Sergey Kuznetsov. NasNet: issue 7

NasNet: issue 7
Sergey Kuznetsov

Publication date: June 21, 2000

Personal

The kind people from RJ put a message about my birthday at the top of my previous issue. Thanks to everyone who congratulated me.

Project: nineties

(See detailed description of the project here )

In case anyone has forgotten, the nineties had not only a middle, when everyone watched Tarantino, took drugs and earned crazy money, but also a beginning, when the Soviet government was quietly dying, and something new was slowly emerging. The Medgermenevts were already writing their texts, Kuryokhin said that Lenin was a mushroom (and the audience still did not all nod their heads in understanding), Victor Pelevin edited the first official translations of Carlos Castaneda, Boris Kuzminsky worked at Nezavisimaya Gazeta, and I did not even think about a career as a journalist (and even more so online). But I made extracts of various stories, cases, observations, and so on - and over the years that I kept them (and I stopped writing them just when the real nineties began), I accumulated about fifty small texts in .dbf/ format. dbt (if anyone is interested in technical details, then for such a strange thing as Karat_M). At some point, I made an attempt to recode them to something more modern, but the Memo field - where the texts actually lay - stubbornly refused to be recoded... or the Russian language was dying. In short, if anyone has ideas on how to do this, you can send them to me. (All this, however, is in parentheses.)

So, most of these records were of a timeless nature, others are of interest only to me and two or three people who still remember each other, and some - a minority - fully characterize the era of the late eighties and early nineties. Looking through them now, you clearly see that they are divided into stories “about the seventies and eighties,” “about perestroika,” and “about the nineties.” The latter are a minority, but occasionally I will extract something from there and bring it to your attention. Today I somehow can’t even choose and therefore I offer several at once - each in its own way. The first is an absolutely reliable, but pure horror story in terms of the genre on the topic of new times and their sign - iron doors, then called “safe”.

(Key words: gore, safe door, blood, Fedyukovo)

There was a wedding in the village of Fedyukovo. The father of the bride's friend really didn't like it when his daughter came home late. And now the wedding is coming to an end, the daughter goes home, the father opens the powerful safe door of the apartment and lets her inside, from where his swearing can be heard, etc.

At this moment, the bride realizes that her friend forgot her jacket and goes to give it back.

The doorbell rings. The friend’s father opens the door, silently takes the jacket and slams the door.

And he cuts off three of the bride’s fingers with the door!

And the following story could be timeless if not for a small detail: in the early nineties, prices could actually change depending on the client.

Third word

(Key words: foreigners in Russia, obscenities)

The Dutch woman complained that when everyone sees that she is a foreigner, they charge very high prices.

She was told:

- And you do this: put your palm to your cheek, bow your head and say: A... Fuck... - and the price will immediately fall.

She sat and trained all evening: fucked up, fucked up, etc. And in her notebook, next to the important words THANK YOU and PLEASE, she wrote down the third important word FUCKING.

The following story has no plot, pure signs of 1992, when in the West everyone was afraid that we would die of hunger, while the nineties were already beginning in full swing.

A line where people humiliate themselves

(Key words: queue, currency)

Chernov told me that he saw a line in which, according to him, people humiliate themselves (unlike the Soviet lines, which are known to humiliate people). It was a long line with “foreign cars” lined up, ladies in furs et cetera. It stretched for several blocks. It led to a bank that accepted currency at prices higher than in other places!

In my opinion, this line is a symbol of the current (that is, 1992 - K.S.) murmur that comes from Moscow.

And the last one. Also in 1992, I wrote down:

To avoid being looked at like crap in a store, you need to immediately ask two magic questions:

- Do you accept checks?

and

- Is it necessary to submit a declaration?

After this, people will tiptoe around you.

I remember very well that later (before?) it was necessary for similar purposes - that is, for force - to say: “Do you accept non-cash payments?”, and then even more so to ask about credit cards. But I bring this evidence of the times because I completely forgot what kind of checks we are talking about. Not about checks for Berezka... they had already been transferred by that time. Or did I mean not “accept”, but “prescribe”? If any of the readers can clear my doubts, I will be grateful.

Of course, the list is not exhausted and you are still waiting for encounters with the distant time of the early nineties. Dear readers can also take part in drawing up a portrait of the past decade:

Name

E-mail

Favorite Places

Today here is a chosen place that I have long promised to write about. Pole.ru has opened, a large entertainment project consisting of seven “glades” so far. One of them, entirely dedicated to cinema, is being made through the joint efforts of Maxim Andreev (ex-“Segodnya”), Ksenia Rozhdestvenskaya (ex-“Evening Moscow”), Alexey Dubinsky (“Kinno.Net”), Anton Kostylev and me. It is the work in this wonderful place that is responsible for the fact that I stopped writing about cinema in all other places on the network - and for those who, since the days of “Hayloft”, “Monocle” and “KG”, appreciated me as a film critic, I can only advise you to come there more often. I can advise everyone else the same and, in addition, give a list of links to those of my reviews that seem to me the most successful - as compensation for a month and a half of silence about the movie.

A simple story - perhaps the best review I've ever written.

Magnolia is an object of pride and secret exploration, the true meaning of the title of Paul Thomas Anderson's film.

Joan of Arc - under the modest name La Femme Joan.

The girl who was interrupted - I settle scores with the myth of madness.

The Color of God should have been called “You can’t see with your hands, you can’t understand with your eyes,” but Maxim Andreev didn’t see the quote and renamed it “There is neither darkness nor death in this world,” which is also good.

Exiled .

Open Your Eyes is the only attempt at a hypertext review made on the site so far, consisting of four files. In fact, I have written a few more in this style, but due to technical problems it is still difficult to post them.

In the same clearing there are two dozen more of my reviews. As well as reviews from such famous people as Maxim Andreev, Stanislav F. Rostotsky, Lev Danilkin, Nikolai Okhotin and Sergei Kudryavtsev. In the “Festivals” section , Mikhail Trofimenkov reports exclusively from Cannes, and Andreev and I report from Sochi.

The design and interface, in my opinion, leave much to be desired, but we will work on it. There will be a lot of interactivity and everything. I think that's where I'll make a section for letters about movies.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Also on the Cinema Glade there is a section “Favorites” , where quite a lot of excellent articles from the old “Segodnya” and “Evening Moscow” are collected. Read and see if old love rusts.

Interactive

Nabokova guessed about a third. This is, of course, a quote from a 1959 poem:

What a bad thing I did,
and am I a corrupter and a villain,
I, who makes the whole world dream
about my poor girl.
Oh, I know that people are afraid of me,
and they burn people like me for magic,
and, like poison in a hollow emerald,
they are dying from my art.
But how funny that at the end of the paragraph,
contrary to the proofreader and the century,
the shadow of the Russian branch will waver
on the marble of my hand.

Alexander Rudnitsky examined a hidden quote from Pasternak (“What kind of dirty trick did I do? / Am I a murderer and a villain? / I made the whole world cry / over the beauty of my land”) and asks: “How could Nabokov, being in the resort of San Remo in 1959, to know what Pasternak wrote at about the same time (a little earlier?) “on the table?” The answer is disappointingly simple: Pasternak's poems were published in the West. And Nabokov, who didn’t like Doctor Zhivago, wrote, like, a parody. That’s what he himself wrote: “Lines 1-4: the first stanza of this poem imitates the beginning of a poem by Boris Pasternak, the first line of which was borrowed in full.” As attentive readers can see, Nabokov was joking again - the first line, of course, is different. No less than a subtle esthete was especially offended by the word “dirty”.

And Renat tells a good intertextual story:

***

Personally, I first encountered the line not in the original, but in the work “I Can’t Imagine Myself” by Yaroslav Mogutin, in a context approximately as follows: “...I imagine myself as Nabokov, exclaiming: What a bad deed I have done, And am I a seducer and a villain, I, making the whole world dream about my poor girl." I imagine myself as Humbert Humbert..." etc. This is the precedence of quotes.

Feedback

Someone Petrukha writes:

**

Your reader wrote that 4 consonants in a row are “fantastic!”

This is actually bullshit. There is such a word - fuck up. There are 6 consonants in a row. And there is also such a thing - counter-bang. 9 consonants. This is what fantasy is - counter-fuck!

**

No comments

Impression

The day before yesterday I watched Greenaway's 8 1/2 Women. Poorly ventilated hall of the “cult” “blue” cinema in San Jose. Three and a half spectators (one came later and left early). Twice I couldn’t fight the dream, but then I woke up and looked further. Contrary to the name and expectations, women were not slaughtered - just one turned out to be converted from a man. The impression of “Countdown of the Drowned”, a completely unexpected movie for those years, when it was first shown at some festival in “Horizon”, it seems, in 1989 (remember, they used to show decent movies there), was stronger. :) In short - disappointment happened. And at “Gone in 60 seconds” in an ordinary cinema, where nothing was shown except blockbusters, a full hall of people hooted enthusiastically when police cars turned over and crashed into a cake, and Cage’s hero drove at a speed of 160 miles per hour, when they are already twisting over 105 and dragged to prison without talking. A triumph of cinema marketing... Is it already in Moscow too?

( Yuri Syuganov )

I answer: it’s on in Moscow. Review - here . All other readers are encouraged to write their reviews of life experiences of the past week... and save the cinema for Pole.ru.

Name

E-mail