Nashi - Youth Movement in Russia

I've been asked several times while in St. Petersburg why I don't move to Russia and do a year in St. Pete's or perhaps Moscow. My answer is the same every time: "I love this city (st. petersburg) but I hate this country." The article below has it's problems, but the tone is worrisome in that a lot of this is "happening" in Russia now. You might be surprised as you start reading the article you may think, oh so the Russians have turned into the Moonies and are engaging in mass weddings to promote a kind of family values. But then there was this award that the Nazis would give to women who bore the most children for Der Vaterland. This Russia is potentially more terrifying than that of Stalin, at least back then we the world was afraid and vigilant, and now, with the mounting and continuing problems of the middle east and our own War on Terror being a terror in the world, someone may not notice these small details of youth movements backed by the Kremlin and the way that a country's history is being rewritten for their youth, and the ideological exhuming of Stalin's memory. Read on...

Sex for the motherland: Russian youths encouraged to procreate at camp

By EDWARD LUCAS - More by this author » Last updated at 08:35am on 29th July 2007

Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp's mass wedding. "They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia".

Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation - known as "Nashi", meaning "Ours" - is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

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Sinister: Millions of young Russians at a youth camp discerningly similar to the Hitler Youth

Nashi's annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear - supposedly a cause of sterility - and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp's first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.

Attempting to raise Russia's dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country's demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

But the real aim of the youth camp - and the 100,000-strong movement behind it - is not to improve Russia's demographic profile, but to attack democracy.

Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as 'Young Guard', and 'Young Russia', is in the forefront of the charge.

At the start, it was all too easy to mock. I attended an early event run by its predecessor, 'Walking together', in the heart of Moscow in 2000. A motley collection of youngsters were collecting 'unpatriotic' works of fiction for destruction.

It was sinister in theory, recalling the Nazis' book-burning in the 1930s, but it was laughable in practice. There was no sign of ordinary members of the public handing in books (the copies piled on the pavement had been brought by the organisers).

Once the television cameras had left, the event organisers admitted that they were not really volunteers, but being paid by "sponsors". The idea that Russia's anarchic, apathetic youth would ever be attracted into a disciplined mass movement in support of their president - what critics called a "Putinjugend", recalling the "Hitlerjugend" (German for "Hitler Youth") - seemed fanciful.

How wrong we were. Life for young people in Russia without connections is a mixture of inadequate and corrupt education, and a choice of boring dead-end jobs. Like the Hitler Youth and the Soviet Union's Young Pioneers, Nashi and its allied movements offer not just excitement, friendship and a sense of purpose - but a leg up in life, too.

Nashi's senior officials - known, in an eerie echo of the Soviet era, as "Commissars" - get free places at top universities. Thereafter, they can expect good jobs in politics or business - which in Russia nowadays, under the Kremlin's crony capitalism, are increasingly the same thing.

Nashi and similar outfits are the Kremlin's first line of defence against its greatest fear: real democracy. Like the sheep chanting "Four legs good, two legs bad" in George Orwell's Animal Farm, they can intimidate through noise and numbers.

Nashi supporters drown out protests by Russia's feeble and divided democratic opposition and use violence to drive them off the streets.

The group's leaders insist that the only connection to officialdom is loyalty to the president. If so, they seem remarkably well-informed.

In July 2006, the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, infuriated the Kremlin by attending an opposition meeting. For months afterwards, he was noisily harassed by groups of Nashi supporters demanding that he "apologise". With uncanny accuracy, the hooligans knew his movements in advance - a sign of official tip-offs.

Even when Nashi flagrantly breaks the law, the authorities do not intervene. After Estonia enraged Russia by moving a Sovietera war memorial in April, Nashi led the blockade of Estonia's Moscow embassy. It daubed the building with graffiti, blasted it with Stalinera military music, ripped down the Estonian flag and attacked a visiting ambassador's car. The Moscow police, who normally stamp ruthlessly on public protest, stood by.

Nashi fits perfectly into the Kremlin's newly-minted ideology of "Sovereign democracy". This is not the mind-numbing jargon of Marxism-Leninism, but a lightweight collection of cliches and slogans promoting Russia's supposed unique political and spiritual culture.

It is strongly reminiscent of the Tsarist era slogan: "Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality".

The similarities to both the Soviet and Tsarist eras are striking. Communist ideologues once spent much of their time explaining why their party deserved its monopoly of power, even though the promised utopia seemed indefinitely delayed.

Today, the Kremlin's ideology chief Vladislav Surkov is trying to explain why questioning the crooks and spooks who run Russia is not just mistaken, but treacherous.

Yet, by comparison with other outfits, Nashi looks relatively civilised. Its racism and prejudice is implied, but not trumpeted. Other pro-Kremlin youth groups are hounding gays and foreigners off the streets of Moscow. Mestnye [The Locals] recently distributed leaflets urging Muscovites to boycott non-Russian cab drivers.

These showed a young blonde Russian refusing a ride from a swarthy, beetle-browed taxi driver, under the slogan: "We're not going the same way."

Such unofficial xenophobia matches the official stance. On April 1, a decree explicitly backed by Mr Putin banned foreigners from trading in Russia's retail markets. By some estimates, 12m people are working illegally in Russia.

Those who hoped that Russia's first post-totalitarian generation would be liberal, have been dissapointed. Although explicit support for extremist and racist groups is in the low single figures, support for racist sentiments is mushrooming.

Slogans such as "Russia for the Russians" now attract the support of half of the population. Echoing Kremlin propaganda, Nashi denounced Estonians as "fascist", for daring to say that they find Nazi and Soviet memorials equally repugnant. But, in truth, it is in Russia that fascism is all too evident.

The Kremlin sees no role for a democratic opposition, denouncing its leaders as stooges and traitors. Sadly, most Russians agree: a recent poll showed that a majority believed that opposition parties should not be allowed to take power.

Just as the Nazis in 1930s rewrote Germany's history, the Putin Kremlin is rewriting Russia's. It has rehaabilitated Stalin, the greatest massmurderer of the 20th century. And it is demonising Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically-elected president. That he destroyed totalitarianism is ignored. Instead, he is denounced for his "weak" pro-Western policies.

While distorting its own history, the Kremlin denounces other countries. Mr Putin was quick to blame Britain's "colonial mentality" for our government's request that Russia try to find a legal means of extraditing Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

Yet the truth is that Britain, like most Western countries, flagellates itself for the crimes of the past. Indeed, British schoolchildren rarely learn anything positive about their country's empire. And, if Mr Putin has his way, Russian pupils will learn nothing bad about the Soviet empire, which was far bloodier, more brutal - and more recent.

A new guide for history teachers - explicitly endorsed by Mr Putin - brushes off Stalin's crimes. It describes him as "the most successful leader of the USSR". But it skates over the colossal human cost - 25m people were shot and starved in the cause of communism.

"Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite," it says. In other words, Stalin wanted to make the country strong, so he may have been a bit harsh at times. At any time since the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in the late 1980s, that would have seemed a nauseating whitewash. Now, it is treated as bald historical fact.

If Stalin made mistakes, so what? Lots of people make mistakes.

"Problematic pages in our history exist," Mr Putin said last week. But: "we have less than some countries. And ours are not as terrible as those of some others." He compared the Great Terror of 1937, when 700,000 people were murdered in a purge by Stalin's secret police, to the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

The comparison is preposterous. A strong argument can be made that by ending the war quickly, the atom bombs saved countless lives.

Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman-may have failed to realise that nuclear weapons would one day endanger humanity's survival. But, unlike Stalin, they were not genocidal maniacs.

As the new cold war deepens, Mr Putin echoes, consciously or unconsciously, the favourite weapon of Soviet propagandists in the last one.

Asked about Afghanistan, they would cite Vietnam. Castigated for the plight of Soviet Jews, they would complain with treacly sincerity about discrimination against American blacks. Every blot on the Soviet record was matched by something, real or imagined, that the West had done.

But the contrasts even then were absurd. When the American administration blundered into Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of people protested in the heart of Washington. When eight extraordinarily brave Soviet dissidents tried to demonstrate in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1968, they were instantly arrested and spent many years in labour camps.

For the east European countries with first-hand experience of Stalinist terror, the Kremlin's rewriting of history could hardly be more scary. Not only does Russia see no reason to apologise for their suffering under Kremlin rule, it now sees the collapse of communism not as a time of liberation, but as an era of pitiable weakness.

Russia barely commemorates even the damage it did to itself, let alone the appalling suffering inflicted on other people. Nashi is both a symptom of the way Russia is going - and a means of entrenching the drift to fascism.

Terrifyingly, the revived Soviet view of history is now widely held in Russia. A poll this week of Russian teenagers showed that a majority believe that Stalin did more good things than bad.

If tens of thousands of uniformed German youngsters were marching across Germany in support of an authoritarian Fuhrer, baiting foreigners and praising Hitler, alarm bells would be jangling all across Europe. So why aren't they ringing about Nashi?

• Edward Lucas is author of the forthcoming The New Cold War And How To Win It.

Dappled Cities stole the show...

Seriously, Tokyo Police Club was good... but Dappled Cities were amazing!!!

Fog...

I'm washing dishes
and cleaning a good time.
There's a Mexican stand off
between the night and my kitchen,
sodium is at odds with incandescence
and fog visits every corner unseen
felt like footfalls on the grave.
This is summer by the ocean,
a melodious harmonium,
Shankar's raga bhimpalasi
struggling with the metronomic
call of a horn near the water.
Mythologically speaking
something wails in the glow
of a dark night illuminated within
by handfuls of tears,
floating between the building
detached from the greater body
of being heard.

The New 7 Wonders Of The World

 

The New Wonders	The old Wonders

More fog...

“There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.”

--Federico Garcia Lorca

Yesteryear's achievment

This is by far the best... I mean sure, Doctors are human, and I'm sure there are some cardiologists that finish a triple bypass and then step outside the hospital and have a cig, or two, but to run an add like this... wow! So the science of big tobacco, disproving that smoking leads to lung cancer, or at least creating reasonable doubt in such a ludicrous theory, was first applied in a statistical manner to determine if doctors, soon to become their worst enemies, preferred their cigarettes to marlboros. I'm glad Camel helped inform of us which smooth turkish blend to trust. Man I want a smoke...

More from yesteryear

Now this one is just about being blunt, and tasteless, and if this were the modern age, where looking like Tucker Carlson was a crime, or should be, then the creator of this add would find themselves with the ACLU crawling single file, up his a$$ with a microscope and a subpoena. It amazes me how much bigotry there was, and still is, but wow, these things didn't pull any punches.

The marketing of yesteryear

Maybe this is bad, well it's probably not good, but I'm thinking that this add is just anticipating the rage that would come to be known as the Atkins diet. I mean look at all the happy shiney people who went around stuffing their faces with bacon and eggs and pork bellies, washing them down with a handful of greens and watching as the miracle of Ketosis slimmed their waste and caused their cholesterol to shoot through the roof! This is the kind of future thinking that probably turned the creator of this add into a multi millionaire who started a company that is still around today, maybe... er um, maybe not...

To teach

Listening to NPR: story about Cardinal Mohoney in LA, snippets of victims voices etc. "I was a cradle catholic, I waited to the 11th hour to file suite against the church that taught me how to love God." I find this strange, that a church teaches you to love God, I thought it was something that existed within everyone, or most, this concept of Love and that the act of Love itself was that of G-d? Does Love have to be focused upon the image of a bearded figure in order to realize the act of it? Or is it in the fact that one can experience love for another being, another thing, the thingness of l-o-v-e that in and of itself is a manifestation of the divine? So the church that taught her how to do it, isn't it only riding the coat tails of a capacity that exists within each person to begin with? Sure direction, focus, right-way-of-life, a sense of noble purpose etc, but really, the core of it all, the love, the basic tenets of J.C., isn't that just common sense? I don't know... maybe, but that phrase struck me as incredibly strange.

For Bert Chen

Faster than a clemens curve or careening off a highway cliff because the night is so much thicker here than humid nights on Jersey shores. Bridge and tunnel bruise and fly: to experience the sensation of trust let go of the rock. Oh this is how we roll: digesting G-d in a bowl of tendon and tripe. Worshiping his knife work, commerce, a labor, let's not get crazy, but I've a lesson to learn in random geometry. Lady luck's a tough old sow that blessed few and cursed tomorrow's suckers. Listen the metro's a dirty place, but you wouldn't ever ride the bus. When the mechanics of a penis on four wheels find expression between the champs d'elysee and boulevard st. michel, it'll be the sound of pigeon wings: this is called the sauce and you get to decide if you're on or off.

More Fog...

“Like a man travelling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, though in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.”

-Benjamin Franklin

Containment

The fog is a pressure chamber into which you plunge headlong. There's the mystery and the mystery of things left unsaid. The fog is a destination. Outside there's this cool summer day and then there's the fog, a welt on the land, gray, a pustule to be filled with brooding if you so choose. The fog's characteristics are quite plain: to be filled by your mood. The fog is filled now with something somber, something like the book I'm reading. I should stop reading this book as it's depressing me in a strange way, but then I can't quite put it down and want to get through it hoping that by the time I do the sun will have burned a pin sized hole through the fog on the spot where I'm sitting by the window where half my body is cold from exposure and the half that is resting against the leather of my reading chair is warm. I'm feeling a little like mercury racing through the pages of Observatory Mansions, but this flight isn't heraldic, I'm not bringing Zeus any lightning bolts from Vulcan, I'm sitting and have decided to make a cup of tea. I'm no longer sitting in my chair, I've moved, and the tea will help warm me from the inside and ease the scratch in the back of my throat. The scratch is deeper than the soft pink skin of my esophagus and extends into something like my spine. My spine is a conduit that radiates memories to all parts of my body. I'm remembering my time abroad which has already started to become a kind of dream. My body is remembering my time abroad and the scratch and the cough are reminders that death in dreams can be similar to the death of dreams and that each has a toll in the real world. My spine is reminding me that there's a place and time for things and that fog brings them to bear on my consciousness. My spine feels fatigue in the form of weight; when the limbs of my body, the matter of my person, and the fact that weight is a measure of gravity, when the gravity of the fog being filled with memories and things is weighing down on my limbs, and they are tugged from below by the nature of things, this is when I know that my fatigue is two sided, twice the burden, twice to bear things born once. This is the nature of fog, sitting in it, keeping it out by closing a window that has never kept it out, that never closes that wills itself open even when you know you never closed it, because the act of closure is a dogged one. This is how fog creeps into everything, every little space, a crevice of uncertainty. The fog is a reminder that every black and white construct can make a gray area, this is a place where choices don't have to be made but one can sit with one's own thoughts for a spell, relics borrowed from the fog and due to be returned once they've been processed and addressed. This too is a kind of fog...

From the Abbey

How many to be judges
so few and a debt
for each to pay
in tomorrow's currency:
stock and bone
flesh made stone
which earthly
remains remain
as the dead knowing
it's better to be
alive.

DVM SPIRITUS HOS REGET ARTVS
So long as breath controls my being.
-Giovani Batista Moroni (portrait of a man)

London Fog

I wish I could say that it's just fog, I mean that would be grand, but I get enough of that back home in San Francisco. No, this is much worse, much, much worse; this is rain and it's been making a mockery of me and my camera gear. I take it out, it starts raining, I put it back in, it starts raining... what the bloody hell is going on? I'm being chased by a big fat gray cloud that is dumping on me wherever I go... it's not fair I tell you...

So now that I got that out of my system let's get down to brass tacks... how much for the pint?

Before I left Russia Nellman said to me: "London will drain your bank account faster than any other city on Earth." Guess what, he was right. I've had to stop myself from computing the cost of things. I mean 2 quid for a cup of joe, sounds great, right? Wrong that's 4 bucks! I mean I don't think it's that expensive at a baseball game even. I pulled 200 pounds out when I arrived and realized I was grabbing 400 hundred dollars, oh well, that's how it goes. Maybe I'll win the lottery when I get home. Ha!

My first full day in London, and Erez's birthday was a long affair. We started the morning by walking to Westminster Abbey which is about five blocks away, or somewhere there about. What can I say about a house of the dead? I've never seen so much art in service of the dead. Well that's not entirely true too, but I swear the British are like the Egyptians in that they glorify their pharohs in one house rather than building a separate one for each and every single one of them. This is probably good as the whole of London would be nothing but one big graveyard otherwise. Westminster Abbey is an amazing place. It really is in that it houses world famous writers, poets, in the poet's corner and monarchs that have defined not only English history, which ultimately affected most of the world if we're to believe in the old addage: "the sun never sets on the British empire." I was a little disappointed to find out that photography was verboten in the abbey. I would've very much liked to have taken pictures of some of the graves and monuments. I remember pausing for a long while when I reached the coffin of Elizabeth and then Henry the 5th. These figures are not only the stuff of history and myth in the western world, but they're also a kind of literary icon considering that Shakespeare wrote two of the most stirring speeches in the English language when he penned Henry the 5th (St. Crispen's Day and Once More Unto the Breach) but that he wrote in Elizabethan England. It's a wonderful place, and frustrating as well. Every nook and cranny of the abbey is filled with a stone to someone or other. There are modern figures like Laurence Olivier and Winston Churchill and of course obscure generals and what not that earned their rights in the afterlife by dying gallantly in battle. Yet, there's this put on air about the whole thing, a kind of over romanticism about the building and it's contents which are naturally invaluable to the character and spirit of England, but somehow over wrought and now thought of as invaluable. I think most monuments fall into this category in one way or another. The austerity of Arlington isn't that far off from this place, but maybe the open space creates a kind of quietness about it, that the containment of the abbey, filled with tourists, can't quite create, or mute their over zealous and rude footsteps on the heads of so many defining personages from history. It was a mixed bag and I'm not sure why, but I thought back to a book that Boobar had with him on Benjamin and Monuments. I have a feeling I'll be looking to my dear friend Walter Benjamin for advice on this one. I did find one thing slightly curious, it was a stone in one of the chapels near Elizabeth's grave and it was a curious stone that had a crescent moon on it that looked more like something you'd see on top of a mosque than an icon in a Christian church. I asked a priest about it who flashed me a smile and said hello outside the chapel and he didn't know why it was there. Eventually, after walking out of the Abbey i asked one of the robed guides and he couldn't remember the exact significance of the stone, so he called his manager over, a man named "Eddy" and he too couldn't quite remember why that stone was there. He postulated that it might be part of the family crest of whoever was buried in that chapel. After some more discussion I proposed that this person's family might've been involved in the crusades and possibly had a stake in the Jerusalem of the 12th/13th century thereby bringing that bit of iconography into his or her family crest, which he thought was possible. He was a nice fellow and I enjoyed talking to him. I went on to ask him if any of the bodies had been removed or bones moved and he said they're all there, except for one, a high protectorate of England who was exumed and then disposed off following the Reformation and that whole debacle with Bloody Mary. He had fallen out of favor, postmortem, and had been forcibly removed from his honored resting place.

After the Abbey we walked along to see Big Ben, Parliament, then along the Embankment where I shot a few pictures of the monument to those that fought and died during the Battle of London and the air raids. The words "Never has so much been owed to so few by so many" is etched into the stone of the memorial from a speech delivered by Winston Churchill. It's a rather beautiful memorial. Pictures are to come.

From there it was off to Picadilly and then Trafalgar as we contemplated buying tickets for Fiddler on the Roof. We've been toying with this idea for a couple days now and I'm just not in the mood to sit for a musical, I much rather be walking around. Yeah, great walking I'm doing thick with insomnia now. Poor Erez will be waking up in like an hour to head out to Aberdene in Scotland on business. He's had the last couple days off and has been wandering around London with me, but alas, it's back to the grind for all of us at some point, he's coming back tomorrow night... but man... it's going to be a long day for him.

Back to the day though... it was off to Covent Garden, I saw St. Paul's church, a lovely small church on the edge of the market with a beautiful garden wet from the rain. The trees here are majestic and seem to be as old or older than the castles. No telling how many survived the fires and German bombs that fell on this city during the war years, but nonetheless, they are truly regal. From Covent we found our way back to a small corner restaurant where we dined on Fish and chips (you have to once, right?) and then went back to Trafalgar which is being prepared for the Tour de France kick off in London. Not sure about that to be quite honest, but hey whatever floats their boats. You know Tour de France, France, I know I know, the British have always laid a claim on the French throne, but aren't we past that yet?

The national gallery was free and open late so we hopped in queue and found ourselves facia tu facia with Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks. WoW. What a marvelous work of art that shows off his three masterful skills: contraposto, sfumato and chiaroscuro. All three of these are at work in this painting. He has done small things that are completely out of character for other works of this period and earlier, the Christ child is not being held by Mary, quite the contrary, the baby next to mary praying makes you think is the Christ, but on the contrary that's John the Baptist praying to the Christ child which is closer to the Foreground and is being attended too, or meditated upon by an angel. To think that human hands found a way to glorify myth with such passion and force of conviction as to create a work of art that takes into account all of Da Vinci's amazing talents for physiology, science, graphic art etc is to really be impressed by the power of faith as the corner stone of art through most of human history.



There are some wonderful Titian's in the collection including the very dark Allegory of Prudence that features 2 three headed figures one composed of the face of 3 men representing past present and future and one of a wolf lion and dog representing prudence in an allegorical fashion of those that may consume the imprudent. A little message is included for the obtuse that might miss this powerful visual symbol in latin on the canvas: "learning from yesterday, today acts prudently, lest by misaction he spoil tomorrow."

Above and beyond the museum has a wonderful collection of modern art that includes Seurat and Monet, Van Gogh's sunflowers are on loan from the Van Gogh museum in the Netherlands and I was happy to see them again.

From the national gallery we went back to wandering around a bit and finally returned to Westminster to shop for groceries. We cooked dinner at home and drank beer and wine. I fell ill at this point, something didn't quite agree with me. I'm still not sure what it was, either old mayo that I had with my chips or maybe the tap water, who knows. I tried to rally and we went back to Covent Garden to make merry for E's 29th, but I had a devil of a time and started to sweat and go through the rigamarole of fending off a foreign intruder. I held it together long enough to make it to a Brazilian club called Guanabara that had fantastic music, a thin crowd that night, but some great dancers. A couple in particular, really caught my eye and I watched them for a long time. He was obviously the stronger dancer of the two, she wasn't half bad either, but you could tell he was definitely in charge and would make corrections to her moves when they were not in line with his intentions. It was the bosa nova mate, and it was good. He would push and pull her and she had a radiant smile on her face. I grew nostalgic for our somewhat drunken dance sessions at Achtung Baby, that cavernous cellar in the back of some 19th century building that we couldn't quite stay away from. It was far less graceful than what I saw that night, but it was just as passionate and at times unforgettable in the sheer bliss of the moment as we all of us, madmen and women, writers and all, glided across the dance floor.

Well I'm going to call this a night for updating the blog. I'll tell you about the Tate and the southbank tomorrrow or some other time, It's four in the morning, Erez is up, and I'm going to hit the sack... once he leaves, so maybe I'll post some scribbles from my notebook before I go though... adieu...

London calling

It's the clash and it's not the clash, it's something alright. All the cars are moving in the wrong direction and you have to mind the gap. I pulled money out of an ATM today and realized that the sum I pulled out is double what I actually received. As Josh said before I left St. Pete's "London drains your bank account like nothing else!" Well that's fine... sorta... I don't know... it's a beautiful city. I'm sitting here a block away from Scotland Yard feeling very secure, sorta.

I arrived in Heathrow to find that the authorities had shut down Terminal 4. All the connecting flights, international I believe, were cancelled and passport control was a mess! We sat on the plane in what I can only describe as total gridlock. There were five other planes trying to get into their slots when we touched down. When we finally entered our docking slot off the runway the captain announced that the mobile stairs hadn't arrived yet. This was nothing compared to the 10 switchbacks of the line to get through passport control. After walking through, finding my luggage in a sea of bags I walked into the terminal building and there was Erez pretending to be the paparazi with his camera out taking pictures. I could've strangled him, the last thing after dealing with a massive hangover from the night before, that I wanted, was to be photographed looking like death warmed over.

Saying goodbye to friends in Russia was painful. I can just imagine them right now going to bed and or wandering in from Achtung Baby after having danced the night away to bad mixing and tall cold beers. Boobar and I woke up shortly after 10 in the morning. I think it was close to 5 when we finally went to bed. The boat ride was the perfect thing, or method of exiting that city. To see the Winter Palace and Hermitage from the water, along with the opening of the bridges is how the city was kind of meant to be seen. The buildings aren't terribly tall in St. Pete's but their massive size, big fat constructs hiding even larger and more spacious courtyards makes for deceptive sense of distance. On the river things are put into a little bit more perspective. Everything in St. Pete's is massive, and then you get to London and the sense you get here is that everything has shrunk and has been packed in tightly. The streets are tiny and the facades of the buildings remind you of Amsterdam except that nothing is leaning quite in the same way as those old Dutch buildings, falling and being supported with metal tie rods and all kinds of hacked engineering to keep them in place. I'm in total withdrawal, I dropped a coin in the Nevya last night, and made a wish... I was as I am now a little nostalgic... ok, a lot.

So anyway morning started out painful, really painful. My normal state of being in the mornings is one of slow moving, stale breath from too many cigarettes, beer vodka and whatever else we had for dinner that night, and I can usually shake the haze in a matter of minutes. I wish that was the case this morning. No, the haze lasted for most of the day. I don't remember who it was, maybe Jessie, but someone handed me a shot of cognac on the boat, this ontop of two different kinds of beer (the boat had warmm bud on it, disgusting) and then there was the vodka we had at Kilikia, about 700 grams of it... between friends, toasting to an absent comrade in arms, the cognac did not do me good, or the beer I had when I got Achtung Baby. That was a really bad idea, achtung baby... it was absolutely unnecassary, we should've just gone back to the mini hotel and drank the good vodka boobar had in the fridge, but no, we went, and we left quite quickly. I feel a little bad, at one point I saw Boobar get up to go and without saying goodbye to anyone, as I had sad many goodbye's before we embarked on our river/canal ride, I left, ran out of the place, I was feeling quite drunk and just had to get home... self preservation instinct I suppose. Shaking the fog was tuff, but I managed to shower, finish packing and then Boobar and I headed off to Zoom. Now this was a monumental moment for Mr. Dostoyevksy himself, James is never awake before noon on the day of one of his walks, but for me he was up and out at 11 am to go have breakfast. Mariya joined us for a quick bite and I was able to say goodbye to her then. She left and then Sasha joined us. Casey came through Zoom and she took down my email addy to keep in touch and so forth and so on. Boobar and I sat with thousand yard stares, like Sheen and Dafoe in Platoon, we were completely indifferent to those that crossed our path for any number of reasons. We finally disembarked from zoom and headed back to the mini to get my crap. From there it was a walk to the 301. Nastia, young Tanya, Gleb, Timur were all in the office. Low and behold here comes Igor up the stairs... "let's go eat" I just ate, "nah, tam yeda na hooya blat! let's go have real food" Igor, my cab is coming in 20 minutes. "ladna, ok, I'll see you off" I miss that crazy bastard... so he did just that. I had a throng of well wishers seeing me off, it was sweet, touching and made me want to change my ticket, but maybe this place will be good for me, a little decompression, a little something different... maybe just a breath of air... but I miss the stench of ladas and moskvitches, the thick summer air of the swamp on which the city sits and the stale breath of good friends drinking well into the night... mostly I miss them all...

So tomorrow, it's erez's birthday, we'll walk the town a bit, shoot some pics, if I can, I'll rouse myself extra early to try and catch the london eye which is a five minute walk from here, in the morning light, and then go to the tate and or british museum, not sure which yet, but we'll figure it out... I think we'll take a walk arouund Westminster and visit the churches in the neighborhood... and hopefully, nothing will blow up while we're out and about... a big cheers from fish and chip land...



From that night in Fort Ross or Grand Cafe Nevsky when I was called as backup because two very drunk Russians were harassing an equally drunk Igor and company... this is what happens when Igor takes pictures... that's the right logic, right?

Leaving...

I'm leaving to London tomorrow... I'm all set, not packed yet, but mentally girding my loins for the trip... I'm not ready to go... went to Banya with the boys... tired as all hell... had vareniki with sour cherries in them... a little slice of heaven that's full of aroma and memory... now I'm just killing time waiting for the boat ride and trying to relax a bit... definitely not ready to leave quite yet... maybe I'll write a poem later called "Not Yet" and it'll be about all the things that we do that we aren't ready to do, but still feel the need to have done because we know they are what is necessary even if we're not feeling that way... or maybe I'll just close my eyes for a bit and wander around the streets of St. Petersburg in a dream... in either case... nu vot... eta kak skazka konchayitza ve etom momente...

Migration Control - Welcome to Russia!

Or maybe we can call this post "London Calling"? The Clash, the only band that matters! So I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off today. We have a staff meeting, then there were issues with the mini hotel where I cam officially captian minni. Arrivals for the second session have begun to trickle in but the majority of them will be arriving tomorrow. We will have over 40 people leaving and almost 50 arriving! Yikes! The stellar and free wireless connection at the Mini Hotel has been severed. I don't know why. At first I could reach the router and hack into it and reset it, but the DSL line it was plugged into stopped working. As of yesterday the router was unreachable and we are now in a wasteland of NO INTERNET. It really really really really sucks. The 200 some odd photos I shot of fire dancers by the Dvoretskey Bridge will have to wait until I reach a stable location, like London, and have Wireless or something like it at Erez's flat.

Quick summation as I have more work to do and a few things to take care of before tonight's boat ride and other festivities... I did go on my annual walk to the embankment with Boobar. We were sitting in the office and really feeling a bachic call to drink. He looked at me said "wanna get out of here? I said, sure. I knew the score at that point, we were going to relive our epic stumble from the Cynic bar near St. Isaacs along the embankment to the bridges and back along Nevsky. This time we just left the pub and went stright up Kazanskaya and down Nevsky past the Hermitage where I took a good nightshot of the palace floodlight and over to the embankment where firedancers were performing. After watching the dancers and pretending I was some national geographic photographer on safari we crossed the street and stood waiting for 1:25 AM to strike when the Dvoretsky Bridge would open up allowing larger boats down the Nevya river. A local struck up a conversation with me and told me that in 1989 a girl made the jump across the bridge from the Peter Paul side as it was openning on a motorcycle. It's funy to watch as people run like mad across this very long bridge which literally traps you on one side of the Nevya or the other. The problem is that there's only bridge that stays down because it's high enough above the water to allow ships thorugh, but all the historic bridges are low and as such have to open and that bridge is a haul from the center of town. Men in camoflauge with bright green vests set up road blocks and cars come flying through gaps in the blocks as they avoid the setting up of the block and manage to cross to the side that they need to be on. It's really kind of wild and disordered yet it all works, amazingly, somehow, miraculously, it just works.



Last night was a night of complete tom foolery. I stopped drinking early but my poor room mate continued down the road of destruction. Folks were quite hammered and we managed to usher them into Sukawati, an Indonesian restaurant on Kazanskaya instead of letting them go back to the beer garden or Datcha once the office bar closed. I think the folks working at the restaurant thought we were insane, I wouldn't blame them... not one bit... we were all acting a bit nuts. I had tea and we sat and watched as one table of particularly drunk fools kept challenging us to toast and back and forth. It was fun, mostly, until two women picked a silly arugment fueled by booz and ego and then it no longer was a good time and I wound up leaving with a few others. I finally made it home and to bed around 4:30 in the morning. James stumbled in an hour later and almost repeated the face plant into the door, or was it him just unable to take his pants off again this time? I can't judge, I was in that state once last year... you fall over taking off your pants to go to bed, that's a sure fire sign you should've been in bed before reaching such a plastered state.

The days are now counting down to my departure I'm going to help get this second session under way then mozy on out of here on Tuesday London bound. Sasha has been tossing around the idea to go camping with a few folks on Sunday night, an hour or two outside of the city to a lake she says is quite beautiful. Since I won't be here for Edward's Datcha party at the end of the year, one of the best afternoons I've ever had in this country, I don't think I would mind spending a white night on the bank of a river, so long as it isn't pouring miserably because the weather, although not the record heat wave of last summer that cause most of us to break out in all kinds of nasty rashes and not sleep, walking around like zombies, has been wet as hell and limited the number of decent photos days I have. I leave the camera at home because its raining, walk around, it clears, go home grab gear, then it clouds over and begins to pour arctic rain on us again... so bloody unpredictable...

So that's most of the news that I have for you... guess I'm going to have to watch my ass in London, looks like a car bomb plot was thwarted near picadilly... imagine that, Petersburg has been quietter and calmer than London... insane. Maybe it's because this city is getting so bloody expensive that it's calmed down from the days of the wild west and rampant bribes and coruption. It's still corrupt, but not that corrupt. The migration control thing was odd, some officially decided we weren't paying enough per night at the mini hotel and was going to come and do a migration control check. I had to warn our occupats with a good story that they don't know each other and that this isn't a group buying out the hotel, I don't know why, but that's what had to happe. I had to sneak from room to room, warned by the woman at the desk, who was sitting there with the owner, because the owner speaks english, and this woman at the desk, well she's been nice to me as I speak the lingo and I don't give her grief. She hates Burke though... which cracks me up... oh well... can't win them all.

Police avert car bomb 'carnage'

Police say the area will be closed for some time


Reaction to car bomb
A car bomb planted in central London would have caused "carnage" if it had exploded, police sources have said.
A controlled explosion was carried out on the car, packed with 60 litres of petrol, gas cylinders and nails, in Haymarket, near Piccadilly Circus.

An ambulance crew saw smoke coming from the green metallic Mercedes, near the Tiger Tiger nightclub at 0130 BST.

"International elements" are believed to be involved, Whitehall sources told the BBC.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command, said: "It is obvious that if the device had detonated there could have been serious injury or loss of life."

The ambulance had been called to the nightclub - where up to 1,700 people were inside - when they spotted smoke, now believed to be vapour, inside the car.

Bomb experts manually disabled the "potentially viable explosive device".

The car bomb has echoes of other terrorist plots. Five men were jailed for life in April for a UK bomb plot linked to al-Qaeda that targeted a shopping centre and a nightclub with a giant fertiliser bomb.

And Dhiren Barot was jailed for life last November for conspiring to park limousines packed with gas canisters underneath high-profile buildings before detonating them.

DAC Clarke told a press conference that it was too early to say who was responsible but the incident "resonated" with previous terrorist plots.

"The threat from terrorism is real. It is here, enduring. Life must go on but we must all stay alert," he said.

Mr Clarke also specifically mentioned nightclubs as a potential target.

Following the discovery, police patrols in central London were stepped up "to provide a visible reassurance", rather than in response to a specific threat.

Officers will visit licensed premises to reiterate ongoing crime prevention and safety advice, said a police spokesman.

The Muslim Council of Britain, the largest organisation representing Muslim groups in the UK, urged people to help the police find the perpetrators.

Secretary-General Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, said: "It is now a duty upon all the rest of us to help the police so that they can bring whoever was involved in this plot swiftly to justice".

On the trail of Raskolnikov

Spark and Dust

1.

to the living and the dead
inevitably dust inevitably
man’s most frightening invention
strikes a devil’s third
withering the land of people
to return the impossible
act of having been alive

2.

to the dead and the living
inevitably collide inevitably
the return is a fiction for its self
and certainty mocks the mirror
to be made in image
disassembled in the course of fire
but still a spark in passing

Switching stones

The switch in stones
stepping into such spaces
is air and the economy of cigarette butts

blue tomorrows carried in a brown paper bag
a left over acidity when a single shot darkened 70 years
we can't be sure but the devil stalks the moscow metro

there's something about the plan
then planned and executed with care for details
derails all other options when this too is uncontrollable

you might say go to the devil
and ask for a blessing to be had for success
this is neither feather nor down

publicly speaking
what if we set this town on fire
it's as much a birth right as it was wrong to be born

silenus ends silence
breeding myths and rivers
best to forget solutions and concentrate on the moment

the question is asking itself an answer
another way to break the surface of it all
and what exists excites and enters the skin to be remembered

The days are bleeding togehter...

I could swear that the days are melting together. The separation between night and day, or more accurately, the lack thereof, makes it impossible to keep time "straight". Time here is not time, I've said that before. JD made an interesting observation at one point, he said that distance is disconcerting in that you can't trust what you see or that you're always surprised by the distance of things because the buildings are so massive and you can't really tell how far something is. The scale of these 19th century giants makes a seemmingly short walk seem like a million miles of unpredictable "ulitzi." This has been a remarekably different trip for me. I'm not sure how to categorize it. I've done nothing cultural, I haven't stepped foot in a single museum. I've been to all the big ones multiple times. I've simply "been" here. Does that make sense? I've spent a bit of time walking around but mostly talking with an international cast of friends who I'm fortunate enough to see once a year in this magical place. I've had some bloody great conversations and enjoyed the company of good people while sleeping in till the afternoon and coming home between 5 and 8 in the morning. Does it seem like I'm throwing this whole trip away? I don't know, maybe, but I think I've been ready for a "vacation", one of those things where you lay your ass down on a sandy beach and spend a week causing the depression of your bum to become a permanent fixture somewhere in the tropics. I haven't had something like that in a long time. I did my exploring while I was in Israel, a madman on the run trying to take in as much ancient history and modern "stuff" as possible. Here I'm just in a state of being. I did some serious drinking over the past week but it's slowed down. We had some binge nights that featured waaaaaaaay too much vodka, beer (not an alcoholic beverage here) and a giant bottle of Johnny Walker Green Label that Tanya brought James and left in our room, so yeah on that front, I've worked my muscle, I mean liver like a hooker in the tenderloin.



Last night was James' birthday, let me rephrase that, last night James and fellow degenerates, including myself, marked his Birthday by collecting ourselves near the Defense of Leningrad museum at a flat inhabited by Ryan and Scott, quasi participants, former alums of the program who are just hanging out in "the burg" and playing Peter Bjorn and John's Young Folks over and over and over again. There were like 5 trips to the market for beer, no matter how many we would buy they seemed to be gone in the space of 30 minutes. 2 bottles of vodka and about 25 liters of beer later we were all quite happy and once again, out of beer. So the decision was made to move the entire crowd to Marstal. Marstal is one of those terrible places that I'd say is a strong argument against capitalism. The place is essentially a brothel that happens to have strippers. 90% of the women in that club are "working girls" and if you have a foreign passport you can get in for free while locals or people carrying a Russian passport pay a cover charge of 50 rubles. We stayed in there for another hour, I sat down feeling no real compunction to dance to terrible Euro Trash techno and guarded our group's things. It really is a terrible place considering that down the street and around the corner is a great new club called Achtung Baby where the music is good (mixing is crap) but the music is danceable, the lights aren't obnoxious and cheaply arranged club strobes, and the space itself is this wonderful high ceilinged brick room. We've gone there a few times for drinks and to cut some rug and it has always been a beautiful time. This is the kind of join that feels unpretentious and the locals get down with the foreigners without trying to take them home for a price. The place really is a melting pot and I dig that about it. I've heard everything from US3 to Sinatra, David Byrne and Oasis in Achtung Baby.

Going back a few days...

We sat around and enjoyed the celebration known as "The Last Bell" where a historic 3 mast schooner is sailed across the Nevya river and the main drag, Nevsky Prospekt is shut down so the throng of recently graduated teenagers and military cadets can get stupidly drunk and break their beer bottles. In past years we would charter a boat and cruise the Nevya but this year we couldn't get a boat and wound up hanging out near the cathedral watching the madness unfold. As the day waned the streets became bloated with people frolicing. I walked out into the middle of the street to shoot some photos of the crowd. I was a little nervous about having my camera out, feeling a little vulnerable, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world to be quite honest. Pictures are now up here.



So this town has become very expensive. 3 years ago I could get a business lunch for 3 dollars, 90 rubles and the excahnge rate was like 33 to the dollar. Now it's 25 and I can't find one for under 250. It's insane! Beers at the beer garden are now over 2 bucks, the store is still cheap, but we used to score them for just over a buck! Everything here has become ridiculous including my favorite Uzbeki place, but I don't care the cost, it's still one of my favorite things. I went to Banya today with a couple guys and it was 360 rubles for 2 hours unlike 300 for the last two years. So this place is changing something fierce... and I'm not sure I like the changes...

There are a few things I'm planning on doing still, there's an exhibit of courtyard photography at a gallery next to Nabokov's house that I'm going to go too, and probablly pop over to Nevsky's Monastary for a little photo shoot of the other graveyards I didn't have enough film for 3 years ago. I want to also finally get inside of the monastery and see Nevsky's grave... there's also the siege museum at Moskovsky Metro Station... so maybe on Thursday... the weather is crap and I'm unmotivated to go anywhere. I've been sitting here in the office bar writing and uploading photos, seems like a successful day for me... the tea is good and I have a fresh pack of smokes, so I'll be here for a bit until it's time to go to Il Patio for James' official birthday. That man hasn't celebrated his birthday in the states for 7 years, not such a bad way to go about it, what do you think?

Hope everyone is well...