Fragments

With Marinos’ death I begin to obsess about Athens – I keep coming back to the places, the psychogeography of the city, and this is made up of plants and grit, and the stuff under our feet. I don’t care about form; I just want to uncover the everyday details that make a place real. I must have feared losing a connection to my youth, to a potential that might have been squandered. Writing becomes a salvation.

George Perec’s Je me souviens – a series of one line personal recollections of things that are largely important to himself but serve to trigger an emotional response, and therefore precisely the sort of thing that I love – includes blank pages for the reader to fill in their own examples. I go with his idea at speed but the Athens I had known keeps splitting up into smaller parts, and like mismatched magnets they slip and repel as I attempt to force them together.

Athens or Attica: they are both uncomfortable for me to write when I mean parts of the city and parts of the country. I don’t know much about the north of Attica near Boeotia, or the south-west by Megara, I barely know the southern tip by Lavrion, or the area inland from the port of Rafina. The part I am interested in has an elegance, and serenity that does not exist anywhere else in Greece. My Attica is the size of the story I could piece together to illustrate that Attica is not just the classical past, it has a wider, more colourful context. Its history is full of mysterious interludes and darkenings, where the records trail off, due to invasion, or simply because the places were no longer relevant.

Attica is the province under Ottoman occupation, when there were camel trains coming through from the east, and a hammam was housed within the Acropolis complex, the Muslim era comes with folklore of remorseful executioners, and tales that might belong to prince-of-paradox Nasreddin. Attica is also the long Byzantine period, and the short-lived Crusader Duchy, when it changed hands between Burgundians, Catalans and Florentines. It is Roman, Emperor Hadrian’s project of urban renewal, it is occupied by the Germans in the second world war, whose Swastika is pulled down from the Acropolis by a plucky teenager, who later became a leader of the Greek left. It is settled by communities of Arvanites, which is to say Albanians. It is the home of foppish Koutsavkides gangsters in the late 19^th century; bandits named Davelis and Bibichi; the Duchess of Plaissance who kept her deceased daughter embalmed in her house on Piraeos Street and struggled to build a mansion in Pendeli. It is filled with colourful trivia.

And since this place is being written by me, at this point in time, it is an Athens threaded together with Bangkok. The Teochiu cemetery, still fresh on my mind, is pushing up through the classical spaces of Attica, apparent in the sentence that would be, for some months, the beginning of a novel.

I met her in the gardens of the ancient cemetery. It was spring and the wild flowers were out. At the time I was obsessed with the old graveyard – its mausoleums witnessing the submergence of a grassy road: the beginning of the Sacred Way.

*

While writing about my gardens, in one of those moments where you realise that you’re not alone, and at the same time you could just give up before starting anything because it’s all been said already and better by someone else.

The collection of garden sketches I had been crafting with their towering holm-oaks and shoreline cyclamens gradually evolved into a horror. I wish I could have continued writing about pretty gardens and botany. Why couldn’t those sentimental places have remained innocent? What a twisted fuck I am. What had been a refuge was corrupted by messy experience, smeared with fluids, attacked, insulted and burned down. The problem is that into those walled gardens came ghosts, and these were not always friendly double-exposures of family and friends – sometimes they were people I knew who had died in pain or alone, as children, violently – sometimes they were furies.

Strange Twins

The writing was both story and process of incremental self-discovery. Although I love the idea that the journey is the destination, it wouldn’t be my point because I have a definite goal. From here on the pathway is treacherous; it turns back on itself, through time, and meanders between Bangkok and Athens. What else would you expect when searching for the ineffable? Doubtless there are other ways to proceed, but this is the one I have found and if you bear with me we will arrive, I promise.

First we have to get through a doorway: right in the centre between the clear edges of Athens and Bangkok, which have been brought together and don’t quite overlap, there’s a pitch black space, that’s where we’re heading, that’s the portal.

This merging of places occurred on a computer screen as I edited a film. It had been shot in Athens and was assembled in Bangkok, where I spent months sitting at my grandfather’s desk – the very one he had been at making mother of pearl inlaid boxes, and drawing scenes from the Ramakian – here I replayed and spliced Athenian streets, and snatches of dialogue in Greek. It’s a hypnotic process, take for instance a shot of an actor driving his moped down a street, played over and over until each passerby is familiar, every bit of wild sound is anticipated – it is greater than the original memory, it becomes a tri-fold life, encased in the teak scented room in Bangkok, the bird calls and the wail of motorbikes passing in the Thai lane outside.

For the mastering I got some help from Lee and Rit, who had been, respectively, editor and sound designer on Thai art-house classic Tropical Malady. They brought my film up a notch but I found colour and sound were taking on local qualities, the yellows turning green and the audio mellowing. When Alex came to Thailand for the end of post-production, we had to tell Rit to stop reducing the volume, “That’s the way it is, Greeks are loud when they speak.” Alex instructed him.

It had been Alex’s idea to make a film. We had just watched a performance of Greek shadow puppetry, Karagiosis, played by a man called Athos, who infused his narrations with political satire. Alex had time off work and asked if I was interested in trying to co-direct something. I said, yes, yes, not taking him seriously. Then he cornered me at a party on a friend’s terrace in Koukaki, and we set a date to start shooting, and bullied a few more of our drunken friends to help out. The first shoot was on the 25^th of March 2004 – the Greek National Day. Our anti-hero was filmed smoking a joint at the foot of the acropolis with the fighter jets and attack helicopters of the military parade passing in the background, for free.

The film came together in sputters and stops; it was made up as we went along, working from a thirty page outline Alex and I wrote in the café of the School of Fine Arts above the ancient Agora. The story followed a police informer, through protests and parties, and referenced real-life characters, who’d played off both sides in the cat and mouse game between government and radical left. Ostensibly a political thriller, it was to be a record of Athens in flux. We cast a real-life private detective as one of our bad cops, alongside an anarchist bookseller, who spoke exquisite Greek but drank too much, and dabbled with heroin. The real actors, both up-and-coming and washed-up, were reached through a school friend who was now a casting director. It was a miracle that anything came of it. At one point, our actors refusing to work, and the camera reclaimed by its owner, we had nothing but a tripod, and Alex’s will power.

Ultimately the completed film would be called Ola Gia Tipota, All for Nothing, but we toyed with Pandora’s Box for a time, and Gazaki – after the small gas-canister bombs the anarchists set off periodically – one of the actors joked that it should be called Rouf Garden, using the word Roufianos, snitch.

When we weren’t shooting Alex, Marinos and I went scouting for locations. We stumbled across a wasteland to the west of the city, a passage-way to industrial sites, hard to access from the wealthier east of the metropolis, but being neglected somehow abounding in anomalies.

Off a huge highway, built for trucks, beyond the spray of diesel fumes and dust, was a scene from another life. An elegant house stood in a large garden, it had a conservatory, in the grounds were tall palm trees, pistachio trees scribbled against the light blue sky, dogs chasing butterflies. We gaped at the place and moved along in silence.

By autumn, the film wrapped up, we were back for a stroll. The terrain was almost marshy, forsaken, a flatland of browning grasses and reeds, almost treeless. We came across a chapel, with a graveyard. The chapel was open to the sky, its bronze candlestick holder collecting water, the icons and altar unattended to.

Athens was on the cusp. I believed it was rare to observe a place in the midst of change, because in history you cannot see where you are until later, when the character of the times reveal themselves. But this was not the case with Athens. It was transforming before our eyes, with a sudden increase in affluence, building works, services. The film we were making was not metaphysical, but a chief motivation was to document places before they disappeared. We used to go to a tiny restaurant, run by Greek Muslims from Thrace – who were probably partly Romany. They spoke a dialect of Greek peppered with Turkish words, and were hilarious, would break into song and dance, like characters out of Emir Kusturiça films. The neighbourhood had been built by this obscure minority, and within two years they were all gone and the pretty little houses and that tavern had been turned into bars.

The pace of change was given a massive push by the Olympics. Many people, the usual moaners and pessimists – people like me – were disturbed by the games. “Our grandchildren will pay off the debts amassed for these games,” it was said. I wasn’t as conscientious as I made out, thanks to my casting agent friend, Kelly, I got work as an extra in TV ads for the Olympics. I was a Brazilian football supporter shimmying through Plaka. In another I was part of a crowd of enraptured spectators. The director, a Spaniard, asked a girl in front of me to look prayerful for the close up. “Think of La Madonna.”

While making our film Alex and I got hauled in by a motorcycle cop, for shooting “near critical and sensitive infrastructure on the eve of the games,” we had been filming out of the car window while driving up Kifisias Avenue. The cop looked at us with contempt in the station, placing a glistening boot onto his spandex wrapped thigh, he signalled, “Show me what you were shooting.” Alex ran the material back on the camera’s flip screen. “What is this shit? Your film is boring,” the policeman exclaimed after a few minutes, and kicked us out.

Afterwards disheartened we took ourselves to Varsos where we had a beer under the plane tree. Our misunderstanding was with progress: Attica was this elegant elder relative, that told us stories, and opened her dusty wonderful house to us, she had picture albums, and curios, and a lovely garden. Over the years this space had become a hypnotic zone. One day her ambitious son arrives and starts cleaning the place up, knocking things down, burning the broken furniture in the garden, and building. We felt any alteration to the space to be sacrilege.

Alex called me a snob. “I can predict the kind of people you’ll get on with.” He left it at that. But to his horror, his own aunt pronounced us equally snobbish. When he explained the plot of our film to her she pointed out that we had no real sympathy for the working class, “the antihero of your tale is the only kid who has a job. The rest of your characters just hang around and go on marches, because they can afford to.”

As 2005 commenced, Alex and I pushed on with editing the film. Alex had a new job lined up, working as an economist in east Africa. We decided to set up our little work station in a basement apartment, underneath the Ethnographic Museum in Plaka, that had belonged to his grandmother, abandoned after her death, and crammed with the detritus of several lifetimes, and a dense atmosphere of fading memory. We browsed the dusty things when not arguing about the editing. We found a receipt written out to Alex’s great aunt, it was for the rental of a piano on the day the Germans occupied Athens during the Second World War. “How could anyone think of playing the piano in times like that?” We wondered.

It was cold in our makeshift studio, we’d sit huddled by the glow of an electric heater, drinking strong tea from cups we never cleaned. In February it snowed. I was in a taverna off Alexandras Avenue; the city snowed under during the course of the meal. When I walked home, Athens had been silenced by the storm, it was still snowing, and the muffled air throbbed with an intensity of life and death; as I came to the grounds of Nimitz hospital, that had supposedly been used once as an execution site, I saw an urban landscape transformed into a vista from a fairytale.

The next day, I woke to voices from the street below, the crunching of feet on thick snow, and not a sound of a car. I put on an extra layer, a woolly hat and gloves, and ran down to pick up Alex in Plaka. We panted and slid up to the Pnyx, to practice T’ai Chi and Chi Kung in the ancient assembly; surrounded by the frosted city, the acropolis at its most painterly, and the mountains of Attica hoary in the perfect clear air.

By March, having been going on and off for a year, the film was still unfinished, I decided to visit my grandmother in Thailand before she died. Thinking I would be in Bangkok for a few months I soon got myself ensconced in life: work–relationship–confusion.

Adjusting to Bangkok was hard, I felt myself come undone. The thoughts I had about Bangkok were tainted, filled with smoke and oil, everything exuded darkness. I thought Athens was all light. I considered planting a pomegranate and an olive tree in Bangkok’s soil, to make me feel at home, but they would have been sad. It was ignorance too, for Bangkok was full of pomegranates, they hang over fatigued walls topped with broken glass, their seeds are watery, and not very sweet.

I rented a room on a street called Sailom, meaning breeze, where I witnessed army trucks filing down the road from the nearby base on the night of the 2006 coup. The helmeted soldiers looked like deadly toys, with their machine gun muzzles in the air.

Even then, faced with a reality, I abstracted and referenced Athens – replaying 1967, when the Greek Junta seized power. I knew more about the Greek Coup, which I had read about obsessively, than I did about the 17 coups that Thailand had experienced thus far in the post-war period. I thought of the philhellenic writer Kevin Andrews, overhearing the word-play of two men in Kolonaki, the morning of a rigged election, “Did you vote, did you slaughter yourself.” “Xifises, sofises?”

The night of my coup, Thai TV played a message, akin to the broadcast in Athens of 1967, an announcement and a justification. The Greek coup was heralded by martial music, and a claim that twenty-seven truckloads of weapons had been discovered; the army had acted in order to save the nation from anarchy and communist conspiracy. No evidence was ever produced. But pronouncements were never so dramatic in Bangkok, the event I witnessed was one of many coups, itself to be followed not so long later by another.

Alex took All For Nothing to Thessaloniki in 2006 for the festival, which I couldn’t make. Instead I presented it at the Bangkok World Film Festival. An overzealous PR woman had tricked the Greek Ambassador into attending, after the film he looked confused and left in a hurry. During the Q&A another Greek asked for the microphone saying, “I am from Athens, and I brought my Thai girlfriend here to show her my home. Now she doesn’t want to visit. Why did you make it look so bad?”

I suggested that it was a gritty take on the place, there are plenty of other films that show the popular side of the city, but this too was a kind of homage.

“But those people you depicted, the protestors and vandals, they are a bad bunch.”