Vereschagin - Russia and The East

Delivering a paper on Russia and the East, I did not even know about the existence of Vereschagin, whose painting you see above has little to do with his eastern themes, except for the tromp d'oeil effect he likes to go for. In the Tretyakov Gallery I realized only after listening to the commentary that on the painting that stands to the right of this one, the Tashkent scene he depicts has a number of severed heads stuck on poles as a 'mullah' is giving a speech surrounded by them. The hand itches for another paper!

German Faces, Russian Faces

"There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows - Nazi cows! - and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: "I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people." Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use. And Heil Honey I'm Home! has nothing to say about that."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/23/nazi-culture-film-hitler

what an oppurtune article that speaks to my disparate observations in Moscow.
Mortensen- I was talking about his Eastern Promises at the conference, and as I was listening to another participant giving his paper about how Russian nationalism fared in the face of the Russian adoration of all things French, he seemed strangely familiar to me (and I know no Russians) and then I realized some of his facial gestures were exactly like the Mortensen character I'd been talking about. I'm guessing Mortensen also spent a lot of time in Russia just looking at people. Hats off! Now I'll have to go an see his depressed Nazi.

THE Embittered Marxist

On the sunniest day of my visit to Moscow I was at a conference where I could follow only half of what was going on. But I could follow the man in the picture alright, with rebuttals in Russian and English to everyone who spoke. His remark to my paper about 'everyone having their own East' was "I think the Muslims and the Orthodox are no where comparable, I don't think you'll find our youth, Orthodox youth protesting on the streets of Paris even twenty years from now". But the Marxist in him came out when I picked one of the above seen bottles of water to fill out a glass. He said I should take the whole bottle, and I said one glass was enough to which he retorted "Oh please, take the whole bottle by all means (he did have occasional English mannerisms), now if it was our American friend who needed the water, he would have taken the whole bottle without asking." The American, one of the three people who gave their papers in English, simply smiled. I could only say "Do you mean to say that I have also failed in etiquette by not properly asking you? (which I really hadn't)" to at least try to make myself as culpable as the American (Moscow makes strange bedfellows) But then the silly conversation stopped, and when it was his time to give his paper, a number of younger Russian students challenged him, which my lovely translator summarized at the end as "They have just had a very interesting discussion about nationalism" Excellent. Now I know what I missed.

An Unexpected Find

A Russian dissident sits across from me in the park.
He must be a dissident because
he's Russian, and he's
here
in New York City.
Does he know that Central Park
is
muggers only
after dark?

(Ahdaf Soueif)

A Boston Encounter

Ecce Polis! We are riding a tram, huddled into a wintercoats, and we're returning from seeing a nice play in a nice university town. There are a group of girls frolicking at the back, singing, dancing and my companion asks me whether I remember a time being so carefree and doing such things. "Well, a couple of weeks ago when I was in London..." I start to tell her. She is an established psychologist and has been telling me about her patients half of whom happen to be musicians - professional or amateur. She sees one of them at the metro station now and then. By this time the girls have turned up their volume and the Rabindranath Marx looking guy sitting in front of me who has been listening to our conversation revolving around the play (Beckett's End Game) since we got on the tram with eager interest now starts to make eyes at me. No, of course not that way, he's got his girlfriend by his side but Rabindranath, let's call him Ed, with his Marxist beard and grey tweed coat suggesting the 1930's thinks me, for some reason, equally inconvenienced as he is by the girls. He probably has guessed that I have been sending Embittered Marxists left and right on facebook and wants to capitalize on this familiarity.
Then the girls leave. He takes a theatrical sigh of relief, clasps his master of the revels hands together and announces, bass "Now, our next act..."
"Yourself maybe" I venture.
At the next stop, taking a half bow, he gets off the tram.

An Atlanta Encounter

Since there is not much to be seen in Atlanta (except for Stone Mountain of course where we went to encounter a plantation but managed only to see the back seat of an American police car, more of that maybe later) I spent most of my time socializing, almost Oxford-style, bench hopping and trying to raise my voice above the din. At one dinner party with a German-language poster like Democles's sword over us, we ate, we discussed Iraq, Vietnam and Israel. And right after everyone had managed to upset everyone else, a number of us took their leave and one among us with a decidedly public school education (no matter which or where) and one that had tried to calm everyone during the debate retired to a darker corner of the room and asked the gentleman of the house "We shall smoke?" We had not quite realized that the event was black tie.
I met the same public school graduate, whom we shall call Snap's Master, at another party whose themes this time ranged from food-poisoning death to whether as a child one had been oiled and massaged. Love, too, came up, and as one of those present was sort of lamenting that his brother was in love with a Pakistani girl Snap's Master asked like nothing "Is she brown?" and then told us about the various nannies he had had, named after various fruits and flowers.

A New York Encounter

What better way to spend the one Sunday you have in New York than to buy yourself a camera which should enable you to shoot your own news reports, thought my cousin. She had thought the same about the Saturday, but she had been recommended to go and shop at the B&H which, she found out later, was run by orthodox Jews and so no luck on Saturday. And so I come in fresh from Atlanta and so it is Sunday morning with us and a shop full of kippa wearing salesmen- men, of course. There's also a Metropolis like pulley and train system right above our heads, carrying I don't know what I don't know where.
So we munch on our kosher sweets, and two of the salesmen are very keen to get my cousin the best deal, when the sickly looking one disappers, we get into a convo with the healthy looking one, he asks where we are from and says 'So, reporting live from Turkey, eh?" "Eh" my cousin concurs. "Reporting more, like, from New York, from a shop that closes on Saturdays" I say. He laughs and adds "Well, you know, not only is the shop closed on Saturdays, but the website is down as well". Hats, kippas, headscarves off. The Spanish tourists are watching our conversation with hidden glee. Then the sickly salesman appears. He wants in on the conversation. "So where are you from?" he asks.
This time we want to play it. "Guess" we tell him. First he smiles signifying impossibility. My cousin says the inevitable cliche "Somewhere between the East and the West". He smiles impossibility for one more second, but then the cliché has worked and he says "Turkey?" We are now in a full-blown conversation. We want to take it somewhere but we don't know where. I venture "So where are you from?" "New York" he says. I try to push it a little to find some common ground and ask "And your people?" . "New York" he says again. In the sociality of the moment I loose grip of the situation and ask as I do any American "How about in Europe? Where are they from in Europe?" His look tells me before he says anything that I am touché. "Germany and Poland".
Silence.
"Interesting, I spent two years in Heidelberg" is not going to cut it this time.