A few weeks ago, I was in a trolley on the way downtown. As we approached a stop just outside the Garden Ring, an elderly but very slim and fit-looking man appeared out of nowhere right in front the trolley, causing our driver, a woman, to hit the brakes abruptly and curse loudly. He got in at the stop, and she spewed some of her wrath at him while he was looking for his wallet. "You like extreme, don't you?" she was saying. "You're crossing the street like this, all the while thinking, 'Will she hit me or not?' Right? Is that what you were thinking of?" To which he very calmly replied: "Thinking? What's there to think about? There was nothing but pure calculation." It's still making me smile, the way he said it and then moved past the turnstile inside the trolley. He looked very much like Nikolai Drozdov, one of the sweetest TV people in the world, who's been doing a nature show - "V mire zhivotnykh" - since I was a little kid. I wonder if it was him indeed, and whether the driver woman recognized him and mentioned "extreme" because of that: Drozdov, in 2003, took part in Survivor show ("Posledniy geroi") - I rooted for him then, but he didn't win...

My dear friend Sasha (aka Alex Kleimenov) spent a weekend in Ternopil and sent me this lovely picture taken at a department store there:


© Alex Kleimenov

There's Yushchenko's portrait, and Taras Shevchenko's, and Ivan Franko's - and then there's this triptych, and I recognize only one man, Stepan Bandera, but Sasha writes me that the two others are "major UPA leaders" as well.

"Across the aisle," Sasha also writes, "they were selling kitchen utensils."

A very tasty image - thank you, Sash.

I didn't make it to Gogol Bordello's performance yesterday - for a number of reasons (my laziness is just one of them). Really regret it.

(Regret it even more after I've found these bloggers' photos from the concert: here and here. What an idiot I am...)

***

I'm reading these two extremely long pieces on Putin's Russia now: one by Michael Specter in the New Yorker, and the other by Perry Anderson in London Review of Books.

If I ever manage to finish them, I hope to share a few thoughts here. Maybe not.

A few weeks ago, Marta woke up during our walk at Novodevichiy Monastery. Normally, she sleeps from the moment we get outside till, sometimes, an hour after we're back in. But this time, she was either feeling too hot (it was before the winter finally made it here), or she was disturbed by me singing Santa Lucia (I was in a very good mood then and had just read a story by Ray Bradbury, in which someone was singing Santa Lucia, too). Anyway, I had to cut our walk short and was on the way home - and Marta was having a screaming fit until we reached the little open-air market where there were enough distractions for her to calm down. Her sobs, however, had made an old, tall, sloppily-dressed woman accompany us for a while. First, she shook her keys - big, old-fashioned ones, attached to a thick metal ring - in front of Marta, thinking that the sound would cheer her up. It didn't work, but I thanked her. Then, out of the blue, she started telling me about her son: that he used to have a millionaire wife (millionersha), but he dumped her (and all her cars and apartments) for a younger girl who was now three months pregnant. The rich one couldn't have kids, the old woman said with disgust; all she had were three cats. Of the young and pregnant one, she spoke with the same disgust - possibly, because the girl was poor. I said something about kids being such a blessing, regardless of who their mothers are, and hurried away from the old bitch.

A month or so ago, I was on my way to the subway station near us to meet a friend, when I saw an old woman, with a walking cane and wearing valenki, trying to cross the street. It was slippery and windy as hell then, so I decided to help her, thinking it'd only be a few meters, but she wrapped her arm around mine and, slowly, very slowly, we walked together for two blocks. She must've felt so grateful she decided to share what she probably thought was an invaluable tip: a birth control trick, not for the faint-hearted. After intercourse, she told me, take a pee into a banochka, a glass can, and then pour some of it inside you; works really well, she said. We also talked about those goddamn drivers who'd drive over you the moment you turn away, and about the corrupt Moscow police who come over to the elderly people's apartments and burn their legs with laser, to intimidate them into re-writing their wills and leaving their apartments to some evil strangers. It was a fun experience, and it's good that my friend was late, too, because otherwise she'd have had to wait for me in the cold for, like, 20 minutes...

How do you like this headline on Gazeta.ru?



"Yushchenko has called holodomor genocide again."

They just can't get over that bad boy Yushchenko, no matter what.

It's gotten really cold here at last, and I'm hibernating, and so I've started yet another pseudo-blog thing: no thoughts attached.

Lazy, I'll be posting quotes from the stuff I read there - nothing but quotes (and links, if there are any).

***

I've just finished this piece on Iraq (London Review of Books, November 2006): surreal beyond belief - and nearly every paragraph in it seems quoteworthy...

American military spending on Iraq is now approaching $8 billion a month. Accounting for inflation, this is half as much again as the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War; the total spent so far has long surpassed the cost of the entire Apollo space programme. Three and a half months of occupation costs the equivalent of Iraq’s estimated oil revenues for the current financial year. We now know, thanks to the leaked report of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, that if US troops withdrew, they would in all probability be redeployed to neighbouring countries, increasing the already massive expenditure and inevitably threatening new arenas of conflict. Here’s an unimaginable alternative. If the US army left the region, and if the money was instead handed out to every Iraqi man, woman and child, they would each receive more than $300 a month.

[...]

The State Department is unforthcoming about the real cost of the corporate armies operating in Iraq: the mercenaries, or ‘private security contractors’, who guard US officials and international contractors ensuring that Coalition forces are free to fight insurgents. The GAO estimated last year that there were more than 25,000 of these ‘contractors’, significantly outnumbering British troops. A former squaddie, kitted out with dark glasses, automatic pistol, rifle, body armour and radio, working for a construction team, can earn at least $12,000 a month. A former special forces NCO protecting a Coalition official or construction firm boss can make more than twice that. The State Department says the cost of security makes up 16 to 22 per cent of the overall outlay on big reconstruction projects, but this may be an underestimate.

[...]

Before 1991, Iraq had one of the best health services in the Middle East. Baghdad’s doctors and nurses provided care often comparable to that of their counterparts in Tel Aviv or Cairo. A decade of sanctions scuppered that: by 2002 the Health Ministry budget had been reduced by 90 per cent. According to both the UN and the World Bank, the health system needed $1.6 billion just to resume normal operation. The CPA set aside less than a quarter of that.

A new children’s hospital in Basra was to be a showcase for American generosity. It was a joint venture of Bechtel and Project Hope, one of Laura Bush’s favourite charities, overseen by USAID. Congressional Democrats questioned whether Iraq needed a state of the art 94-bed paediatric unit when existing hospitals were in dire need of basic repairs and medical supplies. The contract was signed anyway: $50 million was set aside for construction and $30 million for supplies and training. The project was to be finished by 31 December 2005. This June, the embassy finally ordered work to stop: $150 million had been spent, and Bechtel estimated that a further $98 million would be needed.

[...]

As a centre of oil smuggling, the British-occupied area around Basra is rivalled only by the Niger delta. More than 1600 fishing boats in Basra spirit away 15 million litres of oil a month. Basra is now the most corrupt city in Iraq. Everyone has been accused of smuggling: the Iranian-funded Shia militias, criminal syndicates, the mayor, the Baghdad Oil Ministry.

[...]

Sadovoye Koltso near Park Kultury subway station, the long-awaited snow - and Gogol Bordello, my favorite band, is to play in Moscow on Jan. 28!!! I hope I'll be able to go.

A new GV translation - this time about the Russian-Estonian dispute over the Tallinn monument.

My GV translation on Kushnaryov's death is here.

Skiing Base at Gorky Park - but nothing to ski on...

Here's an ordinary-looking children's playground somewhere near Sportivnaya subway station:



And here's the bench up close:



The writing on it says that a certain Djavat, an [ethnic] Georgian (gruzin), is a khach and a blackassed jerk. There's more, but it's irrelevant, so I won't bother translating it.

The relevant part is that Djavat doesn't sound like a Georgian name to me, but rather like an Azeri or a Turkish one - so it probably means that gruzin is used as a slur here, not as an indicator of ethnicity. Must be a new trend. If this is so, then this use of gruzin is similar to the use of "blackass" and khach. In Armenian, khach means "cross" (and Armenia was the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as state religion, in 301) - but this word in Russia is by now an established ethnic slur, used for people from the Caucasus, regardless of whether they are Georgian, Armenian or Azeri.

Back in the Soviet times, it wasn't so complicated - there was nothing but zhidy, kikes, then. Or so it seems now.

Jerks.

(I apologize if this entry has made someone sick: it sure does make me sick to be writing about it like this.)

One more photo from our Sunday's walk - the fire department on Prechistenka:



The upper part of the mural is about the 1853 fire at the Bolshoi Theater; the lower part is about the 1977 fire at Hotel Rossiya. (For a bigger copy, see here.)

Prechistenka on Sunday, around 4 PM.

This may seem like a boring picture - no action, no nothing. No cars. Right, and this is what's truly extraordinary about it: Moscow sometimes looks like this on weekends - and, as Mishah said, this is probably how it used to be a long, long time ago, before it turned into a huge and seemingly neverending traffic jam.

***

We took a trolley to the center today, with Marta in a stroller, and had a wonderful walk through all the little streets between Ostozhenka and Prechistenka. Marta slept through it all, as usual.

One of the weirdest places in central Moscow: the backyard of a music school on Prechistenka. There must've been stables there before, but now people live in these buildings - and there are probably a couple of artists' studios there as well.

Reminds me of Odessa a lot.

And of the spooky place where I lived in Iowa City during my first year there - Black's Gaslight Village on Brown St.

***

I almost posted this, but then wandered off to find some photo of Gaslight Village or a story about it. Very few mentions, unfortunately, and no photos.

Found the Black Angel, however - here. I'm probably one of those few people who've never seen it up close.

Here's what the woman who took the picture wrote:

I too had many nocturnal visits to the Black Angel. It was just one of those things you had to experience, like Black's Gas Light Village, or Gabe's oasis. Those kind of memories are part of what made my Iowa City adventure so wonderful.

The Oakland Cemetery, where the Black Angel stands, is located at the end of Brown St.: I got lost on my way home one night in February 1997 and realized in the morning that I'd been walking in circles a block or so away from the cemetery, blissfully unaware of it. Another time, also late at night, my Gaslight Village neighbor was giving me driving lessons at some cemetery, and it could've been the Oakland Cemetery, but honestly, I've no idea.

Anyway, here's another photo that I've taken today at that weird place on Prechistenka - I wasn't planning to post it because it's out of focus, but after running into the Black Angel of Iowa City, I have to post what looks like the Yellow Angel of Moscow:



***

Here's a cute link: Haunted Iowa City. Both the Gaslight Village and the Black Angel are on the map used by The Third Eye Over Iowa Ghost Hunters Club.

:)