Today’s desperately empty refrigerator provoked two (temporally, geographically) unique trips to the shop, and all really managed to purchase was nearly 5 liters of beverage (in order of nutritional importance and/or consumption: apple juice, orange juice, kefir, and beer). I know, this is totally uninteresting, but I’m just sort of whelmed that I can spend nearly twenty bucks and still face pretty much empty prospects for breakfast tomorrow. Thank the pope for eggs. And ketchup. Have I mentioned lately how much Russia’s honed my love for the all-five-tastebud-stimulating sensation?

But really the big news is that Ljenja (I’ll write that in cyrillic as it turned out to be a problem, later, when I made him a mix cd and received an instant shaming for not knowing that the last vowel was soft: Лёня…. I mean, I can still barely hear the я even when Dasha over emphasizes it, but what’s a fellow to do) had a birthday and bought himself a new bike. This means that he is totally (totally!) lending his old two-wheeled companion to me until he treks back to his parent’s place in Vladimir. After walking about in the glorious weather (something like +9 degrees above average for April; nobody complains about the warming on this side of winter) on Petrogradskaya for a bit I received his phone call with the joyous news.

To appreciate the magnitude of this I should remind you that I haven’t ridden a bicycle in over seven months after a period when pretty much the only thing I ever did, took photos of, or talked to my friends about was bicycling and how much fun bicycling is and etc (thankfully this never quite descended into the fixed-gear porn and wallet-hemorrhage stage). Anyways, I went for an inaugural ride with him and Dasha later that evening which we rinsed down with the moderately priced chic of desert and drink at Zoom cafe (also an inaugural, for me anyways). I had a Napoleon. Ljenja and I had pies so good we licked the sauce off of our plates and Dasha’s choice of vanilla ice cream and hot jam has opened a whole new world of deserts to me. I’ve accordingly gone through a half jar of raspberry in under a week.

Speaking of sweets last week I went a-baking so as to send my fellows off to Sibera with some swell American cookies. This gesture went over rather well, and I was repaid in a slight haircut as well as the obvious swarm of glowing affection. At any rate, their departure (and that of my Italian guests a days before) has left me to an empty apartment. The first time I’ve lived alone (excluding dorm room singles, of course) I think ever. It’s kind of liberating (unkempt is the operating term, it seems) but also a little lonely. In spite of all sorts of hermit claims and misanthropic growls it turns out I am, after all, a social creature. Nevertheless I’ve kept myself occupied with two languages, a couple books, some staggering films, some mediocre films, the BBC serial of Agatha Christies Poirot, some tinkering around with that bicycle.

I know flickr can be strange in the view department, and I’m aware that the trickle of hits on this blog and my photos are from the same small group of friends and family members who have not totally given up hope on me, but can anyone explain why this completely untagged and not really skillful picture of some random Italian dude who was living in my flat tripled the two-day accumulated views of others posted the same day (one of them featuring a girl, confections and tea, another: one damn fine yellow sweater)?

On the film front I watched Sergei Solovyov’s “Black rose, the emblem of sadness; red rose, the emblem of love” which can, I think, really best be described as carnivalesque. Solovyov is probably best known for 1988’s “Assa” which was, I understand, something of a seminal perestroika film (although really, it seems like every other film from the 80’s that I hear about these days played a critical perestroika role). For me the movie stands on the merit of it’s lovely photography, use of footnotes (!?), and Sergei Bugaev’s diction. Also there are some pretty scenes about the execution of Emperor Pavel and a midget actor/would-be assassin that will probably make you cry. At any rate, most people know it for the final 5 minutes and the credit sequence which features Kino’s Viktor Tsoi replacing the dead hero as vocalist in a Yalta hotel band somewhere circa 1982 and storming onto stage for a rousing version of “мы ждём перемен!” As the credits roll the Hotel turns into a massive, lighter-lit stadium, and we, like, totally feel how the demanded change is going to come. It’s more than a little campy these days, especially when the hotel manager asks the surly Tsoi for his residence and receives the response, “He’s a poet, he lives on this white earth.” But iit is a rather awesome scene and managed to get me riled up enough that I went on yet another week-long Kino binge.

“Black rose…” is much more abstract, employs (I think) a great deal more slang and oblique cultural references, and has pretty much nothing of a narrative for a bewildered foreigner like myself to hang on to. All the same it’s a brilliant picture and that which I did catch (the jokes, the sentiment) went down with serious impact. Instead of Tsoi, we get Boris Grebenschikov (the cliché analogy: he is the Dylan to Tsoi’s Cobain) of Akvarium who shows up out of a cupboard (Kharmsian!? Oh, why didn’t I see this film a year ago in the midst of my thesis) for a mad sing along around a small Moscow apartment. If Assa kicked me back into Kino, Black rose has gotten me into BG; when I was at Dasha/Ljenja’s apartment I jacked a couple of their Akvarium albums and I’ve been listening to them on repeat since.

Last week in our civilization course we watched “Bed and Sofa,” Viktor Shklovsky’s 1927 film, darling of all sorts of critical inquiry and truly a swell piece of work. Bourgeois objects, glorious soviet workers, open spaces, closed spaces, a whole bloom of points for the discussion soviet gender and family relationships, and all the while veiled criticism of the preceding including, most memorably (and perhaps not so veiled) the scene where the soviet worker man takes a break from construction to drink milk and gaze out over the new Soviet Moscow from the roof of the Bolshoi theater and lean, unmistakably, up into the phallus of the horse statues atop the theater. This paired sort of productively with one of the mainstream Russian movies I watched last night, “Kacheli”, about a Russian SWAT officer who’s also the ideal family man except for some cavemanery in the sack. This handsome fellow is, of course, driven to tears (lots of them and on more than one occasion) by his crazy freewheelin’ wife (it’s actually never really clear whether she’s bipolar, as the film’s make up costuming rather bluntly indicates, or just driven to insanity by his brutish sexuality). There are some truly great montages of hostage rescue scenes, really awkward sex, and a family splitting apart. Anyway, It’s all wrapped up like a complex look at the contemporary Russian family but this is hardly the case. The golden dad not only survives two close encounters with death and repents for his single sin, he plays the condescending martyr to keep the family together. The wife, on the other hand, turns out to be a sex-starved hypocrite who prefers low life drug-scum to taking care of her totally cute daughter, to the point that we’re not supposed to care whether her marital problems come from some legitimate source as opposed to complete moral turpitude. I’m not sure what all this means for the state of marriages, families, sex or whatever in Russia, but I’m pretty sure we’d all be better off if we had someone like Putin.
Speaking of, the big man’s got something less than a month left in office and the crazy thing is that hardly anybody cares. That is, none of the Russians I know or have asked have any idea if the change of power has or hasn’t happened because, as they see it, there’s really hardly any change at all. Or as Valerii of Kazan might have put it, “какая б*%$ разница.” This may or may not be correct considering how Putin has arranged his post-presidential situation. As of this week, in addition to becoming Prime Minister Putin has also agreed to head United Russia, the party with a vast majority hold on parliament. How this all will relate to his oft-declared role (not by him, modest fellow) as the “spiritual father/leader” of the country remains yet to be seen. On the other side of the transition, the most I hear about Medvedev these days is that people have “heard” he’s a swell guy. “Молoдец” actually. That these evaluations take the form of rumors after something like 70% of the country voted for him (although this too is under dispute) in the Election should indicate a little something about the state of democracy in Russia.

As opposed to, say, the United States where this whole super-extended primary situation is giving everyone that cares ulcers. In terms of bodily ailments reflecting political dismay, the whole “elitism” scandal is approaching aneurysm level. I’d say everyone should read what people like Hendrik Hertzberg and Bernard Avishai have to say about it, but it’d just be pointed out that they too are “elites.” So instead, how’s about I’ll echo Hertzberg and throw out the Bruce Springsteen card. Pawn.

Which brings me something like half circle back to Boris Grebenschikov who’s 1989 English language album “Radio Silence” is all Boss meets REM and Paul Simon, in the best possible way. For all his irony and sang froid in Russian he sure knows how to kick out a solid rock anthem in English. And then you get solid lines like: “There’s only one way out of prison, which is to set your jail a-free, but then it’s just a bunch of pretty words, to stand between the sailor and the sea.”

God speed!