Catching up

It's been an eventful spring for me to have taken this unscheduled hiatus, and I'm trying to slowly get back in the swing of things. Been snowed under a pile of copyediting, copywriting, and toddler-care, but hopefully things will perk up a bit in the coming weeks.

About yesterday's inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev as the third president of the Russian Federation, I don't have a lot to add about the geopolitical implications. But the teevee show itself was amazing in that it couldn't have been better stage-managed if the Kremlin's production team had just decided to chuck it all and CGI the whole thing.

The sweeping boom camera shots, the panoramic aerial shots over an eerily deserted central Moscow, nothing was left to chance -- they even threw in a few real digital CGI effects. And whenever you have a fortress as your seat of government, you get remarkable control of media access. So every media outlet on earth was stuck with the Kremlin's single, unified vision, with each and every shot completely managed.

And yet... I don't know if it just got overlooked in the shuffle or they just didn't think it was important enough, but the whole thing was still horribly boring -- In marches the flag, in marches a deluxe edition of the Constitution, Mironov and Gryzlov slink on stage. It was pure catatonia. The most interesting part were the new tsarist uniforms designed by fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin, which are, I dunno, over the top? And in keeping with the general television spectacle theme, the thing abruptly ended and regular programming returned, and everyone was shooed back to their regular routine. By nightfall, I saw news websites that had bumped it down in favor of a story about Poland's talks with the U.S. about missile defense.