inner peace

The level of lunacy here has reached such heights we don’t notice it any more. It’s like indigenous people in the Andes who have developed barrel chests to allow more oxygen in their lungs to account for the lack of oxygen at higher altitudes. People here have a larger category of what’s funny in order to metabolize the lack of mutual base respect people have for each other. I recall my Russian teacher in NYC telling us horrendous stories of death and calamity between cackles at the humanity of it all. I never understood how she could laugh but now I’m starting to see that there is sometimes nothing else to do. My first Russian friend here from the synagogue told me a story of his first landlady. He was giggling before he uttered his first word and crying, he was laughing so hard by the end. It seemed he had an ever-escalating series of quarrels with her that led to her stealing most of his furniture, but he kept living there and they are still acquaintances somehow. This story was in response to my problems with our new landlady.

She is named Maria (the most common name here strangely) early to mid twenties, pretty, fond of plastic rubber duckies, square – pants sponge bob paraphernalia, and lying. Married to a 50 something burned out hippy from Oregon who told us a twenty-minute story about trying to find good cinnamon buns in Saint Pete. Anyway, we were eager to move into their apartment. A sponge painted firelight fresco of yellow and orange usher you into a large sun drenched kitchen overlooking one of the main squares right next to the subway and with a splendid view of the ever present golden arches. Mickey D’s in the house – so to speak. They even let us pay in dollars and included all the utilities even Internet. Sounded perfect. They would be moving to the states and it seemed only fitting to rent their flat to compatriots. (She would soon become an American citizen)

The catch was that there was a lot of stuff they needed to move into the “storage room” (their bedroom) and Maria would be doing that for the first few weeks after we moved in. Fair enough. Those weeks stretched into months. She came three times a week and rearranged our dishes, left the vacuum out as a hint I assume to vacuum more often. It was true that we could have been keeping the house tidier but with our heavy schedules it was very difficult to motivate to mop. It wasn’t so bad if we didn’t see her, but that changed too. . .

One Saturday night I stayed late at my studio working on compositions for our upcoming abxot which is like an exhibition of our work for the teachers to grade. It was 9 pm and I hear an unfamiliar loud and slurred form of Russian. I look up and see a wet smile spread across a pockmarked ruby face as a drunkard takes three unsteady steps into my workspace. Behind him I hear the high-pitched shrieking of the babushka who may live in the room next to my studio where they fire the sculpture. She is lucking at the staggering man to get out at once! He reaches a grimy gnarled mitt into a paper bag and retrieves a bottle of wine. In retrospect I think I should have noticed Bacchus knocking and invited him with open arms after my 12-hour work day (on Shabbat no less) , but instead I was filled with furry which I barely contained. I politely declined his offer and gently ushered him to the door. He never spoke and never lost his smile except once. Five minutes later I had settled back to work trying to learn the anatomy of the bull for my composition of Gilgamesh’s battle with it. I heard the familiar frantic fretting of the babushka and the shuffle of unsteady feet. I was using a knife to better model the heavy musculature of the bull’s shoulder girdle when he entered the room again.

Someone is angry with me every day. The teachers for having to repeat themselves, the models for having to sit still, the woman behind the counter for having to count out tokens at the subway. They hate you for making them work. They hate you for making them take your money and give you change. If your currency is in too large a denomination they sometimes will flat out refuse to sell things to you. Lines are not the shortest distance between to points here, they are a mass of people pushing and elbowing like school children. It is difficult to overstate the lack of common courtesy here. It just doesn’t exist. In the face of this onslaught of stress, work keeps me sane and my studio is a sanctuary.

With the defilement of that sanctuary a floodgate of frustration loosened and impulsively I rose to my feet, knife in hand. My opponent’s wet smile dried up quickly. The man regained his brand of composure and implored me to join him in revelry. Again I should have seen this as one of the many pies in the face we receive here and hastened to taste the burgundy custard but instead the bull sculpting knife led the way. I bellowed for him to get out now, speaking more with my blade than my tongue! Finally I had to physically throw him out of the studio and slam the door shut, frantically locking it as he pulled and twisted the door handle from outside.
To me it was Russia on the other side of that door jerking the handle trying to get in. I felt invaded in the one place where my treasured peace and focus in work can go largely uninterrupted. 10 deep breadths later I was trying to channel wrath into the bull’s attack stance. The subway stops running at midnight so I went home eventually looking forward to a little peace there finally.

10 minutes after getting home and starting to work on a drawing I needed to finish by Monday I hear the peculiar and familiar noise of the door unlocking. Now Ilya my roommate is on vacation in NYC and the only other person with the key is Maria. Did I mention that personal space is also a rare commodity? “Surprise” is how she introduces herself and her friend who will be spending the night. Now in retrospect I see that again I could have played this differently. By now I could have been drunk and here are two young Russian girls at my door after midnight on Saturday, but all I’m thinking is I want to work and why am I paying this woman rent if she thinks she still lives here. At this point I completely flip out and scream at Maria telling her she has put me in a terrible position as I don’t want to put to young women out on the street on Sat night, but this can never happen again. She has the expression I’ve seen on many 3rd graders after I’ve told them to go to the principal’s office and the two quiet girls apologize and tiptoe into her :storage room”

Gabriella, the French/Italian girls, had her own housing problem, which makes mine pale. She lives with another young French girl in a flat with a shared bathroom. They share it with a crazy old babushka. Many of the old people here are truly insane as their world has changed too fast and perestroika left little room for social welfare and really created the worst form of capitalism here. At any rate this old woman began to believe that these young French girls work for the KGB and were spying on her. As a good citizen I suppose she decided to call the police who actually showed up and demanded to see their documents. In the end they had to move and then move again 2 days later because when Gabriella went to brush her teeth in her first new place her sink crashed to the floor killing one of the many rodents in her new abode. I haven’t seen her newest place but I hear its more fitting for a couple of French/Russian spies.

Chinese New Year

Finally got online at home again. This is an old blog but figured I'd through it up any anyway:

So it’s been many New Years in a row. The Russians celebrate New Years on Dec 31 with the rest of the West and on Jan something because of the Russian Orthodox Church which is still on a slightly different calendar and Chinese New Year was last week.

Since 90% of our class is Chinese they really have no choice but to give us a few days off. I expected to sleep for 3 days but not with as full a belly as I ended up with.

I ran into Marcela who lives near me. (She’s the Austrian- although born Croatian and Russian grandmother) and she invited me to celebrate with her classmates. She was sort of punished because she refused to go to the Russian classes (and so didn’t pay for them). Her punishment was to be sent to the evening drawing class. She is the only European in that class. She understands Russian because her grandmother was Russian and she speaks German, English, French, and Croatian quite well. Since the Chinese are generally hopelessly lost when it comes to Russian and the translator went back to China the teachers are going crazy trying to communicate. Marcela often gets a largely disproportionate amount of their time simply because she is the only European and the only one who understands their rants. To boot the painting teachers this year are new to the Pod course and so have only taught Russians before and they are flabbergasted at the low skill level and slow progress. It’s hard to exaggerate the tenacity with which these teachers teach and with which the Russian students have been taught usually for at least 10 years. They go to art school for 6 years and then Art College for 4 and then come to the Academy if they are accepted.

Anyway I thought I knew none of these Chinese students but I went with Marcela anyway. It turned out this was the house of the students I take sculpture with. Some of their parents were there too, all the way from Mongolia. The spread was ridiculous. There were at least 20 people around the table and when I asked whom we had to thank for such bounty they all pointed at each other. They had been cooking for at least 12 hours. There were 400 hand made dumplings and you know I tried to eat them all. There was a glistening fried whole fish as the centerpiece swimming in ginger. I was so happy to see the fish head that I went straight for the eyes and the cheeks with surprised smiles form our hosts who enjoyed my gusto. Of course I held back a little and didn’t start gnawing on its gills like I normally would have. My reserved nature was adventuresome for them. Diced checked with hoards of garlic and red pepper was uncovered after two kinds of soup, one of which included some kind of femur bone. I couldn’t help myself when I saw that I picked it up and had flashbacks from my last life as a dog as I raked it clean with my incisors. It helped that they have a custom of making the guest drink a toast with each of the hosts. That meant 20 drinks without a break and I already started drinking vodka. I couldn’t go back to beer and I couldn’t repeat my birthday when I was bed ridden for two days with the worst hang over of my life. So I took tiny sips and ate two dumplings after each one. Yes that meant 40 dumplings and they weren’t small.

I think the best moment was when we started singing. We tried to find songs we all new. Communication was generally very difficult between poor Russian and poorer English, but they new the Beatles. We got through “Yerow Submaline” and a bit of “Micherre my Berr” with straight faces and finished it off with one they all new quite well. The A,B,C’s Yes at the top of our drunken voices we bellowed “Next Time wont you sing with me” It was a beautiful moment in Chinese American diplomacy.

Saha's B-day

About a month ago I went to Sasha’s 55th B- day party. You've seen the movie clip. The last two summers Sasha taught me and other students sculpture in his studio. He teaches with a humble gentle humor provides a much needed counter point to the harsh tactics of the professors at the academy. Despite the demands on my time I have started working with him outside the academy on the weekends.

The party was in his studio and it really strengthened my resolve to stay in Saint Pete. His friends are all artists and while they are accomplished in their fields they have no airs, no condescension, which unfortunately is the norm at the academy. They are fun loving genuine hard working people with bad teeth and wide smiles. No pretense, no glamour, all humor and love. Some of them have been struggling through together for some 40 odd years and its heartening to see them supporting and enjoying each other so much after so much time. The group included a couple of other sculptors along with some painters, some theater designers, an accordion player and his wife a singer. The musicians were the last to come and while we waited, people drank and Sasha opened gifts. His first gift was a set of fake ears. The whole night Sasha wore these gremlin ears and it gave him an impish look as he tore through wrapping paper and danced and sang. Most people brought artwork as gifts. A landscape depicting an autumn day with an impressionistic painterly hand, a couple of poems about Sasha which I hope to understand one day because they had people weeping with laughter, a sculpture of him and his wife as a sailor and virgin (which got a big laugh), a pair of binoculars wrapped in a box made to look like huge binoculars, and enormous merriment. When the musicians showed up the party really got in motion. The woman’s voice was powerful. When she hit the strong high notes and held them I could see her tongue vibrate in sink with the muscles in her high cheekbones. The studio isn’t large and the sound waves she created were enough for a large auditorium. I could feel them reverberate in my chest as well as hers. Her husband was extremely theatrical as he sang and played. Though he walked around the room more and more, his wine glass remained balanced on his accordion as he forced the air through the instrument’s lungs. There was a lot of dancing too. Some stomping sort of river dance that came from Moldova with many slow tongue and cheek pirouettes.
I understand about 1 in ten words now and I do a lot of guesswork, but when your clapping and swaying arm in arm with a group who is pretending to be on a sea ship as they sing there isn’t much to be translated. At one point the accordion player emitted a huge steamboat sound from his instrument, which added to the fantasy. With red noses and twinkling eyes we laughed and stomped and swayed and sang. It was quite a night for basking in the glow of our tenth round of vodka. I managed not to get sick though because of the food.
The table was spilling over with it. Hot buttery mashed potatoes. Two large plates of hard and soft salami cut in ovals and layered in circles on the borders of the dish. At the center of the salami was what I first though was sliced cheese in a circular array. I thought of the Jewish Russians I’d been with the week before who didn’t mix meat and dairy and mentioned it to Lena. She said with a laugh not to worry the whole plate was meat. It wasn’t cheese at all, but the star attraction – pig lard from Sasha’s mother’s pig at the farm. On closer inspection I saw that it was atop ham. The center included such soft succulent ham encrusted with pickled garlic – almost unbearably delicious. These high fat content dishes were not only delectable but also necessary. I soon realized that my vodka intake had to be balanced by meat in order to keep up with the Russians. There was also a kind of gelatin with pork and cabbage eaten with very spicy horseradish – my mouth is watering as I describe this. They had a layered dish with potatoes and herring, which I loved too. Also Pickles! Pickled cucumbers, pickled tomatoes, pickled cabbage, and pickled garlic –pickle heaven. Lena asked if I wanted salad. I thought good some roughage to work all this meat and fish and lard through. It turned out to be a salad of small cubes of meat, potatoes, mayo, croutons and who knows what else. There was anther “green” salad, which consisted of some lettuce drowned in cheese dressing. I was glad to get my roughage though. When I was in high school one teacher always called me slim Jim. I’d like to see him again after a couple of years of this.

New Model

So much has happened. Let’s start with my schedule:

There are few things more satisfying than seeing slow sustained progress. We work so many hours each day that I often feel delirious and its all I can do to keep the engines churning. I’ve found that routine helps. I’ve never valued 10 minutes so much. I’ve begun meditating 10 minutes in the morning and at night and I find it helps me fall asleep faster and helps me from waisting energy throughout the day. There are more reasons to be frustrated here than I care to enumerate so keeping from blowing one’s top can be crusial to making it through a day. A day goes as follows:

Classes are usually 45 minute stints with 15 minute breaks, but during the breaks I’m either eating stretching, sharpening my pencils, or sketching, usually eating. I always carry food with me. Sculpture, drawing, lunch, and Russian are all in different buildings. If you are late to lunch there will be a line so long and slow you will surely be late to Russian – this is only good if I haven’t finished my home work and am doing it online (so to speak) If you are late to Drawing the door will be locked and Claudia the matronly woman with the died red hair will make all kinds of groans before she heaves her weight from her chair and galumphs to the door to open it. When she does if you are me you smile and say excuse me. She gives a sullen look and lets you pass with a silent understanding and quietly you make your way to your malbert(G-d, I’m loosing my English). If you are anyone she doesn’t like which is everyone who doesn’t give her mandarins when she’s sick and asks about her family regularly she screams at you in Russian and threatens to tell the head of the foreign department that you are cutting class and not a serious student. There are many people like Claudia in the school. It’s unclear what her position is. She is a cleaning woman/ doorman/ superintendant. She actually wields a certain kind of power and is very good to know of you are looking for materials or trying to get past locked doors, but I digress. The point is its difficult and important to make it to each class ontime.

Here’s is the official daily schedule:

9:15 – Sculpture (two 15 minute breaks – at 10:00 and 11:00)
12:00 – rush to Drawing
12:15 – Drawing (one 10 minute break at 12:55)
1:55 – rush to lunch
2:00 – eat
2:20 rush to Russian Class
2:30 Russian (one 15 minute break at 3:45)
5:30 finished – with class.

At 5:30 the work really begins. We are expected to work for three hours a night on compositions. For the sculpture students this means making small maquettes or figurines – many of them. It’s actually quite fun and the exhaustion passes with food and tea. The work itself gives you momentum. The sculpture teacher rips them apart when he sees them- sometimes literally. For example – he gives us a themes – at first they were more abstract “a meeting of two people or animals” I started with an old familiar theme Cain and Abel, highly dramatic and for me overly conceived. I worked for uncountable hours trying to get all the proportions right and creating highly dynamic movement and even some facial expressions. He looked at it and said what I’ve heard more than anything else from him, “Eta, ni nada!” [Don’t do this] He took a knife and cut my sculpture in half separating the two figures which wasn’t difficult since they were composed independently. He took the two pieces and said here’s one sculpture and here’s another but they don’t fit together. Since the results were not pleasing to him, he choose a simpler theme- one person who is discovering something. I began making children since I’m working with them on Sundays fell on the idea of a tree stump. I made a lot of stumps and children around them discovering nature or each other. He liked one and told me to make a larger version which he was less than thrilled with. Finally he stopped making us think so hard and lowered the bar- just make people working – really simple carrying a pail or in the field – nothing too cerebral just make something simple that holds up as a sculpture. (Of course all in Russian – he is very good at pantomime and using the limited vocabulary we know) I made a woman neading bread. He took one look and drew a silhouette of what he saw. The woman was directly behind the table so the cutting board became the focal point and from many angles. This is a no – no. While it does have a main façade a good sculpture must be interesting form every angle and “plastic” which is sort of the opposite of disjointed. The picture he drew of my sculpture accentuated the lack of these qualities. As I looked from his sketch of my composition to the actual piece I saw how boxy and bland it was I could swear his sketch resembled a tombstone. Sure enough he scribbled an epitaph on the stone and I finally understood the word he kept saying – my sculpture was dead. Well, I didn’t come to be coddled.

Sculpture is a small department here and our class has grown from 3 to 7. Each addition of Chinese students has made Gabriella the French/Cicillian roll her eyes and give me this look that says, “Fantastique! Now what we are going to do?!” The newest addition is half Korean and while he doesn’t speak English his Russian isn’t half bad. This is a huge boon for the Korean students who now have a translator. He also has some balls and hasn’t let Gabriella push him around which has made me respect him. He is very serious, but not so skilled. I’m snterested to see how he progresses. Unfortuneately I am still not learning from the other students in any of my classes. Many of them don’t listen to the teacher’s advice and continue to make the same mistakes. I don’t know why.

My mediation practice began the day I screamed at a developmentally challenged individual for being slow. Yes, I blew up at a retard. I walked into class late after oversleeping, in a terrible mood, preparing myself for castigation from the teacher and instead found no teacher and a new model posing for a portrait. Most models here are crazy like everywhere but they are amazingly still and stay that way for 45 minute stints - more than twice the expectation for the states. This one was different. I have a bad sense of smell (a great asset in this country) but even I could tell Sasha was in the room with my eyes closed. Maybe in his twenties, unshaven, portly, slovenly, hair in uncombed matted clumps, Sasha was unlike the other models. His eyes meandered through the room and his head followed his gaze. His hands rubbed each other incessantly and he was actually rocking in his chair. I looked at the other students and we shared baffled looks. For some reason I broke. Before I new it I was in his face screaming in Russian “Is this your first time modeling? Your first day? Can you stay still for even one minute?!” He said nothing, but seemed to recede within himself. “Don’t you speak Russian?!” I demanded, still no response. Soon after, the teacher came and asked Sasha if he’d had his breaks. As soon as I heard his clipped monotone speech and saw his eyes dart to the floor like a child afraid of authority I understood my mistake. At the end of the day he asked Gabriella to zip his coat for him. I decided I was going to hell.

I grew to like Sasha and felt so bad about the first day I began buying him his favorite yogurt drink on the breaks. Once I understood why he was moving I treated him like one of my youngest students, speaking softly and asking him to focus on a single spot on the room. Strange boyish smiles would creep across his face at times and no one new why, but he is always on time and tried his hardest to do what was asked of him.

The Four Jewish New Years

Chanukah

Simchat Toorah