Anyone who’s ever lived in a run-down neighbourhood in Kiev or Moscow or…

I first heard this song this past winter, and have been thinking about it for a while:

Instead of the fantasy world of boutiques and Porsche Cayennes and lip implants, I get the reality of my own neighbourhood in Ukraine: colloquial pronunciations, walls covered in graffiti and guys named Vasya, along with gossiping grandmas in summer slippers and people eating sunflower seeds.

I think people are exhausted by artificial glamour. They want familiar glamour – the wind blowing up the skirts of young girls, the elaborate tattoos of their neighbours, etc. They want places tourists don’t see – the strange, dangerous rows of concrete, where people like them are living and dying every day. And showing their asses – whether metaphorically or otherwise.

I walked through the park yesterday on my way home from the center. It was late and I was “high-fiving” the trees lining the outer street. I had my keys out in my hand – the serrated main key can easily be jabbed into someone’s face if necessary, and it’s always good to be able to get inside the building quickly. But the street was full of people, even on a Monday night, and I could hear them over Anastasiya Prikhod’ko in my MP3 player, and they seemed oddly happy. Maybe it’s spring, maybe it’s the realization that crisis or no – the “regions” (neighbourhoods) will continue doing what they always do.

7 thoughts on “Anyone who’s ever lived in a run-down neighbourhood in Kiev or Moscow or…

  1. So a self-proclaimed feminist puts up a grimy video of girls flashing their asses. Interesting.

  2. I’d like to introduce you to a little something called “reality,” Tabby. In this magical dimension, girls flash their asses, guys harass each other for money and some people don’t even wear their seatbelts. This is what the song is portraying.

  3. I’m not approving or disapproving. I’m saying that this is close to what ordinary people experience in their daily lives. If you want songs about people who sit with their hands folded primly in their laps – occasionally unfolding them to flip a page in their Dworkin – you are in the wrong place.

  4. Also, those images could be from the outskirts of basically any big city in Eastern Europe, old men loitering and showing off their bods for lack of employment or anything better to do, girls doing the same, younger kids emulating older kids, old ladies looking tired and disapproving and bemused all at the same time, oversize tattoos, haphazard parking…

  5. Um, that sentence should have read “young men showing off their bods..” though, of course, there’s nothing like the sight of a shirtless old man showing off his abundant white chest hair as he sits on his apartment balcony….

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