april 1978.
Got a teleobjective from somewhere, looks like something 300mm, maybe from the club. Here and there I'd take the praktika along and shoot around Novi. Didn't take it to the faks like that, the tele requires more light, and I'd probably spend what tape I had too fast.
This was like supposed to be something like artisticist, documentary, fuckit what shot, but not even in a delirium would it reach any exhibition, for there was no story in it. Now there is.
As early as on 13-IX-1970. I wrote about those male socks over stockings, how housewives wore them. Lo, eight years later it's still done. Um, sometimes it seems that they just can't wait to get married so they have them at hand...
This, however, is typical in few more ways. Let's go down the list.
The maam on the moped. It's a Tomos APN, with automatic gear shift. Later I learned that it's got a total of two gears. Novi being not much wider than Zrenjanin, I could have shot it in both places, the scene just happened to set itself here. So, the ladies from the surrounding villages or suburbs, found that the moped is the best transportation when going for grocery a bit farther, or when going to market to sell their garden produce, so this was no extraordinary sight, this was a normal thing to see.
The jacket, a stronger one despite it being april already with everythin fully green. She may be from Petrovaradin, and it's always blowing on the bridge, or maybe from Adice or Kać, who can know, so warming up is due, no matter that the APN is limited to 25 km/h (otherwise it would require a category A license, this way the so-called doggie [license] sufficed). The headscarf may or may not be related to it. If it is, then it's the ancient serbian fear of catching cold, specially from draft. Don't let your head get cold. If it isn't, then it's simply a habit - my granma wore it even at home, not just when going ot, see the photo with the above date.
The truck is a military dajc (duytz) (probably Magirus deutz, why did the vojska call a dojc a dajc, probably because it rhymes with jajca [balls, dim.]), though the license plates are civilian. Though, it's possible that it belonged to some construction firm, these were made to withstand all kinds of terrain.
This seems to be shot on the same place, or not too far [from it]. A typical scene, chick on a poni bike, bell bottoms, something imaginative knit as a top, in the back three Zastava's vehicles (polish 125 aka pezeljka, peglica [small ironing iron, aka fiat 126], stojadin (zastava sto jedan, 101)) and the white one behind looks like a renault 16, maybe. Poni bicycles were very popular, the slovenian Rog kept the quality, they lasted hundred years and could be collapsed to fit into a trunk.
This, however, is unrelated except chronologically. This is a pastime with which Paja infected us, specially me, this tablecloth of primes. The numbers are simply laid out in a spiral - ace in the middle, then the eight following numbers clockwise around it, then the next sixteen and so on until you get bored. Ljuba was already bringing his TI-58, so we programmed something to calculate primes; didn't have anything to save the code to, except paper, if so, it wasn't preserved. I wrote the code again two years later, when I got my hands on another such piece of machinery.
The dots corresponding to primes are filled. Allegedly there's no theory which would explain the appearance of groups (marked with square dots here), and even less one which would predict them. Some eighteen years later I wrote some code to create this cloth onscreen, and lost that too. Now I'm thinking, if I get sufficiently bored, to do it again.
Mentions: 13-IX-1970., Ljubivoje Tomić (Ljuba), Novi Sad, Paja Ćurčić, praktika, vojska, in serbian
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