Passivity runs deep

2006 Moscow, the TV in the kitchen it switched to Kultura showing a documentary featuring Stalin. I am feeding my daughter as the pans of potatoes and beetroot bubble away on the rackety stove while Svetlana Alexeyevna moves pots and pans from one cluttered pile to another. Svetlana Alexeyevna has read Solzhenitsyn and Varlamov, and she knows all about what the thirties and forties meant to those living under Stalin’s rule: she is of the generation that came to full adulthood as the soviet dream was dying and she and her husband read about it all.

As Stalin speaks at some forgotten congress I make a vague remark to the effect that he was a bastard and she pauses nervously before answering: “well…. He was a complicated man.”

It is deep in them and there is some of it even in the best of them

The Great British Public Speaks

Dear everything else in the world,

  The reason we haven’t reacted more angrily to the things Mr. Snowden has told us is precisely the reason why the world he has so helpfully revealed emerged in the first place.

We don’t care.

We have our lives and our admittedly small, problems: we have stuff to do and stuff to get.

 Granted, we should pay more attention; maybe read more, who knows, even contribute more. But we simply don’t want to, we never really have and by this late stage it is very doubtful that we ever will.

We trust that governments and corporations are benign not because we are fools, but simply because we can’t be arsed to find out if they are not. We are idle, we are greedy, we are self obsessed, and we can be bought off very cheaply. (And we mean, really, really cheaply, we’ll even let you lend us the money to buy the shiny shit.)

 In return for allowing us to remain in this state of semi-comatose indifference we ask only two things.

   Firstly, you must allow us to endlessly call every last one of you a good for nothing bastard, who is only out for themselves and their sinister co-conspirators, regardless of how much of your lives you spend actually making our lives better.

  Secondly, what were we saying? 

No…it’s gone.

Tea?

The Portable Authors.

      

            This was a publishing venture begun by Penguin books in the 1950s.   Reacting to a public mood that had come to find irksome the notion   of carrying around, for example, the complete Henry James, the innovative folks at Penguin introduced their first editions in the spring of 1952.

            The portable Tolstoy was first off the production line and proved at once to be a resounding success. Some two thirds the size of the real Lev Tolstoy and moulded from a light yet durable plastic, this charming figurine proved to be all the rage at dinner parties from   Greenwich Village to Soho.

            The portable Faulkner, Melville and Twain quickly followed, each arriving at homes of delighted new owners in a hand crafted leather box, for the deceased authors, a charming coffin shape was chosen,  and for those still living an attempt was made at some thematic continuity with their work. The Faulkner case for example was decorated with images of teenaged Down’s syndrome sufferers   interwoven with a recurring pattern of lynched Negroes.

            The future success of the venture seemed assured and the artists were called in to begin work on Dr Johnson. However, no sooner had the great lexicologist begun to appear in the bookshops, than a chorus of complaints arose concerning the validity of the term   portable being applied to one who was clearly such a “Fat Bastard.”

            The adverse publicity soon presented a serious threat to a project whose modishness had been evident from the outset. Fashions are fickle in literary circles at the best of times and this coincided with the added difficulties caused by competition from Weidenfeld and Nicholson’s new range of “Inflatable Greats of World Culture.”

All might well have been lost were it not for the genius of Samuel Allavein Penguin, the grandson of the firm’s founder. Flinging his office chair at an underling one evening the gouges made on the face of the latter by the chair’s casters suggested a simple way out. Wheeled authors: what could be simpler? Girth would henceforth only add to the fun as eager literary enthusiasts rolled their shrunken writers over the marble floors of their salons with gusto.

            And so the venture took on a new impetus and the continuing fortunes of the Penguins were assured.  “Make it new’ Ezra Pound had howled at a stuffy Edwardian literary scene, well nigh half a century later the Penguins had heeded his call.

Glory be to god

Thanksgiving

Glory be to god for dimpled twins From Idaho.

And for the web that wafts them here, on angel wings of Javascript.

 Aye, God be thanked for Christians, for we are blessed.

   Nightly are we gifted

Prestigious front row tickets

For this theatre of the Stupid

To deliver us from boredom.

Thanks be that “Dawkwin’s” just recanted, 

And that Einstein was a churchman

And that quantum is a crystal from on high.

Give praise to him for his gift

Of idiots with crosses,

And with broken, angry logic

And those clinching misquotations

From dear old C. S. Lewis.

   Praise be, above all, for their jazz spelling improvisations as they lie for Jesus.

Glory be to god for dimpled twins from Idaho,

Or Irkutsk.

William Blake

"When the chimneys of perception are truly cleaned, I will pay that scruffy little urchin, and not a moment before."

So asserted William Blake, 19th century poet, nutter and man who never really did figure out how to draw hands properly.

 Born in the eel basketers' district of south, north, south London in seventeen twenty twenty, to a Blacksmith's dancing assistant and the daughter of a mother, from an early age, the minor details of architecture seemed to him to reveal a path to the deeper mysteries of being.

 "The Doors of perception" was a concept that arrived only after much stumbling. "The window sills of consciousness", his first poetical work of note, opens with the memorable line: "Remember this line" and goes on to ask the startled reader:

"Did you remember that line?                         

Are you sure?                                                     

What was it then?                                                 

Eh?"

And so on for three hundred pages, richly illustrated with pictures of tormented souls slaving in the call centres of the mind and asking strange questions concerning feet: "Did those feet, just yesterday, walk past my bedroom door?"

After which he was committed to the Bedlam Home for Weird Citizens of North west south, in what was then East London, where it is said he dribbled.

Having given a squirrel to Thomas Paine and so started the French revolution, he married Molly McCormagillian, a daughter's mother from the western part of the east coast of Wales. Then he devoted himself to his greatest work: "The Chimneys of Confusion" Before being murdered by Wordsworth's grandmother in a brutal hammer brawl that erupted one night following an argument about ducks in a library in Wolverhampton upon Thames near Woollich.

On his simple gravestone, buried deep beneath his body in Buckingham Palace's famous Lizard Gallery, are written three simple words: "Leg, Vole" and "Sorry".

A fitting epitaph.

Indian

While killing time surfing the web, I randomly turn on a streaming Indian TV channel and see that there is a really classy looking show going on. An attractive middle aged couple in designer outfits is walking around a plush looking house laughing and joking with their teenage son who sits at the tableб being kind of sullen but hipster cool.     

It’s all really charming and I’m listening to the Hindi soundtrack seeing if I can pick up any words at all, I can’t. Then I notice English subtitles underneath and absent mindedly tune in as the mother laughs and says to her husband: “reports say that the rape victim had strangulation marks on her neck.”

He looks at her with a knowing smile and jokes that: “India’s rape crisis is proving likely to have serious political consequences.

Then the son chimes in with a smirk and points out that: “The latest victim is a 5 year old child” And the two parents hug as they all burst out laughing at his witticism. This is where my brain melts down and all of those recent articles about elements of Indian society being overly tolerant of sexual violence come flooding back. I had no idea it was this bad: this is an episode of Friends with rape jokes: I’m in a world gone mad.

I know loads of Indians, 30 % or so of my home town are Indians, my flat mate is Indian, I work at an Indian Pharmaceutical company regularly and none of them have ever said or even seemed anything like this. Have they just been acting politely out of respect for my delicate western sensibilities?  It is demented and I can’t deal with it.

Then the screen shifts to pictures of police men and ambulances and screaming women and it suddenly becomes apparent that what I have been watching was an advertisement with a badly designed low tech news ticker running along the bottom of the screen, a ticker that no one turns of when the ad break starts.

 The story has no moral, except maybe thank god my computer didn’t crash before the news show resumed, leaving me with a horrifying new understanding of just what middle class Indian culture is all about.

Democracy, what's that then?

We talk about democracy, like we talk about love, or freedom, as though we know what it is, as though it were soap or a pencil. Then we say that this country is a democracy and that country is not, and having said so we feel we have said something significant. All we have really said is that we approve of this country and disapprove of that one. At the extremes it’s easy: North Korea is evidently not a democracy, and Sweden is, so that even without considering what we mean we can be right sometimes, as a stopped clock is right twice daily. But when we talk about the places closer to the middle of that continuum we very quickly find ourselves saying nothing.

These obvious and largely ignored facts about what we mean by the word are sparked by Tony Blair on Radio 4 saying that Iraq is a democracy, albeit a flawed one. When one has got past the visceral hatred of Blair, and bear in mind that half the world never will, one sees that it’s true. They vote there and those elections decide who will be president: ergo in the world of simple where we increasingly live, it is a democracy. The fact that it is full of US soldiers and religious fundamentalists confirms that it is flawed, but does not negate the point about elections.

 John Stewart tells me daily that US democracy is flawed, that it is a commodity, and he appears to be right. They have elections there too, and they spend vast amounts of money to win them, then they changed the laws of the land so that they could spend even more money and that looks like a massive flaw to me. However, the fact that Mr. Stewart explains this to me on television daily, and has not been arrested yet, rather suggests that some of what we appear to mean by democracy is functioning very well over there.

After Mr. Blair a journalists appears and talks of young Americans in Iraq, politico types rather than soldiers, who were convinced with a kind of religious zeal that democracy could be installed in Iraq and the problems would go away. But it’s hard to install windows 8 when your computer is on fire, and so with democracy.

Obviously this is about Russia too, and right on time a Russian pops up on the radio to explain that democracy cannot be imposed by force. Instinctively I catch myself thinking: “well you would say that wouldn’t you.” He’s one of the United Russians, the ones who celebrate Russian Orthodoxy by stealing money from Russia and extol the Russian path by educating their kids in London. But then he says that democracy cannot be installed if the institutions and traditions are not in place, and the bastard is right.

People have to take responsibility for this stuff to work, and when I write people I mean ordinary working people. They have to do boring things like knowing who their elected representative is, and complaining and writing letters and talking to neighbors about practical ways to make everyday life a little better. A lot of what seems to work in democracy actually looks quite boring and even petty in action, and the Russians, on the whole, don’t do that stuff.

 Moreover a minister I spoke with told me once that the constitution here and many of the laws that are passed are actually perfectly democratic and well planned, having been developed by think tanks with the assistance of Germans and Swedes and so on, and that the problem is that when they are passed they drop into the morass of the civil service Kafka world and go down like a rhino in quicksand. On top of this the public don’t give a damn and so, unless you have Peter the great chopping people’s beards and heads off until stuff gets done, then stuff won’t get done: hence the amount of intelligent and perfectly decent Russians who yearn for a strong leader.

Define terms carefully and agree on what you have defined, then talk about democracy or freedom, or else don’t do that, and instead spend hours saying nothing in an impressively rhetorical manner. As you prefer.

Lie to me

We complain that Politicians just tell people what they want to hear, and we’re right, we’re always right.

 Anyway here’s what we want to hear: That we can have loads of stuff without paying for it, that the problems we face are the fault of Immigrants/Bankers and that it’ s all going to be ok if we can just hammer the rich/the poor hard enough. Tell us that and we’ll vote for you, but remember to say it good and loud, cos the other fellow’s saying it too.

  In Britain Blair and his minions figured it out first: they understood that it was nothing to do with being right or wrong. You could be right all day, but if the mail and the sun were telling everyone you were wrong then it didn’t matter. So they focused on the papers and they won and we, the ones who had been reading those papers and putting Major in number 10 long after we should have stuck a fork up his arse and turned him over, because he was obviously done, well we got all indignant about spin. We howled about focus groups and political consultants as though their emergence was not a direct result of our own behavior.

And the media was the cheerleader for this anti spin rage, they devoted acres of newsprint and untold hours of airtime to exploring how the media worked until finally their heads were so far up their own arses that you couldn’t really hear what they were saying anymore. But it was ok, coz they were telling us that none of it was our fault, and we knew that anyway.

  Then, leading by example as ever, our American brethren showed us the next logical step by putting a millionaire president’s son in the white house because he was, like an ordinary guy and stuff. It was a wise move, and obviously designed as a warning to demonstrate to the world what would happen if we all continued along this path of rampant, debt driven consumerism and self righteous egotism. “Look” they said: “This is what happens to uninformed morons, is this what you want?” And the world looked on in awed bewilderment and said: “No.”

  A teachable moment, a cry for help, an astonishing practical joke, whatever it was it was clearly not something any sane nation would care to emulate. Then our Saudi friends changed the punch line and we all went mad. Greed and fear were what drove the stock market they always said, and having reached the point where greed no longer looked like a viable path to stability and contentment, we went with fear. Wars and torture and lies, all of them working under cover of fear. Yay we shouted:  no need to lose the SUV after all and all that scary thinking and reading stuff that was looming up was irrelevant suddenly: everything was black and white again. And it didn’t matter what side of the political fence you were on: Osama or Bush, both were cartoon devils and, how perfect was this, now we could:  “like if we loved freedom” or: “share if we hated Cheney”, ah, the heady winds of people power.

 Meanwhile in Russia and China those inscrutable, unknowable, mysterious men looked on and learned. Democracy = a sham, check, freedom = just a word, check, open global markets = you are thinking we are blind? Money = everything, check. And what did we really want from them? Well oil and Iphones would be a nice start and they could manage that no problem.

 But of course we’d spent all the money by this point and we couldn’t afford stuff anymore, so we looked to the politicians and cried with one pure voice: “tell us what we want to hear” and they, knowing the deal by now, did just that. So we carried on buying houses with no money and wide screen TVs to put in them, we carried on demanding better hospitals and tax cuts and those nice young men in the city juggled stuff so that everyone, including their selves, could keep on buying shit until it all exploded in a great big mess.

And whose fault is it?

Well the bankers’ obviously, I mean the bastards kept giving us money, and the politicians, why the hell didn’t they tell us to stop and in doing so plunge into humiliating electoral defeat, what were they thinking? Not to mention the satanic corporations who made the stuff we wanted, the bastards: hang em all!

Pass me my Ipad, I need to sort this out by posting a pic on Facebook. No it’s over there, under those credit cards, next to my Samsung galaxy, yeah that’s it, ooh look Kanye has a new album coming out…

The Truth will send you mad

“I read a book” he says.

“Just the one?” I ask, but the punch line dies as he says: “yes.”

He’s driving a ford, I’m in the front, my son in the back giggling and whispering: “what a twunt” into my ear as I try to focus on what the guy is telling me.

 The key point is that I must consider the Kremlin. I do. Then I apparently have to ponder that it was built in the year 546.ad. So I try that, but before I can really pull it off, he is pointing out that Westminster palace was built only in 1927 and it is the only building in England that might be compared with the Kremlin apparently.

He is clearly about to explain how this demonstrates Moscow’s vast historical superiority, but my son chimes in and tell him it was built in the 1200s and was made of wood.

Ignoring the child, he asks me if I know how old London is. I tell him I know it was Roman city once, but I have unwittingly triggered the heart of the theory he is heading towards.

You see the whole of western European history was rewritten by the Pope in the 1600s, prior to that it had been a benighted land of bogs and forests where fur clad men wept at the realization that they were not Russian. Dante, Chaucer, the Magna Carta, the ruins of all those medieval towns? All of them built by a seriously busy pope in the 17^th century, a pope whose name escapes my teacher.

“why did he do this?”

Because… because… because of the reformation, that’s when this pope stole all of Germany’s money. Germans eh? Even in a Stone Age wilderness of weeping they had a thriving economy, the bastards.

“What a twunt!” says Zhenya as I look to my new found guru. He doesn’t seem to be obviously insane: he is well dressed and driving a newish car attentively. Nor is he obviously a cretin: he speaks well and in joined up sentences.

I inquire whether he has ever been out of Russia, and he tells me he hasn’t because he doesn’t need to, there’s this book you see, its name escapes him as does the name of the author and he is not forthcoming on the question of whether it was written in green ink and on toilet paper.

The boy in the back is waiting for me to rip into our driver, but I can’t do it: he’s warm and friendly and is clearly telling me all of this because it is helpful for me to know these things.

He pulls up at our destination and turns to beam at me, clearly deeply content at having dragged another poor soul out of the valley of darkness. I tell him I really had had no idea of these matters, thank him for his wise words and wish him all the best.

“what a twunt!” says the boy as we walk off.

The Short Lived Cult of PR Truthfulness.

This would have been in the mid 2000s: a time when it didn’t feel too comfortable being a foreigner here. I was teaching a PR professional. Usually this is essentially an editing job: I turn up and they have a load of texts that have been written in bad English by the young woman who got her job with the company on the strength of her perfect English. Nobody else in the company would know perfect English if they saw or heard it, not that this stops them pronouncing on live journal at great length concerning grammar rules that were taught to them in soviet times by people who had this perfect English too.

When I roll up, the people with the perfect English go hide in cupboards in case I speak to them in a crowded room and unmask them. I never would, but fear is a powerful thing.

On the day in question my PR hero had a new project that was something to do with the Kremlin, whether he was bidding for a tender, had won one, or was involved in some other way I never knew. Still at the time the wise folks in the corridors of power appeared to be spotting that Russia’s image in the world was not all it could be, and discussions were afoot concerning what was to be done. What was done involved employing foreign PR firms, and over time the moments where you read a quote from a prominent Russian politician and cringed in shame and horror grew less and less common, which is nice.

But our PR man was struggling with a different notion of what national PR might be: somehow he had landed on the notion that the secret was to tell the truth. Now, you don’t have to spend much time around PR people to see that truth is a tricky concept: if they were genuinely worried about it one suspects they would have continued working as journalists, not that that was any guarantee of probity in recent years, but still, a passion for truth is not a PR professional’s best friend, not in any country.

What he said was that, if we could only communicate to the outside world the actual lived reality of Russia, then they would understand and thus sympathize and welcome her into the community of nations. I inquired as to whether the “lived reality” that needed communicating was the one that people actually lived: the one where they ranted against bureaucracy and corruption and policemen and dirty roads; the one he too had dismissed on numerous occasions. It turned out that it was not that reality at all, but rather one that had been discovered elsewhere, and accepting it was an act of faith, apparently, for it had no obvious basis in reality.

  I suggested, tentatively, that an honest admission of the problems the country faced, combined with a call for recognition of just how much had already been achieved in less than two decades, would probably be a wiser move, if truth was absolutely necessary, well there was a truth there that wasn’t all that bad. But I had confused the truth with what actually exists, and it had nothing to do with that. As he explained this to me his eyes took on a certain shine, and his voice gained in conviction and I understood that we were at the point where my job was to smile kindly and shut the fuck up.

 I came across the same notion quite often around that time: the idea that there was no need to lie to the world about Russia, but simply to communicate a truth that was deeper, greater, more profound and yet unhindered by facts. It reminded me of Rove et al deciding that they could determine reality and all that remained for the journalists was to write that reality down until they were provided with a new one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Maybe because I am a foreigner some people assume that they can get away with this nonsense, but I have talked to Government ministers with a far more negative assessment of the nature of the country’s problems, and to journalists in real papers and agencies, Russian and foreign, and they are as far removed from this sort of RIA Novosti optimism as the taxi drivers and accountants.

It is what it is, and it’s not hard to find out what it is. The problem is not that foreign media are incapable of understanding Russia; the problem is that they can come here and look and ask people. That’s not to say they will get it right even then, but offering a beautiful new “truth” ain’t gonna cover it, which may be why this notion failed to last.

In the years since, I have thought a lot about this encounter and other similar ones that took place at the time, and I’ve discussed it with Russians. Some call it a cult, and suggest that the way to understand what’s going on is essentially the same as when trying to make sense of a religious persons views: they may be good and sincere, but there is a fundamentally skewed premise underlying their conclusions and thus they can’t but be wrong.

  The other aspect that seems to me central stems from asking the question “Who are they talking to?” When editing texts for PR folk for large Russian and Foreign companies you rapidly gain the impression that they are going to great lengths to persuade the public of points on which that same public has no opinion whatsoever, have no desire to form an opinion and, indeed, are utterly ignorant of, and indifferent to, the whole question of what this bank plans to do with its corporate lending strategy over the next quarter. Then it occurs to you that the only people who are concerned with this question are working in various state organizations. Much of PR in an autocratic society is necessarily GR: that is government relations. The public could care less if you change your interest terms for corporate clients, people at the central bank and the ministry of finance are more interested, as well as having far more power to hurt you and your company. I have wondered since whether this strategy of “truth” that briefly seduced many in the communications industry had a similar cause.

Dacha Season

Summer begins and along with it dacha season.
The whole dacha insanity industry kicks off in millions of Russian families as soviet era parents start trying to persuade the younger generations to load themselves up with stuff, get onto overcrowded suburban trains, and go start the potato farming fantasy that sustained their parents, spiritually and nutritionally in 1983.
 Boxes full of nonsense need to be carried to a 600 square meter plot 50, 100, 150 miles outside of Moscow, where they will sit for the summer before being brought back on those same trains in the autumn. Cucumbers that you could buy in shop 20 yards away, on your way home after a 12 hour working day must be planted in your own private agricultural dream world. There will be no laying on Saturday, Friday evenings that could be spent walking the green boulevards of a half deserted city, must now be given to ill tempered hours in traffic jams on the filthy highways out of Moscow, or for the poorer, crowded metros and trolleybuses, the trains and then death trap minibuses at the other end.
 If it were my choice I would kill every last vegetable in that dacha and plant grass and flowers instead, then let then grow wild around us as we sat on a summer’s day determinedly idling. I would take the broken fridges and the sheds full of half empty paint tins and huge bails of rusting wire that: “might come in handy one day” and throw them all. I would burn the wooden frames of the rickety green house and all of the old papers, the astrological, gardening almanacs and 9 year old TV guides featuring lifestyle pieces on Oleg Gazmanov. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv_OgysforQ And as it all burned I’d get the kids and we would go all Shawshank and dance around it like wind injuns.
 But it’s not my choice, it’s the choice of someone whose brain lives in a world without supermarkets full of fresh produce and where a week’s work is 30 hours of cake eating, tea drinking and grumbling about the sausage shortage. The dacha was the only place that many people worked: the middle classes or the intelligentsia or whatever we call that huge swathe of soviet society who worked in research institutes planning to reverse the course of rivers and build radio links to Absurdistan, they went to the dacha in April and felt good to be planting and sawing and hammering.
Everything else has changed, but suburban trains full of old people with sacks full of gardening gear sitting next to tired and irritated adult children: that doesn’t change.

Stuff that Russians do well

They are exceptionally good at friendship these Russkies, most of them anyway. They make friends at kindergarten, school or college and then tend to remain close friends until they die. You tell them this and they say: “No, no, no: that’s not particular to Russia.” Then they tell you about their oldest friend who they met in a maternity home incubator in 1973 and who has just borrowed $50 000 from them to buy a car. They also help their friends in very concrete ways.

What set me off was a show where Fry and Laurie were reunited in front of the cameras recently and the narrator said how rare such a long standing friendship is. It struck me as nonsense until I realized that all of the examples I can think of are Russians. It happens in England too, of course, but it happens a lot less.

Of course, you can construct a thesis about the ways in which an absent or indifferent state leads people to stick closer together: when there is no stability in the place you live you have to build your own networks. The people who fall through the cracks fall really hard here: there is no safety net to speak of, but if you have friends they will catch you.

Or you could raise the specter of how this family and friends closeness is part of a wider tendency towards tribalism, and that dubious word Nashi (ours) but why do so?

Better to admire the way they have of staying best friends forever without posting glittery “best friends forever” shit all over their worlds while bitchin about each other constantly.

 You don’t hear so many stories of betrayal and nastiness listening to Russians talking about their friends as you do listening to Americans or British people. They are forgiving of faults and pretty used to being forgiven for their own and that’s no less brilliant for being every day and undramatic.

It might be a case of making a virtue of necessity, but it’s a virtue nonetheless.

Russopedia cabbageonomics

Russopedia: Economy: Early Developments.

  Archeological records, in combination with the ancient Chronicles of Gutran the Somewhat Apologetic have revealed that, for the first thousand years of her history, Russia’s was predominantly a cabbage based economy. Indeed, even as late as the 19^th century there were regions of this vast land where the most significant date in the calendar was that of the annual cabbage fair, usually held in a market town or, in lieu of that, in a cave, bears allowing.

  Here the cabbage traders from the snowy wastes would gather, once yearly, to display their wares and swap lore concerning the noble vegetable, while the locals celebrated the spring cabbage festival, or Karpustitchstvo, with a variety of games and competitions devoted to this food staple. The most famous of these was the Smertelni Karpushichboi, or Fatal Cabbage Fight, wherein the mightiest warriors from the various communities would pummel each other to death with cabbages, while the spectators placed, cabbage based bets on the potential victors. Russian folklore is rife with tales of simple but noble young men who made their names, and their fortunes, in these contests. Gleb Karpustpobed and the Snow Cabbage of Glomsk is perhaps the most famous of these, primarily due to of Rachmaninoff’s opera of the same name.

 It is a little known fact that centuries before the founding of the Moscow Stock Exchange, the Boogoslavl region of central Russia was home to no less than three Karpubirzhi, or cabbage exchanges, or that the wealth generated by these markets led to the creation of generations of cabbage oligarchs, some of whom were able to manage their vast wealth with sufficient wisdom that they gained the status of princes and held sway over vast areas of Russia for centuries before the coming of Christianity.

  Whether it was the coming of metal money, the rise of the Moscow princedom or exasperation at the sheer absurdity of cabbage based economics that led Russia to largely abandon these practices in the late medieval period, is unknown. But with the arrival of the tartar yolk the fate of the noble Cabbage of Russ was sealed.

The Tartar Yolk.

Quite how such a people as primitive as the central Asian Tartars managed to create an egg with a yolk large enough to cover the bulk of European Russia is a question that remains unanswered to this day…

Podolski: Polish German Russian

Russian football commentators think that Lucas Podolski is one of theirs. This chap Podolski, who is of polish descent and has German citizenship, is playing for an English team, and not playing particularly well. Even so, every time he gets the ball, the two Commentators get all breathless with excitement just as they do when a Russian gets it.

The problem is there aren’t any Russians here who might get the ball, not even a Ukrainian, which is the same thing when you are desperate for all this excitement to say something to you about your life. Somewhere in the stadium though, there is actually, one Russian. By chance too, this one Russian is the best Russian there is in matters of football. This one Russian is the gnome faced genius of Petersburg. The legendary, well, you’d have to say, “nearly legendary”, or “almost brilliant”, or “so close to being astounding that it hurts”, the nearly man’s nearly man: Andre Arshavin.

 Arshavin, played incredibly well in front of the world once or twice, about 5 years back, and so he naturally concluded that he was God and must, as a result, be embraced at once by the heavenly host that is F.C. Barcelona. But Barcelona didn’t want him and so he went to that year’s Barcelona light, which was Arsenal, in London.

  He did some great things for a bit and then he stopped doing them. He said something about the food not being any good and his wife missing Russia, but you could see his heart wasn’t in it, even when he meandered back to Petersburg recently he didn’t do much there either.  This is an old tale for fans of Russian football: the sudden shining star that turns out to be merely a comet passing.  

So they are forced to live vicariously through the exploits of any player having a connection to Russia: the Ukrainian Andre Shevchenko, for example, used to send them into paroxysms of delight, though less so when his free kick kept Russia out of an international championship. The London club Chelsea, or Chelski, is owned by a Russian Jewish oligarch. Football fans here are not famed for their love of Jewish people or oligarchs, but you have to take what you can get, and so about half of Russians, who express a preference, are Chelsea fans.

They used to have a Serbian playing at Spartak Moscow who went to Manchester and he got lots of love for a while until the passing years made the connection too tenuous and, even worse, it turned out that this Serbian was traitorously striving to stop Chelski from wining whenever he played against them. Hence they must look elsewhere when they need to shout the word “our” before the name of a player doing something outstanding as they always did with “our Andre Shevchenko.  But Podolski, A German pole? At least the Andre, and the perfidious Serbian were from orthodox countries.

There’s a joke: A Russian and a Ukrainian are walking through the country ravenous with hunger when they spot a huge, tasty looking cake cooling on the windowsill of an old lady’s cottage. They know they shouldn’t, these two friends, but needs must when the devil drives, so they grab it and run off into the forest. There the Russian takes out a knife and prepares to cut the cake, but his Ukrainian friend stops him, asking how they will divide it. “Why, we will share it like the Slavic brothers we are” replies the Russian: “is that not the way?” But the Ukrainian replies: “I thought this time we might go 50/50.

Like Shevchenko, the joke is Ukrainian.

received defective George pants or why rich countries are not happy places

“In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away” Auden

Jeremy Hardy says that people from telesales cold call him and ask if he knows how much he is paying for his house insurance. He replies, or wishes to, by saying: “No, if I knew how much I was paying for my house insurance I would kill myself.”

Life is short and death is coming, getting and spending, the hell that is other people and, what Larkin calls: “the whole intricate rented world”, it all takes too much from us and we find no time for what matters.

So why then would we rush headlong to meet that flood of money driven, bureaucratic banality when it is painful enough to simply endure it.

Why then would we do this:

“He had been looking forward to wearing his new George pants”, imagine his pain, imagine being a man who looks forward to wearing new George pants, go on, imagine it because I can’t. I can imagine plunging to my death from a high building moments after the realisation that pant wearing had become a thing I looked forward to.

“I guess I just unlucky”(sic) So unlucky that defective pants seem like a thing worth spending time posting about: that would seem pretty lucky to most of the world. She had checked reviews of George pants previously too.

“What are you doing honey?”

“Oh just checking George pant reviews on the wallmart site”

Is this how it was, can it all really get this small, can pants matter so much? Can we be mortified by defective pants? And can we really spend our fragile lives considering whether our problems “speak to the overall quality of those pants”?

I need to believe not, but there it is: a couple received defective George pants, and nothing can ever be quite the same again.

Really? I haven't seen you in church

   Ex pats come in various forms. We touched previously on the drunken twat spouting superficial analysis at a bunch of overly tolerant Russians who are all hoping to get out of their motherland and have made the unfortunate error of talking to a bumptious cretin to discover what that might mean.

  Then there are the English teachers, young folks who are basically doing a second gap year but calling it a job, or middle aged divorces who seem to be here because they have no idea what the fuck else to do. There are the businessmen. CEOs and CFO’s in big companies travelling from a western style business centre to western style flat in a western car with everything except arse wiping dealt with by western style assistants. There are also those lower down the corporate chain who are here too, specialists or middle managers, jabbering about supply side economics and how easy Russian girls are.   What all of these ex pats have in common is that they are not here for long and so they have little invested emotionally, intellectually or financially in Russia. They seldom get anywhere near fluency in the language or anywhere near empathy in their understanding, because they don’t need to: Russia is not a country so much as a posting, or an opportunity or an adventure.

 The long termers are those who have, in one way or another, fallen in love. Maybe it was with the country, or the language or a person. In this latter group there are some teachers, a few businessmen, quite a few journalists and some arty types. And there are the diplomats, about whom I know very little.

Here’s what I do know.

 They are middle or upper class on the whole: nobody from my school made it into the civil service, never mind the diplomatic service. There are the public school people, and none the worse for that: a good education is a fine thing. I wish I had had a better one. Secondly, they tend to freeze and remain in the cultural moment they were in when they left England. I feel this myself, when friends ask me how it is in England I feel, more so with each year that passes, that I only know how it “was” in England. How it was when Blair and just been elected Oasis were promising. But what if you had come here 20, or 30, or even 40 years earlier, what then?

  I first found out in Austria, going to a consulate to get a new passport with a British friend of Indian descent. We were taken into a room where an old gentleman was sitting among pictures of the Royal Family and watercolours of dear old bloody old England. And it took him a minute to grasp that my friend was English: he asked her if she was sure, and if it wasn’t so obvious that he had no idea what world he was living in she might have taken offence at that. But it was clearly not racism as much as the fact that England was pretty much a distant dream for him, where white Oxbridge buys rowed along rivers in the watercolours behind him.

When we had established that we were all British he sorted the passport stuff and then invited us to the Norman Wisdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wisdom film evenings they had once or twice a month, saying they would be glad of some new blood. We made our excuses and left.

Then, and I may have mentioned this before, I went to the British Embassy here in Moscow for one of the Queen is not dead yet functions they hold every few years, a garden party in the old Embassy over the River from the Kremlin.

Going in my wife, being far to charming and open for her own good, failed like everyone else to head straight through the building to where the free food and beer was and somehow got herself in a line of people meeting members of the diplomatic staff and other VIPs. I couldn’t leave her there and so went over and found myself being introduced, along with a bunch of random Russians to the plum in the mouth brigade who worked in various capacities representing the interests of Great Britain, or at least the parts of great Britain where wearing a string of pearls was still the done thing.

Halfway down the line I found myself shaking hands with a very refined old lady, who clearly took me for a Russian or maybe for a British businessman, rather than for the half drunk idiot I was. But Katya, my wife, had decided to engage her latest hand shaker in conversation and I was trapped in front of the dowager duchess having run out of polite meaningful nothings. So she, having grasped that I was not Russian by this point, asked how long I had been in Moscow. This was 2002, so I answered “5 years already” and she rejoindered: “Really, I haven’t seen you in church.” That’s a line that would last have been possible in England itself in about 1952, and then only in a village in Shropshire. Perhaps she imagined that every British person arriving in Moscow, got off the airplane and then set about looking for the nearest Anglican church http://www.standrewsmoscow.org/, or maybe she had simply been driven insane by the city, I would like to think that she amused herself in these formal boredom fests by resorting to a viciously ironic parody of Englishness, but it seemed unlikely.

Anyway, I made my excuses and left. Now I wonder: is this my future?

Race: notes towards a basic mind map

Race nations divisions

Because in recent years race and nationality has come up again and again in conversations, it seems worth making an effort to define some basic notions and divisions that, I certainly knew nothing of before I came to live here.

In the Soviet Union passports carried information on ethnicity: this is no longer so: however all of those races and all of the nations that made up the USSR continue to exist and to play a role in the Russian understanding of the world.

First of all we have the Russians themselves, about 80% of the population. A wise man tends to avoid notions of purity, but in general a great number of Russians you talk to have varied ancestry. A group of 4 people I spoke to yesterday could count Russian, Azerbaijani, Polish, German, Ukrainian, Tartar, and Jewish elements in their ancestry. Then, when you come to look at non Russians, it helps to divide things up with some binary divisions. After a while one is tempted to draw Venn diagrams.

Westerners/Ex Soviet

I am English, and so foreign in a way that the Uzbek people living and working in the city are not. The complex and ancient “Russian and the West” issues continue to matter, and, we westerners are seen in various ways, but these are more cultural than ethnic understandings. After a decade and a half here I am still to some extent a visitor: no one ever begrudges my poor Russian as they might resent the lack of Russian of other ex-soviets.

“Some of these French people can’t speak Russian” is not a phrase I’ve ever heard, replace “French” with anyone of a number of post-soviet nationalities and it is otherwise. Or consider the following exchange: I was standing by the lift in my apartment building with a neighbor, a young, dark skinned guy of Caucasian origin, though a third generation Russian Immigrant. As we were standing waiting for the lift we were looking at the fresh graffiti on the wall saying “Russia for Russians” and as he looked at me with a weary smile I said “That’s for me yeah?” He was still chuckling as we left the lift five floors up. I am never accused of stealing their jobs and chasing their women, though I have clearly done both.

Slavs/non Slavs

The non-Russian Slavs most evident here are Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Moldovans. To most Russians they are seen as essentially the same people as the Slavs inside the boundaries of Russia, and, for me, being in eastern Ukraine a few years back was indistinguishable from being in Russia for as it was for the Russian friends I was with. A young Moldovan guy told me recently, he had said in company that he was not Russian and all of the folk around him had said warmly: “of course you are”. Basically the boundaries on the maps feel to most people to be no more than just lines.

Inside Russia/ outside Russia

Some groups such as Dagestanis, Chechens, Tartars are people of republics within the border of the Russian Federation, others such as Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and the numerous central Asians are not, though all are ex-soviet peoples.

Muslim/Christian

Georgians, Armenians, the other Slavs and the Baltic states are primarily Christian countries, at least in the sense that they, like Germany, or England have a Christian heritage. Azerbaijan, Chechnya and the central Asian states amongst others, are Muslim.

Caucasian/non Caucasian (meaning here people of the Caucasus region)

Generally the Caucasus region is seen as a space that is defined neither as European nor Asian, in the way that Ukraine is European and Kyrgyzstan is Asian. This is not about geography, but perception: I remember 20 years ago travelling around Eastern Europe, we would arrive in town after town and find tourist brochures telling us we had come to the very place where “East meets West” until finally it struck us that there is no point on planet earth where east does not meet west, not north, south. There is something of that in the Caucasus of Russian perception.

All of this is obviously skimming the surface, and anthropologists, or even a Wikipedia writer can tell you there were over 100 distinct ethnic groups in the USSR, or that Dagestan alone has over thirty language groups. But, just as I can’t describe every nuance in a blog post, most Muscovites don’t think on such a complex level in day to day life any more than Greeks or Canadians do. That said, as a basic categorization of what people here are understanding when they speak of nationality, or race etc, I am confident it’s pretty much right.

Awkward conversations

The way I understand it empires are followed by imperial hangovers. England has numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and Caribbean people, France, I understand, genially hosts North Africans and the Netherlands has various black people from wherever it was that Dutch people sailed to in pursuit of profit before going all liberal and nice. This is just how it is, you jump on a boat, go somewhere and claim it as your own, then you co-opt a percentage of the population to administer your new colony and to stop yourselves getting killed, and then when it all falls to shit, you end up with lots of new people in your homeland.

Of course you can complain about them stealing our jobs and taking our women, but inside you know it is crap, and that all of these different coloured people are the price you are paying for what your country did last night when it got loaded on cheap cotton or spices. Sure, it takes a while to figure all of this out: I remember sitting in a classroom with a map of the British Empire on the wall, just behind a teacher ranting about immigrants, and I didn’t make the connection. But, then, I was 9.

Russians are still struggling to make this connection and they are less than pleased when I help them to do so. They tell me that Russia never had an Empire, and when we get that fixed, and they concede that Imperial Russia, might just have had an empire, they move on to explaining that the Soviet Union was not an empire. That’s a conversation that can last about 8 hours if you’re not careful, and who has 8 hours to spare? If you have a Pole, a Czech, a Chechnyan or a Hungarian in the room the conversation can be much shorter, but the blood loss will increase inversely.

 “Why do they come here?” my Russian friends ask plaintively.

“I can’t imagine.” I reply: “And why do they all seem to be fluent in Russian? I mean it’s almost as though they learnt it at schools established, I don’t know, 40 or 60 years ago.”

 So they come here because we went there, we all know this really, it’s just a question of how many decades it will take us to admit it. They come here to work because the money is here, and one of the main reasons the money is here is because we took it from there way back when.

Orangutans

Orangutans

Back in the day, when Boris ruled and I didn’t know enough Russian to tell someone that their mother enjoyed having sex with orangutans, I used to work morning and evening in a bank. Two times a day five days a week I would arrive at the flashy new building with my cheap suit on and my passport in hand to explain English conditionals to a convicted fraudster from Siberia who had done rather well for himself after the breakup of the USSR. After some time I was asked to explain stuff to his daughter and his son in law, and then to his nephew who all had senior positions in the banking empire, nepotism being a standardized HR strategy in the late nineties. All in all I would go to that bank ten, fifteen or more times every week, and ten fifteen or more times a week I would hand my passport to the security guard on the front door.

 And ten fifteen or more minutes was how long it took him every single time to examine that passport, and to check it against the computer he had in his little glass box and make a couple of calls to double check that it was OK for me to do the job his boss was paying me to do. My face must have been more familiar to him than that of his wife, if he had a wife: my suspicion was that his heart had more likely been won by a cockroach or a potato.  Let’s do the maths: 50 weeks, multiplied by 5 days, multiplied by 3 times a day would make 750 times a year he looked at my face and my passport, and still he had to force me to wait in the cold for 10 minutes before he pressed the button that opened the door to his kingdom. Maybe he hated foreigners, maybe I was the spitting image of a man who had brutally killed his entire family 10 years previously or maybe he had been badly duped by a shape shifting monster that could assume any form it chose. The only other option would be that he was a spiteful cretin accorded so little responsibility in life that it had driven him to employ power crazed techniques of pettiness and obstruction against innocent teachers in order to feel himself a man.

I had to leave home fifteen minutes early every time to account for this routine. I complained to my bosses, but they were making too much from my work there to want to upset the apple cart.

 So all I could do was talk to him, through his little window, but my Russian then was negligible and he didn’t understand English at all, except for “fuck” and “Yo Momma” and so on. Which was how I discovered the release valve of looking into a man’s eyes and explaining to him calmly and in detail that his cretinism was a result of his having sucked so much dick throughout his life. Or, that if he could just manage to resist the temptation to let stray dogs perform anal sex on his person then his IQ might one day rival that of a brain damaged squirrel. The creative possibilities were endless. Granted it was pointless, utterly pointless, I know, for he understood nothing and, as my tone remained courteous however puerile I got, he never really grasped what was going on. But I felt better, the minutes passed pleasurably so that in time I came to quite enjoy the exchanges and it was certainly less frustrating than silently fuming in the ice and snow.

 And then it all ended: the fraudster asked me one day if I was having problems getting in to the building, I told him the truth and after that my dog raping subhuman friend would buzz me into the building before I even had my passport out of my pocket and graciously wave me through into the lobby taking care to avoid my eye, but I had one more technique to help me deal with the travails of this place.

One must have a mind of winter...

  I know that only animistic primitives think the weather has intention and all right thinking folk know that it is nothing more than a huge and indifferent complex of random forces. If you go outside and it’s minus 8 halfway through March and there is fresh snow falling onto the hard black ice, well, that’s the weather for you: it doesn’t mean anything.

 But no!

 Winter in Russia is simply evil, consciously cruel, and revels in her mockery of mere mortals. I say “her” because they use a feminine noun: “Zima”, and women here are called things like “Nina, Dina, Zina” or “Hiroshima” (I may be mistaken about one of those, but the point stands.)

 She comes in each year, slinkily emerging from Autumn’s mellow fruitfulness, fluttering her eyelashes with that first, fresh snowfall and challenging you to start writing poems called: “first snow” and to imagine log fires burning brightly in quaint wooden homes. You know it’s all bullshit, you live in a concrete box in a city of three trillion million people and none of them will smile for the next six months unless they are drunk or mentally ill. You know she’s going to destroy your shoes as the city authorities fight her by spraying noxious chemicals all over the streets. You know all this, but it doesn’t help.

By January she has dumped you, broken your heart into a million little pieces. She gives you days of impossible beauty, glittering sunshine and silver dust dancing in the light. Days when your kids say: Papa, let’s go for a walk.” Then spend the next two hours demanding that you find a warm café. And then by February she has just resorted to punching you in the kidneys every ten seconds.

 Then, when you are weeping like an orphaned child living in a drain she starts her flirting all over again. She gives you a warm almost spring like day; she sends huge blocks of melting ice plunging from the roofs of buildings so that you imagine you might die happy, smiling as your skull is hammered into your rib cage. And then she laughs, like Michael Sheen in that vampire movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7kT0qiv78s before taking you back into minus 15 and ice as hard as steel. Or she buries you under snow for the whole of March and April. And she will do this as many times as it takes to remind you that hope is for cretins, as many times as it requires to break you, crush you, to teach you that despair is the only wisdom and that death will be a merciful release.

Mad

Once in Moscow these two guys met, sharing a flat, set up by the school they worked for. Strangers to each other, one was a friend of mine, a hearty, salt of the earth type, a good man, and the other, a Welshman, I never met. Anyway they had a long, awkward, and oddly intense, “getting to know you” conversation in the crummy little kitchen, about life and Russia and who they were. Then my friend said goodnight.

Later, in the wee small hours, when he was going to the toilet he heard the other through the door repeating the conversation verbatim, both sides of it, word perfect, but in a strange strangled voice, and after each exchange he laughed a horrible laugh.

That’s all there is to it, but it’s unnerving to remember it even now.

ere zey have no language

On a summer evening on Kuzinetsky Most street, I was walking up towards the FSB headquarters to take the metro home and lighting a cigarette, when a man approached me. About fifty, in an expensive suit, with Radovan Karovitch hair and a briefcase, he caught my eye and, seeming to be reassured that I wasn’t a killer, he came up and said, with a heavy French accent: Can I?”

He was signaling towards my lighter and taking a cigarette of his own from his pocket.

“You can.” I replied

“aaaaah, you speak English.” As I lit his Galoises.

“I am English” I told him, and we paused to inhale in a moment of fraternal amity.

Then he pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes and said in a vaguely conspiratorial fashion.

“Ere, zey do not ave language.”

“They have Russian.” I pointed out, and he gave a superbly gallic shrug, said  “Hmmmmmmmmn” and we parted.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I walk into the boy's room, he's laying in his pants looking at videos on a tablet.

I fling open the windows, outside is a courtyard full of green trees and blossoming

summer flowers. The scent of cherry blossom and lilac floods the room carried in

on a warm breeze.

I am enraptured.

"Look boy, Reality"

"No!" he screams in reply.

"Life is there Zhen, look a whole world of beauty is open to us, here, now, free.

"No!" He repeats, with rising and venomous rage.

"Let's walk, " I cry: " Lets walk in this glorious, sunbathed city and go from cakeshop to cakeshop until the evening sun fades behind the golden domes of the Kremlin. Let's live child, lets live now, for death is coming and yet cake exists."

"No! No! No!" he howls as he pulls the quilt up over his head and forms a fortress of pillows and blankets to guard the sacred tablet.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

I am defeated.

I write this.

If you can make it there...

New York, ah New York: the city that thinks with its teeth. Siren squealing self-obsessed tourist tat bling, humanity’s first and greatest attempt at creating a fully twat based economy.

Manhattan, ah yes, fuck trees there’s no money in that breathing nonsense. Manhattan: here even the dreams of children are concrete and neon and noisy.

And Brooklyn, yes, Brooklyn, Manhattan’s very own personal elsewhere: so much better till you actually get there and see that it is New York, ah yes, more New York, because Manhattan is apparently not enough New York for these clowns.

For before New York men lived in potatoes, before New York there were no cities. Before New York there was nothing.

The two types of immigrants

Much to the Daily Mail’s delight Russia has a new policy on illegal immigrants. Here’s how it works.

 My wife hires a few guys to make repairs to the flat. The police, by chance, or at the prompting of a concerned citizen, arrive and demand to see everyone’s paperwork. Of the three, non Russian, workers one has some problem with his documents, though he has apparently been stopped every day for the last year without this problem being apparent. Anyway the cops, take my wife off into a room and tell her she is going to court for hiring illegal workers. But luckily, they will be able to help her out if she pays a 24 000 ruble fine, 730 dollars.

Receipt? Lolski.

She doesn’t have that much in loose change, so they suggest she goes round the neighbours to see if any of them can contribute, she won’t do so. After much haggling it comes down to 5000 and they leave, after warning her that if they should come back and see any work going on there will be a far larger “Fine” required to avoid legal hell.

The room has massive holes in the walls and ceiling, so the work continues. When a van arrives to deliver materials, my wife asks me to go carry them up the five flights of stairs just in case the cops are waiting. They are, and when I open the door they demand to see my papers and those of the worker who is with me. He is legal, he must be, as they examine his papers for 10 minutes and quiz him and nothing comes of it.

Am I legally here? We never establish that because I tell them I am English and have no papers on me, which appears to satisfy them at once as they scuttle off sharpish giving me nervous glances over their shoulders.

A more skeptical man that I would suggest that a western foreigner is a far more complex problem than an Uzbek, and particularly one who speaks Russian, looks them in the eye and is evidently not a fresh faced tourist. I, however, refuse to fall prey to any such cynical interpretations and remain convinced it is simply a mark of the profound trust and mutual admiration that exists between our two great nations.

Home is where the heart stops

I’m thrown by how much Moscow is home: I hadn’t noticed that happening until I got back from America. Returning to England doesn’t feel that way, for England is home too: my time there is mainly spent in the house I grew up in.

 But walking out into Sheremetevo Airport, with its shiny new terminals and customs officers who still don’t actually smile but look as though they might just know how to, and seeing the Cyrillic script and those Cyrillic faces everywhere evoked the feeling that landing in London gave me 10 years back: that sense of: “Right, this is my world.” What was more unexpected was that it felt like Europe, which it is after America, very much Europe. Compare Moscow to London and the latter seems like the capital of Medieval Elsewhereistan, yet after a fortnight of New York’s siren drenched, glittery self regard seeing quiet people quietly doing stuff is like a soothing bath. No one asks me how I’m doing when I buy a train ticket into the city, the guy who sits in the next seat is clearly not going to start a conversation, and after I half return his curt nod, he is assured that I won’t either. As I leave the train the steward doesn’t tell me to have a great day, and the metro is not a white tiled public toilet with large people singing bad A cappella soul songs in the wagons. Here the metro has exactly the same aura of marbled grandeur as the NY Public Library’s main building. Bolsheviks are startlingly good at metros.

 And then the green, I look from this window and I count …one second… fifty three full grown trees in glorious summer dress, and about two acres of grass. In Midtown Manhattan if you drop a few cabbage leaves into a box it will fill up with self-conscious people using Macbooks before you have reached the next stoplight.

 And there is a stop light every minute: they took a concrete and brick chessboard and filled it with traffic and sirens. Then, having burned all the green stuff, and half blocked most of the sidewalks with scaffolding, and every corner with people trying to make you get on an overpriced bus tour, they made every junction into a waiting game. All the time there I was looking for the quiet courtyard that is rarely more than a minute away here and I never found it, is grass socialist too? Green too Islamic?

 I loved the place, a spectacular city, and endlessly fascinating, but I get back here and this absurd and ravenous monster of a city feels like an ocean of calm.

Moscow, the sultry coquette, has sneaked up on me yet again.

Rhaphsody

Moscow: jewel of the north, Venice of the east, Grimsby of the mind. Moscow, where east meets west, and north meets south, and south, south west meets north, north east. Moscow: a point on a map, like anywhere else where tourist brochure writers ran out of ideas really quickly. Moscow: where yesterday meets the day before yesterday and they take tea in a garden of all of our lost tomorrows.

Moscow: city of misty bears and pine forested women, golden gnomed eyebrows of burnished steel sitting in state twixt noses of rare, yet treacherous, promise. Moscow, capitol of capitols in a Russia of many Russias, golden boned, chocolate domed Moscow, ah me ah my.

And there, crouching eel-like on the hill of Bogoloopskoi the deterred, between the river Moocow and the walls of Plagovitch the denailer: there it glowers:the Kremlin.

The Mighty Kremlin a million roofed dance of anarchitectural prawns, founded 47 times each hour by Vladimov the denosed, ruler of twelve shining inches or thirty glorious centimeters. Vladimov the bewildered: emperor of the metric. Its mighty form glowers benignly over the scuttling masses in their many layered and brightly painted wooden overcoats, the sun glints off its myriad golden gnomes casting glittering shadows on the yellow grey Kremlin tanned skin of its noble inhabitants.

And here, Red Square, a crimson cube forged of steel and cake by men whose names were Ivan. Red square, ah me, the heart of this throbbing, engorged metropolis. Site of fifty seven million historical events whose meaning is lost in the mists of, well, mist.

And at the heart of the scarlet quadrangle St Bozil’s cathedral of Gleb the dispenser: Constructed of meringue and sponge by nameless men called Ivan to commemorate the victory of Vladimov over the Polgol hordes in the year of eleventy ninety whenever. All eyes are drawn to its unearthly beauty by men, likewise called Ivan, bearing complex eye drawing devices forged in the bear haunted tunnels of Glaznagomsk by men, called Ivan.

Ah Moscow, ah Russia, ah fuck it.

NY more notes

Central park is a dream, Times Square when baked less so. I must make a point of going to both places again, but timing is all.

In the park there are communities of dog walkers, as there are in most places. Here there are a wider mix, east side, cosmetically altered cougars, rented dog walkers of various non Anglo Saxon descent and other, apparently, ordinary people.

The dogs arrive at the square by the pond where they all meet and go charging ahead round the corner as though on rails, the owners lag behind, the dogs greeting everyone before they get to do their hellos..

The park is full of Victorian style architecture, very beautiful, very English.

You sit there and you think: this is it, this is how to make a good city, benefactors and public money combining to make the world a better place, and you remember that these Americans used to know this. It is time to remember, for making greedy people richer won’t pull this stuff off and we have enough strip malls and light industrial zones anyway.

On the radio an evangelical preacher complains that his movement is fading as right wing nuts have tarred them all as extremists. This is another of the nuances we miss elsewhere. He remains silent on the fact that he had nothing to say when those wingnuts were in the ascendancy, but it bothers him now that everyone thinks he’s a twat too.

I bought a hat off a hat selling homeless man with a bad sales pitch and an incomprehensible black guy accent, like Bubbles got a job in Macy's. I said: “do you have anything dark and simple”, which on reflection he may have misheard as a description of his own good self. He offered me three hello kitty does Manhattan things before I took the one that I had described.

People smile, when you pass them in an isolated spot, in a park or on the shore they will often nod and smile or say hi. It’s like England in this, but nothing at all like Moscow. It is also like London in that it is a city that has grown organically driven by a mix of politics and commerce, minus the imperial roman shit which I guess is down in D.C.  Moscow on the other hand is a planned city and so has a lack of retail space and public areas are all formed by a top down notion of what the “people” need. Here there has been a dialogue. There have also been philanthropists and reformers fighting to ameliorate the worst effects of the market here, and it is those spaces that make the place so pleasant, but they need more.

The impulse to retire into anonymity, so natural to the English, is lost here, people have stories ready to tell, stories they have practiced and that they would have define them. An old black lady on a bench outside K Mart invites me to join her in marveling at the insanity of passersby: she deconstructs them mercilessly. That one is wearing 3 jumpers coz his mom had him when she was already old and pa wasn’t around enough, the homeless guy with the cart shouting at walls sees something we can’t see, and who knows if he is right? Then a couple walk past with a lap dog in a kids stroller, and she says that’s the end of civilization, we’re all doomed but it doesn’t matter coz we always were.