Eduard Banulescu is a music and sports journalist, a singer-songwriter and, now, a novelist.
Eduard Banulescu, for the most part, and on most days, just sits around, writing or playing music. Now, that's no reasonable way for an adult to behave. Still, at least, to some degree, these things add to the world more than they take from it.
I, Eduard Banulescu, have been writing music reviews for 12 years or more. After a while, you stop counting. That may sound like a silly thing to be writing until you consider people like Nick Kent and Lester Bangs. I suppose that the rhythm and word choices I employ come from them. They must. They're certainly there in the pages of "The Reeperbahn's Anything You Want it To Be." It's my debut novel, and, as of yet unpublished.
I've also held a steady sports journalism job. In fact, that's lasted a decade now. The words in those articles are shorter. The sentences are as well. They're meant to tell the story of triumphs and defeats in less than it takes to turn on the telly.
I have also written about a hundred songs. I suspect that my next hundred will be better. Many of them have been recorded.
When not singing and playing my own songs, I've played in bands. Sadly, nothing pretty. It's mostly been punk and gothic rock, sweaty clubs and stages.
There's also the matter of travelling the world. I've done a lot of that over the past 10 years. I'm away for long stretches at a time, often finding myself talking to Scottish would-be druids, German techno obsessives and hard-drinking Norwegian fishermen.
That's where "The Reeperbahn" comes from.
It also comes from one particular night on the streets of Hamburg, from hearing a popular song get mangled up through cheap speakers, and from the fear that modern tech is telling us stories that we won't be able to unhear. Are those stories replacing what we used to call the "the truth," even if it's a thing as dumb as an '80s pop song?
What's left? More music and sports writing, empty Northern European highways, and, should the sky stay in place for a while longer, at least, a couple new novels to be ready sometime soon.
