Videos, videos

Dear friends,

I'm a big believer in the notion that each of us thrives on little risks. Few of us are actual dare devils. But I think the casual attempt to turn the parking bump into a balance beam, or the challenge to walk to the end of the building while holding your breath, or to see how long you can walk with your eyes closed in an open field, I think they all make our hearts jump just a bit and let us know we're alive, and very much the shapers of our lives.

So I'd like to celebrate mundane risktaking, in all its excitement and life-affirming plainness.

With that in mind, I'm going to start a new series on the secret underside of the life of a grad student researcher in Moscow. It's a tour of the uncelebrated, quite mundane, but strangely off limits to cameras spaces of post-Soviet institutions. I start this installment with the Communist party archive, RGASPI, which is probably the most locked in a time bubble than even all the rest.

They currently occupy a building in central Moscow's most expensive business district, and the 10-foot tall bas reliefs of Marx, Lenin, and Engels now stare perturbedly down onto the Louis Vuitton boutique. You know their stone faces would, if they could only move, reach from deep within, clear their throats, and hawk massive loogies across the street onto the Bentleys and women in furs. Alas, they can't. They're petrified in rock, left to watch, frowning, in their own ironic hells.

RGASPI has many great features, which you'll see in teh days to come. For now, feast upon the least-celebrated but perhaps most authentic sculpture graveyard in all of Moscow. The massive heads/spheres on the left couldn't possibly have ever been joined with bodies, I think. If so, the statures would have been easily 30 feet high. But they clearly didn't find their way to the top of the pediments they were intended for. So they just sit. Now going on 20 years...

I promise to make no more unkept promises about what is coming in the blog!