Sergey Kuznetsov. Cultural Guide. Issue 52

Cultural Guide. Issue 52
Sergey Kuznetsov

Date of publication: October 26, 1999

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This is the 52nd issue of the "Cultural Guide". Consider it a year. And therefore I would like to ask the reader to rate each department on a five-point scale.

Great section ! I liked it so-so ugh I haven’t read it

Movie
Literature
Art
Music
TV movie
Interactive
Past

Also, as always, detailed thoughts on related issues are welcome.

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Movie

First off: my apologies to the readers. Due to unacceptable negligence, when advertising the films of Makhsen Makhmalbaf at the 35 mm cinema, I not only did not bother to clarify his address, listed in the Afisha magazine as Pokrovka 20, but did not even bother to talk with colleagues from this publication. If I had done this, I would have known that “35 mm” is the former “Novorossiysk”, located not at all in the middle of Pokrovka Street, but at the very end of it.

As a result of a typo in the Poster, as well as my negligence, several dozen people tried in vain to get into the cinema on Saturday. The most offensive thing is that the thought of “Novorossiysk” does not seem to have occurred to anyone. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I myself was one of the victims. As a consolation for those who didn’t make it to “Gabbeh,” I will say that they are going to show it on TV in a week under the name “Persian Carpets.”

And now - to what you can see in the cinema this week, namely, about "The Blair Witch Project".

An advertisement that promises a very scary film is, as always, lying: the film is not scary at all. It fits not into the context of “The Mummy” or “The Haunting of Hill House” (which is playing at the renovated Horizon since October 20), but into the context of “Dogme 95” and Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games.” It's not just the handheld camera, the low budget and the fact that violence isn't shown on screen, but rather the impact. As in “Triumph,” at first it seems that you are watching amateur filming, and everything begins when you have already managed to believe in everything. And I don’t want to believe what happens next. And it’s no longer possible to perceive it as a movie. Haneke's film is based on the same thing: it also cannot be perceived as a movie - because all the laws of traditional narrative are violated: from the very beginning it is clear how the matter will end, there is no climax, and indeed no horrors occur in the frame.

The result in all three cases is the same: a feeling of discomfort. Viewers are not used to this kind of cinema. By and large, one would have to get up and leave the hall - but in all three films, almost everyone endures to the end. Probably, they still subconsciously associate themselves with the heroes - if only because they are also unpleasant and uncomfortable and they would also like to get out. But they, in fact, have nowhere to go. Maybe just outside the frame.

And so they walk mindlessly through the forest, shouting Fuck! and Shit! and encouraging yourself with conclusions like: “Yesterday we walked south and came back to where we came from - which means today we’ll go east.” They don’t even think of crossing themselves and praying. The best thing the heroine can do is dictate a farewell letter to her mother into the camera, finally turning into a little girl at that moment.

Violation of a stereotype of perception, destruction of a comfortable way of existence always causes changes in the psyche - if you like, say “in the soul” - of a person. The surrealists, who stood at the beginning of modern art, counted on exactly this. And by and large, this “destruction” is one of the main components of the culture of the twentieth century. Violence, drugs, psychoanalysis and, more broadly, psychotherapy, contemporary art - all of this is trying to achieve the same thing, but by different means. The goal is always the same: the truth about yourself.

In the case of The Blair Witch Project, Celebration, and The Idiots, both the audience and the film's characters can touch this truth (The Games, the weakest of all the films discussed, does not: it doesn't seem like the characters understood). The truth is that it is inexpressible in words, and therefore do not ask me what it is.

Maybe “we are all little children in an endless dark forest”?

Or: “when Something comes, we will have nothing to oppose it”?

"The Blair Witch Project: coursework from the other world." Cinema under the Dome, October 26-28.

Literature

I'm still going to announce the list of those modern Russian prose writers whom I personally consider the most advanced and fashionable. Fearing that it will be small, I redouble my efforts to look at other people's lists in the hope of expanding my own. One such list was published six months ago by the famous literary magazine Playboy. The list was also small and included the traditional Pelevin and Sorokin (this was six months ago, and now Playboy is threatening to throw Pelevin out of the list of fashionable authors - in particular, because, having gone on a “creative business trip” to Turkey with playboy money, Victor Olegovich refused to write anything. Which - if this is really so - is not good), as well as the long-known Mamleev (a writer, of course, a very good one, but how “fashionable” ... I don’t know) and a much less famous , although no doubt fashionable, Vladimir Tuchkov.

The opinion of Playboy magazine, of course, is not a decree for us. But when one beautiful and smart girl (the expression “beautiful and smart girl” always reminds me of Eco’s passage about what it means ... about “in Lial’s expression, I love you madly”), so when one a beautiful and smart girl told me that Tuchkov is a must read, I finally believed in his fashionability and advancement.

But nevertheless, something haunts me in this story. Despite his thoughtful and balanced presence on the Internet (including the “topic of the day” column in Vesti.Ru), for some reason it seems to me that Tuchkov is in some way surprisingly out of date, although, of course, he is talented and deserves attention.

Tuchkov became famous for his Tolstoy-style stories about the new Russians and the boy who earned a lot of dollars. They were published for the first time in UFO, and are available online here . If this is not Tuchkov’s best work, then it is the most characteristic: all the others are built on a similar principle, although less clearly visible. These include his major works, such as the cycle of stories “Death Comes from the Internet” (a separate mystery is to find a mention of the Internet in the text) and small ones, of which I will give two typical examples to make it clearer what I’m talking about:

I gathered you for disassembly
all the best
where can I find it now?
that towel
that it will dry your wounds
wipe away my tears

(from the series "Songs of the Slavic Soul" )

I learned that among the Moscow homeless there is a very funny belief that the owner of a hundred thousandth banknote with the number 0000001 can live without a passport. I laughed until I cried!

(from the series "The Rose Garden" )

In other words, in all cases, Tuchkov talks about modern (“new”) reality, using one or another stylistic model: Tolstoy, folklore, Rozanov, etc. The whole effect, of course, is based on the fact that Tuchkov himself knows very well that the “new man” does not have psychology and ethics in the traditional sense and therefore writes about him in the spirit of psychological prose (as, for example, Ergali Ger does in " Tales over the phone") is not correct. And having despaired of finding an adequate form in advance, he takes the most unsuitable, achieving at least a joyful smile from the reader. Which, in fact, is also a lot.

Pelevin faced a similar problem when he wrote “GP” - and perhaps that is why the novel resembles not a novel, but a writer’s portfolio. Pelevin’s output is also not ideal, but Tuchkov’s output still seems somewhat outdated to me: by and large, it’s still the same socialist art of the late eighties, only it has changed the topic: instead of the scoop, they tell us about bandits and bankers.

I can’t help but hope that sooner or later someone will find an adequate language for our life... or, more precisely, for the life of the early nineties, because that’s what Tuchkov writes about. In cinema, Grisha of Constantinople almost succeeded in this - and, probably, not by chance, because the first path lies precisely through cinema, the images of which are much more adequate to what was happening than the images of classical literature. (Pelevin also gravitates towards this method). The second way - probably ideologically closer to Tuchkov - lies in a description made according to the principle of “Yawning Heights”: a description that is ruthless, cruel and moralistic without jokes. In any case, this should be a description from the inside, and not from the outside... but, perhaps, due to his age and social status, Tuchkov is not capable of this. Bankers still have too much to do to write about themselves.

Well, it's okay, we'll wait.

28 of October. Classics of the 21st century. Strastnoy Boulevard, 8. Evening of Vladimir Tuchkov

Club

The main event of the club week will obviously be the weekend that falls on Halloween. Igor Butman will play at Le Club, and in the Republic of Beefeater the waiters will dress up as skeletons. But the most exciting program is planned by the "Dom" club. On Saturday there will be a grandiose performance “Birth Memory”, dedicated to the practice of reconstructing prenatal memory. Folklore theater "Ladanka" and Itelmen Leonid Sysoev from Kamchatka will show a performance and video installation. And also a ritual is promised - I don’t know if it can be considered a performance and part of the theater. And on Sunday, All Saints' Day itself, its Mexican version will be presented: Calaverada Holiday - All Souls' Day. The rules call for sugar skulls and skeletons, but promises include Latin American music, old Mexican films and photography. Which is also good.

That same night, “Chinese pilot Zhao Da” holds an after party “Good has won” in the morning. Nice music and seemingly free mulled wine. You can get a discount here .

"House" - Bolshoy Ovchinnikovsky lane, 24, building 4.

"Chinese pilot Zhao Da" - Lubyansky proezd, 25, building 1.

TV movies

This time I will limit myself to a brief announcement, since the RTR program is monstrously rich - you can watch something every day. But I will repeat once again about Mahsen Makhmalbaf’s film “Persian Carpets” (“Gabbeh”) - Sunday, RTR, 23:40.

In addition, I strongly advise all fans of Emir Kusturica to watch the retrospective of director Alexander Petrovich on the Culture channel: three films from Tuesday to Thursday at 22:00. After “The Feather Buyers” (the only film by Petrovich that I have seen; it is shown on Wednesday), “Time of the Gypsies” you look at with different eyes.

Tuesday, "Culture", 22:00, "Three".

Wednesday, "Culture", 22:00, "Feather Buyers".

Thursday, “Culture”, 22:00, “The world will soon end.”

Sunday, RTR, 23:40, “Persian carpets.”

Past

"Leningrad" is coming! How glad we are, how glad I am...

Andrey Travin

The Leningrad group performed at the Chinese pilot Zhao Da club. Many had heard it before and remembered the words. I have not heard it before, I have several paragraphs of fresh impressions.

I would define the band's style as "gentle punk". But it's not about the "label".

The main thing is what kind of background the performers choose for profanity and “obscene verse.” For ditties, such a context has been developed, approved and recognized. All that remained was to identify its properties and use it.

Firstly, “Leningrad” took from them complete freedom and the ability to call a spade a spade. Remember the song "Leningrad", where the last line indicates how the date with the "one" will end? Similarly, only in ditties, it happened that it was stated in plain text what exactly the hero likes to do with his “darling”.

And secondly, “Leningrad” took the mask of stupidity from the ditties. After extracting the opening chords, the performers' faces "become stupid" right before our eyes. But the main “stupidity” of the group’s music is given by its powerful brass section: tuba, “Lizard”, trumpet, clarinet and... the “biggest goat” in appearance - on the sax.

However, “Leningrad” is also looking for other images of heroes who don’t care about anything. Apart from the fool and the buffoon, the person to whom everything is possible turns out to be “Agent 07”. This is the name of their new song, which they rehearsed twice in “The Chinese Pilot” right in public (and why not? - James Bond can do anything, and so can they!).

The most vivid impression from the concert was how happy the ladies were. Such bliss was written on the faces of the spectators, as if this very organ, remembered through words, or at least through song, was inserted and felt by them.

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And here is another review of one of the previous issues:

Regarding the graffiti "GOD, FUCK AMERICA!" I suspect that I may destroy the anonymity of this work. Most likely its author is molecular biologist Sylvian Kamyres. At least, I heard the idea of ​​such a slogan from him several years ago.

True, his phrase was conceived without punctuation: “GOD FUCK AMERIKA” - so that the same sacred meaning would be more visible. The words, I remember, were supposed to be placed on top of each other and form such an American creed. It’s nice that, judging by your words, even with punctuation she hasn’t lost her ambivalence.

By the way, Sylvian came up with this slogan shortly after returning from the States, where he lived for two years and from where he eventually fled. But first, before he became disillusioned and ran away, he really fell in love with this country - the beauty, the animals, the music, skyscrapers, carrot juice in supermarkets... In addition to the noble hatred of political correctness, he brought from there a lot of kind and beautiful images - say, a huge black a cop in a leather jacket and dark glasses, who is on duty at a snowy bus stop and, without taking off his glasses, reads a cheap pocket book under a lamp...

All I'm saying is that "GOD FUCK AMERICA" is not pure banter. There is banter and echoes of sincere pathos. In general, this is not a parody of “GOD, BLESS AMERICA!”, but simply a more personal, author’s version of this blessing. Apparently, in his personal America there was not enough GOD and FUCK, sacred and sexual (which are often the same thing) - so he ran away from there, wishing this country farewell more of God’s seed . ( Patrica Lisidze(/a>)

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New impressions, comments, etc. are accepted and welcomed.

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Who are you most afraid of?

Representatives of the authorities vested with the powers they already have: 26

Government representatives who received emergency powers: 22

I'm not afraid of anything at all: 14

Created people's squads and self-defense units: 11

Terrorists: 4

Well, that's exactly what I expected. Readers use letters to justify their choice.

The other day, my brother was returning from me to his home, pretty drunk, and was literally stopped in my yard by the police for documents. Considering that he was wearing a knitted cap of Rastafarian colors, and his hair was somewhere in the crimson color, it was difficult to mistake him for a terrorist. The police invited him to go to the nearest entrance, searched him for drugs, looked at his money and documents, and let him go.

Arriving home, my brother discovered that money in the amount of 300 US dollars had disappeared without a trace. In upset feelings, he called me, and my friend, who was just spending the night with me, and I went down to the yard, where I told the cops that some people had searched my brother and the money had disappeared. That I, of course, suspect that it is bandits who are at work here - and tomorrow I will write a statement if the bandits are not found. However, maybe it was you, I said, and he just dropped the money. So you look for them properly, otherwise I will write a statement.

My friend and I went home to drink vodka, and half an hour later the cops brought back thirty dollars that they found in the entrance. And in another ten minutes - a CD. “Well,” said the friend, “we recaptured 10%.”

The moral of this story is clear: be careful, and if anything happens, keep pushing. You won’t get all the money back, but at least something ... (Anna Eidis)

What could be more terrible than the mob who have received, even minimal, rights. The government that has received emergency powers is still far from us. The law can always be circumvented. Officials, that is, representatives of power, are to be bought. If a little person is assured that he is participating in the historical process, that the fate of the people depends on his activities, that he is, if not God, then someone close to God - this is scary, impossibly scary. This methodology was followed during the Revolution, the First Five-Year Plans, and the Patriotic War. And what we see is that they killed left and right: aristocrats, kulaks, merchants, priests - everyone in a row, the more the better; they denounced each other in the thirties (based on the same principle); they opened the Red Terror (well, why not a pogrom); they even managed not only to stop, but also to defeat the well-armed and trained German army. Give free rein now - they will kill the Chechens as terrorists, and when the Chechens or all the Caucasians are finished (that is, they are killed) they will turn to others (Tatars, Jews, new Russians) no matter who . ( Yurkov Vladimir )

Everything you listed, including the fact that I’m not afraid of anything, but I have to . ( Alexei )

That seems to be all. Have a safe life, dear readers.