(title goes here)

December to December

2011-12-17T01:12:00.029+04:00

December 2010, Alabama, USA:

Last week, this December, I went to visit my grandmother who lives in the south, the land of "Yes ma'am" and "Y'all," Fox News and the kindness of strangers. While we were driving around Pensacola on Friday she turned to me and said "What are 'duck fries'?" She had read it on a sign. We had been covering some ground that morning on the internet, wikipedia, amazon.com, and the state of life in the USA for younger generations, so maybe she thought I would know better than she what 'duck fries' were. Not so.

Flying home over the Adirondacks yesterday, I looked down on the same mountains I was climbing as a teenager, the frozen lakes I was skating on ten years ago, with friends I no longer have, and I think that this idea of 'home' is a tricky one, whether we can or can't choose where we live, what is the meaning of a place that we are from? And after living in New York, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska, maybe I know more about this country, but I'm not sure I understand it much better. We are the people who vote together? Who have a flag that represents us all? Am I a New Yorker? I am not a Texan. Together, Texans + me are not Canadian. We are not Mexican. We are not Russian. I don't completely understand how these lines of culture and of borders meet and diverge.

And here in the USA, on the one hand I can get all the fresh, organic spinach I want and can solve any problem in my own damn language. On the other hand, everywhere we appear to be eating a lot that is not actually food, and there seems to be a resistance to letting certain people use their own damn languages. In the short time since I have been back, I have been an unwilling party to too many strangers' too-loud cellphone conversations; I have spent too much money, and I love that people stand in lines

I have here below some photos from the past 12 months, from the USA to Russia, Barcelona, Baltimore, Bolivia. Adios, 2011.

January: scrabble serendipity

March: field trip to Barcelona (cooking class)

April: AAS celebrates the royal wedding

more royal wedding

May: three colleagues' farewell-to-Moscow limo tour

caviar and champagne in the limo

June: classroom as a pinhole camera, a student's excellent idea

June: my sister's apartment, home base for my summer projects. Smallest kitchen ever. Baltimore: way too hot, and not, in fact, convenient as home base for summer projects.

June, continued: Post-blowout argument, pre-thunderstorm, my sister in the window.

July: Part parade, part daily life in La Paz, Bolivia

Graffitis amorosos de Cochabamba, Bolivia.

August: Back from Bolivia, on the train home. I definitely love NY.

August: my dad was here (at his dining room table)

August: the Corner-stone bookstore, Plattsburgh, for sale after 36 years. Work in progress...

...if only...

November: beauty at the mall

December: Valentina, part of a series of people on their couches (www.maryrizos.com)

serene/bizarre/drab/colorful/february

2011-02-19T18:16:00.007+03:00

thursday

2010-12-02T21:53:00.006+03:00

2010-01-16T19:30:00.002+03:00

2009-12-25T06:34:00.016+03:00

A dad, two sisters, a brother, the house and place and habit of our childhood - walking, talking, looking around. A history (now distant and not often called to mind) in this place, of flowers, fishing, herons, mosquitos, ice skates, snowstorms, the summers and winters on this brook and in these fields. Today: vines, turkey tracks, silence, heirloom apples in the snow.

la vida reciente, en cuatro mini-capítulos

2009-12-23T00:36:00.016+03:00

1. In which a man explains to Mary about marriage, and women drivers.

After a workshop in England some weeks ago, I was picked up from the airport by a school driver I hadn't met before. I learn his name, though, after I introduce myself and drop myself in the front seat of the 30-passenger van the two of us are in. I tend to like to talk to strangers, and don't get as many chances here as other places. So in a probably unladylike, un-Russian way I sat in front with him and proceeded to ask questions and chat. After some discussion about the weather, the traffic, and the school, comes the Eventual Question:

'Excuse me, Mary - you married?'
'No. Nope.'
Silence.
'Excuse me Mary - Why not?'
'Well... I'm... busy?' I reply, laughing.
Silence.

'Excuse me Mary - you not married? But you very nice girl.'

There you have it, people. I am a very nice girl, and I am not married. Meanwhile, I am in Russia, over-friendly, and in typical 9 p.m. traffic, 6 lanes going 60 (or 80) miles per hour. As vehicles whiz past us on all sides, the car in front of us is going too slowly and can't seem to change lanes.

'Ugh,' I say, 'This car.'
'Woman,' he says.
'WHAT?' I reply, 'You think that's a woman just because they're a bad driver?'
'No,' he says, 'I know.'
'It's not true that women are bad drivers,' I say.
'Yes, true,' he says, almost gleefully.
I look at the car in front of us and say, 'Maybe it's a man with big hair.'

We pass the car and my driver slows down and gesturing for me to look at the driver, who is, in fact, a woman. Next, a black car with all its windows tinted black is weaving crazily in and out of lanes, scooting between cars at a terrifying speed and squirming into spaces that don't seem big enough...

'Man,' he says. 'Good driver. Is man.'

2. In which a man rescues Mary from imminent escalator death

Moscow is okay. Really. I mean, it's the only place I've lived where I don't really feel a sense of community or security. For example, walking through the park by school, which is full of feral dogs, I have frequently had the thought that if I got attacked by one of these dogs and was being torn limb from limb on the ground in the middle of the trail, I would fully expect nobody to help me. Young Russian mothers with old-fashioned baby carriages would stroll serenely by, annoyed that they had to navigate around an obstruction in the path. But sometimes I am surprised into thinking I am wrong about this place, that people would in fact help a flailing foreigner being eaten by a dog. I see small acts of kindness sometimes, for example: young men carry the carts of old women hobbling down steps in the tunnels to the metro - they do it quickly, without looking, scooping up the cart, depositing it at the bottom of the steps, and disappearing into the throng of people without a backward glance.

A few weeks ago I was riding the metro, and as a man across from me who had been reading the newspaper got up to leave the car, he leaned over to me, startlingly close, and though I have no idea what he actually said, he gestured and told me that my bootlace was untied. Huh. For someone (me) who tends to always be an always-semi-unprepared fly-by-seat-of-pants kind of person, the magnitude of the gesture (in a place where people don't generally interact much in public) seems totally disproportionate to the situation. Half the time I notice my boot is untied and ignore it. I feel like it's each person's responsibility to tie his or her own shoes and realize when it needs to be done. However, it does occur to me also that by alerting me to my untied bootlace, this stranger not only may have saved me from a gruesome grinding death in the escalator, but perhaps also saved thousands of other people the inconvenience of having their commute interrupted or delayed as my body was pried from the stalled machinery. So, spasiba, stranger, from all of us.

3. In which a man rescues Mary from unwittingly freezing to death while shopping

At a big outdoor market, immediately following the untied-bootlace-on-the-metro incident, I stopped at a jewelry stand with two old woman and an old man working there, and they told me (as far as I could tell) that I was crazy for having my vest unzipped. My hands were full (with the earrings I was planning to buy from them) and I figured I could placate them by zipping my jacket after I paid them. But as I continued to stand there and weigh the potential purchases I had in my hands, the man came over AND BEGAN TO ZIP MY VEST! And then I realized: it was an emergency! How could I have survived this long with only two sweaters, a scarf, a hat, and an UNZIPPED down vest?!?!?

A lot of the time here I feel like people want as little interaction as possible and see other human beings as merely obstacles on the sidewalk, but then perfect strangers are overwhelmingly concerned for me on matters I consider truly not their problem. I honestly do not understand Russians much of the time, and I imagine there is a lot of cultural history on both sides of our equation that keeps the feeling mutual. I find that often I disagree entirely with their perceptions of the scale of things, but I love it that they do in fact care about each other, even about strangers, even to the point of desperation. My vest zipped, purchases in hand, I leave the market, smiling, and sigh. I LOVE it here! Until my next unpleasant impossible tense unproductive humiliating infuriating exchange, I love it here! I will not be eaten by dogs. I will not die in an escalator. I will not freeze to death on a Saturday afternoon.

4. In which Mary is (happily) left alone

These nights in Moscow lately have been cold, crisp-- nights that have the smell of impending winter and nostalgia - for the winters of my childhood: open spaces, skiing and stars and snow. Here in Moscow it's dry sidewalks past beauty salons, construction zones, old small churches, gold-painted onion domes and skyscrapers, men in suits smoking cigars outside upscale cafes, chauffeurs waiting in parked cars all along the street, a BMW dealership with all the lights on. Traffic. Noise. Bright lights.

On a recent evening I am surprised walking toward a bus stop by a smiling, portly, drunk man who whistles at me as he topples off the curb across the street. I suppress a chuckle (in case he is more ferocious than he looks, turn a corner, hop on the bus, buy my ticket from the driver in the dark, and settle in the back of the bus to see my company: a frizzy-haired pink-hatted passenger surreptitiously snacks on cookies from her handbag, a student with a backpack talks on a cellphone while listening to music through headphones, and there's a distinguished-looking man whose shiny leather gloves and shoes and demeanor is at odds with the trolleybus aesthetic of old coats, old people, old plastic bags. There is no noise inside, just the clack-clack-clack of the lines we're attached to overhead, and the swishing traffic outside. I love the bus. In the old metal tube with its silent, sepia-toned, grimy interior and windows fogged to the darkness and traffic outside, the scene feels timeless, sad, somehow surreal. The knitted hats and plastic bags. You could be anywhere, it seems, on these winter night buses in Moscow. Moscow twenty years ago. Moscow twenty years from now. America. Argentina. The Polar Express.

Distinguished mystery man gets out after two stops. A dozen people join us at the river, lots of gloves and boots and bags and averted eyes. I get out next, buy water, walk past the pile of vomit that's been drying in the underground passageway since last Thursday, make my way through gates and guards and electronic codes to my building. In my apartment, I settle down in the windowsill to drink some tea and watch the building across the street. What you can't see in the photo below that I can see from my window is the interiors of theses apartments, strangers folding laundry, cooking dinner, pacing back and forth, watering plants, closing the curtains, looking out their windows at the apartment building that I am in. In the midst of this life here that I find largely and literally incomprehensible, this scene is always beautiful and intensely comforting.

2009-10-15T20:45:00.003+04:00

Moscow take two: 'R' for 'Revolution'

2009-09-12T20:25:00.033+04:00

It all started when I arrived at the airport in Moscow this past August after spending the summer in Spain. The plane landed, the passengers clapped and immediately started unbuckling, getting out of their seats and opening the overhead compartments as the plane was still speeding down the runway, and as I watched the tarmac out of the window, then waited in the long and disorderly customs line, got my luggage and made my way through the obstacle-course of people to the train, I just had this really strange feeling of...not minding. It persisted on the half-hour train ride into the city... I gazed out the window, watched the forests and houses fly by in the evening light - I definitely was not bothered at all by being here. Clambering through the metro, dragging my suitcases and being pushed around by the crowds was to be expected, in fact was almost comforting - ahhhh, nothing has changed, transportation and public space are still reliably uncomfortable and infuriating. I was sure it would all wear off (and it still might, come November and the total darkness of all my hours outside of work) but here I am, a month after my arrival, and I continue to be happy to be here and unfazed by the craziness that drove me crazy last year. And for better or worse, this place is captivating - it offers small flashes of truth, humanity, and emotion in the midst of a massive, confusing, heartless scramble for (different kinds of) survival.

Two weeks ago, as my friend Erika and I ran down some stairs and around a corner in a throng of people headed for a metro platform in the sweltering autumn underground, there was an old woman at the bottom, standing quietly in a corner, wrapped in a winter coat, with her hands out. We passed her, and Erika stopped, turned back. The woman started crying when Erika gave her 60 rubles, the equivalent of two dollars.

We exited the metro and made our way to a party at a Russian language school, passed a semi-awkward evening with some nice people and the best intentions to start Russian lessons. I have fantasies of really speaking Russian, of living here and talking to everyone and asking questions, making documentaries, reading books in Russian. However, on a 'gypsy cab' (paid hitchiking, more or less) ride to work on a recent Saturday morning I realized just how much and how little Russian I know. Enough to tell the driver how to get to school, not enough to redirect him when he didn't follow my directions. Enough to say, "Do you have a map?" but not enough to say "I can read the map" when he said he didn't have his glasses. Enough to often understand what people say, not enough to really reply. After a year in Moscow, this is what I know: coffee, milk, water, wine. tea. ice cream. lemon, watermelon, mint. chicken, salmon. 1,2,3,4,5,8,9,10 (have gotten into some trouble with 6 and 7). 100. left, right, straight ahead. here. let's go. why? what? how much? ticket, place, new, old. yes, no. what's your name? I, you, we. map, ocean, airplane, house. to teach, to talk, to want, to look, to love, to understand. difficult. spanish, french, english, russian. train. dog, cat, girl, man, woman. attention! black (black tea). green (green tea). white (white wine). red (red square). city, day, night, year, today, friday. see you tomorrow. excellent. victory. world. books. peace. this. that. please, thank you, me too. good morning, good evening, goodbye.

A big change this year was supposed to come in the form of a car I bought last June before I left for the summer. It would (will!) transform my morning commute from one hour into 15 minutes, for one thing. I left all my documents here to have the paperwork processed over the summer, but I had my license with me traveling, so when I got back to Moscow I went to the U.S. embassy, gave them $4 and my U.S. license so they could get me a Russian driver's license. "Should take two weeks, I think, let's wait three weeks, then I call you," said one of the guys who works in that department (they are all Russian, and all great). I waited four weeks, then called yesterday to ask about it. Answer: "Ahhh, your license is ready. You just have to go to police station any Wednesday at 12:30 to sign paper and pick up license. Takes only 2-3 hours, depends on traffic." Well, that's not so much an option for me, at least until a school vacation. So I figured I should at least get my own license back, and I asked about that. Well, yes... but, he can't find it. Anywhere. I am on hold. I am spelling my last name. I am on hold. I am asking if the police have it or the embassy has it, what does he think? "Miss? I am very sorry." A second guy comes on the phone and says, "Please explain, what is it that you need." So I explain again, I applied for a license, it is ready, I can't pick it up, I just want my original license back. I am spelling my last name again. I say, "R." He says, "R?" I say yes, "R," like in.... (and I'm trying to come up with some normal helpful word that starts with R... I've never had to do this for R...) ... And he says "Revolution?" And I say, "Yes, exactly, 'R' like in 'revolution.'" The rest of our spelling is a success, the license is found, and I'm sure there's a chuckle in both our voices as we say goodbye.

an albatross around my neck... or a canon 50D?

2009-08-17T19:53:00.026+04:00

... which, I might add, is an amazing camera that I am happy to have recently purchased and begun shooting with. I brought it with me to photograph the Camino de Santiago this summer as I walked the 700 kilometers between Pamplona and Santiago de Compostela... but then I abandoned the burden of my own expectations to make a photo project out of it, and the extra pounds of camera I started out carrying around my neck eventually got stored in my backpack for most of the trip. And so the Camino was not work, but instead was meditative, slow, with no agenda or ulterior photojournalistic motive. In fact, most of the walking on the trail wasn't captured in photos - from the moment when I decided to pack it in my bag and forget it - a brutal hike uphill in the blazing sun at 2 p.m. in vineyards on red dirt tracks, to the fields of oats and wheat and sunflowers, to most of Galicia: the green, cool, heavily forested and misty northwesternmost region of Spain (though it could be Ireland, you think, walking through it), where the Camino often crosses paths with rivers and brooks, ancient moss-covered stone walls, cattle, and slugs of an amazing size.

And nowhere in photos are the people we met - the aggressively flirtatious and charming Italian guy, the awesome older Italian guy with whom we could barely communicate, the 'German ladies,' the 'Slovak boys,' the Spanish lady who gave me band-aids, the adorable Canadian runner from Toronto (my imaginary boyfriend) whose name I don't even know, hilarious David from New Orleans, Manuel from Valencia with whom we passed a comfortable afternoon of conversation in the shade, the Japanese anthropologist doing her doctoral project on the Camino, the bartenders and grocery-store-owners who answered my questions and gave directions and laughed at us and wished us well. Old people in the tiny towns, with the time to chat, to tell us about their childhoods, about their health care, about how Spain has changed, and to ask about how things are going with Obama. They would stop us in the middle of a street or a field and strike up a conversation - why wouldn't an 80-year old Spaniard and two 20-something Americans have something to talk about?

People in ones, twos, friends, couples, groups of six or seven, strangers who had fallen into walking together, parents and kids of all ages were doing the Camino. One German woman quit her job to do the Camino. A guy from Madrid was on the Camino after 25 years of wanting to do it. Some people had done the Camino five times already. Some were doing it because they had read Paolo Coelho's book, some because they had read Shirley MacLaine's. Michael Douglas has done the Camino and been knighted? Martin Sheen is making a movie about the Camino? Whaaaat??? All this information was shared with us by Spaniards, connecting, with a certain kind of elation, their culture with ours. One old man in a tiny mountaintop town in Galicia (where they speak Gallego first, Spanish second - and, by the way, play the bagpipes) lamented that more people can't speak each others' languages and proposed that we all just speak the same language - why not? he asked, with the utmost sincerity (and quite a bit of pride in his great idea).

The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage, and while you can do it for cultural or religious reasons, and while by and large people give you whatever kind of space and acceptance you want, there's a decidedly religious vibe to a lot of the Camino, which is understandable, valid, in fact completely to be expected, but also a little uncomfortable (holding hands and praying over dinner, leaving it up to God's will where you'll sleep that night) if you're not... really... religious. But I guess you realize too that it doesn't really cost you much to participate in these other worlds - you're just holding hands and wishing each other well, and people's motivations are only as public as they make them - nobody's asking you to state your position, join a crusade or swear on a Bible (or drive the moors out of Spain...)

Sant Iago = Saint James = saint Jacob, and the Camino de Santiago is also called the Way of Saint James and the Ruta Jacobea/Xacobea, the Jacobean Route. The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is the destination, the end of this pilgrimage, and the place where St. James is said to be buried. Fascinating, certainly, but not a destination that held the most closure for me and my friend Liz; we had in our minds that it would be great to arrive at the OCEAN after walking across the whole country, and we set our sights on Finisterre, the mythical, medieval 'end of the earth.' It turns out, though, that the route out to the coast past Santiago de Compostela is not so well-developed for walkers. There are fewer towns, fewer places to stay, and longer distances between the options... we set out walking but after two days were left in the rain by a highway with nowhere to stay-- all accommodation full from here to the end of the earth... so we went back to Santiago de Compostela and stayed there for a couple days before going to Barcelona and then home.

We never made it to the edge of the continent. But we walked some more in Santiago and Barcelona, and slowly re-entered a normal life, with Portuguese-Swedish fusion folk music, the first rain we'd seen in a month, and advice about where to eat octopus. The sound of strangers' snoring that had been our nocturnal company in bunkrooms across Iberia was replaced by the sound of the all-night party that is urban Spain, and it was startling how easy the transition was made from simple days of walking and reading and going to bed at 8 p.m. to city life, email, shopping, watching movies and thinking about work again. But being back in Moscow now is good, it's cooler than Spain and calmer than I remember and there are good people here. The hilarious and fascinating conversations I had this summer with Spaniards of all stripes reminds me, as it should, that it is worthwhile to learn others' languages... it reminds me too what I must be missing here in Moscow. I really need to do something to appreciate Russia more. It seems, from logic and experience, that if I can talk to Russians, that will be something. Besides, I always like a huge crazy project I don't really have time for. However, that's (going to be) another story. here are some of the scenes that were captured in photos from the trip:

this is what it's like to arrive at the festival of San Fermín, the Running of the Bulls, in Pamplona... it's 6 a.m. you've spent the night on the bus, and the night before on a plane. you're not feeling amazing, have a big backpack to carry, the ground seems... sticky? and everywhere you look you see... garbage. people. red and white...

a band plays while people dance in the stands, 7 a.m., the running starts at 8 a.m. and ends in the stadium (pictured here)

yes, it's totally crazy.

at the top of the first big climb west of pamplona

an old Roman road. It's 5:30 a.m. We always left early, to avoid the crowds in the morning and the heat later on

these kids had just invented this game the day before 'you know, to have something to do' they said, planting water balloons and lying in wait for traffic in their small town of Azofra.

la plaza, Viana

the cathedral in Burgos

una plaza en León

Yorkshire Terrier puppies, anyone? This is probably not that funny, but I've always gotten a kick out of the word 'cachorros.' puppies. Especially when followed by something unexpected and in English, like... 'Yorkshire Terrier.'...because you know it will all be pronounced like it's Spanish...

La Plaza de Toros Monumental, in Barcelona

La corrida de toros

people wave handkerchiefs to show that the bullfighter has done well and ask that he be awarded the bull's ear as a trophy

there is a lot to be said about bullfighting, la lidia....there is a lot of beauty in it, and a lot of violence too, obviously. I am not opposed to bullfighting, but I do find this scene difficult, at the end, though it is probably the essence and symbolism of the whole event, in a moment.

escenas de verano en nueva york

2009-06-28T04:02:00.004+04:00

in what my parents call their 'icelandic garden...'

in the evenings, we drink (wine, water, coffee) and play scrabble. in the foreground, my not-so-winning hand of letters...

Yelena

2009-06-27T05:08:00.002+04:00

Yelena is Russian, teaches Russian, speaks impeccable English, and is working on Spanish because she's leaving Moscow to get married and move to Spain! She has lived in Moscow for ten years (having grown up near Vladimir, several hundred kilometers to the east of Moscow) and has seen it change a great deal. "You feel more wealth here now ... before, it was horrible, it was disgusting, the poverty, the shabby buildings... although there are still now people--especially people from the Asian republics--who come to work here and live in horrible conditions." She says, like most people, that the advantage of living in Moscow is the cultural life, the fact that everything is so accessible, the cinema, theater, ballet, the parks and cafes. But what is beautiful about Russia that people might not realize? "The people themselves are beautiful. On the outside, they look very reserved and unfriendly, but when you get to know them better they are very warm, very hospitable, very generous." So true. Gracias, Yelena, y que te vaya bien -

fin de semana 13-14 junio

2009-06-14T17:51:00.010+04:00

a morning out photographing: a bridge where newlyweds follow a tradition of putting locks on metal trees (and where it is evident that kids the world over feel the same about getting group pictures taken at tourist spots), also a church that was empty, quiet, and cool.

on holidays, 'art,' and being a bad blogger

2009-05-17T14:49:00.032+04:00

...yeah, a bad blogger. it's a combination of not really taking many pictures anymore and being suspicious of technology...mass email...blogging...facebook... texting and twitter... didn't we used to be fine without these things... this cult of the self... and then i remember i have this blog, and i'm like, 'why do i have this blog? this is nonsense.' and i ignore it.

BUT THEN, I realize that of course i really like reading blogs, especially a former Spanish professor's blog and my friend Becca’s blog about her recent move to Costa Rica to be a peace corps volunteer. she posts pictures, she talks about people and language and food and work – and it is fascinating, and i can learn some things. like that pineapples grow in the ground. so as becca would say, CLEARLY i need to just chill out about the existential implications of blogging and share what has been interesting about the life that i am in now. there are 3 recent chapters:

1: the all-russia exhibition center, where soviet stuff meets spongebob

what first needs to be understood is that Moscow is not an easy place to just do stuff. not speaking Russian is, as would be expected --and even more than i had expected-- a serious barrier to normal life. so in semi-desperation, a friend and i have this spring taken to looking up random events and stuff to do (usually movies in Spanish with Russian subtitles) and a couple weekends ago, went to see an exhibition called ‘Faces and Laces,’ which we read about and assumed to be a celebration of street art and culture. it was at the All-Russia Exhibition Centre a park with many 'pavilions' for different events, which are huge stately buildings from another era. among all these imposing buildings, on the walkways, there is an outrageous number of rollerbladers, cyclists, skateboarders, people selling shiny colorful balloons, and cartoon characters sitting in plastic deck chairs inviting you to go get your picture taken with them.

we walked for 40 minutes through the park until we got to the exhibit we were looking for – which turned out to be a celebration and sale of streetWEAR, skateboarding shoes, major brand names, etc. there were lots of seemingly disaffected teenagers in this kind of attire milling around, sitting around, skateboarding around, inside a huge domed building... there were many interesting things about the scene – the very capitalist nature of the anti-establishment event, the celebration of a modern global counterculture in a soviet building from the 1930s...

...a round photograph of somebody (?) draped in a cloth...

...the colorful booths and products, the noise, the music, the bar, the haircuts, the fact that a man (a 40-year-old man) stuck out his tongue at me and shooed me out of his booth when i peeked through the (i might note: open) door. there was nothing in his booth besides 1 oriental carpet. but whatever, getting publicly ridiculed here for being different is not exactly news. there may be a small irony in the fact that whatever the theme of this booth was, it was called something like ‘American is the best’ – hahahahahaaaaa... we didn’t stay long at Faces and Laces anyway, called it a day and an expedition, as many are here, which turned out not at all how we expected.

2: Victory Day, May 9

above: the view out one of my front windows, of the apartment building across the street, and the blissfully blue skies we are seeing a lot of these days. the tassel hanging into the top of the window belongs to the huge red banner just outside my window - the banners are put up in the middle of the night, on the buildings all down the street, ahead of major holidays.

on this, victory day, one of the biggest holidays here, to celebrate peace at the end (almost) of World War II, i have not so much to say except that as hard as you try, i wonder if it is ever possible to really understand another culture – or even your own. the history, the collective emotional investment, the ceremony and ritual and the idea of the nation... the celebration here was, for me at least, overwhelming, in the size and quantity of military machinery on display, the sheer number of people in the metro and in Victory Park, and was all just kindof massive and military and abstract except for the park, where people were giving flowers to veterans, enjoying the sunshine and listening to an orchestra...

3: moscow museum night

... when all moscow’s museums are free and open until the early hours of the morning. having read that 450,000 people attended last year my friend erika (to whom i really have to give all of the credit for our cultural exploration agenda) and I decided to go to some smaller photo galleries, not the big museums where we’d heard the lines were hours long. Turns out that the place we went was a conglomerate of a lot of galleries, including the one we wanted to get to, and was also the only place in the city you actually had to pay to go to that night, and though we saw the photographs we went to see – some neat portraits taken in rural russia – we also saw lunch meat cut and arranged into crosses, a man stirring red water in a bathtub while another man talked into a megaphone, and an entire gallery devoted to paintings of the milky way. viva la avant garde (i guess).

3.29.2009

2009-03-30T23:01:00.004+04:00

in athens...

2009-02-20T01:22:00.005+03:00

mary takes the wrong bus to the wrong metro line and meets the right people

2009-02-13T21:50:00.011+03:00

this incident didn’t happen this week, but I remember it now because for most of this week I was so worked up about a couple of things that I couldn’t handle anything. any thing, like small, unrelated things, like noise, traffic, the metro, and moscow, and people. people walking slowly and getting in my way. people walking fast and pushing me. and people speaking russian. how dare they. so as i was being crushed into a crowd at belorusskaya metro station on tuesday i was near-meltdown... (when it’s crowded it’s like those videos you see of water buffalo or cattle crossing a river or something.... hundreds of people squish into the mouth of an escalator) so i bailed out of the stampede and headed home on foot...

and it was while i was stomping around the city tuesday night drenched in mud and ire i remembered how one night in november i left school, at 7:30, ran down the hill to the road just as the minibus was approaching the stop, and of course i assumed it was my minibus (HELLO, it arrived just when I did) so I got on it and tuned out. Then I got out when it stopped.... at not a place I recognized. I asked some of the other passengers for this one metro station, they pretty much said, no way, not that metro station, but here’s this other one. turns out i had been there too and totally knew my way home as soon as i saw it, but these two ladies from the bus, it seemed, had established with some dismay that i lived in russia and did not speak russian, that i was here by myself, and that I appeared not to know how to get home from work. clearly, i was a danger to myself. they were both several decades older than me, had a commanding air about them, and so as they talked over what route would be best for me to take and what they were going to do about me, i realized i would have to play along (which wasn't hard to do, since i certainly didn't know how to say in russian 'it's okay, i was mistaken at first but i know where i am now and i'll be fine'). They made a decision, told me the name of my station and the number of stops like six times, and hauled me onto a seat with them on the metro. at one point i leaned forward to double-check the stations on the map and one of them whacked me and said, in English: ‘Don’t Vourry. We will put you.’ And they did.

1.27.09. martes.

2009-01-29T19:52:00.007+03:00

read on the metro, don't lean on the doors

2009-01-17T22:20:00.003+03:00

I went to a portfolio review in the end of October, and two editors, of the magazines Foto8 and Daylight, told me several interesting things, a few of which were that I need to see rejection as irrelevant, that multimedia matters a great deal, and that my portfolio wasn't well-organized, which makes sense, more or less, since my life isn't that well organized. One editor also asked, 'What project are you working on now?' to which I had to reply, honestly, 'Well... nothing.' 'Why?' And it sounds like an excuse! It feels like an excuse! It IS in fact, an excuse! That my more-than-full-time job is not photography but something else entirely, that I live in Moscow and I don't speak Russian and I feel like real life (and photographic work with any real depth) in this city is completely inaccessible to me. And this editor said, 'Well, why don't you photograph that?' Which is a really good and I think also a really difficult idea... I don't think I know what to do.... there is certainly more to it than photographing through gates and fences and bus windows, but I don't know what that is. I guess, as usual, the best way to figure it out is to get started and think and work harder. This is my project, then. Begin.

la vuelta a Moscú

2009-01-12T19:56:00.009+03:00

After the winter break of three weeks spent hiding out in Plattsburgh NY, I am happy to be back here in Moscow, the place of constant contrasts... the wealth and poverty, the calmness and chaos, the isolation in the crowds, the history alive in the modern world... so here some photos: the first, a park, in fall, some peace and quiet from the speed of the city, and a place that is blissfully silent but also always full of people and pets and old-time baby carriages ...

The second... the street I live on, the lights, the traffic, the constant commotion...

family portraits 2008

2009-01-11T12:37:00.006+03:00

"So you're moving to Moscow..."

2008-12-14T16:57:00.004+03:00

"...Idaho or Maine?" is what a colleague asked me last year when I said I'd be moving to Moscow. So I had to explain... 'No... Moscow... the Russian one.' Turns out, though, that the computer-dashboard-weather feature on my computer defaults to none of the Moscows I had previously been aware of, but Moscow, Arkansas (for alphabetical reasons, I assume). The other day I called up "dashboard" on my computer so I could use the calculator and there by its side was the weather - six days of sunny skies? what? WOW! I got really excited about the week to come, maybe being at work and having it actually seem like daytime... just the idea of all this LIGHT...

...but then, I paused, and thought... 'that's too good to be true, it just can't be right.' In my heart of hearts, I didn't believe it. So I clicked on the 'information' icon, changed it from Moscow, AR to Moscow, Russia and...

...there you have it. Just like that. The Truth. And the rest of the truth is that Moscow is NOT a terrible place to live. I like it for a lot of different reasons, but the constant rain and darkness is not one of them. What are the reasons it's not a terrible place to live, then, and where are THOSE photographs? good question. My job is great, and living in such a big city where I can't really communicate is infuriating, hilarious, and will never be boring, even when (if) someday I can speak Russian and have a 'normal' life here. But those photos... that need to be taken... someday will be taken. Actually a photo editor recently proposed a really good project on the topic... more to follow in subsequent posts.

la vida rusa...

2008-11-30T19:42:00.015+03:00

... or at least what i know of 'la vida rusa,' which is not much, since my daily life is in an English-speaking school. But what I do see of life here is a lot of traffic, a lot of boots, a lot of glam and a lot of grime. All these photos were taken in early fall... when it was still sunny once in a while, and you couldn't go anywhere on a weekend without getting stuck in the middle of a wedding party. Red Square is not totally touristy, either. I mean, of course it is, but it's nice to go there and see Russians seeing the sights too, spending an evening, eating ice cream, taking pictures. They're building a skating rink there now, for winter... more on that in future...

Once upon a time in Aspen

2008-11-29T16:25:00.013+03:00

An interesting thing has happened: yesterday on my way home from work in the rain and mud and the big crazy city I live in now, I found myself profoundly missing Aspen. Aspen, Colorado, where I spent last year living and which, as anyone who knows me well already knows, I did not love. But the problems I had there were mostly financial, philosophical, automotive. It had its great moments, more than its fair share of sunshine and blue skies (maybe it bought out Moscow's share), and it was a tiny, secluded, mostly calm mountain-town paradise. I waited tables at night in a cozy, classy restaurant, met some interesting people, and used to lean on the counter in the kitchen and look out the window at a wall of snowy mountainside with tiny sparkling lights all over it. ...aaaahhhhh, aspen... As a shout-out to two good friends still there, here are some photos of a surprise they left for me outside my window while I was at that restaurant job one night.

soccer!

2008-11-06T21:09:00.019+03:00

wooohooooo! a blog! for photos. for posterity. because everybody else is doing it, so... a highschool soccer practice on a november afternoon in budapest.