House-warming

Andrei Soroker is a programmer, musician and Russian. He threw these three talents into the scales when, in order to pay off the mortgage of their house, created the genre of virtual street music.

The house stands in the old quarter of San Francisco, a charming Victorian building, and as such, it has a thousand problems, accurately described by Andrei in his blog. The reason of its main problem is, however, not its age but our age, namely that as a consequence of the present crisis, it is worth only half of the mortgage that Andrei still has to pay off on it.

Andrei is obviously irritated by the fact, and he decided that before he would call in the mortgage and abandon the house with all they had hitherto paid, he would try to get some extra money to his programmer’s salary through virtual street music. On the site created for this purpose a couple of weeks ago he performs his own and his friends’ songs as well as those of classical Russian bards and of the heroic age of Russian underground in the 80’s. If you liked them, then by clicking on the house you can throw through PayPal one dollar per pixel into the virtual guitar case.


About this heroic age wrote Wladimir Kaminer in his first and perhaps most sincere book, the Military music of 2001:

In 1983 I got to know the innermost circles of the Moscow rocker world. This was at that time the most interesting society among all. My friends and I were looking for our heroes and we found them on the street. They were older than us, but they often behaved like children and they all played on the guitar. It was a wonderful time. The heroes of the 80’s simply started off and swept off the mock-heroes of the Soviet Union.

By clicking on the above image of the site you can watch Andrei singing one of the “hymns” of this heroic age, The man from Kemerovo of the legendary Akvarium group. He accompanies himself on guitar from playback, and the following English translation is also from him:

У меня были проблемы; Я зашел чересчур далеко; Нижнее днище нижнего ада Мне казалось не так глубоко, Я позвонил своей маме, И мама была права - Она сказала: "Немедля звони Человеку из Кемерова". Он скуп на слова, как де Ниро; С ним спорит только больной. Его не проведешь на мякине, Он знает ходы под землей. Небо рухнет на землю, Перестанет расти трава - Он придет и молча поправит все, Человек из Кемерова. Адам стал беженцем, Авель попал на мобильную связь, Ной не достроил того, что он строил, Нажрался и упал лицом в грязь; История человечества Была бы не так крива, Если б они догадались связаться С человеком из Кемерова. Мне звонили из Киева, Звонили из Катманду; Звонили с открытия пленума - Я сказал им, что я не приду. Нужно будет выпить на ночь два литра воды, Чтоб с утра была цела голова - Ведь сегодня я собираюсь пить С человеком из Кемерова.

I had some problems; I took things a little too far; The lowest bottom of the most-remote hell Appeared not terribly far. I called my mother, And my mother was right — She said: "Immediately, you must call The man from Kemerovo". He uses words sparingly, like De Niro; One must be mentally ill to argue with him. Catch him with chaff, you cannot, He knows how to move underground. The sky will collapse on the ground, The grass will cease to grow — He will come and silently fix everything, The man from Kemerovo. Adam became a refugee, Abel got caught in a mobile web, Noah didn't finish what he was building Got drunk and fell face-first into mud; The history of humanity Would not have been as skewed, Had they had the wisdom to connect With the man from Kemerovo. They called me from Kiev, They called from Kathmandu; They called from the start of the plenary session — I told them I will not attend. It is imperative to drink two liters of water before bed, So my head remains whole the next day — Because tonight I'm planning on drinking With the man from Kemerovo.

The identity of the man of Kemerovo is unknown even to my Russian friends who lived through this period, but this is exactly the mystery of the thing. Of course you can find the song also in the performance of the original author, the great guru of the Russian underground Boris Grebenshchikov, of whom Kaminer says:

If I listen to him now, I just laugh. Borya still lives and still sings. Sometimes I think he would do better to stop it.

But in the performance of Andrei you can hear exactly that gentle, meditative and absurd metaphysics that one loves so much in things Russian.

Andrei, his son Boris, and the house

The flat was very small, but we already knew the trick how to pack together a hundred persons on ten square meters. The youth of Kiev were even willing to stand in queue in the evenings just to listen to the play of Mammut for three rubles

– writes Kaminer. Follow their example. Shell out those three rubles, or thirty dollars or as much as you like. Or only five, but each time you regularly come back. And write your signature and address on the wall of the house. To leave your memory and to have your own little place in the house. Just like one did it in those good old time house-warming parties.

(Julene Harrison’s paper cut from Andrei’s blog)

Merry cemetery

After the sad story of the Armenian cemetery of Julfa, let us now see a merry cemetery.

Here I lie. My name is Stan Ion Mihăieş and I was a policeman. From here I went to Braşov where I was a good policeman. And now I give a salute to you because we will not see each other any more. I said farewell to the world at the age of 58, and reposed in the year of 1952.

View Río Wang in a larger map

The merry cemetery – this is also how it is “officialy” called: Cimitirul Vesel – is in the village of Săpânţa of Maramureş county at the Ukrainian-Romanian border, only some eighty kilometers from the Hungarian border. Its establishment was the merit of the local wood carver Stan Ioan Patraş who since around 1935 has become with his popular rhymed epitaphs and colored death images the specialist of wooden crosses in the village. These crosses attest the same breathtaking creativity of Romanians as among others the village churches and wooden houses painted both in- and outside all over Transylvania.

Here I lie. I was called Stan Anuţa, but in my childhood my name was Prilogan. Since I have married Vasil, we have lived well, everybody saw it in the village. I maintained a beautiful household, I was a believer, on the feast of Epiphany I served to the priest at our table during the benediction of our house. I do not serve any more, because I have moved here, under the shadow of the church.

I am Dioca Ţăhu, here I lie in the shadow of the plum tree. If you stop here, you will get to know that I was a column of my house which I have left crying and mourning. Since my childhood I loved to work, I loved very much to take care of the horse and sheep. None else in the village had such horses and sheep like me. I loved very much the horses, and they were also the reason of my death. For while sitting on the haystack on my coach, I fell down and this is how I found my death.

The verses and the images represent the life of the deceased as compressed into one definitive moment, in a fixed posture, like on the peasants’ photos: in the way as they wanted to see themselves and have themselves seen, indicating that they suited the norms of the community.


In a very few case the grave-post presents the deceased without any idealization. Who was it to permit to (or even pay for) having his or her kin immortalized in this way? One thing is certain that this cross will be a memento against drinking for the whole community in his death just like his person was in his life.



And here is the inn-keeper too, who was his ruin. True, he apologizes of having always cautiously retailed alcohol: “to whoever it went quickly to the head, I only gave a half shooter, but to the sober ones I gave with full glass”.

Cross of a child. “My dear sister, while you live, take care of my tomb.”

In other cases it is the reason of the death that they represent, when it was exceptional and tragic and thus memorable for all.




And here is the master himself, “the creator of the Merry Cemetery”. Here he was already modeled by his successor, but in the following image which hangs on the wall of the nearby Stan Ioan Patraş memorial house next to the carved tableau of Nicolae Ceauşescu with the Executive Committee of the Romanian Communist Party and the plate painted with the arms of the Communist Romania, he himself immortalized the moment when in 1935 he began to carve the first cross.

(from here)

And by now even the cross of the master’s successor – who is here painting the cross of the master – has been painted by his successor.

My one-time master, the death and cemetery researcher, psychologist, painter and visual anthropologist Ernő Kunt, as he did in those times when after a long day of fieldwork we sat down at the discussion table, would also ask me now: what do you think about it? And I would say something like as in a traditional peasant community every important occurrence in the life of an individual from birth through wedding to death and to mourning is a public event, thus these grave-posts also speak to the community, reinforcing its norms and defining the place of the individual in it, much more than in our culture where death and grave are part of the personal sphere. I would also say that probably it was some local master in other cemeteries too who established a local style of crosses and headstones, and this is why every cemetery has its own style and face. He would smile with satisfaction, I don’t know whether for my reply or for what he is going to say, and would begin to expose his opinion. And I would listen attentively, for by now he knows already much more about death than anyone else.

the pictures are from here, here and here

Angels

Paul Klee:
Bell Angel • Forgetful angel

Steve Morrison:
Angel

Klee designed in 1939 his series of charming, clumsy and dutiful angels. Seventy years later the brothers (sisters?) or at least cousins of these angels seem to reappear in the blog of Poltavka. She cannot tell either from where she took them. From the original link they have simply disappeared. Angels are like this.

(Update: Now they are all together at the author’s site.)

guardian angel

fallen angel

angel twisting in a bulb

initiative angel • angel in despair

The average angel contains 80% of music,
and its music metabolism proceeds continuously.

smoke break
(board inscription: Deliberation, keep silent)

in the lift take care to call the right level

new ones to grow

remembering the happy childhood

at leisure

angel out of service or not available
(board inscription: Out for restocking)

For more Klee-inspired angels see the book of Riccardo Mazzoni and Carlo Trevisan.