This article was initially supposed to ambitiously piece together a picture of our times, and of things and matters surrounding and surrounded by them; but alas, I am a busy person, and besides, I've never been that much of a writer, so I suppose you, my dear reader, will have to be satisfied with this humble piece. Or otherwise start your own blog and create that work which the alien anthropologist from 252525 will truly appreciate. But anyways.
When I first thought about this subject, oh, I think it must have been a Thursday morning, while I was walking on the Ion Câmpineanu Street near the Palace Hall, while I was passing by the old beggar who seems to have been sitting there for quite a while by now -- so when I first thought about it, the first idea that came to my mind was that the defining spirit of our times must be, if anything, its ubiquitous absence. Sometimes, more often than not nowadays, I feel like I'm surrounded by machines, or NPCs, how they call them in popular culture: "d'you have a few lei to spare?"; "Bolojan has failed the no-confidence motion"; "that Dan is such a disappointment"; "Bucharest is so full of potholes as of late"; "have you seen Trump's UFO files?"; "Romania is such a whore"; and really, I could go on and on and on. Everything's a fucking meme nowadays and everybody keeps yapping the same thing over and over again like a broken record. I am sorry my fellow bipedal apes, but sometimes it's hell of a lot more fun to wage a conversation with a LLM than with you folks; and let's be honest, those are abysmal as far as actual conversations go.
So when I initially started writing down the notes that were supposed to lead to the aforementioned ambitious piece, I shit you not, I initially named the tentative article: "The spirit of the times, or lack thereof". Except.
Except next Friday I met with a very old friend, if you can call knowing someone for more than two decades a very old friendship. She visited along with her husband, a musician native to whatever foreign lands she inhabits nowadays, and we went downtown near the National Theater to a hipster place called Urban Dada, where an equally hipster cosmopolitan event (or so I thought) was taking place, namely the performance of a musical project called Mahamour. By their site, and their site alone, it seemed to me like some hipster folks coopted a bunch of lăutari1 into the sort of postmodern project which blends traditional music with the more modern kind, while also maintaining the café-concert mood at times. And judging by the first hour or so spent there, I was ready to conclude that I was right.
Except after one or two hours, the good folks in the audience started getting tipsy and Rela Miron, who immediately read the room, started joining people at their tables, and they started throwing dedications along with the cash which accompanies this sort of thing, just like they used to do in ye olde parties -- or like they still do at some weddings, nowadays. And by the time Sorin Necunoscutu'2 joined the stage, the atmosphere turned into something that I honestly find very hard to describe in words. But let me give it a try: imagine that the song is running while, say, one guy at a table (let's call him Gigi) gets up, sticks a 200 lei bill in Sorin's accordion and shouts something in his ear; then Sorin changes one lyric of the song to "Cătăline", who suddenly becomes the song's hero; then when you look back at Gigi, he seems to be filming the whole affair with his phone, except his screen shows a face who's probably Cătălin watching the whole thing via FaceTime. Meanwhile, another group is up and they're doing a traditional horă, so the tune changes to something that's even catchier, so the double bassist who's been going for half an hour now keeps going at an even steadier pace than before... and so on, until the sixth hour in the next morning. I actually left early, at about 1 AM, but the whole ordeal went on past the time my tired self crashed into bed. My friend and I were thoroughly satisfied with the show, while her husband, I suspect, is still internalizing the experience, musical and otherwise, to this very day.
I myself woke up the next day as if from a very short and intense holiday, and realized that if there's a Zeitgeist, a spirit to animate people to something more than the state of mere cogs in the machine, then this must be it. I then seriously pondered the possibility that this is mere escapism, but then I compared it with the usual forms of escapism present in today's society and... if this was escapism, then it was the kind that rubs off, in the sense that some of the escapist experience escaped back into my daily life and it's led me, say, to write this piece.
A piece which is way less than an X-ray of today's Zeitgeist, but also, much more in a certain sense.
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Literally, "lăutar" means "lute player", and "lăutărească" is a derivative meaning "lute music". Funnily enough, very few people play this kind of music on lutes nowadays: the standard band consists of an accordionist, a clarinetist, a violin player, a cimbalomist and a double bassist, plus the ever-present vocalist. If you haven't heard the genre, then I suspect you can at least imagine that the band is in fact a small orchestra: the accordion, the clarinet and the violin all take turns on solo work, of various kinds, each filling up a small portion of the musical spectrum, each with its own nuances and its own way of moving you. Meanwhile, the double bass encompasses the bulk of the rhythm section and doubles (sic!) as a percussion instrument, just like it would in any blues/swing band. Finally, the cimbalom is by far the most versatile among them, as it ties in with the bass on the percussive side, with the accordion on harmony work and with the clarinet and the violin on solos. A great cimbalomist such as, for example, Mahamour's Ion Miu, will easily integrate the whole band into a singular sound with his playing, much like a pianist would do in a more modern band.
The vocalist deserves his or her own paragraph, because she or he is usually an old woman or man who brings out the usual blues repertoire: "I'm poor, I stole a wallet and the police caught me"; "I love my brother like he's a part of me"; "my woman left me and my heart is shattered into pieces"; "I fell in love with a girl and I want to crack her nipples between my lips, and stick my hand into her hoopoe"; and so on and so forth. The actual manner in which these are uttered and the exact expressions cannot be really translated, much like the blues-manner can't be translated into Romanian. You have be familiar with the language, and more precisely with the older variety thereof, to appreciate it and to get immersed into the images evoked by the lyrics.
Anyways, the even more modern version of the lăutari band is able to replace every instrument (and all of them) with one or two synths, and most times this is what blends into what we call nowadays "manele". ↩
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Literally, "Sorin the Unknown"; except he's quite well-known, so I guess the nickname just stuck as a sort of a self-irony. ↩