The other day I literally saw a man kill a dog with a spade!

Woah woah woah woah woah woah woah. A few things to clear up first. Such has been the dizzying response to this blog, without any coercion from myself, through facebook or any other means, a major issue has been brought to my attention.

The homepage IS ONLY ONE BIT OF THE BLOG!

‘Huh?’, ‘Wah?’, ‘Zoigs?’, I hear you splutter. That’s right, the tabs at the top, eg ‘About this blog’, ‘Ratings System’, ‘Music’ etc all have stuff in them too and will continue to be updated, so if you liked whatever post you did read, please read those too. Also, if you’re reading this and haven’t ‘joined the site’, please do so by clicking on the link on the right side of the home page, there’s a little google icon above it and also I will give you money.

Ok, now, as promised, another slice of sweet sweet Russian pie...

Firstly the title of this blog post is a complete lie but I thought it would be a good way to make people read it. In others news, in the past week I’ve been treated to a veritable shitload of the very finest superstition Russia has to offer, getting 4 ‘Shastlivi Bilyeti’ or ‘lucky bus tickets’ (which means the sum of the numbers on the right of the ticket equals the sum on the left). Despite my absolute faith in this concept, they unfortunately didn’t seem to have much impact on my luck as I still appear to be living in Russia. Apparently I missed out a crucial phase of my luck-getting, since in order to actualise the mystical qualities of mathematically symmetrical bus tickets, you’re supposed to eat them. Unfortunately this stands in contradiction to my own superstition – ‘death befalls he who eats anything not thrice sterilised in Russia’ - so I gave it a pass.

Then there was my trip to club ‘Vozduch’ or  'Air’. As you walk in, the first thing you see is a massive swimming pool shimmering beneath the open sky. You’d probably think that the combination of loads of pissed Russians, coupled with a swimming pool with absolutely no health and safety regulations, is an absolutely flawless idea, and you’d be right. Behind the pool was a beach area which led onto the banks of the River Neva, with the lights of the city shining from the opposite bank. The scene was almost complete when the MC started singing ‘What A Wonderful World’, complete with a Louis Armstrong singing voice. Unfortunately he couldn’t pronounce any of the words, so was just going ‘Warra Wazdaffu Wang’, over and over again, sounding more like Vic Reeves club singing than anything else. Another issue was that it was about 11pm at this point, so it wasn’t really the time for a lighters-in-the-air party closer. Not to fear, the MC quickly got the point and busted into a dubstep remix of Billy Jean, which was about as good as a dog with a bucket on its head*. Luckily my mood was maintained by two Russian rude boys flexing dance moves at one another, which looked like a mix between a really shit version of that Run DMC video and Street Fighter moves.

As this suggests, the Russians are absolute masters of incongruity in music. The club scene is like one giant iPod shuffle; songs don’t need to begin or finish, or have anything to do with each other, they just have to be really loud and preferably famous. On the other stage this DJ was playing a mash-up set, but since everything in Russia is already a mash-up set, an actual mash-up set is more like ‘guess what song I’m playing in 5 seconds’, or maybe ‘I bet you can’t dance to this without looking like a wanker’. Incidentally, if that was the name of the game, then me and everyone else in the club lost quite badly and repeatedly.

Another club based on a beach, ingeniously spying a gap in the market, is Club ‘Dune’. As can be seen from Club ‘Air’ (open-air) and Club ‘Dune’ (sand), the Russians have a habit of giving things straightforwardly descriptive names, possibly as a hangover from communism. So all convenience stores are called ‘food stuffs’, flower shops are called ‘flowers’, brothels are called ‘viciously exploitative human trafficking warehouses’ etc. Although this is helpful to quickly find what you’re looking for, it does take the mystery away a bit, and it makes things quite hard to find, like ‘yeah I’ll meet you by the shop’, ‘what shop?’, ‘you know ‘shop’, it’s near ‘flowers’’, ‘oh right ‘flowers’, is that near ‘brothel’, ‘nah its near ‘church’’ etc.

I will endeavour to post again within a week or two, in the mean time I’m just about to put some more book, film and music reviews up so why not read them? Come on.

Poka,

Ronan Davidovich

*I robbed this off Bo Selecta