The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 20: G.P.S. for Drunks, and Coming Home to Serbia

Episode Date: March 4, 2016

This week: A Manhattan bartender, prizefighter, and onetime bank robber returns to his ancestral mansion in Serbia; Michael Friedman brings us a new song written from the campaign trail; and a devastating play tackles rape culture. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. How do I get out of here? I can help you with that. Stumble downstairs. In 20 feet, a cluster of smokers will be on your right. You will not feel like saying goodbye to more people. So continue walking with your head down, because if your head is down, you are invisible,

and therefore, not rude. As you exit, carry your jacket, because you are warm from alcohol and too lazy to do all that complicated stuff with your arms. Begin walking in the general direction in which you feel the subway station may be situated. In 100 feet, pull your phone out to look at a map. Make a slight detour to scroll through Twitter

while standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Forget why you took your phone out. Continue walking. Depending on traffic, yield to crowds of other drunk people. They are different from you in tighter skirts and higher heels. But in another sense, they are the same. You're all just trying to squeeze as much experience out of your youth as possible. In a sense, you're all just sailors on the sea of...

Oh, one of them is throwing up. Fear right. In 500 feet, turn left into a bodega and proceed to wander aimlessly through the aisles for ten minutes. Pause to make prolonged eye contact with a bodega cat. Really feel a connection with the animal. Are you drunk enough to justify a cab? Mentally retrace your steps to figure out how many drinks you had.

Once you figure out you had that many drinks, vaguely wonder if you did anything embarrassing at the party. Enter an endless loop of anxiety. In one minute, hail a cab. Keep the windows open. GPS directions for getting home drunk, a piece by Hallie Cantor. The role of Siri was performed by Susan Bennett, who actually is the voice of Siri on the iPhone.

I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us on the New Yorker Radio Hour today. We need to sober up now because we're going to be talking this hour about global politics and sexual politics and dance music politics, but let's start with domestic politics. Michael Friedman is a composer of shows on and off Broadway. Right now he's traveling around the country

covering the presidential campaign in his own very distinctive way. Friedman is visiting big primary states interviewing people about what's on their minds and making songs from those interviews. So it's sort of a campaign art project Friedman was in Texas recently and he was particularly interested

to talk with immigrants about the rhetoric of the campaign. The New Yorker Sarah Larson is following Friedman's progress. Hello, Michael. Hi, Sarah. How are you doing? I'm pretty good. How are you doing?

I'm good, thanks. So the song that we're going to listen to today, this is based on an interview you did in Texas. Yes, at a barbecue joint in Dallas, Texas. Amazing guy, Ramiro. He's one of the dreamers, which is the group of sort of undocumented activists. He's 30, and so he's 30 years undocumented.

My story echoes the story of many immigrants. I was separated from my mother for 20 years because she stayed in Mexico as a nurse. Well, my dad said as an undocumented construction worker. At the age of 13, my dad got deported. Again, I was living only with him, so I know what it feels like to have your family torn away, like, immediately. You come home to an empty house because your dad is not longer there. Michael, who did he live with after his dad got deported?

He basically lived on his own resources. He had some family in the neighborhood. He went around different places, and he's kind of been on his own resources. He was a teenager, which is to say the least. Did you happen to ask him about Trump's The Great Wall of Texas, the Trump's plan to build a wall? Yes. His point was that he didn't believe that anyone could build such a wall. Right.

But he was legitimately concerned. that if Trump or some of the other Republicans were elected, that there would be a real mass exodus to Mexico from Texas, Arizona, and bordering states. That was sort of the feeling was legitimate fear from his constituents. And we're talking of hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people. The other thing I learned about many activists in the Mexican-American community in Texas is there's a lot of dissent among them, for example, the Latino Democrats, do not speak to the Tejano Democrats, which are two different political clubs, and they refuse to talk to each other because they have some kind of falling out.

So, as always, there's internal dissent. There are plenty of ways to disagree with all kinds of people, even people you like, people like you. So let's hear your song. Great. So my story is this born in Mexico, raised in the United States, undocumented. I grew up in South O'Cliff, which is other poor, part of Dallas, moved around a lot to a lot of places. Separated from my mother for 21 years, she stayed in Mexico to be a nurse while my dad stayed here to be an undocumented worker.

When I was 13, dad got deported. You come home to an empty house. He's no longer there. He's no longer there. But each time I come back to Dallas, I come back to Oak Cliff, and I move to a better side. I was making pretty good money, so what I did was I found the most expensive apartment in Oak Cliff, and I took it. It was nice, but from time to time, you'd hear gunshots and go, uh, yes, it's still Oak Cliff. At the age of 18, I got my first job at 20. I got fired at age 22. Same thing, I got fired again, because my documents didn't match up. I decided I was going to deport myself, because I was tired of all of the bullshit like this one time. I saved $5,000 to buy a new car.

I ended up spending it on getting my papers fixed by an attorney. Within three weeks, that attorney had $3,000. I never heard from him again. and eventually you get tired. But then there was this big march, and that kind of ignited the idea of like, hey, there's a lot of us. I started doing like more radical work, hunger strikes, planned arrests, until people were saying, oh, this guy's kind of crazy.

I started doing small campaigns, but campaigns, you know, are flawed by design. The people aren't just a means to an end when a politician says, want to get out the Latino vote. They just want us to vote for them. And I've sold myself to the highest bidder before. But now I'm like to hell with that shit. I'm going back to my roots. If Trump wins, I see like Gestapo-style raids.

Crazy stuff, maybe people who don't give a shit. Who the president is will wake the hell up. Like I say, if you're under attack, you can either run or fight. Arizona, my mentor called and said, Do you want to fight the sheriff in Arizona? And I was like, I have to go to school. And he was like, to hell with school. And I was like, hell yeah.

We did all kinds of crazy things against him sabotaged his events. You know, with a political theater. We took live chickens into his office. But, oh, Arizona was, it was scary. I wouldn't drive in Arizona. I would be so scared They can pull you over Scariest thing we were canvassing

They pulled us over I'm not driving The other guy next to me is driving They ask for his license and registration Then the cop asks me for the same I'm like I'm not driving I'm from Texas And he's like yeah but we still need your license

and registration And I'm undocumented Have my Mexican passport Which is something You're never gonna show a policeman. And luckily in my wallet, I had a Sam's card. And so that's what I showed him. I showed him my Sam's card, and it had my picture. The picture was blurry. And he took it and said, okay, yeah, if you buy in bulk, you must be American. You must be American. Oh, Michael, that's so great. I, I like

that there's some levity at the end of that story. I think if you're undocumented in Arizona, you have to get in. Yeah. So getting to know him was all that he's been through. Yeah. So now you're in Colorado. Yep. Right.

I pronounce it. California, Oregon, and then at the end, I'm going to do pencil at the conventions. Because it's sure looking like the Cleveland Convention might actually be something. Yeah. Well, it is a delight talking to you. As always, I like to like talking to you too. Thanks. I will keep you posted about Colorado. Great. Take care. Bye.

Bye. That's Michael Friedman. His song, Undocumented, is taken verbatim from an interview with a man named Ramiro in Dallas. He spoke with the New Yorker Sarah Larson, and we'll hear from him again in a few weeks. Coming up on the New Yorker Radio Hour, a former boxer and bartender who's laying claim to a mansion in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. It's a crazy story, so stick a...

around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The other night I saw an amazing play, vital, moving, and absolutely necessary, but not an easy night out. I have to admit, by the end of it, I was full of emotion and tears were streaming down my face. The cast is made up entirely of teenage girls, acting students of the director and playwright Katie Capiello. But this isn't kids' theater, not at all. The topic of the play, and some of the language are intended for as they say, mature audiences. If you have some younger kids listening with you right now, maybe this isn't for them.

The play is about a teenage girl who is raped by friends. It's fiction, technically speaking, but it's inspired by experiences that are very much a part of daily life for the girls in the cast. It's called slut, the play. The main character spends the bulk of the show

alone on one side of the stage, giving her testimony about what happened to her. While on the other side of the stage, we hear everything that's being said about, her as the news gets around. Okay. Um, Joanna Grace Del Marco, I'm 16 years old and I live at 545 East 14th Street, apartment 3F. What?

Um, sure. I am agreeing to give this statement without my parents present. Is that what you mean? My mom's still here, right? No, oh my God, no, I don't need them to come in or anything. I actually really don't want to talk about all this stuff in front of her again right now. or my dad. I'm sorry.

I actually don't feel that well. Could I have some water or something? Would that be okay? If it's too much trouble, that's totally fine. Okay, yeah, thank you. I'm sure I'll feel better after I have some of this. I'm just starting to feel sort of shaky. So should I just start from the beginning?

That's Winifred Bonjean Alpert in the role of Joey. Katie Capiello is the playwright and director. So the character is Joey Del Marco. She's 16. She is fierce and confident and kind of a badass and finding herself, right? She's at that great stage in your teenage years where things are really confusing but also really exciting. And she is coming into her womanhood. And that's where you meet her. And we follow Joey through the course of the night. And she is pre-gaming with three of her closest guy friends from her life. And they cram into the back of a taxi to go uptown to a friend's house party. And that's when those three friends proceed to rape her. Yeah. And the bulk of the play is the aftermath in which you have on one half of the stage,

you have Joey in isolation. Yeah. Testifying a kind of extended testimony and soliloquy. And then on the other side of the stage, you have the village. I've known Joey since kindergarten. She loses control sometimes. She's done weird shit before. And honestly, I totally think that night she got home with Jane and her parents were there and she just started lying.

Yeah. And she really screwed over the whole school. I'll say I'm admittedly promiscuous. I hate that word. promiscuous. So that, like, implies what then? That I couldn't have been raped, then? That cancels out the possibility of raped to people? That's so crazy. I wanted you to get both at the same time. I wanted you to get her rationale, where she was coming from, her experience from her voice. at the same time that you were hearing the way we as a culture dissect everything these girls do.

Because here's a really interesting thing when you think about rape cases. When you think about the ones that we've heard about the case of St. Paul's, the case of Steubenville, Daisy Coleman, you so rarely hear from the girl. We so rarely get to hear that girl's voice and her side of the story for a lot of reasons, for her own safety, legally, and we wanted that girl's voice to be front and center. And at the same time,

we wanted you to realize who you are in this story. Who are you? Who are you in the community? What role do you play when this girl comes forward and this story comes out? Right.

How are you tearing her down? Right? Like, how are you poking holes in her story? Because you probably are. Katie, what is the origin story of the play itself. How much does real life inform

what you've written about here? Everything. You know, I was a teenage girl and those memories are so vivid for me and I would say most women that I talk to would say the same that what you experience when you are young and female follows you

the rest of your life. It stays with you. And when I work with my girls, with my students and they tell me the things that they've experienced is impossible for me not to write about that, right? I want to find some way of capturing it and putting it up on its feet

that maybe will lead to healthier dynamics or maybe at least to a conversation or maybe just give somebody a better idea of what it is like to be a teenage girl because it is not easy and it's not easy to be a teenage boy either. In fact, you do a play with teenage boys. Yes.

This came later than Slot. It did. What did you discover about teenage boys that you might not have known through the research for it or the writing event? Oh, just how really loving they are and really confused.

And I was not expecting that. I never, I did not think they were going to be as open as they were, as honest about the degree of confusion that they experience day in and day out in their relationships with each other, with their parents, with girls. But confusion that causes

them to be aggressive and worse? Yeah, I would tie that confusion into pressure too. Right. You know, standards of masculinity are pretty intense. How do you help from having at least some hostility toward the purveyors of the sexual violence? Because it does seem to work in one direction. I guess at the end of the day, I care about them. I know that maybe that sounds trite, but that's, I guess, how I went into this process.

of working with these guys that I care about them. And the reality of the situation is this. As much as I don't want my female students to get raped, I don't want my male students to rape them. Look, the young women,

the girls that you're working with here, they're all actresses and students that are exactly the age of their characters. They're 14, they're 15, they're 16, they're 17. You're asking them to go into incredibly difficult, emotional, territory on stage in front of, you know, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and up.

What's the effect of that? How does that dynamic work? What have you seen happen? You know, it's interesting. I feel like people ask that all the time in a very accusatory way of just how could you do this? How could you let teenage girls get up on the stage and talk about sex and sexuality and sexual assault? And my answer is always, but this is what they're living every day. So who better to talk about it? who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out. And the reality of the situation is they can handle it and they want to handle it. And the girls will tell you this show has empowered them. It allows them to be at a house party on a Friday night and intervene when maybe before they started working on this play,

they didn't know that they could or didn't know how they should. We also have here a remarkable young actress who goes to St. Anne's High School in Brooklyn named Mary Miller, who was in the play, and she plays a character who, it seems, is almost the wise woman. She comes in late in the play. By way almost of giving advice to these slightly younger girls in the play, she relays an experience that Mary that maybe you can tell us about. Yeah, so my character, she hears online, she sees online, basically all the things have been going on in Joey, the main character's life. And so she reaches out to her to try to have a moment of camaraderie between the two of them because Sylvie is a survivor of rape herself and has never come forward about it, did not go through the process like Joey goes through. And so Sylvie reaches out to her to tell her that she believes her, but also she wants to have another person in her life. So, yeah, I do say. Because she's feeling isolated as well. Yeah, because she didn't tell anyone.

How did you two meet? How did you come together? She babysat for my mom's best friends kids. That's true. That's true. I babysat for everybody. I just want to say that. I was a nanny, you know, as I was building.

this company, and I feel like I babysat for all of Brooklyn. How did you encounter the play? So I saw the play when I was, I guess, a summer before my sophomore year. Where did you see it? I saw it the first time it ever was on. I saw it at the fringe festival. What was your emotional reaction to it the first time you saw it? I remember wanting to cry and not really knowing why, but I didn't.

I didn't cry. You resisted it. Yeah. I remember wanting to, but not really knowing why I did. You know what I noticed when I saw the play? Half the girls at the end of the play are in tears. Half them, Katie. Is that a common thing?

Yeah. You mean the girls on the stage? It takes an incredible... And then I turned around. The rest of us were in puddles. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I love it when people cry.

I mean, these girls are going through it, right? I mean, what we tell them is that the way that it is going to most move the audience and most leave the audience change. is if they really go through something on stage. It's not their job to get up there in role play. It's their job to get up there and experience something in front of everybody, in front of everybody in that theater. And that's an incredibly hard thing to do.

And it's emotionally draining for these girls. Yeah, I oftentimes, like, it'll take me... Yes. It'll take me a minute sometimes. A minute. I think half the audience was a basket case into the next day. Right, but you get good at it when you do it all the time. And especially if you're me, who's someone who I don't.

I don't, it's not like this. You have to go home and do homework. Yeah, I have to go home and do homework. But also, it's not like the only time I ever deal with rape is when I'm in the show. Like, I'm kind of good at crying about it for a minute and then getting it together. You kind of have to be. That's how it goes. Now, we find out, because you were honest enough and brave enough to say so in the talkbacks afterwards,

that the experience the character has, where she goes to visit a college and a, and, a party is assaulted, is raped, is similar to something that happened to you. Yeah, yeah. And tell me about what that was like the first time to get up on a stage with an audience filled with people with strangers and talk about this. This is, was it terrifying? Was it helpful? Was it some something of both?

Oh, God, it was a lot of things. So, yeah, I have some similar experiences. to my character, not the same story by any means, but that distance from me to Sylvie is what turns, what you would assume to be a really, a really hard thing to do, just to get up on stage and talk about rape,

into something that was actually not so hard because it wasn't me. I'm not me when I'm talking. I'm this other girl. I'm not telling my story. I'm telling hers. That part of it made, it a lot easier and allowed me to accept my similarities to Sylvie and present them in a way

that was ultimately very cathartic for me, but also maintain some distance. And, you know, it's not. So it's very different from, say, a therapeutic environment. Yeah. It's different for me. I mean, I started doing the show in North Dakota. It was my first show. You got to open somewhere. Yeah, right? And I didn't know anyone from the entire state. So that's a very different thing to do. And probably the best way for me to start doing it was to be doing the show in front of people that I had never met and would never see again in my life. I got to be open and truthful about my life in North Dakota before I ever did it at home. And I came back the next week and I started to do it at home. And I just have to say, North Dakota, after the workshop that we did, Mary did a really powerful storytelling. And then after the performance, there were teenage girls, like, in a line waiting to talk to Mary. That's true. Because so many girls out there who have had this happen to them, who have experienced sexual assault in whatever form, having no one to talk to about it.

I sort of met my Sylvie in a way in North Dakota. That's amazing. What happened? So we did this workshop and I wrote this thing. In addition to the play. In addition to the play, we did a workshop and I wrote down what had happened in my life. And I'd never written it before anywhere. I'd never really said it anywhere except for my therapist's office.

And, you know, I told it to everyone, including the cat. They didn't really know either. And afterwards, this girl came up to me and said, essentially, me too. And that had never happened to me before. I had no one. And all of a sudden... You never told any friends or... I mean, it's different.

It is different to tell someone who you know knows what you're talking about. You don't even have to say it all. So I had that for the first time. But, yeah, no, and it happens pretty often. after shows too where girls will come up to me That's a big responsibility

for you Yeah Yeah Is it sometimes too much I definitely went through a phase where I was mad Because I had never gotten to be that girl Who had someone to go to

I had never gotten that And all of a sudden I was landed in the other seat of having to be that person for someone else when I never got that. It was heavy. Did you ever push it away and say, you know what? Enough.

I can't be that person for you all the time for a line of girls. No. You took it all on? I did because I wanted them to have, well, I didn't get. I wanted that for them. A lot. And the more I did it, the more I realized that actually, it was serving a purpose for me too.

and I mean it's a privilege now and one that I take really seriously and that I carry with me all the time so I love those girls I love them even when they don't say anything even when they just don't know what to say and they hug me and they say like thank you they don't have to say anything other than that

because you already know and I know and they know Katie and Mary thank you so much Thank you for the gift of the play. Oh, thank you for having us. Mary Miller, a member of the cast, and Katie Capiello, artistic director of Arts Effect, and director of Slut the Play.

On March 6th, the play will run in tandem with Now That Were Men, Capiolo's play with a cast of teenage boys. There's some information about that at new yorkeradio.org. Finnellys is a bar in Soho in Lower Manhattan. It's been a fixture in the neighborhood for nearly a century, a lot of tourists somehow find their way there too. One of the big draws till recently was a bartender named Bob Bozik.

He wasn't reputed for his drinks especially, but he was a big personality with a huge number of stories, and he was very generous with those. Bozik retired this year, and here's his retirement plan. Move to Serbia, the Bozik family's homeland, where he doesn't know anybody or speak the language and reclaim a mansion in Belgrade that his family lost seven, years ago. It sounds a little

maybe quixotic is the word, but let's let Nick Poundgarten, a staff writer at the New Yorker, take it from here. So on December 30th, just before New Year's, I got a text from Bob first in a while. It read, since you were in the beginning of this parade, I leave January 11 for four months in Belgrade,

moving into my house around January 15, the fucking Balkans. Best to you and yours. How did you get in here? I got waves. Eric, didn't I say goodbye? I was introduced to Bob by a colleague who thought he'd make a good story. Actually, it was Bob who thought that he, Bob, would make the good story. Here was a New York character who wanted me to write about him. We get a lot of those.

Yeah, he looked like a fucking tourist. Anyway, so we met up and went to some Brazilian place and ate and had a couple beers. And I'm thinking, this guy is full of it. So we're driving through the Kurdish territory of Turkey. So we're eating, but I like to eat. They have kebab, lamb kebabs. Most people eat one, some eat two. Oh, I had three.

And then the leader of the whole thing says, he goes, order more. I eat so many goddamn kebabs. Some guy had a couple of kebabs. Just emphasized the point being Bob. I reached over and took his last ones off his plate and stuck him in my mouth. Bob can now talk anyone you've ever met. But the crazy thing is, his stories are actually true. They check out.

Bob's father was an inventor. Rich, successful, connected. But after the Second World War, the communist security. used him, the father, of collaborating with the Germans. And the Bozix fled to Canada. So Bob was born in Ontario in 1950. But his father split just a few days later. He left the family.

His mother couldn't take care of the baby, so she gave him away to a foster family. And I lived in a foster home until I was nine. Then my mother took me back. I didn't want to be there, so I was furious. So I obviously became who I became. You know, I decided, we're all alone. From that day on, you couldn't discipline.

Bob ran away from home, or whatever home was, when he was 14. He lived on the streets of Toronto, homeless, stealing baloney and checking pay phones for change. End up in Toronto, a gangster met me. He happened to own a boxing gym. Turns out I could fight, and then I became a fighter. All this checks out, too. The gangster's name was Bertie Mignaco,

and he's the one who found Bob on the street and took him in. Bob started working for the guy, running numbers, collecting debts. He also began boxing, and soon was working his way up the ranks. My nickname was the landlord in boxing. Did you know that? I didn't know that.

No, my landlord, because I aspired him with Kenny Norton. Remember Kennernerner? Yeah, of course. I kept pushing Kenny. I didn't like Kenny, so I kept pushing him in the corner. And he kept nailing me. I could hear his knuckles hit my skull. Eventually, Bob won the Canadian National Amateur Heavyweight Championship.

And then he went pro, and he fought some big bouts. He fought Larry Holmes in Madison Square Garden. When I was fighting Larry Holmes, I realized I'll never be this good. He was beaten, badly. And that was the beginning of the end of his boxing career and the beginning of the next chapter. I looked down the board, Madrid. I'll go to Madrid. What's the difference?

So I went to Spain, started a whole life. So I lived in Europe. I ended up in Istanbul. That's when I started driving trucks to Afghanistan. I met some people who hooked me up with some people. And then, because you're in the Kurdish territory. Remember talking about the kebabs? I once asked Bob if there were any unknown unknowns.

things I should know about, like if he'd ever got in trouble with the law. He hemmed and haught a bit and then he said that he'd robbed banks. Well, then he said, wait, I robbed one bank because he'd only been busted robbing one bank. So he was caught robbing one bank. He was unarmed, but almost an apology he gave the teller a pair of tickets to see Oklahoma on Broadway. This was in the police report. And then, after all that, he lands at Finnellys, a saloon in lower Manhattan. For the next 25 years, he'd tend to.

bar. Meanwhile, communism fell. Yugoslavia broke up. Serbia became a country. And Bob got an idea. How are you flying over tonight? What are you flying to Vienna? And I got extra leg room. I met Bob at Finnelli's one last time. He quit his job, moved out of his apartment in Brooklyn, and he was getting on a plane for Serbia later that night. So, Serbia. Almost 100 years ago, Bob's father invented an air brake system that revolutionized train travel. The Bozix had a yacht, apartment complexes, a timber farm, a coal mine, a cook, a nanny, a driver, and this house on Khrunska Street, Belgrade's Fifth Avenue. Really, it's more of a palace than a house.

Anyway, the communists took it in 1946, and for the last 10 years, Bob has been trying to get it back. Describe the house. Okay, it's four stories high. It's 7400 square feet. It's got a beautiful atrium in the back. Got two gates. It's limestone. There's a stairway, two stairways rising to a terrace. There's a big emotional element to all this. It's the house he never had, a connection to the father who abandoned him, to the old country he never really had any connection to, except a name or maybe in his stories.

It's a homecoming to a home that never was. So how is this even possible for a bartender, ex-boxer, convicted bank robber to lay claim to one of the nicest houses in Belgrade? Politics, global politics. Serbia has been trying to join the European Union. To do so, it has had to follow restitution laws regarding property taken, quote, unquote, illegally by the communists. The courts have given me back the house. The one in charge is called the restitution.

They're fighting everybody here. Now, Bob is a tenacious dude. That's what made him a good fighter and what has made him so dogged at pressing his case with the Serbians, who haven't exactly been eager to say, here, take it, it's yours. They've had to deal with me. I've been at them every few years.

Why do you keep doing this? You know? Because this is what I do. You know, you want to, as Larry said, I broke my nose, knocked my teeth. I kept coming. Because that's what I do. I keep coming, you know?

Everything was just a preparation for the final fucking fight. And this is my final fight. But what do you know? He's done it. In the last few months, he's gotten almost all the necessary approvals from the various levels of government.

Almost all. The Serbs seem to come up with new hurdles every day. So you're going to go over there. You're going to land and you're going to, Land at the airport. You're going to do? What's the first thing you're going to do? Go to my small hotel.

Then the first thing I'm going to do is meet my lawyers. They're Serbian lawyers. They're both. Serbian lawyers. I hired the new lawyer whose mother was the mayor of Belgrade a few years ago with the Democratic Party, the ones who are in the house, who are leaving by today. Today they're supposed to be out by. That's my agreement. For a while, the house on Kronska Street was the Iraqi embassy.

Starting the late 90s and until the end of last year, it was the headquarters for the Democratic Party, the center-left faction in Serbia that plotted the defeat of Milosevic. For a time, the Bozik House was the seat of power in Belgrade. So there's a lot of public sentiment surrounding it. It's more than just a nice house. And here's Bob, an American, essentially kicking the Democratic Party out. So the idea is you're going to get there, and supposedly there's going to be a ceremony or something where they're going to turn it over to you.

Yes. You saw the key, right? No, I haven't seen the key. You want to see the key? Yeah, let's see. Here's the key of the house. They're going to present with me, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Is it the actual key, or is it like a... Ceremonial. Wait a second.

Jeez, Nick, here's this. There is what they're presenting me with. That key. That key. That key ain't going to open the door. It looks like confectuary chocolate coated with candy. Like a tennis racket. They're going to give me this key to my house. I mean, let's say they let you in the house.

You're going to move in? Yeah. Let's say. Yeah, I'm going to buy a bit. Ben, lamp, chair, pillows, and everything. Or a tent. Where are you going to be? Oh, I'm going to be on the front floor right at the front door.

Because you know what I bought? I bought first time for years. I bought pajamas. Wait a second. Vesta. Vesta? Vesda? What is it?

Back here. Alex. What are you doing? Get over here. Vesna, Bob's daughter and Alex, Bob's ex-wife, come to say goodbye. Vesna has everything to Bob. He tears up just saying her name. Hi.

Alex is Vesna's mother. Alex was all. also Barack Obama's first serious girlfriend in college. The Serbians, not surprisingly, have made a big deal out of this. But anyway, miraculously, Alex and Bob are still close. What do you think of his going away to do this? I think it's something Bob felt that he has always wanted to do and had to do. Are you worried for him?

I mean, I am a little bit. I don't think it's the safest place. And then the idea of Bob in a big house with no furniture but a mattress and some sheets. and a lamp and his books and pajamas. Bob had said he wanted me to stay in touch with him in case something were to happen. I'd be the one to bear witness. He even told me how it might go down. A mugger or whatever, a shady character,

might rob him in the street, kill him, and then a cop would kill the shady guy. If that happened, Bob told me, we'd then know he'd been assassinated. Sort of a Jack Ruby thing. You have imagined scenarios, You've even told me how it would go down if it were to go down.

He's got the story. You must be nervous, too, because you gave me an envelope to not be opened. Best, don't look like that. Nothing's going to happen. What's in the envelope? I don't know. It's addressed to you, but it's not to be opened.

In case, and last, what, you die? No, not die? In case I insult some people. You know, and I hurt their feelings. Besta, you'll be fine. Don't worry. You're going to be fine. You're my daughter.

You grew up. guy. This is the first I'm hearing of it. I have no idea what it is. Just a lot of things. I'll tell you where the diamonds are. And then you said, don't let your mummy hear this. Yeah, that's what's in the envelope. It's a big pile of diamonds. Bob may joke about the diamonds, but the real treasure is that house, if in when he gets it. And while his pursuit of it has been about his heritage, his journey, closure, and all that kind of stuff, the house is also a heck of a piece of real estate. He may just turn around and sell it. He's not a big money guy. He's never really owned anything, except for his life stories, if anything. But he'd like to leave something for Vesna.

And here's the house where his story began, or maybe even where he'd like it to end. He's already started talking about other places. He has this fantasy, this image of himself, sailing off into the sunset on a boat full of books. I'm leaning toward Nova Scotia, also between northern Morocco, get a boat, get all my books, tons of books. I want to live some place where I can finish up making some kind of sense. I can't make sense of this life, so I'd like to send somebody's interpretation. Once you're out of New York, we'll never be the same. Sire relief. Where are we going for breakfast? Lunch. You want to go to egg shop or do you want to go to

them? Egg shops is a nice, big place. So that was on a Monday. He left that night. On Tuesday, almost as soon as he'd landed in Serbia, he started sending me voice memos, sometimes several a day. Bob's Belgrade Diary So, I went out for dinner tonight, took myself for a nice dinner, a little wine, sat there, a nice cafe, was going to go home and read my books, and, uh, hmm, they've turned off the electricity and the heat. Ah, so it begins. I got the decision last week in our favor after five months of thinking about it, and now they decided that, you know what, this guy in New York, we took the house in 1946, another few weeks in the dark.

dark and cold, isn't going to hurt him, just to let him contemplate, let him know exactly who he's dealing with. To be continued, that was Bob Bozick voice messaging from Belgrade. He spoke with Nick Poundgarten. We'll find out what happens with the mansion and Bozick in the coming weeks. Coming up, James Surawicki explains why cheap oil is bad for you, and I'll get schooled in electronic dance music. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. Let's do a little economics 101 for a moment. We know that low oil prices are supposedly great for the economy. Cheap oil stimulates manufacturing, goods become cheaper, people travel more, and so on. Higher oil prices equals recession. It turns out that cheap oil

doesn't seem to be delivering an economic boom. All you have to do is look around, and the picture is much more complicated. James Surwicky is the New Yorker's explainer in chief on anything related to the economy. And he called up Daniel Juergen, an energy consultant and the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on oil, politics, and history. James wanted to know how oil got so cheap and what that means today. Three things have come together to bring down the price of oil. The first thing that happened was this incredible surge of supply from the United States. Since 2008 until the middle of 2015, U.S. oil production almost doubled, and supply was coming up from other places too. At the same time, the world economy was slowing down and not

growing at the rate people had expected, and in particular, China was slowing down, and that meant weaker demand while supply was increasing. And then the third critical thing that happened was the OPEC countries got together, and instead of doing what kind of markets expected to do, cut their supply, they decided to, well, let the market manage the market, and that's when this dramatic price decline, collapse really began. Right. You know, the increase, the surplus in the oil market today is less than 2%, but it's been enough to drive oil prices down 70%.

That's amazing. The boom in U.S. oil production that you're talking about is essentially the result of shale oil, right? This new technology that's allowed us to access reserves that previously had essentially not been available to us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you went back to 2008, 2009, people would have thought the idea of shale oil, it couldn't work.

But then it started to work, and it really worked, I think, more rapidly and in terms of volumes, much more than anybody had anticipated. So we have this huge glut of oil. So why is cheap oil not translated into more of a stimulus, more of a boom for the U.S. economy? The reason is that we had this tremendous growth of the shale industry. and it was, you know, the major source of job creation in the years after the financial crisis. Basically, every state in the country was benefiting from this because of whether they manufactured steel or information technology, computers. You were getting sort of a dramatic increase in capital expenditures going into equipment and into job creation, added a couple of million jobs to the economy.

So with this downturn now, company after company has cut its budget if it's an oil and gas company. People are losing their jobs. The suppliers who make equipment, make steel, have lost business, and they too are being hit and are having to lay off people. So you've had that loss at the same time. You have more money in motorist pockets, but they don't get it all at once where they go. say, I'm going to go out and buy something big. So one place where you've actually seen a big jump in spending is in convenience stores at

gasoline stations that are up six or eight percent over the last year or so. Right. But cumulatively, for consumers, this is a, you know, is a very significant positive. Got it. So one of the interesting questions is, why do you think OPEC, instead of trying to cut back production to hold up prices, just kept pumping the oil? and as a result we now have this, have had this really big glut of oil on the market. Well, OPEC did not have a unified mind on this.

The Saudis and the other countries, Arab Gulf countries, as they're called, did not want to cut production because they were the only ones who could actually or would actually cut production. And in particular, this all happened after the beginning of the nuclear negotiations between Iran, the United States, and other countries. and they could see that as a result of this movement towards a nuclear agreement, the sanctions that had kept Iranian oil, about half of Iranian oil out of the market, would be lifted, and Iranian oil would come back into the market. So they, in particular, were implicitly saying, not explicitly,

we're not going to cut back our supply in order to make room for additional oil from our greatest rival, Iran. Saudi Arabia's broken diplomatic relations with Iran. the Saudi embassy has been burned in Tehran. Normally that would have sent oil prices up. It doesn't even cause a tweak, a twitch in the oil market because it's because of the real surplus that's there now. But if you have a tighter market and you have a disruption in some place or heightened geopolitical risk, that will show up in the oil price. But the oil market historically has had these sort of boom and bust cycles.

and when you think about what the future holds, what do you think is going to happen to oil production and to oil prices? Well, it's kind of amazing. The oil industry is a long-term industry. People make investments now and you don't see the impact for 10 years or longer. And yet it seems every three or four years at least, the whole perspective, the whole outlook changes. There's a tendency wherever you are to think, well, it's a tendency. straight highway, a flat line from that, but this market is going to move in cycles as it always

has. It's so deeply involved with geopolitics. It's a story that has no ending in sight. Daniel Juergen, the author of The Prize and The Quest, talking with the New Yorker's James Surawiki. You can find Surawicki's articles on oil and other subjects at New Yorker Radio.org. I love talking about music with Caliphaseini. He has very eclectic taste and he knows stuff that I'm completely clueless about, like contemporary Nashville and electronic dance music. He listens to EDM while he writes. You can hear it faintly emanating from his office out into the hallway,

and he just wrote a great profile of a DJ called Kaigo. Hey, how you doing? Sorry about my noisy door. Your door sounds fantastic, but it's like a haunted house. That's exactly right. So you wrote about Kaigo, and how has he set the world on fire in Ediegel? I mean, it's pretty crazy. He doesn't have an album out yet. He kind of came up by posting tracks on SoundCloud, and he became the fastest artist to get a billion streams on Spotify. A billion streams.

So what sets him apart from Skrillex and all the other big stars of the form? Well, the most technical thing that sets him apart is that his songs are slower. Mainstream electronic dance music or EDM is around 120 beats per minute. and Kago likes to stay closer to 100 BPM. They call what he does Tropical House to sort of capture the idea that it's supposed to be kind of chilled out. So he's the Jimmy Buffett of EBM. Now, he's worked with everybody, right? So he's...

Well, yeah, it's funny when you say worked with... Because a bunch of his remixes, especially in the early years... They're not collaborative efforts? Some of them are now, but some of the most popular ones, he would just grab tracks that he liked that he heard and just add his own production to them. Right. So let's hear some.

This is a remix. he did by a relatively obscure English singer called Kyla LaGrange. Her song is called Cut Your Teeth. So can we hear something else? Yeah. You know, when I talked to him about what influenced him, what inspired him to make music, I was expecting him to talk about, you know, tracks from the last decade, right? So who does he listen to?

Well, you know, he's not a music nerd. He's not the kind of person that has 10,000 records at home and he's learning the full history. You know, and he mentioned relatively recent artists as the people who inspired him. The most important was probably Avici. Kago's from Norway. Avichi is this star from Sweden who only emerged in the last five years or so. And Avichi's big hit is Levels, which takes an Eta James sample and became one of the kind of defining tracks of the electronic dance music boom.

I know this song, right? Oh, yeah. This is like spinning class heaven here. So in the piece you talk about how this is the new disco. at least potentially. Yeah, I mean, it's similar, not least because people who listen to this stuff really love it and much of the rest of the world seems to kind of hate it. Similar to disco, this is music that came big without much help from the music establishment

with no help from music critics who tend to disdain it. And the funny thing is, you know, disco is marginalized and hated, but then it ends up creating all this other kinds of dance music and house and techno and all these genres kind of come out of disco. So is it headed somewhere interesting? Well, the interesting thing is that one generation's sort of like uncool mainstream hit is something that the next generation might find inspiration in and might find a way to reclaim it. Right now there's this group of producers out of England called PC music, and they're kind of rummaging around in what I would call turn-of-the-century dance pop. What does PC stand for?

They don't say. I love that. And so, you know, all this stuff that was big, you know, 15 years ago, trance pop, garage, and they're taking that and making it. it twice as psychotic as it was back then. Sounds fantastic. What do you got queued up here? This is awake for hours by a producer called Danny L. Harrell, and it's just about the least chill

thing you could ever hear. And what you viewers at home can't see are the bluebirds flying across the screen. My God. Give me the other James one back. Well, among many other things, it's a good reminder that any song is kind of always going to be ripe for remixing

or reconsideration, and that these categories really are unstable. Kay, it's always an education. It's always something, isn't it? Good to see you. Good to see you. Kelle Fasani. If you're intrigued by what you've heard,

Kay has a playlist of tracks by Kigo and other artists all around 100 beats per minute. And that wraps up the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for being here with us and let us know what you thought. Leave us a comment, a nice one, I hope, at New Yorkeradio.org, or look for us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. Next week, Julia Louis Dreyfus joins me to talk about playing the vice president and then the president and how the real campaign has outstripped

any satire they've cooked up on her show, Veep. I hope you'll join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garv Marl Garvis of Tune Yards. The role of Drunk Girl was played by Ave Cario. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.