Walking along Nevskiy; a fantasy

I want to get horribly intoxicated on a cocktail of Soviet Champagne, a big cuban cigar and Shostakovich and then walk out on Nevskiy and blame everything. I'll blame the collapsed marble seat outside Gostiny Dvor for it's laziness; I'll blame the snow for not sticking to it's convinctions but giving in and melting into water;  I'll blame the beer cans for lying there on the road; I'll chide the crumbling dirty facades for  not taking proper care of themselves; I'll blame the paving stones for holding me down here on this one urban street with not much happening instead of lifting  me up and taking me some-where sublime. How beautiful the sky  and the network of rivers below would be.

 I'll sit on the metro and  I'll blame the reflections in the dark windows  for showing me only the masked faces of people and not revealing their soul or translating their conversation.  My elation will well up into melancholy so I will blame all the people for  sitting so indifferently and not sharing  my emotion and the metro for taking me some-where too slowly.

After this magnificent shedding of responsibility I'll want to feel in control again and I'll make my sincere apologies to all. I'll explain to the marble seat that it was I who kicked the support from under it; I was jealous of it's solidity and the way it conspired with all the lovers holding hands. So I'll kiss it's marble surreptitiously when I think no one's looking. I'll gently lift the beer cans and bury them  reverentially in their tomb and then I'll lay on the road to better understand their  degradation; thrown down they lie helpless against kicks and scornful steps to avoid them.  To the snow I'll admit that I joined the universal chant against the Snow Queen  telling her to go away, come again another day. I beat it with my hunting shoes and called it malicious and avoided it. I'll empathise with it's tears (it is transforming into whole canals and lakes of tears across the town) and cry into it. I'll know that it is only myself holding me down and pinning the paving stone under me. To make amends I'll draw the towers and fortresses and parks it will never see in chalk across it's granite.

Out-furrification

Without furs;synthetic fabrics and
 big hairstlyes

With the advent of spring, hats and furs have vanished from all but the occasional babushka. They are safely stored away for the  next season. I am now outfurring the Russians with my 40s style furr hat from a charity shop. It is clearly from an era before the invention of affordable synthetic thermal clothesn so I don't feel an English twinge of guilt at wearing a small fluffy animal on my head. If some-one pats me on the heat I feel like a wood-land creature or a cat. From the way it moves on my head it really feels like my own skin and I feel tempted to purr. When the hat is not on my head - my real hair wants to capture the rare and glorious sunbeams -  it is my little pet and I occasionally stroke the tactile furr. Then I carelessly stuff it in my bag for convenience because for is not something I have ever aspired to own or adore. It needs restictching anyway.

Despite all moral considerations, aesthetically and experientally it is a dissapointment to no longer see the furrs.. They were glistening, shocking, sensual ornamentation; from an illustrated Snow Queen fairytale, inveterately Russian, nostalgic; significant, massive, ideal;savage, luxurious; flocculent. They were so evcoative as to give me  nightmare flashes, imagining the animals still alive and biting viciously, imagining them being skinned, imagining wearing one and the lynxs or other sharp-teethed creatures writing into life and savaging my hair in revenge.. However, so temptingly feminine as to make me want one.

Standing on the metro

Standing on the metro writing, one hand on the safety rail when the train jerks. Some standing freestyle, some half leaning against the door. A babuska  in front of me reads with a studied stance, the feet almost in the en garde position of a fencer.  Adebtly keeping her balance without the handrail as she must have kept it during more buffeted times. I nearly go flying when there's an an unpredicted jolt. Perhaps that spot tucked in the corner of the door and seats is the ideal one.  Her thumb and forefinger are so tensely paused over the page that I wonder if she is reading at all. Perhaps she feels that I'm observing her of perhaps she always feels discomfort in public. I remember moments like that, where my hands were gripping the book but I was scanning the same page again and again without registering anything, too aware of things around me. The page moved and now she has the book completely, gripped against her body like a teddy bear or a seatbelt. A Canon printing paper package covers the book: protection or to hide what is being read. I've often seen the babushka generations with newspaper or magazine covers to their books.

In the other corner, a girl leaning against the seats and holding her grey cloth hat in one hand. Extremely run and slightly grey. I thought there was something bizarre about her eyes, a disease which gave them a white plastic film, but then I realised she is wearing white eyeliner within black just under her eyes. Her style  hasa lightness of fabric and flair which is Europeanesque.; fishnets;long cordoruy coat; wan and pale;fishnet tights; governess boots. I think she was cut and pasted here from a Russian translation of Gormenghast.

When a seat is vacated, this girls sits down and sleeps. The 'ethic minority/scapegoat' next to her (the disaffected immigrant herds from Kazakhstan, Uzbekhistan etc that are mercilessly castigated by Russians distinguishable generally by their shortness and darker, Asian skin) turns flagrantly to smile at her. The whole thing gives the affect of a puppet nor automation turning it's wooden head with a n unsettling clockwork smile(unheimlich). Then he smiles at me when he notices me watching him. Contravening the no-smiling-without-a-very-good-reason rule, especially not in public at strangers.

Soviet Twins

Two men with identical black berets sat next to each other on the metro. They had the same shadowed face, the same muted clothing. The same way of looking deferentially at the floor as if they were peasants and the feodal lord was some-where or the factory master. One got off without speaking to each other and I realised they didn't even know each other. They couldn't have looked more like painted workers from a Soviet poster.

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.