Notes On Scale As It Relates To, You Know, Moscow
1. Your first experience with Scale In Moscow(1) comes on the Aeroexpress, the theoretically-anyway-high speed electric train connecting each of Moscow's three major airports to Moscow Proper. The website(1.5) for the Aeroexpress runs its enthusiastic copy -- "Aeroexpress: You Are On Time!" -- over photographs of reflective Russian professionals drinking from steaming mugs of coffee on the train and it's that protest-too-much-ness aspect of the website's emphasis on convenience that leads you to your default-mode-suspicion re: just how much urine you'll have to smell therein but upon boarding the Aeroexpress does indeed feel as-advertised, and it feels even more so when you ask The Attractive Girl on the train if this train will get you to Red Square because your hotel is sort of near Red Square and it's about 4pm and you're thinking two birds/one stone and she says, "Yes -- short trip, four stops from here" in cheerful-enough-English that you automatically trust her and her general prettiness and her sense of the lay of the land and then you sit in a seat and say things to yourself about modernity/globalization/the power of a smile/etc. The train leaves the station and five minutes in your landscape is pretty much scrub and brush and then full-on trees/forestation and after thirty minutes of pretty much nothing else and a few dozen stops slipping by the window without the train actually "stopping" you start to wonder: a. about The Attractive Girl; b. what "short trip" actually means here; c: just what the (omitted) is going on here. The forestation/general emptiness of the landscape feels like a certain marker for "something's not quite right here" and you get a little uneasy and remind yourself about your lifetime BA(1.6) in terms of Pretty Girls and you and the now-a-little-uneasy-guy with whom you are traveling keep looking at an indecipherable train map and guessing wildly when that first of four stops might be coming and then you see abrupt patches of tall and severe concrete buildings, and then concrete-everything-in-all-directions, and then the kind of graffiti that people who are "totally into street art" will claim in some awful conversation is "the last authentic art" or something and you start to have a sense, because this is the beginning of Moscow rapidly expanding upward and outward right in front of you that, yes, Moscow is big-big. And perhaps that when the Girl meant "short trip" she meant "like, less than a day?" short-trip, and perhaps you may be hitting Red Square later than you thought previously which is, you know, totally okay because "spirit of the trip" and all that and just as you settle back in your seat and whisper "be present" to yourself in a really grateful way the train will stop and every person who has been on the train will get off. The next conversation you have -- because you still aren't ready to believe that The Attractive Girl from earlier was either wrong or just flat-out (omitting) with you -- will be between you, your travel companion, a teenager in some pretty dirty jeans, and an officer from Aeroexpress which will consist of the four of you sort of dancing about and making ape noises. The other two will make gentle/kindly ape noises back at your more uncertain ape noises as way of explanation that there is only one stop and who knows what the Attractive Girl was talking about but this is it and if you wait here much longer the train will start moving backward. Off the Aeroexpress you're dumped in your first Muscovite Metro station where a few thousand Muscovites are all smoking and kind of glaring in the off-hand way all Muscovites seem able to glare and when you look at the map for the metro you'll realize you aren't sure where on the map you actually "are" and even more problematically you'll realize you don't know how to say Red Square in Russian and that just quizzically saying, "English?" really loudly at anyone who walks by just encourages the glaring. Your tourism plans are out the window; your dinner plans are out the window. It will occur to you that there is no discernible way to get anywhere other than where you've already gotten and it will occur to you in as plain and dumb a fashion as anything can occur to anyone that Moscow is Big.
2. Scale can be contemporary and pop-cultural, too(2). Tee-shirts in Quasi Americanese are omnipresent in Moscow and on each is a clumsy affirmation of such optimism that it's difficult to separate that faulty optimism from either the shirt-wearer or the nation it is apeing and in the end you sort of feel bad for both. An example from an eleven year old boy in "athletic-capri-pants" on the Aeroexpress: the lede - "Sports!"; the tag-line, "And He Is Successful!". On a middle-aged man by a "Cbappo"(3) near Red Square: "Enthusiasm!" Just, "Enthusiasm!" On a teenager near him, "Your Name Has Blues Power!" Exclamation points on each; from each the sense that Russians' relationships to their American tee-shirts aren't so different from Americans' relationships to their misspelled Asian tattoos. I'm pretty sure it's here that I'm supposed to write that awful sentence that goes something like, "The spirit of (glasnost, capitalism, the New Russia, etc. etc.) is alive and well in Russia" and then say something about the number of Starbucks there are (there's a lot) and show you a picture of, like, an officer from the Red Army drinking a frappucino(4) but that doesn't speak to anything as interesting/sad/remarkable/anachronistic as that young thirteen year old who asked his father to buy him an "American" tee shirt that celebrates in only the least specific terms imaginable his certain-near-future-successfulness in the area of "sports".
3. But there's scale and then there's scale and in Moscow when we say scale we really mean architecture and when we say architecture in Moscow what we mean is: Red Square(5). We went to Red Square Monday afternoon and spent hours trying to figure out what to do with Red Square once we were there -- we tried saying, "Oh, wow" in hushed and awe-struck tones; we tried scribbling unreadable notes to ourselves; we tried taking photographs from really low-angles to catch the blue sky behind the onion domes which are in turn set off by miles of red brick; we tried taking photographs of people taking photographs; we tried taking really wide photographs that sort of "got the whole thing"; we tried taking photographs of, like, three yellow links in a fence or one brick on the ground or a single English Word misspelled on a sign; we tried sketching That One Character; we tried just stepping back and practicing our "looking" skills. Perhaps what is most surprising about Red Square isn't that it's so big and beautiful and architecturally arrogant on such a specific level that anything you look at in any corner of the place looks like it must have taken a lifetime to build, it's that the whole thing feels incomprehensibly sad. In front of Lenin's tomb there are seventy people lined up to take a photograph in front of the tomb so they can go home and say I've Been Outside of a Building That May/May Not Hold a Famous Dead Person to their friends; military police are stuck blowing their whistles at A Disrespectful Public Who Just Can't Keep Off The Reasonably Small Patches of Grass In Spite of The Other Twenty-Three Thousand Square Feet of Room They Have To Pretty Much Do Whatever They Want With; kids are making out all over the place with a frankness and disregard that is astonishing and perplexing; there are more cameras than people herein and every last one of us is behind a viewfinder trying to figure out how to frame the Minin/Pozharsky statue(5.75). The sad thing about Red Square is that this massive and awful and wondrous thing is just another Disneyland now and still none of us can figure out a way to look at it.
*****
A final note on scale. As we waited for Jeff Parker(6) to meet us at our hotel bar and "show us the town" we struck up a conversation with our bartender who was born in Uzbekistan and learned English in Uzbekistan and came to Moscow because the work is better here than there and so(5.5) When we asked him what he liked to do for fun in Moscow he grinned shyly and said, "I don't do much here. It's very, very expensive".
We passed the night with Parker first by watching the Women's World Cup Final in a bar that was pretty-well unconvinced the thing even existed and seemed to specialize in fleecing Americans Who Purchase Cigars; then in a kind of alleyway bar not too far from Red Square. We'd only been in town for a few hours(6.5) -- the only sites we'd seen outside the Aeroexpress were the massive circle of buildings Google Maps insisted must house our hotel (they did not)(7) and the fenders of the hundred thousand or so lunatic Muscovite drivers intent on running us over as Google Maps marched us toward our death -- and on the way to Bar #2, as Parker was haggling with the cab driver over the final 100 Rubles of our fare, we came upon a large intersection and bright sodium lighting and Parker sort off-hand said, "Oh -- over there's Red Square". Then at the bar he told us something about the way you are supposed to order and drink vodka and also that Russians don't really have a word for "shot" (which is a little hard to believe) and the bar ran a playlist that included with no discernible irony whatsoever songs like "Islands in the Stream" and "Morning Train (9-5)" and we were warned not to open a certain door because it may or may not be the entrance to a sex club and toward the end of the night we sat at a small table in the alleyway while Brandon smoked the ten dollar cigar he bought for 30 dollars and I kept saying, "Can you believe we're really here?" pretty stupidly. Even the alleyway was enormous. Parker found a cab and left us to our own devices; we faced a two mile walk home through early morning Moscow streets. When we passed Red Square and the sodium lights and all the closed street vendors and kiosks I made a note to myself to be grateful for all that I've been afforded, and to be sure to really "see" Red Square the next afternoon.
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(1) In addressing scale herein I do want to acknowledge that pretty much anyone who writes about Moscow writes about Scale in Moscow and thus the whole thing becomes a feedback loop of self-obfuscation.
(1.5) http://www.aeroexpress.ru/en/
(1.60 Batting Average. Mine = very low.
(2) A striking example: the fifty-yard-wide billboard we passed on Tverskaya for the film "Captain America". This vein of anachronism runs so deep (The hero himself; the title of the movie; the Hollywood-as-conquering-emperor thing; WW2; etc. etc.) that all I could do to work with it was snap a photo of it with my iPhone and then focus the rest of my energy on the statue of Lenin facing it directly across the street.
(3) S'barro.
(4) There was a Starbucks across the street from it and yes, I know, if you were me you would have gone to some totes-authentic coffee shop or something because you understand coffee/travel in a way that I don't and also you can't believe I'm supporting whatever it is I'm supporting when I support what I support, but I'll say this: I'm vegan, I don't know how to say soy in Russian, and the triple vente caramel latte I ordered was outstanding.
(5) Obviously I'm being reductive here. In Moscow, all architecture is enormous -- so much so that it fazes itself out of recognition almost immediately and becomes invisible. You'll find yourself standing next to the largest apartment complex you've ever seen in your life and you won't have any sense it's there until you are about a mile away, looking back over your shoulder, wondering where that thing back there came from and the guy you are with goes, "Dude -- we were just there?"
(5.5) His name was Marat and he was incredibly kind/young in a way that is immediately charming and graceful and we wanted nothing more than for Marat to like us because if nice people like you then you = doing okay. In telling us about his own life he mentioned Uzbekistan and then said, "So I lived in Soviet Union for 29 years" which blew us away until we asked how old he was and he said and it turns out he was about fifteen years older than we thought. Here Brandon and I sort of ran our hands through our gray hair and thought about the separate collapsing empires that are our bodies and he smiled and looked at our beers and said, gently, "I don't do any of that."
(5.75) Which isn't to say small moments of grace are impossible to find even in the most crowded places. In St. Basil's Cathedral -- that's the onion dome you think of when you think of the Kremlin, ill-educated you -- we wedged our way through a tight stairwell and came into a gorgeous chamber where four members of the church were singing chamber music to raise money for the Cathedral. They sang two songs, and in standing there you again remind yourself to stop worrying about Larger Cultural Implications Of Anything and remember that in all places everywhere there are people who love and love the world and love God; but in standing there you also say to yourselves, "I'm blogging this" and immediately hit record on your iphone and bootleg the performance and think to yourself about torrenting it later too.
(6) Check out Parker's wonderful first novel here: http://www.iamovenman.com/main.html Then buy it.
(6.5) A note on itinerary. We landed in Moscow 3:51pm EEST. We drank one beer outside of an airport C'Bappo as celebration; we rode the Aeroexpress for +/- 60 minutes; we stood around in abject shock in the metro station for +/-30 minutes (and I used a pay-WC that was extraordinarily intimidating but "not optional given my state at the time"); we rode the metro for +/- 30 minutes; we walked around the circle of buildings/between-cars-intent-on-killing-us for +/- 90 minutes, we arrived at the Sheraton Palace Hotel at approx. 8:00pm EEST; we met Jeff Parker at the Sheraton Palace Hotel at 10:00pm EEST.
(7) Here I'll add that Google Maps has been off by about 2 blocks on every direction it has given us and though I wish it weren't so it's also the case that the streets in Moscow go in often surprising directions and also that the names of the streets change pretty arbitrarily and it's hard to blame my iphone for not always knowing where we are.