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Version 2.0

I feel I should take this time to address the figuratively thousands of e-mails that I've recently received, pleading for an update to this blog. Why no new enlightening entries? Why no witty commentary and sensitive introspection? Why no new videos of Russian guys electrocuting women in bathtubs?

Well, the short answer is that we're moving. Yes, we are currently in the process of relocating The Moscow Diaries' official headquarters offices apartment. And I we see this move as an auspicious opportunity to renovate this blog. So in a few weeks, you can look forward to The Moscow Diaries 2.0: bigger, better... um... and interesting-er.

I don't want to give away the master plan and spoil the surprise, but I will say that I'm going to try to restructure the blog so that it reflects the broader range of interests that motivate my research. So, for example, you may not have gathered from some of my ramblings that sound recording technologies and recording "aesthetics" figure prominently in my research. But since this blog has been limited to vague discussions of my ethnographic research in Moscow, I've felt that it would be inappropriate to link to really interesting and relevant stories about trends in recording aesthetics like this:

Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if there were a regular feature on this blog... like Music Monday... maybe Sonic Sunday?... Phonic Friday? Clearly I'm going to need a few weeks to work out all of the little regular featurettes and their appropriately clever titles.

Anyway, the point is: watch this space. Good things are coming.

Linux, Russia, Africa

Hello again, Gentle Reader. Please forgive the last month or so of radio silence. I've just come back a fantastic vacation in South Africa and Botswana -- places which, I thought, would be wonderfully restful since they have absolutely nothing to do with my project or Russia in general. And with few exceptions, I was right. I saw a lot of people in southern Africa sporting trendy "Soviet" brand bags, and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg touches on how the anti-apartheid movement was branded as a Soviet front of sorts... but for the most part, I've enjoyed almost no sense of continuity among my everyday experiences of travel in Russia, southern Africa, and Chicago over the last month or so.

That said, I've become increasingly aware of and interested by cultural images of Africa and Africa-ness in Russia and America. For example, on one warm spring day in Moscow I encountered a group of musicians at Chistye Prudy, dressed as crocodiles, lions, and bears, performing for a crowd of children and parents. They were singing this popular children's song, which is, from what I can gather, a kind of Russian Jabberwocky:

Маленькие дети! Ни за что на свете Не ходите в Африку, В Африку гулять! В Африке акулы, В Африке гориллы, В Африке большие Злые крокодилы Будут вас кусать, Бить и обижать,- Не ходите, дети, В Африку гулять. В Африке разбойник, В Африке злодей, В Африке ужасный Бар-ма-лей! Он бегает по Африке И кушает детей - Гадкий, нехороший, жадный Бармалей!

Little children! Don't, for any reason under the sun, Don't go to Africa, Go walking to Africa! In Africa there are sharks, In Africa there are gorillas, In Africa there are big, Evil crocodiles. They'll bite you, Beat and insult you -- Do not, children, Go walking to Africa. In Africa there's a bandit, In Africa there's a villain, In Africa there's a terrible Bar-ma-lei! He runs around Africa And eats children -- Nasty, no-good, greedy Barmalei!

Fortunately for me, the Barmalei must have deemed me too old to make for a tasty snack, because he never menaced me during my walks in Africa. Nor did the sharks and crocodiles. I did meet a few gorillas, though, but they were quite friendly and even agreed to pose for a family photo.

When I returned to the U.S., I decided it would be nice to spend some time doing something totally unrelated to my research and to my visit to Africa. I eventually settled on what seemed to be the furthest possible thing from my travels: installing Linux on an old laptop.

(I'll wait for you to stop chuckling before I continue. Yes, I know. Linux. The supremely nerdy but cost-free operating system. I try very hard to hide it, but at heart I really am an ultratechnogeek.)

It turns out, though, that I was wrong. While searching for which "flavor" of Linux would best suit my aging Hewlett-Packard, I came across a popular version called Ubuntu. What does Ubuntu mean? Here's what the makers of this version of Linux have to say:

Ubuntu is an African concept of 'humanity towards others'. It is 'the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity'. The same ideas are central to the way the Ubuntu community collaborates. Members of the Ubuntu community need to work together effectively, and this code of conduct lays down the "ground rules" for our cooperation.

Where to begin, huh? I mean, there's nothing terribly extraordinary about the cultural image of Africa -- not a country, nor a nation, nor even really an actual continent, but an ideal of Africanness -- used in the service of marketing a product, even in the case of computer software. Rhetoric by non-Africans about African knowledge, rituals, legends and proverbs has a long and rather distasteful history. Suffice it to say that whenever I hear someone talk about "African concepts", I'm immediately reminded of Calgon's "Ancient Chinese Secret."

And maybe this is just more of the same, with these Linux programmers and users casting themselves as more than mere nerds but ethical and socially conscious nerds undertaking a revival of the Ancient Chinese Secret... excuse me... the African Concept of fairness, sharing, and humanity that is Ubuntu. But I must admit that even after installing Ubuntu on my computer, I was not prepared to discover that the system came preloaded with a video file about the relationship between Ubuntu the software and Ubuntu the concept... featuring Nelson Mandela!!!

OK, really, what gives?

Hedgehog in the Fog (Ёжик в тумане)

For the film buffs among my readers, here's something to make up for my last post: the award-winning Yozhik v tumane (1975), directed by Yuriy Norshteyn, and based on a story by Sergei Grigoryevich Kozlov. As a foreign researcher in Russia, sometimes I feel a lot like this little hedgehog...

Tide: Safe for Fabrics, Dangerous for Russian Women

Um... anyone care to explain this to me?

Can you hear me now?

I know I'm a graduate student and that I'm working towards a PhD. I know that I'm supposed to be thinking about big questions, writing papers on important problems, and tackling projects that take years of careful study and difficult research. But truth be told, I would much rather write about the little things. Like this ad that I stumbled across for the Russian mobile phone service company МТС (Mobile TeleService):

Allow me to provide some translation and commentary. The commercial opens with a hand sweeping over a bookshelf and pulling out a collection of poems by the late 19th / early 20th century Russian symbolist, Aleksandr Blok. The next shot reveals the man who picked out the book and is now speaking to someone on a mobile phone. The man says, "I'll dictate, you take this down," and then proceeds to read Blok's rather well-known 1912 poem, "Night, Street, Lamp, Drugstore".

As he reads, the words of the poem appear in white letters and drift out of the apartment window, wandering across Moscow. Here's the original text with my translation:

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека, Бессмысленный и тусклый свет. Живи еще хоть четверть века - Все будет так. Исхода нет. Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала И повторится все, как встарь: Ночь, ледяная рябь канала, Аптека, улица, фонарь.

Night, street, lamp, drugstore. Meaningless and dull light. Live on for another quarter century - All will be as such. No outcome. You'll die - start again from the beginning And everything will repeat, as long ago. Night, a canal's icy ripples, Drugstore, street, lamp.

We watch as the text of the poem sails up into the window of a classroom, and it's at this point that the ad's "punchline" emerges. We see a student copying down the poem as he listens through a cellphone headset. An announcer explains, "We're doing everything so that not one word is lost," as the cheating student finishes, stands up triumphantly, and hides his cellphone headset. The ad concludes with the company's slogan, "МТС: People Talk."

Considering the esteemed position of Russian poetry and poets here, I was more than a little surprised to see a cellphone company advertising--even in jest--that their network's clarity and fidelity is so good that it could help students from having to learn the great Russian poems of the past by heart. (It would be a bit like T-Mobile running an ad in which they say, "Thanks to our advanced network, you kids will never need to memorize another Robert Frost poem ever again!")

The second thing that stood out to me was the ad's soundtrack, which is a so-called "sound-alike" imitation of The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony." The song used in the commercial is nearly identical to the original in rhythm, structure, and instrumentation, but dissimilar enough to avoid the cost of licensing the song. The choice to use a sound-alike of "Bittersweet Symphony" is, if not ironic, certainly noteworthy, since that song in particular is famous for violating copyright laws by using a longer-than-approved sample of an orchestral recording of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time." And "The Last Time," in turn, is said to be an uncredited adaptation of a gospel song by the Staples Sisters. All of this for an ad about how the sonic fidelity of a cellphone company's network is so good that it can be used to copy a poem word for word and cheat the system.

Nevermind

I just spent the last couple of hours trying to write a blog entry concerning all the ways in which the world seems to be going totally bonkers on me these days. But I realized, somewhere around the 20th paragraph, that this really isn't the forum for such a rant.

Suffice it to say that this week there really is nothing important to report from Moscow. I think I burned through the bulk of my enthusiasm in my first couple of weeks here, and now I find myself frustrated with my inability to communicate fluently and wondering how I make the best use of my remaining time in Moscow.