ALL MY FRIENDS
LCD Soundsystem
All My Friends
EMI : 2007
[Seriously, Buy It]

A POEM OF STALIN : EPILOGUE : AVE MARIA
Alexander Galich
A Poem of Stalin
Singing Poets of Russia : 1998
[Some record store in Brighton Beach; I forget which]

HEROES
David Bowie
Heroes
RCA : 1977
[Buy It]

POETS
ARRESTED FLIGHT
Vladimir Vissotski
Le Vol Arrete
Le Chant Du Monde : 1977/1981
[Buy It]

I don't have a lot to add to Hua Hsu's deeply personal description of the new(ish) LCD Soundsystem single except to say that I couldn't stop listening to it last weekend. Which was in most ways a great weekend - a friend's film screened; I went to to the beach, and to a lovely party. Saturday was a perfect day. And Sunday I drove out of town to see what's left of the family.

Dad - who was born in Moscow, in '36 - talked a bit about his political life; a subject which seldom came up when I was younger, in part because my father is genuinely modest about it. He and my mother were what you might call mid-list dissidents. Close friends with the Russian balladeer Alexander Galich (at home, I have a childrens' book, about giraffes, translated in Galich's hand from the German), and with Andrei Sakharov (there's a photo, somewhere, of me crawling under the kitchen table and Andrei Dmitrievich crawling after me).

They copied and smuggled documents, met with Western journalists, wrote and signed petitions, taught in the "underground university," supported the spouses and families of jailed dissidents.... That sort of thing. When Keith Gessen, who was then writing for FEED, wrote about ex-Soviet dissidents living in America, my family name served, in some small way, as a passport.

So, I'd known about raids by the secret police, samizdat, and the constant threat of imprisonment. But I always thought it was mom who'd more or less politicized my dad (if anything, I'd pictured my father as something of a playboy).


My maternal grandfather - an aeronautics engineer - emigrated to the USSR in the early 30s, to help build Socialism; he was arrested and killed, most likely just hours, or days, after his arrest and/or interrogation, in '37, when his wife - my grandmother - was two weeks into her first and only pregnancy. (She continued to hope, and never remarried; that's the only-surviving photo of my granfather, in his Soviet cap, way at the top of this post). My mother - who grew up dirt poor and fatherless, and died at the age of forty-two - had no love for the system.


But, as I was saying, my dad talked a bit the other night - among other things, about Hungary in 1956, and about sneaking out alone, at the age of nineteen, to plaster the Moscow subway with hand-lettered leaflets protesting Soviet imperialism. (Typewriters were closely guarded in the Soviet Union and, hence, easily traceable.) Even after Stalin's death, this would have gotten him an automatic ticket to the Gulag. It's worth mentioning that my father's background was very different from my mother's: Her mother taught at the Gnessin conservatory, but was paid bread crumbs, and sent what she had to the Lubyanka, where she hoped her husband might be. (Officially, he was being held "without the right to correspond;" unofficially, this meant a bullet in the back of the neck, but at the time, no one knew, or wanted to believe it). She and my mother starved while my father - the son of a party member - lived in relative comfort.

My step-mother shook her head, slightly, while dad talked. And he said, "What? It might not have been the worst thing, to have been arrested." Which provoked something midway between silence and a fight between them. But it struck me because, dumb as it sounds, it was my father's version of a feeling I'd grown up with, too: That the people around me had been tested by fire, in ways I never would be. Had survived terrible things, but learned things about themselves that most of us will never know.

But while I'd always thought environment had a lot to do with my parents' politics, this weekend, I came around to the fact that my father's politics, at least, were hard-wired. That, to paraphrase e.e. cummings, there was simply some shit that he would not - could not - eat.

I'm not sure what else to say about this, here, except I also noticed this weekend that, as he poured us another shot of Lithuanian vodka, my father's hands were shaking - trembling - and that his skin had lost a good deal of its elasticity. I believe that people have internal ages, which don't really change: I've been something of an old man ever since my mother died. But my father is an eternal teenager. And yet, my father is seventy now, and every new thing I learn about him makes me that much more painfully aware of how much I don't know, and won't ever learn about him. That not only do most of us never, truly, know ourselves - but that neither do we really learn about the ones we're closest to. I know that I do what I do for a living, now, because my parents did what they did, then. But why, exactly, did they do what they did in the first place? And, of course, another question presents itself: What, if anything, does any of it amount to?

And so, the reason I bring all of this up is to explain why my nearly-perfect weekend brought me very near to tears....