Sound Kitsch: Dinescu's New Year's Eve

Since 1990 on, Mircea Dinescu, taken by some for a poet, by others for a journalist, and others for a slick, struggled to be original. Nothing wrong with it and non-conformism can be a solution to save yourself of the magmas of anonymity, especially when the country is loaded of poets, journalists and slicks. At times on the left, at other on the right, centre, or periphery our landlord poet who read his editorials in TV shows, like other bards recited their verses, has made up the image of a big mouthed and pun skilled, where material wealth, that of Boyar aristocracy, peacefully coexist with metaphysical thrills of the lyrical self. And, we have to admit, it's interesting to be bohemian when you’re business is doing well, just as it is easy to mime non-conformism when you trundled through all the beds of conformism.

I always looked with reservations at Mircea Dinescu, trying to understand where it his histrionics end and where begins the erudition of the former editor of the magazines "Luceafărul" and "România literar㔠(Literary Romania), where ends and begins the vulgar and where ends and begins the aesthetic feel of the former owner of the "Plai cu boi” (The Ox Valley). And I never was able to have any certainties, as masks have always covered, in random sequence, the image of Stelian Tanase’s chat companion.

That is, until the recent New Year’s Eve that the poet held at home, at the Castle, and that Realitatea TV broadcasted like as sort of culinary and spiritual revolution, trying to give us an example on how good people as in Romania enjoy themselves. To contrasts the manele music and other lamentable shows in the night between the years with something tasteful and refined, with musicians and words of wisdom. And indeed, the effort extended by the ones on Realitatea TV was impressive: no less than 30 people (technicians, directors, operators, etc.) coordinated the fate of a show filmed with eight cameras (!!!) and meant to drop the entire country’s jaw. And the Romanian, in craving, to wipe it all off the TV screen with a crust of bread, as they put it so poetically at one point.

Unfortunately for Dinescu et company many go out for wool and come home shorn, and things have not gone just as anointed. Live broadcasts have provided a kind of embarrassing exhibitionism, of a cheap theatricality, with all seams in sight, with people who had one face before the camera and another when they thought they were not shot, with a Dinescu lamentably acting his part, between jumps driven by mediocre folk music and stuffing a catfish with peppers with a more intelligent expression than many around him. Instead of the intended Boyar atmosphere they only managed a sad mockery, with masters and servants, with command and execution, with guest stars and loners who only got it too late that the differences between them and the stuffed calf are minimal.

In a "lucid" moment, Dinescu apologized that the grilled calf was torn, as that seemed to him to be the only drawback of the Citadel party. And I could not repress a smile, because everything looked too much like "golden calf", yeah, yeah, that of Ilf and Petrov’s, with a local Ostap Bender, lacking the charisma of the original, but synonymous, in the basics (upstartism, slyness, indecent histrionics) with the "son of Lieutenant Schmidt."

From everything I saw, from everything I heard, live and during the endless replays the following days, I realized that, ultimately, Realitatea TV was right to show us the rudeness, vulgarity and perfect kitsch of a "Romanian party”. Eventually, manelism can take different shapes and, even if you play after the score, with the Philharmonic Orchestra, it will still be manelism...