MY BIG FAT RUSSIAN BIRTHDAY!

MY BIG FAT RUSSIAN BIRTHDAY - Part 1.

I wish I'd taken better notes prior to take off but the days and weeks, (not to mention hours) leading up to my flight to Moscow and then Siberia were plagued with trouble. My passport, visa, tickets all had to be renegotiated and changed at the last minute costing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars... but due to friends, supporters, fans, even strangers, I made it. It takes a village...

This flight scared the shit out of me. Many of you know I hate flying and will take a train or a Greyhound across the country rather than get on a plane due to claustrophobia and a general fear of flying. But I was up in the air, with you all in my pocket, thinking I'm finally here. I'm finally here. Flying anywhere is a struggle for me but especially to a country where I not only, don't speak the language but they even use different characters than I'm used to. It was daunting, emotional and a bit lonely.

I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow on my birthday. Edward Schornik, a man who'd invited me to Siberia had arranged for a family friend to meet me on my 10 hour layover. But before I could meet Masha, I had to make it through customs.

Click on people's faces in the photo to tag them.

Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow, Russia

There are no lines in Russian airports. Seriously. Everyone stands in a huge melee of crowd before a few kiosks of officials who will sign you into the country and stamp your visa etc... It was frustrating negotiating this lack of organization AND not speaking the language, but eventually, I simply had to assert myself or resign to being passed up by every man, child and babooshka traveling through Moscow. Because I'd been instructed to have everything efficient and in order, along with rubles in my pocket, once I got to the customs person, I breezed through with my brand spanking new passport. Because of my early morning flight, long layover @ LaGuardia, 10 hour flight to Russia and just general anxiety, I was stinky when Masha who was young and beautiful and clean, met me. We piled everything into her car and she graciously showed me around Moscow for the afternoon.

Masha, my Moscovian tour guide

What a great birthday gift to drive past Pushkin Sq. complete with a statue of the man known as The Father of Russian Literature. ...and a lot of people don't know this but Pushikin was mixed. African and Russian. We drove through the anarchic traffic of downtown Moscow toward Red Sq. and finally found parking about 10 blocks away. Walking through Moscow with a stranger made me nervously excited. Masha was the first Russian to apologize for her "bad English"  but she wouldn't be the last. She spoke fluent English.


St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow, Russia

Approaching Red Square from blocks away, you can't help but notice the towering spectrum of onion shaped structures atop St. Basil's Cathedral. The Cathedral built in 1555 to commemorate the victory of Ivan the Terrible over the Mongols, is the most colorful and possibly most beautiful building I've ever encountered. St. Basil's is literally a swirl of colors towering across the sky. Each of the nine chapel tops has its own unique color scheme and design. I stood outside clicking away pictures until I had to see the inside.

Inside one of the chapels @ St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow Russia


Ivan the Terrible (he doesn't look so bad), St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow Russia


Inside one of the chapels @ St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow Russia

Masha wouldn't let me pay to sight see on my birthday and even covered our right to take pictures inside the church. Each chapel, unlike it's flamboyant rooftop was small, dimly lit and intimate, mostly sepia toned, earthy. The rooms were made of rock, some antiquated type of concrete, wood. Pictures of Ivan the Terrible and Jesus adorned the walls. One room had an extremely ornate mosaic. The artwork was beautiful and left me humbled in the quiet beauty of it. From the second floor you could look out the window onto Red Square, which, I hadn't noticed, sprawled, while Muscovites meandered with street performers and cops.


Me outside St. Basil's Cathedral, Moscow Russia

Having spent enough time in church, we left St. Basils and walked toward the Kremlin which is the hugest building I've ever seen. It stretched seriously for what seemed to be miles past gardens and fountains, malls and rivers. It is incredibly long though only a few stories high.

There are hardly any black people in Russia, so I got looked at quite a bit. It made me a bit uncomfortable until I realized that I was just new to them. I felt no disrespect, just interest. There was no African slavery in Russia so blacks hadn't grown there or been brought there like many other parts of the industrialized world. Some people just flat out stopped and stared. I began to just ignore it. Masha and I grabbed some coffee at a nearby cafe and then sat by a large fountain while three huge sculptures of stallions played in the water. Teenage girls posed wearing scarves and tights bright as Basil's rooftops. Teenage boys with Beatles mops bopped by wearing black and looking mod and playful as teenagers anywhere.

One girl asked if she could "make picture" with me but had no camera of her own, so Masha shutter-bugged as the girl put her arm around me. I think she just wanted to touch me and be sure that I was real.

I was growing jet lagged and tired from walking the expanse of downtown past statues of Marx and the place where Lenin's body used to lay in state, outside for all to see his embalmed body through the glass case. I regret the recent development to remove his body from sight and place it inside the mausoleum it sat outside of for years.

Before Masha brought me back to the airport, we stopped and had a birthday meal. Beer and salad. She let me pay because I wanted the experience of it. I had a Siberian Bear beer. I forget the Russian word for it.  Again, this is the first place I've ever been where not only the language is different but the characters used to write the language as well. So words that became familiar to me in sound, I could not identify by sight until the last few days I was there.

I went back to Sheremetyevo to board the Aeroflot flight to Novosibirsk, Siberia where I would show up in the middle of the night...
STOP! Moscow, Russia

The Detroit Troubador - Stories from Detroit & Beyond "EASTWARD HO"

The Detroit Troubador - Stories From Michigan and Beyond
"Eastward Ho"

I'm an aging performer in one of the hardest cities in America, Detroit, MI, so tomorrow, I’ll head to the east coast to busk in the subway. It's where I learned to play, write my first songs, hone my performance chops.

Last time I played in a New York subway, it was so hot it felt like swimming in a pool of my own sweat with an acoustic guitar welded to my chest. Two songs in, my shirt was drenched in so much sweat you could have wrung it out. I made $500 and spent it all on hotels and transportation. Tomorrow I’ll do it all again, maybe staying with friends this time to retain some cash.

 

Musician D. Blair Busking at Christopher St. (PHOTO BY TIFFANY L. CLARK)

To save dough, I’ll take a Greyhound Bus, where the people are always interesting, to say the least. My last bus trip was spent with two younger dudes discussing the eastern expansion of The Crips,  a dude who looked like Prince,s ave for the tattoo shrieking across his neck, and a woman who seemed until she started speaking to white people in what sounded like Swahili, but probably wasn’t.

When these folks walked away, she'd address them as if they were members of her church congregation. A dude in a Lynard Skynard shirt became Sister Elizabeth to whom she beckoned, "I know you brought your good book Sister Elizabeth. Now start proseletyzin'." "Sister Elizabeth" was freaked out to say the least. He was a young white dude leaving Denver, where he'd left his $1400 Blue Pit with a girl who, while he was in jail, traded the dog for Percocets. He was 20 years old and had hair like Leo Sayer... Richard Simmons...? I'm dating myself.

When busking I wonder if I show my age. I like to reinterpret  pop songs of yesterday or in currency. My underground concerts consist of originals and covers by Radiohead, Talking Heads, Stevie Wonder, Tracy Chapman, Bob Dylan, Bjork, Ani Difranco, Paul Simon, Rhianna, The Killers, Tom Waits.

It’s an art learning what people will like in the West Village. They don't like being intruded upon. They want to be enticed, surprised. It’s my favorite when passengers enter the turnstiles, see my guitar, proceed to a far end of the platform only to return to me, with a few bucks at the first sweet words of Hallelujah. Of all the songs I do in the subway, this is the  favorite. Regulars request it. Cheshire Cats and Mona Lisa’s stand nearby singing softly to themselves... "Hallelujah / Halleluuuujah" It's almost religious.

Seventy-year-olds thank me for playing Leonard Cohen, thirty-somethings for playing Jeff Buckley. One woman, about 50 her hair in a bun, dropped a dollar in my case saying, "I love Shrek," reminding me that I found it odd hearing it in the movie when I watched it with a friend’s family while on tour.

But there's no tour happening now.

Next big thing for me is a trip to Siberia in late September. I'll read at an international youth conference, fly home by way of a Universtiy performance in Wales, then stop by Antwerp. Early 2011, I’m reading at The West Palm Beach Poetry Festival on the same bill as Pulitzer Prize winners and Genius Award recipients.

But for now, I'm broke and headed east, like a Crip, because there's money to be made underground. I'll use it to turn the lights on in my apartment. They’ve been off for over a month now. For me and lots of Michiganders, life is a struggle. Yes, I could get a job at KFC or something and take care of it, but I not only value, I need the time I have to read, write and practice, even if it is by candle light. And truth be told, I can deal for another month and a half if it means having good poems and strong songs to take to my international performances.

I'm not getting younger. My time as a small time rock star here in Detroit and beyond is perhaps behind me. But I still have tricks up my sleeve, so  please don't count me out. I'm going back to school. I’ll win some grants, attend residencies and workshops. So, I'm an aging artist in one of the hardest cities in America. There's still hope for this city and an old troubador like me... right?