Seksopolis: The Guitar Stole My Husband

SEX DIVAS SINGING FOLK SONGS

In the last few years I’ve started noticing that Zagrebians have gone crazy for a strange variety of folk music, which sounds as if a stray cat was singing the Greek Syrtaki. My fellow citizens lift their arms to this music and fling their hair back over their shoulders while I’m not entirely sure what this music is doing at our urban longitude and latitude. This cat Syrtaki is blasting from every bar, of which there are two to every inhabitant, thank you very much, because we have still not embraced the Western European pace of work. Instead, we have to pace ourselves and stop for an hour or two after every hour of work. Female singers who perform this kind of music have sex-diva status. Their pictures are all over the newspapers; they are girls with wide hips and substantial breasts. Looking like pre-historic Venuses, they fill up every bar and pub, they climb on tables and do their little dance routine for the mesmerized masses. Of course, what they sing has as much to do with rock & roll as it does with the Pythagorean sphere music, or any music at all. The lyrics are equally inspiring: “My sad tears glued the wallpaper; you and the child disappeared into vapor.”

MUSICAL MEN

One of the Croats’ favorite sayings is “Those who sing don’t think mean thoughts,” and this seems to be even more the case when it comes to men who are into their music. Musical men are less dangerous than those who are not, because they have less time to get into bad habits. You can feel perfectly at peace when you live with a guy who every so often locks himself up in a tiny room with walls covered with cork (in a real Proustian manner) and who keeps himself entertained with an electric acoustic guitar—there are six strings to the guitar and once he has pulled on each one of them he hasn’t got the time to go out and get up to no good. My husband is actually busy creating a home studio in which he’ll record his first CD: he will play the parts of six musicians. I can constantly hear him moving about, playing, recording, re-recording and recording yet again. He looks like a fly, with those gigantic headphones on his ears. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that when I talk to him he accompanies my speech with appropriate notes, and the louder I speak the louder he plays. Only once I stop talking will the playing stop, but not for long. My husband will withdraw into his studio, guitar in hand, and play until I...