Imaginary Urban Spaces
November 2, 2012
Studio A is the largest TV studio in Bosnia and Herzegovina, shared by Federal Television and BHT1. On Tuesday afternoons in the spring of 2011 in Studio A, we filmed “The Readers’ Club” (Klub Citalaca), a late night variety show which broadcast on Saturday nights. (Kind of like a Bosnian “Saturday Not Live”, as we taped in advance…)
The premise of the show was that a motley crew of book lovers were trying rather unsuccessfully to start a night club in downtown Sarajevo. On Saturday nights at this imaginary club, musicians, artists, city officials and public intellectuals showed up to chat, perform and clown around. We as the club’s staff acted out improvised scenes of our squabbles and various ill-fated ideas for improving business.
The show generally got two reactions.
Reaction #1: “OMG, the scenography on your show is so cheesy and cheap-looking, what was your budget? And the improv scenes! gimme a break! Soooo contrived.”
Reaction #2: “oh dear, I was worried about you last weekend when you were working at the Reader’s Club. Your boss gives you such a hard time! But I loved it when you tried to hypnotize a chicken!”
Readers’ Club became an imaginary urban space.
Is a public space real if we think it is?
Other posts about my TV days:
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pilgrimography 
Haha! Do you remember any examples of “ill-fated ideas to improve business”? Was the humor based on your cluelessness, or what? 😉
well we locked ourselves into the cafe in order to start our own reality show, brought in this gigantic ancient cash register that didn’t work, tried to use coffee grounds twice.. drawing a blank on the other ones! the humor was based on our total ridiculousness, ludicrous squabbles and insults, etc.. 😉
Thought of you and your multiple modes of expression while reading this interview with Alton Brown…
Zagat: I noticed you’ve been responding to Twitter cooking questions with Post-It notes lately – clever.
Brown: I hate rules. And I hate being told that I have to do something to 140 characters and I like drawing and I find sometime that the expression that can come out on a Post-It is so much richer than anything that I can do with 140 keystrokes. It’s almost like performance art in a way. I was a theater major in college so it’s almost like showtime, you know.