OLD WORLD CITY/ SLOW TOURISM
Just walking along to the music cellar last night was as exciting as being in the place itself. Walking under an old clock, through dimly lit streets. Catching a thrill from the just-turned-Autumn air. Feeling very alert and prowly like a wild animal in new surroundings.
An unusually high number of people here seem to have deformities (rickets?) so it makes me conscious of how wonderful it is to be able to stride along. This is also because I got into some tortured thought process (because of a slightly sore back) at lunchtime that I might be going down with MS! No idea why. But for a few days afterwards, you feel differently about walking.
In the cellar, there is the kind of slightly shabby wooden decor that reminds me of an old cinema ad where people got holed up to dance the night away when there was a hurricane blowing ouside. I feel more at ease than I have for years in club-type environments, which I generally don’t enjoy that much. But it wasn't set in stone and maybe I'm a different person.
Maybe I was playing at being someone different when I was in the UK? I know that every time I open my mouth to launch an opinion, especially of the “generally, I don’t…” variety, I am forging an identity rather than describing anything. So much of our behaviour is just reacting to what others expect.
Now it's the weekend I should really be doing some more sightseeing. But why rush it? I love this slow tourism. It means that a metro station can be enjoyed as much as an art gallery, even more perhaps, because of the atmospherics.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Thursday, September 16, 2004
DATAFACTORY
The Office for Statistical Management and Moderation has an awesome reputation for data manip and that’s why Crabdale was proud to join them after the last lot had pulled the wires from his chickenbone frame.
You can find it in one of the cratered back streets, a slightly scabby but not unattractive turn of the 20th Century building, with a courtyard open to the sky and enormous double doors like sentries. You can see by its magnificent pillars that it had originally been some elegant urban apartments, but you wouldn’t guess it has also been a base for the Purification of Youth movement; an interrogation centre in the dark years; and then a sound recording studio during the years of hope, where, tutored by long-suffering orchestrators of genius, a stream of untidy musicians converted their half-baked ideas into ephemeral jingles, used occasionally to promote gadgets but usually as soundtracks to poisonous adolescent vision quests.
This was all before it was purchased by DataFactory and thus entered its loftiest, though tattiest, period, in the service of Hibernia. Which is the greater good, arching above us all, in case you were wondering. (Don’t. There are more dark years ahead, more detention centres, and none of it must be hastened into existence by your unruly thoughts.)
DataFactory is a private consortium whose owners, whoever they are, do very well; not a credit from the public purse is intentionally lavished if it’s in any way possible to claw it back. The moderators all use reconstructed keyboards, grey with finger-grime and the data storage devices crash daily because of the amount of meaningless junk stuffed into their limited capacities. There are still typewriters on the go, the whirring and crashing of which can now be read by data-sticks as text. Ranks of drones are jammed into their individual stalls, often walled in, either racking their brains or dreaming uncontrollably, which occasionally results in an excited shudder. (It’s all right. No one is looking.)
They conduct interviews using beaten-up tape recorders held together by sellotape, and afterwards everyone strains so hard to separate the dialogue from the hiss that you would think there was something worth hearing. And, for relief, most drones go once or twice a day to the other stalls, which are tiny and stink like a farm.
The line manager is Lentil, a man in whose soul there isn't enough light material for any spark of humour to catch. He has protruding eyes and a wispy beard. He is thin and stalks round the office like a heron. No one knows exactly what he does. Crabdale, by contrast, scurries round trying to deal with the piles of paper on his desk and weights on his mind, both accumulating. He takes pills for today's hectic lifestyles and hopes they'll prevent the spreading of the dry patches on his palms.
Nothing is ever mended or brought to completion here. It is a continual striving for an improved state of affairs no fool would dare spell out in any detail. For he would be howled down, and after the howling was over, everyone would sit awake in the early hours and grip their sheets.
The Office for Statistical Management and Moderation has an awesome reputation for data manip and that’s why Crabdale was proud to join them after the last lot had pulled the wires from his chickenbone frame.
You can find it in one of the cratered back streets, a slightly scabby but not unattractive turn of the 20th Century building, with a courtyard open to the sky and enormous double doors like sentries. You can see by its magnificent pillars that it had originally been some elegant urban apartments, but you wouldn’t guess it has also been a base for the Purification of Youth movement; an interrogation centre in the dark years; and then a sound recording studio during the years of hope, where, tutored by long-suffering orchestrators of genius, a stream of untidy musicians converted their half-baked ideas into ephemeral jingles, used occasionally to promote gadgets but usually as soundtracks to poisonous adolescent vision quests.
This was all before it was purchased by DataFactory and thus entered its loftiest, though tattiest, period, in the service of Hibernia. Which is the greater good, arching above us all, in case you were wondering. (Don’t. There are more dark years ahead, more detention centres, and none of it must be hastened into existence by your unruly thoughts.)
DataFactory is a private consortium whose owners, whoever they are, do very well; not a credit from the public purse is intentionally lavished if it’s in any way possible to claw it back. The moderators all use reconstructed keyboards, grey with finger-grime and the data storage devices crash daily because of the amount of meaningless junk stuffed into their limited capacities. There are still typewriters on the go, the whirring and crashing of which can now be read by data-sticks as text. Ranks of drones are jammed into their individual stalls, often walled in, either racking their brains or dreaming uncontrollably, which occasionally results in an excited shudder. (It’s all right. No one is looking.)
They conduct interviews using beaten-up tape recorders held together by sellotape, and afterwards everyone strains so hard to separate the dialogue from the hiss that you would think there was something worth hearing. And, for relief, most drones go once or twice a day to the other stalls, which are tiny and stink like a farm.
The line manager is Lentil, a man in whose soul there isn't enough light material for any spark of humour to catch. He has protruding eyes and a wispy beard. He is thin and stalks round the office like a heron. No one knows exactly what he does. Crabdale, by contrast, scurries round trying to deal with the piles of paper on his desk and weights on his mind, both accumulating. He takes pills for today's hectic lifestyles and hopes they'll prevent the spreading of the dry patches on his palms.
Nothing is ever mended or brought to completion here. It is a continual striving for an improved state of affairs no fool would dare spell out in any detail. For he would be howled down, and after the howling was over, everyone would sit awake in the early hours and grip their sheets.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
OLD WORLD CITY (2)
Beautiful, beautiful city and today is only the second cloudy one since I got here. And a warm (top floor), very central flat near the Parliament building and near work. So I've landed on my feet. The pay is, well, lamentable but a lot better than many professional Hungarians get. So, although I've had to tighten my belt, it's with a good grace. I may also be tightening it literally soon. Can't find all my usual ingredients, so I'm having to eat a bit less! So tempting to ditch my semi-veggie ways and have all the different sausages with the cheese and strange dark breads... it'd be easy peasy to eat that kind of Germanic breakfast every morning.
Things I'm looking forward to: "having a bath in a Cathedral" (the Gelert thermal baths) and playing chess in outdoor thermal baths on a cold winter day.
Beautiful, beautiful city and today is only the second cloudy one since I got here. And a warm (top floor), very central flat near the Parliament building and near work. So I've landed on my feet. The pay is, well, lamentable but a lot better than many professional Hungarians get. So, although I've had to tighten my belt, it's with a good grace. I may also be tightening it literally soon. Can't find all my usual ingredients, so I'm having to eat a bit less! So tempting to ditch my semi-veggie ways and have all the different sausages with the cheese and strange dark breads... it'd be easy peasy to eat that kind of Germanic breakfast every morning.
Things I'm looking forward to: "having a bath in a Cathedral" (the Gelert thermal baths) and playing chess in outdoor thermal baths on a cold winter day.
Monday, September 13, 2004
WAKING UP IN AN OLD WORLD CITY
When I lived in London, I'd been there so long I ceased to notice my surroundings anymore, and walking round the city was one long tuning out session. A day here in Budapest is different, a feast of impressions. I'm suddenly more awake to details and textures.
The first thing you notice is the decorated buildings in the centre. Carved on the facades of many of them are historical and mythological figures - the guide-book probably knows their identities; lions' heads and art nouveau motifs. The poster-covered pillars on the wide pavements and streetlamps suspended awkwardly between shabby buildings are distinctively European, and make it easy to imagine another era.
Taking the Metro is more fun too: it's a kind of looking-glass world where the different space and layouts of stations and all the indecipherable ads crowd out any sense of the familiar. (Plus it's cheap, clean and regular, so my frame of mind is altogether different.)
On a trip to Tesco's for marmite, I passed some Communist-era blocks of flats, the peeling walls of which, lit up by the Saturday morning sun, looked as bright and bleak as the surface of the moon.
When I lived in London, I'd been there so long I ceased to notice my surroundings anymore, and walking round the city was one long tuning out session. A day here in Budapest is different, a feast of impressions. I'm suddenly more awake to details and textures.
The first thing you notice is the decorated buildings in the centre. Carved on the facades of many of them are historical and mythological figures - the guide-book probably knows their identities; lions' heads and art nouveau motifs. The poster-covered pillars on the wide pavements and streetlamps suspended awkwardly between shabby buildings are distinctively European, and make it easy to imagine another era.
Taking the Metro is more fun too: it's a kind of looking-glass world where the different space and layouts of stations and all the indecipherable ads crowd out any sense of the familiar. (Plus it's cheap, clean and regular, so my frame of mind is altogether different.)
On a trip to Tesco's for marmite, I passed some Communist-era blocks of flats, the peeling walls of which, lit up by the Saturday morning sun, looked as bright and bleak as the surface of the moon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
