Most of the time while I was writing the previous bunch of entries in the diary, there were transfer interruptions. That is, dad would interrupt me, as we needed to transfer a bunch of bricks or planks or whatever from one heap (probably on the street) to the one in the back. Of course, bricks would need to be stacked, with proper overlap so it doesn't fall.
Yesterday I visited the gang at ruža, what's left of it, but they weren't there. Found them a couple of blocks behind, on the little market, there was a carousel installed, loud music etc. The interesting half of the gang is gone - Patak was there. M. ... Rencika is now with Gradivoj. V. gave heel to her now ex guy but seems to string him along for a while. Not even a decent basement affair to spice things up. I find myself thinking of Bosa recently, I wonder why.
Today I was supposed to meet with Pop and Dimče, Morava was supposed to bring new keys to the door of DC-99, but nobody was there. Walked up to gimnazija to check the terms of enrolment into 2nd grade. Met one cute girl from the old KČS, and oh boy was she sweet... fortunately we talked for just about three minutes, so I resisted all urges. Wish I knew her name (or remembered now who that was)(must be Slavka, as per note below... um no, probably Ruška).
Later I heard the meeting was rescheduled to 18:00 because Morava was working first shift and simply couldn't come (and nobody knew that in advance?). The guy uostairs agreed that we should hook into his water main, and we already had the money, so now to engage someone to install a sink and a tankless heater. The whole club is in place, we can start.
On 12th I just waited for Tejka to appear. It's her birthday, and while I didn't tell her that we arrived (how could I, we had no phone, didn't meet anywhere), I did bring the postcard that Ivka sent to them into the Borik camp, but it arrived when they already left, and I dropped it into their postbox. And sure enough, here she comes. The missing gossip that we exchanged was mostly small stuff; the only relevant piece is that S. was the guy who simmered V. for Gradivoj, so he should be the guy from the paragraph above. OK, it all fits.
In my room, I started a poster corner, behind the furnace. I put up three sheets of packing paper ("pakpapir") on either side of the corner, from floor to ceiling, nailed them and will now start pasting various things there. The arrangement is not the most elegant, the glue extends the paper so it's never tout and snug to the wall, but at least I can do this much while keeping some pretense that the room can be quickly reverted to normal. I've already put a peace sign and all photos of Korni grupa that I could find, two of Blaženko, one of Arsen, one of Nikola Nešković, and plan to put up some of my own drawings.
I plan to do something about the lights some day. There's a chandelier in the middle of the room, with three upturned bulbs (mostly working on two, one leg is a bulb killer). The matte glass dishes are, however, too shallow, as if the glassmakers never met the factory doing the wood and metal parts, so the wider part of the pear*, including the filament, sticks out and I got harsh light on anything above 2m, and decent diffused light below. But I feel that light as oppressive, it's somehow killing any atmosphere I'm trying to achieve. And it's awful for most of kinds of photography I'd like to do.
One of these days I went to the dance at Dom, alone. Just to get the feel of the place and know where is what, without having to watch over those two. Funny, though, when I appeared with four girls last winter, everybody was there and was my friend, now nobody there. Met Slavka, who was my customer this spring, for a couple of negatives she shot with her sister - almost all of it out of focus, save one excellent portrait. And the sister is cute too. One of the seniors (now prob'ly a student) from their inner circle, as I heard, didn't like that I took over the business, as he was probably the one who developed those before. Wow, I didn't even know there's enough of that to make a market. I'd develop perhaps six or eight rolls a year for the asking. And yeah, she was with one of those seniors this evening.
Met Pop also. The famous "Hendrix is dead, long live Morava" was repeated (for who knows why, the guy probably wouldn't even know how to tune a guitar, only Bukac would know, he invented that). Found out that most of the former KČS are still on vacations, perhaps a handful have returned. Bosa is also away.
I got a swell idea for a film, would be named "Can not" or "But how he can". I want to make every shot mean something, do something, not a single excess frame. It would feature a conductor who stops the choir, an engineer who stops a huge crane with a single hand motion, a cop who stops the traffic by a simple raised baton. Now this guy, who observes all that, tries the same, but the column of the vojska (archive shot from the may parade in Belgrade, I think Dimče shot that) just keeps going. The guy gets scared and runs away. End.
----
* eventually four years later I noticed that I wrote „pear“, probably copying parts of the paragraph from the diary. That's what we then called the glass part of the lightbulb; the other part was the neck.
2-I-2021 - 17-XI-2025