20 years ago. Goodbye Lenin.

(photo by Reuters)

Mikhail Lermontov, poet of the Caucasus
Writer, poet and painter. Born in 1814 and died in 1841, in a duel at the foot of the Mashuk mountain.
He once said tha the trouble with Russia was not that some people were suffering but that an immense number of people were suffering without realizing it.
I am not sure when Lermontov said those words, but they are still valid now, as they were back in the XIX century.
Tsar Nicholas I is reported to have reacted to Lermontov's death with the following words: "A dog's death for a dog". No wonder why.

Indie Folk Sounds #2 - Emily Jane White
"Wild Tigers I Have Known" is included in the Dark Undercoat album.

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space
Directly from the Soviet Archives. This is Valentina Tereshkova, minutes before being launched aboard Vostok-6 as the first woman in space, June 16 1963. The photo is a cover of the book "Propaganda: Photographs from Soviet Archives by Mark Holborn".

In 1963, Valentina married Andrian Nikolayev, another Russian cosmonaut. Their daughter, Elena Andrianovna, became an object of medical curiosity for being the first child born from parents that have both travelled into space.

Valentina Tereshkova won the International Women of the Year Association's "Woman of the Century" award in 2000.

Indie Folk Sounds #1 - Marisa Nadler
This is the first of a series of posts on Indie Folk Sounds.
For the first post I chose this hypnotic-psychedelic live version of Marisa Nadler's Fifty Five Falls. Enjoy!

Courage
We know what trembles on the scales,
and what we must steel ourselves to face.
The bravest hour strikes on our clocks:
may courage not abandon us!
Let bullets kill us—we are not afraid,
nor are we bitter, though our housetops fall.
We will preserve you, Russian speech,
from servitude in foreign chains,
keep you alive, great Russian word,
fit for the songs of our children's children,
pure on their tongues, and free.

Anna Akhmatova, 1942



A good selection of bi-lingual poems by Anna Akhmatova can be found on this page. Translations by Andrey Kneller.

"If you could say it with words, there would be no reason to paint"
Edward Hooper

Sarah Palin in Hong Kong
It is a mistery to me why an organization such as CLSA, one of Asia’s leading brokerage and investment groups, invites someone like Sarah Palin to its investors conference, last week in Hong Kong. Sarah Palin broke a two-month silence period and both the Washington Post and NY Times were fairly positive about her speech. Robert Fisk has a different but interesting view on this speech event. Read Robert Fisk article from The Independent here.

The Glyndebourne Festival
http://www.glyndebourne.com/

It takes a good dose of english excentricity to hold an international opera festival in the middle of the Sussex countryside. The breaks take 2 hours. Long enough for a picnic and a refreshing glass of Champagne among the sheep and the horses. All very clean and civilized.