Closed City
Adventures in the Muscovite film trade, 1993 …
“The set was on a military base; a legendary Russian designer had built a replica Western town where even the Man With No Name would have felt comfy enough to chew his cigarette and shed some blood. I spent hours teaching a wonderful Russian actor named Boris to walk into a bar, fix his eyes on the villain and declare, “You’re the only man I ever met who sunk to the bottom and then went lower.” The lines would be dubbed, but I had to get his mouth working the right way. Besides, I was from Nevada, and I assumed I could get him to talk like a cowboy.”
Read more in my story, “Closed City,” in Vegas Seven.
The First Chapters of the Book of Tark
When the legen
dary UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian died on February 11, 2015, he left a legacy that had transformed not only a basketball program, but a city. In “The First Chapters of the Book of Tark,” I discuss his early years in the desert, the dawn of an era in which he helped shape Las Vegas—and Las Vegas shaped him
Revolution Square
“The decades were watching—a statue of a crouching man with a German shepherd, a bronze girl with a baby on her shoulder. The dog’s nose was golden from the touch of Muscovite hands. It was said to be good luck. I did not touch the dog; one must be careful with watchful dogs. The escalator out of the Revolution Square metro station goes up forever. One feels like Aeneas leaving the dead, the watchful dead, behind.”
A true tale of a dark Moscow night, a bottle of green soda and a room without a view. From Vegas Seven magazine, this is Revolution Square.
The Glorious Rise of the Pigskin Empire
Yes, it’s a weekend for NFL football and high-anxiety over Ukraine. Some things never change. From the Archives, a disturbing September 2014 hallucination about point spreads, Vladimir Putin, and—what?—pro football in Vegas
By Greg Blake Miller
IT IS SEPTEMBER, and all of world culture—the painters and poets, sinners, saints and stock traders— have turned their eyes to the gridiron. Since my childhood, the word has summoned up images of a heavy black metal device used for cooking chicken, sort of a proto- George Foreman Grill. Alas, the word actually means “beer.”
In Europe’s smallest nation-state, the red-capped cardinals of the Vatican sit down to watch Arizona play New Orleans, wondering how to aim their prayers, because as any NFL player can tell you, God answers all football prayers, and because it is difficult for a cardinal to choose between a Cardinal and a Saint. If only Notre Dame were in the NFL, all would be clear.
In the gilded hallways of Moscow’s Kremlin, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev can be spotted, huddled close in a shadowed corner, heads tilted downward, voices low, discussing the Tampa Bay- Jacksonville spread before getting Barack Obama to bite on the Jaguars minus-4 1/2, with all of Ukraine hanging in the balance. We should undertake to resolve all of our conflicts at the betting window.
In Germany, Angela Merkel declares that the immense global power of football resides in its counterintuitive use of “foot” to describe a game played chiefly with the hands. In an attempt to restore the flagging popularity of soccer from Bonn to Berlin, she issues an edict that the beautiful game will henceforth be known as handball. This angers two greasy guys playing old-school handball against a graffiti-covered wall in 1970s New York City. No one else, however, seems to mind. Except for one little kid who likes to run around telling his friends, “I’ll cut you so low you’ll play handball against the curb.” He has 37 years to come up with a new put-down.
Back in the present, Obama is trying to figure out how he got hoodwinked into laying 41⁄2 on the Jags. Ukraine is now fully under Russian control. Putin’s first move is to legalize sports wagering in Odessa, where football odds quickly become more popular than handball odds. The Donetsk Destroyers of the new UFL will soon travel to Las Vegas to challenge Vince Neil’s new indoor/outdoor coed lingerie team, the Outlaw Ace Silver Gamblers. It is a marvelous attempt at pigskin diplomacy, but it falls short when Valeria Mazza intercepts Colonel Igor Strelkov’s Hail Mary pass to secure a last-second victory for Neil’s team. Putin immediately declares sanctions against all Las Vegas-produced fuzzy dice—an ineffective measure since fuzzy dice, as everyone knows, are made in China. The U.S., however, responds by banning pigskin exports to the former Soviet Union.
“This does not concern us,” Putin grins, cool blue irises sagging low in the eye socket. “Pigs, we have.”
“Nothing,” he says, “will deny our people their football. And by that I do not mean handball.”
Of course not. He means beer.
Originally published in Vegas Seven, September 11, 2014. Greg Blake Miller is the director of Olympian Creative Coaching & Consulting—personal training for the creative mind. Visit OlympianCreative.com.
Images and original page layout by Cierra Pedro for Vegas Seven.
For Miller’s less flippant essays about Russia and Ukraine here on ReentryShock.com, please see:
• “Russia, Ukraine, and the Battle of Yesterday”
• “Harvest of Grievance”
• “Diplomacy’s Final Exam”
What I Learned | Vegas Seven
When we attempt to prepare our kids for the world, we have to learn not to exclude the world, in all its bewildering openness, from the conversation. After all, you never know what it might have to say. So it’s somehow fitting that when I sat down to write this Vegas Seven essay about the age of standardized testing, I wound up wandering off target and musing on my own dreamier days in the wild-blue classroom.
The Morality of Slow | Vegas Seven
Thoughts on summertime, creativity and the meaning of intensity.
Empty Box Syndrome
“I treasured those old basketball programs, but the box began to take on some kind of nasty symbolism, something about my mistaking the artifacts of living for life itself. That box—and it was a really big box—was taking up garage space that might otherwise be used for, say, winter clothing and emergency nonperishables. OK, the problem was less about storage capacity than psychic space; I suffered through insomniac nights picturing my future home library where the programs were shelved in chronological order in plastic slipcovers. In the mornings I looked in the mirror at my tired eyes and thought, This can’t be right.”
Read more thoughts on fandom, clutter and the enduring weight of precious things in “Empty Box Syndrome, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let Go of My Old Rebel Stuff,” from Vegas Seven magazine.
Reentry Shock—The Dissertation
From Marlen Khutsiev’s “I Am Twenty” (1961/65)
Reentry shock: Historical transition and temporal longing in the cinema of the Soviet Thaw.
By Gregory Blake Miller, Ph.D., University of Oregon, 2010, 323 pages.
Abstract: Nostalgia is the longing for a lost, and often substantially reimagined, time or place. Commonly regarded as a conservative impulse available for exploitation by hegemonic forces, nostalgia can also be a source of social questioning and creative inspiration. This dissertation examines the ways in which nostalgic longing imports images and ideas from memory into present discourse and infuses works of art with complication, contradiction, and ambiguity.
In the early 1960s, emboldened by Nikita Khrushchev’s cultural Thaw, many Soviet filmmakers engaged both personal and social memory to craft challenging reflections of and responses to their times. These filmmakers reengaged the sundered spirit of the 1920s avant-garde and reimagined the nation’s artistic and spiritual heritage; they captured the passing moments of contemporary history in a way that animated the permanent, productive, and sometimes stormy dialogue between the present and the persistent past.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966, released 1971), and Marlen Khutsiev’s The Ilich Gate (1961, released with changes in 1965 as I Am Twenty ) were planned in the anxious years surrounding Khrushchev’s fall, and the films mark a high point of Thaw-era cinematic audacity. Each film is epic in scope; each deploys temporal longing to generate narrative ambiguity and dialogue between historical epochs. The films are haunted by ghosts; they challenge the hegemony of the “now” by insisting on the phantom presence of a thousand “thens”; they refurbish old dreams and question contemporary assumptions.
The Thaw permitted the intrusion of private memory into public history, and the past became a zone for exploration rather than justification. Easy answers became harder to come by, but the profusion of questions and suggestions created a brief silver age for Soviet cinema. For us, these films offer an extraordinary glimpse into creative life during one of the great, unsung social transitions of the 20th century and reveal the crucial contribution of individual memory in the artistic quest for formal diversity, spiritual inspiration, and ethical living.
[Dissertation available for order from UMI Dissertation Publishing/ProQuest Dissertation Express.]
Hello, Las Vegas. I’m Back for More
Who on earth, having left Las Vegas for the cool, green good life in Oregon, decides to come back to the desert? Me, that’s who. I try to explain this to myself in this week’s Vegas Seven Magazine.
With the Sun in Our Hands
Here’s a link to my Vegas Seven Magazine story on residential solar energy. The rooftop solar array hasn’t hit cultural critical mass yet, but it’s working its way into everyday consciousness. The question’s no longer whether the technology is too pie-in-the-sky, but rather “How close are we to making this stuff affordable?” It’s not for everyone yet, but we’re getting closer.
Reentry Shock 