Update: This is the flyer for the party. NOW does Beta make sense, ‘droo? 

Previously: Ok, here’s the situation: Funzine is throwing a New Year’s Party with a Hair theme. Yes, Hair, as in the stage performance and movie about hippies fighting the Vietnam War draft in the late ’60s. I have been assigned with coming up with a theme for the party, which will take place immediately after a performance of the play. The only thing I could think of off the top of my head was “Sex and Drugs!”, but my boss didn’t really go for it. Since I haven’t even seen the film or the play, I am asking for your help. Anybody have any suggestions???

Last night I saw a really strange contemporary dance piece by a German troupe called Derevo. E had told me that this was one of her favorite choreographers, and so, trying to be a good boyfriend, I went with her to check it out. The “performance” started in the lobby, where androgynous-looking people with shaved heads walked, crawled, screamed, smiled and otherwise performed the actions of living manequins. Okaaaay, I can handle this after a long stressful Monday at the office (wow, I sound so boring). Next we moved into the theatre space, where more crazies were throwing chairs and brooms and hand-trucks around. When one of them draped a huge rope around one of the audience members, I got a little worried that this performance would be one of those ones where they mess with the audience, and I was not in a mood to get messed with. Luckily, the action stayed on stage, and for the next hour and a half the performers screamed and twitched their way through any number of life and death and sex struggles, rebirths, joys, pains, and realizations, all the while dressed in nothing but a thong loincloth and some occaisional garbage bags, feathers, chicken beaks or skirts. At the end they poured water all over the floor and rolled around in it, perhaps mimicking bacteria in a petri dish. But I heard somewhere that the whole thing was based on an Aztec God. That’s Budapest for ya.

Next, I got to see a free screening of An Inconvenient Truth, which everyone in the world should see. The reason it was free is because E and I have volunteered to transcribe and translate several short videos produced by Greenpeace, which Greenpeace Hungary wants to make subtitles for. The leader of the group is named Bob, and is this totally cool grizzly-bear tree-hugger dude that always wears a green bandanna headband and plaid flannel shirts. Anyway I will refrain from taking too much time to get into it, but we should really all be trying to consume less, recycle and reuse more, pressure our governments to tackle global climate change and support green, sustainable development. Some things you can do are really easy, such as changing even a few light bulbs to compact flourescents and unplugging your appliances and computers at night. If you want a list of ten things you can do, click HERE. Make it a habit! In my opinion, global climate change is a little like uncontrolled eating. It feels real good and easy at first to chow down on Big Macs and potato chips, but then you turn into a huge, smelly, disease ridden burden, and then you die an early, painful death. But when you eat right, get enough exercise, and think conciously, you look good, feel great, live longer and make more money. It’s just better.  

What do YOU think?

The last few days have been chock-full. Last week we reorganized the listings sections of our magazine (yes, I know I haven’t gone into much detail on that; I will soon) to be more descriptive, I wrote or compiled all of the articles, interviewed the producer and creative director of the upcoming biggest theater performance in Hungarian history, and continued to upload content to the company website. The first item was actually kind of fun. First I mapped out the locations of all the restaurants in our listings, which was sort of a puzzle, and organized them into areas of the city. I got to make up the names for these places, although mostly they are self-evident, then I wrote a few words about each restaurant. Now since I haven’t actually been to or eaten at every one of the 75-odd restaurants or cafes on our list, I basically had to look at the pictures and menus on their websites (hopefully in English) to get a sense of the place, food, and cost, and then write a totally innocuous-sounding sentence that both made it sound good/average/bad depending on your point of view. Here are some examples:

“Sports pub owned by a famous Hungarian boxer. The food is a knockout.”

“Fine dining with King Arthur and his Gypsy band.”

“Gourmet Hungarian on an island. Known movie star haunt.”

“Pan-Asian hotel restaurant with great food for people who don’t know better.”

“As good as Indonesian gets in Budapest.”

and my personal favorite: “Eat with your fists and watch out for swinging swords.”

Another task was more of a pain in the neck, because it was a surprise interview that I had no time to prepare for. Luckily, the producer and creative director of Vampirok Balja were pretty chill, and just talked in Hungarian for an hour while I held a tape recorder for them.

However, all these little work things pay off in perks. I got free tickets to the Sneaker Pimps opening party and the Heineken Thirst Studios event. The first was actually kind of boring, except the food was really good and the shoes were dope. But the people were such hipsters that it made the whole thing depressing. 30 people stood and watched a guy paint a picture of a shoe for at least 2 hours (we left after the first hour, when it was less than half done). Apparently, the shoe is worth something like $10,000. Cool? The other event was a bit similar. The lineup of De La Soul, Coldcut, Groove Armada, DJ Ronin and Hungary’s finest, DJ Palotai is pretty hard to beat. But since the tickets cost about 4 times more than the average Hungarian can afford, there was basically nobody there, and the event was in a large event hall. Well, at least we had room to dance, and it was pretty easy to get to the barriers at the front and center.

Just saw the movie last night, and couldn’t resist the most obvious blog post tit-le. It had me tittering all night long. And when I woke up it was a tit bit nippley. Oh well, here’s the breast I could find in 5 minutes:

Snakes on a Blog

Snakes on the New York Times Magazine

Snakes on the original movie title blog post

Snakes on Wikipedia

Snakes on a Rotten Tomato

All your Snakes are belong to us

Tonight (Tuesday) I will be the guest on Radio Café’s “Legal Alien” radio show (irony noted), probably the only English-language talk show in the country. If you want to listen via the web, go to the following link and click on “Gyertek hallgassátok online!” and then look for the English explanation. 

Link

The show starts at 8 p.m. here in Hungary, so that would be 2 p.m. east coast time, 11 a.m. west coast time, and 4 a.m. Japan time. Gomen nasai!

*UPDATE* - If you missed the live broadcast of the show, I have uploaded the recording of it in mp3 format. Click on the following links to hear the show. You will need speakers/headphones and a media player to hear the files (doye).

Section 1 - (5:32, 5Mb)
Section 2 - (10:20, 10Mb)
Section 3 - (12:14, 11Mb)

The rockin’est Halloween party this side of, well, the Danube was at Nagy (Big) West Balkan this last October 31st. I am going to go ahead and claim credit for suggesting it, being the resident American and all. While our attempts at decoration were feeble and last minute, and the DJs didn’t even play “Thriller”, we still got possessed by the spirit of naughtiness and danced the night away. Next year will be even better. Enough talk, let’s see the photogalleries!

Spent the last weekend in Venice and Padova, after taking advantage of a cheap ticket deal from SkyEurope. We went to visit our friend S and just relax and enjoy the first world for a bit. I say “first world” because I really noticed a huge difference in the quality of retail shops, services, the roads and vehicles, overall cleanliness and just about everything else, despite having only flown an hour or so west. For one, there was very little graffiti, despite what you see in my photo gallery. Also, people were happy to serve customers and shops (besides the mall) were actually open on the weekends! From what I remember of my backpacking days in Y2K, there was a similar difference between north and south Italy as well.

We spent the first day walking around Venice and then linked up with S and her boyfriend, Padova’s first rapper who goes by the alias of Silek. I picked up some new shoes at a market the next day, and we ate lots and lots of great Italian food. You really haven’t had pizza until you’ve eaten it in Italy. 

The photogallery for the trip is here.

This Halloween I decided to get a little bit ambitious and build my costume. As a regular reader of the Make Blog, I came across this site, and, being in Hungary and all, instantly knew the costume that would a) fulfill my creative impulse, b) be something that no one else would even think of doing, and c) endear me to any Hungarian that saw me in it. They don’t even celebrate Halloween here anyway, but because I work at a tourist magazine, we (well, I) had the idea of throwing a big party. This is the process and results.

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