Shifting the Suburban Paradigm

by Alison Arieff

Is there anything made in America that’s less innovative than the single-family home? While we obsess over the new in terms of what we keep in our houses — the ever-increasing speed and functionality of our Smartphones, entertainment options built into refrigerators, sophisticated devices that monitor, analyze and report on our sleep cycles, even the superior technology of the running shoes we put on before heading out the flimsy fiberboard door — we’re incredibly undemanding of the houses themselves. These continue to be built the same way they have for over a century, and usually not as well. Walls and windows are thin, materials cheap, design (and I use the term loosely) not well-considered. The building process is a protracted affair, taking far too long and creating embarrassing amounts of building waste (over 50 percent of all waste produced in the United States, in fact).

But the lack of innovation extends beyond the high-tech. Not so long ago homes were designed to make the most of their surrounding climate and terrain. Vernacular forms like the shotgun, in places like New Orleans, served a purpose that went far beyond aesthetics — they encouraged natural cooling by improving cross-ventilation. In Texas and New Mexico, thick adobe walls similarly kept heat in during the winter, and out during the summer. Houses were sited and windows placed to maximize or minimize sun exposure as needed.

No longer. Today, it’s essentially the same floor plan, sheetrock and construction that’s used coast to coast. Glossy brochures with stock images of smiling families advertise “Spanish Gothic” or “Tuscan Villa,” but what’s really on offer is the same dumb box with a stage set of a façade tacked onto the front. The reasons behind the advertised vernacular styles have long since disappeared, their function surrendered to ornament.

It’s not that the means don’t exist for better building. There have been significant advances in homebuilding: smarter, safer, more sustainable materials that contribute to healthier and more energy-efficient structures (less expensive to heat and cool); precision building technologies that reduce construction time and waste; and more enlightened planning principles that recognize the social, economic and health benefits of building homes within denser, more walkable neighborhoods (important as sprawl is associated with high levels of driving, which contributes to air pollution, and air pollution leads to morbidity and mortality).

Why? The reasons are complicated. Incentives received by commercial builders for doing the right thing are not extended to residential builders. But it’s also true that the homebuilding industry isn’t interested in risk or change, despite (in spite of?) dramatic slowdowns in residential construction, an anticipated surplus of thousands of homes, a market besieged by foreclosures and still-dropping home values. Even though there’s increasing demand for more diverse housing — especially smaller, more energy-efficient homes and multifamily units in more walkable communities — too many homebuilders are inexplicably committed to the status quo.

For many in the homebuilding industry, the current scenario is seen not as a call to action but as a temporary problem of the market (I found the same thing to be true in the world of shopping-center builders, who pine for — and fully expect the return of — a go-go consumer culture that is likely gone for good). To address current market realities, they don’t look to innovation but rather to an easier fallback strategy: a new marketing plan.

Five years ago, at the crest of the housing boom, I worked on a team consulting with a master planned-community developer who had asked us to help “revolutionize the way our homes are sold.” The developer had little interest in the work we proposed — namely, to revolutionize the way their homes were designed and built. That company, like most of its competitors, laid off nearly half its work force the following year, and ended or delayed most of its future development projects. Devoting energy to how best to market its inventory hadn’t been the most forward-thinking strategy for them then — nor would it be now.

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TV's Fixation With 'The New Breed' Of '60s Women

[ed.  What?  I don't watch tv often, so I guess I shouldn't judge. Must be some kind of nostalgia (or yearning) for the good old days when sexual politics were much simpler.]

by NPR Staff

The fall television season is in high gear, and there seems to be a barrage of tight skirts, panty-hosed legs and perfectly made-up faces making their way from the 1960s to the small screen.

On ABC is Pan Am, a show about airline stewardesses. There's also NBC's The Playboy Club, which following the stories of fictional bunnies in Hugh Hefner's nightclub. The networks are hoping to get on the nostalgia bandwagon after the success of Mad Men, AMC's period drama.

Ratings aside, what is it about that era and the women who lived it that has captured our collective imagination?

"It's one of the most glamorous, most beautiful eras in our history, but I also think it was an era of most change for women," Stacey Wilson, senior editor at the Hollywood Reporter, tells Rachel Martin, host of weekends on All things Considered. "And I think that it offers some ripe scenarios for fictional storytelling."

One male character in Pan Am dubs the fleet of stewardesses "a new breed of women." The networks must want viewers to remember that because ABC and NBC have played up their characters as gender pioneers — using their good looks and charm to get by in a man's world.

At times, it might be hard to look beyond the corsets and bunny ears and see a feminist, but Wilson says the formula can serve as a springboard for richer characters.

"Yes, the women are hot; they're in tight clothes," she says, "but I do think it allows for interesting evolution of character when you start with a girl who's kind of confined to this costume."

Wilson says there is something oddly comforting about watching "train-wreck history." She says watching these characters on the front lines of sexism elicits a combination of shock and relief. Network television is able, she says, to show us the uglier parts of our past in a lighthearted way. "I think it really actually affords us appreciation for how good things are now," she says

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camille (by Hard-Lip)
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Jillian Tamaki
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Brian Eno: Interview

[ed.  Fascinating interview with Brian Eno on the essence of creativity in music.]

by David Mitchell

Brian Eno is widely considered one of the great contemporary composers and music producers, famously for his work with U2 and Coldplay, but perhaps most influentially with David Bowie and the Talking Heads. He began his career in 1971, in his early 20s, as a member of the band Roxy Music, then left to make music on his own, including such albums as “Another Green World,” “Music for Airports” and with David Byrne, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” a landmark in the history of sampling.

His fascination with musical technologies and artistic systems led him to popularize the Koan algorithmic music generator, and, with Peter Schmidt, to develop the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards, an intervention into the artistic process. His music is heard, unknowingly, by millions of people every day: he created the start-up sound of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating software. He is a founder of the Long Now Foundation, whose mandate is to educate the public into thinking about the distant future. “Drums Between the Bells” is his latest release.

Excerpts:

But really, the idea arose out of the new possibilities of the medium of recording. I listened with interest to the work of producers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek and George Martin because I realized that they were doing things with music that could be described as sound painting. For me, trained as a painter, this was exciting: Music was being made like paintings were made, adding and subtracting, manipulating colors, built up over a period of time rather than performed in one sitting. Separated from performance, recorded sound had become a malleable material, like paint or clay. And the results of this process were pointing toward a type of music that was less linear and more immersive: music you lived inside.

 ***

I remember an early review of one of my ambient records saying something like, “No song, no beat, no melody, no movement” — and they weren’t being complimentary. But I think they were accurate, because this is a music of texture and sonic sensuality more than it is any of those things they were alluding to. I’m sure when the first abstract paintings appeared, people said, “No figure, no structure,” etc … The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

I wanted to hear a music that could create an atmosphere that would support your attention but still let you decide where it was directed.

 ***

What is interesting to me about music among all the arts is that it is, and always has been, as far as I know, a completely nonfigurative medium. Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting. Even opera, with its strong narrative element, doesn’t depend on the narrative for its effect. So although lots of people still find abstract painting difficult to deal with, they are very happy to listen to music — a much more resolutely abstract form of art.

 ***

The problem with analyzing music is that there are so many relevant variables. The most complicated is context. When you hear a great moment in a piece of music, how far can you separate it from its context? And how much of its context is relevant: the preceding two bars? The surrounding four bars? The whole piece? What is the context, anyway? Is it your knowledge of how the piece was played? Your understanding of the artist’s other works? Your understanding of the whole genre? I always think that whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to — all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard. So what you are listening to are tiny differences, tiny innovations. Something new is added, something you’ve grown used to is omitted, something you thought you were familiar with sounds different.

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photo:  Wikipedia

Burning the Diaries

by Dominique Browning

I just burned 40 years’ worth of diaries. I didn’t plan to — or rather, I had always planned to, once I knew I was dying, or so old that I would soon lack the energy to gather wood. But I woke one morning and knew it was time to let it all go.

I yanked open the flue, started a small log fire and began laying on the books. They burned slowly, at first, reluctant. A few pages caught, charred edges smoldered across my handwriting, plumes of thick smoke funneled lazily into the chimney. Small hard-covered volumes, bound with thread and taped up the side, most of them from an old French stationer, their plasticized glossy lapis blue or turquoise covers shrank and shriveled. I had thought that color would keep away the evil eye. The eye that would pry. The eye that would judge.

I didn’t want anyone else reading my diaries, ever.

Diaries are irresistible. And I am an unregenerate snoop. I will read any diary left in my path. I’ve even bent my path toward diaries carelessly left lying around. I know it is horrid of me, but I can’t help it. I’ve even read diaries in other people’s homes, that’s how bad I am (and that’s as close as I’ll come to confessing the most outrageous violation of privacy I ever committed, which turned out to be a life-altering experience — karmic return — and I promised myself I would never, ever do such a thing again).

Privacy was, perhaps, the proximate cause of my recent pyromania. My sons were spending the summer with me, probably the last one at my home. They were on the verge of departing into their own adulthoods, moving into their own first homes. It had struck me, several years earlier, that once children get to a certain age, the age at which they start keeping their own secrets, becoming opaque to those who love them most, the age at which they start doing things they cannot dream of their parents ever having done, they (the children, that is) become voraciously curious about what exactly their parents did do, what were their secrets, who were they, anyway? Once children get curious that way, nothing puts them off the scent.

I should know. I spent years as an adolescent rooting around in my parents’ closets looking for letters, sorting through boxes of letters and photographs, riffling through sock drawers, searching for clues about who they were, how they came together, why on earth I was on earth?

There were plenty of people I wanted to smoke out of my life. Come to think of it, several months earlier, one of them, about whom I had written in my diaries copiously, tearfully, had recently popped unceremoniously back into my life after decades of absence, petulantly demanding to be returned to his pedestal, or at least to my bed. Perhaps a roaring fire would put to rest the Undead.

The urge to burn may have been born, long ago, of the old prayer I said on my knees every night as a child: “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” My soul lived in my diaries, and that weighed on me; by the time I was in my 40s, if I died before I woke, I wanted Someone to snatch my diaries before anyone else did.

I started keeping journals when I was 14. I was compulsive about it. I scribbled daily — and as I went through college, I filled hundreds of pages with dense, colorful ink, going right to the edge, ignoring the light threads of red margin markers, denying paragraphs their breaks, my nib flattening under the pressure of the stream of soul pouring forth. A psychiatrist once told me that I was obviously trying to psychoanalyze myself, which, professionally speaking, is considered impossible. But there certainly was — and has always been — a form of therapy in keeping journals. It is a way of self-soothing, as an adult, a way of rubbing the satin corner of your blankie against your finger when you’re anxious about separation, or too worked up to fall asleep.

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photo: Don Farrall/Getty Images

Henri Matisse - Pot of Geraniums, 1912
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Pork Cutlets With the Wisdom of Two Continents

by Melissa Clark

I had always thought that schnitzel came in one flavor — veal — until a trip to Vienna several years ago set me straight.

The plate of schnitzel I was served in a restaurant there looked like the usual fare, but the meat had a fuller, brawnier flavor that was unmistakably porcine. I became an instant convert, and sought out the crisp, breaded pork cutlets wherever I could for the rest of that trip.

Back in New York, pork schnitzel is harder to come by, at least in its Viennese iteration. So when the craving hits, I head to a Japanese restaurant and devour tonkatsu, deep-fried pork cutlets served with a thick, sweet and piquant Japanese Worcestershire sauce.

Thanks to a coating of fluffy, brittle panko instead of regular bread crumbs, tonkatsu (or pork katsu) is crunchier than most pork schnitzel, and the accompanying sauce gives it a jolt of tangy flavor.

Pork katsu is easy to make at home, especially if you borrow some techniques from its schnitzel sibling.

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Recipe:  Pork Katsu With Pickled Cucumbers and Shiso

Recipe: Homemade Tonkatsu Sauce

photo: Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times NYTCREDIT

Algoma Hill, 1920, by Lawren Harris
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Kiss Another Summer Goodbye

by Rick Sinnott

Every morning in early September a cheechako I know exclaimed over the increasing number of yellow leaves fluttering on the aspen trees. Some things are better left unsaid. Calling attention to each newly yellowed leaf is like teasing a teenager about a new zit every morning. I finally had to growl at her that Alaskans don’t dwell on that annual rite of fall.

Of course, we all comment on the first spray of yellow leaves in late July or August. But we share this news with family and friends in the same hushed tone with which we point out a dead dog on the highway.

Alaska’s summer weather is often indistinguishable from autumn, or even winter, weather in other states. But our autumn – the brief interlude between the first yellow leaves and puddle ice thick enough to support your weight – is obvious enough to anyone who’s survived an entire year in the North Country. In Alaska, autumn is the season to cram in a last fishing trip, a last hike in the mountains, some berry picking, or a fall hunt.

In autumn, our wetland sedges and grasses have turned a tawny yellow. The unadulterated rays of a rising or setting sun can ignite a marsh this time of year. And here’s an experience common to duck hunters, but unappreciated by most adults: the slurping sounds of boots pulling out of black mud. I’m not talking about clamming-tide mud or dip-netting mud or Ship Creek Slammin’ Salmon Derby mud. I mean organic, marsh mud. The roiled muck exhales a sulfurous smell from rotting, submerged vegetable matter and who knows what else. Marsh perfume. I’d roll in the marsh like a dog if I could shake the chilly water out of my coat.

The woods this time of year have a different perfume, the smell of musty gym socks. Highbush cranberries. The first whiff of ripening cranberries in late August or early September is a more reliable sign of fall than a yellow leaf or two. I don’t recommend stuffing a sweaty sock in your mouth, but somehow that funky aroma complements the drupes’ tartness. There is no jelly more Alaskan. We stock up every September so that later, in the darkest days of winter or even next spring, we can reprise the nearly forgotten spell of autumn with a few twists of a lid.

When most people think of autumn in Alaska, they don’t think stink, they picture the colorful landscapes of the deciduous forest or tundra. Like most people, I do admire the colorful, dying leaves of plants. But Alaska is not known for its fall colors like New England, and there’s a good reason. Alaska’s autumnal salon hanging is much more ephemeral. Some years there doesn’t seem to be an ideal day for admiring the fall foliage; it’s raining every day or the clouds are low. Almost inevitably a cold snap or a big blow, like an art school bully, knocks nature’s palette to the ground and wipes the canvas clean.

During fall, we begin to forget that green is a color too. Dark green spruces and lighter green alders punctuate and accentuate the spreading yellow and red tints. Fall is when I finally learned to admire alders. If you hike much in the mountains, you spend more time cursing alders than singing their praises, because their springy stems spread like upside-down umbrella ribs, often interlocking with neighboring alders to form a near-impenetrable hedge. Alders are woody workhorses, pumping nitrogen into the soil and preventing mass wasting of steep slopes. But you aren’t thinking about soil while climbing a steep slope blanketed with alders. You just want to crawl out of the leafy hell.

Here’s what I like about alders. In fall, Alaska’s alders don’t sport the blood-red carmines of highbush cranberries, the gay yellows of aspens, the dusky vermilions of fireweed. Alders don’t celebrate autumn. No, like most Alaskans, alders pretend autumn is a slightly cooler version of summer, clinging to their green leaves until a hard freeze, high wind, or wet snowfall sheds all such pretensions overnight. Like a cold-water drowning victim, summer’s not dead until it’s cold and dead.

The migratory birds don’t wait for the potholes in my driveway to freeze, they’ve started flying south. Shorebirds and terns leave first, in July or August, about the time the first gold leaves appear. They have a long way to go, and their foods – mud-dwelling invertebrates and small fish – are locked beneath an icy armor all winter. Most of the insect-eating birds, like many of the songbirds, have also left the state. Insects are notoriously hard to find in winter, unless you know where to look for their eggs and pupae. Sandhill cranes are flying over my house, trailing a final primeval yodel in their wake. Many ducks and geese delay departure until they can benefit from a stiff tailwind, but they’ll be gone soon, except for the urban mallards that hunker down in artificially warmed watercourses and are fed cracked corn all winter. Anchorage’s Canada geese, with a smorgasbord of lawns and athletic fields to feed from, will wait until the first snowfall before seriously contemplating the long flight to the Pacific Northwest. They won’t have to wait long.

Soon the only birds left in Alaska will be the permanent residents, the avian sourdoughs like ravens, magpies, goshawks, jays, owls, woodpeckers, redpolls, chickadees, grouse, and ptarmigan. These birds all have a trick or two that helps them survive the long winter. They’re scavengers, or they roost in tree cavities or under the snow to conserve energy, or they stuff their crops full of seeds before the sun sets so they can absorb energy after dark, or they can locate prey under the snow by hearing alone, or they carry a pry bar for peaking under bark for insects, or they have feathery snowshoes, or their feathers turn white, or they lower their body temperature at night to conserve energy. Anything it takes. Not all of us can afford to fly to Hawaii or Baja California for the winter.

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photo: Pamshubby

Abbe May

Congress' Dysfunction Long in the Making

[ed.  Pretty good explanation of how we've gotten here, but no clear solution on how we get out.]

by Charles Babington

How did it get this bad on Capitol Hill?

Why does Congress barely function today?

The legislative branch of the world's most powerful nation is now widely scorned as it lurches from one near-catastrophe to the next, even on supposedly routine matters such as setting an annual budget and keeping government offices open.

Congress is accustomed to fierce debate, of course. But veteran lawmakers and scholars use words such as "unprecedented" to describe the current level of dysfunction and paralysis. The latest Gallup poll found a record-high lack of faith in Congress.

There's no single culprit, it seems. Rather, long-accumulating trends have reached a critical mass, in the way a light snowfall can trigger an avalanche because so many earlier snows have piled atop each other.

At the core of this gridlock is a steadily growing partisanship. Couple that with a rising distaste for compromise by avid voters. Unswerving conservatives and liberals dominate the two parties' nominating processes, electing lawmakers who pledge never to stray from their ideologies.

Instead of a two-party system, American government has become a battle between warring tribes, says Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma who has taught at several universities. When House and Senate leaders set out their goals and strategies, he said in an interview, "it comes down to the party first," with the public's welfare lagging behind.

The parties have driven all but a few centrists from their ranks. House districts are ever more sharply liberal or conservative because both parties collude in gerrymandering to protect incumbents and because mobile Americans like to live among like-minded people.

For many Republicans, the biggest threat to re-election is from their party's right flank. For Democrats, the danger is being insufficiently liberal.

"The problem in a nutshell is that most members are more worried about their primary election than the general election," said former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., now a campaign strategist. "They ask themselves, 'Why should I go out and be the next Bob Bennett or Mike Castle?' So they become very averse to compromise."

Bennett, a three-term Utah senator, and Castle, a former Delaware congressman, were veteran GOP lawmakers who unexpectedly lost Senate nominations last year to tea party activists who had denounced them for occasionally working with Democrats.

Some Washington insiders thought the downgrade of the nation's credit-worthiness, which followed last summer's bitter battle over the government's borrowing limit, might shock congressional leaders into ending their brinksmanship. But just days ago, a relatively minor disagreement over disaster aid money brought new threats of a government shutdown. Also, many lawmakers are deeply pessimistic that a special bipartisan committee can develop a viable plan this fall for sharply reducing the deficit.

Interviews with current and former lawmakers, congressional scholars and others point to several events that have tangled up Congress that lawmakers barely can keep the government's lights on, let alone tackle big problems such as illegal immigration and soaring health costs. They include:

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photo: Creative Commons / Bjoertvedt

Inside the World's Largest Embassy

by Peter Van Buren

The World's Biggest Embassy (104 acres, 22 buildings, thousands of staff members, a $116 million vehicle inventory), physically larger than the Vatican, was a sign of our commitment, at least our commitment to excess. "Along with the Great Wall of China," said the ambassador, "it's one of those things you can see with the naked eye from outer space." The newly opened embassy was made up of large office buildings, the main one built around a four-story atrium, with overhead lights that resembled sails. If someone had told us there was a Bath & Body Works in there, we would not have thought it odd.

The World's Biggest Embassy sat in, or perhaps defined, the Green Zone. Called the Emerald City by some, the Green Zone represented the World's Largest Public Relations Failure. In the process of deposing Saddam, we placed our new seat of power right on top of his old one, just as the ancient Sumerians built their strongholds on top of fallen ones out in the desert. In addition to the new buildings, Saddam's old palaces in the Zone were repurposed as offices, and Saddam's old jails became our new jails. Conveniently for Iraqis, the overlords might have changed but the address had not. The place you went to visit political prisoners who opposed Saddam was still the place you went to look for relatives who opposed the Americans.

The new embassy compound isolated American leadership at first physically and soon mentally as well. The air of otherworldliness started right with the design of the place. American architects had planned for the embassy grounds to have all sorts of trees, grassy areas, and outdoor benches; the original drawings made them look like a leafy college campus. For a place in the desert, the design could not have been more impractical. But in 2003, no projection into the future was too outlandish. One building at the compound was purpose-built to be the international school for the happy children who would accompany their diplomat parents on assignment. It was now used only for offices. Each embassy apartment offered a full-size American range, refrigerator, and dishwasher, as if staffers might someday take their families to shop at a future Sadr City Safeway like they do in Seoul or Brussels. In fact, all food was trucked in directly from Kuwait, along with American office supplies, souvenir mugs, and T-shirts ("My Father Was Assigned to Embassy Baghdad and All I Got Was…", "I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel") and embassy staff members were prohibited from buying anything to eat locally. The embassy generated its own electricity, purified its own water from the nearby Tigris, and processed its own sewage, hermetically sealed off from Iraq.

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Painting by Kenton Nelson
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How To Write A Love Poem

by Jim Behrle

Poetry occupies a cultural space in Contemporary American Society somewhere between Tap Dancing and Ventriloquism. People are certainly aware that poetry exists, but this awareness comes upon them only vaguely and in passing moments. During commercials, mostly, which feature corporate poetry. When people think of a poet, perhaps they imagine the finger-snapping beret-wearing beatnik. Or the slammy mike-wielding poet-ranter. Both proud poetic traditions. But most people who write poetry are people just like yourself. Scruffy, broken wordpals. In the age of Twitter, casual word-shaping may be at its all-time high worldwide. As we attempt to fit all the meaning and emotion we can into a few short lines, no doubt Maya Angelou and Walt Whitman and Bashō are looking down from heaven and smiling. (I know Maya Angelou isn’t dead. She just lives in heaven.)

Love poetry has, of course, been with us since the beginning of time. Lame pick-up lines were passé even in Mesozoic times; we diminish ourselves with cheap dating gimmickry. And who would want to woo anyone who could be gotten so cheaply anyway? It’s the chase that's the fun—and the poem is the map you use! To get to Someone’s Soul! (Excited trumpets!)

When is the right time in a relationship to present someone with a poem? A good question. The line between creepy and romantic is ever shifting. Some people might like a poem written about them at first, and then later come to find it creepy and taser you. Others might, upon first reading, feel creeped out and then later come to love the poem you wrote. You never know. Love makes us put ourselves out there in crazy ways; it's a roller coaster except there are no safety restraints. You could find yourself floating or smashed on the boardwalk like a heel-crushed hotdog. That’s the fun of it! It starts as a funny feeling in the stomach and then quickly goes on to flood the brain. Soon we're constantly thinking about them, wondering what they look like without pants on, trying to remember their schedule at the yoga place. Poets actually know more about longing than they do about love. Poets fall in love with other people’s wives, people who don’t love them back. They're human, in other words; and humans weren't built for happiness. They were built for dissatisfaction and yearning.

So, what’s your story? For whom do you yearn? Could be your parole officer. Or the guy you hired to kill your ex. We generally are attracted to complication: people who it might be impossible to pursue. As the great John Wieners wrote, “The poem does not lie to us. We lie under its law.” I quote that a lot, because it’s the most important thing a poem can do: communicate energy and Capital T Truth to the reader. In this case to someone you think is pretty special. So make your Truth sound pretty good.

The first step is to stare at a blank piece of paper for a while. This is actually a helpful step. Like the way Michelangelo stared at a block of stone for a while and then figured out that there was a man with a strangely small penis inside of it. Or Jackson Pollock would stare at a blank canvas and realize that a bunch of random painting droppings and swirls were underneath, waiting to be dripped out. Or Eve Ensler saw an empty stage and a microphone and then decided that she wanted to talk about her vagina. What does the blank page tell us? A lot. It's a mirror of our own minds. Especially, in my case, when I have spilled coffee on it.

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UVB-76

by Peter Savodnik

From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: “Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman.” But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones.

The amplitude and pitch of the buzzing sometimes shifted, and the intervals between tones would fluctuate. Every hour, on the hour, the station would buzz twice, quickly. None of the upheavals that had enveloped Russia in the last decade of the cold war and the first two decades of the post-cold-war era—Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, the end of the Afghan war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the bombing of parliament, the first Chechen war, the oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen war, the rise of Putinism—had ever kept UVB-76, as the station’s call sign ran, from its inscrutable purpose. During that time, its broadcast came to transfix a small cadre of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. Although the Buzzer (as they nicknamed it) had always been an unknown quantity, it was also a reassuring constant, droning on with a dark, metronome-like regularity.

But on June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased. No announcements, no explanations. Only silence.

The following day, the broadcast resumed as if nothing had happened. For the rest of June and July, UVB-76 behaved more or less as it always had. There were some short-lived perturbations—including bits of what sounded like Morse code—but nothing dramatic. In mid-August, the buzzing stopped again. It resumed, stopped again, started again.

Then on August 25, at 10:13 am, UVB-76 went entirely haywire. First there was silence, then a series of knocks and shuffles that made it sound like someone was in the room. Before this day, all the beeping, buzzing, codes, and numbers had hinted at an evil force hovering on the airwaves. Now it seemed as though the wizard were suddenly about to reveal himself. For the first week of September, transmission was interrupted frequently, usually with what sounded like recorded snippets of “Dance of the Little Swans” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

On the evening of September 7, something more dramatic—one listener even called it “existential”—transpired. At 8:48 pm Moscow time, a male voice issued a new call sign, “Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris,” indicating that the station was now to be called MDZhB. This was followed by one of UVB-76’s (or MDZhB’s) typically nebulous messages: “04 979 D-R-E-N-D-O-U-T” followed by a longer series of numbers, then “T-R-E-N-E-R-S-K-I-Y” and yet more numbers.

***

As you might expect, the Buzzer’s history is murky. Roughly 30 years ago, it’s said, the Soviets built a radio station near Povarovo (the accent is on the second syllable), a 40-minute drive northwest of Moscow. At the time, Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, the Kremlin presided over an intercontinental empire, and Soviet troops were battling the mujahideen. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was revealed that Povarovo was controlled by the military, and that whatever happened there was top-secret.

Shortwave radio aficionados developed various hypotheses about the role of the station in Russia’s sprawling, military-communications network. It was a forgotten node, one theory ran, set up to serve some function now lost deep in the bureaucracy. It was a top-secret signal, others believed, that transmitted messages to Russian spies in foreign countries. More ominously, countered another theory, UVB-76 served as nothing less than the epicenter of the former Soviet Union’s “Dead Hand” doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack. (The least sexy theory, which posited that the Buzzer was testing the thickness of the ionosphere, has never enjoyed much support.)

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Photo: Sergey Kozmin

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