This is the English version of a new column I’m writing from Moscow webzine Look At Me. The Russian version is here.
Moscow is illegible
by MOMUS
1. I’m on deadline to write two pieces of journalism:
a) An account of my visit to Moscow, the one you’re reading right now.
b) An essay about the Swiss author Robert Walser’s Microscripts, the tiny and almost-illegible pencil texts he wrote while incarcerated in a mental institution. I haven’t read Microscripts, and that will be the whole point of my article. Any academic, any student, can write about the Microscripts having read them, but only I can make an interesting text about not-having-read them, in other words, about their glamourous evanescence and their final illegibility.
2. Why do I say Walser’s Microscripts are illegible? Well, for at least four reasons:
a) They were written in an extremely tiny hand, using private abbreviations it has taken experts years to decipher.
b) They were written by a man who was, at this stage, officially mad, incarcerated in an asylum.
c) They were written in German, a language I speak very poorly.
d) They were written without thought of readers, for the amusement of their author alone.
3. It occurs to me that Moscow and Microscripts have something in common, because what interests me about Moscow is its illegibility. I’m interested in the slipperiness of my impression of the city, my difficulty in grasping it. And, since I have a parallel career as an “unreliable tour guide” (making up lies about exhibitions in museums), I enjoy talking about ambiguous and slippery things, and finally making them more ambiguous and more slippery. It’s not dishonest, you know! In some ways, it’s more respectful and more honest than claiming you can illuminate something.
4. “In Moscow, I don’t know who to trust.” This was my statement – made from the comfort of my sofa in Osaka – to one Russian magazine who asked me what I felt about my upcoming visit to the city. This is still my basic feeling about the difference between Japan and Russia. They are both foreign to me, a Scotsman. But in Japan I feel that I can trust pretty much anybody. In Russia, I trust nobody.
5. There are three “traumatic anecdotes” which established my distrust of Moscow. They are possibly apocryphal, exaggerated, or misremembered (one thing that Moscow has in common with me is that you can’t trust us):
a) Someone told me that Aphex Twin fell sick while in Moscow, and that instead of taking him to hospital, the ambulance driver took him to a field far from the city and said he’d only go to the hospital for a large bribe.
b) Jason Forrest said that a taxi driver charged him over $100 for a six-block ride. When he demanded to be taken instead to the police, the driver seemed delighted and assured Forrest that the police would back the driver. Cursing, Forrest paid in full, but came back to Berlin telling everyone that the more official people in Moscow are, the more corrupt they’re likely to be.
c) On my first trip to Moscow the woman from the concert agency told me she had just had an expensive BMW – bought with casino winnings – carjacked by Chechen thugs, who had left her tied up in a forest. The police only said that a woman driving such an expensive car in Moscow was asking for trouble. The mafia said they could get the car back, but not guarantee immunity from Chechen revenge attacks. In the end, the car – won free – was written off.
6. My first impressions of Moscow, back in the winter of 2004, were of casinos, sand on the road, advertising banners covered in dollar signs, in other words of a sort of cowboy capitalism which made Berlin look positively communist in comparison. Later, in the centre of the city, I enjoyed the statues of Mayakovsky, the busts of Marx in the metro, the vysotki towers.
7. Above all, Moscow reminded me of London in its greyness, its monster dimensions and ugly sprawl, its apparent contentment to let the super-rich live alongside the super-poor, its high cost of living, made even more absurd by its low quality of life, and its very poor food.
8. But between 2004 and 2012 I noticed many changes for the better. In 2012 Sheremetyevo Airport seemed about twice as big, had free wifi, acceptable food, and a fine new rail connection to the city. The casinos and advertising banners covered in dollar signs were gone, the taxi drivers seemed pretty honest, and there were rather impressive art complexes (Strelka, Artplay) and galleries.
9. Everything was not rosy, though. My host Fedor assured me that Moscow was still a dangerous city, and insisted on accompanying me everywhere, just in case I needed to trust strangers. Late at night, on the street with some journalists, I happened to be listing the films of Tarkovsky. “Solaris and Nostalghia,” I said, and some passing hooligans (it’s hard not to think of them as descendants of the Soviet gangs who inspired Anthony Burgess to create Alex and his droogs) picked up the refrain and started shouting “Solaris and Nostalghia” in mocking tones. I wondered what they would have done if I’d been alone, but then realised what a stupid thought it was: even I, eccentric and pretentious as I am, wouldn’t be shouting out Tarkovsky film titles while walking alone down a Moscow sidewalk.
10. In Moscow, I think of myself as the most trustworthy person present. In Osaka, I feel like the least trustworthy person; an immigrant, a potential criminal. I’m not sure which is worse, to lack trust in the people around you, or to feel like a criminal yourself. I think I’d rather be the only criminal in a world of honest people than the only honest person in a world of criminals.
11. The first thing I did when I arrived in Moscow this time – straight from the airport, in fact – was deliver a performative lecture entitled “Japan: True and False”. In the airport train (being a criminal I hadn’t prepared anything) I chose a couple of hundred photos of life in Japan, readying them for projection at Artplay. The lecture was highly successful, in that I was able to improvise some interesting lies about Japan. The audience laughed, and I wedged some truths about Japan in between the untruths (the first lie was that “Japan does not exist”). But some Japanese people left halfway through, apparently exasperated by my falsehoods. Perhaps they were staff from the Embassy.
12. When I am working in America, I feel the spirit of P.T. Barnum hovering above me. The ghost of Barnum seems to say to me: “What Americans want is someone big, bold and colourful, someone with something to sell them, someone with easy confidence. Americans understand that since money will be this person’s main motivator, he won’t necessarily be honest, but that doesn’t matter because for Americans self-interest itself is a kind of honesty.” When I’m working in Russia, things are much more complex. I feel like the ghosts of Gogol and Dostoyevsky are hovering above me, talking of everyday insanity, government inspectors, absurd futility, grinding suffering, long winters, dead souls, and the absolute necessity of laughter and alcohol.
13. On the metro Fedor asks me my impression of the mood of Muscovites. Two adjectives pop into my brain: “wild” and “desperate”. If you needed to express that as two nouns, maybe they’d be “Gogol” and “Dostoyevsky”.
14. At a party after my show I go to an apartment with some media people. One of them is Jewish and works as a censor on a government-controlled Arabic-language channel. I ask him what was the last thing he censored. “The star of David,” he says. “It’s too provocative.”
15. I have a free afternoon. Fedor asks me what I want to do. I say I want to take the metro to the end of line 7, a place called Vykhino, where I’ve read there’s a good secondhand clothes shop. I explain that it isn’t just the clothes that interest me; places reveal their true nature better at their margins than at their centre.
16. The sun is shining when line 7 eventually pulls out of the tunnel into the open air. Big industrial buildings are marked with the word MOKBA, as if one were likely to forget that this is still Moscow. I feel more at home amongst the Asian, Islamic and oriental faces of the working class people on this train, and on the street at Vykhino. Somehow I feel that the poor people of Russia are the most honest and sympathetic, and suddenly above my head Tolstoy and Trotsky are hovering, temporarily replacing Gogol and Dostoyevsky.
17. In the secondhand shop I go crazy, because you pay by weight. I buy mostly women’s clothes:
a) A beige smock which I think of as “Russian”, but it’s probably from H&M. When I get this home I can’t pull it on without ripping the seams.
b) A pair of silver trousers which could only really be worn on stage.
c) A caramel top with a built-in scarf (I wear it onstage the following night and am able to do some Mick Jagger moves with the scarf. Later I throw it away.)
d) A grey sweater with a decollete front which shows a cheeky triangle of my chest hair (rather than the woman’s cleavage it’s supposed to frame).
e) A purple V-necked sweater.
f) A cream-coloured woollen scarf which, for me, connotes moral goodness.
18. The Moscow metro map looks like a diagram of Sputnik. Sputnik is mostly important to me because of the so-called Sputnik Shock, the moment when Americans decided they had to invest a lot more money in education and creativity if they weren’t to fall behind in the Space Race and be humiliated. Thus it was that the explosion of American creativity in the 1960s – moonwalking, the internet, LSD, the freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and all the rest of it – was actually set in motion by Russia.
19. Overall, I am more a “Russian” person than an “American” person.
20. I have nothing to say about Pussy Riot or the resurgence of Russian nationalist groups.
21. Snow fell during the night on the day before my departure from Moscow. The following day I stood – in my totally inadequate sandals – in a big slushy pile of snow, wetting my foot as I climbed into a taxi. It was probably the worst thing that happened to me in Moscow, and it wasn’t bad at all.
22. To be honest, I spent a large proportion of my Moscow hours in the restaurant at Artplay, using the internet and listening to the same tape play over and over. As a result I came to recognise and appreciate Nouvelle Vague’s cover of the Cramps song Human Fly, and Adam Green’s Cigarette Burns Forever. I also ate a lot of not-particularly-Russian schawarma.
23. I was paid for my concert in cash, first in roubles and then in euros. To get the euros, promoter Ygor took the roubles to a street currency trader. I was given 500 euro notes, which I’d never seen before. Later, when I paid these into a bank in Britain, three separate employees had to hold them up to the light and compare them with examples in a book, to ensure that they were genuine. They passed every test. When the bank employees asked where the euros were from, I lied and said Spain. I felt that if I’d said Russia, three more employees might have to be summoned.
24. I flew directly to Barcelona from Sheremetyevo Airport. And I must say, Barcelona felt very, very nice after Moscow. The sun shone, it was warm, there were beautiful orange and pink flowers everywhere, the buildings had charming art nouveau detailing, there were benches and fountains and narrow cobbled streets and a delightfully serious and intellectual show at the contemporary art museum. Gentle zephyrs blew in from the Balearic Sea, scooters beeped, people seemed calm and happy despite newspaper talk of economic crisis. I thought: “I wonder if you people know how lucky you are?”
25. The author Tao Lin once wrote a piece about Seattle for a Seattle paper despite – or rather because of – the fact that he’d never been there. That’s basically what I’ve been doing in this article, and what I would have been doing in the Walser piece too. But for some reason the art magazine never commissioned it.
Moscow is illegible
by MOMUS
1. I’m on deadline to write two pieces of journalism:
a) An account of my visit to Moscow, the one you’re reading right now.
b) An essay about the Swiss author Robert Walser’s Microscripts, the tiny and almost-illegible pencil texts he wrote while incarcerated in a mental institution. I haven’t read Microscripts, and that will be the whole point of my article. Any academic, any student, can write about the Microscripts having read them, but only I can make an interesting text about not-having-read them, in other words, about their glamourous evanescence and their final illegibility.
2. Why do I say Walser’s Microscripts are illegible? Well, for at least four reasons:
a) They were written in an extremely tiny hand, using private abbreviations it has taken experts years to decipher.
b) They were written by a man who was, at this stage, officially mad, incarcerated in an asylum.
c) They were written in German, a language I speak very poorly.
d) They were written without thought of readers, for the amusement of their author alone.
3. It occurs to me that Moscow and Microscripts have something in common, because what interests me about Moscow is its illegibility. I’m interested in the slipperiness of my impression of the city, my difficulty in grasping it. And, since I have a parallel career as an “unreliable tour guide” (making up lies about exhibitions in museums), I enjoy talking about ambiguous and slippery things, and finally making them more ambiguous and more slippery. It’s not dishonest, you know! In some ways, it’s more respectful and more honest than claiming you can illuminate something.
4. “In Moscow, I don’t know who to trust.” This was my statement – made from the comfort of my sofa in Osaka – to one Russian magazine who asked me what I felt about my upcoming visit to the city. This is still my basic feeling about the difference between Japan and Russia. They are both foreign to me, a Scotsman. But in Japan I feel that I can trust pretty much anybody. In Russia, I trust nobody.
5. There are three “traumatic anecdotes” which established my distrust of Moscow. They are possibly apocryphal, exaggerated, or misremembered (one thing that Moscow has in common with me is that you can’t trust us):
a) Someone told me that Aphex Twin fell sick while in Moscow, and that instead of taking him to hospital, the ambulance driver took him to a field far from the city and said he’d only go to the hospital for a large bribe.
b) Jason Forrest said that a taxi driver charged him over $100 for a six-block ride. When he demanded to be taken instead to the police, the driver seemed delighted and assured Forrest that the police would back the driver. Cursing, Forrest paid in full, but came back to Berlin telling everyone that the more official people in Moscow are, the more corrupt they’re likely to be.
c) On my first trip to Moscow the woman from the concert agency told me she had just had an expensive BMW – bought with casino winnings – carjacked by Chechen thugs, who had left her tied up in a forest. The police only said that a woman driving such an expensive car in Moscow was asking for trouble. The mafia said they could get the car back, but not guarantee immunity from Chechen revenge attacks. In the end, the car – won free – was written off.
6. My first impressions of Moscow, back in the winter of 2004, were of casinos, sand on the road, advertising banners covered in dollar signs, in other words of a sort of cowboy capitalism which made Berlin look positively communist in comparison. Later, in the centre of the city, I enjoyed the statues of Mayakovsky, the busts of Marx in the metro, the vysotki towers.
7. Above all, Moscow reminded me of London in its greyness, its monster dimensions and ugly sprawl, its apparent contentment to let the super-rich live alongside the super-poor, its high cost of living, made even more absurd by its low quality of life, and its very poor food.
8. But between 2004 and 2012 I noticed many changes for the better. In 2012 Sheremetyevo Airport seemed about twice as big, had free wifi, acceptable food, and a fine new rail connection to the city. The casinos and advertising banners covered in dollar signs were gone, the taxi drivers seemed pretty honest, and there were rather impressive art complexes (Strelka, Artplay) and galleries.
9. Everything was not rosy, though. My host Fedor assured me that Moscow was still a dangerous city, and insisted on accompanying me everywhere, just in case I needed to trust strangers. Late at night, on the street with some journalists, I happened to be listing the films of Tarkovsky. “Solaris and Nostalghia,” I said, and some passing hooligans (it’s hard not to think of them as descendants of the Soviet gangs who inspired Anthony Burgess to create Alex and his droogs) picked up the refrain and started shouting “Solaris and Nostalghia” in mocking tones. I wondered what they would have done if I’d been alone, but then realised what a stupid thought it was: even I, eccentric and pretentious as I am, wouldn’t be shouting out Tarkovsky film titles while walking alone down a Moscow sidewalk.
10. In Moscow, I think of myself as the most trustworthy person present. In Osaka, I feel like the least trustworthy person; an immigrant, a potential criminal. I’m not sure which is worse, to lack trust in the people around you, or to feel like a criminal yourself. I think I’d rather be the only criminal in a world of honest people than the only honest person in a world of criminals.
11. The first thing I did when I arrived in Moscow this time – straight from the airport, in fact – was deliver a performative lecture entitled “Japan: True and False”. In the airport train (being a criminal I hadn’t prepared anything) I chose a couple of hundred photos of life in Japan, readying them for projection at Artplay. The lecture was highly successful, in that I was able to improvise some interesting lies about Japan. The audience laughed, and I wedged some truths about Japan in between the untruths (the first lie was that “Japan does not exist”). But some Japanese people left halfway through, apparently exasperated by my falsehoods. Perhaps they were staff from the Embassy.
12. When I am working in America, I feel the spirit of P.T. Barnum hovering above me. The ghost of Barnum seems to say to me: “What Americans want is someone big, bold and colourful, someone with something to sell them, someone with easy confidence. Americans understand that since money will be this person’s main motivator, he won’t necessarily be honest, but that doesn’t matter because for Americans self-interest itself is a kind of honesty.” When I’m working in Russia, things are much more complex. I feel like the ghosts of Gogol and Dostoyevsky are hovering above me, talking of everyday insanity, government inspectors, absurd futility, grinding suffering, long winters, dead souls, and the absolute necessity of laughter and alcohol.
13. On the metro Fedor asks me my impression of the mood of Muscovites. Two adjectives pop into my brain: “wild” and “desperate”. If you needed to express that as two nouns, maybe they’d be “Gogol” and “Dostoyevsky”.
14. At a party after my show I go to an apartment with some media people. One of them is Jewish and works as a censor on a government-controlled Arabic-language channel. I ask him what was the last thing he censored. “The star of David,” he says. “It’s too provocative.”
15. I have a free afternoon. Fedor asks me what I want to do. I say I want to take the metro to the end of line 7, a place called Vykhino, where I’ve read there’s a good secondhand clothes shop. I explain that it isn’t just the clothes that interest me; places reveal their true nature better at their margins than at their centre.
16. The sun is shining when line 7 eventually pulls out of the tunnel into the open air. Big industrial buildings are marked with the word MOKBA, as if one were likely to forget that this is still Moscow. I feel more at home amongst the Asian, Islamic and oriental faces of the working class people on this train, and on the street at Vykhino. Somehow I feel that the poor people of Russia are the most honest and sympathetic, and suddenly above my head Tolstoy and Trotsky are hovering, temporarily replacing Gogol and Dostoyevsky.
17. In the secondhand shop I go crazy, because you pay by weight. I buy mostly women’s clothes:
a) A beige smock which I think of as “Russian”, but it’s probably from H&M. When I get this home I can’t pull it on without ripping the seams.
b) A pair of silver trousers which could only really be worn on stage.
c) A caramel top with a built-in scarf (I wear it onstage the following night and am able to do some Mick Jagger moves with the scarf. Later I throw it away.)
d) A grey sweater with a decollete front which shows a cheeky triangle of my chest hair (rather than the woman’s cleavage it’s supposed to frame).
e) A purple V-necked sweater.
f) A cream-coloured woollen scarf which, for me, connotes moral goodness.
18. The Moscow metro map looks like a diagram of Sputnik. Sputnik is mostly important to me because of the so-called Sputnik Shock, the moment when Americans decided they had to invest a lot more money in education and creativity if they weren’t to fall behind in the Space Race and be humiliated. Thus it was that the explosion of American creativity in the 1960s – moonwalking, the internet, LSD, the freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and all the rest of it – was actually set in motion by Russia.
19. Overall, I am more a “Russian” person than an “American” person.
20. I have nothing to say about Pussy Riot or the resurgence of Russian nationalist groups.
21. Snow fell during the night on the day before my departure from Moscow. The following day I stood – in my totally inadequate sandals – in a big slushy pile of snow, wetting my foot as I climbed into a taxi. It was probably the worst thing that happened to me in Moscow, and it wasn’t bad at all.
22. To be honest, I spent a large proportion of my Moscow hours in the restaurant at Artplay, using the internet and listening to the same tape play over and over. As a result I came to recognise and appreciate Nouvelle Vague’s cover of the Cramps song Human Fly, and Adam Green’s Cigarette Burns Forever. I also ate a lot of not-particularly-Russian schawarma.
23. I was paid for my concert in cash, first in roubles and then in euros. To get the euros, promoter Ygor took the roubles to a street currency trader. I was given 500 euro notes, which I’d never seen before. Later, when I paid these into a bank in Britain, three separate employees had to hold them up to the light and compare them with examples in a book, to ensure that they were genuine. They passed every test. When the bank employees asked where the euros were from, I lied and said Spain. I felt that if I’d said Russia, three more employees might have to be summoned.
24. I flew directly to Barcelona from Sheremetyevo Airport. And I must say, Barcelona felt very, very nice after Moscow. The sun shone, it was warm, there were beautiful orange and pink flowers everywhere, the buildings had charming art nouveau detailing, there were benches and fountains and narrow cobbled streets and a delightfully serious and intellectual show at the contemporary art museum. Gentle zephyrs blew in from the Balearic Sea, scooters beeped, people seemed calm and happy despite newspaper talk of economic crisis. I thought: “I wonder if you people know how lucky you are?”
25. The author Tao Lin once wrote a piece about Seattle for a Seattle paper despite – or rather because of – the fact that he’d never been there. That’s basically what I’ve been doing in this article, and what I would have been doing in the Walser piece too. But for some reason the art magazine never commissioned it.
