My deliberations were interrupted by Novotný, who asked the officer from Interpol why this particular artwork was considered of such importance as to have three departments of the Prague Central Criminal Police assigned to its recovery. There were, after all, he argued, valuable artworks passing through Prague every week of the year; his office, he continued, was full of files on these, or at least had been until recently, when the bulk of his files had been moved to another office which he had not yet been allowed to occupy. The officer from Interpol replied that it was beyond Novotný’s, Rosický’s or my remit to be informed of the reason, or reasons, for the value placed on the painting, just as it was beyond our remit to know the nature of the bodies for whom it held such value. Some information is to be shared with the likes of us, some not: we can only expect to be told so much. The meeting ended at 11:07 [eleven zero seven], after which …
* * * * *
The presence of the subterranean practice room on Ječná is announced by these words, scrawled in chalk on the building’s outside walclass="underline" Roger! This is the practice room. Below them, an arrow points down uneven stone steps. Lying at the bottom of the staircase, moulding and rotting, the strings, plate and soundboard of a disembowelled piano hint at the musical enterprise to which the basement has been consecrated. The practice room itself is shaped like a wine cellar: a stone ceiling that curves down into walls which are offset with alcoves that house instruments, leads, amplifiers, wah-wahs …
Right now, these very objects should be stacked up in the middle of the room ready for carrying up the staircase, but somehow it’s just not happening. Roger Baltham has set up a small projector which is throwing images up onto the flat section of wall that’s furthest from the door, behind the drum kit. The drum kit is intercepting the bottom of the images before they reach the wall, but this isn’t a problem as the effect of these images distorting around curved metal and taut hide seems to please the assembled company, who purr and chuckle as they watch. A joint is being passed round. The Velvet Underground’s ‘Stephanie Says’ is playing on Radio Jedná. Roger’s standing behind the projector, the index finger of his left hand laced round the thin strip of celluloid so as better to facilitate its passage from the projector’s lower spools into the upper mechanism’s slit. From time to time, his right hand takes the joint, feeds it up to his lips and passes it on while he exhales the smoke into the cylinder of light in front of him, watching it uncoil and disappear …
The images show the moon landing — the first one, 1969. Or rather, they show a television screen on which the landing is being shown. Roger found the film among old boxes full of cast-off clothes in the attic of his parents’ house in Palo Alto. He plays a cameo role in it himself, crawling nappy-clad towards the screen and touching it before being whisked away by adult arms. At this precise moment Armstrong, or perhaps Aldrin, is bouncing on the surface of the moon, and Roger’s older sister Laura is copying him on the surface of the coffee table, oblivious to the hands that appear from the edge of the shot to wave her aside. The company assembled in the practice room all laugh. Armstrong or Aldrin bounces again. The camera swings round to show a hair-bunned aunt performing Monroe pouts at it, then zooms in on her breasts. The assembled company laugh some more: they’re in a laughing mood.
The company are, in order of appearance on the CD jacket: Tomáš Stein (bass, lyrics), Kristina Limová (vocals), Jiří Vacek (guitar) and Jakub (“Kuba”) Masák (drums). When the reel they’re now watching was shot, Roger’s friend Nick was two or three days old, but none of these people had been born. Not one of them had yet been conceived — not quite. After the joint has passed him for the third time, Roger starts wondering if their parents were still virgins when the landing module made its tentative descent on the moon’s surface. A serendipitous apprehension of synchronicity starts forming in his mind: if, as is entirely possible, their parents-to-be were meeting for the first time at that very moment, exchanging their first shy words, or for the second time, going out on a proper date, or even — and this too is possible — indulging in their first moments of prenuptial sexual congress at that very moment, then these acts are theoretically in shot right now, contained within the sphere of the earth which is just coming up on screen, the camera having abandoned the aunt’s cleavage to swing back towards the television set. Providing that Europe happens to be facing up towards the moon, of course, and not America, Australia or China. He can’t quite discern a land mass. If Europe’s in view, though, then that makes their watching these events right now, here in the practice room … which makes this afternoon’s experience — hang on … no, pop! it’s gone, sequences of logic uncoiling with the smoke in the light’s column, losing shape, their verbal bridges replaced by the song’s lyrics:
She’s not afraid to die
People all call her Alaska
Between worlds so the people ask her
It’s all in her eyes …
On the Baltham family’s television screen, Armstrong or Aldrin stands on the moon’s surface with the US flag. Kuba points, red-eyed:
“Look! It’s an American flag!”
“What did you expect it to be?” Jiří turns his head towards him, red-eyed too. Oh boy. “A Czech one?”
“I always thought the flag said MTV.”
The company all hoot and throw cushions at Kuba. He uses these to build himself a backrest, then, reclining into this, picks up a drum machine that’s lying on the floor beside him, rests it across his knees and switches it on. A syncopated high-hat beat comes from it. As the astronaut launches off once more into long, floating strides, Kuba turns a knob to slow the beat right down; each time he lands, Kuba speeds the beat up again, which makes the company laugh still more. The song’s chorus comes round and they all join in, surprisingly out of tune for musicians, it seems to Roger, wailing:
It’s so cold in Alaska
It’s so cold in Alaska …
It’s not hot in Prague. Two hours ago he was out filming rows of cars around Palmovka, then an old shipyard he’d noticed earlier beside the bridge: might want to use it in some montage … His fingers couldn’t grasp the camera properly after a while. Get gloves tomorrow. And new film, soon. He’ll wait till he goes back to Poland for that: great stock there, really cheap. He must have shot all around Central Europe now: Warsaw, Tallinn, Budapest … showed a cut-and-paste film at a festival in Vilnius … in a Romanian village he got peasants to act out Beverly Hills 90210: an entire episode, reading the dialogue which he’d transcribed from video before leaving San Francisco, then paid a professor at the Bucharest Film School to translate, tractors and pig troughs standing in for sports cars and swimming pools … Ostploitation: a new genre, one that he’s invented. Baltham: Ostploitation. Balthamesque … Coming out here’s been good for Roger: helped him grow creatively, expand … In January there’s Berlin’s festival of avant-garde film — must try to get on the bill there … Tonight, a Factory-style party at this French guy’s. He’ll show the spliced found-footage Fifties-housewife-with-lions film, this moon one, plus maybe an old porno flick as well — a sure-fire crowd pleaser … In any case, the band will be playing in front of the screen (what’ll they use for a screen? Perhaps this Jean-Luc has a big white wall) and everybody will be drunk …