Though, this could be the winter before or after...
Don't know where we were in the evening, where did we go at all on such evenings. It was a saturday, we did drink some, but really can't remember where. Not that there were too many decent places to go around downtown - Trpeza, hotel Central, hotel Vojvodina and perhaps Tisa when they didn't have too many people. Anything further from downtown would be disreputable - the „Mostar“ on Žitni, which everyone called Najlon (nylon), was probably called so because of the folksy singers who'd striptease on the stage, where it was easier to get into a fight than to get the next beer. Likewise „Drina“, „Lokomotiva“, „Morava“. Šanta was also too far, we went there only once.
Anyway, we met Tiki, haven't seen him in a while. He practically took over his mom's photo shop, and was a real pro now. With him was Gagika, every photographer's pet. The local photographers usually had their shops in the backyards of the main street buildings (and so did he), and on the street they had a tiny show window, no larger than for one movie poster. In that space they'd display a few words and dozens of tiny photos from their production, trying to have them look the best. Of course, that meant the nicest chicks. Gagika wasn't exactly a stunning beauty, but her face radiated some joy, and she knew how to make her smile look natural, so her photos, larger than the others, adorned at least three such displays. So there's fame for you, girl.
At some point Tiki was out of the picture, guess he had enough booze and everything for the evening. So we were stuck with Gagika and the gangly Srđa, who walked funny and wasn't too sure of his hands either, guess he had some light paralysis as a kid or whatever. He inherited the passion towards cars and driving from his dad, even raced on closed track or in the all-terrain races.
Now this is a weird spread of personae dramatis. Tiki was about four years younger than us, she was at least six older, and Srđa probably much older, as my mom remembers him. And there Gagika got the idea that it's all closing downtown, let's go somewhere. So we got into Srđa's fića, we in the back, and she immediatelly went on with „Serž, sir la vilaž! Sir la vilaž“. Yeah right, as if none of us understand that much french. But what the hell, some adventure. We ended up in Čurda, and only the „Arany csillag“ (gold star) was open, and nearly empty. The band already packed and left. So we had just one drink, he drove us back to town, nothing happened. Eh, Gagika, some adventure this was, shot a blank.
Herbert Franke... There was some lecture on RU* Ćirpanov, in some skyscraper on the outskirts of the old city kernel of Novi, and we attentded because I mixed up the names. The lecturer was not Frank Herbert, but never mind, it was interesting all the same, computer art. And not the fake, graphics achieved by printing letters of different density to look like Mona Lisa, which is not computer art at all, it took punching a huge amount of cards (can be calculated, 132 letters per row times 120 rows per page times 4 or 6 pages divided by no more than 72 letters per card) and doing that the pedestrian way, as I don't believe there was any kind of scanner available at the time. No, this guy drew lines. Don't know how, as what we saw in the leaflet and in the accompanying article in „Index“ was a reprint.
Art? C'mon, what art. He drew a dozen squares, then again with random rotation, well the silly swingograph did better graphics. But the idea was interesting, lots of stuff could be done on a compuer, if it had those output engines - you make it calculate the coordinates of dots of a curve and pass them to the output medium, whatever one may have, screen, paper. Who knows, some day I may work in a place where they'll have the apparatus and time for that kind of idle entertainment.
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* Radnički universitet, workers' university. Pretty much your community college, though it rarely held any courses of high level and surely nothing that would count on any real university. Most of their production was various courses for skilled work, e.g. specialized welding, or foreign languages, dactilography and such. They also organized lectures for general public, like this.
24-X-2023 - 16-VII-2026