Before I start thinking about something positive, here's more paranoid, misanthropic anti-patriotic stuff. I want to tell you how my home city welcomed me at Sheremetyevo-2 last week when I flew in from Amsterdam. The place was always a mess, but these days it seems to be deteriorating to an all-time low.


Instead of being parked at one of these telescopic tubes which lead directly to the terminal, the plane was parked at the edge of the airfield. After 10 minutes of waiting, a minibus approached, and two passengers were called to the exit. The minibus departed. "Wait, soon they'll call another couple," -- somebody joked in the darkened plane. Everyone laughed. In 10 more minutes a regular bus arrived and took in 100 well-squeezed passengers. On the way to the terminal it had to stop for a few minutes, as there was a car parked right across the road.


At passport control the queue wasn't as huge as I expected. After less than 15 minutes I reached the pogranichnik in the booth, only to discover that his machine had broken down. So I stood there at the glass window with my little red passport, waiting and waiting. "Don't you know me?" I asked the guy. "I have this television show ..." "Yes, I know you," he replied, "but it's the machine, not me, that makes the decision."


After at last being released from passport control, I found myself in the luggage claim area. Of the four baggage carousels, one was standing still and was marked "Washington." Three others were rolling, but there was nothing to indicate where the bags had come from. "Do you know where they put the stuff from Amsterdam?" I asked a uniformed supervisor. "Ah, you know, they can throw it anywhere -- so you just run around," he answered and smiled very kindly. So, with dozens of other passengers from Copenhagen, Budapest, Frankfurt and other places I rushed between the transporters in an effort to trace my bag. I found it, eventually, brutally got around the long, long lines at customs and passed through a corridor of humans with and without signs with passengers' names on them, all of them eagerly looking at me. To call it a small nightmare would be overstatement, but it was a difficult experience.


I remember my first arrival at Sheremetyevo-2, from London in 1987. There were far fewer people then, and everything worked. But the guys at customs carefully inspected all my luggage and took away all the video cassettes to see if they were aesthetically and ideologically correct. (I received them all back a week later.) The contrast between now and then is symbolic, isn't it?


n


Since returning to Moscow I've seen almost nothing but offices, offices, offices, plus some television studios. A couple of nights out have been pretty wild though. Albert Kuvezin, the Tuvan throat singer possessing the lowest voice on Earth, became a father. The celebration took place at Woodstock -- a small, members-only rock musicians' bar at Dobryninskaya. At 1 A.M. a friend came to pick me up, and we tried a new club, called Fellini's. Half a dozen security guys met us at the entrance, only to announce that the place was empty. Later I found out that a year's membership at Fellini's costs a quarter of a million dollars, so I'm not surprised at the absence of guests. Poor old Federico. Still hungry and thirsty, we went to Stanislavsky -- a club with gorgeous interiors and lousy everything else. Their kitchen is bad, and their DJ is bad, and the waitress I liked has resigned. The next day I had the worst hangover in years, which unluckily coincided with two television shoots.


On Friday, the scene was split between Manhattan-Express, where the fabulous Dva Samolyota performed a one-off show called "Flight to Venus," with cosmic decorations designed by Masha Tsigal; and Pilot, where Sergey Voronov, the lead singer/guitarist of Crossroads, celebrated his 33rd birthday. I was at both places and liked Manhattan-Express better. On Saturday I judged the annual Russian Rap festival. On Sunday I went to visit a friend who lives in the northern outskirts of Moscow. I returned home by metro after midnight. The carriage was almost empty, and there was a woman of about 30 sitting alone nearby. For 10 minutes, until she dropped out of sight at the circle-line transfer, I counted the drunk males who tried to pick her up: no less than four of them, one after another.


Such is my life. Next week, I'll watch some television and make a political comment.