The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

June 20, 2016
Musician Nicolay, who has performed around the world with indie bands including the Hold Steady, the World/Inferno Friendship Society, and Guignol, in addition to teaching music at Bard College in New York, attempts to merge literature, politics, travel, and punk rock into something bigger than its parts. And he succeeds, to a degree, in this account of a six-month tour in 2012 that began and ended in Kiev with runs through Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania, among others. The book often veers into rote tour diary entries despite Nicolay’s best attempts to integrate perspective into the account by bringing in other voices—notable authors such as Christopher Hitchens, experts who have written about his current location, etc.—to help tell the backstory of the places he visits. He adds a layer of depth by exploring the ways music, specifically punk music, inspire and unite the local populace. Though he’s clearly researched his destinations, there’s no real arc to the narrative, and as a result Nicolay’s journey gets to be repetitious for the reader.

June 1, 2016
Want to see the seamy side of a country? Go on tour as a rock musician.Nicolay, a multi-instrumentalist and founder of a Brooklyn collective called Anti-Social Music, combines a number of interests and skills, all serving him well in his effort to epater la bourgeoisie and see the unusual parts of little-visited nations: he is not only a master of such things as the electric banjo and the accordion, but also a self-described Slavophile and "enthusiast of Balkan music since an encounter with a bootleg cassette of the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov." A knowing reader of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), his copy of which was stolen in comparatively safe France, Nicolay conjures up all manner of scruffy types: the promoter who swears he's getting out of the business after trying to rob his moneymakers ("Can I PayPal you the money?" he pleads on getting caught in the act); a "stocky, ham-fisted, forty-five-year-old veterinarian" with a bent for weird conspiracy theories; a Romanian soundman who "played cajon, of all things, with the opening act, alongside an acoustic guitarist and a singer in a Wasted Youth T-shirt." Such figures lend themselves to lampooning and rough stereotyping, but Nicolay is mostly sympathetic and gentle; he likes the DIY spirit of the post-communist frontier, clearly, and doesn't mind a little bad food. In the end, the book would be much like what Paul Theroux might write if he played the musical saw, lived on beer and borscht, and had a sense of humor--more humor than the KGB officials, at any rate, who classified Kiss and AC/DC as punk rock and therefore suspect of aiding and comforting young Soviets of a "contrarian bent." A pleasing romp: punk in attitude but literary in execution and a fine work of armchair travel for those unwilling to strap on an accordion on the streets of Rostov for themselves.

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