"Read Any Good Brands Lately?"

I was beginning to wonder why nobody else seemed to mind Dragos Bucurenci's rise to fame. I can understand that TV audiences prefer to watch men who are easier on the eye than the current TV lineup. Even Romanian soap operas feature males whose only physical claim to fame may be the absence of a beer belly. Or what if 99% of Romania's gorgeous men (not very many to begin with, see the beer problem) got into the music industry or the modelling business? Here we had someone who couldn't sing or dance, didn't have a model's appeal, was articulate enough and "somehow" got loose in the cultural circuit where he made an easy kill? Or maybe Romania came to a point of such boiling excitement and giddiness before its European ascension that nobody can sit still long enough to read a book anymore, therefore he's perfectly fit for the job? In short, I was imagining apocalyptic scenarios that might explain the apparent insularity of my anger.

Just as I was almost ready to accept that his tricks had worked sad wonders (plenty of those in Romania, unfortunately!) and that this guy with very skimpy formal education had indeed become the uncontested cultural choice of "a new generation", I came across the site of Kiki Vasilescu.

Actually, another blog pushed me there. Its author, tausance, had pitched in a poll Vasilescu against Bucurenci under the headline: "Who is the young hope of Romanian literature?". Wow. Had it come to that? Bucurenci is leading, needless to say.

But closer scrutiny raised some major questions. If you understand Romanian, you're better off reading tausance's entry for yourself. If you don't, I'll summarize it for you:

-- it's not the quality of their literary output that tausance is interested in (they both seem to be bluffing "here and there")
-- what is being weighed and discussed is each writer's BRAND, "their image and their notoriety".
-- tausance would choose DB over Kiki, because he wears cool clothes and his blog is "rather clean", as opposed to Kiki's "doubtful taste" in clothing and messed up respective website.

In the end, tausance sums it up: the suggested poll is about "absolute cultural value". "Let there be justice!", the author exhorts, then exits blog post.

I'm taking a break. Like, I need to mourn for a few seconds here.

*****************
This is Bucurenci's audience thinking out loud, "make no mistake about it"... But I can't get into the OBVIOUS issues this attitude poses right now, I have to stick to my topic.
*****************

I don't know about the clothing, but the author may be A BIT right in snobbing Vasilescu's web presence. It's not just a blog, it's a regular custom-made site, so theoretically more difficult to put up and maintain than a run-of-the-mill blog, which takes minutes to set up and maybe a few hours to tweak in order to customize, complete with one's own graphics. But Vasilescu's site doesn't look that great, the information is all over the place, and one has to subscribe to his phpBB forum in order to leave feedback -- and that's oh so 2003-ish! So if he wants to stand a chance against aggressive brand builders with decent blogs like Bucurenci, I would advise him to migrate his content into a blog and get with the program...

I'm sure tausance would advise getting another wardrobe, too.

I will now briefly refer to the writing. You may skip the next paragraph if you don't think it matters.

I am not familiar with Vasilescu's debut novel, but since he touted that he wrote it almost entirely in 30 days, I'm not holding my breath. While it has been done before, it is exceedingly rare to pull off a very good book in that manner. And then I understand that he's not being original, he's just re-writing an old classic, updating it creatively, using today's language, etc. It might be a worthwhile practice for his future writing career, but anyway, as I said, with so many excellent & original (i.e. "from scratch" :)) books on my nightstand, I'm not looking forward to the experience.

Now I talk branding shit again:

What shocked me was his video blog (vlog), "Episode no. 6". The very same elements in Bucurenci's interview for "Suplimentul de cultura" that enraged me had Kiki go berserk! So there is at least one other person in that country who thinks that DB's guts are utterly despicable. So alike were our objections that I'd have thought he predated me, had he not pre-dated me (well, not really, I just couldn't resist the pun.) And it was on this occasion that I had a glimpse of the "Suplimentul" paper version, which Kiki was exasperatedly waving about, after having washed, dried and ironed it.

The horror!!! Obscenely spread on half a page, A HUMONGOUS Bucurenci head shot, I kid you not: the black-and-white photo which is pushed on all the channels and is featured on his blog too, you know, the one where he pensively emerges from behind a dark object (a tire?), unshaved, his huge left eye fixated on YOU, the reader. (Shudder...) Speaking of which, he's peddling a series of beauty shots, like a real self-marketing pro, what the heck. My "favorite" is a warm-toned, flooded in back light photograph, cheesy to the point of disaster. (You may admire this masterpiece, together with some real bad Photoshop experiments signed by Alex Leo Serban, at Atelier LiterNet. If you want to see how a writer/critic tries to do a favor to a beginner but manages instead to embarrass himself to the point of losing credibility, read Florin Iaru's intro. But that's about writing too... Or, is it? I just can't tell anymore when people are doing their jobs of writing/criticizing and when they're just being hacks and... branding.

That awful back-lit image may be for the down market, or whatchamacallit, he's working the field... What do I know about the intricacies of "building a strong cultural brand". Quickly tired with all this, for restful old style I cry. (Forgiveness, Shakespeare!) Like, people write great stuff and editors are happy to publish it and then other people read it and talk about it and recommend it to each other and then the people who wrote the great stuff become famous, and nobody would dare to call them "cultural brands", let alone themselves calling themselves that dirty b-word. (I just channelled Gertrude Stein, must stop NOW!)