Moscow

Moscow was shrouded in smoke! I got here day before yesterday, in the evening, and the whole city smelled like the inside of a woodstove. People march stony-faced up and down grey streets with surgical masks hiding their expressions (or lack thereof), buildings fade off into an otherworldly haze that obscures the ends of streets and wipes away the skyline. After dark the city transforms into a dreamscape; maybe it was the bottle of Bordeaux I shared with Vasya, maybe the shock of leaving Petersburg, but more than anything the surreal sensation of walking into a dream was from the omnipresent smoke. Дым, it's called in Russian. Dym. And it seeps into the metropolitan, and it cuts at your eyes, and it reminds me of my father and the 3rd-degree burns I got when I warmed myself too close to our gargantuan iron stove. I was so tiny, and the stove looms enormous and black in my memory; was it really twice as tall as me?

The smoke has cleared somewhat, but the singed smell remains, and the whole city is parched. Grass is sand-colored and harsh, trees are already shedding crumpled, crisping leaves. August is a force to reckon with here.

Tomorrow I'm taking the train to Kiev.

I'm too busy having adventures to write them down! I'm too busy jamming under the bridge on the far side of town, playing my kazoo, drinking rum on the banks of the Neva, riding Petya's spare bicycle in between lanes of traffic, shooting watermelon seeds at pigeons, swimming in the Bolshaya Nevka, making galettes, packing my suitcase, being locked out of my apartment, walking across town (and back again), birthday partying, giving concerts on the roof, sleeping under the table, in the park, at friend's houses, everywhere but my bed. Oh I wish I could give my time here the description it deserves.

Нам не так уж долго осталось быть здесь вместе

I feel, again, for the hundredth time in my life, like my life is a text scrolling past me faster than I can read it, and it falls to me to reach out and grasp at it, try to slow it down and at least make sense of the moment before it's gone. But the moments fly by and I gain no understanding, just a fleeting sensation that I've missed something important and it will never come back. I feel the weight and guilt of having taken even a moment of my time here for granted, I feel like I deserve bruises for how much I've wasted wallowing in loneliness, helplessness, self-pity when I was down. I can't believe I let myself get away with it. Once again I've come to that point where my stay has been whittled down, the days have dwindled to few and I can count them on my fingers but before I can close my palm on them another chalk line appears on the wall and another day has disappeared. I am sad, because I don't want to go home. I am sad, because part of me thinks this is home. I am sad, because it is a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only once. If I had two lives, I'd spend one of them here.

I am scared, because I don't know if I'll ever come back.

It seems like I discovered all of the books, films, songs, and pictures that resonate with me early in life, all at once; I turn back to the same pages and notes to describe my state of mind, even though I've heard hundreds of songs since then and read more books than I remember. Maybe I've grown harder, the way babys' skulls are in pieces at first but stitch together with time; maybe I'm not growing anymore.

My life is so incredible and I miss it already.

Vacation within a vacation!

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.

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.

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.

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.