relative culture

really enthusiastic about the Mozart Requiem concert tonight and, consequently, quite dejected when confronted with the reality of every ticket having already being sold (i might have bypassed such by stopping to inquire/purchase on my way home, after work and meeting with David and Sara, but this is only a remote possibility).

since i'll most likely be called upon to discuss in the language of Culture (not to be mistaken with culture: small, everywhere, as it is) at some point in a near future, perhaps i ought to get started straightaway. which is to say: a fair bit of stereotyping running rampant as i assumed that i'd be able to obtain a concert ticket less than an hour before the opening strains and, even, that the hall would likely be unfilled. i might as well say that i thought they'd all (the natives, that is) be jump-dancing with the Turbofolk.

there was a time—and it was not altogether long ago (in years, and not ages)—when Jugoslavia could have been a single Continental stop, perhaps in a lifetime, and satisfactorily (superlatively) so. Beograd even, with its slightly Turkish (i mean Ottoman; i mean...i'm dodging and running away) allure, with the edifices now caked with a soot that, if removed, would collect again before you could say "Beautiful Serbia" (the English-language slogan of gauzy-draped restoration projects). there was a time, says Fantine, and it all went wrong.

but the people stayed, and only in part because there were no visas to be had, no money for travel—because the rest of the world believed that antagonists play their own violins (the specificities of "tortured subjects" had long since been forgotten). those who remained, in drawn and wired borders, held onto clothes of fur and black, so when the orchestra tuned up again they could shake dust from imploded buildings off the high shoes kept shiny, when the museum and opera buildings re-opened they would buy tickets as though the torch-center of Europe had neither been swept up by a relay of swift and tirelessly westbound sprinters nor left, through seismic activity, for vacuous.