SF: North Beach

No matter how hard I try to repackage it, my idea of San Francisco is permanently peopled and shaped by the Beat Generation. I know well that the place wasn't discovered by Kerouac and Cassady driving over the Bay Bridge, like a pair of irresponsible East Coast Columbuses. I know that California has welcomed generations of vagrants, crooks, and artists. But with any idea, you have to come in somewhere. And this is how I arrived.

I didn't make it to City Lights until my last day in the city, but there was certainly no way I would miss it. The legendary bookstore and publishing house founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been on my mind for decades now — at least since 1989, when my freshman English teacher came to class one afternoon with a beret and bongoes and read Ferlinghetti's poems to us. Despite the Maynard G. Krebs props, Mr. Cook seemed to love and respect the work, which unlike everything else we read in the course, was alive. He told us that Ferlinghetti was still alive, and still had this bookstore in San Francisco, and you could still probably find him there. Wearing a beret, no doubt. To a kid still stuck in a small New England milltown worldview, that was an amazing concept.

When I made it to the store the night before we left, the sun was gone and it was drizzling. Before heading in I crossed "Kerouac Alley" to visit Vesuvio, the charming little dive where the boys did some of their famous drinking. It was just after work, the bar was pretty crowded. There were two groups of what were obviously tourists on some kind of literary pub crawl, filling the big tables and looking around while making slight small talk to each other. I squeezed up to the bar, between two groups of office women talking earnestly about their days at work. Way off in the corner, where the bar met the wall, there was a young man in a button-down shirt and glasses reading a giant book open in front of him. It could have been me, but I'm the kind of loner at bars who pulls out a notebook and starts scribbling all the time.

I like the place very much, even though it was crowded and loud, and managed to have installed gigantic plasma tvs that were showing sports. That, ironically, is one of the only things I remember about the first time I arrived at Vesuvio in 2004, when I watched some of the Athens Olympics there.

Back over to City Lights, which is so much smaller and quainter and less crowded than I expected. To my surprise, the big event seemed to be an anniversary run of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, published by City Lights 50 years ago. It had a fancy new edition in bright blue and orange, and it included in the back reproductions of the correspondence between O'Hara and Ferlinghetti. I sat on a stool upstairs and read the whole thing, and felt perfectly at home. Despite the sheer amount of time I've spent in them, many kinds of bookstores feel alien to me — except, oddly, used bookstores which have a kind of down market charm that makes me think that time has vanished.

City Lights has an astonishing poetry section: full and broad and evangelical in the way it welcomes you and practically admonishes you to stay and have your mind opened a little. "Sit down and read something!" the sign commands. There are photos of Mayakovsky and Corso on the walls (and Yevtushenko, alas. No one's perfect). It is one of those places that remind you that poetry is important and matters, and isn't necessarily as frippy and dispensable as daily life can lead you to believe. It is a kind of temple to remind you of why poetry is important to you, and I dearly wish there were more places like it around.

I learned from a few other books about the lives the gang led in San Francisco, and the realization that Allen Ginsburg wrote "Howl" in an apartment on Pine Street, which is just behind the place where we were staying on Bush Street. That the Moloch he wrote about, the red-eyed monster in the smoke and mist, was the Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Powell Street that we'd walked past dozens of times already. That the hum of the cable car line in the street was the rhythm of that second canto of the poem.

It was a very literary block. From our window we could see the alley, where I key event in The Maltese Falcon happened (Dashiell Hammett Lane was right next to us). A plaque a few buildings away revealed that Robert Louis Stevenson had lived there for a little while. But the revelation about "Howl" was really amazing to me. I had always imagined it as a great New York poem — the references to Harlem and Rockland. Putting it there on that block, in that very specific location opened it up for me. A stew of very specific images and sounds had been born, something that nearly achieved the level of the universal. This poem that I read one afternoon in my high school library before baseball practice, shortly after Mr. Cook's performance. When I remembered those strange, long lines, those explicit bits that embarrassed me, the idea of freedom and space and future that poetry has in its guts.

SF: Haight Ashbury

Broken Clock, August 2014

With a few hours on my own, I took a walk around Haight Ashbury to see what's left of this place that has such a large presence in our idea of counterculture. What stuck out about the place to me the most, the idea that I couldn't shake no matter how much I tried, was the amount of bad energy that swirls around the place.

A big part of that is in how the place still attracts and draws people who are looking to live in a certain way. Walking up past Buena Vista Park, you smell marijuana and you can't figure out from where. No big problem there, but you see the folks huddled around — there was a fierce, cold drizzle bearing down from the ocean. I was a bit stunned by how young many of them seemed. They are living some kind of fantasy of self-realization, but the reality looks more like a very sad joke.

This particular vibe around the neighborhood is hardly new. Joan Didion explored it at great length in her magazine piece "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" about the human cost of the "Summer of Love." For awhile I thought her tone and focus was excessively negative — that she was more interested in making fun of Jerry Garcia than hearing his music. But it's really there. The way she identifies in the inarticulate longings and hopes that characterize the people that went there and tried to make a life, and how that is a product of our consumer culture that has only gotten much, much worse in the past few decades.

There was, of course, something self-indulgent and self-absorbed about the whole thing. It is one of those things in the art and music of the period that I try to ignore. Though sometimes, it just pops up. I happened to come across an article quoting Garcia and the Dead upon hearing of the death of their friend Janis Joplin in 1970. There was no talk about the tragic, avoidable, and stupid loss of a brilliant talent. It was all about how that was her trip, man, and ain't nothing nobody could do about it. It sounded monstrous.

There is a weird, complacent danger of "finding your tribe." On Haight Street I spent some time at an anarchist bookstore, and it was a very warm and pleasant place for me. All the books were interesting, all the t-shirts proclaimed sentiments I would proclaim were I the type to proclaim things on my clothing. There was a whole rack of small press pamphlets and broadsides — a scene that appeared more vibrant than their minuscule circulations would suggest. I bought a book by Viktor Serge and was happy to be a part of the solution.

There was a young man at the counter chatting with the fellow that worked there —volunteered there, rather. He was gushing, asking about writers and books and where he could find them. The guy at the register had walrus-y sideburns and was glad to talk. The young man explained that he was passing through town — just traveling from one place to another, you know? But he'd definitely be back. The walrus-y fellow piously declared that the Haight was the only part of the city worth anything anymore.

Which based on the rest of my wandering around the neighborhood is a pretty wild assertion to make. If he said Berkeley, or Oakland, I'd buy it, but the rest of the area seemed warped and frozen in place, but in a preposterous way.

I'm fascinated by what Haight Ashbury means to certain generations. I feel very much for what drove all those kids there in 1967, but even more so for those that felt the pull but stayed put. Much has been made of the way that the "Summer of Love" was inflated, exploited, condemned, and killed by mass media. But the message of it must have been very powerful for young people trapped in sad cloudy milltowns, or the military, or any of the less exciting parts of the country. It must have been very important to know in the back of your mind that there was the idea of escape — as you dragged yourself through school, or a tour in the Army, or a shift at the factory so you could pay your suddenly adult-looking stack of bills for your new family. Sometimes ideas have power.

So what would that person who stayed make of what the Haight has become. It is part tourist trap, part magnet for purposefully lost children. It is a regular procession of shops selling everything tie-dyed, with water pipes and mood rings and vintage Quicksilver Messenger Service posters. But even that message, its own history, is getting a few whacks in strange directions. The sonic firmament is shifting — lots of Grateful Dead, of course. Janis Joplin remains big, and there is a definite presence of Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles are there ex officio. But the plot starts to get confused with Bob Marley — now we are interpreting the spirit a bit more broadly. But it goes wildly off with Led Zeppelin. This story belongs to no one anymore.

And progress and capitalism diligently, relentlessly clomps on. Haight Ashbury is in San Francisco, and markets wait for no man in the United States. I strayed off Haight onto Ashbury Street to find the Grateful Dead house, the cheap dilapidated rowhouse where the whole band and its various hangers-on and friends lived in a brief kind of communal harmony (for a little while at least). It was easy to find the house, thanks to the impromptu sidewalk graffiti featuring Dead iconography (and Bob Marley, for whatever reason). But the house itself is just another amazing old Frisco Victorian. With huge windows and fresh paint and plenty of urban appeal. When you walk off Haight Street today, you are transported in ways Owsley and the Diggers could have never imagined — you are dropped right back into some of the most expensive real estate on earth.

Haight Ashbury, August 2014

SF: Unlikely Geography

Bay, bridge, and Pacific fog

The first thing you notice is the weather. If you land in Oakland you see it before you feel it: the great Pacific fog hanging over the city ready to engulf it. In August, it is chill, fogs, and wind, of different degrees and variety depending on where you are, but always there.

The Chronicle, in its weather boxes, absurdly lists the day's high temperatures as between 62 and 90 degrees. Every day.

Given the unlikely geography of San Francisco it is amazing there is a city there at all. At Mission Delores, the first Spanish settlement in the area, there are prints of what the land looked like when Europeans first appeared. The peninsula was all hills and dunes and weird strange weather. And no one even found until hilariously late because the Golden Gate was hidden by fog so often. Most of the local Native Americans shunned the place, preferring to spend their time in any number of friendlier locations around the Bay.

It takes a lot of collective enterprise to pull of a city in a place like that, perhaps not on the scale of Venice or Amsterdam or St. Petersburg, but the same idea. That's why the Golden Gate Bridge is such an apt symbol for the city. It is a thing of astonishing scale — about 1.7 miles long, with towers that soar to 746 feet. It was designed and built in the very teeth of the Depression, when the global economy had completely cratered, almost as a deliberate act of will. And even more so, why was it built? It connects the city to... Marin County? Was a crowded ferry to Sausalito really such a burden? If you think about it, it is hard to imagine a national project that was less necessary.

But when you see it, you forget about all that. It's like the space program in a sense. One of those things societies do just to remind themselves of their potential as a species.

A series of words about San Francisco

Powell Street

On the premise that no travel should be wasted by not writing about it, I'm going to post a few small pieces about what we saw and did on our trip to the City by the Bay last month. It's taken me a while to get around to it — probably because I can't seem to get this fall underway, because the summer felt so short. But now it's back to work.

Rain in July

A passing shower this evening over our garden.

When Brooklyn is not enough

There was a time when going to Pearl Street was a big part of my summers. During my summers back home when I was in college, I'd usually make it a few times to the Northampton night club, which was a part of the indie rock circuit at the time. This summer, with a month to myself while the wife and daughter are visiting relatives, I kept a close eye on the listings. I noticed last week a show of a few bands from Brooklyn, so I drove down for dinner and to see what the kids are up to today.

I think the last time I went to Pearl Street it was to see the Swedish band The Soundtrack of Our Lives, which I and maybe ten other people seemed to enjoy. The club was the same as I remembered — filthy and dark, but not as smelly as I remembered thanks to the smoking ban. The security was absurd, the drinks expensive, the sound wretched — all the same.

Their schedule this summer has, more or less, sucked. Ordinarily I wouldn't be super excited to see a bunch bands from Brooklyn, but it was honestly the only thing that remotely caught my attention. And I don't really know why — maybe because I like MGMT, and one of the bands were friends with them in college. Maybe because New York still might mean something as a creative hub. But it was really weird how each of the bands frequently told us they were from Brooklyn (not New York, Brooklyn), as if that was a desperately critical piece of information we had to drill into our heads or all would be lost. I would love to know what these guys think Brooklyn means out here in the sticks, but I bet it's not what they think it means.

The first band was an outfit called Total Slacker, which to my amusement/horror is a 90s nostalgia act. That is, their bassist wore a t-shirt with Fox Mulder's "I Want to Believe" poster on it. Lead guitarist/singer Tucker Rountree borrows a bit from Kurt Cobain's look and Thurston Moore's voice. I enjoyed their set — knots of noise and feedback, plenty of drones and grooves. I actually sort of liked them, but I never thought the culture of my youth would be a retro throwback for the young'uns. At least not yet.

It is a much richer experience to see bands in small, out-of-the-way, divey joints like Pearl Street. You see a lot just waiting around — who's fighting with their chick, who needs a smoke, who is drinking maybe too much before the show. There are these little moments — Rountree walked right past on his way to the stage, and we made eye contact for a second, nodded and said "hey." This sort of matters, I realized this is a guy who is aware that he's doing something that involves other people. That small human connection makes you root for them. I still have a soft spot for Jen Trynin based on that one time I saw her at Pearl Street in 1994.

The second act up was Junior Prom, a pair of hilariously photogenic young men with an array of synthesizers that do this hopped up disco-skiffle thing. I admired their energy, which is the apparent result of the naive hope and optimism that comes between your debut EP and first LP. Everything is looking up for these guys — or at least to these guys. They might make it, or they might disappear. I can't predict which.

Then we can to the main act, a group called Bear Hands (from Brooklyn, no one can stress this enough). I almost didn't go just because of their name alone (speaking of which, geezus, these were the worst band names I've ever seen in my life). They've been around for a few years, and are touring on their second album. They have a couple of videos on YouTube — but these days making a pro-looking video is just about the easiest thing you can do. But there's very little buzz about them in the usual places.

The kindest way to describe their set is to say that it didn't really connect. It starts with Dylan Rau, their singer, who keeps his eyes firmly shut and sings in a mannered kind of yelp that feels like a particularly insolent kind of karaoke. It was clear they were tired; they've been touring all year, and have a lot more ahead of them in the next few months.

It wasn't at all what I expected. Based on their albums and videos, I figured they would realize that their hook-heavy songs really need a bit of Junior Prom's energy to come across. But it wasn't there. They opened with "Agora," a decent song that somewhat thoughtfully deals with agoraphobia. But the cheerlessly professional version they offered was almost sad. The same thing for their other single, "Giants," which is really a downer they way they played it.

They played dutifully, then said goodnight. I don't have any idea what becomes of this band. Maybe they get worked into an episode of Girls. Maybe they land a VW commercial. As it stands, if your capsule bio says more about where you are from and other bands you sound like, you probably aren't thriving. I don't know what they can do to change it, and I suspect they don't know either.

Happens to us all, kids. But God, just shut up about Brooklyn already.

A stupid game

I've been slowly getting through Orlando Figes' recent book about the Crimean War, seeing how relevant that part of the world has become again. What strikes you first is just how much of an anomaly the Soviet experience was, and how quickly Russia jumped back to earlier times. To when Russia was a socially retarded, violent, paranoid feudal state, with a ruthless top-down power structure, a complicit national faith with delusions of being the next Roman empire, and a swaggering sense of racial superiority.

It's often tempting to leave them alone and deal with them as best we can, but what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight yesterday shows what happens when this bullshit spills over. 298 people who had nothing to do with this stupid little farce in eastern Ukraine were blown out of the sky, and setting aside all the usual caveats about what we know and don't know, the moral dimension is very clear. To Putin's power structure this is all a big f-ing game. It's jaw-dropping how creative the bootlicking Russian media has been happy to publicly fantasize about what might have happened.

The news yesterday was a huge shock to those of us who have continued to follow the news from Ukraine closely. It has felt for awhile that the situation was beginning to sort itself out. That with Crimea firmly in hand, Putin wasn't all that interested in a huge flare-up in the east. And the quiet support from Moscow was worrying the separatists enough that they began whining about being abandoned. And the world was beginning to see what was happening — that these separatists were a small, violent minority made up of the usual unemployable lot of track-suit wearing losers you find getting drunk in housing projects all over Eastern Europe.

I hope the world can maintain a sense of outrage about this, and that there will be real consequences for this regime. But I don't expect that will happen. The history of civilian aviation is full of moments like this — when airline passengers have been murdered by misunderstanding — and nothing really changed.

Putin and his crew don't care what the world thinks. Holy Russia is beyond reproach, and all that matters is the integrity of the internal "power vertical." And worse, as David Remnick pointed out on the New Yorker website: "Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control."

A Day at the Space Center; or, Lamenting our Lost Space Age

Playground of the Musks: although historic Launchpad 39-A looks empty and still now, SpaceX has the commercial lease to launch from there in the future.

Perhaps I'm paranoid, but it felt like there was something suspicious in the way our tour guide at Kennedy Space Center kept talking about Elon Musk. In my last post, I gushed about how much I enjoyed our visit to the center, but hearing so many times about how this South African billionaire equity dude was a "visionary" and the future of our space program seemed inappropriate.

Every museum is a window into the time and place where it exists. So, while the American Museum of Natural History is a case study in the "benefits" and contradictions of modern American plutocracy, the lesson at KSC seems to be the ways Americans are avoiding the subject of how wealth polarization is an integral part of our national decline, and how it is a process we refuse to acknowledge, let alone understand or attempt to address.

Everything at the space center is a celebration of a specific moment in American history. That period of a few decades — which is emphatically now in the past — when we had a sense of common purpose, and the ingenuity and motivation to do amazing things. We look back at what we did with awe and pride, but when we turn to the present and the future, we have… well, Elon Musk.

We are now at a very low point of the history of our space program — though you hate to say "the lowest" point because it certainly could get worse. We have to rely on the Russian's to get to and from space. The Chinese have the kind of "let's show the world who's boss" gumption that we had 50 years ago. And the void is filled with Musk's SpaceX, and other companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Sierra Nevada. Each of these is a perfect representation of late-stage capitalism: entities designed to create value for shareholders, not to produce a profit while doing cool and useful things for all of us.

These companies alone are what makes KSC what it always has been — a working spaceport and the 20th century equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg. That's important to the tour guides who now talk about CEOs with the same kind of awe we once reserved for John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, and for the entire regional economy, which with zero irony calls itself the "Space Coast." Guys like Musk are the only viable future in sight — a future that is also seductively exciting and profitable as well.

This is the great fever dream of privatization — the twisted logic that things that ought to be free of the greed and callousness of the market should be handled by anything other than the government. It is a dream shared by the stunted adolescent boys who think Ayn Rand is a great thinker, and the centrist Democrats who so admire their own genius and virtue that of course they should get fabulously rich solving the world's problems.

But to have these thoughts at Kennedy is an insult to the memory of what Americans did there. You see very clearly, now that nothing is really being launched from all those disused pads spread all over, that the glory days are well past. That the practical reality of what SpaceX and the others propose (not the fanciful p.r. chatter about going to Mars), is merely redoing what we figured out how to do 40 years ago.

The heroic Space Age celebrated at KSC is the product of a stream of circumstances in the post-War years, when most of the world had blown itself to rubble and the U.S. completely remade the global economic system to our advantage. Back in the day when we had the will to dream big, the willingness to pay our f--king taxes so we could have nice things, and the trust that collective action could do things like send us to the moon. When we had a rival in the USSR that pushed us stay on track.

But that's all well over. We've turned into a third-rate plutocracy where NASA has to beg hillbilly congressmen who believe in the literal truth of fairy tales from the Book of Genesis for change from the sofa.

Space is gonna do me good

The early ones

As we drove across Merritt Island, which in addition to being the home of the Kennedy Space Center is also a giant nature preserve, we kept count of the alligators we saw in the drainage trench beside the road. The idea of wild alligators is a trippy one for northerners, but Florida is like that in every single way. You get to have fun down there with sharp contrasts — palm trees all over, egrets and herons hanging around, air temperature that isn't too cold. The land is lush, packed, and green, and it is a bit jarring to think that it is from there that humans blasted off to explore the cold vastness of space.

We went to Cape Canaveral on our last trip to Florida with Mila and my mom, and it was something I'd been looking forward to for years. That place is deeply burned in my memory, because I must have been about seven years old myself when I went there. That whole trip is pretty much welded into my consciousness — right from the flight on Eastern airlines, which was quite an odyssey to me. About the space center I remember lots of open spaces, and a kind of bright sunlight that made everything glow in a weird way. I remember the sandy soil and sharp prickly grass, and the rockets lying around at all angles around like broken pipes.

That trip we also had a chance to watch a space shuttle launch. It was a few days later, and it was from Daytona Beach up the coast, but I remember being told about it and being very excited. I was a bit disappointed when the thing itself was just watching a long matchstick arc into the sky over the ocean, along with a distant rumble. I was expecting something more akin to what you saw on t.v., so I was a bit disappointed. I tried hard to remember that feeling as I got all excited explaining things to Mila, to not take her occassional indifference personally.

I realized the challenge right off the bat, when we signed up for a bus tour of the vast facility, driving out to the old launch pads by the sea, which at this point are really not much more than disused industrial sites. The idea of what happened there requires a massive act of imagination, and I'm not sure if I convinced her it was worth her time.

She bravely got through the experience, but I was fascinated throughout. NASA has been the repository for so many dreams of what it means to be on the technological cutting edge that seeing the actual buildings where it happens is very weird. At the center of the base is a non-descript cluster of buildings called the "Industrial Area," which features the center's headquarters and its operations building. That's the one where astronauts would train and be quarantined just before their missions, the one they walked out of to the bus for the drive to the pad. The buildings are almost comically common, like some backwater office complex. And it is hard to believe that men and women could plan and execute the launch of people to the moon and back from from a plain building make of cinder blocks, with air conditioners droning in the windows, and blinds keeping out the intense afternoon sun. With a few alligators lolling about not too far away.

And there are the hilarious contrasts down there that you can't really appreciate. The Vehicle Assembly Building is one of the most interesting structures on earth — the world's largest single-story facility, with nearly the most interior volume on earth, and at 526 feet high believed to be the tallest building outside a city. That last fact is what grabs you — you stare at the place and realize there is something up with it, but it feels like some kind of optical illusion because there is no context whatsoever. 

Bigger than it looks

The KSC experience really takes off with the exhibits, which are slick but not simple, and dump a lot of information at you in a flashy and fun way. There's lots of engineering and aviation science, and well-done history. You get a real sense of the enormous leap between the early Mercury-Redstone rockets of the Mercury program and the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo program just a few years later — the jump from modified ICBMs with people strapped to the top designed to throw you off the face of the earth, and actual spacecraft designed to throw you out of earth's orbit. They do an amazing job of presenting just how amazing and strange the Apollo program was — that we really haven't seen or done anything like it before or since.

If there is a disappointing angle to all this, it has to be the coverage of the Mercury and Gemini programs, which are assigned to their own pavilion near the entrance. The exhibit feels campy in a way that disrespects what these these guys in aluminum foil suits with their buzzcuts and cool expressions represented.

The new big thing at KSC is the space shuttle "Atlantis," which has been housed in its own brand new pavilion since last year. The shuttle program gets the respect it deserves, which had definitely faded in the years of routine missions to haul up satellites and space station modules. The exhibit makes you realize what a technical achievement the program was, and that there was never anything routine about what they were doing.

As you can see, the visit brought out something unusually boyish in me, and I'm aware how silly it seems. Earlier this spring, I took Mila to hear two astronauts speak at MCLA, and there was something about their demeanor and the way they spoke that was timelessly earnest. It was in the way they rattled off statistics about mission specs, payloads, and the mechanics of keeping yourself alive in an absurdly hostile environment. And at other times they became awkwardly poetic as they described watching whole continents pass under their eyes, or about the giddy sense of purpose that comes with being able to see the whole earth as a frail little ball hanging in vast black nothing.

KSC has created a space that allows you to appreciate all that, and frees you from the obligation to be an eye-rolling teenager. For me, I realized that if you look at it with a squint, the entire space program doesn't have to have been about what I cynically assumed it was. Not a public relations branch of the military/industrial complex, nor a heroic advance in the science of understanding our universe, nor about practical stuff like better communications and weather satellites. In a sense, it is a great big poetry program designed to make us wonder in a secular, humanist, nondenominational way about what we are and what we could be. About the great things we can do when we inspire one another, and share the burden of designing our technology and paying our bills. To feel pride and astonishment about what we did in the past, and to think constructively about our future.

Jeez, that's corny. They must've put something in the water.

The stones of San Juan

The way these things work, I didn't get to see a lot of San Juan — let alone Puerto Rico — when we passed through last month. We spent most of our day climbing around the fortress at San Cristobal. For fans of fortifications, like me, this is plenty fun — even if I had to play up the pirate attack angle to keep my daughter's attention. Here's are the coastal defenses of the old city, looking over toward El Morro and the entrance to the bay.

Around the Homosassa River

Had a few weeks of heavy work (eh, freelancing), and am now down south in Florida for a visit. Today spent the afternoon on an airboat poking around the Homosassa River, seeing the inlets and islands out around that patch of the Gulf Coast.  

Russia as it was, as it will be

I've been looking at that last post above, and how much things have changed since then. It's been an amazing, and profoundly depressing few weeks for those of us who have an interest in Russia and its future. I've been paralyzed over how to begin to make sense of all this here, my attitude and fears about what's happening keep changing — becoming reliably more bleak.

There has been a lot of interesting commentary about all this. I think Julia Ioffe at the New Republic did the best job of capturing just how sad it has been to watch from afar this descent into madness:

"Westerners rightly know Russia as a font of absurdity, but lately, it’s been hard to keep up: I’ve been trying to write this post for a solid week now, and have been constantly derailed by the increasingly bizarre and worrying developments coming from the Trans-Eurasian Development Belt."

She ticks off some of the nonsense. The absurdities issued by Kremlin flunkeys in the Duma, the belligerent posturing of the neckless tough guys that dominate the Russian conversation, the inability to discern just where all this ends.

"Here’s what’s scary about this: this is all being done, according to various reports, without any consultation with anyone outside Putin’s shrinking inner circle of old KGB spooks. The economic elites most likely to suffer from a plummeting ruble and sanctions have been shut out of the decision-making process. This is all about intangibles, the things that reason can't hook, the things impervious to logic and reasoning and even the cynical algebra of geopolitical interests. This is about pride and values and the Trans-Eurasian Development Belt. 

And, yes, all of this is familiar and increasingly terrifying, but to whom? To you and me and an increasingly besieged island of Moscow liberals? Because, terrifyingly, familiarly, all of this works. The method has been tried many times, and it is true: Putin’s approval ratings have grown to their highest level in three years."

For 15 years, Putin in plain sight wrote the blueprint and assembled an apparatus for a new kind of autocratic oppression. And now we're watching it click and whir into life.

Power stupefies

Watching events unfold in the Ukraine over the past few days I've been working over in my head a single question: Was there a specific moment in the last few years when former President Viktor Yanukovich said to himself, "Screw it, I'm going to go ahead and put in the pirate ship-themed dining room and start a private zoo. There's no way that could possibly come back to haunt me."

It is a moldy old saying that power corrupts, when it seems more precisely that power stupefies. Something about being a ruling oligarch makes you think there's no way you could ever be knocked off, and looking from afar, it is hard to believe anyone could be that deluded. It is probably a bit like winning lottery — everyone is convinced they aren't the guy who is going to go bankrupt in a few years after they win, but it keeps happening over and over again.

The Ukraine is a great case study in the ways things just don't change, and how patterns keep repeating in new and wonderful ways. So I watch thing with a very cynical eye, and chortle when I hear commentators in our stunningly earnest and ignorant American media declare, "Well Joe, I tell ya all this started in the 1930s with Stalin." (Only Americans are young enough at heart to say things like that).

I'm incredibly pessimistic about things because I've been following things there closely, and I remember the Orange Revolution. That last outpouring of popular unrest in the Ukraine was enough to scare Russia to its core, and convince Americans that the Ukraine was all set for the future and didn't need anymore attention. But as events unfolded, the new power structure revealed itself very quickly to be just as venal and greedy as the last one. To say, "they blew it" is an understatement. So the stunning events of last weekend were a real downer. I wish it were possible for the public persona of Yulia Tymoshenko to immediate skip from her heroic release from prison and go straight to the cheesy "Evita" theater spectacle featuring her hairdo. Too bad she's going to insist on proving how corrupt she is all over again — and perhaps someday the masses can take selfies in her gold-plated hot tub or with her vintage car collection.

With leaders like these there's not a lot to hope for. Yanukovich was a singular case, such a clown that even Russian is embarrassed to know him (I sincerely hope we someday find out that his tragicomic flight from the mobs included him dressing up as a nun and slipping out a hotel kitchen). But the opposition is reduced to Tymoshenko's flunkies, some nationalist groups that remind you just how scary the far right is in central and eastern Europe, and a celebrity boxer. If only it were just as easy as deciding between owing your soul to Russian oligarch or the German bankers.

The powerful act stupid because they don't believe things will change. At that level, you have to create such world views or you don't function. And I think the rest of us feel it too. All through last week, when the streets were on fire and the bodies were stacking up in the hotel lobbies, it felt like that feeling amped up to 11. How could this possibly end? how could anything change?

And then on the weekend, it did. Everything we will hear in the coming months will suggest that it was the only outcome possible, but of course it wasn't, and it certainly never felt that way as it happened. Scenes feel like they'll go on forever until they don't. Growing up I didn't believe in the possibility of a generation defining event like Pearl Harbor — I thought that right up to Sept. 10, 2011. It always comes as a surprise. Vladimir Putin and Jamie Dimon take note.

'She should just talk'

I have two thoughts about the sudden and sad passing of poet and writer Maggie Estep. I can't admit to having been a particular fan, but for those few years in the 90s, if you were an English major, you pretty much had to have an opinion about her and the entire downtown Gen X poetry slam thing.

First, if I knew back then just how fickle, fleeting, and rare pop culture's interest in poetry was going to be, I wouldn't have spent quite so much time making fun of it. Looking back, it's incredibly hard to believe that a) MTV was once a cutting edge and trend-setting cultural institution, and b) had a more than passing interest in the doings of Lower East Side poets.

While it was happening, while poets were appearing on television channels aimed at cool young people, I thought the barbarians were at the gates. To me, poetry was a Very Serious Thing. Artists like Maggie Estep were not only misappropriating the legacy of the Beat Generation, but were making poetry shallow, silly and — ugh — popular. Sure, it didn't last, but I would love to know how many readers and writers she inspired with her work. I can begrudge now that what she was doing was interesting in its engagement with technology, and awareness of the collision of cultures that the media environment at the time introduced to one another. And I think it was brave, in the sense that she had to put up with snobs like me laughing up our sleeves (but despite admitting all that, the weird cadences of "slam poetry" still drive me straight up the wall).

The second thing is that I'm grateful I got to spend a few minutes with that famous Beavis & Butthead clip, which Estep's obits note was one of the biggest audiences her work had. It's funny what happens when you grow up. In high school and college, I used to love the cartoons and put up with the commentary on videos. Now that you can watch the videos online, and the commentary pieces are unavailable because of copyright baloney, I realize just how absurdly insightful and hilarious those parts were. What I wouldn't give to find somewhere on the internet the original, unedited B&B's of my youth!

Where Amiri Baraka began

When I heard about the death of Amiri Baraka this month, a throwaway line about him from my favorite jumped to mind. In a funny way, it captured a moment in American literature, the kind of place that New York was in the 50s and 60s and would never be again, when it was a watershed for thousands of ideas and schools of thought. The rest of Baraka's career is one path, but a pretty narrow one considering where he started.

To put Baraka's life and work into perspective, you probably couldn't do any better than Questlove, who wrote a perceptive appreciation of the man in the Times. He described the time the Roots worked with him on a project:

We were at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, and Mr. Baraka came in to add his vocals, which consisted of reading a poem he had written, “Something in the Way of Things (In Town).” I listened to the track again Friday, after he died, and I hear so many things hiding in the corners of the poem and his performance of it. There are traces of early poetry mentors like Charles Olson, there’s a little William S. Burroughs, there’s a reminder of how he opened the door for poetry to speech to recording long before the Last Poets or Gil Scott-Heron. There’s a devotion to making language mean something, even if — especially if — that something isn’t safe and preapproved.

Mr. Baraka got himself into trouble sometimes with the things he said, but then he got himself out, too, and it wasn’t his fault if you decided to pay attention only to the first part. He had an unshakable devotion to change, even if his ideas were imperfect. That was what kept him committed to refinement and improvement, both within and outside himself.

That's a remarkable swirl of influences and ideas. And I respect Questlove's effort to explain rather than glide over some of the more problematic parts of his bio. I'm not sold on it — you are responsible for your words, and deserve to be judged by them. Baraka's reprehensible Sept. 11 poem is a poisonous stew of paranoia, ignorance, and laziness. I'm a free speech absolutist, so I don't agree with the silencing hatred the poem met, but as a reader and a citizen… I mean, if you are going to behave like an anti-Semitic fool in public, I'll draw my own conclusions.

And I agree with all that about making language mean something. There are a lot of earnest, Dead Poets Society sort of things I could say. Embarrassing things like: poetry is a thing that brings us together as a community, it is the embodiment of a higher sort of communication that embraces emotions and instincts, as well as the genius of language with its music, beauty, and freedom. It always fails when it stoops to division and separation — which is why "Somebody Blew Up America?" is a kind of crime for just being a monumentally shitty poem.

I've always wanted to think that at some level he knew better. That he remembered when he was young perhaps touched with a little optimism to go along with his emerging talent.

That throwaway line I'm thinking about comes from Frank O'Hara and his (perhaps?) satirical manifesto, "Personism." His mock movement "was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person."

It's a very simple idea, two friends having lunch together, friends from wildly different backgrounds or race, class, and sexuality who were connected by their common lot as artists. That "by the way" is key: it could have been Roi, if circumstances had allowed, and it's no big deal one way or another. He was accepted for who he was, but he turned his back on it. And his work suffered badly because of it.

My favorite music of 2013

I suppose, to the extent that I "resolve" anything anymore, I'd like to pay more attention to the blog because…. well, someone ought to. So with that in mind, I found lying around my half-hearted list of best albums of 2013:

Things I really, really looked forward to and guess I like fine and all but… I like their other stuff so very much more…

The National, Trouble Will Find Me

Since High Violet is probably the best album to come out of the Great Recession, this was bound to disappoint a little. But good on them for staying in the right lane.

MGMT, MGMT

The first band of their generation that made me think the kids will be alright. But it seems they're in one of those "turning in on themselves" kinda moments. I can't wait until they come back!

Deerhunter, Monomania

I listened the heck out of Halcyon Digest, and they did such a good job exploring roots rock and melody etc. that it turned out to be a little boring. 

David Bowie, The Next Day

It's exciting he's still doing important, quality stuff after all these years. But he already worked through this stuff on Hours…

Nick Cave, Push the Sky Away

Just another Nick Cave album (a very high compliment).

I had no idea there was a chance I'd like this, but go fig, here we are...

Queens of the Stone Age, …Like Clockwork

Yes! I do like guitars!

Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City

Those super-catchy, skittery rhythms from pretentious Columbia nerds used to really bug me. But it's weird how well they're growing up.

Daft Punk, Random Access Memories

Hearing Wilco cover "Get Lucky" at Solid Sound last summer sealed how fantastic a pop song they've created.

Lorde, Pure Heroin

That song about Maybachs is hard to get out of your head, and I hope the point hits home (not a chance).

Despite the hype, only a 'm'yeah, s'alright'

Savages, Silence Yourself

Not a great sign when I'm more impressed by the layout of their feature profile on Pitchfork.

Very nice, but are they trying too hard?:

Haim, Days Are Gone

Sounds like a rockin' Christine McVie solo album.

No idea why everyone like this so much:

Chvrches, The Bones of What You Believe

This is like an entire album of interstitial music from Girls.

My favorites of 2013

Speedy Ortiz, Major Arcana

And listen, this album was recorded in Easthampton, Massachusetts. I can't even process how mind-blowing that is to me. My head hurts.

Arcade Fire, Reflektor

Still the most ambitious, thoughtful, and inspired rock band working today. Hearing Winn Butler publicly chatter about how the album was conceptually inspired by Kierkegaard could be insanely obnoxious, but just makes me love them so much more.

Foxygen, We are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

These doomed kids really made my summer. Great melodramatic, vague songs about youth, love, and hope. As catchy as the Kinks, as relevant as MGMT (a year or two ago). It's a shame those two didn't make sure that they liked each other before creating something this awesome and bursting with potential.

I'm with Everyone else on this... This was the Very Best Album of 2013:

Kanye West, Yeezus

I'll admit, I only really gave this a serious listen because Lou Reed told me to, and he never let me down. This is the first hip-hop album I listened to from start to finish — as in, sitting in a room with headphones on and my eyes closed — since Licensed to Ill. Sharp-edged, angry, hilarious, hurting, this album changed the way I think about an entire genre. And extra-bonus points for that long sample from Hungarian hard rock classic "Gyöngyhajú lány."