Summer Journal 2012, August 29

A week from today we should be in Athens, Greece, awaiting our flight to New York City then to Atlanta, Georgia.  Yesterday was particularly eventful, and I think I got some good photographs.  Today I'm planning to work just with my video camera.  I finished Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land. I'm planning when I get home to buy a copy for each of the guys in Nic's Triangle of Truth.  Now I've started the lengthy Secret Ingredients:  The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink edited by David Remnick.  Frank Bruni, who Addie has fortunately introduced me to earlier, says of this book, "You couldn't ask for a more diverse, dazzling collection of writers."

 

No  matter how many years I've come to Ierissos, I always find seeing the monks walking along the beach or around town very curious.  I liked the contrast of this monk next to the red bench against the blue sea. 

 

Last night our grand-niece Maria, who has just completed law school in Athens, came with her "serious" boyfriend, Timos, to our place for a drink followed by dinner at Christos.  The boyfriend who goes by the stage name of Leon, is a songwriter, and pop star in the country.  In late September they are moving to London, so he can produce a second album.  His family is quite wealthy as they had the Otis Elevator Franchise in Greece for many years.  If you've been in Athens and Thessaloniki you will understand the importance of elevators.  Anyhow we had a nice dinner with them.  I'm going to follow with their photograph and then an article from a June edition of the New York Times, where his work is cited:

 

Pop Star Leon with our niece, Maria





Paralysis in Athens

By RANDALL FULLER

Published: June 6, 2012

Athens

“WHAT are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?” asked the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy in 1904. “Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?”

Less than two weeks before Greece holds another round of national elections, Cavafy’s famous poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” has renewed force and urgency in Athens. The elections, scheduled for June 17, will decide Greece’s fate in the euro zone and perhaps even its long-term future as a viable state. But with an excruciating choice to be made between draconian austerity measures and a departure from Europe’s shared currency, the birthplace of democracy is paralyzed with indecision and poised to descend into chaos and economic catastrophe.

Evidence of a state tottering on the edge of complete dysfunction is apparent everywhere in Athens. Traffic signals work sporadically; a sign giving the shortened hours of one of the world’s great museums, the National Archaeological Museum, is haphazardly taped to the door; police officers in riot gear patrol the perimeters of the universities, where a growing population of anarchists, disaffected young people and drug addicts congregate in communal hopelessness.

“Greeks have worry beads up to here,” one Athenian told me in the shadow of the Acropolis, measuring to the top of her head. “We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

The most visible sign of these dire, uncertain times is the proliferation of graffiti over almost every vertical space in the city. Athens has long cherished a tradition of political commentary and street art, but the recent financial crisis has spurred the young to express their discontent with nihilistic intensity.

“Wake Up!” is a ubiquitous tag in the city. “Welcome to the Civilization of Fear” reads another. One airbrushed scene portrays an Athens bus — not long ago a symbol of Greece’s commitment to improving its civic infrastructure while reducing pollution — about to run off the road or crash into an oncoming vehicle.

If the young bear the harshest burden of the economic crisis — 48 percent of Greeks below age 24 are unemployed — they do so with a mix of denial, frantic exuberance and a debilitating sense of the absurd. A flash mob recently appeared in Syntagma Square, not to protest the lack of jobs or the political gridlock but to dance to ’N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye.” Nearby, another graffiti slogan seemed to capture the mood: “Dancing All the Time, Feeling All the Rage.”

Throughout Athens I asked people of all ages what it was like to live in Greece at the moment. “Hell,” one woman told me. “Terrible, terrible,” said a waiter at a tavern on the Plaka.

A Greek friend sighed and admitted that he would leave the country immediately if he could: “There is no good solution to the current crisis. Austerity will damage us for years to come, and so will the return of the drachma. Either way it will get much worse before it gets better.”

On a warm, lovely Saturday night two weeks before the election, the immensely appealing Greek pop star León was finishing a sound check at an outdoor space in the trendy Gazi neighborhood. Strumming a ukulele, León sang what could easily stand as an anthem for this perilous moment in Athens and the rest of Greece:

Tell me what to do when everything is changing,

Tell me what to do when you can’t step on the same river twice.

If Cavafy’s poem blamed national inaction and a too-easy fatalism on a long and tortuous history of invasion from without, León seemed intent on exploring ways to survive this period of gloom and impasse from within. “The master of the ship, the leader of your mind ... you don’t need them anymore,” he sang.

Then the tune, a folkish number titled “Someday (Somewhere, Maybe Somebody),” blossomed into an infectious chorus. León’s band, an eight-piece group of men and women playing electric guitars and the more traditional accordion, leaned in and sang together.

In this place where tragedy was invented, the song was joyful and sadly cathartic. The chorus had no words, but it nevertheless contained an invitation to join in the achingly beautiful melody. I still can’t get it out of my head.

Randall Fuller is a professor of English at the University of Tulsa.

Nic will be delighted to know that we also saw his friend Demetri with his wife Marianna.  Nic stayed with Demetri and did a radio program in Thessaloniki at his radio station many years ago.  They now have two little girls.  He asked to be remembered to Nic.  Hopefully if Nic and Apisata are here next summer they can have a reunion. 

 

Marianna and Demetri

 

Helena and Natalie

 

It seems that everyone was at Christo's last night.  Helena and Natalie sat at the table next to us.  Helena met Natalie several years ago in Panama.   Natalie is a Muscovite who currently lives in London and works in the television industry.  One of the shows her company carries is "Doc Martin."  Her mother works for the U.S. Army in Washington DC, and a sister works in film.  Her sister is in the process of moving to Malibu with her two children.  Unfotunately Natalie was only here for a few days and has already left for her return to London. 

 

We've heard from Petra that she and Kyros will come from Frankfurt on the the 3rd, so we have scheduled to have dinner with them, and our friend Takis (who one year served Adeline a lot of fish and trimmings) will cook for us on Tuesday afternoon.  I imagine that will be our last meal.  Stell says he is ready for me to fix ribs! 

 

Nothing dramatic planned for today - but the weather is fallish and still perfect for swimming, and I will take every swimming opportunity these last days afford.