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East Side Story
Monday, January 22, 2007

The long shadows in this photo - the long shadows of a soviet past hanging over you as you strive for a 21st century capitalist future. In the hotel foyer fake animal fur covers the seating and young girls with hair as black as coal drink diet coke (though they are whippet thin) and smoke cigarettes, dreaming of Cheeky Girl futures in towns where not everything is made of concrete. The men, dressed in black leather jackets and jeans with indecipherable labels, their coal black hair in pony tails, drink 40% proof brandy and think of ways in which they can make Cheeky Girls work for them.
In the Mining Museum, a man who looks like Roy Orbison shows us around the dusty exhibits, featuring photographs of the faces of unsmiling men ranked in rows and although he is speaking a language which I can't understand, I can tell they were shot - but who by? the communists or the Nazis? The Turks or the Greeks? It's a country with so much more past than future - like the world. Like me. I would like to celebrate with the people, their pride in joining the rest of us(or those who celebrate thievery), but there doesn't seem much to celebrate. The race is on for scooping up the last remnants of wealth before we disappear under a slag heap - they want to be in the race too. Why not? Capitalism is the human default mode. Survival of the cruellest.
On the way to the airport, girls who have given up being cheeky wait by the road side wearing puffa jackets and pragmatic expressions. In the bushes I glimpse a man with his trousers down. Hey ho, business as usual, girls. We'll never be stuck for a job.
8:43 AM  

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