Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Living in a Natural Disaster Area

When I was young, droughts were something that happened elsewhere: as a punishment from God in the Bible, or in far off Africa, where unfortunate babies with distended bellies would die in the scorching heat of an evil sun. In Scotland, by contrast, there was never a shortage of rain - quite the opposite, in fact: We hardly ever saw the sun, and might have thought its existence a mere rumor were it not for those people who came back from holidays in Spain burnt red, toy donkeys under their arms. 

Flash forward a few decades and suddenly I find myself living in Texas where droughts are a regular occurrence. Currently we are enduring our ninth month of epic dryness, my second drought in five years, which - depending on which website I consult - is either the worst or third worst in the history of the state.

Will America Go Into Default?

The debt ceiling, the debt ceiling, everybody says the debt ceiling. Apparently Obama has to raise it if Uncle Sam is to pay his bills. The big issue is the question of how to get more money so America doesn’t have to keep borrowing cash from foreigners: cut spending and cut taxes? Or keep spending and raise taxes? The answer depends on which baseball team you support. I mean, political party.

Well anyway for a long time I dismissed all this debt ceiling talk as the usual shenanigans from the plutocrats in Congress. But then I read that if an agreement could not be reached between the Blue Team and the Red Team then America would default on its loans. Pensions would go unpaid! Babies would be forced to shovel coal! And so on! Apparently Moody’s - an organization possibly related to the burger joint of the same name at the end of my street - is threatening to downgrade America’s “Triple A rating” (which I believe describes the quality of its hotels).

My Local Mega-Mosque

Georgetown is a small-ish town north of Austin located in a notoriously conservative county that - until recently - did not permit the sale of alcohol in restaurants. The judges there are very fond of inflicting harsh punishments on criminals; social life centers on the church, the golf club and the high school; the average age of residents is 45; and so on.

Anyway, I lived there for a few months after I first arrived in Texas and quickly started to lose my mind. After all, I had just spent 10 years living in Moscow, that mega city of beauty, evil and horror, and now, here I was in small-town America, in a place so perfect it shimmered like a mirage. The boredom was intense. Is this how I shall spend the rest of my life? I wondered, scarcely able to suppress my panic.

July 4th, Russian Style

I first celebrated American Independence Day in Russia, surrounded by Russians. Now you might think that curious, given the history of (at worst) enmity and (at best) mistrust that exists between the two nations but… hell, Russians love to celebrate and any excuse for a party will do. That’s why in the last 10 or 15 years they have enthusiastically embraced hitherto foreign festivals such as St. Valentine’s Day, Halloween and even St. Patrick’s Day, while surrendering none of their own “indigenous” holidays.

The Independence Day party I attended was held at Kuskovo, a large estate in Moscow’s Deep South. At one point the vast territory had belonged to some aristocrat who (if I am not mistaken) had built a serf theater on the grounds. Or maybe it was a serf art gallery; I’m not sure, it all happened a long time ago. A lot of the historic buildings still stood, and it was a pleasant enough place to stroll, even if it was located a ridiculous distance from the subway. And on July 4th it always filled up with a large crowd, looking to par-tay.

A Helpful Warning to All Residents of and Visitors to the United States

Recently a friend of mine decided to sell the antique Indian headdress she kept in a Perspex box in her house. I was baffled by this decision as it was a thing of great beauty and she did not need the cash. But she had made up her mind: she was moving house and the headdress had to go.

I asked how she had acquired it in the first place:

“My grandparents picked it up at a train station in the 1930s,” she said. “They used to travel around the South West and the Indians would come to the platforms to sell things. So they bought the headdress. They probably didn’t pay much for it, either.”

Of Rock Stars, Slaves and Free Men

Ever since I left the university 15 years ago I have led a strange life, one which has been short on cash but rich in unusual encounters. Recently for instance I have been spending a lot of time in the house of a musician acquaintance whose band had several hits in the 1980s.

He bought himself a nice house with the proceeds of his success: a ranch-style compound located high on a hill in west Austin, set amid 10 acres of wild scrubland. Lizards and armadillos and deer roam the territory. Once a porcupine attacked his daughter’s pony and he had to pull ten inch needles from the whimpering beast’s wounded flesh. I’m sure there are some evil serpents out there also.

The Sound of Silence

Recently I took out a subscription to Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s pet project, SNOB magazine. Terrible title, I know, but in between the sympathetic profiles of people who stole a lot of money in the '90s and ads for luxury real estate you can find some interesting articles. This month for instance, Alexei Yevdokimov asked a question that had never occurred to me before: Why has nobody written a book or made a film about 1991?

1991 of course was the year that Yeltsin stood on a tank to defend democracy, shortly after which the Soviet Union collapsed, shortly after which Yeltsin spent eight years making a mockery of democracy. Pretty important, then: and yet as Yevdokimov pointed out, that key year, the moment of annihilation of the old world, is a theme that has been almost completely neglected by Russia’s artistic elite.  

These Days I Get My Truth From the Tabloids

When I first came to America I read a lot of supermarket tabloids. These differ from the notoriously salacious British tabloids in that they contain no politics, preferring to focus on celebrities and weight loss stories. Also, everything in them is completely imaginary. Consider for instance the World Weekly News, which regularly reports on the latest doings of the Loch Ness monster, and frequently cites Nostradamus as an authority - marvelous stuff. 

I was fascinated by the flow of fabricated stories about celebrities, and soon became an expert on the alleged misdeeds of famous people whose TV shows and movies I had never seen. These tabloids struck me as the purest form of anti-literature: joyfully garish and crass, written in the simplest language, perpetually straining after the cheapest sensationalism. I also admired the writers who operated at a level of ego killing anonymity that would put a Buddhist monk to shame. It’s not easy for a writer to kill his ego, but these guys did it.

Monday, July 18, 2011

American Election Watch, Episode 1

Ever since Barack Obama was elected, a lot of pundits have asked: who will run against him in 2012? They do that because they’re paid to of course, but as the election draws nearer perhaps we should take the matter a little more seriously. Here, therefore is an E-Z cut out n’keep list of possible Republican candidates for next year’s presidential race.

1)    Sarah Palin
In June, Sarah Palin will travel around America on the “One Nation” bus tour. This will be a bit like 60s author Ken Kesey’s bus tours, only substituting Tea Party rhetoric for LSD tabs. The predictable media frenzy has already begun- is this the prelude to something big? Will she finally declare her candidacy? 

The One About the Chuckchi, the Irishman and the Scotsman

Although I am still in my mid-thirties I am often struck by how much the world has changed in my lifetime. For instance, I remember when it was acceptable to make jokes about stupid Irishmen on British TV. Indeed, when I was a child there was a ‘comedian’ named Jimmy Cricket, who was a professional ‘stupid Irishman’. He regularly appeared on TV, gibbering like an idiot, encouraging Britons to laugh at the supposedly witless imbeciles inhabiting the island next door.

Alas for Jimmy’s career, changes were afoot in British culture and within 20 years the country had become a world leader in the sphere of post-modern speech crime. These days, cracking a gag about the Irish tap dancer who fell in the sink is to commit career suicide. Stereotypes persist, of course, but people are afraid to vocalize them lest they be socially ostracized or face criminal penalties. Whether fear induced hypocrisy is an improvement over honest ignorance I’ll let the reader decide.

How I Slayed the Serpent

When I was a boy I was always glad that I lived in Britain, where there were no dangerous animals that might kill me. Yes, once upon a time there had been bears and wolves in the depths of the forest, but that was before my ancestors had so thoughtfully annihilated them all. Instead we had hedgehogs, wasps and midges (a tiny species of mosquito common in Scotland) and the occasional angry cow. And that was about it.

When I moved to Russia, things got more interesting on the deadly animal front. For a start, there were tigers, white ones even, but they were far away, and so I never encountered any. There were also wolves and bears, but alas, not in downtown Moscow- unless you counted the cops, of course. One time while traveling in Siberia I visited a religious community and the locals informed me that there were bears living in the forest that surrounded the village; however the beasts are so shy that hardly anybody had ever seen one. 
On the other hand, I did encounter a lot of cockroaches, which, although not dangerous, are certainly vile.

Osama Bin Laden, the Great Unifier

When I first saw the headline that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, I assumed it was a nonsense story that a lazy web editor had put online to score hits – you know, like “bacteria discovered on Mars”, or ‘nails from Christ’s cross found’. 

I’m so accustomed to cosmic incompetence from the folk in charge, (most recently stumbling into a war in Libya they don’t want to fight, for instance), that I just couldn’t imagine the US government or the CIA had finally whacked the world’s most wanted man.

Bury My Heart on Nameless Road

It was curiosity that led me to Nameless. I kept wondering: what lies beyond my local HEB, that vast supercenter of consumerism where I buy my groceries? The road seemed to lead nowhere, disappearing abruptly after a gas station and a chemist’s, devoured by the sky. But there had to be something else out there. So one day I resolved to follow the road to the end.

The bland, lunar housing developments dwindled to dirt and scrub and then, through some trees, I spotted a Buddhist Temple. A promising start to my voyage: a Buddhist Temple is not something you expect to see in rural Texas - even if the pursuit of oblivion makes a lot of sense out here.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Party of the Damned

Recently I acquired a collection of LIFE magazines from 1971, and was curious to see what was making the news back then. You can probably guess some of the topics (e.g. the Vietnam War) and you’ve probably forgotten others (the opening of an airport on the Seychelles). As for me, I was particularly interested in the October 29th issue, not because of the David Cassidy cover but because it promised a report on “Kings, Queens, Emperors at the Shah’s Party.”
I’ve been interested in Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran, ever since I read Ryszard Kapuscynski’s The Emperor some years back. The party in question - held in the ruins of Persepolis to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire - is described in Kapuscynski’s book as a nadir for Pahlavi’s regime, the point at which the gulf between the Shah’s autocratic excess and his people’s poverty became unbridgeable.
Of course, it’s easy to pronounce that type of judgment when you have hindsight.

RIP Yuri Gagarin, Long Live the Russian Space Program

This week marked the 50th anniversary of the first manned space flight. Indeed, I am writing this on Tuesday April 12th, known as Cosmonaut’s Day in Russia in honor of the hour or so Yury Gagarin spent spinning around the earth in a tin can.
I have been fascinated by Gagarin since childhood, and not just because I come from Red Fife, where we had a communist local councilor even into the 1990s, and where the mining village of Lumphinnans has a street named Gagarin Way. Nor is it because of the First Spaceman’s mysterious early death. No; I think it’s because he came from the Dark Side. 

Freedom of Speech and Cosmic Stupidity

One thing I truly love about America is the First Amendment- you know, the one about Congress making no law ‘…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’ and all that.

Just think about it: a group of revolutionaries had just seized control of a British colony, and one of the first things they did was grant everybody the right to abuse them. It’s astonishing: probably the first time in human history people in power willingly granted the lower orders free license to say whatever they wanted.
Indeed, it’s so radical that I don’t think any government has gone as far since. When I was a boy in the UK I assumed we had freedom of speech, even though we don’t have a written constitution. In fact there were blasphemy laws and bans on ‘nasty’ videos imposed by a cabal of invisible censors.

Why I Am Immune to Royal Wedding Fever

The other day I spotted a postcard of a familiar-looking palace on my desk. Is that Peterhof? I wondered. But it wasn’t kitsch enough- this was a simple, big gray shoebox with columns on. Suddenly I recognized it: Buckingham Palace, dreary residence of my gracious Queen. Then I spotted the text, written in swirly gold lettering:

YOU’RE INVITED

My Life of Crime

Some time ago I got heavily into crime. Not big or interesting crime mind you, like serial murder or death camps, but rather tiny crime, rubbish crime - the kind of thing unusual enough to fill 150 words in a newspaper, and then disappear forever.
My interest in this inglorious subgenre started in Russia, where the mind-bendingly dull Moscow Times would very occasionally publish something readable, strange one- or two-paragraph stories from around Russia, often featuring an element of crime. I vividly recall the tale of some kids who were found playing soccer with a human head near Smolensk. 

The Ballad of Boris Grebenschikov

Last weekend, I was looking for interesting music to (legally) download when I found myself thinking about Boris Grebenschikov. For those who don’t know, Grebenschikov is a Legend of Russian Rock, the ‘Russian Bob Dylan,’ a mega hippy who got his start playing underground concerts in 1970s Leningrad and was the first Russian rock star to release an album in the West- 1989’s long forgotten Radio Silence.

Now, as that execrable LP demonstrates, not everything Grebenschikov does is good, or even listenable, but if you were to pick the best songs he has recorded over his 30+ year career you could make at least one decent album. The site I was looking at had two records- an experimental duet released on an obscure Russian label, and the other a ‘best of’ compilation put out by Naxos.
It was surprising to see Grebenschikov on a Western label again- Naxos is German- since his first experience was so disastrous. Radio Silence was released in 1989 during the heady days of perestroika, when soviet culture was fashionable.

Overnight Sensations

Five years ago I flew into Texas, not knowing how long I would be here. Although I am generally bad with dates, I remember my arrival in the Lone Star state because it coincided with Austin’s South by South West music/media/film festival, which is running this week.

And I recall that on that fateful plane journey I met a woman who was chaperoning a teenage rock band from Wales. They hoped to be “discovered” at the festival; their parents were concerned that their ambitious offspring would self destruct in a maelstrom of coke-snorting and whoring.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Let A Thousand Concealed Handguns Bloom!

Strange things happen to your mind when it’s transplanted to a foreign culture. Events and ideas that would have once appeared outrageous become very normal, and before long you accept them without batting an eyelid. It takes a serious jolt for you to realize how normal the hitherto abnormal has become.

Recently I had one of those jolts, when I read that the Texas State Legislature was about to pass a law forcing college campuses to permit students to carry concealed weapons on their persons. There is already a law that says Texas colleges can decide for themselves if they want students to wander around with secret firearms. None permit it; that’s why state lawmakers want to force them to grant students their 2nd Amendment rights.


O brave new world, that has such people in’t!

Robocop Forever!

The United States is a troubled nation, friends. The economy is a mess, the political culture is unbearably shrill, ponytailed types are rioting in Wisconsin, etc. Fortunately there is some good news: Detroit is getting a statue of Robocop.

This is how it happened. Last week, via Tweet, somebody proposed a Robocop monument to the city’s mayor, Dave Bing. Bing replied sniffily: "There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion"

Almost immediately an Internet campaign began which raised the $50, 000 required to build it, after which a local non-profit organization donated a site. Bing’s diktat was overruled by the will of the people - kind of like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, only completely different.

Life After Wartime

I’ve always been fascinated by the military. Well, not always. In fact, when I was younger I was bored senseless by it. I couldn’t stand war films, war comics, or anything war related. The only exception was war in space. I loved laser guns and watching aliens die.

And then, at some point, my attitude changed. After all, nobody can deny that war is a phenomenon worth pondering, given that humans like killing each other so much.
Suddenly too I found that I admired military people. I was jealous of their ability to rise early, keep their hair short, and submit to external authority. Bohemianism is overrated: disciplined habits can help a man progress in life.

Ice Storms, Snowfall And The Last Man On Earth

Growing up in Scotland, I didn’t see much snow.  1979 provided the only white Christmas I remember. After that (with the exception of one year when blizzards closed school for a few happy days) you’d get two weeks of slushy stuff at the end of January/start of February, and that was about it.

In January 1997 I moved to Russia. I vividly recall the banks of deep snow in front of my dilapidated khrushevka in northwest Moscow. I waded through it with pleasure, astonished as I sank in up to my waist. Of course I was walking in an un-trodden area beneath the trees, which greatly confused the handful of Russians who were using the smooth, flattened path like regular people.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

A Brief Encounter With Holy Death

For a while now I have been hoping for an encounter with death- Saint Death, that is, or Santa Muerte, affectionately known to her (largely Mexican) followers as La Flaca- the Skinny Girl. She’s all bones, you see.
I don’t remember how I first found out about Lady Death. It was some time last year, while I was prowling the Texas-Mexico border. For the uninitiated, Santa Muerte is a crypto-saint not recognized by the Catholic Church. Nobody seems to know where she came from- one source I read speculated that the cult was new, dating back only to the late 1960s. Another speculated that it was much older, and arose as a result of peasant confusion between a Catholic Saint and an Aztec deity of death. Whichever variant is true, Holy Death emerged looking like a figure from a death metal album cover: grinning skull face, scythe, hooded robe etc.

Ancient Wisdom of the Apache

Years ago, a friend of mine started dating a vivacious American girl. Being American himself, he naturally included her ancestral lineage in his discussion of her charms. “Yes, Dan,” he said, “She’s part Scottish, part Irish, part German, a little English and also Apache - on her great-great-grandmother’s side.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said.
“Why?”
“Well, because her great-great grandmother was raped, of course. What do you think the white settlers were doing on Indian lands in the 19th century? They weren’t passing the bong around at a groovy inter ethnic love-in, I’ll tell you that for nothing. “

Things Coca Cola Has Taught Me

On Monday, I helped an 88-year-old man move a Coca-Cola vending machine from the floor of an industrial warehouse to the back of his pick-up truck. He was buying it for the employees at his scrap metal business in Houston. The owner of the vending machine was out of town, and I had agreed to meet the old man and help.

Alas, I wasn’t much use. I soon discovered that even if I pushed the vending machine very, very hard with my shoulder, it wouldn’t move. Fortunately there was a man across the street with a forklift truck. If he hadn’t been there, the Coke machine would still be standing in the original spot, or perhaps the 88-year-old man and I would be lying under it, two bloody smears on the warehouse floor.

And so the week began with a new discovery: VENDING MACHINES ARE INCREDIBLY HEAVY. Reflecting upon this, I wondered what other things I had learned from Coca-Cola which, like the air we breathe, is a ubiquitous part of modern life.

The Ghost In The Rage Machine

Shortly before New Year I canceled my cable TV subscription. I resented paying so much for such junk.

It’s not the first time I’ve done without TV. For years in Moscow I had a TV in my apartment, but I was too lazy to connect it to the outside antenna. Deprived of Russian variety shows and dubbed Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, I had to find other ways to unwind. Usually I’d sit in a cafe, or roam the labyrinthine city streets, studying the exotic urban fauna.

Was it a more productive way to spend time than watching TV? Slightly, I suppose. I only watched TV when I was tired, at which point the brain doesn’t really want to get engulfed in a book, or write a masterpiece. So I had simply replaced one form of frittering time away with another.

In the U.S., however, I felt relief when I abandoned TV. You see, I had developed an unhealthy habit of watching the 24 hour news channels. What I liked most was to watch a bit of right-wing demagoguery on Fox, and then change to the rival news channel MSNBC to get even more berserk left-wing demagoguery. This perpetual rage machine was occasionally amusing but usually churned out nothing but boring, annoying, apocalyptic fluff. Every second I spent watching it, I was aware that I was wasting my allotted fourscore and ten.  But still, it was hard to turn away. Like millions of others, I was hooked on my daily dose of venom and paranoia.

And yet, once the supply was cut off, it only took a few days to get clean.  Soon my head felt clearer and my step was lighter. I didn’t know anything less about what was going on in the world. You pick that up just by breathing these days. But the accompanying angry soundtrack was gone. In fact, my entire house became soothingly quiet. I’d play music, of course, but I like music. What the TV had generated was noise.

An unexpected side effect of canceling cable was that I spent less time on the Internet. Suddenly a lot of rage fuelled blogs and columns made no sense to me. They were parasitic on cable, which you needed to watch to understand who and what was being discussed. It turned out that all those reality stars and political hysterics existed only as a weird, electronic hallucination. I pulled the plug and they ceased to exist.
Last weekend however I discovered that my escape from the Moebius loop of Internet-cable gibberish was not total.

No doubt you heard about Jared Loughner, the gunman who “allegedly” shot a Democratic Arizona Congresswoman and killed numerous others. It was a tragic event, of the sort that will always occur in a country so free that its citizens have easy access to guns. Every now and then a lunatic will go wild. If anything, it’s surprising that it doesn’t happen more often.

Anyway, having spent a good few years hooked up to the rage machine, I suddenly realized that I could hear what the talking heads were saying even though I didn’t have a TV. I was like an amputee, who still feels his ghost limb. The shriekers on the left would be using Loughner’s act for political gain, attempting to tie him to the Tea Party, forcing his victims’ corpses to jerk like puppets on a string for the sake of vilifying Sarah Palin, Republicans, etc.

After a while, curiosity got the better of me. I went online and saw that yes indeed, my ghost limb’s twitching was accurate. These squalid freaks must have been at their computers within seconds of hearing about the shooting, gleefully hurling accusations of complicity at the people they devote so much energy to hating. Stunningly exploitative, I know, but that’s how you get ahead in the American media.

What I didn’t expect was the response of some on the Right, who in reply accused their foes of a “blood libel.” Now, don’t get me wrong: exploiting a tragedy to smear people you disagree with is reprehensible, but “blood libel” specifically refers to the anti-Semitic belief that Jews use the blood of Christian children when baking matzos for Passover. For centuries in Europe and Russia, this poisonous myth was cited as a justification for periodic massacres of Jews. But conservatives in America are not subject to pogroms, no matter how sorry they feel for themselves.

Suddenly I felt exhausted and switched the computer off. But it was too late. Outside my window I could hear screams and howls - not of the actual wounded and grieving (who had been reduced to bit part players in another drama) but of cynical, hysterical media monsters hurling invective at each other.
Somebody – anybody - make it stop!

14/01/2011

Parallel Lives: Russian Literature At Home And Abroad

Recently I received a review copy of an English translation of The Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin, one of Russia’s most controversial authors. In the early 2000s, his novel Blue Lard, which featured sex scenes between clones of Stalin and Khruschev, led to Russia’s first post-soviet obscenity trial and inspired bizarre scenes whereby “patriotic youth” flushed copies of his books down a giant toilet erected in front of the Bolshoi Theater.

At the time I remember thinking that if I were an American or British publisher, I’d snap up Blue Lard for publication. Scary Putin stories were all the rage in the press, and here was a (seemingly) classic case of Freedom of Expression Under Attack™. In fact, the obscenity case was swiftly dropped and Sorokin today is feted as a modern day classic. But who needs nuance when it comes to marketing? Alas, Anglo-American publishers are notoriously reluctant to publish foreign authors and remained resistant to Sorokin’s charms.  
Until now, obviously, when it’s about eight years too late to capitalize on the giant toilet.

Friday, February 4, 2011

A Brief Encounter with Holy Death

For a while now I have been hoping for an encounter with death- Saint Death, that is, or Santa Muerte, affectionately known to her (largely Mexican) followers as La Flaca- the Skinny Girl. She’s all bones, you see.
I don’t remember how I first found out about Lady Death. It was some time last year, while I was prowling the Texas-Mexico border. For the uninitiated, Santa Muerte is a crypto-saint not recognized by the Catholic Church. Nobody seems to know where she came from- one source I read speculated that the cult was new, dating back only to the late 1960s. Another speculated that it was much older, and arose as a result of peasant confusion between a Catholic Saint and an Aztec deity of death.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Ancient Wisdom of the Apache

Years ago, a friend of mine started dating a vivacious American girl. Being American himself, he naturally included her ancestral lineage in his discussion of her charms. “Yes, Dan,” he said, “She’s part Scottish, part Irish, part German, a little English and also Apache - on her great-great-grandmother’s side.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said.

“Why?”

“Well, because her great-great grandmother was raped, of course. What do you think the white settlers were doing on Indian lands in the 19th century? They weren’t passing the bong around at a groovy inter ethnic love-in, I’ll tell you that for nothing."

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Things Coca-Cola Has Taught Me

On Monday, I helped an 88-year-old man move a Coca-Cola vending machine from the floor of an industrial warehouse to the back of his pick-up truck. He was buying it for the employees at his scrap metal business in Houston. The owner of the vending machine was out of town, and I had agreed to meet the old man and help.

Alas, I wasn’t much use. I soon discovered that even if I pushed the vending machine very, very hard with my shoulder, it wouldn’t move. Fortunately there was a man across the street with a forklift truck. If he hadn’t been there, the Coke machine would still be standing in the original spot, or perhaps the 88-year-old man and I would be lying under it, two bloody smears on the warehouse floor.

And so the week began with a new discovery: VENDING MACHINES ARE INCREDIBLY HEAVY. Reflecting upon this, I wondered what other things I had learned from Coca-Cola which, like the air we breathe, is a ubiquitous part of modern life.

The Ghost in the Rage Machine

Shortly before New Year I canceled my cable TV subscription. I resented paying so much for such junk.

It’s not the first time I’ve done without TV. For years in Moscow I had a TV in my apartment, but I was too lazy to connect it to the outside antenna. Deprived of Russian variety shows and dubbed Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, I had to find other ways to unwind. Usually I’d sit in a cafe, or roam the labyrinthine city streets, studying the exotic urban fauna.

Parallel Lives- Russian Literature at Home and Abroad

Recently I received a review copy of an English translation of The Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin, one of Russia’s most controversial authors. In the early 2000s, his novel Blue Lard, which featured sex scenes between clones of Stalin and Khruschev, led to Russia’s first post-soviet obscenity trial and inspired bizarre scenes whereby “patriotic youth” flushed copies of his books down a giant toilet erected in front of the Bolshoi Theater.

At the time I remember thinking that if I were an American or British publisher, I’d snap up Blue Lard for publication. Scary Putin stories were all the rage in the press, and here was a (seemingly) classic case of Freedom of Expression Under Attack™. In fact, the obscenity case was swiftly dropped and Sorokin today is feted as a modern day classic. But who needs nuance when it comes to marketing? Alas, Anglo-American publishers are notoriously reluctant to publish foreign authors and remained resistant to Sorokin’s charms.  Until now, obviously, when it’s about eight years too late to capitalize on the giant toilet.

Is America Becoming More Texan?

Recently I saw an interesting map of internal immigration within the United States, in which black lines represented people moving into Texas, while red lines represented those leaving. The cities of Austin, Houston and Dallas were three black holes sucking in human bodies from the Midwest, East and West coasts. Los Angeles and San Diego on the other hand were explosions of red as people fled outwards.

This may seem strange to outsiders as California and New York still dominate media representations of the United States. If you believe movies and TV, California remains a paradise of beaches, palm trees and movie stars while New York is a sophisticated metropolis buzzing with music, art and interesting crime. Texas is a nightmare zone of Creationists, hillbillies and death by lethal injection, where towns have strange names, like Chocolate Bayou (pop.60).

Monday, January 24, 2011

For Instant Christmas Spirit, Blow Here

Four years ago, I spent Christmas in Texas for the first time. Shortly beforehand I’d been driving around in the desert out West, and I have vivid memories of the return journey which, late at night, brought me through Johnson City, the birthplace of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Now, Johnson City is a place that nobody needs to visit before they die. But that night it was spectacular. The entire town was illuminated - streets, buildings, front yards, trees and the County Courthouse were all dazzling in the darkness.

I stopped the car to walk around and was immediately struck by the strangeness of thousands of lights representing icicles, snow, and snowmen in a place where it never snows.

Finding Magic in Everyday Places

It’s important to seek wonder in everyday life, to retain a child’s fascination for simple things. This is not always simple - the sheer grind of daily life can easily knock the joie de vivre out of your system. Fortunately you can find wonder in the most unexpected places, so long as you keep your eyes open.

Just the other day for instance I picked up a copy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac 2011 while waiting in line at the supermarket. I am neither a farmer nor terribly old, but I do like to learn new things. Getting home however I discovered that the almanac is not really for farmers any more, but is rather a collection of miscellanies – bathroom reading. 

Flicking through its pages I was less interested in the whimsical articles than I was in the multitude of small ads. Since the almanac is ostensibly for farmers, many of the items for sale were aimed at people with rural tastes - e.g. barn lighting, rustic doodads, Amish goods, and handcrafted Vermont cheese. Apparently even in the land of supermarkets the size of air craft hangars some people are still unsatisfied and prefer to have their cheese MADE BY HAND and dispatched to them via the mail.

And yet on the same page, incongruous amid this fetish for the rural, was a true classic of the American small ad genre, something I’d never seen before: a Litter Robot. A photograph showed a cat peeking out of a gleaming white sphere that resembled something from the 70s SF movie Logan’s Run- a teleportation chamber perhaps, or an atomization capsule. There was a small control panel beneath the opening. Now you can enjoy freedom from scooping litter - just let the Litter Robot work for you!

Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More

Back in the Golden Age of easy credit I’d walk around Britain wondering where all the money was coming from. This abundance of cash was especially baffling in Scotland, where nobody makes anything any more. Who was scoffing down truffles in the fancy restaurants? Who was shelling out a fortune for houses that had been built for miners in the 1930s? Of course, the high priests of money-voodoo insisted that there was nothing to worry about. Then the global economy crashed.

Since then, the high priests have prophesied several resurrections. I distinctly remember some juju men revealing that America’s recession had ended over a year ago, and yet millions of people still cannot find work. Last week, the long-term unemployed had their benefits turned off and then on again as Congress squabbled over how to fund their aid. Meanwhile, over in Europe the proud Irish have become supplicants seeking financial relief packages. And yet I recall that a year ago, following the Greek meltdown, the juju men performed some ritualistic “stress tests” on the banks and declared that the gods would be merciful. But now these same juju men fear that Spain and Portugal might join Ireland and Greece in the outer darkness.

The City and the Country

I lived in Prague for a while in the 90s, back when it was a favorite spot for American college grads dreaming of Bohemian greatness. Once or twice I even attended their open mic nights, at which Henry Miller wannabes would read aloud rancid poetry to similarly minded aesthetes bankrolled by daddy. Years later I still remember my pain, if not the content of what I heard- except for the first line of one mediocre song:

Texas is like Russia- big and hopeless.

At the time I’d never been to Texas, but even so the comparison seemed ridiculous. What could J.R. Ewing and V.I. Lenin have in common?

Friday, January 21, 2011

God and Germs Are Everywhere

I recently moved and one of the things that attracted me to my new address was the church at the end of the street. It’s a white, wooden structure, with a narrow spire: classic Americana, like something out of a movie. Best of all is the message board outside the entrance, which reads:

One out of every one will die.
Life is a terminal illness.
Where are you going?


Now some individuals might object to being confronted daily with this bleak message, but I was delighted. It’s good to be reminded of your mortality, even- or perhaps especially- when you’re nipping down the shops to buy toilet paper.

Whatever Happened to the Fort Hood Shooter?

After living here for four years, American culture still seems LOUD. Cable TV abounds with angry heads yelling at each other, while radio and the Internet are flooded with toxic invective. Waiting at the traffic lights I am frequently instructed by bumper stickers what position I ought to take on abortion; whether to spay and neuter my cat; and who I should have voted for six years ago. This openness can be thrilling or exhausting. It’s never boring.

There are, however, significant taboos. A public figure can end his career instantly if he uses the wrong language when discussing race. Immigration is another issue it is best to tread lightly around. And then there is radical Islam: you know, men with bombs in their skivvies, or beardy types planting bombs on Times Square.

Nothing is a buzz-kill for the American media like this stuff.

Post-election Psychosis, American style!

While the rest of the world has moved on, here in the United States the psychodrama of last week’s elections continues to unfold. On the Right: gloating over the Democrats cast into the outer darkness. On the Left: frantic excuses for the drubbing received. Obama set the tone at his press conference when he explained that people were frustrated that the magical “change” unicorn wasn’t coming fast enough. Well he didn’t use those precise words, but you catch my drift.
Other Democrats blamed Fox News, racism, or the party’s inability to communicate its own wonderfulness. Failed presidential candidate John Kerry simply declared the voters irrational- first they didn’t elect him, now this! These peasants are crazy!

Messiah Time Again- The Apocalypse in Russian and American Politics

For most of the 20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union served as Yin and Yang, each nation opposing its righteousness to the other’s evil.

Even today, with the collapse of the Soviet Union almost twenty years behind us, multifarious hacks in the Anglo-American media remain wedded to a vision of America and her sinister doppelganger. They pine for a New Cold War.

This Russian-American “doubling” runs deeper than politics. Culturally too, Russia is frequently viewed as reflecting American forms in a shadowy, distorted way: Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the Russian answer to Kubrick’s 2001, and Boris Grebenschikov is Russia’s Bob Dylan. Perhaps this is just a crude marketing tool, but the ease with which it is done suggests something more substantial lurking beneath the surface. Would anybody care about the Belgian Bob Dylan? Nope.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Border Blues

I met Sgt. Ron Martin of the El Paso police department early in the morning, and was about to climb into his car when I found my way blocked by an assault rifle, propped up against the backseat like a faithful dog awaiting its master. A thorny issue of etiquette presented itself: Do I push it out the way? But what if it goes off and blows my brains out?

“Go in the other side,” said Sgt Ron.