Brenda and the F Word

No. This is not yet another far flung corner of the world where people are reading James Wolcott. It’s short for wolf-fuck. In serbo croat. Which means a rough, arduous place. What a perfect description of Lars Triers’ new flick, Anti Christ. Do not go there. I was riveted, however, by MJ. And not in a seamy, sordid way. The guy was just so uncannily ALIVE, right up until the night before he died. Sure, he looks weird. Wasted. He looks so weird, it suddenly occurred to me that this might explain why he covered his kid’s faces with veils. A classic case of transference; of a parent projecting their own fears onto a child.

But back to vukojebina; to the serbo croat word for a rough, arduous place. I have a young friend from Brooklyn who is living there right now. I’ve mentioned her before. She’s shooting her first feature film in the mountains of Serbia. Her all female production crew from Belgrade call themselves the pit bulls. Undaunted by a foot and a half of unexpected snow, my friend is on day #4, directing the same woman who starred in that dismally, depressing Romanian movie about abortion. I wish I could remember the title. Anyway, aside from the blizzard, a French grip, “hissing like a vampire,” and a cinematographer who prefers to play the tuba, all is well. When her husband asked how to say “Good day, today,” the crew shuddered. “We never say, good anything, in this country. It brings bad luck.”

Easy to believe after listening to my dinner companion on Saturday night. He worked as as a shrink in Kosovo before opening a small “boutique trauma center” here in New York for victims of political violence. “Boutique” was said with tongue in cheek. Needless to say, the guy is not a big fan of the Serbs. “They scared the hell out of me,” he said before we were served dessert.
“Me, too,” I replied before launching into talk about Storm, a new movie about a Bosnian Serb, a Muslim woman, who testifies at the Hague about her experience as a prisoner at one of the country’s “rape hotels.” Set up by the Serbian military, it was run by man who had once been her next door neighbor.

It’s unimaginable. I mean, how does life go on after such horrendous and unspeakable acts? How do people return to villages and carry on with their lives after killing and raping their neighbors? How do they move into abandoned houses, cook on the same stoves, laugh, dance, marry and have children, surrounded by the phantoms of such blood lust? And what about that female production crew, the pit bulls? The ones shooting up in the mountains with my friend? Do their parents ever talk about the war? Do these young people bother to ask questions? Because I remember a man, a friend, named Ali in Cyprus. A short, grizzled survivor of the war between the Greeks and the Turks back in the 70s, he lived in one of these villages. A village on the Turkish side that even years after the Greeks had fled, remained half empty. When I asked him if he ever wondered what had happened to his neighbors, he smiled. “I live like a kitten,” he said. “We all do. Because a kitten is born with its eyes closed.”

I’m the one who lives like a kitten, of course. Me, discussing political violence and Kosovo at a delightfully civilized, candlelit dinner in a Tribeca loft. Me, with my only experience or exposure to rough, arduous places being a somewhat uncomfortable seat at a theater over on on 13th St. How do I dare ask such questions? What do I know about generations of blood feuds? It took me months to even figure out who was fighting who in that particular war: serbs, bosnian serbs, croats. None of it made sense to me. Because I live in a country that has a very short history; that is propelled forever forward and loathes looking back at the past. Because I live in a country where people seem to fear aging and getting fat or gaining weight more than they do the loss of liberty itself. All of which means we end up “vukojebina’ed”. Wolf fucked by health insurance companies, credit card companies, oil companies, banks, politicians…Enough.