larger crowds, but the cost is a loss of the buzzy warmth that one hears on older gaida recordings. I bumped into UCLA ethnomusicologist Tim Rice last night, who has been studying Bulgarian folk music and its sociological dimensions for four decades. We commiserated about soulless composite gaida reeds a bit, but he pointed out that that is the way folk music adapts and changes. Nothing you can do ‘bout it.

Dr. Rice is the author of “May It Fill Your Soul” a fantastic book and CD set examing the development of Bulgarian folk music through the experiences of two master musicians – Ivan and Todora Varimezov – whose lives spanned the changes of the twentieth century. If you are interested in Balkan bagpipes, Bulgarian music, or how humans learn music, get this book. Rice focuses on the concept of how Bulgarians learn their devilishly complicated music, which traditionally was “learned but not taught.” It is an eye opener to anyone who has ever tried to learn a folk musical form or instrument from a culture other than their own.We’ve been to the last two Koprivshtitsa festivals, in 2000, and 2005, and at the last one we discovered a tradition that I had not known of before, the Koleda dancers of Yambol.These are troops (literally in Bulgarian “cheta”) of young men, often Gypsies, who do a marching and dancing routine each Christamas and New Year and compete against each other for the title of best of the year. The dances are related to the ancient ritual dance tradition in the Balkans such as that of the Calusar in Romania as well as the moresca dance of southern Europe and even the Morris dance of England.

And these are some heavy masculine dudes, tattooed up the wazoo, bayonets tucked in their boots, knocking back buckets of beer before each performance and dancing non-stop in between sets – often dancing in feminine belly dance styles. Really tough tattooed muscle guys are allowed to do that. The Koleda troops are so fascinating that I will write more about them later in the blog, but Koprivshtitsa has almost no internet access – there are a couple of hotels up the hill, but we can live without wifi for a week, can’t we? Can’t we?In fact, Bulgaria is pretty well wired and internet savvy – anybody who finds themselves with some time to spare in Europe should make the effort to take a detour to Bulgaria. For tourists, it is about the most affordable place in Europe. Face it – regarding tourism, Hungary is rip-off city, Romania has gotten expensive, leaving few places where one can just relax and spend time without feeling like you are being milked for cash. Bulgaria – which has a fantastic traditional culture, a beautiful Black sea coast, and lots of stunning mountain scenery – deserves more travel attention. Food, internal transport, lodgings are a fraction of the western or even Eastern European price and you will never feel ripped off ( except if you take a taxi that waits in front of the Sofia train station. Use the taxi stand in front of the neighboring bus station instead.)

Our next stop is Istanbul, the city that stole my heart and made me start this blog back in 2006. Music? Food? Tradition? Istanbul has it all in spades. I will miss Bulgaria, but the Ottoman influence pervades Bulgarian culture in many of its more positive ways – the hospitality, the pursuit of pleasure in food and music. I’ll be back. The next Koprivshtitsa Festival is only a half decade away.

Going South!

2010-08-01T17:52:00.003-04:00

Its been a busy July, and I'm finally due a vacation. In my part of the world, that means going south - and south of here is the deep Balkans. I'm off to the Koprivshtitsa festival in Bulgaria tomorrow. Every five years the historic village of Koprivshtitsa in central Bulgaria hosts a festival of folk music performed exclusively by non-professional village musicians. It's like the Burning Man of Bulgarian folk music. A weekend of Bulgarian geezers blowing their bagpipes, sawing away on gadulkas, singing in their tight village harmonies, amidst some of the most inedible crap festival food on this blessed earth. Ten years ago a kebab from Koprivshtitsa sent me to the emergency ward of Sofia hospital. I have since learned a thing or two about eating during Bulgarian heat waves. And I will be there. And posting. I have been to the last two festivals in Koprivshtitsa, and there is no way I would miss this, killer kebabche or no. After that I will spend a few weeks in Istanbul, the Best City in the Grilled Meat World. This blog actually began years ago as a document of my addiction to Turkish grilled meat in Istanbul, and grew from there.

Last week I played a gig with Muzsikas at the Artist's Valley Festival in Kapolcs, near Veszprém. Luckily, the festival food is a bit better in those parts. The The Técsői Banda from the Ukraine was busy playing at the Katlan Toni village-style catering area, growing fat on free gulyas and rooster ball stew.After leaving Kapolcs we headed back to Veszprém, my Mom's home town, to catch the train back to Budapest. I still have a lot of relatives living here, and it is certainly one of the prettiest towns in Hungary, if only because it isn't flat.

As soon as I get into Bulgaria I'll be posting more: truly disturbing food, flacid pastries, amazing peasant ladies, and those frightening bagpipes - the gaida - that I love almost as much as Transylvanian Gypsy music.

The Smallest Fiddler in Palatka

2010-07-28T12:37:00.009-04:00

After playing the festival in Sighet we suffered an unpleasant surprise: we had no place to stay for the night after our concert, a day we had expected to be a free day with accomodations. When you are traveling with a band abroad, this is one of the worst nightmares - the local promoter who strands you with eight people on a shoestring budget. Luckily, when Di Nayes get into a pickle like this in Transylvania, we are covered. We have a safe haven. Puma made a call, we met fiddler Florin Codoba in Cluj, and an hour later we were at his uncle Lőrincz' house in in Palatka.

Palatka - written as Palatca in Romanian - is a village in the deep middle of the Transylvanian plains, the Mezőség, home to one of the most deeply stirring music and dance tradtions that I ever encountered anywhere. I have written about Palatka here, here, and here, but this is the music that I heard at the age of fifteen and something went click in my soul and I had found my sound for life. This is what made me buy my first fiddle. It is the sound that brought me to Europe twenty years ago, and is one of the main reasons I remain here.I can't live far from the persistant audial addiction I have to the music of the Palatka Gypsy Band. The Hungarian folk scene considers the Palatka band to be the most archaic of the Transylvanian string band traditions, and most of the best Hungarian fiddlers have spent time learning to play in the confoundingly asymetrical style. The unique sound of the Mezőség fiddle bands is the use of the three string kontra viola and the highly ornamented and often dissonant fiddle style.Modal melodies - ones that might be harmonized using minor chords - are harmonized using major chords on the kontra and bass. Like most Mezőség villages it is ethnically mixed, about 350 of its 1400 residents are Hungarian, with about as many Gypsy. The musicians tend to come from three or four musician Gypsy familes, the Codobas, the Macsingos, the Moldovans and the Radaks. The two Codoba brothers - Béla and Martón - led the band in its glory days between 1970 and 2000, when Béla died of a heart attack on stage at a concert in Veszprém and his place as second lead fiddle was taken over by cousin Lőrincz, who used to play kontra viola in the band.

In this youtube video Béla is playing with a much younger Florin around 1996, when teenage Florin was just starting to learn to play. What is amazing is how closely Florin's bowing exactly matches that of his uncle. That is how the sound and style is inherited. People are always predicting the death of traditional music, a form which is fast losing ground in the modern, digitalized world, but among the Gypsy musician dynasties of Palatka, the younger generation still grows up in a world surrounded by music.

The latest example: the amazing two and a half year old Sebi. Sebi was with his parents at the general store that serves as the Gypsy bar in Palatka when we arrived. While we arranged for the musicians to come down to play, Sebi's uncle produced a tiny, unstrung 1/4 size fiddle and Sebi "played."

This two and a half year old child has all the moves down - even the fiddle bowing hesitations - before he even makes any sound on the instrument. When somebody would enter the bar, Sebi would walk up to shake his hand. He already knows how to dance. Sebi gets to wear a real musician's hat when he plays. When the musicians play, Sebi comes into the circle and plays along. When the musicians take a break and have a shot of palinka, Sebi gets a shot of orange juice and toasts the musicians before knocking it back in one shot, just like the big folks do.He is absolutely the darling of the family and his grandparents dote on him. On this tour we had New York fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment with us. Jake is possibly the best klezmer fiddler on the scene today, but he also has played Hungarian trad fiddle for years and performs for most of the hungarian folk dance events around New York. He's especially attuned to the music of Palatka, and two years ago we were able to get him together with Florin Codoba at the Yiddish Summer workshops in Weimar when Alan Bern's Other Europeans project was in its infancy and the summer workshops theme was the interaction of Jews and Gypsies in European music. Rather than academically belabor the point, we brought along our own Gypsy musician. Florin and Jake just clicked, so it was a stroke of luck that we finally got Jake to Palatka.Right off the bat, Lőrincz handed him the fiddle and said "OK, kid, let's see what you can do." If you are a tradtional fiddler, this is as close as it gets to final exams. And Jake did pretty well. The locals were impressed. (Pardon the dark video, but if you watch closely you will see the amazing Sebi popping in and out of the musicians playing on his tiny fiddle.)

One of the other fiddlers on hand was an old buddy of mine, Ignac Macsingo, whose nickname "Naci" is pronounced in English as "Nazi." I'll never be able to get Naci any gigs at Klezmer festivals. Its a shame - he's a great musician, stunning singer, and dancer.Naci's father, Gheorghe Macsingo - the fiddler in the nearby village of Barai - was the fiddler I first learned with when I came to Romania with Puma in 1988 during the worst times of the Ceaucescu period. We first went to Barai to find him, but Gheorghe wasn't home and the family spoke no Hungarian. Speaking in Romani, I asked his wife were we could find him, and she told us to drive back to Cluj where he would be catching a bus to the village later on after his factory job let out. We did, and met him at the bus station. He got in the car and said not a word until we got to Barai. When he saw his wife he was elated. Apparently, when we met him at the bus station he thought we were Romanian Securitate agents sent to arrest him.

Gheorghe's wife, on the other hand, thought that we were rich Gypsies from Bucharest who wanted to hire him to play at a wedding. In any case, Nazi eventually left miniscule Barai and moved to Palatka where he leads the second tier band that plays in the village and also plays the regular weekend gigs at the Gypsy bar.

Săpânţa: The Happy Cemetery

2010-07-23T11:41:00.017-04:00

Săpânţa is a village about 15 kms west of Sighet, smack up against the Tisa river in the far north of Romania. When I first came to Maramureş in 1990, the streets in this village were lined with cearga - furry raw sheep wool blankets - for sale, hanging from every house' fence along the road that leads to Sighet. Within weeks of the end of Communism, these villagers were doing business big time. In 1990, right after the fall of Ceaucescu and the Communist Party in Romania, the peasants of Săpânţa had their own reading on freedom. After annoucement of a federal tax on home brewed brandy - the ţuica so central to Maramureş existence - the villagers of Săpânţa blockaded the main road to Sighet and effectively revolted in defense of their beloved tax-free home brew.After a couple of weeks the government backed down, and the villager's favorite hooch was safe. Yes, Maramureş folk - the moroşani - love to drink. And yes, they may even drink themselves to death, and how well they know it. Presently the most unique attraction in Săpânţa is the "Happy Cemetery." Originally begun by a peasant grave carver named Stan Petras in the 1930s, and carried on today by the Pop family, the cemetery has become one of the most popular tourism attractions in rural Romania, with tour buses pulling up and unloading foreigners hourly. We were lucky - we visited on a religious holiday just as the villagers were coming from a Church service.The grave markers in the cemetery in Săpânţa are carved and painted with scenes of the deceased accompanied by a poem describing their fate in Maramureş dialect. About half of them have two painted sides - one showing the deceased as they were in life, and the other showing either the way they died or illustrating some quirk that made them the talk of the village. A good woman is celebrated on side A:

But everybody in the village knows about her B side... she obviously made an impression on the village that would not go away even after she had left this mortal coil...

The most interesting of the carved grave markers celebrate the fickle nature of death: machines just happen to blow up, planes accidentally fall out of the sky, cars just naturally tend to hit people:

And drink. The poetry of the grave markers is wry and reflects the way village opinion saw the deceased during their lives. People in Maramureş drink a lot of home brew, and some drink more than others. It's a hard country with few pleasures, and from the few fruits they can coax from the poor mountain soil they brew plum and apple brandy.

Tavern keepers are also well represented in the other side. This one apparently drank himself to a deathly white paleness on his road to the afterlife. Or else the artist had run out of beige paint.Trains are a particular danger. After a walk around the cemetery you simply don't want to go near a train. They kill in all sorts of ways. You can get all dressed up to go out and still manage to find yourself slammed by a locomotive:

From the evidence on some of the grave markers it seems that Romanians have been experimenting with the notion of extreme sports long before the arrival of cable television. Note to self: definitely do not try roller skating along the railroad tracks. Ever.

Or you can simply be walking along the tracks and suddenly find yourself crushed to death. The look on this poor fellow's face says it all. Oops!The poem accompanying this gravestone said something along the lines "And now my children are in the hands of God / Which is probably better than being in my hands" The laws of Darwinsim are always a bitter pill to take. And speaking of bitter pills: the Romanian attitude towards visiting the hospital:Ever notice how many people go to the hospital and then die? Lesson: Don't go to the hospital! Some of the markers date back to earlier times and reflect historical realities. This one is of a shepherd cruelly killed and beheaded by Hungarian Gendarmes during WWII.

Friendly fire incidents among the Border Guards are also a nuisance.

And many of the graves show the happier moments of village life, with poems declaring sentiments like "In my life I loved to sing / And always bought a round / And paid the fiddler well/ But now i'm dead and gone"

In Maramureş the concept of being "oamnenii bunii" - good folks - is the motto for the approved behavior. And this means being a hard worker and a hard partier: drinking, singing, dancing, dying.

This is the soul of the Maramures region. The peasants up here have held off all of the twentieth century's interlopers - they maintain their Greek-Orthodox church traditions, their thick country dialect, their bewildering fiddle music, their hard drinking ways, and their tradition-bound ideas about life and death. They are some of the toughest, most moral people you will find in Europe today. Let them lift a glass or two in peace. Like the song says Aşa beau oamenii buni "That's how the good folk drink/ They drink from Saturday until Monday."

Maramures Jewish Festival: Sighet

2010-07-17T06:10:00.012-04:00

Sighetu-Marmatiei, also known as Sighet (Sziget in Hungarian, Siget in Yiddish, Si'het in Ruthenian) is a small town in the Maramures region of Romania, smack dab on the river Tisza border with the Ukraine to the north. If known at all in the West, it is usually because of the fact that writer Elie Wiesel was born there, for Sighet was once one of the most Jewish of all cities in Europe.Before WWII a third of the city was Jewish, and Jews uncharacteristically worked the land as peasant farmers in the countryside. The culture of Maramures, and of Sighet in particular, resonates with the influence of Yiddish in the local dialect, the local food, and the music of Maramures. Of all the cities in east Europe that I have visited, Sighet most strongly acknowledges the losses of the Holocaust: immediately after the end of WWII the bars of soap made from Jewish corpses in Auschwitz were buried here, and today a monument prominently marks the spot.Di Nayes were invited to play a festival of Jewish Culture in Sighet, and so we crossed the border at Satu Mare and headed east up into the mountains. Satu Mare was another town and region that should be familiar to folks involved in Jewish culture: as Satmar, the hasids of this region continue to maintain their faith and customs, but in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and NY suburbs like Monsey instead of the Carpathian mountains. When I began visiting the town and region to collect Jewish folklore in the early 1990s, there were about 200 Jews left in the Maramures region - before 1989 there were almost 3,000. As soon as the Communist regime ended, most emigrated to Israel or the USA. Today there are hardly enough Jews to keep a minyan of 10 going at the refurbished Synagogue. The festival was mainly dedicated to fostering education about Sighet's Jewish heritage and providing a meeting for many of the Sighet Jews who visit their home town from Israel each summer. One thing that Maramures will always be cherished for among Jews is the memory of its home brewed fruit brandy: palinka, tsuica, or horinca, as the thrice-brewed top quality stuff is known around these parts.

You can get it - bottled in plastic soft drink bottles - from the cheese sellers in the marketplace. I don't believe the EU cares for the practice of selling home brewed white lightning, but screw them. At 10 Romanian New Lei a liter (about $3) you can be sure of no hangovers and you are drinking the stuff that fueled hundreds of hasidic l'chayims over the centuries. In Maramures they drink a lot of horinca. Every social situation calls for a toast, and little plastic bottles of clear liquid appear out of nowhere to make any occasion. We also stocked up on straw hats in the market.

Maramures peasants traditionally wear small little hats called clop (visible hanging in the background) while city folk wear more normal hats, but everybody wears a hat. Nowhere in Europe does traditional dress persevere as in Maramures. One reason has its origins in the persecution of the Communist years. Maramures has always had a social structuire in which certain villagers were considered "noble" - not by wealth, but by status. When the Communists tried to punish this class - by closing churches and redistributing their land - the response of the local Maramures peasants - the morosani - was to retreat into the fortress of their traditions.Wearing a furry vest and a tiny straw hat became a mark of defiance that persists to this day. In Maramures, local identity is proudly maintained: to be oameni bunii,, "good people" is the goal of any morosan. That means earning a wage at hard work - often abroad on construction sites in France and Italy - and being as self sufficient as possible at home. It means being a devout church going Orthodox or Greco-Orthodox believer: I've never met a morosan atheist. Another key identity symbol is the local musical style of Maramures fiddle and guitar music.

This is what was on offer at the CD stand in the marketplace. No place else in Romania offers this much of its regional folk music on a commercial level - and there are still loads of fiddlers "ceterasi" in all the villages. In Maramures most of the commercial recording are of peasant or trained musicians - the Gypsy clans (mostly families named Covaci and Baranyi) that provide music rarely make recordings. Most musician families don't like being called "Roma" at all - that is reserved for the Kalderash clans that speak Romani and do business in the marketplaces.

Typically, Transylvanian Gypsy musicians refer to themselves as "Gypsies" - "cigány" in Hungarian and "ţigan" in Romanian, which irks outsiders who have convinced themselves that Roma is the only proper term for Gypsies. When speaking to musician Gypsies in Romani, however, they will say "Rom" referring to themselves, but outside of their dialect they would see the term restricted to the more "classic" Kalderash and Lovara Roma. While we were in Sighet we were put up at the very classy Perla Sigheteana Hotel, the same hotel where we played for the wedding of the owner's daughter about eight years ago. They served the best tripe soup - ciorba de burta - that I have ever had in Romania. I ate this stuff twice a day: believe me, this is the Romanian breakfast of champions. They served it with some fantastic home baked crusty bread and the classic ciorba accompaniments of sour cream and hot peppers. The sour cream was a thick, luscious cream from the milk of water buffalos, so thick you could spread it on bread and eat it like cheese or clotted cream. And everybody proceeded to do just that.

I really enjoyed the Hotel Perla Sigheteana where we stayed - they have a beautiful garden area for outdoor lunches and if you are ever staying in Sighet this is the place to stop. We played for the festival reception dinner the night we arrived, and although the festival as such was tiny and not entirely a festival, it ended up becoming a miniature workshop for players of the small cimbalom, with Australian Tim Meyen in attendance alongside Shaun Williams, an American teaching English in the Ukraine while learning Hutsul cimbalom music, the Tecso Band's Vasile Hudak on Hutsul tsymbaly, and our cimbalom player Feri - who used my small hora cimbalom on this tour because he had transportation troubles with his big cimbalom. Here's a taste of Tim Meyen jamming with Ivan Popovich:

Zalaba, Slovakia: The Best Mayor in the World.

2010-07-11T11:45:00.006-04:00

Although the last post about Prague was the opening gig of the recent band tour, this post is about the last concert we did at a small village festival in Slovakia on July 4th. Zalaba is a tiny village just nborth of the Hungarian border in Slovakia, about 7 km north of the town of Parkány (Sturovo in Slovakian.)It is only about an hour's drive north of Budapest but as soon as you leave the border town of Parkany and enter the hilly countryside you could be in Transylvania. The villages are small and unspoiled, with well kept old peasant houses, working farms, vineyards, twisting country roads. Eventually, we reached the small village of Zalaba - population 170, of which 85% are Hungarian, 15 % Slovak. Everybody speaks Hungarian as well as Slovak here, and the festival we played at was named after the brook which runs through the village: the Szikince. As soon as we arrived the Mayor of Zalaba, Michlianová Etelka, introduced herself by making sure we were fed. First we got a basket of home made pogacsa (biscuits - seen above) made by Mayor Michlianová herself, as well as sandwiches made from goat cheese from Mayor Michlianová own goats. The Mayor poured us a round of excellent quality palinka and then laid out her specialty: Zalaba retes ('strudel'.)

This was a mixture of meat, sour cream, and curd cheese rolled and baked into a kind of über-burek, a savory strudel the likes of which you would never see in Budapest a mere hour's drive to the south. The fresh, meaty strudel was just what we needed after the long day's drive in from the Romanian border. This was the kind of old fashioned strudel that you can't find in many modern Hungarian homes - not only was the pastry hand stretched, it was hand stretched by the Mayor! How many Mayors bake strudel for their festival guests? Does NY Mayor Bloomberg bake cookies when a klezmer band comes to NY? No. He does not. Zalaba thus beats New York by a strudel length. Etelke, you win the award, you are the Best Mayor in the World.

We played our set, and got everybody up and dancing a basic freylakhs led by Sue Foy. As soon as we were finished, Mayor Etelke met us at the side of the stage with another bottle of palinka. Now that's hospitality. And just before we left she gave Fumie a couple of liters of excellent local wine - grown around these parts only for local consumption, and unavailable in bottles. Given that it is releatively easy to get to Esztergom by train from Budapest, cross the bridge to Parkány, and bike up to Zalaba... I have a feeling there may be a few bicycle trips to Zalaba in the future.

Prague: Bread Dumplings, Beer, and No Parking Fines!

2010-07-08T11:41:00.007-04:00

Our recent travels began with a gig in Prague, which is a wonderful city for tourists in the summer but definately not if you are a band trying to park a Ford Transit mini-bus anywhere near the downtown. None of the underground garages can accomodate a van, since Prague was spared the destuctive bombing and destruction of World War II and thus its city center lacks the kind of blemished urban open spaces that make parking in Budapest, Warsaw or Berlin such a joy of post-war European experience. Still... Prague is stunning. We played as part of the Nine Gates Festival in the Wallenstein gardens of the Czech Senate.
This was our third time playing the Nine Gates festival, and each time the organizing has gotten ever better... there has been a lot of fine tuning going on in the Prague World music scene over the last few years. Although inteneded as a Klezmer Festival, this year's festival was co-sponsored by the Prague Romanian Culture Institute, so things were a bit relaxed on the semito-authenticity front. There was some great Romanian Jazz when we were there.

The opening band was a local Czech Gypsy band, whose Jewish content seemed limited to having a guy in a tuxedo singing a medley from "Fiddler on the Roof"... which is fine, I suppose... I mean, that's what most folks expect. What I was expecting was this:Fresh Pilsner beer, the dark variety. Yeah... I've been on a diet... haven't had a beer since February, but heck, I'm in Prague, and the Czech's don't have any sense of a light summer cuisine. Bread and potato dumplings everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

Duck with knedly dumplings. Essentially, knedly is steamed bread. Not exactly the thing for Mr. Low-Carb, but this is the Czech Republic, after all, and that is duck, so... There are other forms of knedly mixing white and dark breads, and the dumps go well with any kind of gravy or sauce, although I really wish the Czechs would look at their calendars and say "Ah. Summer. Maybe time to lighten up."

We didn't see a single vegetable - with the exception of sauerkraut - during our entire stay in Prague. Did that bother us? No. But, since the national food is beer, and food at beer halls is filling and a lot cheaper than anything in a downtown restaurant, it remains a knedly-fest weekend for us. In fact, the first big carbo-load I had eaten in months was this:

Potato dumplings stuffed with smoked non-kosher meat served with the mild, cumin tinged sour cabbage that Czech serve with almost every dumpling dish. Eat thgis and you won;t be hungry anymore. The same goes for these stereotypical Good Soldier Svejk weenies which are pushed all over town to the teeming touristic masses.

As regards the parking problem... we did get a parking ticket on the mini-bus when we parked it in a public overnight space near the Malostranska Church. Like a good citizen of the EU that I am I marched down to the local police station to pay up (our van rental service travels to Prague quite a lot, after all...) and the local cops took down my info, asked if we were with the Festival, smiled, and told us to go our merry way. No fine! And that's fine with me.

Mici for the Masses: Oradea, Romania

2010-07-05T05:36:00.008-04:00

The band just got back from a tour in which we hit Prague, Romania, and Slovakia in ten days, driving along in our rented mini-bus for whole days to make it to gigs and eating at both the high and low ends of the trough as we went. Yesterday the meat du jour was Romanian mici.While I love cevapcici and will crawl barechested over a field of broken glass to get some, there are times in this cruel and deceptive world when you simply can't get any. There are spots on the planet where there simply are no displaced Bosnians available to grill cevapi for you, and this is a sad fact that we all must learn to deal with. So you lower your standards, grit your teeth, and man up to face whatever ground meat wad the locals throw at you. Yesterday it was mici, (pronounced meech) the Romanian version of the pan-Balkan meat-dispensed-in-a-tube-form which is also known as mititei. We started our day in Oradea, (known in Hungarian as Nagyvárad) located on the border with Hungary, having done a concert in town at the Posticum, a modest jazz-oriented culture center.In the morning we were up early to hit the flea market. The Oradea flea market is a huge, sprawling sun baked celebration of free market capitalism, selling everything from used autos to accordions. In eastern Europe the flea market is where most folks do their home appliance shopping - while you can get everything new and shiny at the new malls, people trust the second hand stalls to offer things at a more affordable price.
The Pet Market was fascinating blend of animals that could be either made into lovely home companions or just eaten outright with potatoes and peppers. Pigeons and chickens were on sale alongside puppies and parakeets. There was one rabbit for sale that was the size of a German shepherd.

Now that rabbit will either be a wonderful garden pet named Fluffy or a hearty stew named "Eat me!" Which will it be? I'm betting on the stew. Even having a pet area in a flea market, fer chrissakes, is a bit disturbing. Marketing "Flea" and "Pet" in the same sentence? If you are used to hygenic, EU-conforming pet shops, perhaps the flea market in Ordea is not for you. It seems to be struggling with an identity issue: "Am I a pet shop or a Supermarket meat section? I just can't seem to decide!" But there's no need to eat the pets here - just saunter over to the mici stands.The Oradea flea market has the most grilled meat stands of any single market I have ever seen in Romania. Big sellers are grilled kolbasz, pork chops, chicken legs, and at every stand.... mici. Considering that the market opens at 6 am, that makes mici the breakfast of champions. Most market mici I have eaten have been miserable, charred, raw in the center blobs of fat and gristle, the mici I breakfasted on here were superb.

Mici have been slowly modernizing over the last decade. Refigeration - once an exotic luxury in rural Romanian parking lots but now quite commonplace - had made the mici business safer and allowed for a better quality ground meat experience. As with Yugoslav cevap, the ground meat in mici has to be mixed with salt and kneaded into a paste to which a small amount of soda bicarbonate is added. The salted ground meat needs to be cold in order to form an emulsion or else wou end up with a simple tubular hamburger wad. Modern mici are thin and long when put on the grill, but blow up as the bicarbonate heats up and expands, which also adds a nice smooth grilled crust to the meat. Another adavantage of mici is that they are cheap. very cheap. Laughably cheap.

At the present exchange of 4.2 Romanian lei to one Euro, this is meat for the masses at Euro 25 cents a piece. Served with a hunk of bread and the traditionally crappy thin mustard, four mici is a hefty meal.