The Year in Pictures 2011

The annus horribilis of 2011 is coming to a close – a year that will go down as one of dramatic upheaval and revolution alongside 1789, 1848, 1917, 1989, and now, this year. In Egypt, young revolutionaries overthrew the government of Hosni Mubarak after 31 years of subservience to a one-party state bolstered by an omnipresent muhabarata, or secret service, further bolstered by an overreaching military, after Egyptians witnessed similar events in Tunisia lead to the removal of that country’s former leader Ben Ali. Consequently, the domino theory made a surprise return as events in Egypt triggered revolts elsewhere in Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Of these, only Libya’s leader fell after rebels received aerial support from NATO war planes; Qaddafi was found hiding in a drainage canal near his hometown of Sirte (or Surt, depending on your news source and spelling) and subsequently dragged through the streets, sodomized with a knife and otherwise tormented before being shot in the head. In the Libyan conflict three photographers lost their lives, including Chris Hondros who was the first ever news and conflict photographer willing to sit down and meet with me about the profession of photojournalism and talk to me about his career and the one I had yet to really embark on, with only one internship, one fellowship, and a freelance gig in Ethiopia under my belt. He was a nice man and it was nice of him to pick up that round of drinks in late 2007 at the Downtown Bar and Grill on Court Street in Brooklyn, which included two Aldaris Latvian beers for me, and happens to be where I found myself eating lunch with a friend before his memorial service, an image of which is included in this year’s best of images, a small gesture of thanks for the support and inspiration while Chris was still around creating images. Stateside, things similarly devolved after a sit-in demonstration began on Wall Street, spawning similar movements first across America and then throughout the world. Who knows precisely where the world is going in 2012, but with few leaders of genuine mass support around among the political class or the activists in opposition, it is all the more difficult to say much more than come what may, it will come.

Most of these stories, though, other photographers, closer to events, told better. For me, this was a year of observation and learning. I received a master’s degree in Georgetown in May in security studies after spending months holed up in my Brooklyn apartment reading for my master’s thesis on military-media relations in the United States the nonfiction of three defining conflicts in recent U.S. history: the Second World War, Vietnam, and the post-September 11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this time, I covered a sea change in the politics of my hometown of Chicago as Mayor Richard M. Daley, whom many believed would be “mayor for life” since he served 22 years in office just as his father, Richard J. Daley, who died in 1976 in office after serving 21 years as mayor of Chicago. The younger Daley was replaced by his chosen successor, Rahm Emanuel, the former White House Chief of Staff who resigned from the position and was subsequently replace by Richard M. Daley’s brother William “Bill” Daley. Following my graduation from Georgetown, I spent several months drifting and couch surfing, first in Chicago, then in the Czech Republic (thank you to all of my amazing friends who put me up, put up with me and supported me in this time – I owe each of you for the piece of sanity and sleeping space you provided), I moved to Baku, Azerbaijan with the assistance of a Fulbright grant in photography to begin work on a year-long project documenting the role of women in Azerbaijan. Included in this year’s portfolio of my best work is a sneak peak at a few of my favorite images from the project this fall. I hope you enjoy and I hope, as a new year’s resolution, to be moving more and more towards the center of global and geopolitical events in not just the coming year but the year’s ahead.

Happy new year and see you in 2012!

Bakou avoir 20 ans au pays de l’or noir
Madame Figaro
Deember 26, 2011, p. 90-93
Photos by Amanda Rivkin.

Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011
The New Inquiry
December 18, 2011, 5:44PM
by Amanda Rivkin

Where are the great men? Are we beyond the point of elevating the individual over the group, or are there simply no more individuals? Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer, has warned for more than a decade of the emergence of “leaderless jihad” as terrorist movements spawn violent individuals. But lately his idea has been turned on its head, as the movement for freedom attempts to override the putsch for security. It seems there are no more barriers between the secure, the secured, and the guardians of their security; it is all the same anarchy, brutality, violence, and havoc. There is the elite and then there is everyone else. Enter Vaclav Havel.

The words of a Czech man were forwarded to me this afternoon, and they hit me like a cold sheet: “Yep, the last great man.” Every obituary printed today mentions Havel’s achievements: playwright and poet, artist, intellectual, and dissident — but these are titles. More important, he was an inmate who could only forsake the cell-block walls and bars later because he lived long enough to see the cafes and meet the Western intellectuals who idealized him, because he lived in a parallel time and knew moral courage as more than mere words.

In Sageman’s analysis, individuals are inspired by violence done in the name of a collective. In Havel’s world, the antithesis of Sageman’s, individual creative acts spawn a collective, which together can challenge and — inshallah and man willing — destroy an oppressive system. Havel did not create the guidelines of creative defense, nor did he spawn every activist who was tired of a system in which every last piece of bread must be saved because the proverbial rainy day is, in fact, every day.

Rather, Havel embodied the guidelines of creative defense with wit, wisdom, and the shortcomings of a man. He inspired people with a bold algorithm, a mantra really: living in truth. In an era of cryptic truths, so too was the very notion of “living in truth”. After 1989, he became the first anti-political president of the Czech Republic and the planet; he remains so to this day the bearer of a political legacy not so much shrouded in failure as indifference to power. Yet, he was never powerless, not for a moment.

Who in New York, Baku, or its affiliate, well-to-do cities of East and West dares brave the consequence for something greater than a slogan, or greater than themselves? To be a dissident has reached the point of cliché if only because human rights is all too often the case of a competing elites, alienated from “the people”; to be imprisoned does not necessarily mean you speak for human rights, but it does mean, if only for a moment, that you spoke for yourself. Yet in many societies, this remains a grave crime. To do so creatively, brilliantly, and in a way in which the humor never fades from the voice, the laughter never subsides, and the constant cackle is one that echoes in the executioner’s chamber as opposed to in society, the inmate’s cell and among those who have struggled to know the difference between the two — this is the gift Havel gave.

As a photographer, I seek out moments that reveals something apart from the constant and continuous flow of time. Whether in Baku or Istanbul or even New York, Washington, or Chicago, discussing the tumultuous events of this year, many people, even among the young, are reluctant to support anarchy over stability. But what is this stability? Few dare challenge stability, not with confrontation but rather with creativity, an act that in Havel’s time alone begged for confrontation. Havel was imprisoned for it. Like the smartest former inmates I know, he became a better man for it.

The overall message nowadays seems all too clear, echoing of earlier, broken times: come what may, it will come.

Amanda Rivkin is a Fulbright grant recipient in photography based in Azerbaijan. She has previously worked across the former Eastern bloc in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Her portfolio can be viewed online at www.amandarivkin.com.

Explorers Bio
Amanda Rivkin
Photographer
Young Explorers Grants, Expeditions Council Grant

Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
Current City: Baku, Azerbaijan

What did you want to be when you were growing up?
When I was very small, maybe seven years old, I told my godmother I wanted to be a crane, and when she asked what kind of crane, I said an operating crane like on a construction site. As a teenager, I thought I would be a writer, which is what led me to go to the college I eventually went to, Sarah Lawrence College, although I waited until the last possible moment of my senior year to take a writing class, because the curriculum itself was designed for writers, with no exams and independent research projects to complement the work in every course. This is what led me to journalism school, where I discovered by wonderful accident my true passion, photography.

How did you get started in your field of work?
I was studying print journalism at Columbia University when I enrolled in a short course mainly for writers who would be asked to take an occasional picture for their publications. I do not think I ever put down a camera after that.

What inspires you to dedicate your life to photography?
There are a ton of ups and downs in photojournalism and life generally, and the pay, especially when you are starting out, is often meager, but the strangest things keep me going. I remember being at the Visa Pour L’image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France, for the first time this year and there is one café where everyone goes to drink in the evening, Café de la Poste, and often this group includes some of the world’s finest conflict photographers. This café is in a square named after one of the bloodiest battles in history, certainly in Europe: Place de la Verdun, where 300,000 men lost their lives in a senseless war of attrition that lasted 11 months in 1916, during the Great War, the war to end all wars. I wonder how many people at Café de la Poste know this history and so for me such small examples of an ironic and ephemeral value continuously serve to remind me of the value of photography. Even if we allow ourselves as humans and nations to make the same mistakes, we should at least have a record and knowledge so that if we look the other way on lessons of the past, it is our decision and something we or others can return to later to study and grow from. I have come to see photography maybe in the vein of ancient epics, for a good photo is crafted like poetry.

What’s a normal day like for you?
A normal day is hard to define! I love shooting news photography. I love the adrenalin of racing someplace, the competition of trying to make the best picture and file before the other photographers. But I also love the quieter assignments and projects that allow for a longer time to meditate on a certain topic and gather research and that work far more as a choose-your-own-adventure, within the confines of the selected story of course! If I can, I start the day with a shower and a cup of coffee or tea, but if I am someplace strange or rural where this is not possible, then I go without. If I can, I like to read or research late into the night.

Do you have a hero?
I have so many people I consider inspirational but the word “hero” scares people, especially the living and particularly me I think! When I was younger, it was the work of poets and musicians that inspired me greatly, singers and songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs and the poetry of Federico García Lorca, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire.

In photography, I am drawn to people who have produced work over a long period of time that I think has an almost epic depth to it: Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Gilles Peress, James Nachtwey, Lynsey Addario, but I feel like I am not naming every one!

Politically I am drawn to those individuals whose ambitions were revealed over the course of a long, moral struggle but who personally never sought power, men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Adam Michnik, a former student agitator, later imprisoned by the communists in Poland who created and remains editor to this day of the first free and independent newspaper after the transition in 1989, Gazeta Wyborcza.

What has been your favorite experience in the field? The most challenging?
My favorite experience to date in the field was on my National Geographic Young Explorers Grant when I had a peculiar dream come true of visiting and photographing Azerbaijan’s offshore oil fields in the Caspian, where the earliest oil discoveries were made in the 19th century and where oil is still pumped to this day. Having grown up during the very twilight years of the Soviet Union in America, it felt like the very definition of forbidden. The most challenging moments for me always come with keeping my composure to work when I am confronted with something that is just egregiously wrong. Sometimes I can hold it together long enough to get home and other times I end up crying alongside the people I am photographing.

What are your other passions?
I love cooking and literature, theater, and art.

What do you do in your free time?
What free time? Most of my free time is spent reading and researching but also looking at creative works in other fields like literature, theater, and art to inspire my own.

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Related:
“At Five Years Old, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture,” National Geographic News (June 8, 2011).

“CHICAGO—Rod Blagojevich, the ousted Illinois governor whose three-year battle against criminal charges became a national spectacle, was sentenced to 14 years in prison Wednesday, December 7, 2011, one of the stiffest penalties imposed for corruption in a state with a history of crooked politics. Blagojevich’s 18 convictions included allegations of trying to leverage his power to appoint someone to President Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat to raise campaign cash or land a high-paying job.”

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(FILES) Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich attends a press conference at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, on February 15, 2008. according to the Chicago Tribune on December 9, 2008 Blagojevich was taken into federal custody at his North Side home this morning. The governor’s administration has been the subject of a federal investigation into whether contracts and jobs were being traded for contributions to Blagojevich’s campaign fund. The investigation has been expanded to include allegations of wrongdoing in selecting a successor for President -elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat. AFP PHOTO/Amanda Rivkin/FILES (Photo credit should read Amanda Rivkin/AFP/Getty Images)

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(NYT36) SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Jan. 29, 2008 — ILL-GOV-IMPEACH-3 — Gov. Rod Blagojevich goes over his notes in his office in Springfield, Ill., on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009. Blagojevich later delivered a dramatic closing argument in his impeachment trial at the Capitol. (Amanda Rivkin/The New York Times)

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(NYT41) SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Jan. 29, 2008 — ILL-GOV-IMPEACH-8 — Gov. Rod Blagojevich awaits his jet’s takeoff after delivering a dramatic closing argument in his impeachment trial at the Capitol in Springfield, Ill., on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009. Blagojevich was convicted, thrown out of office and barred him from ever holding public office in the state again. (Amanda Rivkin/The New York Times)

Pictured: A World at 7 Billion
The New York Times Lens Blog
December 7, 2011, 5:00 am
By KERRI MACDONALD

Here it is: A visual time capsule, capturing our world at seven billion people — and counting. Below, you’ll find a virtual quilt that weaves together about 400 of the more than 1,000 photographs we received. There is little rhyme or reason to the order you see. We sought a mega-snapshot of our world — different regions, subjects, viewpoints.

There is a serendipitous beauty in the chaos.

What will these photos tell the future generation — including some of the newborns who were photographed by Lynsey Addario on Oct. 31 — about our world? Explore the gallery using the search box just below this text. Browse by name, location, or — if you want to get creative — randomly, by word. One of our most successful searches was “hope,” which brings together the optimism we found in so many pictures.

[...]

View my image, “A Dissident Remarries,” featured as #3 of 390 images submitted by photographers working with The New York Times and readers.

For the passed two days, I was in a tiny village of Azerbaijan called Murguzalli, photographing the story of a French woman, Yvonne Botto, who was born in Monaco in 1928 and raised in the town of La Fayet, France. As a young woman in her teenage years she met, and fell in love with an Azeri man who had escaped from a German prisoner of war camp and attended her father’s clandestine communist meetings. They wed in France and soon his homeland beckoned and he took his new wife Yvonne to his home village, a journey that lasted three months by rail in 1947 and then three days from Baku by “araba,” a homemade form of transportation much like a horse-drawn wagon that really lacks translation. Two years later, she had a son and three years later at the age of 29 her husband was dead of an unknown illness. Since her son was a Soviet citizen, she was unable to take him home with her to France, so she decided to stay and settled into a life in the Azerbaijani village of Murguzalli. By village custom, she remarried to a cousin of her former husband, had six more children and now has 30 grandchildren and 22 more great-grandchildren.

For 64 years, she lived in obscurity until flooding in her region last summer brought the story of her plight and isolation from her homeland into the media, first in Azerbaijan and then in France. She has since traveled home to France for eight days with the assistance of the French consulate in Baku and the European Azerbaijan Society, an organization with close links to the very powerful Ministry of Emergency Situations of Azerbaijan, that is also planning a film about her story. The Ministry of Emergency Situations is now building her a new home and providing for an additional home on her land. For now, though, as construction is underway, the family lives in a shell of their former home, one room, a long narrow corridor, as the rest was knocked down to make way for the new home, with five beds, a table, a television set, and a small wood burning heater in the middle.

In a village lacking much more than a post office, the family has all the food it needs to provide for itself in its yard; dairy cows, chickens, turkeys. In Murguzalli, a village lacking much else, is where we found the bird for today’s Thanksgiving festivities far away from what was once my home in Chicago or New York, for now in Baku where I am a Fulbright photography grantee. As the tendency in Azerbaijani villages is towards extreme hospitality once you have been accepted, it is truly like you are family. I did not want a free turkey, which would have no doubt been the reaction if I told them the meaning of the occasion and what the turkey would be for. It is also hard for me to accept such a large gift from people whose wealth is largely measured in terms of love in the family and livestock and ethically it would be uncomfortable.

Instead, I had to keep it a bit of a secret, so I asked my translator, Alina, to give money to our driver, Anar, who then took to solving the problem by telling the family he needed to buy a turkey for his family and asking if they could kill and gut it for him. While I was photographing the women of the family herding sheep and feeding a baby lamb, Anar was off thankfully and generously procuring our Thanksgiving turkey. Half an hour later, he returned with one of the grandchildren clutching a turkey by its legs. The family of Yvonne Botto then did a wonderful job of preparing it and I think I even learned through photographic observation how to should I ever be stuck and my previously existing city skills fail me as they did on this occasion. I am thankful for everyone in Yvonne’s family for making this Thanksgiving memorable from the start. It is also the first time I will be making a turkey on my own for Thanksgiving.

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Turkeys in the yard of Yvonne Botto, 83, in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 22, 2011.

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The grandson of Yvonne Botto Hagani Shirmammadov, 30, takes a knife from Botto’s granddaughter Hamida Shirmammadova, 26, as Botto’s great-grandson Vugar Shirmammadov, 2, looks on in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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(Center) Yvonne Botto’s grandson Hagani Shirmammadov, 30, looks around for a place to slaughter the turkey beside the family’s semi-constructed new home as other members of the family stand around in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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The grandson of Yvonne Botto Hagani Shirmammadov, 30, prepares to slaughter the turkey as Botto’s great grandson Vugar Shirmammadov, 2, looks on in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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The grandson of Yvonne Botto, Hagani Shirmammadov, 30, slaughters the turkey by cutting off its head and spilling its blood as Botto’s great grandson Vugar Shirmammadov, 2, looks on in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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The grandson of Yvonne Botto, Hagani Shirmammadov, 30, slaughters the turkey by cutting off its head and spilling its blood as Botto’s great grandson Vugar Shirmammadov, 2, looks on in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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The dead turkey after its head was cut off experiences its final tremors on the ledge of Yvonne Botto’s new, partially constructed home in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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The granddaughter of Yvonne Botto, Hamida Shirmammadova, 26, prepares the turkey for cooking by boiling it in hot water to remove its feathers as the rest of the family prepares renovations on their new home in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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The granddaughter of Yvonne Botto, Hamida Shirmammadova, 26, prepares the turkey for cooking by boiling it in hot water to remove its feathers in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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The feathers of the turkey sit in a boiling water beside a covered picnic table in the large front lawn of Yvonne Botto in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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(L-r) Jamila Shirmammadova, 58, the daughter-in-law of Yvonne Botto, and Hamida Shirmammadova, 26, the granddaughter of Yvonne Botto prepare the turkey by cleaning it and removing its innards in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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Jamila Shirmammadova, 58, the granddaughter of Yvonne Botto with the cleaned turkey takes it inside for refridgeration in Murguzalli, Azerbaijan on November 23, 2011.

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Thank you to everyone who helped, shared, cooked and feasted this Thanksgiving!  I am inspired in strange and interesting ways today and wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving!  With love from Baku, Amanda

Late Monday night Baku time, my Emphas.Is crowdfunding goal to raise $4,250 online to return to the BTC Pipeline route was met! I have enough funds to travel this winter to places and meet people whose lives have been effected by the 1,100 mile transnational oil pipeline route in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. A great many thanks to all 82 supporters who to date have leant their support to this project! Any additional funds raised now will go to expand the project to include the conflict zones that have helped determine the current pipelines geography and additional costs incurred as a result of this important study on the post-Soviet, post-Cold War reality of international energy commerce. To support the project, please visit my Emphas.Is “BTC Pipeline” project page. Thank you!

“BTC Pipeline” by Amanda Rivkin on Emphas.Is

Thirty days have passed since I began my efforts to raise $4,250 through the photojournalistic crowdfunding platform Emphas.Is to return to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline route this winter.  I am happy to announce that the goal is very much within reach and I have less than $500 to go until I meet my goal!

With crowdfunding, it is all or nothing – you meet or exceed your goal and get the money, or you fall short and you do not.  Therefore, it is imperative to keep the goal reasonable and even on the low side or risk not achieving anything.  For this reason, any additional funds beyond the stated goal will be used to expand the project and hopefully include some of the conflict zones that have helped to define the pipeline’s geography from Nagorno-Karabakh to South Ossetia and Abkhazia to Turkey’s internal conflict with its Kurdish other in the east.

Once called the most significant post-Cold War victory, BTC is the first pipeline to deliver oil and natural gas from a former Soviet Republic to the West whilst bypassing Russia and Iran.  Rewards for contributors include limited edition books and prints, so please know you will be rewarded as well!

Here is the project page:  “BTC Pipeline by Amanda Rivkin” on Emphas.Is

Direct Link: http://www.emphas.is/web/guest/discoverprojects?projectID=342

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The Economist: Eastern Approaches blog “Caspian Dreamin’”

Rounding out the past few weeks is a small feature I wrote for The Economist’s Eastern Approaches blog entitled, “Caspian Dreamin’” about two American Peace Corps volunteers and their viral hit song, “Baku State of Mind,” a parody version of the Jay-Z and Alicia Keys hit, “Empire State of Mind”. The duo was invited to try out to represent Azerbaijan next May at the Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Baku, and in a small update to The Economist blog, both ended up doing so together in the end, performing a rendition of Justin Bieber’s “Baby” for the four member judges panel at Ictimai Television Studios in Baku last week.

Here is The Economist story: “Caspian Dreamin’”

Here is the YouTube video: “Baku State of Mind”

Thank you as always for your support for my work! Look forward to updating you about my travels this coming winter along the BTC pipeline route!

Very warm regards from the Baku,

Amanda Rivkin

Soft diplomacy
Caspian dreamin’

Oct 31st 2011, 12:53 by A. R. | BAKU

WHILE the Eurovision song contest is not typically an arena in which America can compete, an unlikely hit song parodying “Empire State of Mind”, the famous Jay-Z and Alicia Keys tune, is presenting a chance for the country to participate in the contest. It is also an opportunity to witness American “soft diplomacy” at work.

The song, called “Baku State of Mind”, features retooled lyrics about the Azeri capital such as “where oil flows like honey, nothing sweeter than my money”. More surprisingly, it was written by two American Peace Corps volunteers, Brad Kessler and Tim McNaught, known to Azeri audiences as The Caspian Dreamers.

They now have a hit on their hands. On YouTube, the video-sharing site, a clip of the two performing the song boasts nearly 100,000 views—which is a lot for an Azeri act. Even most YouTube videos starring Emin Agalarov, a self-styled popstar, who has the advantage of being the husband of the Azeri president’s daughter, Leyla Aliyeva, and the son of a Russian oligarch, don’t reach that many views. But not just Azeris are in a state of mind to enjoy the song. Recently a taco dinner at the home of a senior American diplomat was interrupted so guests could enjoy the song.

A few weeks ago, the National Eurovision Committee officially invited the Caspian Dreamers to represent Azerbaijan in next year’s Eurovision song contest, which will be held in Baku (Eldar Gasimov and Nigar Jamal, better known as Ell and Nikki, won last year’s contest in Düsseldorf, Germany, with their song “Running Scared”). Should the Americans win the try-outs, and perhaps even the contest itself, it would be a welcome “bottom-up” counterpoint to the top-down orchestration prevailing in Azerbaijan (which has staged an elaborate, continent-wide public relations blitz around the contest).

Alas, it is not clear whether the duo will actually compete. With try-outs set to begin sometime in the next few weeks, only one of the Caspian Dreamers has agreed to do so and submitted the necessary paperwork.