07-IV-1976.
The political economy exam, got a 9. The utter bullshit of the matter is what I delivered - I just got very verbose, repeating the statement in the question in different shapes over and over, pretending to prove and/or expand on it, basically saying nothing. And that passed. Luckily, there was no oral, and I guess the guy didn't have the time (there were too many of us - all of maths, biology, chemistry, physics and even geography) to read through everything. So I wrote two A4 pages of who knows what, repeating a lot, saying the same thing three times in different word order, thus creating the pretense that I knew what I was talking about and using all the right words in excessive amount. It was more than enough. This raised my average mark...
Made some nice photos this month. The owners of the house came for a brief visit during (their children's?) spring break, so they removed the extra bed from my room. Now I could move the bed to the wall and have some room in the middle. The icon, or whatever it was*, hanging above the bed, was partly covered with a paper cutout crucifixion, with a comics-style baloon where the guy says "MAMA!" (and then you hear "oooo", because this was a straight reference to "Bohemian rhapsody", which was highly popular that winter). On the floor, my shoes, slipper, and a bottle of Knjaz (mineral water). On the chair, a box of napolitanke (so this is probably right after my parents' visit, I'd never buy that on my own).
Just like I kept improvising ashtrays, so I did with the light. There were two beds here, but one was removed when the owners of the house visited a couple of weeks ago. So now I had the space, but the light was in the wrong place, so I brought the wall lamp that my parents had above their beds since forever. Couldn't hang it on the wall, there was no nail in the right place and I had no tools, so I hung it off the icon and made a shade out of tin foil (my folks must have brought some more food and it was wrapped in it).
The old two-bar infra heater was finally unnecessary, and we could also use the kitchen. We could before, but it was too cold. Even the bathroom was available, provided the gas in the bottle lasts. So I started using the kitchen table first, to sit and at least do some geometry on it. The picture wasn't that bad, I screwed something with the light when I was reshooting it (02-I-2016.) so the edges are faded. Or maybe it was fucked up in the lab, there seems to be a trace of perforation over the bottom quarter. That's when I, probably by Franci's suggestion, went for self-made ID-19 developer and started extending the development time to raise the film's sensitivity. Because this was shot with available light, which was just one 60W lamp. We had a can of "choice ananas gesüsst", which was a weird anglogerman aka germisch mixup (in english it would be "...pineapple sweetened") which we used as a table trashcan for wrappers, peels etc. I darkened some letters so it became "hoi nana esu", which then became a mock official greeting among us.
The transistor radio on the kredenac (i.e. credenza) is the one I won in Ohrid (v. 28-VI-1970.). It couldn't catch anything special, BG1 and 2, NS 1 and 2 (that's on ultrashort; on middle it caught too much, and all at once at that). NS1 was in the languages of nationalities, which I didn't really speak, except the period two years later when it pleased me to listen to slovakian and russinian, just because of their melodies. The NS2 had a few good rock emisija, that's where lots of stuff could be heard.
The kitchen being available now, including vessels and utensils, we began cooking. That is, she did, Franci ate at the students' mess. We didn't do anything fancy, I'm not a cook even today, but there was soup from a bag or from a cube, and we bought farina and eggs and made dumplings. I somehow always made them harder, and liked them that way. And then I recalled how granma made me popara - she'd lay stale bread, in slices, on a plek, sprinkle it with water, cover it with crumbled young cheese and rebaked it somewhat. I didn't have that much, just a leftover loaf butt which was no good to eat as it was, and why not reuse it this way. In absence of young cheese, I covered it with sliced kačkavalj or trapist, added leftover butts of salami or bacon, and whatever I found, even sour cream and mustard, and tossed it into a pan. And it turned out quite well most of the time (okay, shouldn't overdo it with mustard).
Around this time I befriended a colleague who suddenly began appearing at the classes, one Ljuba. We'd drop by his place at times, he lodged at some guys, physics senior year, lived near the campus, and the guy had stacks of Lui, Playboy and Mad magazine. Then once he and some girlie, Ela from chemistry (a year younger and somehow shy-ish, which I later understood came from her being a leftie and pressed into using her right hand for all her life), came for lunch. She was sweet, but my girl was even prettier.
Ah yes, we redid the spaghetti. We tried macaroni once, in that room of his, two of us and that guy from Žabalj, three ignorants, the macaroni overflowed and Ljuba grabbed the pot to take it off and screamed solidly, but didn't drop it, just landed it neatly on the floor. The handles were hot. So there, we didn't even know how much water will the dough soak when cooked. But we ate it, as much as we could. We also had a can of Podravka's haše (hashed, I guess), which I then thought was some special recipe, but it was just ground meat doused with some industrial tomato sauce, which didn't matter, for students' appetites this was a feast).
This time we had ready spaghetti from a bag, the quantity predefined, happy ending.
Around these days one of the politicians threw his spoon**, and, as it was customary, all the radio stations hit it with who-just-died music. Comes 18:20, time for the legendary „Randevu sa muzikom“ (rendezvous with music), and it's neither Anđelko Maletić nor Vita Simurdić nor Jovan V Nikolić, it's the guy whose dayjob is to read the news, saying thusly:
"In today's emisija we will listen the D major symphony by the british composer Keith Emerson, performed by London symphony orchestra. Conducted by author.“, in the standard over-the-grave voice, which was used on state radio to announce serious music, with both three prescribed seconds between the last word and the first tone. Now I don't really remember whether it's really a symphony, even less whether it's in D major, but this was worth listening to. It's all there, his seriously jazzed piano, and the strings who do more or less what bass would do, and the rhythm is somehow there despite the lack of drums (but then I think he made a couple of minor miracles with timpanies) - ergo, I'd like to hear that again.
[it's actually 1st piano concert... just wonder what would a symphony sound like... and I heard this a lot, thirtysome years later]
This is probably the corner where she would turn left, or one of two other corners between her and my place. Amazingly, I never quite lost that umbrella. I did forget it in the menza (the students' mess hall) once, but went back and the ladies there wanted me to prove it's really mine. I was able to describe it to the last detail. Well, it wasn't too rich with them details - just say it's all black, the mechanism works, the handle is plastic fake wood with faded paint, slightly less faded to the ends, so it's rather worn out than sun-faded.
The puddles along the curb are a regular thing. There are rain drains, but the holes in the manhole covers would get clogged, or were a few millimeters above the water. In this street, south of this corner, there's a rain ditch, but they didn't quite think of draining when they put the curbstones, so the water was removed partly by evaporation, partly by splashing over when vehicles pass.
And this is a kind of drawing that I made for my own amusement. Combining incongruent pieces into one imaginary machine... let's see: stovepipe, a đeram (well with a dip bucket hanging on a seesaw, balanced with a counterweight), a piece of a highway, olympic squares (announcing 1992 in Albania), a roulette with confusing graphic cues, a mix pult with just two high voltage switches, a railway car brake, a tire around the lens, a Washinon washer door lens, Badyear logo on the tire, "super doonster" brand, a ski jump, garage entrance, a washer selector (called "programator" here) with a tv channel selector with six sliders, a railway car stepladder with elevator buttons above it, a coin slot, a fire staircase between two nowheres, a headset jack, an sideways airport with a hand drill on top of the control tower, and entrances to a bank and a birc (a beer joint).
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* the owners of the house are Hungarians, at least by surname - don't remember whether I even saw them at all - and it's then assumed that they must be catholic, and ikons are an orthodox thing, so... how come they have one? Or, despite the looks and the exactly same format (and probably being done by the same shop), this is not an ikon but rather a simple picture of a saint, with just a different meaning in this context.
** croaked. The legend of lapot, ritual killing of elderly in the poorest areas of east Serbia, was discovered by ethnologists just a few years ago. They'd put the person behind a mound and throw rocks over it, saying "it's not this stone that kills you but it's this bread". The last lunch was served beforehand, and the condemned would lean his spoon against the pot, needing no food henceforth. The expression „leaned the spoon“ soon became „threw his spoon into shit“ (which we just heard of, few weeks after this) and then got abbreviated to „threw the spoon“.
Mentions: 28-VI-1970., 02-I-2016., emisija, Franc Bauer (Franci), Ljubivoje Tomić (Ljuba), plek, in serbian
24-III-2020 - 20-II-2026