From the sky above Berlin
We are indeed flying!
Ten passengers are onboard, and the tenth one (myself, of course) didnt get a passenger seat and I am sitting next to the pilot.
What an irony – the old German airport arranged sightseeing flights with Soviet planes – AN-2.
We landed while I was writing this.
All impressions – later.
I am back from the funeral of an airport
And tomorrow we will look at the deceased one from the sky (if we are lucky with weather).
Magomaev
A mixture of Elvis and Frank Sinatra, with Southern touch – that’s how I can try to describe Muslim Magomaev, a great singer who died today in Moscow.
He became extremely popular in mid-60s in the USSR and for me in the late 70s he was a living classic. I asked my mum today what it was that made him the first Soviet star. Relatively stable decade of the 60s brought TV-sets to big amount of Soviet families and Magomaev was the first singer who impressed the public by his appearance not less than his voice.
He was from Azerbaijan, then a Soviet province, and he had explosive combination of a sexy Southern man, an opera voice, Italian education, aristocratic look and a trendy repertoir. USSR for the first time could afford really a chic style star.
Just a few years ago I had great pleasure to observe my 2 year old son enjoying a classic Soviet animation musical called “The Musicians of Bremen” where Magomaev sings for the main character Trubadur. My son literally stuck to the film, he was watching it every single day for a year or so and I had possibility to enjoy the voice many times.
And the last thing – since I started with comparison to Sinatra:
Another “Battle of the Year”
Another “Battle of the Year” follows a real one which I wrote about the other day. Breakdance again – but performed by well-known guys. The joke video is being discussed in Russian blogs also because it is produced by Dmitry Lesnevsky who used to be an owner of a Russian Ren-TV Channel, sold his share due to some Russian circumstances and now is busy with the MiniMovie project outside of Russia.
Needless to say there were videos of similar kind with Russian characters. The one that comes to mind first of all is the one where Russia’s then President Vladimir Putin lost his car and is trying to get a ride to the Kremlin (it is very common in Russia to get a ride this way, it is cheaper and quicker than taxi). Putin doesn’t know the price (it is usually discussed before driving) and the route (it is particularly funny because the video shows he stands very close to the Kremlin Wall).
No way
“10% of [Russia’s] population live in settlements and villages without stable connection with the road network”, Russian prime minister confirmed.
So approximately 14 mln of Russians live in places where you can’t get by road all around the year. You might need a boat, or properly frozen river to drive on ice, or a helicopter.
I have been to many places like this in Russia but they were thinly populated, half-deserted, with just pensioners in there, with population of 3, 10, 100 people.
Perhaps Northern settlements are included in the statistics: they might have infrastructure but surface transport connection would be too expensive for them.
But it is indeed shocking to realize there are tens of thousands of inaccessible settlements in Russia and millions of people are living there.
The magnificent nine
The guys from “TOP 9”, a Russian breakdance team, look just like usual guys in their 20s. We filmed them before “Battle of the year 2008” and after the “UK B-boy Championship” where they took the main award.
From 21 to 28 years old, graduates from different universities – “Saint-Petersburg University of Culture” as well as some financial ones. Breakdance is not their hobby anymore – they even toured with a show in Russia. Just this combination of very teenager clothes and behavior with “5 hours per day” practicing – that’s what impresses me. And it is definitely the case with all teams of the world level. The head of the South Korean “Extreme” mentioned exactly the same to me: “5 hours practicing, and thinking about it while walking, eating, driving – breakdance takes perhaps 10 hours per day all together”.
“TOP 9” sent me an sms about their Braunschweig victory at 6am next morning – the night was hot, I presume. I wonder how I would feel after taking two world-top awards within a week.
A mind-blowing documentary
I had discussion about this video in Livejournal (through my Russian language blog) and I just feel I must put the link here, too:
Indeed everybody has something to say about it. For example I see neither sparks nor drops in my head when I am dealing with figures. I don’t even see figures. I rather hear them.
Photographic crisis
German magazine “Der Spiegel” published an interesting selection of photos on the financial crisis. It is indeed such a pain in the neck for the photographers: how to illustrate bailouts and Dow Jones points, shares and derivatives during more than a month?
I liked the picture of an Arab. Perhaps the photo with young women, too.
Russian stock indexes, however low they fell, didn’t impress photographers either. At least I didn’t see anything impressive.
About chess
I don’t understand anything in chess. So at the World Chess Championship (where I had to make a short report from) I was rather interested in details.
Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik sit behind a dark net, like a mosquito one, but huge, from the floor to the ceiling. The hall is dim and the net is virtually unnoticeable.
“In Elista we had a glass wall!” – a girl from press-service said.
The purpose of all the tricks is to defend the players from possible influence by the audience (whatever the influence could be).
The game is shown online for the first time. But logging-in is not free, even for the accredited journalists.
-How come? Why? – I asked at the press-center.
-What do you mean, – they asked me. –How do you want it to be?
-Well I want it to be free.
-No. It is our marketing measure.
Whatever they mean by marketing pleasure, sorry, measure – their “online game” site (for 10 eu) doesn’t seem to be the only one. There is live game on the website of the Championship, a Russian newspaper arranged something similar on its website and Indian media, I am sure, have something, too. Ok, one cannot see the players through “unofficial” sites but who needs players? The game is about moves, if I know something about chess. All the bonuses like “comments, interviews and press conferences” are mainly for the press, of course. So it is actually a form of accreditation fee.
If I manage to be in Bonn during the last game I will definitely ask whether any statistics about the website is available. Marketing should have some results, shouldn’t it.
