deepchild

Russian Rambles…

Sunday, June 27th, 2010 | deepchild live and dj sets, reflections

Through nothing short of a miracle, I have officially survived a vodka-drenched night of Russian ‘forceful hospitality’ in Krasnodar…

Not only am I, bafflingly, entirely-free from hangover symptoms (No hangover! No sweats! No cotton-mouth! No gammy dehydration!), but I was honored to play one of the better live-sets I’ve performed in the last 3 years. Whether or not this can be attributed to the obliged consumption of “Come in the Hand of a Stranger” and “Bloody Haemorroids”, or through some feat of unexpected yogic-fortitude, I’ll never know.

I do know that I finally sunk into an all-too-brief slumber at around 8am, whilst my rather worse-for-wear promoter lay, almost catatonic, in the neighboring room.

I’m currently sitting in Moscow Airport, catching up on promo material from hombres at Moon Harbor, drinking Hoegarten, and preparing for a final leg on Russia’s infamous Aeroflot airlines, back to Berlin. I perform, again live, on the Fusion Festival main-stage tomorrow-morning at 11am. I predict an early bed-time tomorrow night, in my beloved Neukölln. God, I love Berlin. Travels in the last few months for shows in Russia, Poland and the US have only served to remind my of my position of complete privilege, in this respect. Moreover, they’ve also steeled my determination to learn German to at least a nominal level of polite-conversation.

I’m so frequently asked about Berlin…so rich in mystery and over-blown hype, in sacredness - yet also bearing the scars of a dark, unrequited nihilism. What can I say? For me, Berlin’s riches lie in its humble experiments with truth (to rather crudely paraphrase Gandhi). Will living in Berlin make you rich? No. Hardly - Berlin’s infrastructure, social-welfare and the rest leeches heavily from wider GDP affluence, whilst Berlin itself is a poster-child for unemployment bedlam.

Will living in Berlin make you famous? Probably not. Our Berlin community is transient, possibly oversaturated with ambitious ‘artists’, all riding high on the ‘elegantly wasted artiste’ mythology which has coined proclamations of a “new New York”….I’ve never been to New York, so I’m only speculating in my comparisons, but I dare say that Berlin is hardly the hyper-paced business megalopolis of its US ‘nemesis’. No, Berlin is not New York. It remains a strange social anathema - so full of gorgeous contradictions…and yet, I love Berlin, because Berlin’s heart has always been broken…because Berlin is a city which does NOT believe in the aspirational mythologies of nuclearity, of acquisition, of stasis, of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. These are the stories which have betrayed it, and the rest of the world, with unfathomably depravity.

I love Berlin, because, it’s ok to ‘be’, to just ‘be’. Stripped from the narratives which foster a deluded sense of self-sufficiency, Berlin’s story is one rooted in a confession of failure, of inter-dependence, of some sort of bastardized recognition that, really, there IS nothing that ‘can’ be achieved, acquired, which doesn’t eventually disappear….

Enough already.

For the last few days I’ve had Stings glorious cold-war pop-gem, “Russians” cycling in my head. “We have the same biology, regardless of ideology”. The older I become, the more suspicious I become that perhaps Sting was more subversive than I first imagined. Or perhaps he just re-appropriated Eastern European folk into a compelling noir-pop statement?

Regardless, the song feels as poignant and gorgeous as ever.

It seems that the USA has always needed to claim an ‘enemy’, and I can’t help but feel that this repeated motif blatantly betrays the countries neo-Evangelical roots. Without an ‘enemy’, what differentiates a US ideological “will-to-power” from that of the heathen-masses, who feel they have far less to lose.

Obama still feels like a breath of fresh-air for the USA, and for the rest of us. But I cannot quite fathom his place in the US political-story. Perhaps he’s just far wiser and astute to me? He knows the rules of the game, and plays them decisively in the context of whatever ‘politics’ has come to represent. And yet, I’m alarmed by disparate reference to a distinctly ‘old-guard’ lexicon. The ‘war’ against the recent oil-spil speech? What on earth? Prefaced by an unexpected reference to Al Quaeda (do they even exist?), Osama Bin Laden et al, and ‘our men and women on the front line’. This all just feels like strained back-peddaling to me.

But yes, enough already. Such are the thoughts of this unlikely expat through the wilds of Eastern Europe, playing repetitive beats to kids who’ve seen far more than me…

Berlin calling tomorrow. My heart so touched by my first Russian shows.

See you in 10 days, Miami

Tags: deepchild. Krasnodar, Russia

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