List-o-mania

As the year plods to an end, I’ve been reading through a lot of end of the year “best of” lists to catch up with what I missed back home. It tempted me to share my own eagerly-awaited by no one list:

Fave Albums:

I think the consensus about Arcade Fire’s eagerly-awaited Neon Bible was that it's good, but not “Funeral” good. That's a fair assessment. Also in heavy rotation around here is The Shins’ Wincing The Night Away.

One album that came out in 2006, but I think only in the States in 2007, that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserves is Jarvis Cocker’s first solo album, Jarvis. In many places it sounds like a middling Pulp album, which is still pretty friggin’ awesome. Jarvis’ unusual self-awareness is on full display here, as a sort of jotting of the thoughts of a semi-retired rock star from his country house. It is a peaceful, dreamlike album. It is unmistakeable and hilarious on “I Will Kill Again,” probably the best song here, and refracted in his musing on contemporary criminal trends in “Fat Children,” which suggests he’s likely to vote Tory in the next election. “Baby’s Coming Back to Me” is about the sometimes beautiful confusion between the great and small in a life.

But album of the year has to go to Wilco. Sky Blue Sky took a little awhile to warm up to, but the naysayers who condemned it as an Eagles album were too hasty in their rush to judgment. Listening to the first track, “Either Way,” is very much like getting into a nice warm bath. If the song never really takes off and rocks, nor wanders down some experimental alley like the last few Wilco efforts have, so what? There’s a time and a place for tunes that are supposed to replicate having a migraine (“Less Than You Think,” from A Ghost is Born), and there are time for just a simple tune about your hometown like the title-track, “Sky Blue Sky.”

Fave Singles:

Whenever you see one name and one song keep popping up, you figure there is something behind it. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” is, I think, the undisputed world champion of 2007, and I can dig it. Even here in Moscow it was everywhere, that one foreign song that pops out over the summer and can be heard even on the tinny speakers coming from a shwarma stand and from cab-driver’s Lada Zhigulis. This genetically engineered monster triumphs over its parts. Jay-Z’s ridiculous intro gives it a weird sense of an “event,” the production is heavy-handed, the lyrics are simple. But it’s a catchy tune, and the diminutive Barbadian that sings it does seem to have that mysterious “star quality” that is usually talked about and applied so recklessly.

But still, my personal track of the year remains “Australia,” by the Shins. It is one of those songs that seems to actually take flight, with impressionist lyrics. And every time I hear when that banjo pops in at the end of the song, it is a surprise. I decided when I first heard it in February that this was that kind of song – the one in some parallel universe that would be playing from the car windows lined up in traffic on Pine Street on some Philadelphia summer Saturday afternoon as I was walking to meet friends.

Just Heard But Might Really Like:

I haven't been as surprised by liking something as much as I have been by M.I.A.’s Kala, especially “Paper Planes” which comes close to being my favorite of the year. It pulls off the rare feat of really looking into what it means to live in a smaller world. All far more nuanced than what you hear about the subject from governments and corporations, as well as multi-culti enthusiasts and haters.

But I'm still a little hesitant, because I'm still turned off by the overemphasis of the craft of the studio. I imagine this is a big part of the appeal for a lot of listeners, and I can respect that, but I might pass myself. Listening to a whole album of tricks and effects is like watching a teenage computer nerd play with what he got for Christmas. Mr. Timbaland is a prime offender in laying his gloss, and I will never really ‘love’ anything he does. It gets boring.

The 'Fabrika' Award for Song I'd Like Surgically Removed from My Head:

I don’t know if Mika made it the States, but here, while avoidable, he kept popping up and these damn songs are awfully catchy. It’s very easy to make fun of the guy and his dippy music, but that’s part of the charm. “Grace Kelly” simply revels in its goofy lightness, with its bouncy mix of swagger, pout, and earnestness. It comes from the same place as “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” really.

Just Not Following:

There are a few breakouts this year that I don’t get. LCD Soundsystem, for instance. Having a hard time buying that. Also, Amy Winehouse. It’s been done, it’s all been done.

Just Caught this Year a Few Years Too Late:

Call it a lesson in learning not to judge others too hastily. For years, I’d been intrigued and amused by Pete Doherty’s crackity adventures like everyone else. Then I actually heard Babyshambles “Fuck Forever,” and to my shock, it’s a fantastic song – snidely-literate, outward-looking, super-catchy. That got me to look back at the Libertines and “Time for Heroes” and “What Became of the Likely Lads,” have been in heavy rotation in my headphones. As a fervent Britpop fan – I’m American and I like Suede, enough said – it was probably only a matter of time before I stumbled upon them. And I’m glad I did, even if it feels like the last chapter of an era, just before the Arctic Monkeys became bigger than the Beatles.

Christmas!

So, Christmas. Or as it is known in Moscow, Tuesday. Everyone here is in the holiday spirit, but that holiday is New Year's next week. And since even Orthodox Christmas is sometime in January, I feel a bit out of step with the calendar. And since Mila is generally pretty happy about every day, holiday or no, and Olga has neither the will nor the interest in sharing "Christmas in Hollis" with me, it's awfully hard to get in the spirit in the face of another midwinter workweek.

On the bright side, on Sunday the sun came out for a few hours! So we trumbled off to the park for some wintertime fun...

Russia's cover boy

Vladimir Vladimirovich is Time’s “Person of the Year,” joining Josef Stalin (twice!), Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Gorbachev (also twice!) as Russian heads of state to earn the “honor” (coming just a year after YOU won it!) and which frankly says a lot about how important Russia is, and the manner in which it is woven into America’s world view. Russians should be pleased by this. But judging by the tone of the cover package, they probably won’t be. And judging by the OJ’d up portraits they produced, they probably shouldn’t be.

After watching Russia up close for several months now, I am forced to admit with some certainty a fact constantly overlooked in the West: when it comes to Putin, Russia could do a lot worse. It seems that westerners are too busy holding their noses and tsk-tsking to bother to notice the real good that he has done here. He deserves a lot of credit for restraining the Darker Angels of the Russian Soul, specifically the vast military-intelligence-police complex that has had a terrifying hand in running things since the 16^th century. It should also be acknowledged that he broke the power of the 90s oligarchs, when for awhile it appeared Russia would actually be governed by a self-perpetuating criminal overclass. Not so long ago, it was possible to actually trace the chain of power from the punk that would smash you in the head with a brick and take your wallet straight up to the guy that stole the national airline and largest oil and gas companies from the people, who according to Soviet law, owned it.

There’s a lot about Putin I wouldn’t try to defend. In particular, there is no excuse for the cheap nationalism and “political technologies” conjured up by the cynical hacks that he insists on keeping in his employ. I hope that this xenophobia and foreigner-bashing is nothing more than a cheap political narcotic, and reflects just the primitive understanding of how a democratic society works you might expect from one that is only 16 years into its effort. That said, you have to accept that today’s Russia is a sort of democracy. Living here I can say that Putin is legitimately popular, and would clearly win another election in a walk. You are free to point out – as western journalists insist on doing every opportunity – about the state’s restrictons on the media, but frankly… we listen to Echo of Moscow on the radio, I buy Novaya Gazeta every week at a newspaper box in the subway, nothing is blocked on my Internet connection (which some repressive societies, like China, have mastered. Right, Google?), and it really should be noted (certainly better than Time chose to) that the Other Russia rally in Moscow this month did have a permit: they only ran afoul of the police when they tried to march to the elections committee. You have to jump through the same boring old law-and-order hoops in New York City.

Based on Time’s own logic, I think they correctly assessed Putin’s real importance at this moment in time. But how history will judge him is largely dependent on very large and unpredictable forces sweeping around Russia right now, which are far greater than anything being conjured up or manipulated in the birch-forest of Novo-Ogrevo or behind the walls of the Kremlin itself. If Russia can continue to diversify its economy and spread its wealth, encourage the nascent civil society that is now going through a very rough childhood, and keep its security services aware that they are the servants of the people, Russia has a good chance of becoming a “normal” country. But on the other hand, if wealth continues to polarize like it is now, if backwards feudalism built on a foundation of xenophobia and fear is going to be how the state is run, and if the brutishness that lies too close to the surface of much Russian life grows unchecked, it will be disaster for everyone. It is impossible to say which way things are likely to go. But Vladimir Vladimirovich probably deserves credit at least for giving Russia a chance.

Another year older

Had a birthday yesterday, though it was a bit on the tough side. Just before falling asleep Thursday night, I began to notice the unmistakable signs of yet another Moscow cold coming on, and then Mila opted not to get a good night’s sleep. And since I'm still in a strange city, and since the sun hasn’t penetrated the wool-like layer of clouds that has covered the city for the past month, Friday was generally kind of a downer.

I couldn’t help but notice how depressing in general my birthday is. Among the famous deaths are George Washington (1799), Prince Albert (1861), Andrei Sakharov (1989), and my favorite then-living writer, WG Sebald (2001). It was the day a sea wall collapsed in the Netherlands causing the St. Lucia’s Flood (1287), which may have killed up to 80,000 people, and which permanently scaring Dutch national psyche. It was the day the Tsar’s iron heel came down on the Decembrist uprising, setting back the cause of moderate reform in the Russia (1825). But on the plus side, it was the day the Clash released their watershed album London Calling (1979), so it isn’t all bad.

Today, still getting over this cold. Among the unexpected things about getting older is that I keep forgetting how old I actually am, and only really get a sense of it when I notice more and more gray hair poking through. And I didn’t care nearly as much about the day as I did for Mila’s birthday in October.

It's Medvedev!

Putin is certainly fond of his surprises. Just as everyone was getting prepared to learn who the next president is going to be next Monday at the United Russia congress, he goes ahead and makes his choice public this afternoon.

I’d long thought Dmitry Medvedev would get the nod. He was the only one whose name came up whose entire political career is based on his close personal relationship with Vladimir Vladimirovich. Plus he was the only one with an important job – running Gazprom – that Putin might conceivably be interested in during his hiatus (if they wanted to go that route). But there were plenty of doubters: rumors that he was too soft or too young for the big job.

It didn't help that his specific portfolio includes all sorts of thankless tasks: diversifying the economy, and handling the Russia-is-shrinking demographic crisis. Things looked bad in September when Viktor Zubkov was named out of the blue as prime minister, but it is clear that was just an act for the voters, trotting out a Mike Ditka-style shouter to make it appear the government was doing something ahead of the Duma elections. And for awhile it looked bad if you relied on the old Kremlinologist skill of measuring face time on state television. Archrival Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was always doing something cool – visiting a jet fighter factory, or greeting championship sports teams. Poor Medvedev was always stuck at some boring conference in the Kremlin behind his trusty Sony Vaio saying dull and not-so-horrifying things about important policy matters.

Putin’s announcement is a relief. It highlights the uncomfortable fact that Putin is perhaps the least bad option in contemporary Russia, and he seems to be managing his succession in the least bad manner possible. The world dodged a serious bullet in Ivanov, who is sort of like Putin except without the charisma and without the label “former” attached in front of his relationship with the security apparatus.

Watching these past few intense weeks of Russian political life, I have mixed feelings about the idea of “managed democracy.” For a moment, I think I can see the bright side. Putin will step aside according to the nation’s Constitution (in keeping with the spirit of 'rule of law'), and his endorsed successor will almost certainly earn the legitimate support of a landslide of voters in March. Whatever else happens makes sense – whether Medvedev just keeps the seat warm for four years until Putin can come back (backroom deals are hardly unheard of in the west – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown apparently carved up the Labor Party leadership over ten years ago) or if Putin becomes Prime Minister and continues to wield power there (which could probably be a good thing, as the accumulation of power in the Kremlin over the past eight years could use some sort of redistribution).

The only lesson seems to be that no matter what the context, politics is ugly business. Back home, one leading Republican candidate for president doesn’t “believe” in evolution, another believes the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, another proudly sponsored an anti-torture law that allows torture, and a certain former mayor of America’s most important city is sleazy enough that he could have had a successful career in Russian politics in the 90s.

[About that picture… This is my daughter’s plastic toy bear (medved' in Russian) who we’ve named Medvedev for obvious reasons: he always wears a spiffy neck-tie, and when you ask him a question and give him a nudge -- “is President Putin doing a good job?” or “is the economy going to improve” -- he nods enthusiastically at first, and then continues to nod delibrately and contently for a little longer.]

No country for optimists

“Don’t you think you are being a little too hard on the Russian people towards the end,” my wife said after she read an early draft of this month’s Letter to Moscow in the Eagle.

“I have to take the Metro with the Russian people,” I scoffed. “I don’t think it is possible to be too hard on the Russian people about anything.”

I usually think this way for an hour or so after I get home -- Moscow is the only place I've ever lived where I have missed a stop because I couldn't get out of a crowded subway car, a monstrous way to end the work day. But after thinking about what Olga said, I gave it some thought and toned it down just a little bit. But I stand firm in the belief that if people here are to stop treating each other (and foreign guests) so unacceptably, it will take a major top to bottom attitude adjustment.

First thoughts on the Duma elections

The results are dribbling in, and it doesn’t seem there are any real surprises. The first thing that is clear is that this new legislative arrangement is hopeless. The idea of nationwide proportional representation – with a high seven percent threshold for seats – might work for a small and compact country like Israel, but it is useless in a country as vast as Russia. Further, the rules governing news coverage in the weeks leading up to the election were convoluted and routinely ignored, especially by the state-run television channels. And finally, reports of “irregularities” have been frequent and widespread enough to raise serious concerns, but with no independent monitors on hand, we’ll never know the truth.

Putin’s United Russia party actually had a pretty tough job going into today. Not only did they need to win big, they needed huge turnout. But as I’m sure they realized in the past few weeks, it is much easier to alienate people from politics than to motivate them to actually get off their ass for you. Turnout figures so far (it is still relatively early) seem all over the board. In St. Petersburg I’ve heard it was only about 40 percent, suggesting most people up there were sane enough to pass on this exercise (many people in the past few weeks came to the cynical conclusion that the best way to make your point was to stay home because it was already decided). In Chechnya, the reported turnout is a hilarious 99.12 percent. United Russia’s proportion nationwide right now is a little over 60 percent, which frankly has to be somewhat disappointing. But the margin is enough to serve their purpose: giving Putin and Co. a leg to stand on as they tamper with the constitution or however else they will choose to keep in power in the next few years.

The nationalist Liberal Democratic Party is now at about nine percent, which was easy to foresee. Vladimir Zhirinovsky is easy to imagine as that guy in many working class bars who sits in the corner and fulminates on whatever comes to mind from moment to moment. This loudmouth usually has a bunch of dimwits around him who hang on his every word as he explains how the Jews control international banking or whatever. Zhirinovsky proves that this mentality can work on a national level as well. But this guy, when it comes down to it, is ultimately a coward. In the next Duma we can expect him to belly-up and go along with whatever Putin tells him to do– just like this heroic iconoclast did in the last two Dumas.

The great mystery and scandal we don’t know about yet is “A Just Russia,” which is presently hovering just on the right side of the seven percent mark. It is certain they are going to stay there as more votes are counted. I knew the fix was in last week when I saw leader Sergei Mironov on one of the Rossiya channel debates. Considering how badly beaten up they’d been over this fall – defections and Putin dissing them so dramatically being the standouts – Mironov looked unusually relaxed days before judgment day. Frankly, I can’t figure how this gang can exist without some artificial help. An opposition party that is unquestioningly loyal to Putin still makes little sense. Who votes for them? Seriously , I’d like to meet one because I can’t figure it out. I imagine they must be pretty kinky – they want to lick Putin’s boots while he looks down and mocks them. Sounds like s&m.

The only real interesting thing is that the Communists came in second with 11 percent. I suspected they would pull through, perhaps with fewer votes. As it stands, they are the only real opposition, and have probably tapped the very large pool of angry people – poor pensioners, underpaid workers – who are not getting any of the benefits of these alleged boom times. Tonight, Gennady Zyganov suggested that they intend to continue to act like an opposition, raising the question of voting irregularities and the strange way that it seems the results are coming in a mechanically predetermined fashion. Today’s Communists aren't quite the same dead-enders we remember from the 90s. They appear to represent a very large group of people that is only going to keep growing in the next few years – much faster than that famous “small but growing middle class.”

Hey, an election is coming up!

The Duma elections are coming up on Sunday, and you could tell we hit the homestretch when the rhetoric got noticeably more, er, colorful over the past week or so. The government has put up posters on many of the city's billions of billboards and placards and subway posters reminding people to vote. They feature average, working Russians -- apparently that middle class I keep hearing about -- urging them to use the voice that the state has granted them. They're upstanding citizens like doctors and teachers and young families, and they have a voice in their future! (Unfortunately we didn't snap any pictures of my two favorites, the personable cab driver and the passionate mathematics teacher, but you get the drift). Posters I didn't see include the miserable pensioner or the unemployed alcoholic, so I guess no future for them! (Losers).








We've also seen a very great many ads from United Russia, the ruling party that is going to win a crushing majority on Sunday. You may notice their posters are the same color scheme, which is a happy coincidence. Here are some of the few that don't mention President Putin, who leads their electoral list...





Now, I would love to include some posters of the opposition parties as well, but amazingly, although I pass hundreds of placards each day -- which are changed every two or three days -- I didn't see a single one from any of the other 10 parties that are on the ballot. Silly opposition candidates! don't they see this can be a good way to let the public know they exist? I mean they're always whining about how state controlled media never covers them. If I were a cynic I'd say that their western NGO money-men are too cheap to spring for a modern election campaign!

Thanksgiving abroad

My first Thanksgiving abroad. It’s always been one of my favorite holidays, partly because of the sense of travel and going home it always brings to mind. It reminds me of bracing for another trip to 30th Street Station or Penn Station, and the feeling of getting a chance to take a few days to catch your breath and reflect on the new year (whatever the calendar says, I think they always start for us in the fall). I remember going back my first year away from home, standing on the Peter Pan bus all the way from Utica to Albany because it was packed with kids like me heading east. And I remember that year I spent the holiday alone in Washington because I couldn’t get away, and feeling very tremendously lonely and glad that I knew that feeling at least once, and wanted to leave it at just once. And of course, last year, when I was still on paternity leave, and when Olga and I and Mom put together a rather comprehensive little dinner for ourselves between looking after our three-week old. That was the first turkey we made, which I always imagined was a major life milestone.

So since in Moscow, Thanksgiving is just another Thursday, I had a full day of work, But we’re planning on putting something together on Friday, a little late. We’ve had some help from parents-in-law with the shopping – a turkey breast, some klyukva (which I suspect are Russian cranberries) and the ingredients for a reverse engineered version of Bell’s Seasoning (the trick is you can only find sage at the pharmacy, where it is sold as herbal medicine).

Alas, the football I’ll have seen around the holiday is likely to be England crapping itself against Croatia on Wednesday (by the way, between that and the announcement earlier in the day that the government had lost millions of people’s personal financial information, it really wasn’t a good day over there). I still have plenty happy memories of the World Series to be thankful for, and we signed Mike Lowell!

Norman Mailer

It is very easy to make fun of Norman Mailer, and I think he was aware of that, and that’s what made him great. His death this weekend is sad enough – he never got that Nobel prize – and as mundane as it sounds, an era passes and I’m sad about what’s left.

I always took Mailer with a grain of salt, but he was such a figure that I realized I’d been thinking about him on two discreet occasions in just the past few days. First, I was wondering about what he thought about how rubbish the Village Voice has become. He was one of the founders in 1955, and I’ve always wondered if he ever bothered to check in with it in recent years. I’ve taken the paper’s collapse personally – in high school I would pay $2 for the thing at Lizotte’s newsstand in Northampton, and in college I had a subscription outright (this was before the Internet, and it feels like ages ago). I would read the things cover to cover, feeling my world open up as I read about the huge horizons of the big city, about bands and musicians and artists I hadn’t heard about yet. Within a few years though, it had collapsed into a dogmatic chaotic mush so predictable and bland that it wasn’t even worth its new cover price (free). Then a few years ago, those New Times twits bought it out, and brought their manner of sun-belt “alternative” writing to the grandfather of it all. Out went the stable of legendary – if somewhat lazy – writers, and in came a handful of underpaid kids. It is a shame, because I have always loved the idea of the alternative press, and I guess the future will be on the Internet somehow, sometime. And maybe it would take people like Mailer to ever get it working.

On a more broad level, I was thinking, as I often do, about how contemporary fiction and why I don’t give a damn about it. My latest round of thinking about it started when Nathan Englander’s much awaited second novel came out earlier this year, and as I read about it and heard the interviews, I became aware of an overwhelming feeling that there is nothing less I’d like to do than actually read the thing. I realized I read a lot of book reviews, and usually feel exactly the same way. There is nothing to get excited about, and Mailer was nothing if not exciting.

There is so much to like about his work. I remember reading The Naked and the Dead in college in giant hundred page chunks at a time. It was paced so well, and even though it was written just after the war ended and lay in plain sight for decades, it still shook and challenged everything I thought I knew about the war. I also greatly admire the manner in which he later turned to nonfiction. He was candid about how when he was young being a novelist was the most heroic thing you could do, but that in the 1960s nonfiction more and more took its place, and he brought something to that revolution. And later went back to fiction because it was important enough. He always had a way, even at his most obnoxious, to make you think. I saw him speak at Penn, and unfortunately all I can remember is that he spent a lot of time comprehensively attacking fluorescent lighting -- I agree with him, and to this day I think about that talk every time I’m in a quiet public room and hear that damn buzzing. I remember staying at a bed and breakfast in Maine with a ton of books on the shelves, including a host of Mailer’s works. I started flipping through a first edition of The Prisoner of Sex. I thought that I could detect in it the physical effect of writing on a typewriter. Something I can’t put my finger on about the fast pace of the writing, as fast as thought, mixed with a jangly and illusory confidence that comes from not thinking enough as the words hit the paper, and not thinking you have to rewrite as carefully as they should. There are a lot of things not to like about the man and his work. The egomania, the self-indulgent prose, the idea of the arts as a competitive sport, the attitudes toward women, the glorification of violence... But he was a man who was always looking for a fight or an argument, and always seemed willing to go out for a drink afterward. This honesty, friendliness, openness and risk-taking, are the best attributes of America. And it is something we are losing very fast.