INSIDE THE LEMON

Notes for landscape tones... Long sequences of tempera. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick dust - sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water. Light damp clouds, earth-bound yet seldom bring rain. Upon this squirt dust-red, dust-green, chalk-mauve and watered crimson-lake.

- Justine, Lawrence Durrell


Yeah, it's Alexandria, not Budapest, but Durrell's palette seems to apply to these close, sweaty days. I rather like it. During Budapest's long work day, the quiet streets are suspended in treacle, one-foot-in-front of the other slowed by some immense drag, the heat waves rising off the concrete emit a faint hum. Every evening, a truck comes road to water the roads (against cracked tarmac?) and and by dusk the brick dust from the VIIth's ever-present roadworks hangs pink and low.

NEW, OLD TOWN

Some weeks ago, I took the train to Dunaújvaros (that's Danube New Town, formerly Sztálinváros) the purpose-built industrial town some way down the Danube in central Hungary. Under Soviet rule, Dunaújvaros was used to showcase the socialist perfectibility of Hungary, even after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution eminences were taken on hospitality tours of Hungary's largest iron and steel works and the wide, dappled avenues lined with Socialist Realist apartment buildings.

Left to rust after The Change of System, or System Change (note the linguistic implications of these terms for denoting the end of Communist rule here in Hungary) it has latterly undergone reinvention as a city of culture (though not as a City of Culture - that honour will be bestowed upon Pécs in 2010). Dunaújvaros now has its own Institute of Contemporary Art, artists' studio complex and the International Steel Sculptors Colony. There's something pleasantly apposite and self-sustaining about this particular process of regeneration. The iron and steel works supports the artists with materials, and in turn the works are bought by the local council and installed in public spaces, like the sculpture garden on the banks of the Danube.


No Gehry or Foster destination architecture here, nor the kind of apparently well-intentioned, yet fundamentally-insensitive attempts at Critical Regionalism you might find in British post industrial city centres under a process of regeneration. This low-key town's prime tourist pull seems to be the beautiful view across the Hungarian plains.


The Hungarian Government, like that of Britain, clearly recognises the regenerative power of that thing, culture, though, and the ease with which cultural regeneration segues so easily with commercial development. The National Theatre* and the Palace of Arts on the Pest bank of Lágymányosi Bridge are the cultural luncheon meat in a commercial sandwich that is regenerating the Ferencváros district, just north of the island of Csepel.


Here, as in other spots around the city, Budapest seems hell-bent on transforming its cityscape into the kind of glass-boxed, stone-fasciaed heterogeneity that better befits a modern European capital. Vodaphone and Morgan Stanley have already moved in. There's a riverside redevelopment apartment complex, replete with the kind of architectural clangers (lack of provision of pedestrian access or most basic services and amenities) generally associated with British redevelopment projects. There's also a good smattering of public art installed with the express intention of evoking, in ersatz style, the heritage of the area, and the deeply-emotive significance of the National Theatre in Budapest (it was demolished on a shaky pretext by the Communists in 1965). Despite these attempts at producing locality, this place, this strange shiny, landscaped enclave on the banks of the Danube could be anywhere. All they need now is a Big Screen like in Hull or Manchester - the cherry on top of all post industrial regeneration projects, I reckon - and the successful transformation will be complete.


* The National Theatre has long been a pawn in the game of tit-for-tat that is pluriform multi-party democracy here in Hungary. I'm going to resist recounting its chequered history here; those with a taste for the political absurd can go here to read the tale in full.

AGRIZOOPHOBIA

The Budapest Zoo somehow manages to segue kitschy ethno-tat into Hitchcockian terror into a thoroughly wholesome day out which at no point prods your animal welfare panic button, as some of our European cousin's slightly more, shall we say, laissez-faire, attitude to animal conservation is prone to do. No scraggy, dead-eyed Siberian tigers here, only a gorilla eating its own shit, which, I'm told, is completely natural.



The place seems to have that masochist-zoophobic-with-a-keen-appreciation-for-high-camp market cornered, housing Komodo dragons, cockroaches, a black widow spider and a green mamba in enclosures apparently inspired by the set of The Crystal Maze. There's a suitably fetid palm house, with a mezzanine level dangling precariously over a pair of nasty alligators, where flying foxes, with binbag wings folded, Dracula-style, get some kip overhead. On the purpose-built concrete "mountain" piles of raw meat engorged by bluebottles await kestrels for luncheon. In the Petting Zoo, frenetic toddlers give Benny Hill chase to bearded goats and bunny wabbits. In the midst of this, the brown bear chews on a mangelica leg, not too bothered by the indignity of his captioner's thoroughly A.A. Milne take on the ursidae.

ERSATZVAROS

Déli pályaudvar is Budapest's southern station. Reposed, it looks something like the clubhouse of an exclusive ski resort, collaged out of a colour-saturated postcard of 1967. It might once have been perched at the top of nearby Sas-hegy, supplying off-piste Jagermester and pretzels to Austrians with blonde eyebrows, in thermal unitards. It might have careered down the hill in a landslide sometime in the eighties, ended up wedged behind the var.

You'd be forgiven for not noticing its pedigree, though. From the metro station escalator, you're flung up into stacked, interconnecting walkways, atria and quadrangles. It's low-slung dimensions induce a cautious stoop. Like most public spaces in Budapest, it contrives to serve your most obscure consumer whims: antiquarian books, home chiropody kits, lace tableclothes, yellow polyester harem pants, tanning, alongside the usual Budapesti surfeit of pastry snacks, shot-sized coffees and fags.


Budapest's transport interchanges collect all that is most salty and decrepit in this exceedingly salty and decrepit city. Déli is no exception. Linger longer than a speedy transfer from metro to vonat and you'll emerge coated with a thin film of clag that is not quite wet and not quite dry.

From the curved tinted glass in the ticket hall there's a brown panorama of the XIIth. The view from Déli is already distorted, vignetted, blurred as through the meniscus lens of a Soviet toy camera.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

With its chronic environmental problems, Budapest was never really going to top the list of Liveable Cities. However, if we're talking about a viable way for people to live together in an urban environment (rather than an index to help multinational corporations and Governments calculate relocation allowances), then there are certainly lessons to be learned from this fine, smoggy, congested European capital. Though your first Saturday morning gasp of fresh air on alighting the bus in the Buda Hills after a week of scuttling around Pest is second-to-none, Budapest gets a lot right.

As I've mentioned before, the early glimpse of life on the mainland gleaned from the pages of modern languages textbooks at school - where everyone wore their rucksacks on both shoulders, finished school at lunchtime, earnestly loved the Cure and played a hell of a lot of ping pong - still remains my go-to point of reference for thinking about our European cousins. Even then I knew something was wrong with our own semi-detached way of living, although I could never quite understand Marta, José and Javier's adoration for the Yellow Magic Orchestra.


High-rollers, diplomats and politicians here in Budapest take palatial villas with exquisitely-landscaped compounds in the hills at Normafa or Roszadomb (prime Saturday morning ogling, if you're ever in the vicinity). However, Budapestis, by-and-large, live in flats - be they in the glorious, tumble-down apartment blocks of central Pest or the slightly-less-glorious panel houses of Újpest, Újpalota or Kelenföld. And it works rather well. Although Budapest is a capital city, its thoroughly walkable (much of the metro system in the centre of the city is as surplus to requirements as the Covent Garden-Leicester Square stretch of the Piccadilly Line), has distinct, well-amenitied neighbourhoods and - most startlingly - there are actually people walking about on the street after 6pm! I'm not talking about the rather formal promenade of cities like San Sebastian or Seville, but streetlife here (in all its strange, unctuous forms - when Google Street View finally makes it here, they'll be prime ogling there too) continues long after close-of-play.

This last part has long been a problem for provincial cities in the UK (and for once, I mean that in the most London-centric way possible). We just don't seem to get the hang of getting up and having a walk around. In Norwich and Hull (the cities that, for my sins, I feel most able to comment upon), come six o' clock inhabitants would flee to their homes to get tucked up safe away from, well, all the people who live there. If you dawdle, or, say, fancy a stroll, you face a O.K. Corral of paranoia with that tough-looking chap walking in the opposite direction down the High Street. In fact, if you were feeling a bit Daddishly pithy, you might say that under these circumstances you could begin to see the point of Bill Drummond and Iain Sinclair's psychogeographic simonizing of perambulation.


It's unfortunate that talk of declining community values in Britain should traditionally have a Littlejohnish bent, as Mr Tolerance himself would be the last likely tenant in the experimental mixed housing schemes that are valiantly attempting to counter the complex of problems around society and sustainability in the UK. Elsewhere, with the growth of riverside developments - albeit with the barf-inducing rebranding of flats as European-style apartment living - we seemed to be getting the idea. However, the economic crisis has meant fewer are willing to invest in - or, indeed, afford - in a pricy single storey. What's more, whilst a sizeable proportion of British people still live in the mistakes thrown up during post-war redevelopment, there will always be a deep-rooted suspicion of high density housing. It remains to be seen whether you really can prise the Englishman from his semi-detached castle.

THE CONVERSATION

Incipient nark due to painful Burton on the stairs late last week quickly curtailed by this astonishing view from Szent-Istvan Bazilika.


Not quite Union Square, but definitely a Polanski view of the city - with iconography to match.

Overdose, the Wonder Horse

BABA I BUDA

Swedish television's 1936 film, Bathing in Buda.
(via Pestiside.hu)

I don't edit these, promise. It seems there's some kind of dayglow pigment in the yellow ochres, dusky roses and orange peels they slap on the exterior of buildings here.

STEP INTO MY OFFICE

Hundreds of column inches are devoted to prodding the mystique of what those that write for a living do all day. I'm thinking particularly of those picturesque writers' profiles in the Guardian Review, often accompanied by a photograph of the writer's desk: usually Habitat-level or above( or junk shop and artfully worn), framed by postcards and tasteful, not-too-distracting bits of art, perhaps the odd, intruding piece of domestic detritus. Writing, by these accounts, is comfortably incorporated into the day thus: one rises at seven, and is shuffling papers at her desk by eight, exhales the necessary 500-100 words by lunchtime and has the rest of the day free.

Well, in my experience, its not quite like that. Writing for a living (and a very bitty sort of "living" at that), for me, happens along a daily line of most resistance. Its a myopic, time-shrinking thing, marked only by the irregular peaks of hammering a thought into a just-about-satisfactory expression, a half-decent paragraph. It's pacing, always overdoing the coffee and always falling asleep to the sound of a book (hopefully paperback) falling on your head. The commercial writing I do (which just-about comprises my actual "living"), however, is a wholly different matter. Its nigglingly riddly, but neat in the end, it grants the rewards of sudden expertise on subjects well outside your usual remit. If you're pervy that way, you might even get a kick out of it.

Thank God, then, for getting out of the house. In Budapest, it's quite permissible to move your home office operations (that's a term I use to describe my yellow laptop, "Bigbird", my pencil case and my kettle) wholesale to the nearest café. This is Central European café culture for you and, happily, it has granted my working day a welcome semblance of sanity - even productivity - at last. After all, under the scrutiny of twenty others engaged in their own similar pursuits, napping, pacing, growling at the computer screen and systematically splintering your arsenal of freshly-sharpened pencils with your teeth doesn't seem quite right.

In Budapest's Golden Era, cafés served a similar purpose to the gentleman's club. Here's John Lukács' description from his very atmospheric Budapest 1900:

One could sit for hours over a cup of coffee, with a glass of water frequently replenished by a boy-waiter, and avail oneself of a variety of local and foreign newspapers and journals hanging on bamboo racks. One could send and receive messages from the coffeehouse. Free paper, pen and ink were available there... At a particular table - their reservation was sacrosanct - this or that group of journalists, playwrights, or sculptors and painters would congregate, usually presided over by one or two leading figures... In those frequented by journalists and writers the headwaiters (some of whom were celebrated for their knowledge of literature) kept sheaves of long white sheets of paper available to any writer who chose to compose his article or essay there. These headwaiters were also the courses of tips of the turf, of useful gossip, an - more useful to writers - of extension of credit as well as occasional loans of petty cash.

These days, sadly the fringe benefits have gone, but the spirit's still there. In fact, I'm pecking away at my keyboard here in Szoda, just around the corner from my apartment in the VIIth. Though the music policy might be called questionable, its a damned sight better than sixth form smokers corner at Café Nero in Norwich.

If, by some mischance, you've stumbled upon this post looking for useful information, here are my picks for if you're toting a decent book, writing your memoirs or have to edit a 10,000 word business report "by close of play today" (yeuch!):

Sirály
Király utca 50.
This place positively invites repurposing into an office, ersatz HQ or a classroom. In the sea of tables upstairs I've seen English lessons conducted and regular meetings of what looks (and sounds) like some particularly fiery and well-subscribed Students Union society.

Jelen
Blaha Lujza tér 1-2,
Big and barn-ish, there are nice, big tables here to liberally sprinkle the contents of your bag over.

Ibolya Presszo
Ferenciek tere 5.
Where ELTE students, squirreling away at the library opposite, go for their tea break. Also, strange cushioned around out the back, if you need a lie down.

Muzeum Cukrászda
Muzeum körút 10
And finally, a good bet for afternoons when you're full of good intentions but know that, in fact, all routes inevitably lead to egy korsó sor, kerem. That is, this place serves coffee, but also booze, cake and is open 24 hours.

By no means feel restricted by this list, however. I've seen people, four pints in, whip out their laptops to deal with some urgent correspondence in the middle of a heaving Saturday night out at Szimplakert.

WRITER FOR HIRE

File under: Shameless self-promotion

When I'm not griping about the state of the novel in Britain or poking my camera lens into places it shouldn't be, I'm a freelance writer, researcher and editor, believe it or not. What's more I'm currently (ta-da!) available for commission! In a multitude of guises I've done lots of web development, web consultancy work and specialist research for business, alongside the usual copy writing, web writing and editing.

You can look at my CV here, or get in touch here.


J

P.S. Edit, link fixed!

REMEMBER A TIME BEFORE TASTE?

...Before our buildings went up with vectors shamphered, plate glass smoothed, lighting recessed.

For a time in the early nineties new corporate and civic architecture had Duplo-bright exoskeletons and superplastic panelling coloured through in a palette of crayons. There are still remnants of this kind knocking around the UK in suburban business parks and less affluent parts of the town centre, though they look pretty bashful at being overdressed next to their mausoleum-in-smoked-glass counterparts.



Budapest's Lehel Csarnok, which I gather is locally thought of as something of an abomination (which well, it pretty marvellously is), is this stuff in excelsis:

ALPINE PURSUITS/ Life from the pages of a Modern Languages Textbook

If I'm ever reincarnated as a person less wrapped up in books and more bent on commerce, I'd happily return, after a day's pen-pushing, to one of District II's neoclassical mansions. As it is, I just have to waft precariously past them as I'm hoiked up Janoshegy on a chairlift.


As a UKer more familiar with spending weekends going "up town" (despite being far away, I'm always keen to perserve the linguistic anomalies of Hullish), down the pub and perhaps for a quick redemptive sortie around the local park, I'm dead keen on Euro-style leisure habits. Weekends are much more wholesome here, some shops close after lunch on a Saturday and many head for the hills for outdoor pursuits. Though in downtown Pest its just a bit parky, at the top of the hill there were four inches of snow and Budapestis togged up in ski suits jogging, kids toting wooden sledges and (as it was Valentine's Day) a fair few bashful teenage couples grabbing at oneanother's be-mittened hands.

ART AND RELATABILITY/ Dóra Maurer at the Ludwig Museum Budapest

Relative Swings, 1973

I have a dreadful confession to make: I still don't get visual art. This admission has been a long time coming, I think I first realised this whilst levitating past an advertisement for, you know, Caravaggio or something at the Haywood Gallery on an escalator in the London Underground some time in 2003.

Despite this I'm a regular gallery visitor; I find they provide good grist to the drift; the pacing, the silence and the squeak-squeak of rubber-soled shoes are unmatchable in encouraging thoughts to wonder. Although, perhaps in this sense none have matched the Toledo Museum of Modern Art: marked on maps and street signs, we arrived at an apartment block en el centro de la ciudad to find all the usual signs of an art museum – entrance, corridors, ticket office – but no galleries or exhibitions.

Anyway, frustrated and somewhat shamed by this I'm trying to find a way in. I'm as far as posturing as naif at this point; after all, about the sum total of my understanding currently rests on Hogarth and a long streak of the grotesque. Art Appreciation 101 stipulates it's okay to laugh at the mischievous dog in the corner of the canvas, permits one to speculate on the knowing look in the sitter's eye, fine to snigger at the aristo's get-up to grasp towards a grasp that might be superficial, but at least it's proper.

With all this in mind I took myself off to the Ludwig Museum, which relocated from its Buda Castle home to a industrial no man's land turned cultural regeneration centre just north of Csepel some years ago. Though I'm pleased to note that their permanent collection of fairly tautological twentieth-century big hitters now includes selected Hungarian works, I was more interested in Limited Oeuvre, a retrospective of Budapest-born graphic artist Dóra Maurer.

Etude 3

Modest conceptualist Maurer is into the the stuff of things. Her abstract geometries trust form's own logic. Instead of privileging the action, she's content to make her early intervention then allow forms to play.

Once we had departed

Maurer's graphics, photographs and films eschew representation in favour of the pleasures of form. She dirties graphic design and sullies mathematics to make neurotic investigations of proportion and seriality that not only emphasise the physical but also expand the remit of graphics to include traces and residues:

The craft of reproducible graphics, on the other hand, has an aura about it. Its materials have a fragrant smell, the work is a precise one that requires attention. It breaks down into phases, and the concentrated anticipation of what is not yet visible is a good feeling.

Overlappings, no. 16

Her recent Overlappings force geometry to dance. Maurer's brightly coloured forms unfurl and overlap like washing in the wind or juggled hankerchiefs. These are forms that aspire towards non-materiality. They reflect, or perhaps parody, changes in the grammar of contemporary graphics, whose forms deny their nature, appear lighter-than-air or quasi-organic. Like the difference between the cover of Esquire magazine in 1972 and the Microsoft Vista operating system, say.

BARBEZ AT TRAFO

Poking fun at earnest Brooklynite rockists for being, well, earnest Brooklynite rockists is a bit like taking a flaming spear to a straw target.


Their Paul Celan song cycle made me wince, though their salad bowl, saxophone n' theramin circus chaos was much, much better.

See what you think:

FROST/NIXON

Growing up in British cities, where the geography of a night out at the cinema is most likely to take you to an out-of-town Retail and Leisure Development and post-film drinks to a nearby franchised theme bar housed in a car park, seeing Frost/Nixon at Terez körút's Muvesz Mozi felt like a most metropolitan night out.

The film is one of a recent crop that approaches its historical moment through broadcasting history, opening out a televisual event to give us a second look at the twentieth century. In a time where we're more conscious than ever of media machinations and subterfuge, it's both refreshing and heartening to watch these paeans to the power of television. Frost/Nixon is a love letter to the vigour and thrust of TV's liberal, righteous origins. Though its plot eeks out the suspense of Frost's team snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, what's most significant isn't Frost's unexpected political nous or grilling technique, nor Nixon's slippery evasions, but television itself. As screenwriter Peter Morgan admits in his Front Row interview on Radio Four, the real triumph is in the editing process, zooming and cropping Nixon's derelict close-up.

In the end, however, the film is hoist by its own petard. After the first day of filming, where Frank Langella's fantastically prunish and perspirant Nixon has derailed the interview with 23-minute homilies, Frost's team warn him against the perils of humanising the former president. Via the screenwriters extra-factual additions (like Nixon's drunk, self-pitying telephone call to Frost's hotel suite), the film does just that.

Less vigourously and angrily political than Goodnight and Good Luck by far, then, but still an evocative period piece.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

As an undergraduate, a large part of my imaginative life was taken up by foreys into Englishness, a pursuit both blessed and blighted by the tinge of juvenilia, like all the best obsessions are. Indeed, with the sureity that only a nineteen year-old can muster, it hadn't occurred to me that many, many others were similarly busyied away, constructing their own imaginative landscapes to form a vast, collective hallucination of ice cream cones, film stills of Julie Christie, bunting, Sarah Cracknell's smile, seaside piers on fire, bald patches and anaglypta wallpaper.

Having spent the five years since then systematically chipping away at an instinct, on coming here I had thought I was too ensconced for a long spell in Hungary to reshuffle my picture of England. I was wrong, however; from here England has begun to reorganise itself into a solid shape and the view doesn't look too sprightly. What this amounts to, I'm not yet sure. In terms of my, ahem, literary pursuits it's a very timely boon (confidential to those with a friendly interest in my meatworld: it's just under three weeks 'til my PhD application is due), clearing much of the fog around the subject. In a wider sense, I'm far to innured to the perils of cultural relativism to begin to think comparatively about this fine, strange, new place yet. I'll think on...

SUNDAY PROMENADE

Újlipótváros is fast becoming my favourite district of Budapest. Its grids loosely overlook Margit Sziget and shade from rough n' ready to elegant and genteel as you edge closer to Parliament.

Lehel Csarnok

This marvellous place wasn't giving up its secrets too readily on my fly-past. Google tells me it's a market hall, built in controversial style to resemble a ship.

What lies beyond Nyugati Station.

Construction work in Budapest works something along the lines of the painting of the Forth Bridge. From eight onwards on weekdays, the street of the VIIth (and indeed most other districts) are hemmed by chaps in overalls toting minature coffees and dragging on strong fags. Clearly here they'd knocked off in a hurry.

The weather here seems to have turned on a sixpence: after an early January of -7 degree maximums the last few sunny, smoggy days have me convinced that spring has sprung. It's doubtful - freezing February will surely bite me on the bum - but for now, ice cream (that's fagylalt) seems close.