Now that I’ve been at this bar so often recently, the heroic past came up in my mind, when Silo still existed in Amsterdam, a squat hosting Patapo, a pirate radio, and a punk community of wolf cubs. In the back was a pub, also a squat, quite similar to Jelen, but there you had view on a harbour with screaming sea-gulls. That was where we gathered together in the evening after our time spent at the Anne Frank House, after work. We had good food, we talked and drank and stared, with quiet jazz – or some new hype at the time: house – playing in the background. Now it’s clear that past is present, and I hear that funny Dutch language around again.
Scholar of stupidity Matthijs Boxsel, too, appears to have stayed for the night when we arrive back from Space Theatre. I spot Jaap Scholten, a Dutch writer living in Buda, and the whole company of Opal Theatre, including a plump hunger artist called Triceps. The ruins of a Dadaist and pathophysical afternoon... In the meantime, the fellows Dadaist only in their appearance – Elemér Balázs, József Balázs, Gábor Czikovsky, Krisztián Lakatos, Zoli Zana – are playing. They produce something that has gone far from the jazz faculty, blends with its environment, something ambient and chill-out, more meditative than agitating. It’s as if they were not present, and if yes, only to fly me to my thoughts, back to the past, to some bar with a piano playing free runs (that, yes, we know, follow a constructed scheme).
This very type of free jazz is not my cup of tea, as I can’t become informal to music. I like when defining grooves take you and make you move your feet. Tonight I can take some pleasant rest with it, long after the gold shot in the cultural sense, and just having had a brutal meat loaf sandwich and some coffee. Beer, smoke, food, and an aggressive accordion begins to play at the table of the Opal Theatre, louder than the jazz quintet, it’s great, I go over, wake up, than go home. However, it is the quiet jazz that remains in my ears, an I fall asleep with that. Tomorrow it’s Dutch day again.