drenica

demining

wellcome tu komorane

brod, in south kosovo

art and architecture, 2 (inexplicably, lucille ball & mamafucka)

inexplicably, lucille ball

art and architecture, 1

"greater albania", minerals mounted on felt

saturday drive

ten miles south of kosovo

and west of Skopje, above Lake Matka and its St. Andrew Monastery hemmed by cafes and wooden tables shaded by red and white umbrellas, across that water as surprisingly green as an anole's backside on a small boat steered by a captain who only grunts when I pay him and up the eastern face of that gorge, the trail a mess of unsettled rocks outlining steep Zs from one side of the incline to the other and back again till we get to the monastery wall at the top and through the gate where the monks have been replaced by working Joes taking slugs out of cans of Skopsko while on break from tending the modest garden there, or perhaps dirty blue pants and a wifebeater is just the uniform of this sect of monks, the sect of Saint Nicholas, to whom the small church is dedicated to, and in whose honor every inch of the inside of that church has been painted in scenes real and imagined from the bible, painted sometime in the mid-1600s and then abandoned by all before being heavily graffitied, with the eyes of every reachable saint scratched out in the traditional fashion of non-Christians wishing to defile, but also graffitied thoroughly and at chest height for the entire circumference of the room with such pithy observations as “Goran [was here in] 1830” and so on, so that we are moved to (nearly religious) wonder at the universal human compulsion to piss on one another's scent, and so not at all surprised to find, framed by the legs of two horribly blinded saints crippled not by their Creator but by their Viewers, a dedication to the seemingly distant place of our birth:

tallava forever, part 3

another mashup of found tallava pieces.

stari trg, the tenth and eleventh horizons (still photos)

stari trg, the tenth and eleventh horizons

the embassy / the museum

On July 2nd we passed through metal detectors, armed guards and police cordons so that we could join the other Americans and their invited guests eating hamburgers and hot dogs. There can't possibly be a single enemy of America in Pristina, but still, because we are Americans, we must shut down the streets and divert traffic and have the utmost in security measures for an early Independence Day celebration at the museum, with an exhibition honoring the relationship between our countries.

The Kosovo constitution had been reproduced by hand to resemble its American counterpart. There were numerous ordinary items of clothing on display too, clothing that had been worn by Madeline Albright and Wesley Clark. American flags were hung side by side with Albanian flags and there were pins for Greater Albania and signs for Get Serbia Out of Kosovo, and I was embarrassed to be seen there, as if this display was making any attempt to grapple with history and truth, because it wasn't. It was only more adoration and patriotism, hamburgers and rock music.

Not that the items on display weren't historical. Many of them were. But this was a museum, and the uncritical homage seemed out of place there, like a political speech in a church, or an execution in a hospital.

I had a funny feeling as we ate hamburgers and the band played “Money for Nothing” and “One Love.” I wished I could have celebrated, because there were people present who were truly happy and truly thankful to my country. But it seemed like such a simple and stupid mistake that my country had made—to use a museum this way. The displays were perhaps even somewhat less self-analytical than those in the Military Museum of Belgrade, and I was scared that my country had really become hopeless, that we had become incapable of learning, that we would always ignore that which didn't suit our needs until it was too late, and that when real tragedy struck again here—as it had only the day before, when a pediatrician died in the streets of Mitrovica—the people from my country would only stare in wonder, dumbstruck, convinced that there was nothing they could have done better, and then go back to patting themselves on the back. I felt like I was getting dizzy, and spinning in circles, because it was me and my fellow citizens who used a museum this way; we had paid to have our praises sung, and we would probably have to pay for it again, one way or another, for years to come, because I've never yet read of self-satisfaction like this ever coming to any good.

one thing I never expected to be doing; many things I never expected to see; so much left undone

After a month or so the back seat of the car has been filled with empty plastic bottles, and then it's time to drive up into the mountains to the spring by the side of the road and fill them. We used to fill the empty bottles from the tap as reserves for those times that the water goes out. But then we saw the sediment in that water forming into brown algae-like clouds that rose to the surface of each container, and we smelled the toilet backing up through the shower drain, and we stopped trusting the tap water. We could buy it in the stores, and sometimes we do, but we try to get most of what we need from the springs, and today I went looking for one in Bajgora.

Halfway up the mountain I passed the mines, and then I entered the tunnel, slowly, because of the cows. There were four of them in there this time, one laying in the middle of the road, and the other three frantically licking the sides of the tunnel. They were pale colored, a dirty white with yellow and tan spots. Their horns flashed in the headlights, and they didn't seem to notice me as I wove between them, as if the time they spent down their had made them blind, or as if they'd been born that way, like enormous hairy albino newts in subterranean caverns. They sucked away at the slimy stone like leeches.

The spring was only a trickle, filling an enormous metal trough. Villagers passed by and said things to me. For all I know they were telling me “That spring is poisonous,” or “That's be ten dollars.” I finally found one who understood my mix of Albanian and English. He grinned and said, “Yes,” the water was good. Still, the rest of the village had so much to tell me I couldn't feel confident that I was understanding everything. Maybe I had offended them, or there was a trick to it, or maybe they just rarely had strangers up there.

I'm telling you this so you'll know how it was that I died, should I die. It was the water, from all the way up in Bajgora, that drips down across blind cow tongues, pass the entrance to the coal mines and seeps through piles of slag, into the rivers and lakes and then the pipes that empty into our sink, our toilet and tub: if I'm dead, then you'll know that the water turned out to be most deadly at its source.

tallava forever, part 2 (the return of tallava)

a new mashup from found sources...

24 hours, parties and people

The wedding party stepped backwards through the church doors, stopping to kiss the wooden door frame. The groom's brother threw candy and coins to us over the newlyweds' head. A man behind me began firing his weapon and the empty shells bounced off of the brick walkway and pelted my legs. The brass band doubled their volume in order to drown out their competition: a second wedding party was making their way down the hill towards us. Two local Roma girls stood to the side and waited for us to leave, eyeing the coins that we had left scattered about.

Below us apartment building walls and tin kiosks were plastered in layers of election posters. Not one of them was intact. They had all been torn, or plastered over, or defaced. I still could not remember which party was which. In the south there were new posters announcing Sunday's protest of the war veterans: this one displaying a map of greater Albania.

...

The next morning elderly people closed and shook their umbrellas as they entered the university to vote. Cars decorated in ribbons and flowers were parked outside of cafes, and gunfire celebrated more weddings. A small crowd gathered at the bridge in the north, waiting and looking south. Reporters were everywhere, and KFOR had occupied the Culure Center again. French soldiers aimed enormous camera lens at both sides. It felt like the old days.

In the south about half of the protesters were dressed in their football team's green and black in preparation for the championship game that evening. About half the crowd marched towards the park, but the other half split off and walked purposefully to the bridge. They chanted “UCK” and threw stones, and we thought that KPS or KFOR had set off tear gas, but this turned out to be fireworks from the other side. Rocks were thrown from the other side too, and a short burst of automatic gunfire sent KFOR into their tanks behind the Center. Most of the crowd in the south seemed happy and eager. A lot of people brought their small children to watch. I didn't recognize a lot of people because they had come from out of town for the protest. They tried hard to avoid stepping in the new flowerbeds that had been planted to welcome attendees of last week's “Cities in Transition” conference. We might have all come for a free concert in the park, except that a free concert would never have brought as many attendees. I was surprised by how many people were smiling and pleased. Ecstatic teens drove through the streets waving green and black flags, shouting, and honking their horns. Now the security would be higher around the bridge again, and things would be a little worse than they had been a few days before.

I figured that UNICEF ambassador Alyssa Milano's scheduled photo shoot on the bridge would be canceled. I never watched that television show when I was young, but I knew people who did. The cafes did a brisk business of old men and the security personnel of every organization in Kosovo, talking about what had and hadn't happened. The sky cleared, and they sat in the sun drinking macchiatos and smoking cigarettes.

may 30