Lately it feels like we’re heading back into some kind of full on Cold War II with Russia or WWIII with Russia or some slimy partnership with Putin involving Russian mobsters, bad debts, shirtless badminton, a vodka haze, a Volga fog, some leaked emails and a pizzagate golden shower.

Whatever the future holds between our two bonkers governments it’s important to remember that the Russian people are not Vladimir Putin. And while he’s a KGB vampire the people and their culture have given the world some of its greatest gifts including this amazing take on A.A. Milne’s classic character, Winnie the Pooh. Shout out to Phoenix Sun Marino-Ramer for turning me on to these beautiful cartoons…

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Whenever I come up short on something to post I almost always check to see what Ezra’s found for {R}emnants. I don’t think he’s ever left me empty handed. The other day he flipped us this fascinating New Statesmen article about a new book remembering Rasputin — the enigmatic Mad Monk died 100 years ago this December 30…

His legend has been recounted many times. The peasant who became an all-­powerful figure at the Romanov court. His priapic sexuality and his rumoured affair with Tsarina Alexandra. His “burning” eyes. His ability to hypnotise and beguile. His gift for healing, which miraculously preserved the life of the haemophiliac heir, Tsarevich Alexei. His devilish influence over the imperial couple that led them into repeated mistakes, eventually precipitating the 1917 revolution. His debauchery. His supernatural power, which obliged his murderers to kill him not once, but thrice – with poisoned pink cakes, with gunshots at point-blank range and eventually by drowning him.

Read the whole article at the link above, and look back at the mysterious life and stubborn death of Rasputin with the 1996 film Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny starring the late, great Alan Rickman as the Mad Monk…

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Growing up during the second half of the Cold War, when I was a child the Soviet Union was notable for two reasons: nuclear weapons and censorship. That’s about all I really knew: the Russians and citizens of their satellites can’t read or watch or print what they want. Also they have enough warheads to make our assured destruction one of the mutual sort.

I know I’m constantly posting stuff from Open Culture here, but that site is so smart and their free-to-watch/read/listen to finds are a kind of palette cleanser for the shitty mall that most of the internet has become. I came across another great find on the site today, one that put me back in mind of those nights when I couldn’t sleep because I was worried about nuclear annihilation. You know — childhood for Generation X. Here’s a bit about Glass Harmonica, the only animated film ever banned in the Soviet Union…

At first glance, one would think The Glass Harmonica would fit right into the long tradition of Soviet propaganda films begun by Vertov. As the opening titles state, it aims to show the “boundless greed, police terror, [and] the isolation and brutalization of humans in modern bourgeois society.” And yet, the film offended censors due to what the European Film Philharmonic Institute calls “its controversial portrayal of the relationship between governmental authority and the artist.” There’s more than a little irony in the fact that the only fully censored Soviet animation is a film itself about censorship.

The central character is a musician who incurs the displeasure of an expressionless man in black, ruler of the cold, gray world of the film. In addition to its “collage of various styles and a tribute to European painting”—which itself may have irked censors—the score by Alfred Schnittke “pushes sound to disturbing limits, demanding extreme range and technique from the instruments.” (Fans of surrealist animation may be reminded of 1973’s French sci-fi film, Fantastic Planet.) Although Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s film represents the effective beginning and end of surrealist animation in the Soviet Union, only released after perestroika, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a brilliantly realized example of the form.

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Religion is all fun and games until someone takes their mythology too literally and then takes it to the squad car, the pulpit or the White House. It’s fun to make fun of fundamentalism, but when it comes to The Apocalypse, these playas ain’t playin’. The Daily Beast has the bad news…

It’s the end of the world as they know it. So why do evangelicals worry so much?
Say “evangelical Christian,” and most people will probably think of Biblical fundamentalism, and opposition to the sexual revolution, feminism, LGBT equality, evolution, science, and secularism of all sorts. Historian Matthew Avery Sutton, however, wants you to think of something else: the End Times.

Today, fully 77 percent of U.S. evangelicals believe that we are living in the End Times, the last period before Christ returns to Earth to judge us all. That’s compared with 40 percent of Americans, and 51 percent of Protestants overall—still high numbers, when you think about it, but imagine a huge crowd at a mega-church or Christian Right political event. Three quarters of those people believe the end of the world is nigh.

Sutton’s new book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, argues that this belief is not incidental to the evangelical movement, but central to it. Focusing on the birth of fundamentalism (roughly, the 1880s through 1940s), Sutton marshals quotation after quotation from the leaders of the movement.

For example: “We are on the brink of a world catastrophe and impending judgment,” said Billy Graham, who also asked, “Are the last days here?” way back in 1949.

Perhaps more disturbingly, Ronald Reagan said privately in 1971 that, “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.” One wonders if his subsequent battles with the “Evil Empire” were animated by this belief.

And the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, which calculated the year of the apocalypse to be—wait for it—1988.

I admit, it’s hard not to read American Apocalypse without smirking at a century of such failed prophecies. Will we ever learn?

Check out the link above for the rest of the story. In the meantime, here’s Dennis Hopper and Francis Ford Coppola trying to bring on my favorite apocalypse…

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As any fan of the Coincidence Control Network knows, we’ve been following the Pussy Riot story very closely since the band/action art collective’s infamous performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012. Although the podcast has committed itself to being a weekly at this point, we’ve experienced a number of technical difficulties that have made our reports more erratic just at a point when the Pussy Riot story has had some major developments.

Here’s the back story: On February 21, 2012 Pussy Riot performs their “Punk Prayer” at the cathedral and by that evening a video of the song has gone viral on the internet. The performance accuses Vladimir Putin of being a tyrant and warns against corrupt ties between Putin and the Orthodox Church. The girls are famous. Their feminist, anti-Putin message is heard around the world and their colorful, knitted balaclava masks become iconic.

In March, 3 of the members of the group are arrested. They are convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Yekaterina Samutsevich is set free, but Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina are sent to separate prisons to serve 2 year sentences. An international backlash pressures Putin to free the girls and on December 23, 2013 they are released from prison in a gesture that is widely seen as a PR stunt in preparation for the coming Winter Olympics in Russia.

So where did Pussy Riot come from? The Wiki has a nice breakdown:

The group cites punk rock and Oi! bands Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects, Sham 69 and The 4-Skins as their main musical influences. The band also cite American punk rock band Bikini Kill, Karen Finley and the Riot grrrl movement of the 1990s as inspirations. They stated:

Tolokonnikova, her husband Pyotr Verzilov, and Samutsevich were all members of the anarchist art collective “Voina” from the group’s early days in 2007, until an acrimonious split in 2009. Following the split, they formed a separate Moscow-based group, also named “Voina”, saying that they had as much right to use this name as Voina founder Oleg Vorotnikov. Pussy Riot is usually considered to be an offshoot of the “Moscow faction” of Voina.

“Voina” is Russian for “War.”

True to their punk/anarchist roots, the band is now resisting efforts to “brand” its image. They’re also claiming that their musical projects may be abandoned in favor of more direct political actions. Here’s The Wall Street Journal‘s take:

“Talking about the brand isn’t really interesting to me,” Ms. Tolokonnikova said.

“We can promote our cause without playing any shows,” Ms. Alyokhina said. “And we will never play any shows for money.”

Even if the band won’t promote their brand, Tolokonnikova was fresh out of prison when she posed for a slide show on the Trend Brands fashion retail site, modeling clothes and returning a favor. Again, from WSJ:

On Tuesday, Ms. Tolokonnikova posted a link to the spread on her Facebook page with the note: “My cool capitalist friends, Trend Brands, supplied me with clothes during the long days at penal colonies where the internal regulations allowed me to freely wear clothes brought by relatives.”

For the best account of the Pussy Riot story I’ve seen yet, watch the documentary film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer on my YouTube Channel

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