The Streets are Paved in Gold

One of the dramatic readings at a recent festival, Кино без плёнки [Films without any film], was a "whodunnit" melodrama staged at the 1957 World Festival of Youth in Moscow. The scenario was pretty horrible, but the discussion on how to "improve" it afterwards was fascinating.

I'm still struck by one of the phrases that came out of the anti-hero, Zina's, mouth:

What's there to love about the Urals? It's all dirt, drinking, degeneration... But here - in one word - is the capital!

This is interesting on a couple of levels, not least of which that it is an Armenian man in St. Petersburg writing about the glory of the capital, at such a time when Piter has been relegated almost to the provinces.

To Russian provinces, that is, as opposed to American: I recently gave a presentation on American suburbia, which I loosely translated, for the fulfillment of my purposes (but with full disclosure that my definition wasn't definitive) as an ideologico-geographical space somewhere on the periphery of a metropolitan area, where families live in nuclear houses. You notice - this includes small towns and bedroom communities, but does not include apartment slums.

After the presentation a few people made a point of verbally and, to an extent, vehemently disagreeing with those two specific points (no slums, small towns included). "I grew up in the suburbs," one said, "and the defining feature of the ideology, for me, was that we spent all of our free time out of the suburbs and in the city."

It highlights an American centrism we don't prefer to accept. We don't have the same relationship to our capital, the hotbed of Senatorial prostitution, muggings, and heightened crime rates that it is; but for all of our multiplicity of metropolitan areas, there still is the sense of being IN or being OUT.

-An urbanite: "I might not be from New York, but at least I'm from Philadelphia."

-A suburbanite: "I might not be from the city, but at least I'm not from a small town."

-A small towner: "I might not be from the suburbs, but at least I'm not from a farm in the countryside."

And admitting any happiness at being from a more provincial region, or by identifying ideologies that might clump an individual with a "lower" podunk village - that is vulgar and conservative and repulsive.

"To Moscow, I beg you!"

Image: Mikhail Trakhman, "String Orchestra in a Car," 1957 Moscow Youth Festival

Heritage

I asked Storm: "Why is it that, some three thousand years after its construction, the Parthenon is still the paradigm of Classical beauty? What would it take to reestablish our standards?"

We laud the Parthenon for its purity, its geometric excellence, the systematization of its orders. This is all because of our modern vanities. We believe the Parthenon to have always looked the way we now see it.

How would our perception change if we saw, not a bare and abstract form, not the "culmination of the Doric order," but a temple with Elgin marble intact, statuary and religious rites complete, the hustling crowds of worshiping masses, the colors and the vibrancy?

It would be busy. We would speak more to the tiny diagrams of processing parades that no one can see, the poor engineering of the meandering approach, and wonder if the reason the interior/exterior colonnades are different styles isn't because of a systematic hierarchy, but because the Parthenon was actually a Hellenic-Mannerist piece that fused multiple styles.

Oh, how I'd love if everything we ever thought about classical orders was based on incorrect interpretations of Greek architecture by Vitruvius et al.

<3

Drunk

Forever and Ever, Amen

Atlantis. Camelot. Lemuria. El Dorado. Kitezh.

What is the appeal of a lost city? There must be an appeal, the amount of thought and dreaming we've put into the Atlantises, Alexandrias, Babylons... Yes, they all have become mythic heavens-on-earth. Yes, each has an aspect of Star Wars-ian "Long-ago-but-somehow-in-the-future" trope.

I think we're more excited because for once, in these lost cities, we escape the process of urban renewal. There can be no porosity - no unfinished projects, no abandoned dreams, no future hopes, no lost monuments, no decaying ruins, no bad paint jobs or plasterwork. There is just holy stagnation, frozen perfection.

There is a utopia. By which I mean a total and absolute war on time itself.

<3

Drunk

Image: N. Roerich, "The Fall of Atlantis" 1929