Friends, romanians, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Racz, not to praise him. Mind you, there are plenty of things to praise about his opus, and even some to praise about what is perhaps his magnum o-fuss, Turbonimic. Racz has identified a certain autocolonial streak in the Romanian highbrow journo ethos, a certain desire for imposing a heavy-petting Bed-Stuy soft touch on the Romanian world of sharp corners while draining it of soul. The problem is that he does this as the auteur likes to say, “by tackling the player as well as the ball”. It sounds better in Romanian. This desire to play with balls often results in Racz clobbering the messenger to critique the message and the over-personalization of said messenger as the villain of the piece. Racz breaks balls, and this results in his occasionally admirable ideas getting shafted. He does this because he has a desire to speak his truth but also because he has the distance (ideological, ideatic, but most importantly geographical) to personally attack the object of his truth without running into the object later in Barton. This is a common trope in his work, literary, paraliterary and whateverthefuck the ceproste blog constellation is. But nowhere is this more present than in Turbonimic, where the gist of his arguments descends into dissecting the image of “the journalist” to get at the vacuity of its soul. Turbonimic raises some good points about the failures of what i like to call the “DOR Style”, namely an overreliance on woo and soft soulsearching on the part of the middle class overeducated journo’s perspective within the complexities of a nasty, brutish and, more often than not, short field work, an overreliance that often erases the subjects of the piece, turning them into objects for the journalist to reflect upon. But vacuous it is not, just… meh.

There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with putting your own perspective in a piece, even an interview. I do it all the time, I take pride in it, in the end, in a media landscape oversaturated with the visual, the reader is there to read, might as well elevate the piece over an e-mailed Q&A. The reader is there for you as well. But this is where DOR nd narrative journalism sometimes failed, and this is what Racz critiques to the point of obsession if not hatred. The lack of balance. To my mind, Racz’s issue is with journalists thinking they’re hot (albeit soft, moisturized) shit, positioning themselves above a painful issue and crying over it, to soothe middle-class souls. Racz, being an evil, spiteful man (I know him well, he’s a dear friend of mine), cannot resist punching because if the journo stands above all, you can do is punch up. 

The problem is that the journo does not stand above. Journalists, even the narrative, soft touch, high-brow we-have-the-New-Yorker-at-home ones are the skin of the dick, as Romanians say, both in terms of cultural and of actual capital. They are would-be deep dilettantes with a desire to project their words into a world that has stopped reading anything longer than a tweet. They are soft, of course, but less in the sense of collagen-peptide moisturised skin and more in the sense of wet, mangy puppies. Unrestrainedly punching a narrative journalist is not punching up; it’s not even punching across. It is pure and simple punching down at the losers of the medium wars, stomping on way too many people who mistakenly think writ(h)ing words, cute 2deep4u words at that, is still cool because there is a very niche audience that assures them that it is. This is why Turbonimic is not a thing. The critiqued style is not elevated nothing, it is most definitely something, a receptacle for the hopes and dreams of people who want a kinder (albeit often equally bland) reportage in the era of clickbait. It is the aspiration of the cultural middle pretending to be Granta highbrow whilst subsisting on vegan pateu Ardealul and NY Mag pdfs off of Libgen. Racz critiques the blandness and forced aesthetics of a style, but he does it with such revolutionary zeal that he stumbles past the curtain and dick-punches the uppity precariat working the switches. Then he points and laughs. 

DOR died, and the Romanian journalistic scene is poorer for it. The DOR style lives on, and the Romanian journalistic scene is none the worse. Turbonimic lives on in a sort of twilight. Its failure was that it was so vehement and personal a critique that it changed nothing; it led to no reflection, just to applause from the usual suspects, upturned noses from the rest and the labelling of Racz as a hater, a label that fits him well and that he wears as a badge of honor. This, of course, is bad and stupid. In the years since Turbonimic Racz did a lot of good work in his Paestinian advocacy, some quite good work in his literary endeavours, and even some good movie criticism, but being now and forevermore labelled a hater, he has not punched into the mainstream as much as he should have. He is locked out of the ever-shrinking corridors of pretend-power in a world where nobody really reads anymore.  That is, perhaps the true tragedy here. My heart is in the gutter there with Racz.

And I must pause till it comes back to me.