Praise for The Humorless Ladies of Border Control
“A truly remarkable book. On the surface, it’s a tour diary of shows around the wilder reaches of Eastern Europe and Russia. In actual fact, however, Franz has written a profound and perceptive travelogue in the vein of Paul Theroux or Rebecca West; like them, he teaches you about the places he visits, about the people he meets, about a forgotten but fascinating corner of world culture, and ultimately, about himself.” —Frank Turner, author of The Road Beneath My Feet
“In this amazing road tale, Nicolay captures how it feels for a wandering artist, scrounging in the underground punk scenes of Russia and the Balkans—sleepless nights and shaky trains, strong beer and unsavory companions—watching history turn inside out.” —Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is a Mix Tape
“If there isn’t already a shelf for Classic Punk Literature, we need to build it and stock it with Franz Nicolay. Part low-budget tour diary and part Slavic history lesson, this book is a love letter to the punk vie bohème.” —Amanda Palmer, author of The Art of Asking
“Funny and wistful, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an engrossing romp that casts fresh eyes on Old World cultures rich in paradox. Nicolay taps into the current cultural zeitgeist in the best travelogue tradition, with vivid scenes capturing the absurdities of daily life in the context of history and a deft reading of some of the most important cultural figures.” —Gregory Feifer, author of Russians
© 2016 by Franz Nicolay
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
Some material contained in this book first appeared in Vice (www.vice.com), Noisey (noisey.vice.com), The Ruckus (www.whatstheruckus.com), the chapbook Complicated Gardening Techniques (Julius Singer Press), and the essay collection The Road Most Traveled (Milner Crest).
Map by Ariana Nicolay
Many thanks to Emily Meg Weinstein for early readings, edits, and suggestions.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2016
Distributed by Perseus Distribution
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Nicolay, Franz.
Title: The humorless ladies of border control: touring the punk underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar / Franz Nicolay.
Description: New York: New Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014069 (print) | LCCN 2016014551 (ebook) | ISBN 9781620971802 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Nicolay, Franz—Travel—Europe, Eastern. | Nicolay, Franz—Travel—Russia (Federation) | Nicolay, Franz—Travel—Mongolia. | Europe, Eastern—Description and travel. | Russia (Federation)—Description and travel. | Mongolia—Description and travel.
Classification: LCC ML410.N615 A3 2016 (print) | LCC ML410.N615 (ebook) | DDC 781.66092—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016014069
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For Maria: traveling companion, musical compatriot, translator,
friend, trusted first reader, and beloved wife, without whom
none of this would have been possible.
Contents
Introduction
Part I
I. The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (Ukraine)
II. Party for Everybody (Rostov-on-Don to Saint Petersburg)
III. A Real Lenin of Our Time (Moscow)
IV. God-Forget-It House (Trans-Siberian)
V. The Knout and the Pierogi (Tomsk to Baikal)
VI. The Hall of Sufficient Looking (Trans-Mongolian)
Part II
I. Drunk Nihilists Make a Good Audience (Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia)
II. A Fur Coat with Morsels (Hungary, Poland)
III. Poor, but They Have Style (Romania)
IV. You Are an Asshole Big Time (Bulgaria)
V. Don’t Bring Your Beer in Church (Bucharest to Vienna)
Part III
I. Changing the Country, We Apologize for the Inconvenience (Ukraine After the Flood)
Bibliography
Playlist
Itinerary
“Were I in the place of the emperor, I should not be content with forbidding my subjects to complain; I should also forbid them to sing, which is a disguised mode of complaining. These accents of lament are avowals, and may become accusations.” —The Marquis de Custine
“The gentle reader cannot know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.” —Mark Twain
Introduction
I became a professional traveler. It said “musician” on my tax returns, but if you drew a bar graph illustrating how I spent my years, “music” would be a matchbox, and “travel” and “waiting” twin towers. I stopped having real friends. My old friends still saw one another, met for drinks, fell in and out of love—they just did it without me. And my new friends were either friends of necessity—we were trapped in the same rolling boxes—or of transience, necessarily shallow relationships since I wouldn’t see them until their own orbit blipped through mine again. “I understood what it was like to be dead,” wrote Paul Theroux of the itinerant life. “People might miss you, but their lives go on without you.”
To those of an unsettled, anxious, or fretful temperament, a life of perpetual travel is a convenient Gordian solution. The insistent flicker of unease, the failing fluorescent bulb holding back despair, is at home a problem, even a sickness, crying for a solution: a new job, a new love, a new new, the unanswerable. But in travel, acknowledged to be at best uncomfortable and disorienting and at worst dangerous, one finds a convenient and all-encompassing skeleton key to the existential lock: “There is always gain,” said Montaigne, “in changing a bad condition for an uncertain one.” Out of sorts? Blame the jet lag. Tired? Blame the bunk on last night’s train. Lashing out at those around you? Those around you are strangers and don’t understand a word you’ve said anyway.
Having dispensed with the existential questions, we travelers are free to indulge nearly any pursuit that doesn’t require possessions. Many of us settle on voyeurism, the flip side of solipsism. We adopt a God’s-eye view, lordly in our solitude. We spend an afternoon—by necessity or accident—in a strange city, passing snap judgment on a society based on its customer service, road maintenance, the fashion sense of thirty minutes’ worth of passersby at a café, manners of queueing and bargaining, pornography, or street-sign graphic design. We generalize from particulars and approach individuals armed with preprogrammed stereotypes. Confident in our conclusions, we claim an intuitive gift. “It is true that I have not fully seen,” wrote the Marquis de Custine in his Russian travelogue, “but I have fully divined.”1 We claim the privilege of the inquisitive foreigner, the dignified heritage of Herodotus and Alexis de Tocqueville. We may get some details utterl
y wrong but still capture something of the larger truth—or, conversely, misrepresent the larger story but preserve some quotidian or piquant details. We ask leading questions of innocents, then spend a suspiciously long time in the bathroom scribbling out their answers or pecking them into a phone. We are sketching what V.S. Pritchett called the “human architecture,” gathering basketfuls of Ford Madox Ford’s “little bits of uncompleted lives,” trying to patch the holes we’ve torn in our own lives by our leaving with rags we’ve picked from those of the people we pass. But let the last word on wanderlust go to Melville’s Ishmael:
Custine wrote eight hundred pages on Russia after a three-month trip, Rebecca West twelve hundred on Yugoslavia after a mere six weeks.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
There is another way to travel, of course, and that is with a companion. My wife, Maria—a musician and an ethnomusicologist from a family of postwar refugees from western Ukraine—and I had long planned to ride the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In late spring of 2011, we met Dima, a young Russian from Saint Petersburg, in Kyiv. Dima had booked and was managing a monthlong tour in Russia and the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Ukraine for Jeff Rowe, a singer-songwriter from Boston I’d recently met in London. When the tour reached Kyiv, I happened to be there, taking a few weeks off after finishing my UK tour, and I opened the show. Afterward I laid out my plan to Dima: could he book me and Maria from Saint Petersburg to Lake Baikal, playing shows along the way?
He agreed, and the first leg of what became a six-month tour, from March to September 2012, was in place: we would start in Kyiv, tour down the industrial cities of eastern Ukraine, cross into Russia, head north to Saint Petersburg, south to Moscow, and then board the Trans-Siberian proper east to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal.
From there, we reasoned, there were two options: we could continue the three days’ journey to Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast, but there was nowhere of interest to stop on that route. Alternately, we could turn south, on the Trans-Mongolian line, through Ulaanbaatar to Beijing. I set myself on the project of finding gigs in Beijing (where at least I had a lead—New Jersey punk band the Bouncing Souls had played there and put me in touch with their contact) and Ulaanbaatar (where the best I could do was post on expat messageboards and hope for a reply).
Tours have a way, like gas leaks or bread dough, of expanding to fill the space available. We sublet our Brooklyn apartment in March 2012 and didn’t return until September: six months, twenty-one countries, 104 shows, and more than fifty thousand miles later.
This story will focus in Part I on my travels with Maria in the former Eastern Bloc countries Ukraine, Russia, and Mongolia (May through July 2012); in Part II on my trip alone the next year to the former Yugoslavia and farther south into the Balkan Peninsula, Romania, and Bulgaria (March and April 2013); and in Part III on our return the following summer, in July 2014, now with a young daughter, to a postrevolutionary Ukraine that had become international news in the wake of a confusing Russian invasion. (In a few places—parts of Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and Poland—I combine and conflate two visits, one with Maria and one without, for the sake of narrative clarity.)
I concentrated on this part of the world not only because DIY punk touring in the United States, Western Europe, and the British Isles is, both literally and metaphorically, well-trod ground. First, I had a personal motive. A Slavophile since a high school Russian literature class and an enthusiast of Balkan music since an encounter with a bootleg cassette of the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov, I wanted to visit the countries I’d spent years imagining, to put myself in the paths of past traveloguers and literary portraiteers and to compare their impressions, sometimes a century or more old, to mine in the present day.
Second, I wanted to hone in on what I think is an interesting dual story about the past and future of underground punk and rock in formerly Communist states. On one hand, it is a backward-looking story, in which a surprising number of aging rebels, from scenes and bands that had defined themselves in opposition to authoritarian communism in the 1970s and 1980s, took an unexpected (or perhaps not, like grouchy old American punks who discover a misanthropic taste for guns and libertarianism) turn toward reactionary nationalism in the 1990s and 2000s.
On the other hand, it is a forward-looking series of portraits, in their own words, of a young and Internet-enabled generation with a utopian idea of American punk, DIY, progressive politics, and communitarian ethics not unlike the romantic idea of the “Imaginary West” that anthropologist Alexei Yurchak described taking hold in their parents’ Soviet generation. Despite having little real analogue in the actual distracted and fickle punk scene in the United States, this idea of punk provides this generation with the moral fortitude to carve out a fragile, tenuous, but extensive and resilient autonomous zone for themselves, and to defend it against the actual physical threat from police and right-wing gangs and the psychological battering of cynicism and disillusionment of life in societies that must often seem to be existing, in the words of Rebecca West, in “a permanent state of simultaneous anarchy and absolutism.”
When I began writing, Russia, despite its best efforts to reassert itself on the world stage, remained a geopolitical cipher, apparently impotent and certainly aggrieved. By the time I finished, Ukraine had undertaken a second popular revolution, and Russia had responded with a passive-aggressive invasion premised on a wink-nudge implausible deniability. It became an international crisis when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by rebels in eastern Ukraine. Overnight, the foundations of the postwar European peace seemed a little less secure and the resolutions of the Cold War a little less resolved.
I thought of West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a book that arose from her compulsion to trace how another violent act in a distant corner of Europe—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo—led to the catastrophe of the Great War and that tracks, almost meteorologically, the growing pressures that led to the next war. In her epilogue, written in the midst of that second war, she said, “If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realized why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians and what the Romans, and had written down all she knew and felt about it, the record would have been of value to historians. . . . Without doubt it was my duty to keep a record of it.”
One of the people I met in Ukraine said, “It’s like I’m reading a book of history, and I don’t know how it ends.” In my travels up until then, my engagement with the history of every place was with its past, both literary and political, but always transitory and always in a rush. Now I found myself in the midst of a story as it was written. There is nothing like West’s sense of inevitable disaster in this book: several postcommunist countries, such as Poland and Croatia, seem likely to be secure and successful in the long term. Mongolia will probably remain a country on the periphery of world events, half-engulfed in the romance of its name. But Ukraine, despite an engaged and empowered polity with a liberal and European-looking vision for its future, remains unstable and vulnerable. An unpredictable and bellicose Russia is keen to exercise a renewed ambition for international influence. The story of history unfolds fast enough that the telling of it cannot hope to keep pace, and parts of this book may read like old newspapers by the time of its publication—but there is a value in capturing how people felt in the transient moment. Perhaps none of the people in this book are destined to be the men and women in the headlines, but their lives, whether they want to be a part of shaping their countries’ future or just to drink cheap beer by t
he dam and listen to punk rock, will be parts of that story, and this book a marker of their small claim.
PART I
I.
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (Ukraine)
Our roommate on the sleeper train from L’viv to Kyiv was a stocky, ham-fisted forty-five-year-old veterinarian. A friend of his, he told us, had a visa to America in the 1980s, but he got caught stealing from the grain quota and now can’t go to America ever. He had conspiracy theories and opinions he was eager to share: they didn’t kill bin Laden, it could have been “any tall guy with a beard”—for that matter, I, Franz, look a little like bin Laden, don’t I? And we haven’t seen that much of Michelle Obama recently, have we? If there’s not a trumpet, it’s not jazz. Vitamin C doesn’t work, all you need is raspberry tea with lemon and the love of a good woman. Everyone’s been there—first beer, first guitar, first girl.
He stripped down to what would once have been called his BVDs, nearly obscured by his hairless belly, and snored all night. When we awoke, he was gone, replaced by an older man with a lined face and Clint Eastwood stolidity. “He has the saddest face I’ve ever seen,” Maria said. He slept first, facedown and fully clothed; then, when I returned from the bathroom, he was sitting upright, bag beside him, staring out the window. He never said a word.
I was a musician then, often traveling alone, sometimes with my new wife, Maria. I hadn’t always traveled alone: for years I had been a member of the kind of bands who traveled in marauding, roving packs, like “Kerouac and Genghis Khan,” as the songwriter Loudon Wainwright once put it. First there was the nine-piece circus-punk orchestra World/Inferno Friendship Society, a monument to pyrrhic, self-defeating romanticism and preemptive nostalgia that still haunts me like a family lost in a war. But I had ambitions, and World/Inferno had “underground phenomenon” baked into the concept. So I jumped to a rising neo–classic rock band called the Hold Steady, which became, for a few years, one of the biggest bands in what is, for lack of a term of representation rather than marketing, called “indie rock.” We opened for the Rolling Stones and played the big festivals and bigger television shows. Our victory-lap touring constituted an almost audible sigh of relief that we’d finally arrived—we’d never have to work a day job again.
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