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.

Life after napalm

It was with profound, profound interest that I read Jack Shafer's story in Slate about great moments from journalists on the way out of newsrooms (such a rich topic, it managed a part two). A few years ago, I had my big bridge-burning moment, with a letter that I still think about a lot, and which might be some of my best work -- I didn't even have to resort to profanity. What's surprised me most, is how long after the fires have died and been forgotten by everyone else, I still can't make peace with it all.

I should say from the start that I have never, not for a moment, regretted what I did. I wrote the truth, to the correct person, with the precise amount of force the situation warranted. It got me out of a very crumby situation, and perhaps for a few moments forces another human mind to think with a little more depth about a situation and the choices they made. It also forced me not to settle for easy decisions, and though it is the most transient and base aspect of all this, it made me feel better after months of feeling helpless.

But eventually, the very brutal reality set in: it didn't accomplish anything. This effort, this sacrifice, didn't change anything for anyone except me (and my family, for better and for worse). It's a terrible irritant: the story here that resonates the most with real life, alas, is Ron Rosenbaum's famous departure from the Voice ("Who was that?").

While Shafer pokes fun at the idea of the journalist that "works through his anger by killing chipmunks and other small game," I'm not sure there is a lot to laugh at. Journalism, or "Journalism" if you must, is suffering because of those "paper-pushers" and "quacking mallards," though maybe that's easy to forget when you have a steady paycheck from the Washington Post Company. And of course, if you look at the state of late-model, corporate capitalism, it is pretty clear that every line of work is being debased by this new feudalism of a handful of wealthy bosses and a vast army of peons. Only difference, perhaps, is that journalists are usually better writers.

There is a pattern to the lives of journalists. The thing that has dismayed me the most about the business, the point at which the high-minded rhetoric of J-school is in too stark contrast with the reality of the newsroom, is how... well, meek working journalists can be. Oddly, people who have no trouble asking the grieving mother how she "feels," who can shout embarassing questions at a press conference about a congressman's privates, who can shrug off any number of nasty arrows and cheap-shots from Internet trolls, seem unable to constructively engage with the reality of how little control they have over their own careers. And the methods for dealing with it are pathological. In the day to day, it looks like this: Bitch bitch moan complain bitch complain and bitch some more. Some decide to carry on and get by, others quietly slip away (hopefully to something more lucrative), but for whatever reason, I didn't care for either option. And when that happens, things catch fire.

Obviously, I could write about this all day, even though I realized long ago, consciously at least, that madness lies in that direction. Whenever it comes up in conversation, I tend to shrug and make a small joke and try to signal that I've moved on. But really, I haven't as much as I would have liked. And the fact that I'm still mad this made me mad makes me mad.

There is wisdom out there though. I'll refer to Joseph Brodsky's Michigan speech, which I wrote about last month, and which had an interesting take on the angle of forgiving and forgetting:

"Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those -- in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists... By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in injustice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn't justify the effort: it's the echo that counts. That's the main principle of any oppressor, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don't allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time that it took for it to occur." 

Great advice. Very hard to live by.