Yesterday, when I was at the public library to borrow holy paper wafers to bookbase (from freebase) on later, I spied a book of photographs in the new arrivals rack. A bright red piano with Moskova written in Cyrillic, irresistible. So I devoured it. I have never been to Russia, unless visiting a place imaginatively though literature counts. Consequently, Andrew Moore's photographs provide another superb tunnel to Russia, Rilke's spiritual homeland. From the quite pared down minimalism of "Ice Fishing, Vologda" to the baroque excess of the famed Amber Room in Tsarskoe Selo, Moore's camera swoops and dives, to hover lovingly and unsentimentally, over the Russian landscape. In this landscape, as can be expected, the human figure and face are completely subsumed, except in glimses such as this one of a family who call an abandonded missile base home. Through this process, Moore's photographs enable the viewer, for a moment, to be the man that Rilke wrote about in "The Book of Hours", thinking of Russia's open spaces:

"Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot."

-trans by Robert Bly

Perhaps, it is also time again for me to watch "Dr. Zhivago". I was in love with Julie Christie's "Lara" for weeks after I first saw this movie on TV many years ago. Oh, trivia note: Julie Christie was born in Assam, India.

...

And this talk of beautiful women nicely brings us to this Vanity Fair article on the devilish (ref: Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita") nightclub scene in the capital of, what Granta in a recent issue called "The Wild East", Moscow. A section that particularly caught my eye:

"Karina, from Volgograd, is celebrating her birthday upstairs at the V.I.P. tables ringing the main dance hall. "All these girls come to Moscow," she says, casting her eyes at the sea of women below, many of whom have traveled great distances to hunt oilmen and those who own banks. "They're looking for a guy who will buy them a car and give them $100,000." Karina flicks her blond hair and it kaleidoscopes through all available light. "Not me. I came here for $10 million." In this society, it is mainly the men who practice the commerce. The fairer sex works the angles. It is clear from talking to Karina and others that these girls are not cheap. Instead of fighting for the Western ideal of gender equality, which is not an option, they have become super-feminine, exerting all the power a brutally beautiful woman can bring to bear, which is not inconsiderable.

"I like being taken care of," says Dunia Gronina, who owns a boutique shoe-and-accessory showroom that generates $5 million a year. To a certain mind, Russian women may be laboring under the yoke of patriarchy. But there is plenty of wisdom to go around. "Our moms, they say to us, 'The man is the head of the family, and the woman is the neck,'" Gronina says. "'Where the neck turns, the head looks.'""

The question is what will "feminists" have to say to these women? Are they "morally"/"ideologically" right in deploying what are obviously their strengths to a real situation for their own advantage? Questions. Questions. Tell me what you think.