You have to be hungry......Just a few minutes before we had to decided if we should to go eat in Okucani or in the barracks of the NepBat (the UN soldiers from Nepal who are "protecting" the southern part of UNPA west) in Pustra near the famous highway of Unity and Brotherhood (they are famous for their spicy food). After we checked out the menu in what can be called the restaurant we decided not to eat warm food at all (with 4 vegetarians it is hard to get a meal on the day before the "pig-killing holiday" (30 November, the former National day in former Yugoslavia), if it is easy at all in this area, but that is another story). We turn right on to the highway, or rather we hope we are on it, since we can't see any different between the road and the fields around it, it looks if UNPROFOR finally have find a way to camouflage their cars (UN cars are white). Kristoff, from Sweden, who is the among other things the driver the "peace circus" has a hard time to keep his bus on the what we think is the track.
At that moment I put on the "ghetto blaster" and we hear the strong dark rapid bass driven music with also accompanied me about 2 and half years (August '91) on another highway. That day we were in other bus, also the only travelers on the road, untill a convoy of tanks with red stars comes from the upper site side to occopy the television tower of Vilnius as we heard later. Just a two weeks before that we danced on the same music together with the soldiers for a few hours on their tanks in their barracks, during an anti-militaristic action we organised on "Hiroshima day" on our yearly Ecotopia, which was that year in Estonia. Yes it was the same music which brought us home through the coupe in the USSR (However that is another story).
In the spring of that year, during Earth Day, I walked through the old part of Praha and out of the loudspeakers, which in those days still were at every street corner the voice of the pope send his blessing over the town, I couldn't hear it most of the time, since through the headphone of my walkman came music from a cassette I bought five years before in Maribor. The music remind me on those first days of the velvet revolution, dark, dangerous and at the same time sparks of hope (but that is surely another story).
The other people in the "peace" bus also knows the songs, at least the music, since the lyrics are still, also for me after more than 20 months in this area mostly a complete mistery. Still we shout along and so we drive as South pole explorers through the white landscape, behind our bus we produce a massive snow storm (a film taken from a helicopter should have been fantastic, especially if you could hear the music).
Humming along with "Lanci Franz", since that is the band which produced all this sounds, we leave "Srpski Krajina" and confuse two local police cops, who were freezing in thier car on the highway near Novska. 4 "hippies" in a yellow Swedish bus, coming from a road which is closed, in a snow storm, with Slovenia music and four different pasports, what is anyway normal around here. The police guys take our pasport and my UN certificate and drive a few times around the bus, making piroette's in the snow with their car.
After about 20 minutes they decided that we are at least "normal" enough to enter Croatia again, after our driver has shown that he really is a juggler (and one police guy had said that he is also a juggler, but with kinderjaja's (children eggs (handgrebade's)), but that they could better have asked in Kutina, Lipik, Pakrac, Japaga and Okucani, where children wet their pants from laughing. And the grandmothers and mothers in Japaga and Okucani kissed (something you get use to, when you drive drive aid transport into the UNPA's and Bosnia, but which is in a way every time not making me feeling happy, I can't help that I haven't been born here, but 2500 Km away from here and therefor capable to do this, nothing special) them to thank them for the food, they took with them over the cease-fire and which they got from the Argentinian UNPROFOR soldiers (since we started 6 months ago together with International volunteers and the locals to rebuild the second heaviest destroyed town of Croatia the relation with the UNPROFOR is getting better all the time), who are not allowed to give it to locals themselves. But that are other stories.
A few days later I stand with Vesna in the tram in the because of the snow Zagreb is declared disaster area, a guy asked me something in local languages, since he see me reading Feral Tribune, but I as always don't understand a word. "Sorry" he replies in English and explained that he was searching for the concert of what he says is the best band from Slovenia ("There is always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area" Wavy Gravy said on Woodstock years before). Vesna recognise him as a guy from Sarajevo, who we met in the spring from last year during the concert "for the children who died in the wars", which the ARK (AntiWar Campaign) organised in Maksimir. "Which best band", I asked him and how could it be different, yes it was the one and only "Hungry Guy" (their name translated in English). Although we were tired enough to sleep for at least 2 days we decided to show the guy the place and join the concert oursleves, it has been 5 years ago that they played here in the Zagreb for the last time (and for me it is even longer ago that I have seen them).
"I have the honour to present you the first band, which comes from another republic, which is now abroad" or something like that, the guy with grey hears and moustache says, who I know from all those Saturday night television evenings on HTV. A couple of minutes before an American girl promised me a few thousand juggling balls, but also that is another story. This story is about "Lacni Franz" and their first performance after the war started in Croatia.
But before this really happened we had to wait for at least an hour more than what the poster on the door promised us, but what the hack I have learned to wait in this part of the world, and at least this time I know where I am waiting for, and that is not always so clear. They start with a song in the old tradition, after a crate of beer is brought on stage, a love song how a girl occupied a boy or the otherway round (somebody translated me years ago), but that "occupied" (the song is called "okuperera" or something like that) give at this time in history a totally another feeling in my head, I love this guys.
Yes, what to say, if you can remember the sixties, you weren't really there, the guitar player of "Jefferson Airplane" said ones and that what it is, it was "Lacni Franz", only they looked a lot older and fatter than the last time (and the public a lot younger) and drunk a lot less on stage than I remembered, but that was maybe because it was "Tuborg" and not "Union" (but also that is another story), for the rest I thought we needed that beer harder then them, since the place was cooking. And than back into cold Zagreb, but some how this music always keeps following me, and rather it is always in a situation from which the rest of the world says that it is booiling over, for me however it always had to do something with "Praslavan" ("the old Slaves"), in the former USSR, former CSFR and former ..., but also that is another story.
Zagreb, night 1 to 2 December
Wam
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