Alexander Ageev. Hunger 55

Hunger 55
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Date of publication: October 1, 2001

To be honest, I wrote the previous “Hunger” - about Senchin - through force, through some kind of mental spasm that twisted me (probably not only me) on September 11th. It’s as if a global casket with fundamental values ​​was roughly shaken, gangster-style, and nothing has settled down yet, and if it does, it’s in some other, unusual and disturbing order. I have a strange feeling that the world wants to become simpler - and it is becoming simpler before our eyes, well, as always happens during mobilization: a mug, a spoon and a pot are strumming in the sidor, everything is clear to everyone, and what is not clear - the sergeant will explain.

And here, you see, there’s some kind of Senchin - just the type, however, that inevitably turns out to be a sergeant. In general, I wrote schematically about Senchin and his heroes - there, in that cynical prose, if you take it seriously, there is a connection with the entire current world crisis, which is absolutely unclear where it will turn. It may, of course, end in pure zilch, but that would be completely offensive.

About Senchin - just to finish about him - Arutyunov wrote in some ways more expressively and more accurately than I did in the forum . He seems to be the same age as Senchin, otherwise some people started attacking me on the stupid generational issue. Well, what difference does it make to me whether Senchin is young or not young? Alexander Zinoviev , for example, is not young, and Prokhanov is not young, and Rekemchuk , who moves Senchin around briskly everywhere, but no one will stop me from saying that the first is senile, the second is paranoid, and the third, it seems, hates all living things and this hatred of his seminarians He teaches at the Literary Institute . I have heard a lot of different stories about this seminar, where, by the way, Senchin is now conducting classes together with the master. It conveys, therefore, experience.

Well, that’s it, enough about literary life - it used to be unseemly, but now, against the backdrop of events, it completely reeks of something teenage-narcissistic. I don’t care what’s going on in the world, but have you, old man, read my new story in the almanac “Ring A”?

Somehow I’ve been thinking more about America all these weeks, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’m starting to have a kind of split personality about what’s happening there. I seem to be completely on the side of America in everything that lies ahead, if only because, alas, there is no other convincing force in this world. On the other hand, I read about the patriotic upsurge that has swept the States, about the sky-high ratings of Bush Jr. (an obvious imbecile, in my opinion) and it makes me sick to my stomach - for some reason I very vividly imagine what an unspeakable vulgarity the patriotic upsurge is in America, and anywhere else.

And in general, a unanimous America is terrible and dangerous, because a unanimous America is a weak America. Somehow it’s not America at all. Do you understand what I'm talking about?

That’s why I was unnaturally pleased by two messages about protest demonstrations against the impending war (unnaturally, because I myself am not against it). Recently there was such a demonstration in Washington, and the first to march through the streets, almost immediately after September 11, were Berkeley students. There were no student demonstrations there for a quarter of a century, and yet it was there that the entire youth revolution of the 60s began.

This message from Berkeley especially warmed me because I had once visited those places of “revolutionary glory”, and especially loved to walk along Telegraph Avenue - along the same street where in its time the police dispersed student crowds to the point of shooting with live ammunition and killing . There, nearby, is the “Field of Peoples” (or, in another version, the “People’s Field”), because of which that same youth revolution began back in 1964 (not in ’68!). The story is kind of funny: the university owned a piece of land in the center of the town of Berkeley and was going to sell this piece at a profit. And students took to the streets, demanding that something public be built on this land, and not given to greedy developers. During the demonstration, the police killed one of the students (most likely with an accidental shot), and so it began, and did not subside until the early 70s - already regarding Vietnam and other matters.

And the “Field of Peoples” remained undeveloped - then, when I saw it, it was a littered wasteland with trampled yellow grass, on which here and there there were rookeries of homeless-looking people, but in fact these were partly former ones, dilapidated by drugs, with gray-haired hippies, some outright psychos. When I arrived in California, I was immediately warned: recently almost all the psychos had been released from hospitals, and they flocked to where it was warmer, including Berkeley. In fact, the town - generally sleepy and peaceful - seemed somehow crazy due to the abundance of psychos. Peaceful psychos lay in the Field of Peoples, and passionate ones staged performances in the streets that our Kulik and Brener had never dreamed of.

I remember that I was standing at the People’s Field (and it was still surrounded by the most decrepit or badly beaten “foreign cars” around the perimeter, and on some of them the pieces of paper were white: Sale - $150) and I thought, or rather, I asked a rhetorical question: and because of this filthy wasteland something began that radically changed the world? Yes, a monument should be erected here!

However, the dirty, smoking thick cigarettes, veteran hippies, lying here and there in the stunted bushes, may have been such a paradoxical monument to that motley era...

I found touching traces of her in other places. Well, for example, in a music store on the same Telegraph Avenue. I really loved going to that store. There were cassette tapes placed on racks along the walls, CDs were laid out on the counters in the middle of the store, but under the counters there was the most interesting thing - several dozen cardboard boxes with used or discounted vinyl (ten years ago this was the case, and even vinyl in the States was still met). The disc in these boxes cost from a dollar to three, and if you bought ten, they gave you the eleventh for free. And what was not there! For example, I bought myself Physical Graffiti and Presence of Led Zeppelin, sealed in cellophane, a couple of the same fresh Creedence Clearwater Revival records, and something else in the same spirit. But the unsealed records were the most interesting - for some reason the most interesting were the battered, well-used records from the late 60s - early 70s, that is, exactly the ones that the “revolutionary youth” listened to on their campuses back then with marijuana and LSD. Well, the descendants, apparently, sold all these antiques to the store.

I remember that I stood for half an hour in thought over one of the most famous records of those years: the Volunteers disc by the unforgettable Jefferson Airplane. And the envelope was torn, and the record - it was visible to the naked eye - was worn to the point of sand, it must have been played with all their hearts at some point. Should I take it or not? The cover is wonderful, ironic: under the shadow of the American flag, sprouting some shoots, the group is depicted in the most goofy form. Well, here’s a picture for you in parts (the scanner doesn’t take more from me, and I’m too lazy to use Photoshop to glue the two together):