My 2011 'list'

I love year-end "best of" lists -- most of us are too busy with everyday life to keep up with everything we would like to, and this is our one chance to catch up before the whole caravan moves on. Since we can't be a fanatic fanboy about everything we'd like, we have to accept we're all amateurs now. 

I'm at that point in life where I can't even keep up enough to offer a whole list of my favorite cultural production of the year. There are just a few things I want to rave about before the calendar flips...

MUSIC I think it is amazing that a serious, unflinching examination of the English experience of the First World War would be the year's only album that matters. PJ Harvey's Let England Shake doesn't compromise much, in its allusions, its poetry, or its assessment of the vast dangerous gulf between the language of valor and patriotism and the blood and terror of war. By wisely looking through the lens of a distant trauma -- the trenches and fields of a war a hundred years ago -- it meditates on the deep social costs of what we can politely call "conflict" in a way I can't remember anything else in recent memory has.

I've never been great at writing about music, so I can only fumble around for the right words about it. Much of the haunting, relentlessness appears to have something to do with the autoharp, and her particular singing style of late -- that choking, high shriek I believe she debuted on White Chalk that some of her long-time fans find grating. Her choice of samples ranges from the cliched -- that bugle in "The Glorious Land" -- to the inspired -- a new generation of listeners has now met Niney the Observer thanks to "Written on the Forehead." But one thing that is consistent is the way she can still make your skin crawl, as in "All & Everyone," which with little sentiment or irony imagines what it was like to die at Gallipoli.

But what's more interesting is how this album fits in Harvey's catalog. It seems crazy to say it about sometime whose first album I remember hearing in high school, but this album puts her in that exclusive company of artists like Dylan and Lou Reed and -- for some reason the analogy always springs to my mind -- Neil Young. These are all artists who came to sudden, youthful fame in a particular genre -- folkie, art rock, country rock, and the riot grrl whatever -- but were so talented and brave and devoted to their craft and vision that they had to grow and evolve with each subsequent album. Through the years, they've managed the unique task of growing up to become interesting adults, and you reach a point where the brand is so strong you pay attention to whatever they come up with. I can't wait to see what Polly Jean creates next.

MOVIESThere was a moment maybe halfway through Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life when I realized just how well conditioned we are as viewers these days. We expect every scene in a film to be busy, to be working. But there was one moment in Malick's film when one of the brothers is sitting at a table painting. As is Malick's meditative style, we linger around for a few beats longer than we expect. The scene is meaningless out of context, it only "advances" the story in the context of the dozens of other scenes around it.

Why, I would like to know, are filmmakers so terrified of taking their time? Why do they insist on assuming we have no memory, no patience, no attention span?

Actually, don't answer that. I saw a preview of Jack and Jill before I saw Tree of Life at the Mammut shopping mall near Moskva Ter, which managed to make me shrink into my seat in shame, even in a dark room where no one could know I was American.

And of course, it isn't hard to find the reasons that a movie like Malick's is a tough sell. As I left the theater, I heard two young women speaking -- in English, oddly -- about the movie. One was complaining about how she couldn't figure out what this and that "signified." This inability to handle the idea of a sweeping, non-linear, subtle movie has become part of this film's lore already. There is the story about the theater posting that it wouldn't be giving refunds if you asked for one because you couldn't figure it out. The quotes from Sean Penn about how he couldn't figure out what he was doing there (frankly, neither did I, his performance was rather statuesque).

I wanted to patiently tell her not to pull a muscle trying to figure it out. A movie isn't a math problem, for crying out loud.

Sometimes, you have to just buy the ticket and take the ride. That's the charm of film -- you give your time and your attention and you get taken someplace. It requires a great degree of trust, and Malick more than earned it. A few others have for me too. Stanley Kubrick, for example, is the same way for me.

The easy knock on these filmmakers is that they are pretentious, and self-absorbed and obtuse. But really, that's just ambition. And there's a reason I dropped my 1,200 forints to watch this instead of Jack and Jill.

There's nothing wrong with understanding that film can be poetry and it can be prose. And hell, it can be painting, and it can be music.

BOOKS

I like books. Quite a lot. And I feel I should have something clever to say about the year in literature. But still after all these years, I continue to to be aware that there were hundreds of years of great literature before 2011. I'm still catching up.

So, to borrow James Wolcott's appropriate phrase, I haven't spent much time this year "preparing Joan Didion's reliquary [or] fawning over the latest literary genius farted aloft from the borough of Brooklyn."

One more thing about 'Hitch'

I've been sufficiently creeped out by the fulsome celebration of all things "Hitch" that I'm compelled to write a little more. The turning point was reading Katie Roiphe, the hackiest of Slate's considerable stable of knee-jerk "contrarians" -- who regularly pulls off a trifecta of being wrong, thin-skinned, and boring -- describing how Hitchens offered personal encouragement in her career as a "provocateur."

Well, the man frequently suffered from terrible judgment, and I'm glad that my favorite writer younger than me, Alex Pareene at Salon, was there to settle the record. In particular, his refusal to excuse his hypocritical support for the war in Iraq:

"And so we had the world's self-appointed defender of Orwell's legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government's war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz."

The sting of this behavior is just how convincing his writing about Kissinger and that ilk is. I was shaken by his powerful reporting on the immorality of Agent Orange -- a toxin whose evil reaches across generations -- that I cannot understand how that writer and the Iraq War cheerleader are related (it's a little infuriating to say it now, but seriously, go read 'The Vietnam Syndrome' in VF). Strange, but I think that to be so right about one thing while at the same time being so wrong about another is a chronic condition of the 20th century.

There was a quote kicking around twitter in which Hitchens described how he always wrote to be read posthumously. That's an ambitious idea, and truly cuts both ways. Without the shambolic, chain-smoking, lovable curmudgeon we remember from the chat-show circuit, we only have his words. Many should be cherished for a good long time (see above), but I hope I don't live to see the day that his cheap, blood-thirsty, war-mongering is accepted as truth by reasonable people. 

If there is a fate worse than an eternity in hell, perhaps it has having your biggest mistakes laying in the sun without the opportunity to charm yourself into a state of grace where a mere man does not belong.

Hitchens

I'd long made it a habit to automatically read anything by Christopher Hitchens that came across my vision, and it has been an unpleasant feeling this past year of so to realize each time that this may be the last thing we'll have. It feels terrible that this long anticipated absence has finally arrived.

Others will say more precisely and more eloquently what they'll miss about his work. I'll miss the routine of engagement, the curiosity that comes trying to figure what he'd have about this or that. I can't think of any other writers who could make you applaud or hiss with such regularity. I'll never come around to his opinion about the Iraq War -- which I guess "ended" the same day he did (and don't read too many fawning eulogies without also reading John Cook's blisteringly honest breakdown of his biggest mistake). Also, I'll probably never think much more of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie than I do now, but those times when you agreed with him... boy, you felt there were legions with you.

Bless him for never letting an idea alone, for proving that "received wisdom" is a wholly bad idea. His insistence on looking hard and critically at Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons, Jimmy Carter (to name just my favorites) were great blows for truth and justice. I wish more people would be persuaded.

I think that his last great crusade, the "New Atheism" as it has been dubbed, is an important legacy. I was never wholly sold on it, mostly because I think protesting quite so much crosses the line into just being a jerk, but I'm incredibly glad he didn't shrink from the fight. This is a world in which born-again Christians continue to obnoxiously insist they are a persecuted minority, and I'm very grateful that he had the vision and courage to speak out on behalf of the real victims of oppression: the godless, and by extension those who wish to be free to explore their doubts.

If I was often impressed by the reasoning in his writing, I was often less fond of his style. They say he could churn out columns in 30 minutes, and it often showed. They often felt like hectoring emails. But great "writers" are a dime a dozen these days. His achievement was to keep the spirit of George Orwell alive for another generation. He proved that all wasn't lost to self-absorbed craftsmen and panicky careerists.

From his formative years in London in the 1970s right up to today, he wrote when the the sureties and pieties of the "short" 20th century were coming to a messy, confusing end. We have no idea what is being forged at the moment, but no doubt we'll need to be as curious, argumentative, and unintimidated as he was.

Loyalty Day

The "Loyalty Gate" in Sopron shows city dwellers pledging allegiance to Hungary.

It seems I share a birthday with a small national holiday here. Today is "Loyalty Day" (A Hűség Napja), which is celebrated in the western town of Sopron. It commemorates the plebiscite in 1921 in which the people of the city and several surrounding villages voted to become a part of Hungary, rather than Austria. About 65 percent voted to stay, and earned the city the nickname "Civitas Fidelissima" -- "the most loyal city." It's important because it marks the only time the hated Treaty of Trianon -- which dismembered historical Hungary -- was ever revised.

This is why I don't gamble

The great thing about being a pessimist is that if the awful thing actually happens, you can take comfort in at least being right, and if it doesn't, you're so glad who cares what you thought. Proving that Russia is never boring, my predictions were way off.

But... you can never be too cynical when thinking about Russia, so the headlines in the West about Putin taking a beating miss the point. Watching election coverage Sunday, the talking points emerged pretty quickly: the economy is horrible, of course the incumbents would take a beating! and doesn't this prove once and for all that democracy in Russia is transparent?

You don't have to look too hard to realize this is too simple. Look at the roster of opposition parties in the new Duma: all the same chuckleheads who were the "opposition" in the old Duma. I heard a very telling quote from a United Russia leader on Russia Today last night, talking about how there would be no permanent coalition partner, but that they would make "technical" coalitions on a case by case basis. This means they'll pair up with A Just Russia for legislation to quiet human rights scolding, with the Communists to quiet whining pensioners, and with LDPR when they need to serve up some red meat to shut up ultranationalists.

And the system itself remains badly screwed up. National party-list voting in a country the size of Russia is plainly ridiculous. Voters don't choose leaders to represent them -- they choose party hacks who are loyal to their party leaders, who are loyal to themselves. And the fact no one ever talks about the Federation Council, theoretically a part of the legislative branch, says it all. And voters won't get to say anything about again for five years.

The possibilities of the 'Big Lie'

Sunday's Duma elections will likely come down to just a few percentage points. It is certain United Rusisa will maintain its legislative majority, and the only question is whether they'll keep the two-thirds needed to run everything in the old Soviet fashion, or will face the unlikely possibility of a minuscule speed bump. The remaining seats will go to a grab bag of quiescent "opposition" parties -- most likely the incumbents -- who will gladly go along to keep their seat at the table.

But in recent weeks there have been a stream of reports that the Kremlin is nervous about how the elections may go. Polls had shown support for United Russia is eroding, and a few high-profile incidents like Putin getting booed in public, and the twitter mockery of Dmitry Medvedev's ridiculous lame duck presidency, suggest a distinct undercurrent of discontent.

In today's Russia, the ruling elites -- the oligarchs and minigarchs and siloviki and grey cardinals and youth group organizers -- have achieved separation from the "people." They can now afford to take their vacations in Western Europe, send their kids to private school, park their cars wherever the hell they want, sleep in gated high-rise apartments, eat and party at elitny clubs, and shop in shiny, trashy malls. For this one percent, the 99 percent are those grey lumps your driver zooms past as you lounge behind the tinted windows of your German car.

The 99 percent is also a huge herd that exists to be milked. Through most of human history, you could get away with this con for generations. But it is harder now. General improvements, like widespread literacy, and specific ones, like social media, accelerate the cycle of envy and irritation.

You don't realize that "cows" have feelings too until it is way too late. And the the ruling elite in Russia seems to have made some telling misjudgments. It has felt for awhile like the tenor of discontent has been growing -- I've heard surprising yelps of discontent from people who had always been at least "okay" with the way things were going.

But a lot changed when Putin and Medvedev announced they would be switching places. One Saturday afternoon, the political direction of the country for the next 12 years was etched in stone. Of course, everyone knew that was a possible outcome -- in fact, it was always the most likely one. But the way the handover was botched was unusual. The "tandem" carried on like two 13 year olds pulling the old trick when you tie a string to a dollar bill and leave it on the sidewalk and yank it when an unsuspecting person stoopes to pick it up. This was the plan all along, they yucked. Har har. It's one thing to screw people, another to mock them while you do it. It was the kind of "misstep" that makes you wonder.

A few awkward questions about Warsaw

A marker in Nowe Miasto notes where the boundary of the Jewish Ghetto stood.

Exploring Warsaw with an inquisitive preschooler is a minefield of unexpected and unhappy conversations which I'd thought were still a few years away.

Here are just a few questions that popped up in our first day wandering around Stare Miasto and Nowe Miasto with my five year old daughter:

Q: "Why did they have to rebuild all these buildings after the war?"
Q: "Why were the Nazis so bad? Did they kill people? Even kids?"
Q: "Why did all the Jewish people have to go behind a wall? What was everyone else doing? Why didn't they call the police?"
Q: "What is that thing you do with your hand when we walk into a church?"
Q: "Why do we go into churches here but not back home?"
Q: "Did your grandfather live in Warsaw? Well, why didn't you ask him when he was alive? Why do you always tell stories about your granddad but not about your dad?"

Happily, introducing her to Polish food and taking her to new science museum weren't as intense.

Memorials like this, on Wierzbowa, mark the spots where Nazi reprisals took place.

... And in the early evening

Looking south from Margaret Bridge just after sunset this afternoon, on my way to get my daughter from school.

Mists

November is a very misty month here, when the air is a kind of powdery blue and quite still. It is particularly striking at dawn and dusk. This was the view of the Danube and Parliament  from the Lanchid this evening, just before sunset.

Comparative Playground-ology

The playground at Vermezo park in Budapest.

Thanks to daylight savings time, playground season seems to have come to an end. While the weather during the day is still nice enough that we can make a trip every once in awhile, no more automatically passing some time after school at the playground at Honved ter or the one outside our apartment building. Too dark.

Having young children necessarily means that you become a theorist about playground design. Especially if you aren't chatting with other parents, you need to be just attentive enough to make sure your kid doesn't go tumbling off something, which gives you a narrow range of things to think about. You try to figure out the right balance between engaging and overwhelming, between variety and safety.

In the States, playground design has come quite a ways since I was a kid. Our regular haunt is the one at Williamstown Elementary School, a new, plastic, multi-function structure that is pretty popular. It is in appealing, muted colors, has no sharp edges, and is made of lots of recycled materials, as a sign moralistically reminds you. But it is a place whose functions are very narrowly proscribed -- this is the slide, these are the monkey bars, etc. I don't think kids really like that -- after all, no self-respecting preschooler has ever met a slide and didn't want to skip climbing the ladder and just clamber up the downward part. And at the same time, the structure is a little overwhelming. It commands kids' attention.

In Moscow, playground equipment is ubiquitous and primitive. Rusty slides, unnervingly fast carousels, splintering see-saws. Kids seem to treat them as stage props in their little lives, occasionally useful for a few minutes of fun but by no means the main attraction.

In Budapest, we've met another category of thing. Most playgrounds here have these strange contraptions, which I believe are made by the same company, that are somewhat puzzling at first glance. They are often sets of reinforced ropes, parallelogram-shaped plastic platforms, sliding handles and trolleys. Some come to look like meat racks, others like commando training equipment. They seem almost dangerous until you watch kids grapple with them and realize how challenging and forgiving they are. 

This has been quite enough to keep our daughter quite engaged. She is particularly thrilled with this kind of rope bridge that frightened her at first. We've enjoyed them, but I already heard one of our friends who lives here complain that all the playgrounds have the same stuff on them...

Occupy Szabad Sajtó útca?

Sunday felt like the first of those late autumn, early winter days in Central Europe that people love to warn you about. Mid-40s, damp, pure grey -- the kind of days that make the happiest and healthiest people feel dour and fevered. Pulling up the shutters that morning, I thought to myself that Prime Minister Viktor Orban would probably be pleased -- both the left and the right might just choose to stay home.

I headed off to the protest after lunch, after taking a long time to decide whether or not I would go. I felt a little silly, like Norman Mailer in his writing on the 1960s protests, when he spent a silly amount of time thinking about himself and what his place in all these sweeping events was. Would I go as a journalist? not precisely, because there's no money involved. As a participant? that's tricky. I take the idea of national self-determination seriously, and Hungary is not my country.

Yet, 2011 has a certain special feeling, like 1989, 1968, maybe even 1848. Whatever is happening is bigger than any one country. I've spent a lot of time these past few weeks thinking about Occupy Wall Street, and how I'd respond if I were still back home right now. My opinion has changed a few times over that stretch. I began from a definite distance -- I have a permanent skepticism of the way leftist dissent in America presents itself as a laundry list of isolated grievances. Maybe its generational, but I can't think about this sort of checklist of interests without irony. But I've been won over by the idea of it. After all, I have an unreasonable mountain of student loan debt. I devoted myself to a profession that was trashed by unimaginative leaders, investment bankers, and a professional managerial class. So in general, yea, I have some pretty serious grievances. 

So I chose to go as an observer, a blogger, and see what I could see. The walk to the protest was striking, as usual. I crossed the Lanchid, which I've done dozens of times this month, and it never looks the same. On Sunday, it was decorated with flags -- it was National Day, when the country commemorates the beginning of the 1956 Uprising.

Across the Ukraine

I've let keeping up with things fall away the past few eventful weeks. The simple story is, we are in Budapest, having arrived here at the beginning of the month. We've been getting used to our new surroundings, and more on that later.

We arrived here by train from Moscow, which was truly one of the most interesting ways to cross the steppes. It took about two days -- conveniently at the same time as the Red Sox were flushing the season for good.

Here are some images:

I had very distinct ideas about what we would be able to see from our window. I wanted to see those rolling steppes, the 'Black Earth,' the vault of the sky and the curve of the earth. I was a bit off. The land was in full autumn gloom -- permanent drizzle, menacing low clouds. But somehow, the land itself seemed to be appreciated, as opposed to in Russia, where it sometimes feels taken for granted.

The station at Vinnytsia, about halfway through.

Reading the land as it passed, all I could think about was the place's long, bloody history. Just the idea of the millions that perished here in my grandfather's lifetime alone is staggering. The whole place feels haunted.

The schedule, more or less.

Our spalny vagon, at the station in L'viv. This was the only place where we stopped long enough to get out for some fresh air..

Keleti Station in Budapest.

Twelve more years....

I went online to check the news Saturday afternoon, and saw a peculiar headline at Izvestia. It was the usual humdrum weekend layout, but the main headline read "Medvedev agrees to head United Russia Duma list." That's funny, I thought, because if he ran for Duma it would be hard to run for... oh.

Talk about burying the lede. Every western news agency got it right: "Putin to return as Russian President." All of a sudden, with unmistakeable clarity, the national political life of this country has been decided for the next 12 years. But much of the Russian media seems to have taken incredible pains to avoid spelling out the obvious, presenting the developments as just another "normal" part of the political process in this "sovereign democracy."

But it is sinking in. The past few months, you hear a lot of talk about "stagnation," reminding many of the Brezhnev era's modest economic comfort, stifling stability, and soft repression. It's understandable. Something about the way people complain about the difficulty of life in Russia has gotten more desperate, I've noticed, and I've heard some surprising people talk about how tired of it all they have become. It's hopeless, so no wonder the media is trying to downplay the reality of what just happened.

It is a rather different feeling than the last time Russia was told of a shift at the top in December 2007. I heard about it in the evening, when I was listening to the "Nachtkonzert" online, and was convinced I'd misheard the German news announcer. Could it be Putin had really picked the gentle, Western-minded legal scholar over the defense industry stooge who was considered his primary rival? There were certainly good reasons then to be queasy about how the transfer of power was conducted, but there was a possibility it could be the light at the end of the tunnel. For those that clung to that belief, this weekend's developments must be particularly hard.

This underscores the limits of the "stagnation" narrative. Under Brezhnev, the USSR was simply old and worn out. On the occasion of his death, in November 1982, Serge Schmemann of the New York Times wrote about the mood on the street:

"In the later years of Mr. Brezhnev's life, his slurred speech and obvious infirmity evinced a combination of pity, embarassment and aggravation among many Soviet people.

During his recent speech in Baku, at which he began reading the wrong text, a woman watcing on television was overheard to say, 'Poor man, why do they make him do all this at his age?' The comment was typically Soviet in the presumption taht even the General Secretary of the Communist Party is somehow manipulated by the faceless 'They.'

Among more sophisticated people, a common feeling in later months was a frustrated sense that any progress, any reform, any assault on the country's economic and social stagnation was impossible under the aged, frail Brezhnev regime.

'I don't care if it does get worse,' one economic planner recently said. 'As long as there's change.'"

There is nothing old and worn out about those in power now, and there aren't words for the feeling of finding yourself once again at the bottom of such a very large hill.

A trip to the 'Main Universal Store'

Moscow's GUM department store was built in the early 1890s, a mix of traditional Russian architectural themes with contemporary glass and iron engineering.

I went through a very distinct phase in my youth when the idea of a "shopping mall" embodied everything I thought was wrong about the world. Such commercialism! how shallow and pointless, all those people wandering around like cattle. Like, man, it's all so corporate.

But as I grew older, and my sense of irony became real instead of forced, I developed a real interest in these places, and not just because they are the emblematic structures of late 20th American public life. They belong to the world, to capitalism and modernity itself. Didn't Walter Benjamin spend his working life on vast, unfinished thought experiment about the arcades of Paris, the forerunner of the modern shopping mall?

Though to be honest, what really changed my mind was living in a small village like Williamstown, where getting to any retail center is major work (I have no idea how people lived there without the internet and Amazon). Whenever I drop off or pick up anyone at the Albany airport, I make time to wander around the Crossgates Mall of Colonie Center, usually withouth buying anything, just to look at things. There is always that weird shudder at Barnes & Noble, when I see in reality a book I've read a lot about.

In Moscow recently, I took my daughter to visit Red Square, and we did the usual things. We watched the changing of the guard at the war memorial, had lunch at Okhotny Ryad, listened for the bells of Spassky Gate.

But I also took her to GUM, the enormous 19th century shopping edifice that occupies the eastern side of the Square. I hadn't been there since my first visit in 2003, and was curious what it looked like now.

The answer, of course, is awfully elitny. The Glavnyi Universalni Magazin enjoys pride of place like no other shopping center in the world. And the inside shows it, with a painfully high-end string of boutiques filling a space that is remarkably beautiful in a very practical way.

The fountain, in the central courtyard of GUM, is decorated for the season.

A funny piece of Soviet nostalgia: the store, with its blank, descriptive name ("Gastronom No. 1") and window full of Soviet-era essentials like flour and sugar betrays its real identity. Inside, you won't find much to be nostalgic about, but lots of incredibly expensive imported wines, cheeses, truffles, and whatnots.

A map of GUM. Notice the trapezoidal shape.

This unique news kiosk reflects the interest of most GUM shoppers: glossy gossip tabs, psychology magazines, business titles, and, of course, a magazine solely about luxury wristwatches.

One more thing on Sept. 11...

Everyone has a Sept. 11 story, and on this, the tenth anniversary, it feels like most of them are being told. The events of that day are almost too large to look at with our usual tools of distance and detachment, because they fail to describe what we remember. What happened, in one way or another, wounded everyone, so to understand it, we feel an obligation to break it into manageable little stories.

I haven't even tried to read that much of what has appeared about it -- just enough to figure I might as well pitch in my thoughts as well. I've seen a lot of older writers, baby boomers, who still seem astonished that something happened in the full flush of their adulthood that shaped an entire era. And I've read a lot of recollections from kids who were in college or in high school at the time, who have lived with this as part of their life.

I don't have anything to say about the event itself, a crime of such horror and evil that words fail. So I'd take the opportunity to look at another angle of it. Perhaps one can make too much of it, but I think about this through the lens of my generation, that awkward thing between Gen X and Gen Y, that slacker, post-slacker whatever that seems to hold together mostly by coming into consciousness in the 1990s, during that profound "vacation from history."

The Space Age

I'm always going to think the "Monument to the Conquerors of Space" is pretty cool. The enormous, titanium-coated arc to the sky was completed in 1964, and mixes space age cool with socialist realist silly. The whole area around it -- the old VDNKh is next door -- is a bit like that. But it seems with each passing year it feels like the past is becoming more, well, passed.

The last time I went there was in winter 2003, during my first visit to Moscow. Back then, it was a full-blown Soviet kitsch experience. I remember the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics -- which is in the base -- back then was a small, dark, and very much like visiting a mausoleum. An extensive renovation was completed in 2009, and did quite a lot to bring it into the, well, 20th century.

But the result is still a little curious. There is a lot of hagiography, especially about Gagarin, and a good bit of red meat for techies and engineers. But unfortunately for my visit, it couldn't quite capture the attention of my four-year-old girl. She skipped right past rocket scientist Pilyagin's reading glasses, and did not share my amazement at how closely the sleeping compartment of a Soyuz capsule resembles an overnight train compartment.

I find it absolutely hilarious that for a museum that relies rather heavily on models and replicas, they have on display Belka and Strelka. The real Belka and Strelka. Right near the front, which prompted a strange conversation with my daughter about how yes, they came back safely. And went on to have long, happy dog lives. But were stuffed because they were heroes (like Lenin, I guess).

Russia's Lost Bastille Day

The memorial to the 1905 uprising. We're still waiting on the memorial for 1991.

Last month, on August 19, Russia could have celebrated its version of Bastille Day. There were some television specials and broadcasts of glasnost-era movies, but the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, the failed coup by Communist hardliners, came and went. The memory of those historic events among today's Russians is mixed, and seems to reflect that in politics, sometimes success is only managed disappointment.

The coup began on August 19, and the next day, a Monday, Russians heard the news that their leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was "ill" at his Crimean dacha and that a committee of reactionaries was now in charge. But it was clear from the start that the putsch was a farce. They issued a stream of bizarre, apocalyptic statements, and ostensible "leader" Gennady Yanayev couldn't keep his hands from shaking when he appeared on television. Within hours, a crowd had gathered around Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Parliament building, the White House, and began throwing up barricades.

American writer Jamey Gambrell, writing in the New York Review of Books just days after the coup failed, summed up the giddy sense of confusion and excitement. "At the first mass demonstration, there was at last a feeling, which was to grow as the days passed, that Russia had taken a stand, perhaps for the first time in its history."

The coup fizzled over the next few days, as the military declined to participate in a bloodbath, and the Soviet Union quickly began to unspool. By the end of the week, the enormous statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, the hated founder of the secret police, had been ripped from his pedestal outside KGB headquarters, which itself was covered with derisive graffiti. Emotions in those days spread, soon vented against not just the Party and the KGB, but at Gorbachev himself. By Christmas, the Soviet Union was history.

But not everyone remembers the story as an uplifting journey from oppression to freedom. A recent poll by the independent Levada Center found that only eight percent of respondents viewed the events of August 1991 as the start of a democratic revolution. About 43 percent said the coup attempt was nothing more than a struggle for power among bureaucrats. To this day, 36 percent say the collapse of the USSR was a negative thing.

A lot of that comes through the lens of hindsight, through all the shocks and traumas that Russia endured in those years. When the coup took place, Soviet citizens were already adjusting to a radical realignment of their political space. They lost an "empire" in Eastern Europe, and the splintering of the USSR into separate republics left about 25 million ethnic Russians suddenly as minorities in foreign nations. And it was unclear when the unraveling would stop, raising questions about the territorial integrity of Russia itself -- the Caucuses were already in revolt, and there was a danger that Tatarstan, in the heart of Russia, would be next.

No clear order had emerged in domestic politics either. Yeltsin may have been hero at the White House, but a little more than two years later he would bomb the same building after months of squabbling with the Congress of Peoples Deputies. The irony was lost on no one. And the appearance of free markets held little appeal. The "shock therapy" recommended by the international neoliberal elite meant that to most, instead of being robbed blind by Communist nomenklatura, they were now free to be robbed blind by elitny businessmen.

There are many ways to read all these struggles. Russophobes insist Russians, after centuries of oppression, are culturally unable to handle freedom. But Russians weren't alone in finding the Brave New Post-Socialist World more complicated and difficult than they expected. Disappointment and frustration appeared everywhere once they had moved beyond the black-and-white struggle against Communism. "We are witness to a bizarre state of affairs," lamented Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, in April 1992. "Society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse that when it was in chains."

There are many moving parts in politics, and success is sometimes a matter of how you organize them into a story. In Russia, the past ten years the story has been about the horrible 1990s, how Russia was rudderless and adrift and only a "strong hand on the tiller" -- like Vladimir Putin's -- could keep the ship on course. The story worked while the economy was treading water -- thanks to Russia's disproportionate reliance on the export of raw materials. But as the global economy stumbles and another round of disappointment takes shape, it is a tragedy not to have the memory of moments of courage and promise to rely on.

Someone loves us all

There's a little frisson that hits the air when you are walking through Moscow and suddenly come upon a group of OMON riot police standing at attention glaring at passers-by. Then you hear the megaphone, and then, you find a public demonstration.

Yesterday, on the way back from the zoo, we stumbled upon a pro-Gaddafi demonstration put together by the LDPR by the monument to the 1905 Revolution outside the Ulitsa 1905 Goda Metro station. It was a little hard to believe at first, mostly because the most prominent photos of the Colonel were more than a few decades old. It just proves this guy is a fashion icon -- his image really changes depending on how you want to see him.

The speaker was reading off a list of European politicians who have condemned the West's intervention in Libya. One sign offered the peculiar statistic that 73 percent of Russians support the Libyan leader (although the thin crowd gathered suggests a definitely silent majority). The subtext, though, wasn't really about supporting a tribal strongman in North Africa, but against NATO and the United States. Frankly, it seems to me that if opposing one thing means you have to line up behind someone like Gaddafi, you ought to rethink your priorities.

Where else would they be?

This sign, spotted on Bolshaya Bronnaya Street a few days ago, kinda makes my head hurt. If your cyrillic is rusty, it says "Ruby Ray -- Interiors in da house."

The sidewalks of Moscow

Moscow can be a city of abrupt and sudden changes, and everytime I come back, there is a period of a few days when I try to figure out what's different. This year, for example, I noticed there are no longer any ads in the subway. I haven't looked into why, but I have noticed that a consequence seems to be that spray-painted ads on the sidewalk near subway stations have become the preferred means of commercial communication.

The decisions of the powerful are very mysterious. This year, the city government seems to have decided to replace all the city's sidewalks at once. The photo above is of some of the piles of tiles lined up along Ulitsa Pokrovka. This makes pedestrian traffic even more slow and annoying than usual -- this in a city that already hates pedestrians with a passion. 

Today, the Moscow Times started poking around in the matter. Perhaps the most important part is this observation, which I've heard as a rumor or a joke for several weeks, but appears to have a little more substance:

Complicating matters, City Hall has been forced to fend off media reports that Sobyanin's wife has a finger in the sidewalk pie, and experts have questioned whether the bricks will really be better for Moscow than good old asphalt.

Sobyanin rolled out the 4 billion ruble ($136 million) plan in late March, promising to replace the 4 million square meters of Moscow sidewalks within the Garden Ring with bricks over the next few years.

While more expensive, city officials point out that bricks have a longer life span, withstand rough weather better, are more environmentally friendly than asphalt, and are more pleasing to the eye.

Contractors, however, will not be able to meet this year's goal to replace 1.1 million square meters of sidewalk because brick production facilities cannot keep up with demand, First Deputy Mayor Pyotr Biryukov said earlier this month.

For the record, in our distant neck of Moscow, they've gone and replaced all the asphalt paving. As a result, Mila's scooter riding skills have increased dramatically.

'Boynya nomer pyat'

I found another one of those things in the attic at the dacha that complicates my understanding of the life of the mind in the Soviet Union. Like many summer cottages, ours also serves as an off-site storage place, with a ton of musty old books and journals lying about. There are tons of science journals (my father-in-law is a physicist), books about chess (my wife's grandfather was a fanatic), and a little used complete collected works of V.I. Lenin (pages of which are frequently used as kindling when the family makes shashlik).

They  also have a large number of crinkled copies of the literary journal Novy Mir, which had a fascinating run in the 1960s. Every time I look into a random one, I find something surprising.

This time, I opened the issue from March 1970, and discovered a lengthy excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which had been published only the year before.

It is particularly poignant, because that book was one of the nine books banned by a New York school district and led to the landmark 1982 Supreme Court case Island Trees School District v. Pico, which found that the First Amendment applies to school libraries too.

And it is particularly ironic that the book remains to this day, in America, the source of controversy for being too dangerous for young minds. The school board in Republic, Missouri, just this summer decided to ban it.

The Embankment

The view of the Smolenskaya Embankment, from Kutuzovsky Bridge, August 4. 

The voyage out

Compared to the last time we went abroad for a long time -- four years ago, with our little six-month old in tow -- this time leaving the States was not very dramatic. Last time, I remember going through those last few days at home taking mental notes of all the things I did, hoping to be able to remember them through the months away that lie ahead.

This time, I mostly only noticed how busy and tiring it all is. How many loose ends kept popping up, how I almost willfully tried to avoid thinking about what it means to leave home for a long time. So far, this trip has given me little chance to ruminate on the metaphysics of what we're up to. It has been a very immediate experience.

To give ourselves plenty of time to make our flight, we stayed the night before at the Days Inn near the airport. It is one of those airport hotels that is a lowest common denominator space. Everything felt small and cramped, cheap and plastic, easy to clean and yet somehow still filthy.

Our flight out was on Transaero, one of the newish Russian airlines that has recently begun the New York-Moscow route. We knew little about them, but the tickets, bought months ago, were priced alright. In our usual fashion, we made it to the gate at the last moment, and was surprised to see that the plane was a Boeing 747. Imagine the jumbo jet that took you on your first trip to London, way back in the 1980s or so... this was the exact airplane that the company must have bought from BA on eBay. The paint was cracked, the lights were dirty, the upholstery was threadbare. The only difference was that the seats were painfully close to one another. Now, this is a common refrain among air travellers, who have been slowly squeezed through the years. But this wasn't the case here: I was unable to put the tray down all the way, the seats were that close together.

But what was weirder was how Transaero chose to divide their space. As we walked onto the plane, we walked through a completely empty Business Class section. Empty. The company has a weird strategy for making money that seems a bit too rigid to make much money or to make customers happy. Apparently, according to the inflight magazine, the First Class sections in the front and on the upper deck are given over to full-blown elitny bullsh*t. Which explains the better dressed, friendlier, prettier stewardesses we caught brief glimpses of on the way in and out. They boast dining tables, beds, meeting rooms. But lord, when Mila accidentally walked close to that empty section, the stewards freaked out.

The usual finding our way around Russia process went as would be expected, with a predictable mix of new and various annoyances. First, there was the visa registration process. It is in some ways easier now -- you can do it at post offices. Trouble is, in actuality we had to visit three different post offices to find someone competent to do this, and then had to account for lunch hours, computer breakdowns, and half-assed attempts to fish for bribes. That took two days.

Then I came down with a massive bout of food poisoning that sent me off the earth for many days. Then there was a big editing project that needed my attention, and so since we arrived, I haven't gotten out much.

At the moment, my wife is on a business trip, Mila is at the dacha with her grandparents, and I find myself with time on my hands. I'm amazed at how quiet things can be. I'm still getting adjusted, thinking about what's next.

A poem for heading off

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.


Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.


The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.


(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)


-- Walt Whitman, from "Song of the Open Road."

Woody Allen chugs along to Paris

I always like say that my Russophilia killed my Francophilia. I grew up a young man with a Romantic streak, a fascination with Europe and travel, and all kinds of cultural aspirations. But after long experience with Russia, somehow Paris has become very quaint and safe, a bourgeois fantasyland.

So I started to tune out of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris sometime during the first real scene of dialogue, as Owen Wilson mooned to Rachel McAdams about how inspiring and perfect the whole damn place is. Especially how breathtaking it is in the rain. The rain, for some reason.

A few quick points:

-- Woody Allen, more or less, has been functionally retired to me since 1997. I think a great number of the fans of his early work would draw that line at different points. But at the very least, the guy has got to slow down. There might have been an interesting movie in here, which with some patience and teamwork and at least another year in the oven, it could have emerged into something really valuable.

-- There's really nothing wrong with rehearsal. Allen's way of having actors interact has become a mannered charade of how late 20th century New Yorkers interrupt each other, say "Really?" in a forced way, and awkwardly try to purposefully look at one another when they aren't yapping. Loved it all when Diane Keaton did it, but man, every new generation that tries it out just looks dumb.

-- Woody needs to have a drink with an actual conservative every now and then. I love making fun of wingers as much as anyone, but even I cringe at the caricatures Woody routinely trots out to get a few cheap laughs from the Upper West Side crowd.

-- I love the "Lost Generation" -- far more than most do. So I enjoyed all the imitations of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dali. But I realize they were cartoons, and I think I was kinda laughing at them, not with them.

-- "Prufrock is like my mantra!" ... Really? this line got through a rewrite?

-- I know everyone thinks it when they see it... so I'll say, *SPOILER ALERT* that you should do the math and figure out the age difference between the last two characters on the screen. (okay, I checked IMDB, it's 17 years). It's just gotten creepy already. Is he really so surrounded by yes men that he doesn't realize this? If this movie had any emotional honesty, Carla Bruni (one year older) should have appeared at the end.

-- So, New York, London, Barcelona, Paris... someone wake me up when he gets to St. Petersburg.

For the Fourth...

"Bunyan's Greeting"

It is the spring morning without benefit of young persons.

It is the sky that has never registered weeping or

    rebellion.

It is the forest full of innocent beasts. There are none who

blush at the memory of an ancient folly, none who hide

beneath dyed fabrics a malicious heart.

It is America, but not yet.

Wanted. Disturbers of public order, men without foresight

    or fear.

Wanted. Energetic madmen. Those who have thought

    themselves a body large enough to devour their

    dreams.

Wanted. The lost. Those indestructibles whom defeat can 

    never change. Poets of the bottle. Clergymen of a 

    ridiculous gospel, actors who should have been

    engineers and lawyers who should have been sea

    captains. Saints of circumstance, desperados,

    unsuccessful wanderers, all who can hear the 

    invitation of the earth. America, youngest of her

    daughters, awaits the barbarians of marriage.

-- W.H. Auden, from the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Paul Bunyan.

The prodigal Bruins fan

The puck I caught at a game at the Boston Garden in 1988. It came into our section off Gary Galley's stick.

I've been following the Bruins very closely these past few years, but very quietly. Mostly out of shame that I couldn't face everyone who has been with the team through these rough years. I feel like the hockey equivalent of those Pink-Hat crowds that showed up at Fenway in 2003.

But it still feels great to be back. And to have that unusual feeling, first time since 1990, of caring about the Bruins' season when it is 90 degrees outside.

The reasons I drifted away are quite common around here, as hockey in general and the Bruins in particular went through a pretty rough patch. Foremost, I had a lot of qualms with the direction Gary Bettmann took the league -- trying to turn a regional passion more like candlepin bowling into a ready-for-primetime mass market entertainment product. This was quixotic at best. When I was younger I developed a theory that you couldn't watch hockey on t.v. unless you played hockey yourself -- this was the days before huge plasma screen HD t.v.'s. I remember watching games with my uncle, a basketball fan, who would leave the room. "I don't even know what you're looking at," he would say. Bettmann's effort also came with a desire to pull the game from its heartland and force it on the Sun Belt. I've always maintained, and frankly, I still do, that hockey doesn't belong in places that don't have naturally occurring ice.

There were a host of aesthetic problems as well with the game in the 90s. The dreaded neutral zone trap was as bad a problem as we all remember. The league's effort to clean-up the goonishness may have gone too far, taking away a lot of the game's personality. And the fact that every team suddenly decided it needed teal and a cartoon character on its jersey made it a giant circus.

But ultimately, there are a number of reasons why Boston fans in particular might pull away. The Jacobs family, the consummate skin-flints they were, were unable to put a decent product on the ice. I loved the Garden, flimsy seats and obstructed views and all. I only went to the TD Bank Fleet Center Whatever-you-call-it one time, and it was more than enough. And we lost a great rivalry when the Hartford Whalers moved.

More than that, we fans had gone through a lot. We'd lived through Cam Neely's freak injury, and watched loyally as Ray Bourque's career fruitlessly ticked away. When the team hit hard times, it was really hard to go through emotionally. Don't forget, we were all tortured Red Sox fans as well. And the Celtics were going through the very hard post-Bird, McHale, etc. years. And the Patriots, though already on showing signs of life, were still the comprehensive laughing-stock of the NFL. At some point, there's only so much you can put up with.

So many things combined to restore an idea of what the game could be. The most important was my daughter. I've been conscientiously bringing her to all manner of sporting events at Williams, getting her to understand what they are and hopefully begin to decide what looks right to her. Her favorite by a wide margin is hockey. She can happily plant herself on my shoulders and get through an entire game, which knowing a preschooler attention span is remarkable.

And this past winter, I started playing again. Just pickup hockey around the rink a few times during the week. Just enough to get my legs back and remember how bad I was at it. Still, it's been great. It reminds you of how fun life was up in New England when hockey is a part of it.