June 23, 2005
Adult. in the Netherlands
Evil timing. The day after I get back from the Netherlands (I was in Utrecht for a four-year reunion with my friends from journalism school), Adult. comes to Amsterdam to play. I bought the plane tickets before I knew they were coming, and the tickets were non-flexible. Killin' me.
My good and dear friend Bram took pity on me though, and found me a site with some live audio and video of Adult playing in the Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands two years ago.
I have lots of pics and no time to put them up. I love you all anyway.
June 17, 2005
Once more into the breach
No time to write or process. This has been a motherless hump of a week at my day job (having to catch up on the mountain of work after a few days off is the company's revenge), and now I'm on a flight to the Netherlands this afternoon for a weekend reunion with my buddies from journalism school. It's going to be great and I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone again, but I wonder when I'll ever get a chance to process all these experiences and, you know, sleep...
June 15, 2005
Ukraine, part two
Ironically, the only words I've gotten down for my writing project during the trip (besides about fifty pages of handwritten notes) were these, neither deep nor studied, nor even taking place in Ukraine:
Moog, Thomas's contact in Warsaw, hated Moscow ever since a tangle with an electronic turnstile in the Metro a couple of years earlier. He'd been rushing through the open space in the turnstile and inserted what he thought was a valid Metro card (it had expired). At jogging speed he ran right into the plastic bars that snapped instantly shut from both sides of the turnstile, and in his words, "crushed my balls in their horrible grip." Dizzy with pain and shock, he'd bounced off the plastic bars, clutched onto one side of the turnstile and emptied his stomach onto the top of the slotted chrome machine. Before he was even able see straight again, the passengers behind him had shoved him to one side and howled at him for slowing down the line. And then a sadistic female dwarf in the uniform of a Metro attendant hurried over to berate him for making a mess, not bothering to conceal her glee at having witnessed the ball-crushing. "They don't have to be so cruel," Moog said afterwards. |
Ukraine, part one
Also, the Ukraine trip was "almost" a complete success. It's going to be a real challenge to get a news story I can sell out of it. This is mostly because my story was going to be a speculation piece on whether Ukraine would take an active role in the global flight of energy transit paths away from Russia, and it looks like that issue was decided at the highest levels before I even left Ukraine.
The huge new BTC pipeline will bring Caspian Sea oil from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Georgia to Turkey, where it will offload onto tankers at the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The route very purposely avoids Russian territory, as well as the territory of Armenia and the Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabach. In the early 90s, Armenia fought a short but vicious war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabach, with Russia supporting Armenia and a number of countries, including some in the Middle East, supporting Azerbaijan.
The point is that the companies building this USD 4 billion pipeline are willing to run it through Georgia (a country that is now a US client state but which is also an occasional base for some very dodgy elements including Chechen rebels and reportedly Al Qaeda cells) rather than take a chance on the existing Russian pipelines from Baku (which do run through Chechnya and so are not completely secure either).
So if the Western investors that financed BTC are willing to put that kind of cash on the line to have an energy transit route free of Russian control, how about a country like Ukraine, which is critically dependent on oil and gas piped in from Russia? I wanted to look into rumors that they would be interested in getting oil from BTC shipped up through the Bosphorus in tankers, and then reinserted into Ukrainian pipelines at Odessa--or at least take some active steps to secure energy independence from Russia.
Well, I don't know if they're going to use tankers to get Caspian oil up "the wrong way" through the Bosphorus (the Bosphorus is pretty much at max shipping capacity already anyway), but the day I left Ukraine I found out Yushchenko visited Turkey and signed some energy deals while he was there.
So now I wonder what little I can add to the story now that it's gone international.
It's not like I regret the trip at all. It was a great experience. I saw things there I didn't expect and couldn't believe, probably because I didn't have time beforehand to prepare any preconceptions about the place. On Friday night I wandered down to Sevastopol harbor and sat by the waterfront, drinking a bottle of pivo, watching the waves break against the rocks, watching the running lights of tankers moving far outside the harbor, watching the crescent moon redden as it sank into the Black Sea, and wondering who I was.
It was definitely worth it.
Eno Again
Woo hoo! Brian Eno just released a new album yesterday. I just bought it off the iTunes store and the first couple of tracks I've heard so far I like very much. The deceptively simple vocal tracks remind me of the great vocal stuff off his first three albums in the early 70s. I've been aching for more music like this. I'm very happy.
June 06, 2005
Mission: Chill-out or Die!
Okay, that's it. I just finished the last bit of work I need to take care of, and can now focus on what I'm going to do in Ukraine for the rest of this week. I haven't had nearly enough time to prep for this, study my Russian, or secure the kind of preliminary contacts I would need to get a "real" story out of this.
But hell with it. I just need to get away from work for a few days and chill out. Spend some time thinking about something else for a while. Even if I don't get published this time, I'll have good background material for the writing project I'm working on. And there are worse things than taking a week off in new places, especially places as interesting as those I'm heading for.
At the secret agent party the other night there were a lot of travelers (most of Klaus and Zorana's friends are internationals in some way or other). I had some great conversations about other cities that may make the list after I get back from Ukraine... Baku, Samarkand, Bangkok and Vientiane.
It's never enough, never enough time and so damn much to do...
More soon.
007 Party
 007 and his nemesis discuss global domination |
It wasn't long before the Monty Norman Orchestra gave way to Kylie and TaTu, but that's okay. We should do this more often!