The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (38 page)

On the way back, we ran into two women from Ai Laika, one of the opening acts: Nastia, thin, dark, in a cutoff Blink-182 shirt, wearing round black sunglasses and conveying a distant air; Lera, friendlier, in sandals and a yellow fanny pack, wearing anchor earrings. They would play first, followed by Phooey, the band Yura had recommended the night before.

“Phooey is the best Ukrainian band,” Lera agreed.

“We are probably second-best,” her bandmate added drily.

“Maloi is great too.”

I played with them last time, I said.

“They are even better now.” (“All of those guys are in like six or seven other bands,” Yura had said of Maloi. “It makes them better, I think.”)

Odessa, the girls agree, had the best punk and hardcore scene in Ukraine. A big festival had just happened there. “Also the kids
are younger. Here we have a good scene, but there are no younger bands.”

Why?

“Maybe they see they can't make a living at it.”

Back at the venue, a folding table had appeared, strewn with a few demo cassettes, zines, and a handful of vinyl for sale: Fucked Up, Government Issue, a Hot Water Music seven-inch. I asked Sasha what were appropriate prices for my merchandise.

“I don't know,” he said. “Let me ask around. I haven't done a show since the currency changed.” He meant the post-crisis inflation that devalued the hryvnia from about eight to eleven against the U.S. dollar (the value would halve again by the end of the year).

I went outside to do some people watching and greeted Constantine, whom I'd met at my last Kyiv show. He was earnest, with a hardcore crew cut. He'd been in a band on the American hardcore label React, and had recently been touring in Belarus. “I really like Minsk—it is like Kyiv but easier. I don't like Moscow or Saint Petersburg because everyone is moving really fast and pushing.” He mimed throwing elbows.

Ai Laika began their set—upbeat, melodic pop punk, including a cover of Ace of Base's “All That She Wants.” I asked Constantine what he thought of current Ukrainian bands. He mentioned Dakh Daughters and DakhaBrakha, a pair of female-fronted acts centered around the Dakh Theatre in Kyiv, whose Dresden Dolls–esque “freak cabaret” had made them viral video sensations. DakhaBrakha “are doing really cool things. They did a soundtrack for” Земля, a classic Ukrainian silent film. “I took my dad because he liked this film, and he said, ‘Get me all this band's records.'”

His mother worked at the chocolate company Roshen, the centerpiece of the business empire of the new president.
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“He is not really an oligarch like Akhmetov, who made all his billions at once in the nineties. [Poroshenko] made it as a businessman over twenty years.” He also thought Poroshenko was a relatively straight dealer in a way uncommon, to say the least, at the highest levels of Ukrainian business. Most companies, he said, paid their employees a different wage in cash than on paper, a tax-avoidance scheme. Roshen, at least in his mother's experience, paid aboveboard wages. “I voted for Poroshenko because I didn't want a [runoff]. We didn't have time as a country for more months and more tax money for more elections.”

His mother had her own political awakening recently. A Russian from the Caucasus, she went to Crimea on vacation. “She saw all the houses, the architecture was Tatar, but there were no Tatars.” (Under heavy pressure, thousands of Crimean Tatars have left the peninsula to become refugees in Ukraine.) “Before that she was a Russian nationalist; then she thought, this is not right.”

Phooey set up. They were a shaggy trio with a 1990s-revival sensibility. The singer wore thick glasses and a Sonic Youth
T-shirt, and they did sound like Sonic Youth, or Dinosaur Jr., or a noisier Smashing Pumpkins. I asked Constantine about the Kyiv punk scene's involvement in the Maidan protests.

“I am glad the punks got involved,” he said. One Russian-language news site after another was parroting or succumbing under pressure to the Kremlin party line that the Maidan protesters and the new Ukrainian government were perpetrators of a neo-Nazi coup. “I woke up one morning, and overnight the first website I checked every day had been replaced with ‘Crimea has always been Russian territory.'”

The Russian propaganda was confusing to some European punks and activists habituated to responding to calls for antifascist action. “Some Italian hardcore leftists wanted to do a tour of Novorossiya”—the separatist name for the southeastern regions—“because they thought it was all anarchists and communists” fomenting antifascist revolution. “Then they got there, and posted one photo on Facebook and nothing more, when they saw the crazy people that were there. . . . Many of the people I work with, their parents are in the east, and I hear them on the phone: ‘We have a checkpoint fifty meters from the house. We haven't left the apartment in two weeks.'”

Sure, he said, there are right-wing elements in Ukraine. “There are two different kinds of right-wing: imperialists and anti-imperialists. All Ukrainians are anti-imperialists. There are even Russian nationalists who hate Putin, because all their tax money goes to the Caucasus,” a region outside the ethnic Russian heartland. The lack of a distinction reflected a dangerously vague taxonomy both in the propaganda and the reporting surrounding the conflict, which blurred the differences on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides between legitimate fascists, Soviet
imperial revanchists, ethnic purists, pan-Slavic utopianists, Trypillian neo-pagan primordialists, and simple patriots, lumping them all under the multiform adjective “nationalist.”

“I don't see why anyone would care,” said Vlad from Maloi. He wore a Hot Water Music T-shirt, rolled camouflage shorts, a backward baseball cap, and sockless slip-on shoes. “It's not like the poor rising up against the rich. It's just geopolitics.” He had other priorities and asked if I could recommend a mixing engineer. “We have a new album recorded, and I want to get someone good to mix it. I was thinking to ask the guy from the Posies.”

What do you want it to sound like? I asked.

“Kind of like the Posies.”

Phooey finished their set, and I dropped my tuner and cables on the floor in front of the center mic. The singer, Nikita, approached me after packing up his guitar. He had, it seemed, an agenda and a message he wanted me to receive. “Do you need help setting up?” he asked. “Sorry, maybe that sounds condescending.”

No, I said, my setup is pretty simple.

“No, to play acoustic is simple,” he said. “They asked me about putting on your show last night in Zhytomyr, but you needed too many mics. I don't know anyone with that many mics, so I declined.”

I use one vocal mic and lines for one, two, or three instruments.

“I think maybe there weren't too many people?” he continued, with a kind of deadpan smirk.

Actually, I said, there were a couple dozen. Not bad for me.

“Uh-huh, yes, shows are not as good there these days.”

If that night was any indication, shows actually were quite
good in Kyiv these days. After the show, Nikita had some more opinions. “It was really great the way you combined humor with sadness and anger. I usually go outside. I am like an old person. I only like my own music. Maybe that sounds egotistical.”

I had to agree, though only to myself—maybe it did.

“So, you're going to come have a drink?” Sasha asked after we'd cleaned up. Maria and Lesia were already in bed, so I said yes. “Then drop your accordion,” he said, “and let's drink.”

“This is a classic old Soviet bar,” he said after a short walk. “Just beer and dried fish.” It was a utilitarian, brightly lit room, a cross between a bodega and sports bar. It was prosaically named Podil, after the neighborhood (not that you would know from any signage). The proprietor was round and balding, with spectacles low on his nose. His shirt was unbuttoned and his chest hair was gray.

“No vodka, and there never will be!” advertised signs Sharpied on cardboard and posted throughout. An old propaganda poster showed a handsome man rejecting a shot of vodka: “Nyet!” While it looked like the owner had furnished and decorated the bar entirely with promotional items and branded miscellany from multinational beer companies, the handful of taps all poured local brews. TV screens on every wall played soccer highlights.

The real innovation—practically a sellout, Sasha's friends agreed—is that the bar had started selling chips.

“These chips, they are Soviet invention,” said one, a long-haired hesher with a flat-brimmed Chicago Bears cap. “You can set them on fire. I have the right equipment.” He demonstrated with a lighter. The paper-thin wafer indeed burned like a taper.

Sasha's cell phone sprang to life: Queen's “Flash.” I raised my eyebrows at the melodramatic riff.

He shrugged, picking up the phone. “It's just . . . epic!”

The hesher had a tattoo of a boom box on his right bicep. “I heard you played with Leftover Crack,” he said, referring to the infamous ska-punk band. I had, and told him a story about their singer, Stza (né Scott Sturgeon): The last time I'd seen him was at a punk festival in Blackpool, England, where he was supposed to play with his new touring band, the Star Fucking Hipsters. It was the first day of their UK tour, but the drummer hadn't got a visa and the guitarist had a court date in the States. When I ran into Sturgeon in the hallway, I hadn't seen him in years, but he picked up as if we'd been interrupted in the middle of a conversation.

“Yeah, man, our driver is gonna play drums,” he said in his high-pitched rasp, like an ingratiating parrot. “Maybe you could do the lead guitar parts on your accordion? You remember those songs, right?”

The two songs I'd recorded on piano years before and never played again? Sure . . .

“Ah, don't worry about it. We just need to fill forty minutes to get our guarantee. So we'll play, like, five songs, and make 'em all like ten minutes long. Maybe you can play one of your songs!”

I don't know if your fans of cop-killing crust punk are going to be interested in my neo-cabaret stylings, I told him.

“Well, anyway, if we need to fill more time I'll just pick a fight with the crowd.” All of these things came to pass, and they got paid in full.

“Some people, they just have trouble in their veins,” the hesher said. “We have this friend, from Artemivsk in Donetsk Oblast—he's living in Moscow now.” He asks one of the others to translate.
“He is this thrash-metal guy,” he explained. At one show “they formed a ‘corridor of death,' the neo-Nazis and the Russian special ops with their batons, and he called the special ops faggots. They dragged him to their van, and said, ‘Why did you say that? We will put this ammunition in your pocket, and take you down to the station.' And he said—there is this thrash band in Russia, they are called Corrosion of Metal, they are crazy, they have ugly naked girls on stage, and will fuck them; everybody knows their fans are crazy—he said, ‘I am Corrosion of Metal fan.' And they said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.'”
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He sensed that that the thrust of the story was perhaps deteriorating in translation. “I don't know,” he said. “I have lots of stories, but you won't understand.”

A man approached our outdoor table, recited a stanza of poetry, and got a round of applause for his troubles. Another tried to sell us an electric cigarette lighter: “It's Russian,” he offered.

The abuse was instant and general.

“OK, OK,” he said, backing away. “Slava Ukraina.”

“I would have overthrown the crass fuckers too,” as I had thought while at the tsarist vacation retreat Peterhof, outside Saint Petersburg. In the wake of Yanukovych's flight to Russia, his
compound, a palatial 350-acre private park on the banks of the Dnipro north of Kyiv called Mezhyhirya, was nationalized and opened to the public. Shuttle buses labeled “Mezhyhirya: Residence of the Citizen of Russia Yanukovych” left from Maidan.

“I don't need to see that shit,” Sasha had said the night before, when I told him that Maria, Lesia, and I were going to visit Mezhyhirya. But I did: the shameless exploitation of a country for the benefit of a ruling cadre, it bears remembering, isn't a relic of a picturesque history.