Ancient Babushka with a Tall Fur Hat

Blusher and pink lipstick forced onto the most minimal of lips. A fur hat is the only moisture in this shrivelled creature and even that seems dried and has none of the  fresh-from-the=slaughterhouse lusciousness of the coquettish hats the younger girls wear. It is stiff and starched. Perhaps it dried with age along with her pink lips and cheeks.

Eyptian without the desert

The Staccato of Stilettos

Yesterday,  I was painfully attuned to the high-heels on the semi-defrosted streets, in the sort of way a graze is very sensitive to a drop of acidic lotion. A girl in tacky delicate  block heels, the sort that have only rubber height and no beauty of form, was walking unevenly before and behind me as I alternatively relaxed or speeded up my pace, enjoying the puddles in my clumpy trekking boots from a hunting shop in deep America. The advance of the heels , tak tak tak, sounded like a child cutting an awkward shape with slightly unwieldy scissors. From the other direction, the more steady, clip clip clip of a secretary’s scissors.

At the Pavlovsk park, in the company of my friends, a girl was wearing  precarious stilettos which leaned slightly on the ice, destroying any continuity of line and therefore parading the ridiculous rather than the feminine. Some  of us were worried what the stilletos would do to the rubber dinghies we planned to sled on. Nonetheless, she stalked on ahead of us like an inelegant clumsy flamingo.

There are many girls who resemble large exotic avian creatures stuttering around their cage because of their long thin legs which walk with such precipitate awkwardness. Many are extremely thin but their body fluffs out like a bird from flaring coat and bags.

Others are patently women(and not girls trapped in unflattering mimicry), or the Feminine, wearing delightfully statuesque heels and walk quite magically and naturally in their leg extensions.

Beauty Convention

A beauty convention . My friend got free tickets from her hairdresser. To get there from the metro you need to walk across a frozen lake; such a contrast of the savage and the altar of the artificial. Inside were boutiques with a strange mixture of products, not necessarily suited to a beauty convention; honey beer, Kvac, Cider, beeswax . Not far from these traditional market products was an ultra-modern tan-spray machine, being used (demonstrated) by young generic  bikini-clad girls and photographers in suits . This was placed incongruously next to an esoteric stall of essential oils and health books.

On the main stage, spread out like painters canvasses but more orderly, was a beauty competition on the theme of fantasy . Behind each stall was a fabulously decorated woman; a dress with a pom-pom skirt in play-school colours; hair curled into a cylinder and fixed with some very powerful hairspray or perhaps glue, like  a wooden honey-comb scraper or moulded from the interior of long thin ribbed bucket(she had to hold it up with her arm).; an onion.

By the main stage was a body-painting competition inspired by Dali. Nude women with fabulously painted bodies and surreal hairstyles curling in the air. It seems this kind of decoration could only work with these Russian models, given their strawberry facial structures and long Rapunzel hair.

Some of the models were clearly amateur and the dowdy presenter of a hair-dressing master class berated them models, ‘They’re young. They don’t know how to walk. We choose this music for them and they walk like that.’ She was very deputy-head style .

It was fascinating to see the mixture of extravagant and tacky (cheap stilettos, leopard skin) people attending the convention.

Moscow free-write

I got to Moscow at 7am on a night train and the first image I saw seemed to be St Pete train station; the same large rectangular room, the same statue in the middle, Then out in the streets instead of the 'boom, crash, wow!' and bold colours and rough rude glamourous Moscovites of the communist capital, of the site of battles who's parliament sounds so very much like 'gremlin', there were quiet becastled streets and polite people dressed modestly in jeans and flat shoes. The sun seemed to rise, athough it had already risen and was merely emerging slightly from cloud cover.

Me and my Russian friend walked on and on down a straight straight street reminscent of Mosckovsky prospect(as one may expect) but could only find the same inspid banal chain establishments restaurants, russified  versions of the Costa coffee concept, as in St Petersburg. Oh, and a Starbucks and Mcdonalds to mark how far Moscow was from it's anti-capitalist past. Then we spotted a My-My, a Societ style cantene mentioned in the guidebook and sitting down to soup, sirniki and and a rich cheese and mushroom dish to accompany post night-train coffee we wrote without limitations our impressions of Moscow.

Moscow. What is there, but towering skyscrapers and primitive Latvian castles squatting be hind the train station; a mirror image of St Petersburg and you can drink coffee in the St Petersburg Café and take the metro to Mayakovskaya or Puskinskaya (semantic shift in operation)? The main problem is walking for a very long time with a heavy bag amongst Moscovite towers and the side-streets are not full of squats (skvots) unless you coud say the side-streets are squatting and ALL THESE PEOPLE (what people, what metropole? I can’t see any.) have space to move through the boulevards. Café is all she wanted and it’s the word she proclaimed loudly and proudly and angrily, holding her arms up to the Slavic gods. ‘Café, café.’ There were no cafes , only bars and late night dives and then Mcdonalds. The stars were unsympathetic. The little known god of Coffee Houses however peered down from his barista’s ledge in the sky, near the moon, and took pity on this unglamorous Moscow night, in the civilised light. Suddenly, in this industrial town, a café fell from the sky and inconveniently blocked the entrance to Mcdonalds. The goddess of tearooms forgot her long-running dispute with the Coffee god and laughed seraphatically at this triumph over fast-food. The muscovite, who   was  wearing   jeans   even  though   she   was   long out  of her teens, strolled into the café which boasted an excellent selection of wholesome cakes and ordered the special brew before blowing the café to smithereens and emptying the pockets of a few groggy customers. She had been inspired by the ribald diction of pulp fiction and this divine intervention was a lucky twist of fate.

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