I could not resist doing this again.

1. Comment to this post with "I surrender!" and I'll assign you the basis of some tv show idea. (Science fiction show, medical drama, criminal procedure, etc...)
2. Create a cast of characters, including the actors who'd play them
3. Add in any actor photos, character bios and show synopsis that you want.
4. Post to your own journal.

smhwpf gave me period drama and initially specified pre-1815, but my burning period drama idea takes place in 1907, which is nearly 100 years ago so ought to qualify in terms of lavish costumes and set design.

Apologies in advance for the profusion of British white dudes playing Russian white dudes. This is a Beeb production. It's 90% dialogue and largely an excuse to get really talented actors to shout at each other. Russian and French dialogue is in English with the actors' actual accents; dialogue in German and Polish is subtitled.

The show is called Common Cause (Общее дело).

It's 1907. The first attempt at revolution in Russia two years ago was a miserable bloody failure; the movement's surviving leaders are scattered in exile throughout Europe or rotting in Tsarist prisons. Lenin's just declared that it'll be twenty years before they have another shot at overthrowing the Tsar. Some elements are trying to reunite the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as well as the Social Revolutionaries and anarchist groups in a common struggle; other forces work behind the scenes to undermine any cohesion or unity.

The one group that does take the revolutionaries seriously is the Okhrana. In an attempt to prevent a repeat of 1905, the Tsarist secret police has dispatched agents and infiltrators to destroy the various revolutionary movements from within; in fact, as in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, the Parisian emigré community has more informants than actual activists, and they've been entirely successful in hobbling the movement.

Until now.

( based on a true story )

I expect it would run for two or three seasons (with six episodes each) and then get abruptly cancelled. There is also a made-for-TV movie, set during the Berne Trial, that reunites the surviving characters and ends the series.

Q: So why is the mayor allegedly hanging out in a crack house in Etobicoke?

Doug Ford: Well, you know something, I know, OK, let me cut to the chase, Don (Peat, Toronto Sun reporter). Because your paper’s gone a little offside.

Q: The paper that endorsed you in 2010?

Ford: Everyone changes. Until the media —

Q: So did the mayor.

Ford: Can you let me finish, Don? Until the media, stops it’s [sic] Soviet Stalin-era Pravda journalism, and for the folks that don’t know what Pravda journalism, back in the day of Stalin, that tries to coerce, get the people to believe in what they’re doing.

Q: What are you talking about, Doug?

The whole interview is comedy gold. Never change, Dougie.

Electronic music. Communism. Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin. Futurism. Alchemy and the occult.

There are a few times that I've wished that I were more mechanically and musically inclined. Alas, I lack the talent to ever build one, though given that it's played by drawing, I'm pretty sure I could actually play one.

ETA: Here it is being played (starts at around 4:17):

I have located my missing ushanka!

Now I have two. At least I was smart and got the new one in a different colour. And I do think black goes better with the Black Coat of Swoopiness. The other one is from Moscow though, and I am incredibly sentimental about it, and also it is warmer and more comfortable.

This winter has barely called for ushankas at all, not that I'm complaining.

As promised, some words about the most horrific book I have ever read.

It's called Voices from Chernobyl: the oral history of a nuclear disaster, written by Svetlana Alexievich and translated by Keith Gessen. Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the Chernobyl meltdown, including liquidators sent in to clean up the disaster, firefighters, scientists, soldiers, family members of victims, and, most chillingly, young children. I'm not sure whether it's their stories, her editing and transcription, or Gessen's phenomenal translation, but there's a haunting lyricism to the monologues that places the reader at Ground Zero of the humanitarian catastrophe of these stories.

I'm afraid of the rain. That's what Chernobyl is. I'm afraid of snow, of the forest. This isn't an abstraction, a mind game, but an actual human feeling. Chernobyl is my home. It's in the most precious thing: my son, who was born in the spring of 1986. Now he's sick. Animals, even cockroaches, they know how much and when they should give birth. But people don't know how to do that. God didn't give us the power of foresight. A while ago in the papers it said that in Belarus alone, in 1993 there were 200,000 abortions. Because of Chernobyl. We all live with that fear now. Nature has sort of rolled up, waiting. Zarathustra would have said: "Oh, my sorrow! Where has the time gone?"

I think I was startled by just how compelling and awful I found this, given that I've read plenty of books on the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine and the Congo and Bhopal. Maybe it's because the Chernobyl meltdown happened when I was seven, and is one of those events that stuck in my mind and gave me nightmares, or because, while there are no shortage of disasters and wars and horrible things that can happen, Chernobyl was unpredictable and, as we saw in Japan, can easily happen again. Could have happened here. But it's also the luminous quality of the writing that makes the suffering and death depicted in these pages feel incredibly concrete and present.

---

On a more cheerful note, I went to Word on the Street today and picked up an incredible haul:

The Female of the Species, Sarah McCully. Sarah and I were friends in high school, but from the description of the book, I'd still be completely eager to read it even if I didn't know her. She's also an incredible musician and I bought her CD as well.

The Panic Button, Koom Kankesan. I know Koom as well, through teacherly things. Anyway, Alan Moore recommended it, which is good enough for me. I can't believe that someone I know (albeit not someone I know well, but still) is in communication with Moore. I seriously envision him living this Salingeresque life of hermitude that he emerges from only to write the occasional comic and make disparaging remarks about cinematic adaptations of his work.

Book of Disorders, Luciano Iacobelli.

Teaching Rebellion: stories from the grassroots mobilization in Oaxaca, Diana Denham and the C.A.S.A. Collective. I'd never heard of this book but I think it's obvious why I'd have picked it up.

Zot, Scott McCloud. I feel it is probably essential to read this.

Barnum: In Secret Service to the USA, Howard Chaykin. Never heard of it, but I liked the cover and it's by Howard Chaykin.

The Authority: Human on the Inside, John Ridley. I didn't read very far past Ellis' run on The Authority, and that clearly needed to be remedied.

I also picked up some cool t-shirts, one from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and another from Spacing Magazine, and three issues of Shameless for my class.

I am very pleased about this, as I ran out of books that I own, haven't read, and am excited to read. I've got some holds at the library but I'm going through a new book every few days. One of my holds is Das Kapital, which should keep me out of trouble for awhile, but in the meantime I need some good commuting reading.

In other news, I have a migraine. Still. The pills aren't helping.

Dinner tonight:





Also, via umadoshi: What's up with the LJ DDos attacks. I have to say, that makes me want to stick with LJ more.

I just finished Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which, as several have pointed out, is kind of the best title ever. It's about the ordinary lives of young people in the Soviet Union from the 50s to the 80s.

The prevailing images of Soviet life in the West—at least when I was growing up—were of disaffected youth who wanted nothing more than Levi jeans and Coca-Cola, quietly mouthing the hackneyed slogans forced on them by the government while privately listening to censored rock music and plotting the downfall of socialism.

And who could blame them?


Salad with mayonnaise. Check out English Russia's World of Soviet Groceries post.

Yurchak, having actually experienced the system firsthand, takes a more nuanced view, rejecting binaries (surprise! He is a post-modernist) and exploring instead the basic contradictions experienced by Soviet citizens, leading to the USSR's collapse. He begins from Claude Lefort's paradox of modernist ideology:

[T]he split between ideological enunciation (which reflects the theoretical ideals of the Enlightenment) and ideological rule (manifest in the practical concerns of he modern state's political authority) [...] In the society built on communist ideals, this paradox appeared through the announced objective of achieving the full liberation of the society and the individual (building of communism, creation of the New Man) by means of subsuming that society and individual under full party control. The Soviet citizen was called upon to submit completely to party leadership, to cultivate a collectivist ethic, and to repress individualism, while at the same time becoming an enlightened and independent-minded individual who pursues knowledge and is inquisitive and creative.

The result is an analysis that actually allows Soviet citizens some agency, particularly in Yurchak's descriptions of the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth), to which most people in the USSR belonged. Loyal Komsomol party secretaries had no problem espousing a critical but supportive view of socialism, while seeing no inherent contradiction with an appreciation of what Yurchak calls the "Imaginary West" as constructed through music, shortwave radio, and subculture. In fact, it was the ideology of their institutions, which in theory promoted inquisitiveness, that led them to pursue these interests.

The first two chapters are a slog through an analysis of authoritative discourse—the "everything was forever" referenced in the title, where content became subservient to the creation of language that removed the author and gave a sense that there was a universal, static truth that everyone new. (The result of this discourse being hilarious copypasta speeches and banners where local Komsomol members would notice grammatical errors but be forbidden by higher-ups to correct them, since the mistake was in the original.) It's dense stuff, mainly dealing with the relationship between the constative dimension of discourse—which can be true or untrue—and the performative dimension—which can only be effective or ineffective. (Thankfully, we get examples. A constative statement is "I am cold"—a description of reality; a performative statement is "I vote for this resolution," which affects the nature of social reality.) At times, I felt I lacked the requisite background in linguistics and po-mo to understand what the author is on about, but he quotes Laibach along with Derrida, so I got through it.

The rest, which focuses on institutions and subcultures, was a much faster, more engaging read. He looks at concepts of svoi ("us," as in "us/them," distinguishing "normal people" and complicated social networks from activists—in this context, unquestioning pro-Soviet ideologues, and dissidents), vnye (occupying a position simultaneously inside and outside the system, but finding the official discourse "uninteresting"), and some very strange performance art. There's some really good primary source research that's just completely engrossing, breaking up the theory with letters, jokes, and strange collections of anecdotes.

Anyway, totally worth a read. If you got through the above blather, you can have a picture of a bootleg record made on an X-Ray:

Vladimir Putin sings "Blueberry Hill." Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Mickey Rourke, and a bunch of other famous actors sing along.

I don't know. This video might actually be too post-modern even for me.

Via dubaiwalla:



A concise history of the Soviet Union, featuring Tetris and an accordion.

You should all be listening to this band because they are awesome.

Hat tip: zemleroi.