mono

From Facial Humilation, the feature story in Issue #188 of eXile, a Moscow-based alternative newspaper, discovered via Joel Biroco:

Driving up in a new BMW with a model girlfriend, bodyguard, manager and Gucci suit; you never really know if you'll make the grade. If you don't have the connections it takes to get a club card, your fate hinges on the whims of the club's art director, that hateful, bloated coke addict that presides over the doors at every Moscow club.

To defeat the art director, we must first understand the art director. What motivates him, and how did he so skillfully hone his ability to destroy egos?

The classic art director had to crawl before he could stand. He crawled his way through endless humiliations, sucking up to every club owner and fashionable socialite until at last he gained power of his own over helpless patrons. The club bosses keep him on as a model of the possible rewards available for others wishing to prostrate themselves before Moscow's Svetskye. The art director occupies a middling rank among Moscow's aristocracy, the equivalent perhaps of a Collegiate Assessor under the Tsar. To really understand this character reread The Inspector General and note how eager Anton Antonovich is to please his superiors. After so many decades and so much turmoil, Moscow still resembles Gogol's caricature of provincial Russia.

Actually, art directors are even more ruthless than Gogol's mid-rank clerks because the art director's path to success is an even more savage one. It's the law of the jungle; those who were hazed the worst, subjected to the most brutal dedevshino, become the cruelest when power is in their hands. After all that groveling, the art director avenges his shame by punishing the peons that remind him of his former self.

[...]

It's only natural that Zima, which is probably Moscow's most exclusive club these days, has the most hateful guy manning the door. He looks the part: he wears all black, although it doesn't hide the fact that he's starting to get fat, and has a weak chin, a mole-like smirk and an earpiece connecting his mobile phone. His gaze is always floating a couple of inches above everybody's heads, scanning the horizon for someone important so he can curry favor with them. He never speaks more than a couple of words with anybody; the people he refuses entrance to are beneath him, whereas the people he lets through wouldn't waste their time on him. So Pasha occupies a precarious position, in which his only power or joy comes from denying people.