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5.

Post-Communist

Practice:

Valentina and Emir

Valentina Hasan: Ken Lee

Who is Valentina Hasan? Valentina Hasan is a Bulgarian who auditioned for Bulgarian Idol in February 2008. She told the jury that she was going to sing the Mariah Carey song “Ken Lee” (the song’s real name being “Without You”[1]). Valentina Hasan, a stumpy young woman in a cheap peach satin dress and glammy make-up, bravely sang the song in a completely unrecognizable language. To the jury’s snippy question about the language in which she was singing (as if Henry Higgins himself had appointed them!), Valentina, taken aback that they didn’t know, replied: “English.”[2] A video clip with Valentina Hasan’s appearance started doing the rounds on the Internet, and a regional war erupted on chat-forums soon thereafter. Bulgarian commentators distanced themselves from Valentina, claiming that she was Turkish, or maybe a Gypsy, but certainly not Bulgarian; the Macedonians and Turks jumped in and accused the Bulgarians of racism; the Greeks defended the Bulgarians and accused the Macedonians of themselves being “Gypsies” and having stolen the name Macedonia for their non-existent state. These anonymous outbursts, nationalist and racist, soon descended into a tedious Balkan soap opera that was comprehensible only to Bulgarians, Macedonians, Greeks, Turks, Serbs, and Roma. While all this was going on, a million-strong global audience watched “Ken Lee.” Within a month the clip had four million hits and Mariah Carey had tipped her hat to her Bulgarian imitator on French television. Valentina Hasan’s unexpected popularity forced the Bulgarian producers to invite her back for a repeat performance. Dolled up like a real star this time, Valentina sang the song in a slightly more comprehensible English, but to the audience’s delight performed the chorus in her mangled English as she had the first time. On their feet and holding hands, the audience joined Valentina for the chorus of “Ken Lee.” By the first half of May 2008 the video clip had thirteen million hits. Then a hit remix appeared. To this day Internet forums are full of people trying to imitate Valentina Hasan’s unique brand of English.

Valentina Hasan became much more that an ordinary karaoke singer. For a brief moment this anonymous young woman was a “princess.” A Bulgarian, whose appearance, figure, voice, and English had the jury rolling its eyes, won an unprecedented moral victory. Millions of YouTube viewers ruled in her favor.

Emir Kusturica: Drvengrad

Emir Kusturica is a Yugoslav film director with a deserved international reputation. On a hill called Mećavnik in southwestern Serbia, Kusturica has built his own town called Drvengrad or “Kustendorf.”[3] Drvengrad really has tongues talking. Few people in the world get to build their own Graceland, Neverland, or Brioni, and very rare indeed are those who get to raise a pyramid to themselves in their own lifetimes.

On a trip to Serbia in April 2009 a friend talked me into visiting Drvengrad. Built on the crest of a hill and with its own gate, Drvengrad is just like a medieval village, but visitors need to buy an entry ticket. Everything is made of wood, the ground covered in wooden decking, the scattered wooden houses connected by flights of wooden stairs. The houses themselves are perfect examples of wooden architecture. In Drvengrad there is a movie theatre named after Stanley Kubrick, a swimming pool, a cake shop, two or three restaurants, a souvenir shop (in which the only DVDs and CDs on sale are Kusturica’s films and their Goran Bregović-composed soundtracks), a library with a reading room, and an art gallery. The streets are named after Kusturica’s idols, including Matija Bećković (a Serbian poet and member of the Milošević-era political elite), Ivo Andrić, Bruce Lee, Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Maradona, Nikita Mikhalkov, and Jim Jarmusch. The restaurants and cake shop are named after Ivo Andrić characters or works (for example, “Aska and the Wolf” and “At Ćorkan’s”). I don’t think any of the street names are permanent; they change on Kusturica’s whim. All the signs are written in Cyrillic, so the names are lost to many visitors.

Kusturica has successfully managed to become not only the owner of a “feudal estate” built on protected public land, but also the director of a national park. He is both a private landowner and a high-ranking public servant. Expensive “ranger” jeeps line the car park. The uniformed park rangers look like a cross between bodyguards, security guards, and the “rangers” one sees in American films. Kusturica’s transport fleet also has a helicopter, which is often seen flying above the local peasants and Drvengrad’s many visitors. At the foot of the hill lie the renovated Jatare railway station and an excellent restaurant. With Kusturica’s helicopter nervously buzzing overhead, destroying the idyllic rural silence, my friend and I could barely exchange a word, let alone take a mouthful of our meals in peace. Kusturica has also put a short abandoned railway line into service. He doesn’t own the tracks, but they work for him. The train is a typical tourist attraction, and over a one-hour journey travelers complete a “figure 8” and enjoy the untouched beauty of the surroundings.

The peasants who live as neighbors to this modern and modish feudal estate complain about Kusturica. As soon as he finished building an entire village out of wood, in his capacity as director of the national park Kusturica banned the peasants from felling trees for firewood or building wooden houses like his own. “With the forests I safeguard, I am part of the oxygen you breathe” is what he told them. At least that’s what the Serbian papers reported. Others worship him, saying he’s “brought tourism” to a God-forsaken region and employed many locals to help build and maintain his “dream.” A friend recently crossed the border between Republika Srpska (the Serbian part of Bosnia) and Serbia proper and apparently had to pay a special toll for passage through Drvengrad National Park. The customs officers weren’t able to explain whether this little “tax” was enshrined in national law, a local council regulation, or a tithe payable to Kusturica himself.

There are a fair few things about Drvengrad that remain unclear, but Kusturica was obviously gifted his estate by the Serbian authorities. He publicly supported Milošević and passionately supported Vojislav Koštunica, effectively making him a supporter of the entire Serbian nationalist political and “entrepreneurial” elite. Kusturica has assets and revenue that directors of a similar international status can only dream of. At the same time he incessantly mouths off about liberalism being the scourge of the earth, and that art, honor, and spirituality matter, not money (woe is us when the market becomes the measure of all values!), railing against globalization, and publicly urging a return to nature. Judging by the earthworks and foundations being prepared for new houses, Drvengrad is set to expand down towards the foot of the hill.

As a true auteur Kusturica has played with concepts of the authentic and the fake. Not far from Drvengrad lies the museum village of Sirogojno, which was well-known in the former Yugoslavia and overseen by leading ethnologists. The village is home to many authentic wooden houses, an excellent souvenir shop (with carefully crafted replicas of village implements), and a restaurant with a modest selection of local dishes. Under the leadership of a number of fashion designers, the women of Sirogojno have for decades won international acclaim for their decorative sweaters, which are hand-knitted from local wool, and a special museum documents how the sweaters have made their way as far as Japan. Sirogojno has been deserted since Kusturica built Drvengrad. Today even school trips skip Sirogojno and head straight for Drvengrad. So the kids will get a sense of “authentic” village architecture.

Kusturica is a capricious ruler. Drvengrad has a prison, a little joke to amuse visitors I guess. The time I visited a painting of George W. Bush’s head hung behind the metal bars on the prison’s wooden doors. A glance at Bush’s head prompted a fleeting smile, and then an immediate feeling of unease. It occurred to me that, depending on Kusturica’s mood, anyone could (and can) end up there. The village has its own painter-in-residence, a full-time employee who works on the various wooden surfaces, changing details per Kusturica’s instructions. I assume there isn’t a special advisory board to decide on whom to symbolically imprison.

Kusturica is the absolute ruler of a village he himself invented, symbolically honoring people (with street names), symbolically imprisoning them, and symbolically burying them. The 2009 Kustendorf Film Festival opened with a spectacular funeral. The YouTube clip shows Kusturica demonstratively throwing a tape of the Bruce Willis film Die Hard into a wooden coffin, a burial of “cinematic rubbish,” with Kusturica’s No Smoking Orchestra bandmate Nele Karajlić in the role of priest, and a crowd of friends (some of them famous) and acquaintances standing in as mourners. During the later burial of Willis himself, an actor playing Willis bursts from the coffin, and in flames, flees into the distance, the burial candles having set his suit on fire. According to Kusturica this symbolic artistic gesture is meant to illustrate the apparent invincibility of the industry that produces “cinematic rubbish,” and that, given the inevitably of a new Die Hard sequel, again starring Bruce Willis, both will again need to be buried at next year’s festival.

Kusturica chooses his guests in accordance with his own political and artistic preferences. Among others, Nikita Mikhalkov (a Russian director, cultural oligarch, and key Putin supporter), Vojislav Koštunica, Peter Handke, and the young Japanese director Kokhi Hasei have all put in appearances. Hasei was so taken by his experience at Drvengrad that he converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church and was baptized in the village’s church of Saint Sava.

“I’ve created a place that looks like it was once inhabited. But it wasn’t,” said Kusturica in an interview. In another interview he says that he has created a mythical place in which the spirit of authorship will be reincarnated. Kusturica’s website is called Kustopedia and is “the online encyclopedia on the universe of Emir Kusturica.” He might not have dreamt up the name, but he surely approved it. Kusturica uses a hypermodern form (a fully-realized simulation game) and an antiquated authoritarian-utopian rhetoric (I invented a village; I built a mythical place; the reincarnation of the spirit of authorship, the universe of Emir Kusturica, Kustopedia).

Opposites

Valentina Hasan’s is a textbook case in popular culture. Culture is a living, active process; it develops from the inside and can never be imposed from the outside or from on high. Valentina Hasan is both an active consumer of this culture and a potential participant. She is a representative of the millions of people all over the world who not only communicate via popular culture, but who also increasingly control it. Television is today dominated by “reality” TV (variants of Big Brother), local and imported soap operas, and local and imported series (the majority being sit-coms). With transition cultures having adopted the infotainment model, real news and current affairs programming is very rare. Today untrained actresses not only act in soap operas, but also write and produce them, while memoirs and autobiographies are inevitably a by-product of the “celebrity business.” In Croatia an anonymous young man became famous for being the first man (at least in Croatia) to have his lips pumped with silicon. Today he is a celeb and hosts his own popular TV program. Even local models and porn stars have their own programs. The examples are simply too numerous to go into—and they are no longer the exception, they are the rule. The media—newspapers, television, the publishing industry, the Internet—live off these “automatic-for-the-people-pop-stars,” and these “people’s pop stars” live off the media, together shaping and controlling popular culture. As exemplified by Valentina Hasan, this culture is no longer confined within local borders. Transitional post-communist cultures no longer ape American and Western European formats. They are early adopters; they imitate, embrace, communicate, and participate, never missing a beat. Like Valentina Hasan, popular culture is ideology-free, an empty screen on which consumers and participants together locate and inscribe meaning. But Valentina Hasan is no Cinderella. Like the many Bulgarians who headed west in search of work following Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union, Valentina Hasan lives with her husband in Spain. Her unexpected popularity on Bulgarian Idol and the video clip that made its way around the world led to an appearance on Spanish television, where she impressed with her more than competent Spanish. As a consumer of popular culture, Valentina Hasan pushed all the right buttons: in the marketplace of popular culture everyone is welcome, everyone has the right to their five minutes of fame, and this five minutes of fame is a lottery—it all depends on the very second in which millions of people, themselves just like Valentina, choose their “star.” The first time, silicon pumped lips might do it, a second, poorly pronounced English, the third time it might be exceptional talent. Valentina owes her five minutes of fame to inadvertently breaking the rules (her mangled English), to the jury who appointed themselves linguistic authorities (everyone in the jury began their careers like Valentina), and, most of all, to the audience who recognized this. The carnivalization of imposed values and of authority has always been a driving force behind popular culture. Valentina, “the people’s princess,” inadvertently carnivalized a body of authority (a Bulgarian television jury), inadvertently knocked a “queen” (Mariah Carey, the queen of pop) from her pedestal, and then made one final gaff: like a modern Eliza Doolittle, she knocked the English language off its pedestal.

As opposed to Valentina Hasan, Emir Kusturica is not only a representative but also a champion of “high culture.” The Drvengrad project is very similar to computer simulation games such as SimCity (a “city building simulation game”); it’s as if Kusturica followed SimCity’s promotional catchphrase—“Design, build and run the city of your dreams.” With its toys for little boys—helicopters, rangers’ jeeps, a railway park and old train—in its very realization Kusturica’s Drvengrad resembles SimCity. Kusturica, however, is not a player of emancipatory-empowering computer games. He’s a different kind of player, a transition mutant, a modern version of the communist state artist par excellence. In Serbia this position was long reserved for Dobrica Ćosić, who, known to his friends (including Kusturica) as the godfather, was in Milošević’s time briefly president of “rump Yugoslavia” (consisting of the republics of Serbia and Montenegro). Kusturica is a new, neoliberal godfather, a landowner and entrepreneur, who has bundled his entrepreneurship into a personal ideological mishmash that includes anti-globalization, anti-liberalism, Serbian Orthodoxy as new spirituality, environmentalism, and the elitism of art. Kusturica could only realize his utopia with the help of the Serbian political and “entrepreneurial” mafia. He didn’t have a choice; he built it in Serbia. The kindly hearted will intone that every state has a mafia, and this is true. But in Serbia—and the same goes for Croatia, Bosnia, and several other countries in transition—the mafia has a state. And that’s how and why Kusturica has his Drvengrad.

Post-communist cultural practice blossoms between these two poles, between “Valentina” and “Emir”; between the ever more exuberant and dominant pop culture on the one hand and cultural representatives on the other, who, although they don’t have their own Drvengrad, have heads buzzing with ideas that are similar to Kusturica’s. There are the legions of “academics,” covered in historical dust, who every now and then let out an epileptic kick in the hope of reinstating the canon. There are writers who are retouching their self-images in the hope of winning back the audiences they lost in the historical change. And there are writers who have figured out that the media is king, who successfully combine roles (as writers of newspaper columns and owners of newspapers, as publishers and owners of publishing houses, as TV personalities and TV show hosts, as bloggers and “twitterers”), having taken lessons from the media strategies of politicians and pop stars. For this reason we needn’t bat an eyelid when we see the writer T. T. appear on Russian television dressed up as Catherine the Great (cosplay!), her wig clumsily falling on her sweaty forehead. Nor should we be surprised to see the respected Russian writer L. P., in her twilight years (she’s over 70), dressed up like a cabaret singer, performing her sad Edith Piaf karaoke. Nor should we worry when other prominent Russian writers use musical accompaniment (usually drums!) to liven up their showbiz-like appearances. And the last thing to startle us should be the Croatian writer V. R. practicing cosplay on television, appearing dressed up as a nun, a “woman in mourning,” or a “beaten woman,” visually underscoring whatever she has written or said.

Within the general karaoke culture, post-communist culture also wants the right to a voice. And that’s why we really shouldn’t be surprised that—just like Valentina—the aforementioned L. P. wanted to finally have her time under the bright lights, a right which, hand on heart, she truly deserves. The old dame woke from a dream, and having cottoned on that times have changed, she chose well: she went for a—hmm—“unique” karaoke gesture.

[1]The song isn’t actually a Mariah Carey song. It was written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans of the British band Badfinger, and first made famous by Harry Nilsson in 1972.

[2]Listening to a recording of the song Valentina noted down what she thought were the words. Here’s how her version of the chorus went:

Ken lee (I can’t live);

Tulibu dibu douchoo (If living is without you)

Ken Lee (I can’t live);

Ken Lee meju more (I can’t give anymore).

[3] Translator’s Note: In Croatian and related languages “drven” is the adjective for “wood,” and coupled with “grad,” which means town or city in many Slavic languages, “Drvengrad” roughly translates as “wooden town.” Kustendorf, on the other hand, pairs the (possesive) first syllable of Kusturica’s name with the German “dorf,” meaning “village.”