Dance Me to the End of Love

Tonight, Barclays Center sports arena is packed almost to limit of its seating capacity. 19,000 people came to hear Leonard Cohen. It is strange to see all these people quietly waiting for a performance to start. Barclays looks more like Lincoln Center than a sports arena.

The overhead lights dim and only cell phone screens glimmer in the darkness below me. The scene lights up in bordello red and blue and the band arrives. Seventy-eight-year old Leonard Cohen sprightly scampers across the scene, like a winner of the octogenarian Olympic Games. He starts the performance with 'Dance me to the End of Love'. As his voice fills the stage, I am left to ponder on why I like him so much.

I like him even though his songs are often too sentimental for my taste, occasionally crossing into the dangerous realm of sappiness.

I like him even though in this silly hat he looks like a retired Jewish gangster.

I like him even though he carries with him a trio of middle-age women in black and white suits that look like tall skinny penguins. Now, they are marching and making strange waving motions on the left side of the stage.

I like Leonard Cohen and so do the 19,000 or more people sitting next to me. Old and young, men and women, Americans and foreigners, New Yorkers and tourists are listening intently, dancing with Cohen to the end of love.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in,
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove.  

Does the audience know this song was inspired by a story about a concentration camp string quartet playing for people walking into gas chamber? The lyrics get a different, darker tinge, don't they?

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born,

The light upgrades towards the plush end of the bordello spectrum. The penguin chorus of waving women keeps striding in one place.

 

Cohen sings, 'Ain't no Cure for Love.' Sad words reverberate between the walls. I am holding Yvonne's small plump hand just to reassure myself that love doesn't have to be a tragic one-sided affair. Yvonne pulls her fingers out; she needs both hands to keep shooting her camera.

Every one of Cohen's song is a lovingly crafted ode to death, betrayal, failure, misery and loneliness, mostly self-inflicted. His poems re-enforce each other, methodically and melodically describing all the bitter options that life offers to the reader.

So, why are 19,000 people listening to a depressed bard?  Why am I sitting so still, my usual fidgeting and impatience gone? Is it, because Cohen's gift of golden voice somehow projects reassurance and comfort? There is an eerie strength in him, confidence and quiet goodness.

He sings that it's really bad and that it's gonna get worse. He sings that everybody will die, and that the survivors will envy the dead.

The mysterious warmth in the old singer’s voice reaches across Barclays Center. It fills thousands of cubic yards of space. It fills the audience. Cohen doesn't bring people happiness. Instead, he uses his anguish and talent to bring us wisdom and strength, necessary to cope with life.

And I hear that I should hold on to what I have; that I should appreciate every moment of joy in my life. Next to me sits a woman I love. She returns my feelings. I shouldn't fail her and myself.

He starts 'Tower of Song.'

All my friends are gone, my hair is gray,
I ache in the places I used to play.

A merciless projection screen to the side of the stage shows a close up of his face.

He looks like his own corpse. Strands of stringy muscles stand out on his neck. Dry skin with pigmentation spots cling tightly to his tired face. He can barely stand, and yet he continues to sing. Lesser men hold on to power or to money. With gnarly fingers, Leonard Cohen holds on to song, like a geriatric Orpheus.

A coarse man's voice bellows from the other side of the arena, "God bless you, Leonard!"

It's such a strangely polite thing to yell.

Cohen is pushing on.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin 

The rhythmic music and the stubborn energy reverberating in the singer's voice trap me. I don’t even notice when a woman one row in front of us throws up. People leave. A few minutes later, three maintenance men in grey and black suits noiselessly materialize in the air like wraiths. They cover the puddle of vomit with a cleaning powder that smells like lemoncello, noiselessly scoop the whole disgusting thing up and disappear the same mysterious way they came in.

Instead of annoying me, this small accident adds an extra tang to sadness I feel. Is this how my life will finish? Will somebody pour lemoncello flavored cleaning power over my stinking corpse and scoop me away?

In the Tower of Song, Cohen described himself as being born with a gift of golden voice. He was not bragging, he was being realistic. Funnily, it took him almost forty years to realize it. He had published three books of poetry before he sang his first song. Now, just for a few minutes he puts the guitar down, the band goes away, and the poet starts reciting the lines.

The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
 You win a while, and then it’s done –
Your little winning streak.

He is his usual optimistic self.

If anything, Cohen's voice projects more feelings when he simply speaks rather than sings. Yvonne and I travel 'Thousand Kisses Deep'. I have a silly idea. What if Cohen just dropped the music and recited poetry for the whole evening? One concert takes in roughly two million dollars, it would be the most commercially successful poetry recitation in the history of the world

It's been a two and half hours. I am getting tired from sitting in a chair. Cohen keeps singing. His body is shaking slightly, his movements look jerky and stiff. His voice is still filling the arena though, holding the audience hostage. It is an example of artistic depression winning over physical frailty by sheer willpower.

I keep getting nervous that he'll just keel over and die right in front of us.

As I found out later, he did faint three years ago during a concert in Valencia.  I also learned that, on the last tour he gave twenty one concerts in fifty days.

Meanwhile, Cohen turns nostalgic. A duet of violin and piano, piercing and pacifying, accompanies Suzanne, the song that launched Cohen's songwriter carrier in long gone 1960's. My parents hadn't even met yet.

Oh, well, depression has just surfaced back in its blazing glory as Cohen is singing a song about having wasted his life.

I waited half my life away.
There were lots of invitations
and I know you sent me some,
but I was waiting
for the miracle, for the miracle to come.

Well, the miracle came - he is still singing.

Yvonne is taking one picture after another. Her lens is staring threateningly towards the stage like a huge black eye protruding out of her head.

The concert is drawing to end. I am almost relieved, I would rather Cohen lived and wrote for a few more years, rather than pushed the daisies right here, on the stage. The lights turn on, and the audience goes into a collective paroxysm of appreciation. 19,000 people stand up, applaud, whistle, scream bravo. It doesn't look yet like a sport stadium but it ain't no Lincoln Center either.

Well, Cohen runs back, stumbling.

If you want a lover
I'll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you

Not surprisingly, it didn't work out so great for the guy in the end,

I've been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees

Yvonne looks at me, pointedly, “Don't you screw up.” I look back at her, “I promise.”

Will he ever stop? It's being four hours. Is he only alive when he sings? What if he is actually dead between the concerts and his team revives him from suspended animation when the time to sing arrives?

Finally, Cohen is gone. He will speak no more and his voice be still. Till the next concert, hopefully.
The light is back on and multitudes of people are hurrying out in perfectly organized flows. From the top, they look like ants marching out of an anthill. In only a matter of a few minutes, the arena becomes lifeless and empty. Yvonne packs her camera and we leave.

Welcome to the Subway People: images in words

This is a stream of accidental images and encounters describing the people I see in the New York City subway. I will keep updating it.

Comments are welcome. Stories are even more welcome. Add them as comments and I'll append them to the main file.

1.
A 300 pound guy and a 100 pound girl are holding each other hands
And gazing at each other tenderly. Good luck guys.

2.
A plastic butterfly rides the black girl's sunglasses.
Like Benigni in Night on Earth, driving a cab at night.
Nice boobs though.

3.
Fashionable holes on fashionable jeans.
Mosquitoes' favorite.

4.
A fat old Jewish guy with a long white beard and a bald head covered by a large warm yarmulke is slouching on a seat across me. He is reading a red and white Torah in Royal Folio size.
A fat young Jew with a shorter brown beard and long hair covered by a small black yarmulke is slouching on a seat ten feet away. He is reading a Torah that's the size of an iPhone.

5.

A padded jaunty bouncy butt of a Santa Claus. Girls must like it.

6.
The guy looks like a cross between a young Dalai Lama and a Bruce Lee. His son squirms on a seat next to him, a toddler in a blue T-shirt with a Superman logo. A fifty year old man in a red Turkish hat embroidered in gold stands nearby, with an iPhone in his hand. The squirmy kid keeps looking at the iPhone longingly. The guy smiles and gives it to the child. The kid takes the iPhone in two chubby little hands and starts carefully scrolling through pictures on screen with one finger. The dad spots him, but the kid operates the phone quite confidently.

Conventional pediatric wisdom says that children master small muscle control after age five. Welcome to the age of Apple devices. Good-bye conventional wisdom.

7.
The guy is 6'5" and built like a sumo wrestler. He is explaining to his kid how to spell the word 'wrong'. He is carefully enunciating every sound with his heavy Brooklyn accent, "R, O, N, G". The guy's wife, a petite woman with sharp features is standing behind him. Her shoulder length hair is plaited in Egyptian pharaoh style. She looks at her husband broad back with love and exasperation. Unlike him, she knows how to spell 'rong'. I try to keep a straight face.

As I pass her on my way out, I realize that, at 5'8", she is only one inch shorter then me and she is quite solidly built. She only looks petite next to the huge bulk of her husband.

8.
A immaculately groomed middle-aged guy in a Prada woolen jacket and very square shaped glasses is playing a game console, leaning it against an upper hold bar. His Doom style character is running among some stone labyrinth shooting guns, rockets and lasers, leaving behind smoking ruins and shattered enemies. A beautiful teenage girl looks at the guy with confusion, "When will he grow up?"

9.
A woman in her sixties is sitting across Yvonne and me. It is immediately evident to me that she is Russian. I ask Yvonne, "Why?"

Yvonne looks at the woman. "It's because she is dressed like a Russian," Yvonne rolls her eyes at my lack of visual-analytical skills and explains, "They always dress like a baked potato. Look, she is wearing a round heavy brown coat with a frilly opening, just like a potato would open. And, it's always the same dark color. The floppy squashable round hat with a flower attached to it is the topping".

The woman pinches her lips suspiciously. She knows that the world is up to no good.

10.
As I am getting into the last door of a last car on A train at 181st, I hear a desperate voice calling from the top of the stairs, "Hold the door please". I obligingly hold the door with my foot. A man rushes in, carrying his daughter in one hand and balancing a drink on a pizza box in another hand. As the train starts, they devour the pizza. The girl is just as hungry as her dad, but she demonstrates decisively better manners.

11.
I walk down the train and start counting. Twenty nine people are riding this train car and twenty six are wearing coats and jackets in various shades of black. Has somebody died? Three people wear gray and only one (your humble servant) is wearing a coat in bright happy green.

I have to admit though that white, yellow and red scarves help somewhat.

Twenty six people are sitting in the next train car. Everyone (including me) wears pants of mud blue, dark blue, gray and black. The only exception is a young teenage black girl in reddish pink pants and a purple jacket. Go girl!

12.
An Asian couple is standing on a platform with their backs towards each other staring with angry defiance into the space. Are the preparing for the last stand fight against an overwhelming enemy? Or did they just have a family quarrel?

13.
Guys, have some decency. If you're overdosed on pot, don't top it off with mushrooms. Incessant high pitch giggles don't go well with glassy unfocused eyes. Oh, well, at least they look like a happily married couple. And, three little red pompons on her left knee are bouncing quite prettily as she is lurching her way towards gates.

14.
A cylinder 5'8" high and 3' diameter is wrapped in a brown fake fur coat. A underwear-thin pleated pink skirt hem coquettishly covers Mary Jane shoes.

Zip Lock Bags + Poetry = Money

This was my first ever poem. I made $400 on it. Live and learn. Not so bad for a fifteen minute exercise in writing really crappy poetry. 

Oh, zip lock bags! The sweet plastic.
Like duct tape, they are matrix of life. 
I use them to store lots of stuff, 
from AA batteries to sugar. 
When I bring lunch to work, I use zip lock bags, 
Even to pack pasta with lamb stew. 
(Since the freaking lunch boxes at home are all gone). 
I take a dozen with me on every trip. 
From Cordilleras to Sierra Nevada mountains, 
From Xi’an to Barcelona, zip lock bags travel with me. 
They protect route descriptions from rain. 
They hold a first aid kit (of sorts) 
Since I never bothered buying a proper bag.
They keep food from evenly spreading across my backpack. 
And they hide stinky French cheese from US customs. 
(always guarding our Great Nation from corrupting influences and other foods). 

They are as annoying as they are helpful.
Zippers randomly open, and zipper heads fall off.
I put them back on and close the zippers 
But the process repeats itself. 
Food spreads across the backpack and 
All my clothing smells like French cheese.
To the delight of US custom dogs. 
There is no alternative and I use them. 
But, I can never predict what they are going to do. 
It’s like with women. Sorry, but I just couldn’t resist.

Scientists - in Politics and Prison

A major earthquake struck on April 6, 2009. It killed three hundred people in the Italian city of L'Aquila. Hundreds more were injured and thousands were rendered homeless. More than three years later, on October 21, 2012 an Italian court found seven men guilty of this disaster. One of them was an Italian government official, the others were senior Italian scientists. They will spend six years in prison.

To summarize the story of the earthquake:
For a few months, numerous tremors alerted and frightened the L'Aquila residents. The residents were quite worried and experts from Italian Major Risks Committee were called in. Six senior Italian geophysicists had a meeting with a civil official. At the meeting, the scientists considered different scenarios. None of the scientists ruled out a possibility of earthquake. Some of experts considered the earthquake to be not very likely. One of them made a clearly erroneous statement - that small tremors may act positively by dissipating energy, thus reducing the probability of an earthquake. All of the experts specified that it was impossible to predict or completely rule out an earthquake. Later, the civil official presented the results to the public. He stated that an earthquake would not take place and he recommended that the residents stayed.

According to the prosecutor, the experts' analysis was, "Incomplete, inept, unsuitable and criminally mistaken." An Italian judge determined that the accused failed to adequately communicate the dangers of earthquake. They provided, "Inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" with respect to the quake warning.

To the best of my knowledge, the accusation, the prosecution, the trial and the consequent indictment were unique in the history of modern Western world. I am a scientist myself, so I have a personal stake in this incident. I have no desire to end up in a prison for my insufficient scientific qualifications or for my lack of communication skills.

Italian judiciary accused the scientists of two crimes.

They failed to predict an earthquake.

They failed to communicate to the public directly and clearly.

Yet, it is known that nobody can predict earthquakes with full certainty. The scientists are not civil officials or government members. It is not their responsibility to communicate to the public or to make executive decisions.

Natural disasters strike every year. Sometimes scientists predict them successfully and the authorities handle the crisis well. Sometimes, scientists fail. Sometimes, the scientists do their job well, but the authorities fail. A tsunami or a hurricane occasionally destroys a political career or two. But, so far, to the best of my knowledge, no politician has been criminally prosecuted for ignoring a scientific forecast. And, more importantly, no scientist has ever been prosecuted for being inarticulate or for failing to be omniscient.

The rules of the game were that the scientists kept away from politics and that people didn't blame scientists for wrong executive decisions.

I believe, it would be fair to say that the scientific community and the public signed an unofficial compact over the last half century. On one hand, the public viewed the scientists with a certain suspicion - they were a strange bunch of over educated eggheads who wore glasses and used long confusing words.

On the other hand, the public reluctantly trusted the scientists because the latter were generally competent, honest, bipartisan and non-prejudiced. The scientists were supposed to conduct the research as carefully as they could and truthfully inform the public of causes, effects and consequences. They analyzed, predicted and advised, but they didn't make political decisions. The public was not qualified enough to test or fully follow the scientists' research. However, the public could generally trust the scientists' qualifications and dispassion.

The compact worked reasonably well for many years.

However, over the last 10-20 years, environmental science changed the rules of the game. Environmental science studies interaction between human society and the environment. It soon became closely tied to the environmental movement. A moral cause of protecting the planet from the destructive human activity blended with the necessity of political action. The scientists sought publicity to promote their views. They actively participated in public and political activities. In their desire to avert an environmental disaster, they sometimes sacrificed caution and scientific precision. They insistently came out with strong predictions of approaching crisis. They are no longer stayed behind the ivory walls of their towers.

They are no longer protected by a compact.

The media energetically picked the cause of an impending Apocalypse generated by humans. They exaggerated scientific data and shed all the scientific uncertainty in the search of an ultimate sensation. The scientists didn't attempt to dissuade the media or the public. The corresponding UN and EU bodies energetically picked up this cause as a perfect global reason to expand. Following Parkinson's laws, they grew, obtained more funding and regulatory powers, signed protocols, and created organizations. The scientists actively participated.

Thus, environmental scientists acquired more opportunities, power and funding. In the process, they lost their dispassionate observer status. In the eyes of the public, the scientists now share the responsibility with the decision makers. Since the public doesn't distinguish among different varieties of scientists, all of them are guilty if a disaster strikes.

Politicians had centuries to hone their skills of passing the buck and avoiding responsibility. Scientists will shoulder all the blame and we will be left out in the open for the public to pick us apart.

Regards,

Boris Itin, Ph.D.

On Girls

It's Sunday noon. It drizzled yesterday morning, then the temperature dropped. The thousand foot long ice patches on Stratton mountain ski trails glisten harshly and brightly in the sun.

I am watching my ski students with pride. By the end of the second day, the kids are smoothly sliding down a black diamond slope with "I-don't-give-a-crap" attitude. The conditions, challenging even for Vermont, don't bother them. The kids have learned how to handle ice; they love the speed.

They are siblings - a 12 year old girl and a 14 year old boy. Their dad trained them well on multi-day kayaking trips in Canada and Alaska. They are motivated, determined and easy to coach.

The kids live together, read the same books, go to the same school, solve the same math and physics problems (they are Russian), skate, ride horses and beat their friends on tae kwon do sessions.

They are so different; they could belong to separate species.

The boy could teach a bullet how to fly in a straight line. Coaching him is an exercise in linear dynamics. He gets something right, and I praise him. He screws up, and I explain what to correct. The boy fixes his mistakes. We banter as we ski. He likes me and he wants to impress me. He brags about building robots.

The boy improves. In an hour, his attention starts waning. I show him how to spin on the snow and ski backward. He goes for it like a 14-year-old boy should. There is some fear and frustration involved. He overcomes it and he is happy. Welcome to primitive life forms. One thought at a time.

The girl. Oh, the girl. Girls. I don't even know where to start. She is as athletically gifted as the boy. She seems to like me and she trusts me as an instructor. She enjoys skiing and she wants to improve.

The complexity of her thinking exceeds that of a 1000 node computer cluster. At any point, she has at least ten processes happening inside her brain, all oblique and unrelated to each other; yet they all aim to achieve one mysterious objective.

She judges and manipulates me. She wails, "Why do I always fail everything?!" with a sincere and almost heart-rending passion. Meanwhile, she keeps looking at me from under her eyelashes, analyzing and gauging my reaction. She needs constant approval. She can only handle a very carefully and lightly meted constructive criticism generously flavored with encouragement.

The girl demands attention. She beseeches, cajoles, gauges, flirts, complains and looks at me admiringly at the same time. She tries to set her dad, me, and her brother against each other. Just a little bit. Just for training.

The kids like each other, albeit with some reservations. Every once in a while, the boy exasperatedly rolls his eyes, "Girls!" The girl looks at her brother with maternal affection but a bit pityingly, as if he is a sweet but dumb puppy who just peed in the middle of a living room. Meanwhile, she talks to me as one adult to another.

Simultaneously , she fully concentrates on skiing. She listens to me carefully; she feels her body, the snow, and the skis; she improves fast. Her brother is two years older, but she matches him in technique and speed. She can maintain concentration better than him and she doesn't get tired.

She glows when I praise her. Immediately afterwards, she is feeling insecure again.

If she sees me, she complains that she is afraid even when she is not. If she gets scared when she doesn't see me, she fights her fear successfully. She demands attention. She gets jealous when I spend an inappropriate amount of time with her dad or her brother. She is also demanding of her dad's attention.

She is a 12 year old girl.

When I was fifteen, I thought that women were like men with boobs.
When I was twenty five, I could not understand women, at all.
Now, that I am forty, I understand a little better what women do. I still don't have a faintest idea why they do it.

The Security of Bread

I am looking at a picture my girlfriend just took. I didn’t even know that I could look so serene and happy at the same time. Something in my facial expression is reminiscent of a mother looking at her sleeping baby. Cannibalistically. 

It’s 10pm on a Wednesday night. It’s dark outside the window, a cold November drizzle smears the lights coming from the Castle Village buildings. I am sitting at a wooden table in my tiny Manhattan kitchen come dining room. My left hand is soaking in a blender – cold water is unsuccessfully trying to soothe the pain radiating from a large burn across my palm. I don’t care. I am happy. I achieved a dream that I hadn't even have the guts to dream about. The dream is sitting right here, on the wooden table, on a black wire tray a foot and a half away from me. The dream looks like a misshapen slightly burnt brownish lump still covered in a thin coat of whitish powder. It's about the same size and shape as a human brain but it’s slightly less symmetrical. I gingerly caress it with my fingertips; I run them along the rough folds, grooves and ridges of the surface. Something crackles faintly underneath. I bring my head close to it and almost touch the surface with my ear. Heat irradiates towards my head and I can feel faint noises coming from under thick crust. It’s talking to me. It says, “Hi.”

My girlfriend, Yvonne, laughs at me. 

“Come on, wait. It’s only ten minutes.”

I sit back down, still keeping my hand in the cold water.

600 seconds stretch. I keep inhaling the aroma slowly and deeply through my nose. I am a chemist, so I know that it’s just a bunch of volatile ketone molecules being recognized by my nose receptors. But, I don’t care. I breathe in satisfaction, satisfaction. I am at peace with myself and the world. It is such a rare sensation. 

The allotted time passes. Yvonne brings a knife from the kitchen and looks at me inquiringly. I nod. Yvonne’s short plump and capable fingers wrap firmly around the knife’s handle. And, then, she sinks the sharp serrated blade deep into the side of my dream. The crust resists and I can see muscles on Yvonne’s arm tensing slightly as she cuts through and down and across. She takes a slice, bites a piece off, holds it in her mouth, chews, thinks, repeats the cycle a few times and pronounces the ultimate verdict.

“It’s considerably better than Balthazar’s. It could be better than Amy’s. It’s definitely better than what I baked. It could be the best bread I had in years.”

She cuts another piece, a slightly bigger one, and hands it to me.  The slice is 10” long and 1” thick. It lies trustingly in my hand. It says, “Eat me.” A thick hard dark crust protects the tender soft flesh inside. The smell generously rolls off the bread and wafts through my nostrils all the way up to my brain, down to my heart. I sink my teeth into the slice. The crust feels just a tiny bit burned, the dough inside is moist, soft and chewy. It tastes simple and rich, subtle and powerful, earthy and uplifting, overwhelming; like bread should taste. 

I nervously ask Yvonne, “Do you think the crust is too burned?”

“No, you idiot, it’s absolutely perfect,” Yvonne helps herself to another slice.

I just baked my first loaf of bread. It’s magic.

Over the years, people have conjured many images describing how ugliness unexpectedly generates beauty. A ugly duckling becomes a magnificent swan; a slimy caterpillar turns into a dazzling butterfly and so on. But to me, nothing is as impressive as the birth of bread.

I put three cups of tasteless white powder into a bowl, add a sprinkle of salt and yeast, and pour water over the sorry mess. I wait for a few hours till the yeast digests the flour, releases some carbon dioxide and a few enzymes in the process and turns the whole thing into bubbly sickly white sticky goo. I squeamishly pick up the goo and drop it into a cooking pot, put it into the oven and wait for 45 minutes. I open the oven and out comes the essence of goodness, the thing of divine beauty, a perfectly baked load of bread. If this is not magic, I don’t know what is. 

 

I grew up in Moscow. There were bakeries at every corner. Bread was churned out in large state bakeries, run by indifferent state managers, operated by indifferent and often drunk state workers. The sanitary conditions at the bakeries were atrocious. My friend, Igor, worked in a bakery during one summer. He refused to eat bread for months afterwards. We are talking about the same guy who once, on a hiking trip, calmly fished a heavy boot with a pound of mud stuck on it out of a cooking pot and poured the soup into our bowls. I never got enough nerve to ask Igor what exactly freaked him out so much during his short baking tenure. 

Still, every morning state factories baked bread and small trucks carried it to stores. As I walked down a street, I could smell a bakery from a few hundred feet away. Inside, five to ten types of bread and buns lay on the shelves. Most breads, both rye and wheat, tended to be slightly heavier, Eastern European style. Interestingly though, Russian bagels were much lighter than their American counterparts. 

In the Soviet Union, the Cold War ultimately shaped people’s diet. It was a country of 10,000 ballistic missiles and zero microwaves. The food processing industry, a Cinderella of socialism, never got out of its stepmother’s house. The quality of food was often low, the choice was limited, but, at least, most of it wasn’t processed. Milk would go sour, butter turned rancid, and bread became stale in a few days. There were no preservatives, no additives, and few food colorings. Bread was baked in ovens, out of flour and yeast. It had taste and smell, crust and inside. I ate it. 

Then, at the age of twenty, I crossed the Atlantic towards the land of milk and honey. I still remember my shock from walking into a first supermarket, a Stop & Shop in Omaha, Nebraska. It was the perfect opposite of the small and dingy food stores of my Soviet childhood. It could probably fit a few dozen of them inside it. It was spacious and light and clean. Untold thousands of strange foods, bright and colorful, covered hundreds of shelves. The store gleamed so much that my eyes hurt. I wondered around it like Alice in the Wonderland. 

In a while, I found myself in a bread section, confused, looking at dozens of strange plastic packages. The sign above the isle said bread, the signs on the packages said bread, it had to be bread. But, it couldn’t be bread. It didn’t smell, it didn’t have a crust and it felt like a strange sponge in my hand. I tried lightly pressing against it and the bread just gave way, rotting flesh falling apart, behind my fingers. I looked at one of the labels more closely, reading down the long list of components that this alien product was made from. After three years at the Chemistry Department of Moscow University I could recognize or guess about dozen compounds out of twenty. Confused, I looked around some more. Then, I saw something that looked more familiar. A paper bag said Gourmet French Bread on it and a yellowish end of a loaf was sticking out. I happily grabbed it. But, my fingers just fell through the single molecule layer crust into passive foamy insides. It felt like I just crushed a centipede. I stood in front bread row for a while, contemplating the strange vicissitudes of life. Finally, I picked up a random plastic package and a paper bag with bread products and headed home. 

I tried eating this bread. It tasted like foam. I asked my American friends. They suggested cooking it. Then, it tasted like toasted foam, roasted foam, burnt foam, omelet covered foam and, the most horrifying of all, gooey microwaved foam. I gave up. I ate supermarket tortillas - they were slightly less repulsive. 

A few years later, I left the United States for New York City. To foreigners, the Big Apple is the symbol of America.  To many Americans, Manhattan is a foreign land. They are probably right. New York is frighteningly (for some) and wonderfully (for others) different from the rest of the country in so many ways. I started eating bread again.

Every morning, more than a dozen of small bakeries spread around Manhattan deliver fresh bread to New York stores. Amy’s, Balthazar, and Sullivan Street Bakery head the list. Many others faithfully follow. French, Italian, white, whole wheat, rye, baguettes, Pain Pugliese, Ciabatta, and my personal love and delight - Amy’s five grain bread. These breads smell; these breads taste; their crust is crunchy; their insides are chewy; they have souls, and their souls desire to please. 

Every couple of days, I would buy a loaf of bread. And, it kept me happy. But, somewhere deep down I’ve always had this feeling of insecurity and trepidation. What would I do if I end up back in the exile of 48 contiguous states, together with 300 million Americans, away from Manhattan’s tiny haven? I travel a fair amount and my trips take me to the places where the only alternative to eating Wonderbread is healing through fasting. It is a thin veneer of flour, yeast, and an exhausted man in a white apron, that separates me from the unspeakable bleakness of breadless life. 

Somehow, I had never considered making bread for myself. I had always thought that baking bread was art and craft, time consuming and required specialized equipment. Soft tasteless bread out of my friends’ bread making machines had only enforced my opinion on the futility of homemade bread. 

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, in 2006, a psychotically driven, sleep deprived man known to the world as the founder of Sullivan Street Bakery finally went public. After years of baking and experimenting, Jim Lahey came out with an idiot-proof easy-to-use no-knead home-oven bread. Finally, on November 8, 2006, the Dining and Wine section of The New York Times published a small article. It described how a lazy idiot like me could invest fifteen minutes of labor and twenty hours of patience to make a high quality bread loaf in a home oven.

Unfortunately, it took me six more years to find out about it. One day, Yvonne came home and asked me, “If you like bread so much, why don’t you just make it?”

I just looked back at her.

“The Sullivan Street Bakery guy has this recipe for homemade bread. It made a huge buzz a few years ago.  I’ll try it, let’s see what happens.”

The next day, we ate her bread. A few days later, we ate my bread. My sweet little lopsided brain, slightly burned on the bottom. My miracle of life.

http://www.sullivanstreetbakery.com/recipes

Russian Wine in the 1860's

This is a story about the Russian wine industry in the 1860's told by Saltykov-Schedrin:

Apparently, no grapes grow in Kashino and wine is produced in wine-makers’ basements. The technology is amazingly simple. For every type of wine, the makers pick up genuine barrels from genuine wines. They fill a genuine barrel with Astrakhan Chikhir (a cheap red wine from the Astrakhan region) and mix it with water in a certain ratio. The Kashino river provides good water; recently they also found out that river Kotorosl in Yaroslavl region also possessed numerous Jerez and Lafite properties.  

When the diluted Chikhir absorbs enough stink from the barrels, the wine-makers start beefing it up. Firstly, they add a bucket of alcohol per barrel.  Then, based on the type of produced wine, they add some flavors. For Madeira, they add molasses; for Malaga, they add tar; for Rheinwein they add lead sugar (lead acetate). They mix the mixture till it gets uniform and reseal the barrel. After the wine sediments, the owner or his chief manager comes in and sorts the wine. If he spits once, the wine becomes a simple Madeira - 40 kopecks; if he spits twice, the wine becomes zwei-Madeira - 40 kopecks or 1 ruble; if he spits three times, the wine becomes drei-Madeira - 1.50 ruble or more (it could be a 100-years-aged Madeira). The makers bottle, cork and label the wine when it was ready. 

Following the rules of hierarchy, the wine-makers bring the wine first to health department officials, then to the governor. Once everybody confirms that they’ve never drunk anything better, the wine goes to district judges and municipal officials. Then, the whole wine harvest takes the river and travels to Nizhnii Novgorod Fair from where it spreads instantly all over Russia. Cops drink it, local judges drink it, land owners drink it, merchants drink it and nobody knows what they're drinking.

“Of course,” the writer adds in his notes, “I only describe how Kashino wine was made based on the stories and I can’t vouch for them. There is one thing I can vouch for though. No grapes grow in either Kashino or Yaroslavl. At the same time, many types of many wines are produced.”