Letter from Ljubljana (and the USA) 2001
More news from Planets Slovenia and Pennsylvania
brought to you by Wes Eichenwald

Labor Day weekend, 2001
Pennsylvania can be an unexpectedly hip place these days. In the Airport Diner, a Silk City diner (with a more recent add-on wing) next to the sports airfield in Kutztown, there are CD jukeboxes in the booths, within which, among other delectable items, you can find the Velvet Underground, Green Day and Nirvana's "In Utero." Out in the parking lot, I spied this bumper sticker:

WARNING
In case of rapture
this car will be unmanned

October 4, 2001: I can see the WTC from here

Dear friends, family and unwary onlookers,

Yeah...I wasn't sure there would be another one of these, either. But if there was ever going to be a good time for it...

From my bedroom window at the city’s northern end, I can see the glass tower of the World Trade Center Ljubljana. It’s one of those lovely sunny October days in which clarity - of sky and of mind - seems like an eternal given, and several of the windows in the building, which to my New Yorker's eye looks like an oddly truncated, modest skyscraper, are open to the fresh air. The top of the building is slanted, so that one end is three stories higher than the other. There was a time I felt like joking about this building; not now. Across the highway are farms, and a nice 19th century church with a modest but crowded graveyard adjoining; a little ways down is the field in Mala vas (‘Little village’) where the local Jezica team plays baseball against both Slovene and other European teams. It’s not Shea Stadium, but at Jezica’s home games there are uniforms and umpires and bleachers (and a local kid keeping score by hanging numbers on a wire backdrop), and the few dozen spectators are definitely into the game.

It's difficult to be a New Yorker at the moment, either in New York or in exile, even if it's a voluntary exile. Feelings of glad-I’m-not-there-now, got-out-just-in-time and wish-I-was-there-now are still kickboxing it out in my head. On September 6 I met two friends for lunch at the French Roast Café in lower Manhattan, at 11th St. and Sixth; the following day I flew out of JFK and arrived home in Ljubljana on the 8th, where I fell into bed for 15 hours. On Tuesday afternoon, Ksenija called me and asked if I was watching television...

WHAT I LEARNED AT FIFTH AND POWER

LIVE FROM THE FOLKFEST, CAMBRIA CITY, JOHNSTOWN, PA USA:

6:31 p.m.: Still daylight on a perfect sunny Saturday, the first of September 2001, Labor Day weekend Johnstown PA. I’m in a narrow strip of green between Power Street and the river, listening to a generic ‘50s good-time band play Kansas City and Rock Around the Clock, looking at the multicolored, banded onion domes of the Slovak RC Church. Power Street is hard by the narrow Conemaugh River, which is banked by steep industrial concrete, with gentle forested western Pennsylvania mountains rising behind - and close by is the 4th Avenue Bridge, an open, ventilated metal railroad bridge painted dark green.

On a nearby tree is nailed this sign:

PLEASE
KEEP
DOG’S
OFF THE
GRASS

If I’m not exactly on the road to look for America, the place I’ve found definitely ain’t along my usual NYC-Boston axis. I’ve extended myself as far out into the real America, western Pennsylvania division, as I was able to justify - 366 miles or so from NYC - and found myself in a place that looked for good and all like small-town Slovenia, with a few extra star-spangled banners. At this point, I guess, Texas would seem more of a foreign country to me than Slovenia...except maybe for Austin and parts of San Antonio. And imagine how sheepish I felt when I realized I could’ve saved myself quite a bit of trouble (and money on language lessons) by just moving on a few hundred miles to Cambria City instead of Slovenia across the sea. Just kidding, I think.

6:07 p.m. - Nathan and the Zydeco ChaChas play to a crowd overflowing onto the sidewalk at Fifth Ave. between the Chestnut Street midway and Brallier Place; these guys are a good time guaranteed, and locals across the street sit on their front porches and in their room-sized front yards and calmly observe the accordion-fueled sparks. Down by Fifth and Cambria, away from the local news trucks, ice cream, iced tea and water are all a buck a cup (you have to exchange dollars for scrip at one of several midway booths); right across is St. Stephen’s, on 4th Avenue between Power and Chestnut. Cambria City is Johnstown’s historic district, chockablock with houses of worship built by immigrants from Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Greece: St. Mary, St. Casimir, St. Emerich, St. George, St. Rochus, St. Columba, the Magyar (Hungarian) Reformatus. Mute participants in the street party of Johnstown’s year, as the descendants of their founders, and just plain day-trippers in from Pittsburgh and points east, eat and enjoy. And what eating...pierogies, halushky, Italian sausage and Thai barbecue and chocolate-covered strawberries and curly fries and funnel cakes and apple dumplings and onion blossoms ($6 and quite the treat) and Nyota’s Ting, Foods for Superior People, Af-Am gourmet vegan cuisine (up from the boroughs, I believe) served by a regal plus-sized woman clad in exotic colorful splendor. There’s a sizable line at Sherri’s Crab Shack on the midway...can’t get enough of that crab...and off to one side, in an alley, sit outdoor tables and racks filled with frilly-to-the-max kids’ party clothes.

I wouldn’t have gone to the FolkFest if one of the performers hadn’t been one of my songwriting heroines of this year, Christy McWilson. We’d sent a couple of letters back and forth between Ljubljana and Seattle, but I didn’t tell her I’d be coming because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it. I approached her at the side of the Conemaugh Health System stage, a tent up at 8th Avenue, and introduced myself. Christy was delighted (if surprised) to see me and was just the warmest, most unpretentious and down-to-earth person (and sharp as a tack; those songwriters are perceptive, you know). After the set, which concluded with a blazing cover of “Jackson,” she autographed my CD, To Wes - Here’s to them mysterious mysteries. I only wished I’d had time to stay for the Sunday shows, since another of my favorites, the great R&B; showman Barrence Whitfield, whom I used to catch in his early years of performing in Boston, was also at the FolkFest (Christy was delighted that they were staying at the same hotel), but the FolkFest folks had scheduled the two bands’ sets almost simultaneously; ain’t that always the way?

Vaya con Dios, Christy McWilson. (You can read more about her on the music page.)

One month old and still looking freshly opened, the Kolosej multiplex (‘Colosseum,’ brought to you by Kmecka druzba d.d., the farmers’ cooperative) has a new-car smell that hits your nostrils on entrance to any of the 12 screening rooms. State-of-the-art form-fitting seats, first-run subtitled movies, all for less than half the price of an average movie ticket in the USA. What’s to complain about, I know. Still, when I traversed the vast, newly asphalted parking lot on my first pilgrimage it seemed as if The Mission had at last been accomplished: the Americanization of Slovenia was complete. At least on this patch of land. It looked just like home.

Now that getting a whiff of Kolosej seems to have killed off any lingering scent of Eastern Bloc communism for good, hey, what’s next? Time to have some fun. But keep it among ourselves, ‘pri nas’: wouldn’t want the neighbors over the border to know how good we have it here in the green cell-phone heaven that is Slovenia.

When I first came to LJ, almost five years ago, without portfolio and settled in darkest, dustiest Rakova Jelsa, brez avtobus or paved road, I thought I’d escaped from America in reaction against a money-above-all-else value system (though I’m no anarchist or Communist, hvala lepa). Should have known better from the start, with all the late-model cars jamming the downtown streets. Since then, I’ve watched American values gradually creep up to me here in Ljubljana. The town’s been getting scarily modern lately, too much so for my taste.

For all the ‘bobu bob’ about Slovene workaholism, I’ve seen little evidence of it here: Slovenes really seem like closet, well, not hedonists exactly, but seekers of the good life, valuers of balance. Caught at the center of the European compass (as ever, the trick is to get the rest of Europe to notice, if only to a point), Slovenes, it seems, figure they might as well enjoy themselves, write a few new chapters in the art of living (soon to be on sale at Rokus Gifts and Mladinska knjiga). Time to have some fun. But do keep it ‘pri nas’: ...

I visited Ireland in June (departing on Bloomsday, June 16, by chance the same day as the Bush-Putin summit in Slovenia), and was struck by certain similarities between these two green pieces of Europe. Both Ireland and Slovenia are former vassal states with large percentages of their ethnic nation living outside the national borders; both are now independent and fairly prosperous, and in recent years have been trying to deal with an influx of immigrants and ‘guest workers’ themselves. The Slovenes and Irish are both well-traveled, have an extravagant pub culture, flourish in small villages and love working small farms; both worship the word and put their writers and poets on the banknotes. Poetry and music hang in the air in both Galway and Ljubljana, as natural as oxygen.

Perhaps Slovenia should look to Ireland, rather than Switzerland or Belgium, for a truer glimpse of what it might look like in 50 years. Perhaps the Slovenes can learn a few things from the Irish about how to modernize, and even join the EU, without losing your national soul. And it’s not inconceivable that Ireland could take a leaf or two from Slovenia (for instance, unlike Ireland, Slovenia never gave up its language only to go to great pains to later on effect a revival).

After ten years of independent Slovenia, a great deal of this small nation’s future depends on just how the Slovenes would like to view themselves and what kind of national myth they want to promote going forward. Much hinges on how the Slovenes are prepared to value their history, and which history, and whose. Should one take it as a whole, or pick and choose? And how far back in history can one go and still consider it “one’s own”? Do the past ten years subsume the previous 200?

I’m just another sympathetic observer asking questions...