A Man, A Plan, A Camera

Yes, it's time for an update on that serious event on the Budapest calendar... Sziget!

This year I shall be mostly not going to Sziget (if it's not already over it will be shortly) - at least compared to other years when Sziget was a week-long festival: this year it is only 5 days and we only went for two... but it was 14 hours the first day and ~11 hours the second. We get our money's worth!

So, off we go... first the natty sunglasses courtesy of Iguana...














Then a nod to the strong European influence everywhere these days... the "European Urban Art Centre..."




















But, what I really came for was the music. Thank you Dylan for observing - indirectly - that I have the musical tastes of a paleontologist as the bands I wanted to see - the Sex Pistols and R.E.M. - were "dinosaurs".

A well preserved fossil is shown below, a specimen of Rottenus Johannii, if I am not mistaken

Way back when Mr Rotten was vociferous in his belief that there was "No future" - 30 years on the failure of his initial prediction does not deter him from its endless repetition. Is it perhaps post-ironic nihilism - with a twist? Are we still vacant? Did god only save The Queen because the Pistols asked him to? We shall never know. It's been a fun 30 years... punk, war, new romantic, war, retro, war, other stuff, and more war. And through it all, Johnny Rotten - a veritable icon of stability and the establishment.














And then, a propos of nothing much, there is the strange, but so typically French attitude to dogs to report... "If your dog is lost..." it says beneath the "Found-again Dogs" headline [Query: if "lost and found" is "objets trouves", why do dogs get to be retrouve'd? eh?]

But that's a side issue. Note the phrasing beneath the headline. Not, you notice, "If you have lost your dog" but if your dog "is lost"... as in "temporarily uncertain of position" to use the aviator's euphemism, or bewildered by the absurdity of a world in which people stand on sticks (see below) instead of fetching them. If either of these apply to your dog - or other companion animal - I suggest you buy it a satnav and/or discourage it from reading Sartre and Camus.

This next snap sequence began with "Does the moon look odd to you...?" (and went on, obviously, to "Ooh! Look! Something is eating the moon! Maybe Ragnarok is coming!"


But it's not all linguistic and astronomical fun here at Sziget; when walking on the ground is just too easy why not stick yourself three feet above the ground (~1m). Takes some getting used to but there is more than a little satisfaction in this generally pointless exercise... it's just fun! Must think about a unicycle sometime.

But now, back to the music...

The REM main-event on the main stage - enhanced by the coincidental partial eclipse of the moon - was somewhat diminished for me by the cold. Friday it had been scorchingly hot (38C) and so on Saturday (despite 60% chance of rain... which never materialised) I went again in shorts and short-sleeved shirt in expectation of hot-wet and occasional sheltering in marquees and other beer dispensing locations; as it happened it was cold-dry, and by 22:30 my teeth were chattering.

Still, got to sing "Losing my religion" with 20-30 thousand others.












We did branch out into other musical genres. Apocalyptica is a fine upstanding Finnish, er, band of some description - three long-haired, Finnish rock-gods playing cover versions of Metallica (and Grieg) on cellos. Damn good actually - go and see them if you get a chance. And then Punish Yourself a fine upstanding French group with bare-breasted fire dancer cum angle-grinder workbench. Then there was Mass Hysteria - also French (Ah! Que les francais adorent Le Rock!) - with lots of energy and a willingess to take on all comers... Bush, Sarkozy, the EU etc. etc. etc.











What else?

Oh yes - bungee-cord ballet courtesy of a rather spectacular show called Carillon 3. It begins with a bungee-monolith...













Dancers arrive dangling from the large crane I had noticed parked suspiciously nearby and then proceeded to do all sorts of contortions on, in and around the monolith...
























occasionally with umbrellas.




















And that as they say, is nearly all there is to say apart from the fun to be had on the rock-your-own-boat thingie (no pics yet)... the Vietnamese water-puppet-theatre... the outsize table & charis and crib (thanks to the anonymous Frenchman for the show...), hats (of course), and last, but not least, the kinetic sculptures near the Luminarium (which we've seen before so didn't bother to endure the enormous queue for this year - but if you get a chance, go see it...)

Sziget in Pictures

Naughty silly people - English? Mais oui!















Doing the Ka-Mate haka


















On location for Dr Who and the Attack
of the Saxophone Creatures

There were two of them... the Stuff of Nightmares

















Sziget on Sea















Cheapskates: you had to pay to do wrestling in
chocolate elsewhere on site; mud wrestling you
can do for free...













The Magic Flute Ballet - with Segways... just what Mozart had in mind I'm sure...

Actually, they can be quite cool when used like this.

Flamenco ballet - now that was cool

Sziget 2007 - Day 3 - Pink Wet Madness

On the third day we moved less and spent more time around the main stage.

We caught the last half of Gogol Bordello (Ukrainian fronted US band) whose lead singer heaped imprecations on the crowd to party harder "I was born just across the street - you're not fooling me!", then came Laurent Garnier- godfather of French techno.

He got off to a fine, banging start, semi-reluctantly agreed he had to play the old gold, such as "Crispy Bacon" which was excellent, then gave a metaphorical Gallic shrug and went his own way again; which is to say that after three pretty dull tracks Laurent and I parted company.

Pink put on a good show, but nothing to write home about.

However... Madness headlined tonight, and all though the crowd wasn't quite up to Chemical Brothers density, it was noticeably bigger than when Pink was on stage. Suggs now seems to look like Colonel Jack O'Neill in his cool shades - but alas I have no photos to support this claim, and Suggs' potential sang-froid in the face of a Gua'uld attack is largely irrelevant here.

Appearances notwithstanding the show was the Madness I was hoping for - and the rest of the crowd loved it too spite the fact that less than 1% of the crowd could possibly remember them from their heyday. There were plenty of the famous hits - Baggy Trousers, Our House, Madness, It Must Be Love, One Step Beyond, etc. etc. etc. - and plenty of energy, both on an off stage.

At the time, it was quite dry. I've always called Sziget "Glastonbury without the mud", but that is not always true. Yesterday the weather delivered on the BBC's 5-day forecasted "light showers" (sort of), but seemed to overlook any commitment to thunderstorms today... until sometime after midnight.

Noemi particularly wanted to see Eszenyi Eniko at the Dance and Theatre Tent around midnight. She (not Noemi - or the tent) is a 40-something Hungarian singer, who, as soon as she picked up the mic struck me as merely a would-be Hungarian Marlene Dietrich, and since we were in the standing-room-only area I decided to skip the tedium of listening to songs I couldn't understand and went outside.

Well, there was lots of laughter from inside; the Marlene Dietrich thing was just that - a Marlene Dietrich thing to start the show, which was full of hilarious songs mostly about the various shortcomings (and in at least one case longcomings) of men... or so I am told. She certainly wowed the crowd - just her and her piano accompanist - for nearly two hours.

Two long hours.

Two long and increasingly wet hours

I started outside with a coffee and a cigarette. It started to rain. I stood under a tree. It started to rain harder; people walked faster. There was a flash of light. Ah. Lightning. Tree. Not a good place to be standing.

So I wandered back to the small entrance shelter of the Dance and Theatre Tent. The planking above had a narrow crack which meant that the 1.5m of space that was sheltered was divided into two zones by a curtain of water. I chose the wider, front section.

More people jammed in. I gazed at the blossoming storm and did my "let's have some lightning over.... there" finger-pointing trick; but nothing happened... at least not immediately.

A short while later, just in the appointed place a real doozy of a lightning bolt flashed through the sky. It didn't zig, it didn't zag, it just came down - did a small left, right, right, left U-section and carried on with a lovely bright white and yellow neon flash. And then there was a loud bang. Woo hoo! The lighnting show was on!

Under the tent's porch, some sat on the metal scaffolding, arses on the rails, feet on the ground. Unfortunately I don't know enough Hungarian to be able to say "Lightning is dangerous" let alone "Although the metal will provide a low resistance path to earth, some current is still going to flow through you if you keep your feet on the floor", so I just tried not to think about lightning striking anywhere close.

Sometime later, I shifted my feet and they got wet. The earth beneath them had become a puddle about 4cm deep while I had been standing there and all had been well until I created a wave that over-topped the waterproof part of my trainers. Yeucch!

To escape the rising waters many snuck into the back of the tent where they just metaphorically kicked their heels while waiting for the show/rain to end or, in the case of one small group of Hungarians and one larger group of Americans, they talked loudly.

In the case of the Americans they talked very loudly. Archetypally loudly. So loudly in fact they were almost shouting to each other - I'm sure they could be clearly heard on stage - despite the fact that they could have used normal voices, and that anyone with any consideration would have been whispering even though a normal voice would probably have been OK, but for some a normal voice is clearly a loud voice.

I was tempted to go over and say "I do apologise - I missed the beginning of the performance. Would it be a terrible imposition if I were to ask you to start your conversation again?" But I had the feeling the Speech Volume and Irony Appreciation were probably inversely proportional.

So, I am now going to be very rude about the Americans who aren't my dear and wonderful friends because this bunch were arrogantly obnoxious (the Hungarians were, by comparison, merely annoying). It's strange - some nations are collectively as nice as they are individually, such as the Japanese, Welsh and French (as long as they're not Parisians), whereas others, unfortunately including both the English and Americans are just ghastly. Oh, let's not forget the Israelis as some of the loudest mouths on the planet either.

However, to return to the pizza-obsessed, loud-mouthed, inconsiderate cretins in the tent and others of their ilk...

What do you call an American without an arsehole? Shit for brains.

Yeah, I like that - stiletto humour: stylish, pointy, subtle...

What do you call an American with an arsehole? Mr Vice President.

I thank you.

The performance came to an end eventually, but the rain didn't. Noemi got the green cagoule, I got the mat to drape over my head. We got wet as we trudged back to the entrance to Obudai island (that's "Sziget" - sziget just means "island"), and wetter as we stood waiting for the bus, which however at least dropped us with a few hundred meters of home and a nice dry bed.

And it was also good.

Sziget 2007 - Day 1 - No Haka, No Power

This week I shall be mostly eating junk food and drinking beer - because Sziget is here!

I meant to write this immediately, but it's now Day 3 and already things are becoming hazy!

We arrived in time for the Maori dance workshop at 13:30 by the Afro-Latin stage, but they didn't. No surprise there - it is after all a long way to New Zealand and it only takes one airline hiccough to derail a carefully organised itinerary (lovely mixed metaphor!)

...and now, seven days later I can't remember a damn thing about today, except it was hot, I drank a lot of beer, and in the middle of a concert at the World Music Stage the power went out during Salif Keita's concert so it looked like this.

It came back in bits and pieces a few minutes later, but it was a bit flaky. It came, it went. One of the backing singers put on one woman show of dance while the band played acoustically, and eventually the lights came on again and Salif Keita returned.

He started singing but his mic wasn't working. So after a minute of frustration and (I suppose frantic back-stage activity) when no sound emerged he flounced off stage never to be seen again.

Turns out it wasn't just this stage - seems a lot of places on the island lost power. Rumour has it that there was a slight underestimation of the power requirements and a consequently a rather big blown fuse.

Sometime after midnight the late bus home; 300Ft to get dropped (if the driver is amenable) about 200m from home, or if not quite so amenable, about 400m... not bad.

That was it for day one. Must have done lots of other things but I have no idea what they were.

Sziget 2007 - Day 2 - Haka, Kaizers Orchestra and The Chemical Brothers

On the second day I fulfilled an ambition: I finally got the chance to do the Haka today thanks to Te Matarae I Orehu Maori Dance Group and Wetini Mitai-Ngatai, their leader - choreographer who has been helping to preserve Maori tradition and garnered considerable respect for his efforts - and deservedly so.

I've been to New Zealand numerous times (though not since 2000, now I think about it)- beautiful place, fantastic people. The first few trips were business trips (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch) but the rest were pure pleasure - though it was on the very first trip that I took a week off to drive back across North Island - stopping off at Rotorua, Mt Ruapehu, and so on along the way for thermal parks, spas and a spot of skiing.

Since then my interest in Maori tradition developed in the course of researching IT; I have a wonderful book called The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori by Elsdon Best in which the traditional knowledge of the "Whanau Marama" - "the children of light" (i.e. the heavenly bodies) was recorded at the beginning of the 20th century; sadly, even then much of the oral traditional knowledge was already lost.

As a tiny illustration of how central astronomical lore was to the Maori (due in no small part to its importance in navigation) consider this lullaby (Best, p5)

I haere mai koe i te ao o Puanga
I te Huihui o Matariki
I a Parearua, i a Poutu-te-rangi
Ka mutu, e tama, nga whetu homai kai ki Aotea

Translation: You come hither from the realm of Rigel, from the Assembly of the Pleiades, from Jupiter and from Poutu-te-rangi [Altair: Best p33]. These alone, O child, are the stars which provide food at Aotea [Great Barrier Island - see wikipedia]

Outside New Zealand, Haka, meaning "words of fire" or "fiery words" (Ha - breath, hence speech, words; ka - fiery), is probably best known by the intimidatory performance of a war haka by the All Blacks rugby team before the start of a game.

According to Wetini Mitai-Ngatai, the whole purpose of the eye rolling, tongue poking and face pulling is to make oneself appear as mad/hungry/fierce as possible - and thus "the uglier the better", so he was naturally very complimentary about my efforts.

What we leant was the Ka Mate haka - Wetini Mitai-Ngatai taught us the movements, the words and the story a piece at a time and so in the course of about half an hour we put it all together and finally performed the whole thing with members of Te Matarae I Orehu Maori Dance Group mingled among the great unwashed who make Sziget what it is. It was a fantastic 45 minutes.

So, after working up a bit of a sweat and getting the adrenalin flowing (we did some Maori martial arts practice games too) it was time to get on with the rest of the day...

Today's unexpected find was the Norwegian rock band Kaizers Orchestra on the main stage (direct links to MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube). They opened the show on the nagyszinpad but should have headlined on some other day instead in my opinion - they easily outclassed some of the other supposed top-draw artists.

Of course, by the time The Chemical Brothers were due on stage at 21:30 the space in front of the main stage was completely full - by which I mean completely full, and considering that it's a space of at least 40,000 square meters the crowd seemed easily 50,000 strong (it looked huge, but the whole capacity of the island is only 70,000 and they definitely weren't all there - just most of them).

Unfortunately, there had been a few of what the BBC had anticipated as "light showers" but which turned out to be short but torrential downpours during the day - necessitating periodic retreat to whatever tented beer pavilion was closest... bummer!) - so whilst not quite up to Glastonbury standards, the ground underfoot was a bit damp and squelchy in places by now. This meant rivers of people skirting large puddles on the way in and trying to keep to the metal sheet areas once they got there (or at least avoiding the major pools).

Excellent show of course. What else can I say?

We caught some Lead Zeppelin on the Blues Stage later - the lead singer looked a bit like a gay Dom Deluise but he had a pretty good Jimmy Page substitute voice.

We probably went to the Roma tent for some gypsy music, but I'm damned if I can tell you who we might have heard.

And it was good.