Zemfira-Worship and Other Tales, in Reverse Chronological Order

Photographic Tragedy
Valentina Petrovna just looked at my pictures of Olkhon, and told me with great dismay that I had not taken nearly enough of them, what had I been thinking, hopefully other people in my group had been more wise and I could get pictures from them, I had for instance taken a picture of this very boring little hotel when I could have been taking pictures of the ‘tourbases,’ etc. In vain were my protests that my pictures were basically representative of the experience and that most of the island looked about the same; she was equally unimpressed by my attempt to demonstrate to her that I already had too many pictures in my life, scrolling through the hundreds of pictures of everyone I know making funny faces, buying sausage, wearing funny hats, cramming food in their mouths, looking at the camera in exhaustion as they walk across muddy fields in Vermont, etc. My failure has no apology. I guess you’re all just going to have to do your best to look past it. Having a mother who sent me a CD of ridiculous hippies singing Oh Happy Day earned me considerably more points, but I don’t think it quite outweighed the photo failure.

As Ivan wrote in his notes, “Trouble Understanding the Time of Troubles”
For some reason our mainstream class was especially impossible to understand today. Which eventually led to my abandonment of the attempt to pay attention. I comfort myself with the fact that I never understood the Time of Troubles in English either. Anyway, I had plenty of time to contemplate the footwear of the boy sitting across the aisle from me. The shoes were the usual super-pointy, black, dressy Russian variety, with the only unusual quality being that they had both laces in the front and zippers on the instep. I would have thought that this dual removal capacity was more unusual had I not just spent a lot of time looking at shoes of all kinds, which leads me to:

My Boot Expedition
From the recollection of Natasha that the Boot Market was near Skveer (Square) Kirova, and from the instruction of Valentina Petrovna that there was such a market near where she worked, I had a basic idea of where to look for these boots. But the process still involved a lot of wandering around the city asking people where I could find “a market with lots of shoes, and boots.” I think I stressed the word boot incorrectly, because usually people did not understand me. On my search, I found the city’s synagogue, which oddly enough looks exactly like the Palace of Children and Youth Creativity. I don’t know why I find this resemblance so odd, but they’re the only two buildings in the city that look like this, and it seems like there must be some explanation; were they formerly the mansions of twin brothers? Anyway, I finally found the shoe market. And there were many, many, many boots there. Usually there was a wall of autumn boots and a wall of winter boots. And then some table or something of men’s footwear, upon which I will comment before I forget. Apparently men, in the winter, wear fur-lined dress-shoes. I mean, I guess this makes sense; Russian men have the same need as Russian women to be both stylish and warm in the winter. But a boot looks like it’s supposed to be warm, it’s part of the idea of a boot, while a man’s dress shoe looks like it’s supposed to be thin and cold. It seems sort of cheating to have secret fur on the inside. At one point I thought of Kurt’s giant rubber boots, and how they would go over in Russia, and I couldn’t help laughing. So all the people in that store think I’m crazy. But that’s only about 2 people, so it doesn’t really matter. These stores are all about the size of a walk-in closet. Eventually I gave up trying to act like I knew what I was doing, and I also decided that finding the absolute cheapest pair of boots in the complex might not be the best strategy considering the fact that I would have to wear the things for many, many months and it would be sad if they weren’t warm or I couldn’t walk in them or I didn’t like them. So eventually I just found a store that looked like the correct medium level of stylishness and told the women working there that I was from America and had no idea what I was doing. They were highly entertained by me. And they sold me boots. The prices were all posted and I don’t think it was the kind of place you could bargain, so they didn’t cheat me, and these boots are not among the most expensive in the store. They are brown, suede, lined with fur though I never understood the name of the kind of animal it’s from (the word does not mean rat, or dog, so that’s something), are only very minimally heeled, and have some embroidery with sequins at the top. I’m pretty excited to break out the capri-and-boot look, which has long fascinated me, but as these are winter rather that autumn boots I think I have to wait until November. That seems to be the basic rule for fur-bearing clothing items here. I guess you have to give the rest of your wardrobe a chance.

Charismatic Macrofauna
In Baikal Studies we discusses the practical difficulties of the domestication of reindeer (you have to put the saddle on their shoulders, rather than on their back like a horse, so riding one is very painful and difficult if you aren’t good at it), various types of bear and moose traps (the best bear trap is one where they climb a tree in pursuit of some rotting meat you’ve hung up there, are unable to climb past a platform thing you’re build to impede their path, fall back down onto some sharpened stakes surrounding the tree), and the superior skills of native Siberians as WWII snipers. This class is so fascinatingly non-theoretical. We don’t consider various theories of the development of history, or the nature of tribal and national identity, we just get straight to the proper distance from which to shoot a fat German on a dark riverbank.

Do You Believe in Rock-n-Roll, Can Music will Save your Mortal Soul?
Went to the Zemfira concert. It was so awesome. It was in a fairly crowded club near my apartment, Megopolis; I’m not sure how many people were there, I’m not good at estimating numbers. But I was standing near the back and was still within ... dang, I’m not good at distance either... 25 yards, maybe, of the stage. The stage was always covered in smoke of various colors, and making Zemfira herself more an ephemeral, monochrome form than a typically embodied mortal; the hardest-rocking monochrome form ever born. It seemed like her body would catch fire from the energy pulsing around her like an aura, and that only severe restraint kept flames from shooting from her fingertips; she danced like she... I can’t even begin to describe it, like she was pulling the pain and the grief and the splendor of the world out of her soul and dancing it around the stage, and it was as heartbreaking and beautiful as truth. I am aware that this paragraph is absolutely ridiculous, but it is a good representation of the ridiculous degree of my worshipfulness; I had never before experienced that pull that seems so common to humanity, to treat a celebrity with the reverence due a god. This is probably not good.