Monday 20 December 2010

Metro encounters

Today, opposite me on the metro, there was a man with a vintage face. A big nose exploding from it, dominating the tucked in chin. He started reading a broadsheet, a rare thing on the metro. He seemed really to people a 19th century satire, and he could easily have been a Gogolian clerk.He smiled in a Mr Bean style as he read an article entitled 'Stariye Pyecni'(Old songs) and then at Park Pogedi, up he got officiously with his briefcase. He was wearinfg a pale pink shirt under a cricket jumper, in the English  chap style which is currently a little in fashion here.


I wondered in a previous blog if I might see the same people when I get the metro, which is always at disparate times of the day.

Recently, I remarked the same woman as I saw around two weeks ago. I think it was perhaps a couple of days after I went to the all night-party and was focussing on specific details as is easy to do when tired that I saw a woman who walked in a strange inhibited way. How I imagined chinese women who had their feet bound would walk. This time, I noticed the cause of her strange walk; oddly shaped white platform shoes sloping up at an angle.

 She wore a long skirt and a white shawl aroiund her head. and was carrying white carrier bags.

And , again, a third time, I saw the same frail woman in her cumbersome shoes walking out from the metro. I wonder has she ever seen me and what critique would she have made? If I climbed to the roof of the metro and looked down at myself what on earth would I see- a red beret, a blue alien hat or bright red bobble; that is my first disguise. Then, how do I walk - I think my wlak changes regularly depending on my destination(work, home, party?),  the time, how hungry I am and of course my mood. Sometime I run, sometimes I walk slow and heavy in my slow heavy boots designed to combat the snow.  And sometimes the stilettoed girls scurry faster than me across the metro, across the ice, like elegant incaustious spiders draped in fur and cosmetics.

Russian nightclubs

ZH

Short for 'ass' in Russian. Dark factory doors with only an imposing Russian letter to hint that there is something interesting inside, although it suggests a private mans club rather than the calm club spread out when I entered. Apparently, it's in the European style. The idea of an old appartment mildly renovated into a shabby-chic night haunt is very Eastern Europe, and reminiscent of the Budapest clubs. The  whole room was covered with bric-a-brac; a plastic horse head, antlers on the coat stand,  and a landscape of u-bends, chandeliers  and umbrellas, dripped beautifully  from the ceiling. Along the walls were gritty, carnel images. A Lucian Freud-esque nude, an indecent obvious nudity with no photoshopping; a still from a faux-documentary film about mass murderers; a  fleshy provocative sex scene. The images seemed to watch me, or at least they kept drawing my eye to their uncomfortable scenes, breaking the fairy-tale fantasy of the umbrella ceiling.

When I enterered, it was a quite cafe-bar, a couple of scattered groups talking, drinking at the bar. Up the grey stairs, was a random poker table and locked doors.


Once midnight past, the club filled with more smoke fumes, couples sat sensuously together and the dance floor filled with people echoing the images on the walls. The music past from indie and vintage to more popular dance songs and at that point I left, so what happened next is left to the imagination.




Tuesday 7 December 2010

The metro is the bane and gem of dear old St Peter. It is quite terribly different from the London  metro; though a metro is a metro and the differences are perhaps subtle.

The big bulky blue trains as huge and communist as the buildings around Park Pogedi and Mockovskaya, those massive stone testaments to soviet power. If it could be, it would be made of those same large bricks but instead it is  matt blue wash metal. A very unjoyful blue. It is not so 'metro-sexual' as to shine and flash red signs like some of the London trains.

It is a wide geometrical wound dug into the earth, a surgery perpetrated deep deep down into her intestines.

Little tokens with an 'M' sign  just like magic coins. I wonder, if that was London, wouldn't people make fake ones  as they do for the supermarket trolleys? So here there is the tinkle of coins, and in London only gliding paper. The card system exists too though it doesn't have such an evocative name,;only 'Proyezdnoy Bilyet'(train ticket), and no oysters,  no thoughts of Alice in Wonderland or Venuses emerging from the sea.

Standing. On the way up, it is absolutely acceptable to stand sprawled on both sides of the escalator, Very, very rarely some-one tries to climb the stairs.  No efficient businessmen nudging tourists irritably aside with their briefcase. However, every-one makes a mad uncouth rush for the escalators when they leave the metro, then they stop suddenly once having managed to stand a  place or two higher on the moving stairs than the rest of the rabble. Russians go on the escalators, two by two. It gives the effect of a big fur-coated, high-heeled game of British Bulldog, the metro and the stairs being the two safe zones. Just like in that game people move out of bounds, scaling the opposite stairs to get to safety quicker.

Sunday 5 December 2010

Fairy-tales




November 9th

This is the only moment I have to weave fairytales, this stolen transversal black hole between two townscapes. From the statue of Lenin, his guesture almost flowing with the wind to protect and offer community to the bare, brazen Karousel - ironic name for a supermarket,; this, children, will be your playground when you are tall enough to negotiate the winding isles. It is not a playground, its’ colours are taken from the electronic vocabulary of a computer screen.
These moments with strangers. Is it ever the same stranger? We are mixed together like a pack of skittles. Perhaps sometimes in an adjacent carriage, a stranger I sketchedthe day before waits.
Nov 1oth
Today, in the carriage, there was a man with a rodent-like face, I thought then as I looked more closely I realised that he was a gaunt alley cat, something very feline skulking in that sucked in face. A graying pen and ink cat. A black cap.
Russia, RussiA, RUssiA, RuccIya
Where, I don’t know? Russian is a stressful language, or at least it wants to be stressed, to be pushed and pulled with predefined rules such as in a predefined dance. Dance classes stretch me, demand exactness and reciprocity and it is the same for the Russian language; I want to make it all up, express it at my own guise but it is important to learn the set conventions, for better communication.
The streets of St Peter are full of stereotypes, effortless stereotypes and not the carefully constructed images of London. A man in tweed and glasses hanging by string, tall and gangly, from a book, from a film. A tall pale man, he too from a image of primitive revolutionaries, of innocent youth.

The many women epitomising feminity with long shining hair and  furr coats that seem still to be alive, beautiful full hoods. They have stepped from the muted colours of an eighteenth century painting, rather than from the immense uncouth jaws of the metro.

In my world, the ideal is to appear ‘inappropriately centuried/era’d’, to not have been born into this same era, to have something magic and other, transcending all, standing out in all western culture. The red beret - it stood out as more solid, more wholesome, antique, magic than the high street berets which sprung into fashion, was one means of such a transcendance but that has been stolen from me now, in this  tranposed world full of beautiful antique butterflies amongst the rising capitalist mist.
 
 

Peterhof

9th October
Peterhof today. Everything was magnificently golden, with an autumn backdrop of vivid oranges, a combination of rich muted colours. Women collected the autumn leaves from the park and carried them as bouquets. Some children wore them as lush autumn crowns around there heads.
European style gardens with Orthodox gold dominating everything. The gardens didn’t initially impart a sense of awe, because they are not strikingly different from European gardens. It is disconcerting, this Europe in Russia, an emulation of the West which is mirrored today in Mcdonald-going, Hollywood films, imported Western fashion. Strange such an emulation when the most fabulous buildings are in the Russian style.. The very edible Church of spilled blood with glorious, jubilatory colours.
The gulf of Finland, the fence and boundary of the park, was a very sober sea. Hungover maybe, from rollicking around on the Atlantic. A uniform grey covers sky and water, calm and disinterested.
I am such a parrot that my English is already affected by non-communication with native-speakers - word order jeapordised, unnecessary words stripped out. It is difficult not to be able to express your full vocabulary, knowing that it will not be understood; subtleties and underlying hints will not have the strength to jump the language barrier.

Friday 3 December 2010

Pre-Russia prerussceptions

In August, I got a job in Saint Petersburg, teaching English to children.

I am writing this to progressively document my perception of Russia - starting from a state of not being in Russia, and continuing to a state of being in Russia.
What is the level of my current ignorance and cultural misconceptions? How has Russia so far entered into my English-woman psyche?
Russian literature, that potent and wonderful strain beginning, for me, with Gogol and his walking-talking noses. Dull, ridiculous functionaries. The hot, disturbed nights I spent while reading ‘Crime and Punishment’, the ridiculously hot summer of 2007. Repulsion and empathy for the anti-hero - a strange illusion of guilt - mingled together. Then three years later, continents away, more Dostoyevsky,this time the Karamazovs, where Alyosha/Alexei(how confusing Russian names then seemd) seemed to be a perfect prototype of a man with his gentle manners and innocent masculine beauty. I read it obsessively , on every bench I could find rest on in Montreal. My interest for the Karamazov Brothers first began months before I read the novel. It began at the Opera of Budapest, looking down at a scarlet stage, the beautiful but incomprehensible story below. The drama mirroring the step I was about to take, out into the Ocean, across the Atlantic. Russian classical music. It flurries in confidently amongst other classical music, without modesty, like hail dropping down to drown out the pitter-patter of the rain. Much of it has innate exclamation marks - Shostakovich! ! At full blast in a SUV, through the wide snow and wooden houses, listening to it and feeling a blast of despair, raising up a quiet redneck country into something sublime. . . .  Overflowing with Shostakovich as I smoked a cuban cigar in my mouth. Watching the slow puffs of smoke follow the rhythm of the music.
Tchaikovsky came earlier, and incidentally, as a gift when I left Hungary. High pitched and delicious, water coloured tinted fairytales, baroque expressive letters give so mch expression to the paintbrush.

Ra-ra-Rasputin, ‘Oh those Russians,’ presenting Russia as exotic and fascinating. That wonderful, superstitious myth.
 
A Canadian friend asked me why I would go to Russia, it’s not really some-where one goes it? An American warned me about who I hung out with, ‘You know, there’s the Mafia out there. There’s some bad people.’ Most people recognise St Petersburg as a fascinating, cultural city and congratulate me on having obtained a job there.