Without paying attention, without any intention, I somehow managed to take an entire week off work. Last Thursday I left Andrey Khlobystin's Nevsky Prospekt apartment and shoved art to the back of my mind, fully intending to get back in the saddle on Monday morning, but through a string of unrelated events, Monday arrived, and then Tuesday, and then Wednesday...Monday I spent half the day getting to and from the Smolny headquarters to return a library book and ask Elena, the asst. program director, if she had any leads on finding a transcriber for my interviews. I had just gotten home from the office, around 4 PM, and was preparing myself for a line of stilted introductory phone calls, when the rest of my day was suddenly consumed by a search for bicycle wheels--
Here I must pause and explain why, precisely, I was looking for bicycle wheels. Once, I had bicycle wheels. I even had a whole bicycle! When David said his bitter farewells to this godforsaken country--once and for all!--he bequeathed me his cell phone (borrowed from Smolny) and his ancient, forest-green, Soviet-issue collapsible bike. It needed some work before I could ride it, so I locked it up in my courtyard and forgot about it entirely apart from when I would see it entering and exiting my apartment each day. At least a week went by, probably more, and each time I saw the bicycle I remembered that I needed to find a wrench and tighten the handlebars. And then one day, I pushed the door open, greeted by the suddenly not-so-familiar sight of my bike, exactly as I had left it, only WITHOUT WHEELS.
Well, as things often go with me, it's taken at least another three weeks for my search for bicycle wheels to evolve past a half-assed, disinterested effort into a full-blown investigation. The best part of the investigation has to be the fact, uncovered when I drunkenly began asking my chainsmoking neighbors if they'd seen, "by chance" any bicycle wheels lying around, that someone in the building "just happens to have" a set of wheels he might be willing to sell.
Yeah. Please, sir, sell me back my bicycle wheels. Can I get a discount for not punching you in the teeth?
Anyway, the ordeal of tracking down a bike shop, learning it would cost me over $100 to replace my wheels, and enduring the heat (St. Petersburg is hard when you can't eat ice cream) had left me so exhausted that my day was done.
And yesterday I tried, I really tried to work! I called several artists I've been meaning to get in touch with, and again today, but everyone has left town for the week, and nobody will be back until early early August. So I've thrown it all to the wind and simply embraced my free time: I'm going to Novgorod on Friday and I plan to be absolutely useless for the rest of the week. Zach Hanson, friend & compatriot from last fall, is back in town, and we have a whole lot of being useless to do while he's around.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Picnics on islands, picnics on rooftops, picnics in parks
Birthday picnics
On Thursday night, Katey & I met Mitya and schlepped out to Kammeny Island with violin & ukulele in hand to celebrate Vasya's brother's birthday. Vasya had returned unexpectedly from Moscow as a surprise for his brother; the whole family was having a picnic on the island with 6 or 8 bottles of wine and a smorgasbord of zakuski (appetizers/side dishes). I was expecting something a little more thrown-together, a little more potluck-y, a little more young-hooligans-boozing-in-the-park, so I brought homemade bruschetta and a nectarine galette (oh how I love to cook) but it was unnecessary, given how clear it was that Vasya and Daniila's mother had spent at least the last 12 hours in the kitchen. They had the best goddamn tomatoes I've ever had in my life. I ate them like apples! The whole family did toasts about love and long life and how wonderful family is, how honored they are to have this son/brother/nephew, etc... A few glasses (uh, plastic cups) of wine in and the fog of fresh acquaintance was lifted; Mitya and I cracked open our cases and played a few songs; Spanish folk songs and Russian rock and international classics and Beirut. Vasya sang (Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao!), Mitya sang (Gagarin, ja vas ljubila!), I sang (a careless life, a scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking). We missed the last metro and walked back across all the islands, almost 2 hours on foot.
Lunch picnics
Pasha and I had lunch on Friday in the Tauride Gardens, sprawled out on a bedsheet eating egg salad and playing Simon & Garfunkel with him on guitar. I was cranky and unreasonable; I was unfair and I hurt his feelings. We parted unpleasantly.
Night picnics
Friday night, we met up on Palace Square, Mitya and me, and played everything we could think to play for an hour or more. The Doors, Janis Joplin, Beirut, the Beatles, even Radiohead. We made enough money for dinner and two bottles of wine, and while the clouds rolled in off the sea we converged with two of Mitya's friends and took our little concert up onto the roof, violin and accordion and ukulele. We drank our wine and ate our baguettes and sang our hearts out under the slight spattering of rain and the heavy, warm wind until the dawn.
Girly picnics
I've fallen in with some foreign interns from all over the globe; Elina from Kazakhstan, Sarah from Taiwan, Marcelo from Brazil, Ewa from Poland. I took Elina, Sarah, and Marcelo out to Udel'noi market, where we spent the afternoon gawking at the rare and ridiculous, the treasures and trash. I almost bought another accordion, a bigger, subtler, more elaborate and more beautiful one. Elina bought two old cameras, and charmed a vendor into giving us all scarves for free. We tired ourselves out, bought a bag of tomatoes and returned to my apartment where I made gouda crostini and bruschetta (my new favorite thing) and took them up to the roof. I felt like a hero from the excitement, amazement, and sheer glee it gave them to be on the roof, in the sun, above the domes and chimneys of this gleaming city.
On Thursday night, Katey & I met Mitya and schlepped out to Kammeny Island with violin & ukulele in hand to celebrate Vasya's brother's birthday. Vasya had returned unexpectedly from Moscow as a surprise for his brother; the whole family was having a picnic on the island with 6 or 8 bottles of wine and a smorgasbord of zakuski (appetizers/side dishes). I was expecting something a little more thrown-together, a little more potluck-y, a little more young-hooligans-boozing-in-the-park, so I brought homemade bruschetta and a nectarine galette (oh how I love to cook) but it was unnecessary, given how clear it was that Vasya and Daniila's mother had spent at least the last 12 hours in the kitchen. They had the best goddamn tomatoes I've ever had in my life. I ate them like apples! The whole family did toasts about love and long life and how wonderful family is, how honored they are to have this son/brother/nephew, etc... A few glasses (uh, plastic cups) of wine in and the fog of fresh acquaintance was lifted; Mitya and I cracked open our cases and played a few songs; Spanish folk songs and Russian rock and international classics and Beirut. Vasya sang (Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao!), Mitya sang (Gagarin, ja vas ljubila!), I sang (a careless life, a scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking). We missed the last metro and walked back across all the islands, almost 2 hours on foot.
Lunch picnics
Pasha and I had lunch on Friday in the Tauride Gardens, sprawled out on a bedsheet eating egg salad and playing Simon & Garfunkel with him on guitar. I was cranky and unreasonable; I was unfair and I hurt his feelings. We parted unpleasantly.
Night picnics
Friday night, we met up on Palace Square, Mitya and me, and played everything we could think to play for an hour or more. The Doors, Janis Joplin, Beirut, the Beatles, even Radiohead. We made enough money for dinner and two bottles of wine, and while the clouds rolled in off the sea we converged with two of Mitya's friends and took our little concert up onto the roof, violin and accordion and ukulele. We drank our wine and ate our baguettes and sang our hearts out under the slight spattering of rain and the heavy, warm wind until the dawn.
Girly picnics
I've fallen in with some foreign interns from all over the globe; Elina from Kazakhstan, Sarah from Taiwan, Marcelo from Brazil, Ewa from Poland. I took Elina, Sarah, and Marcelo out to Udel'noi market, where we spent the afternoon gawking at the rare and ridiculous, the treasures and trash. I almost bought another accordion, a bigger, subtler, more elaborate and more beautiful one. Elina bought two old cameras, and charmed a vendor into giving us all scarves for free. We tired ourselves out, bought a bag of tomatoes and returned to my apartment where I made gouda crostini and bruschetta (my new favorite thing) and took them up to the roof. I felt like a hero from the excitement, amazement, and sheer glee it gave them to be on the roof, in the sun, above the domes and chimneys of this gleaming city.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
This is a blog about the weather.
Soooooooooo sleepy.
It's dawning on me that I might never get a full night's worth of sleep again. Or that I might never be satisfied with 8 hours again; every morning I feel like I was awake all night, and every night I resist sleep until my eyes close on their own.
I worked diligently all week: Interviews every day!
Irina Dudina--we drank mors in the ballroom of a renovated palace/theatre. She claims to be the first artist after the fall of the Soviet Union to point-blank address contemporary Russian politics with a satirical, critical eye in her art.
Ivan Sotnikov--he drank sour white wine out of a box until drunk in his musty, cluttered apartment/studio while I searched for an excuse to excuse myself and he showed me crude, primitivistic paintings that I just didn't get.
Ilya Gaponov--he and his wife Katya
Sasha Terebenin--he suggested I might want to live in St. Petersburg forever; I told him I want to buy a dacha in the countryside, raise goats and grow watermelons
Yuri Shtapakov--he chainsmoked, shirtless, throughout the interview, cracked jokes with the ease and grace of a well-settled rock star.
Manya Alekseeva--I took a marshrutka from a far-away metro station, hoping beyond hope that I was going in the right direction. She directed me over the phone and I gave myself up to god (figuratively) and my spotty recognition of the unfamiliar street names that I had only incompletely parsed. She met me on a dusty street corner in billowing Israeli pantaloons and squishy foam sandals. Her house is in an area of town that over the past 20 years or so has slowly been developed, unofficially, into an "artist's village"--artists moved out there because it was cheap and there's a lot of space to create large projects without interruption or the constraints of four close, pressing walls. Manya hosts art shows in her enormous, decaying living room and has monumental sculptures haphazardly strewn around her lawn. I joined her outside for a post-interview cigarette (her, not me) and we clicked perfectly on historicism: the historian's most important task is not just the rote, accurate chronicling of events; a good historian approaches their work the way an artist approaches theirs, as a project, as a proizvedenie, a work of art that says something.
Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva and Andrey Rudyev--a funky young couple, both contemporary artists, whose work rarely coincides. Veronika, a video-artist, asked me to sing a Russian song for her present project. We climbed up onto the roof and she filmed me singing "Gorod Zolotoy"--the Golden City, with the golden spire of Petropavlovsky Krepost' glinting in the background.
Andrey Khlobystin--whose verbosity began the moment we sat down and continued, uninterrupted, for 40 minutes. He's writing a book right now that attempts to answer all the questions that I've been dreading addressing: What is contemporary art? What is Russian art? Is there a characteristic that unites all of Russian art? Is Contemporary Art a purely international phenomenon? He's brilliant and he suggested quite a few interesting, convincing ideas about the nature of Contemporary and of "Russian", as an attribute. His book is in Russian, I believe, but it's going to be a very, very important source for my thesis. I can tell. He spoke at an almost incomprehensible pace, giving the slightly comical impression that the words were building up behind his mouth and exploding outward, but not quickly enough to prevent the growing traffic jam. He has too much in his head to take his time; these thoughts are URGENT. By the end of our interview (he bowed to me, sensai-style, before locking the door behind me) I was tightly-wound, strung-out, and exhausted from the sheer effort exerted to comprehend and keep up.
So, by Thursday my brain was fried (and I really get it now, Dove: "Professor, can I be excused? My brain is full."), and I gave myself the whole weekend off. I haven't given work any more energy than it took to write this post since Thursday afternoon. I deserve it; aside from conducting 9 interviews in 5 days, scurrying all over the city to meet artists at their leisure, I had some urgent, unrelated-to-research business to take care of. On Tuesday night, my acquaintance Pasha brought some friends over to project a movie on our wall. Pasha asked if he could try out my violin and, thinking nothing of it, I showed him how to hold it and then turned my attention elsewhere. An hour later I picked it up--and panicked to hear a raspy, breathy, squealing tone coming from my usually acoustically pleasant bow. I grilled Pasha until he admitted that he had been stroking the horsehair. Upset, exasperated, angry, I explained that the horsehair is NEVER to be touched, that the oils from your hand ruin the hair and it requires specific substances and some level of expertise to clean it, neither of which I have. He apologized and offered to pay for the repair, so we spent all of Thursday morning at a stringed-instrument shop getting my bow professionally cleaned. Just in time, in fact; Mitya had invited me to a picnic Thursday night at which he and I were to be the entertainment--ukulele and violin, with vocal accompaniment. I was expecting a messy gathering of young hooligans of the kind that gather on Palace Square--but it turned out to be a charming family gathering in honor of Mitya's best friend's brother's birthday; other than Mitya and Vasya nobody was familiar--except, oddly enough, Philippe, the director of Smolny Institute (for those whose memory needs a jolt, that's where I studied last fall). Turns out that Vasya's brother works at Smolny; what a bizarrely small city this is sometimes.
Picnics and street concerts (last night Mitya and I made enough money for wine and dinner, which we ate on the roof with two of his friends, under the lightest sprinkling of rain and the most beautiful wind, singing and playing and learning songs from each other until late, late, late...) and spontaneous excursions to Peterhoff; interviews and farewells (the law students from Cleveland are peacing out) and reunions (Katey's back and it is so wonderful to see her!) and it is time for a long, long sleep, which I doubt I'll ever get.
I've got two weeks left in St. Petersburg. I plan to use them well.
It's dawning on me that I might never get a full night's worth of sleep again. Or that I might never be satisfied with 8 hours again; every morning I feel like I was awake all night, and every night I resist sleep until my eyes close on their own.
I worked diligently all week: Interviews every day!
Irina Dudina--we drank mors in the ballroom of a renovated palace/theatre. She claims to be the first artist after the fall of the Soviet Union to point-blank address contemporary Russian politics with a satirical, critical eye in her art.
Ivan Sotnikov--he drank sour white wine out of a box until drunk in his musty, cluttered apartment/studio while I searched for an excuse to excuse myself and he showed me crude, primitivistic paintings that I just didn't get.
Ilya Gaponov--he and his wife Katya
Sasha Terebenin--he suggested I might want to live in St. Petersburg forever; I told him I want to buy a dacha in the countryside, raise goats and grow watermelons
Yuri Shtapakov--he chainsmoked, shirtless, throughout the interview, cracked jokes with the ease and grace of a well-settled rock star.
Manya Alekseeva--I took a marshrutka from a far-away metro station, hoping beyond hope that I was going in the right direction. She directed me over the phone and I gave myself up to god (figuratively) and my spotty recognition of the unfamiliar street names that I had only incompletely parsed. She met me on a dusty street corner in billowing Israeli pantaloons and squishy foam sandals. Her house is in an area of town that over the past 20 years or so has slowly been developed, unofficially, into an "artist's village"--artists moved out there because it was cheap and there's a lot of space to create large projects without interruption or the constraints of four close, pressing walls. Manya hosts art shows in her enormous, decaying living room and has monumental sculptures haphazardly strewn around her lawn. I joined her outside for a post-interview cigarette (her, not me) and we clicked perfectly on historicism: the historian's most important task is not just the rote, accurate chronicling of events; a good historian approaches their work the way an artist approaches theirs, as a project, as a proizvedenie, a work of art that says something.
Veronika Rudyeva-Ryazantseva and Andrey Rudyev--a funky young couple, both contemporary artists, whose work rarely coincides. Veronika, a video-artist, asked me to sing a Russian song for her present project. We climbed up onto the roof and she filmed me singing "Gorod Zolotoy"--the Golden City, with the golden spire of Petropavlovsky Krepost' glinting in the background.
Andrey Khlobystin--whose verbosity began the moment we sat down and continued, uninterrupted, for 40 minutes. He's writing a book right now that attempts to answer all the questions that I've been dreading addressing: What is contemporary art? What is Russian art? Is there a characteristic that unites all of Russian art? Is Contemporary Art a purely international phenomenon? He's brilliant and he suggested quite a few interesting, convincing ideas about the nature of Contemporary and of "Russian", as an attribute. His book is in Russian, I believe, but it's going to be a very, very important source for my thesis. I can tell. He spoke at an almost incomprehensible pace, giving the slightly comical impression that the words were building up behind his mouth and exploding outward, but not quickly enough to prevent the growing traffic jam. He has too much in his head to take his time; these thoughts are URGENT. By the end of our interview (he bowed to me, sensai-style, before locking the door behind me) I was tightly-wound, strung-out, and exhausted from the sheer effort exerted to comprehend and keep up.
So, by Thursday my brain was fried (and I really get it now, Dove: "Professor, can I be excused? My brain is full."), and I gave myself the whole weekend off. I haven't given work any more energy than it took to write this post since Thursday afternoon. I deserve it; aside from conducting 9 interviews in 5 days, scurrying all over the city to meet artists at their leisure, I had some urgent, unrelated-to-research business to take care of. On Tuesday night, my acquaintance Pasha brought some friends over to project a movie on our wall. Pasha asked if he could try out my violin and, thinking nothing of it, I showed him how to hold it and then turned my attention elsewhere. An hour later I picked it up--and panicked to hear a raspy, breathy, squealing tone coming from my usually acoustically pleasant bow. I grilled Pasha until he admitted that he had been stroking the horsehair. Upset, exasperated, angry, I explained that the horsehair is NEVER to be touched, that the oils from your hand ruin the hair and it requires specific substances and some level of expertise to clean it, neither of which I have. He apologized and offered to pay for the repair, so we spent all of Thursday morning at a stringed-instrument shop getting my bow professionally cleaned. Just in time, in fact; Mitya had invited me to a picnic Thursday night at which he and I were to be the entertainment--ukulele and violin, with vocal accompaniment. I was expecting a messy gathering of young hooligans of the kind that gather on Palace Square--but it turned out to be a charming family gathering in honor of Mitya's best friend's brother's birthday; other than Mitya and Vasya nobody was familiar--except, oddly enough, Philippe, the director of Smolny Institute (for those whose memory needs a jolt, that's where I studied last fall). Turns out that Vasya's brother works at Smolny; what a bizarrely small city this is sometimes.
Picnics and street concerts (last night Mitya and I made enough money for wine and dinner, which we ate on the roof with two of his friends, under the lightest sprinkling of rain and the most beautiful wind, singing and playing and learning songs from each other until late, late, late...) and spontaneous excursions to Peterhoff; interviews and farewells (the law students from Cleveland are peacing out) and reunions (Katey's back and it is so wonderful to see her!) and it is time for a long, long sleep, which I doubt I'll ever get.
I've got two weeks left in St. Petersburg. I plan to use them well.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Am I really all the things that are outside of me?
I took my coffee on the roof this morning, listening to the wind and my favorite music piped in through wires and tubes. Took off my clothes with a silent chant of "Down with tan lines! Up with nude beaches!" and had a moment of clarity and melancholy as I communed with history and extracted myself from it. The things I believe in have no place in history; nobody writes a historical narrative about freedom, beauty, truth, and love. Hammocks, and gardens overflowing with watermelons and zucchini, and sunny afternoons spent on blankets in knee-high grass--don't make history books. So I'm a bohemian alone on the roof, refusing to be a part of a history that isn't about people and life but some lofty importance we all assume we have. I believe in the beauty of insignificance. I would rewrite history a different way, fill the annals of time with the sun-carved lines on Columbus's face, the flutter of Marie Antoinette's heart before the guillotine, the sigh of relief from the back of Hemingway's throat as the first swallow of whiskey hit his belly in the morning.
I waved to the man who sits on the neighboring roof sometimes; I could see his smile from fifty meters away right before I ducked inside.
I have a confession to make: it doesn't make sense to me to be studying a history I don't believe in; I'm made for trees and old time string bands and smores and thunderstorms. I'm not an academic, and sometimes I think I hate History. I just want a dacha in the woods and a typewriter and a kitchen and a garden and some baby goats that will grow up to be mama goats. My tastes are simple.
I waved to the man who sits on the neighboring roof sometimes; I could see his smile from fifty meters away right before I ducked inside.
I have a confession to make: it doesn't make sense to me to be studying a history I don't believe in; I'm made for trees and old time string bands and smores and thunderstorms. I'm not an academic, and sometimes I think I hate History. I just want a dacha in the woods and a typewriter and a kitchen and a garden and some baby goats that will grow up to be mama goats. My tastes are simple.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
I'm living on watermelon until August.
Next to every fruit stand, in front of grocery stores and in the courtyard of the market, iron domed cages have appeared, their vertical bars painted green. All at once they popped up like mushrooms after the rain, covered with tarps and empty, for the time being. Watermelon season has begun: within a few days those giant cages will be filled with mountains of enormous Asterkhan watermelons for 18 rubles/kilogram. All of St. Petersburg will be seen carrying the swollen green melons under their arms, taking them home to be a constant feature at the dinner table for the next month or so.
I got my first rejection today, from an artist who doesn't think it's worth his time:
(my direct translation) "I understand you, princess--you need to defend something, your dissertation or I don't remember what, but I'm not sure that I need to waste time on these frivolous goings-on. Understand me correctly, don't get offended."
I suddenly realize how critical it is to make myself and my project seem important; being modest will get me nowhere. From now on I'm slamming all my credentials down all at once: fellowship from prestigious university, support of the State Center of Contemporary Art, huge list of artists I've already spoken with. I gotta make it seem like all the cool kids are doing it! Although most of the cool kids don't seem to need much convincing; they agree right away. Summer is a slow season for artists in St. Petersburg, the exhibition season hasn't started yet, and they seem to be eager for ways to spend their time.
I, on the other hand, am running out of time to spend! And there are too many ways to spend it! Walking around the city, sunning in the park, playing music, swimming in the countryside, eating vegetarian food at a Hare Krishna cafe (why is every vegetarian cafe here run by a cult?), sweating buckets in the awful humidity. Yeah, I've got a full schedule.
I got my first rejection today, from an artist who doesn't think it's worth his time:
(my direct translation) "I understand you, princess--you need to defend something, your dissertation or I don't remember what, but I'm not sure that I need to waste time on these frivolous goings-on. Understand me correctly, don't get offended."
I suddenly realize how critical it is to make myself and my project seem important; being modest will get me nowhere. From now on I'm slamming all my credentials down all at once: fellowship from prestigious university, support of the State Center of Contemporary Art, huge list of artists I've already spoken with. I gotta make it seem like all the cool kids are doing it! Although most of the cool kids don't seem to need much convincing; they agree right away. Summer is a slow season for artists in St. Petersburg, the exhibition season hasn't started yet, and they seem to be eager for ways to spend their time.
I, on the other hand, am running out of time to spend! And there are too many ways to spend it! Walking around the city, sunning in the park, playing music, swimming in the countryside, eating vegetarian food at a Hare Krishna cafe (why is every vegetarian cafe here run by a cult?), sweating buckets in the awful humidity. Yeah, I've got a full schedule.
Friday, July 16, 2010
And the clouds opened up...
Today the rain finally came. Hesitantly at first, the first few drops sizzling on scorching hot sidewalk and bare brown shoulders. The air stirred and grumbled (the thunder purred and rumbled), and as sweat mingled with rain the city breathed a collective sigh of relief. A storm had broken over St. Petersburg, or rather the storm had broken the still and sweltering heat built up over days of sun. The streets were like a greenhouse; even in the shadows one couldn't shake the panicked feeling that we were all baking in an oven. The rain has cleared the atmosphere and my mind feels sharper, clear, not cottony, delirious and slow under that oppressive heat. I'm going to sleep well tonight.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Madness! Hooliganery! Yorscht!
Madness! Hooliganery! YORSCHT!
My new American friends invited me to a concert on Friday night! Auktsion was playing, a new-jazz experimental group maintaining a steady reputation of awesome since the early eighties, with a special guest on the contrabass: the bassist whom I had drunkenly asked, in October of last year, if he would like to jam sometime. К сожалению, he said, Я очень занят.
The law students (Americans + 1 Il'ya, from Moscow) met me at the metro with a bottle of vodka and a bottle of beer, neither with caps, both juggled around the group. Matt had an umbrella; he twirled it in drunken arabesques and passersby gave us a wide berth. At the concert we danced and drank, offended our neighboring concert-goers and made friends with some, and grew thoroughly sauced as the night progressed. As I was standing talking to Matt and Will, a young man sidled up to us with a grin on his face. "Hello," he said, and we decided to become friends. This is Mitya: his English is well-thought, delicately accented, humorous and irreverent, full of surprising words. He is a translator; he makes puns and bi-lingual jokes. He plays the ukelele--"What? You play the ukelele? I play the violin!" Immediately we were all invited to jam with him and his friends on Palace Square after the concert, and we exchanged phone numbers.
The show ended; we trooped back to the metro. "Where are we going?" Natalie wailed. No time to explain--we dashed up the stairs, wreaked a brief tornado of havoc on my apartment, leaving it in shambles with my violin and accordion in hand. We searched for Mitya on Palace Square, found him sitting in a circle of friends above which hovered a giant, luminous white balloon. "He's a magician," Mitya explained, indicating the swarthy, elegant-looking fellow, dressed in a flowing white tunic and pants, who was maneuvering the balloon. We played Beirut and the Beatles, drunkenly out of tune, and I got in a fight with a saxaphonist who apparently plays on Palace Square every night; he didn't want to play with us, but we wanted to play with him.
The Americans began to droop, and fried with fatigue we said goodbye to Mitya and his troop, bought another bottle of champagne and some wine and limped back to my apartment. We climbed onto my roof to greet the sunrise, yelling at the dawn. As 5 in the morning drifted in, it found everyone asleep on the cool red metal of the roof, except for me and Il'ya, having a playful bi-lingual conversation about art and history and god-knows-what.
On Sunday night, Mitya called to invite me to another gathering of friends; they would meet to play music in the park, and "If I had time and a wish" I should join them. Monday I puttered around all day, just waiting for the evening. I went for a run, then bought some wine at Aromatniy Mir, to share with the musicians. I played violin and accordion all afternoon, hoping to make up for my awful drunken playing on Friday night. I lay in the sun at Usupovsky Sad, writing and reading and feeling my skin caramelize, and finally returned home, dressed, and hopped a bus to meet Mitya and his friends. Meet them I did, in the park on the University Embankment, all dressed cleanly and crisply, with moistly twinkling eyes and bright smiles and smoky voices, a ukelele and a guitar and a shaker made of a gin&tonic can filled with sand or pepper. We had all come prepared, and the music was lovely. We passed the bottle of wine, passed the guitar around, passed the violin even, and someone brought a satchel full of beer, and I slathered myself in lotion against the mosquitoes buzzing around my ears & ankles. Oh the evening! Melodies, harmonies, tunes familiar and strange, singing deep, joyful, mocking, sometimes quiet and heartfelt. When the repertoire dwindled we finally packed up our instruments as the sky was dimming, and walked along the embankment--to Palace Square! someone said. To the roof of my apartment! I quipped--and that's where the group parted--Volodya was going to the train station, back to Moscow, and everyone wanted to see him off. Mitya and I continued to my apartment to sit on the roof, and we drank pomegranate juice and ate olives straight from the container. We spoke both English and Russian and leaned back to look at the starless deepening sky. It was late; he had missed the last metro train and the bridges had already opened to allow naval traffic. I offered him my extra bed.
June 13th, Tuesday--I spent the day in a daze, exhausted and unenthusiastic. Woke up early, 7:30 AM, to Mitya fumbling with the lock on the door; got up to work my magic with the finicky device. I didn't try to go back to sleep, but instead made phone calls to the evening across the ocean. My voice was heavy with sleep, thick with regretted cigarettes and wine swigged from the bottle, my skin was crisping on the windowsill, and I said goodbye to Dove with the plan to go to a vegetarian Hare Krishna cafe near Ploschad' Vosstaniya for breakfast. I showered and dressed and took the metro to Ploschad' Vosstaniya; the cafe was closed, so I strolled around looking for somewhere to grab breakfast. I had cold borscht and Grechesky salat at a somewhat sleazy Cafe Sahara on Ulitsa Vosstaniya, then made my way back to my apartment trying to shake off the otherworldly feeling within which I was wrapped. I took my time, contemplating how little I wanted to keep my scheduled meetings. At home I laid down for a few moments before nenthusiastically gathering all my equipment again and heading out to meet Vera Svetlova at Ploschad' Aleksandra Nevskogo. We strolled through the cemetery at the Aleksandr Nevsky Lavra, and did a short interview in the cafeteria there. She spoke with a lisp and flowing, graceful gestures, and repeated my questions back to me, and echoed the same sentiment I've heard many times already: "Russian" is a tradition based on adopting foreign ideas and modifying them; matryoshka dolls (Japanese), Icon painting (Byzantine), even the Futurists & avant-garde (Italy).
We rode the metro back to Sennaya together, and I finally managed to take an hour's nap before getting back on the metro to meet Ivan Khimin at Ploshcad' Muzhestva. He immediately insisted we speak on ты, and we walked half an hour in the sweltering sun to his studio. The neighborhood reminded me of Primorskaya, all tall grey buildings and wide empty streets. The studio was on the 5th floor of a building that appeared only half-constructed; the whole length of it is one long hallway littered with paintings, sculptures, debris, connecting bleak fluorescent-lit studios. A dozen or more artists work there. bought cold Czech beer and then drank it on the couch in the corner of his empty studio, pressed against the wall to stay out of the sun. He spoke blurred words and I didn't catch half of it, with my mind sprawled flat on the open roof, sizzling, with my mind swaddled in cotton and sweating feverish, with my eyes drooping and straining to focus. He was very nice, but I kept yawning; I nearly fell asleep. It feels as though the weekend was interminable, like I'm still in the clutches of that exhaustion. Maybe it's the heat (a baby on the bus smiled at me so sweet). We rode the metro back and he said goodbye at Mayakovskaya, and I went home to sleep and hope that my days continue suchly!
My new American friends invited me to a concert on Friday night! Auktsion was playing, a new-jazz experimental group maintaining a steady reputation of awesome since the early eighties, with a special guest on the contrabass: the bassist whom I had drunkenly asked, in October of last year, if he would like to jam sometime. К сожалению, he said, Я очень занят.
The law students (Americans + 1 Il'ya, from Moscow) met me at the metro with a bottle of vodka and a bottle of beer, neither with caps, both juggled around the group. Matt had an umbrella; he twirled it in drunken arabesques and passersby gave us a wide berth. At the concert we danced and drank, offended our neighboring concert-goers and made friends with some, and grew thoroughly sauced as the night progressed. As I was standing talking to Matt and Will, a young man sidled up to us with a grin on his face. "Hello," he said, and we decided to become friends. This is Mitya: his English is well-thought, delicately accented, humorous and irreverent, full of surprising words. He is a translator; he makes puns and bi-lingual jokes. He plays the ukelele--"What? You play the ukelele? I play the violin!" Immediately we were all invited to jam with him and his friends on Palace Square after the concert, and we exchanged phone numbers.
The show ended; we trooped back to the metro. "Where are we going?" Natalie wailed. No time to explain--we dashed up the stairs, wreaked a brief tornado of havoc on my apartment, leaving it in shambles with my violin and accordion in hand. We searched for Mitya on Palace Square, found him sitting in a circle of friends above which hovered a giant, luminous white balloon. "He's a magician," Mitya explained, indicating the swarthy, elegant-looking fellow, dressed in a flowing white tunic and pants, who was maneuvering the balloon. We played Beirut and the Beatles, drunkenly out of tune, and I got in a fight with a saxaphonist who apparently plays on Palace Square every night; he didn't want to play with us, but we wanted to play with him.
The Americans began to droop, and fried with fatigue we said goodbye to Mitya and his troop, bought another bottle of champagne and some wine and limped back to my apartment. We climbed onto my roof to greet the sunrise, yelling at the dawn. As 5 in the morning drifted in, it found everyone asleep on the cool red metal of the roof, except for me and Il'ya, having a playful bi-lingual conversation about art and history and god-knows-what.
On Sunday night, Mitya called to invite me to another gathering of friends; they would meet to play music in the park, and "If I had time and a wish" I should join them. Monday I puttered around all day, just waiting for the evening. I went for a run, then bought some wine at Aromatniy Mir, to share with the musicians. I played violin and accordion all afternoon, hoping to make up for my awful drunken playing on Friday night. I lay in the sun at Usupovsky Sad, writing and reading and feeling my skin caramelize, and finally returned home, dressed, and hopped a bus to meet Mitya and his friends. Meet them I did, in the park on the University Embankment, all dressed cleanly and crisply, with moistly twinkling eyes and bright smiles and smoky voices, a ukelele and a guitar and a shaker made of a gin&tonic can filled with sand or pepper. We had all come prepared, and the music was lovely. We passed the bottle of wine, passed the guitar around, passed the violin even, and someone brought a satchel full of beer, and I slathered myself in lotion against the mosquitoes buzzing around my ears & ankles. Oh the evening! Melodies, harmonies, tunes familiar and strange, singing deep, joyful, mocking, sometimes quiet and heartfelt. When the repertoire dwindled we finally packed up our instruments as the sky was dimming, and walked along the embankment--to Palace Square! someone said. To the roof of my apartment! I quipped--and that's where the group parted--Volodya was going to the train station, back to Moscow, and everyone wanted to see him off. Mitya and I continued to my apartment to sit on the roof, and we drank pomegranate juice and ate olives straight from the container. We spoke both English and Russian and leaned back to look at the starless deepening sky. It was late; he had missed the last metro train and the bridges had already opened to allow naval traffic. I offered him my extra bed.
June 13th, Tuesday--I spent the day in a daze, exhausted and unenthusiastic. Woke up early, 7:30 AM, to Mitya fumbling with the lock on the door; got up to work my magic with the finicky device. I didn't try to go back to sleep, but instead made phone calls to the evening across the ocean. My voice was heavy with sleep, thick with regretted cigarettes and wine swigged from the bottle, my skin was crisping on the windowsill, and I said goodbye to Dove with the plan to go to a vegetarian Hare Krishna cafe near Ploschad' Vosstaniya for breakfast. I showered and dressed and took the metro to Ploschad' Vosstaniya; the cafe was closed, so I strolled around looking for somewhere to grab breakfast. I had cold borscht and Grechesky salat at a somewhat sleazy Cafe Sahara on Ulitsa Vosstaniya, then made my way back to my apartment trying to shake off the otherworldly feeling within which I was wrapped. I took my time, contemplating how little I wanted to keep my scheduled meetings. At home I laid down for a few moments before nenthusiastically gathering all my equipment again and heading out to meet Vera Svetlova at Ploschad' Aleksandra Nevskogo. We strolled through the cemetery at the Aleksandr Nevsky Lavra, and did a short interview in the cafeteria there. She spoke with a lisp and flowing, graceful gestures, and repeated my questions back to me, and echoed the same sentiment I've heard many times already: "Russian" is a tradition based on adopting foreign ideas and modifying them; matryoshka dolls (Japanese), Icon painting (Byzantine), even the Futurists & avant-garde (Italy).
We rode the metro back to Sennaya together, and I finally managed to take an hour's nap before getting back on the metro to meet Ivan Khimin at Ploshcad' Muzhestva. He immediately insisted we speak on ты, and we walked half an hour in the sweltering sun to his studio. The neighborhood reminded me of Primorskaya, all tall grey buildings and wide empty streets. The studio was on the 5th floor of a building that appeared only half-constructed; the whole length of it is one long hallway littered with paintings, sculptures, debris, connecting bleak fluorescent-lit studios. A dozen or more artists work there. bought cold Czech beer and then drank it on the couch in the corner of his empty studio, pressed against the wall to stay out of the sun. He spoke blurred words and I didn't catch half of it, with my mind sprawled flat on the open roof, sizzling, with my mind swaddled in cotton and sweating feverish, with my eyes drooping and straining to focus. He was very nice, but I kept yawning; I nearly fell asleep. It feels as though the weekend was interminable, like I'm still in the clutches of that exhaustion. Maybe it's the heat (a baby on the bus smiled at me so sweet). We rode the metro back and he said goodbye at Mayakovskaya, and I went home to sleep and hope that my days continue suchly!
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Success days!
In so many ways, yesterday and today have been fantastic successes. Like so:
Tuesday, July 6
--Interview with Aleksandr Dashevsky--fun! Hiked out to Petrograd Side in the scorching sun; he met me on the sidewalk with a sack of plums & nectarines, he was late because he had to go to the store. You NEVER show up as someone's guest empty-handed; I brought a half a kilo of green grapes. We climbed the 7 flights of stairs to his top-floor studio. The staircase was narrow, asymmetrical, and cool, with clouds of flies ("It's too hot for them, too, in the sun," he joked) and richly-hued, threadbare carpets on each landing. His comments were very interesting--new contemporary art and contemporary artists are all the same, dealing with the same issues of mass media, consumer culture, the failure of capitalism no matter where you look; as long as artists deal with such universal issues their art cannot be tied to their national, personal experience. In Russian contemp. art there is nothing that Russians can call their own, for just that reasons--the issues they deal with are the issues that are fashionable. Artists move to Moscow from the far east and the south and instead of continuing to create art that's linked to their personal experience of having lived where they lived, they look around at the art that everyone else is making, the pseudo-indignant, conformist-in-its-feigned-subversion art, and copy it. There have been enormous breaks in the history of Russian art, with the Revolution and then with the end of the avant-garde/the beginning of Socialist Realism, and with Stalin's death and the onset of sots-art, and then the fall of the USSR; as a painter (which is surprisingly rare these days, in fact) Dashevsky wishes to sew up some of these rifts, to link himself concretely to the history of art in his country and the rich tradition of canvas paintings. We ate nectarines and plums and grapes and the sweat rolled down our faces, and the lighting was perfect for my video. I left in high spirits.
--Interview with Vitaly Pushnitsky. Amazing! His opinions were strong, convincing, and contrary to my expectations and what I've received so far. I only succeeded in asking him a few of my scripted questions because he rendered so many of them superfluous. He spoke of the deep link between language, thought, and art, and for him "Russian Beauty" is an impossibility because beauty is universal and 'Russian' isn't an ideal that Russians champion; he described it as a common misfortune that all Russians share: to have been born in Russia. His views of Russia were bleak--if Russian Beauty exists, he says, it is a beauty "In spite of" instead of a beauty "because of"; in America nationalist patriots hold up the flag and say "We love the USA because of this, and this, and this--our strong economy, our revolutionary history, our comfortable place in the sphere of world events, etc etc etc"...while nationalists in Russia can only say "We love Russia in spite of this, and this--its dirt and its dysfunction and its corruption, its poverty and confused identity; nevertheless, we love her." He spoke of the impossibility of contemporary national/folk art that avoids becoming ethnographic. He greeted me warmly on the landing outside his new, clean, spacious apartment ("We just moved here"), gave me slippers at the door and then put his finger to his lips, said his baby son was sleeping. He offered me coffee, I brought him strawberries, and after the coffee he insisted that I eat something, practically forcefed me a delicious traditional salat (uh, salad) of beets, potatoes, pickles, and dill. He began speaking immediately, almost unbidden, uninhibited as though we had known each other forever, something about national differences in character linked to the physical climate of the country; in Russia the seasons are unpredictable and harsh, and the people are just as intense. His former teacher Ivan showed up with a new student of his, Dasha, in tow, and she & I listened as though to a televised debate as Vanya and Vasya argued over whether or not national art can exist today. As I left he tried to convince me that I was, in fact, an artist, despite what I might think. "To be an artist means only to ask good questions. You don't have to have the answers." I left, again, in high spirits, but exhausted from the hours of comprehension and blurting out scrambled, nearly indecipherably butchered Russian.
--I walked home, decided to treat myself to a cold drink at a nice cafe where they don't have wi-fi, because I wanted to take a breather in the here and now instead of losing myself in cyberspace as I am wont to do when I have nothing else on my schedule. I picked Stirka, a bar/club a few blocks from my home, where you can do laundry in the functional washing machines along the back wall. There were jolly American voices all around when I walked in, and I sat down by myself and spent a few moments in shock before I realized that I needed to take this opportunity for some no-business socializing. I introduced myself. Law students from Cleveland, and they don't speak a word of Russian except for Spasibo and Pozhaluista. They were so nice! Chris bought me a beer, and I had a long talk about art with Natalie, and by the time I tottered off to meet with my landlord Nadezhda I was thoroughly drunk.
And I spent today relaxing, playing music, writing postcards, cooking, reading; went to the market. I had a meeting with Irina Vasil'eva at 7 PM, which was great fun but not very useful; she wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea of the interview and preferred instead to invite all her friends over to sit with us in this cute little cafe of her choosing (she knew everybody in the place). Several bottles of wine were produced and the company got raucous, so I turned off my voice recorder and just let myself enjoy the company. I excused myself at 8:15 to give myself ample time to walk across town to Loft-Etagé, an art center with a fantastic little cafe where I was meeting Ivan Tuzov, a photographer/contemporary artist-turned-animator, at 9 PM. He's the youngest artist I've talked to so far, only 26 years old and a little shy. He was awkward with words so our interview wasn't too productive, but it was interesting and, again, good company. We took the same train to get home, and we parted warmly with a promise that he would send me links to his new animations and I would send him info about Louise Bourgeois. I dashed home to make a very, very important phone call to the United States (yeah, you, I'm talking to you.) and cooled off sucking on frozen grapes and sipping iced tea.
Baskin' in the warm glow of time well-spent! I have another interview tomorrow evening, and more translation to do. Plus....
Sarah is effecting her triumphant return to the motherland tomorrow afternoon!! REJOICING ALL AROUND!
Tuesday, July 6
--Interview with Aleksandr Dashevsky--fun! Hiked out to Petrograd Side in the scorching sun; he met me on the sidewalk with a sack of plums & nectarines, he was late because he had to go to the store. You NEVER show up as someone's guest empty-handed; I brought a half a kilo of green grapes. We climbed the 7 flights of stairs to his top-floor studio. The staircase was narrow, asymmetrical, and cool, with clouds of flies ("It's too hot for them, too, in the sun," he joked) and richly-hued, threadbare carpets on each landing. His comments were very interesting--new contemporary art and contemporary artists are all the same, dealing with the same issues of mass media, consumer culture, the failure of capitalism no matter where you look; as long as artists deal with such universal issues their art cannot be tied to their national, personal experience. In Russian contemp. art there is nothing that Russians can call their own, for just that reasons--the issues they deal with are the issues that are fashionable. Artists move to Moscow from the far east and the south and instead of continuing to create art that's linked to their personal experience of having lived where they lived, they look around at the art that everyone else is making, the pseudo-indignant, conformist-in-its-feigned-subversion art, and copy it. There have been enormous breaks in the history of Russian art, with the Revolution and then with the end of the avant-garde/the beginning of Socialist Realism, and with Stalin's death and the onset of sots-art, and then the fall of the USSR; as a painter (which is surprisingly rare these days, in fact) Dashevsky wishes to sew up some of these rifts, to link himself concretely to the history of art in his country and the rich tradition of canvas paintings. We ate nectarines and plums and grapes and the sweat rolled down our faces, and the lighting was perfect for my video. I left in high spirits.
--Interview with Vitaly Pushnitsky. Amazing! His opinions were strong, convincing, and contrary to my expectations and what I've received so far. I only succeeded in asking him a few of my scripted questions because he rendered so many of them superfluous. He spoke of the deep link between language, thought, and art, and for him "Russian Beauty" is an impossibility because beauty is universal and 'Russian' isn't an ideal that Russians champion; he described it as a common misfortune that all Russians share: to have been born in Russia. His views of Russia were bleak--if Russian Beauty exists, he says, it is a beauty "In spite of" instead of a beauty "because of"; in America nationalist patriots hold up the flag and say "We love the USA because of this, and this, and this--our strong economy, our revolutionary history, our comfortable place in the sphere of world events, etc etc etc"...while nationalists in Russia can only say "We love Russia in spite of this, and this--its dirt and its dysfunction and its corruption, its poverty and confused identity; nevertheless, we love her." He spoke of the impossibility of contemporary national/folk art that avoids becoming ethnographic. He greeted me warmly on the landing outside his new, clean, spacious apartment ("We just moved here"), gave me slippers at the door and then put his finger to his lips, said his baby son was sleeping. He offered me coffee, I brought him strawberries, and after the coffee he insisted that I eat something, practically forcefed me a delicious traditional salat (uh, salad) of beets, potatoes, pickles, and dill. He began speaking immediately, almost unbidden, uninhibited as though we had known each other forever, something about national differences in character linked to the physical climate of the country; in Russia the seasons are unpredictable and harsh, and the people are just as intense. His former teacher Ivan showed up with a new student of his, Dasha, in tow, and she & I listened as though to a televised debate as Vanya and Vasya argued over whether or not national art can exist today. As I left he tried to convince me that I was, in fact, an artist, despite what I might think. "To be an artist means only to ask good questions. You don't have to have the answers." I left, again, in high spirits, but exhausted from the hours of comprehension and blurting out scrambled, nearly indecipherably butchered Russian.
--I walked home, decided to treat myself to a cold drink at a nice cafe where they don't have wi-fi, because I wanted to take a breather in the here and now instead of losing myself in cyberspace as I am wont to do when I have nothing else on my schedule. I picked Stirka, a bar/club a few blocks from my home, where you can do laundry in the functional washing machines along the back wall. There were jolly American voices all around when I walked in, and I sat down by myself and spent a few moments in shock before I realized that I needed to take this opportunity for some no-business socializing. I introduced myself. Law students from Cleveland, and they don't speak a word of Russian except for Spasibo and Pozhaluista. They were so nice! Chris bought me a beer, and I had a long talk about art with Natalie, and by the time I tottered off to meet with my landlord Nadezhda I was thoroughly drunk.
And I spent today relaxing, playing music, writing postcards, cooking, reading; went to the market. I had a meeting with Irina Vasil'eva at 7 PM, which was great fun but not very useful; she wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea of the interview and preferred instead to invite all her friends over to sit with us in this cute little cafe of her choosing (she knew everybody in the place). Several bottles of wine were produced and the company got raucous, so I turned off my voice recorder and just let myself enjoy the company. I excused myself at 8:15 to give myself ample time to walk across town to Loft-Etagé, an art center with a fantastic little cafe where I was meeting Ivan Tuzov, a photographer/contemporary artist-turned-animator, at 9 PM. He's the youngest artist I've talked to so far, only 26 years old and a little shy. He was awkward with words so our interview wasn't too productive, but it was interesting and, again, good company. We took the same train to get home, and we parted warmly with a promise that he would send me links to his new animations and I would send him info about Louise Bourgeois. I dashed home to make a very, very important phone call to the United States (yeah, you, I'm talking to you.) and cooled off sucking on frozen grapes and sipping iced tea.
Baskin' in the warm glow of time well-spent! I have another interview tomorrow evening, and more translation to do. Plus....
Sarah is effecting her triumphant return to the motherland tomorrow afternoon!! REJOICING ALL AROUND!
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Sunny!
I got caught in a rainstorm on my way to the vernissage of Yuri's installation across the
Fontanka. All morning the sky had been cloudless, but suddenly around 6 PM the clouds rolled in and the streets emptied. I dashed into a musty passageway to wait for the rain to subside, along with three girls in sky-high heels who had also decided not to carry their umbrellas. It was still sprinkling when I continued on to the show; there were people in every doorway and at every gate who had similarly been caught unawares.
Yesterday I took the day off. I made one phone call in the morning and then packed my backpack, caught an elektrichka up to Sestroretsk, on the Bay of Finland, about an hour up the coast from St. Petersburg. Men were selling cookbooks, strips of bandaids, maps, ice cream out of ice chests--up and down the center aisle of the wagon. When we reached the platform I didn't know where I was going; I let the crowd from the train carry me along, across the tracks, into a fruits & vegetables market (the kind that springs up next to all these dusty little train stations), through a few huge apartment buildings, onto the main road into town. Standing on a bridge over a small river, I could feel salt in the wind, and found a packed-dirt path along the bank, so I followed it into the woods in the hope that it would lead me to the shore. I ran into an old man who was collecting Podorozhnik, a medicinal plant, in a plastic bag, and he guided me onto all the right paths and pointed the direction to the seaside. "You ought to be careful, a girl like you, in these woods--the kinds of people we've got around here!" He prefers Belorussia, he says; none of this muck, litter, garbage everywhere, it's so clean and peaceful, and the people are friendly. "Here, just look at this mess, and everybody's drunk." He also confirmed my suspicion about a spiky-leaved plant I'd had an encounter with earlier: крапива, stinging nettle!
The mosquitoes were vicious, even worse than the ones that keep me vigilantly awake in my apartment, but when the mud gave way to sand and the trees opened up onto a coarse-pebbled beach, they subsided as well. It was a beautiful expanse--the beach was narrow, covered in dry reeds and grass that rustled, driftwood, tiny blue and purple flowers. The remains of a campfire were still smoking where I laid out my towel on the edge of the woods, but the beach was empty and silent so I took off all my clothes and stretched out to read the last 100 pages of Force of Circumstance. I was nervous and kept glancing around, remembering Beauvoir's recollection of falling asleep on sand dunes in Tunisia, then waking up to a man with a knife sitting on her belly. Still, the sun was bright and there was nobody to be seen. I put down the book every now and then, looked around me and was overwhelmed with a sense of--I want to call it vertigo, but I know that's not right. An awe at being where I am, utterly alone, so far from what I consider my life, lying in the sun on one far corner of the vast Euro-Asian landmass. Instead of the isolating, maddening solitude of living alone in a big city, I felt a solitude that was serene, voluntary, replenishing. It was just what I needed.
I laid there until my stomach grumbled, then got dressed and dove back through the woods. Had some embarrassingly bad soup in a cafe by the railroad tracks, then some incredibly good dark raisin bread baked in the Sestroretsk bread factory, and the most perfect tomato I've ever tasted, which I ate whole, from a fruit and vegetable stand in the market. I caught the 6:30 train back to Petersburg. There were more men selling ice cream on the return train.
And today woke up at noon, feeling terribly groggy--I couldn't sleep last night from the nettle burns on my ankles, the mosquito bites, the heat, and I took some benedryl to soothe myself a bit--it put me to sleep, alright, but waking up is so unpleasant with benedryl. I went out for a run, then spent the entire day walking around the city. There was a street celebration in honor of Fyodor Dostoevsky outside the apartment he once lived in; performance art, puppet theatre, fake 19th century signs up on all of the buildings. I got sprayed with chunks of watermelon by actors deep in Dostoevskian despair and madness, who tore them apart while another actor, Dostoevsky I presume, wrote words in blue paint on a grey backdrop. I went into Land, a posh supermarket where they sell tofu, squid ink pasta, Johnnie Walker Blue Label (15,000 roubles a bottle; the price is staggering even in dollars), individually packaged mangoes, camembert and hummus--I bought orange preserves and dry soymilk. Bought a stale croissant from a stuck-up bakery near Chernishevskaya metro, sunned myself in the Tauride Gardens while I finished Simone de Beauvoir.
I've been practicing my accordion without big results; I'm far too impatient for musical instruments and this is an exercise for me as much as sit-ups or the gym. But I take a few deep breaths, set my eyes on my goal, and take baby steps toward it: first scales, chords, simple tunes. THEN, La Valse d'Amélie!
Tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and across the ocean I feel like celebrating for the first time in my life--because I'm so out of place here, because I'm independent, because it might make me feel a little closer to home. Yeah, huh.
Fontanka. All morning the sky had been cloudless, but suddenly around 6 PM the clouds rolled in and the streets emptied. I dashed into a musty passageway to wait for the rain to subside, along with three girls in sky-high heels who had also decided not to carry their umbrellas. It was still sprinkling when I continued on to the show; there were people in every doorway and at every gate who had similarly been caught unawares.
Yesterday I took the day off. I made one phone call in the morning and then packed my backpack, caught an elektrichka up to Sestroretsk, on the Bay of Finland, about an hour up the coast from St. Petersburg. Men were selling cookbooks, strips of bandaids, maps, ice cream out of ice chests--up and down the center aisle of the wagon. When we reached the platform I didn't know where I was going; I let the crowd from the train carry me along, across the tracks, into a fruits & vegetables market (the kind that springs up next to all these dusty little train stations), through a few huge apartment buildings, onto the main road into town. Standing on a bridge over a small river, I could feel salt in the wind, and found a packed-dirt path along the bank, so I followed it into the woods in the hope that it would lead me to the shore. I ran into an old man who was collecting Podorozhnik, a medicinal plant, in a plastic bag, and he guided me onto all the right paths and pointed the direction to the seaside. "You ought to be careful, a girl like you, in these woods--the kinds of people we've got around here!" He prefers Belorussia, he says; none of this muck, litter, garbage everywhere, it's so clean and peaceful, and the people are friendly. "Here, just look at this mess, and everybody's drunk." He also confirmed my suspicion about a spiky-leaved plant I'd had an encounter with earlier: крапива, stinging nettle!
The mosquitoes were vicious, even worse than the ones that keep me vigilantly awake in my apartment, but when the mud gave way to sand and the trees opened up onto a coarse-pebbled beach, they subsided as well. It was a beautiful expanse--the beach was narrow, covered in dry reeds and grass that rustled, driftwood, tiny blue and purple flowers. The remains of a campfire were still smoking where I laid out my towel on the edge of the woods, but the beach was empty and silent so I took off all my clothes and stretched out to read the last 100 pages of Force of Circumstance. I was nervous and kept glancing around, remembering Beauvoir's recollection of falling asleep on sand dunes in Tunisia, then waking up to a man with a knife sitting on her belly. Still, the sun was bright and there was nobody to be seen. I put down the book every now and then, looked around me and was overwhelmed with a sense of--I want to call it vertigo, but I know that's not right. An awe at being where I am, utterly alone, so far from what I consider my life, lying in the sun on one far corner of the vast Euro-Asian landmass. Instead of the isolating, maddening solitude of living alone in a big city, I felt a solitude that was serene, voluntary, replenishing. It was just what I needed.
I laid there until my stomach grumbled, then got dressed and dove back through the woods. Had some embarrassingly bad soup in a cafe by the railroad tracks, then some incredibly good dark raisin bread baked in the Sestroretsk bread factory, and the most perfect tomato I've ever tasted, which I ate whole, from a fruit and vegetable stand in the market. I caught the 6:30 train back to Petersburg. There were more men selling ice cream on the return train.
And today woke up at noon, feeling terribly groggy--I couldn't sleep last night from the nettle burns on my ankles, the mosquito bites, the heat, and I took some benedryl to soothe myself a bit--it put me to sleep, alright, but waking up is so unpleasant with benedryl. I went out for a run, then spent the entire day walking around the city. There was a street celebration in honor of Fyodor Dostoevsky outside the apartment he once lived in; performance art, puppet theatre, fake 19th century signs up on all of the buildings. I got sprayed with chunks of watermelon by actors deep in Dostoevskian despair and madness, who tore them apart while another actor, Dostoevsky I presume, wrote words in blue paint on a grey backdrop. I went into Land, a posh supermarket where they sell tofu, squid ink pasta, Johnnie Walker Blue Label (15,000 roubles a bottle; the price is staggering even in dollars), individually packaged mangoes, camembert and hummus--I bought orange preserves and dry soymilk. Bought a stale croissant from a stuck-up bakery near Chernishevskaya metro, sunned myself in the Tauride Gardens while I finished Simone de Beauvoir.
I've been practicing my accordion without big results; I'm far too impatient for musical instruments and this is an exercise for me as much as sit-ups or the gym. But I take a few deep breaths, set my eyes on my goal, and take baby steps toward it: first scales, chords, simple tunes. THEN, La Valse d'Amélie!
Tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and across the ocean I feel like celebrating for the first time in my life--because I'm so out of place here, because I'm independent, because it might make me feel a little closer to home. Yeah, huh.
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