Three days in Belgrade, mainly to film the pilot of this demo, with front-end Cullers and back-end programmers-cum-directors. Three days of productive "work" and meeting interesting Serbs, providing an ideal forum for chat on theory and the Balkans, certainly more than I would normally. Would we come back glibly singing their praises, they're so nice/generous/friendly/etc?

Three of us minus the producer arrived in Belgrade city centre early on Friday, ably assisted at the airport by Dusan. His tipping of the taxi driver was the first sign that we may be coming back thinking the above. We were staying at a hotel that had seen better days and room occupation rates, it supports itself in the now-familiar post-Eastern Bloc style by leasing out a space for what is coyly advertised as a ‘nightclub', but was right near the presidential and parliamentary buildings, the ministries and the embassies, including the federal parliament that was the famous forum for the overthrow of Milosevic in 1999. For the rest of the day we had an introductory walk round this area, taking in the contrast of Belgrade's neoclassical and modern arkitektur with the more functionalist socialist vernacular. Aesthetically, the place is not the strongest and it is unlikely to reel in the low-budget, high-expectation whores to this side of the Iron Curtain the way places like Prague and Budapest do. Beneath the surface it has the class and culture of a typical European capital, but that in itself is buttressed by a climate tempered by still being in the outcast years after the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Nato bombings, evidence of which we'd see later. 

We had an encouraging try-out of the Clintocx costumes before meeting Dusan's brother Milan in the hotel restaurant. Our main man over the weekend and old pals with our producer from a previous conference in Belgrade attended by among others L'IT and Alberto, Milan edited the journal Prelom (Break, or Rupture), which was financed by the delightfully and seriously named Centre for Cultural Decontamination. With funding uncertain due to a cut in links with the centre, the next issue is on hold in production terms if not in the ideas in Milan's mind, and he is currently researching for a War Crimes NGO. He sees the latter as boring if a necessary process for Serbia (many Belgrade citizens were shielded from much of the truth of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. He was enlightening on the golden period of the Yugoslav's federal years, and keen to point out some of the aspects that would make the block move away from Tito's vision towards disintegration. The shift from speaking Serbo-Croat to pure Serb, essentially the same whether in Cyrillic or Serb texts (which are both learned), was a pretty big indicator. Certainly it does seem that the overthrow of Milosevic effected a situation whereby Serbs are very keen not to come across like they were made in the mould of the post federal republic "genocidal maniac", as our character would have it. As for the ‘Kosovo question', it seems that if you say it should stay Serbian then you're an imperialist, but if you say it should go then you're a traitor to your people. Milan, a Red Star fan, said the night of one of the bombing raids was weird; his crowd partied hard in hedonistic defiance of the West. Later, he did us proud by taking us to a good bar, where we meet his friends Sonia, Vlada and Trifka before going on to Plastic for a finale of functional but effective techno and house. No drukqs around to enable us to feel the music beyond the beats. Perhaps Mr Prog Trance John Digweed will get the crowd of beautiful Serbian young men and women going there next week, as the flyers predicted.

Sunday morning.

Nenad, in addition to availing us of Magyar phrases that are particularly abusive - one conjunction manages to incorporate something about fucking your dead mother in her grave, was also insightful, telling us about his national service and the prospect he had of supporting the Army as the next line in defence after the tanks. This inspired a debate on would you or wouldn't you shoot your own people; most of us could not speculate on how you would turn in such a situation, but that's probably what some Serbians thought too. We also are filled in on the paramilitaries and recent developments - Arkan sympathiser and footballer Sinisa Mihailjovic dating the dead warlord's wife, for example. More shooting round the streets, park and hotel, Nenad's monologue insinuating all sorts of things about our intrepid hero.

We stopped off to watch some of the Smelsea game, and enjoyed the bewildering offering of foreign games in the downtown betting shop-cum-bar. Later on, our producer's returning of a dodgy beer in a bar inspired my rant: how too much cultivation of, say, connoisseurship of fine wines or chairs, is just noise that gets in the way of true knowledge, and how too much appreciation is so much sophistication. No-one really agreed with the heathen, but basically we're fooling ourselves if we think we can see real appreciable difference in a claret beyond a basic quality level. How good does food and wine get really? To be honest this is a bit of a bugbear for me - up until a few months ago I thought that carrying a proper bag to work rather than a reused plastic bag was selling out to the bourgeois machine (I am 32). So understandably I was provoked into further thought. My last concerns about how you square this dual existence that many of us seem to practise of being salaried ‘professionals' as well as downtime creatives, how you reconcile your serving of the corporate world and how you deal with any ‘revolutionary' notions, were also ably assuaged. The first two: don't'worry - take a workerist outlook; the third, you won't change fuck all because the world is an allusion in a materialist sense. It's not all connected, despite the efforts of Google, Murdoch and Gates. You can cull yourself, as I did just there and then on one point, but to believe that you can effect real change is frankly optimistic. We know we're on the right side, that's all. The braindeads, if they don't want to listen, are damned. Our group probing came to an end when one of us brought in a young bloke he met in the street outside. Straight away he was in your face, saying let's make films, go to clubs, connect in some way, any way. Unfortunately, he wouldn't take no for an answer, and began to start hustling. Soon we were on the list of an r&b club we didn't want to go to. He'd drive us there. He enlisted his g'friend (weeping nostrils), later his mates, to prove his credibility. She'd drive us there. Two of us definitely didn't want to do that. They went. Two stayed on. Despite sound advice from the departing pair, we carried on, and soon were back in the hotel with him having been drtiven there. Nice move. But it was only to the lobby when after more hours of discouragement he finally did one. 

With our conclusion of Serbs all being nice/generous/friendly already foregone, and welded to it that they bear the English no grudge even though they helped bombed the place and then ushered in the never-loved privatisation process, how ironic was it then that our last social moments would be filled with the irritating presence of a chancer and his entourage. Personally I found it embarrassing and unnecessary - he was unlikely to do us any harm then but has far more motivation to dislike English post-trauma tourists now - but others didn't share my idiotic bravado. We chilled with a run through the encouraging footage and more beer and prescription drugs, which left the three of us on an early flight in fine fettle for getting up, going to the airport and waiting in extremely smoky lounges. We resorted to the catchphrases of the weekend, mimicking the producer's clinical schedule and the clinical nature of the transaction. In this case, the latter would be: we bought the flights and hotel, the airline got us there and the hotel was great; we sorted out the stuff we needed to here; Srpska replied by welcoming us warmly; we closed the book by promising we'll come back. Job done.