Sheremetevo and me

For those wanting to see some footage of my time at Sheremetevo here are three clips. This is from when I was already at Gate 25, optimistically listed on the boards right after we passed through customs as the gate from which SU 315 would be departing to New York, albeit at 10pm. The gist is that a crowd had gathered at the front desk of Gate 25 after an announcement was made stating that first, the flight would now be leaving at 11:30, and second, that it would be composed of passengers who had 'registered first' for the flight. The lack of clarity surrounding what this meant--would those who had registered for todays flight SU 315 take precedence, or those left over from the SU 315s of days gone by, i.e., the several hundred people whose flight was canceled on December 26th and who did not, because Aeroflot told them to go home, make onto the flight that ran on December 27th--more than half empty, it was said, so that Aeroflot would be able to post that flights were running as scheduled. No passengers, because they've been sent home, but the flight got out.

So the crowd gathered. There was a crush at the desk--no Aeroflot workers ever appeared at the gate, it should be noted, it was total vigilante airline management at this point--as people pushed and shoved in the belief that whoever made it on the plane would fly. People from the Dec. 26th flight who had been at the bar and just showed up to find a line at the gate got angry. Names were called. At just this moment, the board changed--and SU 315 was now scheduled for 4am. All hell broke loose. A group of young men, and one very loud young woman whose daddy definitely did something fun for a living, who had been nursing a bottle of Hennessy for some time commandeered the microphone making empty threats and demanding to talk to an Aeroflot representative. Attempts to get a gang together to storm customs were made. At that moment, two police officers appeared calm things down and, ideally, shut off the microphone. As can be seen here, they succeeded in neither.

The girl is saying: I just spoke to an Aeroflot representative. She looked at the computer. She said that in total are registered for the flight 324 people. [The rumor circulating was that Aeroflot had registered 600+ for the flight--which was in fact true, they just decided to run two planes. Like Greyhound. The first 11:00am to Boston fills up, they whip out another one.] Here are her words: if you have a boarding pass, you are flying. [The crowd begins to yell in protest, they lie! they lie!]. Yes, we're flying at 4 am [Liars!! for two days liars!!!]. At which point one of the Hennessy lads gets on the line and says, basically, they're all liars, they've been lying for two days, let's not listen to Aeroflot. We want an aeroflot rep to come.

What they didn't know at that moment was that an aeroflot rep was standing right next to them, quietly and efficiently preparing for the flight to hanoi that was about to leave from our erstwhile gate. Shortly after this, she decided to just open up the passenger manifestos for the Dec. 26th and Dec. 28th flights to JFK so that people could see their names on them. Mine was on the 28th. Ben said that when he checked the flight status online this morning, one flight had taken off and one flight, bizarrely listed as traveling between a helipad in Moscow and a helipad in Westchester, had no news available. I suspect, being as my ticket was for the 28th, I would have been on that one.

Let's put me and Anne back on top!

Anne and I had fun in Moscow. We took lots of pictures of each other, but have only this one picture of both of us, helpfully taken by a ledge on the side of St. Basil's looking out on Red Square. There are also some pictures taken in front of a gallery, but those aren't online and don't have the classic Russia feel. And they weren't taken by a classic building, but by a man who informed us that a) US submarines sank the Kursk, and b) New Jersey is the second-smallest state.

Visualizing Moscow

Ben just came to visit Anne in Moscow and they had a marvelous time together, living the high-life--or at the very least, the slightly-elevated-life-- as compared to the one possible in New Jersey, for a week on the edge of winter. Ben has all the photos from their time together. Wouldn't it be great if he posted a few for everyone to see? One imagines Anne would be excited about that, especially as word on the street is her Grandma has recently acquired a computer. One imagines Grandma W. would be excited, too.

Until such time as Ben deems fit for photo-posting, Anne will entertain you with some pictures she took on her ipod touch, at an excellently-curated photography exhibit put up at the new Museum of Graphic Culture, a municipal museum in a half-Guggenheim, half-warehouse concrete and glass cookie-cutter on Ostozhenka. While this particular building is nothing to write home about, I really like what has happened to the Ostozhenka area in the last few years. Lots of people are crying about the wooden buildings that perished under Baturina's heavy hand, and I feel that, I really do, but the bare fact of the matter is that with the exception of the city's modernist treasures--Dom Narkomfina and Dom Melnikova are both in tatters, the former literally crumbling, just beyond the windows of the American embassy--I suspect Moscow is one of the better-preserved European capitals out there.* This is largely due to inertia. Think East Berlin v. West Berlin vis-a-vis those lovely four or five story apartment houses, which still grace Prenzlauerberg, where local authorities lacked the resources to tear them down and put up something new after the war, but were lost in the West. Capital-poor places don't make way for new construction as often as capital-rich ones. Governments that are both paper-heavy and cash-poor, and thus prime candidates for rampant corruption, make for especially slow change. While Moscow remains paper-heavy and corrupt, it is no longer poor. It's rolling in it. What's sad is not that this new money has been used to put up some very innovative, if obviously exclusive and high-end, housing stock between Ostozhenka and the river. What's sad is that so little of this money--because there was more than enough to do both, and still is, despite the 'krizis'-- has been used for capital improvements to keep the city thriving for the next few decades.


But I believe I was going to post some photos.


*This is all the more true when one takes into account the historic building materials to which Muscovites have had access over the centuries. I was tooling around my neighborhood this morning near an old church that has just re-opened, the interior has been lovingly refurbished but the exterior is in utter disrepair, with chunks of plaster sliding off to reveal a fairly shoddy brick job below. Bricks were a huge deal for Moscow--stone was just so incredibly expensive and inaccessible here, most structures were built of wood, which was cheap and plentiful, and which burned regularly. I was just reading in the Zhilishchno-Zemelnyi Otdel files about the dire flammability of revolutionary Moscow--the city was counting more than 45 fires a day in 1920, many of which were serious enough to render the buildings where they happened entirely unusable, often for several years. That means unoccupied, plumbing bursts, windows broken. Find me another place that in the face of all this would have so many wooden buildings standing at all. And balance that out with the need to keep the city livable by modern standards. For all people scream about Baturina and Luzhkov and their underground parking garages, anyone who has walked around the center for a single day knows how desperate the parking situation is and how it is coming close to destroying anywhere within the ring as viable to foot traffic. Traffic is not, god knows, why Luzhkov got the boot, despite what Sobianin tells us, but it's bad here, people, it's really really bad. And not just for the drivers. And totally failing to regulate parking, with the result that sidewalks have become long, thin parking lots, is not the answer. Build some underground parking. But then of course, as we know from metro construction, you run up into the problem of the wet, wet land Moscow is built on. But probably they've figured out how to deal with that by now.

Reqd Reading: David Foster Wallace

Oh, oh hi.

Required reading for those making the trip to the mid-Coast, here is David Foster Wallace's magnificent article published in Gourmet several years back, a fascinating ethnographic study of the towns spanning from Rockland to Belfast. Foster Wallace, apparently, disdained his talent as a non-fiction writer. Fiction was harder, and therefore better, and so he forced himself to write novels instead of resting on his laurels as an essayist, and was almost always unhappy. He was a remarkable essayist, as this article attests.

Either click this link:
2000s Archive: Gourmet.com

or copy and paste the following into your browser:
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster

Joe and Bea

The picture: yes, the picture. It's from a visit my mom and I took to the Wood Stove and Doll (and mechanical music, and button) Museum of Thorndike, Me.



This is from the mechanized doll display. Bea scavenges for old dolls each winter when they are in Florida, while Joe creates the mechanical displays. They make you wait outside while they power up the room, so that you can walk in when the Barbies are already prancing, the puppets swooshing, the toy cars honking. The second is a massive warehouse of mechanized music machines--a wonderful old hurdy-gurdy, countless player pianos, including an early version in which the player, in the form of a giant wooden block with fingers, sat on the stool before the piano, and when wound-up, played the piano from the outside, by pressing down on the keys with its wooden fingers. Joe scoots around in a mechanized chair but as we moved through his display, he left the chair behind as he drew us from one machine to the next.

The third is their wood stove showroom, which is their main business--they have the contract for all the wood stoves in the Cracker Barrel stores--and the fourth is the button room. It's the smallest but had the best story attached to it. Apparently Bea came into a little bit of money at a certain time, an insurance payout, after a man tried to break into their mechanic's shop. (This, at least, is what I inferred. I believe her words were, "Someone trieda hit and I got a check.") She used this money, $25,000, to purchase a button collection. Here's where this story gets appropriate for a website about a wedding: as Bea explained, Joe always trusted her with the money and didn't interfere. But when he learned she spent a check that big on buttons, he said to her with a sigh, "Oh Bea, there's no money in buttons." But did Bea show him: that winter in Florida, she worked night and day on that button collection: arranging it thematically, on handmade cards, so beautiful that in February, at winter's end, she sold it at an annual button show, of which one imagines there are several in Florida, to a woman with a huge collection and a lot of money, for seventy-five grand. "So I showed Joe," Bea says, "there's some money in buttons."