Translated material
Sergey Kuznetsov. Cultural guide. Issue 68.
Interactive
If we talk about the nineties, changes in which area are most significant for you?
politicsculture in general
music
literature
movie
psychedelia
attitude towards sex
attitude towards money
other
It's hard to imagine that readers won't have their own opinions on this issue. So write it to me!
NameTomorrow
Movie
Kukuts and Mukuts
Plunkett and McLain were not exactly like Kukuts and Mukuts, nor like Bonnie and Clyde. One of them was a poor adventurer without principles, and the second was an impoverished aristocrat. McClain wanted to live well, and Plunkett dreamed of stealing more money and escaping (for some reason) to America. Together they made a good couple: one ingratiated himself with the elite and found out who was going where with money, and the other, of course, robbed. They were real people, and they were called gentleman robbers - because during the robbery they behaved politely. Let's say they came to the wedding of a famous high society woman (censored) and not only took away all the jewelry from her guests, but also informed the groom that the bride was sick with syphilis. They knew about the latter firsthand: MacLaine had already caught the French disease from this English beauty. Of course, in addition to the depraved and selfish lady, there is a charming and beautiful lady; perhaps chaste, although this is not emphasized. There is a bloodthirsty villain who is after her, and a hero (the same McClane) who saves her from the villain.
To the number of figures required for the exemplary “cloak and sword” film of the times of our childhood (usually a joint production of France and Italy; with Jean Marais or Alain Delon in the leading roles), a politically correct positive homosexual has now been added, whom for some reason even to me, a well-known guardian rights of sexual minorities, I would like to call him a fag - he is so theatrical, mannered and provocative. However, in this kind of films, the hero is always a Hero with a capital letter, the enemy is a Scoundrel, a Scoundrel and a Psychopath, and the heroine is a real Beauty. It is reasonable to assume that a homosexual must be a fag: the general affectation characteristic of the genre, superimposed on the affectation characteristic of the gay subculture, gives a truly destructive effect... In a word, it is not recommended for homophobes to watch. However, they can send their children to the cinema so that they do not grow up gay.
As for the rest of the audience, the film is of greatest interest from the point of view of the development of modern English cinema, which is generally considered to be on the rise since Trainspotting. Trainspotting couldn't be avoided: suffice it to say that Plunkett and MacLane are played by Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller. The mere participation of these English stars (let's add Liv Tyler in the role of the main character) takes the film out of the series of adventure crafts: the authors clearly made a bid to update the genre. The update should have consisted of a new visual style: the camera moves like something out of your MTV, the editing is such that it dazzles the eyes, the only thing missing is psychedelic special effects - but, apparently, there was simply nowhere to attach them in the plot. One of my colleagues (Alexey Medvedev, it seems) noticed after watching that the time of action was specifically chosen to be the era when gunpowder was poured onto a special shelf in the pistol - so that when fired it exploded beautifully.
And indeed: the children of the MTV era have the right to their “cloak and sword” films. As for older viewers, the combination of fashionable visual aesthetics and adventure film cliches creates a strange impression. This, however, does not matter: probably, fans of Douglas Fabrenks and Alain Delon seemed unacceptably newfangled.
"Plunkett and McLain." "Pushkinsky" until February 24, "35 mm" from February 25.
Clubs / Art
It has long been known: it is wrong to evaluate avant-garde figures by the product they produce - if you take paintings, poems or novels as a product. A creative impulse and a creative environment are important; everything else is just side effects.
Based on this, the avant-garde fashion designer Petlyura should not be considered a fashion designer; It’s not so much the models that are important (and who saw them? And whoever saw them will remember?), but the general style. In the early nineties, the Petlyura squat was probably the main place in Moscow. Not only artists and diverse bohemians, but also the pioneers of Ptyuch culture went there. There they didn’t drink E and acid and didn’t dance to techno that was super fashionable at that moment, but drank vodka and danced to a song about hares. At that time, nostalgia for the seventies had not yet splashed out on the television screen with songs about the main thing and was a fashionable trend - not captured by glossy magazines, which were not yet in sight, but allowing one to define “one’s own.” At the birthday party of the then chief artist of the Kommersant magazine, they organized a concept: a birthday in the style of the seventies - they listened to Brezhnev's solo album and ate only what could be got in those years: Olivier salad, red caviar, balyk... the seventies turned out to be abundant, like from a Kremlin distributor.
Petlyura took - and probably still takes - his things from flea markets and landfills. Nowadays this can be associated with the enduring fashion for second-hand shops; but at that moment it was closer to the same (pseudo) nostalgia: it was a farewell homage to the conceptualists. At one time, Kabakov and his colleagues worked with material from Soviet life, when this life was still alive; Petlyura turned to him when he was already thrown into a landfill. In the same way, the heroes of the previous generation looked for fragments of the pre-revolutionary past in the landfill - from furniture to icons. Even Andrei Voznesensky made his stained glass windows from materials found in garbage dumps:
I found you in a landfill
But I'll make you shine.
The landfill, as we know, is a universal symbol of the twentieth century. The man becomes just another wreck in the car graveyard; into an armless doll; into a syringe on the floor of the Tarkov Zone. In such a dump of former people, Petlyura found his lady Bronya - perhaps his main creation.
Did Mrs. Bronya's life become better after meeting the world of the avant-garde and bohemians? Does Petlyura have the right to use another person the way he uses her? Does he give her enough in return? What is the responsibility of the artist to the object of his work, if this object is itself a subject? These are the questions that primarily arise in this situation. It would be attractive to believe that Petliura was counting on this... however, it seems that his desire to conceptualize did not go that far. He was simply used to working with material that had been used up before him: old houses, garbage dumps, rags and people of a bygone era...
Saturday, February 26th. Cultural center "Dom". Alexander Petliura, Pani Bronya and others. Petliura show "25 years later. 12 months. Second month." 21:00.
Literature
Moreover, my “rest” is too vague to articulate. But - since it seems that I cannot avoid Sokolov as the main character - I will try to formulate.
Perhaps the main complaint against Sokolov will be that he is a man of a different generation. This generation had political views throughout the nineties, and did not lose them in the ninety-first, only to painfully gain them today; they preferred vodka to psychedelics and classical literature to fashionable music. They had not only irony, but also a sense of their own importance. Not only stylistic brilliance, but also unambiguous assessments.
This generation, of course, is not so much an age group as an ideological concept - but Sokolov and Timofeevsky are perhaps the brightest exponents of its spirit. To say that this spirit is unpleasant to me is to say nothing. He is, perhaps, alien to me. Perpendicular. If there’s anything that irritates me, it’s the thought that I could be the same (not in talent, but in my views and attitude towards life). And therefore, the release of a two-volume book, where Sokolov collected his speakers over almost ten years, gives me about the same impression as the message about the release of a good jazz record... or even a box of records: it’s wonderful what happened, I believe it’s significant... but still not for me.
This, it seems, is called pluralism: I had my nineties, Sokolov had his, Cherednichenko had his. Everyone will choose what they like. I readily believe that Sokolov’s book is the best book of the year in its genre. But Kuritsyn’s “Journalism” has much more to do with the life that I have lived for the last ten years - although, of course, it also talks about Kuritsyn’s nineties, and not about mine.
It remains to sympathize with the historian: how will he, having added up everything that we have written during this time, restore the portrait of the era?
However, watch today's Interactive... vote, otherwise you will lose... do you still remember this slogan?
Monday, February 28. Essay club Rubric "90s": Evening of essayists Tatyana Cherednichenko (with the presentation of the book "Russia of the 90s in ratings, slogans, images...") and Maxim Sokolov (with the presentation of the book "Poetic views of Russians on history") . 18:30.
Interactive
What place does sex occupy in your life?
One of the main ones: 46
Secondary: 18
Main: 7
I don't know: 7
Doesn't take up any space at all: 5
I don't want to answer this question: 3
The results are disappointing for purists: it turns out that sex is one of the first places for more than half of those surveyed. However, Alta-Vista could tell us this.
However, analysis of the letters shows that for some reason the majority of respondents understand the word “sex” as practical activities... whereas I also meant thoughts, fantasies, and so on. So, someone Misha writes:
I would like to clarify the wording of the fourth answer option: “It doesn’t take at all, unfortunately.”
Or his half-namesake Mike writes:
For me, sex is about understanding another person, in other words, the highest form of human communication. I foresee questions from readers about masturbation. Masturbation is not sex, but the highest act of selfishness. It’s funny, really, all this is voiced in words that are simply not enough to describe “what place does sex occupy in your life?”
From my point of view, masturbation is definitely sex, just like nocturnal emissions, watching relevant movies, and so on.
Here is another example of the same difference of opinion:
I put sex first, but only with the man I love. And therefore, sex moves to something like a “secondary” place. Musia
Captain Strawberry offers another questionnaire:
It would be more interesting to conduct cross-interaction. Horizontal question - what place does sex occupy in your life? Vertically - what space would you like it to occupy? Or “What place should sex have in a PERSON’S life?”... ( Captain Strawberry )
Here's another serious answer:
Sex occupies a serious place in the life of any person. But the point is more in its presence or absence, and if present, in quality. More and more people say that there is no longer enough time for this, some complain that there is simply no one with whom. And not because you yourself are bad, but because you cannot find a partner who would fully meet your requirements and with whom you can find true harmony.
If harmony is found, then I have no doubt that for this couple sex will take one of the leading places, which helps in life, in business, and in creativity. I think so. ( Irina )
And in the end - almost a joke:
Here the program “Vremechko” conducted a survey: “Does the NEED to have sex bother you?” Out of interest, I even watched the program with results like:
Yes-380
No-300
and something else there :))) ( Maximka )
Formally, it is clear that the NEED to have sex means that you don’t want to fuck, but you have to... with your boss or, on the contrary, with your spouse. But it still makes a funny impression. However, they say that in one of the former republics of the USSR, which gained independence in 1991, in a survey on the comparative importance of various types of activities, food surpassed sex... in which republic I am not writing specifically, so as not to be branded a nationalist.
Past
***
I was at this very announced “Faust” of Murnau, accompanied by Letov (Sergei) and his comrades. The impression I received was certainly worthy of writing about. Moreover, at the end of the film, Letov announced that this was his last accompaniment of Faust: the project, which lasted for almost a year (from April 17) and was shown in many cities, was completed.
The impression is threefold. Firstly, the full-length film itself is from the year 25. Seductive Mephisto - why is it always so easy to portray this Evil as charming? Really young beauty Margarita (really young, really beautiful and really Margarita) - practice shows that pre-war movie stars are not always perceived now in exactly this capacity. Expressionist effects that put all of Hollywood's "Matrixes" to shame. In Hollywood they try to make the most complex computer stunts as natural as possible, showing in every possible way that for them it’s a piece of cake, but here it’s the opposite - a simple overlay or splicing is presented with such a drumbeat that you freeze, like in a circus.
The point here, perhaps, is that old age, even the wear and tear of the tape, creates an effect best described by the joke: “Grandfather, were you on Noah’s Ark? - No, of course not! - How come you didn’t drown then? " I want to say that for us, the time of narrative has already compressed, it has gone into the same “long past tense” (separated into a separate grammatical category in all Romance languages - in Italians, for example, it is passato remoto) as the time of narration itself. Therefore, when you see a blond archangel with a sword talking with the horned Satan in the prologue, it doesn’t seem like a kitsch: that’s how the higher powers perceived it then! When - then? In 1925 or in the Middle Ages? Who cares! A feature film from the era of the Weimar Republic can easily be imagined as a genuine chronicle of medieval Germany (and Murnau, let me remind you, starts not from Goethe, but from a folk legend) - both were equally long ago. And cinema, as we know, has existed forever.
Secondly - music. What Letov does with Lipatov and Borisov is difficult to attribute to any genre, least of all to jazz, even “new”, under whose department all this is formally listed. The grinding of a baritone saxophone and the gentle shimmer of a flute (you just expect rats to run on their hind legs - fortunately the melodies were all German), the mutterings of a DJ, the noise of a guitar - all this formed a “sound track” in the true sense of the word - the road of sounds along which you keep walking and walking...
It is perceived so organically that you remember that this is not something that was originally conceived, but even modern and spontaneous accompaniment, very slowly and very rarely. And if you also take into account the striking resemblance of the bald and at the same time wildly curly and long-bearded Sergei Letov with Faust in old age, then it becomes absolutely remarkable.
The third impression, unfortunately, is much less pleasant, although also very deep. About five minutes after the start, a television cameraman climbed onto the stage and began filming the musicians. And since it was dark on the stage, he turned on his headlight as if nothing had happened. The fact that it was dark for a reason, but because the movie was being shown, clearly did not interest him at all. As a result, when he came in from the side, half the screen was illuminated, and when he came in from the back, the headlight hit the audience directly in the eyes. All this lasted for about ten minutes. I must admit, I was so enraged that I almost got up and left to demand the money back - I didn’t come here to get into the box, but to get some kind of integral aesthetic impression! What stopped me was not so much the ridiculousness of such a demarche, but, ashamed to admit, a habit: we have come to terms with the fact that paparazzi and TV stringers are allowed to get in front, interfere, block, blind, and we no longer even understand how it could be different.
What a good impression! Detailed and on topic! Keep up the good work, dear readers!
Name