Ohanami in Budapest, coming soon.

Today I went skateboarding for the first time this season. I had taken out the board once before to go pay a bill at the post office, but this was the first day of attempting to do any tricks. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be - skateboarding is one of those things that requires daily practice, like learning a foreign language - but that doesn’t mean it was very good either.

Budapest is not a great city for skateboarding. I’ve asked at skateshops where people go, and I usually get a laugh, followed by the answer “to other cities.” Most of the buildings are old, the streets are rough and cracked, and there is a distinct lack of easily-grindable surfaces such as marble ledges, as those kinds of materials usually go along with contemporary-style architecture. There is one “skatepark”, but the ramps are in terrible condition, largely due to abuse by BMX bike riders (when a skateboard[er] bails, its just a piece of wood and maybe flesh hitting the obstacles; when it’s a biker there’s a heavy, metal object with spiky appendages that can puncture the wood or warp metal transitions). There is actually a miniramp quite close to where I live, but it’s a bit further in the “hood” and is usually covered with gypsy kids, so if I go there I spend more time telling them I can’t speak Hungarian and then letting them try my board than actually skating. The best spot in the city is in the middle of the downtown square, where there are a large series of interesting wedges (public art?) made of a great material and with good transitions. Unfortunately, this is also the biggest bust - I’ve rarely seen skaters there for more than a few minutes before being shoed away by municipal employees or the police. It being the first day of the season, and with a mind to the fact that I would be embarrassingly rusty, I went to a spot across the Petőfi Bridge that sits in a sort of public meeting area under a Communist-era building adorned with the Konica Minolta logo. The area is generally used by students, and skating there on a weekend day can be derailed due to the amount of broken glass left about from the previous night’s partiers. While today was no exception, I kicked aside what I could and made mental notes of where NOT to fall.

I spent about an hour trying to land a few of some of the few things that I can do: frontside 50-50s, kickflips, nollie backside 180s, nollie frontside shuvits, half-cab kickflips, fakie heelflip. I think I landed just one kickflip, in countless tries. Skateboarding has got to be one of the most amazing sports - even at the professional level, riders have to try a trick many times before they land it. This can be frustrating to no end, but the rush and satisfaction you get from landing it after so many tries is unbelieveable, and keeps you going. Hopefully I’ll get back up some skills and make it to that downtown spot before August.

Whenever I interview a local foreigner living in Budapest, I usually ask them a series of questions about why they came to Hungary, what their favorite tourist attraction/restaurant/dive bar/local poison is, and very last, whether they think Hungarians are, as a whole, hot or not.

Mostly they grimace. Then they try to explain that it’s not so easy to generalize about an entire group. It usually starts something like this: “well, the girls are hot . . .”

My sentiments exactly. (After all, I did come here for one of them, and I definitely wasn’t the first . . .)

Why are Hungarian guys in the “not” category? Maybe, as suggested to me by a Dutch guy who runs an IT company, they need to read some more fashion magazines. I like to be a little bit more generous, and just say that they don’t have a great selection of clothing to choose from. Basically, if you’re a guy in Hungary you can shop at the mall, and the mall.

If you know me, you know what I think about malls.

The reason I’m writing this now is that today I was on a mission to do some clothes shopping, as I rotate about 3 pairs of pants for work, and it’s getting a little stale. Alas, I was mostly unsuccessful, after having been to not less than 5 different second-hand stores and still not finding anything I loved - just some kinda weird black jeans with white plaid stripes. What I wouldn’t give to have just one day to cruise the Hollywood thrift stores . . .

 What do you call one more than a baker’s dozen of hamburgers?

(Pauses to think of a punch line . . .)

Man this brings me back - waaaaay back to like 1991. The Simpsons Sing the Blues was the first album I ever owned, and this was my favorite cut. For some reason I thought to look it up on YouTube and now I’ve seen the video for the first time. Sounds like DJ Jazzy Jeff did the beat.

The next album I owned was equally influential on my musical and political tastes, for many different reasons.

Pictures from my recent trip to Florence, Italy, can be found HERE. Words will be coming soon.

As promised, pics from the Funzine Masquerade party in February. You love it. 

Dominatrix Evi and Eszti Lauper

Belly Dancer Sanyi and Kitty

Basically, today was depressing, and it seemed that more than ever the world is going straight into the toilet, so I thought that I would post something for the WHOLE WORLD to see and later use against me in a court of law. I no longer think (if I ever did) that an individual’s actions would cause them to be banished to hell. Rather, it’s the attention that one gains from their actions, and the subsequent condemnation by society that is truly damning. The Devil waits not in the depths of Hell, but walks in and among us. You’d only have to see these pictures to believe.

Over the last month we’ve recieved sad news that three of Budapest’s most atmospheric and unique cultural havens have closed, changed management, or are slated to be torn down.

The first casualty was an abandoned building called Tuzrakter, which was taken over as a cultural venue by a group of French artists who painted crazy three-story pictures and held weird events on an even weirder schedule. A strictly open-air venue (albeit with a grimy basement for the occaisional rock band), it was open only from late Spring to early Fall, and during the colder evenings at the ends of the season they would have metal drum fires that sent dancing shadows up the walls to tango with the graffiti. According to this article (which also details the fate of the next venue to pass away), there was some kind of beef between the French artistes and the company who ran the bar in the building, and since we are talking about the ghetto, it was probably tied up in some mafia trouble. Anyway, the Frenchmen had to return to France in a hurry, and now the place has been renamed Tuztater and is probably going to be torn down in a year in the name of gentrification.

The next spot to fall in the name of “progress” is the Cha-Cha-Cha, a funky and ecclectic bar inside the pedestrian area of Kalvin Square metro station. Subdued during the day, after the trains stop running it became one a party-hard spot for people of all types who are so beyond pretense you’d actually forget places like this are what dominates the nightclub scene in Budapest. To tell the truth I never actually made it to one of their dance-till-6am ragers that apparently go down on a weekly basis, and now I never will, because it (and the entire metro station) was closed due to construction of the 4th metro line, to be completed in God knows when. Luckily, there is also a Cha-Cha-Cha garden bar on Margit Island, although the scene is much more chilled out.

Last to feel the axe of advancement is a bar/movie theater/general student hotspot called Kultiplex (the name is a [bad] pun: a “multiplex” is a huge mainstream mall cinema, whereas the “kulti” makes it “cultural”), which is housed in a building that is slated to be demolished some time this fall. Home to the cheapest movies ($2 per ticket) and beer ($1.50) in town, as well as legendary community radio station Tilos, I have fond memories of seeing Irie Maffia for the first time, summertime drinks before world cup coverage, being a “guest” on a friend of E’s radio show and more. We’ll have to visit a few more times before this graffiti haven is consigned to the dustbin.

These places are what made Budapest unique and exciting for me during my first few months here, and I’ve seen almost nothing like them elsewhere in my travels. But I guess the best things in life never last.

50,000. Fifty-frickin’-THOUSAND. That’s how many people came out for today’s critical mass ride. This was the biggest turnout for a CM in the world. Ever. I’m speechless.

Pictures here (click on the picture for more).

As Earth Day is coming up on Sunday, there have been a lot of articles written lately, not least of which in Budapest Fuzine, that discuss the effect of climate change and what we can do to slow it, adapt to it, and profit from it. I was passed a recent issue of Time Magazine with the morosely simplistic cover story “Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things You Can do to Make a Difference”, accompanied by one of those sinfully cute emperor penguins. I wouldn’t mind having one stuffed in the same pose on my bedside table, but since I don’t have one (a bedside table) I guess I’ll have to pass. But skipping over the fact that humanity’s single most disastrous challenge in recent history is hanging over our heads and the title makes it look like a Cosmo guide on “51 Ways to Make him love your toe nail clippings”, I must say that Time magazine is written as if it’s audience hadn’t graduated 4th grade. As a part of the “things you can do” piece, the authors helpfully included a scale with such important measurements as “feel good factor”, which complemented the various made-up words and distracting references to popular television quite well. If I didn’t care so much I would have been insulted. Haven’t Pulitzer Prize winners written for this magazine? The photographs, on the other hand, were terrific. Thank God they tell a thousand words, because the writers sure didn’t bother to.

(more…)

Unfortunately, I won’t make it to any of the Earth Day celebrations this Sunday, as the plan is to take the ‘rents, who have been in Europe the past two weeks or so, to Lake Balaton for some sun and lángos.

Anyway, here are some fun CM banners:

1

2

3 (my fave)

4

This week has been one of those times that I’m happy I live in Hungary. There have been no shootings of random people, or any shootings at all for that matter. The Virginia Tech tragedy is definitely in the news, but it feels far away - perhaps I’ve been desensitized by the constant news of bombings in Iraq, of which today there was another painfully gruesome example. It’s hard to imagine 32 people being gunned down, just as hard to imagine at least 146 dying in the wake of car bombs in Baghdad. It’s almost like this happens every day. Which it does, in places like Sudan and Sri Lanka.

What I think is pretty abominable has been the sensationalization of the event. Even the New York Times has diagrams, walkthroughs entitled “Interactive Graphic: The Rampage“, profiles of the victims - only a day after it happened! While some people have already jumped to blame the violence on video games, the response has been even more game-like: giving readers the power to live a madman’s last hours in an orgy of violence, as if it was internet hits were the score. The political fallout will of course be intense, and as boingboing notes quite astutely, will be similar to that after the 9/11 attacks. Personally, I’m anti-gun. I have never felt safer in Japan or Hungary, which both make it virtually impossible for citizens to obtain weapons. But I also know that guns are a part of American culture. It’s in our blood, just like the Magyars and paprika.

What has been easier to imagine is the big news in Hungary today, that a trailer truck filled with some 5,000 rabbits got in an accident on the highway, freeing the lucky bunnies, who had apparently been en route to a slaughterhouse. There were no injuries in the accident, and dozens of cops and firefighters were sent to the scene to round them up. Hop, bunnies, hop! Only about 1,000 of the hares were carrying their lucky rabbit’s foot, however, as the rest have so far been recaptured.

Also interesting (and another grab from boingboing) is the story about the world’s oldest company going out of business. I wonder what the second oldest company is.

OK, I know I’m terrible at updating, which is usually because I feel like I have nothing to say. That’s just not a good excuse and the truth is, I need to practice “real” writing more, as the stuff I do at Funzine is not the most breath-taking.

So I’ve decided to set a goal for myself: a post a day for a month. I really doubt I’ll do it. But I will try. This is the first.

Today to keep you distracted from work I found this great “Geek Poet”, Ernie Cline. My boss also sent me the link of a guy on MySpace named Dan Freeman, which is weird because a) my boss is googling my name (oops, I’m not anonymous anymore, as if my ten readers didn’t already know me), and b) apart from being black, I share an almost remarkable resemblance to this other Dan Freeman, right down to philosophies, musical preferences and so on.

I will be posting text and photos from my recent trip to Florence, Italy, soon. But now I’m going to drink beer, eat peanut M&Ms (thanks mom!) and watch “A Scanner Darkly” with E.