The Advantages Of Performing Ones Own Lobotomy

“Because I was born on July 7, I’m greatly tempted to find legal possibilities for changing my birth date. I spent yesterday following the JUL Congress comfortably, in the long and short version. I was physchologically prepared for diverse humoristic remarks which otherwise go hand in hand for me: from the director’s multi-colored and black and white shoes, scenograhpy, and direction to the confusion of humanistic, universal places that in the July heat began to turn sour more than four years ago...But humoristic instinct left me very quickly because it’s not about a utopian sect of cranks.”

This is the way Branko Vucicevic reacted when we asked him to say something related to JUL’s sensitivity for Vreme. Otherwise, let’s see what is hiding in the souls of the cultural workers involved in this movement, party, company. A day after the historical congress “For the material and spiritual reform of society,” was written with big letters in the headlines of media friendly to JUL, above all the state Borba daily. That was, they say, the leitmotif of the entire gathering. It is a fact in this directed gathering that Dr. Mira Markovic in her own directed meeting, latter through acclamation for one of the documented congresses, mentioned cultural reform in the same sentence with material and spiritual didn’t get any kind of notice. Neither Dr. Markovic nor the remaining speakers didn’t explain how the Left imagines cultural reform. The party’s executive committee chose the following people from our cultural and entertainment world: Ljubisa Ristic, theater director, who is also president of the party; Jovan Ristic, television director; Mirjana Markovic, writer; Jara Ribnikar; Zorica Brunclik, singer; Tatjana Olujic, violinist; and Desimir Stanojevic, actor.

On the title page of Dr. Markovic’s site on the Internet, visitors are welcomed by the following, pitiful prophesy, “A new, richer, juster, universal world is coming.” In the chapter entitled Attitudes, Mirjana Markovic presents here view, among others, on art. “If we don’t pay attention to film politics (that film forms a value system that influences young people fore than any other art form), it could easily happen that young people are inspired by courage found in a police series, rather than, for example, in rebellious and analytical treatments of the relation between society and the individual as in the films of Jean Luc Goddard.  It might happen that they associate the idea of adventure with the clashes of third-rate gangsters, but not, for example, with the refined vision of liberated women from the film Jill and Jim, that they defend the institution of adultery, or they from a corner contest the soapy atmosphere of a multitude of cliché films shot for two to three days and forget that hour when the light was lit, rather than from the corner of humane analysis, the secret of which Luis Malle tapped into in the film Lovers.” The extract in question is from the work Night and Day. This obvious fascination of Dr. Markovic with the rebellion of French “new wave” perhaps explains how Ljubisa Ristic is in JUL.

PEBBLES IN THE SAND: “I learned that traveling is essential and significant. Don’t step anywhere, don’t conquer anything, don’t strengthen anything, don’t acquire anything. It appears as though I’m some kind of mad avante guardist who drives the public to move about the banks of rivers, city streets, abandoned warehouses, and courtyards,” said Ristic in one interview. His longtime (and former) friend and associate Slovenian playwright Dusan Jovanovic gives a deeper explanation to Ristic’s avantguardism in an extensive psychological report of Ristic published in Nasa Borba in 1996. “Avante guardism for Ristic has almost meant radicalism. He wanted to be first in intellect and first in radicalism. The struggle for power fascinated him in the form of conspiracy and coups. In other words—shortcuts. Another important aspect of Ljubisa’s global view is his fascination with the phenomenon of playing. Playing for Ristic was a replacement for religion. He was obsessively interested by the rules of playing, mixing different players, playing one game by the rules of another. (Ljubisa Ristic shares the fascination with playing and world direction while his namesake Jovan Ristic who once said, “That moment when a child takes pebbles and arranged them in the sand, then he doesn’t like the arrangement of them, and changes it, he then begins to direct, he just isn’t conscious of it.” Otherwise, just like Ljubisa, he was considerably interested by the quantitative rather than aesthetic aspect of playing. This 50 year-old is still a passionate collector of badges, stamps, chocolate wrappers and a compiler of hydroplanes).

Jovanovic continues, “The study of controlling mechanisms was Ristic’s passion. He was directly obsessed with questions of control. Later, when he had formally come to the head of theater institutes, he painstakingly concentrated control mechanisms in his own hands, and he gave nothing up accidentally. There was no kind of democracy or discourse with Ristic.

Ristic was a master at creating extraordinary conditions. In normal conditions, he couldn’t activate his naiveté. In chaotic, impossible conditions, Ristic swam like a fish in water. For that, he continuously longed to create a climate of imposed conditions, elementary troubles. Ristic never directed only performances, Ristic directed the world. People who didn’t understand or want to understand always got on his nerves. Ristic always understood everything. He always presented himself as a man for whom hesitation and doubt didn’t exist.”

If Jovanovic’s  above description is credible, how do those qualities of Ristic reconcile with one more attitude of Dr. Markovic, this time concerning intellectuals, “It’s unusual for one educated man, scholar to bring into question ahead of time the ability of other people to think better of him (or whoever).”

MESSIAH: What is most important for Jaru Ribnikar? “The relation between men and women is the basic theme of life. Men are strangely sensitive and vulnerable. Women are preserving and stronger. It’s probably because of that that the male needs to demonstrate and constantly show his superiority. It would be nice when one woman could love more men differently,” she said in one interview. Like a badly mentioned Trifeau film, therefore. Except for free love, Comrade Ribnikar takes the center place in public remarks of transcendental meditation. “I freed myself of stress, tension, low self-confidence, fears. At one time, I was afraid of lifts and of masses of people. Today I feel that imperceptibly lost. That is a state of complete silence in which the soul is awake, but freed of contents. When a man acquires direct experience of all ranges of value in nature, he ceases to experience nature as something foreign, he realizes that everything evolves, the tempestuous waves of history. One must enter evolution, because you are safest there.” Completely contradictory to Lj. Ristic for whom Dusan Jovanovic said, “time controls, hides all emotions—and tries to act rationally (that’s the way to get an ulcer).” Some things the writer and member of JUL’s Main Board, Jara Ribnikar otherwise can’t understand, “I’m sorry for writers who have left to direct politics, primarily because among them there is a lot of talented people. Others need to participate in politics, writers should write. Who will write poems now, while they dream politics? It’s a shame for this nation and culture because writers should work through literature, not on meetings and gathering members.” Author Mirjana Markovic writes almost the same, “If writers feel the need to participate in changing society, that they alone can change it, because as a means in the struggle for that change they underestimate their gift for poetry, literature, art in its entirety. Because they give the advantage to delegates questions in the Parliament, screaming in meetings, but especially to sticks and pistols.” At least according to this question, a bizarre unity was created in the upper eschalons of the party. Lj Ristic once said, “The world is art, especially from the theater, we leave writers on the side because they always have unrealistic, messianic ambitions, the entire artistic world is waiting for the insanity of primitive nationalism to pass.

CARAMEL AND OPERETTA: Not only Ljubisa Ristic’s nerves throw a shadow of schizophrenia on the surface of the picture the JULies extend of themselves. Jara Ribnikar is quite unsatisfied when she says that, “our nursery schools don’t have a program, they play Lepa Brena (folk singer)for the children. But Comrade Brunclik who sings, “Caramel, Caramel, I am your caramel, you are my gourd, do you love me George?” sits as a member of the executive committee. But since we’re already talking about trash, not even the mentioned Jovan Ristic is too far off. Last year in Sava Center he directed, in celebration of world music day, a musical spectacle under the title “The Pearls of Opera and Musical”, but his 2,500 television directorials are on the same aesthetic niveau. Perhaps that’s why a few years ago he hurried while Milorad Vucelic made himself odious to him through RTS, agitating against, “the flood of distasteful broadcasts, like the broadcasts of newly composed folk music.” Only a few months later, on BEMUS, when Slovenian flautist Irena Grafenauer protested to cameramen of his station who turned on cameras and then went to the car to have a frustrated talk which was perfectly heard on the stage through the activated camera receivers, he reacted: “What do these artists want? A lot of them are complicated, something is constantly bothering them.” What would his party comrade Tatjana Olujic (who in the name of the party extended condolences to the British ambassador following the death of Princess Diana) say to that?

Radical avante guardists and turbo-dance trash, hyperactive obsession “towards directing the world” and “reconciliation with evolution” “writers” in power who wonder from where the inspiration comes to write about politics, how do they explain all that in one place, and not run into psychiatric terminology?  We return once more to a Jovanovic description of Ljubisa Ristic, “He’s not a moralist: he has very different opinions about morals. It’s the same for rights and himself (he’ll give you everything and he’ll give you nothing; before that he’ll take something if he thinks you have more than you need). He fulfills promises or he doesn’t. He says one thing, and he does another.” He even has something wise to say in relation to the meditations of the profit Jara Ribnikar, “People are enigmatic beings, people are fascinated by creation, and because of that they have no rules in life, they have no recipe for luck, everything is possible and permitted. It’s brutal to be a moralist. It’s easy to judge people. You’ve got to understand them.” Look at the beginning of the text.