Karaoke Culture. Dubravka Ugrešić

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      Praise for

      Dubravka Ugresic

      “Ugresic never commits a sloppy thought or a turgid sentence. Under her gaze, the tiredest topics of the ‘tired’ continent (migration, multiculturalism, ‘new Europe’) spring to life.”

      —The Independent (London)

      “Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives the wars in the former Yugoslavia produced.”

      —Charles Simic

      “Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.”

      —Richard Eder, New York Times

      “Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.”

      —John Balaban, Washington Post

      “As long as some, like Ugresic, who can write well, do, there will be hope for the future.”

      —New Criterion

      “Ugresic’s wit is bound by no preconceived purposes, and once the story takes off, a wild freedom of association and adventurous discernment is set in motion. . . . Ugresic dissects the social world.”

      —World Literature Today

      Also by

      Dubravka Ugresic

      in English Translation

      essays

      -The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays

      -Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream

      -Nobody's Home

      -Thank You for Not Reading:

      -Essays on Literary Trivia

      fiction

      -Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

      -Fording the Stream of Consciousness

      -In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories

      -Lend Me Your Character

      -The Ministry of Pain

      -The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

      Copyright

      All changes and revisions to the original edition of this book (published in Belgrade and Zagreb as Napad na minibar, 2010), including the title, essay selection, inclusion of new essays, chapter headings, and amendments to individual essays originate with the author.

      Copyright © 2011 by Dubravka Ugrešić

      Translation copyright © 2011 David Williams

      “Cans of Tuna Fish and the European Classics”, “Captain, Sir, We Have Plenty of Coffee!”, “The Hairdresser with the Poodle”, “Dangerous Liaisons”, and “The Spirit of the Kakanian Province” translation copyright © 2011 Ellen Elias-Bursać

      “Old Men and Their Grandchildren” translation copyright © 2011 Celia Hawkesworth

      First edition, 2011

      All rights reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-59-7

      ISBN-10: 1-934824-59-3

      Design by N. J. Furl

      Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

      Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

      www.openletterbooks.org

1. Karaoke Culture

      1.

      And by the mid-afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.

      —Jonathan Safran Foer,

      Everything Is Illuminated

      2.

      “Help me. I had a dream last night. I was skipping through a meadow holding a picnic basket and the basket was marked ‘Options’. And then I saw there was a hole in the basket.”

      “Mr. Kugelmass, the worst thing you could do is act out. You must simply express your feelings here, and together we’ll analyze them. You have been in treatment long enough to know there is no overnight cure. After all, I’m an analyst, not a magician.”

      “Then perhaps what I need is a magician,” Kugelmass said, rising from his chair.

      —Woody Allen,

      “The Kugelmass Episode”

      3.

      . . . But one day

      The sun will stand where the heart once stood

      And there will be no words in human speech

      That a poem would renounce

      Everyone will write poetry . . .

      —Branko Miljković, “Everyone Will Write Poetry”

      4.

      We human beings hog the limelight on this new stage of democratized media. We are simultaneously its amateur writers, its amateur producers, its amateur technicians, and, yes, its amateur audience. Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is now running the show.

      —Andrew Keen,

      The Cult of the Amateur:

      How Today’s Internet Is Killing our Culture

      1.

      Why Karaoke,

      and What’s Culture

      Got To Do with It?

      It needs to be said upfront: I’m not a karaoke fan. This essay was not only conceived, but also half-finished, when it occurred to me to go and catch a bit of real karaoke. They say Casablanca is the most popular karaoke bar in Amsterdam. My companion and I, both neophytes, arrived at eight on the dot, as if we were going to the theatre and not a bar. Casablanca was empty. We took a walk down Zeedijk, a narrow street packed with bars whose barmen look like they spend all day at the gym and all night in the bar. Muscles and baggy eyelids—that pretty well describes our barman at Casablanca, to which we soon returned. On a little stage, two tall, slender young women were squawking a Dutch pop song into a couple of upright microphones. A concert featuring Dutch pop stars played on the bar’s TV screens but was drowned out by the evening’s young karaoke stars. The girls sang with more heart than the guys, and for a second I thought there must be an invisible policeman standing over them. The whole thing was a deaf collective caterwaul: deaf insofar as nobody actually listened to anyone. Amsterdam is definitely not the place for a karaoke initiation. I’m not sure why I even thought of going to see karaoke in Amsterdam—maybe because of the paradox that sometimes turns out to be true, that worlds open up where we least expect.

      I was watching the film Lost in Translation for the third time and had stopped at the part where Bill Murray, with fatalistic forbearance, does his karaoke number. I sat down at the computer and opened YouTube. Trailing a few words behind and holding out little hope that I’d ever catch up, I gave singing “I Will Survive” a go. It was an invigorating experience. I had a go at opera too. I managed to warble along with a popular aria from The Phantom of the Opera, but on Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partirò” I could only get my tongue around the first line of the chorus. That song definitely has too many unpronounceable words.

      I thought about buying the karaoke version of “Ti Voglio Tanto Bene” for $2.99, but gave it a pass. I didn’t buy Cantolopera either, which would have let me sing operatic arias accompanied by a whole orchestra. I didn’t even buy a teach-yourself pack, a virtual coach for classical