#also anyone who knows even a little bit of any slavic language hates his last name

[black-rose-writings]

Why do people call darkling sasha?

His birth name is revealed to be "Aleksander" in R&R (and it's also used in the show).

"Sasha" is a common slavic nickname for Aleksander. Trust me, I don't get why that's the short version/nickname either.

And people who like the Darkling call him Aleksander or even Sasha to counter all the dehumanizing of him the books love doing.

[nancypullen]

Soooo...

The counter tops are gorgeous, even prettier than I’d hoped. But in true Eastern Shore tradition, the plumber was a no-show.  I didn’t have a functional kitchen last night or this morning.  The plumber called and said he was on his way, but he’s coming from Philadelphia.  Does this make sense to anyone? There wasn’t a plumber in all of Maryland or Delaware that could do this small job?  Mickey could hook it all up  (new faucet, garbage disposal, etc) but that would void the guarantee on the contract. We have to use their guy and apparently he lives in Pennsylvania.  Does this smell like mafia to anyone else?  Just kidding. I don’t want to sleep with the fishes.  If they think the most efficient way to finish the job is to have a guy drive two hours each way, who am I to argue?

I also threw the whole crew for a loop when I told them I only wanted three holes drilled for the faucet.  I don’t want the sprayer.  I never use it, and I’ve never had one that didn’t leak or dribble. Sprayers are overrated.  I just want the center faucet and a hot and cold handle. Simple.  You’d think I’d said I wanted a water pump out in the yard.

  There’s a bit of a language barrier - the counter crew and the plumber are speaking what sounds like Russian but could be any Slavic language.  Yesterday the guy in charge kept asking, “No spray???”  I was tempted to just say, “Fine! Give me spray!”  But I want what I want. No spray. Fast forward to the plumber arriving (earlier than expected, so bravo to him!) and getting to work, then calling out, “Hello? I can not do. No hole for spray.”  I had to convince him that I don’t want it. What is this love affair with sprayers? I don’t hate them. I’m not anti-sprayer. I just don’t need one and I am willing to live with any regret that may pop up in order to have my sweet,simple faucet and two handles centered above my sink, thankyouverymuch!   Geez.  Give me water and leave.  It all seems so straight forward, surely this has got to be one of the most problem-free calls that a plumber gets.  Boy, I sound cranky.  Apparently a day and a half without the use of my kitchen puts me in a bad mood. I need to do something crafty. That’ll put me right.  Yesterday while the counter guys worked I got busy with that old cradle from the auction. It was rusty and dusty and so very brown.  I don’t mind brown.  If it was meant to sit beside a fireplace and look vintage, it was just fine.  But this cradle is going to swing in a pastel room where a princess dwells.  So I sanded it a bit and wiped it down, and hit it with a whole can of white spray paint.  It wasn’t quite enough, but it’ll do for now.  I can touch it up later.  I wanted it ready for play this weekend.

White and pink paint and a few rosebuds later it’s ready!  Those roses are leftover from the little canopy I made for her bed in Tennessee, I knew I’d use them again some day.  The baby doll has open and close eyes (a preference of the little miss) and a mouth that takes a pacifier and a bottle. She can decide if it’s a girl or boy and give it a name.  I’m personally hoping for a girl named Princess Petunia. I also started on a piece for the entry hall. Oh, that sounds too grand. The front hallway?  The space just inside the front door?  Whatever, you know what I mean. There’s a weird little corner there and I didn’t want to put another table there, seemed too busy.  I stuck a big fake plant in one of the baskets I used in my laundry room in Mt. Juliet and that was a start. There was already a nail way up on the wall so I hung the window frame thing that I had in the living room in the old house. It doesn’t work for me either.

It’s not bad, it’s just kind of bulky.  Something smaller and less imposing is needed.  I thought about a mirror there - it would bounce the light from the door back and really brighten things up.  But I don’t have one the right size and shape for that wall and I’m not buying one.  I’m determined to repurpose as much as I can from the Mt. Juliet house.  Since we don’t have the same wall colors or decor that usually means fussing with it and changing it, two of my favorite activities.  BUT, then I remembered those pictures that I bought at the auction- I only wanted the frames, so I was thrilled to pay something like $3 for the lot.  I grabbed one and slathered it with gesso. Then I started slapping everything on there from washi tape to a paper doily. I had a big letter P from the old house and I slapped that on too.

I may add more, take something off, or scrap it all together.  But if I get it right I think it’ll be just the thing to sit above that plant.  We’ll see. Two hours later:

I think I hear the plumber packing up. Oh, JOY!!  He tested the garbage disposal and then started carrying stuff out the door.  Hallelujah! I still have to put the kitchen back together and decide what bits of pretty go where, but that’s the fun part. Stand by for annoying and boring kitchen posts. He’s gone! Sneak peek of the most beautiful sink in the world.

 She was worth the wait.  If you need me I’ll be in the kitchen, blocking anyone trying to come in and mess it up.

[kittoforos]

A Beginner’s Guide to the Music of Aleksandr Bashlachev

By popular demand, here is a starter kit, in mostly English, to help anyone interested get into the work of my absolute favorite late-Soviet poet (/rock poet/singer-songwriter/guitarist of sorts) and one of my best beloved poets, as they say, всех времён и народов: Aleksandr Bashlachev (Александр Башлачев, or, if you’re feeling extra helpful, Александр Башлачёв— that last “e” is always pronounced “o”). 

Aleksandr Bashlachev was born May 27, 1960, died February 17, 1988 (by his own hand; sometimes people count him in the so-called “27 Club”), and left around 60 poems/song texts and various recordings (audio and some video), many of which are available on YouTube (a lot of his stuff is on Spotify, too, if that’s your thing). Despite the short length of his life/career, his body of work was/is a sort of massive hidden influence on Russian rock music/the associated culture from Perestroika forward; he’s not at all well-known among the general public in Russia today, but if you’re at all interested in any of that cultural history (or if you just like Russian rock), he’s worth at least a passing familiarity.

I’m making this post partially because I just love him and want to share his brilliant work,*** but also because his poetry (like, frankly, a lot of Russian poetry) is graceful and rewarding on its own, but also densely loaded with intertextual meaning, and his performance style (messy snarly vocals, messy acoustic guitar, just a bit of a mess really, albeit a through-composed one; also incredibly intense, somehow simultaneously explosive and hypnotic— one of his contemporaries, Yuri Naumov, used the term “thermodynamic”, which I like a lot) can be a rather “acquired taste” for a lot of people, especially for those who aren’t already familiar with the stylistics of Soviet bardic music or, like, garage folk-punk or something idk. I know it took me a long time to get into his stuff, at any rate (but once I did, I didn’t listen to anything else for months).

Themes and frequent images in his work include: Russia’s fate, politics (complicated ones, for which he got “shaken down” by various “security” organizations a couple of times— they only stopped doing that in 1987), spiritual freedom, spiritual honesty (”it’s impossible to sing one way and live another”), human contact, human nature (each unique individual as part of the whole), words, bells, birds, heights, Leningrad, love (unconditional and all-encompassing: “even those I hate, I love— they’re just not good enough people to realize it yet”), the sun, the role of the artist in society, the utopian future, suicide.

Also a key point here: SashBash (that was/is his nickname) wrote not so much songs, as fellow rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov put it, as entire emotional spectacles, so when you watch a video of him singing, there’s a helluva lot to take in on top of the words and music themselves, even though he was given to keeping the mis-en-scene pretty minimalistic (just a snarly Russian dude, his guitar, and his bell bracelets). It can be pretty intimidating stuff overall, (especially if your first language isn’t Russian! and/or you’re not used to listening to poetry in Russian, in which case I’ll tell you up front that this is gonna be really rough, but ultimately totally worth it— all the time I’ve spent listening to this stuff and frantically trying to decipher it has helped me a ton with my Russian!) and it can be hard to know where to start with him because his poetry is very complex and he wrote in a couple of different “genres” (to use the term loosely); hopefully this guide will help.

So with that, here are ten (10) songs (plus important musical/poetic background) to get you started— all listed, linked, and commented on under the cut!

(i love this pic there’s something magical and telling about the combo of rocker-style leather jacket and komsomol lapel pin)

***and because this man desperately wanted to be remembered (he believed that people are reincarnated as soon as they are forgotten, and absolutely did not want to ever come back), and I get so much out of the art he made, I feel like i should try at give back at least a little, if only now, and like this

I see you’re still with us! Excellent! Поехали!

Okay, so, the first thing to know with Russian rock music is, a lot of it is based on (at least) two traditions: Western rock music (and/or the contemporary Soviet perception of it) and the Soviet bardic song genre of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Okudzhava, Vysotsky). Russian rock tends to be heavily text-based and very individual-driven (in the sense that the lead singer of a group is often pretty much synonymous with the band— it doesn’t really matter who’s playing backup to Boris Grebenshchikov, as long as he’s there, the band is “Akvarium”), and SashBash’s work is definitely no exception to those rules— if anything he takes them to even higher levels. He worked almost exclusively alone, and a lot of his singing uses a dramatized speech-like recitative timbre; his main concern was not so much with rock music as such as with the poetry, with the Word, with expression through the Russian language (великий, богатый и проч. и проч.). 

Although that artistic concern remains fairly constant throughout SashBash’s repertoire, his genre choices are less consistent. Roughly speaking, his work can be divided into short comic songs, short serious songs, and long-form epics or meditations. Texts for all the songs I’m about to list can be found at http://www.bards.ru/archives/author.php?id=1927.

Short Serious Songs: (i’m starting with these because because there’s a lot of them, because they include some of his best known songs, and also because they’re just a good place to start to get a feel for what he was about as an artist without buckling in for a twenty-minute Suffering Session— that comes later)

1. Время колокольчиков (The time of little bells) — SashBash’s most famous song, just generally a famous song, gave its name to the whole era in Soviet music culture. If you’re only going to listen to one of these, this is the one, and I highly recommend watching the linked video of him performing it (all of the videos I’ll link here are from a квартирник (apartment concert) at Boris Grebenshchikov’s place— there exist other videos of SashBash performing, but a lot of them are from large concerts which he was very uncomfortable playing, and a lot of the time it shows). Rock and roll, the role of the artist in a time of individualist upheaval, the fate of the Russian soul, and more. (3:20)

2. Лихо (Likha (Slavic mythological personification of Evil); Dashingly) — One of SashBash’s major influences on the Russian rock scene was an eye toward Ancient/Medieval Rus’ as both a source of contemporary Russia’s problems and model of possible futures, whether good or bad. These certainly weren’t new ideas in Russian literature (see: Westernizer vs. Slavophile debates of the 19th century), but SashBash’s deft, unforgettable phrasings (and passionate, agitated delivery) brought rock and roll into conversation with these classic Russian arguments, and imbued them with new urgency. (2:41) 

3. Влажный блеск наших глаз (The wet shine of our eyes) — This is a bit sexier. Actually it’s all about sex. And love? And misery. And sex. (3:08)

4. Поезд №193 (Train №193) — This is a straight-up suicidal ideation song, an attempt to catch at a working definition of love, a swift pile up of quick-fix definitions, desperations. A genuinely short song with a pointedly circular structure. (2:16)

5. Вишня — This is the last song Aleksandr Bashlachev wrote whose text and audio survive. It’s a relatively melodic, life-affirming song full of fairy-tale imagery and general generosity of spirit, and the advice the singer gives to the princess character is actually pretty solid imho, especially for the 1980s (be brave, be kind, rejoice in all the things that please your heart and especially in your own freedom/will). (4:17)

6. В чистом поле дожди косые (In the open field slanting rains) — A treatment of a lot of the same themes as Время колокольчиков, but more explicitly and imagistically Russian (as opposed to Soviet), with the theme of rock and roll expanded to art/literature in general, a lot more Orthodox Christian imagery and ideas (anticapitalist), a less ecstatic and more lachrymose ambiguous ending...  A lot of people claim this to be the best song he wrote. (4:57 (song starts around 30 seconds in))

Short Comic Songs: (We need a break...such as it is. Soviet humor. If you don’t know the drill, you will shortly. I’ll go ahead and put trigger warnings in for these.)

7. Подвиг разведчика (The feat of an intelligence agent (title of famous WWII movie)) An average late-Soviet asshole with a brutal hangover daydreams about going on Cold War spy adventures, is ridiculous. The linked video has a pretty solid translation in the drop-down. (4:55) TW: alcohol, food, domestic abuse, poison, homophobic slur, torture mention, guns, suicidal ideation, rape mention (casual use of term)

8. Верька, Надька, Любка (Faith, Hope, Love (girls’ names)). Sometimes subtitled Исповедь весеннего рака (Confessional of a spring crab). A very strange, ultimately sweet and oddly earnest song that starts fairly concretely and gets rapidly, cosmically out of hand. A giant confused metaphor for a single Leningrader’s personal ideological development, with metamorphoses. (5:20) TW: food, suicidal ideation, religion, alcohol/drugs, brief casual transphobia (? tbh i’ve been chewing on this line for two years now and in context i’m still not quite sure), unreality

Epics/Meditations: (ok here we go, от винта!)

9. Имя Имён (Name of Names) — A chant of shifting rhythms over a monotonous pair of guitar chords, an uncertain, lurching, demanding, overawed and underserved Credo. (8:19)

10. Ванюша (Vanyusha (boy’s name, affectionate)) — This is an arc-structured song, about trying to understand the loss of a loved one, of a child, to find or make meaning out of that suffering (Bashlachev, whose philosophy in total seems to me simultaneously very Soviet and very Orthodox Christian, believed that all personal development, and indeed all that, which is worthwhile in life, comes to us through suffering— “if your soul hurts, it means it’s working”). It uses a lot of Russian folk structures and motifs, both lyrical and musical. (11:53)

Please note that these are not my personal favorite songs of his, necessarily— just a good first set that I hope represents and can act as a starting point for his whole body of work. Thank you for reading!! Спасибо за внимание!!

BONUS SashBash singing Russian 19th and 20th century pop hits with some friends. Laughter, joy, and contextually inappropriate quotations of Lenin ensue