T-shirt writing job is OK

One of the enduring fads around here are random phrases and words in Latin letters printed on them. Often, they are just clusters of separate words about a particular subject (“surf” “sail” “ocean” “beach” etc). But sometimes they get more ambitious, and they never have a proofreader. The results can be hilarious, and I've seen a lot this summer around the city. Though they haven’t quite reached the heights of hilarity I've heard from friends who have spent time in China, Russia is doing alright on the unintentional public comedy scale. To be perfectly honest, I feel bit guilty about making fun of people like this. For whatever weird reason, clothing is incredibly expensive here. So for most Russians -- the overwhelming majority that aren't even anywhere near the "small but growing middle class" I keep reading about in the western press -- their apparel options are limited. To assuage my conscience I’ve removed all examples except the ones that made me actually laugh or snicker in public…

A young man on the subway wearing a camouflage t-shirt with the words: “Special Units: Progress Report.” (Apparently even spetsnaz have to deal with paperwork these days.) A middle-aged woman, on the subway, wearing a blouse featuring Japanese anime women with cartoon bubbles that read: “You job is okay!” Young man on Ulitsa Zhivapisnaya, wearing a black t-shirt with a line drawing of a scuba diver and the words, “Optimist Deep Diving School.” (Presumably, it’s better than the Pessimist Deep Diving School down the road.) An attractive young woman walking along Gogolevsky Bulvar wearing a dowdy brown plaid and demin vest. On the back, stenciled with pink glitter: “High Voltage / Stay Away” A fashionable young man walking around the Shchuka mall, wearing a powder blue t-shirt with several WWII vintage American Army Air Corps emblems. Stamped in block letters on the back the words: “Air Soda” This one is a thinker: On the Metro in the afternoon, a young man who was the epitome of contemporary Russian club-guy fashion. He wore shades, sported a discreet mullet (which is okay in Russia, but that is an entire post in itself), wore faded jeans with lots of patches and carefully frayed threads, and a tight, bright pink polo shirt. On it was written, in giant cursive letters in rhinestones, “Nothing is at it seems.”

And the winner by several lengths…

Young man walking down Ulitsa Marshala Vasilevskovo one morning wearing a black bowling shirt. On the back was an image of a beach and a palm tree, and written around it: “Hotel El Camino / Firetrap / Positive Vibrations”

Football season in Russia

The start of football season calls to mind crisp autumn days, lazy Sundays at home, tree-lined campuses on Saturday, etc. But when in the “third Rome” … football season is just coming into the homestretch, as the Russian league wraps up. Meanwhile, the European leagues are all getting their seasons underway – either way, football’s always on. So while I am reducing to following the Sox through the homestretch on ESPN Gamecast, there is plenty else for a homesick sports fan to distract himself.

Here in Moscow we get to see a good number of good overseas club matches and international matches. We have a pretty good state-run sports channel, but of course, as with almost everything here, you can’t enjoy it without feeling compromised. A few years ago, you may remember, television channel NTV was the only independent station that was still critical of the Kremlin. But in 2001, the state gas company forcibly bought them out, and many of the journalists took refuge at another smaller station called TVS. Two years later, the state snatched the station up on some trumped up tax issues. And they decided to turn it into a 24-hour sports channel. Bread and circuses indeed.

It is perhaps one of the ironies of the breakup of the Soviet Union that I think it took away the best footballers. Looking at the record, you have to conclude that it was actually the Ukraine that propped up the Soviet Union’s football reputation, and that in their absence has been nothing but primitive tactics and rampant corruption. Russian football – or as the state-run television channels call it, “our football” – is hard to watch. The game is blissfully unaware of the developments and improvements Latin players have brought – no individual flair, no quick graceful passes, no finesse. I think Russians like to believe they play a sound, traditional way, with strategies and tactics. But really, players just thump the ball across the field, run after it, throw a hard tackle, and eventually the big Moscow teams win more games than anyone else. The saddest part of this spectacle are the few foreign-born players in the Russian league – who are hard to miss, as like every other segment of Russian society, people of color stick out. You see them looking lost and forlorn as they play along with this crap, knowing full well if they took some initiative and tried to wing around a defender on their own, or executive a crisp short pass, their manager would hurl his thick Brezhnev era manual of tactics and strategies at his head, and his work visa would get revoked.

My approach to professional sports is multidisciplinary. I am interested in the places, the fans, the history and how all those factors relate to the game. I am not enough of a sports enthusiast to appreciate it for the “game itself.” Nor am I enough of a cynic that I regard it as a matter of interchangeable parts the way a gambler would. So whatever match I am watching I’ll pick a side and stick with them, and if I sat down and thought about it long enough I could probably systematize how I choose which side I support. I suppose I try to gravitate toward underdogs by nature, as an American raised on “Bad News Bears” movies. I always root against Italian teams because they play so ugly. I always root for Dutch teams because I read David Winner’s awesome book about the glory days of Dutch football, “Brilliant Orange,” last year. While I can’t really explain what’s so mind-bending about the way the Dutch play, it sure lends itself to good writing. I will always root against Chelsea because of that Abramovitch. I will lean toward Arsenal because there is something very much akin to them with the Boston Red Sox, in that they are a big-spending team that always seems to be outspent, and have an intensely suffering fanbase that somehow puts up with it year in and year out.

I thought for awhile about choosing a Russian team to follow. While I love the idea of AC Milan or Barca legging out an early Champion’s League qualifier against Luch-Energiya Vladivostock, I decided my team would have to be from Moscow. I married into a Moscow family, and I have always been a homer, so that’s that. And none of the suburban teams will do, so while Saturn could have made a case, they play in Ramenskoe and I don’t even know how to get there.

So we are left with a rather large choice, which is appropriate considering Moscow’s outsized role in Russian life. At the top of the list is Spartak Moskva, which has dominated Russian football since the Soviet breakup. They are clearly out, because in terms of league dominance and potent brand identity of their red and white colors, they’re the friggin’ Yankees. So screw ‘em. Screw ‘em to hell.

CSKA Moskva has made a compelling case, especially after winning the UEFA Cup in 2005, which was something of jolt in the football world because Russian teams suck in European competition. But they are the military pet team, and afrorementioned villain Abramaovitch gave them a multimillion dollar “gift” recently, so the stench of multiple rats is just too great.

We also have Dinamo Moskva, who have pretty spiffy blue and white and kit and a long tradition, but they were Dzerzhinsky’s team, and they were always closely connected to the MVD. So much so that their opposing fans call them “Musora,” which means “garbage” and is a very rude nickname for the police. So they are right out. FC Moskva is the newest kid on the block, but they are actually partially owned by the city itself, and Mayor Luzhkov, so forget it.

That leaves us with the best contender, Lokomotiv Moskva. They have a long association with the railroad union, and are still majority owned by Russian State Railways. They have a spiffy green and red kit, and generally I don’t see neckless hooligans wearing their colors on the subway, though I have seen bright-eyed young kids with jobs pretending to be hooligans on the weekends wearing it. So, in Moscow derbies, they are my squad, but frankly I don’t think enough of them to really take the ride. And I must confess, I kind of like not caring enough to get worked up about it!

Arbus season

Right on time, every street crossing and Metro entrance in Moscow has their own temporary pen of fresh watermelon from the Astrakhan region...

The Russian Jack London

Most Russian families of a certain background have many collections of the multivolume collected works of various authors. These were state approved authors and the editions were affordable. The translations were usually exceptional as well, because folks with a love of art and a knowledge of foreign languages often didn’t have anything else to do with their skill. So on the shelves of older, university educated Russians you will certainly find the collected works of Pushkin, probably Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. If they are particularly fond of the written word, you’ll find modern writers like Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Akhmataova. Among foreign writers, the list is more limited. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Stendahl, maybe some Hemingway. And quite common is Jack London.

Jack London. I know my way well around American literature, and I remember Jack London as the writer of Klondike adventure stories like Call of the Wild and White Fang that I read as a boy in junior high school. I was sufficiently impressed with his Russian reputation to look him up again and see what all the fuss is about.

It seems Americans have declined to remember that he was also a pioneer journalist – possibly one of the first ‘New Journalists’ perhaps – and a raging, unapologetic socialist, which accounts for his getting into print in the Soviet Union in the first place. It is pretty amazing that this quintessentially American writer has been best defined abroad, and his important place in American letters has been nearly forgotten.

In terms of the scale of his output, his comfort with prose and nonfiction, and his engaged public persona, he is a direct descendant of Mark Twain. They even share a sort of open-minded world view, though London is far less funny (though he had a definite streak of very black humor). He set the parameters of what it was to be a successful writer much the same way F. Scott Fitzgerald a generation later would. He made a fortune writing, enough to become a comfortable gentleman farmer in Sonoma Valley. His work defined masculinity for a generation, the same way Hemingway would in the later generation. His nonsense, do-or-die attitude to writing as a son of the working class was followed by Henry Miller. His writing as a wide-eyed optimist roving the American land in The Road would double back in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. His belief in the raw power of nonfiction as a genre would find an echo in Hunter S. Thompson. And he was a groundbreaking freelancer, a true pro. He allegedly asking other writers about what they were paid until at least 1913, when he was already the most successful freelancer in the country. (I could also add he wrote a collaborative epistolary novel, a tract against cruelty to animals, and a thriller about a plague that wipes out humanity).

And in terms of the ideas he tackled and tried out, he was quite farsighted. I just finished reading The Iron Heel, his completely forgotten dystopian novel from 1908 about a near future marred by a oligarchic ruling class that establishes a nasty police state that calls to mind 1984 – and was indeed read by creators of imaginary police states like George Orwell, as well as creators of actual police states like Leon Trotsky.

I will concede that it is not the most best written novel I’ve read lately. As a stylist, London leaves a lot to be desired when he veers away from spare adventure stories. He did not benefit from Modernism’s revolution in streamlined, straightforward prose – and alas, he did live at a time when you were paid by the word. So there is a tiresome wordiness in the book, especially when he steers from concrete plot points and into the world of ideas. The Iron Heel is beset by thoroughly unnecessary characters, and the entire first half is a bleak lecture on the basics of Marxist thought, that makes you ready to throw the thing aside before it starts getting good.

That accounts for part of why he fell away – his style simply fell out of fashion. But that happens to the best of them. Only a few of Henry James’ many novels are read today for the exact same reason. Another reason that I think most Americans would deny is simple Cold War politics. The irrational fear of communism drove reasonable Americans to insanity, and I believe that they threw away London in a fit of overzealous book burning. Today, when you think of a omnipresent police state you automatically, unconsciously turn to Orwell’s bleak vision of “Big Brother.” It is left-wing socialist thinking run amok. London’s vision of right wing capitalist thinking run amok has vanished.

I believe Jack London represents an important and lost thread in American literature. It is about the intimate interaction between fiction and non-fiction, and whose loss has been calamitous. As London put it in 1903: “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration: Light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."

I am developing a half-baked Secret History about all this, and maybe I’ll post it when it gets to be about two-thirds baked.

Not-so-broadsheets

For years American newspapers both big and small, great and modest, have tried to save some money by shaving off more and more from the sides of their physical product. The process has been so gradual that you hardly notice it. But here in Russia, there are still several old-fashioned broadsheets, and still whenever I buy them I realize I hardly know how to hold the things anymore.

Recently my mom sent us a package, and she thoughtfully included a copy of her local newspaper, the Ocala Star-Banner. It made me think about the clown show at the circus, when the Hobo Clown is being chased by the Policeman Clown, and he tries to hide by sitting on a stoop, crossing his legs, and reading a newspaper like a respectable citizen. Only he doesn’t have a newspaper so he unfolds his handkerchief and holds it in front of his face and pretends it's a newspaper. That’s what it feels like to physically read the Star-Banner nowadays.

All the great newspapers of Europe have already bitten the bullet and chosen to switch to the – gasp – tabloid format. Not only does it save paper, but advertisers should be pleased they never have to see their ad buried at the bottom of a long page where no one sees it. A serious newspaper has nothing to fear from the shape of its pages. And that American newspapers continue to clown around by fussing with the margins is another part of the short-sightedness on both the business and editorial sides that is crippling the industry.

Maybe France gets it right?

My latest column for the Eagle I tried to get away from the post-socialist gloom that hovered over my last few efforts. Instead I thought I'd take a look at its biggest public health problem -- you know, something a little lighter.

I admit this is also a veiled criticism of America’s immaturity about alcohol. Where we've created a category of second-class citizenship for people of a certain age and have Puritan graffiti marring our Constitution for all time. But living in Russia, it is hard not to notice how alarming it can be when a nation goes too far the other way.

Pop scene

Very chilly and rainy August so far out here, and I’ve come down with something ugly and haven’t been outside or much help around the house this week. I’ve been keeping pretty far from Mila because of it – I only get close to her when wearing a mask of sorts tied around my face: an old Young Pioneers kerchief that reads “Always Ready.” Among the things I’ve been wanting to write about for awhile is a certain crisis in the Russian pop scene I’ve noticed this trip here. We got here just as the Eurovision Song Contest was heating up, and the most popular CIS entries have become stuck in my family’s consciousness in very unpleasant ways. The Russian entry was a prefab girl-group called Serebro, upon which all the hopes and dreams of a resurgent Russia rode. Indeed they planned that these three cute, virtually talentless girls would somehow prove to Europe Russia’s long-neglected awesomeness. Their big single was a rather insipid effort called “Song #1.” The songs chorus begins with what sounds like one of them having something dropped on her foot, includes various rhymes of “honey” “money” and “funny.” It includes the line “Put a cherry on my cake and taste my cherry pie.” Such lyrics have been completely unacceptable to Western ears since Warrant. This is unbecoming of Russia’s glorious pop-crap tradition, and the market penetration of this song is depressing though luckily, now in August, it is fading away at last. The other entries have been similarly ubiquitous. The Belarussian entry was by a chap named Dima Koldun, whose song “Work Your Magic” is so funny that the first few times I heard it I thought it was a lost Saturday Night Live sketch. It is like Balki from “Perfect Strangers” jabbering on about “your loving potion.” (Getting much less attention here at any rate was Verka Serduchka’s “Dancing Lasha Tumbai,” a song that I remember was described on the Internets as almost certainly the song they play on the escalator to hell. It is our clear and far ahead favorite, and we were strongly pulling for it to win the competition. It is also a big favorite with Mila.) Russia’s pop tradition is long and noble. It doesn’t take very long here to realize that Russians truly love singing – unfortunately that usually manifests itself in a group of young men wandering through your neighborhood in the middle of the night bellowing to their drunken hearts’ delight. That impulse was carefully channeled in the Soviet era variety shows, in which lip-synching singers would croon mild songs in front of various glittering backgrounds, as a theaterful of respectable citizens would look on and occasionally clap in unison. These types of show remain a staple for the older folks on the weekend line-ups on the state-run channels. That led to today’s pop culture, in which actual talent or ability was not nearly as important as the right look and connections. Morbidly catchy tunes would be crafted by professionals, and played by professionals, and all the artists had to do was get the lip-synching down correctly. Which is fine in its place. The appeal of pop music is that it is light, not supposed to take itself too seriously, and fun. Perhaps what has soured me on Serebro is that it got mixed up in various Russian complexes of the moment, and they played along like good troopers. Also, the singing in English is a huge mistake. But at its heart, pop music can be appreciated because it is engineered to appeal to as many people as possible, and that in itself is some sort of art. And I admire that the Russian music industry is so thoroughly shameless and unapologetic about that fact. The phoniness is not deep, not like when the American music business tried to convince people that Avril Lavigne was a “punk.” On my first extended stay in Russia in summer 2003, the song that was everywhere was by girl-group Fabrika. “Pro Lyubov” was unavoidable for a few weeks – you heard in stores, in the checkout line at the gastronome, from speakers on the patio of outdoor restaurants. I think I would pay to have this song surgically removed from my head. Here is a link to the video, but seriously, be careful. At the same time, there were guilty pleasures out there. I came to actually kind of like Glyukoza. All of her videos included her as a sort of computer-animated girl that walked around with a Doberman, the tunes had a sort of surf-rock thing going on, they seemed to include a vaguely girl-powerrrr message, and her single “Nevesta” helped me permanently remember the difference between “instead of” and “together,” which in Russian sound very similar to one another. Her career has gone in all sorts of wrong directions in the past few years – too many ballads, marriage to some creepy minigarch – but that album was alright. No politics, no apologies; just dopey fun.