Hello and welcome to Russian Redhead Unhinged, a newsletter written by a cosmopolitan Russian singer who despises political gossip and loves mangoes, bonding, and deep conversations. This newsletter was born out of my desperate need for sanity. Having lived in the States forever, I never thought about my Russianness too much even though I was at one point suspected of being a spy (by humorless robots, after being set up by an evil abusive ex who wanted to disappear me). But recently, people like me became the hated enemy, and I have no choice but to object vocally. Now I am writing a book called “Problematic Content: A Diary of a Russian Redhead.” Please consider becoming a paying subscriber. For a price of a cup of coffee a month, you will get access to the chapters as I am writing them as well as to the brand new podcast. I am an annoyed Russian, but I still believe in the power of love.
The world is nuanced. People are complex. Social media is mostly primitive and unbearable.
I have never figured out how to package my various interests as a neat list, so here is a disorganized heap of them:
For practical reasons, I am concerned about the attack on the environment, on my body, and on the physical integrity and well-being of many, many living creatures with whom I share this planet.
[My focus is not on corporate environmenatlism—which I don’t quite trust—but on cause and effect as they exist in the physical world, as far as my senses allow me to understand it. I am cynical about the intentions of people with power. Our spectacle-oriented culture tends to obfuscate even the most vital aspects of life and to castrate even the noblest of intentions. Nature has been under an attack by ambitious egomaniacs for centuries now. Each iteration of them comes up with new ways to bully and spin. Each iteration of them comes up with new ways to train us to act against our best interests. Some promote abuse of nature for the sake of “religion,” some do it for the sake of “progress.” Observing this abuse is humiliating. But as a Soviet expat, I know that one day, the lying television will break, the apparatchiks will be laughed out of the room, and we will be free again, in a world that operates according to the laws of physics.]
For existential reasons, I am appalled by the abuse of language.
[The world troubled. It is impossible for any one human being to address or even consider everything that is wrong with this place. The reason I feel so strongly about protecting the sanctity of language is because language shapes our reality, and when things are named correctly, it is much harder for charlatans to mess with people’s heads or to trick people into acting against their best interests. As a human being, I care about harmony and happiness. As an artist, I care about otherworldly beauty and raw emotions. I think that destructive linguistic trickery should be brought to light, especially when abusers of language pretend to be public servants and helpers. The battle against toxic linguistic obfuscation is the battle I have chosen to fight in the first person.]
For professional reasons, I care about intellectual property and artists’ rights.
[Over the past two decades, musicians, photographers, writers, and other creative professionals have been mercilessly downgraded by Big Tech companies. The big shots at the Googles, the Amazons, and the Spotifies of the world have crossed every line of professional human decency that is important to me. They have purposely destroyed the way for musicians outside of the one percent to make a sustainable income from selling music (hello, unlimited free content by impoverished creative laborers that can be used to train AI and to collect people’s data). They have been lobbying and bullying American and European governments to keep the legal status quo from 1998 that allowed for it in the first place. They mess with the environment and human health by mining toxic materials, using child labor, and spreading digital addiction. They don’t care if we all live or die (kind of a common trend for large corporations), as long as they get to run the world in which people are merged with machines. They abuse language like crazy via potent and all-pervasive propaganda. They certainly work with the state to promote the state agenda, Soviet Union style. They censor what they want to censor, and they allow what they want to allow. And Facebook has deleted my Russian mother’s profile that I created for her. Not once but at least five times! Clearly, the photos of my mom’s cakes were undermining the American democracy. I get it.]
For personal reasons, I detest the xenophobia against Russians.
[I am Russian. This new Cold War has been exhausting. I am beyond tired of being looked at with suspicion. I am beyond tired of having to defend my heritage from pretend intellectuals who are mixing my people with dirt. I say ‘pretend intellectuals” because I come from a culture that respects writers, musicians, and dissidents, and my standards for intellectual honesty are high. I was raised on the ruins of the Soviet Union which taught me to make it a point to expose myself to a wide range of opinions in order to sum up all the biases and find the evasive seed of most likely factual truth. That seed of truth is not a very popular seed at the moment! Stories about my people told by the media outlets I used to like, are driving me crazy! The NYT manhandles facts with the shamelessness of Fox News. Or the other way around, who knows. Perhaps if it didn’t impact me directly, I wouldn’t notice, and would just carry on. But it does, and I do, and dear God does it feel absurd (not to mention the tragedy of income lost to paranoia). I know that the time of hating “the Russians” will pass, and people will forget, and a new external enemy will replace my people, and then somebody else will be abused, not me.
I am saying it in this cruel and absurd way on purpose. Maybe you’ll feel something. Please feel something. Please.]