Comment on Paparazzi by Ciril

vulpul's avatar
Nice shot! :D

Unfortunately our gipsies (Romania) don't care that much about the whole comunity. A small part of them are nice people and very gifted in what they do (music from classical to folklore, tin craft, woodwork, bricks, and a lot more) but the majority of them went down the nasty road. A lot tof thiefs and beggars are gipsies and that's because many of them didn't care about education or didn't value their heritage or had any scale of values. Right now we have a lot of gipsies with no goal in life and they are not united at all. If you go to a gipsy village or a gipsy neighbourhood to take pictures the'll think you want to turn them in to the police (or a newspaper) for something and they'll be too aggresive trying to intimidate you to stay off. Sometimes this means threatening with violence after a shower of bad language. And in some ocasions some of them might think to start a fresh business start by aquiring your camera and stuff because it looks expensive and they might sell it after they've taken it from you :D You don't want that.

The minority of gipsies that are really cool and ok seem to be more like any other romanian, so there's no strong visual identity or tradition to dfine them as gipsies.. Only a few ones are keeping the old gipsy style alive although is extremely distorted by contemporary subculture. These few ones are the wealthy ones who display their money in any way available (gold teeth, mercedes, lincoln, massive gold jewelry, huge marble buildings although no architectural control whatsoever, etc.) It's more like they have been poor for too long and now they try to show off. Some of them are quite good on the showbiz line with singing a mingled kind of music (combined from folklore, oriental music like turkish, and cheap sound effects) which is extremely popular with the kids from the rural areas and the people with low or weak education. I've heard this kind of music all over the Balkans and I guess it's a regional phenomena. Anyway gipsies developed this a lot in Romania and there are a few of them considered superstars for this. :shrug: They're cool in their own way.
tinekr's avatar
Well i have to comment on this one. Well i disagree with vulpul about the topic. I do not know a lot about gypsy culture but my oppinion is that is very narrow minded if you think like that.
I visited Romania twice and i just loved it, i can't say anything bad about it and it is really a lot of gypsies there. But Romania is a country where a naive turist can be mugged immediately- you know what i'm talkin' about.
But we didn't got mugged by gypsies and a friend wasn't been (grammar?) beaten and robbed (500$ plus all documents) by a gypsy but that happend with ordinary romanian folk. A lot of these things happen when there is a lack of money and when a society and family doesn't give a chance for youth. So there is no black and white.
And in Slovenia there is no black and white. If you are positive to gypsies they act the same to you.
vulpul's avatar
It's not about black or white or grayscales. But when some gipsies that I know (and that have studied in the arts highschool and later on the conservatory) are winning international prizes for violin interpretation or other high performance in culture, or other gipsies that I know do wonders with a hammer and a piece of metal, and this is mostly because it runs in their families for hundreds of years, WHY the others, the majority of them are only breaking their buildings apart and taking an aggresive attitude towards all that's clean and beautiful? I mean, poverty can't be an excuse to live in filth and doing nothing but steal the damn railroad tracks to sell the iron! (you see this almost once a month in the news here) And I'm not saying there are no idiots among romanians too. Oh there are plenty! And it's bad. But when you do the math you'll find out that over half of the existing gipsies are causing serious problems while you can't say the same about the romanians. In terms of percentage, our gipsies are scoring nagative points. I'm glad to see that in other countries they're better organized and are trying to make something out of it. I could only hope that our gipsies are going to learn from their example. But until then I can show you hundreds of downtown buildings taken apart by families of gipsies living inside just like in caves. In their way of thinking it's no use to clean the walls or to dispose of the garbage properly. They're just silly, but this gets them on the losing path towards theft and violence. Besides a naive tourist can be mugged in Paris too :) I'm happy I'm not naive enough for this (so far) And you can't really say anything about gipsies because you haven't really lived near them (once again I'm reffering to specific groups of gipsies living in Romania) And also if you haven't been to a filarmonic concert to hear some real performance from a gipsy hand and a gipsy ear. It may be gray in between but there's always the edges that show up.