Author Archive

Belgrade After Darkâeuro;”and After Milosevic

Written by Richard Byrne on November 20, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

BELGRADE – A soft blue light suffuses the dim recesses of Belgrade’s newly reopened Akademija club, as some young Serbian MCs rap over a brutally funky marriage of techno and old-school beats. My friends Vuksha and Tijana are caught up in the crescendo, dancing together as the music washes through the darkened space. Fuck it.
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Black Box Recorder’s Nervy Pop Style

Written by Richard Byrne on May 8, 2001. Posted in Posts

Britain is beat these days, and it’s not just the mad livestock feeling the hurt. When I was there in the fall, there were train wrecks, floods, bombs, everything but a plague of locusts. Around that time, I heard Black Box Recorder’s sublimely sweet single, "The Facts of Life." The sound was echt All Saints,
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Weimar Berlin’s Morbidly Erotic Fascinations

Written by Richard Byrne on January 29, 2001. Posted in Books, Posts

As a cultural construct, Weimar Berlin is Atlantis. It’s become a fabulous tale so freighted with hype, misconception and myth that it has sunken to a point where one questions if it ever existed at all except in its renderings–Isherwood, Cabaret, Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Some of Weimar Berlin has come down to us more or
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Putin’s Moves

Written by Richard Byrne on January 2, 2001. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

The result was that Clinton had no grand moment like Nixon’s in China or Reagan’s at the Brandenburg Gate–but there were no administration-shredding moments like Iran-Contra or the Iranian hostage crisis, either. In the main, Clinton turned out to be a global mechanic, the man performing seemingly endless and exceedingly thankless small tasks that mentally
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A Serbian Writer Describes War from the Inside

Written by Richard Byrne on December 5, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Then, suddenly, you find yourself and your country in the sights of NATO warplanes. Not only are bombs falling on your city, but you find that the "soft" totalitarian state has become a lot more rigid overnight. Jasmina Tesanovic is one of a number of Serbian writers who found herself in that position in the
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A Free Serbian Press?

Written by Richard Byrne on November 14, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Velickovic was one of the last people to see Curuvija alive, which put him at the center of a controversy in Belgrade last week over a surveillance report leaked to the press from the state security service. According to the document, secret police agents followed Curuvija on the afternoon that he was killed, almost up
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Happy Gangster Story: Schoolly D Returns

Written by Richard Byrne on October 24, 2000. Posted in Posts

Schoolly D Reached by telephone in Philadelphia recently, Schoolly sounds more philosophical than pissed off about the fact that he hasn’t reaped the full credit for his innovation and influence. "The winners write history," says Schoolly. "Whoever’s making the most money can fool the public and say that they created it themselves." Schoolly adds that
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Australia’s Neglected Go-Betweens

Written by Richard Byrne on October 24, 2000. Posted in Posts

The Go-Betweens That’s not exactly the problem for Australia’s Go-Betweens that it might be for, say, Men at Work. Founded by songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan in 1978, the Go-Betweens were never big enough to cash in the first time around. They were always critical darlings, but their knack for signing with ill-fated record
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NATO’s Insecurity Forces in Bosnia

Written by Richard Byrne on July 21, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Sarajevo—There was a big turnout at the NATO SFOR (“Stabilization Force”) Press Center in downtown Sarajevo two weeks ago, where NATO’s outgoing Secretary-General Javier Solana gave a press conference. Solana was a regular visitor here back in the day when the NATO peacekeeping operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the alliance’s biggest chore. A few months of bombing Yugoslavia and the task
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“The Lifeblood of the Serbian Government Is War.”

Written by Richard Byrne on July 7, 1999. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Pop quiz time. Who said this about whom, and when did he say it? “He has never understood that the man who set Yugoslavia on fire will never put the fire out, that the lifeblood of the Serbian government is war.” If your guess was Tony Blair, or Bill Clinton, talking about Boris Yeltsin or Pat Buchanan in the last
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