REVIEW - 'Norte, the End of History'

In an attempt at combatting the attentive deficits in the Twitter-age of ephemera, cinema has sought to elevate a sense of immersion within an increasingly anachronistic linear medium. 3D has inflated budgets and revenue returns over the last decade, and 4D is next on the agenda, with cinema seats shaking audiences like kernels of popcorn in a carton. But there is an innovation I don’t believe has yet been exploited – climate cinema.

So it was that on a muggy and sun-baked Tuesday evening, I went along to the ICA cinema on Pall Mall to see Lav Diaz’s new film ‘Norte, the End of History’. With no air-conditioning, as the lights dropped, the cosy 50 or 60-capacity screening room was soon a stuffy cave of hot and languid air.

Set in the Philippines, the torrid heat of the film’s environment appeared to seep through the pores of the screen to bear down onto the audience who could little more than wilt on the cushioned vine.

At 250 minutes, ‘Norte’ is, by any normal standards, an endurance test; although when you consider the marathon standards of Diaz’s previous films - ‘Melancholia’ at 7 hours, and ‘Evolution of a Filipino Family’ at a monumental 11 hours - it begins to look rather more like an effort at restraint.

The film takes as a skeleton narrative, Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, upon which muscular issues of humanity, morality, national identity and political struggle are grown.

Fabian and Joaquin are young men separated by class and circumstances. Fabian is a conflicted law student with pseudo-intellectual pretensions on truth, evil and revolution that he expostulates during drinking sessions with his gang of friends. Joaquin is a simple family man struggling to make ends meet following a leg injury, such that he and his wife fear their dream of opening their own eatery may now be hopeless.

The desperation of both men drives them to the gilded door of the heartless local money lender. When Fabian impulsively decides to murder both her and her daughter, Joaquin is apprehended and convicted for the crime.

In the aftermath of this tremulous upheaval in their lives, both men struggle to reconcile their fate with their actions. We observe Fabian, a wonderfully crafted character, gradually become infected by the pernicious virus of guilt. Before the murder, he is egregious and bombastic; holding forth on the ‘death of politics’; how heroes of the Philippine Revolution like Andres Bonifacio ‘fulfilled their purpose and then died’; and advocating a kind of confused proto-fascist state in which any perceived evil be forcibly eradicated.

From the start he is imbued with a reckless and destructive streak, splintering his circle of friends with the revelation of his affair with one of their girlfriends. All the while you can sense that by proselytising such ideals he is at a loss as to how to either live up to or repudiate them.

By murdering the greedy moneylender he makes his primitive strike against what he judges to be the ‘evil’ infecting the community; a one-man army almost anticipating the revolution to be wrenched into being from his decisive action. In the event though, like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, he is tortured on the rack of his own guilt, rendered inarticulate and aimless. He attempts to make overtures of reconciliation to Joaquin’s destitute family, but crucially can never bring himself to do the only true and moral thing which is to hand himself in, instead sinking further into the quicksand of self-destruction and brutality.

Meanwhile, Joaquin manages to withstand the torments of prison, taking it upon himself to nurse a sadistic inmate enforcer after he suffers a debilitating stroke; eventually transcending, in a visually Tarkovskian trope, to a higher realm of contemplative benevolence. Despite his freedom, Fabian is en-caged by his turmoil and gradually becomes ever more monstrous; whereas, in captivity, Joaquin, thorough his strength of conviction, is able to cultivate a stoic virtuousness that ultimately enshrines his humanity.

It is the plight of Joaquin’s young family that garners the most affecting examination. The scene in which his wife, at her wit’s end, contemplates committing infanticide, is an astonishingly potent example of the film’s real emotional heft.

Of course, this is a film that requires perseverance and patience; many shots linger interminably (despite the cinematography being constantly wonderful), and many scenes appear to languish unnecessarily; but the overall impact is of a sprawling, novelistic investigation into the lives and fates of two disparate men woven together by the strands of situation and circumstance.

As far as the 'climate experience' went, as the sweaty audience peeled themselves from seats to traipse out into the cool night air, I felt that the immersive potential could certainly be exploited elsewhere: plunge the cinema into iciness for ‘Into the Void’ or ‘Stalingrad’; pump up the tropical humidity for ‘Apocalypse Now’; or whip up the wind for ‘The Perfect Storm’...

Views on Space Exploration

'If you could see the Earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon...'
Galileo Galilei


On a recent trip to Moscow, a workmate and I paid a visit to the Cosmonautics Museum where the 'Conquerors of Space' that had blasted off in the name of advancing the Soviet cause were celebrated, almost as though Neil Armstrong had never taken his small step.

I wandered amongst the replica models of modules from the Vostok programme of the 1950s; the coffin-shaped capsules designed to transport dogs into orbit, and their slightly scaled-up equivalents for their human counterparts which, to my eyes at least, appeared to have all the technical sophistication of an over-sized baked bean tin. How such craft ever managed to survive the intense velocities and thrust pressures that were exerted upon them appeared to be something of a miracle in itself.

In the decades-long race to conquer space, Russia and America carefully manufactured enthusiastic consent from their respective populations to fund and pursue their imperialistic endeavours. In the wake of possibly the bleakest period in world history, the Second World War, with its detestable ideology fuelling untold barbarity and culminating in the horror of 'the Bomb', it is perfectly understandable that the masses sought a new 'grand vision' to invest some level of belief. If planet Earth was no longer quite so attractive in the light of such destructive evil, then the tempting propensity to turn attention to the frontiers of space was perhaps a wholly rational response.

From the start of Sputnik 1's extra-terrestrial bleeping, to Kennedy's solemn pledge that men would walk on the moon; the global morale needed a tremendous injection of vitality, and the technologically prosperous epoch of the 1950s was the ideal time for the Prozac of space exploration to be administered.

What was far more surprising, and speaks rather more profoundly about the human condition, was just how insubstantial the impact was on the collective psyche.

The Space Age may have only lasted, according to J.G. Ballard, from the sonic response of Sputnik 1 in 1957 to the first re-entry splashdown not broadcast on TV in 1974, the merest of blips on the human evolutionary chart. In truth, the kind of fundamental shift onto a higher stage in the evolution of the human race failed to materialise in any real sense; dissipating away from anything substantive and into branding, merchandise and Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters.

The Apollo landings on the moon simply didn't provide the mass transcendental galvanisation in an imaginative or aspirational sense; instead, perhaps alienated by the sheer scale of the event, people slowly lowered their gaze to the more immediate and tangible earth-bound concerns. We did not, as Kubrick envisaged, have a colony settlement established on the moon by the year 2001; on the contrary, the zenith of the Space Age has become tarred by the modern brushstrokes of cynicism - apparently 7% (some 22 million) American voters believe the moon landings were faked.

My workmate's enthusiasm for the testaments of space exploration and the boundless possibilities for human advancement into the wider universe was infectious, and surely, no one could see any of the Hubble telescope images - vast coronas of opalescent colour splattered across the blank canvas like a cosmological Jackson Pollock - with anything other than awe. And yet, I could not help but try and peel away the carefully presented artifice of the museum to explore the less reverential reality of the subject matter.

It would have to be conceded that technological advances in space travel have yielded great benefits in terms of communications, environmental and meteorological investigations. Yet the fundamental moral dilemma persists - how can such far-flung ideological pursuits be justified when so many civilian problems remain? Particularly in the case of the Soviet Union, which subjugated large swathes of its population with poverty whilst funnelling millions into an ultimately futile race with the Americans, who themselves had a great many alternate earth-bound causes desperate for investiture.

I cannot help but ruminate on whether the Soviet Union's fateful collapse was in fact sealed by ceding the race to the moon to Nasa in 1969, and whether the psychological impact of such a defeat might perhaps offer a comvincing explanation for Russia's aloof and isolationist stance on the world stage; forever keen to portray itself as the underdog.

It is a moral charge that could be levelled today against India, who are pumping around $1 billion investment per year to fund their mission to Mars, a symbolic demonstration of national strength and development. Meanwhile, according to World Bank statistics, nearly 180million Indians live below the poverty line, whilst a lack of sanitation and child malnourishment levels are persistently high.

What space programmes represent is the same drive for empire that fuelled colonialism, the adventurous opiate of the masses that keeps them from querying why more of their nation's riches can't trickle down to help improve their lot rather than acquiescing to their leaders' whims of building the mythological Tower of Babel ever higher.

Neil Armstrong said, upon observing the Earth from space; 'I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet. I didn't feel like a god, I felt very, very small'.

It is this cognisance of the sublime, in possibly its most meditative incarnation, that I think demonstrates the true value of our travails into space. The fragility of the planet, a mere paper lantern blown by an imperceptible breeze, its effervescent glow melting the human construct of time, is exemplified in a way no more profound than by the god-like act of covering the world with a human thumb.

Today, we have some of the finest minds marinating their intelligence and energy in the inspiring yet stolid stew of Big Bang theories, compositions of black holes, and such like. Whereas, the investment of such intelligence could be far better encouraged to tackle the perennial problems afflicting human kind, in areas such as the environment, social inequality, medicine and fragmenting labour markets.

It is obvious that these kinds of perpetual issues afflicting society fail to inspire the same pioneering imaginative spirit as space travel, because ultimately they deal with the frustrations of detail, geographic disparities, conflicting opinion and constantly mutating parameters that very often prove insurmountable. It is akin to setting off to reach the moon only to discover it moving further away into space or shifting its coordinates to a new point in the sky.

As Frank Borman (the Commander of Apollo 8) expressed it with veritable incredulity: 'when you're finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that this really is one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?'

Indeed, I believe that Richard Branson should reassess the target audience for his imminent Virgin Galactic space tourism away from the glitterati and the moguls, and compel the political leaders of the world to embark on the voyage together. I think such an enlightening experience would surely serve to dissipate the intractable conflicts that currently blight so many regions of the world, address the fact that so much greed serves to disenfranchise so many, and perhaps retreat back from the current point at which the single gravest threat to the future vitality of the planet is mankind itself.

Alternatively, whilst they were all up there taking it in turns to stub out the world's light with their thumb we could lobby Branson to leave them up there in an indefinite orbit. For in space, no one would be able to hear their lies.

Oil Exhibition - the Ecstasy of Black Gold

There’s an anecdote of which I’m fond that is commonly attributed to the novelist Kingsley Amis who, upon staring at his mirror reflection and the melancholic void into which had passed the many years and travails of his life, pondered on “what a strange thing it was to have happened to a small boy…”

I found myself slipping into this shallow pool of surreal reflection as I stood in the grand hall of the Kremlin quaffing champagne and scoffing canapes whilst a tuxedoed string section knitted flurries of notes together with their bows. The absurdity of life had never seemed quite so luminous; what strange alchemy of events and circumstance had conspired to deposit me here?

I was in Moscow to attend a major international petroleum congress with work, an opportunity as unique as it was unexpected. Just the weekend before I had been exploring the city of Kiev, marvelling at its European charm and stoicism; and now here I was in Moscow, and in the Kremlin itself!, revelling in the opulent yet adamantine heart of Russian statehood. I felt like the weasel-kid at school sympathising with the weakling at one weekend sleepover and then living it large with the big bully during the next.

It was the opening ceremony and in the general melee my workmate and I got chatting to a Ukrainian photojournalist who said he felt like something of an interloper being there at so volatile a time, on the eve of Russia’s Gazprom cauterising the flow of energy to his homeland.

Not unsurprisingly, he seemed to harbour quite genuine remorse at the predicament and expressed his hope that Putin, mooted as he was to be delivering the keynote address, might offer an apology ‘to save face’ with the Ukrainians. I felt tempted to break this levee of hope by saying that there was probably more chance of Putin stripping naked, oiling himself up and wrestling a brown bear on stage, but demurred for fear of causing upset.

Bizarrely, our photographer friend then siphoned into our circle from the mass of bodies shuddering like contained molecules, a grumpy Russian scientist/businessman, proceeding to expostulate grandly on his pre-eminence and how honoured we should consider ourselves for such a meeting. Throughout this sycophantic introduction, our esteemed associate puffed out his cheeks and roved his fat marble eyes around the vicinity, clearly keen to discern anyone of remotely higher standing than two press-badged minnows from London; obviously mentally admonishing himself for having been ensnared in this way like a dawdling pedestrian by an eager charity-rep.

Not doubting his stature but being fairly convinced as to his poor social etiquette, I attempted to draw him out on the difficulties he had experienced due to the increasingly taut relations between Russia and the West. He sighed heavily and, whilst scanning other attendants rather than meeting my eyes, grumbled “business is business, politics doesn’t much matter…” With such wisdom imparted he offered vague excuses and shuffled off into the fray. Our Ukrainian friend appeared on the verge of breaking into applause, whereas I just wanted to slap him across his root vegetable head.

But then I thought that actually, his rhetoric was quite telling. For in this hall full of oil executives and industry heads it was quite salient that, as far as the metaphorical water table was concerned, the political top soil might be shifted around here and there but below the surface the dirty business of oil keeps on flowing according to its own particular whim.

There is something both overwhelming and terrifying about playing witness to such a colossus of an industry showcasing itself for a few days; particularly one that (not wishing to succumb to hyperbole), has a very considerable influence on the future stability of the entire planet.

The Congress itself was based at the Circus Expo Exhibition Centre, a mammoth manikin to be dressed in the finery of entire industries at will. Sitting in the dehumanising judder-and-jolt of the Moscow morning traffic, I couldn’t help but reflect on how tortuously apposite it was that the only way to attend a congress displaying the efficacy and might of the oil industry should be through the kind of gridlock congestion that makes central London roads look like free-wheeling autobahns.

Exhibition centres are the most diaphanous of modern buildings, they are like airports without the allure of impending flight, shopping malls without the wish fulfilment of commerce, motorway services without the juxtaposition of stopping amidst continuous momentum.

They are vast monuments to nothing except empty space, phantom architecture taking on transparent forms. Gleaming bright marble floors, escalators pinioned between multiple levels, wide expanses of corridor that feed into a tremendous delta of a foyer, and the constant swimming pool burbling of static noise that clots the air like a thick wool.

The immense hall was gridded with stands from all the major oil players – BP, Shell, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, et al – as well as more minor figures; there was a Ukrainian Petroleum Stand (or cubicle) but it remained poignantly bare, a mere tin shack next to these futuristic villas of monopolised market power. On the second floor was a showroom of luxury sportscars – Ferraris, Bugattis, Lamborghinis – for delegates to peruse and splash their black gold on these oil-thirsty symbols of personal prestige.

If there’s one thing I always find oddly amusing about exhibitions, it’s the ubiquitous lanyards, with the excess length dangling down peoples’ backs like a ponytail. I start to see peoples’ heads as balloons on the end of string, severed by the scissor-legs of yet another stereotypically attractive Russian woman to float away with distraction from their conversations.

Entering into conversation with anyone is presaged by a reflex flickering of the eyes over the inscribed lanyard details, in what I see as a forebear of the social scanning techniques that will become an involuntary instinct as soon as we are all overlain with displays of our ‘digital profiles’.

Away from the talks and discussions there are small huddles of grey-suited men, the cogs of business deals being wrenched into rotation. Escalators ascend and descend with static conga lines of people furiously tapping on or barking into handheld devices. Quite a lot of the time I feel like Jonathan Pryce in ‘Brazil’, turning up to the Ministry of Information and finding himself being swept up in the flash flood current of bleating and braying bureaucrats as they circulate the building without an apparent destination.

Over the four days of the Congress, I find myself traversing through the four ideological seasons that can generally be said to inform the span of a lifetime.

On the first day I am awe-inspired by the scale and the vibrancy, my senses becoming accustomed to such a voluminous environment. On the second day, I become frustrated at the stumbling blocks preventing headway being made with my own agenda, and after attending a few talks, become inflated with a righteous anger at the perceived intransigence I perceive of those at the top table. By the third day, my residual anger has been shouted down by a surge of pragmatism and a determined effort to ‘play the game’ and achieve the aims I had been tasked with. And on the fourth day, I arrive at a place of weary acceptance, however reluctant, that this is unavoidably ‘the way of things’, encroaching upon a vague gratitude that the whole charade is nearing its close.

Despite approaching the congress knowing that my personal socio-political views would likely be out of kilter with the received wisdom of the delegates, I still found myself, at the end of the second day, infected with a certain misanthropic disenchantment.

From the talks that I attend, the impression I’m left with of the debate on display is of its stiflingly prosaic tone, evocative of a party political conference. Barely any alternative opinions of any discernible persuasion are aired, there are scarcely any searching questions posed, it all appears like a giant rig platform for people to demonstrate how firmly their hands are clasped around the same pump.

At my lowest ebb I start imagining everyone as an oil derrick, mechanically bobbing up and down, dredging up the same PR messages from the same well.

Whether they would acknowledge it or not, the petroleum industry have many complex issues and predicaments to address, both internally and in the public arena. Instead, the general aura surrounding the presentations and limited discussion is (to quote that tiresome phrase) to ‘keep calm and carry on’. From what I observe there is never any mention of renewables or the issues of climate change that the oil industry plays such an influential role in affecting.

The only time environmentalism is uttered is with the kind of condescending sneer that makes you believe their perception hasn’t moved an inch from the image of 60’s hippies, when people grew long hair, smoked drugs and chained themselves to trees in an irritating affectation of eco-awareness. There's a sense that anyone with such views of energy plurality are akin to the heretical Cathars to be crusaded against by the all-powerful Catholic papacy of oil.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certain that there are very many incredible achievements being wrought in the industry that offer a continual benefit to very many societies worldwide. I’m also aware that the industry is as uniformly maligned as the banking industry, and that disastrous events such as Deepwater Horizon cast a disproportionately large shadow over the industry as a whole.

That being said though, it is my firm belief that history will not judge these people kindly at all. The generations to come, who will have to contend on an ever-increasing regularity with ecological catastrophes, and face disruption through ever more global conflicts, with rightly look on the era of our unrestrained thirst for oil, like bees sucking up the nectar with a single-minded lust, as a truly shameful folly.

Positive progress can, and should be made, but is attainable only as a result of dialectical discussion and introspective examination; and this is surely possible on the proviso that there be a forum in which honesty, transparency and rigorous interrogation can be allowed to thrive.

Those making up the panels are high-profile, highly paid representatives who should be subject to a far greater degree of scrutiny than the self-congratulatory feather-bedding they face here. On one panel I observe, focusing on the ethics and the public perception of the industry, there is such a nauseating air of apologetic entitlement; each trying to represent themselves as being sorely misunderstood yet coming across as unwilling to demonstrate engagement with, or responsibility for, a great many geopolitical, ethical and environmental quandaries that stare the world in the face.

The critical problem, I deduce, is not strictly with the practitioners such as these, however tunnelled their vision might be, but the larger scale systems in which they operate; a problem that is promiscuous amongst countless other industries in our modern age.

The natural resource that these companies exist to exploit has been so valorised that it has become just another product to be traded according to the exigencies of the marketplace. They are beholden to their shareholders who demand healthy investment returns, and it is this unassailable fact that prohibits the kind of honest and searching debate that might fuel decisive progress.

You need only look to Ecuador’s recent energy policy as an example of a developing nation attempting to manage their abundant natural resources responsibly and prudently only to be let down by the perfidious short-sightedness of the international community.

I think this exists in parallel with late capitalism and the sense that somehow the current ‘way of things’ must begin to shift into a new gear. The answer is regulation, sanctions and a tighter control on transnational energy companies that utilise their vast wealth of human knowledge simply to maximise profits and raise share prices above those of their major competitors.

You don’t have to be a fully paid-up Marxist to know that such a manifest desire for more of everything at a greater profitability is ultimately doomed to expire; but it takes governments that are resistant to lobbying to stand up to these companies and impose industry-wide structures that compel them to cooperate and act in a socially and environmentally responsible way.

I came to the realisation that my ire was wasted on these company mouthpieces, given that they are operating perfectly naturally given the field in which they have for too long been given free rein to graze.

With my moment of clarity casting a halcyon glow over the event, I found myself able to disengage somewhat and drink in the proceedings with a renewed ambivalence. By the final day I felt I was able to identify the nagging oversight afflicting the whole event.

The whole raison d’etre of the congress, every statement, every proclamation is centred in the some way around this commodity known as ‘oil’. A naturally occurring substance formed deep underground by intense pressures exerted upon long-dead life forms which then comes to represent this quasi-mystical elixir, this ‘black gold’ for which wars are waged and without which our lives are scarcely imaginable.

And yet, this organic substance is, I come to realise, completely absent from the event. Instead of this fundamental detachment, I felt everyone would benefit enormously from getting their hands dirty with the stuff; get barrels of the crude liquid into the centre of the exhibition hall, let people swim and squirm around the oleaginous oom-ska; becoming attuned to some deeply sublimated primordial psychology; and by the very physical process of communion perhaps breach the mental barrier between the commoditised unit of trade, and the pungent, butyraceous gloop in all its glory.

I’m being facetious of course. The lanyards would be ruined and just imagine the dry-cleaning bill for all those grey-toned suits…

Tearing the city at the seams #21 - Moscow to the end of the line (before giving up)

There are certain places that seem to pulsate with the tremors of historical significance. Entering Red Square through the twin peaks of Resurrection Gate, and walking across the subtle camber of the cobblestones for the first time, you get the sense that you’ve stepped into some kind of vortex in which history and the present intertwine in helixes of simultaneity.

The sheer weight of history applies almost physical pressure as though all those people ambling across the square were subterranean marine life pinned down against and crawling across the ocean bed. The birth and rebirth of a nation, the revolutions inspired, the grand displays of power, the meetings of minds and ideas, the quashing of insubordination; all have wrought their psychical energy upon this place. Whilst Red Square might appear openly flat; imaginatively it is wrenched upwards with peaks and troughs of historical import like a colossal mountain range.

Directly ahead, St. Basil’s Cathedral is bulbous and abloom with colour, like a cluster of hot air balloons ready to float untethered from the ground. In terms of its symbiotic relationship to ‘Mother Russia’, the cathedral is as synonymous as the Statue of Liberty to America or the Eiffel Tower to France; and yet it retains an almost comical fascination, as though it were liable to morph into fresh and more flamboyant forms by the day like an exotic plant.

Juxtaposing this architectural abandon, the Kremlin citadel with its turrets, golden domes, crenelated red-brick walls and towers, is almost the physical embodiment of ‘statehood’ and power that has remained fortified here since the original settlement in 1147. A shining red star gleams atop the Saviour Gate Tower like a kitsch decoration upon a stern brick Christmas tree.

Hunched against the wall is the mausoleum playing host to Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body. The room is hushed and reverential with synthetic chilled air, spotlights bathing the corpse in light, and statuesque guards monitoring for no dawdling, no talking and absolutely no photographs. At the behest of Stalin (himself afforded a more modest burial just outside against the Kremlin wall), his body was to serve as a relic of the communist revolution, and legions of scientists tasked with concocting a formula of preservatives, dissecting his brain to uncover the chemical genius therein as though it were a neurological genie waiting to be released.

The personality cult of Lenin that has been cultivated since his death 90 years ago is something of a socialist mythology, very similar to that of Che Guevara who is now little more than a production line image for mass consumption. Lying in state in such pope-like repose, Lenin is now little more than iconography, a 20th century Tutankhamen whose principles and influence have long been contorted by analysis to fit the particular agenda of ideologues.

Flanking the opposite side of the Square is the GUM shopping mall, its resplendent curved glass roof invoking Paxton’s Great Victorian Way that was to encircle 19th century London. Strolling around this cathedral for the new faith in consumerism and purchase power, I can’t help but wonder what Lenin would make of it were he to roll back the stone on his tomb and walk amongst this new proletariat with their Louis Vuitton handbags and Gucci shoes?

It is this cognitive dissonance (the presence of two contradictory ideas at once) that I find initially jarring and, after a week or so, quite puzzling. Everywhere the Soviet hammer-and-sickle is emblazoned as wantonly as the golden arches of McDonald's or the red bubble of Coca-Cola. Touring the metro system, with its opulent mosaics, bas-reliefs and marble sculptures, I marvel at the evocative symbols that persist. The glory of the Bolshevik revolution, the resilient peasant women toiling on the land, the bouquets of wheat, the proud soldiers marching off into battle, the strong-willed workers standing their ground at the factory gates.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Gorky Park on the south bank of the Moscow River, where people roller skate and pose for photographs amongst the statues and monuments celebrating Russia’s past. A grand monument of Peter the Great looms over the point at which the river splits in half, his ship pointed defiantly towards St. Petersburg, the city he would champion, in the process consigning 18th century Moscow to pestilence and ruin.

There is scant subtlety to these installations; instead there is a pervasive sense of proud nostalgia, the continuation of the urban space as propaganda, from the extravagance of Stalin’s metro system (designed to shore up the Muscovite workers’ morale), to the VDNkH Soviet Exhibition park – a demarcated zone for the fulfilment of leisure.

By contrast, just around the corner from the Metropol Hotel at Lubyanskaya pl is the humble Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism, understated to the point of invisibility, a chunk of stone lifted from a labour camp to which untold numbers were exiled during Stalin’s ‘Great purge’. State-sanctioned terror as an instrument of civilian control. The anonymous masses disappeared to Siberian gulags, Stalin’s mere statistics.

My workmate and I ponder on the contemporary implications of all this persistent semiology left by the Soviet Regime. Stalin’s ruthless collectivisation schemes of the 1930s – enforced agricultural austerity – led to the deaths of several million Russians. I cannot help but wonder whether this would have been the fate of the Third Reich had a less-megalomaniacal and war-hungry tyrant than Hitler steered the Nazi party to power; Nazi aesthetics persisting as proud icons of a once mighty state power, coming to embody little more than sentimental historical intrigue?

Across the river sits the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the site of the protest group Pussy Riot’s infamous performance in 2012. Western media agencies threw their grappling irons into the story with an eagerness that belied the old narratives of intolerance and authoritarianism that they were glad to see Russia conforming to. Although, as my workmate commented, “in what kind of church could you sing a song like that and not get arrested?”

Nevertheless, it reveals the moral dilemma currently facing modern Russia. After Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia threw itself headlong into capitalism, enthused by the perceived ‘end of history’ which unshackled it from its austere past. For all the nouveau riche in their blacked-out Mercedes, and the oligarchs buying up half of West London, you can discern a wider sense of disenfranchisement, hence (presumably) the candles still being held for the security and familiarity of the old regime.

Strolling down the Arbat, I pass an openly gay couple and almost feel tempted to applaud them for such an audacious display in contravention of Putin’s punitive legislation. Meanwhile, I walk the streets keeping an optimistic eye out for the exiled fugitive Edward Snowden, domiciled here in Moscow after spilling America’s surveillance secrets.

Keen to bake in the authentic Russian culture, my workmate and I visit the Sanduny banya, the eldest in the city (established 1808). Instantly clocked for the novices we are, a pair of well-built and well-nude Russian men demonstrate the soaking of the birch branches in warm water before beating your partner with them, thereby aiding circulation. It’s said that in Britain business deals are often secured on the golf course, whereas in Russia it is within the masculine sweatbox of the local banya. Which makes perfect sense, for once you’ve beaten someone across the bare arse with birch branches it’s likely to perspire away any of the egotistical bluster that might act as a barrier to a smooth deal.

Fleeing from the lobsterific heat to plunge in the ice bath, I see the two Russians – clearly banya aficionados – taking it in turns to rub lotion into one another’s broad backs, which is where my workmate and I resolutely draw the line. With open homosexuality increasingly subject to prohibition within Russia, perhaps it is inside the confined and steamy quarters of the old banyas that such activity bubbles to the surface; latent desires summoned forth from the hot coals in these gay speakeasies.

Not to be swayed by such temptations, my workmate, who had been playing the Tinder fruit machine all week, finally landed on a jackpot; further proof, as I see it, of the instrumental powers of web technologies to realise instinctive and primitive sexual encounters without the awkward frigidities of social convention or cultural differences.

Free from such distraction, I began to feel desperate to break out of the central fist and explore the wide arms of the city. I set off early one morning, keen to plot a path linking the literary coordinates of the great Russian writers as though I were a detective tracking the crimes of a serial killer – the Tolstoy estate to Pushkin House, Lermentov House to the Bulgakov Museum and Gorky House, and north from there to pay homage to Dostoyevsky’s childhood home. The plan being to complete this circuit before meeting up again with my workmate at the Cosmonautics Museum in the northern district of Ostankino.

Almost instantly I feel an encroaching sense of entropy seal itself over me like a dawn fog. I felt the same on my first explorations in Los Angeles, the gigantic geographic scale of the city acting as a hobbling agent, trampling down my endeavours into the mud of insignificance. There seems no feasible way of escaping the vast thoroughfares; thick spokes in the concentric wheels of the Golden and Boulevard Rings that encircle the city centre.

The tyranny of traffic is complicit in my malaise, stacking up in stasis along 6-lane highways that teem with noise and fumes, forcing the pedestrian underground to subway systems. Very often these are patrolled by begging babushkas; old women whose pensions were lost without recompense in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The begging population of any city is a condemnation of the governing power, but somehow the sight of frail old women in headscarves and shawls is even more of an abrogation of the state’s moral responsibility.

Walking the sclerotic veins of the streets, I feel hemmed in by the bleak functionalism of the architecture, oppressive and uncompromising, evidence of Stalin’s slash n’ burn programme to remake Moscow anew, in the process culling so much evidence of the old Tsarist regime. Coming across an old church like the Upper St. Peter Monastery, its spiked domes like military zischagge helmets, is almost a visual sigh of relief.

I traipse past the Planetarium and the Narkomfin, an once-lauded exemplar of Le Corbusier-style urban habitation, now looking sadly dilapidated, much like similar complexes being purged across London like the Heygate Estate and Robin Hood Gardens. One of Stalin’s ‘Seven Sisters’ dominates the eye-line; these imposing art deco monuments standing as short and stubby interpretations of Manhattan’s skyscrapers that Stalin insisted on positioning around Moscow like sentinels keeping a tight watch on the movements of the subjects below. It’s hard to imagine any coalition with human agency, they seem to be unresponsive structures left, like the statues in Gorky Park, as remnants of an abandoned and discredited ideology.

I eventually locate the Bulgakov Museum; alas it doesn't open until the afternoon, and so I veer off the main road and down a side street to Patriarch's Ponds, featured in the opening of Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita', two men meeting 'under the shade of freshly budding lindens'.

Instantly, the psychic energy of the area is displaced, from the sauna of the roadway to this pleasant ice bath of fresh air and quiet. There are locals walking dogs, running laps and sitting on benches to read papers and straight away I find the pressure of the stultifying cityscape being offered a brief respite.

Reluctantly, I abandon my literary walk and catch the metro to the area of Ostankino with its knitting needle TV tower which was, in 1967, the tallest free-standing structure in the world.

It is often said that history is defined by the victors, and in the case of the Space Race that is certainly true of how NASA have sought to dress the narrative with their characteristically patriotic gloss. The Cosmonautics Museum goes some way to tilting the balance the other way, honouring as it does several leading Russia cosmonauts, foremost of course Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel into outer space.

The Soviet powers used their space programme as a powerful propaganda machine, releasing fragments of information as and when they felt compelled to reinforce the conviction in the populace that the vast capital investiture was justified. Details of space flights were often confidential until after the event and several major accidents were brushed under the carpet of obliviousness; the Nedelin catastrophe in 1960, a launch pad explosion that killed around a hundred people and was suppressed until 1989.

For all that Russia has reformed and to a certain extent embraced 'Western cultural values', it is my view that it now stands at a critical crossroads in its history. The Western powers of NATO, largely in collusion with the mainstream media, have succeeded in antagonising and backing Russia into a corner from where Putin still tries to exert dogged resistance, seeking to cement ties with a suspicious China and succeeding in extending revanchist tentacles around Crimea.

More concerning perhaps is the increasing level of authoritarianism and state censorship currently sprouting like very familiar weeds from the Kremlin soil; many journalists have found themselves imprisoned for 'subversive acts', and rules decreeing that an online blog with more than 2500 followers must be registered as a state organisation. In addition, Putin has condemned the internet as a 'CIA operation' and mooted plans to create a Chinese-style nationalist alternative.

John Steinbeck in his 'A Russian Journal' wrote -
“In Russia it is always the future that is thought of. It is the crops next year, it is the comfort that will come in ten years, it is the clothes that will be made very soon. If ever a people took its energy from hope, it is the Russian people.”

How appropriate that quote can be applied for 21st century Russia is most uncertain. John Bowlby's famous Attachment Theory denotes that the level of security and reassurance experienced by the child is directly influenced by the stronger presence of a maternal figure. Perhaps for Mother Russia to move towards a better future in this uncertain era of late-capitalism and tense geopolitical relationships, the people need to step out from under the feet of the parental authority figures to whom they seem so obedient.

Culture - June

Books Read:

Mikhail Bulgakov - 'The White Guard'
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'Notes from Underground' (re-read)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The House of the Dead'
Tony Benn - 'The Benn Diaries' (single volume edition) (non-fiction)
Will Self - 'Psycho Too' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'No End' (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
'The Ploughman's Lunch' (Richard Eyre)
'The Battle of Chernobyl' (Thomas Johnson)
'The War Zone' (Tim Roth)


Albums Played:

The Orwells - 'Disgraceland'
Kasabian - '43:13'
Lana Del Rey - 'Ultraviolence'


Theatre:

'Titus Andronicus' (at Globe Theatre, London)
'Carmen' (at Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow)

Gigs:

Ollie Howell Quintet (at The Vortex Jazz Bar, Dalston)