Last week’s post got me thinking about some of the strange, beautiful, and funny Hungarian words I have come across. I have compiled a brief, but by no means comprehensive, list of my favorites, in no particular order. For a guide to Hungarian pronunciation check here.
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért: means because of your holier-than-thou attitude, and allegedly the longest existing Hungarian word, though I seem to remember a word that has to do with cabbage that is similar in length. Anybody dare to count the suffixes here? Ten?
pitypang, pünkösdirózsa: flower names are great in Hungarian. Dandelion and peony respectively.
vízicsikó: means seahorse. Of course, when translating seahorse into Hungarian for two young new students, I made the mistake of calling it a vízicsikló, which roughly translates as a sea-clit.
csecsebecse: one of the first words I learned in Hungarian, and I still get a kick out of saying it. Csecsebecse is the collective term for knick-knacks. Say it out loud, it's fun!
link alak: lazybones, good-for-nothing. Well understood in these parts.
ölni: Hungarians have few homonyms, but the ones they have are very telling. This is the verb for killing as well as the noun for one's lap. Ölel means to hug or embrace: dangerously close to the verb for killing. In the same category is paradicsom, which means both paradise and tomato.
arcátlan, szemtelen: literally faceless and eyeless, but both mean obnoxious or insolent.
lurkó, rajkó: the first is a street urchin, the later a Gypsy street urchin.
palimadár: a sucker bird, or just a sucker. There is one hatched every minute, I’m told.
csaj,csávó: slang adopted from the Lovári Gypsy dialect. Girl and boy respectively.
házisárkány: literally, a house-dragon; figuratively, a woman who is overly dominant around the house. Also in this category is the papucsférj, or slipper husband, a man who is henpecked. The papucsférj is quite the opposite of the házisárkány, but somehow they get along well together.
smárolni: slang, means to make out.
kolbászolni, lekenyerezni: two verbs created from food-related base words. Kolbász is sausage, but to kolbász, means to wander around. Kenyér is bread, but to bread somebody down, is to bribe them.
Elefántcsontpart: Even the Hungarian announcers at the last World Cup got a kick out of the translation of the Ivory Coast: literally Elephant Bone Coast. Even better: elefántcsonttorony, which is an ivory tower, or, an elephant bone tower. If that is not evocative language, what is?
Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.
“It should be against the law to mock somebody who tries his luck in a foreign language.” So begins Chico Buarque’s novel Budapest. It’s a winning opening line, both disarming and knowing, especially when read by somebody who has tried to learn Hungarian, “the only tongue the devil respects.”
To learn a foreign language, especially one so different from English as Hungarian, takes a certain leap of faith, a willingness to participate in a mode of expression that appears to have been rearranged and, in many cases, dissected and reassembled. It takes a similar leap of faith to enjoy Buarque’s novel, in which stories unpack themselves like Chinese boxes, and realities and narratives are constantly shape-shifting, challenging and undermining whatever presumptions the reader has already anchored themselves to.
The story begins when the Brazilian narrator’s plane is waylaid in Budapest after a bomb scare. As a ghost-writer and linguist, he becomes immediately enchanted with the Hungarian language and Budapest itself. On the most simplified level, the story follows the path of the narrator, Jose Kosta, (Josef K?) on his path to fluency in Hungarian, after breaking with his wife and falling in love with his language teacher. But nothing is so easy in Budapest, as Kosta observes of the language, “he had no way of knowing where each one (word) began or finished. It was impossible to detach one form the next; it would be like trying to cut a river with a knife.”
Like Budapest’s körút(s), the language is circular: base words are stacked with suffixes and prefixes that hang off them like weights on an unwieldy barbell. The characters’ destinies run the same circular route: histories, texts, and relationships bleed into each other until the reader is not sure if Kosta can be trusted as a narrator, or if he is the narrator at all.
In one phantasmagoric sequence reminiscent of Victor Pelevin (who I have brought up before in this blog: he is the ‘thinking man’s’ Murakami), a night of drinking turns into a potential ménage-à-trois, then morphs into a game of Russian roulette, then a robbery, then back into a night of drinking. Buarque stays with the scene only long enough for us to think we have a grip on its reality before he pulls the rug out from under our feet. Buarque, a composer and writer, wisely keeps his actual observations and use of Hungarian to a minimum (which led me to suspect he doesn’t actually speak Hungarian, though perhaps he simply doesn’t want to confound the reader further with its utter strangeness). But then he floors you with an occasion description like the following, “Seeing Hungarian in words for the first time, I felt as though I was looking at their skeletons: ö az álom elötti, talajon táncol.” Or “I couldn’t distinguish the words, so I knew it was Hungarian.”
In the same way every New Yorker inhabits a different city, with its own individual, constantly changing landmarks and signifiers, Kosta’s Budapest is not to be taken too literally: he employs made-up names, cigarette brands, street names, literary societies, and hungaricum (perhaps accidentally-on-purpose referring to Tokaj wine as Tajok wine). We know to take it all with a grain of salt when Kosta is both ghost-writing poetry for a has-been Hungarian poet and correcting locals on their grammar. Kosta’s Budapest is not my Budapest, just as his story, in the end, is not even his story.
Because of Kosta’s occupation as a ghost-writer, ownership of the text is a theme that is constantly returned to throughout the book. Indeed, a writer for whom he has ghost-written a book uses that very book to seduce Kosta’s own wife away from him. Like Jim Crace’s Genesis, and to a lesser degree, Arthur Philips' Prague, or even better, like having a friend from out of town come visit, it is a thrill to experience Budapest through somebody else’s eyes, to see it reinvented, even if that invention does not conform to your own. Budapest is a pleasing, occasionally perplexing read: like the Hungarian language, it is potent and fluid, but then again, so is nitro-glycerin.
Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.
It appears that the economic downturn has affected even the very rich, who are now buying their wheels by bulk (but still pay extra for a plastic bag to carry it home in).
Once there was a dusty, grey city in the middle of a flat countryside, where almost anything went: prostitution was tacitly legal, white slavery was common practice, bunkos angled for your gambling money, tax-dodging was a local pastime, and corruption from organized crime reached the highest levels of municipal government. A hit could be put out on a rival for a pocketful of change, delivered by thugs who congregated around popular nightspots. Sound familiar? Welcome to Chicago before the turn of the twentieth century.
Of course this could also be modern-day Budapest. There are more general similarities between the two cities as well: both lie in the center of vast swaths of agricultural regions, both are waning industrial hubs, and both have experienced, at one point in their history, influxes of German and Polish immigration. There is a working-class feeling common to Chicago and Budapest, despite growing prosperity. More importantly, both cities wallow in their underdog status, and compensate with inflated local pride and grandiose architecture. In hearing how the daredevil Hungarian construction workers defied safety regulations in erecting the Megyeri Bridge, I couldn’t help but think of the perils of creating, not to mention riding, the first Ferris wheel, invented for Chicago as a landmark for the 1893 World’s Fair, or the completion of the world’s first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building on LaSalle.
Even at the most visceral level, upon arriving in Budapest for the first time, I felt it shared a kinship with my hometown. There was a gracious decay to the buildings’ facades, particularly in District VII and VIII, that harmonized with my memories of Wrigleyville and Uptown in the 1980s. It was gratifying to learn that a particular section of District VIII was referred to as Chicago, for its shady reputation and criminal element. And, lucky me, for the first several years in Budapest I lived on the outskirts of ‘Chicago’, observing the sleazier aspects of Rákóczi tér, and discovering, late one boozy night, a local speakeasy.
If you want to talk about vice in the USA, forget Vegas. Turn-of-the-century Chicago had entire blocks, neighborhoods, filled with nothing but bars and brothels, where girls from the countryside and from Europe were baited with well-paying jobs by the gangs of strongmen Johnny Torrio, Harry Cusick, and later, Al Capone. Even locals were not safe from the gangs that operated with impunity, due to large police and political payoffs: it was known that men sometimes sold their dates into prostitution from dance halls, or for girls to be kidnapped off the street and held captive. As we all know, institutionalized human trafficking has by no means disappeared; post-soviet trafficking must be one of the least policed abominations of recent times.
Other tactics modern vice seem to have been invented in Chicago, and perfected in Budapest. Chicago’s Mickey Finn was a saloon owner who was famous for baiting tourists and unsuspecting men with seemingly available girls, who would then drug their drink with knock-out powder. The men would wake up, sometimes totally naked, in an alleyway in the back, with no memory of what proceeded. Budapest's Váci utca, is home to any number of konzum lányok (drink girls) plying this trade, with scant notice from the law. And it is not just tourists who are targeted. Tales abound of expats having been slipped a Mickey Finn at such crime-neutral places as Cha-Cha-Cha, Sark Presszó, and A38 to name but a few. As for gambling: I love that card games designed to swindle unsuspecting Chicago gamblers were called ‘bunko’ games. For those that don’t know, bunko in Hungarian is a meat-head, or thug. I am not sure if there is an etymological connection, but there is definitely a shared spirit.
Everybody, naturally, sees associations where they choose to. I have heard Budapest referred to as the Bangkok, or even the Tokyo of the West. There are those who call it the Paris of Central Europe. Nairobi of the EU, anybody? Perhaps it is a touch of homesickness that causes me to see Chicago everywhere, even in the decrepit corners and seedier streets. That is fine: Chicago, and all its vice, daring, and pride, is an inextricable part of my personal history, and I bring it with me wherever I travel.
Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.
The best way to put it is that I needed a secular kind of Lent; a purging of toxins as well as an atonement for overindulgence. And when you write for a food website, and don’t object to the occasional 5 a.m. nightcap, Budapest is an easy place to overindulge. So, based on approximately no one's good advice or any worthwhile guidelines, I decided to go on a fast, an exercise that blurs the line between self-discipline and self-torture.
Day 1
Fasting should be all about not eating, but once you are deprived of food, it becomes all about what you are not eating. Morning is difficult, not because I need a lot of food when waking, but because my morning habits are fairly well-ingrained: coffee, food, writing, shower, writing, and chasing money for the rest of the day. But the simple act of removing food from the equation throws the whole ritual off balance. There can be no writing while fasting, and morning becomes nothing more than the after-math of sleep.
Words, however, over the course of the day, take on sublimated meaning. Brioche becomes a one-word poem, evoking something at once forbidden and essential. Saying Hungarian food words is particularly tantalizing: füstölt gomolya, körte, zsemle: scalloping out each syllable as though they might materialize from my mouth, and sate my hunger.
The city is a carnival of food smells: hot yeasty air from the bakery on Tatra, Subway Sandwiches (which you can smell from halfway down the block); and the carnal olfactory incitement of gyros meat roasting on the spit. The soap in the window of Lush makes my mouth water. Every fruit is a precious artifact: an object of desire. On the street, I split people into two classes: those who are eating, and those who are not. One thing is for sure; the world is a very unfair and cruel place without food. I would forgive anybody a crime who experienced this feeling after being overtaken by the smell of roasting meat. Hunger turns you outlaw.
The evening is spent thinking about food. You never realize just how omnipresent it is until you are deprived of it. Distraction through entertainment should provide some relief, but while characters in Victor Pelevin’s novel Clay Machine Gun feast on Soba noodles, I silently urge them on, to eat more and more, hoping their gorging on food turns into a pivotal plot point (but this being Pelevin, plot points are illusory as the noodles I was imagining). Rented films are not much help either: in Finding Forrester, canned tomato soup had never looked so good; and, of course, Diner is on TCM. Though exhausted, sleep comes slowly.
Day 2
Dreams exclusively concern food. Oddly, it is lencse fözelék that recurs during the night. Only later does the significance of the lentil occur to me. I enjoy meal after meal of it before I wake, instantly knowing I will have none on this day.
With nothing to chew over but thoughts, I acknowledge there is a sort of masochistic pleasure at work here. With that in mind, I wander over to Westend City Center and sit myself down in the middle of the food court for lunch rush. The sensory overload of the vivid colors, smells and sights, create a kind of synaesthesia, whereby the colors are full of flavor: it isn’t the food that looks edible, it is the colors. Even the orange food trays appear tasty. Smells, too, are painfully sharp in my nose. What a preposterous amount and variety of food we consume. But while food has gained meaning for me, it seems to have lost it for everybody else. It is like porn: an instrument of selfishness. People eat and eat, discarding piles of what they cannot eat, and leave. I watch for a while, then suddenly, something clicks, and the whole scene revolts me: who are all these people, with all their meals? The thought of food is disgusting. Appetite is a weakness. Eating is gluttony. I cannot watch any longer, and home I go.
The night brings nothing but loneliness and depression. As somebody who spends a lot of time by myself, loneliness is actually a fairly rare state for me. Sure, I have plenty of friends I could call: but they are all eaters. Hunger makes you isolate – hunger makes you profoundly alone.
After a fitful sleep, where my muscles ache, where I dream lucidly of food, I wake, shower, and am the first in line at the nearest étkezdé. I order lencse fözelék, and from the first spoonful, savor it patiently, gratefully, then return to the society of the living.
Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.
Of course I was just funnin’ ya with that Ramones video, because there has been no force more powerful in the appropriation and reselling of youth culture than MTV. Thanks to its far-reaching, Vans-shod tentacles, kids here can see exactly how their counter-parts in the West are dressing; and H & M, plus any number of fly-by-night mall boutiques, fall all over themselves to cater to those dictates. It is a nifty closed-circuit for sellers: MTV brands the look, the labels that sell the look advertise on MTV. It is win/win for all involved, and has globalized fashion trends (to wit: these people have a lot of Hungarian wiggers to answer for – I hope they sleep well at night). Couple the perpetually replenishing cool-factor of rock (and all its sub-genres) with the visual stimulus of MTV and, as that Vampire Weekend song goes, the kids don’t stand a chance. And countrymen, let’s not fool ourselves that post-bloc youth are aping our style because it is ‘American’, it is because MTV is American.
To call kids who comb the images on MTV for fashion cues ‘fashion victims’ would not be too far off target. But youth everywhere are a marketer’s dream. They come to the game with open minds, and deep identity insecurities. Basically, kids would buy the dirt from under their own fingernails if you could figure out a way to sell it to them. Which is why – in Hungary, at least – hallways and even classrooms of schools are prime advertising space for youth-oriented products, a nefarious little practice that has raised objections in about zero quarters. It is not just the usual suspects like Coke getting in on the action. Because ‘cool’ marketers know, when something takes here, it takes big: Green Day, for example, the only thing that both my second graders and high-schoolers could agree upon. (Green Day themselves were only too happy to benefit from their unlikely success in Eastern Europe – nice fifty dollars a pop ‘punk’ show, boys).
But the youth market sought by MTV and kids who have appropriated hipness are not the same thing. MTV is cool, or at least what passes for cool. Hipness is harder to nail down, and should be harder to market and, thus, to market to. Take Tisza trainers, for example. For those that don’t know, Tisza is the former state-owned brand of athletic training shoe that was sold under socialism. These days, under the guidance of a young entrepreneur, they are hundred-dollar a pair, high-design sneakers that are so omnipresent on the first generation of youth not to know socialism, that they are almost a cliché. They are not only a great product, Tiszas are cool – but they are not genuinely hip. Should kids start collecting vintage Tiszas, that would be hip. Hipness is all about indirect consumerism: building an identity from consumer artifacts of the past (whether it is your nostalgia you are indulging in, or somebody else’s does not seem relevant). For example: cowboy shirts (plenty of those here, these days), Star Wars figures, Members Only-style windbreakers, cartoon-character lunch boxes, or, say Def Leppard tee shirts. Star Wars figures are nobody’s idea of cool, but if presented in the correct ironic framing, they are very hip.
In the tipping point (an overused buzz word these days, but applicable here) of hip in Budapest, something interesting happened: Csendes Art Bar. Few locals and fewer expats know about Csendes, but it represents the first real home-grown expression of Hungarian hipsterism that I have encountered. What trips me up about Csendes is that it looks like no place in Williamsburg, Silver Lake, or Wicker Park, but you could set it down in any of those locales and it would not be out of place. It is only imitative in its aesthetic, not in its actual style. It is totally Hungarian, but hip to the gills. For starters, there is virtually nothing in Csendes that is new. It is a shrine to ironic comment on childhood. Virtually every decoration (or installation) uses a cartoon character, scavenged doll, or old movie poster, not to mention, a vintage Tisza trainer bag; plus they did something I have never seen a bar or café in Budapest do before – they kept the name and a portion of the old sign of the business preceded it – the Csendes Étterem – and incorporated it into the design. Needless to say, it is also pretty great place to have a beer on a Saturday night.
In the States, way back when, hipsterism began as an organic set of values (of the beat generation), then changed into a lifestyle, then finally evolved into a fashion pose that could be appropriated by media and corporate interests, and sold back to the youth market by the likes of Urban Outfitters, Capital Records, and eBay; whereas the Hungarian hipsterism has worked in the opposite direction, from a mediated style sold to the youth market over the airwaves, to something more organic, and authentic feeling, that is at least attempting to defy being sold to. They do tend to do things in reverse here. Optimistically, there will also be a set of values that will bind this community together other than coveting new/vintage KISS tee-shits, but perhaps that is hoping for too much.
This embrace of consumerism, without buying anything ‘new’ that is the hallmark of hipsterism, must be a conundrum for marketers who had it so easy with Hungarian youth ten, even five, years ago. But they didn’t clock all those credits in Ivy League psych-departments for nothing. One way to get their dollar, at least in Budapest, is to create new ‘vintage-looking’ clothing. There is plenty of that, in used clothing shops and department stores alike. Another way is to brand something as cool so persuasively that you can sell the mere logo, like they do with the Vespa bags. This all leaves me nowhere in terms of my own black bag. What the hell, I might as well chuck it all and buy that black Ramones official diaper-carrier bag – my own checkered soul was sold long ago: some hipster kid is probably cutting it up into Kockás Fülű Nyúl sock puppets by now.
-Matt Ellis is a free-lance editor for Word Pill, a service for writers of fiction and non-fiction.
Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.
This is a little off message for Mókus, but I was recently accused of looking down on Hungarians and asked why, oh why, don't I just pack up and go home if I find so much to fault. Well, this is what is waiting for me there. Besides, unless you can't infer from the thought, time, and interest-level that goes into my blog: I love this city.
Anybody who knows me knows I carry a black book bag, basically, at all times I’m clothed, and sometimes when I’m not. They tend to last a year or two before the strap or zippers break, or holes wear through the bottom. Budapest, it is no secret, is about the worst place to be if you need something both specific and basic, such as knee socks, contact lens fluid, or, perhaps, a black shoulder bag. No problem: I know the drill. Hit every Iguana, Alter-Ego, or alt-rock haberdashery until something turns up. Only this time, nothing is turning up. Sure, there are plenty of black bags, but the trend (and there is no bucking trends, not in this city) is for shoulder bags with Converse, Vespa, or Nightmare before Christmas logos. I am making due without until I am next in Vienna.
It must be a great time to be a marketer: getting the cool kids to act as walking billboards for your products, and having them pay for the privilege. Of course, there is more to this whole scenario than just bags and logos. And not all of it is bad. Budapest has experienced, in the past few years, an amping up of youth culture and its youth-culture cool-factor. In other words, Budapest got hip. I had always taken comfort (albeit small) in the existence of Prague and Berlin, both cities magnetically drawing all the American hipsters off course before they could reach our humble town. Budapest has no heat, no buzz, and even less cool. And that is fine with me, and just about everybody I know. But what I didn’t anticipate is that hipster culture would spread like a virus, ignoring all boundaries of border and nationality. Hungarian kids got hip all by themselves. Well, not exactly. There was a ton of help from those who profit from their consumer choices. Local youth are sitting ducks for this kind of ‘cool’ branding, and have swallowed it whole. Their lives simply haven’t been the media blitzkrieg of that of the average American teen. Thus, they either haven’t developed the necessary defenses or haven’t been taught to see through the manipulation. And they tend to move in larger herds, whereas American teens have far more sub-sets of counter-culture to chose from. Hungarian – and youth of all over the post-Soviet era – are far more susceptible to 'cool-branding' than their American counter-parts, if for no other reason than we invented it. Or maybe they just don’t care. For whatever reason, it seems that the entire sub-22-year-old population is hip.
It is no great revelation that marketers love nothing more than a solid counter-culture with its own organically grown aesthetic: the more authentic and rigid the better. It is a brilliant trick, appropriating a sub-culture’s aesthetic, and then selling it back to them. I should learn how to do that. Take, for instance, punk rock. Ever heard of the Vans Warped Tour? When I was a teenager, Vans would have fit exactly nowhere into the equation of punk-plus-tour. Then came the almost overnight uptake of punk by American youth via the (major label, lest we forget) likes of Nirvana and their ilk. Whether kids like me, who helped create this sub-culture (by buying indie-label records, going to shows, reading Maximum Rock and Roll) were buying was irrelevant. Nirvana created a ‘mass sub-culture’, and one that demanded to be out-fitted. Too obvious? Forget Nirvana, let’s look at the Ramones: perhaps the coolest band of all time, and one of the primary forces in actually inventing punk. But that was then, this is now. The Ramones are no longer a band – they have cashed in on all that cool-band cache and have become a brand: and not in the way KISS is a brand: they have become a clothing and accessories brand. Ramones tee? check. Ramones belt buckle? check. Ramones scented candle: smells just like teen spirit! ok, check! Only, ask a hipster Hungarian kid which their favorite Ramones song is, and you will see just how hollow a trend it is. "A Ramones album? You mean, they make music too?" Can I get an ‘I wanna be sedated’? At least the kids know Nirvana was a band, not a fashion label.
But let’s imagine you are totally out of it, or just too young to remember when grunge ruled the radio waves and runways. How about Disney? Yes, even they are going for the hipster's pocketbook with a darker, edgier branding. Now that the kids who have grown out of their Little Mermaid backpacks have grown up, it is time to comment on the passing of that childhood phase with, what else, but more Disney gear. What hipster wouldn’t want a hip-hop-inspired graffiti Mickey Mouse baseball cap? I am this close to wanting one myself.
Hey: bad news for idealistic former punks, great news for the average young Hungarian hipster. Buying quirky things, creating your identity around some ironic pastiches of childhood is fun! You get all these funky anime dolls to collect, you can pierce yourself anywhere you choose, look cool in the eyes of your friends, and more importantly, your parents just don’t get it. And, let’s face it: buying things is fun, period. It might not be authentic individualism, but at least they think it is, at least they are trying, and that is nice to see. It is far more appealing than the drab beige or brown uniform of the Hungarian male circa 2000. Plus, all this has fueled a boom in vintage clothing shops, which has made clothing shopping in Budapest much more affordable and interesting. From a purely selfish angle, this hipster marketing triumph is good for the likes of me, as it increases my own choice as a local consumer. I, too, wear Tisza trainers, and have a Def Leppard tee-shirt, without ever having owned a Def Leppard album. But American and Hungarian hipsterism is different, and in a vital way. How so? Return next week for Part II of The Hipster Conquest of Budapest, or: Hey! Ho! Let’s Go (shopping!).
But, for now, a Ramones video, which I highly recommend not skipping. It will do you a power of good, and, for the time being at least, it is free.
-Matt Ellis is a free-lance editor for Word Pill, a service for writers of fiction and non-fiction.
The Gustave Eiffel-designed market halls, with their iron girder lattice-work, look like huge hangers for old-time zeppelins. But this being the Eight District, the flight is mostly chemically induced, and the only contraptions of bodily transport are the home-built half wheelchair/half bikes favored by a local stripe of paraplegic. With the gentrification and, now, total gutting of Rákóczi Tér, the neighborhood that is the former welcome mat of the red-light district, has almost become upstanding. But there are still oddities to be found in my favorite csarnok, if you just scratch the surface a little. Here are a few:
5. Tiny pickled melons. Looking like aborted watermelons, I have never seen their like outside of Hungary. At once sweet and sour, and occasionally fermented along with hot peppers, the tiny dinnye can be found at any of the row of pickle stands.
4. Zsaru, Krimi, andPandúrmagazines. Want to know what strip of Pest gigolos and rent boys cruise, how many break-ins there were in Borsod County, or just see some grizzly pictures of dead bodies? The newsstand has the best and bloodiest crime magazines, written in easy to read, low-brow Hungarian, and an excellent source of new and shocking vocabulary.
3. Horse sausage. I don’t know the history of eating horse in Hungary and Austria, but I suspect it coincided with a wartime famine. The spicy links look innocuous enough, and unless you know the word for horse in Hungarian (ló), could be easily mistaken for standard pork sausage. A decadent, nay, downright taboo-busting snack, especially when coupled with number one on our list. 2. Chinese porn. But I just bought it for the…characters. Along with soy-bean drinks, fermented eggs, dried greater-lizard fish barbeques sauce, and frozen crabs, the Chinese market at the Rákóczi Tér csarnok is one of the city’s best, and might just be the only local purveyor of Chinese pornographic magazines and soft-core movies.
1. Moonshine. Cheap házi pálinka is to the Eighth District what oil is to Texas. Only don’t light a match too close to the codgers and nénis whose tables run down the center of the building. The hootch is not on display with other only slightly more legal goods: home-made hot pepper sauce, odd-looking onions that could only be home-grown, and already-baked squash. Their fruit brandy is made in backyard stills, sold in mineral-water bottles kept hidden from view. Last I checked it was but a thousand forints for .25 liters. Drink up: now who says Rákóczi Tér is getting respectable?
Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.
Ah, the Hungarian pop scene, a target so big you could drive a tour bus through it. With bands like the Moog, who basically represent the outsourcing of western indie pop, and MC Speak becoming a Jonathan Safran Foer character come to life, it is like a bad joke that somebody keeps retelling, hoping it will eventually get a laugh, if but for no other reason than out of mercy.
True, you get the occasional Balkan-infused bright spot, but mostly it is a grim world for new-music lovers. It shouldn’t have been surprising—yet it was—when The Unbending Trees’ first video, "You Are A Lover", shot in a stark and minimalist black and white, capturing all the melancholy of a Budapest that looked trapped in time, started making regular appearances on MTV. Even more gratifying, The Unbending Trees actually turned out be one of Hungary’s own, though backed by an international record label. Having been spotted by Ben Watt of Everything But the Girl on myspace, and subsequently signed to his label Strange Feeling Records, The Unbending Trees are aimed at an international market. But it turns out Hungarians also liked what they saw, and the elegiac, affecting song rose to number 5 on the local video charts before the album, Chemically Happy (Is The New Sad) was released this earlier this month.
I sat down with The Unbending Trees frontman Kristof Hajos at his favorite Ráday street café Mode (since closed) to find out what he was thinking by putting out melodic, carefully arraigned and written music, and thus confounding all my nasty preconceptions about Hungarian pop, and discovered he had more than one story to tell.
Mókus: In terms of “You Are A Lover”, it made me a little angry that some foreign band came to Budapest and captured the feeling of the city so well, then I discovered it was Hungarian, which was pleasing.
Hajos: It was a funny thing because Ben (Watt) didn’t want a video, because of it not being cost effective, and then I thought that there is a young guy who I used to work with on some web pages, and I asked him to help make the video. I was just coming up with ideas of what to do, and I was just sitting on the underground, the földallati, and I was thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if there was just some couple who would snog next to me like hell. And I told him this idea and we were thinking like, to do this in the BKV might not be such a good idea, so why don’t, we just do it in a car? So I asked my colleague who sits next to me ‘do you feel like snogging in a video?’ So they came but they split up after the video, but it was a lucky combination because the video cost zero forints and the welcome has been really warm.
Mókus: The famous Hungarian song "Gloomy Sunday" came up on my youtube search of you.
Hajos: We covered that version live, and it comes up on all these sites for some reason. But it is also going to be on the UK edition of the album.
Mókus: Why not on the Hungarian release?
Hajos: That would be too cheap, too obvious, but for England it seems like a good thing to do. We also used to do "A Whiter shade of Pale".
Mókus: I read that Hungarians were rated the third saddest population in Europe.
Hajos: I think our music is not going to help. But when we signed with Ben, I did not think the album would be published here because it is so against the mainstream here in Hungary, but the welcome has been a lot warmer, I would have never dreamed to be played on MTV like we are.
Mókus: Well, it is fresh.
Hajos: But Hungarians don’t care about what’s fresh, they care about what the trend is. But we are not Kylie (Minogue).
Mókus: Then what is your logical predecessor?
Hajos: I don’t know–I don’t really listen to music like that. The music itself is written the two other guys, Peter Hary and Havasi, the renown pianist, I only write the lyrics and sometimes the melodies. But the melodies sort of come from the music anyway. So what they say is we are sort of like Nick Drake or Tim Buckley or all these people who have died prematurely. We were also compared to Antony and the Johnsons, but he has a much higher voice. It might be just because he plays piano, I don’t know.
Mókus: Is there anything specifically Hungarian about your music?
Hajos: I don’t know. The Kodaly way of music education is in our blood, so maybe.
Mókus: Do you mind talking about what the album title refers to?
Hajos: That is fine to talk about. The album is called Chemically Happy (Is the New Sad). I had a nervous breakdown in 1997, and they started treating me with different kinds of drugs, tranquilizers, and antidepressants. It was useful at the time because I could finish university and quit smoking, but I developed something of an addiction, which was very depressing. It was like, before age 30, every day wondering if you forgot to take your pill in the morning.
Mókus: Is going off the medication perhaps not worth the psychic sacrifice?
Hajos: Not really. For the first couple of years, but afterwards, I had to be really careful. It was just too much chemistry, but not the right chemistry. I have come off tranquilizers completely, and struggling to come off anti-depressants, but it is difficult, because it is not a physical, but mental addiction.
Mókus: Do you feel the medication altered your personality?
Hajos: Well, it took away my moods. That is what that line is about, chemically happy is the new sad. Not really happy, not really sad, just in the middle. But that is also an experience.
Mókus: Do you think Hungarians are resigned to being sad as part of their national identity?
Hajos: Yeah, well I definitely think Hungarians are not the happiest people. I lived in Slovenia for a year, and it is an amazing change. You cross the border, and people start smiling, well maybe it is not so black and white, but wherever you go, people are so much more optimistic. Even if you go to London. There is not much to be happy about in London either. But I don’t foresee moving out there. I am quite happy with my job right now. So unless it is really necessary, I don’t think I will move. Maybe if the band becomes that successful over there, but that is not very likely. Seriously, that would probably fuck me up again mentally. I like walking in the streets like everyone else. It is perfectly lovely playing in small clubs, having a bunch of people that appreciate your music.
Mókus: I also like the new video to "Overture", was there a story behind it?
Hajos: "Overture" is a duet with the every-so-lovely Tracey Thorn (of Everything But the Girl). It is funny when you get to sing a duet with your once idol. When she agreed to do it, that was one of the most amazing times of my life. The song is about trying to open the other. I find we are getting more and more closed and trying to hide our real selves from others.
Mókus: What are Strange Feeling’s expectations of the album?
Hajos: We just had a little chat with him (Ben Watt) about that, now that the album has actually been in the stores for two weeks. I don’t think he is interested in sales. He just wants to get us out there, in the first place. If we sell a couple of thousand copies, it’s fine. Of course playing music is very enjoyable and I don’t want to worry about it. I do find releasing an album very tiring both physically and I don’t want to end up in an asylum.
Mókus: I sent the video to a friend of mine in New York. He said he loved it, but detected a sort of underlying hysteria.
Hajos: Underlying hysteria? I don’t think it is underlying at all? I think it is quite obvious.
The complete interview with Kristof Hajos will be included in the upcoming music-themed print issue ofPilvax Magazine.
Photo of The Unbending Trees by Balint Radoczy, used by permission.
Matt Henderson Ellis is a freelance manuscript editor and author coach working with writers who publish in print and digitally.
