(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

Whirlwind Brooklyn felt like between apartments, IRS with a side of Kafka, thwarted before expedition with compass and atlas to Kew Gardens could be attempted, library #1, library # 2, Score! Kinship and Social Organization, saw "Summer of Love" at Village East, surrendered to the elements, as slept Sunday night on an air mattress and sunk into alice_ayers' golden couch on Monday night, talked to Donna Martin's Boyfriend on the phone for an hour, sitting on a bench in Tomkins Square Park, intimidating pigeons with the steel toe of my red cowboy boot, had an all-too-brief rendezvous with akozorez, trying to cram all the words in, talking like auctioneers, with suntraps in our hair, picked up some TZ film at Adorama and like closing a bracket returned to the Magical Fung-Wah Bus that took me from Lynn to Brook-lynn and back.

NEXT STOP LORIMER STREET


in the epicenter of downtown with akozorez


I am a loyal reader of the Village Voice


alice_ayers and rachelkb have a Leaning Tower of Books in their living room.


And there is absolutely no reason to post this Chinatown bus photo, except that I really like how it turned out.

Comments

[tsenft.livejournal.com]

I feel like you should send that VV photo to them.

[christophrawr.livejournal.com]

I wish my bookshelves had the Pisa grippe... :P
Wonderful images, as per always!

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of excellent pictures in that bunch, but I particularly like the leaning tower of books one. There's something Alice-in-Wonderlandish about your pose or expression there, somehow.

[spawnsong.livejournal.com]

i'm very much on board with the scenester glasses.

[alice-ayers.livejournal.com]

They are so perfect on her! I am so glad I twisted her arm into buying them...

The whole photo essay was fun, especially since Rachel and I have no plan on "fixing" that bookcase at present.

[ladycat269.livejournal.com]

That is funny because I was also admiring the glasses.

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

i agree -- the chinatown bus picture is very alluring. that's the one your b/f keeps in his wallet and shows to his friends to prove how lucky he is.

verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[mashuta.livejournal.com]

fuuun! that last foto in particular is sooo cute!

which reminds me! re:your pondering whether mine and akozorez's paths have crossed before... you said she lived in lynn and went to school there, which would pretty much guarantee that her and I "hung" back in the old days, back when I actually used to "hang" with the noahth shoah russian community (which i remember mostly with a shudder and bewilderment that i got myself into as little trouble as i did!). but i dont remember her! weird! i DO have a feeling that i've met her tho, but it was later, in college, in boston, around maybe 1994? my college roommate was a wonderful russian girl Lena Kai (Kai was her pen-name, i shamefully cant remember her real last name) with the soul of a tortured and discontent poet... and she may have introduced me to anya, or at least someone who looks like her. i am guessing i was in her company no more than 2-3 times? i think lena and maybe-anya may have had a falling out after that - i have a murky memory of some mild conflict? anyway, i have no idea what happened to lena - last time we met was maybe around 2002, she was in this tiniest sublet on the upper west side, fresh from an ashram in India, and freaking out because she could no longer earn money doing graphic design, so that she could high-tail it back to India once she made enough dough... i wonder what happened to her.. no amount of google-ing seems to bring an answer.

and while we're on the subject of Lynn - the one russian -excuse me, "European" - shop that has been there since my high school days (oh dear) is on Broad street when you turn the corner from Central Sq (via Exchange st - woohoo FNX!), before you get to the intersection with Newhall st - and Newhall st, incidentally, has the russian-ghetto-housing where my grandma lives, and the other two big ghetto-houses are in about a block radius from it. my grandma's sister lives in one of the other ones. There was another russian food store across from what is now Stop&shop i think (used to be star market, and i spent 3.5 long years of my teenage-hood baggin groceries and doing other prol-type jobs there... oh the memories), owned by parents of Vita, who was my high school friend waaay back in the day... but i am pretty sure they closed their store, and i dont know if anyone took over in that location... worth checking out one day, i suppose. before it gets too dark :D

also, what do you think of this Red-Rap song (http://www.kprf.ru/sound/69/01_Track_1.mp3) by SixtyNine? (lifted from this post (http://www.livejournal.com/users/anais_v_tumane/21715.html))- makes me think of you in lynn a little. i think i am alternately moved to tears of empathy or offended by this song. i wish i could find its text (and sub-text?) so that i could make up my mind already.

and finally, i shut up!

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

whoah...that song...I don't even know how "offensive"/stepping that song is, it all goes back to really confused disursive categories of race-in-America in Russian pop culture (I mean, did black-people-in-America even exist in Russian cultural consciousness except for a circumstantial punchline to old USSR vs US jokes like "а в америке негров линчуют"). Racist humor, for example, in Russia used chukchas and such, and Africans, rather than African-Americans, presumably b/c that's what Sovetskiy Narod was exposed to/in contact with (through annexation of arctic territories and the University of Patriciy Lumumba). I liked the song, and it also made me intensely uncomfortable, but I *get* it with my Russian cultural-meter which does not register it as "racist" just as contextually offensive but then again maybe it's enabling/complicit of me to say "that's not racist" because in a larger way I think of racism as something not measured by discrete intent, but something coded and unconsciously recoded in language. The question is, what happens with translation? Is it a different kind of "racist"? Is it somehow more static and less insidiuous, like very old colonial texts or someone's grandpa, who are no less racist but are clearly of-the-past, and while, of course, the past and history is what configures social categories of today, grandpa and some Kipling text already did their damage? Oh, I am babbling and I just woke up and my entire chest hurts and I need hot tea. I don't know if any of this made any sense, but also: (I can google in Russian now that I quick-bookmarked this.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/chistyakov/100670.html?thread=1566782#t1566782

Also if you had known Anya in college, I believe you would have known her in her goth incarnation, which I am not sure this picture I posted reflects at all... Somehow I can't imagine your paths not intersecting, I will ask her about this person, Lena....

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[mashuta.livejournal.com]

i just got up too, and language such as "contextually offensive" makes me want to stab my brain with a Q-tip and mutter something unintelligible about those %@!#@ friggin' anthropologists. please contextualize the context of which you speak. i will try to get this brain jumpstarted and have something to say, now that i have the text and your response to go by. the text is good(as is your response!). even if have no idea what 40% of the words in the first stanza actually mean - and yet i totally "get" what it says - kreeepy!
that whole thread about russian babas singing in the sanatorium was so touching - i've thought on occasion that it would be a really neat project (were i independently wealthy and actually had some idea about musical anthropology or whatever such a subject would be called) to travel from village to village and record these people before the art dies out. altho another part of me thinks it's all in vain, no one will care, save a few poor (&probably very lonely) souls doing their PhD on the subject, as the world gets paved over with Disneylands and BurgerKings and Brittanys and Wallmarts. bleeegh. ? ????? ???? ?????? ??????? ?????
wait did that work? that russian-text-typing link ROCKS! i've been meaning to ask you how you google in russian! do you use google.ru? that translit.ru thing is also AWESOME. even if the above text did not come through (and why not?!)

peee. eees. plyushit kak trufel' ?????!!!?

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

The text you typed came out just as question marks on my screen...I am not sure why...I go to that website, check the "cyrillic" box, type then copy/paste (using actual commands from the pulldown menus b/c my standard Mac shortcuts don't work when it's doing cyrillic). Did you copy/paste? Does it show up as Russian on your own screen? But yeah, that's how I do Russian googling. If you enter Russian text into regular google it will spit out Russian websites. Or there are language settings, but I think that's redundant. I also have proper Russian font on my computer, but since I don't know the Russian keyboard layout it takes me forever to type in Russian unless I use one of these phonetic programs.

The context I was speaking about was using the image of the American urban ghetto in a cultural context where it's not a side-by-side reality and not a part of that culture's own class/race stratification, but rather an appropriated, but very distant iconic symbol, like an imaginary of something very long ago/far away, radical alterity at a distance in a particular context where it's not a product of colonialism, historically speaking. I dunno, I have really mixed feelings about it.

And what you are thinking of is ethnomusicology, it's its own discipline, and I know people who do just that--go around and record music in rural/traditional settings before it dies out. I am fairly certain there are many homegrown ethnomusicologists in Russia, I don't know specific ones off the top of my head, but I can ask my other Russian friend Anya, she is much more tapped into the Russian anthro community than I am.

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

wait, actually, where did you go to college? Anya went to U Mass Amherst.

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[mashuta.livejournal.com]

hm. that makes the whole theory of us meeting in college all the less plausible, considering lena and i went to BU. unless Anya lived in boston the year before she went to Amherst, since i think she is a year younger than me - still, a senior in Lynn highschool living in boston by herself - sounds kind of highly improbable doesnt it?
i am still mystified how we didnt meet (or at least i do not remember doing so) in lynn. argh. the thing about lynn is that even tho it was a highly memorable and incredibly full time of my life, i was only in Lynn English High for a year, before my parents deemed Swampscott educational systems much more.. well... educational... and college-promising. so off i went into that yuppie hell place. ugh. dont get me wrong, lynn had its problems too (as you are discovering), and how... but .. but... agh. i am gonna go drink my "tot samiy indiyskiy chai" now. and you, too, should venture out to that "European" deli and get yourself some nice therapeutic tea for your achy chest, and steep yourself in that wonderment that is the lynn russian community for a few. man, i LOVE going into that store (in that BDSM sort of way)... i wonder if that kid who i partied with back in the day still helps out there on occasion... no i think he's a lawyer now... at least he was studying to be so, last time i saw him many many moons ago... what was his name? something with "s"...*chai nastaivayetsa, mozgi nachinayut potihon'ku vorochatsa, kak nedovol'niy medved' v berloge*

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure Anya lived in Lynn and went to h.s. here and possibly then in Salem? But anyway, she hung out with the punk/goth kids and she is 29 so I figured there was a good chance of you guys running into each other at some point. I know nothing about Swampscott except that ppl keep telling me the beach there is nice. I will definitely venture to the European deli. Two questions, though: do they sell сушки и сгущенку? do they also sell Russian music/videos/weird sexual horoscopes?

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[mashuta.livejournal.com]

sushki i sgushenka - but of course!!! what kind of a self-respecting russian store would not carry such staples of russian existence!? incidentally, i discovered a russian street in SF (Geary around 20th st), and got myself a nice supply of sushki and pryaniki and ovsyanka for the camping trip last month... god those things are sooo goood!
back in my day they rented VHS tapes. they may have some DVDs now, who knows...
but you can sign them out, provided they "know" you - they'll probably ask for your ID... i dont know how it works, but i am sure it cant be that hard to earn their trust.

also, i have DVDs of "Snezhnaya Koroleva" and "Morozko" languishing here, and i gave my mom "Vasilisa krasa" - so i can lend those to you if you're ever feeling waves of nostalgia :D
i also have some VHSs but they are pretty bad quality...

another pee eees

[mashuta.livejournal.com]

i am also beginning to feel slightly odd to be talking about akozorez in your comments section, like we're passing notes behind her back in class or something. at least it's nothing bad! heh

Re: another pee eees

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

well, we can invite her onto this thread and collectively figure out if y'all know each other.

Re: another pee eees

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

plz see akozorez's epic reply below.

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[illdub.livejournal.com]

no, sweetness: i think you may be referring to Anya Rozhdestvenskaya, who you did meet through Lena :)

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[mashuta.livejournal.com]

aaah yesssss, thank you for reminding me about her last name! she was the really cheerful, slightly voluptuous, loud girl who had really short hair for a time, and sometimes wore "tel'nyashki"??? i think you me her and lena hung out once in our bay state apartment?! i unearthed a recording of the three of us (girls) rambing and singing one evening, surely a night fueled by some lovely cheap wine and insanity. i havent listened to it yet, maybe i will on the way to boston... :)
whatever happened to her?! last lena told me, anya and her s/o lived in NYC somewhere in a tiny apartment, blissful and crazy as ever. but that was moons ago (prolly 5 or more years). i think lena lived with them for a time.
the anya i was talking about - might not actually be called "anya", but for some reason i keep thinking she is. she had a darker and more introverted disposition compared to mz. rozhdestvenskaya, was small and had dark curly hair, and played guitar and sang her own songs - which is why akozorez was reminding me of her. but she must have been a year or two older than us at least. i remember hanging out at her apartment. she, and anya r. and lena, and to a small extent I, were friends with Dana Confalone, who killed himself that new year 93-94, so we hung out together a couple of times, they cried, sang songs, it was saaaaad. first and last time someone i knew (sucessfully) committed suicide... aaanyway.
this person named Tyutyulnik sounds painfully familiar too. who is it who is it@???!! i can *almost* bring out a face from "nedry" of my gray matter... in any case, the path she followed sounds really interesting and different. i hope she found happiness after all that messy stuff with mom dying and break-up. a friend of mine is in (probably that very same boston) accupuncture/alternative/eastern medicine school, it sounds really tough! he stuck me with needles once! it was fun! ok i shut up.

Re: verbal hemorrhage on a chilly cicada-y summer night

[akozorez.livejournal.com]

You can find Anya Rozhdestvenskaya here:
http://illegalplumbing.com/index.htm

SHe still lives in the same house in Brooklyn where, as far as I know, she moved ages ago. Martin had a child with a different woman, and, last i heard, had moved to Piter with his son and that woman. Anuta does incredible photgraphy (amongst many other artistic creations). If you come out for Gogol Bordello, I am sure she will be there, taking pictures. Or, if you'd like, next time you come to the city we can call her up.

[signamax.livejournal.com]

:)

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

hello! :)

[signamax.livejournal.com]

welcome to Lynn
ps
you are welcome at our place, havn't A told you?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

merci.

And I'd love to come visit next time I am in NYC