IN RED SQUARE

Wednesday, June 27, 2007
I'm drinking free champagne and consuming skewered fresh fruit and petits fours at the opening of a new Kiehl’s boutique in the GUM department store on Red Square. My Hollywood Reporter business card got us past the PR girl with the clipboard, though my name was somehow not on the list. Odd to be in Moscow at the opening of Kiehl’s, a funky old family-owned shop where I used to buy shaving cream when I lived on the Lower East Side. Now it’s a global brand.

I’m hanging with Timour from Kirgyztan, who used to be a yuppie working for DHL and now works for Sasha’s music management company, Greenwave, when he isn’t playing guitar with various rock bands. He’s been tasked with showing me the tourist sites and now he’s on his third glass of champagne.

So here I am, in this place that I’ve seen on TV newscasts since Kruschev’s time, where he and his successors stood sternly on Lenin’s tomb and reviewed the marching armies and megaton weaponry said to be pointed our way. It’s hard to believe that now, given the general shabbiness and utter dysfunction of Moscow’s infrastructure – please, Timour, don’t make me ride that horrible subway again! Yet the sheer power of Moscow’s vast central plaza, flanked by the Kremlin one side and the multi-colored onion-bulb spires of St. Basil’s at one end, is undeniable.

The real power, however, now sits across from the Kremlin in the GUM department store with its Chanel and Dior boutiques, and its sleek women on the arms of newly minted billionaires gliding through the marbled passageways. Another glass of champagne, please… and here’s to Kapitalism!

THE NAKED AND THE DAMNED

Thursday, June 28, 2007
Turns out that I am sharing my room in the Olympic Village Hotel with Lu Edmonds, London-based musician from the Mekons and The Damned ( http://www.wacobrothers.com/lu.htm ) and a “key figure in World Music,” according to the program for the Sayan Ring Festival (he's on the jury, too). It’s true – he not only speaks Russian but knows all the stars of Central Asian roots music personally and all the inside-Tuvan gossip. We’re traveling to Tuva together with Sasha and Huun Huur Tu, and going on from there to the Festival in Big Shush. He’s really into the arcana of the throat-singing genre and the personalities involved. He goes on and one about this guy and that one… “A really fucking phenomenal singer, man, really strong on the kyrgyraa. I’ve been there with them, northern herders, they hang out in buckskin, like the Sioux. And this one guy, a southern boy from the Mongolian side. He’s been in trouble, man. Horse thieving. A lot of rustling going on a few years back, a lot of bad blood.”

We have a few days in Moscow before heading East, so Lu and I hang out at the brand new Mall just a stroll from our Olympic Village Hotel, logging onto the free Wifi, eating pizza at the food court and ogling the girls. What do they feed them here? Moscow girls are utterly stunning – miniskirts and high heels at noon! Ah, but the girls are interested in billionaire oligarchs, not a couple of scruffy rock n’ rollers from the impoverished West.

When we get bored, Lu and I head for the Banya – the Russian baths. It’s full of businessmen with bottles of vodka and whiskey, eating smoked fish and sausage. The call goes out and everyone crowds into the sauna. A big cedar-lined room full of naked men sweating, wearing silly-looking felt hats. One man sits on a stool and fans the heat around the room, waves of heat searing the flesh. Moans and groans in a rising crescendo of heat and sweat, some beating themselves or one another with eucalyptus branches, shouting encouragement until by mutual agreement the room bursts into applause and everyone pours out the door to sluice off the sweat in the showers, or plunge into the cold pool. I suspect Lu of secretly enjoying a little too much the beating he gave me with those branches, but then he probably thought the same about me. In any case, we’re eager to get the hell out of dirty filthy Moscow and head to the cleaner climes of Siberia.

ON THE ROAD TO SIBERIA

Friday, June 29, 2007
A 10:30 PM flight from Moscow lands us in Siberia at dawn in the city of Abakan. A waiting van with a grumpy driver takes all of us – the four members of Huun Huur Tu, their two managers Sasha and Volodya, Lu from the Damned, and me. Two documentary film crew guys are also aboard; a tall serious Moscow Film Institute grad named Pasha intently studying the instruction manual on his brand-new Canon DV; and his buddy Vladik, the shorter of the Mutt & Jeff team festooned with a variety of still cameras and lenses, whose long blond hair and big dark sunglasses are constantly getting in the way of his focus. Everybody is smoking furiously.

Some of us are still toasted from last night’s all-nighter which began at a club called 16 Tons (“…and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt”). Lu was backing up Geoffrey Oryema, the Paris-based Ugandan singer-songwriter (http://www.myspace.com/geoffreyoryema ).

Oryema’s guitarist had somehow failed to show up for the gig, so Lu sat in. Joined by a local blues harmonica enthusiast, they rocked a packed house. After the triumph, we taxied across town to a club whose habitués reputedly included a mix of Russia’s top oligarch billionaires and avant garde artistes. Located in a warehouse district, the joint was unfortunately not exactly jumping. The action consisted mainly of scantily clad cigarette girls jiving to the deafening techno offering fistfuls of some new brand, and laid back pot-heads puffing away in the rear garden. We decamped to the nearby flat of the club’s owner, a yuong Russian artist who used to live in LA and is sort of on the lam here after he was caught up in the great Stone Canyon pot bust a few years back. We spent the remaining hours until dawn drinking tea, discussing music, Malevich and Constructivism like a bunch of 1920’s Bolsheviks – just as I’ve always imagined life in Moscow.

But now the sun is coming up over the pine-fringed ridges and as we head down the road southeast toward the Sayan mountains, Kaigal-ool begins to hum a tune in a melodious vibrato, a confluence of notes and tones known as throat-singing. In five or six hours we will be in Tuva on the other side of those mountains and home for Huun Huur Tu.

FIRST NIGHT IN TUVA

Saturday, June 30, 2007
I’m living in a yurt! Okay, so it’s not a real Siberian yak herder’s yurt. That one’s up the road. Mine is in a tourist encampment of yurts assembled on a bend in the rock-strewn Bii-khem River, a tributary of the mighty Yenesee rushing northward to the Arctic Circle. We're only a few miles outside of Kyzyl, capital city of the Republic of Tuva and at least a 30-point Scrabble word if you hit it right.

The arduous all-day drive from Abakan took us through endless landscapes of stunning Siberian beauty. But it was hot, we were beat and the Huun Huur Tu group eager to get home. The Mutt & Jeff film crew, however, insisted on stopping every few miles to set up their tripods and arty angles to shoot this forest and that mountain and various rivers until we were pleading with them to get back in the car. I'm afraid I got very cranky with the lads but it's Siberia and I can say what I want, dammit.

At long last, descending from the high ridges and pine taiga of Khakasija we halted at a checkpoint for a document inspection before crossing into Tuva. We traversed the rolling green expanse of the Valley of the Kings, where Scythian royalty still lie undisturbed in countless burial mounds and arrived in Kyzyl at dusk, pulling over by a Buddhist shrine on the city outskirts. Summoned by cell phones, which actually function in this farthest of far-off places in the geographical center of Central Asia, HHT’s homeboys showed up and spirited them away for a little homecoming celebration.

The homeboys returned with Kaigal-ool and Sayan to the yurt camp. They assembled in my yurt as the sun was going down, all of sitting in a circle. I brought out a pint of Cazadores Tequila and dedicated it to my new friends. Passing it around, each of the Tuvans first dipped a finger in the liquor and solemnly flicked a few drops in the air before taking a swig. They seemed to like the stuff, which most had heard of but never before tried. One of the homeboys later said, "I always wanted to taste the juice of the cactus before I died."

My first night in the yurt, I slept like a stone, only to be roused by a huge crash. I stumbled outside to see a thunderstorm hovering over the peaks of the Sayan range, pulsing with intermittent lightning. The sky to the south was clear, illuminated by the fullest roundest moon. While standing there in the warm embrace of a humid breeze whispering off the river it was possible to hear the wild notes of those same songs that Kaigal-ool was throat-singing in the car on the way to this incredible place.

MAGICAL DAYS IN TUVA - July 1 - 3

Tuesday, July 3, 2007 - We visited several Arzhans, the sacred springs that flow from the steppes and are marked by shamanic offerings. The mineral waters are supposed to heal whatever ails you.

All I know for sure is that the weather was hot in Tuva and the cold stuff felt good on my face. I think it may have eased a slight ache in my left foot, too. The herders let me ride one of their horses.
With Huun Huur Tu we paid a visit to the Chief Shaman of Tuva, one of the most powerful shamans in all of Siberia. The shaman performed a ritual and then requested a command performance at the Kyzyl Museum for him and his wife and friends. The guys put on an inspired show. Afterward, the shaman called for a group photo. Then we all received a special guided tour of the museum...
...including a look at a collection of ancient stone figures that are kept hidden from most visitors because some locals still regard them as sacred. The mouths of the figures are stained by the milk and butter offerings that worshippers ritually feed them.

LAST DAYS IN TUVA

Wednesday, July 4, 2007
On location with Huun Huur Tu, playing in the hills overlooking the valleys northeast of Kyzyl, as the evening breeze swept over the steppe and the lowering sun touched everything with a golden glow.

Their homeboys came along and despite their menacing appearance, they turned out to be a sweet bunch of guys to hang out with... and strangely familiar, too, as if I'd known them back in the small upstate New York town where I grew up. On our last day in Tuva, we all drove out to village of herders where the film crew shot Huun Huur Tu playing in a field of galloping horses. Afterward, we feasted on boiled lamb and fermented mare's milk, a traditional alcoholic beverage of the Siberian steppe - a little something different from the beer you're probably drinking on this Fourth July.

Now, back on the long road over the Sayan Range to the Sayan Ring Festival...

SAYAN RING FESTIVAL, JULY 5 - 8

The Festival was great - like a Siberian Woodstock.Huun Huur Tu played two magnificent sets...And I had a lot of fun... and so did a few of the girls I met! I did a bit of dancing, they tell me. My memory is a little blurry, but here is graphic evidence:

This distinguished lady was the chief Shaman of the island where the festival was held. I gave her a brass bell to add to the other bells hanging on her outfit. She said "Whenever this bell rings, it will send you blessings across the sea." I believe it!

You can read about the whole crazy thing in my article in the October 2007 issue of Rolling Stone Italia (if you read italian): http://www.rollingstonemagazine.it/page.php?ID=1839

Dosvedonya!