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

klinë e epërme

election rally in north mitrovica

babin most

the orthodox cemetery in south mitro

leposavic, year three

Last night I went there to see a friend's band play, and we stood outside on the occasion of the Leposavic saint day, drinking Jelen out of cans and eating pleskavica out of a perfectly greasy paper wrapper. My friend's band setlist is chosen for the masses but the musicians are really top notch, including my favorite kind of bassist, perfectly in-the-pocket, dead-on drums and dueling guitarists with chops. Some of these guys would be heroes of the scene in Houston, heroes for their pure devotion to their sounds and instruments.


I've long ago gotten used to hearing thickly accented Kenny Rogers and Stevie Wonders as they might have sounded muffled and ringing harshly behind an iron curtain. Still this singer has a different problem, one of not really understanding all the words, and instead substituting wordlike phrases and sounds into lyrically critical moments, so that when he says, “Please allow me to intro doom ice elf, I'm a man of wealth and taze...” I am disappointed, yes: disappointed, and I find it hard to believe that he is anything like the devil. But this is just me, my feelings, not those of their crowd of entertainment-starved teens, and this band stood in front of the municipality building hammering out hits while five-year-olds in party dresses performed somersaults in the grass behind them, and they honored Saint Vasily Ostorzhsky with energetic performances of works by Lenny Kravitz, and Eric Clapton and other minor poets of distortion and assorted junkies, while the night previously, as has happened for more or less three hundred years, high on a cliff in Montenegro, the box containing his relics was opened and the Saint was honored for his anti-Papal fervor and Turk-evading dedication with the presentation of a new pair of shoes.


After a while we were distracted by friends, who convinced us to walk with them up those streets graffitied “New Serbia” to a club named for Belgian comic book character cowboy Lucky Luke and it was a tiny place, the walls covered in wooden beer signs like any pub in England but unusual here, and crammed with people. In the very back there were three musicians, at least I think they were musicians. The singer and guitarist might easily be mistaken for a homeless man, and the percussionist might just as easily be mistaken for a clerk at a New Age shop selling healing crystals and tarot cards, and the accordionist might simply have been a football hooligan, but they were hammering out well imagined remakings of plenty of classic material, Johnny Cash twice even, and the audience was jumping and singing along, and pretty soon so were we. This fellow's accent was strong but the words were meaningful—I agreed with him, yes, I thought: Viva Las Vegas, and this gaunt-cheeked bearded homeless man did seem to know full well what it was to have fallen into a ring of fire, and his deep understanding gave me pause during which I might be forgiven for wondering how this place came to be here, and just when Nova Serbia was founded, and where it had been for the last three years, and where I had been for the last three years too, and just how did I come to be here, in this unusual place within unusual places.

short spring rainfall

43 seconds of aggression in north mitrovica

a certain symmetry

south Mitrovica neighborhood, 2010

Orthodox baptistry in Ohrid, 5th Century

north Mitrovica neighborhood, 2010