This is going to sound egregiously reductive, mostly because it is egregiously reductive, but all of the Russian girls I’ve met have fallen into two categories. There’s the fresh faced wide eyed with wonder perpetually innocent summer’s child type: these tend to be Yanas and Lanas. The second type are the world weary won’t get fooled again wistfully smoking a cigarette while sitting on the edge of the bed winter’s child type: I can’t remember the names of the ones I’ve met like this but I instinctively want to say Tatianas.
These are very broad generalizations based on first impressions where in most cases I didn’t get to know these women super well but it did seem to be a pattern. It certainly wasn’t a preconceived notion I started with and projected onto the Russian women that I met – it was a thing I noticed over time. I suppose it’s possible that they all roughly start as the first type and move toward the second depending on life experiences but I don’t see it that way: the type ones I’ve known didn’t seem to lead completely charmed lives and the type twos seemed like they had similar personalities as children.
It should go without saying that obviously there are many, many more types of Russian girls and women – I just haven’t met them.
As her name would suggest, Yana was one of the first type of Russian girls I described. I first met her when I went to New Orleans for Halloween in 2008. New Orleans was still a very different city from what it’s like now in that year. It had been three years since Hurricane Katrina and the Military Police, or MPs, were still handling a lot of law enforcement. The spray paint marks of the rescue workers were still fresh on the buildings in affected areas and it wasn’t uncommon to see blocks where ruined buildings vastly outnumbered those in any stage of restoration where the flood had hit hardest.
Rebuilding as a concept had not yet come to represent gentrification and displacement.
I’ve been to a handful of Mardi Gras celebrations in the city, sometimes for the entire season and sometimes for just the last few days, but this was my only New Orleans Halloween. Maybe it’s that all of the festivities are packed into a single weekend or so instead of a longer season but it definitely felt like things had a harder, darker edge. It could have something to do with the academic calendars of the surrounding colleges and universities.
Frenchmen Street in particular had a younger crowd and almost Woodstock ‘99 vibe. I remember joking at the time about how much I enjoyed seeing angry people in costumes and that if none were available it was easy enough to make some. On Frenchmen Street it didn’t require any particular intervention. A quick scan of the busiest intersection revealed a caveman with a giant plastic club screaming at his girlfriend in a blind rage and a group of Medieval princesses giving courtly waves after one of them projectile vomited from a taxi window.
A strong thread connected New Orleans and the people who had been on board The Miss Rockaway Armada in 2008 and I generally connected with and spent time with people from the project when in the city. It was Lisers who plucked Yana from a crowd and introduced her to the rest of the group. At the time she wore blocky glasses, had dark hair with severe bangs and the same infectious smile that helped me recognize her in more recent photos where the first two features are gone.
She carried the kind of large black camera that signifies somebody is trying to get serious about photography – the super youthful kind if you know what I mean by that. I want to say Minolta because that’s what they gave us is Sixth Grade Photography but in reality it was probably a Canon or Leica. I’m not the guy to take a lot of pictures or know much about cameras, hence the thing you’re reading and, at the time of writing, the hundred or so pieces like it.
I showed Yana around New Orleans a bit and brought her to Termite and Vine with the promise that it was populated with besprizornye. It’s a Soviet era word for orphaned children that supposedly lived in Dickensian underground societies – I would have learned it from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I don’t know if anyone who lived at Termite that year was an actual orphan but the house was a hotbed of the kind of train rider and jug band informed fashion that was in a special vogue those years.
Yana and I stuck around town at least until November Fifth when Drew celebrated his birthday in a bar at the edge of the Bywater I’m going to guess doesn’t exist anymore. The night ended up being especially celebratory because Barack Obama’s first presidential victory was announced. New Orleans responded to this news with a level of general public jubilation that I didn’t see again until The Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010.
What this looked like on the ground was every person who was out in public shaking every other person they came into contact with in genuine excitement and every person that was driving a vehicle leaning on the horn and out the window to high five all of the passing pedestrians. I’m sure the city has its share of staunch Republicans and at least more than zero Colts fans but in each of these situations they must have stayed home. I certainly never saw a single human being that wasn’t over the moon about these happenings.
I think the next time I would have seen Yana was back in New Orleans for the 2009 Mardi Gras season. She had just come from Washington D.C. where she had gone to see the historic inauguration first hand. I don’t know if every Russian who learns English as a second language mispronounces certain diphthongs the same way but every time she shared this piece of information it caused every person in earshot to laugh uncontrollably.
The same pun made by a person with actual racist intent wouldn’t have been particularly funny but combined with Yana’s constant wide eyed innocence it was a winner. I have to take full accountability for my role in maneuvering to cause her to repeat this word in front of as many people as possible while leaving her in the dark about what everyone was finding funny about it. I don’t know if somebody else told her, she figured it out for herself or she was just reacting to the obvious energy that she was being made a figure of fun but she started responding with wounded indignance:
“No, Ossian!”
This is another one of those situations where I wish this was in an auditory format because none of this is going to be as funny without her actual voice or accent and the pouting expression she made. On the very slim chance that anybody didn’t get what the original joke was, it was that she was accidentally saying a word that rhymes with the one before “of fun” in the previous paragraph every time she said inauguration. It definitely helped the humor of the situation that everything about Yana was as cute as pajamas on a ladybug.
The next couple of times I saw her she was living on the edge of Williamsburg in New York City. She snuck me in to crash at a famous butoh studio she was living and studying at when I was in town around New Year’s Eve and didn’t have anywhere else to go. The next morning we were walking to the train when I happened to look down and find a mysterious baggie of white powder lying in the snow.
Yana certainly wasn’t into that and I hadn’t been using drugs much that year except for psychedelics and pharmaceuticals. This discovery wasn’t actually that far from where I had tried cocaine for the first time with the intention of it being a gateway drug at the legendary Kokie’s Place. I never really liked the drug that much if I wasn’t injecting or smoking it – without a rush the effects are nothing to write home about.
Still there’s something about found drugs that makes you feel like you have to do them and I wasn’t about to sketch out any of the people I was staying with by searching for needles or attempting to cook up freebase. I don’t know how I decided on The Cloisters as the place to get geeked out but it did feel appropriate. It definitely wasn’t for any historical significance because outside of some questionable analyses of almost certainly cross contaminated mummies it is extremely well established that the substance would have been completely unknown in the setting and era of the exhibited artifacts.
Still the cold weather, drafty flagstone walls and unicorn tapestries I’d been waiting to see my entire life seemed to pair well with whatever I was stuffing up my nose. I had been growing my fingernails out in the interest of dressing like a witch so pinky nail bumps held as much, if not more, than any key. Discreetly ducking behind interesting helmets and ornamental serving dishes to take them was an adventure in itself.
I never put it on a scale but I must have found at least a gram and I wasn’t lying when I said I really didn’t like the stuff. The whole Cloisters thing was fun but there was no way I was going to do a whole gram there. It would have been pure insanity to smuggle it onto a plane but I also couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I went to a lot of different cities and stayed with a lot of different people on this East Coast visit so I’m struggling to remember who I finished it off with.
I want to say that it was either a brother and sister or a male/female couple and they were kind of square. Now that I’m wracking my brain about it I realize that I may be transposing another memory about randomly finding cocaine on the ground in Oakland during the OCCUPY! protests. Maybe somebody reading this will remember me uncharacteristically offering them powdered cocaine somewhere in the North East in early January of 2010.
It doesn’t matter to the larger story, if there can even be said to be one, in the least but little details like this are among my favorite parts of this whole thing. I couldn’t make them up.
The last time I remember seeing Yana she had helped set up a show for me at a warehouse/loft space down the street from her butoh studio. This space felt like it could have existed on a show like Friends – it wasn’t decorated too differently from spaces me and my friends had lived in, with things like painted pieces of mannequins, but something about the energy was painfully generic.
The people who lived there were like hippies who are into circus aesthetics and electronic dance music – basically what I’d call burners. I don’t know if any of the kids who lived there actually went to Burning Man but they definitely seemed like they thought Burning Man was cool. There’s a lot of rave hippy types that I wrote off as burners when I first encountered them, only to discover that they were actually cooler than burners. The SPAZ, Katabatik and Mutant Fest crews immediately come to mind.
Being a burner isn’t the worst thing in the world.
This would have been on the U.S. Tour where Teen Suicide changed their name to Generation and I’m pretty sure we were traveling with Forced Into Femininity. We had been through a veritable tasting flight of artistically trying scenarios at this point: a party in Denver, Colorado where a recently arrived freight-rider freestyle rapped over Reine’s set about how much cocaine he was on; a generator show in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they said we could jump the bill but then refused to let me turn up my drum machine to even half the volume of my screaming voice without a microphone, or the ambient noise of the generator at that, in fear that the show would get broken up before the “real bands” with drummers played; a failed festival outside of Detroit where we were going to play on a bicycle powered stage with recycling themed clowns but jumped to one of the main stages because all of the big name artists were abandoning ship with the revelation that they weren’t getting paid.
Or actually I’m second guessing myself as to whether this was on that Summer tour or if it had been earlier during my January trip. I know that other people besides me were supposed to play this show and I don’t remember it being the acoustic singer-songwriter girls I was touring the North East with that January. I guess it really doesn’t matter in terms of the things that I want to say about this show.
The people who lived at this space had a somewhat unconventional idea of what agreeing to host a show means, or maybe there had been a bit of a language barrier when Yana had set it up with them. They thought it would be more like a rave and when it was nothing like a rave they insisted that the people who had been scheduled to play stop playing so that their housemate could DJ some more rave-appropriate music. It’s killing me that I can’t clearly remember who all else I was playing with but I do remember this back and forth conflict between live acts playing and the hosts just DJing building up as the night progressed.
In the course of doing Bleak End at Bernie’s I learned that I seemed to put on the best performances when the crowd, to some degree at least, liked what I was doing and I, to some degree at least, hated them. There was something like a feedback mechanism involved: nearly all of my songs were rooted in feelings of anger, disappointment and disgust and having real time stimuli that helped me tap into those feelings led to a more genuine and compelling performance.
I don’t know if it was because she saw my drum machine or just a coincidence in terms of timing but just as I was taking the stage one of the girls who lived at the venue stepped in front of me in a burlesque costume holding a hula hoop. She glanced back at me over her shoulder:
“Play something slow and sexy.”
I can’t remember which one of my songs I started with but only one of them could be said to fit those parameters and it wasn’t that one.
I gathered my hatred, cranked up the drum machine and started to scream…
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 