Tag: Kino

Blood Type

Contemporary listeners of Kino’s hit album Blood Type (1988) would have had no trouble identifying the war alluded to in the title track: the Soviet-Afghan War was still ongoing. The war was one of the causes of the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse in 1991. Unless it is stopped in short order, the Trump regime’s just-as-needless war against U.S. cities will lead to the collapse of the United States. ||||| TRR

Kino, “Blood Type” (1988), English Translation

Source: TK Stuff (YouTube), 26 December 2021

The Soviet–Afghan War took place in Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989. Marking the beginning of the 47-year-long Afghan conflict, it saw the Soviet Union and the Afghan military fight against the rebelling Afghan mujahideen, aided by Pakistan. While they were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of the mujahideen’s support came from Pakistan, the United States (as part of Operation Cyclone), the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, in addition to a large influx of foreign fighters known as the Afghan Arabs. American and British involvement on the side of the mujahideen escalated the Cold War, ending a short period of relaxed Soviet Union–United States relations.

Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside, as most of the country’s cities remained under Soviet control. The conflict resulted in the deaths of one to three million Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Between 6.5 and 11.5% of Afghanistan’s population of 13.5 million people (per the 1979 census) is estimated to have been killed over the course of the Soviet–Afghan War. The decade-long confrontation between the mujahideen and the Soviet and Afghan militaries inflicted grave destruction throughout Afghanistan, and has been cited by scholars as a significant factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; it is for this reason that the conflict is sometimes referred to as “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam”.

Source: Wikipedia. The emphasis, in the last paragraph, is mine. ||||| TRR

[…]

The pretext for this war, of course, has always been a bogus premise. Yet federal agents treat it with the dogma of settled fact. But I keep wondering: How does the average CBP or ICE agent convince themselves of this? Even now, I can’t help shake the absurdity of anyone—Trump, Gregory Bovino, whomever—hoping to convince a thinking person, even themselves, to believe that places like Minneapolis have ever required an armed occupation. It’s against this genuine perplexity that I keep coming back to how these officers look and what mirrors might reflect back to them when they dress up for war.

“Anybody who’s had a fun evening on Halloween can understand what happens when somebody fully dresses up in paramilitary gear with flash-bang grenades hanging off of them,” said Peter Kraska, a justice studies professor at Eastern Kentucky University. “They’re going to walk out in public and say to themselves, ‘I am different from all these people.’ They become the enforcer. And when they look out and see the other, they see an enemy. The [paramilitary gear] gets them to react differently and think differently than they normally would.”

The role of military-style uniforms in helping the Trump administration create a theater of war where none exists cannot be overstated. It marks a stark evolution from the early days of Trump’s mass deportation plans, when plainclothed agents looked a lot like your best friend’s worst boyfriend—the guy who moved to rural Pennsylvania and discovered the basement levels of gun culture. Now, agents march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.

Consider the camouflage now ubiquitous across the cities ICE occupies. At first, the pattern’s technical science might seem like a natural extension of the Trump administration’s increasingly illegal efforts to shield the identities of the men carrying out its vision of cruelty. But the theory breaks down when you look at the urban landscapes where ICE hunts down immigrants. Simply put, wearing camo in places like Lake Street or Hyde Park defies its central aim. If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection, ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility. They want to show they are soldiers. And they want to do so to make it seem reasonable, if only to themselves, to act like an invading army.

When I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the use of military gear among ICE agents, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin responded with her own question: “Why do ICE agents wear tactical gear when they are facing rampant assaults and vehicular attacks? Is that the question you’re asking?” No, not really. But the snark with which McLaughlin replied was enough to grasp that questioning why DHS employs camo when lush woodlands do not exist in the cities its agents invade was irrelevant. They are dressing for the war they want.

What other way was there to interpret the coat of the former envoy of terror, Bovino? The commentariat spent much time deliberating its lineage, whether or not Bovino’s hulking olive garb was in fact true Nazi wear. (It turns out it was not.) But in roaming around Minneapolis in the fashions of Hugo Boss circa 1933, Bovino, who reportedly travels with his own film crew, succeeded in pushing the optics of war where it does not exist.

“What you’re seeing is the functionality of gear for legitimate, militarized purposes versus a type of postmodern, performative imagery,” Kraska said. “It makes them feel a particular way, to tap into those warrior fantasies and masculine drive of, ‘I’m a real man, I’m a real badass.’”

Federal agents stand outside the Whipple Federal Building in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 8 January 2026. Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty/Mother Jones

The same holds for the men under Bovino. These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood-type patches, despite little evidence that they would ever be needed. After all, they are in Minneapolis, an American city with American hospitals, where doctors provide blood transfusions without the help of uniform instructions, the way a soldier on a remote battlefield might actually need. Furthermore, ICE’s own data strongly undercuts the notion that the job of an ICE officer is even uniquely dangerous work. In the absence of peril, federal agents turn to costume to legitimize their presence.

[…]

Source: Inae Oh, “ICE’s Theater of War,” Mother Jones, 29 January 2026. The emphasis, in the last paragraph, is mine. ||||| TRR

Mama Anarchy

 

Kino, “Mother Anarchy”

A soldier was walking home down the street and saw these guys.
“Who’s your mama, guys?” the soldier asked the guys.

Refrain
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.

portvein

The once-ubiquitous Port 777 should not be confused with its distant Portuguese cousin. In quality and flavor, it bears more of a resemblance to Mad Dog 20/20.

All of them wore leather jackets, all of them were small,
The soldier wanted to walk on by, but it wasn’t easy.

Refrain
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.

Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.

The boys played quite a fun joke on the soldier.
They painted him red and blue, and forced him to use foul language.

Refrain
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.
Mama is anarchy, papa’s a glass of port wine.

Original lyrics courtesy of gl5.ru. Image courtesy of Soviet Visuals. Translated by the Russian Reader

Boshetunmai

 

Boshetunmai
If you ran away when you were fifteen,
It’s hard to understand the guy who went to a good school.
And if you’ve got a firm plan for your life,
Then you’re unlikely to think about anything else.

We drink tea in old apartments.
We wait for summer in old apartments,
In old apartments where there is light,
Gas, telephone, hot water,
Radio, parquet floor,
Separate toilet, brick walls.
One family, two families, three families.
Lots of closet space,
Not interested in first or last floors,
Close to the subway, downtown, downtown.

Everyone says we’re together.
Everyone says it, but few people know where.
A strange smoke comes from our pipes.
Stop! Danger zone! Brain at work!
Boshetunmai, boshetunmai, boshetunmai . . .

 

Thanks to Comrade Igor R. for the heads-up on the video.

Andrei Otraskin & Jungle

Jungle, “The Shore,” featuring Andrei Otraskin on guitar. “Musical Ring,” Leningrad TV, 1989

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Jungle was formed in 1983 in Leningrad Rock Club’s new wave milieu, continuing a local tradition of giving groups names that had to with animals and domestication. Jungle, known as Джунгли (Dzhungli) in Russia, was an exception among Aquarium, Zoo (aka Zoopark) and other prominent underground groups in Leningrad in another respect: its music was purely instrumental and its musicians cited European ”avant-progressive” Rock In Opposition musicians and American proponents of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics as their influences instead of The Velvet Underground or British new wave groups. More canonical names they mentioned were King Crimson and Oregon, which both can be heard in Jungle’s early music – Robert Fripp in its dark angularity, and Oregon in its beautiful melodicism, though contorted by a youthful punk urgency and recklessness.

The punk urgency and recklessness of the Soviet 1980s new wave groups can mostly be heard in the live recordings of the time. Studio recordings, especially in those rare cases when they were done in professional studios, tended to be sterile and timid, perhaps as a consequence of a striving for a polished, ”professional” sound, inexperience of sound engineers with this kind of music, lack of producers or audience feedback, or all these combined.

Audience feedback and excitement around the rare rock concerts was tangible. Since the 1950’s the state institutions had variously tried to ban, suppress or domesticate rock music, deemed ”anti-Soviet” in its content as well as animalistic and base by the guardians of the near-Victorian morality of the time. In March 1985 the situation was still very much in check despite the fact the Leningrad Rock Club, the centre of the nation’s rock activity, was able to hold its third annual festival in a 600-seat concert hall just a few hundred meters off the city’s main street Nevsky Prospekt. The Leningrad Rock Club was a rarity in the whole country: a rock musicians’ organisation run by musicians themselves together with officials of the club’s concert hall. It is still a moot point to what extent the KGB had been involved in the foundation of the club in 1981, how much its constant monitoring influenced the music and how much the musicians could guess about its presence. Whatever the answers to these questions are, practically nothing in the Soviet Union could be organised without the watchful eye of the secret police, and the point was in ignoring it, testing limits or sometimes winning micro power struggles.

While these struggles were palpable in and around the lyrics of other Leningrad groups like Aquarium, Zoopark, Televizor or Kino, they also extended to titles of Jungle’s compositions, such as ”Conformism” or ”The War of All Against All”, and their interviews in which they spoke of their ”fight against conformism”. Another trait shared by the early lineups of most of these groups was the presence of both virtuosos and non-musicians who could barely play their instruments in the conventional sense, but who brought grit, avantgarde ideas, or at least a whiff of anarchy into the proceedings. 

Jungle went through endless lineup changes during its entire existence from late 1983 until early 1991, with only two constant members: Andrei Otraskin, the guitarist and composer of the group, and bass player Igor Tikhomirov. A major turning point for the group occured in late 1987, when Otraskin was baptized an Orthodox Christian and ”denounced Jungle’s earlier output as demonic,” as he wrote us now in correspondence concerning the release of ”Live in Leningrad”. Tikhomirov left Jungle in late 1990 after having played simultaneously in Kino, arguably the most popular Russian rock band ever, and joined later the equally popular DDT. In the summer of 1991 Otraskin emigrated to the USA, where he formed the duo Guitar Monks with Timothy Young and released a CD called ”Songs For Oblivion” in 2000.

In 2007, the Moscow label Geometry released the double CD ”Spring In Shanghai/Six Coachmen From Casablanca”, which collects all of Jungle’s studio recordings, including the LP ”Spring In Shanghai” released by the Soviet label Melodiya in 1989. “Live in Leningrad” (usually known as “Live at Leningrad Rock Club Festival 1985”) as well as several other live recordings have circulated in Russia as bootleg cassettes, CD-R’s and recently as mp3’s. So far there is virtually no information about Jungle in English on the internet, but for Russian readers the Wikipedia article about the group will give more pointers.

source: http://www.nbresearchdigest.com/leningrad/. NB. There are several free (and out of this world) Jungle tracks available for listening (and purchase) at this link!

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Guitar Monks (Andrei Otraskin & Timothy Young), “Tulips and Palominos,”
October 10, 2002, Seattle

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Jungle, “Spring in Shanghai” and “Requiem.”
Winter Stadium and Leningrad Rock Club, Leningrad, 1988