Davitoville

When the annals of history have been written, edited furiously, and then reedited—after the confrontations, then collusions, of vainglorious victors—three things will be remembered about feminist Russian punk-rock band ‘Pussy Riot’: 1) They had what was easily one of the best band names ever concocted, 2) They weren’t so much “a band” as they were a collective of some dozen-and-a-half performance artists who melded punk music with ski-mask costumes & guerilla performances to broadcast political convictions, and 3) They helped raise the slow-bubbling anger over the neo-czar-like rule of Vladimir Putin into something closer to a slow-boil, galvanizing the former Soviet-empire’s disparate youth movements to rally as one body—for the right of people to love whom they pleased, for the voice of womyn in a society that often treats them as an afterthought to male concerns, and for the values of democratic due process over the increasingly paternal-fascist Putin/Russian Orthodox Church alliance—at least for the duration of the fallout from their most notorious stunt, which landed 3 of them in jail & butterflied Pussy Riot into an internationally-lauded symbol of feminist-flavored political resistance.

On February 12^th, 2012, just a year-and-a-half after their formation—though their political predecessor & brain-trust ‘Voina’ (translation: ‘War’), a Russian performance group of street-artists (think Banksy but in motion), which included members who would later form P.R., had been active since around 2007—Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and two other womyn entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, where church services were not being held, changed into colorful ski masks (known as “balaclavas” in many Slavic-language societies), and began to deliver what they called a “punk-rock prayer”—imploring “Mother of God, Drive Putin Away” (also the title of the accompanying song)—to an establishment otherwise utilized for keeping submissive peoples in check (& womyn in non-threatening roles).  They were protesting the upcoming “re-election” of Vladimir Putin, almost certain to win due to his political strong-arming & over a decade of carefully-curated image-mongering of himself as a semi-God (a page straight out of Joe Stalin’s old playbook), corroborated & exacerbated by the Orthodox Church itself, especially when Patriarch Kirill called Putin a “miracle from God” earlier that same day in comments made openly supporting the Czarsky’s re-election.  The sight of a band of bold young womyn, wearing bright war-like masks & flailing their bodies as well as projecting their voices, must have bordered on the cathartic for observers—especially when viewed in the illumination of the long light of womyn who gave their lives trying to democratize Russia, like the politician Galina Starovoitova and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya (both murdered under mysterious circumstances by forces associated with Russian intelligence officers—Vladimir’s old job).

Five days later, the “criminal investigation” papers were filled, and less than a week after that, the womyn of P.R. who participated in the protest began to be arrested, charged with the ludicrously-labeled “crime” of “hooliganism driven by religious hatred.”  After months of a highly-publicized trial, about which even a dastardly-smirking one Vladimir Putin himself quipped to a “Russia Today” news camera that “although there was nothing good about what Pussy Riot did, still we should not judge them too harshly.”  Wink, wink, bro.  Three P.R. womyn were eventually sentenced to 2 years in prison, despite (or especially because of?) the full-throated support of British & American icons like Sting & The Red-Hot Chili Peppers.

One can read more about the history, the incident, & the subsequent trial on the Internet, but the take-away here is tremendous & two-fold: 1) In Soviet Russia—I’m sorry, I meant some shit called “The Russian Federation”—President chooses YOU! (to go to jail for hurting his feelings, that is), and 2) We in the United States take our freedoms of speech & assembly not only for granted, we squander them on talking a lot but often saying little.  The U.S. is not Russia, but here too the forces of religious traditionalism hover over our rights, corporatist money endangers the power of our votes, and vituperative Supreme Court Justices have taken to toying with absolutely essential legislation like some off-kilter sentence in a personal novel.  It’s inspiring that artists like Pussy Riot (and Banksy, and countless others with less fame) are willing to put their freedoms & lives in jeopardy to fight bellicose patriarchies & dictators or blood-loving corporations & military industrial complexes, and certainly big stunts like performance-bombing a symbolic landmark are responsible for shifting the social consciousness in ways that can begin to chip away at the paradigm.  But when we allow the dissent to end at the symbolic act itself, the familiar first-as-tragedy-then-as-farce trajectory will curve again.  True, Pussy Riot may have been speaking to Russians more than anyone, but there are lessons to be extrapolated for all of us.  An injustice in one part of the world is an injustice everywhere; it is this mantra that will allow us to breach the next final frontier: our unnecessarily limiting conception of the national border.  We here can’t assume the responsibility of changing Russia (nor should we), but we can certainly resolve to cull from a global imagination, and we can remember—an act that has the power to save a whole people, and to give birth to a new one as well.

Let us remember then that we in the place where punk-rock & hip-hop & graffiti were born should never get so spoiled by our comforts that we forget to stand more vociferously with freedom fighters the world over (not just in oil-rich countries with dinky militaries) who sing protest songs with lyrics inspired by our own poets—nor should we forget to sharpen the tenor & tone of our own, from time to time.

Because the threats of stagnation, complacency, & repression demand it.  Because the tugs of regression howl like dying twisters.  Because if we don’t, who will?  (And what would I even write about then?)

—DM, 3/14/13

It’s 2010, the world needs more compassion. A lot more love, a lot less reaction. A style that’s free-thinkin’ and untouched by sanctions—not meaningless gestures, I’m talking ‘bout action. I’m talkin’ revolution, but deaf ears turn to factions, they can’t see that absolutists are the real blasphemes. I try to shine lights, but night-eyes can’t stand ‘em, I’m in the middle of this road and that path lies in fractions. I try to move wisely but can’t avoid all these scratches, my heart is too big to be burst by detraction. Yeah I meditate but succumb to distractions, I wish my vision & foresight were as clear as my passions.

—DM, 5/26/10

Rihanna—world-renowned pop star & recent jet enthusiast/journalist-kidnapper—has a song on her 7^th studio album entitled  “Nobody’s Business,” featuring the 21^st century’s Ike Turner: Chris Brown.

And you know what? She’s right.

It isn’t any of our business.

Following the infamous 2009 assault that left “Robyn F.” with a battered face—as well as Chris Brown in a sea of trouble/bad tattoos and gossip rags with a 24-hour “news” cycle of endless speculation—media outlets & journalists took it upon themselves to turn the two young musicians into a parable of relationships gone awry. 

University students, activists, celebutantes, and any blogger worth half her weight in salt followed suit, mutating an awfully sad but basically private incident into the poster discussion for domestic violence at large. The PR machines behind both singers were collusive—trying first to whitewash the situation, before realizing that leaving it on constant spin was probably more profitable. The amount of literature that exists on the subject online alone is enough to fill a graduate program’s entire workload—and that’s excluding the unfathomable amount of user bloviating and bickering. Brown was quickly demonized & dismissed (howls for his head emanated from both the shallows & depths of the Internet alike); Rihanna was turned into a superficial portrayal of a victim and pitied (never acknowledged for those aspects of her that were strong and not victim-like); and never was a genuine dialogue about the sorts of conditions that lead people to act & react violently—or what such violence can do to either person psychologically—seriously engaged.

As for Rihanna & Brown themselves, the media decided their thoughts & feelings on their own story did not really matter. There were interviews, sure, but with each passing article, op-ed, and year, the two were systematically deprived of the agency to own their own narratives. Yes, they tweeted suggestively & made allusive songs, but any school counselor will tell you that such passive-aggressiveness a cohesive catharsis does not make. 

It wasn’t until Rihanna sat down for a one-on-one interview with Oprah, more than 3 years after the fact, that we really bothered to ask her how SHE felt about the incident, about her (then-former) partner—who, she told Oprah, really “needed help” at the time, whose own abusive childhood & personal demons led him to actions that overnight morphed the public’s perception of him from sex symbol to monster, without ever acknowledging what trauma or wounds may lie beyond the camera’s glare. I’m not saying we should feel sorry for Brown, per se, but I do think it would be more useful to interrogate critically his psychological & emotional condition at the time, rather than simply to castrate him.

Nor did we bother, really, to ask Rihanna how she felt about the whole world using her personal hurt as a cheap-ish prop for a litany of discussions about what’s wrong with relationships between men and women, all of which betrays one very real and glaring irony—that this same act of indulgence and disregard for privacy/people’s dignity is not so different from the same sort of evils this self-righteous media gluttony was attempting to disavow.

I agree: It’s important for us to have honest, open dialogues with one another about the kinds of wickedness that usually get buried in hushed tones and behind closed doors—like domestic abuse—especially with teenagers & young people. It’s equally important that, in allowing our public figures their right to heal in private, we begin to heal our own malicious tendency to drag the most well-known amongst us through the mud for the sake of our insatiable, schadenfreude-laden thirst for entertainment.  

By turning Brown & Rihanna into easily digestible tropes for our own over-consumption, rather than recognizing them as complex individuals deserving of our compassion, we robbed ourselves of an opportunity to have a dignified discussion of the nature of abuse, conflicts between partners, the hard work of relationships, the pressures that come with success, and the mixed fortune of being a young person living under the ever-watchful eye of public scrutiny.

And now, the media is reporting that Chris Brown & Rihanna are back together. Endless ‘twit-pics’ & public appearances corroborate this, and the album itself might well be called one long love letter to Brown. Of course, opinion-peddlers and graduate students writing dissertations are angry. And maybe this IS the sad saga—ripe with didactic parable—of a troubled woman wrongly identifying with and forgiving her abusive lover, despite pleas from the chattering masses (and maybe even their managers).

Or maybe it’s just another turn in the lives of two twenty-somethings, and maybe it really isn’t any of our business at all.

—DM, 12/4/12

  “Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.”

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” ― Vladimir Nabokov

***

“On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given.” ―Gary Shteyngart, ‘Absurdistan’ (2006)


We don’t make the tools that
 make us
But we make sure we buy them.

I’ve bought into more fallacies
 than I can care to count.
Though even that act of
 enumeration
 is essentially
 exploitation.

I can’t even separate my yearning from my conditioning anymore.

But still,
 I
Do—

Yearn, that is.

For—
Short bursts of
 inspiration,
And—
Big spurts of
 perspicacity,
Plus—
Reciprocal, reverent
 rapture,
But—
Roots
 have a way of
 pulling at the polymers
 of progress.

I just wish they understood
 that settling…
 actually dissolves
 a compound,
 rather than makes it whole.

But even if I were
 to twirl eternally,
 like some centrifugal dervish,
I could never relinquish…
 the difficult work
 of locating myself
Between the two beats
 of a heart
Divided against
 itself.

For this, we need our tools.

But we don’t need to sell
 ourselves
 to chase
What shiny coins
 can never
Replenish.

—DM, 1/10/2013

*Written in thumb on an iPhone, at the AT&T store on E. 86th & 3rd Avenue, waiting for a charge.