View from the top

Not quite hibernating yet, so apropos the earlier post on Mittel Europa,

Enjoying the view from the top.

Climb the mountain that is in front of you...

Winter Hibernation

Time to reflect on the year 2016, a year of great surprises and transformations.  But a bear's way of doing that is to disengage, rest, and reprocess. So NJ Kpopper will be in hibernation until the new year.

Алые паруса - Pali Road

Pali Road is a thought-provoking and well-executed film that tells an undistracted story of love, identity, and the ever-present (for NJ Kpopper) theme of dreams meshing with reality, structured with mystery and thriller overtones.

One of the highlight lines is shown in the trailer above ---  "Is this life so awful that you had to go and make up some fairy tale world?"  An essential question entwined with many decisions.

Pali Road is a kind of obverse face of the pure idealism and lyricism of Алые паруса  (aka Scarlet Sails).  Алые паруса portrays the pure power of love and dreams in such a beautiful way that it deserves to be an eternal classic.  But there is a kind of darkness present in all such dreams, because it is the contrasts between darkness and light that gives the dream stories their sometimes blinding intensity. Whereas the ordinary world lacks that reductive contrast unless someone refracts it through their own personal lens.  That is why black and white photography can deliver more power than color in the right hands. It is just that kind of juxtaposition teetering on the edge of darkness that this bear is chasing after, hoping to capture.

Buddhist Republic, Chess City

A brief follow up to the Lost Cosmonaut post.  The idea of a "Chess Republic" is imaginatively explored in Lost Cosmonaut and factually explored in this documentary from 1998.

Kalmykia as a whole seems to exist in that flickering liminal zone, insufficiently centered on the main flows of the modern world, yet still connected enough to be buffeted by waves in its wake.  A place where ideals can be superimposed on reality, with some success it seems, viz. Город Шахмат.

Lost Cosmonaut

Daniel Kalder's Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist is about as good a book that can be found, if you are looking for a single volume that discusses experiences in Kalmykia, Udmurtia, Mari-El, and Tatarstan.

Of course, most people will not be seeking experiences in any of those places, let alone having them all in one volume.  When this bear first encountered the book around the time of its publication, he was still too respectful and observant of proprieties to fully engage with its brashness.  However, after some marinating that included spending time in some of the locations Kalder describes, the book's apparent irreverence is revealed as a manifestation of the author's own unique and sincere quest for a personal truth.  And if there is anything NJ Kpopper is crazy about, it is a unique and sincere quest for a personal truth.  Just love that.

One quote, about one of the cultures under the lens:

"Certainly they'd cooked up a religion and some folktales, and they had a separate language, but that doesn't take much effort. Every culture that has ever existed has done it. Humans do it by default.  You can hardly praise them for it."

A bit pointed, but it does contain truth.  Kalder is powerful when conjuring up the landscapes of dreamy unreality that are conjured by our imaginations and the uncomfortable disjunctions that result when these landscapes are overfit onto a crumbling reality.  

But that process can run in reverse, where a crumbling reality is restored by the imagination into an ideal dream.  It is the merger of the two that lends credence to our longing.

At least that is what this bear is aiming to create from his personal landscapes.

Mortality

Each individual has their own lens through which they view life, but the fact that Janna Friske is already dead and gone is a permanent reminder for me that very little time remains for a person to live the life that they themselves want to live.  I hope I will get there and complete my goals on this unhappy planet.

Где же ты, где

Twenty years have gone fleeting by since Blestyashie ruled the "airwaves", as they used to be called.
Epitomizing post-Soviet decadence and the rise of the sponsored songs of the oligarchs, Blestyashie paved the way with their groundbreaking hits such as "Au, Au, Au," with its morbid murder-sex mutilation theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wdidNqQF6E

What a fabulous era it was, when it was possible to reinvent life within the span of a few weeks, and live out that dream on the installment plan for an indefinite term forever after.  Some with sparkling motel-stay experiences may choose to disagree, but this bear is forever enamored of the early ought's for their sense of possibility and renewal of a life that did not deserve such chances. Just this.