Untamed fashion in USSR

Never heard of 'Untamed fashion in USSR' until now and glad to be able to share this amazing book.

During perestroika, in the second half of the 1980s, designers were permitted to attach their own names to their designs, and clothing stores opened at fashion houses where previously only the Soviet elite could order items. But even this sudden shift could not change the overall situation - it was all too late and in vain. Graphic artist and designer Misha Buster was an active member of the artistic underground movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He organized art-actions and music festivals during 90s. Author of numerous anthropological and critical essays on underground art. The Untamed Fashion in USSR catalog is published on the occasion of the photo exhibition Untamed Fashion in USSR, by Moscow curator Misha Buster as part of Perestrojka!, a festival organised by Maxim Goldfinger and held in Amsterdam between the 8th and 24th of November 2013.

Misha Buster is preparing now for an iPad edition of 'Hooligans of 80s'. That edition will hopefully include English version, too.

In the search for that unique Soviet atmosphere

I know some tourists come to Russia looking for the time that have past.

Just like those guys who come to Cuba in the memory of Che Guevara (I admit being one of them). Or those who visit East Side Gallery in Berlin (that would be fake remains of the famous Berlin wall). Me again.

So I'd like to show you searchers for the past where you can still breath the air of USSR and see some interiors that our grandmothers live in.

Meet my top two St. Pete picks from full list of USSR-friendly venues:

Pyshechnaya (Doughnut joint)

Saint Petersburg, Bolshaya Konyushennaya ulitsa, 25

The most Soviet place haven't changed in many decades. Maybe they only started selling Coke, but that would be it. The doughnuts are the same I ate 20 years ago. Paper towels on the table are still not made from paper, but from some cheap material that doesn't help cleaning hands. Prices are low. Food is not healthy. People bring kids to show "how it all was". Nostalgic chic.

Here you can:

• stand in a real Russian (sorry, Soviet) queue
• eat only doughnuts 
• feel the vibe

"Producty" (GroceryStore bar)

Saint Petersburg, Naberezhnaya reki Fontanki, 17

This bar is officially the smallest in St. Pete. Owners wanted to make it very DDR-like (Soviet Germany), so they brought typical things here. Well, it feels the same USSR. And they have exclusive Wurlitzer vinyl jukebox (tokens are sold at the bar).

Here you can:

• get some nice alcohol (two previous spots do not have any)
• ask for a sandwich
• watch young locals having fun
• walk around Fontanka river afterwards

Have a nice atmosphere-catching time!

Salinger and Russia: over the abyss

Salinger is dear for my heart and for many other Russians, too. Some things are not meant to be together but they do stick anyway and you cannot tear them apart later (even if you happen to read new translation or even the original text).

Somehow (and the link below nicely explains why) the quality of Rait-Kovaleva's translation surprisingly made the book to be appropriate both for USSR censors and for intellectual crowd:

First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the nineteen-sixties, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society. For a postwar intelligentsia chafing under repressive Communist rule, Holden Caulfield’s voice was electrifying—who knew phony better than these daily consumers of official Soviet language? Teen-agers adopted their hero’s speech patterns—or their Russian equivalents—even though the world of “The Catcher in the Rye,” with its private schools, hotel trysts, and jazz clubs, existed across a great abyss.

The whole article starts with tender passage:

A few years later, while taking time off from college, I wound up teaching English in a provincial school in Russia. When Russian acquaintances asked me where I was from, I’d haul out my worn copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” and tell them that I grew up only a few miles from the author’s house. This had a magical effect: it turned out that Salinger was just as revered in Russia as in America—if not more so. “Over the Abyss in Rye,” as “Catcher” is called there, was particularly beloved.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/translating-catcher-in-the-rye-if-holden-caulfield-spoke-russian.html