Trekhprudny Lane

Yesterday we blew a fuse six times (our daily average lately). In the evening I bent down to run a bath and the faucet blew right off, banging around the empty tub, while water sprayed directly from the wall all over the room. And this place is seriously chilly. The girls sleep in tights and sweaters with pajamas; still they have colds. 

But yesterday we went to the newly opened Garage (** ) for an Ilya Kabakov exhibit... when an MA student, I wrote a paper on his 1992 installation The Toilet, but never expected to have a chance to see his work in person. He has always had a complicated relationship with nostalgia (maybe that's true of all Russians born in the twentieth century). The new work too shows this. And I missed his rich anthropology; the space was quite sterile. Creating a fictional biography through a staged art exhibition, rather than a domestic interior, eliminates so much interesting detail.

A. and I heard a Rimsky-Korsakov program at the Conservatory this weekend, too. Such eagerness, serious excitement, among the audience, and at intermission, feverish discussion in the long lines for the toilets. (Again a building with tattered dignity: magnificent chandeliers, floor tiles simply missing.) The ebullient woman who came onstage to introduce each piece (earrings worthy of a Central Asian princess, and an interesting sheer black sequined smock, like a cafeteria apron for evening) made us feel as if we were tightly knit with everyone else in the auditorium, which felt smaller, we were together just for a while, witnesses to something very special.