The Hollywood of the Carpathians

Putting your city's name in giant letters on a hillside worked for Hollywood, so why not for Brasov? Two years ago, the mayor of this multicultural city of 350,000 people in the heart of Transylvania (a mix of (mostly) ethnic Romanians, as well as Hungarians, Germans and gypsies), decided to put the theory to the test. Although a little smaller than the Hollywood sign, the letters B-R-A-S-O-V on the side of Mount Tampa certainly attract the attention of all visitors to the city. Brasov (pronounced Brash-ov) is already the centre of Romania's small but growing tourist industry, thanks to a charming medieval old town, picturesque countryside and the nearby Bran Castle which, despite its tenuous links to the historic Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), has been succesfully promoted as 'Dracula's Castle' to legions of foreign visitors.
Mentioning the Brasov sign to my driver, George, on the way to Bran Castle, he lets out an exasperated sigh. "Our mayor spends money on this sign, instead of on our schools." A self-confessed patriot, George is fed up with his country. And, at 37, he he wonders whether anything will change in the '30 years or so' he has left to live. As we pass gypsies in wooden carts on the road to Bran, he points to the surroundings and says, "This is where they filmed 'Cold Mountain'. I was a driver for them." It's certainly a wild and beautiful landscape and incredibly verdant. George laughs as I points this out. "To us it is normal."
Pulling up at Bran Castle, I am surprised how unimposing it seems from the road. And the bazaar of stalls selling handicrafts (a wooden mace anyone?), tacky t-shirts ('a smile from Transylvania') and other tourist tat doesn't augur well for the experience. But, despite its manifest inauthenticity, there is a certain ludic quality to the castle (particularly in the courtyard and surrounds) that is reminiscent of the 1960s TV Series, 'The Prisoner', or MC Escher's drawings 'Relativity' and 'Ascending and Descending'. The ideal home for a shape-shifting vampire.
My visit to Brasov coincided with the Golden Stag ('Cerbul de Aur') festival. The medieval town square was converted into the venue for a series of evening concerts, the first of which featured the superannuated Joe Cocker. Having always despised his blue-eyed soul, it was a slightly disconcerting experience to hear Cocker's voice echoing around the streets of old Brasov while I checked out some of the local hostelries. When those bars (Deane's Irish Bar and Grill and Groove Garden) then starting showing a live telecast of the Cocker gig, I knew it was time to go to bed.
The following day, sitting in my room at the Aro-Palace, a 1930s Busby Berkeley extravaganza of a hotel remade on an arthouse budget (although currently undergoing renovation to restore it to its former glory), I decide to watch some TV. On the Romanian station, TV Pro, a bleached blonde in leopardskin top, black leather mini-skirt and knee-high boots is performing alongside a bunch of guys who mix folkdance moves with breakdancing, including one chap in a t-shirt sporting the slogan, "I'm so fucking precious." Clearly, Romania dances to a different drum when it comes to taste in music!
The one exception to that rule so far has been O-Zone, whose 'Dragostea din tei' was a monster hit across Europe lat year. After a pleasant evening at the Carpathian Stag restaurant on my last night in Brasov, it was a shock to walk out into the old-town square and hear the final bars of that monster hit. Following the Norman Greenbaum school of live performance (17 renditions of 'Spirit in the sky'? Yes, thank you!) O-Zone proceed to immediately encore their one and only moment to remember.
Leaving at 2.30 am for Bucharest Otopeni airport with George the driver, I recall a conversation between us the previous day. Upon learning I was a journalist, George had asked that I do something to correct the negative perception of Romania in the West. Well, I can't do much, but my experience of the country was generally positive. I wasn't ripped off or mugged, people were friendly, trains ran on time and the scenery was fantastic. Perhaps, after many years of failure and corruption, things are finally looking up again for Romania.

The Brussels of the East

Arriving in Bucharest on Tuesday on my way to a conference in the Romanian city of Brasov, I was struck by the similarities to my home city of Brussels: the heavy rain, the aggressive driving, the poorly-maintained pavements, the odouriferous streets, the art nouveau buildings scattered among ugly and ill-planned modern developments, and especially the monumental building projects pandering to the egos of cruel despots.
In the case of Brussels these are the Palais de Justice and the Basilique, the former, the largest stone building in Europe, the latter, the fifth largest church in the world. Both were built in the late 19th century at the behest of King Leopold II, using the massive profits garnered from his personal fiefdom of the Belgian Congo, monies accrued from mines and rubber plantations worked by a population terrorised by Leopold's army of mercenaries. Adam Hochschild, the historian who wrote 'King Leopold's Ghost', estimates that four to eight million Congolese died as a consequence of the man's greed and megalomania.
Romania's Leopold II is of course Nicolae Ceasescu, who, before his bloody overthrow in 1989, set about wasting vast sums of his country's money on the notorious People's Palace , the third largest office building in the world (behing the Pentagon and the Potala Palace in Lhasa), and the Boulevard of Socialist Victory, a four-kilometre-long road lined with showpiece apartments and fountains that leads up to the palace. Some 40,000 people were forcibly relocated and much of Bucharest's historic centre - including its Jewish quarter - was destroyed to feed Ceausescu's monstrous ego (another echo of Leopold, who razed much of Brussels' working-class Marolles district to make way for his Palais de Justice).
Today, the People's Palace is home to the Romanian parliament and has been renamed the Palace of Parliament. However, such is the scale of the building that much of it remains unoccupied. It therefore seems like a perfect opportunity for Bucharest to become the 'Brussels of the East' in another way. After Romanian accession to the EU in 2007, why not move the monthly travelling circus of the European Parliament from Strasbourg to the Palace of Parliament? The Eurocrats would certainly feel at home in Bucharest and it would be a great sign of faith in the project of EU expansion. And, for the Eurosceptics out there, it would give a whole new generation a reason to hate Ceasescu's eyesore.

Fight (for) the power(less)

Good to see that Public Enemy haven't lost their sense of rage. 'Hell no we ain't all right!': just one of a wave of protest songs recorded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Taking the pennant

One of the best spoof sites I have seen for a long while. Go Bucs!

Two cameras pointing in different directions

In one of the most pointless artistic endeavours of all time, photographer Andy Gotts has created an exhibition based on that tedious film buffs' parlour game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Gotts spent 90,000 notes on this vanity project. So, he met and photographed some film stars? Wooooh!
Meanwhile, back in the real world, photojournalist George Azar has been capturing scenes from everyday life in Gaza, depicting the time in between the 'news events' that have made this small strip of land one of the most infamous and hotly contested of our age. It is to be hoped that 'news events' become less frequent and the everyday more commonplace.

The Ambient High Street

Reading in the news about two quirky new businesses, a Welsh company that is selling bottles of Snowdonian mountain air and a US firm that plans to open 'sleep centers' in shopping malls, I felt like I was leafing through the pages of a JG Ballard novel or through Brian Eno's journal. The fact that both businesses were deemed newsworthy suggests that Ballard and Eno's visions haven't quite become commonplace, although their existence implies that that day can't be too far away.

Mark Prindle

Good music, crap jokes: markprindle.com.

Land use interpreters

The Center for Land Use Interpretation's website is well worth a visit, particularly for the Land Use Database. If you've ever wanted to know about drowned towns or nuclear facilities in the US, or just wanted to know where you can see some land art, this is the place to go.

Out of the twilight

When it comes to labour of love websites about obscure-but-fantastic post-punk music, Frank Brinkhuis's Crepuscule and Factory pages has to rate as one of the best. As Brinkhuis explains, "This site tells you about the mysterious Les Disques Du Crepuscule from Brussels and the late 'mythical' Factory label from Manchester, and their countless connections." And indeed it does. A chapter of recent music history that thoroughly deserves to swap the twilight for the limelight.

Party-time wasting is too much fun

Still clearing up after last night's excellent party. Many thanks to everyone who showed up and an extra special thank you to DJs Stuart James and Gary Chapman. Well-played lads! Top stuff!

Still punching his weight

Many thanks to Simon Reynolds for taking the time to offer his thoughts on my review of his latest book. Fans will be pleased to know that Simon has no plans to hang up his music critic's gloves just yet: "It's still the area of culture that most excites me and kind of the prism via which I write about the world/politics/life etc.," he explains.

No worries

Very interesting opinion piece from Jonathan Freedland in yesterday's Guardian. Certainly, the 1990s already has the rosy glow of a more innocent age and while I, and no doubt you, had plenty of worries during that decade, they weren't the global anxieties we have all been confronted with on a daily basis for the last four years.