List-o-mania

As the year plods to an end, I’ve been reading through a lot of end of the year “best of” lists to catch up with what I missed back home. It tempted me to share my own eagerly-awaited by no one list:

Fave Albums:

I think the consensus about Arcade Fire’s eagerly-awaited Neon Bible was that it's good, but not “Funeral” good. That's a fair assessment. Also in heavy rotation around here is The Shins’ Wincing The Night Away.

One album that came out in 2006, but I think only in the States in 2007, that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserves is Jarvis Cocker’s first solo album, Jarvis. In many places it sounds like a middling Pulp album, which is still pretty friggin’ awesome. Jarvis’ unusual self-awareness is on full display here, as a sort of jotting of the thoughts of a semi-retired rock star from his country house. It is a peaceful, dreamlike album. It is unmistakeable and hilarious on “I Will Kill Again,” probably the best song here, and refracted in his musing on contemporary criminal trends in “Fat Children,” which suggests he’s likely to vote Tory in the next election. “Baby’s Coming Back to Me” is about the sometimes beautiful confusion between the great and small in a life.

But album of the year has to go to Wilco. Sky Blue Sky took a little awhile to warm up to, but the naysayers who condemned it as an Eagles album were too hasty in their rush to judgment. Listening to the first track, “Either Way,” is very much like getting into a nice warm bath. If the song never really takes off and rocks, nor wanders down some experimental alley like the last few Wilco efforts have, so what? There’s a time and a place for tunes that are supposed to replicate having a migraine (“Less Than You Think,” from A Ghost is Born), and there are time for just a simple tune about your hometown like the title-track, “Sky Blue Sky.”

Fave Singles:

Whenever you see one name and one song keep popping up, you figure there is something behind it. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” is, I think, the undisputed world champion of 2007, and I can dig it. Even here in Moscow it was everywhere, that one foreign song that pops out over the summer and can be heard even on the tinny speakers coming from a shwarma stand and from cab-driver’s Lada Zhigulis. This genetically engineered monster triumphs over its parts. Jay-Z’s ridiculous intro gives it a weird sense of an “event,” the production is heavy-handed, the lyrics are simple. But it’s a catchy tune, and the diminutive Barbadian that sings it does seem to have that mysterious “star quality” that is usually talked about and applied so recklessly.

But still, my personal track of the year remains “Australia,” by the Shins. It is one of those songs that seems to actually take flight, with impressionist lyrics. And every time I hear when that banjo pops in at the end of the song, it is a surprise. I decided when I first heard it in February that this was that kind of song – the one in some parallel universe that would be playing from the car windows lined up in traffic on Pine Street on some Philadelphia summer Saturday afternoon as I was walking to meet friends.

Just Heard But Might Really Like:

I haven't been as surprised by liking something as much as I have been by M.I.A.’s Kala, especially “Paper Planes” which comes close to being my favorite of the year. It pulls off the rare feat of really looking into what it means to live in a smaller world. All far more nuanced than what you hear about the subject from governments and corporations, as well as multi-culti enthusiasts and haters.

But I'm still a little hesitant, because I'm still turned off by the overemphasis of the craft of the studio. I imagine this is a big part of the appeal for a lot of listeners, and I can respect that, but I might pass myself. Listening to a whole album of tricks and effects is like watching a teenage computer nerd play with what he got for Christmas. Mr. Timbaland is a prime offender in laying his gloss, and I will never really ‘love’ anything he does. It gets boring.

The 'Fabrika' Award for Song I'd Like Surgically Removed from My Head:

I don’t know if Mika made it the States, but here, while avoidable, he kept popping up and these damn songs are awfully catchy. It’s very easy to make fun of the guy and his dippy music, but that’s part of the charm. “Grace Kelly” simply revels in its goofy lightness, with its bouncy mix of swagger, pout, and earnestness. It comes from the same place as “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” really.

Just Not Following:

There are a few breakouts this year that I don’t get. LCD Soundsystem, for instance. Having a hard time buying that. Also, Amy Winehouse. It’s been done, it’s all been done.

Just Caught this Year a Few Years Too Late:

Call it a lesson in learning not to judge others too hastily. For years, I’d been intrigued and amused by Pete Doherty’s crackity adventures like everyone else. Then I actually heard Babyshambles “Fuck Forever,” and to my shock, it’s a fantastic song – snidely-literate, outward-looking, super-catchy. That got me to look back at the Libertines and “Time for Heroes” and “What Became of the Likely Lads,” have been in heavy rotation in my headphones. As a fervent Britpop fan – I’m American and I like Suede, enough said – it was probably only a matter of time before I stumbled upon them. And I’m glad I did, even if it feels like the last chapter of an era, just before the Arctic Monkeys became bigger than the Beatles.

Christmas!

So, Christmas. Or as it is known in Moscow, Tuesday. Everyone here is in the holiday spirit, but that holiday is New Year's next week. And since even Orthodox Christmas is sometime in January, I feel a bit out of step with the calendar. And since Mila is generally pretty happy about every day, holiday or no, and Olga has neither the will nor the interest in sharing "Christmas in Hollis" with me, it's awfully hard to get in the spirit in the face of another midwinter workweek.

On the bright side, on Sunday the sun came out for a few hours! So we trumbled off to the park for some wintertime fun...

Russia's cover boy

Vladimir Vladimirovich is Time’s “Person of the Year,” joining Josef Stalin (twice!), Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Gorbachev (also twice!) as Russian heads of state to earn the “honor” (coming just a year after YOU won it!) and which frankly says a lot about how important Russia is, and the manner in which it is woven into America’s world view. Russians should be pleased by this. But judging by the tone of the cover package, they probably won’t be. And judging by the OJ’d up portraits they produced, they probably shouldn’t be.

After watching Russia up close for several months now, I am forced to admit with some certainty a fact constantly overlooked in the West: when it comes to Putin, Russia could do a lot worse. It seems that westerners are too busy holding their noses and tsk-tsking to bother to notice the real good that he has done here. He deserves a lot of credit for restraining the Darker Angels of the Russian Soul, specifically the vast military-intelligence-police complex that has had a terrifying hand in running things since the 16^th century. It should also be acknowledged that he broke the power of the 90s oligarchs, when for awhile it appeared Russia would actually be governed by a self-perpetuating criminal overclass. Not so long ago, it was possible to actually trace the chain of power from the punk that would smash you in the head with a brick and take your wallet straight up to the guy that stole the national airline and largest oil and gas companies from the people, who according to Soviet law, owned it.

There’s a lot about Putin I wouldn’t try to defend. In particular, there is no excuse for the cheap nationalism and “political technologies” conjured up by the cynical hacks that he insists on keeping in his employ. I hope that this xenophobia and foreigner-bashing is nothing more than a cheap political narcotic, and reflects just the primitive understanding of how a democratic society works you might expect from one that is only 16 years into its effort. That said, you have to accept that today’s Russia is a sort of democracy. Living here I can say that Putin is legitimately popular, and would clearly win another election in a walk. You are free to point out – as western journalists insist on doing every opportunity – about the state’s restrictons on the media, but frankly… we listen to Echo of Moscow on the radio, I buy Novaya Gazeta every week at a newspaper box in the subway, nothing is blocked on my Internet connection (which some repressive societies, like China, have mastered. Right, Google?), and it really should be noted (certainly better than Time chose to) that the Other Russia rally in Moscow this month did have a permit: they only ran afoul of the police when they tried to march to the elections committee. You have to jump through the same boring old law-and-order hoops in New York City.

Based on Time’s own logic, I think they correctly assessed Putin’s real importance at this moment in time. But how history will judge him is largely dependent on very large and unpredictable forces sweeping around Russia right now, which are far greater than anything being conjured up or manipulated in the birch-forest of Novo-Ogrevo or behind the walls of the Kremlin itself. If Russia can continue to diversify its economy and spread its wealth, encourage the nascent civil society that is now going through a very rough childhood, and keep its security services aware that they are the servants of the people, Russia has a good chance of becoming a “normal” country. But on the other hand, if wealth continues to polarize like it is now, if backwards feudalism built on a foundation of xenophobia and fear is going to be how the state is run, and if the brutishness that lies too close to the surface of much Russian life grows unchecked, it will be disaster for everyone. It is impossible to say which way things are likely to go. But Vladimir Vladimirovich probably deserves credit at least for giving Russia a chance.

Another year older

Had a birthday yesterday, though it was a bit on the tough side. Just before falling asleep Thursday night, I began to notice the unmistakable signs of yet another Moscow cold coming on, and then Mila opted not to get a good night’s sleep. And since I'm still in a strange city, and since the sun hasn’t penetrated the wool-like layer of clouds that has covered the city for the past month, Friday was generally kind of a downer.

I couldn’t help but notice how depressing in general my birthday is. Among the famous deaths are George Washington (1799), Prince Albert (1861), Andrei Sakharov (1989), and my favorite then-living writer, WG Sebald (2001). It was the day a sea wall collapsed in the Netherlands causing the St. Lucia’s Flood (1287), which may have killed up to 80,000 people, and which permanently scaring Dutch national psyche. It was the day the Tsar’s iron heel came down on the Decembrist uprising, setting back the cause of moderate reform in the Russia (1825). But on the plus side, it was the day the Clash released their watershed album London Calling (1979), so it isn’t all bad.

Today, still getting over this cold. Among the unexpected things about getting older is that I keep forgetting how old I actually am, and only really get a sense of it when I notice more and more gray hair poking through. And I didn’t care nearly as much about the day as I did for Mila’s birthday in October.

It's Medvedev!

Putin is certainly fond of his surprises. Just as everyone was getting prepared to learn who the next president is going to be next Monday at the United Russia congress, he goes ahead and makes his choice public this afternoon.

I’d long thought Dmitry Medvedev would get the nod. He was the only one whose name came up whose entire political career is based on his close personal relationship with Vladimir Vladimirovich. Plus he was the only one with an important job – running Gazprom – that Putin might conceivably be interested in during his hiatus (if they wanted to go that route). But there were plenty of doubters: rumors that he was too soft or too young for the big job.

It didn't help that his specific portfolio includes all sorts of thankless tasks: diversifying the economy, and handling the Russia-is-shrinking demographic crisis. Things looked bad in September when Viktor Zubkov was named out of the blue as prime minister, but it is clear that was just an act for the voters, trotting out a Mike Ditka-style shouter to make it appear the government was doing something ahead of the Duma elections. And for awhile it looked bad if you relied on the old Kremlinologist skill of measuring face time on state television. Archrival Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was always doing something cool – visiting a jet fighter factory, or greeting championship sports teams. Poor Medvedev was always stuck at some boring conference in the Kremlin behind his trusty Sony Vaio saying dull and not-so-horrifying things about important policy matters.

Putin’s announcement is a relief. It highlights the uncomfortable fact that Putin is perhaps the least bad option in contemporary Russia, and he seems to be managing his succession in the least bad manner possible. The world dodged a serious bullet in Ivanov, who is sort of like Putin except without the charisma and without the label “former” attached in front of his relationship with the security apparatus.

Watching these past few intense weeks of Russian political life, I have mixed feelings about the idea of “managed democracy.” For a moment, I think I can see the bright side. Putin will step aside according to the nation’s Constitution (in keeping with the spirit of 'rule of law'), and his endorsed successor will almost certainly earn the legitimate support of a landslide of voters in March. Whatever else happens makes sense – whether Medvedev just keeps the seat warm for four years until Putin can come back (backroom deals are hardly unheard of in the west – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown apparently carved up the Labor Party leadership over ten years ago) or if Putin becomes Prime Minister and continues to wield power there (which could probably be a good thing, as the accumulation of power in the Kremlin over the past eight years could use some sort of redistribution).

The only lesson seems to be that no matter what the context, politics is ugly business. Back home, one leading Republican candidate for president doesn’t “believe” in evolution, another believes the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, another proudly sponsored an anti-torture law that allows torture, and a certain former mayor of America’s most important city is sleazy enough that he could have had a successful career in Russian politics in the 90s.

[About that picture… This is my daughter’s plastic toy bear (medved' in Russian) who we’ve named Medvedev for obvious reasons: he always wears a spiffy neck-tie, and when you ask him a question and give him a nudge -- “is President Putin doing a good job?” or “is the economy going to improve” -- he nods enthusiastically at first, and then continues to nod delibrately and contently for a little longer.]

No country for optimists

“Don’t you think you are being a little too hard on the Russian people towards the end,” my wife said after she read an early draft of this month’s Letter to Moscow in the Eagle.

“I have to take the Metro with the Russian people,” I scoffed. “I don’t think it is possible to be too hard on the Russian people about anything.”

I usually think this way for an hour or so after I get home -- Moscow is the only place I've ever lived where I have missed a stop because I couldn't get out of a crowded subway car, a monstrous way to end the work day. But after thinking about what Olga said, I gave it some thought and toned it down just a little bit. But I stand firm in the belief that if people here are to stop treating each other (and foreign guests) so unacceptably, it will take a major top to bottom attitude adjustment.

First thoughts on the Duma elections

The results are dribbling in, and it doesn’t seem there are any real surprises. The first thing that is clear is that this new legislative arrangement is hopeless. The idea of nationwide proportional representation – with a high seven percent threshold for seats – might work for a small and compact country like Israel, but it is useless in a country as vast as Russia. Further, the rules governing news coverage in the weeks leading up to the election were convoluted and routinely ignored, especially by the state-run television channels. And finally, reports of “irregularities” have been frequent and widespread enough to raise serious concerns, but with no independent monitors on hand, we’ll never know the truth.

Putin’s United Russia party actually had a pretty tough job going into today. Not only did they need to win big, they needed huge turnout. But as I’m sure they realized in the past few weeks, it is much easier to alienate people from politics than to motivate them to actually get off their ass for you. Turnout figures so far (it is still relatively early) seem all over the board. In St. Petersburg I’ve heard it was only about 40 percent, suggesting most people up there were sane enough to pass on this exercise (many people in the past few weeks came to the cynical conclusion that the best way to make your point was to stay home because it was already decided). In Chechnya, the reported turnout is a hilarious 99.12 percent. United Russia’s proportion nationwide right now is a little over 60 percent, which frankly has to be somewhat disappointing. But the margin is enough to serve their purpose: giving Putin and Co. a leg to stand on as they tamper with the constitution or however else they will choose to keep in power in the next few years.

The nationalist Liberal Democratic Party is now at about nine percent, which was easy to foresee. Vladimir Zhirinovsky is easy to imagine as that guy in many working class bars who sits in the corner and fulminates on whatever comes to mind from moment to moment. This loudmouth usually has a bunch of dimwits around him who hang on his every word as he explains how the Jews control international banking or whatever. Zhirinovsky proves that this mentality can work on a national level as well. But this guy, when it comes down to it, is ultimately a coward. In the next Duma we can expect him to belly-up and go along with whatever Putin tells him to do– just like this heroic iconoclast did in the last two Dumas.

The great mystery and scandal we don’t know about yet is “A Just Russia,” which is presently hovering just on the right side of the seven percent mark. It is certain they are going to stay there as more votes are counted. I knew the fix was in last week when I saw leader Sergei Mironov on one of the Rossiya channel debates. Considering how badly beaten up they’d been over this fall – defections and Putin dissing them so dramatically being the standouts – Mironov looked unusually relaxed days before judgment day. Frankly, I can’t figure how this gang can exist without some artificial help. An opposition party that is unquestioningly loyal to Putin still makes little sense. Who votes for them? Seriously , I’d like to meet one because I can’t figure it out. I imagine they must be pretty kinky – they want to lick Putin’s boots while he looks down and mocks them. Sounds like s&m.

The only real interesting thing is that the Communists came in second with 11 percent. I suspected they would pull through, perhaps with fewer votes. As it stands, they are the only real opposition, and have probably tapped the very large pool of angry people – poor pensioners, underpaid workers – who are not getting any of the benefits of these alleged boom times. Tonight, Gennady Zyganov suggested that they intend to continue to act like an opposition, raising the question of voting irregularities and the strange way that it seems the results are coming in a mechanically predetermined fashion. Today’s Communists aren't quite the same dead-enders we remember from the 90s. They appear to represent a very large group of people that is only going to keep growing in the next few years – much faster than that famous “small but growing middle class.”

Hey, an election is coming up!

The Duma elections are coming up on Sunday, and you could tell we hit the homestretch when the rhetoric got noticeably more, er, colorful over the past week or so. The government has put up posters on many of the city's billions of billboards and placards and subway posters reminding people to vote. They feature average, working Russians -- apparently that middle class I keep hearing about -- urging them to use the voice that the state has granted them. They're upstanding citizens like doctors and teachers and young families, and they have a voice in their future! (Unfortunately we didn't snap any pictures of my two favorites, the personable cab driver and the passionate mathematics teacher, but you get the drift). Posters I didn't see include the miserable pensioner or the unemployed alcoholic, so I guess no future for them! (Losers).








We've also seen a very great many ads from United Russia, the ruling party that is going to win a crushing majority on Sunday. You may notice their posters are the same color scheme, which is a happy coincidence. Here are some of the few that don't mention President Putin, who leads their electoral list...





Now, I would love to include some posters of the opposition parties as well, but amazingly, although I pass hundreds of placards each day -- which are changed every two or three days -- I didn't see a single one from any of the other 10 parties that are on the ballot. Silly opposition candidates! don't they see this can be a good way to let the public know they exist? I mean they're always whining about how state controlled media never covers them. If I were a cynic I'd say that their western NGO money-men are too cheap to spring for a modern election campaign!

Thanksgiving abroad

My first Thanksgiving abroad. It’s always been one of my favorite holidays, partly because of the sense of travel and going home it always brings to mind. It reminds me of bracing for another trip to 30th Street Station or Penn Station, and the feeling of getting a chance to take a few days to catch your breath and reflect on the new year (whatever the calendar says, I think they always start for us in the fall). I remember going back my first year away from home, standing on the Peter Pan bus all the way from Utica to Albany because it was packed with kids like me heading east. And I remember that year I spent the holiday alone in Washington because I couldn’t get away, and feeling very tremendously lonely and glad that I knew that feeling at least once, and wanted to leave it at just once. And of course, last year, when I was still on paternity leave, and when Olga and I and Mom put together a rather comprehensive little dinner for ourselves between looking after our three-week old. That was the first turkey we made, which I always imagined was a major life milestone.

So since in Moscow, Thanksgiving is just another Thursday, I had a full day of work, But we’re planning on putting something together on Friday, a little late. We’ve had some help from parents-in-law with the shopping – a turkey breast, some klyukva (which I suspect are Russian cranberries) and the ingredients for a reverse engineered version of Bell’s Seasoning (the trick is you can only find sage at the pharmacy, where it is sold as herbal medicine).

Alas, the football I’ll have seen around the holiday is likely to be England crapping itself against Croatia on Wednesday (by the way, between that and the announcement earlier in the day that the government had lost millions of people’s personal financial information, it really wasn’t a good day over there). I still have plenty happy memories of the World Series to be thankful for, and we signed Mike Lowell!

Norman Mailer

It is very easy to make fun of Norman Mailer, and I think he was aware of that, and that’s what made him great. His death this weekend is sad enough – he never got that Nobel prize – and as mundane as it sounds, an era passes and I’m sad about what’s left.

I always took Mailer with a grain of salt, but he was such a figure that I realized I’d been thinking about him on two discreet occasions in just the past few days. First, I was wondering about what he thought about how rubbish the Village Voice has become. He was one of the founders in 1955, and I’ve always wondered if he ever bothered to check in with it in recent years. I’ve taken the paper’s collapse personally – in high school I would pay $2 for the thing at Lizotte’s newsstand in Northampton, and in college I had a subscription outright (this was before the Internet, and it feels like ages ago). I would read the things cover to cover, feeling my world open up as I read about the huge horizons of the big city, about bands and musicians and artists I hadn’t heard about yet. Within a few years though, it had collapsed into a dogmatic chaotic mush so predictable and bland that it wasn’t even worth its new cover price (free). Then a few years ago, those New Times twits bought it out, and brought their manner of sun-belt “alternative” writing to the grandfather of it all. Out went the stable of legendary – if somewhat lazy – writers, and in came a handful of underpaid kids. It is a shame, because I have always loved the idea of the alternative press, and I guess the future will be on the Internet somehow, sometime. And maybe it would take people like Mailer to ever get it working.

On a more broad level, I was thinking, as I often do, about how contemporary fiction and why I don’t give a damn about it. My latest round of thinking about it started when Nathan Englander’s much awaited second novel came out earlier this year, and as I read about it and heard the interviews, I became aware of an overwhelming feeling that there is nothing less I’d like to do than actually read the thing. I realized I read a lot of book reviews, and usually feel exactly the same way. There is nothing to get excited about, and Mailer was nothing if not exciting.

There is so much to like about his work. I remember reading The Naked and the Dead in college in giant hundred page chunks at a time. It was paced so well, and even though it was written just after the war ended and lay in plain sight for decades, it still shook and challenged everything I thought I knew about the war. I also greatly admire the manner in which he later turned to nonfiction. He was candid about how when he was young being a novelist was the most heroic thing you could do, but that in the 1960s nonfiction more and more took its place, and he brought something to that revolution. And later went back to fiction because it was important enough. He always had a way, even at his most obnoxious, to make you think. I saw him speak at Penn, and unfortunately all I can remember is that he spent a lot of time comprehensively attacking fluorescent lighting -- I agree with him, and to this day I think about that talk every time I’m in a quiet public room and hear that damn buzzing. I remember staying at a bed and breakfast in Maine with a ton of books on the shelves, including a host of Mailer’s works. I started flipping through a first edition of The Prisoner of Sex. I thought that I could detect in it the physical effect of writing on a typewriter. Something I can’t put my finger on about the fast pace of the writing, as fast as thought, mixed with a jangly and illusory confidence that comes from not thinking enough as the words hit the paper, and not thinking you have to rewrite as carefully as they should. There are a lot of things not to like about the man and his work. The egomania, the self-indulgent prose, the idea of the arts as a competitive sport, the attitudes toward women, the glorification of violence... But he was a man who was always looking for a fight or an argument, and always seemed willing to go out for a drink afterward. This honesty, friendliness, openness and risk-taking, are the best attributes of America. And it is something we are losing very fast.

But plague... what about plague?

I admit that I waited too long to go get tested. I mean, I didn’t think there were any problems, but people kept telling me I had to go. I had all the usual excuses: the clinic was on the other side of town, I felt fine, and these tests are stupid anyway. But I finally just couldn’t put it off any longer. You choose to live your life a certain way, and you try not to think about the consequences. But you can’t outrun them forever. Last week I went to the clinic, and on Friday I picked up the results. I don’t have leprosy. Nor do I have syphilis, chlamydia, TB, HIV, high blood pressure, or a narcological dependency. I have an official certificate stamped and notarize in accordance with the most recent round of laws and decrees covering foreigners here. The $60 raft of tests were for work, and I put it off longer than I should have. I admit I’m not at my best around health care professionals to begin with, but the idea of going to a Russian clinic terrified me. My daughter has a giant welt on her arm from an improperly administered TB shot as a testament to the overall competence of Russian medicine. I learned from my co-workers where to find the cleanest and most relatively efficient authorized clinic. It is near Semyenovksy Metro station, and incidentally at the heart of the shoe shopping district, with the “Paris Commune” shoe factory nearby. Anyway… to my very real surprise looking back, I can’t complain too much about the clinic or the process. You get a little sheet, and then you go on a scavenger hunt. One stop they take your blood, another they inspect you for lesions, then you go out to a little shed in the yard for a chest x-ray, and someone else takes your blood pressure. Most interesting was the visit to the narcologist, a very friendly and chatty fellow who makes you roll up your sleeves and checks that your eyes aren’t too glassy while asking about your drinking habits. Like so many things here, the experience was at the same time fascinating, frightening, annoying, and absurd. Most of the conditions they checked for are much more likely to be picked up here rather than brought here.

Orange October?

It’s a long holiday weekend here in Russia. Nov. 4 marks the third “National Unity Day,” when Russians celebrate the overthrow of the “Polish Yoke” in 1612 in a ‘spontaneous’ uprising of the leaderless Russian people against foreign aggression. The holiday was conjured up a few years ago to replace the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, celebrated on Nov. 7. The theme of foreign interference has been a dramatic subtext of late. On Sunday, we watched on the TV-Tsentr channel Postscript with Alexei Pushkov, which featured two rather incredible segments. First was a report about the Katyn Forest massacre, the 1940 Soviet slaughter of up to 26,000 Polish officers being held prisoner. Because of where and when this happened, there was much finger-pointing and plausible deniability about whether it was more a Nazi or a Soviet atrocity, but the matter was cleared up to the satisfaction of most serious researchers by the late 1980s. The incident is the subject of a new movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, and the Postscript team went to report about “the ends that don’t quite meet.” So we were treated to interviews with several Russian chauvinist “historians” who were filmed walking around the Katyn site and offering their theories, much of which I gathered revolved around how the Red Army was too incompetent and inefficient at the time to kill that many people in so short a time. Postscript wasn’t done yet. There followed an article about the Bolshevik Revolution which really earned some innovation points. It focused on the fact that Imperial Germany had funded and enabled Lenin’s transportation from Switzerland to St. Petersburg in 1917. Nothing new about this, but Postscript pondered whether this proves the revolution was, in fact, “Orange.” In today’s Russia, the word “Orange” is practically a swear word. It refers to the December 2004 pro-democracy protests against rigged Ukrainian elections. But in Russia’s warped worldview, it refers solely to when western NGOs agitate where they don’t belong and convince dupes to take to the streets to foment trouble on behalf of NATO, the EU, the US, or whoever. The idea strikes paranoid terror throughout Russia’s ruling class. The report speculates whether the Bolsheviks were an “Orange virus,” but they are too clever for themselves. In Russia’s media it is no longer kosher to be ashamed of the Soviet past, so they had to leave the implications of the question hanging. They limply concluded that all revolutions are unfortunate whenever the powers that be overlook the people’s will.

As the old song goes, good times never felt so good

I still can’t believe the Monday we just had. On Saturday night we set our clocks back here, a week ahead of the States, and when I realized that meant Game 4 of the Series would start at 3 a.m. instead of the usual 4 a.m., I decided it would be best to just stay up for awhile. So I moved the laptop to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and watched Goodfellas dubbed in Russian on NTV while reading everything I could find on the Interwebs about the Series. Game 4 began, and what can I say? Worth every sleep-deprived minute. My mom, who was visiting for the week, managed to get up for the last two innings. And once Papelbon nailed the final out, I opened a bottle of Guinness we’ve had lying around for awhile to celebrate. It was a great postseason with the perfect ending. I think I’m kind of going to miss these ridiculous middle of the night wake-up times, when I’m alone in the sleeping apartment with just my laptop and my sunflower seeds. And it is such a good time to be a Red Sox fan, which you realize when you think about fans of the other teams. In watching the games, I came to feel a little bad for Cleveland’s fans. They had a very good team, and since they haven’t won the pennant since 1948, they are approaching operatic degrees of sports fan suffering. On the other hand, I don’t have a lot to say about Rockies fans. The team only started in 1993. History counts, and a tough, heart-breaking, through, beating like this is the kind of thing that lets you build one. It is the circle of baseball life, and I have to think that somewhere in Colorado is a kid that will remember Tulowitzki-Holliday-Helton-Atkins the same way I remember Boggs-Barrett-Buckner-Rice. Once the game was over, and I’d watched most of the online postgame show, I collapsed into bed. The sun was already up (I think, it had been an impossibly dreary and grey October here), and it wasn’t long before my little girl woke up and started cooing – shaking her head mischievously at her mom and I when we asked her if she was indeed the birthday girl that day. Little scamp. Olga graciously let me sleep a few more hours before I woke and celebrated my little one’s first birthday, which included visits from friends and family and all the usual trappings. All day I kept thinking about what a freakishly good day it was. I had a lot of time to think about the world in which she was born, getting to see the Red Sox win a Series in her first year of life. I’m happy for her, and happy that I will have to explain to her how nerve-wracking it was in 1986, 1995, 1999, 2003, and how wonderful 2004 was. Much has been made about how allegedly Red Sox fans wallowed in their misery all those championship-less years, but every real fan I know was simply eager to see our team win at last – like any other fans of any other teams – with the sole added baggage of wanted to put an end to the “Curse of the Bambino” industry once and for all. We certainly didn’t build our identity on it, as much as sports columnists wanted to think we did. In 2004 we were happy to have won, after a very long wait, and to have put all that nonsense behind us. But 2007 is pretty darn fantastic itself. I keep asking whether 2004 or 2007 was better, and I just can’t figure it out – each is a thing unto itself. Of all the things I read about this team, what I liked the most was Charlie Pierce’s essay in Slate after the ALCS. It was about Manny Ramirez, and he took the contrarian stance of unabashedly praising the “Manny being Manny” phenomenon. When the Sox were down against the Indians, Manny famously said something to the effect that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and there was always next year. The sports media flipped out, but most Sox fans knew precisely what he was talking about.

“It was impossible to watch the Red Sox over these last three games and not see Ramirez’s words in vivid action. Boston did not play an inning of baseball in which the team was not cool, and loose, and utterly in command of the circumstances. [...] This was a team that realized that losing wasn’t the end of the world, and therefore, losing was nothing of which to be afraid. Manny saw that first and brought the rest of them along.”

Throughout his time in Boston, Manny has been subject to ritualized bouts of heavy criticism, which manages to take his impressive numbers for granted and ignores completely just what he brings to the team. I remember thinking about it back in 2004, when Manny went out of his way to be demonstrably nice and friendly with tightly-wound reliever Byung-Hyun Kim – he didn’t need to do it, it wasn’t popular to do, and it didn’t work out so well, but it was the simple, decent thing to do. This kind of easy-goingness is probably also a critical part of what makes him one of the best hitters in history too. So all the clichés, about taking it one game, one inning, one at bat, one pitch at a time, turn out to be true. So to rephrase Billy Bragg, “I don’t want to change the world/ I’m not looking for a new New England/ I’m just looking forward to another season.” Now, if we can just re-sign Mike Lowell and steer well clear of a certain Scott Boras client, it should be a magnificent offseason as well….

Guess who's one-year old today!

Happy first birthday, Mila Jane!

[Ed.'s note: We'll have a lot more about the second most important thing to celebrate today soon!]

The Sox win the pennant!

It has been a surreal postseason, not just all the waking up at 4 a.m. stuff and the subsequent sleep deprivation, but moments like in the bottom of the 8th inning in Game 6. J.D. Drew comes to the plate, and Joe Buck actually said something like: “This gives these Boston fans another chance to give Drew a round of applause.”

It was a weird feeling following this team so closely for the entire season without ever actually seeing them play until the postseason. I had read about this team’s unusual propensity to collapse. For four and a half games this team looked unstoppable. They practically ran a hitting clinic against CC Sabathia and Fausto Carmona in the first two games, and it wasn’t just Ortiz and Ramirez either – the whole lineup looked like they knew what they were doing. And then, all of a sudden, the lights went out, the door slammed shut, and the curtains came down. I’d never seen anything like that before – they just looked perfectly average, and it seemed perfectly impossible they could summon the heart to dig themselves out of a serious hole. So it was pretty amazing that the lights suddenly went right back on, and against a good Indians team they managed to pull it off.

Through the ups and downs I developed a routine. Setting my cellphone for 3:57 a.m., having a Red Bull, setting up my balky computer as comfortably as I can. Throughout the matches I ate “Ot Martinka” brand sunflower seeds – I think I went through a pound of them in the postseason so far. Russian seeds, semechki, are different than the little salt balls they have in America. They are simply roasted, and have a very distinct and pleasant taste, though they are a bit smaller than the American ones. I’d have a Bochkarev beer at some point, and I diligently kept score because I didn’t have anyone to talk to.

I’ve learned that watching the games over the Internet is a little peculiar. MLB.com has worked pretty well, I have to say, though I had some minor technical problems on my end. The ads are more irritating than need be, though. From the 2003 postseason, I have burned in my memory Ron Silver shouting “His father is the District Attorney!” over and over again from the promos for Fox’s ill-fated drama “Skin.” But I prefer that to this year, and if you’ve had to watch online you know why. I have had shoved into my head various lines from the trailer for sports melodrama “The Final Season” – “They have a tradition here. It is about playing the game right,” Sean Astin emotes. “We grow ballplayers here like corn,” Powers Boothe insists. I will never see this movie but I can’t describe how much I hate it. And another thing… MLB.com kept promoting this documentary about Tony Gwynn’s induction to the Hall of Fame. The spot starts with the moment he actually got the call he was in. We see him sitting on his couch, he answers his cell, puts it on speaker, a voice introduces itself as the head of the Baseball Writer’s Association, and he gives him the good news. Gwynn starts blubbering, his family rushes over to congratulate him, and then he just hangs up! How rude! I hope he apologized later.

Anyhow, I’ll put up with it gladly for another series. I don’t want to write anything potentially jinxy about the World Series. All I’ll say is that it would be criminal if fans of the 14-year old Colorado Rockies got to see their team win the Series their first time there. I believe history is terrifically important in sports, and they need to build some. Plus, their uniforms are hideous, and they do that that tasteless 69 different jersey and pants combos to maximize their merchandise revenue. Not cool.

Mid-autumn wonderland

I just learned a valuable lesson about why one shouldn't complain about the weather in Moscow.

The view out our window on Sunday morning...

And by way of update, it is now Monday afternoon, and gentle fluffy flakes are again falling from a white sky. And yes, some of it is sticking on the ground.

Drizzle

Autumn in Moscow is little more than a few days of clear skies, modest temperatures, golden leaves on all the birch trees. It is a blip on the calendar, and then it is gone. Friday, Oct. 5 was cloudy and drizzly, and the temperature never got beyond 10 degrees Celsius. And it has stayed the same ever since.

I'll sleep in November

A very late night here in Moscow. For the playoffs, I paid MLB for the Internet feed of the games, and can justify the cost in lost sleep because it is October. Besides, Mila has her first cold and appears to be springing about four teeth at once, so it is not as if my sleep patterns weren’t screwed up already!

I didn’t get to see the team in action except back in April, so it is strange seeing these guys I followed so closely on paper through the year. The Sox look awfully good so far this postseason, like they finally started to play up to their full potential only in the past few weeks or so – especially tonight (this morning), when together Ortiz and Ramirez got on base ten times in five at bats each. Unlike the 2004 edition, they seem like a gang of stone cold pros.

I have to admit that since winning the Series in 2004, and with the Yankees making another ignominious exit, the postseason is much more pleasant than it used to be. I looked up the past Sox-Indians postseason series, and remember how excruciating it was. I remember 1995, getting over the novelty of a divisional series and staying up late with my roommate Adam for the 13-inning Game One that the Sox eventually lost. I remember well 1999, when Pedro game in Game 5 and there was a weird sense that our cosmic luck was finally beginning to change, that there was no way we could lose that particular game. I was also surprised to learn that Dave Roberts, hero of ’04, was on that Indians team in his first big league season.

I happened to see that Oct. 12 was the 40th anniversary of Game Seven of the ’67 Series, the sad ending to the “Impossible Dream” season. Bob Gibson threw a complete game – and hit a solo homer in the fifth -- for the St. Louis Cardinals at Fenway, for a 7-2 win. Jim Lonborg got the loss. What really stuck out for me in the box score, especially as tonight's game approached the four hour mark, is that amazingly, that game lasted two hours and twenty-three minutes.

October

Now it is October, and we’re serious about settling in and all that. We have nowhere to go for the foreseeable future, my visa is all set for a few months, and I’ve gone ahead and gotten a regular job. I’ve started an editing gig at at The Moscow News, one of the English language newspapers in the capital. It’s just a few days a week, but its nice to get out of the house for awhile and see up close how journalism is done around here.

Sunday was a perfect autumn day in the capital, which Olga noted is not so much of a season as a handful of days spread out amidst the drizzle and ominous winter weather looming on the horizon. We decided to spend the day at Arkhangelskoe, the country estate just outside the city that belonged to Prince Yusupov. As with most of our excursions of late, it was an adventure to get out. In this case, it was that we had to catch the rare and incredibly packed No. 549 bus from Tushinskaya Metro station. It was laden with Muscovites eager to get some fresh, autumnal air while they still can.

The estate is really a stunning place. In addition to its palace and other buildings, it features acres and acres of formal French gardens, with lots of lanes to stroll and statutes to see. There is an amazing view south over the Moscow River and the long, flat Russian horizon, which you can see from between two Stalinist sanatorium buildings from the1930s. It was crowded, to be sure, with lots of women making elaborate hats out of the golden leaves and families taking photos of themselves. We were no different of course (see below).

It was a pretty lazy day. We let Mila cruise around for awhile, which she has gotten quite good at if you hold her hands, and point out trees to us. She is a great fan of colorful leaves. We ate some shashlik, after some typically Russian adventures in ordering and waiting for them, and while Mila napped we laid around on the grass, probably for the last time this year before snow and cold arrive in force.

Olga in line for tickets at the entrance gate...

Some leaves....

Walking around...

Telegrams and Anger: Mass MoCA vs Christoph Büchel edition

It is amazing how quickly you fall back into things. I was no sooner back from our mercifully Interwebs-free vacation on the Adriatic for only a few hours before something on the other side of the world to cause worry. I’ve been following the Christoph Büchel/Mass MoCA standoff from afar. I had covered MoCA for years at the Eagle, and had reported on the opening salvos of this preposterous dust-up. I was at first amused by it all, but now I’m disappointed that the arts world appears to be too far up its own ass to give the museum the full-throated support it deserves. The story is really quite simple, but is unnecessarily confused by people with an agenda to push. Mass MoCA, despite its modest financial resources and out of the way location, has become one of the most cutting edge spaces for large-scale installation works in the world thanks to its cavernous Building 5 and a team of dedicated staffers who move heaven and earth for them (even when they are flops, like the Höller exhibit “Amusement Park” that had been installed before). For this year the plan for the space was the first big North American project by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, which ran into serious snags as his proposed project ran way over budget. He eventually walked out on the project in a huff, and the rest is litigation. MoCA made the unfortunate decision to open what they had to the public, raising questions about betraying the artists intentions, and sued for violating his contract. It is an unfortunate turn of events – I wish MoCA had just sued for damages for costing them a season they could ill afford to loose and make him pay to clean his crap out of the building himself, but the museum had to do something with its marquee space during the vital summer tourist season. Last week, a federal judge agreed with the museum, and saw past the scaremongering of Büchel’s lawyers about how the rights of all artists are now infringed because, I guess, they’ll now have to sign specific contracts and fulfill the obligations in them. The response of much of the arts community, and the reporters and writers that are supposed to be covering it, has been amazing. Now that I am a private citizen and not a reporter covering Berkshire county, I can admit that I am a great admirer of MoCA and the people that work there. I know what they do and have done, how much they mean to the community where I have so many ties, and how despite its size and reputation, it remains still an experiment resting on a very shaky foundation. So the public pile-on they have had to endure for the sake of this art-world princeling is too much. I saw it first in a July essay by the Boston Globe’s art critic, Ken Johnson, who had the nearsightedness to write that the whole affair “affirms popular perceptions of our most innovative contemporary artists as frauds and charlatans.” Of course, the only honest answer to the question about where that reputation comes from is behavior like Büchel's. Johnson seems to assert that museums should just shut up and enjoy the ride, which seems to me a variation on the sick old adage about what to do if you know you are going to be unavoidably raped. It got worse when Roberta Smith of the Times weighed in, also rising to the defense of those suffering toilers in the trenches of art, who are attacked by an uncaring public and whipped by the taskmasters at non-profit museums who makes them weep blood for their work. “Never underestimate the amount of resentment and hostility we harbor towards artists,” she writes, strings soaring in the background as the camera pans the Sistine Chapel. “It springs largely from envy. They can behave quite badly, but mainly they operate with a kind of freedom and courage that other people don’t risk or enjoy. And it can lead to wondrous things.” And continuing: “In the end it doesn’t matter how many people toil on a work of art, or how much money is spent on it. The artist’s freedom includes the right to say, ‘this is not a work of art unless I say so.’” If we are interested in cute postmodern games about authorship and authenticity, we ought to at least acknowledge that much of the best twentieth century art was supposed to makes us ask just what magic, Olympian power put the crown on the head of the “artist” and made his declaration of “art” more important than my declaration of “bullshit.” (And, when he is not quite so dyspeptic, Büchel himself is apparently big on these sorts of questions. From the press materials for his recent London show Simply Botiful: “Büchel repeatedly manipulates and exploits the perceived power of the social and legal contract, subverting the relationship between artist and audience while insisting on a more active political role for both.” There are moments when the hypocrisy of all this is so overwhelming I have to think it’s actually one big meta-exhibit. If so, I really wish he’d done his homework and screwed around with some money-pile like the Guggenheim). Smith uses very high-minded talk to defend a system that is strangling all those noble and sublime things she is yabbering about. As my former colleague John Mitchell of the Transcript notes on his blog, this is “a piece of NYC art world insider crap… [that] speaks about MoCA as if it were a billion dollar movie studio seeking a final cut rather than a non-profit art museum still working to become self-sufficient.” True. Büchel's supporters have reduced this to a matter of intellectual property, with the assumption that the museum is assuming a role that does not belong to it, for some nefarious, unspoken reason. What to the right-thinking aesthete could it possibly be? Power and glory? I don’t think there is a moment in MoCA’s history that could suggest they are power-mad solipsists. Could it be money? Ah. Contemporary art’s ruling class are the ones that make the fortunes and distribute the crowns for the heads of folks like Büchel: the gallery owners and the elaborate network of enablers that has sprung up to prop up this sad system. Self-absorbed geniuses like Büchel are churned out of the world’s art schools faster than the system can absorb them, and the ones that make it usually have enough sense to keep their ego in check while they’re blowing other people’s money. They don’t know and don’t care where it comes from, as long as it has no whiff of the real world on it and includes lots of encouragement of what a genius they are. That’s how it goes in the “art world,” a sick money orgy with the kind of screwed-up values you’d expect from a multibillion dollar industry, served by groveling arts press that can’t think for itself anymore. It is no wonder so few people give a damn about contemporary art anymore – a pathetic situation which happens to be Mass MoCA’s mission to correct in some small way. This stupid mess has caused incalculable harm to an institution that personally means a lot to me. And as far as I’m concerned that is what, as Ken Johnson might say, makes this a “sad, dumb and shameful” episode.

A moment in Montenegro

Our visit to Europe’s newest little state went well, and was as relaxing as traveling with a 10-month old to visit a family with a two-year old can possibly be. Montenegro is an interesting place, and I think we made it there at a very interesting transitional moment.

The land itself is what I would imagine the northern Arizona shoreline might look like when California finally breaks off into the ocean. Dry and jagged, with sharp bare mountains that fall straight into the sea. The sun is high and intense, the plants are tough and low. The mountains seem to tower over you everywhere – an effect damn near vertiginous after spending several months in the middle of the Eurasian steppe -- and commanding the entire horizon lies the Adriatic, which in color and temperament seemed much like what I always imagined the Mediterranean would look like.

We never really had a chance to get to know the country very well – our Serbo-Croatian is terrible. We stayed near the coast, which as I gather is quite different than the mountain interior. While the inside sounds like a sort of Balkan Scotland, with mountains and valleys and poor soil and fierce clan loyalties, the coast was a cosmopolitan place. It was variously ruled by the Romans, Byzantines, Turks, Venetians, and Austrians. The old towns up and down the coast are really quite stunning. And since about 20 percent of the newborn nation’s GDP apparently is generated by tourism, it is their economic engine now.

Once you are out of the earshot of Russian tourists, Montenegro is one of those places that makes you think, “hey, how come there aren’t more people here?” One day we drove out to a very long stretch of sandy beach just south of Ulcinje, near the Albanian border. The specific spot we went to was charmingly called “Safari Beach,” and featured a rather sleepy little restaurant with a severe wasp problem and almost nothing on its menu actually available for order as it was the offseason already. I took a walk south on the beach and came to its cousin, “Tropicana Beach,” which was completely closed. All the metal furniture, cheap rattan umbrellas, and lifeguard stations had been stacked up good and tight for the winter. It reminded me in an eerie way of Asbury Park, except in this case, it is not a place whose glory days are behind it, but one that is destined to be profoundly changed in the next few years. Reports are that several major overseas developers were interested in the spot, and soon it will soon rival Turkey and Egypt as Russia’s favorite seashore. Montenegro is just discovering it is a tourist destination, and I get the impression that these mountain people were only passingly aware they had a seacoast until just a few years ago. Whether the willy-nilly property sales and hell-for-leather construction schedules will be to the ultimate good seems to me very unlikely.

And it is a bit of a jarring contrast to the region’s recent sad history. This was the first time I’d ever visited a country that my country had bombed in recent memory, and it was something strangely on my mind through most of my time there. Granted, Montenegro was not targeted during the NATO campaign against Serbia in spring 1999. Still, I could imagine American planes flew through those skies, from ships in that sea, over those hills and mountains. The fuel in their tanks, the bombs under their wings, the salary of their pilots, were all paid for by my tax dollar, and were sent on their way by leaders I had a say in choosing.

It made me a little uncomfortable to arrive at passport control with a whole planeload of Russians, as I handed the officer perhaps the only American passport he’d see in a while amid the veritable stacks of Russian ones. What quarrel does my country have with these people? Was it worth it to pick that fight? With all the mistakes that could have, and did, happen? It seems so when you think about why we did it. For years the former Yugoslavia had been a bloodbath of pent up racial and sectarian tension. The bombing was the west’s final effort to show once and for all that this uncivilized barbarism would have to stop.

We stayed in a house on a hillside just up the valley from the village of Dobra Voda, on the outskirts of a Muslim village. From the balcony we could see in the bottom of the valley a mosque, with its minaret topped by a green spire. Ramadan started while we were there, and we could hear the adhan called each night. The Muslims had been there for centuries, the furthest frontier of a civilization that for centuries was the perfect other in Europe’s vision of itself. And what must the people have thought throughout the 1990s when their government sponsored genocidal death squads murdering Muslim men and boys not an afternoon’s drive away from them? What worries did they face when other Muslim countrymen even closer in Kosovo were in danger of a similar threat?

But I digress, here are a few more pics of the view from where we stayed…

September

I always love the start of a new season, and always get good and sick of the old one well before I start to miss it. Living in New England so long is perfect for such a temperament – I love the change of seasons and what each brings. So it is September, and there is no trace of summer around Moscow. The temperature is in the mid-teens, and there is a stiff Eurasian breeze that unmistakably says autumn. The green of the leaves looks worn and tired, and the sun goes down at a reasonable hour once again. The arrival of Russian autumn ought to be particularly morose, however, because it comes with the realization that a whole vast arena of human activity – outdoors – is getting ready to close until May. You see hints of what is to come all around. The double-windows that have spent a few months thrown open to let in the fresh air, but are designed to be sealed shut and well-insulated. You see the little metal fences that mark off sidewalks and roads in the yards, and realize they exist solely so you can tell where the path is on a dark winter day when there are several feet of snow lying around. You realize that those giant radiators – the Russian word for them is “battery,” as in artillery battery – that have sat quiet are about to start roaring again. The experience of seasons is very acute here, and summer is no different. It is like a sort of madness here. The sun stays up until 11 o’clock. Women walk around half naked, people randomly jump into fountains and rivers at the slightest provocation, often with disastrous results. People abandon perfectly good apartments with running water and plumbing in the city to live in shacks on the edge of town for weeks on end. It is all very disorienting. So September starts to feel very strongly like things are getting to normal. There ought to be a chill in the air, and the city feels like everyone is coming home and settling in for awhile. But with all that in mind, my family are going to try to stretch summer just a tad longer with a trip to Montenegro. I’ll write more when we get back…

Kerouac Day

For at least 16 of its 50 years On the Road has been a part of my life, and I’m glad of it, even as he has gone in and out of fashion. There has been a fair bit of hoopla about today’s 50th anniversary of the book’s publication – much of it has been pretty dismal, mawkish stuff about finding enlightenment on the great American road with a saxophone bleating in the background (a phenomenon discussed very well here and here).

When Olga was in New York last month I asked her to bring back a copy because I’d left my famous, weather-beaten copy in storage back home. I just reread it for the first time in a long while, and it was a very interesting experience. It is a work of art that stands the test of time better than I expected. Jack Kerouac has not been well-served by the critics who only saw a social phenomenon, nor by his passionate fans who could not separate the man and his life from his work.

A book like this becomes a sort of thermometer. When you are young and your life is stretched ahead of you the whole thing means something very different when you are no longer. So I found all kinds of surprising things as I read it. Somehow, when you are young, you read the sadness and loneliness that runs strongly through the book in a dismissive, romantic way. Now, I was surprised how a major theme of the book is really frustration and disappointment. All this talk about the novel being about “freedom” is either wishful thinking or rot.

And certainly, forget about Kerouac as the “voice of a generation,” whether for the beats or the hippies or slackers. Time and time again it has been proved that any critic who traffics in such nonsense is fit to be ignored. As a historical document, I think On the Road’s appeal is incredibly limited – it is not about a postwar generation struggling against conformity. That is merely the usual thoughtless stereotypes about the 1950s to which Baby Boomers cling to make dancing around in the mud at Woodstock like an idiot a matter of great historical necessity. And please forget about the book as a celebration of hedonism, the first foretaste of the Me Generation, an invitation to generations of slackers to shirk responsibility and hit the road. And spare me the clever asides about how a writer whose work is about “rebellion” against “conformity” has posthumously been used to sell Gap khakis.

Simply, it is indeed a celebration of America, and what it means to be American. It is about trying to tell a story in a new and bracing way. And it is about friendship, and how strange and exciting it is when you meet the right kind of person.

And there are a lot of important things that are completely forgotten in the Kerouac myth. At the heart of it all is a boy whose family originally hailed from Brittany and arrived in Lowell, Massachusetts by way of Riviere-de-Loup in Quebec. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac grew up in a tight Quebec-American ghetto, and didn’t even begin to learn English until he was six and they introduced it at the parochial school he attended. He grew up speaking joual, the French patois spoken in Quebec that is what French would sound like without the grammarian glare of the Academie Francaise. So as an immigrant, he saw America as a newcomer would – as Saul Bellow would, for example – and as someone from an oral culture with a deep spoken word tradition, he had a very consciously artless, stream-of-consciousness approach to language (“Did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, defray its rhythmic thought impact?” he asked in a 1968 Paris Review interview.)

Most writers, if they are being honest, just want to be liked. But the kind of big-time celebrity eludes most, and it is perhaps better that way. Devoted fans hobble your career and define you after you’ve died. When celebrities talk about what your work means to them, and teenagers carry around dog-eared copies of your work for a few years, and booksellers have to hide your book near the cash register to discourage shoplifters, you aren’t writing the narrative of your own life anymore. After the hipsters and the hippies got a hold of him, the myths became their own thing. It is infinitely more romantic to imagine him churning out On the Road in a coffee and benzedrine fugue on that famous 120-foot scroll now touring the country than to remember the subsequent revisions his editors put him through, or the countless drafts and sketches he had written before.

Kerouac broke under the pressure of fame, becoming something of a hermit, clinging to his mother, and in a few short years became little different than any other alcoholic from his old neighborhood in Lowell. Indeed, he was more Archie Bunker than Timothy Leary when he appeared on William F. Buckley’s television show in 1968 to explain in a drunken slur that the Vietnam War was actually conspiracy between the north and south Vietnamese – “who are cousins,” he helpfully noted – to get American Jeeps.

By then the myth had completely outstripped the man, and whether or not that will continue remains to be seen. The book can seem a bit mawkish, especially now when most prose is polished, and most dreams of literary stardom are more modest. For some, it is more an historical document rather than a work of art, especially after irony and sarcasm became the default position of hipsters everywhere.

And here is one more thing to keep in mind, that no matter how closely the life informed the work, they are really separate things. I personally think in my heart that Kerouac was a decent guy, and there is enough anecdotal evidence from friends and fellow-travelers to suggest that Kerouac was a plain decent guy. But when it comes to the work, it just doesn’t matter.

I think about Kerouac’s peculiar relationship with poet Frank O’Hara. They shared a number of close friends – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers – and yet they did not get along. It is easy to see why considering their personalities. Kerouac was a painfully shy working class guy, insecure around well-educated people, and prone to getting dangerously drunk to offset his shyness, especially when he was in New York. O’Hara was the quintessential cosmopolitan, a complete creature of New York and its catty gossip and hierarchies, and likely to start an anecdote about what Jack said to Barney at Joan’s place in Southampton the other night and end with a quip about Darius Milhaud. Their relationship got off to all sorts of bad starts. Once a drunken Kerouac stumbled into one of O’Hara’s readings and, for whatever reason, began heckling him, shouting “you’re ruining American poetry, Frank.” To which Frank retorted, “that’s more than you ever did for it.”

But Frank had some good words for a few of Kerouac’s books. Not surprising, both were interested in finding a new way of spontaneously expressing observations and emotions, though in wildly different ways. Word got around their very small circle about what Frank had said, and one night, at the legendary Cedar Tavern on University Place in the Village Kerouac spotted Frank and went over. “What’s the matter Frank, I thought you didn’t like me?” Kerouac asked. “I don’t like you,” Frank replied. “I like your prose.” Kerouac was reportedly very happy with this response.