Last night I had just swapped my earrings for my bulkiest, comfiest sweater and resigned myself to a slow, quiet Saturday night with my books and guitar when, from the Italians' room--"Nadia! You want some wine?" Equipped with my wine-jar and my tri-cultural goggles, I joined Consuelo, Iladia [Oh yeah, I found out a few weeks back, in a sitcom-worthy head-on confrontation, that though I had been addressing her as "Anatolia" for nearly a month, my roommate's name is actually Iladia. We laughed it off.] and their Russian friend Nikolai (Kolya), whom they met smoking in the staircase--which, aside from the balconies, is the only area in the dorm where smoking is allowed. It's also, incidentally, how they meet all their friends. The two of them smoke like chimneys; if I'm in for the night, I hear the door open and close in a predictable rhythm throughout the evening. Every so often they bring home acquaintances and I see them squint-eyed in the morning after carousing until the wee hours with the folks they met in the staircase. Everyone smokes in Russia, so it ends up being a really good way to meet people--the staircase is a contemporary public watering-hole.
The (metaphorical) tri-cultural goggles came in handy almost immediately, as the three of us came up against Kolya's typical Russian chauvinism in the age-old debate of women driving cars. We headed out to the staircase to continue our fight with the stabilizing affect of nicotine and "fresh" air (in my case, neither) and within moments we were joined by one, two, five students from our floor. Somebody conjured up a guitar, and suddenly Dima was growling Gogol Bordello and folk songs and classic Russian rock--and then there was a clatter from the 18th floor and a flock of Chinese boys bounded down the staircase, offering "Chinese cigarettes? Chinese cigarettes? Double luck!" to anyone who looked their direction--and steps from below and a boy from two floors below came into view, carrying his girlfriend piggyback. I called David to come up from the 6th floor to join us. And then! My Italians, back and forth from our room, brought out a bottle of wine and--another, and--another! Everyone was singing along, somehow one of the Chinese boys got the guitar and banged out some accented Nirvana, Katya with long, long blonde hair started up a primal yell. The guitar got back to Dima, Iladia reappeared with a bottle of champagne, and soon we were all on our feet, in a line with our arms around each other, kicking to the beat.
The crowd shifted, people came and went, the ruckus died to a simmer when the champagne was gone, and now Dima sat on the floor and sang us a song about our languages, declaring each "the best in the world". He stopped singing and told us to speak, each of us speak in our own language, and suddenly the staircase resonated with the polyglot echoes of Chinese, Italian, Russian, English--laid over the guitar, Dima's voice rumbled out "That Chinese language...My shitty English, my bad, bad, bad, bad Russian language..."
Five o'clock clicked into place and the party had dispersed. Just me, Katya, Kolya, Iladia, Dima, a few boys with another guitar, whose names I never caught, on the landing of the 13th floor--Consuelo had slipped off up the staircase with a 14th floor boy, David called it a night at 4 AM, everyone finished their last cigarette and emptied their glasses and slouched off to bed. The guitar ended up in my lap and I heard my voice echo around the stairwell in sudden silence as they listened and then clapped along to my "very American" Old Crow Medicine Show and Neutral Milk Hotel.
The night felt good, and when I poured myself into bed, I grinned into my feather pillows and fell asleep in instants.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
As if these were adventures
Books! A brief interlude: for a reason somewhere between convenience and nostalgia, I picked up On The Road when I finished Master & Margarita and found myself in need of a new bus-and-metro book. I've never read Kerouac before, and after Bulgakov his writing was especially refreshing in its honesty and irreverence. I flipped the pages with gusto and with each adventure I read, I got a stronger urge to document my own--as if these were adventures. But adventures or not, they don't write themselves.
Incidentally, after I finished On The Road, I skimmed an awful translation of Gorky's A Sky Blue Life and Other Stories, putting it down after the first few tales because it was clear that in Russian the writing would be beautiful, but whoever translated it did so without a trace of tact. Each sentence was stilted, in quality and clarity only a step above free online babel-fish translation. The prose came off as bald and intangible, without atmosphere or emotion. The lesson learned in throwing that aside: no matter how good the original, a good translation can make or break the deal. No wonder Nabokov caused heart palpitations in the literary world with his prose translation of Eugene Onegin--for all y'all non-Russian lit buffs, Pushkin's original was written in verse. I'd prefer a beautiful prose translation to an artless literal one , but purists were scandalized and many maintain he desecrated the novel. That said, now I'm in the first few pages of Andrey Bely's 1920's Symbolist masterpiece Petersburg--or rather Robert Maguire and John Malmstad's translation thereof. Far more appropriate reading material!
So last weekend found me in between all this, having just finished On the Road and just coming to the conclusion that A Sky Blue Life was uninteresting, and thus without a good book for the 5-hour bus ride to Pskov. Pskov! An ancient Russian city that makes America look like a bouncing baby, and to hear our guide Mikhail Ivanovich tell it, one of the most glorious cities on earth. Better than Paris, better than Tokyo--and New York? Psh, that's not even a city. And I can't really disagree with him, Pskov is pretty impressive. The oldest city we've got is what, 300 years old? 400 if you count settlements that have been no more than tourist attractions for the past century or more. St. Petersburg is 300 years old and it's considered "young" by Russian standards. It's still finding its feet. Now Pskov? Pskov has over 1,000 years under its belt. You can't dispute that for seniority.
The excursion to Pskov was one of the Bard-Smolny Cultural Events, which meant free meals, fancy lodging, and traipsing around the city with Mikhail Ivanovich all day--but there's only so much you can take of doing everything in a giant group. And our group was giant! Not only the vast majority of the American students (about 30), but also ten or twelve Russian students made the trip, as well as our program coordinators, and one gaunt, bearded Russian History professor who informed us early on that our first tour-guide--whose name I didn't catch--hadn't a shred of credibility, and spent the rest of the weekend raising his eyebrows and correcting her under his breath. Apparently she had claimed that Saint Olga founded Christianity.
We left Petersburg at 8:00 Saturday morning (and allowing an hour and a half for the commute I woke up at 6), gathering in the dawn at the feet of the largest statue of Lenin I've seen to date. Petersburg is strange in its statuary: It seems like every block in this city has its own statue of Lenin, or bust of Voltaire, or oversized anchor on a pedestal. While these seem to be the most popular themes, there are monuments to Soviet heroes tucked away everywhere in the most unlikely of places. Cosmonauts, explorers, foremen, writers--just today I came across a larger-than-life bust in military garb, perched on a craggy pedestal with a bronze camel curled sanguinely at its base: a tribute to some man who explored central Asia? All this aside, this statue of Lenin was most impressive that morning, right arm flung forward (pointing towards the glorious future of Communism, no doubt) as if the proletarian commander of the troupe of groggy, duffel-toting students clustered beneath him.
The weekend, quite frankly, was made up a series of fantastic meals at nice restaurants, interspersed with long periods of walking around and looking at ancient things. They always feed us so well as a group, especially when there are Russian students along! Lunches consist of a salad and a main course, often soup, followed inevitably by tea and usually by dessert. Most of the cultural excursions are worth going to, but even if they were entirely dull they'd be worth it for the lunch with which each one concludes. But I digress...Pskov is around 50 km from the border with Estonia, historically serving as a guard city, and is thus encircled by a millennium-old stone wall and fortress. I zoned in and out of Mikhail Ivanovich's tour and more than anything just enjoyed the crisp, clean sunlight and solemn peaceful feeling I imagined radiating from the tired old stones. There's just something about sitting on a wall that's been unchanged for over 1,000 years that put me in a quiet and unhurried mood.
Friday night after dinner I joined forces with a few of our girls and sought out the infamous Banya--a Russian tradition that's among my favorite aspects of this culture. The Banya is a public bathhouse where visitors alternate between sitting in a suffocatingly hot sauna where they beat each other with birch branches (to stimulate circulation, see?), and pouring icy cold water over themselves or jumping into a similarly icy cold pool. The process is repeated as the visitor desires. Risley: imagine Pool if it were funded by the Russian government.
We spent Sunday at Izborsk, cite of another ancient fortress and an incredible panorama spread out beneath the guard towers--rolling hills and a flat horizon, trees lazily changing their leaves on the banks of a pristine reflective lake rippled only by flocks of swans floating barely in motion. I imagine this landscape unchanged a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. The phonetics instructor Svetlana Borisovna, upon our return, told us with a note of sincere tenderness that the view from the ruins at Izborsk is, for her, the most beautiful Russian landscape, the symbol of all of Russia, the place that feels most like Homeland. I don't know if it's possible, but I imagined I felt something like that as I spread my gaze over that beautiful, serene place untouched by the heavy pace of history.
All my Russian classes are canceled this week due to some bureaucratic error in the university's system--which is a pretty standard occurrence here--but this week is as full as ever due to my inimitable talant for over-scheduling. I have Impressionism today and Photography on Friday, and I'm volunteering for the art-center Pushkinskaya, 10 on Wednesday and for the Hermitage on Tuesday. Pushkinskaya, 10 is hosting an international contemporary art festival starting next weekend, and my job is to help the non-Russian artists navigate their time here, whether that means hanging paintings, buying art supplies, or taking them to the hairdresser. After the festival starts on the 24th, I have 4 shifts a week as a дежурник, or attendant, in the gallery. Hopefully that means talking with visitors about the show, getting familiar with the pieces exhibited. I'm looking forward to meeting the artists and working so closely with them! It's really exciting having the opportunity to be involved with such important institutions in the art world. The Hermitage, though, to be honest, is far more exciting in theory than in practice--I spent an afternoon working on artists' biographies in English last week, and it felt like doing homework in Uris computer lab. At least my résumé is getting its first real field-related addition, um, ever. The Hermitage, too, is about to open a new show, on tour from the Saatchi Gallery in Britain, and I'm helping compile the information regarding that. Links, if you're interested: This is the Saatchi Gallery show, and you can find the "Level of the Sea" Festival here.
Hopefully, though, all this won't interfere with my intentions for a whirlwind trip to Estonia in the second half of the week...plans are in the works, but not concrete quite yet, so I'll put off any more detail until I've got tickets.
Incidentally, after I finished On The Road, I skimmed an awful translation of Gorky's A Sky Blue Life and Other Stories, putting it down after the first few tales because it was clear that in Russian the writing would be beautiful, but whoever translated it did so without a trace of tact. Each sentence was stilted, in quality and clarity only a step above free online babel-fish translation. The prose came off as bald and intangible, without atmosphere or emotion. The lesson learned in throwing that aside: no matter how good the original, a good translation can make or break the deal. No wonder Nabokov caused heart palpitations in the literary world with his prose translation of Eugene Onegin--for all y'all non-Russian lit buffs, Pushkin's original was written in verse. I'd prefer a beautiful prose translation to an artless literal one , but purists were scandalized and many maintain he desecrated the novel. That said, now I'm in the first few pages of Andrey Bely's 1920's Symbolist masterpiece Petersburg--or rather Robert Maguire and John Malmstad's translation thereof. Far more appropriate reading material!
So last weekend found me in between all this, having just finished On the Road and just coming to the conclusion that A Sky Blue Life was uninteresting, and thus without a good book for the 5-hour bus ride to Pskov. Pskov! An ancient Russian city that makes America look like a bouncing baby, and to hear our guide Mikhail Ivanovich tell it, one of the most glorious cities on earth. Better than Paris, better than Tokyo--and New York? Psh, that's not even a city. And I can't really disagree with him, Pskov is pretty impressive. The oldest city we've got is what, 300 years old? 400 if you count settlements that have been no more than tourist attractions for the past century or more. St. Petersburg is 300 years old and it's considered "young" by Russian standards. It's still finding its feet. Now Pskov? Pskov has over 1,000 years under its belt. You can't dispute that for seniority.
The excursion to Pskov was one of the Bard-Smolny Cultural Events, which meant free meals, fancy lodging, and traipsing around the city with Mikhail Ivanovich all day--but there's only so much you can take of doing everything in a giant group. And our group was giant! Not only the vast majority of the American students (about 30), but also ten or twelve Russian students made the trip, as well as our program coordinators, and one gaunt, bearded Russian History professor who informed us early on that our first tour-guide--whose name I didn't catch--hadn't a shred of credibility, and spent the rest of the weekend raising his eyebrows and correcting her under his breath. Apparently she had claimed that Saint Olga founded Christianity.
We left Petersburg at 8:00 Saturday morning (and allowing an hour and a half for the commute I woke up at 6), gathering in the dawn at the feet of the largest statue of Lenin I've seen to date. Petersburg is strange in its statuary: It seems like every block in this city has its own statue of Lenin, or bust of Voltaire, or oversized anchor on a pedestal. While these seem to be the most popular themes, there are monuments to Soviet heroes tucked away everywhere in the most unlikely of places. Cosmonauts, explorers, foremen, writers--just today I came across a larger-than-life bust in military garb, perched on a craggy pedestal with a bronze camel curled sanguinely at its base: a tribute to some man who explored central Asia? All this aside, this statue of Lenin was most impressive that morning, right arm flung forward (pointing towards the glorious future of Communism, no doubt) as if the proletarian commander of the troupe of groggy, duffel-toting students clustered beneath him.
The weekend, quite frankly, was made up a series of fantastic meals at nice restaurants, interspersed with long periods of walking around and looking at ancient things. They always feed us so well as a group, especially when there are Russian students along! Lunches consist of a salad and a main course, often soup, followed inevitably by tea and usually by dessert. Most of the cultural excursions are worth going to, but even if they were entirely dull they'd be worth it for the lunch with which each one concludes. But I digress...Pskov is around 50 km from the border with Estonia, historically serving as a guard city, and is thus encircled by a millennium-old stone wall and fortress. I zoned in and out of Mikhail Ivanovich's tour and more than anything just enjoyed the crisp, clean sunlight and solemn peaceful feeling I imagined radiating from the tired old stones. There's just something about sitting on a wall that's been unchanged for over 1,000 years that put me in a quiet and unhurried mood.
Friday night after dinner I joined forces with a few of our girls and sought out the infamous Banya--a Russian tradition that's among my favorite aspects of this culture. The Banya is a public bathhouse where visitors alternate between sitting in a suffocatingly hot sauna where they beat each other with birch branches (to stimulate circulation, see?), and pouring icy cold water over themselves or jumping into a similarly icy cold pool. The process is repeated as the visitor desires. Risley: imagine Pool if it were funded by the Russian government.
We spent Sunday at Izborsk, cite of another ancient fortress and an incredible panorama spread out beneath the guard towers--rolling hills and a flat horizon, trees lazily changing their leaves on the banks of a pristine reflective lake rippled only by flocks of swans floating barely in motion. I imagine this landscape unchanged a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. The phonetics instructor Svetlana Borisovna, upon our return, told us with a note of sincere tenderness that the view from the ruins at Izborsk is, for her, the most beautiful Russian landscape, the symbol of all of Russia, the place that feels most like Homeland. I don't know if it's possible, but I imagined I felt something like that as I spread my gaze over that beautiful, serene place untouched by the heavy pace of history.
All my Russian classes are canceled this week due to some bureaucratic error in the university's system--which is a pretty standard occurrence here--but this week is as full as ever due to my inimitable talant for over-scheduling. I have Impressionism today and Photography on Friday, and I'm volunteering for the art-center Pushkinskaya, 10 on Wednesday and for the Hermitage on Tuesday. Pushkinskaya, 10 is hosting an international contemporary art festival starting next weekend, and my job is to help the non-Russian artists navigate their time here, whether that means hanging paintings, buying art supplies, or taking them to the hairdresser. After the festival starts on the 24th, I have 4 shifts a week as a дежурник, or attendant, in the gallery. Hopefully that means talking with visitors about the show, getting familiar with the pieces exhibited. I'm looking forward to meeting the artists and working so closely with them! It's really exciting having the opportunity to be involved with such important institutions in the art world. The Hermitage, though, to be honest, is far more exciting in theory than in practice--I spent an afternoon working on artists' biographies in English last week, and it felt like doing homework in Uris computer lab. At least my résumé is getting its first real field-related addition, um, ever. The Hermitage, too, is about to open a new show, on tour from the Saatchi Gallery in Britain, and I'm helping compile the information regarding that. Links, if you're interested: This is the Saatchi Gallery show, and you can find the "Level of the Sea" Festival here.
Hopefully, though, all this won't interfere with my intentions for a whirlwind trip to Estonia in the second half of the week...plans are in the works, but not concrete quite yet, so I'll put off any more detail until I've got tickets.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
And October already!
From a letter to someone dear:
I've been here for 6 weeks already, and the stories are piling up. I'm stifled under them and in one part of my heart I wish I could give them all to you now, but the clock's ticking down to morning and they're already too backed up, and even in two languages I haven't enough words or the right ones to tell you everything. Another piece of me doesn't want to waste them in empty cyber-space Helvetica: isn't it better to save them up for that illusive SomeDay when I'll call you up and time will graciously stop so we can share everything that we've been missing in each other's lives.
Sunday I went to the opera on one of our many "Cultural Excursions"--or, more aptly put our "Tourist Free-Time". We had third-balcony seats in the Mikhailovsky Theatre to see Iolanta, a Tchaikovsky opera about a king who hides from his blind daughter the fact that she's blind. I think I would have enjoyed it more if they didn't have a clock above the stage for me to glance at every ten minutes or so, if my thoughts didn't keep drifting away from the incomprehensible sung dialogue (incomprehensible because no word, in any language, can be understood when sung on a high C) to the coat check, where my violin was waiting on a bottom shelf. Before the last strains of applause had died away (granted, we applauded for around 10 minutes) I dashed out with the peremptory goodbyes, caught a late bus to Театральная Площадь, "Theatre Square", and walked a few blocks to catch the end of a jam session that had started an hour before. This weekend there was an experimental music festival at the Манэж Gallery/performance space and they were closing Sunday night with an open jam. I wandered in with some friends (Jason and Ben, and I'd love to tell you about them, but this is not the paragraph for introductions) on Saturday, listened to the concert, and afterward talked to a boy who'd been setting up the sound. "We only have 8 channels on the mixer, but anyone is welcome." We communicated only in 2nd languages, my broken Russian perhaps equaling the English he insisted on speaking.
I made it in time for a few jams, some electro-acoustic noise that, frankly, was a little disappointing. What we needed most was a beat to center ourselves around, too many melodic instruments vying for attention--violin (mine, and I tried to take it easy), trumpet, sax, guitar--not enough structure. A few older guys on hand-drums, but when they didn't succeed in establishing a pulse after several tries, they packed up their drums and went backstage to smoke cigarettes and sullenly kick at the ground. The horn man improvised wildly without any sense of rhythm, the guitarist strummed half-assedly with too much distortion. Devin would have set them straight with a nice groove. Still, jam is better than no jam, and I gave that same blond boy my email address and asked him to let me know if they get together again to make some noise. The guitarist, speaking very jaggedly but clearly wanting to say something to me, managed "Next time it will be better," in English as I packed away my violin, and I walked to a nearby bus stop with a smile on my face despite the wind and my feet aching in my opera heels. But the bus didn't come, so I flagged down a gypsy cab, that is to say a random car, and haggled a ride to the metro station for 50 roubles, or $1.50, or more simply a price that a foreigner never gets. I felt Russian. ^_^
You see what it takes just to write down the story of one night? And every day I'm doing things I want to write down. Every day I'm wishing I had the time to tell you everything. For example: yesterday I went to a poetry reading, again with Jason and Ben, and sat in the corner of the room drinking in the words and my jasmine green tea (which I spilled in my lap), listening more for rhythm, taste, and texture than lexical meaning. I saw Пётр Швецов there--one of my printmaking instructors. He and I have bumped into each other twice times now in this big city, once at a gallery opening and again last night. He's an interesting fellow, he looks like Pushkin, with giant sideburns and violently curly hair and a grave, piercing expression, always carrying his bicycle seat under one arm to keep it dry (or un-stolen). We didn't speak last time we met, just inclined our heads at each other in the ubiquitous gesture of Russian politeness--but in a city of 5 million you can't ignore it when someone keeps turning up, so we said a few words before parting ways. I hope he does keep turning up; I'd love to have someone in the art scene to whom I say more than hello and goodbye.
So much has happened! I've got to get on top of my game and get these stories out before they disappear like the dreams I don't remember.
I've been here for 6 weeks already, and the stories are piling up. I'm stifled under them and in one part of my heart I wish I could give them all to you now, but the clock's ticking down to morning and they're already too backed up, and even in two languages I haven't enough words or the right ones to tell you everything. Another piece of me doesn't want to waste them in empty cyber-space Helvetica: isn't it better to save them up for that illusive SomeDay when I'll call you up and time will graciously stop so we can share everything that we've been missing in each other's lives.
Sunday I went to the opera on one of our many "Cultural Excursions"--or, more aptly put our "Tourist Free-Time". We had third-balcony seats in the Mikhailovsky Theatre to see Iolanta, a Tchaikovsky opera about a king who hides from his blind daughter the fact that she's blind. I think I would have enjoyed it more if they didn't have a clock above the stage for me to glance at every ten minutes or so, if my thoughts didn't keep drifting away from the incomprehensible sung dialogue (incomprehensible because no word, in any language, can be understood when sung on a high C) to the coat check, where my violin was waiting on a bottom shelf. Before the last strains of applause had died away (granted, we applauded for around 10 minutes) I dashed out with the peremptory goodbyes, caught a late bus to Театральная Площадь, "Theatre Square", and walked a few blocks to catch the end of a jam session that had started an hour before. This weekend there was an experimental music festival at the Манэж Gallery/performance space and they were closing Sunday night with an open jam. I wandered in with some friends (Jason and Ben, and I'd love to tell you about them, but this is not the paragraph for introductions) on Saturday, listened to the concert, and afterward talked to a boy who'd been setting up the sound. "We only have 8 channels on the mixer, but anyone is welcome." We communicated only in 2nd languages, my broken Russian perhaps equaling the English he insisted on speaking.
I made it in time for a few jams, some electro-acoustic noise that, frankly, was a little disappointing. What we needed most was a beat to center ourselves around, too many melodic instruments vying for attention--violin (mine, and I tried to take it easy), trumpet, sax, guitar--not enough structure. A few older guys on hand-drums, but when they didn't succeed in establishing a pulse after several tries, they packed up their drums and went backstage to smoke cigarettes and sullenly kick at the ground. The horn man improvised wildly without any sense of rhythm, the guitarist strummed half-assedly with too much distortion. Devin would have set them straight with a nice groove. Still, jam is better than no jam, and I gave that same blond boy my email address and asked him to let me know if they get together again to make some noise. The guitarist, speaking very jaggedly but clearly wanting to say something to me, managed "Next time it will be better," in English as I packed away my violin, and I walked to a nearby bus stop with a smile on my face despite the wind and my feet aching in my opera heels. But the bus didn't come, so I flagged down a gypsy cab, that is to say a random car, and haggled a ride to the metro station for 50 roubles, or $1.50, or more simply a price that a foreigner never gets. I felt Russian. ^_^
You see what it takes just to write down the story of one night? And every day I'm doing things I want to write down. Every day I'm wishing I had the time to tell you everything. For example: yesterday I went to a poetry reading, again with Jason and Ben, and sat in the corner of the room drinking in the words and my jasmine green tea (which I spilled in my lap), listening more for rhythm, taste, and texture than lexical meaning. I saw Пётр Швецов there--one of my printmaking instructors. He and I have bumped into each other twice times now in this big city, once at a gallery opening and again last night. He's an interesting fellow, he looks like Pushkin, with giant sideburns and violently curly hair and a grave, piercing expression, always carrying his bicycle seat under one arm to keep it dry (or un-stolen). We didn't speak last time we met, just inclined our heads at each other in the ubiquitous gesture of Russian politeness--but in a city of 5 million you can't ignore it when someone keeps turning up, so we said a few words before parting ways. I hope he does keep turning up; I'd love to have someone in the art scene to whom I say more than hello and goodbye.
So much has happened! I've got to get on top of my game and get these stories out before they disappear like the dreams I don't remember.
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