Good Sisters Make a Good Family

It is such a pleasure to see the good that is done when people of different cultures respectfully get together. The result is a realization of how much we have in common, not in difference. Harmony and mutual appreciation happen—and we learn so much.

I have the pleasure of being a member of the Los Angeles/St Petersburg Sister City Committee (LASPSCC) and presently its president. I love St. Petersburg, its history, its architecture, its art and culture, its people, and its role in today’s Russia. My favorite involvement is with the “babushkas” in St. Petersburg.  A nonprofit group directly helps these deserving old ladies unable to get out and care for themselves. I have loved meeting some of these delightful women, heros all. One I met, at age 95 then, commanded artillery firing at the Nazi’s infamous 900 day bombardment of their city in 1941-43. Each week a helper shops for them, fixes meals that last for a few days, and tends to other needs.

Our committee was founded in 1989 and has raised money and helped orphanages, medical programs, and a home for veterans of the stage. We have brought over to L.A. teachers, lawyers, city officials, and others to learn more about how a city like Los Angeles works and governs an active democratic citizenship. We are helping a dedicated scholar to collect, preserve, and digitize the works of the great poet Anna Akhmatova. Now we are supporting a children’s art exchange.

The U.S. sister city program originated in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a people-to-people, citizen diplomacy initiative. Thanks, Ike. The Sister Cities is a wonderful and fun way to get together, gain knowledge and respect for each other. It is up to the individuals in the local communities. No government supervision is involved—it’s all about individual initiative and mutual care.

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FRIENDS ACROSS THE SEA

In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of The Los Angeles/St. Petersburg Sister City Committee a children’s art exhibit was sponsored. From several districts of the Los Angeles Unified School District a total of 219 paintings were carried to St. Petersburg for display in the historic St. Petersburg State Art and Industry Academy. The whole project was ably organized and managed by two of our Directors, Masha Ziering and Muriel Wood. Masha is from an artistic family in St. Petersburg who, with Masha, helped sponsor and manage the exhibit in that city, as part of thier White Nights Master Class celebration the art and cultural center of Russia.

Next year, 2011, there is planned an exchange of student’s art, with art coming from St. Petersburg for display in Los Angeles. I am pleased to be President of the LASPSCC these days, but it is the Directors who do all the work. I will post news of more projects on this website in the future.

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Tchaikovsky’s Last Notes

This weekend will be the season opening of Orange County’s  Pacific Symphony Orchestra, considered one of the top regional orchestra’s in the country. On the program is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, Jon Kimura Parker, soloist. Tchaikovsky was a genius and his music is immortal. A radio announcer said that “Russian music, like Russian literature, is always excited about something.”  That is true and Tchaikovsky’s music is often excited, but also it can be romantic and sweet. For all the excitement, he is also known for his love of the waltz tempo in his symphony and ballet music.

My photo above is of his desk in his home in Klin, north of Moscow. I visited once there and it was an experience. At this desk in 1893, he left the unfinished composition of his Third Piano Concerto, to go to Saint Petersburg to conduct the premier of his famous Sixth Symphony, It was a flop. Depressed about this, and some other things, he died a few days later from cholera, the records show. What a loss, but he was at his peak, and we have it all to enjoy today. Such a great man.

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Pushkin was right!

“To the orders of God or muse be obedient.

Don’t be afraid of insult,

don’t demand the laurel wreath.

Slander and praise receive

with equal indifference.

     And never argue with a fool.”

This is from a poem Alexander Pushkin wrote in 1836. The epigraph is from Horace – “Exegi Monumentum”

Maybe if he had taken his own advice, he would not have lost in life in a senseless duel in St. Petersburg not long after he wrote this. Nevertheless the advice is not to be ignored. I gave these words in a calligraphic poem, framed, as a gift to my teenaged grandchildren for their home or college room walls. It is advice we all should follow.

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Russian Contemporary Art

 by Tamara Semenova, St. Petersburg

Masha Zeiring and with Muriel Wood, both Directors of our Los Angeles/St. Petersburg Sister City Committee was the team that prepared and took over 200 pieces of art from the Los Angeles Unified School District for display during the Master Class White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia this past June-July. Masha’s parents are celebrated artists in St. Petersburg and Masha has started a web page for them and to provide an expanding representation of the best in contemporary art from that artistic center of Russia. The web page is called The Art Addiction.

I think this initiative of Masha’s is going to grow into a recognized center of contemporary Russian art in the city of Los Angeles.

Tchaikovsky’s Last Note

What magic a photo is! It captures a scene, a sight, an expression, a moment in time and we keep it in some way to revisit, to explain, to maybe prove something. In this case it is the desk of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at his last home in Klin, north of Moscow. At that desk the composer wrote his last notes of music, the unfinished Third Piano Concerto, then left on the midnight train to Saint Petersburg to conduct his last, the Sixth Symphony, and to die. He left us on November 6, 1893 (new calendar).  But we have him with us forever, immortal.

In my world travels over the years, I usually had a camera. but I remember so well the shots I missed–either no camera or no opportunity. Out the car window on a Malaysian country road, dodging the bicycles, was this sight of a worn square brown building with six windows, the whole building side a faded scene which was once a Coca-Cola ad.  And out of the top left window, some thrity feet above the rocky ground, dangled the bare legs of a boy. He looked natural there, unconcerned, in a little escape from the heat of the room beyond him. And we drove on. Pictures in the camera of the mind last just as long, maybe longer 

See the photos on this web site, a few of the thousands I have taken around the globe. Buy here  “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

St. Petersburg is a City of Cats

St. Petersburg is a city of cats. From the streets at night, you can see their shining eyes, peering through the arches from the inner decay of “Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg,” the faceless blocks of communal flats behind the Italianate buildings on the main streets. The cats hang comfortably in the dead trees, dine elegantly in the overflowing garbage, sit regally on the broken steps. In front of our office, in the winter, the last car to park was identified by the presence of the cats, healthy and fat, curled up on the warmest hood.

Petersburg is a proud city which keeps itself as different from Moscow as possible. On one hand it disdains the crass commercialism, the naked power of Moscow and on the other is jealous for some of it. But with Messers Putin and Medvedev and their colleagues from the city, changes are taking place.

St. Petersburg is a feminine city. She is an elegant and noble woman sitting draped with the jewels of her youth waiting for her prince to return. It is the most beautiful Italianate city in Europe. This “Venice of the North” with its symmetry, canals, architecture, statuary, museums, performing arts, palaces, gardens and languid summers with endless days make it a city never to be forgotten.

St. Petersburg is all things, but one wonders at times if it really exists. Beneath the 300-year-old veneer of classical European architecture and fantasy lies the decrepit relicts of communal communism, the “the Dostoevsky St. Petersburg”―and the satisfied cats. To me, it is the most thrilling city in Europe.

(Moscow is a city of dogs. Stay tuned.)

Read more about St. Petersburg. Buy the book here  “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

Children’s Art ~ Friends across the Sea

Art knows no borders. The Los Angeles/St. Petersburg Sister City Committee is sponsoring an exchange of children’s art between LA and St. Petersburg, Russia to celebrate the committee’s 20^th anniversary. Recently I was happy to see the exhibit of that art from the schools, grades 1-12, of central LA and I was really impressed. Over 200 paintings will go to St. Petersburg and be displayed in “Master Class,” a major arts and entertainment event during the glorious “White Nights” that city celebrates every June.

The plan is for in 2011, in addition to again LA kid’s art going to the Russian city,  that art from St. Petersburg’s children will come to LA and there will be a major banquet and event in LA to celebrate that 20^th anniversary. St. Petersburg is the cultural center of Russia and a beautiful city. The amazing advance of all the arts in Los Angeles makes this exchange a mutually enjoyable celebration.

Buy the book here  “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

St. Petersburg and Moscow ~ Cats and Dogs

These two cities define what most see of Russia, and they are so different, yet in some ways the same. They have forever been in contest with each other, and are today.

 Moscow is a masculine city. It is an exploding powerhouse of opportunity held together by threads of personal energy and ambition. It is a cocoon of lives stacked seven stories high, living all the happiness and sins of people anywhere – only at the extremes Russians are so capable of.  Moscow hardly sleeps. It has a muscular aggressiveness unique in Europe and traffic jams that make Los Angeles look easy. The one word that describes Moscow is power.

 St. Petersburg is a feminine city. Her historic personality is as an elegant and noble woman sitting draped with the jewels of her youth waiting for her prince to return. This “Venice of the North” with its symmetry, architecture, statuary, art museums, performing art, palaces, gardens and languid summers with endless days make it a city never to be forgotten.  St. Petersburg is not Russia; it is the historical myth of Imperial Russia.

 Moscow is a city of dogs. There are two classes. One can be seen in vagabond packs or stalking alone, scheming to survive, begging, much like the city’s underclass inhabitants. The other is the canine elite, who walk their masters, regardless of rank, in the parks each morning and evening. The disenfranchised class lurks around the apartment blocks sniffing the garbage for anything to swallow.

 St. Petersburg is a city of cats. From the streets at night, you can see their shining eyes, peering through the arches from the inner decay of “Dostoevsky‘s St. Petersburg,” the faceless blocks of communal flats. The cats hang comfortably in the dead trees, dine elegantly in the overflowing garbage, sit regally on the broken steps. For some reason, the cats always look healthy and fat.

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“Suddenly”

The monarchist Vasily Rozanov said that in Russia change happens quickly—in one-and-a-half or two days. Examples given were the Czar and the Army disappearing in two or three days, the elimination of the Patriarchy under Peter, and more lately, the demise of the Soviet Union. One day there was the Hammer and Sickle flying over The Kremlin, and the next day it was gone. The eminent Oxford professor Andre Zorin quoted Rozanov at a Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg in 2004.

 “Suddenly” is a word much used by Russians. I remember in a past writing workshop we were told never to use the word “suddenly” —that only Dostoevsky could use that word. That nothing in fiction happens without a stated or hinted reason. In Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” he uses the word seven times in the first five pages. I used the word in my poem, “Russian Rivers,” “Suddenly, a foreign ray permeates the ice.” In Russian history it is often the foreign ray, or light, or idea, or perspective that drives Russia and Russians–sometimes crazy. Zorin used two words repeatedly in his lecture—“suddenly” and “incredible.” Those two words are apt when discussing Russian history and culture.

I mentioned to Zorin that it seemed to me that, like an earthquake, human events do not usually happen quickly. We feel them in a moment, but underneath the causal elements were long before inexorably moving toward a future explosion. We, on the surface of things, measuring only what our senses tell us or what we want to believe, feel only the culminating shock. I held up my hand and offered that The Russian Revolution started long before 1917—maybe in the 1860s when the artists in St. Petersburg, “The Wanderers,” rejected the European influence and moved near Moscow and began the great paintings of the Russian common man. Other hands went up and the protest was “No, it was the writers like Belinsky, Bakunin, etc. early in 1830s and the influence of the Enlightenment. The Czars were blind to this. Likewise, the Soviet Union was crumbling years before the flag came down, but we didn’t know it or want to know it. (Military-industrial complex pressures?) The Twin Towers collapsed in 102 minutes. Surely the inertia for that disaster began years before, unnoticed or ignored by political leaders.

Then on the other hand, there is the unpredictability of everyday Russian life. Do things happen suddenly, or are the shocks of life always the lack of a preconscious ignorance of predicting clues? If we were so smart to notice and measure all the tremors of coming explosions, we might be prepared for the resulting shocks. But then life, especially ironic Russian life, would not be judged so eloquently by the masters like Dostoevsky.

 Excerpted from “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”