Trying to entertain Marta this morning, I kept straying off to YouTube, to watch some of my favorite Soviet cartoons. I realized they were a bit too boring for Marta when we were watching the first one, Winnie-the-Pooh, and I wasn't surprised at all, but since it didn't really matter after that, I got to watch Padal proshlogodniy sneg (1983) in between other, more kid-friendly, things.

(All videos and links are in Russian.)

Part One:



Part Two:



Here's another one, made by the same guy, Aleksandr Tatarskiy, in 1981:



I don't think I've ever seen it from the very beginning. In general, it feels very different to watch this stuff on YouTube, not on TV. A totally different context.

Tatarsky was born in Kyiv in 1950, and died this past summer, at the time when we were searching for my papa. So very sad.

Here's a video interview with him, conducted by The New Times just ten days before his death.

Our window would've been like a TV if it hadn't been for the chestnut trees, a few of which still have some leaves left. No use trying to take pictures. And I'm without my camera again, anyway, so I didn't even bother to go outside (and, yes, it is very cold today, Marta spent most of her "walk" at a coffee house with Mishah and his mother).

Outide the window, a few fights, riot police, folks chanting Han'ba, a few anti-Vitrenko guys arrested, apolitical Kyivites walking past the police cordon as if nothing's really happening.

Maybe I should run outside before it's too dark and take a few pictures with my cell phone? (The phone is back, by the way, but I keep forgetting to write about it.)

Fascists, Communists, whatever.

Taking Marta for a walk feels like a guerrilla operation today. Vitrenko is on the right flank, Tyahnybok's fellows, a thousand of them or so, on the left, by Taras Shevchenko's monument. The original plan was to take her to the wonderful playground at the Shevchenko Park, but we've been forced to reconsider.

Mishah was buying herbs at Besarabka, had a conversation with a real cute babushka, a vendor, there. She told him how once Vitrenko was at the market, along with reporters, bodyguards, the crowd, and she got really curious, and ran to look, unaware it was Vitrenko. And someone from Vitrenko's entourage gave her some flowers right away and told her to go ahead and present them to "Natalya Mykhailovna" and thank her. Babushka said, "But who am I supposed to give flowers to?" "Natalya Mikhailovna." "Yes, but who is she, this Natalya Mikhailovna?" "Vitrenko." "Vitrenko?! But I don't want to give her flowers, I don't like what she does! Me, I'm a bazaar woman, yes, and I am at my place, at the bazaar. But Vitrenko, she's a bazaar woman, too, so why is she in politics?!!"

:)

Oh boy, now it's Oleg Gazmanov's turn: Sdelan v SSSR... To fully grasp what a torture it is to live at Besarabka on weekends, go to La Russophobe for the lyrics and the translation of this song...

The Communists are right outside our window now, playing Vstavay, strana ogromnaya and Den Pobedy loudly since around 8 am.

No way for them to get to Maidan: the cops have been preparing for today since yesterday.

No more than a hundred of them, but a really loud bunch. And every other one seems to hold a flag, Mishah reports, so it may appear as if there are more of them than just a hundred. The guy who is making a speech now says there are eight people among them from Crimea - not sure if he thinks that's a lot or not...

Not a single Ukrainian flag, but at least one Russian and about a dozen strange-looking flags - the Imperial Russian yellow-white-black on red.

Mishah thinks most of the people there are Vitrenko's (she's speaking at the moment) and about a third might be from Russia (hence, those strange flags). So, technically, they aren't Communists, but, likely, the so-called Progressive Socialists and the so-called Russian Eurasianists. Not that it really matters, of course.

Some guy is bitching about a recently-dedicated Stepan Bandera monument in Lviv - and this reminds me of an item (RUS) I saw on Gazeta.ru yesterday: a bunch of the opposition and near-opposition groups were protesting in Moscow against restoration of a monument to "the White generals who fought on Hitler's side" during WWII; they called it hypocritical of the Russian authorities to get involved in their neighbors' affairs and yet ignore what's taking place at home.

I don't mind it when this blog inspires discussion, conversation, argument.

But the previous post is too fragile for any of it.

So I'm moving Elmer's comment here - feel free to discuss whether I could have meant that "the commies were not fascists" or any other such crap. Thank you.

8:06 AM, October 13, 2007

Elmer wrote:

Well, Neeka, I don't mean to spoil your melancholy mood, or if you like Duke Ellington, your Mood Indigo, but one thing contained in your write-up just about punched me in the face - the reference to fascists.

My immediate reaction - "you mean the commies were not fascists?"

Charles Aznavour certainly had his day in the limelight all over the world. So did Maurice Chevalier. The Marx brothers did a great spoof of Maurice Chevalier in one of their movies ("If a nightingale could sing like you...")

Hang on to those tapes and that old equipment. These days you can transcribe those old tapes onto CD or DVD - what a great keepsake and memoir.

Fascists - interesting.

Here's some of what I wrote to a friend on August 8, 2003:

[...] I'm home alone again, the third day in a row. I've been talking to my cat, you know... And I'm too sick of Kyiv to go for a walk or something, and all my friends are either busy with family and kids, or away on vacation. And it's 4 am now.

[...] I found myself in my parents' room, trying to watch the news, and then I drifted off to one of those dusty corners where my father keeps all the useless vinyl records (is that what they're called?) - and there I saw our ancient reel-to-reel Philips recorder, underneath a pile of my mama's sewing patterns magazines. And I realized that I'd wanted to drag it out for so long, and to see if it still works (it must be at least a few years older than I am - my father's diplomat friends gave it to him when they acquired something newer...), and to try to find those old records (Italians, and the stupidest English-language disco, and the great Dalida...) that I used to listen to as a child, in the early 80s. So I unearthed it, and then I checked whether the records were still where I remembered them to be - they were, stocked behind all the vinyls, invisible and hardly reachable.

I wiped the dust off the recorder and removed its gray, rough lid - and inside it had that incredibly familiar smell, nice smell, of some kind of plastic I think. I plugged it in and put on the first record - I still remember how to put on reel-to-reel - not from childhood but from the radio journalism class at Iowa where the recorders were very shitty and broken-down. It worked! (The only two things that don't are the rewind and fast-forward functions - they never did, as far as I remember - so I have to do it manually, at first using my index finger and then when it starts bleeding, I switch to a pen.)

The first record was of my father's idol, Charles Aznavour, the French Armenian who has recently had a secondary role in Atom Egoyan's Ararat, a film about the Armenian Genocide of 1915. I never really liked him too much (except that he reminds me of my grandfather who died before I was born, allowing me to idealize him all I want) - but this time he sounded like magic!

I unplugged the recorder and transported it to my room. There, I put on one of my favorites, Nada, an Italian who won at San Remo in 1971, three years before I was born. She has a boy's voice - and I've been missing her so so so much all this time. As soon as I heard this voice, I saw my mama dancing around the room to her, twenty years ago... (When I was in Iowa, I found her sound-alike, an Arab woman with a boy's voice, and at first mama would yell, Turn this horrible music off, but when she was going back to Kyiv four months later, she asked if I could please let her have that Arabic tape, and back home she was torturing papa with it the first thing in the morning...)

At Nada's fourth or fifth song, I realized I was so happy I felt like crying, so I called Mishah in St. Pete. But it's Friday night, right, and he was tipsy and not too much use.

To chase away the reality that Mishah had imposed on me, I put on the recording of my 5-year-old self (as any parent, my papa used to sit me down in front of the mike every year, religiously, till I was ten or something). In 1979, he had me believe that the mike was still off and so I chatted away happily for half an hour, interrupting myself every other minute with, Papa, let's record me already, enough of this testing! Among other things, I showed off my English - a dog, a cat, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a baby, hello, good morning good morning good morning to you, good morning good morning I'm glad to see you - all with the strongest and the funniest Ukrainian accent I never knew I had to such extent (the way to tell a Ukrainian accent - in Russian or in English - is to listen to the "g" sound: the word God would sound like GHod; also, in proper Russian you'd say 'shto' ('what') and a Ukrainian is likely to say 'sho'...). I've also sang a song they taught us at the kindergarten, a very sad song about a schoolgirl named Lyudmila, from the town of Cherkassy, who was captured by the fascists and they wanted to know where the communists were, and she wouldn't tell because she was a conscientious young Pioneer, so they tortured her in every way possible and then hung her... (If I ever have children, I'll record them every three months - because now I know that by the time they are 29, this stuff would make them laugh their asses off.)

Now I'm beginning the fourth hour of listening (it’s my favorite mix now), feeling totally happy, and totally grateful to my parents [...]

[...]

The latest thing I've discovered listening to papa's reel-to-reels is that in 1982, I spoke French. It was some little poem, and it did sound like French to me, like real French! My English didn't sound too English then - and now I'm allergic to French (I mean I like the sound of it but when it comes to spelling and understanding, I always freak out). So now I'm waiting for one of my French-speaking friends to return from his vacation - I really want to know what that poem was about!!! (It's very strange not to be able to understand yourself speaking - almost like amnesia...)

I still remember how happy I was that night. Papa was still healthy, they were in Odesa with mama that week, I guess...

And here're two old videos by Nada - I found them on YouTube a few days ago, and it was the first time I saw her, and both mama and I got really emotional listening to her...

Armenian Genocide on the Daily Show:



Update: The link above no longer works, because of some copyright issues.

The video can now be found here.

Or here, somewhat truncated, though.

Speaking of Our Always - Their Always, that is - Lyndon of Scraps of Moscow has translated answers to Kommersant-Vlast's question of the week: "Is he [with us] forever now?"

I haven't listened to Radio Echo of Moscow since the end of June - but now, after reading Sergei Dorenko's answer, I suddenly begin to miss his morning hooliganism on the Razvorot show...

Sergei Dorenko, journalist: "Putin's problem lies in the fact that he wants to leave power but cannot. His feet are tied to the bicycle pedals. Everyone is crediting Putin with some clever plan, but I think he wakes up every day with a new plan. No one needs him once he's out of power. Though it is true that outside of Russia many are waiting for him with open arms: Chechen families, Nevzlin, Berezovsky, and about thirty other people."

***

And Mishah has posted Kommersant-Vlast's selection of Putin look-alikes on his blog - check it out... :)

Another political joke - in my tonight's GV translation:

To prepare for his visit to the post-election Kyiv last week, Marat Gelman - LJ user galerist, a Russian art dealer and, allegedly, Victor Yanukovych's "spin doctor" in 2004 - looked through Ukrayinska Pravda, a popular online source of political news, co-founded by Georgiy Gongadze in 2000.

Boris Berezovsky's blog was one of the curious things that Gelman found there. He wrote (RUS):

It is him [Berezovsky], indeed. I guarantee that.

He also ran into this political joke (RUS) about George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin and Victor Yushchenko:

God summons the three presidents - of the United States, Russia and Ukraine - to heaven and tells them:

- Dear presidents, I've summoned you because of some really bad news I have to share: the end of the world is in two weeks. I'd like you to report this sad information to my three most favorite peoples.

Bush appears on TV:

- Brothers and sisters, I've got two pieces of news for you. One good, the other bad. The first one: there is God, after all. The second: the end of the world is in two weeks.

Putin speaks on the radio and TV:

- Ladies and gentlemen, I've got two pieces of news for you. Both are bad. The first one: there is God, after all. The second: the end of the world is in two weeks.

Yushchenko makes a radio and TV address:

My people, I've got two pieces of news for you. Both are good. The first one: God himself has recognized me as president. The second: I'll rule the country till the end of the world.

According to some of Gelman's readers who have commented on this joke, it appears to be an old one, recycled many times over the years: substitutes for Bush, Putin and Yushchenko have included Aleksandr Lukashenko; Boris Yeltsin, Helmut Kohl and Leonid Kuchma; Leonid Brezhnev; and, surprisingly, Bill Gates.

But, joking aside, here is Gelman's three-sentence analysis of today's political situation in Ukraine (RUS) :

[...] It's impossible to imagine collisions that are more complicated. Though, all in all, everyone would like to drown [Yulia Tymoshenko]. But since she may become president in the future and is very unforgiving, everyone wants to do it with someone else's hands.

One of the comments to Sean Guillory's post about Nashi's celebration of Putin's birthday:

There is a new joke going around: Pushkin is our everything, Tsereteli is our everywhere and Putin is our always.

:)))

An interview with Victor Shenderovich in Die Tageszeitung, translated into English at Robert Amsterdam's blog:

I cannot speak for the majority of citizens. Among those around me, people are shocked. They are downright ashamed that the Kremlin party congress was such a retro-event. The dramatization was not content with falling back on the symbolic forms of the Brezhnev era. It went right back to Stalin: standing ovations lasting for minutes; a weaver as representative of workers who asks the Kremlin boss to remain in office; a delegate from the provinces who suggests to the president that he do the people a favour and become minister president. This script hails from the Stalin era. It was never before so clear. One just has to be ashamed.

In this interview, unfortunately, Shenderovich is nowhere near as brilliant and funny as he normally is. Maybe something got lost in translation.

But it's not often that he's being interviewed in the West, so I thought I should post the link here.

Here's his Russian-language site.

I wish Ukraine had someone like Shenderovich, too.

Or - it would be nice to live in a separate country, with Shenderovich as its president.

I've only now gotten to look through that New York Times' piece on Yanukovych - which they chose to run right before the election, on Sept. 29.

It begins:

Once a divisive figure reviled by some here as a shady reactionary and Kremlin pawn, Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich has turned into arguably the nation’s most popular politician.

"Arguably" is the key word of this sentence.

And then there's this:

He [Yushchenko] then lost to Mr. Yanukovich in balloting that was denounced as fraudulent by Western observers. Protests forced another election, which was won by Mr. Yushchenko.

How come there's no mention of the Supreme Court's ruling?

Don't really feel like reading on. Maybe later.

The fucking disco outside is driving me crazy. It rained around 6 PM, so there was some hope they'd cancel the concert, but the rain stopped after half an hour or so.

You know, there were moments when I did sympathize with people living around Maidan in 2004 - but at the time, one of the alternatives was a civil war or something similar, and a seemingly non-stop concert with little breaks for political speeches must have seemed okay even to those stuck in the epicenter, I guess.

Here and now is so different.

Is this how Chernovetsky is preparing for a new election? Buckwheat for the elderly, shitty music for the kids?

It's 9:30 PM now. Don't they have to go to work tomorrow morning?