bodies, soviet new wave, and a pandemic seafood buffet

Body horror & cults

I’m not super invested in it so I won’t talk about it too much here, but I’ve been catching up with the The Vow, the HBO docuseries about the NXIVM cult and the damaging exploits of its ponytailed leader Keith Raniere, while scrolling on my phone. My distracted viewing coincided with my reading of Alexandra Kleeman’s 2015 novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. The novel follows A, whose hyperawareness of her bodily self begins to heighten and crumble when she begins overanalyzing her relationships with her intrusive and needy roommate, B, and her emotionally distant boyfriend, C. This lowering of her self-esteem, in tandem with weird disappearances in the city, leaves her susceptible to the manipulative persuasions of an overzealous group called the Church of the Conjoined Eater, which takes the novel into cult mentality territory.

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine was one of the 13 books I had checked out from the library right before lockdown was instituted. I ended up neglecting many of my loans, no longer tethered to the curiosities I had when I initially reserved them. So, I opted for other books, and eventually went through a spell of not reading at all once I started experiencing frequent headaches (more on that later) in early June. But I’m back to reading again and am determined to finish the remainder of my library loans (down to 4 now). I picked up Kleeman’s novel under the impression that its accessible contemporary style would make for a breezy read, but I actually had to slog my way through it. Because it’s so easy to consume in the same way that junk food television is, I persisted, not quite as a hate-read, but to determine which of its qualities inspired critics to sing its praises at the time of its release.

The novel is a satire, but it ultimately reads as overly constructed, and is particularly toothless and inconsequential in its depiction of internalized fatphobia. Its general attitude is reminiscent of the Gen X paranoia surrounding consumerism, commodification, and late capitalism in media like Daria, Slacker, Wayne’s World, Reality Bites, etc., which I don’t generally have issue with, but its diluted execution lacked the charm and idiosyncrasy to make up for its fanglessness. I wouldn’t be opposed to reading more of Kleeman’s work, though. I acknowledge her talent for articulating specific interior experiences and communicating clear and concise descriptions of actions and events. However, even as a champion of the mundane, I often skimmed over chunks of her tedious micro-descriptions of every banality. For instance, there’s a recurring motif where A chronicles the animated antics of Kandy Kat, the commercial mascot for a chemical pastry called Kandy Kakes, whose quests to procure the coveted Kakes are thwarted similarly to the Trix Rabbit’s attempts to simply enjoy a bowl of Trix cereal, but taken to the violent and morbid extremes depicted in The Itchy and Scratchy Show. My eyes vaulted over those passages.

But just because I didn’t like or particularly enjoy the novel, doesn’t mean its content didn’t get me thinkin’. The novel’s title certainly fulfills its cheekily implied promise of body image/body possession with elements of body horror, featuring themes like impossible beauty standards, disordered eating, and doppelgängers. Its descriptions of having a body and feeling disconnected from your body made me even more hyperaware of my own body, namely the chronic pain I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with in quarantine. Which brings us back to the horrible headaches I have been experiencing. It took several trips to the doctor, daily helpings of Ibuprofen, a couple of panic attacks, and finally a dental exam to determine I needed a root canal. I hadn’t been to the dentist in the past four years since I aged out of my parents’ insurance, and because my family dentist does not accept the insurance plan I currently pay for. I know. Four years is a long time. I’m ashamed, but hey, I don’t claim to be a dependable advocate for my own health, and it’s a difficult field to navigate sometimes.

Fortunately, my boyfriend’s parents are excellent, compassionate dentists who have been kind enough to help me out and relieve my squirming temples and throbbing face. On Tuesday, I went in for my root canal. Usually fear percolates within me when it comes to going to the dentist, but I knew any discomfort from the procedure wouldn’t match the cumulative pain I’d endured prior to reclining under the bright surgical light. I tend to zone out at the dentist and end up having minor existential crises. I close my eyes and focus my attention elsewhere, but sometimes the calm purple phosphenes dilating and contracting in the black expanse under my eyelids transmute into orange spiky star shapes when the pressure of a tool exceeds the strength of the anesthetic. Or there are moments when my mind is hovering in a corner outside myself, but my body recognizes an invasion and sends a chill through my arms and legs, reminding me once again that I am tied to this corporeal flesh prison until the day I die.

I go in for a follow-up soon and I’m actually looking forward to letting my tongue go slack and feeling the warmth of the needle numbing the network of nerves on the left side of my mouth.

Soviet new wave, stiob, and Space Bridges

I ought to invest in an English-Russian dictionary, but I still have to work on my Spanish, which is more practical and will delight my grandma and my boyfriend’s mom, and generally improve my life in San Diego and as a person interested in languages. Until then, I’m using Google Translate, just for full disclosure. Please let me know if I’ve interpreted any Russian incorrectly.

Around this time last year, I came across this song on an NTS mix focused on Russian and Eastern European music spanning a variety of genres and decades. It’s called “Шоколадное кафе,” or “Chocolate Café.” I love its melancholic atmosphere.

It produces an image of a wandering bard roaming rain-soaked streets in my mind. This image doesn’t seem too far off from how the band performed and presented themselves in the mid to late 80s. ТУПЫЕ (Tupye), which roughly translates to Dumb or Stupid (I also saw it translated somewhere as The Nitwits), were an avant-garde performance art group from Moscow. Obvious by name alone, the band’s intentions were to not be taken seriously. This manifested in the big parties they’d host during live shows; on-stage participants consisted of up to 40-50 people and sometimes included animal trainers, a pantomime troupe, a children’s choir, and harpists, effectively creating a theatrical Soviet post-punk bacchanal. Alexei Yurchak writes in his book, Everything was Forever, Until it was No More, about how artists employed irony as a method to work around censorship in Soviet arts and culture.

Stiob was a peculiar form of irony that differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision, or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humor. It required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which this stiob was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two. The practitioners of stiob themselves refused to draw a line between these sentiments, producing an incredible combination of seriousness and irony, with no suggestive signs of whether it should be interpreted as the former or the latter, refusing the very dichotomy of the two.(Yurchak, 249-250)

I’m not certain that Tupye were operating under this brand of irony, but based on their flirtation with motley pop formats, their parodic stage spectacles, and the effects of the general widespread socio-political and cultural shifts during glasnost and perestroika, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that this attitude tracked with its members. For instance, the band’s frontman, Dmitry Golubev, recounts a moment when a KGB agent visited his house and questioned the subject matter of his music and the inspiration behind it. Golubev replied with, “freedom, soul, persistent reading of Dostoevsky,” and the agent agreed these were all good things, yet still advised against Golubev’s continuation with the content.

Although there are no official releases of their music, thankfully there are some magnitizdat recordings of Tupye’s music available online. Magnitizdat was the common unauthorized practice of reproducing or recording uncensored speech and forbidden music onto cassette tapes. This quickly replaced the practice of recording onto x-ray disks, and the redistribution of tapes ultimately played a large part in the development of an underground culture in the Soviet Union. Ephemerality and lack of proper recordings makes sense given the band’s improvisational ethos. Reminds me of the international Fluxus movement in that performances and pieces were more about the process rather than the final product. Chaos and the absurd are given a platform, leaving plenty of room for play and chance. All of this seems a rightful reflection of life’s uncertainty, regionally and abroad in global politics at large.

While revisiting “Chocolate Café,” youtube Up nexted me to my latest discovery, НИИ Косметики, or NII Kosmetiki. I guess I’m a little late to the party because apparently Ariel Pink featured one of their songs on a FACT mag mix, but whatever, I found it ~organically. NII Kosmetiki performed at the Rock Laboratory in Moscow, “an officially sanctioned club that promotes musicians who do not belong to state concert organizations”, with the likes of Tupye. Well-known during their time, they played several rock festivals and critics wrote about them in Zombie, a self-published magazine, or samizdat.

New wave pop with a bit of a new romantic glam spangle to it. It’s understandable why someone like Ariel Pink would be drawn to the lo-fi, unproduced quality of these recordings.

Frontman Methodius has recently made efforts to revive the band, replete with an HTML website that harkens back to the Angelfire days with its plain text and glittering animations. You can even leave a comment for them in their Guest Book. The last comments are dated from October 25 of last year, which is apparently Methodius’s birthday. October 25 will be here soon enough, maybe you’d like to wish him a joyous day, too, or tell him how you included his haunted pop songs in your Halloween playlists.

While reading this piece on NII Kosmetiki, I learned about these telecasts held during the Cold War era between the USSR and the US. They were called Space Bridges.

In 1985, “A Citizen’s Summit” was hosted by Vladimir Pozner in Leningrad and in Seattle by talk show host Phil Donahue, of all people. Its aim was to encourage the in-studio Soviet and American audiences to ask any question to bridge differences and build a common ground between the two nations. A veritable “we’re not so different, you and I” moment. It’s basically fifty minutes of Americans sincerely asking questions that reveal their bias against the Soviet Union, such as, “Name three things your country has done to bring about peace,” which isn’t even a question, but they volleyed several questions like it which were met with laughter from the Soviet audience, then thrown back in their court with the same patronizing affect or with feelings of annoyance and hesitation. One woman in the USSR audience eventually suggests that they quit talking about politics altogether because it would just turn the whole event into an amateur recreation of what political leaders go through on the world stage.

It quickly becomes very elliptical and maddening to watch because they keep going back and forth reiterating that they don’t want to talk politics but, of course, end up talking about politics. Apparently, Pozner, a television journalist by trade, often appeared on Donahue’s show and acted as a sort of ambassador of affairs during the Cold War. It should come as no surprise that American TV companies were not interested in purchasing the space bridges. According to Pozner in his autobiography, Parting with Illusions, only eight million people in the US watched the telecasts while 180 million watched in the USSR.

It’s still a mad, mad, mad world after all these years.

Further reading: Soviet new wave figure interviews himself about the surrounding culture in Moscow at the time; short history of Tupye; Everything was Forever, Until it was No More; Rate Your Music is an indispensable resource to consult when exploring regional music and obscure subgenres. I haven’t had a chance to navigate this whole list of Hidden Treasures of the Soviet Union yet, but I encourage you to travel down the Кроличья нора based on the few tracks I did click through and listen to:

Soviet Kosmische from the animated film, The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981):

Jaunty synth pop from Alexey Vishnya, Russian audio engineer who produced Gruppa Krovi by Kino:

Ethereal experimental modern classical for ballet:

Lithuanian soft rock:

Aaron Anecdotes

In this periodical segment, I will be relaying dispatches from my boyfriend, Aaron, who is one of my favorite thinkers. He gets out of the house more than I do and often bears witness to bizarre events and experiences that I wish more people could hear about, but because he is a private person (smart), the strange things he sees and interesting observations he makes often remain between the two of us—until now, perhaps to his chagrin.  

Last month Aaron reluctantly accompanied his family to a seafood buffet for his sister’s birthday. A seafood buffet in the midst of a pandemic already sounds like a risk and a disaster on its own, but that notion soon became palpable. He felt an immediate sense of unease from the moment he entered the restaurant. Half of the vast dining area was empty, the salad bar gleamed bare. However, he reported that the koi fish were still swirling in the pond like usual.

The ordering process was clunky and complicated. Safety protocols called for patrons to wait in line for food cafeteria-style. Dish label inconsistencies on the sneeze guards protecting the food from contamination and difficulties communicating with the servers through masks and language barriers caused for confusion; Aaron said he eventually had to point at dishes and use his fingers to denote quantity, and doing so just made him feel like he was being rude and demoralizing. When he went to use the restroom he was met by vomit splatter on the floor. The thought of someone having committed the act of regurgitation at a seafood buffet in the middle of a global health crisis and someone having to clean it up added to the bleak, dystopian ambience even more.

As he recounted his discomfiting and regrettable experience, I increasingly wished he had documented more of it, for posterity’s sake, because of course he’s not going to go back any time soon. The only photos that bear testimony to the whole experience were of a customer’s matte black motorbike parked against the restaurant’s contrasting soft, pink cherry blossom mural. It effectively captures the off-balance energy exuded by many businesses struggling to uphold the illusion of normalcy during a decidedly abnormal time.