You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  From that moment on, “Toxic” followed me everywhere. And I mean everywhere; there was no escape, no hope of refuge even in the deepest, most godforsaken outposts of Siberia. On a bus rattling its way toward the village of Ongudai in distant Altai Republic, as “Toxic” assaulted a smattering of stone-faced Babushkas, I remember getting angry. Rally yourselves, Comrades, I thought to myself. Fight the imperialist invaders! Doesn’t Russia have its own cheesy blondes? Its own terrible pop music? But the Babushkas endured Britney without blinking. They had survived purges and the gulag, mass deprivation on an unimaginable scale. Britney was nothing—a mere hemorrhoid on the vast buttock of Russian suffering.

  Somewhere, I pictured a marketing executive at Britney’s label, Jive Records, standing over a digital map of the world studying mysterious clusters of pulsating LEDs, his finger traveling to a lone yellow blip, glowing in the dark penumbra of Russia’s Arctic north like a french fry in outer space. Pressing an intercom button, he speaks:

  “Jeeves? How is our market saturation in Siberia?”

  “One hundred percent, sir. We have achieved maximum coverage.”

  “Is that right? Because I have some data here that shows there is a man in the Taymyr Autonomous Okrug, not far from the city of Dudinka, who has yet to hear the hit single ‘Toxic.’”

  “Some of these rural, ice-bound regions are extremely isolated, sir, well beyond the reach of the average radio signal.”

  “That’s no excuse, Jeeves.”

  “Roger that, sir. I will contact our media buyer to increase radio presence in the Taymyr Autonomous Okrug immediately.”

  “See that you do, Jeeves. See that you do.”

  My father told me that back when he was a soldier in the Soviet army, the same two songs played all day long over the barrack’s loudspeaker. The first was “Za Togo Parnya,” about a soldier whose soul mate died during the war. The second, somewhat paradoxically, was a song written by a member of the indigenous Chukcha whose chorus went, “We will ride on deer into the dawn. You will see that the north is boundless and I am giving it to you.” Papa’s reaction to this aural onslaught followed the Kübler-Ross model: his initial denial deepened into anger before culminating in eventual acceptance. And now that Siberia had become my personal Britney Spears boot camp, I too began to feel the effects of indoctrination. At first, the change was subtle. “Toxic” simply failed to annoy me anymore. And then soon enough—it could have been days or weeks or months later; I was somewhere, perhaps a salad bar in Kemerovo with plastic tongs suspended over the pickled herring—I found myself mouthing the words. A bit listlessly, true, but still. Then one day I simply woke up one morning with “Toxic” already thrumming through my thoughts, the start-up sound to my brain’s computer.

  Was “Toxic” a good song? I didn’t know anymore. I was no longer fit to judge. There were more powerful forces at work here, engineering an allure that went far beyond the matter of the song’s actual goodness. Millions of dollars had been spent on my conversion, the bandwidth of entire nations brought to heel. And some small part of me, I admit, was flattered by the attention. Britney Spears’s music sounded like money, true, but it gave me a feeling that only money could buy.

  Still, I couldn’t help wondering where all this would lead. Every addiction starts with a harmless gesture—a puff, a taste, a sip, a snort. I would start off humming one Britney Spears song under my breath in Siberia and end up folding tube tops for a living at a Hot Topic in a mall on Staten Island, with nothing to look forward to but nights of scanning QVC for deals on gold plated jewelry. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that liking this kind of music did something to you, hollowed you out. What about that lost decade I spent lolling around on the carpet in my parents’ living room, sucking on Capri Sun and mouthing the words along with Milli Vanilli? Even as my foot tapped along, I was filled with an infinite sadness. The sadness of every thirteen-year-old girl who loves to sing, who spends days staring into the flickering television screen at another singing girl who scarcely seems real. The thirteen-year-old girl who tries and tries to figure out a way to somehow get from her kitchen, with its humming appliances and sticky vinyl flooring and crushing normalcy, to that glittering, magical place. And then comes to the realization that it just can’t be done.

  It was Konst who first introduced me to the concept of “Growing into the Universal,” a philosophy that was downright heroinlike in its ability to make my qualms about liking Britney go away. We met at a seminar in Novosibirsk, where Konst was working as an English translator, and even before we were introduced, I’d already taken notice of him in the halls. A heavyset man who bore more than a passing resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock, he favored bowler hats, chunky black glasses with clear lenses, and what appeared to be t-shirts from Brooklyn Industries, though of course that wasn’t possible, was it? Over lunch one day, we found ourselves sharing a table in a cavernous hall, empty save for the enormous bouquet of fake flowers stapled to the wall, its dusty plastic vines trailing eerily all the way down to the floor.

  “So what do you do back in New York?” Konst asked. I noticed that his English was impeccable, with only the faintest hint of accent.

  “I work. I sing in a band too, and sometimes we play clubs in the city.” I had long since put away my own Maxi Mouse street amp and upgraded to “real” venues, even though my songs were no less depressing and turgid.

  “Really? What clubs?”

  “Well, you probably wouldn’t have heard of them …” because you live in what appears to be a total nonplace, you poor thing, I finished in my head.

  “Try me.”

  “Well, our last show was at this place called Lit Lounge—”

  “Oh, I know Lit. Cool place.”

  “How do you know Lit?”

  “Nick Zinner likes to hang out there, right?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Gothamist.”

  My forkful of fried beetroot froze halfway to my mouth. A man from the armpit of Siberia was telling me things I didn’t know about a rock club across the river from my apartment in Hoboken.

  The next afternoon, between sessions, Konst pulled me aside in the stairwell.

  “Did you know that Matthew Barney is looking for interns?”

  “How do you know that!?!”

  “I read it on Gawker.”

  “What’s Gawker?”

  “What’s Gawker? Are you fucking kidding me?” And with that, Konst pulled a flash drive out of his pocket and waggled it at me. “Hey, what do you say tonight my iTunes come over and have sex with your iTunes?”

  We became friends and I learned that Konst was a recovering poet and aspiring screenwriter. He had grown up in Berdsk, a city not far from Novosibirsk, a place of anonymous plants making anonymous parts for anonymous weapons that distinguished itself mainly by virtue of not being Iskiteem, another city down the road, built around a cement factory that Berdsk dwellers had commemorated in rhyme:

  On top there’s dirt, below there’s steam

  That’s the city of Iskiteem!

  Konst was kicked out of high school in tenth grade, not long after Lenin’s Path, the city newspaper, published an article declaring that all punk rockers were Nazis. Without a higher education, his options looked grim: a choice between either joining the army and risking getting sent to Afghanistan, or becoming a fartsovshik, selling jeans in the market. His father ended up finding him a job making coffins at a local factory instead. He spent his nights reading—Babel, Olesha, Nabokov—and attending the Berdsk School of Working Youth, a kind of reform school for Soviet losers. Then, one day, Konst took the entrance exams for Novosibirsk State University, one of the top schools in the country. To everyone’s surprise, he passed.

  Once in college, Konst became a full-fledged intellectual, able to discourse at length and in detail on any given subject: the Tartu school of semiotics, transformational grammar, the impact of lubok on Soviet poster art … But by the time I met him, this zeal
for all things obscure, quirky, brainy, and difficult was something he was determined to beat out of himself. Konst called this quixotic mission “Growing into the Universal,” a phrase he lifted from a book by Hans-Georg Gadamer called Truth and Method. One day, while perched on the Ikea sofa he and his girlfriend, Erika, had shipped to Siberia from Moscow, I asked Konst to explain exactly what “Growing into the Universal” was supposed to mean.

  “It is the search for the mythological archetypes resting in the subconscious, the kind of iconography so primal that it appeals to everyone.”

  “Okay.” Whatever that meant. “Like?”

  “Like guns. Or girls. As Godard once said, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. I might be wrong about this, but I am also considering that maybe helicopters are universal. And car chases—car chases are definitely universal. I can watch the same car-chase scenes over and over, even if it’s a movie I’ve seen before. I get so caught up in the moment that I still find myself wondering what’s going to happen next.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I agreed with him on this point. Car chases made me tired. I found shoot-outs boring too, and could probably fall asleep watching four people sink to the bottom of a lake, trapped in a Toyota Camry, pounding on the windows and screaming as the cold water hit their privates. But Konst looked ready to dispatch all kinds of box-office statistics against me to prove his point, and besides, what did I know about the universal? My idea of a good movie was a documentary about the building of a hydroelectric dam across the Yenisey River.

  There was really no mystery as to why Konst had come to embrace the universal and I had turned my back on it. While I spent the eighties watching ladies with impossible hairdos wrestle one another into swimming pools on Knots Landing and Falcon Crest, Konst was watching Soviet humanist dramas about real people living real lives and having real problems. Movies with titles like Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears and The Irony of Fate.

  “All this shit, this kitchen-sink realism—it was just suffocating. Always the same movie, over and over,” he said, grimacing, waving his lit cigarette in the air like a traffic cop. “There’d be the longest takes. I remember sitting there and counting: twelve … thirteen … fourteen … just waiting for the shot to change. Then, all of a sudden in the late eighties, movies from the West became available, stuff like Robocop and Terminator and Indiana Jones and Back to the Future. And I’d look up at the screen and just think, Now shit is happening! See, that is what the universal is all about. It’s about life quests! It’s crude! It’s robust! It’s barbaric!”

  “Yeah, but aren’t a lot of big Hollywood movies just, like … bad?”

  “Look, if you are a storyteller, don’t be an elitist snob. Don’t just cleverly mock the latest fad you saw on the subway. Do something that will get to people, whether they live in Vladivostok or Tokyo. This is what I think: if you are into experimental shit, then go play the chain saw in a Stockhausen orchestra and just leave the rest of us alone.”

  Three years later, when Konst moved to L.A. to make it as a filmmaker, polite suggestions that he go the DIY route and start off, perhaps, by shooting a video on his cell phone and uploading it to YouTube would get blown off with a wave of the hand. His favorite movie was The Bourne Identity and he was working on writing his own unabashedly universal spy thriller.

  “Forget it,” Konst would tell people with a serene smile, “I am going straight into the ass of Hollywood.”

  Not long after I returned from Russia, Josh walked into our bedroom and discovered me sitting on the bed with my acoustic guitar, singing “Oops! … I Did It Again.” I sang it slowly, mournfully, even a little angrily, as though Britney Spears and I were slowly dying of some incurable disease and this song was our last retort to an uncaring world. It was the song we had together, years ago, determined was crappy, and now, faced with justifying myself, I felt suddenly afraid. I wanted to repeat all the things Konst had told me, about how the four basic things in life were food, shelter, sex, and ritual, the latter of which included the cultural artifacts produced by Britney Spears. Then Josh would understand that by listening to “Oops! … I Did It Again” we were actually partaking, subconsciously, in rites and ceremonies that tapped into the mysteries of life itself. Britney was the Universal and the Universal was like fire, something that we could watch endlessly and still remain fascinated. But here was a man who had commuted to high school on a unicycle and spent the early part of his college years living in a tent in the woods. A man whose taste in books tended toward philosophical treatises in the original French or German, whose favorite films were subtitled, whose music collection was a veritable spice rack of human suffering …

  “Hey,” Josh said, taking a seat on the edge of the bed, “I really like that. Can you sing it again?”

  I reached the pinnacle of my musical success after releasing an album covering the songs of Yanka Dyagileva, an obscure Soviet punk singer who had died young. I can still remember the stunned look on my parents’ faces when I found them wandering the palatial lobby of Joe’s Pub on the afternoon of the CD release show. It turned out that they’d been circling the building for half an hour, searching for a club that Papa diplomatically described as someplace “a little more cozy.” The last time my parents saw me perform in New York, it was at Pianos, a small club on the Lower East Side. There had been exactly six people there: me, the two other singers on the bill, my parents, and Josh. And it hadn’t felt cozy at all—it felt tense and scary and lonesome. I remember standing up to face my five-member audience and thinking: Wow, so this is what it feels like to fail in real time. I am in the process of failing right now—and now—and now.

  But that was years ago and now we were here, at Joe’s Pub, a posh dinner club tucked inside the landmark Joseph Papp Public Theater. I took my parents on a tour with Mama still eyeing me suspiciously, as though I were once again the sixteen-year-old prime suspect in the Case of the Watered-Down Vodka. When they returned to the box office that night, they were surprised to find a line stretching around the block; the show had sold out. All I wanted was to hold on to that feeling for a little while. The feeling of selling out a nice venue in Manhattan on a Friday night. The memory of my parents’ being led off to a VIP area cordoned off by a plush velvet rope, looking more than a little slack-jawed. The discovery that the booker, who’d left Joe’s Pub months ago to take a job at Lincoln Center, was waiting backstage to congratulate me. This is just the beginning, I remember thinking to myself. But, in fact, it was more like the end. When I set off on a nationwide tour to promote the album a few months later, I found that outside of New York City, the thirst for harrowing Soviet punk covers was not what I’d anticipated. In Philadelphia, my band played to two people. In St. Louis, we had to cancel a show at a club with a capacity of 250 because no one showed up. By the time I reached North Carolina, I was wrung out, tired of singing to no one, and tired of being weird. Basically, plain sick of myself.

  I was sitting at the bar of the Southern Rail, across the street from the Carrboro Arts Center, where I was scheduled to play that night, when I felt a hand gripping my wrist, interrupting my fingers’ regular commute to my mouth. It was Josh.

  “Please!”

  “What?”

  “Please, please, please stop eating your fingers!”

  “Why?” I asked, bewildered. The fact that chewing the dead flesh off your hands was obviously disgusting apparently wasn’t reason enough.

  “Because it is so unladylike. Will you just look at yourself?”

  Ashamed, I’d looked down at my unmanicured, unpolished nails buried in their scabby little divots. It was true: I looked like I was trying to commit suicide by cheese grater.

  Josh sat down at the bar.

  “Maker’s Mark, no ice,” he said to the bartender. Then to me, “What’s wrong?”

  “Britney Spears makes people happy, and I make people sad,” I blurted. The music the Swedes wrote for Britney had only continued to grow on me; I had lis
tened to little else on the long drive east.

  “I like your music. You’re unique.”

  “Thanks.” I said, draining my third vodka tonic. Britney has a fan base of millions, I thought to myself. I have a fan base of one.

  “Sometimes I just wish I could make people happy too.”

  “I am going to give you an old Jewish parable. Are you listening? Okay, there was once this rabbi, let’s call him Rabbi Shlomo. And he was just an ordinary rabbi, right? So one day he’s talking to his friend and he’s like, ‘I’m just an ordinary rabbi. I don’t do anything special or amazing. When I die, I know God will come to me and ask, “Why were you not Rabbi Akiva?”’”

  “Who’s Rabbi Akiva?” I said.

  “He was this totally amazing rabbi from the old times. Everyone knows about him, trust me. Anyway, so then his friend goes, ‘Look, that’s not what you should be worrying about. When you die, God won’t come to you and say, “Why were you not Rabbi Akiva?” He’ll say, “Why were you not Rabbi Shlomo?”’”

  I waited for Josh to finish, but apparently that was it.

  By now the bartender had slipped away, his interest suddenly consumed by a stain on the far end of the bar. More likely he was just avoiding us, the toxic little cloud of misery I was generating. I knew Josh was right, but still … I didn’t want to be stuck playing a chain saw in a Stockhausen orchestra. I didn’t want to live alone with eleven cats and a dead tree, clinging to my barren rock of weirdness like the Little Prince drifting away on his lonely asteroid, waving at the night sky.