Het не тебя так пылко я люблю

No, not on you my passion's bent... ( Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov ) I am a Canadian that fell in love with Russia. A place I have now lived. It started with Tarkovsky's Stalker. It has been years and still, Everyday I am collecting tiny pieces of my...

[gyulchatai]

New Tumblr

No one can travel anywhere, ever again so, 

Please enjoy my latest tumblr: https://so-this-is-quarantine.tumblr.com/

Its me bitching and mocking the end times.

Cheers if anyone is still on tumblr and still reading things.

[backtotheussr]

David Bowie visited Soviet Union twice. In 1973 he crossed Russia from Khabarovsk to Moscow in the Trans-Siberian Express. 

In 1976 he returned to Moscow together with Iggy Pop.

[flamande]

<3

[gyulchatai]

[gyulchatai]

Остановка   Остановите, пожалуйста

(Next) Bus stop, stop please.

I hold this sticky note in my hand, mouthing the words over and over again. Starting five or six stops before I have to get up and walk to the head of the Marshrutka (think: Eurovan transformed into mini bus, operates sort of like a bus/cab but the drivers drive fast, the toll is less than a taxi but more than bus. Only stops when  asked). I practice for my big performance, my debut over the bridge from Vasileostrakaya island to the center. Don’t fuck up your lines, don’t give yourself away. I have camouflaged up till now in this commuters’ silence. So perfectly manicured my old new country friends wouldn’t recognize my new old country self. It is only when I speak that I am unmasked. Here is a strange stranger. I walk up to the front as the Marshrutka jolts, turns, bumps and bounces. I stand behind the driver who has his uncle in the seat next to him, they both sit on Persian rug upholstered seats and they are worn. He looks at me through the rear-view mirror with his everyday poker face. Nothing moves, not one facial tick, his eye balls glide over to the right to skeptically glare at me. Curtains up! It’s Show time! “Остановка  Остановите, пожалуйста.” He gives me slight upward head tilt, Eastwood style nod of understanding. The noon day sun shines in from above and below, bouncing off the Neva and Saint Issac’s heavenly gold dome. A middle aged woman with a black bob, purple lips and vested in a large bear fur coat is standing beside me. She looks at me sideways, eye brows raise for a second and a crooked mouth sneer dances from left to right as the Mashrutka slows to a halt.

She knows. I am off.

[gyulchatai]

[gyulchatai]

Kept

Question in my homework: каких еще животных держат люди?

What other animals keep people? 

I know the full extended translation is which other animals do people keep but the idea of humans being kept (by more than just one another) is just great. 

I think this way is better.

[gyulchatai]

WELCOME BACK HOORAY!!!

Get ready for a RETROSPECTIVE ! Lets go back to a simpler (not true), more Russian time in my life. 

Always glad to know somebabe is out there. Watching and reading <3

[gyulchatai]

When will you come back to us?! Both physically, and to the blog?? I miss you so much! Hope you update when you get a chance :) -Alex

I ammm back doing a retrospective !

[gyulchatai]

Lunar Eclipse (494 days ago)

Last night I saw the most beautiful lunar eclipse, I have ever seen.

I woke up multiple times to stare at it from the comfort of my bed. It was mystical and enthralling. I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was so surreal, so bright and it made me feel that magic exists.

[gyulchatai]

The Night is Neigh

The night is neigh,

the air is still,

the rooms are empty.

Our things have moved and so have you.

But I am still here.

[realthingnottoken]

[gyulchatai]

I aaaaaammmm BACK!

Continuing where  I left off.

I kept sticky notes of my travels,  they are many things among them anecdotes, poems, random Russian words  and dreams.

This is going to build up to my next journey.

Love you all <3 xoxo

[gyulchatai]

Weddings (Part Two)

So that thing Russians are always yelling across the street at the wedding registry, I thought it meant kiss (mostly cause they yelled it then people kissed) but it doesn't. Горько Гроько Гробко (gorka) means bitter. My conversation teacher explained to me that this spectacle usually this happens in the big dinning hall (huge feast) after the wedding. But I guess the new generation is doing it on the street outside the registry. Everyone is supposed to have a glass of something ( usually champagne) and they yell that is tastes bitter. That life is bitter and sour. They need something to sweeten it. So the couple is coerced to kiss because love is sweet. Then everyone downs their drinks because they have now been sweeten by love. Life which is bitter and sour can only be sweeten by the presence of romance.

[gyulchatai]

Conversations

Tonight I decided to join a Russian conversation club that my Lithuanian friend recommended. They meet twice a week. The club is comprised of a mix of international students and native speakers. I decided to go. It was a little scary because I can easily talk to my professors in Russian but for some reason talking to people in my age group makes me extremely nervous. I enter the Friends Hostel where the get to together was held. I was assigned to a group for the night comprising of two Siberians, two Koreans, a Saint Peterburg native and a Japanese student. I was a quite late so everyone had already been introduced and were chatting away. I spent the first 20 mins folding and re-folding a piece of paper nervously while actively listening. They began to engage me and we spoke more and more and more. Within an hour we were laughing and joking, having a great time. One for the siberians was giving me a hard time about speaking English in Russia. I told him he was a right and it was a shame but that I was really having a hard time making Russian friends ( this is true, I try really hard but most Russians keep me at arms length to be honest). He said "This is not true anymore you have all of us, we are your friends now!" And everyone nodded excitedly. I felt grand! Then the Saint Petersburg naive came to speak me about what I want to do with my life ( a hard question in any language,to be honest ) I said I loved studying art and culture and think I might be a professor or an artist but who knows. He then asked what kind of art I make and I tried to explain film to him and how I develop it. Then he got confused and I crashed and burned in my Russian and couldn't remember how to say chemicals or buckets or anything Then he said: "This is very strange." I said:"why?" He followed with: "because you do nothing. Think of engineers, scientists, doctors, look at what they do. And you do nothing. Nothing." To say I was hurt is an understatement. I felt pierced. The damage was done and I was bleeding out. I wanted the topic to change or for someone to say something else but of course the world was silent and I was left to feel. I couldn't look at him anymore so I looked at other things, in silence hoping for an escape. Then I realized I was going to have tears and started shake and I had to leave before that happened. I abruptly got up, got my coat and left with just a quick пока (paka) to the rest of the gang. Then out on the streets the historic buildings watched a few tears make their getaway down my face. A block away, I was fine again. Why was I so upset? I think it was a combination of being accused of the secret fear of anyone studying art and the inability to really fully express myself in another language. I came back to myself and realized that sometimes I go to hell and back but I have to float because I have to learn how to walk on coals without getting burned.

[gyulchatai]

Ironing room. In the dorm what they call the communal ironing room is a closet with one board and iron. Barely enough space to close the door, oh and a mirror to take amused selfies. #selfie #russia #ironingcloset #amused

[gyulchatai]

Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking. Upon arriving in Moscow I called a friend with whom I had become close over the course of a year. “Vadim is no more,” said his father, who picked up the phone. “He drowned.” I showed up for a meeting with a newspaper reporter to have the receptionist say, “But he is dead, don’t you know?” I didn’t. I’d seen the man a week earlier; he was thirty and apparently healthy. The receptionist seemed to think I was being dense. “A helicopter accident,” she finally said, in a tone that seemed to indicate I had no business being surprised. The deaths kept piling up. People—men and women—were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or plowed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes. Back in the United States after a trip to Russia, I cried on a friend’s shoulder. I was finding all this death not simply painful but impossible to process. “It’s not like there is a war on,” I said. “But there is,” said my friend, a somewhat older and much wiser reporter than I. “This is what civil war actually looks like. “It’s not when everybody starts running around with guns. It’s when everybody starts dying.” My friend’s framing stood me in good stead for years. I realized the magazine stories I was writing then were the stories of destruction, casualties, survival, restoration, and the longing for peace. But useful as that way of thinking might be for a journalist, it cannot be employed by social scientists, who are still struggling to answer the question, Why are Russians dying in numbers, and at ages, and of causes never seen in any other country that is not, by any standard definition, at war? In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner. In 2006 and 2007, Michelle Parsons, an anthropologist who teaches at Emory University and had lived in Russia during the height of the population decline in the early 1990s, set out to explore what she calls “the cultural context of the Russian mortality crisis.” Her method was a series of long unstructured interviews with average Muscovites—what amounted to immersing herself in a months-long conversation about what made life, for so many, no longer worth living. The explanation that Parsons believes she has found is in the title of her new book, Dying Unneeded. Parsons chose as her subjects people who were middle-aged in the early 1990s. Since she conducted her interviews in Moscow over a decade later, the study has an obvious structural handicap: her subjects are the survivors, not the victims, of the mortality crisis—they didn’t die—and their memories have been transformed by the intervening years of social and economic upheaval. Still, what emerges is a story that is surely representative of the experience of a fair number of Russians. People of the generation Parsons describes were born in the desolate, hungry years following WWII. They grew up in communal apartments, with two or three generations of a single family occupying one or two rooms and sharing a hallway, bathroom, and kitchen with three or seven or even a dozen other families. But then, in the early 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev organized a construction boom: cheaply constructed apartment buildings went up all around the periphery of Moscow, and Russians—first and foremost, Muscovites—moved out of communal apartments en masse. By the Brezhnev years, in the late 1960s and 1970s, there were also Soviet-made cars and tiny country houses—such at least was the Soviet consumer dream, and it was within reach for a significant number of Russians. In addition, three important things made life not only less harsh, relative to earlier years, but even worth living. One was the general perception of social and economic stability. Jobs were unquestionably secure and, starting in the 1960s, followed by a retirement guaranteed by the state. A second was the general sense of progress, both of the sort Soviet propaganda promised (the country was going to build the first communist society, in which money would be abolished and everyone would share in the plenty); and the personal material improvement this generation experienced itself moving toward. A third source of comfort of Soviet life was its apparent equality. A good number of people with connections enjoyed extraordinary perquisites compared to the vast majority of the population, but the wealth-and-privilege gap was concealed by the tall fences around the nomenklatura summer houses, the textbook and newspaper depictions of Soviet egalitarianism, and the glacial pace of mobility into one of the favored groups at the top....

[gyulchatai]

Upon Reflection - other works I enjoyed from Manifesta 10

Descriptions from pocket guide mostly cause art historians tend to write it best. However sometimes I can't help myself. For my readers but also for future Kim to look up artists and remember works. Josef Dabering - River Plate (2003) Rive Plate represents a microcosm of society in a fragmented, black and white narrative of the body. Knees, shoulders, feet and bellies articulate a concentrated humaness presence in contrast with a claustrophobic background of cement, stone, rain and water. Flog-style editing accompanies the cascading primordial noises of the river and the highway. Shot on 16mm in Black and white. Rineke Dijkstra- Pearl video (2014) Marianna the video of a young ballerina draws the viewer into girlish dreams, presenting apparent perfection - until that facade cracks as the girl falls out of her role. Boris Mikhailov - The theatre of War, second act, time out (2014) Late in Dec 2013, a month after people came to Maidan and pitched their tents. Mikhailov and his wife went to Kiev and made a series of photographs recording the everyday life of the protesters camp , as well as large-format photo collages with panoramic views of the Maidan that recall the dramatic canvasses made by Russian realist painters in the late 19thc. Mikhailov's works are not photo journalism designed to excite or entertain, they are life from within. The faces of the people extracted from the crowd by the photographer's lens express the dim sense of anxiety about the indefinite future. Olivier Mosset- New Paintings (2009) Color is a readymade that is used to create other readymades. In this sense it is not only an object ,it is an object impossible to disassociate from its co option in the covering of other objects. The association of colors in Olivier Mosset's paintings- there are two in most of them- intensifies the strangeness of each. Vadim Fishkin- A Speedy Day (2003) He incorporates sci fi and utopian fiction in his work, inspired by the cosomology of the Russian Avantegard. A Speedy day is a time capsule with a specially equipped room inside. based on the theory of relativity , the passage of time inside the capsule differs from ordinary solar time: days a re shortened to two and half minutes. which would be hte result of travelling at the speed light. Thomas Hirschhorn- ABSCHALG (2014) ABSCHALG means that important part of the whole- such as the facade of artichetural oeurve- has been cut off. In this sense it opens the formerly invisible and forgotten inside up to the eye with its remnants of living spaces, wallpapers, and dangling lamps. ( This description does not capture the piece, At least 3 floors of the bulidng was cut open and it looks like bomb had exploded, there was a huge heap of rubble that was man made of od tape, cardboard etc.. As a viewer you had to walk in, out and around rubble. then if you look up up up passed the heaping casading rubble you the inside of three folors of apartment building. Like in films when they section off apartments so you can see the teneants doing stuff in the their homes. In the very Russian looking rooms there hang REAL constrcutive paintings by Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov and Olga Rozanova. The artisit himself plays a deafening loud soundtrack of metals grinding against each other and loud industrials things hitting each other. It is live music, using all sorts of industrial stuff) Ann Verconica Janssens- Yellow Yellow An aquarium of sculptures Some filled with transparent paraffin oil, others with demineraliazed water and transparent paraffin oil or with water, methanol, and oil. The organization of these liquids generates phenomena of light diffraction, refraction, and surface tension. The effect of certain compositions generates the appearance of an intense color on the surface of the liquid although it is actually absent.

[gyulchatai]

EUREKA !

My supervisor and I are in email contact! Orrrraaaa!!!! He has given me many articles to read and most are his work in Russian. SO I GUESS I HAVE TO STOP BEING AN ART BUM WANDERING THE STREETS OF SAINT PETE. And move on to my higher post, sit upon my new throne as: RESEARCHER ART BUM WHO SPENDS TIME ANALYSING AND TRANSLATING RUSSIAN CULTURAL LITERATURE AS WELL AS WANDERING THE STREETS OF SAINT PETE. It is a good year to be me, I must say.