26-IV-1982.
I guess the date as we were allowed to town only on thursdays and sundays. Now that I knew I'd be going home, went downtown (with Morkec, of course) to get my airplane ticket. With all the money we had from our photo business, I was wondering what to buy to take home. She said in a letter that I should get some shoeware for Go, which I found on the marketplace, even though the tourist season was still far and the souvenir sellers weren't aplenty. Also bought four LPs, something I haven't done in quite a while. One was the triple live album of Azra, "Ravno do dna", then Idoli with "Odbrana i poslednji dani", John Lennon's "Shaved fish" (we called our first cook "the fish") and can't really remember what the fourth was. These I later took home. Money was no problem, financed by our photo operation.
On some other occasion, he persuaded me to go see a concert of Parni valjak - the descendants of the old Grupa 220 band (where once Drago Mlinarec began), with maybe two or three guys from the original lineup, which somehow managed to be the first one to publish a RnR LP in SFRY, "Naši dani" in 1968. I thought I was a tad old for concerts, and specially didn't like the idea of visiting one while in uniform, it ran contrary to several of my ideas. But he was adamant and I gave it a try.
And it was good. The guys did rock, and I felt fine, and the bar was open and I had a large gemišt, in a large beer mug. I had my bag of škija with me, and accidentally had a faulty pack of papers, where several weren't cut at one side, so I rolled one double length cigarette at the bar. It was nearly endless and I just got tired of it and then didn't smoke any for the next hour or so.
In the Gold caffe I tried to shoot a few, which didn't quite work out, except... this one. As far as I can seee, Morkec smoked Vinčika (Winston), and I did škija - there's the bag, there's the paper.
Of course, most of the alcohol evaporated before we got to the hill road - by then we were at least a quarter of the way up. By the time we were on the peak, it was all gone.
I shot this one night, by parking the praktika on the low wall, with wire shutter set to long exposure, probably half a cig long or thereabouts. I thought the city would have provided too much light, but it seems I shut the aperture well down, and this didn't turn too bad at all. Of lenses I brought only the 30mm [one] that I bought in Amsterdam, the normalnik I barely ever used anymore.
And this is on the other side of the hill, where we could see two or three villages in the valley, and all those roads to the hamlets up the other hill. I shot three or four shots like this, and of course it routinely turns out that the first one was the best. Guess it was because on it I caught the downwards traffic, when the uphill folks were coming down into the valley, shining their headlights to me. These were fewer on the latter shots, and of those who were returning uphill, their red rear lights didn't leave as much trace. And even those headlights weren't much, our škodilak was a rare beast for sporting halogens, aitch 4 I think, the likes of which then no Zastava's car had. Maybe the larger french or german cars did, new ones, but here most of them were second hand, what the gastarbajter would bring.
Around this time one naval captain, also a comms officer, was coming by, with a couple of sailors, to mount some antenna pole by the kitchen's rear wall. I saw it was an ordinary yagi antenna, huge though, eightfold, i.e. with eight sets of dipole plus two directors and to reflectors (which we didn't learn here, but I knew from my travails with home stereo reception). It turned out that he was a radio amateurs, and having access to such a good location on top of a hill, with ready power and almost expert help at hand, and managing to pass that as work, well, all kudos, majstor, you managed it well.
We kept seeing him for a few days while that was assembled, and then he'd come a few more times to make connections to various. He was delighted with the way it worked, on first try he connected to someone in Israel.
He came across as a former Belgrader who, seems, went completely native here, and learned all the local tricks. Said it was the best when he and the likes of him would go fucking with tourists who learned as much as they could, which was barely a fracion - there's a whole dialect with hundreds of mangled italian words, plus the local mores - so he'd suggest them to go dive to 20m to catch a few amphoras, or to make pohovan'd barkasa for dinner. For the uninitiated, a barkasa is a type of a fishing boat.
He kept coming for a few weeks and then vanished. The huge contraption on that pole just stayed so.
Mentions: Damir Molnarec (Morkec), Drago Mlinarec, gastarbajter, Gorana Sredljević (Go), majstor, pohovano, praktika, škija, škodilak, in serbian
15-VII-2022 - 23-VI-2026