On the Prison Highway

by Ian Frazier

Since I was little, I've found myself drawn to abandoned places.  It's hard for me to drive past run-down and empty houses on the highway, without wanting to explore.  I would love to go to a place like Detroit, just to climb through some of the buildings there, except fear for my safety keeps me from doing it.  As a teen, my friends and I frequently explored a closed brickworks and quarry (since revitalized as a farmer's market and green-living experiment).

So, there's a lot I can relate to in Ian Frazier's latest article on his journeys in Siberia (there was a two-part article published about a year ago), this time specifically hunting for abandoned lagers, or what we would refer to in the West as Gulags.

He does come across one, and his descriptions of it are lovely, sad, and very evocative of a horrible period of Russian history.  He follows his experience with a description of the growing popularity or nostalgia for Stalin among modern Russians, a strange phenomenon.

What I think attracts me to the idea of traveling through sites like the one he found, is that they are not sanitized through the act of historical interpretation.  He imagines the site turned into a museum, but I feel like that would cause me to lose all interest in it.  I have no desire to visit a place like Auschwitz, Choeung Ek, or that church in Rwanda with all the skulls, as they have been put on display, no matter how much they were also left in their original state.  But to wander through an abandoned lager, covered in snow, and with no one around, one would feel the weight of the history of the place in a much more visceral way.  I envy Frazier the experience.

Apparently, he has a book being released soon about these trips.  I should probably check that out.

Travels in Siberia - 2

by Ian Frazier

The concluding half of Frazier's travelogue into Siberia is as good as the first. As he moves deeper into the vast region, through places where there are still no roads, he paints a portrait of a space over-looked and ignored by much of the modern world.

This article is at its best when it describes the difficulty of travel - the clouds of mosquitoes, the treacherous roads, the garbage-strewn campsites. It is hard to imagine people making much of a life here, as evidenced by the villages without young people.

What confuses me most about this article though, is why it is being published now. At the very end, it is revealed that this journey took place in 2001; it calls into question some of the topicality of its information, especially with regards to relations along the border of China.

Travels in Siberia - 1

by Ian Frazier

I don't read a lot of travelogues, and I don't know why that is, because I often enjoy them.

In this, the first of two articles, Ian Frazier heads into Siberia in a beat-up old van, with the head of the robotics lab at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University as his driver, and with an alpinist building renovator as a companion (somehow, writing this sentence conjures up a reverse-Borat in my mind, but that's not accurate).

Along the way, Frazier supplies a great amount of historical and geographical detail about this gigantic expanse of land that takes up one twelth of all land on the planet.

Most interesting to me were the attempts made by Frazier and crew to discover the remnants of the Trakt, the old road used by exiles on their way into Siberia. It's no longer used, but its remains can be found near the modern road, still exhibiting the tell-tale mounds of the graves of those who could not manage the voyage by foot.

I look forward to the completion of this article next week.

The Rap

by Ian Frazier

This is an interesting article about Derrick Parker, NYPD's former 'hip-hop cop'. Parker had at one point headed up an investigative team into rap and hip-hop related crime, and is still, even in retirement, the person to go to find out what is happening within the music community.

This falls into the category of New Yorker articles that explain how things you wouldn't have ever thought existed work. Parker now runs a security company, doing bodyguard work and manning the door at events. He is a highly intelligent man, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the communities he has spent his life living in and policing.

My problem with this article is that it's another example of how only the worst of hip-hop is what the mainstream gets to read about. We hear about Busta Rhymes protecting a shooter responsible for killing a bodyguard at his own video shoot, because of the 'no snitching' code. We get to read, again, about shoot-outs between Lil Kim's and Foxy Brown's crews, or how Fabolous came to take a bullet in the leg. And so, once again, it's the garbage that ends up dominating the culture.

I'm not complaining too loudly - last week's New Yorker wrote about Flying Lotus. I just wish I could avoid ever seeing Sean Comb's name in print again (I've been doing a really good job of not hearing his voice).