Summer time - when the art is easy

After getting fed up with publishers and unreliable collaborators I decided to turn my unpublished manuscripts into self-created, self-published video books. The first project I started to work on is the first volume of my 'Southern Cross Trilogy', my Caribbean travel journal, titled 'Carib Book'. The manuscript is about 300 pages long, so it is a huge undertaking, which will take at least 2 years to complete. The full video book is going to be about 15-20 hours in length, will fit on about 8-10 DVDs. I started to work on the prewords of the book at the beginning of June and completed the 45 minutes long video (partly animated) by mid-July. I've spent the past 2 weeks writing stories on famous people from the past. I was commissioned to write them for a portal, which was especially created to attract young women. I was given a list of about 250 past celebs and another list of search words, which had to be matched. The problem was that the selected celebs were mostly males, writers, artists, philosophers, kings, dictators, generals, etc., while the search words were compiled by a young valley girl type bimbo. It was hard to match search words like 'menstruation', 'yeast infection', 'bulemia', etc. with the nearly all male cast of long dead celebs. There were two other writers also working on the same project, but they did it in the Hungarian way: while I wrote 110 stories in two weeks, the two young guys wrote altogether 5 of them during the same period. Commissioned by the House of Terror Museum (Budapest, Hungary) I'll be giving a lecture on the '60s sexual revolution, on the 16th of August, 2008, at the Island Festival. Another commission also came in: in October I will give a theremin concert and a lecture on the life of Leon Theremin, at the Hamvas Béla Library, in Százhalombatta, a small town about 30 miles South of Budapest. They've offered me a decent fee and transportation back and fro. I will make a new video presentation for the show, using the great vintage theremin footage I recently collected from the Net.

Bali Revisited

With DJ Shuriken and his girlfriend, Miss Moxy I went to see a Balinese dance and music performance at the Palace of Arts (Budapest, Hungary) last night. The ticket was a birthday present from my reclusive sister. A very nice present indeed. The performing musicians and dancers were not as good as those I've heard and seen on the islands of Bali and Java, yet they've brought back the memories of my travels to the magical islands of Indonesia, back in the 1990s. The music (gong kebiar), dance and wonderful costumes helped me forget - at least for a few hours - this Balkan bazaar/madhouse of a country I am presently wrestling with. About a year ago I started to translate my South East Asian travel journals into a book ('Malay Book' - the second volume of my 'The Southern Cross' trilogy) which seems to interest the Katalizator Publishers. If we can get some grant money they will publish the first volume of the trilogy - 'Caribean Book' - sometimes this year and hopefully the 'Malay Book' will follow it next year. The results of our grant application are due to come out in March, 2008. After some parts of it were very succesful on some popular internet portals (bahia.hu, korridor. hu - both of them has been shut down since) I've been trying to publish the 'Caribean Book' for many years. After much deliberations and stupid lying the manuscript was refused by a number of publishers (Enciklopédia, Magvető, Kalligram, Ulpius, Nyitott Könyvműhely, Index, Golyós Toll, etc.) so far. I hope that the book (and the whole trilogy - the third volume of it is titled 'The Book of Americas', it contains my experiences on the roads of the Americas) will eventually be published. Unfortunatelly these books are just too long and complex to be released in audio book format.