Free Stuff

Phoebe says she wants a world in which everything is free. She doesn't like the fact that we took away allowance and now she has to earn her money by meditating or reading. I said, we wouldn't have things to buy without the "profit motive" and Richard picked up the bottle of Newman's Own Ranch Dressing on the table and thus began a conversation about who was making a profit from that one bottle, down to the farmers, the plastic producer, the label maker, the owner of Everybody's grocery store who sold it to us, and the gas companies who sold the fuel for the truck that brought it to us, etc.

Then of course, we talked about our "system" vs. how it was different under communism in Russia. (Always have to give the little Russke something for self-referral purposes, and then of course we were off on a digression about Russian blood, Uzbeki blood, etc.etc.etc.)

Rich and I saw "Eastern Promises" last night. In this town, I don't usually recommend movies this dark or this violent because this is a delicate bunch - people like to be uplifted and inspired here and abhor violence. But I really thought this was a well-done, richly textured movie, fabulous script, intense acting by Viggo Mortensen. Definitely avoid if you are averse to dark and violent movies. Slight spoiler here: I'd never seen anything like the scene in the bathhouse ever - really gritty stuff.

In one of the special featurettes on the making of the film, Viggo talks about going to Yekaterinburg to study the Russian mafia. Yekaterinburg is where Phoebe is from and is 850 miles east of Moscow and kind of the frontier. Though it is not technically Siberia, it is the gateway to Siberia which lies even further east. Yekaterinburg is in Asia... eastern slopes of the Ural mountains, which I think partly sheds light on the hidden psyche of our Miss Phoebe, who has that untameable core.

When we were there in 98, there was a lot of talk about the rich mobsters. They seemed to be the only people living in nicer housing, though we didn't see much nice housing as the whole place seems to look like Cabrini Green in Chicago - one big city of 60's style, run-down housing projects. Our driver Sasha pointed the mob owned block out to us - it was nicely landscaped and looked a bit more upscale than all the other buildings.