Alien Antfarm

I was wrong. There is waterfront infrastructure, and the shoreline DOES attract people on warm, sunny weekend afternoons––they just don’t go to the dirty part I visited Thursday. I’m still struck by the sight of people having picnics on rocky coasts strewn with garbage, of children playing in the turning leaves with smokestacks, cranes, and other monuments to heavy industry looming in the background. In Connecticut it causes an uproar if somebody’s house is too close to the street, or if a cell tower goes up where it “doesn’t belong”. In western Massachusetts, it takes years of public relations work to get a single wind turbine built. Not in Soviet Union (it seems less true today, although we'll see if the Gasprom building goes up). Here people always seem like an affront to the architecture. The Winter Palace (and Pavlovsk, which I visited today), strikes me as too beautiful, too grand for whatever people could think of doing there. Where I live, the Soviet-era apartments buildings are like huge machines, which ask not for fickle people, but for perfect interlocking parts––precise, sturdy, reliable. In a city where the buildings resent people, in a sense that their design does not eminate from the people or respond well to their needs, where the roads and cars and buses do not seem to express the people's will––or expresses the collective so well that the result is a boring compromise, like when you get white from combining all the colors––then art is only the things that happen to be neglected or the things that don’t fit, or the deliberate choices that carry a human face, rather than the stamp "made in the USSR"--and each thing is then automatically opposed to the straight lines, the Soviet expectation of what kind of person should fill the spaces it invented. (I also think that's why people get so depressed by Russia--because Soviet buildings demand to be perfect and obviously cannot be kept in perfect shape). Public expression, banned from the buildings, cars, and parks, defaults to the dead dog on the sidewalk, the Caucasians (people from the Caucuses) who sell fruit on the sidewalk and get harassed by the police; the beer bottle that guy's trying to hide; graffiti, cigarette butts, and all the things that got knocked off their pedestals during the night.

PS: My host brother took the picture. I think its amazing, way better than any I took that day. I'm hoping he gets into photography.