a view from the couch

Sitting on my couch, clicking channels from round, middle-aged women talk-show guests and adverts for the latest investment opportunity, I suddenly came across some black and white footage of clouds of steam curling from cooling towers. An old man with a look of despair on his face forlornly takes a drag off a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger as he rasps something unintelligible. Suddenly three children in gas masks stand to attention before some kind of industrial storage tanks, the image rapidly shifting back and forth from positive to negative to a high-voltage din. A little girl presses her face against a chain-link fence and the television asks in a high-pitched voice: "Excuse me, excuse me, what do you remember?" An instant later, two clumsy figures in shiny-flame proof suits are lobbing a large sphere back and forth like a volleyball."Tomorrow with us is better than today without us," declares a gravelly Russian voice.Is this a scene from some forgotten Tarkovsky film? No, it is -- wait for it -- an ad for the Maxima Ad Agency.Personally, I like this kind of surrealistic stuff that messes with your mind (there are better verbs -- but not for print); it forces you to grapple with incongruity -- although I am told some people do not like that. I suppose potential advertisers might be turned off my Maxima's ad by the fear that they may get the equivalent of a Howard Stern or Vladimir Zhirinovsky to pitch their products.There is plenty of surrealism on Russian television. And why not? After all, as the Russians say, "anything is possible here." But one show I would love to see hit the Russian airwaves is "The Prisoner," a British-made series from 1968 starring Patrick McGoohan as a spy who resigns, is drugged, and wakes up in "The Village," a place filled with other retired spooks and run by one side or the other (it really does not matter which). There McGoohan is given a number (six, as in six of one, half a dozen of the other), and he spends 17 episodes trying to preserve his individuality as "they" relentlessly try to force him to reveal why he resigned. It is a show I think the Russians (as well as most expats in Russia) could identify with.Closer to reality, but still surreal to many is Oboz, part of the VID television production company's Friday night line. Oboz is short for "Musicalnoye Obozreniye" or Music Review (Channel 1 Ostankino -- late; how late varies from week to week).The show is hosted by Ivan Denidov, who week to week shows up sitting backwards on a chair sporting short-cropped blond hair, dark glasses and a leather jacket, and whose lips never sync because of the stop-frame production techniques. As usual on rock video sets, a large industrial fan is slowly rotating in the background strobing the host and sending epileptics into fits. (Perhaps the industrial downturn Europe and the United States are just crawling out of is due to a shortage of industrial ventilation caused by music videos -- in any case, I am sure if I had bought stock in industrial fan companies in the early 1980s I could have retired by now). In short, Denidov is a Russian Mr. Cool.Aside from Denidov's performance, Oboz is a more complete picture of post-Soviet rock than many of the other music shows on Russian television -- such as "Afisha" (whose hostess insists on meowing "ciao" at the end of each segment) -- and which serve only as vehicles around which to insert commercials.While I am of the generation that came to age with early Pink Floyd and the dawn of New Wave, and find little redeeming in Rap (unless it is stridently political) and nothing at all in Hip Hop, I can actually sit and watch Oboz. It is not just cultural curiosity; the show is by and large intelligent, featuring a variety of rock group types, music news and interviews with stars. One resent episode even had a piece on how claymation music videos are made.And of course a lot of it is throwaway, but it does give you some idea of what is happening.