small ritual

moscow again [and again and again]

i've been to moscow three times in the last month or so working on a new project, and when i'm here i've been working late night after night, so i've had no energy for blogging. there were no photographs because the work laptop i was carrying, being windows :P was very heavy and i didn't have strength or space to lug my big SLR around as well. so this trip i bought a nikon coolpix s700 to stick in my pocket. it doesn't do a bad job, although i miss the wider angle on my SLR lens - struggling to get the whole church in across the street when i could have easily made it with the SLR - also a factor when shooting video out the taxi window, although the quality is much higher than my phone - something which isn't apparent in the compressed versions on youtube. [the other challenge of shooting video in moscow is that one is either bouncing along at 50mph or at a complete standstill for ten minutes at a time in a traffic jam between trucks.]

when in moscow one always has to work at a thousand miles an hour, because of the limited trip duration, so i tend to crash mentally and physically when i get home. but it's not all slog though - here's a glamorous moment in the city space bar [stills here]

the view wasn't as good as it could have been, because it was snowing. bar manager bek narzibekov, seen putting the finishing touches to a cocktail and explaining it to the customers, is now recovering after being poisoned, probably by a business rival. the young guy who grins at the camera is my work colleague dimitry, who knew bek when he was one of london's top bartenders/managers.

communist postcards

in the 70s and 80s one of my uncles used to travel behind the iron curtain on business. he sent us postcards, as much for us to see the stamps as anything. i found a few of them over easter - here on flickr. there may be more to follow if i can remember where they are. on one such trip he brought back the tu-144 brochure.

the postcard from north korea strikes me as especially remarkable now - it can't be a common thing to have. my brother noticed that the description is in spanish - why would a north korean postcard have a spanish caption? we presume it's because the only visitors were likely to be from cuba. it's also unusual for stamps to feature aggressively brandished machine guns.

norway photos

healthy drink in post below is because i'm having a couple of days off work ill, or exhausted - not sure which. this gives me the chance to finish uploading the norway photos from 2004. on the hard drive it doesn't look like too many, but in my photostream it's pages and pages. but some of these are among the best photos i've ever taken. i can start making a 'best shots' collection now.

moscow

the photographic story that emerged this time was mostly about capitalist neon. in the same vein, the golden apple 'boutique hotel' where we stayed is rather pretentious - check the zip-and-thong curtains in my room!

st ives again

went to st. ives. walked about, ate, looked at things. i didn't expect to take many photos after all that i've taken in the past, and ended up taking far more. in fact i've made a st ives collection on flickr to bag all these things up - there are still the 2002 set to add.

was able this time to photograph the hepworth studio on my camera not my phone. took many pictures of 'conversation with magic stones' - this fascinates me, as a potential ritual space. as a space it's immediately comprehensible but difficult to photograph because there is no single definitive viewpoint [this is the closest but it's a composite of two photos]. the injunction 'do not touch', though understandable, makes no sense applied to hepworth's sculpture. in the garden, where one can [or does] touch, the sculptures are delicious to feel, cold and smooth as pebbles. it would be a great place to take a blind person. one senses that the forms were felt as much as seen, guided by touch as much as sight in the making.

moscow taxi videos

which could. i guess, be a new genre.

Download MOV00143.3GP [16.3Mb]

the first is a 15-minute journey from the apartment into central moscow on tuesday evening to view the new office behind the TASS building - you'll recognise where i took photographs. the route takes us across the river, past the kremlin, down novy arbat and the casinos from the january movie, and through 18th and 19th century streets past churches and mansions. the beginning is a little frustrating, we got stuck in traffic on the bridge - it's hard to keep a video interesting when stuck in traffic, but i didn't want to break it. the taxi radio soundtrack makes up for it. taxi radio is so much part of the distinctive atmosphere of a city, for travellers - the local sound.

Download MOV00189.3GP [5.2Mb]

the second video is part of the journey to the airport through the suburbs. you'll recognise some of the places i took photos in march. i made the mistake of having a window open - the phone picks up the rumble of wind rather than the radio. it's strange that the human ear works the other way round - we hear the music and not the wind. is this how the ear works or is it how the brain processes? the wind rumble spoiled another video clip, in which the taxi radio played 'boogie wonderland' as we drove past the statue of lenin. it's almost worth restaging.

by the way i've kept the videos small because they look better sharper. enlarging them seems to lose more than it gains.

moscow again

photoset here

the sunshine, the greenery and the long hours of daylight make moscow a much nicer place in summer. moscow has a severe hotel shortage, the prices are exorbitant whenever something is happening in town [and there is always something happening], so we rented an apartment just south of the centre, overlooking ploshchad gagarini and about fifteen minutes drive from federation tower. it worked out very well, there was nothing you wouldn't have in a hotel apart from the absence of towels. the apartment was very hot, but the traffic noise was so great that you couldn't sleep with the windows open. great view though.

the problem of these trips is always the lack of sleep. we arrived mid-evening [having left london at lunchtime, due to the time difference]. by the time we had settled into the apartment and waited for our moscow business partner to show up it was past midnight. by the time we had eaten it was 1.30am and our partner was trying to persuade us to meet up with other business contacts. we dissuaded him with considerable difficulty, but for some reason he then wanted to walk back to the apartment, which took until 2.30am. and we had to be up at 7.30am for meetings starting at 9am! the problem is, we do two types of business when we're in russia - the kind that happens in meetings in offices at 9am, and the kind that happens in restaurants at 1am. they have incompatible timescales.

being professionals, we made it to the 9am start - and found that our items had been removed from the agenda for the day. it seems that the basebuild people running these meetings had failed to communicate with our people that the agenda had changed last week. so my trip was largely in vain since my colleagues could handle the rest of our business. we observed the meeting for as long as seemed courteous, until it became clear that we were wasting our time and left to pursue other matters.

but the evening was pleasant. we visited our partner's new offices at the back of the TASS building, went to a little soviet-era bar for a drink, then wandered through the nicer parts of town looking for somewhere to eat. somehow this took longer than it should and again we were eating at 1am in a swanky italian restaurant, waiting for a real estate contact to turn up. so four hours sleep again.

by contrast the next day we went for lunch at the soviet-style canteen next to the moscow city site. the photos don't capture the dingyness, the synthetic-ness, the unappetising smells, the glutinous stew. it was hilarious. 1960s school dinners. the drink looked like it had something decomposing in it, but it turned out to be dried fruit. the flypaper over the servery would get the place closed down anywhere else. it was cheap - about £2.50 for the meal. the turquoise trays destroy the appearance of any food - wonder where we can get them for the new building? ;) more seriously, this is the russian lunch culture - all sit down together for a cooked meal on a tray - which causes us problems in federation tower as there isn't the room to seat everyone at once. they don't go out for sandwiches or eat at their desks. this will be difficult to solve.

and then we went up to levels 57 and 58 - notionally to see the VTB signs, but we were mostly interested in the views. the contractor's lift that crawls up a track hanging off the face of the building is a little scary - ten floors is fine, when you're 50 floors up with nothing around you and 10 to go you are trying not to think about what happens if those little motors and cogs fail.

and then i headed for the airport to get the 9pm flight. all went well until heathrow. a gas leak had closed a runway earlier, and now a lot of flights were coming down at once. we were 20 minutes late landing. then we had to wait on the plane half an hour because there weren't enough staff to connect a gangway to the plane! then we had to wait three hours for our baggage - 1am in the baggage hall at terminal 1, stifling heat, crowds of angry people, three staff and no announcements - seemed like a complete failure of management. i had been up since 7.30am moscow time, so it was 4am by my body clock [after two nights of four hours sleep]. my luggage arrived just as i was thinking about going home without it and coming back the next day. i got home at 2.30am. i emailed the office to say i was sleeping in.