Some Moscow Tidbits

The image of the beautiful, broken lamp was taken in the ruined garden of what had been a swanky club for Kremlin hot shots. A gorgeous place, even in ruins. When I was there part of the building was being used for a dance club, with cobbled-together sound system and very simple club lights inside, "X" in the bathrooms. I don't think they "owned" the building, they just took it over until someone tougher came along to shake them down for money or take it from them. I never got to talk to the young black man popping-and-locking at the break dance show (see earlier postings), but he was pretty good. He may have been one of the African students who still were coming to Moscow for higher education, even after the fall of the Communists. The angry little musician getting a donation from an old lady is a little gypsy boy near Red Square. He's scowling at his family, who have him and another cutie begging alone at a safe distance. Packs of gypsies get cursed at, little cute gypsy boys looking woeful get pinches and coins.

Break Dancing in Moscow Two

Go start with the first breakdance post, if you haven't read it yet... OK, so you end up on stage taking pix of this breakdance battle. The rag-tag guys are the ones you came with, the challengers. The guys in the matching jump suits are the cocky hotshots. They perform on the Arbat, the fancy shopping street, and have some money behind them. So a classic underdog situation. You note the amazing differences between hip-hop Russian kids and the Soviet-style baby-faced police kids. The aloof hipster in the big hat is a rapper named, what else?- Big Mac. The LL Cool J of Siberia. You are thrilled by the hugely lame rapper who come on after the battle and chant, "Fuck the Police" in Mosow. As soon as the scheduled end time of the festival, soldiers in black with sub-machine guns come and clear the Sportiva FAST. You think about the performing arts in Russia, the Bolshoi and Barishnikov and the Hockey playing bears you saw in the Gorky Park circus. Every pass was rewarded with a fish, every goal scored won the bear in question three fish.

Break Dancing in Moscow

So it is a couple of years after the fall of the Soviet Union and you are 24 and foolhardy and want some adventure and are looking for something to do with an English BA other than slave for Scholastic testing 5th grade science experiments, so naturally you buy a one way ticket on Aeroflot to Moscow. You speak no Russian, but you have some contacts, some Americans doing something or other and you figure you'll write some articles about them. Turns out the Americans are full of shit, but you find these guys in a dance club. They are break dancing like crazy in the corner while the rest of the Russian youth jitter around to God-awful Euro-techno. You, clearly, are a big shot American reporter, with your big-lensed Nikon, so they invite you to a "battle" the next day. You are expecting a couple of scruffy kids in a back alley, but instead the breakdance battle is on stage, between Russian rappers and Russian goths and Russian heavy metal bands, in front of thousands of kids. These Russians B-Boys are part of a tiny but ardent subculture, kids from Moscow and Siberia and Kazahkstan who got hold of tenth-generation boot-leg copies of Krushgroove and Breakin'! and have master all the moves. They are convinced that breakdancing is still the big thing in America (in 1994) and you don't have the heart to disabuse them of the notion.

Cows

I took this photo when I was about 16 years old. The cows are on my grandparents' dairy farm in New Jersey. The bovine ladies are in for a cool dip in the kill (Dutch for stream, still used out in the country there, hold-over from colonial days perhaps) on a hot summer day.