The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 3)

Part 3

We awoke on the second day to a brass band right outside our bathroom window. This would be our wake-up call every morning around nine, as our street apparently had been designated as the rehearsal area for bands before they performed on stage. I learned that the first time you awake hungover in Serbia to the sounds of ‘Ederlezi’ (a traditional favorite), the experience is novel and wonderful. All times thereafter, it is no longer novel and exponentially less wonderful. But what never lost its appeal was stepping out on the porch in the warm morning sunlight and finding a freshly deposited plastic sack full of homemade cheese pies and washing them down with the inaugural shots of slivovic.

Homemade Serbian slivovic, the plum brandy I've also been calling rakija, is one of the great pleasures of life in Serbia and one that I have found difficult to replicate here in the States. After having tried commercially made slivovic in Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, and a Hungarian brand imported to the U.S. and found them all wanting, I learned that most Serbs get their slivovic homemade, either from the plum trees on their own land or from a friend or family members. The only danger in this: you, too, might take to greeting the morning with a few shots.

The second day of the festival took us farther afield culinary-wise. Ketchup and mayonnaise packets laid to rest, we made for endless grilled meat stands, where dozens of lambs and suckling pigs were being slow-roasted on spits. There a little illusion in this manner of cooking as one sees exactly what one is eating. And while seeing an animal corpse impaled on an iron spike from mouth to anus slowly turning over a fire may not aesthetically please or appetize some, I found the sight admittedly seductive, especially given the taste of the meat, which came as chunks on platters, cevapcici (little torpedoes of ground meat) in pita, and burger patties on buns. To adorn the flesh, each stand had a buffet of grilled peppers and onions, fresh tomatoes, tapenades, and sauces.

Noam, Marissa, and I became devoted patrons of these stands over the weekend. Aaron and Jesse had it tougher. Eating vegetarian in Guca, Serbia is no easy feat. Theoretically, given the presence of bread and the vegetable buffet, it should have been easy. But the trick was in communicating to the man behind the grill in hand gestures what one wanted, which was to him unthinkable. With impeccable pointing and loudly spoken English, Aaron and Jesse engaged in hilarious, occasionally successful, attempts to order a meat sandwich without the meat. Jesse, in his willingness to play the fool, was more persistent and often convinced the man to throw a pepper on the grill, albeit with a disgusted look on his face.

We passed the day in various diversions with dueling brass bands providing the score. At one edge of town was a carnival run by gypsies, where we spent a good hour riding bumper cars, careening into children while trying to keep our 64 ounce pivos intact. And then, strangely, after leaving the carnival, Aaron, Marissa, and I came across a mechanical bull in the middle of a field. The only people around were two supermodel cowgirls from MB whom we had seen the first night at the club.

“You want ride bull, please?” they asked in coquettishly broken English, after their pitch in Serbian earned them blank stares.

I generally leap at the opportunity to make a fool of myself, and Marissa is always up for an athletic challenge. Aaron might have declined under different circumstances, but beautiful women rouse a deep servility in him not otherwise apparent. He would have straddled an elderly man if they had suggested it.

Despite hailing from Kansas, where mechanical bull-riding is a required course in most school districts, I was no match for Marissa, who showed an alarming prowess. But she was nowhere as good as Aaron was bad. Somehow, as soon as Aaron climbed in the saddle, the empty field filled with gypsy urchins, who must have sensed the impending spectacle of a portly man on a mechanical bull. But rather than throw him from the saddle, the bull, once enlivened, instantly dumped Aaron off its back onto the ground, as though that was it had been invented for—like a dump truck unloading potatoes when the lever is pulled. The urchins cheered, Marissa and I took pictures, and, lo and behold, the Serbian cowgirls were charmed.

We recovered at a sidewalk café where a gypsy children’s band played. Even the bandleader was no more than ten years old, but he exuded the air of a lounge lizard from Havana circa 1950. His hair was slicked back and perfectly parted on the side. He wore a double-breasted white suit jacket with oversized shoulder pads, pleated and heavily tapered gray-check pants, and white leather loafers. And, the trumpet, which was nearly half his size, he played with a passion that seemed almost as ridiculously beyond his years as his dress.

That night was the headline concert of the festival—the Boban Markovic concert. Boban Markovic is in many ways responsible for bringing Balkan brass band music to the world. A gypsy from southern Serbia, he has become an international celebrity and continual presence on the world music festival circuit and anthology album releases. Boban Markovic is so good, he doesn’t even compete anymore. Whereas the other twenty bands that are invited to perform on the stage at Guca are all vying for the prizes of Best Orchestra, Best Concert, and the most coveted, Golden Trumpet, for single best musician, Boban Markovic and his Orkestar have long since won all these prizes. In fact, Boban is the only musician at Guca ever to have received five perfect 10s from the judges. Now having passed a significant share of his band-leading and soloing duties off to his son Marko Markovic, Boban is just along for the ride.

The 11-piece Boban Markovic Orkestar took the stage dressed in angelic white vests. Looking like Gabriel’s heavenly entourage, they proceeded to unleash the passions and furor of hell. To say that everyone danced like crazy is misleading. Dancing is not the right word to describe the complete surrender of control and joyous dissolution that Boban’s trumpets induced in thousands of rakija-drenched brains huddled together in a common pursuit. Convulsion strikes me as more apt, reminiscent of those medieval outbreaks of St. John’s and St. Vitus Dance, where a whole village would suddenly fall into a fit of uncontrollable dancing for days at a time. The only effective cure for the epidemic seems to have been music—which raises an interesting question. What if dancing came first, as a sort of pathological seizure, and music developed as a way to alleviate the sickness of dancing?

Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trying to convey the Dionysian rapture induced in the audience of Greek tragedy, an art form he saw as essentially musical, also furnished the analogy of physical intoxication. He wagered that the Dionysian experience of total self-dissolution arose “either through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive races speak in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets himself completely.”

But for Nietzsche, who allegedly (if we are to believe his Turinese landlady) liked to cut the rug privately in the nude, dancing to music was a sickness to be embraced, akin to religious experience:

"Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances. Each of his gestures betokens enchantment; through him sounds a supernatural power, the same power which makes the animals speak and the earth render up milk and honey. He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dream. No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art."

And, indeed, by the end of the concert, the sweat streaming down our divine canvases, we saw before us the true aesthetic masterpiece of 21st-century cosmopolitanism, a hybrid even headier than Nietzsche’s fusion of the Apollonian and Dionysian— a French hippie sporting a chetnik hat and waving a giant Serbian flag.