Just when you thought it was safe…
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.
Asahi Pentax Spotmatic SP / EXA 1C / Fomapan 400 / Kodak 400 / Ilford Pan 400
If you really think it makes a difference. I want my promised hundred year plus. It‘s my basic human right. Otherwise what‘s all this hassle really for. I want my billion dollar yacht. My equality with the global elite. Equality: what every ape wants. While also wanting to beat all the other apes. I may go flying soon. Passing amongst the Earth‘s cowering masses, an unvaccinated judaeic angel of death spreading malcontent far more potent than any damned virus. It‘s in my head. It‘s in my head.
Asahi Pentax Spotmatic / Jupiter 9 85mm / Kodak Gold 400
Moscow / August 2020
Zenit E / Takumar Asahi Super 50mm 1.4 / Jupiter 9 85mm f2 / M42 / Ilford Pan 400
Moscow August 2020
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!
Moscow July 2020.
CineStill 50D / Voigtlander Bessa R2S / Nikon Nikkor P.C 8.5cm f/2
I smashed my phone. Or so I thought. As I went down the stone stairs inside our building to go on my habitual midnight run through Gorky Park. The stairs are dimly lit. My phone fumbled clumsily out of my hands then flapped down screenside like a dead fish on a chopping board. I bought my phone cheap just over a year ago.
We have an ongoing battle – she and I.
I am anti apple. She isn‘t. She has had two phones in 8 years. I’ve had four. All cheap. One I lost in a Crimean Taxi near Yaltra. And one the battery was only a little too quick running out of charge. Another fell into the toilet. I actually still have it and it still works. Actually, I think that‘s the one with the battery problems. The current one has two sims. I need this just now having a foot in two countries.
And the current one is on it‘s second screen. It also has a dodgy power plug. Of course when I saw it had cracked, I asked myself, to repair or replace. I hate to lose an argument. I want a phone that can last forever! So, I spend all day looking for a new phone. I find rugged phones. You can drop them from great heights and even take them swimming. And, after too much online time, I find THE PHONE. I plan my great adventure to the outskirts of the Moscow Metropolis.
And, as I am about to go on this odyssey, I tell her. I had kept quiet about my phone breaking because of this running competition we have. She asks to see my phone and then strips off the cracked protective glass she had put on months ago without me noticing. The screen is completely intact.
Hmmmm….
Anyway, anyway. We went to a kiddies park. I travelled through town a little. I shot a film. The pictures don‘t always match the words folks.
Zeiss Superikonta A 530 (c.1937) / Kodak Portra 400
Moscow July 2020.
Mornings. Heavy like a stone. Slow starts and click click click. The ever present thread to the new now, which I can hardly tell from the old then. Click click click, chemicals and scanning is all that keeps me going. I fool myself with creative no through roads. I long for cake and dancing but my militant disciplinarian stiff upper lip refuses me the free expression. But in the park, I can watch. I‘m a voyeur at the end of the world. Have they seen the fucking news? I have and really I don’t care. If we can turn it off we‘ll live forever. Or at least another day. Or maybe we only have a month of Sundays. I hate Sundays but I’ll take it. One of the fish died. He had been sucked into the filter backwards, left dead with a look of disbelief frozen on his tiny fishy face, eyes bulging in the evening light. His companions seemed oblivious. The wee one put the remains in a jar of water. Hopeful, but pointless.
Zenit E / Asahi Super Takumar 50mm 1.4 / Fomapan 400 / Fujifilm Pro 400 H
Moscow July 2020.
Moscow feels open again. And, it‘s Summer. Winter feels closed here anyway.
Like a long wait for something desperately trying to happen. You have faith that one will pass and the other will take its place. But your faith has no point. Change will always come.
The dead cars in the neighbourhood become interesting in Summer. The snow and frost is gone and I can spy their strange abandoned contents. It has become a small obsession.
The wee one‘s eye played up. It wouldn‘t open for the doctor. There were screams. Screams calmed by bribery. So, a trip to the kiosk. All the dolls went unnoticed. More cars are needed for the collection.
At least it‘s not a dinosaur. I am so bored of the dinosaurs. They are dead. Forgotten things from the past. When the doctor’s salve needs to go on there are more screams and bribery.
And meanwhile people do what people do. As it should be.
Live for we are a long time dead. Like those dinosaurs.
Maybe some future kid plays obsessively with plastic versions of us in the ever changing dystopia.
Zenit E / Asahi Super Takumar 50mm 1.4 / Fomapan 400 / Fujifilm Superia 400
Moscow July 2020.
Putin has a vote. Apparently it’s important.
He can be king until 2036 if the peasants say yes. So, all the proles are let out of lockdown. But travels to foreign shores are still not possible. Where can we go?
We drive out of Moscow to the concrete Oblast and beyond to the fly ridden flatlands. Through towns of Babushkas and Dog lovers.
The Dacha. Hot. Sticky.
I have a cold. I sneeze and splutter and leak snot. It’s not THE virus. Of course just now noone is sure. The flies don’t care. Blood is blood is blood. They leave bites on my body. Two nights of feasting. We drive on.
Through town and country past and more Babushkas and good capatalists and once we were communist.
…and come to a resort hotel.
With animateurs. Russian style. The food in the Stolovar is passable but entirely unexciting. I try the wine and a long history of viniculture turns slowly in it’s grave. But mostly we are room ridden with our virus for company. We all have it now.
Humans and other animals. Some wear masks and some do not. And these Russians sometimes sport Ukranian bling.
The holiday is over. We drive home.
Past dead petrol stations through creeping traffic all headed for the centre of their universe, but never really finding it. Our Moscow flat feels like the height of civilisation. Sleep. Recover. Sleep Recover.
Shot on Olympus XA / Fujifilm Superia 400
Where is Gordypops? 