85mm – Where is Gordypops?

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

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!