Hypersonic Missiles and the millennial desire/inability to believe

My Anglophilia has been notably muted of late. I hope my reasons for this will not be taken as petty. On an external level, I simply find vanishingly little to admire about modern Britain: which still somehow allows Prince Andrew to walk around free, which persists under the political ‘leadership’ of Rishi Sunak, and which continues under the cultural sway of the likes of Piers Morgan and Jo Rowling (whose politics have become predictable, boring, and almost a sad self-caricature at this point). And on a personal level, I’m still struggling with some of my own psychosexual hang-ups, with which my early Anglophilia seems to have been very deeply entangled. My Anglophilia has been battered and bruised, certainly. It’s a lot quieter than it used to be. But it’s still there and runs quite deep.

And one Briton whom I am quite happy to celebrate for his artistic and cultural achievements is rock musician Sam Fender.

Maybe we were born and raised too cynical;
In the wake of a miracle, we’d never believe.
You impersonate the seasons—your gold autumnal haze,
But something dies inside you when winter rears its face.

Fender’s got two studio albums out now, Hypersonic Missiles and Seventeen Going Under—both of which are tremendous testaments to the enduring appeal and rejuvenation of rock ‘n’ roll music generally. But it’s Hypersonic Missiles in particular that I want to focus on here.

Hypersonic Missiles is deceptively simple in terms of its musical character. His music has a certain transatlantic appeal, with roots rock, blues rock and American heartland rock written deeply into its figurative DNA… not surprising when one considers that Sam Fender considers Born to Run- and ‘Dancing in the Dark’-era Bruce Springsteen to be one of his formative influences, along with soul legends Otis Ray Redding and Donny Hathaway. There’s nothing pretentious about Fender—no progressive time-signature shenanigans, no operatic frills. His music is proudly and defiantly a stylistic throwback, while at the same time retaining its own deeply British independent character.

With such a melodic character, one might expect the lyrics of his songs to follow a similarly straightforward direction: rebellion, outlaw ballads, life on the open road. No such matter. Fender’s lyrics are deeply introspective and even philosophical. My intention here, actually, is to provide Hypersonic Missiles as a poetic-lyrical companion piece to my friend Daniel Schwindt’s There Must Be More than This. These two works raise many of the same questions, raise many of the same cries of internal pain, struggle over many of the same social and even religious problems.

This may seem an odd pairing. Sam Fender is, like many Britons of his age, agnostic—when asked if he was religious, his simple and immediate answer was ‘no’, even though half of his family is religious. His experience of being at a religious camp ended in a sacrilegious prank he and a friend played on the camp wardens that got them expelled. By contrast, Daniel Schwindt has been a committed Catholic traditionalist for as long as I’ve known him. Politically, Fender has been a bog-standard British leftist for a long time, Corbyn supporter and so forth. ‘Play God’, the first single released from this album, was largely greeted as a dystopian anti-Trump anthem, for example—though recently he’s made some noises about being disenchanted with the left. Schwindt’s politics are deeply syncretic, though I would still classify them as conservative.

But Fender’s album and Schwindt’s book share a certain commonality of observation… even of spiritual aspiration. Both of them write out of a certain shared cultural alienation common to millennials in the Anglophone West. In both of their works there is a will, a strong thirst, to believe in something greater, something better… but that will is hampered by having grown up on a foundation of shifting sand.

Hypersonic Missiles is not a concept album, but the songs do hang together thematically. It’s an indifferent, even callous, world that is viewed through the eyes of the young and the vulnerable. The title song, which is also the opening track, is sung through the eyes of a narrator (loosely autobiographical in Fender’s case) whose fatalist attitude toward the modern world and its leaders—who say it’s ‘high time for hypersonic missiles’—gets him called a ‘nihilist’. Yet his attitude of powerlessness in the face of world realities that he has neither the power nor the knowledge to affect, is one which he has learned from his ‘elders’: ‘the silver-tongued suits and cartoons that rule my world’. This very much parallels Daniel Schwindt’s broad characterisation of the millennial predicament.

But there’s more to it than that. Fender’s narrator has difficulty really committing even to his own positions. He owns up to some degree of knowledge, but then disavows it in the same breath: ‘kids in Gaza are bombed and I’m just out of it’; ‘I’m not smart enough to change a thing’; ‘I’ve no answers, only questions, don’t you ask a thing’. It’s as though this narrator understands that there is something being asked of him that he can’t deliver… an understanding that gets spun out and explored in greater detail in ‘White Privilege’: this dovetails very closely with Schwindt’s characterisation of millennial ‘guilt’. The only thing he can own up to is a commitment to love the recipient of said song:

But I believe in what I’m feeling,
And I’m falling for you.
And though this world is gonna end, but till then,
I’ll give you everything I have—I’ll give you everything I am.

It’s not entirely blameless, that the thing that Fender’s narrator finds most ‘real’, the things he can ‘believe’, is a feeling. I think he understands quite well that this is not enough to base any kind of commitment on, yet at the same time, it’s all he has, and it’s the only thing he has control over.

This broad, what I will call attitudinal, agnosticism (rather than religious agnosticism) is what underwrites the entirety of the album. It isn’t an accident, therefore, that the spectre of suicide, of overdose, of death-by-despair, lingers over the whole album like a threatening cloud. In ‘The Borders’, Fender cites how his friend’s godmother ‘took those pills, and now she’s gone’. And of course ‘Dead Boys’ is all about the too-many deaths-by-despair of young men in the impoverished towns of the English north where Fender grew up. And the snarling, imprecatory ‘Use’ at the end of the album maintains a kind of strange ambiguity likening certain kinds of abusive interpersonal relationships to abusive drug habits.

This attitudinal agnosticism contrasts starkly with a certain degree of Scriptural literacy in Fender, which is most noticeable in ‘The Borders’. ‘The Borders’ is a loosely-autobiographical song of Fender in his younger days, who lost a friend who was like a brother to him in many ways. Yet the language he uses in it, and the character of the two boys, very closely recalls the Old Testament tales of estranged brothers: Esau and Jacob most notably, but there are also hints of Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and Judah, even Abel and Cain, in the tale he spins… transposed into the contemporary key of Geordie poverty. The friendship / foster-brotherhood Fender describes rises out of shared experiences: growing up in houses of divorce, abuse, neglect, generational anger… but also the resentments of one against the other build up from the start: ‘and your dad took off when you were a baby, and you still hate me for my dad stuck around.’

There are these glimmers of hope, like when Fender’s friend’s godmother helps him deal with his anger issues. But then those glimmers of hope die. There is no turn in the story in ‘The Borders’. Not only is there no faith that can save the friends and foster-brothers from estrangement, but even the possibility of faith is occluded. The story ends with one brother’s hand at the other brother’s throat. Unlike Ishmael and Isaac, unlike Esau and Jacob, there is no reconciliation. But Fender is still alive and singing—even if it is as hebel, as a passing breath—suggesting that maybe there is hope somewhere… outside the song and its story.

This deeply underscores Daniel Schwindt’s assertion that it requires massive effort, often seeming insurmountable, for millennials to believe. The sort of faith required to effect a reconciliation like the one which ‘The Borders’ seems to yearn for but doesn’t happen—simply isn’t there. And we see certain intimations of the background of fundamental uncertainty (both economic and existential) that underlies this lack of belief.

The most hopeful song on the album, actually, is ‘You’re Not the Only One’, quoted above. It’s a song in which Fender’s narrator is addressing a lover who feels alienated from the fake smiles around her, the pressure to conform, and the meaningless rituals of ‘night life’. The narrator assures her, tells her that she’s not alone, that he admires her composure but also shares her disillusionment. Yet even here there’s a strange ambiguity, a double meaning in the language which distances itself from certainty. (What lover wants to be told that they’re ‘not the only one’?) A similar disillusionment diffuses another not-really-love-song here, ‘Will We Talk?’, which distinctly un-romantically explores the mixed feelings and internal contradictions of the ‘age-old ritual’ of a one-night stand.

Other songs speak to conditions which are more universal and less grounded in specifically-millennial generational angst. ‘Saturday’ describes the age-old work-week grind and the longing for the release of the weekend; ‘That Sound’, the classic mentality of the rock musician for whom meaning and beauty in life is found in his music (and in precious few other places). Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger and John Mellencamp again assert themselves. ‘Two People’ is a distinctly non-millennial song: Fender is describing the travails of an older couple in an abusive, unhappy relationship. One is tempted to think of this song as something of a reply or a coda to ‘Jack and Diane’ or ‘The River’, though ‘Two People’ is much less specific than these—its protagonists are anonymous.

But there is also a kind of generational response to ‘Born to Run’ here, too, in ‘Leave Fast’. There’s a lot less hope that getting out of Dodge is an option in ‘Leave Fast’, which is in fact slow and elegiac in tone, but there’s also a lot more urgency:

Mass of filth and rubbish outside the houses,
And broken fridges and torn up sofas.
The boy racers tearing down the beehive road
Leading out to coastlines,
Where kids freeze their lungs
And run amongst the rolling dunes away from everyone.

The fact that this song takes the form of a conversation with an ‘old man’ who was apparently less fortunate in getting out of his situation than Springsteen was in getting out of Jersey (as a culture writ large), makes this song a suitable close to the album.

Hypersonic Missiles is, at first glance, a fairly bleak album. But because it speaks to the reality of a world where faith (and still less certainty) are hard to come by, and because it speaks to that reality with empathy and understanding, even the bleak moments are characterised by a sense that Fender suffers with us through them. Beneath the unbelief which is so prominent, there is a deep unmet desire to believe. And the album as a whole is shot through with these painfully-bright incomplete slivers of hope, these fragments of promises that things might get better. Honestly, Hypersonic Missiles is one of the best expressions of millennial spirituality that I’ve yet heard, particularly in light of Schwindt’s work.

Pointed video post – ‘Киевская Русь’ by Big History

Back in 2005, Ukrainian melodic heavy metal band Big History put out their first and only album Perpetuum Mobile. The title of one of their songs on that album is literally “Kievan Rus’”. Here are the full lyrics to the song:

Будущего вряд ли хватит что бы прошлое объять,
А вдруг солнце на закате повернет сегодня в спять.
Грянет гром и лопнет небо чрева тайны обнажив,
Тайны прадедов и дедов ты мне чрево расскажи.
Как хватало их терпенья мудро и достойно ждать и
до последнего мгновенья врага ближе подпускать.

Время, стерпит, все стерпит и простит –
Забудет на всегда...
Солнце, светит на Киевской Руси и горе не беда, если все как один всегда.
Точит меч словян и не угостит огонь тысяч душ Киевской Руси.
Я несу свой крест, радость и в грусть,
Мне с тобой тепло Киевская Русь.

Горы в прошлое стремятся , будущего не бояться, нам
Завещано судьбой, пусть разрушать мы отстроим,
А хотят войны то к бою, нам собраться не в первой.
Утро - вечера мудрее, а призыв еще сильнее "Встань!"
Опять плетется сеть. Алчных, потных и строптивых,
Хитро-мудро нагло лживых норм, придется поучить
"Нет сил тепеть!"

Время, стерпит, все стерпит и простит –
Забудет на всегда...
Солнце, светит на Киевской Руси и горе не беда, если все, как один всегда.
Точит меч словян и не угостит огонь тысяч душ Киевской Руси.
Я несу свой крест, радость и в грусть,
Мне с тобой тепло Киевская Русь.

I’m not going to provide a full translation here, but Google does a fairly good job getting the gist. One thing that stands out about such a folk/power metal song is that the historical consciousness of Big History is not romantic or glorious, in no way nationalistic. This song is elegiac in tone, and laments how little has been learned since the heyday of the Kievan polity. It also acknowledges the ‘warmth’ of that time despite how the reality failed to match up to the ideal.

Big History broke up after this album. The main guitarist Evgenii Burykh and vocalist Viktor Vlasov formed the band Берег Неба, which was also located in Krasnodon, while the drummer Rodion Kushnir moved to Berdyans’k. Not sure what happened to bassist Igor Levchenko. The band members, who have this deep and tragic awareness of history, ultimately sided with the autonomists in the Donbass against the Ukrainian government, in part because of the critical love of their homeland which this song displays. The current war displays the same tendencies that Big History laments in ‘Киевская Русь’.

Pointless video post: ‘Если (ты исчезнешь)’ by Берег Неба

Prime power metal from Krasnodon. Excellent musicianship and a definite flair for classic rock vibes: little wonder they chose to round off their only studio album with a cover of Deep Purple’s ‘Burn’. Valery Bykov really puts in the effort in on that melodic line on this song. Sadly, the band broke up in 2014, right around the time the SBU rolled up in force in the area. Hopefully they get back together and follow up this album.

The twin geniuses of Creedence and Pesnyary

Creedence Clearwater Revival

Recently I’ve been listening to the folk-tinged rock music of Creedence Clearwater Revival, on the one hand, and the rock-tinged folk music of Pesnyary on the other. Creedence were a Bay Area band who emerged out of, and came to exemplify, a certain strand within the sixties counterculture—though they usually composed lyrics about, and were influenced by the folk culture of—Greater Appalachia, the Bayou, the American South generally. Pesnyary, by contrast, were a Soviet state-sponsored VIA (vokal’no-instrumental’nyi ansambl’, literally ‘vocal-instrumental ensemble’) who played acid-rock and progressive-rock arrangements of traditional folk songs as well as their own compositions. They were also one of the very few Soviet bands to actually tour in America—specifically in the American South. Creedence had split up by 1972; Pesnyary were then just getting started: officially, there are two bands calling themselves Pesnyary now and four or five others borrowing the name without licence, but most people agree that Pesnyary’s classic period ended in 2003 with founding member Vladimir Mulyavin’s death. Despite their very different origins and ‘stances’—the lyrical and thematic difference between ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Ave Maria’, as it were—I’m finding I’m enjoying them for very similar reasons.

One of the reasons I find both of these bands so enjoyable to listen to, is because they invest these deceptively simple melodies and chord progressions (these are rock groups, after all) with a great deal of dynamic and emotional depth. Creedence Clearwater Revival build on a basis of swamp blues—the harmonica was there from early on—and diverge from there in various directions, adding more and more rock instrumentation, as well as elements like Hammond organ. By the end of their career, as one can hear on songs like ‘Sweet Hitch-Hiker’, they were veering very close to hard rock or even proto-metal. CCR’s tunes are catchy, instantly-recognisable, iconic: ‘Suzie Q’, ‘Down on the Corner’, ‘Fortunate Son’, ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain?’, ‘Lookin’ Out My Back Door’.

As important as Creedence Clearwater Revival are for a certain generation of Americans, I’d say that the Pesnyary are equally as important for a certain generation of people from the former Soviet Union. The Belarusian group, led by Vladimir Mulyavin, took its influences both from Western rock music (particularly the Beatles) and from traditional White Russian folk melodies. Pesnyary songs blend guitar melodies, drums, keyboards and even saxophones with traditional folk instruments (wooden whistles, fiddles, flutes, accordions, hurdy-gurdies) in a unique way. The VIA was signed to the state-owned label Melodiya in the Soviet Union (the only real game in town, as it were), and their albums sold millions of copies. Their unique approach to making accessible music with depth and feeling—with hits including ‘Aleksandrina’ and ‘Belovezhskaya Pushcha’—and Mulyavin’s ability to seek out and recruit talented multi-instrumentalists and singers, made the Pesnyary very literal rock stars in the Soviet Union.

John Fogerty and Leonid Bortkevich are, obviously, two very different vocalists—but even here there are some interesting similarities. Fogerty gives a very nasal delivery, with occasionally having a hoarse or a hard edge to his tenor melodies. There’s definitely a ‘country’ or ‘Southern’ inflection to this delivery, but it’s easy to hear the lasting influence on rock—even hard rock and heavy metal—that Fogerty’s voice had. Leonid Bortkevich was a much more traditional tenor: clean-toned, pectoral delivery, like a classically-trained singer. On the surface, he sounds much more like John Denver than John Fogerty. But Bortkevich deploys some interesting flourishes in his singing—a breath’s delayed approach to the note, a glide or a back-throat catch, that can make his vocals sound grittier, or ‘folksier’ (a good example of this being ‘Do Tret’ih Petruhov’).

It’s a bit strange. I’ve explored a lot of the musical differences between the two bands here. If we take account of their analogical positions within their respective cultures, the countercultural and ‘oppositional’ political nature of CCR’s music (‘Fortunate Son’, ‘Effigy’) more closely aligns with the career of the alternative rock / new wave band Kino headed by Viktor Tsoi. Pesnyary, meanwhile, despite the influence they took from the Beatles, probably more closely aligns with the folk-revival artists like Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives and so on than with the later tail of the folk-rock trend in American music to which Creedence belongs. But somehow it seems more natural to my ear to connect these two bands. Both of them evince a vitality and a creativity that tends in a similar direction. Both CCR and Pesnyary seek their inspiration in the deep roots of their respective countries—not without a critical eye in each case—and both draw them out to infuse them with the sounds of their contemporaries. Certainly both bands are worth listening to and appreciating.

Pesnyary

Pointless video post - ‘Как болит голова’ by Август

What month is it again? Oh yeah:

The Saint Petersburg formation August (or Август) was one of the first-ever Soviet rock bands, and they shared a label (Melodiya) with other acts like Black Coffee, Master and Cruise. At first they played a rather eclectic mixture of pop-rock, art-rock and heavy metal (in part due to the Soviets’ disapproval of certain styles of rock music), but later on their style congealed into something similar to Rainbow or Deep Purple or Uriah Heep. Their first album, from which this song comes, was a runaway success. Enjoy!

Rereading the Armament of Igor in a time of war

Were it not seemly to us, brothers,
To begin in ancient diction
The tales of the toils of the army
Of Igor, Igor Svyatoslavič?

Or to begin this song
In accordance with the ballads of this time,
And not like the invention of Boyan?

One of the few stabs I’ve made at reading again so far this year has been a reread of The Tale of the Armament of Igor. This poetic lamentation of a failed attempt by a prince of Rus’, Igor Svyatoslavič, to stage a raid on the attacking Cumans is the earliest extant example of literature in the Old Russian language, dating to the late 1100s. In addition to the themes of heroism in hopeless battles, grief and exile, the Tale also spends a great deal of time exhorting the princes of Rus’ to put aside their personal ambitions and greed, and unite in the face of a common enemy.

I found a great deal more in it on this third read-through than on my first. The poem rises and falls in mood, between the high triumphant martial imagery of Igor’s exhortations to the defence of the Russian land, and the vast desolate lamentation of Yaroslavna on the walls of Putivl, and finally returning again to a tone of hope in the voice of the poet Boyan. There is much in this poem that is still obscure to me, and that may be owing to my poor Russian.

However, I am still struck by the beauty of the natural imagery of the poem. One can almost hear the cries of falcons, the calls of magpies and crows, in the verse itself. The rivers speak, especially the Donets River with whom Igor converses in his Cuman exile (and which is today still the site of tragic bloodletting and destruction between brothers). The poet invokes the sun and the aurora borealis. Yaroslavna invokes the wind and the sky in her lamentations.

For brother spake to brother: ‘This is mine, and that is also mine!’
And the princes began to pronounce of a paltry thing, ‘This is great,’
And themselves amongst them to forge feuds…

I have found myself unable to write, and increasingly unable to read productively, on account of the war. I am caught between a love of Russia which rebukes their paranoia, and a love of the Ukraine which reproaches their pride and greed, and to see them fall upon each other with this insane bloodlust—Ukrainians against the civilians of Seversky Donets; and Russians against the Ukrainians—breaks the heart. Once again, ‘Kiev groaned with mourning, and Černigov with disasters.’ I find that I resonate much more, given the state of current events, with the lamentations of Svyatoslav over the deaths of his sons, and that of Yaroslavna over the fate of Igor.

This is a conflict which would not have happened, if the Russian leadership had not, under the fear of a threat to its borders, been goaded into an attack by the provocations of the Western powers on the Black Sea. This is also, much more so, a conflict which would not have happened if the Ukrainian oligarchs who foisted the Maidan upon them in 2014 at the instigation of the same Western powers, had not said to the people of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, ‘this is mine, and that is also mine’—and then sent in the SBU and the fascist paramilitaries to destroy them. I hate that the people of the Donbass have been dying needlessly for the past eight years at the hands of their own government, and I hate more that Ukrainians are dying still in numbers equally great, at the hands of an attacking army. Most of all I hate the injustices and machinations and engineered policies of division and exploitation in Washington and London that brought all of this about.

Then in the time of Oleg, Boris wrought for evil: feuds were sown and grew apace.
The life of the scion of Dažbog was wasted,
In the factions of the princes and the generations of mankind were shortened.

What more can be said now? Perhaps the Russian band Aria said it already with their elegiac ‘Ballad of an Old Russian Warrior’:

Or perhaps the anonymous poet in the tradition of Boyan said it best: Далеко! Ночь меркнет.

Pointless video post – ‘Monetary Gods’ by Rage

Peavy Wagner is back, and more pissed-off than ever. Honestly, though, who can blame him? The idolatry of the global elites, and the way that they have been running the world, is indeed enraging, and Rage gives the perfect answer to it here. Enjoy!

Holy Hierarch Kosmas the Melodist, Bishop of Gaza

Saint Kosmas the Melodist

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate a holy bishop and Palestinian saint, Saint Kosmas the Melodist of ar-Rimâl in Gaza. The foster-brother of Saint John of Damascus, Bishop Saint Kosmas is known for his compositions of many hymns which are still used in the Orthodox Church.

Saint Kosmas [Gk. Κοσμάς, Ar. Quzmâ قزما] was born in Damascus, and grew up as a close friend of Saint John. He lost his parents at a young age and became an orphan. Kosmas was taken into the home of Saint John’s father Sarkîs Manṣûr, where the two boys grew up together, as close as brothers of the blood. Saint Kosmas received a very fine education from his foster-parents, including tutelage at the hands of a holy, erudite and learned Sicilian monk who was also named Kosmas (or rather, Cosimo, known by the cognomen ‘the Beggar’). When they came of age, the two foster-brothers went to Jerusalem to visit the Holy Places. Saint John and Saint Kosmas entered the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ together, and became monks there.

Kosmas and John continued their close friendship in the monastery. Together they compiled a Great Oktōēkhos – a hymnal in the eight tones, for daily use in the Liturgy and in the praise of the Saints. To this volume Saint Kosmas personally contributed a number of canons and troparia which are still in use. Saint Kosmas had a particular affection for the poetry of Saint Gregory the Theologian; he composed musical settings for several of Saint Gregory’s homilies and poetic works, including his Nativity homily ‘Χριστὸς γεννᾶται δοξάσατε’. He also composed canons and troparia for a number of other occasions on the Church calendar, including the Dormition of the Mother of God and the Transfiguration. Saint Kosmas is warmly revered and justly considered to be one of the brightest lights in Greek classical hymnography in the Orthodox Church. His best-known hymn is the irmos of the Axion Estin in praise of the Most Holy Theotokos, which is featured in the sidebar of this blog: ‘It is very meet and right to call thee blessed…’

Kosmas departed the Dayr Mâr Sâbâ in 743, however, when he was appointed to the Bishopric of Gaza in Maioumas – which is today Ḥay ar-Rimâl in Gaza (which came under sustained, brutal ærial attack by the Israeli state last year). As bishop of Maioumas, Saint Kosmas ardently defended the use of icons in the life of the Church, and again joined together with his foster-brother to combat the hæresy of Iconoclasm. Saint John reposed at Dayr Mâr Sâbâ on the fourth of December, 749. His foster-brother long outlived him, and reposed in the Lord in great old age. Holy and inspired hymnographer Kosmas, whose tongue still lives with praises of the Word of Life, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Kosmas the Melodist, Tone 8:

O Champion of Orthodoxy, teacher of purity and of true worship,
The enlightener of the universe and the adornment of the Hierarchs:
O all-wise Father Kosmas,
Your teachings have gleamed with light upon all things.
Intercede before Christ our God to save our souls!

Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrios in Gaza

‘Deadly sins’ of left and right

Two articles that came out earlier today in American Compass that are deliberately paired off with each other, one on either side of the political divide, attempt to explore the ‘deadly sins’ of the left and the right. The first article, written by Ruy Teixeira, purports to explore the five deadly sins of the American left: idpol, retro-socialism, catastrophism, growth-phobia and techno-pessimism. And the second article, written by Henry Olson, explores the three deadly sins of the American right: market fundamentalism, snobbery and hubris. Both of these articles are well-intentioned attempts at introspection and self-examination of certain political mythologies and forms of inertia that have accumulated largely through the ‘bubble’ effect; and I appreciate them both for attempting to concentrate and explore the blindnesses, weaknesses and self-indulgences inherent in the political lifeworlds that most Americans now inhabit.

However, I would – to extend the metaphor slightly – like to play devil’s advocate to each. When it comes to discussions of ‘sin’ what we are really discussing is a moral anthropology and the relationship of man to the divine, and as such these questions are fundamentally religious in character. I would therefore like to think I am approaching these from a point of view that is faithfully Orthodox Christian in accordance with what is to date still the most trenchant and insightful document articulating the political and social values of the Church, though ultimately I must leave that to my confessor and to the hierarchs of my Church to judge.

Regarding the first article, by Teixeira. I agree with some of its central tenets. Firstly, I agree with Mr Teixeira that the American left suffers intensely from its fixation on identity politics, which despite the rhetoric of ‘intersectionality’ actually only serve to fracture the body politic into various grievance groups, and cast all social problems through a lens of oppression. I also agree that the left has allowed itself to be coopted by an elite politics which hides, underneath a ‘green’ veneer, a thoroughly nasty and anti-human Malthusian streak (of which I’ve been consistently critical these past eight years), and which tends to see poor people as a dead-weight problem rather than equal agents and partners in the political process. Insofar as he shares these points with the ‘realist left’, I tend to agree with him.

However, I would push back on a couple of the assumptions Mr Teixeira makes here. There is one really big one that he gets wrong, and that is the assumption that more is always better.

I am not convinced, frankly, that people actually always do want more. Based on the data, I’m fairly sure that’s not actually the case. The data consistently show, in fact (the linked CNBC story being only one example in a genre of œconomic studies that has been going on since the early 2010s), that up to a certain point, more material abundance does correlate with human happiness and satisfaction. Actually, that point is right around the average purchasing power parity in most modern Western developed nations, $75,000. However, past that point, having more material wealth doesn't actually make us happier even though we don’t stop trying to accumulate it. It’s the law of diminishing returns. With apologies to Daft Punk, there comes a point where harder better faster stronger just doesn’t get people off, and mo’ stuff actually begins to correlate with mo’ worries.

The irony is not lost on me that Teixeira is using the language of ‘sin’ here, because he is ignoring a critical dimension of the left’s failure to engage. The techno-enthusiasts and the growth-philes ignore these studies and these bodies of data at their own peril, because they are prescribing the wrong medicine – that of more material prosperity – for what is ultimately a hunger of the spirit. Saint John of Patmos put it correctly in his first Epistle: the problem with the ‘lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life’ is that it the stuff of the world that these desires want to find satiety in, is all ‘passing away, along with its desires’. Even though we cannot do without the material – Christ never condemned the material; He came in a material Body and by that Body gave us a material means of salvation – we look for more happiness in more material in vain. And we literally name as deadly passions – as sins – the sorts of behaviour Teixeira wants to encourage: lust, gluttony, avarice. Here is what the Russian Orthodox Church says about this:

The Church is not someone who defines the rights to property. However, the material side of human life is not outside her field of vision. While calling to seek first «the kingdom of God and his righteousness», the Church does not forget about people’s the need for «daily bread» and believes that every one should have resources sufficient for life in dignity. At the same time, the Church warns against the extreme attraction to wealth, denouncing those who are carried away by «cares and riches and pleasures of this life». The Church in her attitude to property does not ignore the material needs, nor does she praise the opposite extreme, the aspiration for wealth as the ultimate goal and value of life.

And still more emphatically:

Wealth cannot make man happy. The Lord Jesus Christ warns: «Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth». The pursuit of wealth makes a baneful impact on the spiritual condition of a person and can lead him to complete degradation. St. Paul points out that «they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things».

And again, with regard to the human impact on œcology, here is what the Russian Church has to say. Note the relationship between material desire, technological progress, and spiritual loss:

Relationships between anthropology and ecology are revealed with utter clarity in our days when the world is experiencing two concurrent crises: spiritual and ecological. In contemporary society, man often loses the awareness of life as a gift of God and sometimes the very meaning of life, reducing it sometimes to the physical being alone. With this attitude to life, nature around him is no longer perceived as home and all the more so as temple, becoming only a «habitat». The spiritually degrading personality leads nature to degradation as well, for it is unable to make a transforming impact on the world. The colossal technological resources cannot help humanity blinded by sin, for, being indifferent to the meaning, mystery and wonder of life, they cannot be really beneficial and sometimes become even detrimental. In a spiritually disorientated man, the technological power would beget utopic reliance on the boundless resources of the human mind and the power of progress.

One of the first unambiguously-left politicians to have foreseen the problem of too much prosperity, and how this prosperity should be dealt with and distributed, was General Secretary Hu Jintao, when he made a suspiciously Confucian (specifically, the Odes) call for a xiaokang shehui 小康社会, or a ‘moderately prosperous society’. It’s been a practical goal of the Chinese left since 2002 to aim for a society where a certain basic standard of living is met but not exceeded; and Xi Jinping has included this aim specifically in his ‘Four Comprehensives’ policy. Note that Chinese policy has not been anti-growth per se, and certainly not anti-technology per se. But according to their own internal documents they are still only willing to pursue growth up to a certain point and are committed to a goal of ultimately tapering off.

So here is where I would say that Teixeira needs to reevaluate. He accuses the left of something like ingratitude when he comes to the topic of technology. I think that’s fair. The left does need to evince a certain degree of gratitude for the frontiers in medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, communications and so on that have been pushed by technological innovation. But the attitude of ‘I want more’ runs thoroughly counter to this position of gratitude. Indeed, what happens when the ‘more’ that people want is inevitably unable to be satisfied by greater material wealth? If ‘more is better’, and ‘more’ even beyond the point of satiety – or even to the point of satiety – is all that the left really wants, then Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were completely right to reject it. And American voters will be right to reject it.

~~~

Coming to the second article, on the sins of American right, by Henry Olson… this article strikes me as a trifle strange on account of its fixation on the figure of Reagan. More on that later, though. The fact that Olson is straight-up willing to criticise these streaks in the Republican Party – not just the market fundamentalism but also white Protestant snobbery and the tendency to idolise the businessman and the pious patriarch – is truly laudable. What’s more, I don’t really dispute Olson’s diagnoses, though it must be admitted that I approach this topic more from a grounding in the American left than in the American right, and thus have a predisposition to affirm these critiques. Even so, there is a certain Whiggish anthropological falsity even under these needed and praiseworthy correctives, that needs to be addressed – and so I feel I have to play Devil’s advocate here as well.

Market fundamentalism is indeed a sin, and it is indeed a sin of the Republican Party in general going back to the 1980s. (It’s an intriguing bit of sleight-of-hand Olson uses to elide the fact that Reagan himself did much to foment and popularise within the Republican Party at least the first of these three cardinal partizan sins he discusses, despite a couple of protectionist flourishes Reagan made in his second term.) The Russian people know about market fundamentalism, having had a direct experience with the ‘shock doctrine’ between 1992 and 1998. So it should come as no surprise that the Orthodox Church likewise censures, first, the absolute commitment to private property among people:

According to the teaching of the Church, people receive all the earthly blessings from God who is the One who holds the absolute right to possess them. The Saviour repeatedly points to the relative nature of the right to property in His parables on a vineyard let out to be used, on talents distributed among many and on an estate handed over for temporary management. Expressing the idea inherent to the Church that God is the absolute owner of everything, St. Basil the Great asks: «Tell me, what do you have that is yours? Where from did you take it and bring to life?» The sinful attitude to property manifested in the conscious rejection of this spiritual principle generates division and alienation among people.

And second, that the Russian Orthodox Church condemns the idea that ‘market relations’ should be the sole or even primary consideration in the distribution of goods like healthcare:

Without giving preference to any organisational model of medical aid, the Church believes that this aid should be maximum effective and accessible to all members of society, regardless of their financial means and social status, also in the situation of limited medical resources. To make the distribution of these resources truly equitable, the criterion of «vital needs» should prevail over that of «market relations».

I likewise agree with Olson that snobbery and hubris – these two appear to be synonymous with the passions of vainglory and pride – are common failings on the political right, though they are far from exclusive to the right. Olson seems to be angling after a particular anthropology or genealogy of the American right, with his observations of these sins: a genealogy which is rooted in its class origins and in its religious origins. I’m a trifle uncomfortable with this genealogical account of conservative sins for, I guess we can call them ‘Quakerdox’ reasons (and, yes, I’m aware of the irony), but fine, we may take it as read.

Olson accuses the Republicans of entertaining, too often, a kind of white and Protestant intégrisme, which elevates the (private, devotional, pietistic) religious concerns of the holders of power over considerations of policy – that theological failings are tantamount to political failings. I kind of get this complaint, and I share it. But he’s treading out on some very thin anthropological ice. The common roots of sæcular law and religious law are more deeply entangled than he wants to permit, and the common roots of morality and religious devotion as well:

Historically, both religious and secular laws originate from the same source. Moreover, for a long time they only represented two sides of one legal field. This idea of law is also characteristic of the Old Testament.

The Lord Jesus Christ, in calling those faithful to Him to the Kingdom that is not of this world, separated the Church as His body from the world lying in evil. In Christianity, the internal law of the Church is free from the spiritually-fallen state of the world and is even opposed to it. This opposition, however, is not the violation but the fulfilment of the law of the divine Truth in its fullness, which humanity repudiated in the fall. Comparing the Old Testament norms with that of the Gospel, the Lord in His Sermon on the Mount calls people to seek the full identity of life with the absolute divine law, that is to deification: «Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect».

At the same time, though, the law is written upon all human hearts; the law is made for all and all are bound to it, regardless of what religious beliefs they hold. There is a certain basic level of human dignity which cannot be reduced to mere religious belonging. Again, the Russian Orthodox Church on the subject:

Among the oldest monuments of the written language are numerous collections of homilies and statutes. Undoubtedly, they go back to the even earlier, pre-alphabet, existence of humanity, since «the work of the law» is written by God in human hearts. Law has been there in the human society from times immemorial. The first rules were given to man as far back as the paradise time. After the fall, which is violation by man of the divine law, law becomes a boundary and trespassing against it threatens the destruction of both the human personality and human community.

The law contains a certain minimum of moral standards compulsory for all members of society. The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell. The fundamental principle of law is: «do not do to others what you would not want to be done to yourself».

So I would go along with Olson happily, as long as what he is critiquing is a certain vainglorious image of homo conservativus, a certain false idol of the self which American conservatives are sometimes wont to lug around with them: an idol of the self in which sentimentality and private devotion (or worse yet, self-interest masquerading as piety!) substitute themselves for actual works of mercy. Merely going through the performative motions of religiosity is no substitute whatsoever for actual works of kindness and justice, true mortification of the will, true acts of courage. He and I can agree all day long on that count. As Khomyakov put it:

He who loved truth and righteousness and defended the weak against the strong, who fought against corruption, tortures and slavery, is a Christian, if only to some extent; he who did his best to improve the life of the workers and to brighten the wretched lot of the classes oppressed by poverty whom we cannot as yet make quite happy, is a Christian, if only in part.

But Olson only partially frees himself from the objections to such idolatry, because of the abject and even idolatrous hero-worship of Ronald Reagan which suffuses his article. Olson engages in the sæcular canonisation of a figure who (again, despite some protectionist flourishes he made as California governor and in his second term as president) possibly did more than any other to retrench the ideas of market fundamentalism on the American right, in a way that had not held sway since Calvin Coolidge. In an article which is meant to explore the sins of the American right, such an emphasis – at best – lacks good taste. At worst, it seems to be an admission of cluelessness with regard to how the American right arrived in its current plight.

Again, I don’t want to come down too hard on either of these authors. In many ways, they are doing better than I am: they are engaged in the hard and necessary work of metanoia on behalf of their respective political communities; and allowances are certainly to be made for excesses of overcorrection, or for lacunæ in the rearward view so dearly held. And I’m sure that there are such lacunæ and such overcorrections in my own idiosyncratic syncretic political views, which are themselves grown out of the crooked timber of sexual fantasies and utopian dreaming, which I have yet to address. I applaud the bravery of these two authors for the conversation they have begun.

EDIT: I cannot believe I posted something about the deadly sins without also referencing Maiden’s Seventh Son album. Bad hesher! Bad! Ahem. At any rate, here to make up for it is ‘Can I Play with Madness’:

Venerable Rōmanos the Melodist

Saint Rōmanos of Blachernæ

Today is the first of October. In China it is the lunar Mid-Autumn Festival, a festival which celebrates home and hearth as well as the moon, and it is also National Day, the seventy-first anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. But in the Orthodox Church, it is the feast day of two great saints of Antioch: Apostle Ananias of the Seventy, and also the venerable Saint Rōmanos, one of the easternmost Orthodox Church’s greatest hymnographers and liturgical singers. The tale of Rōmanos, who is himself a moon reflecting the celestial glories of the Most Holy Theotokos, urges us to recall and to strive for a heavenly homeland.

Saint Rōmanos [Gk. Ρωμανóς, L. Romanus, Ar. Rûmânûs رومانوس] was born in the city of Emesa (that is to say, modern-day Homs), toward the end of the fifth century. Tradition holds that he was ‘of Hebrew stock’. Recent scholars have suggested that according to the available evidence, which includes a number of Semitic turns of phrase in the hymns he wrote, his parents may have been Jewish, or they may have been Syriac Christians themselves.

He served the Church in his youth, and was elevated to the office of deacon and sent to Beirut to serve the Church there. Sometime after this, during the reign of Emperor Anastasius of Eastern Rome, he was sent to Constantinople and served as a sacristan in the great Hagia Sophia Cathedral. He spent his nights at prayer at the chapel of the Holy Theotokos in Blachernæ. Legend has it that Rōmanos suffered from some form of speech impediment, and one time during the Nativity season he was called upon to read the Psalms from one kathisma. Poor Rōmanos stuttered and faltered so badly that another reader had to assist him, and the other members of the congregation, including those among the clergy, cruelly mocked and ridiculed him.

That night, which was Christmas Eve, he went despairing and in tears to Blachernæ and held vigil there. He was visited that night by a vision of the Most Holy Theotokos, who comforted him and told him not to despair. She lay her right hand upon Rōmanos’s head, and produced in her left hand a small scroll, which she told him to take that scroll… and eat it. Unlike Garak, Our Lady was not joking. Rōmanos took the scroll and ate it. When he arose from his vigil some time later, he gave thanks to God and returned to the city. On Christmas the faithful gathered in Hagia Sophia and, to their chagrin, saw Rōmanos again in his place as reader. Grimacing, they braced themselves for the painful stuttering that they knew would ensue. But when Rōmanos went to the lectern and began reciting the Nativity hymn: ‘Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One’, the congregants stood transfixed, because a wonder had occurred: it seemed to them that they were hearing the voice of an angel. When he finished the whole of the nave was hushed and awed into silence, and the same priest who had mocked him the day before stood flabbergasted, and motioned him to continue.

The Theotokos had not only lifted the speech impediment from him, but she had also gifted Rōmanos with a sublime inspiration for lyric poetry, melody and rhythm. Because Rōmanos had swallowed a ‘kontakion’ which had been given to him by Our Lady, all of his subsequent hymns, written in a set structure of twenty-five strophes with twenty-one verses each, came to be known as kontakia. From that Nativity on, in Constantinople, he was given the epithets of ‘Glykophōnos’ (‘Sweet-Voice’), ‘Melōdos’ (‘Melodist’) and ‘Psaltēs Dikaiosynēs’ (‘True-Singer’). Rōmanos may have composed over a thousand of these songs – this may be pious exaggeration, though given that no complete compilations of his undoubtedly prodigious work are extant, we may never actually know. His style, as commented above, relied upon Semitic poetic conceits and turns of phrase – he may have been inspired by the hymns of Mâr ’Afrâm. However, he wrote in clear and unpretentious language, the common tongue of his day, which even the simple communicants in Constantinople could understand and appreciate.

No mention is made of Rōmanos having ever become a priest. It is entirely likely that he continued as a deacon throughout his life: in his iconography he is always portrayed in the robes of a deacon. He lived the rest of his life in Constantinople, continuing his vigils at Blachernæ and continually enriching the church with his divinely-inspired hymnody. He died in peace on the first of October, 556, and was buried in the Church of the Holy Theotokos at Blachernæ. It was not long at all before his memory was venerated by those who sang in the Church, and he was glorified by the Church at Constantinople as well as those of Armenia and the Rus’, he continues to this day as the patron saint both of Church singers and of people afflicted with impediments of speech. Holy and venerable Rōmanos, humble deacon with the voice of angels, pray unto Christ our Lord that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Rōmanos, Tone 4:

You gladdened Christ’s Church by your melodies
Like an inspired heavenly trumpet.
You were enlightened by the Mother of God
And shone on the world as God’s poet.
We lovingly honor you, righteous Rōmanos.

Qyz-Jibek: a slow stunner of a tragic period drama

Tólegen (Quman Tastambekov) and Jibek (Merýert Ótekesheva) in Qyz-Jibek

The Kazakh film I’m reviewing today is the 1970 Kazakhfilm production Qyz-Jibek directed by Sultanahmet Qojyqov, the retelling of the epic tragic romance of the same name which had earlier been rendered into a production for the Soviet theatre. This film is glacially slow-paced, with barely enough of its Romeo-and-Juliet story to justify padding out its 142-minute runtime, and features a heavily-stylised formal cinematic language and theatrically-inspired acting direction that recalls the preferences of Eisenstein. As such it is certainly not be to everyone’s tastes. I won’t lie, it took me a long time to get all the way through it. But it is a stunningly beautiful film, which took full advantage of all of the technical versatility of its filmic medium. It lavishes gleeful attention on the natural beauties of the Kazakh landscape with its sapphirine lakes, dry rugged mountains and deserts and vast high grasslands. There are also a number of technically-impressive wildlife shots of swans and owls. The film also builds dramatic tension with close-up shots of the main actors. Careful craft clearly goes into practically every take. It’s a film which is difficult to like, but which one cannot help but appreciate just because it’s so pretty.

The story involves the ill-fated romance and courtship of the titular Jibek (Merýert Ótekesheva) with the warrior Tólegen (Quman Tastambekov), and Tólegen’s death at the hands of the cruel and treacherous brigand Bekejan (Asanáli Áshimov). There is a tone of high tragœdy about the original story, since the political forces that surround the two lovers through their families doom their marriage to a bitter end. The internecine conflicts for political power between Tólegen’s father Bazarbaı (Káýken Kenjetaev) and the clan of Bekejan, with Jibek’s father Syrlybaı Han (Kenenbaı Qojabekov) caught in between, offer some ideological overtones that resonated with a mediæval Kazakh audience.

There is a great deal of creative use of colour in the film, particularly red, white and black. The colour scheme actually mirrors that of Beloe solntse pustyni in some ways: a film which came out the same year. The duels and cavalry battles are intricately choreographed and spectacularly shot with a mixture of wide-angle ærial and mobile shots. The violence is highly stylised in a way that appears to præfigure Sergei Bodrov’s steppe dramas Kóshpendiler and Mongol. Attention is lavished in close-up on blood spatters across the sand, and these are often mirrored by flowering red blossoms in the field. Atmosphere is also used to great effect, with clouds and sunsets providing some of the needed lighting effects for the duels and battles between Tólegen and Bekejan.

The costumes and the set-pieces are equally lush; there is a great deal of effort put into giving the appropriate texture to seventeenth-century nomadic Kazakhstan. Each shot is meticulously framed, as though the director wanted to get the perfect angle to deliver the correct emotional impact – though my one complaint is that the editors were far too overly fond of wipes, and sometimes used them inappropriately. The scene in the yurt between Tólegen and Jibek on their wedding-night is admirably restrained: the eroticism is actually heightened and sublimated by the fact that it is expressed symbolically and refrains from ever ‘showing too much’. Despite this restraint, one can certainly see echoes of this scene in the (much more explicit) parallel sequences in Ermek Tursynov’s Kelin.

One can’t quite shake the feeling, as one is watching it, that one is watching the local equivalent of an Arthurian romance or a cinematic interpretation of some other folk tale. Despite the very disparate intended audiences, I was reminded more than once of the Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland version of The Adventures of Robin Hood: Quman Tastambekov does have a certain expression, bearing and mode of delivery that strongly recalls Errol Flynn at times. Certainly Tólegen is portrayed with a measure of Robin Hood’s humour, cunning and general nobility of spirit. On the other hand, the romanticised and æstheticised violence – along with the thematic concerns with a political anarchy that is only barely and imperfectly constrained by a veneer of traditional steppe courtesy – carries with it certain echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. The film ends abruptly and discordantly, showing us one fragment of the death of Jibek after she learns of her husband’s fate.

These purely-stylistic comparisons don’t quite do the film justice, though, unless we take the parallel a little deeper. This film is iconic in a way that Robin Hood would be to the British or that the entire Western genre would be to us Americans. It has a mythopœic depth. That is to a significant extent because this film stands solidly at or near the fountainhead of the dastanic epic style in Kazakhstani cinema: with its high romance; its ideological focus on the struggle, here unrealised, for the unification of the tribes; its valorisation of an epic hero (or two in this case, Tólegen and Jibek) imbued with the martial and hospitable excellences of the steppe. It portrays an important national legend – not quite on the same level as Alpamıs, yet not very far off from it either.

The distinctions between Tólegen and Bekejan are highlighted here for the typically dastanic ideological purpose of highlighting the virtues of the Kazakh people. Tólegen is an obedient son – in most things. His choice of bride is not particularly welcomed by his father. And yet he loves his father dearly and rides to his rescue in battle. Tólegen is also shown to be brave, resourceful, respectful of the steppe traditions of fair play and hospitality – yet not without a certain degree of cunning. Bekejan, on the other hand, is portrayed as suitably masculine to work as a foil for Tólegen, but without respect for the steppe traditions. Though he is a formidable warrior, he is lascivious, disrespectful – and ultimately treacherous and ungrateful for Tólegen’s assistance in battle.

The version I watched was officially dubbed-over in Russian, with some of the original dialogue and particularly the singing being audible. The soundtrack features a great deal of Kazakh folk song and traditional dombyra airs: rendered in Russian to be intelligible to a broader Soviet audience, but still retaining their original flavour and melody. The singing and dombyra were provided by the characters

And so, when all of these elements are put together, there is an extent to which it is meant to feel as though we are watching not so much a film as a moving painting, an objet d’art meant to capture as much of the traditional Kazakh spirit as possible: whether in the costumes or the music or the landscapes or the cavalry battles. There is not as much of a sense of ethnographical voyeurism here as there is in, say, Amangeldy – because this is a film which has Kazakhs telling a uniquely-Kazakh story about themselves. The story itself, however, is one which has both a specific local political meaning and a universal appeal: the star-crossed lovers caught in the middle of a tribal feud.

Once again, though: although it is exquisite as an artistic accomplishment, and although it is an important landmark in the development of Kazakhstani film, this movie has a tendency to try the patience of the casual watcher. The martial set pieces are engaging and exciting enough, and the eye is naturally drawn to appreciate the framing and movement and technical mastery of the medium, but you have to navigate between them through turgid expository dialogue and establishing action whose delivery is theatrical to the point of being maudlin. I do recommend it for its sheer stunning beauty, but it is not the sort of film that I would go out of my way to rewatch for enjoyment.

Brat 2: ‘Are y’all gangsters?’ ‘No, we are Russians.’

Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov, Jr) in Brat 2

Aleksei Balabanov’s sequel to Brat, Brat 2, is at once quite a bit more and quite a bit less than the movie which kicked it off. The first film traded heavily on having an indie-film feel, which has been totally jettisoned in this film for a million-and-a-half dollar budget, a professional film crew, international set pieces, chase scenes and lots of vintage weaponry. Brat was no blockbuster. Neither, really, is the sequel – but it comes close.

The premise of Brat 2 lies in its transplanting the main characters from the first film – who were fish-out-of-water in Saint Petersburg in a renovated Dostoevskian style – into a similar fish-out-of-water situation in Chicago. It’s a premise that seems to work fairly well, and Brat 2 does deliver us a rather tart commentary on life ‘at the bottom’ in both countries. The story takes us fairly quickly from Moscow to a much more international setting in short order, but once the characters board their Aeroflot planes events take their time in unwinding, giving the film a slow-burn, meditative and almost brooding pace around the middle.

Warning: spoilers below.

The events of Brat 2 take place about a year after the first film ends. Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov, Jr) is living in Moscow with a couple of friends and fellow-veterans of the Chechen Wars, the museum guard Ilya (Kirill Pirogov), and the bank security man Kostya (Aleksandr D’yachenko). The three of them do an interview for a Moscow TV station about their experiences in the war, during which Bagrov meets the pop star Irina Saltykova (herself) and gets her mobile number. Back in Danila’s hometown, his mother and his brother Viktor (Viktor Suhorukov) watch Danila’s interview – and in a distinct rôle reversal from the first film, their mother tells Viktor to go visit Danila in Moscow and make something of himself instead of being a burden on her.

We learn that Kostya’s brother Mitya (also Aleksandr D’yachenko), an NHL hockey star playing for the Chicago Blackhawks, got himself mixed up with the Ukrainian mafia in Chicago and has been forced to pay most of his salary to the local crime boss Richard Mennis (Gary Houston). Kostya asks his boss Valentin Belkin (Sergei Makovetsky) for help, but ends up being killed by Belkin’s henchmen for his ‘request’, as Belkin and Mennis have agreed to a somewhat risky joint business venture. Danila finds his body, and he and Ilya go into hiding and start planning to get even with Belkin. Viktor arrives in Moscow and joins up with them. After outwitting, outdriving and outgunning Belkin’s henchmen, Danila corners Belkin at a recital where his son is performing and threatens him at gunpoint. Belkin lies to Danila and says that it was Mennis who had Kostya killed. Danila decides to spare Belkin on account of his young son, who recited a patriotic poem ‘Я устал, что у меня есть огромная семья’ by Crimean playwright Vladimir Orlov at his recital.

Ilya makes plans for Danila and Viktor to travel to America to deal with Mennis. He sends Viktor to Chicago and Danila to New York, from which he can drive to Chicago. This turns out to be a wise precaution, because Belkin sics his henchmen on Danila, hoping to get him at the airport. Because they aren’t expecting Viktor, they let him pass – and Danila doesn’t show on the flight he’s supposed to be on. Belkin learns about Viktor’s past in the mafia, warns Mennis about both Viktor and Danila, and has Irina’s phone bugged. (In some comic asides, Irina calls up Danila to ask where he is; Danila tells her he’s in Tula, and Belkin’s henchmen try without success to catch him on the road there.) Danila buys a car in New York from a Russian dealer who assures him it will get him ‘to San Francisco and back’, starts driving it to Chicago, and the car promptly breaks down before he can get into Pennsylvania. He ends up having to hitch a ride with a trucker, Ben Johnson (Ray Toler), with whom he strikes up a friendship, despite not knowing any English and Johnson not knowing any Russian.

Danila has difficulty navigating Chicago with no English, and tries unsuccessfully to contact Mitya. He gets run over by a news anchor, Lisa (Lisa Jeffrey), and manages to charm his way into her apartment and her bed for a night. However, still in need of a translator, he tries to get in touch with a Russian prostitute he met on the street, Dasha (Darya Lesnikova), and ends up on the wrong side of her pimp, and (briefly) on the wrong side of racist Chicago cops. As in the first movie, Danila uses homemade weapons (a shotgun made from plywood, an old pipe, wires and matches, filled with nails) and his wits to arm himself and defend Dasha. He ultimately kills her pimp and she joins up with him. Danila runs into Viktor – who had gotten into trouble with the Ukrainian mafia and the police – and manages to connect with Mitya.

The three of them try to boil some crawdads on Lake Michigan, and the three of them get into a discussion about life in America. Viktor loves the idea that in America one can become powerful by getting money. Dasha is quite a bit more jaded. Having come to New York as a student during glasnost’, she found herself going through a bad marriage and a messy divorce, ultimately having to sell her body to make ends meet. Danila floats the proposal that she can go home, although she’s initially sceptical of the idea. They are interrupted by a black man who tries to warn them of lake pollution, and who storms off when Danila calls him a ‘negr’ in Russian, not knowing that it’s a racial slur. The man comes back with company, and Danila shoots at their feet, scaring them off.

Danila learns that Mennis operates through a nightclub, ‘Club Metro’, which he uses as a front for his criminal enterprises. He stashes an SMG in the men’s bathroom in the back one night, and then uses it the next night to kill all of Mennis’s employees, who use the back of the club to deal in drugs and snuff films. Danila steals the money from the club and learns where Mennis’s ‘legitimate’ office is. Having once been turned back at the lobby, he climbs the safety stairs (reciting Orlov’s poem the whole way up) and smashes his way through a window, gunning his way into Mennis’s office. There he confronts Mennis at gunpoint over a game of chess. Seeing his brother’s picture – the same one the Ukrainians were using to track him down – on the table, he tells Mennis he disagrees with his brother about money being power. In his view, power belongs to those in the right. Having gotten his message across, he tells a frightened Mennis to give him the money he owes Mitya.

Danila gives the money to Mitya and tells him not to worry about the contract anymore. He and Dasha visit Lisa to borrow her phone; Dasha translates for him to call Ben the trucker for help. Viktor, in the meanwhile, has been tracked down by the cops and gets arrested, though he calls out to Danila as he’s cuffed and led to a squad car that he’s staying (in America). The police put out an APB on Danila and Dasha, but Ben escorts the two of them to the airport with no one noticing. At check-in, a man examines Dasha’s passport and tells her that her visa expired years ago and she won’t be able to enter the country again; she just flips him the bird and gets on her flight. At the airport, Irina Saltykova calls Danila again and he assures her that he’s coming back to Moscow. The implication is that Belkin’s joint venture with Mennis failed, and his Russian creditors have come to ‘collect’.

End spoilers.

Brat 2 explores some of the same themes that the first movie did, including (naturally) brotherhood, national feeling and œconomic distress – and of course the question of whether money really is power. Balabanov has a markedly cynical take, both on the promise of the ‘American Dream’ and on its parallel in Russia: Belkin and Mennis are more alike than different, including in their palpable physical cowardice when confronted by Danila. And this is nowhere more fervently expressed than in the philosophy espoused by Viktor, who really does seem to think that money can buy him whatever he wants and that America is the best place to do it.

But Balabanov revels in showing the darker side of American life. He is certainly drawing deliberate parallels and equivalencies in some instances between the materialism of Russia under Eltsin and the class of new biznismen, and that of America. Girls, booze and cars accompany organised crime life in both places. The Russian cab drivers in both Moscow and Chicago both speak with such open cynicism about life (and about Russia under Gorbachev) that Danila asks them if they’re brothers. The fascism of Ilya’s weapons-dealing ‘friend’ in Moscow is paralleled by the racism of the Chicago cops. American storefronts in New York show Russian signs, and signs in Ukrainian in Chicago: the only difference is in the blatancy of the advertising in those street scenes. And of course the plight of the two brothers at the heart of the movie, the ill-fated bank security guard Kostya and the exploited hockey player Mitya, is the same. It’s noteworthy that the only two ‘good’ Americans he shows are the Midwestern working-class truck driver Ben, and the black TV journalist Lisa.

The film is accused of being Russian nationalist, even chauvinist, but this seems contradicted by the fact that in the movie, the real instances where Russian nationalism is expressed – for example, by Belkin’s son Fedya or by Danila when reciting Orlov’s poem – it is done so in a spirit of profound naïveté. Danila saves Belkin on account of his son despite Belkin using every opportunity to try to kill him. And Danila predictably gets cheated by the Russian car salesman in New York who assures him that ‘Russians don’t cheat Russians’. Literally the only in-film validation of Danila’s nationalism, is when he manages to convince Dasha to go back to Russia, and that is done in a remarkably understated way. ‘What would I do there?’ she asks; and Danila answers: ‘What have you managed to do here?’

But regarding the central question of the film, money and power – the ironic conclusion seems to be that, particularly for this director, an emphatic no. Money does not seem to equal power. In losing the ‘indie’ feel of the first movie, it also loses its emotional impetus. Brat 2 is a far less moving and far less profound film than its predecessor, despite being in every possible way more technically proficient an action movie: bigger budget, better effects, better editing, better stunts, better camera work. The music – courtesy bands like Bi-2, DDT, Agatha Christie and Irina Saltykova herself as well as Nautilus – is still excellent: a good glimpse into what Danila is playing in his Walkman (or through the stereo of Ben’s truck). In the first film, the sudden, understated nature of the mortal violence had a profoundly disturbing effect. Here, the violence loses its impact on occasion for being over-the-top: as when a laughing Viktor sprays his pursuers with machine-gun fire from a Maxim from the back of his stolen Volvo until both of their cars explode, and then Danila flings a German grenade in the back seat to destroy the evidence. Sometimes the viewer can’t tell if he’s watching a Hollywood-style crime thriller or a parody of one. Sometimes it feels like Balabanov himself couldn’t decide.

At the same time, Brat 2 is still a fun, cheeky, politically-incorrect, occasionally-cheesy action film with considerable rewatch value. Sergei Bodrov, Jr is still sterling as Danila, and his supporting cast all deliver themselves admirably of their performances, and even the two-hour runtime doesn’t feel stuffed or drawn-out at all. This one gets a recommendation from me, with the qualification that it doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the first instalment.

The English David

Saint Ælfrǽd of Wessex

Today in the Holy Orthodox Church we commemorate the Holy and Right-believing Ælfrǽd the Great, King of Wessex, better known by his modernised name Alfred. Saint Ælfrǽd was truly a pivotal figure, not only in English but in Christian and indeed world history. Of course there were other sainted princes and potentates before him – indeed, plenty of them and perhaps a few too many – and of course there were copious other princes and potentates who truly desired and endeavoured to rule justly. But Ælfrǽd was the first of the ‘barbarian kings’ to truly succeed in uniting the Christian radicalism born of the Benedictine witness to the demands of sacral statecraft. Before Queen Tamara, before Prince Vladimir, and even before Duke Václav – there stood Ælfrǽd. ‘Elf-counsel’, to wit his name, and indeed from his life we can see that his decision-making and his policies were truly fortunate – blessed not by elves but by God.

Ælfrǽd’s quality was not merely shown in war, though his spirited defence of England which stopped the marauding heathen Danes dead in their tracks is certainly worthy of mention, as is his establishment of a reserve force and coast guard to assist in this defence. It was also shown in his passionate love for the education of his people both in the classical mode and in their own vernacular. For him it was not enough merely to have a small, privileged and clerical literate caste as the servitors and interpreters of the nobility both sæcular and ecclesiastical – no. He wanted to inculcate learning among the laity, and not only to high-born sons, through his ‘court school’. And he promoted the bejeezus out of it, not least by wading into the field of scholarly work and popular education himself. He translated Pope Saint Gregory Dialogos’s Pastoral Care, Boëthius’s Consolations of Philosophy and Saint Bede’s History of the English Church and People into, well, English, and also authored his own works on theology, history and gæography in Latin. He commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He even sent shipmen as far afield as Estonia and the White Sea in order to map the coastlines.

Ælfrǽd also personally promoted a codified system of law which was in itself a remarkably ambitious attempt to harmonise the legal customs of the English handed down from Teutonic heathen antiquity, with the Laws of Moses. Legally speaking, he was not only a progressive but downright radical. He forbade private feuds: no small step in an honour culture such the one as he lived in. He took the power of high justice out of the uneven hands of the landlords and placed it in judges who were to deliver impartial judgements in the King’s name and in God’s. He expressly forbade his judges from issuing harsh judgements to the poor while delivering slaps on the wrists of the rich.

Speaking of which, Ælfrǽd also drastically expanded the money supply and instituted a progressive tax code similar to (and possibly inspired by) that of Emperor Constantine. It was based on the productivity and extent of ‘hides’ or landholdings: rich landowners paid proportionally more and contributed more men to the common defence; while poor landowners and smallholders owed proportionally less. And of the revenues he collected from it, one eighth would be directly earmarked what we would consider to be ‘social welfare’: directly given to beggars, hospitals, wayhouses and other sick and needy people. He also made it illegal to make anyone work on Sundays and holidays. Ælfrǽd was committed to a strongly social vision of the common good, not only educationally but œconomically.

In addition to this, he poured massive amounts of energy, time and resources into the building of public works: fortifications of towns or burgs; repairs to cities and roads ruined by Danish pillage; renovations of old and foundations of new churches and monasteries. This energetic promotion of learning and law, welfare and works; this relentless pursuit of a common good – this did not proceed solely from the mind and heart of a man, but it sprang from one enlightened by a sincere and single-minded desire to serve Christ Jesus. Ælfrǽd spent much of his day in prayer and in the reading of the Psalms. He desired to attend – and often did, behind the backs of his þegnas – all the hours that the Benedictines kept, and even fretted that he was oft prevented from doing so by the seasonal and meteorological variability of England’s sunlight!

It is also worth remembering that Ælfrǽd was the youngest son of his father Æþelwulf and mother Ósburg, the youngest indeed of five brothers – a slightly-built boy, and at that one who was often ill with a fearsome and then-unknown ailment (nowadays thought to be Crohn’s disease). It is said his parents brought him to Ireland, seeking healing for him from that nation’s many holy wells and saintly shrines. His mind, though, was active and hungry – according to Bishop Asser, he won from his mother a book of English poems that she offered to the first of her children who could commit it to memory.

Saint Ælfrǽd accompanied his father on pilgrimage to Rome when he was but six years old, and may have met Pope Leo IV there. His father, however, died when he was only nine years old, leaving the kingdom of Wessex to his elder brothers. It was only when Ælfrǽd’s third brother, Æþelræd, ascended the throne, that he began to show his skill – and even then, he was hard-pressed. The West Saxons lost battle after battle to the Great Heathen Here, and in those dark days it looked as though the flickering candle of English independence and Christianity was to be snuffed out forever. But the tenacity of Ælfrǽd and his ability to somehow retain and direct the loyalty of his men under such circumstances changed the tide. He managed to win an engagement against an evenly-manned force of Danes in the Berkshire Downs despite having to fight uphill. However, the losses for the West Saxons kept mounting – including Æþelræd himself, who took a blow which may have killed him at the battle of Marton in April 871.

The kingdom of Wessex, and the fate of England, thus fell upon the slight, sickly shoulders of a twenty-one-year-old Ælfrǽd. After another string of defeats Ælfrǽd was essentially forced to buy the Danes off, in an attempt to buy time for Wessex to lick her own wounds and recover. The Danes did not keep their word and, under a new king named Guðrum, kept on attacking the West Saxons, killing and raping as they went. Ælfrǽd was kept alive through his repeated and seemingly-hopeless engagements through what appears to be the grace of God – and the intercessions of Saint Cuðberht, to whom Ælfrǽd was deeply devoted – combined with sheer cussed stubbornness. He wound up at the head of a hardscrabble, ragtag band that hid out in the scrubby marshlands at Athelney and all that spring mounted hit-and-run asymmetrical attacks and supply raids on the occupying Danes. They won enough help from the lowly folk of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire through the levy at Ecgbryht’s Stone, that they were ultimately able to make a stand at Edington. Unaided by any outside help save that of Christ, they faced the Great Heathen Here which had terrorised and murdered its way across Great Britain for the past decade and more.

Here the English David proved his mettle against the Danish Goliath, for the battle of Edington was a rout for Guðrum and his Danes. The West Saxons formed ‘a dense shield-wall’ and refused to budge; the way that warfare was waged in those days, because the Northmen could not sustain their momentum by breaking through the shield-wall or forcing the West Saxons to give ground, they quickly tired and were beaten back. Ælfrǽd lay siege to the Danish fortress at Chippenham and forced their surrender by starving them out. The Danes promised to withdraw and leave Ælfrǽd’s territory, but significantly Ælfrǽd extracted another concession: the baptism of Guðrum, with Ælfrǽd himself standing as his sponsor.

Ælfrǽd did not merely trust in this baptism to keep the Danes at bay forever, though. He called up his reserve force on a permanent defensive footing, and began his project of constructing fortified towns. He also quickly made a series of politically-astute alliances. He found a high-born Mercian girl, Ealhswíþ (later a saint in her own right), and married her – the better to cement a much-needed alliance between Wessex and Mercia against the Danes. He also spoke frith with the Welsh to his west and the Frisians and Flemings on the Continent – these latter proved helpful to him in building ships which he used to maintain a coast guard against Danish raids from the sea.

Ælfrǽd’s political and educational reforms mentioned above sprang, it seems, both from pragmatic concerns about defence and from a sincere desire to serve God. However, they had the salutary effects of bolstering West Saxon resolve; strengthening and consolidating West Saxon political and military institutions; reinvigorating learning; and rebuilding trust among the common English folk, without whose help Edington and England would have been lost. It’s impossible to overstate how effective he was: at the beginning of Ælfrǽd’s reign Wessex was a beaten, occupied territory; but by the end, it was the undisputed nucleus of a great late flourishing of spiritual, cultural, intellectual and œconomic life in England. He is one of only two kings in England ever to receive the cognomen ‘the Great’, and that is fully deserved – not only on account of his successes in war but also on account of his ability to actively build the common good during peacetime. Holy and right-believing Ælfrǽd, learned prince and protector of the West Saxon lands, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Hearkening to the White Christ,
Thou camest forth from thy flood-girt fastness
To overcome the heathen and lead them forth to holy baptism.
Thou didst build churches, strongholds, shires and swift ships,
Restoring the law of God and making thyself beloved of all.
O wise King and glory of free England,
Who reignest in the Winchester of the heavenly England,
Thou who didst vanquish heathendom by Christendom,
Establish anew the Orthodox Faith in thy land
That we may glorify God, Who alone made thee great!