(----) Vol.10

You know you're in Russia when you step out of the metro train at your stop and there's a dead guy lying on the ground, already wrapped in a black plastic bag with police taping the scene off, and the only part of him that is exposed are his shiny businessman shoes, and because it's Moscow and everyone is in a huge hurry, you can't really even stop to see what is going on and ponder why there is a dead human being whose last sight and smell was this disgusting grey metro station, you just have to keep treading water in the wave of humans that swells towards the escalator.

(ahem)


First day of snow. The view from my bedroom window.




Some more images of snow. It's really beautiful until it melts and turns into black slush and you only have sneakers. And look! It's Josh Carpenter's van! He's learned how to park like a Russian! Just put it that fucker on the curb!


Only in Moscow would you see adjacent billboards featuring Gloria Gaynor, Whitesnake and Timbaland.


Bigger is better when it comes to advertising.


So I went to this ice sculpture gallery in a specially constructed building in a park. The shit was pretty damn psychedelic. Peep this knight fighting a dragon.


You know I had to get a jowl going on up in the ice gallery.


Once more into the dog breach. Outside of the ice gallery there were a bunch of stray dogs. This one ran up to me, I assume looking for food. I started to take a picture and then noticed the terrifyingly blank look in its eyes. I wondered for a moment if it was about to attack, and then thought, "Will my last thoughts be of Rikk?"


Just look at those eyes. The madness this one has seen.....


Seurat's "Early Sunday Morning on the Isle of the Lost Dancefloor."


Yo! Chocolate Friends! What am I watching?


And last but not least, the "creme de la creme" (!). This is a bag of mayonaise. In Russia, mayonaise comes in bags with pour spouts. And this particular brand is called "СКИТ". Now let's spell that out phonetically. The "С" is an "S" sound. The "К" is your normal "K" sound. The "И" is an "EE" sound. And the "Т" is normal. So what's that spell?

"SKEET".

(----) In Russia Vol.9

You know you're in Russia when (this one's for you, Rikk)...you find yourself in a 2nd-floor VIP booth at a club located in the seediest neighborhood you can remember being in so far in Moscow, where there are somehow no pedestrians anywhere amongst the abandoned warehouses, mud and gravel, yet the line to get in stretches out the door, and you're listening to a Euro-remix of Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous Girl" and watching a bunch of promiscuous people dancing to it from a room that normally costs $700/night just to sit in, and you're having a conversation with the club's gorgeous PR woman, because all the clubs here have gorgeous PR people, male and female, who will cater to your every need if you show up and you know somebody who knows somebody else that happens to be kind of affiliated with someone else slightly important, and you and this woman are talking about God and Catholicism and Jews loudly over the earth-shattering bass coming from the soundsystem and your eyes are clogging shut because everyone in the room is smoking, including, to your surprise, yourself, and you decide, "Shit, it's time to go, I'm breaking my own rules here," and you wander out into the night and there is still no one around in this barren wasteland of a neighborhood, and a beat-up car comes barreling down the wet street so you stick your hand out to stop it, and as usual it stops, and the driver opens the door and you try to negotiate the price for the ride but you use the word for "30" instead of "300", which the driver finds quite amusing, but he agrees to take you home, and as he barrels through the streets of south Moscow at 4am, between the naively saccharine Russian pop and R&B clogging the playlist of whatever radio station he is listening to, up pops R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," seemingly the most random fucking thing you can imagine until you remember that you were just talking about religion (or rather, screaming over the Eurodisco about religion) with a woman in a room that costs $700 to sit in.


The view from the room that the aforementioned theological discussion took place.


A go-go dancer, one of many, at this club.


Look! Vomit! And it's still fresh! Usually you only see the splatter stain but the content has been picked away by either the ravens or the rats. I kid you not, these stains are everywhere.


Look! It's 2pm in north Moscow but it looks like a) the fucking Apocalypse and b) 6pm. Can't wait for winter to really kick in.


Check it...another award-winning airbrush job.


So I teach English to a few middle-aged Russian guys; one of them is the editor of "Kinobusiness" magazine, about the film industry in Russia. We meet once a week and he just talks for 90 minutes and I correct him when he says something incorrectly. He has this drawing hanging on his wall; it's supposed to represent what it's like to make a movie in Russia. The monkey is lifting reels of film on his barbell.


This is one of the Seven Sisters, seven enormous buildings built by Stalin in the late 40s/early 50s. This one is the Red Gates building, which is a 3-minute walk from my apartment.


"RESPEKT."




These shots are from Patriarch's Ponds, which is where the Devil appears at the beginning of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita."


So this guy was performing "magic" in the Arbat, which is the most touristy area of Moscow outside of Red Square. He had a large collection of nails, glass, swords and fire. One of his tricks was setting a pile of broken glass on fire and then putting that out with his bare feet. Then he put a large needle through the skin on his arm. Between each trick he would walk around with a huge black trash bag, asking the spectators to throw money into it.


His master's nails, embedded on a piece of wood. And trash bag.


He did manage to blow fire, which was cool.


Oh shit, THESE GUYS.


This lady was tearing it up in one of the underground crosswalks on a Casio.


Metro, midnight.


Bonus: a real, authentic 2am gypsy cab ride in Moscow. A lame attempt to recreate that one scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris." Forgive the length. But check that turtleneck! And listen to that pop jam! All that is missing is the smell of cheap cigarettes...if only that could be digitally processed and blogged as well....

(----) In Russia Vol.8

These three tags were all found in the neighborhood where I work. "Выход есть" means "there is a way out." Not the most uplifting of sentiments in the not the most uplifting of societies.


This has got to be one of the best of the airbrushed cars in Moscow. Click on this picture and check out the details; it's a fucking club, complete with girl in bikini dancing on the stage. The other side of the car is the same thing, just different details. My cup runneth over.


More detail of this car. I saw the owner outside of it last week and he didn't seem like the kind of guy who would appreciate his car getting blogged, so I was hesitant to try and get more photos than this.


This calendar ("ГОД БЫКА" means "Year of the Bull") hangs in a kiosk that I pass every day, and I've been trying to be subtle about getting a photo of it for you all. The previous image had been a cow with a basket of US dollars on its head. Unfortunately, the day I saw my opening (meaning there weren't a shitload of nosy babushkas who might have given me a hard time), someone had changed a page on the calendar. A cow with imperialist currency on its head vs. a cow snuggling a very uncomfortable-looking cat....6 of one, half-dozen of the other.


An ad for a circus that is playing here for a few days. I cannot imagine why anyone would take a child to this. Only in Russia do you have clowns that look like residents of Nilbog.


The gate of the Moscow zoo.


Billboard for a movie called "The Very Russian Detective" ... notice that watermelons have returned to the blog, in the form of the Statue of Liberty's head. And this Carrot Top-esque character is eating a piece of it. I have no insight into the political meaning here.


Mujuice again, this time at a club called Solyanka. I made a lot of friends at this place; everyone kept asking me where I was from, and almost every time I said "America," they started freaking out about Obama. One guy jumped up and down, chanting, "O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!" People here are pretty excited about it.


This is me trying to get a few seconds of footage of Mujuice, only to get smacked down by the security guard. Watch closely, about 9 seconds in, you'll see his face appear before he shuts my shit down.


A rare sight: an empty metro car. Empty except for the 2-liter plastic bottle of beer rolling around on the floor.


Most of the windows in the metro cars have words scraped into them, like this one, which says, "Sory." I was trying to get a shot of all these people sitting under one that had the Russian word for "meaning" a few weeks ago, but I would have gotten spotted. It was pretty awesome, though ... all these disaffected-looking people under this word.


SPECIAL ELECTION COVERAGE: Stayed up all night to watch this shit. It was totally worth it. The experience of leaving my friend's house at 8:30am, walking through the coldest wind I've felt since I've been here, and realizing that our president was no longer going to be a reason to be ashamed to be from the US was awesome. McCain's speech was humble enough to render all of us speechless.


FAIL


To answer RB's question, well, I am not sure why so many dogs. But I can say that they even have dogs on their Internets. This image was on the BBC Russia site today, accompanying an article about a future meeting between Obama and Medvedev. Again, for some reason, dogs always remind me of Rikk.

I was there when Change happened

So, thanks to former 'XYC DJ John Lee and his wife, Shana and I were able to be their guests and attend the Obama rally in Grant Park the other night. We got there around 4:00 when the doors didn't open until 8:30, but there were already plenty of people in line of course. While we didn't have an incredible spot, we were still fairly close. When the big screen showed CNN counting down to the California polls closing, everyone was counting along out loud, and then when it showed BREAKING NEWS - OBAMA ELECTED PRESIDENT, everyone went nuts of course. Then we had to wait a bit longer before Obama actually came out - there was someone who did a blessing, then someone reciting the pledge of allegiance, then someone singing the national anthem (she actually messed up a few words even), but finally the announcer introduced America's new first family. Afterwards, there were a slew of people selling bootleg Obama shirts, buttons, playing cards, etc etc. We got a pretty sweet poster with a rendering of Obama with a basketball, the White House, and a basketball goal, that said Coast to Coast Obama. Here are some photos from the occassion:

(----) In Russia Vol.7

You know you're in Russia when you wake up on a hardwood floor, still fully clothed, and you're in a bedroom full of sleeping people, and one of them, a guy you vaguely know, sits up in bed with nothing but black socks and tight black underwear on and asks you how you are, and all you can say is, "My head hurts," and you try to find your stuff, which has somehow been scattered all over this apartment on the other side of the city from where you live, and there's one guy still drinking by himself at 10 in the morning in the living room, and then the guy in the underwear shows up in the kitchen and now it's your turn to ask, "Is everything OK?", and he answers, "Well, there's no cigarettes and no alcohol left, so no, not really," and you stumble out into the street to find a bus to take you to the metro, and when you finally sit down, head still splitting, knowing that you look like you just slept on someone's floor with no pillow or blanket and you can't really see straight because your contact lenses are glued to your eyeballs, caked with a Russian apartment party's worth of cigarette smoke, you look at your phone and realize that sometime during the night you added a new contact into your address book: Boris. And you don't remember Boris.

Anyway....





Let's get right to the good stuff, shall we? The neighborhood these photos were taken in houses all the boutique stores; the Louis Vuitton shop was right around the corner from this fucking place. Remember our friend from the energy drink sign in the metro? Well, he's not just a model for Russian malt beverages.


Light fixtures in the Mendeleevskaya metro station, where I have to go every day to get to work. Every metro station is like a museum, honestly. Each one has a different architectural theme; I'm trying to get shots of them all but it's hard, because 1. you're not supposed to take pictures in the metro and 2. if you're taking pictures of light fixtures in the metro, you might as well put a sign on your back that says, "I'm not Russian; fuck with me."


I thought we had forgotten about these guys. Apparently Moscow has not. I love the title of the tour: "ALL HOPE IS GONE." Yes, the hope is gone, but someone's still paying for angst, so shut it.


I thought we had forgotten about this guy too. But again, Moscow longs for the mediocre.



Russian parking. This is the path I take to walk to work from the metro. This car has been here for several days. Also, there are often fresh human turds scattered around the sidewalk in this neighborhood. Almost as if they appear in the night, like the North Carolina legend of the Devil's Tramping Ground. Except that here, the Devil is pooping.


THIS guy.


And THAT guy.


And THAT GUY'S FRIEND.


A few landscape shots:


West Moscow at sunset.


South Moscow at sunrise, the day I moved.

The next 3 photos were all taken in a 2-minute span:


This photo of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is 4000 rubles ($150).


This woman is on a horse in the center of Moscow. She offered me a ride for 100 rubles.


This ad is slightly obscene.


So the streets in Moscow are huge, and the traffic is insane. And the driving is atrocious. A lot of people get hit by cars in the crosswalks because drivers just don't stop for pedestrians. So there are underground tunnels that you can cross streets with, and they often lead to metro stations. This one is at the Kitai-Gorod (Chinatown) station; I had been out with people from work and decided to try and find my way home on foot from the bar we were at. This decision turned out to be like a Super Mario game...the list of dangerous, freaky situations I experienced on my walk home was insane: police, drunks, goblin prostitutes, vomit, invalids in wheelchairs asleep on the street, etc. Two minutes after this photo was taken I had to turn around and exit the tunnel because the metro was closed, and the only people in the tunnel were a bunch of dudes drinking. I could hear them before I could see them, and based on their shouting, my instinct told me that if I didn't get the fuck out of there, I might very well be introduced to some discomfort.


This is a bar close to where I live now. "КАНТРИ" is not a word in Russian; it is a transliteration of the word "country", which means this place is simply called "country bar". As in, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, etc. I am ashamed to say that I have not yet checked it out.


This fucking behemoth is always parked here, a block away from where I live.

A few shots of my new home. This is the nicest place I have ever lived in. The irony.


The hallway.


The kitchen.


My room. I live with two British guys close to the center of the city. We can walk to the Kremlin in 30 minutes. Our building is pre-revolutionary, which means that it is classy: huge windows, high ceilings, radiators in every room, hardwood floors. Shit is unreal.


I went to Ashan City today, which is the Russian equivalent of Wal-Mart. Imagine Wal-Mart. Now imagine Wal-Mart without any organization. And these dogs chillin' in front of the place.


The beginning of the checkout line at Ashan. I went there to buy a pillow, a trash bin, and a shower mat. I was in line for 40 minutes. I am not joking. The people in front of me had so much shit that it took close to 7 minutes to ring the entire order up. And when the cashier finished, the total was 16,000 rubles ($600). Which was wrong. So the people raised a huge fuss, and the cashier then tried to figure out what had happened. He called the manager. She showed up and couldn't figure out what was going on, so she left. Then she came back 10 minutes later, tried to enter a few codes into the register, then decided that the best thing to do was to RE-SCAN EVERY ITEM AGAIN. Which they did. And the culprit was an 11,000-ruble sausage that was not supposed to cost that much, but whose bar code designated that price. At this point, all I could do was laugh, because there was no other logical response for such a situation.


Yet another amazing grammatical find in a Moscow mall. I can has 2 words in lowercase separated by a symbol and then one word in CAPS?