19-IV-1997.
Someone on sezam asked
You wrote some reasons to leave, but I'd gladly like to hear the reasons to stay. At least one...
My train to leave has left in 1988, and then what tipped the balance was the half-finished house and a company we started here (which ran really fine next five years), so I decided to give Yugoslavia another chance.
Okay, I fucked myself up, but I grew with „I don't care too much for money“ anyway.
After a brief encounter with some folks on VFUG (virtual fox user group), some Mark Warner pointed me to UA, because I was looking for a forum where I could ask questions.
Today I wrote my first message there, recommended something simple to someone, some easy thing that even I understood. And so it began.
Mucked with CD invoicing. Specially for transportation, theirs is the emergency vehicle department, which also drives the folks to dialysis, to physiotherapy etc, which they charge to their respective insurances (same state insurance, but not necessarily from the same city, and also possibly the peasants' or privatniks' insurance), so it wasn't just a piece of cake.
Accidentally, this is when this shot was made - it's Go, with school, ekskurzija to Tara. The only story from that, that I remember, is that they were walking up this creek, and everyone got mud on their sneakers, except her. She knew how to walk that walk, she knew mud. Such was our street, starting this winter, she built the skills.
On the technical level, oldwave has news:
I take a CD, record it on my hard, start the program for compression and I get a 10 times smaller file of the same quality which can be reproduced in real time, without (to my ears audible) loss in quality, in the bacground in Win95.
When enough music is collected, I carve* a data CD with compressed files, on which fits about 12h of music :) The only (some will say also the crucial) downside is that its unlistenable without a computer, but I don't mind that, my computer is turned on by default.
The technology is called MPEG Layer3.
Come to think better, for 12 hours of music I need 20 DEM (for carving the disk), but that is what I am ready to set aside :)
In a couple of years this will be called mrz format, from mp3 being read as мрз in cyrillic.
Further down the same thread,
That's from Stand Up, it has an unusual sleeve, maybe one day you will even see it :) Dedicated to their later bass player Jeffrey Hammond
Go went leafing through a Buuuurda from '72 or some such, an ad for pro-niksan-has-arrived or whatever the name of that detergent used to be, all in the then ambience, a guy and a guyess lazying it out on some colorful bedcloth (flowered, yes off cross), he has wide and long sideburns just as the then fashion was, holds an orange longplejka [LP record] (made me want to retroactively slap him for leaving [finger]prints on the vinyl), and somewhere closer to the bottom a few record sleeves - and there the girl recognizes Stand Up. Yes, with the original sleeve.
And, ex [x is cyrillic h], may I remind myself of my favorite verse from the there (as our favorite mason in 1987 would say):
Each to his own way out of mind
Best of luck with what you find
the last one fom bulgarians, don't remember whatsit called... Anyway, buy
Root to branches, still didn't find the time to listen to it (it being on a cassette, and the cassetophone is in daughters' room), 1995. Sounds a bit calmer, as Škrba would say, „all silent and calm and you keep waiting for it to explode“
Which is my bullshit, I already knew it by heart, I carried that cassette with me to Hungary (among others) so it was listened to, some at the keyboard, as Joška had some tiny walkman with extra speakers as large as matchboxes, and I'd also insert it in the office cars when I had any field work. But I wasn't impressed, so I was about right saying I don't quite remember it.
The local „kablovska KTV televizija“ (cable CTV television, yes, the full name contains its own acronym, recursion, see under recursion) waded deep into marketing. One of the pearls was some beverage, guess a soft drink or something from a bag, no idea, and the ad, which ran at least three times each hour, said „...collect five labels from Karamba tripaks...“. On sezam I asked „what are the tripci“ (as the proper plural of the not-yet-extant word tripak would be, but it would also be a plural of tripac, which also didn't exist, but sounded pretty much like dripac, a scumbag) and created a nice confusion there. Specially with the subquestion, „how are the ordinary [ones] different from caramba [ones]“.
The other pearl was their selfadvertising, „become a member of kablovska KTV televizija“, which I had no clue what was it supposed to mean, so I rang them up to ask, what size photo is needed for the membership card, and what's the membership fee. It's incredible how the telephone can convey the phrase „blank stare“.
On twonyfifth I took the interest calc to the Čurda cooperative and installed it. On bike. The girls were still in a good mood and all elegant, though now I could feel there's something between them and the director. It was all relaxed last time, the atmosphere was cozy. Their talk then sounded more like team making a plan than one guy giving orders. Ummm... not so much this time.
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* for reasons unknown, we don't burn CDs, we carve them, analogously to the process of printing vinyls... well at least the master, which is indeed carved by a diamond needle. Besides, 'burn' has too many meanings in english, and nobody knew which serbian verb to apply: spaliti (to destroy with fire), goreti (to be burning), spržiti (to fry to a crisp), izgoreti (to burn out), zagoreti (to get the black bottom on food baked in a tray), ispeći se (to get burns on skin)...
Mentions: City doctors (CD), Čurda, ekskurzija, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Joška Apro, KTV, oldwave, sezam, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian
2-IV-2023 - 25-III-2026