They, being the powers that be, have turned my hometown into a ghost town. The few ghosts I do see are all masked. You can’t tell wether they are happy or sad. But I suspect the latter. Where is this thing taking us? All the bars and restaurants are closed along with most of the shops. Where I live it is already three months. They haven’t put us in a lockdown yet, but it’s about as close as it gets. The hospitals are not overrun, and the deaths are happening around the average age people die at without any real significant excess. Less healthy countries are, of course suffering more. But is it honestly at such a level to merit this societal suicide The whole thing is completely weird. I think we are in the eye of a storm. Just now the social payouts are keeping society on life support, but the reality is society will come out of this coma physically and mentally damaged, the question is only one of severity. Switzerland is still comfortable. Luxurious even. But, around us, the cracks are starting to show in civil unrest manifesting itself behind different movements. Little bursts of steam coming from the pressure cooker. People will soon have nothing to lose. I feel their could be some extreme ideologies taking hold in the next two years that will take us into some very dark places. History has a nasty habit of repeating itself. And terrible things often happen in the name of altruistic intentions. So, that’s my little piece of pessimism stacked on the pile you already started building. Is there anything we can do? If you have any money, buy bitcoin and hard assets. It’s still not too late. Your FIAT is going to be completely useless. Stop listening to the news. It will bring you down. God knows I am trying to ignore it myself without much success. Eat healthy, love well and above all value your freedom.
Photo taken on my old Zeiss Ikonta during late Summer from my last few days living in Moscow. Back in Switzerland now. I’m settling down a bit and sorting out my stuff. There are changes afoot in my musical world, which I tend to view positively. The bat monkey psychosis is a rather depressing backdrop to life just now, but as with everything on a macro level, there is little I can do but keep on keeping on. It has become quasi illegal to travel into Germany. Again. I’ll go this afternoon. I have an excuse. To collect a lamp. I’ll stand on a ladder and connect it. There is a risk of injury, but I will do it anyway.
Travelled to Moscow. Visa, easy as pie. Sure I needed a COVID Test. They stick a long Q-tipp up your nose. It’s like having a soft lobotomy. How on earth do cocaine addicts manage? Everything was open. We ate lunch, with friends, in the Hotel Ukraine. The view is outstanding. Food was good too. Back to the Swiss gulag now, where everything that is fun has been outlawed. How protestant. Is this bullshit saving anyone? Where’s Batman when you need him most?
Moscow, Moscow! I love you more, when I know that I might leave you. I escape your back courtyards, your homogeneous inhabitants, your chain bars and food outlets, your rivers and parks. I might miss your steely winters and tepid summertimes, and your cheeky babushkas, even your refreshingly naive kids. Maybe even your impregnable communications and quirkiness. You are gentler than your reputation for really only a few fearful lions rule your jungle. You are passive like your compatriots. Bent to shape by year upon year of tyrant after tyrant. Oh how you keep on choosing them! Will I miss you? Maybe just a bit. I’ll come back, and probably you’ll be the same. We met unsure of one another, we were never lovers but we part as friends. For now, до свидания
I wake before the alarm. Brush my teeth. Grab my things. Adieu ma cherie. Bisou, bisou! The uber delivers me to Sheremtyovo and it‘s all fairly normal bar the temperature check and obligatory mask. I get on a large steel tube with many Russians and we cross the skies to London. Something is grandly amiss in the capital. And the wider British psyche is so clearly damaged. The metroplois is running at maybe an eighth of it‘s usual capacity. And, everywhere masks are being worn. And signs are warning. And theirs is the stench of fear. What the fuck have they done to this once thriving place? Can it ever recover? I drop my Visa application with the Russians. No return for me otherwise. It goes well. And, once done, I just want to get out. Home beckons. It‘s been over 5 months. I am thoroughly ripped off by my trip to town.
So, back out to Heathrow. It is so very very quiet. The flight is how flying is now. Everyone wearing masks. You order your meal and make it last as long as possible… because of course you can‘t wear a mask when you eat or drink. I get to Zürich late. So, whole journey from Moscow without any real checks about the bat monkey virus or quarantines. All the news stories are basically sensationalism. All the government bravado just a front. I fall asleep on the train to Basel and get woken up by cleaner a good half an hour after we arrive. they think I‘m drunk. And so begins my three weeks in Switzerland. It goes by so so fast. I don‘t see so many people. Keep myself mostly to myself and get the jobs I need to do done. And, before long I‘m getting my Covid test to make the journey home.
Armed with a negative result I fly from Zürich. I need to use my result within 72 hours. Zürich airport is like a ghost town. I get there around 6 and there are only 5 flights left for the evening. I fly into a still fearful London leering through it‘s masks. But, three weeks later it feels a little livlier. It is late when I get my airbnb room. I am trying to work out the code for the door to the fat flabby slapping sounds of fucking from my neighbours. The next morning I walk to the Russian Visa Centre. London is still strange. Many shut up businesses. Some signs of dead businesses being renovated and turned over. Pheonixes planning a glorious rise from the ashes. A city this big cannot go on being this dead. But the British are sick, in their heads. It could be a while.
I catch a train out to the airport, and finally a plane back to Russia. The only health check I receive during the whole journey is upon entering Russia. A group of kids taking the paper forms we had to fill out on the plane. Paper forms? Really? The whole thing is a farce. So much fuss and so much disaster. And, when you look at the real raw statistics, it is all for nothing. A waste. A political front with no real conviction put in place to satisfy a terrified public. What has become of us? We are not sleeping. We are on life support.
An Ian Simpson record. His gentle charasmatic voice set over minimalist folk pop. I reviewed it nearly 18 years ago. The blink of an eye. And everything changes. Again and again. Different times now. Like my 5th life. They say a cat gets nine. A middle aged man wondering round Moscow with a camera. A voyeur. With but a few friends and little legacy, but good ones nonetheless. And I am settled in my sixth decade. How did that happen? And, are we awake? We citizens. We prisoners of our greater ideology. Or do we sleep in our fear. Perhaps I should go and throw molotov cocktails at random figures of authority. For surely silence is complicity. Give me a cause. Give me a cause!
In Moscow we have been living in lockdown for nearly 3 months – and tomorrow they will lift most of the restrictions. I arrived here mid March and they locked Moscow down about a week later. It‘s been a strange ride.
I left a Switzerland quickly going into lockdown. It felt apocalyptic. I was on the last normal Moscow flight from Zürich. Geneva Moscow stayed open for another week. The airport felt fairly normal to be honest. Maybe a slight air of nervousness about people when it became difficult to social distance. Maybe a tenth of people were wearing masks. The flight was full. All returning Russians as far as I could see – apart from me. But normally the flight is like this.
When I got to Moscow I was expecting checks of some kind coming in. But there was nothing. I caught the train into town and while going down escalators to the metro managed to rip my arm open by slipping as I was going down the stairs. My backpack tipped my balance over as I ran. My hand was cut and bleeding and further up I had bloody trails from the metal escalator stairs embedded into my arm. I still have the marks now. It‘s nothing to do with lockdown of course. But it stuck in my mind and perhaps enhanced my feeling of vulnerability.
Over my first week back it was still possible to eat in restaurants, cafes and bars. They had socially distanced the tables in some places. I could still go to the photo shop that develops my films. It felt like a fragile normality. By this time Switzerland had largely closed down. And then on the Sunday night, the city closed the parks. I run through the park opposite our block every evening and I had to change my usual route. They also taped off all the children‘s playgrounds and benches in the streets. By Wednesday we were in full lockdown with all restaurants, cafes and bars shut. Forewarned I had a haircut the day before. The situation felt very dystopian. I felt angry and have the opinion the measures were pure folly and still feel that opinion now.
Moscow went very quiet that week and for several weeks afterwards. Technically, unless you were an essential worker, you would be fined for leaving the house. Digital QR codes were introduced that could be ordered online if you needed to go anywhere. We stayed mainly at home going out each day for a coffee and a croissant or to buy food. Our favourite cafe and some other places started doing takeaway. I still ran every night – just not my usual route. I saw plenty of police but they never bothered me. In fact unless I went up to the underground, which went from being a hub of activity to complete desertion, it was hard to notice anything was very different.
We live in a fairly posh part of Moscow and I think the police didn‘t bother enforcing so strongly here incase they pulled up someone connected to someone with influence and got themselves into trouble. On nice days people walked around quite freely and there were even queues at the places doing takeaway. Apparently the government had installed a facial recognition system which automatically sent out fines or caused a police response. I heard tales of it, but never saw evidence of it first hand.
We ordered the QR code and made a couple of drives for groceries to a big shopping centre a couple of miles away which had a large Auchan in it. It really felt like an adventure. The roads, normally packed, were definitely quieter. But Auchan was incredibly busy. I‘d seen empty shelf pictures from the UK. But here there was no sign of shortages or panic buying.
We were also up in the centre of town near red square once. It was eerily quiet. Almost nothing open and very few people in the street. And another day we travelled to one of the tall concrete block suburbs of Moscow to collect an official document we needed. Anyone who was in the street there was wearing a mask and gloves in total compliance with the government orders. And the office we visited checked your temperature on the way in. A lot of people live in these suburbs, but it was very quiet. So everyone was certainly sitting at home in the pokey little flats stacked high into the skies around us.
In Russia a lot of people have a second home. It‘s called the Dacha. It‘s a bit like an allotment in the UK. Normally it‘s a rudimentary building set in a small garden. But they can also be quite sophisticated, very comfortable luxurious houses in a park. I find this phenomenon very strange. The government allowed QR codes for people wanting to visit their Dachas. So, we took advantage of it three times, renting an AirBNB by a lake five hours drive out of Moscow. It was very beautiful and a something new in my Russia experience. This far out, apart from closed restaurants and bars, it really was very hard to notice the lockdown. Hardly anybody wore masks and life appeared to be continuing normally. It was a good break for us to clear our mainly house bound heads and reset a bit. We found the small cafes in the monasteries were open. Of course we took advantage. It felt like an amazing treat.
There were quite a few strange inconsistencies reported during lockdown. The QR codes caused massive queues at the Metros for the first couple of days until they decided to abandon checking them at the Metro entrance. One day they decided to allow all massage parlours and beauty shops to open. But the mayor said you could be fined for going. Putin also declared the lockdown as a national period of non working. Like some kind of holiday.
Flatbound I try to record new music, but find surprisingly little time to do it. It‘s hard for me working on music when I am with people. I need to disappear into my zone for at least 3 hours at a time. I have managed to at least start the next record with one song put down and another nearly finished. I tried to make croissants. But they were more like something between a doughy blob and shortbread. I have had some success with my resolution to do free standing handstands though. I need a wall next to me for security, but a quarter of the time I am pulling them off without it. I just need to get up to nearly 100% then I can start doing them away from the wall. And I have kept taking pictures on film: around the flat; in the neighbourhood; on our escapes. I managed to get the colour chemistry to develop them too.
And, so life has been thus for nearly three months. Putin has an important constitutional change that the people must vote on. His approval rating is dropping to it‘s lowest ever in his 20 years in power. So, suddenly, even though all the evidence points to no real easing up of Corona reinfections, they have lifted most of the restrictions and presented a clear plan for lifting the rest of the measures. I‘m happy. I find the lockdown illogical and more damaging than the virus. I don‘t want to explain my logic behind that here though. Just to throw a little light on how life has been during these strange weeks of lockdown for me here in Russia.
I still ache to go on a long solo road trip in my MGB, but at least the lockdown has finally lifted. We can breathe a little easier. The Moscow summer has started too and its people are out in the streets. In two weeks we can even eat dinner in a restaurant. We plan to go straight to Hachapuri. Things will feel normal. I can‘t leave yet. I need to be sure I can get a Visa which lets me back in again before I can leave. So the road trip must wait.
Here’s a small selection of my film photos from the time. Taken on a Contax T, a Olympus XA, a Bessa R2S and my favourite: the Zeiss Superikonta A 530.
Sheremetova Airport, empty shortly before lockdown
Metro shortly before lockdown
Metro before Lockdown
Metro, shortly before lockdown
Metro, shortly before lockdown
Moscow cafe, just before lockdown. Tables socially distanced.
Shortly before lockdown, busy streets.
Hamovniki Moscow, shortly before Lockdown
Snowy Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Moscow Hamovniki benches blocked off, Lockdown
Our local grocery store was rather quiet during lockdown suprisingly. The larger Auchan was packed. I should have taken a photo.
Workies not quite socially distancing, Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Moscow Mitino, Lockdown
Moscow street during lockdown. Normally jammed.
Wet Streets Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Towards Gagarinski from Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
One of the few mask wearers Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Typical Russian with his plastic bag, Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Hungry Pigeons after my croissant, Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Me by the river, Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Moscow Business Centre, Lockdown
Wet and bumpy road to Seliger
House by Lake Seliger
Fisherman’s Armchair, Lake Seliger
Birds Lake Seliger
Lake Seliger
Woman half in half out at the monastry near Pereslavl-Zalesskiy
Ladas parked in Pereslavl-Zalesskiy
Birds at the lake by Pereslavl-Zalesskiy
By the lake at Pereslavl-Zalesskiy
My recording gear
Our back yard Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Colourful women, Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Hints of summer Hamovniki Moscow, Lockdown
Inside my MG… now sitting in a garage the last 3 months 3000 miles away….
I decided to post a picture of a sheep today. I took it on a Rolleiflex a few years ago. It‘s the only sheep picture I have.
For the record, I feel a lot of empathy for people smashing up their neighbourhood out of frustration at inequality. I‘d probably do something similar – just a different neighbourhood from my own, or at least the neighbourhood of whoever I thought was causing my inequality. Would it work? Long term probably not. Violence and destruction just breed revenge and bad leaders. History shows this over and over again. But it might stop me feeling so angry.
So, what do we do? I really don‘t know. Is it too much to just expect people to respect one another? And that we keep people who so very obviously don‘t empathise out of positions of power?
I get really turned off by so called solidarity movements by people mass posting on social media and then thinking they have done something good. Whether it‘s „I am Paris“ or „Black Lives Matter“ or „Stay Home, Save Lives“. Normally it‘s from people who have no connection to the issue and are totally unaffected by it. But they feel they should do something or worse feel the need to fit in with their peer group. Lets face it folks, posting on social media is really doing nothing. But if it makes you feel better go ahead. Just don‘t think your somehow more righteous than someone else for doing so. Judgemental? Me?
So, meanwhile, I am further coming off social media. It‘s become something that angers me and I want to comment, but more and more realise it is simply pointless commenting on social media. It‘s just text. It‘s often misunderstood outside of a human nuance.
I had been off Facebook (not quite – I keep an account for promoting my bands) for several years. I deactivated My personal account largely through disappointment that Scotland did not vote for independence in 2014 coupled with the divisive textual battles it caused online that I was drawn into. I ended up wasting far too much time trying to convince people who were very clearly entrenched in their opinion. So, some 6 years later the lockdowns left me feeling disconnected, so I reactivated my personal account. And I was shocked to see an almost unison opinion about the lockdown being a positive response to the pandemic. I strongly disagree with this. And, of course I said so. It wasn‘t long before I was called out as a racist and even a Nazi.
After a while I decided it was pointless being on there. Of course I wanted the social connection side of it, but feel unable to let the political stuff from other folks go past without comment. And, I start looking for to convince people again. My little evangelist armchair revolutionary getting control of me. It is basically pointless and a huge waste of energy and time. For nothing. Really. It is nothing. So, about a month ago: goodbye Facebook. And I really feel better without it.
I have been on Instagram for a long time. Of course, it is Facebook now too. I have, until now, found Instagram largely non political and liked it for this. Until a few days ago that is when almost everyone of my circle posted black squares in support of #BlackoutTuesday. Something by the way, I totally agree with. But, I don‘t like this mass herd mentality around me just blindly following whatever movement is trending. It makes it glib. It cheapens it. It simplifies it, and…. it kills proper discourse about it. Herd mentaility stops us seeing other viewpoints and considering why people have them. It didn‘t used to be so prevalent on Instagram, but I suspect Facebook being involved with Instagram has resulted in the algorithms being slowly tweaked to maximise engagement and of course high engagement comes from polarised politics. Don‘t underestimate the effect this has. Just look: Trump in the White House, Brexit, Boris Johnson as UK Prime Minister, Global Lockdown. Social media has played a significant part in all of these.
There‘s a whole other unsavoury side to social media that I am uncomfortable with. It‘s placing us in our own bubble and then selling us to advertisers. We have become the product and they use techniques to make us spend as much time on the platforms as possible. Like little dopamine junkies. And, I worry that certain forces condition us a certain way while blunting our resistance. So, after some consideration – goodbye Instagram, in a few days you will be gone from my wastes of time too. I will keep the band Facebook but avoid using it other than for band stuff.
Worrying trends are going on infront of our eyes: Pandemics giving us quarantines for the healthy, building up into tension that explodes into race riots. Where does this all go?
I‘ll send you a postcard from the future. It might be dystopian.
OK, no suprise to anyone that knows me that I’m a fervent supporter of Scottish Independence, I have been since I can remember. The referendum is now in 2 weeks. A massive opportunity I hope the people of Scotland will seize with both hands. I watch from afar unable to vote feeling rather powerless it has to be said. Anyway, Better Together, the campaign to keep Scotland tied to the Union, launched a couple of years ago trumpeting that they would make a positive case for the union. I’m still waiting to see it. Since then all they have really tried to do is seed every possible doubt and fear they can come up with in the minds of the Scottish electorate. They even changed their name to “No thanks”. So much for positivity. Their latest campaign ad seems to be implying people will punish their own families if they vote Yes. I had a wee play with their ad as you can see. But seriously, you’ve already told us the negative case for independence, now tell us the positive case for the union.
OK, call it sour grapes because Scotland aren’t in it if you like, but this comedy piece from John Oliver explaining FIFA to US viewers would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlJEt2KU33I
Where is Gordypops? 