Number Station Remix

The vibe is the essense of "joyously grim".

The Tale of a Number Station

Station UVB-76 / MDZhB started out as a Soviet military/intelligence number station. Glasnost and defunding have laid it bare. Interstingly enough, it has a fanbase that uncludes radio DXers and club-track remixers:

Today, the Buzzer’s fan base includes Kremlinologists, anarchists, hackers, installation artists, people who believe in extraterrestrials, a former Lithuanian minister of communications, and someone in Virginia who goes by the moniker Room641A, a reference to the alleged nerve center of a National Security Agency intercept facility at an AT&T office in San Francisco. (“I am interested in ‘listening,’” Room641A tells me by email. “All forms of it.”) All of them are mesmerized by this bewildering signal—now mostly buzzing, once again. They can’t help but ponder the significance of it, wondering about the purpose behind the pattern. No one knows for sure, which is both the worst and the best part of it.

The station's output is being relayed over teh internet by a dedicated enthusiast. It can be heard here.

Soviet Films: 17 Moments of Spring (1973)

Presented here with English subtitles for all of you ugly Kulaks.

Red Reed

Cheaply called “the Red Elvis”, American singer/actor Dean Reed pursued his beliefs in Marxism by moving to East Germany in 1973. Say what you will about him, he was sincere, but I could never quite understand how he managed to square away his passion for individualistic themes in his music, gazing a sympathetic eye to the lone, hard working cowboy, with the concept of collectivism, and thus on acute social dependency.

Personally, I think any fealty offered to Marxist-Leninism is misguided, requiring one to accept too many lies as a part of its’ stated virtues. Then again, I remember it first hand.



Here he is in an appearance in the DDR with a vieux copain, Phil Everly, who made what was in 1979, a historic visit. It was a sort of casually and quietly organized form of Ping Pong diplomacy, later to be tried by Bruce Springsteen in 1988.



While his voice was tender, and his craft good, in truth Reed was more of a curiosity to the world outside of the Warsaw Pact/Comecon/Soviet sphere than anything else. Within it, he grew to be a little like the Pepsi they sold in the eastern bloc: it was similarly packaged to the stuff they wanted, but slightly different in a way – only permitted to offer just so much, and no more.

Where's Waldo ? ! ?

No discussion of the nature of Socialism is complete without a rubber chicken.

Atmospherics from the Near Distant Ago

Management is not responsible for the aesthetics or content, time is.

Dystopia Then, Dystopia Now

Just as now, the wasteland of popular culture promoted a sort of "unilateral disarmament" against the world's evils. Otherwise we were to still enjoy the misery we were deserving.

Save the Bears!

Fables of the Deconstruction

It's a mashup, but it has the feeling of the time captured fairly well... and in living color.

Near Distant Ago: the Beginnings

A Legacy left behind by the Red Army: Soljanka

Of which there were very few good legacies, but like that evil genius Ripley’s love of Gulasch, mine is a weakness for Soljanka, a picante soup made popular among Eastern Germans by way of contact with their Soviet military comrades / douchebags / occupiers.

I have translated the recipe from the original Klingon, to which I’ve added my personal touches:

- 200 g /7-8 oz. of Yellow onion, finely chopped (avoid the vidalias or any new-fangled mild varieties)
- 100 g /3-1/2 oz. of unsliced bacon, cubed into small pieces
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 100 g /3-1/2 oz. of Tomato paste
- 1 tablespoon of Paprika
- 2 medium sized pickles (dill or sour are best), “julienne” cut to the extent one can with a pickle
- 500 g of meat: sausage, leftovers, or trimmed tips of pork or ham (anything, really, even leftover chicken!)
- (Add a tbp. of butter, if the meats are all lean.)
- 1,5 liters/ 3 pints of Beef stock (powdered stock may also be used, but omit the salt if you do)
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 1 tablespoon of capers

For decoration:

- Thin lemon wedges (thin sliced rings cut into triangles)
- Sour crème
- Dill

Optional:

- Parsley
- A few sliced olives, or any other pickled favorites.
- Pepperoncini (one of my favorites)

Preparation:

Sauté the onions and bacon in the bottom of your soup pot, until the onions clarify. Do not let them brown.
Add all of the meats, pickles, and paprika for a few moments until they soften.
Then pour in the soup stock.
Add the lemon wedges to the stock, salt and pepper to taste.
Let it come to a boil, and then let it simmer for at least 15 minutes and up to 45 minutes.
Just prior to serving, add the capers, and all the optional faves, as well as the sour crème dollop right in the middle of the bowl.

Decorate with small lemon wedges an a small dollop of sour crème. Some prefer the sour crème “on the side”, or otherwise spoon out the amount they deem excessive prior to stirring it in. Some the dill reserved from preparation is also a good thing to drizzle on top.

Makes 4 servings, or 2 if served without any other dish. Serve with rye or black bread on the side, the gamiest smelling type that you can find.

This is one of the simpler recipes, prone to a more pickle dominated taste, but is easily tempered by using a little bit more bacon or sausage.



Clink on the photo for an excellent Ukranian Soljanka recipe, which has a much fresher taste, not masked as heavily by the tomato paste. It should take on the taste of creative variations more readily.

Travel Ideas

For fans of the gloriously miserable, why not head out to Siberia to see the world's largest head of Lenin?



It only takes 5 days by train out of Moscow, after all.

Speak to us, oh huge brain bucket! Speak to your people!

Want a class free society? Go American

The far left, particularly those with the moral compass that spins enough for them to express an admiration for Socialism, love to discuss classlessness as a goal. Well, Americans really eliminated class distinction to a degree that no society has managed to, not least of which compared to the aristocratic nature of Socialist, Marxist-Leninist, and the rest of the quasi-intellectual variants thereof. We have few living examples left, but they are pure and consistent:

In North Korea, one's songbun, or socio-economic and class background, is extremely important and is primarily determined at birth. People with the best songbun are descendants of the anti-Japanese guerrillas who fought with Kim Il-song, followed by people whose parents or grandparents were factory workers, laborers, or poor, small farmers in 1950. "Ranked below them in descending order are forty-seven distinct groups in what must be the most class-differentiated society in the world today." Anyone with a father, uncle, or grandfather who owned land or was a doctor, Christian minister, merchant, or lawyer has low songbun.

Then there’s the ubiquitous, ass-kissing nature of low-level cronyism:

After songbun, the next most important influence on North Korean life is Kim-Il-song sangsa, or the thought of Kim Il-song. Within certain narrow limits, one's devotion to the thought of Kim Il-song can improve one's songbun, and disloyalty can lower one's songbun.

Not to mention the classlessness of hereditary succession. And don’t bet that the fate of the higher classes isn’t tied to el hefe, and that they will get their when he finally gets his.